Sunday Poetry: There once was a man from Nantucket . . ., by the Editors of the Princeton Tiger

Limerick

There once was a man from Nantucket,
Who kept all of his cash in a bucket,
But his daughter, named Nan,
Ran away with a man,
And as for the bucket, Nantucket.

- by the Princeton Tiger (1924)
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It's the week of St. Patrick's Day, and it's as good a time as any to talk about Limericks. Often bawdy, and usually humorous, limericks are an example of a poetic form working with humor to make something memorable. The example above is a classic, printed in 1924 by the Princeton Tiger and drawing responses from other newspapers. The creative tension of the above poem comes from a rhyme which does not get stated - the reader waits for another "ucket" rhyme that never comes.

Often, the unmentionable does, in fact, get stated, and that is part of the fun. Clean limericks appear in childrens' books and bawdy ones draw a laugh in raucous bars.

I won't go into a lengthy recitation of the history of the lyric, except to observe that Edward Lear's reputation far outstrips his talent (he often repeats the first rhyme), and that St. Patrick's week is a fine occasion to try writing a few of your own.

Sunday Poetry: Morning, Thinking of Empire, by Raymond Carver

Morning, Thinking of Empire

We press our lips to the enameled rim of the cups
and know this grease that floats
over the coffee will one day stop our hearts.
Eyes and fingers drop onto silverware
that is not silverware. Outside the window, waves
beat against the chipped walls of the old city.
Your hands rise from the rough tablecloth
as if to prophesy. Your lips tremble ...
I want to say to hell with the future.
Our future lies deep in the afternoon.
It is a narrow street with a cart and driver,
a driver who looks at us and hesitates,
then shakes his head. Meanwhile,
I coolly crack the egg of a fine Leghorn chicken.
Your eyes film. You turn from me and look across
the rooftops at the sea. Even the flies are still.
I crack the other egg.
Surely we have diminished one another.

- by Raymond Carver
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This poem goes against most of what I like about poetry, but, still, I love its audacity. There is no rhyme and no meter - the poem is carried by the narrative of what he is saying, not how he is saying it.

The final line is a Carver classic - a dramatic opposition to the "You complete me" version of love that Hollywood sells us. The opposition is set up in the third line - hearts are something that clog with grease, not beat in burning unison.

One poetic tradition that is upheld in this poem is allusion. Carver's short poem refers to several other famous poems dealing with the topic of love. My favorite poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", shows up in the hands and prophecy. "Dover Beach" is conjured by the beating waves. I'm sure there are more references rushing past, over my head.

What empire is Carver thinking of in the title? Is it whichever empire produced the old city with narrow streets? Is it the metaphorical empire of love poetry? Or is it simply a contrast to the diminished couple eating breakfast?

Sunday Poetry: September, The First Day Of School, by Howard Nemerov

September, The First Day Of School
I
My child and I hold hands on the way to school,
And when I leave him at the first-grade door
He cries a little but is brave; he does
Let go. My selfish tears remind me how
I cried before that door a life ago.
I may have had a hard time letting go.

Each fall the children must endure together
What every child also endures alone:
Learning the alphabet, the integers,
Three dozen bits and pieces of a stuff
So arbitrary, so peremptory,
That worlds invisible and visible

Bow down before it, as in Joseph's dream
The sheaves bowed down and then the stars bowed down
Before the dreaming of a little boy.
That dream got him such hatred of his brothers
As cost the greater part of life to mend,
And yet great kindness came of it in the end.

II
A school is where they grind the grain of thought,
And grind the children who must mind the thought.
It may be those two grindings are but one,
As from the alphabet come Shakespeare's Plays,
As from the integers comes Euler's Law,
As from the whole, inseparably, the lives,

The shrunken lives that have not been set free
By law or by poetic phantasy.
But may they be. My child has disappeared
Behind the schoolroom door. And should I live
To see his coming forth, a life away,
I know my hope, but do not know its form

Nor hope to know it. May the fathers he finds
Among his teachers have a care of him
More than his father could. How that will look
I do not know, I do not need to know.
Even our tears belong to ritual.
But may great kindness come of it in the end.

- by Howard Nemerov
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This is one of those frustrating poems to write about, where I cannot force myself to focus on the meter or the poetic technique, because I'm closest to the subject. Forgive me for a moment, then, while I focus on the thought instead of the poem.

Nemerov captures so much of what my parenting experience has been in this poem. You are given this little bundle to take care of - immobile to the point you can lay it on a pad on the table while you drink a cup of coffee and read the paper, dependent to the point that it would starve if you didn't feed it, and ignorant to the point that the pet dog has a vastly superior vocabulary.

