A Poem A Day from the George Hail Library ~ Selected by Maria Horvath

In Silence

2012-02-02T07:20:00.000-05:00

(Untitled, 1969 by Mark Rothko, 1903-1970, American
artist)

“Contemplation is related to art, to worship, to charity: all these reach out by intuition and self-dedication into the realms that transcend the material conduct of everyday life. Or rather, in the midst of ordinary life itself they seek and find a new and transcendent meaning. And by this meaning, they transfigure the whole of life.”

~ Thomas Merton (1915-1968), American Trappist monk, poet, and writer of many books and essays, from Art and Spirituality

IN SILENCE

Be still.
Listen to the stones of the wall.
Be silent, they try
To speak your

Name.
Listen
To the living walls.
Who are you?
Who
Are you? Whose
Silence are you?

Who (be quiet)
Are you (as these stones
Are quiet). Do not
Think of what you are
Still less of
What you may one day be.
Rather
Be what you are (but who?) be
The unthinkable one
You do not know.

O be still, while
You are still alive,
And all things live around you
Speaking (I do not hear)
To your own being,
Speaking by the Unknown
That is in you and in themselves.

“I will try, like them
To be my own silence:
And this is difficult. The whole
World is secretly on fire. The stones
Burn, even the stones
They burn me. How can a man be still or
Listen to all things burning? How can he dare
To sit with them
When all their silence
Is on fire?”

~ Thomas Merton

Hunting the Phoenix

2012-02-01T07:21:00.000-05:00

(Nun by Morris Louis, 1912-1962, American Abstract
Expressionist painter)

Today we begin a month of contemplation guided by poetry. The poem below speaks to a journey of inner discovery made possible by the exploration of past experience.

According to Greek mythology, the phoenix is a wondrous bird with shining red and gold plumage. It lives for centuries until there comes a time when it breaks out into a haunting dirge, before it burns itself on a funeral pyre of spices set alight by the sun and fanned by its own wings. The phoenix then arises from the ashes, renewed, resurrected, to live again.

HUNTING THE PHOENIX

Leaf through discolored manuscripts,
make sure no words
lie thirsting, bleeding,
waiting for rescue. No:
old loves half-
articulated, moments forced
out of the stream of perception
to play “statue,”
and never released —
they had no blood to shed.
You must seek
the ashy nest itself
if you hope to find
charred feathers, smoldering flightbones,
and a twist of singing flame
rekindling.

~ Denise Levertov (1923-1977), English-born American poet

Ars Poetica

2012-01-31T07:32:00.000-05:00

(Fritillary by William Morris, 1834-1896,
English textile designer, artist, and writer)

We now conclude this month's study of ars poetica or the art of poetry, looking at the nature of poetry and the way a poet works.

The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz defined poetry as “a passionate pursuit of the Real.” No science or philosophy “can change the fact that a poet stands before reality that is every day new, miraculously complex, inexhaustible, and tries to enclose as much of it as possible in words.”

A poem “begins in delight,” wrote the American poet Robert Frost. “It inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life — not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.”

ARS POETICA

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown —

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.

*

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind —

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.

*

A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea —

A poem should not mean
But be.

~ Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), American poet

Thank You for Saying Thank You

2012-01-30T05:24:00.001-05:00

(Woman at the Piano by Elie Nadelman,
1882-1946, Polish-born American sculptor)

from The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English:

pōʹėm n. A metrical composition, especially of elevated character; elevated composition in prose or verse (prose poem). [from French poème or Latin from Greek poēma = poiēma (poieō make)]

THANK YOU FOR SAYING THANK YOU

This is a totally
accessible poem.
There is nothing
in this poem
that is in any
way difficult
to understand.
All the words
are simple &
to the point.
There are no new
concepts, no
theories, no
ideas to confuse
you. This poem
has no intellectual
pretentions. It is
purely emotional.
It fully expresses
the feelings of the
author: my feelings,
the person reciting
to you now.
It is all about
communication.
Heart to heart.
This poem appreciates
& values you as
a reader. It
celebrates the
triumph of the
human imagination
amidst pitfalls &
calamities. This poem
has 90 lines,
269 words, and
more syllables than
I have time to
count. Each line,
word, & syllable
have been chosen
to convey only the
intended meaning
& nothing more.
This poem abjures
obscurity & enigma.
There is nothing
hidden. A hundred
readers would each
read the poem
in an identical
manner & derive
the same message
from it. This
poem, like all
good poems, tells
a story in a direct
style that never
leaves the reader
guessing. While
at times expressing
bitterness, anger,
resentment, xenophobia,
& hints of racism, its
ultimate mood is
affirmative. It finds
joy even in
those spiteful moments
of life that
it shares with
you. This poem
represents the hope
for a poetry
that doesn’t turn
its back on
the audience, that
doesn’t think it’s
better than the reader,
that is committed
to a poetry as a
popular form, like kite
flying and fly
fishing. This poem
belongs to no
school, has no
dogma. It follows
no fashion. It
says just what
it says. It’s
real.

~ Charles Bernstein, born 1950, American poet and translator

The Poet Is Told to Fill Up More Pages

2012-01-29T08:21:00.002-05:00

(Daily News by Dona Nelson, born 1947,
American artist)

Does poetry make any difference? Poets have disagreed in their answers to this question.

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” Percy Bysshe Shelley announced in A Defense of Poetry in 1821.

Poets, he wrote, “are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting: they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion.”

Not everyone concurs. More than a century later, for example, in his elegy on the death of the Irish poet W. B. Yeats in 1939, W. H. Auden expresses a more ambivalent view about the power of poetry. He writes that poetry “makes nothing happen” but does acknowledge that it is not entirely powerless.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

Mary Oliver, for one, hasn’t given up on poetry, yet.

THE POET IS TOLD TO FILL UP MORE PAGES

But, where are the words?
Not in my pocket.
Not in the refrigerator.
Not in my savings account.

So I sit, harassed, with my notebook.
It’s a joke, really, and not a good one.
For fun I try a few commands myself.
I say to the rain, stop raining.
I say to the sun, that isn’t anywhere nearby,
Come back, and come fast.

Nothing happens.

So this is all I can give you,
not being the maker of what I do,
but only the one that holds the pencil.

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.
Make of it what you will.

~ Mary Oliver, born 1935, American poet

The Pen

2012-01-28T06:33:00.000-05:00

(Intermezzo by Françoise Gilot, born 1921, French painter,
writer, and muse of Pablo Picasso)

I found this poem recently at the blog hosted by librarian Diane Mayr at the Nesmith Library in Wyndam, N. H. You can visit it here.

THE PEN

Take a pen in your uncertain fingers.
Trust, and be assured
That the whole world is a sky-blue butterfly
And that words are the nets to capture it.

~ Muhammad al-Ghuzzi, born 1949, Tunisian poet and translator

The Joy of Writing

2012-01-27T06:02:00.000-05:00

Each Friday we provide the link to the blog that is hosting a celebration of poetry around the blogosphere. At that site you can find the links to the many other blogs that are posting poems (new and old), discussions of poems, and reviews of poetry books.

Enjoy the festivities!

The host this week is the children’s writer and illustrator Jim Hill. You can visit him here at Hey, Jim Hill!

(Engraving from The British Sportsman, by Samuel Howitt,
1756-1822, English painter and engraver)

“It’s not accidental that film biographies of great scientists and artists are produced in droves. The more ambitious directors seek to reproduce convincingly the creative process that led to important scientific discoveries or the emergence of a masterpiece. And one can depict certain kinds of scientific labor with some success. Laboratories, sundry instruments, elaborate machinery brought to life: such scenes may hold the audience’s interest for a while. And those moments of uncertainty — will the experiment, conducted for the thousandth time with some tiny modification, finally yield the desired result? — can be quite dramatic.

“Films about painters can be spectacular, as they go about recreating every stage of a famous painting’s evolution, from the first penciled line to the final brush-stroke. Music swells in films about composers: the first bars of the melody that rings in the musician’s ears finally emerge as a mature work in symphonic form. Of course this is all quite naïve and doesn’t explain the strange mental state popularly known as inspiration, but at least there’s something to look at and listen to.

“But poets are the worst. Their work is hopelessly unphotogenic. Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines only to cross out one of them fifteen minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens. Who could stand to watch this kind of thing?”

~ Wislawa Szymborska, born 1923, Polish poet and translator, from her Nobel Lecture after receiving the Prize for Literature in 1996

THE JOY OF WRITING

Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
For a drink of written water from a spring
whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?
Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?
Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,
she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.
Silence — this word also rustles across the page
and parts the boughs
that have sprouted from the word “woods.”

Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they’ll never let her get away.

Each drop of ink contains a fair supply
of hunters, equipped with squinting eyes behind their sights,
prepared to swarm the sloping pen at any moment,
surround the doe, and slowly aim their guns.

They forget that what’s here isn’t life.
Other laws, black on white, obtain.
The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I say,
and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities,
full of bullets stopped in mid-flight.
Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so.
Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall,
not a blade of grass will bend beneath that little hoof’s full stop.

Is there then a world
where I rule absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?

The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.

~ Wislawa Szymborska

How Poetry Comes to Me

2012-01-26T06:46:00.000-05:00

(Summer Hillside by A. J. Casson, 1898-1992, Canadian
artist)

HOW POETRY COMES TO ME

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of night

~ Gary Snider, born 1930, American poet often associated with the Beat Generation

Reply to the Question: "How Can You Become a Poet?"

2012-01-25T06:21:00.000-05:00

(Spring Beauty by Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American
painter)

How can you become a poet?

The poet W. H. Auden once proposed a curriculum for his “daydream College for Bards,” which he set forth in an essay, The Poet & The City.

1. In addition to English, at least one ancient language, probably Greek or Hebrew, and two modern languages would be required.
2. Thousands of lines of poetry in these languages would be learned by heart.
3. The library would contain no books of literary criticism, and the only critical exercise required of students would be the writing of parodies.
4. Courses in prosody [versification], rhetoric and comparative philology [linguistics] would be required of all students, and every student would have to select three courses out of courses in archaeology, mythology, liturgics, cooking.
5. Every student would be required to look after a domestic animal and cultivate a garden plot.

The poet Eve Merriam suggests another approach.

REPLY TO THE QUESTION: “HOW CAN YOU BECOME A POET?”

take the leaf of a tree
trace its exact shape
the outside edges
and inner lines

memorize the way it is fastened to the twig
(and how the twig arches from the branch)
how it springs forth in April
how it is panoplied in July

by late August
crumple it in your hand
so that you smell its end-of-summer sadness

chew its woody stem

listen to its autumn rattle

watch it as it atomizes in the November air

then in winter
when there is no leaf left

invent one

~ Eve Merriam (1916-1992), American poet and playwright

Dreams and Poetry

2012-01-24T05:51:00.000-05:00

(Still Life with a Glass under Lamplight, linoleum print
by Pablo Picasso, 1881-1973, Spanish artist)

Poems, it could be said, are a little like dreams, only you experience them when you are awake. Both are works of the imagination expressed through symbolism and figurative language.

DREAMS AND POETRY

It’s all ordinary experience,
All ordinary images.
By chance they emerge in a dream,
Turning out infinite patterns.

It’s all ordinary feelings,
All ordinary words.
By chance they encounter a poet,
Turning out infinite new verses.

Once intoxicated, one learns the strength of wine,
Once smitten, one learns the power of love:
You cannot write my poems
Just as I cannot dream your dreams.

~ Hu Shih (1891-1962), Chinese poet

The Thought-Fox

2012-01-23T05:09:00.000-05:00

(Grey Fox by Carry Akroyd, English artist and printmaker)

About fifty years ago, BBC Radio invited the poet Ted Hughes to present a series of programs for school children teaching them “the simple principles of imaginative writing.” These talks were collected in the 1967 book Poetry in the Making.

In the first program, Hughes discussed how he came to write the poem below, one of his most famous.

“In a way, I suppose, I think of poems as a sort of animal. They have their own life, like animals, by which I mean that they seem quite separate from any person, even from their author, and nothing can be added to them or taken away without maiming and perhaps even killing them. And they have a certain wisdom. They know something special . . . something perhaps which we are curious to learn. Maybe my concern has been to capture not animals particularly and not poems, but simply things which have a vivid life of their own, outside mine.”

THE THOUGHT-FOX

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

~ Ted Hughes (1930-1998), English poet, editor and writer of essays and many children's books, and poet laureate from 1984 to 1998

Stardust

2012-01-22T07:03:00.000-05:00

(Stars, engraving by Christoph Weigel, 1654-1725, German engraver and publisher)

In 2008, after she was appointed U. S. poet laureate, Kay Ryan talked to journalist Andrea Seabrook.

Seabrook: You said your poems are almost an empty suitcase.

Ryan: Well, I've always been extremely enamored of cartoons and cartooning, in which you have essentially just the outline, and I think if you leave something empty but charged in some way, not overly elaborated, you can have a surprising number of things come out of people when they read it. That's what I'm hoping, anyhow, and I mean, the truth is, it just is my constitution to do things that way.

Seabrook: To keep things sparse but powerful?

Ryan: Really simple, yeah. Well, hopefully. I mean, that would be the ideal.

STARDUST

Stardust is
the hardest thing
to hold out for.
You must
make of yourself
a perfect place —
something still
upon which
something settles —
something like
sugar grains on
something like
metal, but with
none of the chill.
It’s hard to explain.

~ Kay Ryan, born 1945, American poet, appointed poet laureate, 2007-2010

Lines Lost among Trees

2012-01-21T05:38:00.000-05:00

(Flowers on Cottage Table by Eric Ravilious, 1903-
1942, English engraver, artist, and official war painter
during World War II)

A poem not written down can be easily lost. The English poet Gerda Mayer once wrote, “I’ve thought of a poem. I carry it carefully, nervously, in my head . . . in case I should spill some lines before I can put it down.”

LINES LOST AMONG TREES

These are not the lines that came to me
while walking in the woods
with no pen
and nothing to write on anyway.

They are gone forever,
a handful of coins
dropped through the grate of memory,
along with the ingenious mnemonic

I devised to hold them in place —
all gone and forgotten
before I had returned to the clearing of lawn
in back of our quiet house

with its jars jammed with pens,
its notebooks and reams of blank paper,
its desk and soft lamp,
its table and the light from its windows.

So this is my elegy for them,
those six or eight exhalations,
the braided rope of syntax,
the jazz of the timing,

and the little insight at the end
wagging like the short tail
of a perfectly obedient spaniel
sitting by the door.

This is my envoy to nothing
where I say Go, little poem —
not out into the world of strangers’ eyes,
but off to some airy limbo,

home to lost epics,
unremembered names,
and fugitive dreams
such as the one I had last night,

which, like a fantastic city in pencil,
erased itself
in the bright morning air
just as I was waking up.

~ Billy Collins, born 1941, American poet, appointed poet laureate, 2001-2003

When I Met My Muse

2012-01-20T07:15:00.001-05:00

Versatile Blogger Award

2012-01-19T07:47:00.002-05:00

And now for something completely different — just for today.

Some happy news. This blog has received a Versatile Blogger Award. “Versatile” here is defined as “turning with ease from one thing to another.” The award praises the blog’s pairing of “poetry with art in the most unexpected but perfect ways.”

Thank you, Tabatha Yeatts of The Opposite of Indifference, for this. You can visit her blog here.

