Bookishness

On Hiatus

2011-01-27T19:44:00.000-08:00

When you go as long as I have without posting, you can pretty much guess that a blogger has other things to do. Which in my case is mostly blogging at my other place, Ten Pages (or More). So until further notice, you can look for me there.

But They Have Questionable Antecedents

2010-12-17T12:00:00.000-08:00

From today's San Francisco Chronicle:

When Mike Wood's 3-year-old son was having trouble associating sounds with letters, he built from scratch an interactive "phonics desk." Then he created a company - called LeapFrog - to sell his invention.

Damn! These high-tech entrepreneurs are getting younger all the time.

Today's Shamelessness

2010-12-06T15:39:00.000-08:00

Think Progress reports on the latest in blatant, unashamed bigotry:

Last month, several Tea Party activists formed a right-wing coalition to oust Rep. Joe Straus (R) as Texas House Speaker. They began circulating emails with anti-Semitic messages against Straus, who is Jewish. The groups ran robo-calls and sent out e-mails demanding a “true Christian leader,” and calling Straus’ opponent, Rep. Ken Paxton (R), “a Christian Conservative who decided not to be pushed around by the Joe Straus thugs.”

Thoughts While Showering

2010-11-24T16:12:00.000-08:00

I considered giving the title of this post in French, which Google Translate tells me would be pensées sous la douche, but I thought better of it. Never mind why.

I am one of those people who are restless when they don't have something in front of them to read, so this morning I found myself fixating on the label of a bottle in the shower. It belongs to someone else in the household, and is a product called "therapy reconstructor." Since I could do with both therapy and reconstruction, I was intrigued until I realized it was just for hair.

What really caught my eye, though, were the words on it in French. For some reason grooming products always seem to have French on the label. The therapy reconstructor explains that it is pour revitaliser et renforcer les cheveux abîmés, gros ou cassants.

I like a challenge, so I summoned up my college French and read it as: "for revitalizing and reinforcing abysmal, fat or broken hair." I rather like the idea of abysmal hair. We've all had mornings like that. I'm not sure I've ever met anyone with fat hair, but it certainly sounds abysmal. And I guess if you use too much hairspray you could break your hair, though it also seems to me you might run the risk of breaking it if you reinforced it too much.

The English on the label assured me that my translation was faulty: "repairs and strengthens stressed, coarse, brittle hair," it says. I like my version better. I'm sure it would be abysmal to have stressed tresses. And though my French may not be up to the task, I found the translation experience to be both therapeutic and reconstructive.

JFK Without Tears

2010-11-22T15:42:00.000-08:00

Forty-seven years ago today, I was walking into Harvard Yard on my way to Widener to work on some paper or other when two undergraduates ran past me and I heard one of them ask, "Is he dead?" An unsettling question to begin with, and I'm convinced that my mind went immediately to President Kennedy, although that may be only a memory tainted by hindsight.

At the entrance to the library, a guard was listening to a transistor radio, and I found out what had happened. But, being the dutiful graduate student that I thought I was, I kept going. At the entrance to the stacks I met two history grad students I knew, who were already talking about the assassination's implications in dry, clinical terms. I remember saying to them, feeling faintly disgusted at the intellectualization of the event, "Just write November 22, 1963, on a note card and file it."

But I couldn't concentrate on what I was supposed to be researching, and I turned and walked back to my dorm room where my roommate and I spent the weekend listening to the radio. (Believe it or not, nobody had a TV in their dorm rooms in those days.)

All of this came back to me only because I was listening to NPR on my way to the grocery store and some announcer was playing a snippet of the funeral march movement of Beethoven's "Eroica" and commenting on the anniversary. Then it was back to news about the North Korean nukes and the TSA patdowns.

I won't say it only feels like yesterday, but it hasn't been so long ago since November 22 was an occasion for memorials of one sort or another. Now it's just another day to mark off the calendar on the way to Thanksgiving and Christmas. And maybe that's the way it ought to be. But those of us who "remember where we were when" can recall November 22, 1963, as vividly as most people now remember September 11, 2001. Those beautiful autumn days when human life and death seemed so out of phase with the weather.

Do We Laugh or Cry?

2010-11-19T18:48:00.000-08:00

Is Glenn Beck just a delusional fraud?

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

George Soros Plans to Overthrow America

www.thedailyshow.com

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Political Humor

Rally to Restore Sanity

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Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

The Manchurian Lunatic

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Or is he a dangerous delusional fraud?

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I don't want to keep harping on the "death of shame" meme, but honest to god, Beck's exploitation of American service people is well beyond shameless.

Thoughts While Shaving

2010-11-18T14:18:00.000-08:00

We seem to be a country incapable of learning from its mistakes. Like never fight a land war in Asia and don't put Republicans in charge of the economy.

The Death of Shame

2010-11-17T14:24:00.000-08:00

Last night I watched this and was very moved:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Today I read this on Talking Points Memo:

Bryan Fischer, the "Director of Issues Analysis" for the conservative Christian group the American Family Association, was unhappy yesterday that President Obama awarded the Medal of Honor to a soldier for saving lives. This, Fischer wrote on his blog, shows that the Medal of Honor has been "feminized" because "we now award it only for preventing casualties, not for inflicting them."

Here's how the AP described Medal of Honor winner Army Sgt. Salvatore Giunta heroics:
Giunta, the first living Medal of Honor winner of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, braved heavy gunfire to pull a fellow soldier to cover and rescued another who was being dragged away by insurgents.
Fischer's take? "So the question is this: when are we going to start awarding the Medal of Honor once again for soldiers who kill people and break things so our families can sleep safely at night?"

"We have feminized the Medal of Honor," Fischer wrote. He also quoted General Patton: "Gen. George Patton once famously said, 'The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other guy die for his.'" (Actually, Patton doesn't say anything about the other guy: "The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.")

Fischer recently argued that it's time to get rid of the "curse" that is the Grizzly Bear because of the number of humans who have been killed by bears: "One human being is worth more than an infinite number of grizzly bears. Another way to put it is that there is no number of live grizzlies worth one dead human being. If it's a choice between grizzlies and humans, the grizzlies have to go. And it's time."

Fischer is a favorite of social conservative Republicans, and spoke at the Values Voter summit this fall alongside Mitt Romney, Jim DeMint, and other big-shot Republicans.

And what I want to know is, when did people lose their sense of shame? At what point did it become acceptable for anyone to make statements like this? Have we become so corrupted by the filth on talk radio that a "favorite of social conservative Republicans" and a professed Christian can write such utterly contemptible stuff?

Doubtless there will be some blowback, and Mr. Fischer will issue one of those "if I offended anybody" non-apologies, but the level of discourse in this country is already damaged beyond repair by crap like this.

Ignorance Is Bliss

2010-11-16T15:04:00.000-08:00

From Leah Garchik's column in today's San Francisco Chronicle:

Home School Day at the Monterey Bay Aquarium allows kids who are educated at home to have the same visiting privileges as kids who visit as part of school groups. Many of the homeschooled are kept away from schools because their parents are fundamentalists. So it's not surprising that on Home School Day on Nov. 8, George Post overheard a docent telling a group, "This fossilized seashell is around 80 million years old," to which one kid responded, "Excuse me, but how is that even possible, since the Earth itself is only 6,000 years old?"

The aquarium's Ken Peterson says although the aquarium "is a scientific organization," staff members and volunteers do their best to make sure visits are "productive and respectful." That means, he said, that talks to these visitors don't focus on how the Earth came to be but rather how it is now, and the universal obligation to take care of it for future generations. As to creationism versus evolution, "we acknowledge theories exist," but the desired focus, he said, is how "we can all be better stewards."

Post, a photographer, sent some photos of cards homeschooled kids had posted on bulletin boards in the aquarium's learning center. Among them: God "will bring to ruin those who are ruining the earth," a quote from the Bible; "God is grate"; "It's a big hoax you crazy lunatics. Global warming is happening as fast as it was 6,000 years ago."

Something like that happened to me once, many years ago when I was teaching freshman English in Texas. I had assigned a particularly eloquent passage from Darwin's Origin of Species to an honors class, ready to talk about prose style, when one of them raised her hand to advance the proposition that Darwin's theory had been disproved by the second law of thermodynamics. Naturally, like most English teachers, I had forgotten what the second law of thermodynamics was. (Entropy in closed systems, which organic systems aren't, so the second law doesn't apply.) Unprepared to reply, I gulped, muttered something like "perhaps," and forged ahead with whatever I was prepared to say about sentence structure. I heard her whisper to a friend, "Look how red he's turning."

So Garchik's anecdote leaves me wondering: What was the docent's answer to the question? How do you handle blind ideology "productively and respectfully"? How, in a "scientific organization," is it possible to reply intelligently to anti-scientific thinking? Why would fundamentalist home-schoolers even let their blinkered darlings loose in a place full of scientists?

And isn't there a way we can charge these parents with intellectual child abuse?

For the Day of the Dead

2010-11-02T00:00:00.000-07:00

What I'm Reading: The Passage

2010-10-22T15:26:00.001-07:00

The Passage by Justin Cronin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I don't read a lot of bestsellers anymore. I had to, when I was a book section editor, but now I'm surrounded by shelves of books I haven't read and should, or books I've read but don't remember. But when I heard about this novel, it sounded like my kind of book. What that says about me, I leave it to you to surmise.

I can imagine the pitch to the publishers and then to the movie producers: The Hot Zone meets True Blood. And in truth that's what attracted me to it. The idea that vampirism might be a medical condition, even if it's a far-fetched concept, has a lot of appeal to me. If Cronin had stuck more closely to that premise I might have liked the book more, but then it got all muddled up with telepathic communications that don't seem to have much to do with the virus: the whole business of Sister Lacey and her psychic connection with first Amy and then Doyle, for example. I'm willing to admit that a virus might even allow a human being to grow a carapace, to alter its musculature and make it superstrong, maybe even to glow. But the parapsychology is a bit hard to swallow, especially when it's demonstrated by people who aren't even infected.

Still, I'm game for a good yarn, so I stuck with it. And I'll probably be first in line for the sequel, if only because there are so damn many loose ends that I want to see if Cronin ties up. (For example, what about Hastings/Zero, who was infected with the virus in its natural state in Bolivia? Did he become the same kind of Queen Bee that Babcock became? He seems not to have a connection with the Twelve.)

On the whole it's a strong book for what it is: a deft handling of genre conventions, with more than a touch of Tolkien (Peter as Frodo, the virals as orcs). It's more cinematic than literary, but who am I to knock that?

View all my Goodreads reviews

A Refusal to Apologize

2010-10-02T21:46:00.000-07:00

Dan Savage responds to a "Christian":

Being told that they're sinful and that their love offends God, and being told that their relationships are unworthy of the civil right that is marriage (not the religious rite that some people use to solemnize their civil marriages), can eat away at the souls of gay kids. It makes them feel like they're not valued, that their lives are not worth living. And if one of your children is unlucky enough to be gay, the anti-gay bigotry you espouse makes them doubt that their parents truly love them—to say nothing of the gentle "savior" they've heard so much about, a gentle and loving father who will condemn them to hell for the sin of falling in love with the wrong person.

The children of people who see gay people as sinful or damaged or disordered and unworthy of full civil equality—even if those people strive to express their bigotry in the politest possible way (at least when they happen to be addressing a gay person)—learn to see gay people as sinful, damaged, disordered, and unworthy. And while there may not be any gay adults or couples where you live, or at your church, or at your workplace, I promise you that there are gay and lesbian children in your schools. You may only attack gays and lesbians at the ballot box, nice and impersonally, but your children have the option of attacking actual real gays and lesbians, in person, in real time.

Real gay and lesbian children. Not political abstractions, not "sinners." Real gay and lesbian children.