Then everything changes.

I'm particularly wowed by the final two lines. "Even our tears belong to ritual." It is a ritual, isn't it, that we wind up taking our children to schools - society demands that we act out this strange act, leaving our children to others to teach? (Homeschoolers aside.) We do this to our children, as our parents did it to us, and it is a truly horrid ripping, no matter how we prepare ourselves and how convinced we are that we have the best school and the most excited child. It is a societal ritual, where all parents symbolically surrender their children to society, and all children accept that they will need to face the challenges of institutions without the protective gaze of their parents. All lives are changed on the threshold of schools.

And the final line is not a prediction; it is a plaintive prayer. "But may great kindness come of it in the end." Nemerov was a teacher - a professor at Washington University, a few miles from my childhood home. He knew education and academia, and he does not offer an unconvincing declaration like "This is for the best", or "Education will expand their worlds", or even "They'll increase their earning power if they make the right choices". He doesn't even attempt prosaic persuasion - instead, he joins those of us who have abandoned our children to society in a prayer that some greater kindness, some happier outcome, will follow from the tears of division on the schoolhouse steps.

Sunday Poetry: Dover Beach, by Matthew Arnold

Dover Beach

The sea is calm to-night.
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 A gaean, 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.

- by Matthew Arnold
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If you're looking for a great love poem to read to your Valentine today, go check out my sweet old etcetera, by ee cummings, or Tin Wedding Whistle, by Ogden Nash (a personal favorite), or Older Love, by Jim Harrison. This one probably won't get you where you want to be.

Matthew Arnold may have been the most morose lover of all time. Scholars believe that he wrote this poem on his honeymoon - one pictures him wandering in after a walk on the beach, his new wife swept up in the romantic seaside, and he starts moaning about his loss of faith, his sadness and human misery. I bet he slept on the couch that night.

But, to give Mr. Arnold a more sympathetic ear, Dover Beach truly is a wonderful love poem. It's not all hearts and flowers in the real world, and the poet shares the feeling that the world lies "before us like a land of dreams,/So various, so beautiful, so new", but he knows that the world is really not as joyful as those in the throes of love may feel. He's not blinded by his love, though he obviously feels those impulses.

"Ah, love, let us be true/to one another . . ." What a brilliant line break! Let us be true - Matthew Arnold cuts through the illusions and wants to share what he feels in complete honesty. He could have written a "roses are red" verse, but he insists on being true to his lover. He knows it's a harsh world, and they will face pain and strife in their future, but he wants to go through it with his lover.

That's pretty sweet, if you think about it.

Sunday Poetry: At The Smithville Methodist Church, by Stephen Dunn

At The Smithville Methodist Church

It was supposed to be Arts & Crafts for a week,
but when she came home
with the "Jesus Saves" button, we knew what art
was up, what ancient craft.

She liked her little friends. She liked the songs
they sang when they weren't
twisting and folding paper into dolls.
What could be so bad?

Jesus had been a good man, and putting faith
in good men was what
we had to do to stay this side of cynicism,
that other sadness.

OK, we said, One week. But when she came home
singing "Jesus loves me,
the Bible tells me so," it was time to talk.
Could we say Jesus

doesn't love you? Could I tell her the Bible
is a great book certain people use
to make you feel bad? We sent her back
without a word.

It had been so long since we believed, so long
since we needed Jesus
as our nemesis and friend, that we thought he was
sufficiently dead,

that our children would think of him like Lincoln
or Thomas Jefferson.
Soon it became clear to us: you can't teach disbelief
to a child,

only wonderful stories, and we hadn't a story
nearly as good.
On parents' night there were the Arts & Crafts
all spread out

like appetizers. Then we took our seats
in the church
and the children sang a song about the Ark,
and Hallelujah

and one in which they had to jump up and down
for Jesus.
I can't remember ever feeling so uncertain
about what's comic, what's serious.

Evolution is magical but devoid of heroes.
You can't say to your child
"Evolution loves you." The story stinks
of extinction and nothing

exciting happens for centuries. I didn't have
a wonderful story for my child
and she was beaming. All the way home in the car
she sang the songs,

occasionally standing up for Jesus.
There was nothing to do
but drive, ride it out, sing along
in silence.

- by Stephen Dunn
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I had never noticed Stephen Dunn until a librarian friend recommended his work. I've now read a selection of his work, and he manages to make poetry out of ordinary life, without resorting to folksy wisdom or tying things up in a package.