Now, I shall go on to the second and third duties outlined in The Versatile Blogger Awards manual:

a. Thank and link to the blogger who bestowed the award.
b. Share seven random facts about yourself.
c. Spread the love by passing the award to five other bloggers — and be sure to let them know.

The seven random facts below about myself are actually a few of my favorite things.

• Favorite poet: Emily Dickinson.

• Favorite novelist: Jane Austen.

• Favorite book of non-fiction: The Complete Oxford English Dictionary, for its entries showing the etymology or roots of words and the evolution of their meanings over the years.

• Favorite singer: Edith Piaf.

• Favorite movie: The Third Man (British, 1949), a striking film noir about post-war Vienna, where everything has changed and nothing is different. Written by Graham Greene, it stars Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, and the luminous Alida Valli. I’ve watched it dozens of times.

• Favorite sound track from a movie: the haunting music of The Third Man, composed and performed on the zither by Anton Karas.

• Favorite quotation from a movie: Harry Lime (Orson Welles) in The Third Man, explaining the facts of life:

“You know what the fellow said. In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed — they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vince and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly.”

My choices for Versatile Blogger Awards (click on the names to link to each):

• Content in a Cottage is a place of serenity, filled with images of peaceful interiors and outdoor views, and of animals, wild and domestic. With her new iPhone camera, Rosemary Beck also looks at nature up close, paying attention to the fine details of her garden and her neighborhood.

• Jane Austen’s World is that and much more. Its main brief is to explore the life and times of the novelist’s England, but it also takes detours into other areas of Britain. Currently, it is visiting Downton Abbey, the great estate featured in PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre this month.

• Pentimeno is a most interesting blog. A Ph. D. in music, the host writes thoughtful meditations on love, community, forgiveness, and beauty, and links the reader to videos of enchanting music.

• The children’s writer Jama Rattigan hosts a blog featuring a delightful blend of poems, delicious recipes, memories of childhood, and reviews of cookery and children’s books.

• And finally, The Blue Lantern is beautiful to look at, with colorful images placed against a backdrop that reminds you of soft black velvet. The host, Jane Librizzi, writes brief illustrated essays about the arts — paintings, prints, photographs, and posters — and their place in history. I have learned much there.

~ Maria

For Poets

2012-01-18T07:12:00.000-05:00

(Owl and Young by Osuitok Ipeelee, 1923-
2005, Canadian Inuit printmaker and sculptor)

“We receive but what we give,” wrote the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1832), “and in our life alone does Nature live.”

FOR POETS

Stay beautiful
but don’t stay down underground too long
Don’t turn into a mole
or a worm
or a root
or a stone

Come on out into the sunlight
Breathe in trees
Knock out mountains
Commune with snakes
& be the very hero of birds

Don’t forget to poke your head up
& blink
think
Walk all around
Swim upstream

Don’t forget to fly

~ Al Young, born 1935, American poet

Constantly Risking Absurdity

2012-01-17T06:52:00.001-05:00

(Circus by Marc Chagall, 1887-1985, Belarusian-French
artist)

Poetry in motion.

from A CONEY ISLAND OF THE MIND

15

Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime¹
to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
above a sea of faces
paces his way
to the other side of the day
performing entrachats²
and sleight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics
and all without mistaking
any thing
for what it may not be

For he’s the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap

And he
a little charleychaplin man
who may or may not catch
her fair eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence

~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti, born 1919, American poet, painter, and publisher

¹ rime – old spelling of “rhyme”

² entrachats – in ballet, a leap into the air where the dancer rapidly and repeatedly crosses the legs

Ars Poetica?

2012-01-16T06:37:00.000-05:00

(Czeslaw Milosz answers the door to
reporters after the announcement of
his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980;
photo by Jim Palmer)

How does the poet come to create poetry? Where does he find his inspiration?

In the poem below Czeslaw Milosz suggests that the practice of poetry involves spirits, or daimonions, transmitting their messages to the artist.

Why the question mark in the title? Is he being ironic? Or expressing doubts?

ARS POETICA?

I have always aspired to a more spacious form
that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose
and would let us understand each other without exposing
the author or reader to sublime agonies.

In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:
a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us,
so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out
and stood in the light, lashing his tail.

That’s why poetry is rightly said to be dictated by a daimonion¹,
though it’s an exaggeration to maintain that he must be an angel.
It’s hard to guess where that pride of poets comes from,
when so often they’re put to shame by the disclosure of their frailty.

What reasonable man would like to be a city of demons²,
who behave as if they were at home, speak in many tongues,
and who, not satisfied with stealing his lips or hand,
work at changing his destiny for their convenience?

It’s true that what is morbid is highly valued today,
and so you may think that I am only joking
or that I’ve devised just one more means
of praising Art with the help of irony.

There was a time when only wise books were read
helping us to bear our pain and misery.
This, after all, is not quite the same
as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics.

And yet the world is different from what it seems to be
and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.
People therefore preserve silent integrity
thus earning the respect of their relatives and neighbors.

The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.

What I’m saying here is not, I agree, poetry,
as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly,
under unbearable duress and only with the hope
that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.

~ Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), Polish poet, essayist, and translator,

¹daimonion and ²demons – spirits, both good and bad

A dozen years later, in the lecture on the occasion of his acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Milosz argued for a more deliberative craft, the conscious use of reason in the service of the reader.

“‘To see’ means not only to have before one’s eyes,” Milosz said in Stockholm in 1980. “It may mean also to preserve in memory. ‘To see and to describe’ may also mean to reconstruct in imagination. A distance achieved, thanks to the mystery of time, must not change events, landscapes, human figures into a tangle of shadows growing paler and paler. On the contrary, it can show them in full light, so that every event, every date becomes expressive and persists as an eternal reminder of human depravity and human greatness. Those who are alive receive a mandate from those who are silent forever. They can fulfill their duties only by trying to reconstruct precisely things as they were, and by wresting the past from fictions and legends.”

These two understandings are not mutually exclusive. The art of poetry relies on both the heart and the head, the imaginative and the rational.

Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry

2012-01-15T07:14:00.000-05:00

(Flounce of French Guipure lace from the late
17th- and early 18th-centuries, at the State
Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia)

The conversation below takes place between a philosophy teacher and Monsieur Jourdain, the middle-class son of a cloth merchant in the comedy The Bourgeois Gentleman by Molière (1622-1673), French playwright and actor. The play follows Monsieur Jourdain as he is preparing, with the help of tutors, to climb up the social ladder to the aristocracy.

Monsieur Jourdain (MJ): I must confide in you. I’m in love with a lady of great quality, and I wish that you would help me write something to her in a little note that I will let fall at her feet.

Philosophy Teacher (PT): Very well.

MJ: That will be gallant, yes?

PT: Without doubt. Is it verse that you wish to write her?

MJ: No, no. No verse.

PT: Do you want only prose?

MJ: No, I don’t want either prose or verse.

PT: It must be one or the other.

MJ: Why?

PT: Because, sir, there is no other way to express oneself than with prose or verse.

MJ: There is nothing but prose or verse?

PT: No, sir, everything that is not prose is verse, and everything that is not verse is prose.

MJ: And when one speaks, what is that then?

PT: Prose.

MJ: What? when I say, “Nicole, bring me my slippers, and give me my nightcap,” that’s prose?

PT: Yes, sir.

MJ: Good heavens! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it.

BECAUSE YOU ASKED ABOUT THE LINE BETWEEN PROSE AND POETRY

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

~ Howard Nemerov (1920-1999), American poet

Young Poets

2012-01-14T09:18:00.000-05:00

(The Muses by Brice Marden, born 1938, American
artist)

“Taught or untaught, we all scribble poetry.” ~ Horace (65-8
B. C.), one of the greatest Roman lyric poets

YOUNG POETS

Write as you will
In whatever style you like
Too much blood has run under the bridge
To go on believing
That only one road is right.

In poetry everything is permitted.

With only this condition of course,
You have to improve the blank page.

~ Nicanor Parra, born 1914, Chilean poet and mathematician

Notes on the Art of Poetry

2012-01-13T07:03:00.000-05:00

In the Land of Words

2012-01-12T06:52:00.000-05:00

(Empress of the Blues [Bessie Smith], acrylic, pencil, and
paper collage by Romare Bearden, 1911-1988, American
artist and writer)

Eloise Greenfield, born in 1929, is an American writer of more than 45 books for children — novels, biographies, and collections of poetry. Her works reflect the African American linguistic and musical culture in which she was raised.

“With the poetry and prose, I think the music that you grow up with, and that you love, is a part of you. It’s a part of your speech and a part of your personality. And so there are times when I consciously decide that I want to write about music, for example, the blues poem ‘My Daddy’ in Nathaniel Talking. But there are other times when I just hear the music of speech, and when I’m writing, it flows into the work.”

IN THE LAND OF WORDS

In the land
of words,
I stand as still
as a tree
and let the words
rain down on me.
Come, rain, bring
your knowledge and your
music. Sing
while I grow green
and full.
I’ll stand as still
as a tree,
and let your blessings
fall on me.

Some Like Poetry

2012-01-11T07:44:00.000-05:00

(Tulips, wallpaper design by William Morris, 1834-
1896, English textile designer, artist, and writer)

Is the poet right?

SOME LIKE POETRY

Some –
not all, that is.
Not even the majority of all, but the minority.
Not counting school, where one must,
or the poets themselves,
there’d be maybe two such people in a thousand.

Like –
but one also likes chicken-noodle soup,
one likes compliments and the color blue,
one likes an old scarf,
one likes to prove one’s point,
one likes to pet a dog.

Poetry –
but what sort of thing is poetry?
Many a shaky answer
has been given to this question.
But I do not know and do not know and hold on to it,
as to a saving banister.

~ Wislawa Szymborska, born 1923, Polish poet

Unfolding Bud

2012-01-10T05:02:00.000-05:00

(Water Lilies, watercolor by Beatrix Potter, 1866-1943,
English writer, illustrator, sheep breeder, conservationist,
and creator of Peter Rabbit, among many others)

Naoshi Koriyama is a Japanese poet and translator, born in 1926, who works in both Japanese and English. He was interviewed in 2008 by Tim Newfields of Toyo University, Tokyo.

Newfields: Are you active in any poetry groups?

Koriyama: Well, I'm a member of the Poetry Society of Japan, a small group of mostly Japanese poets writing in English, and the Gerard Manley Hopkins Society of Japan. I admire the sonnets of that 19th-century English poet. That group has a New Year meeting and it’s my habit to read a poem about the new Chinese zodiac sign each year there. It has become a ritual for me to write a poem on January 1st and to drink an extra amount of sake that day.

UNFOLDING BUD

One is amazed
By a water-lily bud
Unfolding
With each passing day,
Taking on a richer color
And new dimensions.

One is not amazed,
At first glance,
By a poem,
Which is tight-closed
As a tiny bud.

Yet one is surprised
To see the poem
Gradually unfolding,
Revealing its rich inner self
As one reads it
Again
And over again.

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe

2012-01-09T05:21:00.000-05:00

(Women and Children, 1990 by Miriam Qiyuk, born 1933, Canadian Inuit sculptor)

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” ~ T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), American-born English poet, playwright, and editor

ARS POETICA #100: I BELIEVE

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we are ourselves,
(though Sterling Brown¹ said

“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”),
digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way

to get from here or there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love
and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?

~ Elizabeth Alexander, born 1962, American poet, playwright, and essayist

¹ Sterling Brown – (1901-1989) American poet and folklorist active in the Harlem Renaissance

A Familiar Letter

2012-01-08T07:56:00.001-05:00

(“Well done, Cynthia, it was deadly nightshade.” — Pen
and ink drawing by Ronald Searle, British cartoonist who
died on December 30 at age 91. His cartoons depicting
scenes of anarchy and mayhem perpetrated by the girls at
St. Trinian’s School inspired a series of delightful films
starring the actor Alastair Sim as both the School’s
headmistress Millicent Fritton and her brother Clarence.)

“My favorite poem is the one that starts ‘Thirty days hath September’ because it actually tells you something,” words attributed to Groucho Marx (1890-1977), American humorist, movie and tv star, and writer

A FAMILIAR LETTER

To Several Correspondents

Yes, write, if you want to, there's nothing like trying;
Who knows what a treasure your casket may hold?
I'll show you that writing’s as easy as lying,
If you’ll listen to me as the art I unfold.

Here’s a book full of words; one can choose as he fancies,
As a painter his tint, as a workman his tool;
Just think! all the poems, and plays and romances
Were drawn out of this, like the fish from a pool!

You can wander at will through its syllabled mazes,
And take all you want, — not a copper they cost, —
What is there to hinder your picking out phrases
For an epic as clever as “Paradise Lost”?

Don’t mind if the index of sense is at zero,
Use words that run smoothly, whatever they mean;
Leander and Lilian and Lillibullero
Are much the same thing in the rhyming machine.

There are words so delicious their sweetness will smother
That boarding-school flavor of which we’re afraid, —
There is “lush” is a good one, and “swirl” is another, —
Put both in one stanza, its fortune is made.

With musical murmurs and rhythmical closes
You can cheat us of smiles when you’ve nothing to tell;
You hand us a nosegay of milliner’s roses,
And we cry with delight, “Oh, how sweet they do smell!”

Perhaps you will answer all needful conditions
For winning the laurels to which you aspire,
By docking the tails of the two prepositions
I’ the style o’ the bards you so greatly admire.

As for subjects of verse, they are only too plenty
For ringing the changes on metrical chimes;
A maiden, a moonbeam, a lover of twenty
Have filled that great basket with bushels of rhymes.

Let me show you a picture — ’tis far from irrelevant —
By a famous old hand in the arts of design;
’Tis only a photographed sketch of an elephant, —
The name of the draughtsman was Rembrandt of Rhine.

How easy! no troublesome colors to lay on,
It can’t have fatigued him, — no, not in the least, —
A dash here and there with a haphazard crayon,
And there stands the wrinkled-skinned, baggy-limbed beast.

Just so with your verse, — ’tis as easy as sketching, —
You can reel off a song without knitting your brow,
As lightly as Rembrandt a drawing or etching;
It is nothing at all, if you only know how.

Well; imagine you’ve printed your volume of verses:
Your forehead is wreathed with the garland of fame,
Your poems the eloquent school-boy rehearses,
Her album the school-girl presents for your name;

Each morning the post brings you autograph letters;
You’ll answer them promptly, — an hour isn’t much
For the honor of sharing a page with your betters,
With magistrates, members of Congress, and such.

Of course you’re delighted to serve the committees
That come with requests from the country all round,
You would grace the occasion with poems and ditties
When they’ve got a new schoolhouse, or poorhouse, or pound.

With a hymn for the saints and a song for the sinners,
You go and are welcome wherever you please;
You’re a privileged guest at all manner of dinners,
You’ve a seat on the platform among the grandees.

At length your mere presence becomes a sensation,
Your cup of enjoyment is filled to its brim
With the pleasure Horatian of digitmonstration,
As the whisper runs round of “That’s he!” or “That’s him!”

But remember, O dealer in phrases sonorous,
So daintily chosen, so tunefully matched,
Though you soar with the wings of the cherubim o’er us,
The ovum was human from which you were hatched.

No will of your own with its puny compulsion
Can summon the spirit that quickens the lyre;
It comes, if at all, like the Sibyl’s convulsion
And touches the brain with a finger of fire.