The dehumanizing bigotries that fall from lips of "faithful Christians," and the lies that spew forth from the pulpit of the churches "faithful Christians" drag their kids to on Sundays, give your straight children a license to verbally abuse, humiliate and condemn the gay children they encounter at school. And many of your straight children—having listened to mom and dad talk about how gay marriage is a threat to the family and how gay sex makes their magic sky friend Jesus cry himself to sleep—feel justified in physically attacking the gay and lesbian children they encounter in their schools. You don't have to explicitly "encourage [your] children to mock, hurt, or intimidate" gay kids. Your encouragement—along with your hatred and fear—is implicit. It's here, it's clear, and we can see the fruits of it.

It Gets Better

2010-10-01T15:47:00.001-07:00

Three Score and Ten

2010-09-28T00:00:00.000-07:00

Back when I was in my fifties, a not-that-much-younger person once described me as "spry." I did not take kindly to the description. I guess I would now, though 70 is what I thought 40 would be like when I was 20. A bit frayed at the edges but basically sound.

Thoughts While Shaving

2010-09-07T13:07:00.000-07:00

Is there a more 21st-century-American name than Travis Ishikawa?

The Proverbs of Questianity

2010-08-30T19:19:00.000-07:00

"Who claims Truth, Truth abandons."
--Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon

Keeping It Secular

2010-08-09T21:00:00.000-07:00

In a rather obtuse New York Times column today Ross Douthat argues that Judge Walker's ruling in favor of same-sex marriage amounts to the abandonment of

one of the great ideas of Western civilization: the celebration of lifelong heterosexual monogamy as a unique and indispensable estate. That ideal is still worth honoring, and still worth striving to preserve. And preserving it ultimately requires some public acknowledgment that heterosexual unions and gay relationships are different: similar in emotional commitment, but distinct both in their challenges and their potential fruit. But based on Judge Walker’s logic — which suggests that any such distinction is bigoted and un-American — I don’t think a society that declares gay marriage to be a fundamental right will be capable of even entertaining this idea.

But is it the business of the courts to protect one supposed "great idea of Western civilization" over another: namely, equality under the law? I submit that opposition to the latter idea is truly "bigoted and un-American," just like Prop 8.

Responding to Douthat, Glenn Greenwald observes that

one can emphatically embrace every syllable of Judge Walker's ruling while simultaneously insisting on the moral or spiritual superiority of heterosexual marriage. There would be nothing inconsistent about that. That's because Judge Walker's ruling is exclusively about the principles of secular law -- the Constitution -- and the legitimate role of the State.

Exactly the point: We live under a secular government, despite all the blustering from the right (and sometimes from the left).

There are all sorts of things secular law permits which society nonetheless condemns. Engaging in racist speech is a fundamental right but widely scorned. The State is constitutionally required to maintain full neutrality with regard to the relative merits of the various religious sects (and with regard to the question of religion v. non-religion), but certain religions are nonetheless widely respected while others -- along with atheism -- are stigmatized and marginalized. Numerous behaviors which secular law permits -- excessive drinking, adultery, cigarette smoking, inter-faith and inter-racial marriages, homosexual sex -- are viewed negatively by large portions of the population.

Of course, the wingnut defenders of Western civilization will retort that Greenwald, like Judge Walker, is gay. But for the rest of us, here's a wonderful collection of photographs of recently married couples.

Bard Thou Never Wert

2010-06-17T11:35:00.000-07:00

The following review ran, a little shortened for space, in today's San Francisco Chronicle:

CONTESTED WILL: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

By James Shapiro

Simon & Schuster, 324 pp., $26

Let's say you're at a party and you're introduced to a Shakespeare scholar. Please don't ask her or him if Shakespeare really wrote those plays. If you do, you'll get an icy glare, a weary frown, or some other expression that clearly says: Oh, God, not that again.

They've heard it all before, the scholars, and they're sick of it. For them, the matter's settled: William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote “Hamlet” and “The Tempest,” “Romeo and Juliet” and “Love's Labour's Lost,” “Macbeth” and “All's Well Than Ends Well,” the two parts of “Henry IV,” the three parts of “Henry VI,” and at least 27 other plays, plus narrative poems, lyrics and sonnets.

But the question just won't go away. It doesn't just get asked of Shakespeare scholars at cocktail parties: In 1987, three United States Supreme Court justices participated in a mock trial to adjudicate the evidence for the authorship of either Shakespeare or Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. Shakespeare won that one, but in 1989 a TV program on the Public Broadcasting System again treated the question as if it were a serious one. The anti-Stratfordians have succeeded in making people think that there is real reason to doubt the authorship.

James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia University, firmly believes that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, but his entertainingly combative “Contested Will” is not just a rebuttal to the doubters. It's a cultural history, an examination of why there were doubts in the first place, and why authorship candidates such as Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford attracted such otherwise sensible people as Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Henry James and Sigmund Freud.

Blame it partly on the Germans, who developed the science of textual study. And particularly on Friedrich August Wolf, whose examination of the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” challenged the idea that they were written by a single person named Homer. Today it's generally recognized that “Homer” is a legend – a figure who was attached to the oral tradition that handed down the Greek epics. And after Homer's existence was called into question there came the Higher Criticism, the textual analysis of the Bible which determined that the Pentateuch was probably not written by Moses himself, and then called into question the accuracy of the life of Jesus presented in the Gospels. The German scholar David Friedrich Strauss's The Life of Jesus was translated into English by George Eliot in 1846, and, as Shapiro puts it, skepticism about authorship “soon threatened that lesser deity Shakespeare, for his biography too rested precariously on the unstable foundation of posthumous reports and more than a fair share of myths.”

One problem is that the documentary record of Shakespeare's life is that of a man who was all business: We have lots of documents of his existence: legal papers, real estate records, and the will in which he leaves his estate to his daughter and the “second-best bed” to his wife. But the Shakespeare of the records is bourgeois, provincial and dull. Surely a man who wrote in magnificent language about kings and princes couldn't have come from such a commonplace background. Wouldn't it be more likely that the works were those of a philosopher-statesman like Bacon or a playwright, poet and courtier like the Earl of Oxford? The question has sent people on all sides of the authorship question to scour the plays and poems for evidence about their author's life.

Shapiro is eminently fair in his portrayals of both Baconians and Oxfordians. He even comments that although one of the first Oxfordians was a man unfortunately named John Thomas Looney, the name has been “the subject of much unwarranted abuse” and that it “rhymes with bony.” And he blames some of his colleagues, who agree that Shakespeare really was “the man from Stratford,” for encouraging the anti-Stratfordians by using the poems and plays as biographical material. Shapiro insists, “The more that Shakespeare scholars encourage autobiographical readings of the poems and plays, the more they legitimate assumptions that underlie the claims of all those who dismiss the idea that Shakespeare wrote the plays.”

Shapiro demonstrates that if you want to believe that that Bacon, Oxford, or anyone other than the man from Stratford wrote the plays you have to ignore copious evidence to the contrary and indulge in intellectual contortions. Moreover, you have to credit the entire Elizabethan and Jacobean cultural establishment with a conspiracy so elaborate and a cover-up so successful it makes Watergate look like hide-and-seek. But in a world in which even the fact of a birth announcement published in a Honolulu newspaper in 1961 won't convince some people that the president of the United States wasn't really born in Kenya, it's not surprising that the “Shakespeare conspiracy” won't disappear.

Ain't That a Kick in the Head?

2010-06-15T11:28:00.000-07:00

Dear merciful goddess, the right wing hates soccer.

"It doesn't matter how you try to sell it to us," yipped the Prom King of new right, Glenn Beck. "It doesn't matter how many celebrities you get, it doesn't matter how many bars open early, it doesn't matter how many beer commercials they run, we don't want the World Cup, we don't like the World Cup, we don't like soccer, we want nothing to do with it."

And of course, according to G. Gordon Liddy, it's a game of the uncivilized. (G. Gordon Liddy is civilized?)

It is, according to the right's anti-liberal-media site, NewsBusters (which you can find for yourself because I refuse to link to it), a creation of the liberal media:

The liberal media have always been uncomfortable with "American exceptionalism" - the belief that the United States is unique among nations, a leader and a force for good. And they are no happier with America's rejection of soccer than with its rejection of socialism.

And a game of the left that all true red-blooded, red-stated Americans rightly shun:

Since at least the 1970s, Americans have been told that soccer was the future, and it would soon dominate other sports. But the United States proved pretty resistant to soccer's charms, to the chagrin of its boosters on the left. (And yes, it's [sic] support has mainly come from the left; in 2002 conservative soccer fan Robert Zeigler plaintively asked in National Review, "What is it about soccer that makes it (in America) the nearly exclusive domain of liberal sports fans?")

It is a sport for poor people, especially brown ones, which means that all true Tea Partiers should learn to play polo, I guess. It's (horror of horrors!) multicultural.

Can the republic survive?

Things That Make Me Blow My Top

2010-06-12T14:36:00.000-07:00

Rand Paul on mountaintop removal:

PAUL: I think whoever owns the property can do with the property as they wish, and if the coal company buys it from a private property owner and they want to do it, fine. The other thing I think is that I think coal gets a bad name, because I think a lot of the land apparently is quite desirable once it's been flattened out. As I came over here from Harlan, you've got quite a few hills. I don’t think anybody's going to be missing a hill or two here and there.

A few years ago, I reviewed Coal River, a fine book on the subject of mountaintop removal which also featured the egregious Don Blankenship of Massey Energy, the man and the company responsible for that recent and terrible mine disaster. It's an environment and economic blight, and now we have Mr. Tea Party himself opining on the topic. My head hurts.

Questianity

2010-06-11T23:15:00.000-07:00

I'm going to start a new religion. All the other ones are too sure of themselves for me. (Well, maybe not the Unitarians or the Buddhists, but there's something too starchy about the former and too detached about the latter.) Its symbol (i.e., its cross or crescent or six-pointed star) will be this:

Its god will be the one Rabelais proposed to meet when he spoke his last words: "I go to seek a Great Perhaps."

Its deadly sins will be the same seven:

Pride: the assumption that one has found the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth
Envy: the preoccupation with whether what other people believe makes them better off than you are
Wrath: the willingness to start a fight over beliefs
Avarice: using a community of belief, like a church, for one's own personal gain (e.g., most politicians)
Sloth: being too lazy to search and question
Gluttony: pigging out on the perks of being a true believer (e.g., most politicians)
Lechery: using the powers of a priesthood for sexual gratification

Welcome to Questianity, fellow Questioners.

Catch of the Day

2010-05-31T19:41:00.000-07:00

The Fish

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes oflime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
-- the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly --
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathrs,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare
-- It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
-- if you could call it a lip --
grim, we, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels -- until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.
--Elizabeth Bishop

Why the GOP Keeps Winning the Blame Game

2010-05-30T20:43:00.000-07:00

Blogger Dennis G. at Balloon Juice nails it:

Look, I know that we face many difficult challenges. A lot of things have gone wrong and more will go wrong. This is to be expected because Republicans have been in charge for most of the last four decades.
Do you really think that you could have Anti-Government Republicans in charge for 30 plus years and actively working to destroy the infrastructure of government without causing system failures? If you do, then you are living in candy land (or a tea infused lotus dream).
The oil spill in the gulf is is just another result of snorting deregulation fairy dust with a Markets-Are-God hi-ball chaser night after night for decades. When you let industry capture regulators and dismantle effective governance, you guarantee a catastrophic failure. The spill is evidence of this, so was that mining disaster in West Virginia, same thing when it comes to that financial meltdown and the same thing will be true when the next system fails.
And when it does, like idiots, we will not blame the failed philosophy of the modern Conservative movement. Nope, we will blame President Obama, liberals and Democrats—because that is what we are used to doing. More than that, we will ignore facts and worry whether or not the optics of the response are right. We will all ask: is we yelling loud enough yet?