I try, when I write about contemporary poets, to encourage you to purchase their books from independent booksellers, and you should certainly consider doing so if you want to swim a little deeper in Dunn's works than you will find online. This time, though, in recognition of how I learned about this poet, I've ordered the books online through the library, and I will pick them up at my local branch in a few days, to enjoy for free.

Sunday Poetry: The Spell of the Yukon, by Robert W. Service

The Spell of the Yukon

I wanted the gold, and I sought it;
I scrabbled and mucked like a slave.
Was it famine or scurvy—I fought it;
I hurled my youth into a grave.
I wanted the gold, and I got it—
Came out with a fortune last fall,—
Yet somehow life’s not what I thought it,
And somehow the gold isn’t all.

No! There’s the land. (Have you seen it?)
It’s the cussedest land that I know,
From the big, dizzy mountains that screen it
To the deep, deathlike valleys below.
Some say God was tired when He made it;
Some say it’s a fine land to shun;
Maybe; but there’s some as would trade it
For no land on earth—and I’m one.

You come to get rich (damned good reason);
You feel like an exile at first;
You hate it like hell for a season,
And then you are worse than the worst.
It grips you like some kinds of sinning;
It twists you from foe to a friend;
It seems it’s been since the beginning;
It seems it will be to the end.

I’ve stood in some mighty-mouthed hollow
That’s plumb-full of hush to the brim;
I’ve watched the big, husky sun wallow
In crimson and gold, and grow dim,
Till the moon set the pearly peaks gleaming,
And the stars tumbled out, neck and crop;
And I’ve thought that I surely was dreaming,
With the peace o’ the world piled on top.

The summer—no sweeter was ever;
The sunshiny woods all athrill;
The grayling aleap in the river,
The bighorn asleep on the hill.
The strong life that never knows harness;
The wilds where the caribou call;
The freshness, the freedom, the farness—
O God! how I’m stuck on it all.

The winter! the brightness that blinds you,
The white land locked tight as a drum,
The cold fear that follows and finds you,
The silence that bludgeons you dumb.
The snows that are older than history,
The woods where the weird shadows slant;
The stillness, the moonlight, the mystery,
I’ve bade ’em good-by—but I can’t.

There’s a land where the mountains are nameless,
And the rivers all run God knows where;
There are lives that are erring and aimless,
And deaths that just hang by a hair;
There are hardships that nobody reckons;
There are valleys unpeopled and still;
There’s a land—oh, it beckons and beckons,
And I want to go back—and I will.

They’re making my money diminish;
I’m sick of the taste of champagne.
Thank God! when I’m skinned to a finish
I’ll pike to the Yukon again.
I’ll fight—and you bet it’s no sham-fight;
It’s hell!—but I’ve been there before;
And it’s better than this by a damsite—
So me for the Yukon once more.

There’s gold, and it’s haunting and haunting;
It’s luring me on as of old;
Yet it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting
So much as just finding the gold.
It’s the great, big, broad land ’way up yonder,
It’s the forests where silence has lease;
It’s the beauty that thrills me with wonder,
It’s the stillness that fills me with peace.

- by Robert W. Service
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College professors will tell you this is bad poetry, and I understand what they're saying. The verse lacks subtlety; the rhythm is heavy-handed. You see a line that ends with "sham-fight", and you can't help but wonder how he's going to pull this one off with a rhyme, only to be rewarded with "damsite". The words don't work with the meaning to create a transcendent crystal.

But this is poetry at its most elemental. This is the sort of poetry that thrilled our ancestors around campfires back before electricity; this is the poetry that bards traveled from town to town reciting for alms. And Service reaches in and finds the non-cynic within me - I read this poem and I want to go see Alaska. Who, other than a tweedy professor choked with dusty theories, could resist it?

Sunday Poetry: Evening Hawk, by Robert Penn Warren

Evening Hawk

From plane of light to plane, wings dipping through
Geometries and orchids that the sunset builds,
Out of the peak's black angularity of shadow, riding
The last tumultuous avalanche of
Light above pines and the guttural gorge,
The hawk comes.
His wing
Scythes down another day, his motion
Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear
The crashless fall of stalks of Time.

The head of each stalk is heavy with the gold of our error.

Look! Look! he is climbing the last light
Who knows neither Time nor error, and under
Whose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swings
Into shadow.

Long now,
The last thrush is still, the last bat
Now cruises in his sharp hieroglyphics. His wisdom
Is ancient, too, and immense. The star
Is steady, like Plato, over the mountain.

If there were no wind we might, we think, hear
The earth grind on its axis, or history
Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar.