So perhaps, after all, it’s as well to be quiet
If you’ve nothing you think is worth saying in prose,
As to furnish a meal of their cannibal diet
To the critics, by publishing, as you propose.

But it’s all of no use, and I’m sorry I’ve written, —
I shall see your thin volume some day on my shelf;
For the rhyming tarantula surely has bitten,
And music must cure you, so pipe it yourself.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1809-1894), American physician, medical reformer, and poet

A Caution to Poets

2012-01-07T07:38:00.000-05:00

(Interior by John Nash, 1893-1977, English painter,
wood engraver, and botanic illustrator)

A CAUTION TO POETS

What poets feel not, when they make,
A pleasure in creating,
The world, in its turn, will not take
Pleasure in contemplating.

~ Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), English poet and critic

Mum Is the Word

2012-01-06T06:32:00.000-05:00

Poetry for Supper

2012-01-05T08:17:00.000-05:00

(Music by Jorge Luis Medina López, born 1955, Puerto
Rican artist)

“Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.” ~ Plato (427?-347 B. C.), Greek philosopher, from The Republic

POETRY FOR SUPPER

“Listen, now, verse should be as natural
As the small tuber that feeds on muck
And grows slowly from obtuse soil
To the white flower of immortal beauty.”

“Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer
Said once about the long toil
That goes like blood to the poem’s making?
Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls,
Limp as bindweed, if it break at all
Life’s iron crust. Man, you must sweat
And rhyme your guts taut, if you’d build
Your verse a ladder.”

“You speak as though
No sunlight ever surprised the mind
Groping on its cloudy path.”

“Sunlight’s a thing that needs a window
Before it enters a dark room.
Windows don’t happen.”

So two old poets,
Hunched at their beer in the low haze
Of an inn parlor, while the talk ran
Noisily by them, glib with prose.

~ R. S. Thomas (1913-2000), Welsh poet

Pretty Words

2012-01-04T07:41:00.000-05:00

(Still Life with Puppies by Paul Gauguin,
1848-1903, French Post-Impressionist
painter)

A sonnet.

PRETTY WORDS

Poets make pets of pretty, docile words:
I love smooth words, like gold-enameled fish
Which circle slowly with a silken swish,
And tender ones, like downy-feathered birds:
Words shy and dappled, deep-eyed deer in herds
Come to my hand, and playful if I wish,
Or purring softly at a silver dish,
Blue Persian kittens fed on cream and curds.

I love bright words, words up and signing early.
Words that are luminous in the dark, and sing;
Warm lazy words, white cattle under trees;
I love words opalescent, cool, and pearly,
Like midsummer moths, and honied words like
Gilded and sticky, with a little sting.

~ Elinor Wylie (1885-1928), American poet and novelist

Poet's Work

2012-01-03T06:12:00.002-05:00

(Hotel Eden, 1945, a boxed assemblage by Joseph Cornell,
1903-1972, American artist)

“For me the sentence lies in wait — all those prepositions and connectives — like an early flood,” the poet Lorine Niedecker once wrote. “A good thing my follow-up feeling has always been condense, condense.”

POET’S WORK

Grandfather
advised me:
Learn a trade

I learned
to sit at desk
and condense

No layoff
from this
condensery

~ Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970), American poet

this is my letter to the World

2012-01-02T08:25:00.003-05:00

(Leaves by Séraphine Louis de Senlis, 1864-1942,
French painter)

This month we will be looking at ars poetica, the art of poetry. We will be considering the nature of poetry and the way poets work.

Words, the what and the how of them, do matter.

To learn more about the power of words, click here.

This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me —
The simple News that Nature told —
With tender Majesty

Her Message committed
To Hands I cannot see —
For love of Her — Sweet — countrymen —
Judge tenderly — of Me

~ Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), American poet

New Year's Day

2012-01-01T08:29:00.000-05:00

(Elizabeth’s Book, Newton, Connecticut by
André Kertész, 1894-1985, Hungarian-born
photographer)

A haiku.

New Year's Day —
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.

~ Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828), Japanese poet

The New Year

2011-12-31T06:43:00.000-05:00

(World without Shadows by Maud Lewis, 1903-1970,
Canadian folk artist)

Best wishes for a Happy New Year, dear Readers.

THE NEW YEAR

The Old Year’s gone away
To nothingness and night:
We cannot find him all the day
Nor hear him in the night:
He left no footstep, mark or place
In either shade or sun:
The last year he’d a neighbor’s face,
In this he’s known as none.

All nothing everywhere:
Mists we on mornings see
Have more substance when they’re here
And more of form than he.
He was a friend by every fire,
In every cot and hall —
A guest to every heart’s desire,
And now he’s naught at all.

Old papers thrown away,
Old garments cast aside,
The talk of yesterday,
All things identified;
But times once torn away
No voices can recall:
The eve of New Year’s Day
Left the Old Year lost to all.

~ John Clare (1793-1864), English Romantic poet

Pied Beauty

2011-12-30T07:13:00.000-05:00

A Sonnet

2011-12-29T06:30:00.000-05:00

(Illuminated text in pen and ink for A Sonnet, by Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, 1828-1882, English poet, painter, and
illustrator; Rossetti created the illustration for his mother
on her birthday in 1880)

The sonnet below is one of a sequence of poems, The House of Life, that concern themselves with the fragility of time. We cannot hold on, Rossetti writes, to those fleeting instances of beauty or happiness. Poetry, including the sonnet, is only “a moment’s monument,” memorializing a memory even as it takes note of its passing.

A SONNET

A Sonnet is a moment’s monument —
Memorial from the Soul’s eternity
To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be,
Whether for lustral¹ rite or dire portent,
Of its own intricate fullness reverent:
Carve it in ivory or in ebony,
As Day or Night may rule; and let Time see
Its flowering crest impearled and orient.

A Sonnet is a coin²: its face reveals
The soul — its converse, to what Power ’tis due —
Whether for tribute to the august appeals
Of Life, or dower in Love’s high retinue,
It serve; or, ’mid the dark wharf’s cavernous breath,
In Charon’s³ palm it pay the toll to Death.

¹ lustral – connected with ceremonial purification
² coin – the ancient Greeks buried their dead with coins over their eyes or mouth to pay for the crossing to the Underworld
³ Charon – in Greek mythology, the ferryman who carried the recently deceased across the rivers from the world of the living to the world of the dead

all worlds have halfsight

2011-12-28T07:48:00.000-05:00

(Black Door with Red by Georgia O’Keefe, 1887-1988,
American artist)

Almost one-quarter of the approximately 770 poems published by e. e. cummings (1894-1962) are sonnets. This may surprise some readers, that this most non-traditional of poets would favor such a traditional poetic form.

As he does in all his works, however, in his sonnets e. e. cummings also transforms the formal structure, arranging the text into eccentric typography or appearance of the words, dividing the stanzas into variable patterns, and making up his own rules for the rhyme and rhythm of the lines.

But the poet does follow the rule that the sonnet takes on one idea, with a proposition and then a response.

In the sonnet below, he makes the case that only through love can we see “the beauty of the truth.”

from 73 POEMS

all worlds have halfsight,seeing either with

life’s eye(which is if things seem spirits)or
(if spirits in the guise of things appear)
death’s:any world must always half perceive.

Only whose vision can create the whole

(being forever born a foolishwise
proudhumble citizen of ecstasies
more steep than climb can time with all his years)

he’s free into the beauty of the truth;

and strolls the axis of the universe
— love. Each believing world denies, whereas
your lover(looking through both life and death)
timelessly celebrates the merciful

wonder no world deny may or believe

Fold a Letter

2011-12-27T07:12:00.000-05:00

(Canada Goose Preparing for Flight by Benjamin Chee
Chee, 1944-1977, Canadian artist of Ojibwa descent)

As we have seen, the rules governing the traditional sonnet sometimes tempt poets into a bit of playfulness. Last Friday, we saw how the fourteen-lines, set rhyme schemes, and iambic pentameter rhythms of the sonnet can be reduced meaningfully to a very short and sweet couplet of four letters and numbers.

Today’s poem is another experiment on the sonnet by a Canadian poet. Alfred Noyes explains his intentions in preparing the collection of Compression Sonnets:

“[S]omething in the [sonnet] form will not let go. Its practice, at its best, was a form of condensation; I have sought here only to see how far such condensation may be taken. Fourteen lines, if nothing else, every student recalls at least this.

“What might come of only fourteen words? What of the ‘sonnet’ remains? A turn after the eighth word? At the thirteenth (a concluding ‘couplet’ of words)? What of the sonnet’s traditional themes? I am interested only in economy — in what might be said with less. In reducing the poem until it turns in on itself, turns itself inside-out. Becomes something else. Becomes nothing. What becomes of form and its tradition, through compression?”

Indeed, what does become of form and tradition, through such compression? Is something lost in the translation? Could well be. For example, in a typical sonnet, the ninth line, which begins the sestet, takes a “turn” or “volta” from proposition to resolution or to effect a change in tone.

Noyes’s verses are missing the volta. In the end, they resemble more the meditative haiku, but are composed of fourteen words rather than seventeen syllables.

Fold a letter
Bright dream tinsel
Thin blue spine
This book’s almost
Done paparazzi

The Coming of Light

2011-12-26T07:08:00.000-05:00

(Hanukkah Brass Menorah, circa 1962, by Ludwig
Wolpert, 1900-1981, German-born sculptor and
designer who worked and taught in Israel and
America)

Hanukkah celebrates the victory, in 165 BCE, of the Jews under the leadership of Judas Maccabeus in Judea over their Syrian rules, who had banned all parts of Jewish culture. The feast celebrates “the joyous day / when we regained the right to pray / to our one God in our own way,” in the words of American poet Aileen Fisher (1906-2002).

The eight-day Festival of Light began on the evening of December 20 this year. The daily lighting of the candles commemorates the miraculous expansion of one day’s oil to an eight-day supply of light, enough to allow the Jews the time needed to rededicate their Temple.

THE COMING OF LIGHT

Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light.
You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,
stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,
sending up warm bouquets of air.
Even this late the bones of the body shine
and tomorrow’s dust flares into breath.

~ Mark Strand, born 1934, Canadian-born American poet and translator

B. C.: A. D.

2011-12-25T07:39:00.000-05:00

Merry Christmas, dear Readers.

B. C.: A. D.

This was the moment when Before
Turned into After, and the future’s
Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.

This was the moment when nothing
Happened. Only dull peace
Sprawled boringly over the earth.

This was the moment when even energetic Romans
Could find nothing better to do
Than counting heads in remote provinces.

And this was the moment
When a few farm workers and three
Members of an obscure Persian sect

Walked haphazard by starlight straight
Into the kingdom of heaven.

~ U. A. Fanthorpe (1929-2009), English poet

To listen to a beautiful Christmas carol performed by the great contralto Mahalia Jackson (1911-1972), please click here.

The Angels for the Nativity of Our Lord

2011-12-24T07:53:00.000-05:00

(Christmas Eve by Henri Matisse,
1869-1954, French printmaker,
painter, and sculptor)

A sonnet.

THE ANGELS FOR THE NATIVITY OF OUR LORD

Run, shepherds, run where Bethlem blest appears,
We bring the best of news, be not dismayed,
A Savior there is born more old than years,
Amidst heaven’s rolling heights this earth who stayed:
In a poor cottage inned, a virgin maid
A weakling did him bear, who all upbears;
There is he, poor swaddled, in a manger laid,
To whom too marrow swaddlings are our spheres:
Run, shepherds, run, and solemnize his birth,
This is that night — no, day, grown great with bliss,
In which the power of Satan broken is;
In heaven be glory, peace unto earth!
Thus singing, through the air the angels swam,
And cope of stars re-echoed the same.

~ William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585-1649), Scottish poet

Please click here to read the collection of poems for the season posted last December.

Short and Sweet

2011-12-23T08:43:00.002-05:00

So What

2011-12-22T07:35:00.001-05:00

(Jazz at Tacoma Station by Joseph Holston, American
Cubist Abstractionist artist)

In our study of the sonnet this month, we have noted several times that rules or restrictions can encourage creativity.

Two corollaries follow from that: rules are meant to be broken, but you have to know the rules before you can break them creatively.

One rule governing the use of metaphors is to avoid mixing them. Combining two elements that are incongruous only confuses the reader.

But even that rule can be broken, in the hands of a skilled poet. A famous example of the effective use of mixed metaphors is found in Hamlet’s soliloquy:

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep
No more; and by a sleep, to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks
That Flesh is heir to. . . .

Similarly, the sonnet below succeeds despite its blatant mixing of metaphors.

SO WHAT

Guess what. If love is only chemistry —
phenylethylamine, that molecule
that dizzies up the brain’s back room, smoky
with hot bebop, it won’t be long until
a single worker’s mopping up the scuffed
and littered floor, whistling tunelessly,
each endorphin cooling like a snuffed
glass candle, the air stale with memory.
So what, you say; outside, a shadow lifts
a trumpet from its case, lifts it like an ingot
and scatters a few virtuosic riffs
toward the locked-down stores. You’ve quit
believing that there’s more, but you’re still stirred
enough to stop, and wait, listening hard.

~ Kim Addonizio, born 1954, American poet, novelist, and writer of guides to composing poetry

Ann Arbor Elegy, for Franny Winston Died September 27, 1969

2011-12-21T07:41:00.002-05:00

(“El” Second and Third Avenue Lines, Bowery
and Division Street, New York, 1936, by Berenice
Abbott, 1898-1991, American photographer)

In 1964, the American poet Ted Berrigan (1934-1983) published The Sonnets, his collection of sonnets re-invented into a modern expression of the personal. Berrigan acknowledged the influence of diverse poets like Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot and Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery. He also felt free to play with syntax and diction, to reflect the simultaneous structure of events in time.

The verse below, a sonnet with variations in length, rhythm, and rhyme, is a good example of how Berrigan uses free association to tell the story as seen from the middle of it all.

It is an informal elegy, a lamentation for a vibrant life now lost. In a sonnet workshop, Berrigan explained that he was “trying to make a very mild poem. . . . that would be an elegy, and the elegiac touch, is perhaps only in the tone, in the mildness, and in the kind of vowels that are used — and then in the fact that it ends in something that you could use in a newspaper.

“I didn't read in the newspaper that Franny Winston had died, but rather I had read that [the boxer] Rocky Marciano had died, in a plane crash in a ﬁeld in Iowa.

“So, reading of his death made me write a poem about her death, which was on my mind. The sonnet seemed to me a proper vehicle for this, that is, to write an elegy, and at the same time, to write a poem in which I was making the events happen in the present, even though obviously I wasn’t writing the sonnet while they were going on. And ﬁnally, there was the transference of having read something in the newspaper about someone’s death who was not the person I was writing about. Again, the sonnet form seemed to allow me to do all those things.”

ANN ARBOR ELEGY, FOR FRANNY WINSTON DIED SEPTEMBER 27, 1969

Last night’s congenial velvet sky
Conspired that Merrill, Jayne, Deke, you & I
Get it together at Mr. Flood’s Party, where we got high
On gin, shots of scotch, tequila salt and beer
Talk a little, laugh a lot & turn a friendly eye
On anything that’s going down beneath Ann Arbor’s sky.
Now the night’s been let to slip its way
Back toward a mild morning’s gray
A cool and gentle rain is falling, cleaning along my way
To where Rice Krispies, English mufﬁns & coffee, black
Will make last night today. We count on that, each new day
Being a new day as we read what the Ann Arbor News has to say.