From Here to Felinity

2010-05-26T20:33:00.000-07:00

Peter

Strong and slippery,
built for the midnight grass-party
confronted by four cats, he sleeps his time away --
the detached first claw on the foreleg corresponding
to the thumb, retracted to its tip; the small tuft of fronds
or katydid-legs above each eye numbering all units
in each group; the shadbones regularly set about the mouth
to droop or rise in unison like porcupine-quills.
He lets himself be flattened out by gravity,
as seaweed is tamed and weakened by the sun,
compelled when extended, to lie stationary.
Sleep is the result of his delusion that one must
do as well as one can for oneself,
sleep -- epitome of what is to him the end of life.
Demonstrate on him how the lady placed a forked stick
on the innocuous neck-sides of the dangerous southern snake.
One need not try to stir him up; his prune-shaped head
and alligator-eyes are not party to the joke.
Lifted and handled, he may be dangled like an eel
or set up on the forearm like a mouse;
his eyes bisected by pupils of a pin's width,
are flickeringly exhibited, then covered up.
May be? I should have said might have been;
when he has been got the better of in a dream --
as in a fight with nature or with cats, we all know it.
Profound sleep is not with him a fixed illusion.
Springing about with froglike accuracy, with jerky cries
when taken in hand, he is himself again;
to sit caged by the rungs of a domestic chair
would be unprofitable -- human. What is the good of hypocrisy?
It is permissible to choose one's employment,
to abandon the nail, or roly-poly,
when it shows signs of being no longer a pleasure,
to score the nearby magazine with a double line of strokes.
He can talk but insolently says nothing. What of it?
When one is frank, one's very presence is a compliment.
It is clear that he can see the virtue of naturalness,
that he does not regard the published fact as a surrender.
As for the disposition invariably to affront,
an animal with claws should have an opportunity to use them.
The eel-like extension of trunk into tail is not an accident.
To leap, to lengthen out, divide the air, to purloin, to pursue.
To tell the hen: fly over the fence, go in the wrong way
in your perturbation -- this is life;
to do less would be nothing but dishonesty.

--Marianne Moore

Ukiah Is Haiku Spelled Backward

2010-05-25T10:53:00.000-07:00

Four Haiku

   A balmy spring wind
Reminding me of something
   I cannot recall.

   The green cockleburrs
Caught in the thick wooly hair
   Of the black boy's head.

   Standing in the field,
I hear the whispering of
   Snowflake to snowflake.

   It is September
The month in which I was born,
   And I have no thoughts.

--Richard Wright

_____

Most haiku are just
Trifling Japonaiserie.
Wright's, however, aren't.

Poem of the Day: Ezra Pound

2010-05-22T20:39:00.000-07:00

A Study in Aesthetics

The very small children in patched clothing,
Being smitten with an unusual wisdom,
Stopped in their play as she passed them
And cried up from their cobbles:

Guarda! Ahi, guarda! ch' è be' a!

But three years after this
I heard the young Dante, whose last name I do not know --
For there are in Sirmione, twenty-eight young Dantes
and thirty-four Catulli;
And there had been a great catch of sardines,
And his elders
Were packing them in the great wooden boxes
For the market in Brescia, and he
Leapt about, snatching at the bright fish
And getting in both of their ways;
And in vain they commanded him to sta fermo!
And when they would not let him arrange
The fish in the boxes
He stroked those which were already arranged,
Murmuring for his own satisfaction
This identical phrase:

Ch' è be' a.

And at this I was mildly abashed.
--Ezra Pound

I think if Pound had written more poems like this one and fewer Cantos, I'd like him a lot more. The Italian says, "Look! Oh, look! How beautiful she is!" and sta fermo means "stand still."

Poem of the Day: Louis MacNeice

2010-05-21T22:20:00.000-07:00

Snow

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes ---
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands --
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.
--Louis MacNeice

Poem of the Day: D.H. Lawrence

2010-05-20T23:34:00.000-07:00

Bavarian Gentians

Not every man has gentians in his house
in Soft September, at slow, sad Michaelmas.

Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the daytime, torch-like with the smoking blueness of Pluto's gloom,
ribbed and torch-like, with their blaze of darkness spread blue
down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day
torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto's dark-blue daze,
black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter's pale lamps give off light,
lead me then, lead the way.

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower
down the darker and dark stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness
even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the lost bride and her groom.
--D.H. Lawrence

Poem of the Day: Theodore Roethke

2010-05-19T22:50:00.000-07:00

I Knew a Woman

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I'd have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek).

How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand;
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin;
I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;
She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,
Coming behind her for her pretty sake
(But what prodigious mowing we did make).

Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:
Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;
My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;
Her several parts could keep a pure repose,
Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved).

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I'm martyr to a motion not my own;
What's freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways).
--Theodore Roethke

I don't think any twentieth-century poet caught the spirit of Donne or Marvell or Herrick better than Roethke did in this wonderful, sexy poem.

Poem of the Day: William Carlos Williams

2010-05-18T23:27:00.000-07:00

Poem
As the cat
climbed over
the top of

the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down

into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot

--William Carlos Williams

Poem of the Day: W.H. Auden

2010-05-17T23:08:00.000-07:00

Musée des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
--W.H. Auden

Auden's wryly observant poem is maybe the most familiar example of poetry as art criticism, and has been widely imitated. Some of the imitations are direct homages to Auden's poem, like Billy Collins's:

Musée des Beaux Arts Revisited

As far as mental anguish goes,
the old painters were no fools.
They understood how the mind,
the freakiest dungeon in the castle,
can effortlessly imagine a crab with the face of a priest
or an end table complete with genitals.

And they knew that the truly monstrous
lies not so much in the wildly shocking,
a skeleton spinning a wheel of fire, say,
but in the small prosaic touch
added to a tableau of the hellish,
the detail at the heart of the horrid.

In Bosch's The Temptation of St. Anthony,
for instance, how it is not so much
the boar-faced man in the pea-green dress
that frightens, but the white mandolin he carries,
not the hooded corpse in a basket,
but the way the basket is rigged to hang from a bare branch;

how, what must have driven St. Anthony
to the mossy brink of despair
was not the big, angry-looking fish
in the central panel,
the one with the two mouse-like creatures
conferring on its tail,
but rather what the fish is wearing:

a kind of pale orange officer's cape
and, over that,
a metal body-helmet secured by silvery wires,
a sensible buckled chin strap,
and, yes, the ultimate test of faith --
the tiny sword that hangs from the thing,
that nightmare carp,
secure in its brown leather scabbard.
--Billy Collins

I'm sure William Carlos Williams also knew Auden's poem, but he found a particularly musical way to evoke his chosen painting:

The Dance

In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling about
the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Breughel's great picture, The Kermess.
--William Carlos Williams

Poem of the Day: Wallace Stevens

2010-05-16T23:33:00.000-07:00

The Idea of Order at Key West

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.
For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.

It if was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plunges of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
--Wallace Stevens

I guess it's worth noting here that the poem's Ramon Fernandez is not the Philippine basketball player, and that Stevens claimed he wasn't the literary critic of the same name, but just a Hispanic name he picked at random. So that's one enigma in this poem you don't have to deal with.

Poem of the Day: William Empson

2010-05-15T20:01:00.000-07:00

Missing Dates

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
It is not the effort nor the failure tires.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It s not your system or clear sight that mills
Down small to the consequences a life requires;
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.

They bled an old dog dry yet the exchange rills
Of young dog blood gave but a month's desires
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It is the Chinese tombs and the slag hills
Usurp the soil, and not the soil retires.
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.

Not to have fire is to be a skin that shrills.
The complete fire is death. From partial fires
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It is the poems you have lost, the ills
From missing dates, at which the heart expires.
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
--William Empson

Empson's reputation rests largely on his literary criticism, and especially on his first book, Seven Types of Ambiguity (which, as a professor of mine once remarked, constitutes an eighth type of ambiguity all on its own). But he was a provocative poet, too, as this strangely morbid villanelle should demonstrate.

Poem of the Day: Edward Thomas

2010-05-14T21:54:00.000-07:00

Lights Out

I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight,
Or winding, soon or late;
They cannot choose.

Many a road and track
That, since the dawn's first crack,
Up to the forest brink,
Deceived the travelers,
Suddenly now blurs,
And in they sink.

Here love ends,
Despair, ambition ends;
All pleasure and all trouble,
Although most sweet or bitter,
Here ends in sleep that is sweeter
Than tasks most noble.

There is not any book
Or face of dearest look
That I would not turn from now
To go into the unknown
I must enter, and leave, alone,
I know not how.

The tall forest towers;
Its cloudy foliage lowers
Ahead, shelf above self;
Its silence I hear and obet
That I may lose my way
And myself.
--Edward Thomas

Poem of the Day: Vernon Watkins

2010-05-13T23:48:00.000-07:00

Waterfalls

Always in that valley in Wales I hear the noise
   Of waters falling.
There is a clump of trees
We climbed for nuts; and high in the trees the boys
   Lost in the rookery's cries
Would cross, and branches cracking under their knees

Would break, and make in the winter wood new gaps.
The leafmould covering the ground was almost black,
But speckled and striped were the nuts we threw in our caps,
   Milked from split shells and cups,
Secret as chestnuts when they are tipped from a sack,

Glossy and new.
                         Always in that valley in Wales
     I hear that sound, those voices. They keep fresh
          What ripens, falls, drops into darkness, fails,
               Gone when dawn shines on scales,
                    And glides from village memory, slips through the mesh,

And is not, when we come again.
                                                  I look:
     Voices are under the bridge, and that voice calls,
          Now late, and answers,
                                              then, as the light twigs break
               Back, there is only the brook
                    Reminding the stones where, under a breath, it falls.
--Vernon Watkins

Poem of the Day: Robert Frost

2010-05-12T22:06:00.000-07:00

Spring Pools

These pools that, though in forests, still reflect
The total sky almost without defect,
And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,
Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,
And yet not out by any brook or river,
But up by roots to brink dark foliage on.
The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods --
Let them think twice before they use their powers
To blot out and drink up and sweep away
These flowery waters and these watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday.
--Robert Frost

This is the Frost I most admire: the observer, not the ironic moralist.

Poem of the Day: Samuel Beckett

2010-05-11T23:31:00.000-07:00

what would I do without this world faceless incurious
where to be lasts but an instant where every instant
spills in the void the ignorance of having been
without this wave where in the end
body and shadow together are engulfed
what would I do without this silence where the murmurs die
the paintings the frenzies towards succour towards love
without this sky that soars
above its ballast dust

what would I do what I did yesterday and the day before
peering out of my deadlight looking for another
wandering like me eddying far from all the living
in a convulsive space
among the voices voiceless
that throng my hiddenness
--Samuel Beckett

Poem of the Day: Paul Laurence Dunbar

2010-05-10T22:20:00.000-07:00

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes --
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!
--Paul Laurence Dunbar

In his day, Dunbar was best known for dialect poems like "When Malindy Sings," which black poets were expected to produce. He wore the mask, but not happily.

Poem of the Day: John Betjeman

2010-05-09T21:40:00.000-07:00

The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel

He sipped at a weak hock and seltzer
     As he gazed at the London skies
Through the Nottingham lace of the curtains
     Or was it his bees-winged eyes?

To the right and before him Pont Street
     Did tower in her new built red,
As hard as the morning gaslight
     That shone on his unmade bed,

"I want some more hock in my seltzer,
     And Robbie, please give me your hand --
Is this the end or beginning?
     How can I understand?

"So you've brought me the latest Yellow Book:
     And Buchan has got in it now:
Approval of what is approved of
     Is as false as a well-kept vow.

"More hock, Robbie -- where is the seltzer?
     Dear boy, pull again at the bell!
They are all little better than cretins,
     Though this is the Cadogan Hotel.

