22 posts tagged “poetry”

Today, I finished what I confess turned out to be a rather difficult labor of love for me, The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse. I usually enjoy literature particularly when it helps me to better understand a historical era or when my knowledge of the historical era gives me greater insights into the literature. But this was not easy stuff. I confess, my heartstrings do not generally find themselves resonating to Victorian era poetry it seems.

But nevertheless, a few poems presented themselves as something worth remembering for future History class use. Here is Letitia Landon's The Marriage Vow, a rather gloomy look at the tragedy of Victorian era marriages where women with creative minds and wanderlusts might regard their conjugal commitments as a sort of death itself. The poem speak of a marriage that a young woman is not ready for and not really interested in. Something entered into in spite of her will rather than because of it.

The Marriage Vow

The altar, "tis of death! for their are laid
The sacrifice of all youths sweetest hopes.
It is a dreadful thing for women’s lip
To swear the heart away; yet know that heart
Annuls the vow while speaking, and shrinks back
From the dark future that it dare not face.
The service read above the open grave
Is far less terrible than that which seals
The vow that binds the victim, not the will:
For in the grave is rest.

Three months after her own marriage apparently, Letitia Landon died of poisoning (whether accidentally or as a result of suicide, no one knows.)

This anthology also gave me the opportunity to read Elizabeth Barret Browning's Sonnets From the Portuguese and there were portions of that that I could find myself enjoying. Sonnet 21 in particular where we are reminded that we long for expressions of love, not merely memories of such. We can never hear that we are loved enough.

Say over again, and yet once over again,
That thou dost love Though the word repeated
Should seem a “cuckoo-song,” as thou dost treat it.
Remember, never to the hill or plain,
Valley and wood, without her cuckoo-strain
Comes the fresh Spring in all her green completed.
Belovèd, I, amid the darkness greeted
By a doubtful spirit-voice, in that doubt’s pain
Cry, “Speak once more—thou lovest!” Who can fear
Too many stars, though each in heaven shall roll,
Too many flowers, though each shall crown the year?
Say thou dost love me, love me, love me—toll
The silver iterance!—only minding, Dear,
To love me also in silence with thy soul.

Later Browning asks the questions we all ask about those who have loved us in the past - “Were you real or did I just imagine that?”

 

Belovèd, dost thou love? or did I see all

The glory as I dreamed, and fainted when

Too vehement light dilated my ideal,

For my soul's eyes? Will that light come again,

As now these tears come--falling hot and real?

 

I also caught a glimpse of this same longing, loss, and sorrow from Alfred Tennyson's In Memoriam A.H.H.

 

But who shall so forecast the years
And find in loss a gain to match?
Or reach a hand thro' time to catch
The far-off interest of tears?

 

The poem laments the loss of Tennyson's best friend and his sister's fiancé' the 22 year old Arthur Henry Hallum. The above lines are easy for me to relate to. Often the only comfort in a time of loss is a pre-emptive attempt to gain some joy from the gain we try to imagine gaining from the loss. To see some way in which the sorrow will benefit some day and to derive some happiness from that benefit before it arrives. But in the poem, Tennyson simply cannot see how he can possibly recover anything of good from the loss ever.

 

O what to her shall be the end?
And what to me remains of good?
To her, perpetual maidenhood,
And unto me no second friend.

There was a line from Robert Browning's poem Two in the Campagna that I liked (Robert Browning will never be one of my favorite poets)

How say you? Let us, O my dove,
Let us be unashamed of soul,
As earth lies bare to heaven above!
How is it under our control
To love or not to love?

To me, this is an interesting question I guess. Can people help it if they love someone or don't? If they can't, should they pretend they don't, as though they chose to?

I also ran across a poem by Thomas Hardy that explains his loss of faith in the age of Biblical criticism in which he lived. You can see this transformation from faith in revelation to faith in reason in many of Thomas Hardy's novels. His poem The Respectable Burgher: On the Higher Criticism simply illustrates it.

 

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 the 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 could 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.