Sonnet for Hélène

2011-12-20T08:17:00.000-05:00

(Azalea by Carl Larsson, 1853-1919, Swedish painter
and interior designer)

The Italians have a saying, “Traduttore, traditore” or “a translator is a traitor.” It is impossible for a translator to avoid misrepresenting the original.

This is particularly true when translating poetry. There is no one way to proceed. Should the rhyme pattern be repeated? What about the meter? How should one translate figures of speech like metaphors and alliteration and onomatopoeia?

Some argue for a more literal translation of words and expressions, while others favor an indirect but poetic translation, focusing on the spirit of the original verse. Many do agree that the best translators of poetry often are published poets themselves.

The original poem below, in the French of the time of its first definitive publication in 1587, is part of a sequence of sonnets written by Pierre de Ronsard, a much-respected French poet. He is speaking to the much younger Hélène, who is declining his passionate offer of love.

from SONNETS POUR HELENE, livre II, xlii

Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir à la chandelle,
Assise aupres du feu, devidant et filant,
Direz chantant mes vers, en vous esmerveillant :
Ronsard me celebroit du temps que j’estois belle.

Lors vous n’aurez servante oyant telle nouvelle,
Desja sous le labeur à demy sommeillant,
Qui au bruit de mon nom ne s’aille resveillant,
Benissant vostre nom de louange immortelle.

Je seray sous la terre et fantôme sans os,
Par les ombres myrteux je prendray mon repos:
Vous serez au fouyer une vieille accroupie,

Regrettant mon amour et vostre fier desdain.
Vivez, si m’en croyez, n’attendez à demain:
Cueillez dés aujourd’huy les roses de la vie.

~ Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585), French poet

This English version below, also in sonnet form, is a quite literal yet still poetic translation.

from SONNETS FOR HÉLÈNE, Book II: xlii

When you are truly old, beside the evening candle,
Sitting by the fire, winding wool and spinning,
Murmuring my verses, you’ll marvel then, in saying,
“Long ago, Ronsard sang to me, when I was beautiful.”

There’ll be no serving-girl of yours, who hears it all,
Even if, tired from toil, she’s already drowsing,
Fails to rouse at the sound of my name’s echoing,
And blesses your name, then, with praise immortal.

I’ll be under the earth, a boneless phantom,
At rest in the myrtle groves of the dark kingdom¹:
You’ll be an old woman hunched over the fire,

Regretting my love for you, your fierce disdain,
So live, believe me: don’t wait for another day,
Gather them now the roses of life, and desire.

~ translated by A. S. Kline, born 1947, English poet and translator

¹ myrtle groves of the dark kingdom – groves located in the underworld, according to classical mythology

At first glance, the second version of the poem in English below does not appear to be a translation of the original Ronsard sonnet. Its form is somewhat different, only three quatrains long, two lines shorter than a sonnet. Most significantly, it seems to tell a different story, of a woman in her old age sitting by the fire, reading a book rather than spinning wool. But W. B. Yeats is repeating Ronsard’s point, reminding his beloved that the great love of her youth remains faithful to her many years later, even after he is gone.

WHEN YOU ARE OLD

When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And, nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

~ W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), Irish poet and dramatist and winner of the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature

Well Water

2011-12-19T07:25:00.000-05:00

(Moorish tiles at the Alhambra in Andalusia, Spain)

Sometimes a poem will appear to be a sonnet, until you count the lines and examine the rhyme and rhythm.

The first of today’s poems, by Randall Jarrell, is one line short, at thirteen, while the second, by Robert Frost, has too many lines, at fifteen. Neither follows the rhyme scheme or the iambic pentameter rhythm of a traditional sonnet form.

We could conclude that these two poems are not sonnets at all or we could decide that they are sonnets in blank verse, with some variations.

At first glance, they both seem to be about well water. But that’s just a coincidence.

Both poems are divided into two parts like a sonnet, first asking the question and then proposing an answer. Each describes the problem that arises if we dismiss the importance of the commonplace of life, the “dailiness,” as Jarrell calls it, the “something,” as Frost does. We remain alone in our loneliness. The water in the first well goes through a rusty pump and keeps everything hidden from sight. The water in the second well is so shiny that we can see only our own Narcissus-like reflections.

Each poem then brings up a solution. In the first, we find the water is nevertheless clear enough to draw our attention to the quotidian parts of life. And in the second, as one unexpected drop from a living thing disturbs the surface of the water, we see new details at the bottom of the well.

WELL WATER

What a girl called “the dailiness of life”
(Adding an errand to your errand. Saying,
“Since you're up . . .” Making you a means to
A means to a means to) is well water
Pumped from an old well at the bottom of the world.
The pump you pump the water from is rusty
And hard to move and absurd, a squirrel-wheel
A sick squirrel turns slowly, through the sunny
Inexorable hours. And yet sometimes
The wheel turns of its own weight, the rusty
Pump pumps over your sweating face the clear
Water, cold, so cold! you cup your hands
And gulp from them the dailiness of life.

~ Randall Jarrell (1914-1965), American poet, essayist, and novelist, appointed poet laureate 1956-1958

FOR ONCE, THEN, SOMETHING

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths — and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

~ Robert Frost (1874-1963), American poet, appointed poet laureate 1958-1959

Sonnet (1979)

2011-12-18T07:02:00.000-05:00

(American Treasures: Gee's Bend, Alabama, Quilts, U. S.
postage stamps, 2006)

In her review of The Complete Poems (1927-1979) of Elizabeth Bishop, the poet Adrienne Rich wrote that “Bishop left behind, in the last unpublished poem of the last year of her life, her own last word on division, decision, and questions of travel.”

Bishop’s own title for this poem (below) insists it is a sonnet.

It may not look like a sonnet. It is much too narrow. The lines are short, without the traditional iambic pentameter of five pairs of short/long, unstressed/stressed meters, of ten syllables per line.

It may not sound like a sonnet, either. The rhyme is eccentric, with only three pairs of rhymes, each irregularly spaced between the rhyme of one line and its mate. For example, the word “level” of line 2 rhymes with “bevel” of line 11.

And its two stanzas are reversed, with the sestet preceding rather than following the octave.

But its length is the required fourteen lines. Most important, it does follow the structure and intention of a sonnet in establishing its theme, in this case first posing the problem, “Caught,” then proposing an answer, “Freed.”

SONNET (1979)

Caught — the bubble
in the spirit level,
a creature divided;
and the compass needle
wobbling and wavering,
undecided.
Freed — the broken
thermometer’s mercury
running away;
and the rainbow-bird
from the narrow bevel
of the empty mirror,
flying wherever
it feels like, gay!

~ Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), American poet

**********************************************************

As promised, here are the answers to yesterday’s sonnet-riddle.

SHAKESPEAREAN SONNET

by R. S. Gwynne

A man is haunted by his father's ghost.
Hamlet

Boy meets girl while feuding families fight.
Romeo and Juliet

A Scottish king is murdered by his host.
Macbeth

Two couples get lost on a summer night.
A Midsummer Night’s Eve

A hunchback murders all who block his way.
Richard III

A ruler's rivals plot against his life.
Richard II

A fat man and a prince make rebels pay.
Henry IV

A noble Moor has doubts about his wife.
Othello

An English king decides to conquer France.
Henry V

A duke learns that his best friend is a she.
Twelfth Night

A forest sets the scene for this romance.
As You Like It

An old man and his daughters disagree.
King Lear

A Roman leader makes a big mistake.
Julius Caesar

A sexy queen is bitten by a snake.
Antony and Cleopatra

Shakespearean Sonnet

2011-12-17T07:38:00.000-05:00

(Sketch by thirteen-year-old Orson Welles, of the young
Will Shakespeare; Welles, 1915-1985, went on to become
famous for his work in film, television, and the theater)

Like all of us, poets like to have fun, — even with sonnets, as can be seen in the following poem.

SHAKESPEAREAN SONNET

With a first line taken from the tv listings

A man is haunted by his father’s ghost.
Boy meets girl while feuding families fight.
A Scottish king is murdered by his host.
Two couples get lost on a summer night.
A hunchback murders all who block his way.
A ruler’s rivals plot against his life.
A fat man and a prince make rebels pay.
A noble Moor has doubts about his wife.
An English king decides to conquer France.
A duke learns that his best friend is a she.
A forest sets the scene for this romance.
An old man and his daughters disagree.
A Roman leader makes a big mistake.
A sexy queen is bitten by a snake.

~ R. S. Gwynn, born 1948, American poet

(The answers to this riddle will appear in tomorrow’s post.)

Renouncement

2011-12-16T08:01:00.001-05:00

Sonnet: More of the Same

2011-12-15T07:26:00.004-05:00

(Plowing, 1936, by Grant Wood, 1891-1942, American
painter)

It’s come to this — there are rules now on how to ignore the rules governing the sonnet. The poet John Ashbery (born 1927) puts his argument into sonnet form, but without the required fourteen lines in iambic pentameter.

SONNET: MORE OF THE SAME

Try to avoid the pattern that has been avoided,
the avoidance pattern. It’s not as easy as it looks:
The herringbone is floating eagerly up
from the herring to become parquet. Or whatever suits it.
New fractals clamor to be identical
to their sisters. Half of them succeed. The others
go on to be Provençal floral prints some sleepy but ingenious
weaver created halfway through the eighteenth century,
and they never came to life until now.

It’s like practicing a scale: at once different and never the same.
Ask not why we do these things. Ask why we find them meaningful.
Ask the cuckoo transfixed in mid-flight
between the pagoda and the hermit’s rococo cave. He may tell you.

What does it mean for the sonneteer?

“Perhaps this suggests that the form is a formula with which to beat poetry over the head,” writes the poet Hans Ostrom. “Another way to look at the issue, however, is to view the form as ever-adaptable, as only an illusory formula, . . .”

SONNET: LESS OF THE DIFFERENT?

(after Ashbery)

A sonnet’s “just more of the same”? Uh, no.
It’s rather like less of the different.
There is no formula involved, you know.
True, syllables and lines and rhymes get spent
At predetermined intervals: mirage
Or order. Inside, sonnets are a mess
Of words, a slew of syntax, a barrage
Linguistically set off; are nonetheless
Provisionally impish — and as free
As freest verse to chat up any ear
Or signal any eye. The form, you see,
Is just a well mapped route from which to veer.
A sonnet is a disobedience
Of sounds, a flaunt of form, a tease of sense.

~ Hans Ostrom, born 1954, American poet, editor, and writer of short fiction

I Am in Need of Music

2011-12-14T08:40:00.000-05:00

(Four Musical Angels by Bernardo Daddi, circa 1280-1348,
Early Italian Renaissance painter)

As we see with Millay’s “On Hearing a Symphony of Beethoven” yesterday and today’s verse by Elizabeth Bishop, the sonnet, the “little sound” or “song,” is particularly well suited, with its length and rhythm and rhyme, to celebrate the magic made by music.

I AM IN NEED OF MUSIC

I am in need of music that would flow
Over my fretful, feeling fingertips,
Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,
With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow.
Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low,
Of some song sung to rest the tired dead,
A song to fall like water on my head,
And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow!

There is a magic made by melody:
A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool
Heart, that sinks through fading colors deep
To the subaqueous stillness of the sea,
And floats forever in a moon-green pool,
Held in the arms of rhythm and of sleep.

~ Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), American poet, appointed poet laureate 1949-1950

On Hearing a Symphony of Beethoven

2011-12-13T08:26:00.000-05:00

(Edna St. Vincent Millay among the Magnolias,
1914, by Arnold Genthe, 1862-1942, American
photographer)

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) is a prolific writer of novels, libretti, lyric poems, and some of America’s finest sonnets.

ON HEARING A SYMPHONY OF BEETHOVEN

Sweet sounds, oh, beautiful music, do not cease!
Reject me not into the world again.
With you alone is excellence and peace,
Mankind made plausible, his purpose plain.
Enchanted in your air benign and shrewd,
With limbs a-sprawl and empty faces pale,
The spiteful and the stingy and the rude
Sleep like the scullions in the fairy-tale.
This moment is the best the world can give:
The tranquil blossom on the tortured stem.
Reject me not, sweet sounds! oh, let me live,
Till Doom espy my towers and scatter them,
A city spell-bound under the aging sun.
Music my rampart, and my only one.

Two Households, Both Alike in Dignity

2011-12-12T06:18:00.001-05:00

(Engraving of Verona, Italy, the home of Romeo and Juliet,
by an unknown artist, from The Illustrated Shakespeare,
published 1847)

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) so perfected the English sonnet that it carries his name. His fame in this regard rests largely on the 154 love sonnets published in his life time. His sonnets are divided into three quatrains in abab, cdcd, efef rhyme, concluding with an epigrammatic or pointed couplet in gg rhyme.

But Shakespeare also includes sonnets in the scripts of his plays. The romance of Romeo and Juliet is introduced by a prologue in sonnet form setting out the family feud that will lead to tragedy.

CHORUS. Two households, both alike in dignity¹,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean².
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;
Whose misadventur’d piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents’ strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love,
And the continuance of their parents’ rage,
Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage³;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

¹ dignity – status or rank
² civil blood makes civil hands unclean – the bloodshed from strife soils the hands of the citizens
³ two hours’ traffic of our stage – the expected length of this play

(The first meeting of Romeo and Juliet, at
a ball, by Edwin Austin Abbey, 1852-1911,
American artist and illustrator)

The two protagonists, Romeo of the Montagues and Juliet of the Capulets, first meet at a ball. They immediately fall in love. They speak a mere fourteen lines before they kiss, fourteen lines of a shared sonnet echoing the pattern of rhyme and rhythm established by the ominous sonnet in the prologue.

ROMEO. If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
JULIET. Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.
ROMEO. Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
JULIET. Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.
ROMEO. O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray — grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
JULIET. Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake.
ROMEO. Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take.

Sonnet for Minimalists

2011-12-11T07:33:00.002-05:00

(White Peony, 1950, woodblock print by
Kawarazaki Shodo, 1899-1973, Japanese
artist)

By the twentieth century, poets felt free to experiment with the rules governing the different kinds of sonnets in English.

This sonnet follows the Shakespearean form of three quatrains of abab, cdcd, and efef rhyme, with a concluding couplet of gg rhyme. But its meter goes its own way, completely avoiding the traditional iambic pentameter of five feet, or ten syllables, of short/long or stressed/unstressed meters per line.

SONNET FOR MINIMALISTS

From a new peony,
my last anthem,
a squirrel in glee
broke the budded stem.
I thought, Where is joy
without fresh bloom,
that old hearts’ ploy
to mask the tomb?

Then a volunteer
stalk sprung from sour
bird-drop this year
burst in frantic flower.

The world’s perverse,
but it could be worse.

~ Mona Van Duyn (1921-2004), American poet, appointed poet laureate 1992-1993

Sonnet

2011-12-10T06:59:00.003-05:00

The picture today is a popular image by an artist known for his “genre” paintings, small works of art depicting everyday life and surroundings. Carl Spitzweg (1808-1885) is a German Romantic painter and poet whose work often expresses a gently humorous satirical point of view.

The Poor Poet depicts a man in a garret. (Click on the image to see an enlarged version.) We can guess that he is not well off. He had tried to replace the coal with pages from a manuscript but the stove is now cold enough for a top hat to hang from the pipe. To stay warm, he keeps his nightcap and cravat on as he huddles under a blanket on a mattress on the floor. The frayed umbrella keeps him dry from rain falling through leaks in the ceiling.

