(Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia)
It began as Decoration Day, a day set aside on May 30 to honor the soldiers of both sides who perished in the Civil War. It is now called Memorial Day and takes place on the last Monday of May to remember all the soldiers who have given their lives for the nation.
from THE BLUE AND THE GRAY
By the flow of the inland river, Whence the fleets of iron have fled, Where the blades of the grave-grass quiver, Asleep are the ranks of the dead: Under the sod and the dew, Waiting the judgment-day; Under the one, the Blue, Under the other, the Gray.
These in the robings of glory, Those in the gloom of defeat, All with the battle-blood gory, In the dusk of eternity meet: Under the sod and the dew, Waiting the judgment-day Under the laurel, the Blue, Under the willow, the Gray.
From the silence of sorrowful hours The desolate mourners go, Lovingly laden with flowers Alike for the friend and the foe; Under the sod and the dew, Waiting the judgment-day; Under the roses, the Blue, Under the lilies, the Gray.
~ Francis Miles Finch (1827-1907), American judge and poet
“Queen of the May” is a hymn, most likely Irish, that traces its origins to the thirteenth century. There are several versions of the lyrics, including one written by Mary E. Walsh and first published in 1871. This hymn is often sung during the traditional May processions in the Catholic Church.
(The performance here is by the Irish tenor Frank Patterson, 1938-2000.)
QUEEN OF THE MAY
Bring flowers of the rarest, Bring blossoms the fairest, From garden and woodland and hillside and dale. Our full hearts are swelling, Our glad voices telling, The praise of the loveliest flower of the vale.
Refrain: O Mary! we crown thee with blossoms today, Queen of the Angels, and Queen of the May. O Mary! we crown thee with blossoms today, Queen of the Angels, and Queen of the May.
Their lady they name thee, Their mistress proclaim thee. O grant that thy children on earth be as true; As long as the bowers Are radiant with flowers, As long as the azure shall keep its bright hue.
Sing gaily in chorus, The bright angels o’er us Re-echo the strains we begin upon earth; Their harps are repeating The notes of our greeting, For Mary herself is the cause of our mirth.
(God Speed by Edmund Blair-Leighton, 1853-1922, English painter)
THE DRAGONS ARE SINGING TONIGHT
Tonight is the night all dragons Awake in their lairs underground, To sing in cacophonous chorus And fill the whole world with their sound.
They sing of the days of their glory, They sing of their exploits of old, Of maidens and knights, and of fiery fights, And guarding vast caches of gold.
Some of their voices are treble, And some of their voices are deep, And all of their voices are thunderous, And no one can get any sleep.
I lie in my bed and I listen, Enchanted and filled with delight, To songs I can hear only one night a year ─ The dragons are singing tonight.
(Spring Landscape by Erich Heckel, 1883-1970, German printmaker and painter)
TO THIS MAY
They know so much more now about the heart we are told but the world still seems to come one at a time one day one year one season and here it is spring once more with its birds nesting in the holes in the walls its morning finding the first time its light pretending not to move always beginning as it goes
(Girls on a Bridge by Edvard Munch, 1863-1944, Norwegian painter)
RECUERDO
We were very tired, we were very merry – We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry. It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable – But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table, We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon; And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.
We were very tired, we were very merry – We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry; And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear, From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere; And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold, And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.
We were very tired, we were very merry, We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry. We hailed “Good morrow, mother!” to a shawl-covered head, And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read; And she wept “God bless you!” for the apples and pears, And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.
~ Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), American poet, translator and writer of verse dramas
(Lake Superior, by Lawren Harris, 1885-1970, Canadian painter)
THE PAINT BOX
“Cobalt and umber and ultramarine, Ivory black and emerald green ─ What shall I paint to give pleasure to you?” “Paint for me somebody utterly new.”
“I have painted you tigers in crimson and white.” “The colors were good and you painted aright.” “I have painted the cook and a camel in blue And a panther in purple.” “You painted them true.
Now mix me a color that nobody knows, And paint me a country where nobody goes, And put in it people a little like you, Watching a unicorn drinking the dew.”
(Honeysuckle, by William Morris, 1834-1896, English textile designer, artist and writer)
GIFT
A day so happy. Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden. Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers. There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess. I knew no one worth my envying him. Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot. To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me. In my body I felt no pain. When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.
~ Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), Polish poet, essayist and translator, and winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature
(Woman with Lilacs by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1841-1919)
from LILACS
Lilacs, False blue, White, Purple, Color of lilac, Your great puffs of flowers Are everywhere in this my New England. Among your heart-shaped leaves Orange orioles hop like music-box birds and sing Their little weak soft songs; In the crooks of your branches The bright eyes of song sparrows sitting on spotted eggs Peer restlessly through the light and shadow Of all Springs. Lilacs in dooryards Holding quiet conversations with an early moon; Lilacs watching a deserted house Settling sideways into the grass of an old road; Lilacs, wind-beaten, staggering under a lopsided shock of bloom Above a cellar dug into a hill. You are everywhere. You were everywhere. You tapped the window when the preacher preached his sermon, And ran along the road beside the boy going to school. You stood by the pasture-bars to give the cows good milking, You persuaded the housewife that her dishpan was of silver. And her husband an image of pure gold. You flaunted the fragrance of your blossoms Through the wide doors of Custom Houses— You, and sandal-wood, and tea, Charging the noses of quill-driving clerks When a ship was in from China. You called to them: “Goose-quill men, goose-quill men, May is a month for flitting.” Until they writhed on their high stools And wrote poetry on their letter-sheets behind the propped-up ledgers.
I like this poem very much for its answer to that all-important philosophical question about the meaning of life. I’m sure my opinion has nothing to do with the fact that my father, Gyula (Jules) Horváth, is Hungarian and this is the first poem in English I have found that mentions Hungarians.
HAPPINESS
I asked the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell me what is happiness And I went to famous executives who boss the work of thousands of men. They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though I was trying to fool with them And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along the Desplaines river And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with their women and children and a keg of beer and an accordion.
~ Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), American poet and writer and biographer of Lincoln
(Blue Bird and Red Swan, watercolor by Janice C. Atkins, published in Blindness Isn’t Black)
I GO UNTO THE ALTAR OF NIGHT
boneless here I am no longer broken
but dance to the music of memory
flaunt my living flesh my crutchlessness
celebrate the legs that still carry me to morning
~ Barbara Sullivan Mangogna, an American poet who is an amputee. This verse was found in Blindness Isn’t Black, a beautiful collection of poems, short stories and illustrations published by VSA Arts of Missouri (2009)
Spring, the sweet Spring, is the year’s pleasant king; Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring, Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing, Cuckoo, jug, jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!
The palm and May make country houses gay, Lambs frisk and play, the shepherds pipe all day, And we hear aye birds tune this merry lay, Cuckoo, jug, jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!
The fields breathe sweet, the daisies kiss our feet, Young lovers meet, old wives a-sunning sit In every street, these tunes our ears do greet, Cuckoo, jug, jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo! Spring, the sweet spring!
~ Thomas Nashe (1567-1601), English Elizabethan poet, critic and satirist
Nothing is so beautiful as spring – When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush; Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing; The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
What is all this juice and all this joy? A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy, Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning, Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy, Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.
~ Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. (1844-1899), British poet whose work has had a profound influence on modern poetry
It’s true, what all our heroes say. There is a way in this world for beauty, for good. It may be a crooked path in a tanglewood, but stay the course and, when the way grows rocky, walk your horse,
and who knows, you may yet come upon the wild rose, as I have done, and, paying close attention, keep from crushing her into the grime, and then, with any luck, in time remember how you found her and how to find her again when the way gets wilder.
The spring has darkened with activity. The future gathers in vine, bush, and tree: Persimmon, walnut, loquat, fig, and grape, Degrees and kinds of color, taste, and shape. These will advance in their due series, space The season like a tranquil dwelling-place. And yet excitement swells me, vein by vein: I long to crowd the little garden, gain Its sweetness in my hand and crush it small And taste it in a moment, time and all! These trees, whose slow growth measures off my years, I would expand to greatness. No one hears, And I am still retarded in duress! And this is like that other restlessness To seize the greatness not yet fairly earned, One which the tougher poets have discerned— Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Greville, Raleigh, Donne, Poets who wrote great poems, one by one, And spaced by many years, each line an act Through which few labor, which no men retract. This passion is the scholar’s heritage, The imposition of a busy age, The passion to condense from book to book Unbroken wisdom in a single look, Though we know well that when this fix the head, The mind’s immortal, but the man is dead.
The bud stands for all things, even for those things that don’t flower, or everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing; though sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on its brow of the flower and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing; as Saint Francis put his hand on the creased forehead of the sow, and told her in words and in touch blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow began remembering all down her thick length, from the earthen snout all the way through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail, from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine down through the great broken heart to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them: the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
~ Galway Kinnell, b. 1927, American poet and translator
A soft day, thank God!