"One astrakhan coat is at Willis's --
     Another one's at the Savoy:
Do fetch my morocco portmanteau,
     And bring them on later, dear boy."

A thump, and a murmur of voices --
     ("Oh why must they make such a din?")
As the door of the bedroom swung open
     And TWO PLAIN CLOTHES POLICEMEN came in:

"Mr Woilde, we 'ave come for tew take yew
     Where felons and criminals dwell:
We must ask yew tew leave with us quoietly
     For this is the Cadogan Hotel."

He rose, and he put down The Yellow Book.
     He staggered -- and, terrible-eyed,
He brushed past the palms on the staircase
     And was helped to a hansom outside.
--John Betjeman

I like to imagine the encounter of Oscar Wilde, the consummate aesthete, and John Betjeman, the laureate of British nostalgia, in heaven. Betjeman treats the great injustice of Wilde's arrest with slyly sympathetic humor, which may, after all, be the way Wilde would like to have seen it treated.

Poem of the Day: Edwin Arlington Robinson

2010-05-08T21:20:00.000-07:00

New England

Here where the wind is always north-north-east
And children learn to walk on frozen toes,
Wonder begets an envy of all those
Who boil elsewhere with such a lyric yeast
Of love that you will hear them at a feast
Where demons would appeal for some repose,
Still clamoring where the chalice overflows
And crying wildest who have drunk the least.
Passion is here a soilure of the wits,
We're told, and Love a cross for them to bear;
Joy shivers in the corner where she knits
And Conscience always has the rocking-chair,
Cheerful as when she tortured into fits
The first cat that was ever killed by Care.
--Edwin Arlington Robinson

Well, what else would you expect from the author of those cheery little ditties "Richard Cory," "Miniver Cheevy" and "Mr. Flood's Party"?

Poem of the Day: Kenneth Rexroth

2010-05-07T21:13:00.000-07:00

Proust's Madeleine

Somebody has given my
Baby daughter a box of
Old poker chips to play with.
Today she hands me one while
I am sitting with my tired
Brain at my desk. It is red.
On it is a picture of
An elk's head and the letters
B.P.O.E. -- a chip from
A small town Elks' Club. I flip
It idly in the air and
Catch it and do a coin trick
To amuse my little girl.
Suddenly everything slips aside.
I see my father
Doing the very same thing,
Whistling "Beautiful Dreamer,"
His breath smelling richly
Of whiskey and cigars. I can
Hear him coming home drunk
From the Elks' Club in Elkhart
Indiana, bumping the
Chairs in the dark. I can see
Him dying of cirrhosis
Of the liver and stomach
Ulcers and pneumonia,
Or, as he said on his deathbed, of
Crooked cards and straight whiskey,
Slow horses and fast women.
--Kenneth Rexroth

This poem is in honor of my one hundred and seventieth consecutive day of reading Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. I don't think there were any Elks' Clubs in Combray.

Poem of the Day: Ernest Dowson

2010-05-06T23:24:00.000-07:00

Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae

Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed
Upon my soul begtween the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
   Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head;
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,
Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;
Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
   When I awoke and found the dawn was gray;
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
   Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I cried for madder music and for stronger wine
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
   Yea hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
--Ernest Dowson

What is there to say about a poet whose two most famous poems are famous for having given titles to works more famous than the poems themselves? In this case, a certain novel by Margaret Mitchell and a song by Cole Porter. The other one is in a poem called "Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam." The titles of both poems come from Horace's odes: This one means "I am not what I was under the reign of the good Cynara."

Poem of the Day: Stanley Kunitz

2010-05-05T21:29:00.000-07:00

The War Against the Trees

The man who sold his lawn to standard oil
Joked with his neighbors come to watch the show
While the bulldozers, drunk with gasoline,
Tested the virtue of the sil
Under the branchy sky
By overthrowing first the privet-row.

Forsythia-forays and hydrangea-raids
Were but preliminaries to a war
Against the great-grandfathers of the town,
So freshly lopped and maimed.
They struck and struck againt,
And with each elm a century went down

All day the hireling engines charged the trees,
Subverting them by hacking underground
In grub-dominions, where dark summer's mole
Rampages through his halls,
Till a northern seizure shook
Those crowns, forcing the giants to their knees.

I saw the ghosts of children at their games
Racing beyond their childhood in the shade,
And while the green world turned its death-foxed page
And a red wagon wheeled,
I watched them disappear
Into the suburbs of their grievous age.

Ripped from the craters much too big for hearts
The club-roots bared their amputated coils,
Raw gorgons matted blind, whose pocks and scars
Cried Moon! on a corner lot
One witness-moment, caught
In the rear-view mirrors of the passing cars.
--Stanley Kunitz

There's a poignant and prophetic quality to this poem, more than fifty years old, and it's somehow best evoked for me in Kunitz's decision not to use the capital letters that commercially belonged to Standard Oil. For oil became standard in our way of life, and we have certainly paid the price for it.

Poem of the Day: William Butler Yeats

2010-05-04T23:22:00.000-07:00

Among School Children

1
I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and histories,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way -- the children's eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

2
I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
Above a sinking fire, a tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to tragedy --
Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato's parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

3
And thinking of that fit of grief or rage
I look upon one child or t'other there
And wonder if she stood so at that age --
For even daughters of the swan can share
Something of every paddler's heritage --
And had that color upon cheek or hair,
And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
She stands before me as a living child.

4
Her present image floats into the mind --
Did Quattrocento finger fashion it
Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
And I though never of Ledaean kind
Had pretty plumage once -- enough of that,
Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

5
What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

6
Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

7
Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother's reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts -- O Presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolize --
O self-born mockers of man's enterprise;

8
Labor is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
--William Butler Yeats

Modernism is over. We are now postmodern, whatever that means. And we now approach the landmarks of modernism -- the novels of Proust and Joyce, the poems of Yeats and Eliot -- armed with the tools of exegesis: concordances and glosses, commentaries and footnotes. We illuminate the obscurities and explicate the personal myths. And certainly the snarls and gnarls of a poem like this one need all those external aids if we want to understand them fully. But sometimes the scholarship imposes its considerable bulk between the essence of the poem: the feeling and the emotion, the sheer mystery of a human experience. So it's gratifying to return to this poem having worked it all out, having figured out its allusions and tracked down its personal references and unsnagged its syntax, and just to appreciate it for what it is simply at heart: a meditation on the antagonism between beauty and mortality, a remembrance of things past and an acceptance of things present.

Poem of the Day: Robert Penn Warren

2010-05-03T23:57:00.000-07:00

Bearded Oaks

The oaks, how subtle and marine,
Bearded, and all the layered light
Above them swims; and thus the scene,
Recessed, awaits the positive night.

So, waiting, we in the grass now lie
Beneath the languorous tread of light:
The grasses, kelp-like, satisfy
The nameless motions of the air.

Upon the floor of light, and time,
Unmurmuring, of polyp made,
We rest; we are, as light withdraws,
Twin atolls on a shelf of shade.

Ages to our construction went,
Dim architecture, hour by hour:
And violence, forgot now, lent
The present stillness all its power.

The storm of noon above us rolled,,
Of light the fury, furious gold,
The long drag troubling us, the depth:
Dark is unrocking, unrippling, still.

Passion and slaughter, ruth, decay
Descend, minutely whispering down,
Silted down swaying streams, to lay
Foundation for our voicelessness.

All our debate is voiceless here,
As all our rage, the rage of stone;
If hope is hopeless, then fearless is fear,
And history is thus undone.

Our feet once wrought the hollow street
With echo when the lamps were dead
At windows, once our headlight glare
Disturbed the doe that, leaping, fled.

I do not love you less that now
The caged heart makes iron stroke,
Or less that all that light once gave
The graduate dark should now revoke.

We live in time so little time
And we learn all so painfully,
That we may spare this hour's term
To practice for eternity.
--Robert Penn Warren

Poem of the Day: A.E. Housman

2010-05-02T19:40:00.000-07:00

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
--A.E. Housman

To those of us who are tired of the bogosity of "threescore years and ten" and who may have just seen their seventieth spring, I offer this response by Emily Grosholz to Housman:

Putting On the Ritz
(For William Jules-Yves)

After a long, cool winter,
at last in May a suite
of warm days wakes the sleepers

One covered from crown to root
in thick crepe skirtlets stops
me, back from hibernation:

Loveliest of trees,
big as the Ritz's balletic
vases charged with bloom.

Not bought, not concocted,
only improbably real.
Why am I not surprised?

My hair is snowed with silver,
evidence how little room
fifty springs allow.

And yet midwinter someone
burst to life inside me,
and lately started dancing.

Just so improbably
snow hung along the branches
changed suddenly to flowers.
--Emily Grosholz

Poem of the Day: Patrick Kavanagh

2010-05-01T20:14:00.000-07:00

Lecture Hall

To speak in summer in a lecture hall
About literature and its use
I pick my brains and tease out all
To see if I can choose
Something untarnished, some new news

From experience that has been immediate,
Recent, something that makes
The listener or reader
Impregnant, something that reinstates
The poet. A few words like birth-dates

That brings him back in the public mind,
I mean the mind of the dozen or so
Who constantly listen out for the two-lined
Message that announces the gusto
Of the dead arisen into the sun-glow.

Someone in America will note
The apparent miracle. In a bar
In Greenwich Village some youthful poet
Will mention it, and a similar
In London or wherever they are

Those pickers-up of messages that produce
The idea that underneath the sun
Things can be new as July dews --
Out of the frowsy, the second-hand won ...
Keep at it, keep at it while the heat is on

I say to myself as I consider
Virginal crevices in my brain
Where the never-exposed will soon be a mother.
I search for that which has no stain,
Something discovered vividly and sudden.
--Patrick Kavanagh

Poem of the Day: Gerard Manley Hopkins

2010-04-30T22:30:00.000-07:00

Spring and Fall
TO A YOUNG CHILD

Márgarét, áre you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow's springs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
--Gerard Manley Hopkins

Poem of the Day: C. Day Lewis

2010-04-29T23:23:00.000-07:00

Almost Human

The man you know, assured and kind,
Wearing fame like an old tweed suit ---
You would not think he has an incurable
Sickness upon his mind.

Finely that tongue, for the listening people,
Articulates love, enlivens clay;
While under his valued skin there crawls
An outlaw and a cripple.

Unenviable the renown he bears
When all's awry within? But a soul
Divinely sick may be immunized
From the scourge of common cares.

A woman weeps, a friend's betrayed,
Civilization plays with fire --
His grief or guilt is easily purged
In a rush of words to the head.

The newly dead, and their waxwork faces
With the look of things that could never have lived,
He'll use to prime his cold, strange heart
And prompt the immortal phrases.

Before you condemn this eminent freak
As an outrage upon mankind,
Reflect: something there is in him
That must for ever seek

To share the condition it glorifies,
To shed the skin that keeps it apart,
To bury its grace in a human bed --
And it walks on knives, on knives.
--C. Day Lewis

The poet was 53 when his wife gave birth to a son who would become a famous actor, and father and son were never close. But there's something in this poem that seems to me to link them: the theme of playing with masks, of the mutability of identity. Day Lewis père was a communist who became that most establishmentarian of things, the poet laureate. And Day-Lewis fils (he resumed the hyphen that his father had dropped) is the most chameleon-like of actors.

Poem of the Day: Thomas Hardy

2010-04-28T21:39:00.000-07:00

The Convergence of the Twain
LINES ON THE LOSS OF THE TITANIC

          1
          In a solitude of the sea
          Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

          2
          Steel chambers, late the pyres
          Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

          3
          Over the mirrors meant
          To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls -- grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

          4
          Jewels in joy designed
          To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

          5
          Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?"