- by Robert Penn Warren
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Robert Penn Warren would be better known as a brilliant poet if he were not such a brilliant novelist. I first encountered his overwhelming genius when I read "All the King's Men", an historical novel based on the life of Huey Long. It seemed like every word on every page was placed with steady purpose - that every word choice was important and deeper than I could fathom. Reading Robert Penn Warren was the first time that I really "got" how much genius goes into great writing - that writing isn't just a gushing of what you want to say, but a composition of reinforcing meanings and sounds that work like the lacy steel in a suspension bridge to carry bigger truths. It was the first time I had the awareness and sense to marvel at great writing.

In his poetry, Robert Penn Warren shows the same control and purpose. Unlike untrained poets, he is not content to gush forth with sentimental thoughts of death or love. Unlike academic poets, he is not content to use language to construct meaningless cathedrals of "experimental lyricism". Instead, he works at his craft until the poem thrills with its language and provokes thought with its meaning.

The first few lines introduce a sight we can relate to - a hawk flying through shadows near the end of a day. In RPW's hands, though, he transforms the shape of a hawk flying into a scythe, and I realize he's describing something I've seen dozens of times, but never had the imagination to make that very plausible connection.

And then he carries the image a step further - what is this scythe cutting down? Another day - which brings us to the stalks Time, and then to the harvest of this scythe - "The head of each stalk is heavy with the gold of our error."

BOOM! In a few words, RPW has taken me from a fresh description of a hawk flying to the gold of my error - my failings, flaws and mortality.

Then, to put me further in my place, he tells me I don't matter. The hawk is unforgiving of my error, but only because the hawk doesn't understand Time or error - indeed, the whole world is unforgiven. In the steady, immense, ancient turnings of the world, I amount to less than a bat, and all of history amounts to a leaking pipe in the cellar of the world.

Now, just think about that description of history! In utter silence, we think we might hear "history/Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar." Wow! Have you ever lain awake at night because a tiny little drip in a remote part of the house is driving you nuts with its tiny but incessant rhythm? That drip takes over and dominates your mind. It's tiny but powerful enough to ruin your night.

In the sense of ancient mountains and steady wisdom, the tribulations of our history are nothing. The crying out of tens of thousands dying in Haiti does not disturb the steady grinding of the earth on its axis. In the context of time, the heavy gold of my own errors and faults is no more than one stalk in a vast, immeasurable harvest.

But human history is like a dripping pipe in the cellar. It is what we hear, it grabs our focus and, for the time we lie awake, it is all we can think about.

Sunday Poetry: Birds on the Family Tree, by R. May Evans

Birds on the Family Tree

The women in my family are birds,
chirping crisply to communicate,
flitting here and there on a constant quest
for what catches only our shining eyes.

Ever alert, we may startle at any hint of danger
unless you mean to molest our nest - then we peck
with a fury that deters even the noblest birds of prey.

We grind down our problems to a palpable size,
worrying them in our stomach like stones.
(When we think no one’s watching,
you should hear the music we pour from our throats.)

- By R. May Evans
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Imagery carries this poem, jumping from metaphor to simile and back, finally, to metaphor. The author, R. May Evans, is a local "artist, writer, activist, feminist, and all-round complex person with Asperger’s syndrome," so it should come as no surprise that her poetry manages to be challenging yet seemingly naive, deeply personal yet approachable, and accessible but somehow distant.

In "Birds on the Family Tree", Evans takes a fairly mundane image of ancestral women as birds and pushes it a little further. The first stanza presents introduces the central theme that the women in her family are bird-like, and communicate like birds on a tree. Nothing particularly novel about the presentation or the concept; women as birds is a common, almost universal image in literature and in common language (cute chicks, etc.).

In the second stanza, she introduces danger and strength. Easily startled suggests that they are nervous, while their willingness to take on birds of prey demonstrates that they have the courage to face the challenges of life, particularly when they threaten that which they hold dear. But why are the birds of prey, threatening nests, "noble"? Evans' work choice indicates a distance from societal norms - the women in her family are willing to fiercely attack what the rest of society deems "noble", as women throughout history have forced change.

The third stanza is particularly tricky. Her metaphor of women as birds encompasses a simile within it. They are birds, and their problems are "like" stones, grinding in a bird's gizzard. The metaphor has achieved sufficient reality in the voice of the speaker that it is capable of including its own artifice.

The final two lines return to metaphor - the "music" should not be read to mean only literal music. But why is it only when they think others are not listening that they produce their "music"? The irony is that the poet is producing her own form of music, and publishing it for others to listen to. To be enjoyed, music and poetry must be heard.