But he does try to keep up appearances: he has a good coat, sturdy leather boots, a walking stick, and that top hat.

We can also guess that he is a poet. He is surrounded by the requisite heavy books of reference and many pages of manuscripts tied into bundles. And he is counting on his fingers the meters of the words he is putting to paper as he holds a quill in his mouth.

**********************************************************

The directions are clear if you want to compose your own sonnet. Just follow Billy Collins’s instructions below. The Petrarchan sonnet begins with an octave setting out the question and then makes a turn into a sestet with the answer. The Elizabethan sonnet keeps to three quatrains and a concluding couplet.

But wait — Collins is ignoring the rules governing the rhyme and rhythm of this form of poetry. Is this just another occasion of “do as I say, not as I do” or, could it be an example of how “the exception proves the rule”?

SONNET

All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now,
and after this one just a dozen
to launch a little ship on love’s storm-tossed seas,
then only ten more left like rows of beans.
How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan
and insist the iambic bongos¹ must be played
and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines,
one for every station of the cross.
But hang on here while we make the turn
into the final six where all will be resolved,
where longing and heartache will find an end,
where Laura² will tell Petrarch to put down his pen,
take off those crazy medieval tights,
blow out the lights, and come at last to bed.

~ Billy Collins, born 1941, American poet, appointed poet laureate, 2001-2003

¹ iambic bongos – iambic is the foot or pair of syllables that establishes the rhythm or meter of traditional verse and verse drama. Each foot is expressed with a pair of short/long or unstressed/stressed syllables, for example, four-TEEN. Iambic pentameter, made up of five such feet, totaling ten syllables, is the rhythm favored in traditional verse and verse in drama in English.

² Laura – the poet Petrarch’s love for her was actually unrequited; Laura married another man

My Letters!

2011-12-09T06:37:00.000-05:00

Each Friday we provide the link to the blog that is hosting a celebration of poetry around the blogosphere. At that site you can find the links to the many other blogs that are posting poems (new and old), discussions of poems, and reviews of poetry books.

Enjoy the festivities!

The host this week is Robyn Hood Black. You can visit her here at Robyn Hood Black — Children’s Author.

(Portraits of English poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
1806-1861, and Robert Browning, 1812-1889, by Thomas
Read, 1822-1872, American painter)

“I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett, — and this is no off-hand complimentary letter that I shall write, — whatever else, no prompt matter-of-course recognition of your genius, and there a graceful and natural end of the thing.

“Since the day last week when I first read your poems, I quite laugh to remember how I have been turning and turning again in my mind what I should be able to tell you of the effect upon me, for in the first flush of delight I thought I would this once get out of my habit of purely passive enjoyment, when I do really enjoy, and thoroughly justify my admiration . . .”

This letter precipitated one of the most famous of Victorian romances.

Elizabeth Barrett had just published a book of poetry to great acclaim. She was almost forty years old, unmarried, an invalid living in the home of her strict father, when this letter arrived. It was written on January 10, 1845, by Robert Browning, a poet six years her junior. “I had a letter from Browning, the poet, last night,” she wrote to a friend, “which threw me into ecstasies — Browning, the author of Paracelsus, the king of the mystics.”

The two met, fell in love, and became engaged — but eloped when her father refused to approve the marriage and disinherited her.

In the two years before they married, she wrote a series of forty-four love sonnets in the Petrarchan form as a gift to Robert. The collection, Sonnets from the Portuguese, gets its title from his pet name for her, “my little Portuguese.”

Most readers are familiar with the penultimate sonnet in the sequence, the one that asks, “How do I love thee?”

Fewer, however, have read this sonnet below from the collection. It is full of tumult. Elizabeth has trouble holding on to five letters from her beloved. The sheets of paper quiver, her hands tremble, and the letters fall to the floor. She is having just as much trouble controlling her emotions, expressing them with exclamation marks, incomplete sentences, many words of one syllable, and caesurae, or breaks, of ellipses and dashes that express the turns her feelings are taking.

SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE

SONNET XXVIII

My letters! all dead paper, mute and white!
And yet they seem alive and quivering
Against my tremulous hands which loose the string
And let them drop down on my knee to-night.
This said, — he wished to have me in his sight
Once, as a friend: this fixed a day in spring
To come and touch my hand . . . a simple thing,
Yet I wept for it! — this, . . . the paper's light . . .
Said, Dear, I love thee; and I sank and quailed
As if God's future thundered on my past.
This said, I am thine — and so its ink has paled
With lying at my heart that beat too fast.
And this . . . O Love, thy words have ill availed
If, what this said, I dared repeat at last!

Ozymandias

2011-12-08T06:32:00.003-05:00

(Percy Bysshe Shelly in Italy writing Prometheus Unbound,
a “closet drama” meant to be read out loud rather than
performed on stage, by Joseph Severn, 1793-1879, English
painter)

Sometimes poets direct their work to their colleagues. They conduct conversations in verse with other poets, like their responses to Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd. And they compete with each other, writing poems about the same theme, like Leigh Hunt’s and John Keats’s sonnets about a grasshopper and a cricket, and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s and Horace Smith’s sonnets below about an ancient tyrant.

Both of today’s sonnets look at the fate of Ozymandias, believed to be Ramesses II of Egypt (1303-1213 B. C.), a pharaoh who built giant monuments, palaces, and temples in his own honor. A Greek historian of the first century B. C., Diodorus Siculus, recorded that the inscription on the base of one of Ramesses’ monuments read: “King of Kings am I, Ozymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works.”

Both of these sonnets are composed in a variation of the Petrarchan form.

The first sonnet is by Horace Smith (1779-1849). In the octave, he describes the remains of a giant statue of a tyrant in a destroyed city of ancient Egypt. In the sestet, he imagines a time in the future when the city of London is similarly annihilated.

OZYMANDIAS

In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:
“I am great Ozymandias,” saith the stone,
“The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
The wonders of my hand.” The City’s gone,
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.

We wonder, and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chase,
He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

The second sonnet is by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), another Romantic poet like Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, and John Clare. It is by far the more famous version.

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed¹:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

¹ the hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed – the mocking hand of the sculptor, and the tyrant’s heart that fed on his vanity

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

2011-12-07T04:52:00.002-05:00

(John Keats, 1795-1821, English Romantic poet)

John Keats is a Romantic poet like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and John Clare.

Writing in the Petrarchan form, he composed the sonnet below after his friend Charles Cowden Clarke had introduced him to the translation of the Greek poet Homer by the Elizabethan dramatist George Chapman (circa 1559-1634). Clarke recalled how Keats “shouted with delight” at certain passages and then went home to write the poem.

“It is not hard to imagine Clarke’s amazement as he read the sonnet over,” Aileen Ward writes in John Keats: The Making of a Poet. “The poem was a miracle; not simply because of the mastery of form, or because Keats was only twenty when he wrote it, or because he wrote it in the space of an hour or two after a night without sleep [reading Chapman]. Rather because nothing in his earlier poetry gave any promise of this achievement: the gap between this poem and his summer work could only be leaped by genius. . . . The unity of form and feeling that begins in the first line and swells in one crescendo of excitement to the final crashing silence was instantaneous and unimprovable.”

ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN’S HOMER

Much have I travel’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer¹ ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez² when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific — and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise
Silent, upon a peak in Darien³.

¹ deep-brow’d Homer – Homer, the great Greek intellect
² Cortez – an error of no import to this poem: it was the Spanish explorer Balboa, not Cortez, who first gazed upon the Pacific after crossing the Isthmus of Panama in 1513
³ Darien – an area in Panama

The World Is Too Much with Us

2011-12-06T08:10:00.006-05:00

(William Wordsworth, 1770-1850, English poet who
served as poet laureate from 1843-1850)

“The World Is Too Much with Us”

These words could serve as the headline over an editorial in your daily paper, but here they form the title of a surprisingly up-to-date sonnet written more than two centuries ago.

William Wordsworth is one of the English Romantic poets, like Coleridge and Keats. These poets favor Nature as the source of happiness over the spiritual poverty of materialism they believe came with the Industrial Revolution. Many of their verses, like this one, make full use of the pathetic fallacy, bringing in Nature by ascribing human qualities and emotions to an inanimate object.

The sonnet below is in the Petrarchan form. The octave sets out the problem — man is out of tune with the world and is losing his soul to wasteful “getting and spending.” The sestet suggests a possible answer — to make himself “less forlorn,” man should gaze at Nature with the same wonder as beheld by the ancient pagans.

THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. — Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea¹,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus² rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton³ blow his wreathed horn.

¹ lea – meadow
² Proteus – sea god in Greek mythology who can take many different shapes
³ Triton – another sea god in Greek mythology; he blows on a twisted conch shell to control the sea

On His Blindness

2011-12-05T06:07:00.001-05:00

(Portrait in pastel of John Milton,
1608-1674, after an engraving by
William Faithorne, circa 1616-1691)

It is said that the works of the poet John Milton, along with the King James Bible and the writings of Shakespeare, transformed the English language.

Milton’s greatest work is Paradise Lost, published in 1667. This is the epic story, told in blank verse, of the rebellion against God launched by the archangel Lucifer and his cohort. Their defeat was total. Lucifer was banished to the depths of Hell where, as Satan, he plotted his revenge. Satan eventually entangled Man in his evil plans. He began with his temptation of Adam and Eve, which led to their expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

The purpose of Paradise Lost, Milton explained, was to "justify the ways of God to men."

Milton is also regarded as having written some of the finest sonnets in English. Like Donne, he favored the Petrarchan form of the sonnet. In the verse below, he uses an enjambment to link the octave to the sestet.

And like Donne, he took advantage of the restrictions imposed by the sonnet to concentrate his mind on the argument at hand. He wrote this sonnet after he had become completely blind in middle age. His eyesight had been poor since his youth, but his practice of reading by candlelight late into the night most certainly put a great strain on his eyes. Now he expresses his despondency and wonders how he can serve God without the eyesight that every writer needs.

As we have seen, the sonnet form seems particularly fitting for such contemplations.

ON HIS BLINDNESS

When I consider how my light is spent
E’re half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent¹ which is death to hide
Lodg’d with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
“Doth God exact day labor, light deny’d?”
I fondly² ask. But patience, to prevent
That murmur³, soon replies: “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts: who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.”

¹ Talent – from the Parable of the Talents in the New Testament, which tells the story of a master asking his servants to account for the talents or money he had given them
² fondly – foolishly
³ murmur - complaint

O, My Black Soul, Now Thou Art Summoned

2011-12-04T07:41:00.001-05:00

(Marble funeral effigy of John Donne, 1631,
at St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, where he
is buried)

John Donne (1572-1631) is among the finest of the English poets. He is one of the Metaphysical poets, the lyric poets who often used one surprising metaphor to bring together two very different ideas. And he is a master of the sonnet.

Donne favored the Petrarchan form of the sonnet but added his own touches. Sometimes he made slight changes to the rhyme or to the meter and he used enjambment or the run-on line to allow for a more free expression of sentiment.

His sonnets demonstrate the truth of an interesting paradox about art: the limits imposed by hard and fast rules often encourage creativity.

In the sonnet below, for example, in a mere fourteen lines, Donne reveals a profound insight into man’s most difficult question, how to confront his mortality. Here, as in his other works, he displays his usual fanciful imagery and subtlety of thought.

SONNET IV of the HOLY SONNETS

O, my black soul, now thou art summoned
By sickness, Death’s herald and champion;
Thou’rt like a pilgrim, which abroad hath done
Treason, and durst not turn to whence he’s fled;
Or like a thief, which till death’s doom be read,
Wisheth himself deliver’d from prison,
But damn’d and haled to execution,
Wisheth that still he might be imprisoned.
Yet grace, if thou repent, thou canst not lack;
But who shall give thee that grace to begin?
O, make thyself with holy mourning black,
And red with blushing, as thou art with sin;
Or wash thee in Christ's blood, which hath this might,
That being red, it dyes red souls to white.

One Day I Wrote Her Name upon the Strand

2011-12-03T06:30:00.000-05:00

(Edmund Spenser, 1552-1599, English poet and
playwright)

The Spenserian sonnet is a combination of two of the main forms of the sonnet. Like the Shakespearean sonnet, it is made up of three quatrains and a closing couplet. But it resembles the Petrarchan sonnet with its connective pattern of rhyme, in this case an interlinking scheme of abab, bcbc, cdcd rhyme before it closes with an epigrammatic couplet of ee rhyme.

This sonnet form was devised by a much-admired and prolific poet, Edmund Spenser. He began his career with his Shepheardes Calendar, a twelve-part pastoral poem written in somewhat archaic dialect, resembling Chaucer in parts. His fame rests on his epic poem, The Faerie Queene, an allegory honoring Queen Elizabeth.

The sonnet below is part of Amoretti, his cycle of 89 sonnets commemorating his courtship of Elizabeth Boyle and their marriage.

SONNET LXXV

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
Vain man, said she, that dost in vain assay
A mortal thing so to immortalize!
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eek my name be wiped out likewise.
Not so (quoth I), let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name;
Where, whenas death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.

When Forty Winters Shall Besiege Thy Brow

2011-12-02T07:15:00.002-05:00

She Ruled in Beauty

2011-12-01T08:22:00.001-05:00

(Petrarch, 1304-1374, Italian poet
and humanist, pictured here crowned
with a laurel wreath in honor of his
renown as a poet)

As a form of poetry, the sonnet can be traced to thirteenth-century Italy. Petrarch, one of the literary giants of the Italian Renaissance, so perfected the love sonnet that one form bears his name. Many of Petrarch's sonnets express an unattainable love for the sublimely ideal woman.

In his work, Petrarch was inspired by his own experience of unrequited love. His muse, the beautiful Laura, married another man.

The Petrarchan (or Italian) sonnet begins with an octave in abba, abba rhyme, which sets out the question or theme. This is followed by a sestet in cde, cde or cd, cd, cd rhyme, which provides the answer or solution.

She ruled in beauty o’er this heart of mine,
A noble lady in a humble home,
And now her time for heavenly bliss has come,
’Tis I am mortal proved, and she divine.
The soul that all its blessings must resign,
And love whose light no more on earth finds room,
Might rend the rocks with pity for their doom,
Yet none their sorrows can in words enshrine.
They weep within my heart; and ears are deaf
Save mine alone, and I am crushed with care,
And naught remains to me save mournful breath.
Assuredly but dust and shade we are,
Assuredly desire is blind and brief,
Assuredly its hope but ends in death.

~ Petrarch, or Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), Italian humanist and poet, translated by Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911)

The Madness of Love

2011-11-30T06:19:00.000-05:00

(Rose Window dedicated to Mary,
circa 1235, at Chartres Cathedral,
located about 50 miles south of Paris;
the medieval cathedral was built in the
High Gothic style mainly between 1194
and 1260)

We now conclude our look at Agape, the final part of the study of love we began in June.

In our work we were inspired by C. S. Lewis, who wrote about the four kinds of love, using the Greek names: “Charity means love. It is called Agape in the New Testament to distinguish it from Eros (sexual love), Storge (family affection) and Philia (friendship).”

The poem below was written by Hadewijch of Antwerp, a 13th-century poet and mystic. She was a member of the Beguines, one of the many medieval Catholic communities of lay women in the Low Countries, including Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg. The women devoted their lives to their faith and their work with the poor.