6
Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

7
Prepared a sinister mate
For her -- so gaily great --
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

8
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

9
Alien they seemed to be:
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,

   10
   Or sign that they were bent
   By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,

   11
   Till the Spinner of the Years
   Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.
--Thomas Hardy

Yes, it's hokum, this personification of the Titanic as human pride and the Iceberg as nature's might. But is it any hokier than James Cameron's version?

Poem of the Day: Richard Eberhart

2010-04-27T22:51:00.000-07:00

The Groundhog

In June, amid the golden fields,
I saw a groundhog lying dead.
Dead lay he; my senses shook,
And mind outshot our naked frailty.
There lowly in the vigorous summer
His form began its senseless change,
And made my senses waver dim
Seeing nature ferocious in him.
Inspecting close his maggots' might
And seething cauldron of his being,
Half with loathing, half with a strange love,
I poked him with an angry sstick.
The fever arose, became a flame
And Vigour circumscribed the skies,
Immense energy in the sun,
And through my frame a sunless trembling.
My stick had done nor good nor harm.
Then stood I silent in the day
Watching the object, as before;
And kept my reverence for knowledge
Trying for control, to be still,
To quell the passion of the blood;
Until I had bent down on my knees
Praying for joy in the sight of decay.
And so I left; and I returned
In Autumn strict of eye, to see
The sap gone out of the groundhog,
But the bony sodden hulk remained.
But the year had lost its meaning,
And in intellectual chains
I lost both love and loathing,
Mured up in the wall of wisdom.
Another summer took the fields again
Massive and burning, full of life,
But when I chanced upon the spot
There was only a little hair left,
And bones bleaching in the sunlight
Beautiful as architecture;
I watched them like a geometer,
And cut a walking stick from a birch.
It has been three years, now,
There is no sign of the groundhog.
I stood there in the whirling summer,
My hand capped a withered heart,
And thought of China and of Greece,
Of Alexander in his tent;
Of Montaigne in his tower,
Of Saint Theresa in her wild lament.
--Richard Eberhart

This is probably Eberhart's most famous anthology piece -- except maybe for "The Fury of Aerial Bombardment" -- as well as a member of a curious subgenre: the mock-heroic meditation on a dead animal. In fact, I can think of only three examples: this one, Thomas Gray's "On the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes" (one of the most misquoted poems in English), and this last, which is one my favorite poems of all time.

The Death of a Toad

A toad the power mower caught,
Chewed and clipped of a leg, with a hobbling hop has got
   To the garden verge, and sanctuaried him
     Under the cineraria leaves, in the shade
Of the ashen heartshaped leaves, in a dim,
               Low, and a final glade.

The rare original heartsblood goes,
Spends on the earthen hide, in the folds and wizenings, flows
In the gutters of the banked and staring eyes. He lies
    As still as if he would return to stone,
          And soundlessly attending, dies
   Toward some deep monotone,

          Toward misted and ebullient seas
And cooling shores, toward lost Amphibia's emperies.
     Day dwindles, drowning, and at length is gone
   In the wide and antique eyes, which still appear
          To watch, across the castrate lawn,
   The haggard daylight steer.
--Richard Wilbur

Poem of the Day: Algernon Charles Swinburne

2010-04-26T22:43:00.000-07:00

The Sundew

A little marsh-plant, yellow green,
And pricked at lip with tender red.
Tread close, and either way you tread
Some faint black water jets between
Lest you should bruise the curious head.

A live thing maybe; who shall know?
The summer knows and suffers it;
For the cool moss is thick and sweet
Each side, and saves the blossom so
That it lives out the long June heat.

The deep scent of the heater burns
About it; breathless though it be,
Bow down and worship; more than we
Is the least flower whose life returns,
Least weed renascent in the sea.

We are vexed and cumbered in earth's sight
With wants, with many memories;
These see their mother what she is,
Glad-growing, till August leave more bright
The apple-colored cranberries.

Wind blows and bleaches the strong grass,
Blown all one way to shelter it
From trample of strayed kine, with feet
Felt heavier than the moorhen was,
Strayed up past patches of wild wheat.

You call it sundew: how it grows,
If with its color it have breath,
If life taste sweet to it, if death
Pain its soft petal, no man knows:
Man has no sight or sense that saith.

O red-lipped mouth of marsh-flower,
I have a secret halved with thee.
The name that is love's name to me
Though knowest, and the face of her
Who is my festival to see.

The hard sun, as thy petals knew,
Colored the heavy moss-water:
Thou wert not worth green midsummer
Nor fit to live to August blue,
O sundew, not remembering her.
--Algernon Charles Swinburne

Poets love to write poems to birds (Shelley's skylark, Keats's nightingale) and flowers (Wordsworth's daffodils). But leave it to kinky old Swinburne to glorify a carnivorous swamp-dwelling plant. And in a love poem.

Poem of the Day: Louis Zukofsky

2010-04-25T22:15:00.000-07:00

Tall and singularly dark you pass among the breakers --
Companionship as of another world bordering on this;
To the intelligence fastened by the senses you are lost
In a world of sunlight where nothing is amiss:

For nothing but the sun is there and peace vital with the sun,
The heaviest changes shift through no features more than a smile,
Currents spread, and are gone, and as the high waves appear,
You dive, in the calming are as lost awhile.

How in that while intelligence escapes from sense
And fear with hurled human might darkens upon bliss!
Till as again you stand above the waters
Fear turns to sleep as one who dreamt of falling, an abyss!
--Louis Zukofsky

Poem of the Day: Christina Rossetti

2010-04-24T22:18:00.000-07:00

In an Artist's Studio

One face looks out from all his canvases,
   One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:
   We found her hidden behind those screens,
That mirror gave back all her loveliness.
A queen in opal or in ruby dress,
   A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens,
   A saint, an angel -- every canvas means
The same one meaning, neither more nor less.
He feeds upon her face by day and night,
   And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,
Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:
   Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;
Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;
   Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.
--Christina Rossetti

Yes, it's a poem about the obsession of Christina's brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, with his model and wife, Elizabeth Siddal, the quintessential Pre-Raphaelite woman. But it's also a poem about objectification, about what feminist critics refer to as the "male gaze." A fascinating lot, those Rossettis.

Christina Rossetti, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Poem of the Day: William Plomer

2010-04-23T22:20:00.000-07:00

In the Snake Park

A white-hot midday in the Snake Park.
Lethargy lay here and there in coils,
And here and there a neat obsidian head
Lay dreaming on a plaited pillow of its own
Loops like a pretzel or a true-love-knot.

A giant Python seemed a heap of tyres;
Two Nielsen's Vipers looked for a way out,
Sick of their cage and one another's curves;
And the long Ringsnake brought from Lembuland
Poured softly through an opening like smoke.

Leaning intently forward a young girl
Discerned in stagnant water on a rock
A dark brown shoestring or discarded whiplash,
Then read the label to find out the name,
Then stared again: it moved. She screamed.

Old Piet Vander leant with us that day
On the low wall around the rocky spacee
Where amid broken quartz that cast no shade
Snakes twitched or slithered, or appeared to sleep,
Or lay invisible in the singing glare.

The sun throbbed like a fever as he spoke:
"Look carefully at this shrub with glossy leaves."
Leaves bright as brass. "That leaf on top
Just there, do you see that it has eyes?
That's a Green Mamba, and it's watching you.

"A man I once knew did survive the bite,
Saved by a doctor running with a knife,
Serum and all. He was never the same again.
Vomiting blackness, agonizing, passing blood,
Part paralysed, near gone, he felt

"(He told me later) he would burst apart;
But the worst agony was in his mind --
Unbearable nightmare, worse than total grief
Or final loss of hope, impossibly magnified
To a blind passion of panic and extreme distress."

"Why should that little head have power
To inject all horror for no reason at all?"
"Ask me another -- and beware of snakes."
The sun was like a burning-glass. Face down
The girl who screamed had fallen in a faint.
--William Plomer

Perhaps Plomer oversensationalizes the otherness of snakes here, but they do seem to inspire a primal fear, as D.H. Lawrence suggested in a somewhat more subtle poem.

Poem of the Day: Emily Dickinson

2010-04-22T22:37:00.000-07:00

The Bible is an antique Volume --
Written by faded Men
At the suggestion of Holy Spectres --
Subjects -- Bethlehem --
Eden -- the ancient Homestead --
Satan -- the Brigadier --
Judas -- the Great Defaulter --
David -- the Troubadour --
Sin -- a distinguished Precipice
Others must resist --
Boys that "believe" are very lonesome --
Other Boys are "lost"--
Had but the Tale a warbling Teller --
All the Boys would come --
Orpheus' Sermon captivated --
It did not condemn --
--Emily Dickinson

To understand the unsettled consciousness of nineteenth-century writers, you have to know a little about the higher criticism, and how it shook their world view. Treating the Bible as a man-made text was faith-shattering for many of them, Dickinson included. Thomas Hardy had a different view of it:

The Respectable Burgher on "The Higher Criticism"

Since Reverend Doctors now declare
That clerks and people must prepare
To doubt if Adam ever were;
To hold the flood a local scare;
To argue, though with stolid stare,
That everything had happened ere,
The prophets to its happening sware;
That David was no giant-slayer,
Nor one to call a God-obeyer
In certain details we would spare,
But rather was a debonair
Shrewd bandit, skilled as banjo-player:
That Solomon sang the fleshly Fair,
And gave the Church no thought whate'er,
That Esther with her royal wear,
And Mordecai, the son of Jair,
And Joshua's triumphs, Job's despair,
And Balaam's ass's bitter blare;
Nebuchadnezzar's furnace-flare,
And Daniel and the den affair,
And other stories rich and rare,
Were writ to make old doctrine wear
Something of a romantic air:
That the Nain widow's only heir,
And Lazarus with cadaverous glare
(As done in oils by Piombo's care)
Did not return from Sheol's lair:
That Jael set a fiendish snare,
That Pontius Pilate acted square,
That never a sword cut Malchus' ear;
And (but for shame I must forbear)
That —— —— did not reappear!...
— Since thus they hint, nor turn a hair,
All churchgoing will I forswear,
And sit on Sundays in my chair,
And read that moderate man Voltaire.
--Thomas Hardy

Poem of the Day: Countee Cullen

2010-04-21T21:35:00.000-07:00

Yet Do I Marvel

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!
--Countee Cullen

Poem of the Day: Dante Gabriel Rossetti

2010-04-20T23:14:00.000-07:00

From The House of Life

19. "Silent Noon"

Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass --
     The finger-points look through like rosy blooms:
     Your eyes smile peace. The pasture gleams and glooms
'Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass.
All round our nest, far as the eye can pass,
     Are golden kingcup-fields with silver edge
     Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn-hedge.
'Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass.

Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragonfly
Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky:
     So this winged hour is dropt to us from above.
Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower,
This close-companioned inarticulate hour
     When twofold silence was the song of love.
--Dante Gabriel Rossetti

This selection from Rossetti's sonnet cycle is maybe best-known for the setting by Ralph Vaughan Williams, which gives me an excuse to include this version by John McCormack, recorded in 1941. A miraculous recording, considering that McCormack was in his 60s and ill with emphysema.

Poem of the Day: Stevie Smith

2010-04-19T23:13:00.000-07:00

Was He Married?

Was he married, did he try
To support as he grew less fond of them
Wife and family?

No,
He never suffered such a blow.

Did he feel pointless, feeble and distrait,
Unwanted by everyone and in the way?

From his cradle he was purposeful,
His bent strong and his mind full.

Did he love people very much
Yet find them die one day?

He did not love in the human way.

Did he ask how long it would go on,
Wonder if Death could be counted on for an end?

He did not feel like this,
He had a future of bliss.

Did he never feel strong
Pain for being wrong?

He was not wrong, he was right,
He suffered from others', not his own, spite.

But there is no suffering like having made a mistake
Because of being of an inferior make.

He was not inferior,
He was superior.

He knew then that power corrupts but some must govern?