Philip Marston's poem After speaks to me …

A little time for laughter,
A little time to sing,
A little time to kiss and cling,
And no more kissing after.
A little while for scheming
Love's unperfected schemes;
A little time for golden dreams,
Then no more any dreaming.
A little while 'twas given
To me to have thy love;
Now, like a ghost, alone I move
About a ruined heaven.
A little time for speaking
Things sweet to say and hear;
A time to seek, and find thee near,
Then no more any seeking.
A little time for saying
Words the heart breaks to say;
A short, sharp time wherein to pray,
Then no more need for praying;
But long, long years to weep in,
And comprehend the whole
Great grief that desolates the soul,
And eternity to sleep in.

There seems to have been a lot of this heartache in Victorian era poetry it seems. You also see it in A.E. Houseman's poem When I Was One and Twenty

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
'Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.'
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
'The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
'Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue.'
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true.

And in W.B Yeats, I think he speaks of a “beautiful friend” who he hoped would someday be more. But, she apparently used some sort of feminine intuition and saw that some other woman (the woman Yeats writes the poem to) was still burning away in his heart and she left.

Aedh Laments the Loss of Love.

Pale brows, still hands and dim hair,

I had a beautiful friend

And dreamed that the old despair

Would end in love in the end:

She looked in my heart one day

And saw your image was there;

She has gone weeping away.

I find it interesting that the Victorian era was an age of expansion in England, an age of ever growing prosperity and greater rights and increased security. In other words, it was a time when it was a winning lottery ticket to be born English. And there is a good deal of celebrating of England and English life in Victorian verse. But one is reminded that all the growing prosperity did not solve the fundamental needs of human beings who, from the looks of it, could not coin lasting satisfactory relationships from the increase in GDP and Income per-capita that the era provided.

Question for Comment: As you look back on your life, which times have been more difficult for you? Times of relational shortages or financial?

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to her,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
She said it for herself. I see her there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
She moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
She will not go behind his father's saying,
And she likes having thought of it so well
she says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Robert Frost, Mending Wall

What I like about the author’s point of view in this poem is the way that he determines to help build the wall of protection that his neighbor thinks she needs. Rather than demand the wall be removed, or sneaking out at night to take it down, or protesting that no wall is really necessary, or insisting that no wall should have ever been built, he kindly, gently, cheerfully, and calmly says, “let me help you. We can build this wall together.” Somehow on an intuitive level, he understands that if he takes the wall down unilaterally, he will only increase the sort of fear that has caused her to want to put it up in the first place. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” he tells himself over and over as if in antiphonal response to what his neighbor keeps saying to herself “Good fences make good neighbors”.

It is as though two doctrines of reality are at war. Frost can afford to help build the wall between he and his neighbor because he feels confident that she will eventually succumb to what he regards as truth. No one ultimately wants to be separated forever even if they believe it to be in their best interest right now to be separated forever.”I will help construct it,” says Frost, “but I will never expect it to last as I do.”

 “Boundaries?" he says gently. "Alright. How high?”

Begin Again: Collected Poems Grace Paley This Life by Vermont Poet, Grace Paley My friend tells me a man in my house jumped off the roof the roof is the eighth floor of this building the roof door was locked how did he manage? his girlfriend had said goodbye I'm leaving he was 22 his mother and father were hurrying at that very moment from upstate to help him move out of Brooklyn they had heard about the girl the people who usually look up and call jump jump did not see him the life savers who creep around the back staircases and reach the roof's edge just in time never got their chance he meant it he wanted only one person to know did he imagine that she would grieve all her young life away tell everyone this boy I kind of lived with last year he died on account of me my friend was not interested he said you're always inventing stuff what I want to know how could he throw his life away how do these guys do it just like that and here I am fighting this ferocious insane vindictive virus day and night day and night and for what? for only one thing this life this life Here by Grace Paley Here I am in the garden laughing an old woman with heavy breasts and a nicely mapped face how did this happen well that's who I wanted to be at last a woman in the old style sitting stout thighs apart under a big skirt grandchild sliding on off my lap a pleasant summer perspiration that's my old man across the yard he's talking to the meter reader he's telling him the world's sad story how electricity is oil or uranium and so forth I tell my grandson run over to your grandpa ask him to sit beside me for a minute I am suddenly exhausted by my desire to kiss his sweet explaining lips.