The madness of love
Is a blessed fate;
And if we understood this
We would seek no other;
It brings into unity
What was divided,
And this is the truth:
Bitterness it makes sweet,
It makes the stranger a neighbor,
And what was lowly it raises on high.

Amazing Grace

2011-11-29T07:12:00.001-05:00

(Engraving of William Wilberforce at
age 29)

William Wilberforce (1759-1833) is celebrated as the man who won the fight in the British Parliament to abolish first the slave trade in 1807 and then the practice of slavery in 1833 in all the countries under its rule.

But his victory was even greater than that. For five thousand years, everywhere on the globe, writes Eric Metaxas in his book Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery, “slavery was as accepted as birth and marriage and death.” Today, after the work of Wilberforce and his friends, “even though slavery continues to exist here and there [in the trafficking of the sex trade, for example], . . . the idea that [slavery] is inextricably intertwined with human civilization, and part of the way things are supposed to be, and economically necessary and morally defensible, is gone.”

How did Wilberforce, as a young member of Parliament, win this great battle to change the hearts and minds of so many?

When he was only 25 years old, Wilberforce underwent a profound conversion of faith. “He saw the idea that all men are brothers and that we are all our brothers’ keepers,” writes Metaxas. “He saw the idea that one must love one’s neighbor as oneself and that we must do unto others as we would have them do unto us.”

This is the very essence of Agape, or charity.

Wilberforce let Agape guide him in Parliament, as we can see in his most famous speech, his Abolition Speech of 1789, which he delivered when he was only 29 years old.

“I mean not to accuse any one, but to take the shame upon myself, in common, indeed, with the whole Parliament of Great Britain, for having suffered [allowed] this horrid trade to be carried on under their authority. We are all guilty, we ought all to plead guilty, and not to exculpate ourselves by throwing the blame on others. . . .

“[W]hen I reflect on the command which says, ‘Thou shalt do no murder,’ believing the authority to be divine, how can I dare to set up any reasonings of my own against it? And, sir, when we think of eternity, and of the future consequences of all human conduct, what is there in this life that should make any man contradict the dictates of his conscience, the principles of justice, the laws of religion, and of God?

“Sir, the nature and all the circumstances of this trade are now laid open to us; we can no longer plead ignorance, we cannot evade it, it is now an object placed before us, we cannot pass it. We may spurn it, we may kick it out of our way, but we cannot turn aside so as to avoid seeing it; for it is brought now so directly before our eyes that this House must decide, and must justify to all the world, and to their own consciences, the rectitude of the grounds and principles of their decision.”

Metaxas writes that “in the thick of the battle for abolition, one of its many dedicated opponents, Lord Melbourne, was outraged that Wilberforce dared inflict his Christian values about slavery and human equality on British society. ‘Things have come to a pretty pass,’ he famously thundered, ‘when one should permit one’s religion to invade public life.’”

The lyrics of the hymn below were composed by John Newton (1725-1807), an Anglican minister, former captain of a slaving ship, and great friend of Wilberforce.

AMAZING GRACE

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

’Twas Grace that taught my heart to fear,
And Grace, my fears relieved.
How precious did that Grace appear
The hour I first believed.

Through many dangers, toils and snares
I have already come;
’Tis Grace that brought me safe thus far
And Grace will lead me home.

The Lord has promised good to me.
His word my hope secures.
He will my shield and portion be,
As long as life endures.

Yea, when this flesh and heart shall fail,
And mortal life shall cease,
I shall possess within the veil,
A life of joy and peace.

When we’ve been here ten thousand years
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we’ve first begun.

The Mower

2011-11-28T04:50:00.000-05:00

(Long Limb by Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American
artist)

THE MOWER

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

~ Philip Larkin (1922-1985), English poet, novelist, and jazz critic

November 3

2011-11-27T07:08:00.002-05:00

(Marigold, design by William Morris 1834-1896, English
textile designer, artist, and writer)

A mitzvah is a commandment or profound obligation to perform a meritorious act or good work. There are 613 such mitzvoth. Maimonides (1135-1204), the great medieval Jewish philosopher and Torah scholar, wrote that a man who performed even only one mitzvah was still worthy of salvation, provided he did so not to impress others or to win credit for himself, but for the sake of love and with joy.

And in his Sermon on the Mount, Christ said: “When thou givest alms, do not let thy left hand know what thy right hand is doing, so that thy alms may be given in secret; and thy Father, who sees in secret, will reward thee.”

NOVEMBER 3

Neither yielding to rain
nor yielding to wind
yielding neither to
snow nor to summer heat
with a stout body
like that
without greed
never getting angry
always smiling quietly
eating one and a half pieces of brown rice
and bean paste and a bit of
vegetables a day
in everything
not taking oneself
into account
looking listening understanding well
and not forgetting
living in the shadow of pine trees in a field
in a small
hut thatched with miscanthus
if in the east there’s a
sick child
going and nursing
him
if in the west there is a tired mother
going and for her
carrying
bundles of rice
if in the south
there’s someone
dying
going
and saying
you don’t have to be
afraid
if in the north
there’s a quarrel
or a lawsuit
saying it’s not worth it
stop it
in a drought
shedding tears
in a cold summer
pacing back and forth lost
called
a good-for-nothing
by everyone
neither praised
nor thought a pain
someone
like that
is what I want
to be

~ Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933), Japanese poet, translated by Hiroaki Sato

Good People

2011-11-26T06:49:00.001-05:00

(Miep Gies, 1909-2010, at work in Otto
Frank’s company in Amsterdam in 1938)

By early 1942, under the occupation of the Nazis, Amsterdam had become a very dangerous place for Jews. Each day Jewish families would disappear. The residents of the city knew that they were being deported to the East.

When Otto Frank asked his secretary if she would help him and his wife and two daughters hide from the Nazis, Miep Gies immediately said “Yes,” even though she knew she could be arrested for this.

The Franks went into hiding on July 6, 1942, the day after Anne’s sixteen-year-old sister, Margot, received notice to report for deportation to a forced-labor camp. Four other Jews later joined them in the attic or “Secret Annex” of the small office building housing Mr. Frank’s business.

Years later, Miep wrote, “Mr. Vossen [another of Mr. Frank’s employees] had placed a hook on the back of the bookcase, which could be fastened by our friends. When opened by them, it would permit the whole bookcase to swing out and away, so that one could enter the hiding place. . . .

“Every time I pulled the bookcase aside, I had to set a smile on my face, and disguise the bitter feeling that burned in my heart. I would take a breath, pull the bookcase closed, and put on an air of calm and good cheer that it was otherwise impossible to feel anywhere in Amsterdam anymore. My friends upstairs were not to be upset, not to be privy to any of my anguish.”

For two years, Miep and other helpers made sure that those in hiding would have food and books and other necessities and even a little luxury now and then.

Then, on August 4, 1944, acting on a tip, the Gestapo broke down the hidden door and arrested all the residents of the Secret Annex. Miep found Anne’s diary and gave it to Mr. Frank after the war. Otto was the only one of the eight to survive the extermination camps.

Since its original publication in 1947, Anne’s diary has become one of the most-read books about the Second World War. It has been translated into more than 60 languages and has been adapted into plays and films.

(Anne Frank, 1929-1945, in May 1942, two months before
the Franks went into hiding)

GOOD PEOPLE

From the kindness of my parents
I suppose it was that I held
that belief about suffering

imagining that if only
it could come to the attention
of any person with normal
feelings certainly anyone
literate who might have gone

to college they would comprehend
pain when it went on before them
and would do something about it
whenever they saw it happen
in the time of pain the present
they would try to stop the bleeding
for example with their hands

but it escapes their attention
or there may be reasons for it
the victims under the blankets
the meat counters the maimed children
the animals the animals
staring from the end of the world

~ W. S. Merwin, born in 1927, American poet, essayist, and translator

The Moment

2011-11-25T08:49:00.000-05:00

Te Deum

2011-11-24T08:09:00.002-05:00

(Behold the Day, woodcut by Frances Gearhart, 1869-1958,
American artist)

Today is Thanksgiving Day in America.

The Latin title of the poem below is taken from the opening words of a Christian hymn from the fourth century, “Te Deum laudamus,” meaning “Thee, O God, we praise.”

TE DEUM

Not because of victories
I sing,
having none,
but for the common sunshine,
the breeze,
the largess of the spring.

Not for victory
but for the day's work done
as well as I was able;
not for a seat upon the dais
but at the common table.

~ Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976), American poet

Song's Eternity

2011-11-23T08:01:00.006-05:00

(Design for the performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute,
by Karl Friedrich Thiele, 1780-1836, after Karl Friedrich
Schinkel, 1781-1841, German artists both)

“The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions — the little soon forgotten charities of a kiss or smile, a kind look, a heartfelt compliment, and the countless infinitesimals of pleasurable and genial feeling.” ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), English Romantic poet

(This poem is best when read out loud.)

SONG’S ETERNITY

What is song’s eternity?
Come and see
Can it noise and bustle be?
Come and see
Praises sung or praises said,
Can it be?
Wait awhile and these are dead
Sigh sigh
Be they high or lowly bred
They die

What is song’s eternity?
Come and see
Melodies of earth and sky,
Here they be
Song once sung to Adam’s ears
Can it be?
Ballads of six thousand years
Thrive thrive
Songs awaken with the spheres
Alive

Mighty songs that miss decay
What are they?
Crowds and cities pass away
Like a day
Books are writ and books are read
What are they?
Years will lay them with the dead
Sigh sigh
Trifles unto nothing wed,
They die

Dreamers list¹ the honey bee
Mark the tree
Where the blue cap, tootle tee
Sings a glee
Sung to Adam and to Eve
Here they be
When floods covered every bough,
Noah’s ark
Heard that ballad singing now
Hark hark

Tootle tootle tootle tee
Can it be
Pride and fame must shadows be?
Come and see
Every season owns her own
Bird and bee
Sing creations music on
Nature’s glee
Is in every mood and tone
Eternity

The eternity of song
Liveth here
Nature’s universal tongue
Singeth here
Songs I’ve heard and felt and seen
Everywhere
Songs like the grass are evergreen
The giver
Said live and be, and they have been
For ever

~ John Clare (1793-1864), English Romantic poet

¹ list – listen to

An Altogether Different Language

2011-11-22T07:47:00.006-05:00

(Landscape with Stars, watercolor by Henri Edmond
Cross, 1856-1910, French artist)

“For love all love of other sights controls, / And makes one little room an everywhere.” ~ John Donne (1572-1631), the greatest of the English Metaphysical poets

AN ALTOGETHER DIFFERENT LANGUAGE

There was an old church in Umbria, Little Portion¹,
Already old eight hundred years ago.
It was abandoned and in disrepair
But it was called St. Mary of the Angels
For it was known to be the haunt of angels,
Often at night the country people
Could hear them singing there.

What was it like, to listen to the angels,
To hear those mountain-fresh, those simple voices
Poured out on the bare stones of Little Portion
In hymns of joy?
No one has told us.
Perhaps it needs another language
That we still have to learn,
An altogether different language.

~ Anne Porter, born 1911, American poet

¹ Little Portion or "small portion of land," Porziuncola; the chapel is one of several small chapels now located here inside the Basilica of St. Mary of the Angels in Assisi.

If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking

2011-11-21T06:18:00.000-05:00

(Road to Town, woodcut by Gustave Baumann, 1881-1971,
German-born American artist and puppeteer)

The opposite of cruelty is not simply kindness or the end of the cruel relationship. The opposite of cruelty is hospitality.

This is the conclusion reached by the philosopher Philip Hallie (1922-1994) after he studied what the villagers of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon had done during the Second World War. Le Chambon was located in a part of France under the close eyes of the Nazis. All the Jews found in the area would be deported to the extermination camps in the East.

The residents decided as a village to provide food and shelter and comfort to any Jews knocking on their doors. Risking their lives, they saved more than 6000 Jews.

But their enduring hospitality did more than save lives. For example, writes Hallie, “the morning after a new refugee family came to town they would find on their front door a wreath with ‘Bienvenue!’ ‘Welcome!’ painted on a piece of cardboard attached to the wreath. Nobody knew who had brought the wreath; in effect, the whole town had brought it.”

“The people of Le Chambon,” wrote a woman years later who had been saved as a young girl, “showed to us that life can be different, that there are people who care, that people can live together and even risk their own lives for their fellow man.” The people of Le Chambon gave their guests hope for the future.

If I can stop one Heart from breaking,
I shall not live in Vain:
If I can ease one Life the Aching,
Or cool one Pain,

Or help one fainting Robin
Unto his Nest again,
I shall not live in Vain.

~ Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), American poet

(To read more, see Philip Hallie’s Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There)

The Fountain

2011-11-20T07:07:00.000-05:00

(A cyanotype, also called a sun print or
blueprint, circa 1850, by British botanist
Anna Atkins, 1797-1871)

“There is a politeness of the heart. It is akin to love.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), German writer, poet, dramatist, and scientist

THE FOUNTAIN

Don’t say, don’t say there is no water
to solace the dryness at our hearts.
I have seen

the fountain springing out of the rock wall
and you drinking there. And I too
before your eyes

found footholds and climbed
to drink the cool water.

The woman of that place, shading her eyes,
frowned as she watched — but not because
she grudged the water,

only because she was waiting
to see we drank our fill and were
refreshed.

Don’t say, don’t say there is no water.
That fountain is there among the scalloped
green and gray stones,

it is still there and always there
with its quiet song and strange power
to spring in us,
up and out through the rock.

~ Denise Levertov (1923-1977), English-born American poet

The Good News

2011-11-19T05:52:00.001-05:00

(Open Window by Henri Matisse, 1869-1954,
French printmaker, painter, and sculptor)

“And when we come to think of it, goodness is uneventful. It does not flash, it glows. It is deep, quiet, and very simple. It passes not with oratory, it is commonly foreign to riches, nor does it often sit in the places of the mighty: but may be felt in the touch of a friendly hand or the look of a kindly eye.” ~ Ray Stannard Baker (1870-1946), American journalist and writer

THE GOOD NEWS

They don’t publish
the good news.
The good news is published
by us.
We have a special edition every moment,
and we need you to read it.
The good news is that you are alive,
and the linden tree is still there,
standing firm in the harsh winter.
The good news is that you have wonderful eyes
to touch the blue sky.
The good news is that your child is there before you,
and your arms are available:
hugging is possible.
They only print what is wrong.
Look at each of our special editions.
We always offer the things that are not wrong.
We want you to benefit from them
and help protect them.
The dandelion is there by the sidewalk,
smiling its wondrous smile,
singing the song of eternity.
Listen! You have ears that can hear it.
Bow your head.
Listen to it.
Leave behind the world of sorrow
and preoccupation
and get free.
The latest good news
is that you can do it.

~ Thích Nhat Hanh, born 1926, Vietnamese Buddhist monk

Why I Wake Early

2011-11-18T07:06:00.000-05:00

Each Friday we provide the link to the blog that is hosting a celebration of poetry around the blogosphere. At that site you can find the links to the many other blogs that are posting poems (new and old), discussions of poems, and reviews of poetry books. It’s also a great way to explore the internet.

Enjoy the festivities!

The host this week is Tabatha Yeatts.

You can visit her here at The Opposite of Indifference.