You may purchase Truth, Love, Blood and Bones, the volume which includes this poem, from Qoop in either a saddle stitched hard copy for $17.38 or as an ebook to be downloaded in .pdf format for $7.00. It's raw, emotional stuff - I probably chose the "safest" poem in the collection to write about. You should definitely venture into the world of R. May Evans if you care about helping young artists keep producing challenging work.

Sunday Poetry: Homage to My Hips, by Lucille Clifton

Homage to My Hips

these hips are big hips.
they need space to
move around in.
they don't fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don't like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top

- by Lucille Clifton
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If women's poetry is supposed to be quiet and reflective, if large women are supposed to envy their slimmer sisters, if sexuality is supposed to be hushed and reverent - well, Lucille Clifton did not get the memo.

The most obvious element of this poem is its boastful humor. (Note: I initially used the word "cocky" in the place of "boastful", but the gender issues of my word choice were too distracting.) It clearly is a fun poem, and when you watch Lucille Clifton read the poem, you can see she means it to be fun. Likewise, when you listen to her read it to an appreciative audience, she obviously plays it like a skit.

I won't murder humor by dissecting it, but I will point out that there is some real artistry involved in this poem. The rhythm is a roughed-up iambic beat, and the line breaks help bring out the meaning. Consider the line "they don't fit into". What does your mind fill in when you reach the end of that line? Size 2 jeans? Lacy underwear? Airline seats? Instead, Clifton sweeps all your answers into the dismissive "petty places" and moves forward.

Clifton has been compared to a less verbose Walt Whitman for her free celebration of herself, and I think the comparison is a good one. Her lines are trim and short, while his go on and on, but the joyful spirit bounds through both. Both write in everyday, proudly non-academic language of people on the street. Clifton even brings in a whiff of the Mamas and the Papas' Go Where You Wanna Go with her "they go where they want to go/ they do what they want to do." If you want to have some fun at the expense of academia, spend some time with Google and find a few stuffy, pedantic essays by grad students trying to explain in thousands of polysyllabic words what Clifton does in under 80 one and two syllable words.

(Buy Lucille Clifton's poetry at your favorite independent bookseller. It is approachable and completely appropriate for someone who will appreciate some poetic joy in their life.)

Sunday Poetry: Prosody 101, by Linda Pastan

Prosody 101

When they taught me that what mattered most
was not the strict iambic line goose-stepping
over the page but the variations
in that line and the tension produced
on the ear by the surprise of difference,
I understood yet didn't understand
exactly, until just now, years later
in spring, with the trees already lacy
and camellias blowsy with middle age,
I looked out and saw what a cold front had done
to the garden, sweeping in like common language,
unexpected in the sensuous
extravagance of a Maryland spring.
There was a dark edge around each flower
as if it had been outlined in ink
instead of frost, and the tension I felt
between the expected and actual
was like that time I came to you, ready
to say goodbye for good, for you had been
a cold front yourself lately, and as I walked in
you laughed and lifted me up in your arms
as if I too were lacy with spring
instead of middle aged like the camellias,
and I thought: so this is Poetry!

- by Linda Pastan
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Poems about poetry are rarely as much fun or as good as this. It starts off by announcing and demonstrating one of the essential secrets to poetry that I love - variations on noticeable rhythm. Pastan does not settle into a "strict iambic line goose-step"; instead, she kicks us around with every form of foot imaginable.

She also treats us to the second secret to poetry that I love - "imaginary gardens with real toads in them," as described by Marianne Moore in another poem about poetry. In this case, the garden itself is the bit of concrete reality that anchors the poem in the everyday world we can relate to. The frost described is a real phenomenon, but it becomes a symbol for the unexpected - both when it comes as common language, or as a warm greeting from a spouse.

(Linda Pastan's poetry may be purchased at your favorite local bookseller.)

Sunday Poetry: Woodchucks, by Maxine Kumin

Woodchucks

Gassing the woodchucks didn't turn out right.
The knockout bomb from the Feed and Grain Exchange
was featured as merciful, quick at the bone
and the case we had against them was airtight,
both exits shoehorned shut with puddingstone,
but they had a sub-sub-basement out of range.

Next morning they turned up again, no worse
for the cyanide than we for our cigarettes
and state-store Scotch, all of us up to scratch.
They brought down the marigolds as a matter of course
and then took over the vegetable patch
nipping the broccoli shoots, beheading the carrots.

The food from our mouths, I said, righteously thrilling
to the feel of the .22, the bullets' neat noses.
I, a lapsed pacifist fallen from grace
puffed with Darwinian pieties for killing,
now drew a bead on the little woodchuck's face.
He died down in the everbearing roses.