His thoughts were different.

Did he lack friends? Worse,
Think it was for his fault, not theirs?

He did not lack friends,
He had disciples he moulded to his ends.

Did he feel over-handicapped sometimes, yet must draw even?

How could he feel like this? He was the King of Heaven.

... find a sudden brightness one day in everything
Because a mood had been conquered, or a sin?

I tell you, he did not sin.

Do only human beings suffer from the irritation
I have mentioned? learn too that being comical
Does not ameliorate the desperation?

Only human beings feel this,
It is because they are so mixed.

All human beings should have a medal,
A god cannot carry it, he is not able.

A god is Man's doll, you ass,
He makes him up like this on purpose.

He might have made him up worse.

He often has, in the past.

To choose a god of love, as he did and does,
Is a little move then?

Yes, it is.

A larger one will be when men
Love love and hate hate but do not deify them?

It will be a larger one.
--Stevie Smith

Smith's wry catechism hinges on a conundrum: Can god, not being human, truly comprehend man? And the only answer to it is that man creates god in his own image, and not the other way around.

Poem of the Day: Matthew Arnold

2010-04-18T21:45:00.000-07:00

Dover Beach

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
--Matthew Arnold

A great poem, perhaps the only great poem Arnold ever wrote. And a quintessentially Victorian one in its disillusionment and its mourning for lost belief. Still, Anthony Hecht's cheeky response to the poem deftly takes the wind out of Arnold's rhetorical sails:

The Dover Bitch: A Criticism of Life

So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, "Try to be true to me,
And I'll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc."
Well, now, I knew this girl. It's true she had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck. She told me later on
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and felt really sad,
Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds
And blandishments in French and the perfumes
And then she got really angry. To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.
Anyway, she watched him pace the room
And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit,
And then she said one or two unprintable things.
But you mustn't judge her by that. What I mean to say is,
She's really all right. I still see her once in a while
And she always treats me right. We have a drink
And I give her a good time, and perhaps it's a year
Before I see her again, but there she is,
Running to fat, but dependable a they come,
And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d'Amour.
--Anthony Hecht

Poem of the Day: Langston Hughes

2010-04-17T21:32:00.000-07:00

Theme for English B

The instructor said,

     Go home and write
     a page tonight.
     And let that page come out of you --
     Then, it will be true.

I wonder if it's that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here
to this college on the hill above Harlem.
I am the only colored student in my class.
The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem,
through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas,
Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,
the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator
up to my room, sit down, and write this page:

It's not easy to know what is true for you or me
at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I'm what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you:
hear you, hear me -- we two -- you, me, talk on this page.
(I hear New York, too.) Me -- who?

Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records -- Bessie, bop, or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn't make me not like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write?
Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white --
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That's American.
Sometimes perhaps you don't want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that's true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me --
although you're older -- and white --
and somewhat more free.

This is my page for English B.
--Langston Hughes

There is something restrained about Hughes' verse, something guarded, even when he's trying to write in the idiom of jazz or blues or in the voices of Harlem. Here, where he's assuming a persona based on his own experience as a young black man in a white college, he doesn't let go even though the instructor has asked it of him: the anger is muted, ironic. The sense of a powerfully restrained tension born of the necessity of self-concealment haunts every line. It's the voice of someone always doomed to be an outsider, not only a black man in a white world, but also perhaps a closeted gay man, which many think he was. "I like to ... be in love," he writes -- not "I like to love" or "I like to make love," but something more passive: being but not doing.

Poem of the Day: Walt Whitman

2010-04-16T22:53:00.000-07:00

Vigil strange I kept on the field one night;
When you my son and my comrade dropt at my side that day,
One look I but gave which your dear eyes return'd with a look I shall never forget,
One touch of your hand to mine O boy, reach'd up as you lay on the ground,
Then onward I sped in the battle, the even-contested battle,
Till late in the night reliev'd to the place at last again I made my way,
Found you in death so cold dear comrade, found your body son of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)
Bared your face in the starlight, curious the scene, cool blew the moderate night-wind,
Long there and then in vigil I stood, dimly around me the battle-field spreading,
Vigil wondrous and vigil sweet there in the fragrant silent night,
But not a tear fell, not even a long-drawn sigh, long I gazed,
Then on the earth partially reclining sat by your side leaning my chin in my hands,
Passing sweet hours, immortal and mystic hours with you dearest comrade -- not a tear, not a word,
Vigil of silence, love and death, vigil for you my son and my soldier,
As onward silently stars aloft, eastward new ones upward stole,
Vigil final for you brave boy, (I could not save you, swift was your death,
I faithfully loved you and cared for you living, I think we shall surely meet again,)
Till at latest lingering of the night, indeed just as the dawn appear'd,
My comrade I wrapt in his blanket, envelop'd well his form,
Folded the blanket well, tucking it carefully over head and carefully under feet,
And there and then and bathed by the rising sun, my son in his grave, in his rude-dug grave I deposited,
Ending my vigil strange with that, vigil of night and battle-field dim,
Vigil for boy of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)
Vigil for comrade swiftly slain, vigil I never forget, how as day brighten'd,
I rose from the chill ground and folded my soldier well in his blanket,
And buried him where he fell.
--Walt Whitman

Whitman's mastery of the long breathless sweep of verse (and despite what his detractors say, this is verse, not prose) was never better shown than in this poem. Both rhapsody and dirge, war-poem and love-poem, it is broken only by commas and a sole semicolon, until it reaches a full stop after the devastating final six-word line.

Poem of the Day: Laura Riding

2010-04-15T22:35:00.000-07:00

With the Face

With the face goes a mirror
As with the mind a world.
Likeness tells the doubting eye
That strangeness is not strange.
At an early hour and knowledge
Identity not yet familiar
Looks back upon itself from later,
And seems itself.

To-day seems now.
With reality-to-be goes time.
With the mind goes a world.
With the heart goes a weather.
With the face goes a mirror
As with the body a fear.
Young self goes staring to the wall
Where dumb futurity speaks calm,
And between then and then
Forebeing grows of age.

The mirror mixes with the eye.
Soon will it be the very eye.
Soon will the eye that was
The very mirror be.
Death, the final image, will shine
Transparently not otherwise
Than as the dark sun described
With such faint brightnesses.
--Laura Riding

Time, mortality, identity, memory -- such grand themes. And they're all here in a poem that's both simple and intricate, as it would have to be to contain them. The obvious comparison is to Emily Dickinson, but though Riding is also inevitably linked with the Fugitives and with Robert Graves, she is her own considerable poetic self.

Poem of the Day: Herman Melville

2010-04-14T21:46:00.000-07:00

Shiloh
A Requiem (April 1862)

Skimming lightly, wheeling still,
   The swallows fly low
Over the field in clouded days,
   The forest-field of Shiloh --
Over the field where April rain
Solaced the parched one stretched in pain
Through the pause of night
That followed the Sunday fight
   Around the church of Shiloh --
The church so lone, the log-built one,
That echoed to many a parting groan
        And natural prayer
Of dying foemen mingled there --
Foemen at morn, but friends at eve --
     Fame or country least their care:
(What like a bullet can undeceive!)
     But now they lie low,
While over them the swallows skim,
     And all is hushed at Shiloh.
--Herman Melville

Amid the historical and moral stupidity of politicians proclaiming Confederate History Month, it's good to turn to poets like Melville for sanity and truth.

Poem of the Day: Yvor Winters

2010-04-13T22:26:00.000-07:00

Time and the Garden

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.
--Yvor Winters

It's funny how a writer can be both out of the mainstream and square in the middle of it. No matter how much Winters might have honored tradition -- heroic couplets, for God's sake! -- he couldn't help being a modern poet. Which is what makes his poetry so engaging, and, as in this poem, reminds us that we are what our times make us. The question is whether it's nobler to fight 'em or join 'em. Winters makes a good case for the former.

Poem of the Day: Emily Brontë

2010-04-12T15:48:00.000-07:00

Hope

Hope was but a timid friend --
She sat without my grated den
Watching how my fate would tend
Even as selfish-hearted men.

She was cruel in her fear.
Through the bars, one dreary day,
I looked out to see her there
And she turned her face away!

Like a false guard false watch keeping
Still in strife she whispered peace;
She would sing while I was weeping,
If I listened, she would cease.

False she was, and unrelenting.
When my last joys strewed the ground
Even Sorrow saw repenting
Those sad relics scattered round;

Hope -- whose whisper would have given
Balm to all that frenzied pain --
Stretched her wings and soared to heaven;
Went -- and ne'er returned again!
--Emily Brontë

Even if you didn't know she wrote it, wouldn't "Emily Brontë" be a good guess? The obvious poem to pair it with is by the other Emily:

"Hope" is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—

And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—
And sore must be the storm—
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm—

I've heard it in the chillest land—
And on the strangest Sea—
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb—of Me.
--Emily Dickinson

Poem of the Day: Allen Tate

2010-04-11T23:31:00.000-07:00

Last Days of Alice

Alice grown lazy, mammoth but not fat,
Declines upon her lost and twilight age;
Above in the dozing leaves the grinning cat
Quivers forever with his abstract rage:

Whatever light swayed on the perilous gate
Forever sways, nor will the arching grass,
Caught when the world clattered, undulate
In the deep suspension of the looking glass.

Bright Alice! always pondering to gloze
The spoiled cruelty she had meant to say
Gazes learnedly down her airy nose
At nothing, nothing thinking all the day.

Turned absent-minded by infinity
She cannot move unless her double move,
The All-Alice of the world's entity
Smashed in the anger of her hopeless love,

Love for herself who, as an earthly twain,
Pouted to join her two in a sweet one;
No more the second lips to kiss in vain
The first she broke, plunged through the glass alone --

Alone to the weight of impassivity,
Incest of spirit, theorem of desire,
Without will as chalky cliffs by the sea,
Empty as the bodiless flesh of fire:

All space, that heaven is a dayless night,
A nightless day driven by perfect lust
For vacancy, in which her bored eyesight
Stares at the drowsy cubes of human dust.

-- We too back to the world shall never pass
Through the shattered door, a dumb shade-harried crowd
Being all infinite, function depth and mass
Without figure, a mathematical shroud

Hurled at the air -- blessed without sin!
O God of our flesh, return us to Your wrath,
Let us be evil could we enter in
Your grace, and falter on the stony path!
--Allen Tate

"Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas -- only I don't know exactly what they are," said Lewis Carroll's Alice about "Jabberwocky." I feel that way about Tate's poems. He was a conservative's conservative: a Fugitive, an agrarian, and, later in life, a Roman Catholic, and I think that this poem expresses a kind of moralizing rage against a world that finds its only values in contemplating itself in the looking glass. Still, I like it for the itchiness of its enigmas.

Poem of the Day: Henry David Thoreau

2010-04-10T22:11:00.000-07:00

I am a parcel of vain strivings tied
          By a chance bond together,
     Dangling this way and that, their links
          Were made so loose and wide,
                    Methinks,
               For milder weather.

A bunch of violets without their roots,
          And sorrel intermixed
     Encircled by a wisp of straw
          Once coiled about their shoots,
                    The law
               By which I'm fixed.

A nosegay which Time clutched from out
          Those fair Elysian fields,
     With weeds and broken stems, in haste,
          Doth make the rabble rout
                    That waste
               The day he yields.

And here I bloom for a short hour unseen,
          Drinking my juices up,
     With no root in the land
          To keep my branches green,
                    But stand
               In a bare cup.
--Henry David Thoreau

Poem of the Day: Hart Crane

2010-04-09T22:00:00.000-07:00

Chaplinesque

We make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations

As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,
Facing the dull squint with what innocence
And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies
More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.
--Hart Crane

True, there are poems by Crane that seem to me to be nothing more than word salad, but this is not one of them. I think it perfectly conveys both the comic and the sentimental Chaplin, even if like all of Crane's poems it's really about Hart (see "heart" above).