(California Meadow by Granville Redmond, 1872-1935,
American painter)

“Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.” ~ Eric Hoffer (1902-1983), American writer

WHY I WAKE EARLY

Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who made the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even,
the miserable and the crotchety —

best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light —
good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.

~ Mary Oliver, born 1935, American poet

To Play Pianissimo

2011-11-17T07:07:00.004-05:00

(Cranes, a mural by N. C. Wyeth, 1882-1945, American
artist and illustrator)

Mother Teresa was speaking to members of her order, the Missionaries of Christ:

“What we need is to love without getting tired.

“How does a lamp burn? Through the continuous input of small drops of oil. If the drops of oil run out, the light of the lamp will cease. . . .

“My daughters, what are the drops of oil in our lamps? They are the small things of daily life: faithfulness, punctuality, small words of kindness, a thought for others, our way of being silent, of looking, of speaking, and of acting.”

~ Mother Teresa (1910-1997), Albanian-born Indian Catholic nun, from Heart of Joy

TO PLAY PIANISSIMO

To play pianissimo¹
Does not mean silence.
The absence of moon in the day sky,
for example.

Does not mean barely to speak,
the way a child’s whisper
makes only warm air
on his mother’s right ear.

To play pianissimo
is to carry sweet words
to the old woman in the last dark row
who cannot hear anything else,
and to lay them across her lap like a shawl.

~ Lola Haskins, American poet and essayist

¹ pianissimo – in musical direction: passage to be performed very softly (Italian – piano, soft)

The Love a Life Can Show Below

2011-11-16T05:24:00.000-05:00

(Still Life by Jacob Collins, born 1964, American painter)

“To love our neighbor as ourselves does not mean that we should love all people equally, for I do not have an equal love for all the modes of existence of myself. Nor does it mean that we should never make them suffer, for I do not refuse to make myself suffer. But we should have with each person the relationship of one conception of the universe to another conception of the universe, and not to a part of it.”

~ Simone Weil (1909-1943), French philosopher and Christian mystic

The Love a Life can show Below
Is but a filament, I know,
Of that diviner thing
That faints upon the face of Noon —
And smites the Tinder in the Sun —
And hinders Gabriel’s¹ Wing —

’Tis this — in Music — hints and sways —
And far abroad on Summer days —
Distils uncertain pain —
’Tis this enamors in the East —
And tints the Transit in the West
With harrowing Iodine —

’Tis this — invites — appalls — endows —
Flits — glimmers — proves — dissolves —
Returns — suggests — convicts — enchants —
Then — flings in Paradise —

~ Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), American poet

¹ Gabriel – the archangel

Song

2011-11-15T07:26:00.000-05:00

(Sprig of Almond Blossoms in Glass
by Vincent van Gogh, 1853-1890,
Dutch Post-Impressionist painter)

“Most people really believe that the Christian commandments (e.g., to love one’s neighbor as oneself) are intentionally a little too severe — like putting the clock ahead half an hour to make sure of not being late in the morning.” ~ Søren Kirkegaard (1813-1855), Danish theologian and philosopher, one of the fathers of Existentialism

SONG

That tree with trembling leaves
is longing for something.

That tree, so lovely to look at,
seems to want to give away flowers:
it is longing for something.

That tree, so lovely to see,
seems to want to flower:
it is longing for something.

It seems to want to give away flowers:
they are already showing; come and look at them:
it is longing for something.

It seems to want to flower:
they are already showing; come and see them:
it is longing for something.

They are already showing; come and look at them.
Let the women come to pick the fruit:
it is longing for something.

~ Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, 1364-1404, poet and Admiral of Castile, Spain

Shema

2011-11-14T06:17:00.001-05:00

(Omega IV by Morris Louis, 1912-1962,
American Abstract Expressionist painter)

The poem below was written by Primo Levi (1919-1987), an Italian chemist, writer, and poet. His many works, especially If This Is a Man, his memoir of his year at Auschwitz, examine man’s struggles to maintain his humanity in the face of great evil.

The Hebrew title of the poem below translates into “listen” or “hear.” It is the first word of a prayer in Jewish liturgy admonishing the faithful to teach their children to love God and to obey the commandments.

The poem is in three parts. The first stanza greets the readers now living in the post-Holocaust world of comfort and peace; the second describes the terror of the death camps; and the third urges us to warn future generations of the lessons of this evil so that such evil can never again take place.

SHEMA

You who live secure
In your warm houses
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:

Consider whether this is a man,
Who labors in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no.
Consider whether this is a woman,
Without hair or name
With no more strength to remember
Eyes empty and womb cold
As a frog in winter.

Consider that this has been:
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,
When you go to bed, when you rise.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble,
Disease render you powerless,
Your offspring avert their faces from you.

Three Words of Strength

2011-11-13T08:24:00.000-05:00

(Toleware Box, watercolor painting by John H. Tercuzzi,
American artist)

The spirit of charity requires that gifts be given without condition.

“Go, give a penny to that blind beggar,” said the Rabbi of Witkowo to his son, when they were walking together.

The boy did so. When he rejoined him, his father asked him, “Why didst thou not raise thy hat?”

“But he is blind,” replied the boy. “He could not have seen me.”

“And how dost thou know,” retorted his father, “that he is not an impostor? Go, raise thy hat.”

~ Celia Haddon, from The Yearbook of Hope and Inspiration

THREE WORDS OF STRENGTH

There are three lessons I would write —
Three words, as with a burning pen,
In tracings of eternal light,
Upon the hearts of men.

Have hope! though clouds environ round,
And gladness hides her face in scorn,
Put though the shadow from the brow,
No night but hath its morn.

Have faith! where’er thy bark is driven —
The calm’s disport, the tempest’s mirth —
Know this: God rules the hosts of heaven,
The inhabitants of earth.

Have love! not love alone for one,
But man as man they brother call,
And scatter, like the circling sun,
Thy charities on all.

Thus grave these lessons on the soul,
Hope, faith, and love; and thou shalt find
Strength when life’s surges rudest roll,
Light when thou else wert blind.

~ Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), German poet, philosopher, and playwright of dramas including the story of the Swiss marksman William Tell

Try to Praise the Mutilated World

2011-11-12T08:42:00.000-05:00

(The Island by Annelisse Molini, artist born 1966 in Puerto Rico)

“Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less.”

~ C. S. Lewis, from Mere Christianity

TRY TO PRAISE THE MUTILATED WORLD

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

~ Adam Zagajewski, born 1945, Polish poet

A Nation’s Builders

2011-11-11T07:25:00.000-05:00

Each Friday we provide the link to the blog that is hosting a celebration of poetry around the blogosphere. At that site you can find the links to the many other blogs that are posting poems (new and old), discussions of poems, and reviews of poetry books. It’s also a great way to explore the internet.

Enjoy the festivities!

The hosts this week are Six Children’s Authors Who Also Teach Writing.

You can visit them here at their blog, Teaching Authors.

(The Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial in
England, which contains the remains of 3,812 of U. S.
military who died either in the Battle of the Atlantic or
the strategic air bombardment of northwest Europe
during World War II.)

Today is Veterans Day in America (known as Remembrance or Armistice Day in the Commonwealth and other countries), when we honor those who so loved their fellow countrymen they were prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice.

A NATION’S BUILDERS

Not gold, but only men can make
A people great and strong —
Men who, for truth and honor’s sake,
Stand fast and suffer long.

Brave men who work while others sleep,
Who dare while others fly —
They build a nation’s pillars deep;
They lift them to the sky.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), American poet and essayist

The World State

2011-11-10T06:50:00.001-05:00

(“I love mankind — it’s people I can’t
stand.” ~ Linus in Peanuts, by Charles
M. Schulz, 1922-2000)

THE WORLD STATE

Oh, how I love Humanity,
With love so pure and pringlish,
And how I hate the horrid French,
Who never will be English!

The International Idea,
The largest and the clearest,
Is welding all the nations now,
Except the one that’s nearest.

This compromise has long been known,
This scheme of partial pardons,
In ethical societies
And small suburban gardens —

The villas and the chapels where
I learned with little labor
The way to love my fellow-man
And hate my next-door neighbor.

~ G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), prolific English author who wrote poetry, novels, essays, and the Father Brown detective series

No Man Is an Island

2011-11-09T06:25:00.000-05:00

(John Donne, 1572-1631, the greatest of the
English Metaphysical poets)

Agape, or charity, is an act of the will. It involves an understanding of our common humanity, of the connections that bind all of us human beings. What happens to you, happens to me. Your suffering is my suffering.

In one of his Meditations, the poet John Donne explains the paradoxical character of this uniquely human vulnerability.

“Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbors. Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did; for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough, that is not matured and ripened by it, and made fit for God by that affliction. If a man carry treasure in bullion or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current moneys, his treasure will not defray him as he travels. Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it.”

from DEVOTIONS UPON EMERGENT OCCASIONS

Meditation XVII

No man is an island, entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less,
As well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends of thine own were;
Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind;
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.

Stranger

2011-11-08T07:05:00.000-05:00

(Place of Gathering by Frank Stella, born in 1936,
American painter and printmaker)

“The fashion of this world passes away. The very name of nature implies the transitory. Natural loves can hope for eternity only in so far as they have allowed themselves to be taken into the eternity of Charity; have at least allowed the process to begin here on earth, before the night comes when no man can work.”

~ C. S. Lewis, from The Four Loves

STRANGER

When no one listens
To the quiet trees
When no one notices
The sun in the pool.

Where no one feels
The first drop of rain
Or sees the last star

Or hails the first morning
Of a giant world
Where peace begins
And rages end:

One bird sits still
Watching the work of God:
One turning leaf,
Two falling blossoms,
Ten circles upon the pond.

One cloud upon the hillside,
Two shadows in the valley
And the light strikes home.

Now dawn commands the capture
Of the tallest fortune,
The surrender
Of no less marvelous prize!

Closer and clearer
Than any wordy master,
Thou inward Stranger
Whom I have never seen,

Deeper and cleaner
Than the clamorous ocean,
Seize up my silence
Hold me in Thy Hand!

Now act is waste
And suffering undone
Laws become prodigals

Limits are torn down
For envy has no property
And passion is none.

Look, the vast Light stands still
Our cleanest Light is One!

~ Thomas Merton (1915-1968), American Trappist monk, poet, and writer of many books and essays

I Love My Enemies

2011-11-07T06:19:00.001-05:00

(Sermon on the Mount, lithograph, part of a
series on the Gospel of Matthew, found here,
by Otto Dix, 1891-1961, German Expressionist
artist

On June 1, we began our study of love with one of the most thought-provoking statements ever made about this virtue.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ tells his followers, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and send rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” ~ Matthew 5:43-48

It isn’t easy.

I LOVE MY ENEMIES

I love my enemies, those I forgive;
they are my friends.
But at times, when fate lies like a stone,
there is a dying in my soul,
and I’m prepared to love even those
no one should forgive,
just because life is hard work.
Any life. Any at all.

. . . You burned down my house
so you could warm yourself by the fire.
You trampled my hopes.
Who can measure my loss?
Still, I’m grateful, friend:
you didn’t kill me,
though you’re stronger than I am
and don’t believe in anything at all.

~ Leonid Zavalniuk (1931-2010), Russian poet and songwriter

The Barranong Angel Case

2011-11-06T06:00:00.001-05:00

(Mystery of the Street by Umbo, born Otto
Umbehr, 1902-1980, German photographer)

Today we begin to look at charity, or Agape (ah-gah-pay) in Greek and Caritas in Latin. This is the love that C. S. Lewis describes as “all about giving, not getting.” It is not an emotion. “It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.” It is the highest form of love, selfless, unlimited, and voluntary.

THE BARRANONG ANGEL CASE

You see that bench in front of Meagher’s store?
That’s where the angel landed.
What? An angel?
Yes. It was just near smoko¹ time on a sale day.
Town was quite full. He called us all together.
And was he obeyed?
Oh yes. He got a hearing.
Made his announcement, blessed us and took off
Again, straight up.
He had most glorious wings . . .
What happened then?
There were some tasks he’d set us
Or rather that sort of followed from his message.
And were they carried out?
At first we meant to,
But after a while, when there had been some talk
Most came to think he’d been a bit, well, haughty,
A bit overdone, with those flourishes of wings
And that plummy² accent.
Lot of the women liked that.
But the men who’d knelt, off their own bat, mind you,
They were specially crook³ on him, as I remember.

Did he come again?
Oh yes. The message was important.
The second time, he hired the church hall,
Spoke most politely, called us all by name.
Any result?
Not much. At first we liked him.
But, after all, he’d singled out the Catholics.
It was their hall. And another thing resented
By different ones, he hadn’t charged admission.
We weren’t all paupers, and any man or angel
With so little regard for local pride, or money,
Ends up distrusted.

Did he give up then?
Oh no. The third time round
He thought he had our measure. Came by car,
Took a room at Morgan’s, didn't say a word
About his message for the first two days
And after that, dropped hints. Quite clever ones.
He made sure, too, that he spoke to all the Baptists.
I’ll bet that worked.
You reckon? Not that I saw.
We didn’t like him pandering to our ways
For a start. Some called it mockery, straight out.
He was an angel, after all. And then
There was the way he kept on coming back
Hustling the people.
And when all’s said and done
He was a stranger. And he talked religion.

Did he keep on trying?
No. Gave us away.
Would it have helped if he’d settled in the district?
Don’t think so, mate. If you follow me, he was
Too keen altogether. He’d have harped on that damn message
All the time — or if he’d stopped, well then
He’d have been despised because he’d given in, like.
He’d just got off on the wrong foot from the start
And you can’t fix that up.

But what — Oh Hell! — what if he’d been, say, born here?
Well, that sort of thing’s a bit above an angel,
Or a bit below. And he’d grow up too well known.
Who’d pay any heed to a neighbor’s boy, I ask you,
Specially if he came out with messages?
Besides, what he told us had to do with love
And people here,
They don’t think that’s quite — manly.

~ Les A. Murray, born 1938, Australian poet and critic

¹smoko – a break from work (Australian slang)
²plummy – rich in tone (informal British)
³crook on – abusive, hostile to (Australian slang)

The Book of the Duchess

2011-11-05T07:46:00.002-04:00

(Courtly Love, by unknown medieval artist)

We now come to the end of our study of the poetry of Eros, or romantic love, that state of “being in love.” (Tomorrow we begin our look at Agape, or charity, the last of the four loves famously discussed by C. S. Lewis.)

Today’s post hearkens back to the origins of the medieval tradition of courtly love in Provence, in south-eastern France. The selections below suggest two perspectives to romance at the time, first, from the view of a man and then second, of a woman. The third poem, by a Cavalier poet from the seventeenth century, shows how the sentiments of courtly love remain an integral part of romance.

Of course, there were many poems and songs about romance before this, like the Song of Songs in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament, and ninth-century songs about star-crossed lovers in Ireland. But the conventions of courtly love, as popularized by troubadours performing among the nobility in the courts from the eleventh century on, brought something new to the literature of love.

The songs and poems of courtly love are notable for their particular ideal of romance, an ideal which features the chivalry and honor of the knight and his unrequited love for a woman. It is a romance that is doomed, a love that is not to be.

from THE BOOK OF THE DUCHESS

Heart-whole, I started to beseech
That she would be my lady sweet.
I swore to her with heartfelt heat
My steadfast duty firm and true,
And love that would be always new.
To guard her honor evermore,
And serve no other, then I swore
To do my best. I promised this:
“For yours is all that ever there is,
My sweetheart. Barring dreams untrue,
I never shall be false to you,
As sure as God’s intents prevail!”