Ten minutes later I dropped the mother. She
flipflopped in the air and fell, her needle teeth
still hooked in a leaf of early Swiss chard.
Another baby next. O one-two-three
the murderer inside me rose up hard,
the hawkeye killer came on stage forthwith.

There's one chuck left. Old wily fellow, he keeps
me cocked and ready day after day after day.
All night I hunt his humped-up form. I dream
I sight along the barrel in my sleep.
If only they'd all consented to die unseen
gassed underground the quiet Nazi way.

- Maxine Kumin
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This poem hinges on the voice. It's not about woodchucks, it's not about killing, it's about the narrator.

On first reading, Woodchucks is an almost cartoonish tale of farmer vs. varmint, only slightly more serious than Elmer Fudd going after Bugs Bunny. It was written in 1972, and it it weren't attributed to Maxine Kumin, it could have been mistaken for Carl Spackler's lone literary achievement.

But there's that last line - too jarring for a folksy farmer poem, and it makes you reread the entire thing, alert for nuance from Kumin. If you know your writers, you remember that Kumin is an animal rights supporter, unlikely to let a killer of animals off so lightly.

Some commentators see a progression in the ferocity of the narrator, but I don't think that's quite it. Despite the narrator's assurances, gassing the family of woodchucks is not truly more merciful than other methods of killing them. The marketing claim that it is somehow more merciful is undercut by the final lines and the reference to the lives lost in the gas chambers of the Holocaust.

The frustration of the failed initial plan annihilation does, however, reveal a deeper bloodthirst in the narrator. It's there in the beginning, with "quick to the bone" death being sought, and the "murderer" is already "inside me" when she resorts to bullets.

Those who prefer to read this poem as a progression of viciousness are missing the more pessimistic point of Kumin's poem. The narrator does not become more dehumanized as the poem progresses - the mass murder of gassing is no less (perhaps more?) dehumanizing than the individual deaths brought by bullets. By the end, the narrator blames the sole survivor for keeping her "cocked and ready", but that implies that the narrator is a gun by her very nature. You can't keep a bouquet "cocked and ready".

On a closing note, did you happen to notice the rhyme in this poem? The rhyming pattern is so subtle - ABCACB - that it is hard to notice, yet makes the poem flow beautifully. Rhyme, in the hand of a master, does not necessarily bring a sing-song tone.

(Purchase Maxine Kumin's poetry here, or at your favorite bookstore. Her Selected Poems, 1960-1990 is genius for 6 cents a page, or less if purchased used.)

Sunday Poetry: Pioneers! O Pioneers!, by Walt Whitman

Pioneers! O Pioneers!

COME my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,
Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes?
Pioneers! O pioneers!

For we cannot tarry here,
We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger,
We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O you youths, Western youths,
So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship,
Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with the foremost,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Have the elder races halted?
Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas?
We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the past we leave behind,
We debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world,
Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

We detachments steady throwing,
Down the edges, through the passes, up the mountains steep,
Conquering, holding, daring, venturing as we go the unknown ways,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

We primeval forests felling,
We the rivers stemming, vexing we and piercing deep the mines within,
We the surface broad surveying, we the virgin soil upheaving,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Colorado men are we,
From the peaks gigantic, from the great sierras and the high plateaus,
From the mine and from the gully, from the hunting trail we come,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

From Nebraska, from Arkansas,
Central inland race are we, from Missouri, with the continental blood intervein'd,
All the hands of comrades clasping, all the Southern, all the Northern,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O resistless restless race!
O beloved race in all! O my breast aches with tender love for all!
O I mourn and yet exult, I am rapt with love for all,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Raise the mighty mother mistress,
Waving high the delicate mistress, over all the starry mistress, (bend your heads all,)
Raise the fang'd and warlike mistress, stern, impassive, weapon'd mistress,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

See my children, resolute children,
By those swarms upon our rear we must never yield or falter,
Ages back in ghostly millions frowning there behind us urging,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

On and on the compact ranks,
With accessions ever waiting, with the places of the dead quickly fill'd,
Through the battle, through defeat, moving yet and never stopping,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O to die advancing on!
Are there some of us to droop and die? has the hour come?
Then upon the march we fittest die, soon and sure the gap is fill'd.
Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the pulses of the world,
Falling in they beat for us, with the Western movement beat,
Holding single or together, steady moving to the front, all for us,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Life's involv'd and varied pageants,
All the forms and shows, all the workmen at their work,
All the seamen and the landsmen, all the masters with their slaves,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the hapless silent lovers,
All the prisoners in the prisons, all the righteous and the wicked,
All the joyous, all the sorrowing, all the living, all the dying,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