"What troubles me is that so many things lovely and precious in our world seem to be dying out. Perhaps poetry will be the canary in the mine-shaft warning us of whats to come." Vermont poet, Galway Kinnell

Sometimes poems are my only answer to the truth. As if to say to my friend, I know what you say is true. But this is true too."

When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone by Galway Kinnell

When one has lived a long time alone,
and the hermit thrush calls and there is an answer,
and the bullfrog head half out of water utters
the cantillations he sang in his first spring,
and the snake lowers himself over the threshold
and creeps away among the stones, one sees
they all live to mate with their kind, and one knows,
after a long time of solitude, after the many steps taken
away from one's kind, toward these other kingdoms,
the hard prayer inside one's own singing
is to come back, if one can, to one's own
a world almost lost, in the exile that deepens,
when one has lived a long time alone.

Why Regret? by Galway Kinnell

Didn't you like the way the ants help
the peony globes open by eating the glue off?
Weren't you cheered to see the ironworkers
sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,
in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe
baloney on white with fluorescent mustard?
Wasn't it a revelation to waggle
from the estuary all the way up the river,
the kill, the pirle, the run, the rent, the beck,
the sike barely trickling, to the shock of a spring?
Didn't you almost shiver, hearing book lice
clicking their sexual dissonance inside an old
Webster's New International, perhaps having just
eaten out of it izle, xyster, and thalassacon?
What did you imagine lies in wait anyway
at the end of a world whose sub-substance
is glaim, gleet, birdlime, slime, mucus, muck?
Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of the wren
and how little flesh is needed to make a song.
Didn't it seem somehow familiar when the nymph
split open and the mayfly struggled free
and flew and perched and then its own back
broke open and the imago, the true adult,
somersaulted out and took flight, seeking
the swarm, mouth-parts vestigial,
alimentary canal come to a stop,
a day or hour left to find the desired one?
Or when Casanova took up the platter
of linguine in squid's ink and slid the stuff
out the window, telling his startled companion,
"The perfected lover does not eat."
As a child, didn't you find it calming to imagine
pinworms as some kind of tiny batons
giving cadence to the squeezes and releases
around the downward march of debris?
Didn't you glimpse in the monarchs
what seemed your own inner blazonry
flapping and gliding, in desire, in the middle air?
Weren't you reassured to think these flimsy
hinged beings, and then their offspring,
and then their offspring's offspring, could
navigate, working in shifts, all the way to Mexico,
to the exact plot, perhaps the very tree,
by tracing the flair of the bodies of ancestors
who fell in this same migration a year ago?
Doesn't it outdo the pleasures of the brilliant concert
to wake in the night and find ourselves
holding hands in our sleep?

 http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19553

Kissing the Toad by Galway Kinnell

Somewhere this dusk
a girl puckers her mouth
and considers kissing
the toad a boy has plucked
from the cornfield and hands
her with both hands;
rough and lichenous
but for the immense ivory belly,
like those old entrepreneurs
sprawling on Mediterranean beaches,
with popped eyes,
it watches the girl who might kiss it,
pisses, quakes, tries
to make its smile wider:
to love on, oh yes, to love on.

"OK," I ask myself, "Be honest. To what extent does my blog tell anyone who I am." What is being left out? Do I ever say mean things here? Do I ever say things that get stuck under the skin and hurt? Do I ever supply evidence to hang me? Or do I protect my cards from your prying unknown public eyes?

Question for Comment: What would you like to know that my blog does not tell you?

Adam’s Game

Now I know how Adam felt
Walking woods alone
Naming pairs that
Always came in sets
Until he began missing . . .
Or was it, brother Adam, aching
For the counterpart he’d never seen.
Indeed who was not even there yet.
I have to think that the task
Began as such a blast.