Poem of the Day: Robert Browning

2010-04-08T23:46:00.000-07:00

A Toccata of Galuppi's

1
Oh Galuppi, Baldassare, this is very sad to find!
I can hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf and blind;
But although I take your meaning, 'tis with such a heavy mind!

2
Here you come with your old music, and here's all the good it brings,
What, they lived once thus at Venice where the merchants were the kings,
Where Saint Mark's is, where the Doges used to wed to sea with rings?

3
Ay, because the sea's the street there; and 'tis arched by ... what you call
... Shylock's bridge with houses on it, where they kept the carnival:
I was never out of England -- it's as if I saw it all.

4
Did young people take their pleasure when the sea was warm in May?
Balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to mid-day,
When they made up fresh adventures for the morrow, do you say?

5
Was a lady such a lady, cheeks so round and lips so red --
On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bellflower on its bed,
O'er the breast's superb abundance where a man might base his head?

6
Well, and it was graceful of them -- they'd break talk off and afford
-- She, to bite her mask's black velvet -- he, to finger on his sword,
While you sat and played Toccatas, stately at the clavichord?

7
What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished, sigh on sigh,
Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions -- "Must we die?"
Those commiserating sevenths -- "Life might last! we can but try!"

8
"Were you happy?" "Yes." "And are you still as happy?" "Yes. And you?"
"Then, more kisses!" "Did I stop them, when a million seemed so few?"
Hark, the dominant's persistence till it must be answered to!

9
So, an octave struck the answer. Oh, they praised you, I dare say!
"Brave Galuppi! that was music! good alike at grave and gay!
"I can always leave off talking when I hear a master play!"

10
Then they left you for their pleasure: till in due time, one by one,
Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well undone,
Death stepped tacitly and took them where they never see the sun.

11
But when I sit down to reason, think to take my stand nor swerve,
While I triumph o'er a secret wrung from nature's close reserve,
In you come with your cold music till I creep through every nerve.

12
Yes, you, like a ghostly cricket, creaking where a house was burned:
"Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned.
"The soul, doubtless, is immortal -- where a soul can be discerned.

13
"Yours for instance: you know physics, something of geology,
"Mathematics are your pastime; souls shall rise in their degree;
"Butterflies may dread extinction -- you'll not die, it cannot be!

14
"As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop,
"Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop.
"What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?

15
"Dust and ashes!" So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold.
Dear dead women, with such hair, too -- what's become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old.
--Robert Browning

Memento mori. Ubi sunt. Où sont les neiges d'antan? This is Browning's essay into the genre, and a poem I've always rather liked. But I guess I'll have to spoil it for you the way someone did for me, by pointing out that trochaic octameter makes for a rather unwieldy poetic line, even if you drop the last unstressed foot -- as Browning does here, and as Tennyson did in "Locksley Hall." And that the resulting fifteeners in both poems (and Poe's "The Raven") can be sung to the tunes of both "Clementine" and the "Ode to Joy" from the last movement of Beethoven's ninth. (And, of course, you can sing "Herring boxes without topses sandals were for Clementine" to the tune of "Freude, schöne Götterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium," and vice versa.) But you wouldn't want to do that, would you?

Poems of the Day: Robert Graves

2010-04-07T21:49:00.000-07:00

The Cool Web

Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose,
How dreadful the black wastes of the evening sky,
How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by.

But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the rose's cruel scent.
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.

There's a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.

But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children's day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad no doubt and die that way.
--Robert Graves

A prolific poet, Graves is probably better known today for his prose, including the harrowing war memoir Good-bye to All That, the historical novel I, Claudius, and his idiosyncratic interpretations of Greek myth. In short, he knew his way about the web of language -- hence, the ambivalence about mediated experience expressed splendidly by this poem. For good measure, here's another wonderful Graves poem about innocence and experience:

Warning to Children

Children, if you dare to think
Of the greatness, rareness, muchness
Fewness of this precious only
Endless world in which you say
You live, you think of things like this:
Blocks of slate enclosing dappled
Red and green, enclosing tawny
Yellow nets, enclosing white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where a neat brown paper parcel
Tempts you to untie the string.
In the parcel a small island,
On the island a large tree,
On the tree a husky fruit.
Strip the husk and pare the rind off:
In the kernel you will see
Blocks of slate enclosed by dappled
Red and green, enclosed by tawny
Yellow nets, enclosed by white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where the same brown paper parcel --
Children, leave the string alone!
For who dares undo the parcel
Finds himself at once inside it,
On the island, in the fruit,
Blocks of slate about his head,
Finds himself enclosed by dappled
Green and red, enclosed by yellow
Tawny nets, enclosed by black
And white acres of dominoes,
With the same brown paper parcel
Still untied upon his knee.
And, if he then should dare to think
Of the fewness, muchness, rareness,
Greatness of this endless only
Precious world in which he says
he lives -- he then unties the string.

Poem of the Day: Alfred, Lord Tennyson

2010-04-06T22:52:00.000-07:00

Tithonus

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapors weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes; I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white-haired shadow roaming like a dream
The ever-silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.
     Alas! for this gray shadow, once a man --
So glorious in his beauty and thy choice,
Who madest him thy chosen, that he seemed
To his great heart none other than a God!
I asked thee, "Give me immortality."
Then didst thou grant mine asking with a smile,
Like wealthy men who care not how they give.
But thy strong Hours indignant worked their wills,
And beat me down and marred and wasted me,
And though they could not end me, left me maimed
To dwell in presence of immortal youth.
Immortal age beside immortal youth,
And all I was in ashes. Can thy love,
Thy beauty, make amends, though even now,
Close over us, the silver star thy guide,
Shines in those tremulous eyes that fill with tears
To hear me? Let me go; take back thy gift.
Why should a man desire in any way
To vary from the kindly race of men,
Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance
Where all should pause, as is most meet for all?
     A soft air fans the cloud apart; there comes
A glimpse of that dark world where I was born,
Once more the old mysterious glimmer steals
From thy pure brows, and from thy shoulders pure,
And bosom beating with a heart renewed.
Thy cheek begins to redden through the gloom,
Thy sweet eyes brighten slowly close to mine,
Ere yet they blind the stars, an the wild team
Which love thee, yearning for thy yoke, arise,
And shake the darkness from their loosened manes,
And beat the twilight into flakes of fire.
     Lo! ever thus thou growest beautiful
In silence, then before thine answer given
Departest, and thy tears are on my cheek.
     Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears,,
And make me tremble lest a saying learnt,
In days far-off, on that dark earth, be true?
"The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts."
     Ay me! ay me! with what another heart
In days far-off, and with what other eyes
I used to watch -- if I be he that watched --
The lucid outline forming round thee; saw
The dark curls kindle into sunny rings;
Changed with thy mystic change, and felt my blood
Glow with the glow that slowly crimsoned all
Thy presence and thy portals, while I lay,
Mouth, forehead, eyelids, growing dewy-warm
With kisses balmier than half-opening buds
Of April, and could hear the lips that kissed
Whispering I knew not what of wild and sweet,
Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing,
While Ilion like a mist rose into towers.
    Yet hold me not for ever in thine East;
How can my nature longer mix with thine?
Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold
Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet
Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam
Floats up from those dim fields about the homes
Of happy men that have the power to die,
And grassy bowers of the happier dead.
Release me, and restore me to the ground.
Thou seest all things, thou wilt see my grave;
Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn,
I earth in earth forget these empty courts,
And thee returning on thy silver wheels.
--Alfred, Lord Tennyson

I've always thought that immortality has its downside. Imagine spending eternity in the company of the kind of people who are supposed to merit it, with no one to gossip with and no one to gossip about. The Greeks imagined it differently in the Tithonus myth: an immortal soul in an ever-aging body. If Tennyson had had a sense of humor, he might have made more of that premise, but his poem does have some lovely sounds and images.

Poem of the Day: Jean Toomer

2010-04-05T23:49:00.000-07:00

Georgia Dusk

The sky, lazily disdaining to pursue
     The setting sun, too indolent to hold
     A lengthened tournament for flashing gold,
Passively darkens for night's barbecue,

A feast of moon and men and barking hounds,
     An orgy for some genius of the South
     With blood-hot eyes and cane-lipped scented mouth,
Surprised in making folk-songs from soul sounds.

The sawmill blows its whistle, buzz-saws stop,
     And silence breaks the bud of knoll and hill,
     Soft settling pollen where plowed lands fulfill
Their early promise of a bumper crop.

Smoke from the pyramidal sawdust pile
     Curls up, blue ghosts of trees, tarrying low
     Where only chips and stumps are left to show
The solid proof of former domicile.

Meanwhile, the men, with vestiges of pomp,
     Race memories of king and caravan,
     High priests, an ostrich, and a juju-man,
Go singing through the footpaths of the swamp.

Their voices rise ... the pine trees are guitars,
     Strumming, pine-needles fall like sheets of rain ...
     Their voices rise ... the chorus of the cane
Is caroling a vesper to the stars.

O singers, resinous and soft your songs
     Give virgin lips to cornfield concubines,
     Above the sacred whisper of the pines,
Bring dreams of Christ to dusky cane-lipped throngs.
--Jean Toomer

A great, strange talent, Toomer almost got lost in the infamous "tragic mulatto" myth, becoming a kind of one-book-wonder after the success of Cane. (He lived for 44 years after its publication, never producing another book to be compared with it.) But what gives a poem like this one its unique power is its sense of double consciousness: looking at a scene that's almost a Southern stereotype from both inside and outside, and reporting it in a voice that (as Toomer was himself able to do) merges black participant with white observer.

Poem of the Day: Edgar Allan Poe

2010-04-04T22:22:00.000-07:00

Sonnet--To Science

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
   Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
   Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise?
   Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To search for treasure in the jeweled skies,
   Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
   And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
   Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?
--Edgar Allan Poe

Well, okay, Diana and the Hamadryads and Naiads have pretty much bought it. But wouldn't Poe, and the other Romantics who decried the inroads of science on the territory of the mythic be surprised that, at the beginning of the 21st century, our bestsellers are about vampires and wizards and more Americans reportedly believe in angels than in evolution?

Poem of the Day: E.E. Cummings

2010-04-03T21:03:00.000-07:00

my father moved through dooms of love
through sames of am through haves of give,
singing each morning out of each night
my father moved through depths of height

this motionless forgetful where
turned at his glance to shining here;
that if (so timid air is firm)
under his eyes would stir and squirm

newly as from unburied which
floats the first who,his april touch
dove sleeping selves to swarm their fates
woke dreamers to their ghostly roots

and should some why completely weep
my father's fingers brought her sleep:
vainly no smallest voice might cry
for he could feel the mountains grow.

Lifting the valleys of the sea
my father moved through griefs of joy;
praising a forehead called the moon
singing desire into begin

joy was his song and joy so pure
a heart of star by him could steer
and pure so now and now so yes
the wrists of twilight would rejoice

keen as midsummer's keen beyond
conceiving mind of sun will stand,
so strictly (over utmost him
so hugely ) stood my father's dream

his flesh was flesh his blood was blood:
no hungry man but wished him food;
no cripple wouldn't creep one mile
uphill to only see him smile.

Scorning the pomp of must and shall
my father moved through dooms of feel;
his anger was as right as rain
his pity was as green as grain

septembering arms of year extend
less humbly wealth to foe and friend
than he to foolish and to wise
offered immeasurable is

proudly and(by octobering flame
beckoned) as earth will downward climb,
so naked for immortal work
his shoulders marched against the dark

his sorrow was as true as bread:
no liar looked him in the head;
if every friend became his foe
he'd laugh and build a world with snow.