A wind from the south
With a honey'd mouth;
A scent of drenching leaves,
Briar and beech and lime,
White elderflower and thyme,
And the soaking grass smells sweet,
Crushed by my two bare feet,
While the rain drips,
Drips, drips, drips from the eaves.
A soft day, thank God!
The hills wear a shroud
Of silver cloud;
The web the spider weaves
Is a glittering net;
The woodland path is wet,
And the soaking earth smells sweet
Under my two bare feet,
And the rain drips,
Drips, drips, drips from the leaves.
Gardens are also good places to sulk. You pass beds of spiky voodoo lilies and trip over the roots of a sweet gum tree, in search of medieval plants whose leaves, when they drop off turn into birds if they fall on land, and colored carp if they plop into water.
Suddenly the archetypal human desire for peace with every other species wells up in you. The lion and the lamb cuddling up. The snake and the snail, kissing. Even the prick of the thistle, queen of the weeds, revives your secret belief in perpetual spring, your faith that for every hurt there is a leaf to cure it.
Come, Queen of Months! in company With all thy merry minstrelsy: – The restless cuckoo, absent long, And twittering swallows’ chimney-song; With hedge-row crickets’ notes, that run From every bank that fronts the sun; And swarthy bees, about the grass, That stop with every bloom they pass, And every minute, every hour, Keep teasing weeds that wear a flower; And Toil, and Childhood’s humming joys!
For there is music in the noise When village children, wild for sport, In school-time’s leisure, ever short, Alternate catch the bounding ball; Or run along the church-yard wall, Capp’ed with rude figured slabs, whose claims In times’ bad memory have no names; Or race around the nooky church; Or raise loud echoes in the porch; Throw pebbles o’er the weather-cock, Viewing with jealous eyes the clock.
I love the word And hear its long struggle with no Even in the bird’s throat and budging crocus. Some winter’s night I see it flood the faces Of my friends, ripen their laughter And plant early flowers in Their conversation.
You will understand when I say It is for me a morning word Though it is older than the sea And hisses in a way That may have given An example To the serpent itself. It is this ageless incipience Whose influence is found In the first and last pages of books, In the grim skin of the affirmative battler And in the voices of women That constitutes the morning quality Of yes.
We have all Thought what it must be like Never to grow old, The dreams of our elders have mythic endurance Though their hearts are stilled But the only agelessness Is yes. I am always beginning to appreciate The agony from which it is born. Clues from here and there Suggest such agony is hard to bear But it is the shaping God Of the word that we Sometimes hear, and struggle to be.
Now Is the Month of Maying, performed by The King’s Singers
Now is the month of maying, When merry lads are playing! Fa la la la la! Each with his bonny lass, A-dancing on the grass! Fa la la la la!
The Spring, clad all in gladness, Doth laugh at Winter’s sadness! Fa la la la la! And to the bagpipes’ sound, The nymphs tread out the ground! Fa la la la la!
Fie then! Why sit we musing, Youth’s sweet delight refusing? Fa la la la la! Say, dainty nymphs, and speak, Shall we play at barley-break? Fa la la la la!
~ Thomas Morley (1557/1558-1602), English organist and a leading composer of madrigals and other secular music
Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright! The bridal of the earth and sky; The dew shall weep thy fall tonight; For thou must die.
Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye, Thy root is ever in its grave, And thou must die.
Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses, A box where sweets compacted lie, My music shows ye have your closes, And all must die.
Only a sweet and virtuous soul, Like season’d timber, never gives; But though the whole world turn to coal, Then chiefly lives.
~ George Herbert (1593-1633), English clergyman and poet, one of the Metaphysical poets like John Donne and Andrew Marvell; the work of these lyric poets displayed a subtlety of thought and fanciful imagery and often used one surprising metaphor to bring together two very different ideas
(In this merry month of May, the poems sing “of brooks, of blossoms, birds and bowers.”)
SONG ON MAY MORNING
Now the bright morning Star, Day’s harbinger, Comes dancing from the East, and leads with her The Flowery May, who from her green lap throws The yellow cowslip, and the pale primrose. Hail, bounteous May, that dost inspire Mirth, and youth, and warm desire! Woods and groves are of thy dressing; Hill and dale doth boast thy blessing. Thus we salute thee with our early song, And welcome thee, and wish thee long.
~ John Milton (1608-1674), English author, defender of civil and religious rights, and poet, famous for his epic poem Paradise Lost.