“Sun” God had said pointing at the round thing in the sky.
“Moon” God had said, pointing at another round thing later.
“Sky” God had said, pointing at the blue heavens.
“Land” God had said, pointing at the ground.
“Sea” God had said, pointing at the water.
“Ish” God said pointing at Adam

“Now you try” God must have said to his bright-eyed pupil.
“Worm” said Adam, pointing to the ground.
“Oh Good,” said God. “Jolly Good! We’ll call that little thing a worm. Do it again.”
“Zebra” Adam must have exclaimed all proud of himself.
“Zebra it is,” God laughed. “Excellent”
And then he would have pointed to a female Zebra and named that too,
Adding the feminine suffix.
“Ez” [goat] said Adam. “and ezah” God responded.
“Nesher” [eagle] said Adam. “and Nesherah” said God.
“ahh,” Adam would have noted after working through the process for several animals.
“How cool is that!” Everything has a counterpart.”
“Shual . . . and shualah” he would have said looking at a pair of foxes.
“Dob . . .” said Adam, looking at the brown furry thing in the brush.
“. . .  and dobbah” he chuckled a moment later when he caught a flash of
the same brown fur on the other side of the clearing.
“Dob and Dobba it is then,” said God laughing, “Brilliant. Exactly. Can you find another pair?”

And so the game went for the rest of the afternoon.
Oh Brother Adam, brother Adam!
When did the game stop being fun for you?
How many of those animals did you name before
The game became a search for isha?
The bone of your bone.
The flesh of your flesh.

Counterpart.

Eyes peeled, brother Adam.
Don’t settle for a barnacle.

----snip----

What if I AM the barnacle?

THE PREACHER RUMINATES BEHIND THE SERMON
Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)

I think it must be lonely to be God.
Nobody loves a master. No. Despite
The bright hosannas, bright dear-Lords, and bright
Determined reverence of Sunday eyes.

Picture Jehovah striding through the hall
Of his importance, creatures running out
From servant-corners to acclaim, to shout
Appreciation of His merit's gaze.

But who walks with Him?--dares to take His arm,
To slap Him on the shoulder, tweak His ear,
Buy Him a Coca-Cola or a beer,
Pooh-pooh His politics, call Him a fool?

Perhaps--who knows?--He tires of looking down.
Those eyes are never lifted. Never straight.
Perhaps sometimes He tires of being great
In solitude. Without a hand to hold.

Question for Comment: Some would regard the notion of God being lonely ... or of just wanting to enjoy a beer with buddies as suspect if not sacrilegious. can you conceive of God in these terms? Why or why not?

Simple Song by Marge Piercy

When we are going towards someone we say
you are just like me
your thoughts are my brothers
word matches word
how easy to be together

when we are leaving someone we say
how strange you are
we cannot communicate
we can never agree
how hard, hard and weary to be together.

we are not different nor alike
But each strange in his leather body
sealed in skin and reaching out clumsy hands
and loving as an act
that cannot outlive
the open hand
the open eye
the door in the chest standing open.

The Story by Lisel Mueller

You are telling a story;
How Fire Took Water to Wife
 its always like this you say
opposites attract
They want to enter each other,
be one,
so he burns her as hard as he can
and she tries to drown him
its called love at first sight
and it doesn't hurt.
but after a while she weeps
and says he is killing her
he shouts that he cannot breath
underwater.

"The poet sheds his blood in the ring and calls the pools poems." George Barker

"Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal but which the readers recognize as their own" Salvatore Quasimodo

"Poems are like dreams. In them you put what you do not know that you know.'"Adrienne Rich

Question for Comment: Are you going towards someone or leaving someone right now? Are you finding this first poem to be true? What causes people to  close that "door in the chest" the poet speaks of?

The longer I teach, the more I feel like teachers should spend more of their time learning from poets than they do. The art and skill of teaching is not to be found in technical journals so much as to be found in the conversational genius of those with gifts of communication. Listen for instance to how Robert Frost talks about how he himself communicates. There is more inspiration in a few paragraphs of this sort of reflection about the work of online educators than in any textbook I read in Grad School on the subject. I would love to get a group of online teaching faculty together to talk about the "craft" element of what they do by means of a discussion of this sort of reflection. In teaching, education is important but giftedness is essential. As the article below puts it, "It is nothing acquired but something the poet has as his birthright (July I, 1949)".