~ Geoffrey Chaucer (circa 1343-1400), English courtier, diplomat, and poet, famous especially for The Canterbury Tales

from THE FOUR SORROWS

“Alas,” she said,
“whatever shall I do?
I shall never again be happy!
I loved these four knights
and desired each one
for his own sake.
There was a great deal
of good in them all
and they loved me
above everything.
Because they were so handsome,
brave, worthy, and generous,
I made them compete
for my love,
not wishing to lose them all
to have just one.

“I do not know which of them
to mourn the most,
but I can no longer disguise
or hide my feelings.
One of them I now see wounded
and three are dead.”

~ Marie de France, writer and translator of the second half of the twelfth century, who wrote in the Breton, Anglo-Norman, and Latin languages

(Richard Lovelace, 1618-1657, English
poet and Royalist supporter of King
Charles I in his ultimately fatal struggle
with Parliament in the English Civil War,
1642-1651)

TO LUCASTA, GOING TO THE WARS

Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind,
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast, and quiet mind,
To war and arms I fly.

True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.

Yet this inconstancy is such,
As thee too shall adore;
I could not love thee, Dear, so much,
Lov’d I not honor more.

The Spring and the Fall

2011-11-04T07:03:00.000-04:00

In Love for Long

2011-11-03T07:08:00.002-04:00

(Grand Boulevard by Léonard Misonne, 1870-1943,
Belgian photographer)

“First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world — a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring — this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.”

~ Carson McCullers (1917-1967), from The Ballad of the Sad Café

IN LOVE FOR LONG

I’ve been in love for long
With what I cannot tell
And will contrive a song
For the intangible
That has no mold or shape,
From which there’s no escape.

It is not even a name,
Yet is all constancy;
Tried or untried, the same,
It cannot part from me;
A breath, yet as still
As the established hill.

It is not any thing,
And yet all being is;
Being, being, being,
Its burden and its bliss.
How can I ever prove
What it is I love?

This happy happy love
Is sieged with crying sorrows,
Crushed beneath and above
Between todays and morrows;
A little paradise
Held in the world’s vice.

And there it is content
And careless as a child,
And in imprisonment
Flourishes sweet and wild;
In wrong, beyond wrong,
All the world’s day long.

This love a moment known
For what I do not know
And in a moment gone
Is like the happy doe
That keeps its perfect laws
Between the tiger’s paws
And vindicates its cause.

~ Edwin Muir (1887-1959), born on the Orkney Islands, Scotland; poet, novelist, and translator

Lili Marlene

2011-11-02T05:27:00.003-04:00

(Left: a poster for one of Vera Lynn’s many performances
for the troops, August 7, 1944, in Blackpool, England;
and right: a salute for “The Forces’ Sweetheart”)

It happens sometimes that a song can become the anthem for the soldiers of both sides of a conflict. Such a song of sentiment gains popularity in part by reminding the men of their sweetheart and the hearth and home they have left behind.

Yesterday, we featured the love song Lorena, from the American civil war.

Today, we look at Lili Marlene, the German love song that became the favorite of the soldiers fighting for both the Allies and the Axis during the Second World War.

Lili Marlene was written in 1915 by Hans Leip, a soldier with the German Imperial Army in the First World War. Set to music by Norbert Schultze in 1938, it was first published under the title of The Song of a Young Soldier on Watch.

A recoding of that song by the German singer Lale Andersen was broadcast repeatedly over Nazi-controlled radio in Belgrade at the start of the Second World War. Soon, soldiers from both sides, throughout Europe and the Mediterranean, were singing the wistful lyrics in German, until the words were translated into the many different languages of all the combatants.

The most popular English versions were those performed by the British singer Vera Lynn (born in 1917) and Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992), the German actress and singer who chose exile over life in a Nazi state.

To listen to the performance by Vera Lynn, please click here.

LILI MARLENE

Underneath the lantern
By the barrack gate,
Darling, I remember
The way you used to wait.
’Twas there that you whispered tenderly
That you loved me;
You’d always be
My Lili of the Lamplight,
My own Lili Marlene.

Time would come for roll call,
Time for us to part,
Darling, I’d caress you
And press you to my heart,
And there ’neath that far-off lantern light,
I’d hold you tight,
We’d kiss good night,
My Lili of the Lamplight,
My own Lili Marlene.

Orders came for sailing,
Somewhere over there.
All confined to barracks
Was more than I could bear.
I knew you were waiting in the street,
I heard your feet
But could not meet
My Lili of the Lamplight,
My own Lili Marlene.

Resting in our billet
Just behind the line,
Even tho’ we’re parted,
Your lips are close to mine.
You wait where that lantern softly gleams,
Your sweet face seems
To haunt my dreams,
My Lili of the Lamplight,
My own Lili Marlene.

Lorena

2011-11-01T07:40:00.004-04:00

(Lorena, cover of the sheet music)

Music can have such power that the soldiers on the opposing sides of a conflict will even choose the same anthem, a lyrical song of sentiment that reminds them of the sweetheart and the hearth and home they have left behind.

During the American civil war, for example, that anthem was Lorena, a poem by Henry Webster put to music by his friend Joseph Webster. The song was published in Chicago in 1858, before the hostilities began in 1861. By the end of the first year of the war, it was a great favorite of the soldiers on both sides, the Blue and the Gray, in the North and in the South, in all parts of the land.

The mournful ballad puts to words the emotions of the composer after the breakup of his engagement to Miss Ella Blocksom, renamed Lorena here — the melody needed a three-syllable name.

My favorite version is the performance by John Hartford (1937-2001).

from LORENA

Oh, the years creep slowly by, Lorena,
The snow is on the ground again.
The sun’s low down the sky, Lorena,
The frost gleams where the flow’rs have been.
But the heart beats on as warmly now,
As when the summer days were nigh.
Oh, the sun can never dip so low
To be down affection’s cloudless sky.

A hundred months have passed, Lorena,
Since last I held that hand in mine,
And felt the pulse beat fast, Lorena,
Though mine beat faster far than thine.
A hundred months, ’twas flowery May,
When up that hilly slope we climbed,
To watch the dying of the day,
And hear the distant church bells chime.

We loved each other then, Lorena,
Far more than we ever dared to tell;
And what we might have been, Lorena,
Had our lovings prospered well —
But then, ’tis past, the years are gone,
I’ll not call up their shadowy forms;
I’ll say to them, “Lost years, sleep on!
Sleep on! nor heed life’s pelting storms.”

Natural History

2011-10-31T05:48:00.001-04:00

(Untitled, textile by Louise Bourgeois, 1911-2010, American
sculptor and artist, known as The Spider Woman for her
large spider structures and web-like images)

“Once you begin watching spiders,” E. B. White said, “you haven’t time for much else.”

White is the author of the classic children’s novel Charlotte’s Web, the tale of a life-and-death drama that unfolds in a barn on Mr. and Mrs. Arable’s farm. The heroine, Charlotte, is a barn spider, a. k. a. Araneus cavaticus.

In 1929, a few weeks of weeks after his wedding to Katherine Angell, White sent the following poem to his bride from the King Edward Hotel in Toronto. (It is a well-established fact that most women don’t like spiders. But everything worked out fine; they remained married for almost fifty years.)

NATURAL HISTORY

The spider, dropping down from twig,
Unwinds a thread of his devising;
A thin, premeditated rig
To use in rising.

And all the journey down through space,
In cool descent, and loyal-hearted,
He builds a ladder to the place
From which he started.

Thus I, gone forth, as spiders do,
In spider's web a truth discerning,
Attach one silken strand to you
For my returning.

~ E. B. White (1899-1985), American novelist and writer, and co-author, with William Strunk, Jr., of the best guide to writing good prose, The Elements of Style, better known as Strunk & White

Wearing the Collar

2011-10-30T08:25:00.001-04:00

(Aliens by Fernand Léger, 1881–1955, French painter
and sculptor)

“Pains of love be sweeter far / Than all the other pleasures are.” ~ John Dryden (1631-1700), English poet, dramatist, and satirist

WEARING THE COLLAR

I live with a lady and four cats
and some days we all get
along.

some days I have trouble with
one of the
cats.

other days I have trouble with
two of the
cats.

other days,
three.

some days I have trouble with
all four of the
cats

and the
lady:

ten eyes looking at me
as if I was a dog.

~ Charles Bukowsi (1920-1994), American poet and writer of novels and short stories

The Gift

2011-10-29T06:14:00.000-04:00

(Untitled, Polaroid photograph by André Kertész, 1894-
1985, Hungarian-born photographer)

“Only love can be divided endlessly and still not diminish.” ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906-2001), American aviator and writer

THE GIFT

One day the gift arrives — outside your door,
Left on a windowsill, inside the mailbox,
Or in the hallway, far too large to lift.

Your postman shrugs his shoulders, the police
Consult a statute, and the cat meows.
No name, no signature, and no address,

Only, “To you, my dearest one, my all . . .”
One day it all fits snugly on your lap,
Then fills the backyard like afternoon in spring.

Monday morning, and it’s there at work —
Already ahead of you, or left behind
Amongst the papers, files and photographs;

And were there lipstick smudges down the side
Or have they just appeared? What a headache!
And worse, people have begun to talk:

“You lucky thing!” they say, or roll their eyes.
Nights find you combing the directory
(A glass of straw-colored wine upon the desk)

Still hoping to chance on a forgotten name.
Yet mornings see you happier than before —
After all, the gift has set you up for life.

Impossible to tell, now, what was given
And what was not: slivers of rain on the window,
Those gold-tooled Oeuvres of Diderot on the shelf,

The strawberry dreaming in a champagne flute —
Were they part of the gift or something else?
Or is the gift still coming, on its way?

~ Kevin Hart, born in 1954, Australian poet

The Odyssey

2011-10-28T07:50:00.000-04:00

Each Friday we provide the link to the blogger who is hosting a celebration of poetry around the blogosphere. At that site you can find the links to the many other blogs that are posting poems (new and old), discussions of poems, and reviews of poetry books. It’s also a great way to explore the internet.

Enjoy the festivities!

The host this week is Diane Mayr.

You can visit her here at Random Noodling.

(Penelope by John Roddham Spencer-Stanhope,
1829-1908, English artist)

The poet Homer is thought to have lived in the ninth century B. C. in Ancient Greece. He is believed to be the writer of two of the greatest works of Western literature.

His two epic poems recount the legend of the Trojan War and its aftermath.

The first, The Iliad, is a vivid tale of warfare, revealing how wrath and pride and a desire for vengeance lead the hero, Achilles, to tragedy and destruction. He has the heart of a warrior.

There are scenes of fighting in The Odyssey, too, but this is more the story of Odysseus, a man with the heart of a husband, father, and builder.

Having helped to lead the Greeks to victory in the ten-year war, Odysseus is now determined, at all costs, to return home to his wife, Penelope, and to his son. That journey will take another ten years, during which he will have to defeat the monsters and dangers the gods throw in his way before he can be reunited with his beloved.

Over the long course of those twenty years, Penelope remains faithful and true. Everyone thinks she has been widowed. It is a lonely time for her, and difficult, for she is surrounded in her house by aggressive suitors for whom, because of custom, she has to provide food and shelter. She has resorted to ruses to ward off their demands. For three years, for example, she promised to announce her choice after she had finished weaving a burial cloth for her father-in-law. Each night she would unravel her day’s work.

In the excerpt below, Odysseus finally arrives home. He has slain the suitors who had menaced his wife. Penelope knows the man sitting before her is her husband — he bears a distinctive scar on his foot — but after twenty years away from her, is he the same man?

from THE ODYSSEY

Odysseus came from the bath
Like a god, and sat down on the chair again
Opposite his wife, and spoke to her and said:

“You’re a mysterious woman.
The gods
Have given to you, more than to any
Other woman, an unyielding heart.
No other woman would be able to endure
Standing off from her husband, come back
After twenty hard years to his country and home.
Nurse, make up a bed for me so I can lie down
Alone, since her heart is a cold lump of iron.”

And Penelope, cautious and wary:

“You’re a mysterious man.
I am not being proud
Or scornful, nor am I bewildered — not at all.
I know very well what you looked like
When you left Ithaca on your long-oared ship.
Nurse, bring the bed out from the master bedroom,
The bedstead he made himself, and spread it for him
With fleeces and blankets and silky coverlets.”

She was testing her husband.

Odysseus
Could bear no more, and he cried out to his wife:

“By God, woman, now you’ve cut deep.
Who moved my bed? It would be hard
For anyone, no matter how skilled, to move it.
A god could come down and move it easily,
But not a man alive, however young and strong,
Could ever pry it up. There’s something telling
About how that bed’s built, and no one else
Built it but me.

“There was an olive tree
Growing on the site, long-leaved and full,
Its trunk thick as a post. I built my bedroom
Around that tree, and when I had finished
The masonry walls and done the roofing
And set in the jointed, close-fitting doors,
I lopped off all of the olive’s branches,
Trimmed the trunk from the root on up,
And rounded it and trued it with an adze until
I had myself a bedpost. I bored it with an auger,
And starting from this I framed up the whole bed,
Inlaying it with gold and silver and ivory
And stretching across it oxhide thongs dyed purple.
So there’s our secret. But I do not know, woman,
Whether my bed is still firmly in place, or if
Some other man has cut through the olive’s trunk.”

At this, Penelope finally let go.
Odysseus had shown he knew their old secret.
In tears, she ran straight to him, threw her arms
Around him, kissed his face, and said:

“Don’t be angry with me, Odysseus. You,
Of all men, know how the world goes.
It is the gods who gave us sorrow, the gods
Who begrudged us a life together, enjoying
Our youth and arriving side by side
To the threshold of old age. Don’t hold it against me
That when I first saw you I didn’t welcome you
As I do now. My heart has been cold with fear
That an imposter would come and deceive me.
There are many who scheme for ill-gotten gains.”

Dim Lady

2011-10-27T05:42:00.002-04:00

(Woman and Bird in the Moonlight by Joan
Miró, 1893-1983, Spanish painter, ceramist,
and sculptor)

A friend of this blog sent us this modern prose-poem version of yesterday’s Sonnet 130 by Shakespeare.

Thank you, Dylan.

DIM LADY

My honeybunch’s peepers are nothing like neon. Today's special at Red Lobster is redder than her kisser. If Liquid Paper is white, her racks are institutional beige. If her mop were Slinkys, dishwater Slinkys would grow on her noggin. I have seen tablecloths in Shakey’s Pizza Parlors, red and white, but no such picnic colors do I see in her mug. And in some minty-fresh mouthwashes there is more sweetness than in the garlic breeze my main squeeze wheezes. I love to hear her rap, yet I’m aware that Muzak has a hipper beat. I don’t know any Marilyn Monroes. My ball and chain is plain from head to toe. And yet, by gosh, my scrumptious twinkie has as much sex appeal for me as any lanky model or platinum movie idol who’s hyped beyond belief.

~ Harryette Mullen, born 1953, American poet and professor of English

Sonnet 130

2011-10-26T04:37:00.000-04:00

(Seed Catalogue, 1897, found at Early
American Gardens)

“Love is a great beautifier.” ~ Louisa May Alcott, from Little Women

SONNET 130

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

~ William Shakespeare (1564-1616), English poet and playwright