My father moved through theys of we,
singing each new leaf out of each tree
(and every child was sure that sprin
danced when she heard my father sing)

then let men kill which cannot share,
let blood and flesh be mud and mire,
scheming imagine,passion willed,
freedom a drug that's bought and sold

giving to steal and cruel kind,
a heart to fear,to doubt a mind,
to differ a disease of same,
conform the pinnacle of am

though dull were all we taste as bright,
bitter all utterly things sweet,
maggoty minus and dumb death
all we inherit,all bequeath

and nothing quite so least as truth
--i say though hate were why men breathe--
because my father lived his soul
love is the whole and more than all
--E.E. Cummings

I'm not, I fear, a Cummings fan. But many are, so this is for them. And for me it's one of the few Cummings poems that truly justify his typographic trickery and syntactical twists. They depict the struggle to articulate a deep and genuine feeling. (And no, he didn't insist on spelling his name with lowercase letters.)

Poem of the Day: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

2010-04-02T21:13:00.000-07:00

Chaucer

An old man in a lodge within a park;
     The chamber walls depicted all around
     With portraitures of huntsman, hawk, and hound,
     And the hurt deer. He listeneth to the lark,
Whose song comes with the sunshine through the dark
     Of painted glass in leaden lattice bound;
     He listeneth and he laugheth at the sound,
     Then writeth in a book like any clerk.
He is the poet of the dawn, who wrote
     The Canterbury Tales, and his old age
     Made beautiful with song; and as I read
I hear the crowing cock, I hear the note
     Of lark and linnet, and from every page
     Rise odors of plowed field or flowery mead.
--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

We suffered through "Hiawatha" or "Evangeline" in school way back when. I don't think they have to put up with all that Gitche Gumee and murmuring pines and hemlocks stuff anymore. In a way it's a pity: 14-year-olds need a good laugh at the moldy oldies. (In my ninth-grade English class, we discovered that "Evangeline's" dactylic hexameter could be sung to the tunes of several church hymns.) But of course it soured us on old Longfellow and on rumty-tum-tum poetry, and alienated us from our parents and grandparents who cherished it. And it deprived us from learning that Longfellow was not such a bad poet when he wasn't trying to write the Great American Epic. And maybe from encountering this simple and fresh appreciation by a pretty minor poet of a really great one.

Poem of the Day: Wilfred Owen

2010-04-01T23:22:00.000-07:00

Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue, deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! -- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime ...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, --
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
--Wilfred Owen

Anger is not an emotion conducive to great poetry, except perhaps when it finds its outlet in satire, as in the best poems of Dryden and Pope. And except when the anger is the great anger of war. (The Wrath of Achilles, for example.) And except when the poet is as equal to the task as Owen was, and the war was as futile, brutal, causeless and useless as the First World War.

Poem of the Day: Ralph Waldo Emerson

2010-03-31T19:57:00.000-07:00

The Snowstorm

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farmhouse at the garden's end.
The sled and traveler stopped, the courier's feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.

Come see the north wind's masonry.
Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly,
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn;
Fills up the farmer's lane from wall to wall,
Maugre the farmer's sighs; and, at the gate,
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have to admit that I like Emerson's poetry a lot more than his prose.

Poem of the Day: Archibald MacLeish

2010-03-30T22:40:00.000-07:00

You, Andrew Marvell

And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth's noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night:

To feel creep up the curving east
The earthy chill of dusk and slow
Upon those under lands the vast
And ever climbing shadow grow

And strange at Ecbatan the trees
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange
The flooding dark about their knees
The mountains over Persia change

And now at Kermanshah the gate
Dark empty and the withered grass
And through the twilight now the late
Few travelers in the westward pass

And Baghdad darken and the bridge
Across the silent rier gone
And through Arabia the edge
Of evening widen and steal on

And deepen on Palmyra's street
The wheel rut in the ruined stone
And Lebanon fade out and Crete
High through the clouds and overblown

And over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls
And loom and slowly disappear
The sails above the shadowy hulls

And Spain go under and the shore
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more
The low pale light across that land

Nor now the long light on the sea:

And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on...
--Archibald MacLeish

Say this about MacLeish: He had chutzpah. Not only did he recast the book of Job into a now-forgotten play, J.B., which won him a Pulitzer Prize, but in this poem he invokes one of the greatest poems in the language. "You, Andrew Marvell" is skillfully done, but it's a bit of a travelogue, lacking the wit and passion of the poem it alludes to. Otherwise, MacLeish is most famous for the couplet that ends his poem "Ars Poetica":

A poem should not mean
But be.

Some of of us think a poem should do both.

Poem of the Day: John Keats

2010-03-29T21:03:00.000-07:00

Ode to a Nightingale

1
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
   My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
   One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
   But being too happy in thine happiness --
    That thou, light-wingéd Dryad of the trees,
   In some melodious plot
     Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
          Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

2
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
     Cooled a long age in the deep-delvéd earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
     Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
   And purple-stainéd mouth;
   That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

3
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
   Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
   Where youth grows pale, and specter-thin, and dies,
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond tomorrow.

4
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
   Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
   Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
   And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Clustered around by all her starry Fays;
   But here there is no light,
   Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

5
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
   Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalméd darkness, guess each sweet
   Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit tree wild;
   White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets covered up in leaves;
   And mid-May's eldest child,
   The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

6
Darkling I listen; and for many a time
   I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a muséd rhyme,
   To take upon the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
   To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
   While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
   In such an ecstasy!
   Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain --
To thy high requiem become a sod.

7
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
   No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
   In ancient days by emperor and clown;
Perhaps the selfsame song that found a path
   Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
   The same that ofttimes hath
   Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

8
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
     To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
     As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
     Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
          Up the hill side; and now 'tis buried deep
               In the next valley-glades:
     Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
          Fled is that music: --Do I wake or sleep?
--John Keats

I think that if it comes to defending civilization against the barbarian hordes, this poem will be one of the works I'll squirrel away in a lockbox along with Bach's cello suites, Mozart's operas, a few Vermeers, Jane Austen's novels and the films of Preston Sturges.

Poem of the Day: Edna St. Vincent Millay

2010-03-28T22:42:00.000-07:00

Dirge Without Music

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, -- but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love, --
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
--Edna St. Vincent Millay

I suppose the only Millay poem that anyone knows anymore is this one:

First Fig

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends --
It gives a lovely light!

And maybe that's as it should be. Millay was not a great poet, being more given to attitude than to originality of thought and expression. About today's poem, you want to tell her that nobody's asking her to approve. The tone is that of a Vassar grad living in Greenwich Village, which she was. And yet, as an expression of a particular era, the 1920s, it's an almost perfect poem. Not for all time, but of an age, to reverse the formula. And the more valuable for being that.

Poem of the Day: Percy Bysshe Shelley

2010-03-27T21:24:00.000-07:00

To a Skylark

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
     Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
     Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Higher still and higher
     From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
     The deep blue thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

In the golden lightning
     Of the setting sun,
O'er which clouds are bright'ning,
     Thou dost float and run;
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

The pale purple even
     Melts around thy flight;
Like a star of Heaven,
     In the broad daylight
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight,

Keen as are the arrows
     Of that silver sphere,
Whose intense lamp narrows
     In the white dawn clear
Until we hardly see -- we feel that it s there.

All the earth and air
     With thy voice is loud,
As, when night is bare,
     From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflowed.

What thou art we know not;
     What is most like thee?
From rainbow clouds there flow not
     Drops so bright to see
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.

Like a Poet hidden
     In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
     Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:

Like a high born maiden
     In a palace tower,
Soothing her love-laden
     Soul in secret hour
With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower:

Like a glowworm golden
     In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden
     Its aërial hue
Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view!

Like a rose embowered
     In its own green leaves,
By warm winds deflowered,
     Till the scent it gives
Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-wingéd thieves:

Sound of vernal showers
   On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awakened flowers,
     All that ever was
Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass:

Teach us, Sprite or Bird,
     What sweet thoughts are thine:
I have never heard
     Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

Chorus Hymeneal,
     Or triumphal chant,
Matched with thine would be all
     But an empty vaunt,
A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.

What objects are the fountains
     Of thy happy strain?
What fields, or waves, or mountains?
     What shapes of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?

With thy clear keen joyance
     Languor cannot be:
Shadow of annoyance
     Never came near thee:
Thou lovest -- but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.

Waking or asleep,
     Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep
     Than we mortals deamm,
Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

We look before and after,
     And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
     With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Yet if we could scorn
     Hate, and pride, and fear;
If we were things born
     Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

Better than all measures
     Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures
     That in books are found,
Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

Teach me half the gladness
     That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
     From my lips would flow
The world should listen then -- as I am listening now.
--Percy Bysshe Shelley

I don't know whether to prefer the Shelley version or the Johnny Mercer-Hoagy Carmichael version. But then I don't really have to choose, do I?

Poem of the Day: Claude McKay

2010-03-26T21:25:00.000-07:00

America

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate.
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood,
Yet as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time's unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.
--Claude McKay

The sonnet concentrates the imagination wonderfully. For a form originally associated with love poetry, it has mutated into one for all occasions. Donne and Hopkins wrote them about God; Milton wrote them about going blind and turning 23 years old; and Wordsworth even wrote sonnets about writing sonnets. But I don't think anyone ever used the sheer concentrated power of the 14-line poem as effectively as McKay did to express his anger about racial injustice in America, here and in "If We Must Die" and "The White City". Brave and bitter poetry.

Poem of the Day: George Gordon, Lord Byron

2010-03-25T21:21:00.000-07:00

Written After Swimming From Sestos to Abydos

1
If, in the month of dark December,
   Leander, who was nightly wont
(What maid will not the tale remember?)
   To cross thy stream, broad Hellespont!
2
If, when the wintry tempest roared,
     He sped to Hero, nothing loath,
And thus of old thy current poured,
     Fair Venus! how I pity both!

3
For me, degenerate modern wretch,
     Though in the genial month of May,
My dripping limbs I faintly stretch,
     And think I've done a feat today.

4
But since he crossed the rapid tide,
     According to the doubtful story,
To woo -- and -- Lord knows what beside,
     And swam for Love, as I for Glory;

5
'Twere hard to say who fared the best:
     Sad mortals! thus the gods still plague you!
He lost his labor, I my jest;
     For he was drowned, and I've the ague.
--George Gordon, Lord Byron

Byron may have been the first postmodern poet: the first to achieve self-glorification through ironic self-deprecation.

Poem of the Day: Conrad Aiken

2010-03-24T21:54:00.000-07:00

Summer

Absolute zero: the locust sings:
summer's caught in eternity's rings:
the rock explodes, the planet dies,
we shovel up our verities.

The razor rasps across the face
and in the glass our fleeting race
lit by infinity's lightning wink
under the thunder tries to think.

In this frail gourd the granite pours
the timeless howls like all outdoors
the sensuous moment builds a wall
open as wind, no wall at all:

while still obedient to valves and knobs
the vascular jukebox throbs and sobs
expounding hope propounding yearning
proposing love, but never learning

or only learning at zero's gate
like summer's locust the final hate
formless ice on a formless plain
that was and is and comes again.
--Conrad Aiken

When he was at Harvard (at the same time as T.S. Eliot), Aiken trained himself to write verse by attempting a different form every day, "all the way from free verse, Walt Whitman, to the most elaborate of villanelles and ballad forms," he told the Paris Review interviewer. "I didn't give a damn about the meaning, I just wanted to master the form." "Summer" is the simplest of forms -- aabb stanzas -- but the meaning is a hard knot to unpick. That it was written in the postwar '40s gives us a clue -- it has that atomic era tension to it, the sense of the ephemeral about the once-solidest things: "the rock explodes, the planet dies." He also claimed, in the same interview, "I'm not in the least Southern; I'm entirely New England." This despite being born and buried in that most gothic of Southern cities, Savannah. But I see what he means. There's a note of flinty despair in his verse that's at odd with the ironic resignation of most Southern poets.