I too with my soul and body,
We, a curious trio, picking, wandering on our way,
Through these shores amid the shadows, with the apparitions pressing,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Lo, the darting bowling orb!
Lo, the brother orbs around, all the clustering suns and planets,
All the dazzling days, all the mystic nights with dreams,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

These are of us, they are with us,
All for primal needed work, while the followers there in embryo wait behind,
We to-day's procession heading, we the route for travel clearing,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O you daughters of the West!
O you young and elder daughters! O you mothers and you wives!
Never must you be divided, in our ranks you move united,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Minstrels latent on the prairies!
(Shrouded bards of other lands, you may rest, you have done your work,)
Soon I hear you coming warbling, soon you rise and tramp amid us,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Not for delectations sweet,
Not the cushion and the slipper, not the peaceful and the studious,
Not the riches safe and palling, not for us the tame enjoyment,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Do the feasters gluttonous feast?
Do the corpulent sleepers sleep? have they lock'd and bolted doors?
Still be ours the diet hard, and the blanket on the ground,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Has the night descended?
Was the road of late so toilsome? did we stop discouraged nodding on our way?
Yet a passing hour I yield you in your tracks to pause oblivious,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Till with sound of trumpet,
Far, far off the daybreak call-hark! how loud and clear I hear it wind,
Swift! to the head of the army!-swift! spring to your places,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

- by Walt Whitman
___________________________________________

You've heard snippets of this poem, read by William Geer (Grandpa on The Waltons), on TV commercials selling Levi's jeans. It's brilliant, and I'm sure Whitman is smiling at the audacity.

Like most of Whitman's poems, "Pioneers! O Pioneers" suffers horribly in dissection. There's no point in discussing the rhythm or the rhyme; the rhythm is too natural, and there is no rhyme. Instead of those, we have straight passion - Whitman's words are like bricks thrown at the glass building of complacency.

Whitman is more than rebellion - Whitman is purity of love and self. Whitman calls upon our better side - a celebration of our nation, not a competition of factions. He allows all their due - he mentions Missouri fondly, and describes enough of America to know he is singing of all America.

If you don't have a copy of Leaves of Grass, the volume that Whitman published to the astonishment of all and the horror of some, go buy a copy; it is one of the basic texts of American literature.

Sunday Poetry: Cherry Blossoms Blowing In Wet, Blowing Snow, by James Galvin

Cherry Blossoms Blowing In Wet, Blowing Snow

In all the farewells in all the airports in all the profane dawns.

In the Fiat with no documents on the road to Madrid. At the

Corrida. In the Lope de Vega, the Annalena, the Jerome. In time

past, time lost, time yet to pass. In poetry. In watery deserts, on

arid seas, between desserts and seas. In sickness and in health. In

pain and in the celebration of pain. In the delivery room. In the

garden. In the hammock under the aspen. In all the emergencies. In
the waterfall. In toleration. In retaliation. In rhyme. Among cherry

blossoms blowing in wet, blowing snow, weren’t we something?

- by James Galvin


___________________________________________________

There are lots of reasons to dislike this poem, but it's beautiful, and that is enough to overcome the rest. Any editor worthy of a blue pencil would delete the second blowoing in second blowing in the title, and in the final line. Any person with sober judgment would mock the odd typography. It doesn't rhyme, it doesn't follow a traditional form, and it is all a set up for the zinger of the final three words.

A better critic would condemn it, but I love it.

Let's jump right into those final three words, okay? When I first read them, I thought they were heartbreaking - the past tense hinting of a former lover wistfully looking at happier times. But, on rereading, I changed my view. The thought that stretches between the third and fourth lines -

In time

past, time lost, time yet to pass.

- allows me a more optimistic view. There is time for this couple yet to pass. In sickness and in health - a reference to marriage. Children are involved. While retaliation is mentioned, so is toleration.

It all somehow fits. The episodic quality of looking over a life spent together matches the reality of how we (or at least James Galvin and I) gaze backward. We don't remember the day-to-day existence, but we remember moments with astonishing detail. Galvin remembers driving a Fiat without documents, I vividly recall driving our first car - a Dodge Dart Swinger Special with a bullet hole in the windshield - from St. Louis to Columbia, and stopping at a long-gone Nickerson Farms on the way. But I can't tell you what we had for dinner 3 nights ago.

The intrusion of the past tense in "weren't we something" is not at all a statement that "we" are not something now. Instead, it is a recognition that those incidents in the past have changed us - "we" are not the same people we were in the Lope de Vega, or in the delivery room. It's like our early selves are characters in a play that we can look back over, and see how it all leads to now. The upper Mississippi is not like the Mississippi at St. Louis, and the Mississippi at St. Louis is not like the Mississippi at New Orleans, but the Mississippi at New Orleans could look back at Minneapolis and New Orleans and say "wasn't I something?".