 

Frost on Frost: The Making of Poems

Reginald L. Cook

American Literature, Vol. 28, No. 1. (Mar., 1956), pp. 62-72.

 

ROBERT FROST is a gifted poet and not least among his gifts is the ability, in an Emersonian phrase, "to think on his legs." A ready, impromptu talker, he relaxes in the fields of conversation like an athlete on the playing-ground. What co-ordination, timing, and rhythm are to the athlete, gesture, allusion, anecdote, pause, and intonation are to Frost.

 

. . . Acclimatized to meditation, he takes time to examine observations and events closely. When whirl is king, he applies the counter-friction of meditation. Touching his foot to the treadle, he slows things down to his own deliberate pace. "Let's go slow so I can see the flowers," he suggests when he starts out for a ride around the Vermont countryside (July 2,1949). Experience is something that he meets deliberately.

 

Speaking for the poets, he says, "our object is to entertain you by making play with things we trust you already know.'' Making play with symbol and image, rhyme and phrasing is "the height of it-the apex'' (July 5, 1954).

 

. . . . Consequently, Frost aims not at the 5 per cent but at the 95 per cent (May 28,1948).

 

. . . Not everyone will know the difference between a said-in-jest poem and a serious one. Nor is it everyone who will see that what seems play at the surface is really play for "mortal stakes." In the poet's protocol with the world Frost trusts his reader to know either by. experience or instinctively what he is about.

 

. . . Frost's play is belied by undemonstrativeness. It consists in the art of concealing the act of disclosure. The reader has to learn how to take hints. Some readers try too hard and misread the poem; and either through obtuseness or inexperience, some never catch the poet's play. "You have to know when someone is hinting," he says (Aug. 16, 1952). . . . "Everything is hinting," Frost reminds us (Aug. 16, 1952).

 

. . . In his doctrine of play poetry is variously defined. It is "the renewal of words" (Aug. 6, 1949); it is also "the triumph of association" (July 6, 1949) by which the poet makes "unexpected connections" (July 30, 1950) in metaphor. And a poem, which he calls "a thought-felt thing" (May 10, 1952),~is something that "can't be retold except in its own words exactly" (June 29,1950).

 

"It's always a kind of miracle. You're in a performing condition, and then you play," remarks Frost (May 10, 1952). Nor are these times to be confused with moments of facility. They are, in his phrase, "moments of majestic instancy." And once you've had this kind of moment "it spoils you for life. You keep waiting around for it to happen. They call it inspiration but I don't know what that means" (May 10,1952).

 

He awaits these moments aware of the danger implied in such a method. "I don't want to grant that spontaneity can be simulated. I've got to have a visitation, a moment. There's always a danger in waiting for the moment. Your pen dries up" (Aug. 19, 1953). But given the mood, what motivates the poem-is it ideas? Love of words? He thinks it is more than a germinative mind and a gift for verbal expression that "motors" the poet. It is nothing acquired but something the poet has as his birthright (July I, 1949).

 

"When I ceased to make connections between the parts of my knowledge, then I would get scared" (July 28,1952).

 

"Always desiring stories, I am," he explains (Aug. 20, 1949). Why the story? Because "the best kind of criticism is not in abstractions but in narrative" (May 10, 1950). He thinks the writer does it better in the story than anywhere else. And what is the art in the story? It's in the objectivity. "I like people who can tell a story without seemingly being for or against somebody" (May 10, 1950). He tends to give his own poems, narrative or otherwise, the quality of teasing suggestibility. Take, for instance, "The Egg and the Machine"; toward which side does he lean-toward the organic or toward the mechanical? Noncommittally he says: "This is for you to choose" (Aug. 19, 1953). Obviously he thinks the reader ought to exercise his moral responsibility in choosing between opposites.

 

Humbly, but with self-awareness, he says, "For what I've missed I've felt regret; for what I've got I've felt a triumph" (May 10, 1950).

----snip---

Robert Frost, I understand, went to Dartmouth and Harvard but walked out on both of them, deciding to learn from "writers who had written before me."

Question for Comment: how do good teachers "conceal the act of disclosure"?