(You can purchase James Galvin's poetry from your local independent bookstore, such as Rainy Day Books, or on the internet here. If you don't subscribe to the New Yorker, you really should, and if you do it now, you can get my favorite calendar in the world.)

Sunday Poetry: Invictus, by William Ernest Henley

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

- William Ernest Henley
_______________________________________________

Is this poem great, or is it crap? Is it well-wrought inspiration, or overwrought egotism? Do you love it, or hate it?

John Ciardi, one of the best poetry critics ever to write, was not a fan of the poem, which he described as "perhaps the most widely known bad poem in English":

"Invictus" ("Unconquered") is perhaps the most widely known bad poem in English, and certainly there is no trace in it of a technical flaw on which its badness could be blamed. Nor is the poem bad because of its subject matter. Hardy and Housman, among others, have written many poems that take as bleakly pessimistic an attitude toward life as does "Invictus." The success of many such poems is sufficient evidence that English and American readers can enter into a sympathetic contract to consider the world as some sort of unhappy pit. It is not in the way Henley takes his subject, but in the way he takes himself that the reader parts company with the poet. To take the world as one's subject and to take the attitude that it is nothing but a place of suffering is one thing; but to react by taking oneself with such chest-thumping heroics, is very much another. One feels that Henley is not really reacting from his own profoundest depths but that he is making some sort of overdramatic speech about pessimism. There is a failure of character in the tone he has assumed. The poet has presented himself as unflinchingly valiant. The reader cannot help but find him merely inflated and self-dramatizing.

Is that criticism fair?

The poem certainly is extreme, and seems almost laughable when adopted by those whose worst "fell clutch of circumstance" is a traffic jam or a failing stock portfolio. The fact that shallow middle-managers quote it after a mediocre review does tempt one to sneer at the poem for its self-dramatizing fans.

More sinister, this is the poem that Timothy McVeigh, the cowardly terrorist and murderer of children, used as his last words. The poem helped him bolster his valiant self-image till the moment of his death.

And yet the poem has served others, as well. Nelson Mandela recited the poem to himself when he was imprisoned during Apartheid, and he taught it to fellow inmates. John McCain recalled the words during his imprisonment in North Vietnam.

The poet himself came by his valor honestly. He suffered from tuberculosis, and wrote the poem after the amputation of his foot, in an age when surgery was not a white-gowned affair, and the handicapped did not get reserved parking for their carriages. Henley remained an active poet, critic and teacher, and thrived despite his disability. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to him after publishing "Treasure Island", "I will now make a confession. It was the sight of your maimed strength and masterfulness that begot Long John Silver...the idea of the maimed man, ruling and dreaded by the sound [voice alone], was entirely taken from you".

Despite my admiration of John Ciardi, I disagree with him on this one. "Invictus" is a great poem. It sparks a reaction in those who read it, and we are drawn to apply it to our own lives and situations, however ignoble or bland they may appear to others. The "bludgeonings of chance" in our lives may not be prison torture; they may be challenges at work or at home, and yet we all need inspiration. "Invictus" speaks to our stronger selves, even if our circumstances are not at the extreme of human suffering.

Sunday Poetry: An Ex-Judge at the Bar, by Melvin Tolson

An Ex-Judge at the Bar

Bartender, make it straight and make it two—
One for the you in me and the me in you.
Now let us put our heads together: one
Is half enough for malice, sense, or fun.

I know, Bartender, yes, I know when the Law
Should wag its tail or rip with fang and claw.
When Pilate washed his hands, that neat event
Set for us judges a Caesarean precedent.

What I shall tell you know, as man is man,
You’ll find neither in Bible nor Koran.
It happened after my return from France
At the bar in Tony’s Lady of Romance.

We boys drank pros and cons, sang Dixie; and then,
The bar a Sahara, we pledged to meet again.
But lo, on the bar there stood in naked scorn
The Goddess Justice, like September Morn.

Who blindfolds Justice on the courthouse roof
While the lawyers weave the sleight-of-hand of proof?
I listened, Bartender, with my heart and head,
As the Goddess Justice unbandaged her eyes and said:

“To make the world safe for Democracy,
You lost a leg in Flanders fields—oui, oui?
To gain the judge’s seat, you twined the noose
That swung the Negro higher than a goose.”

Bartender, who has dotted every i?
Crossed every t? Put legs on every y?
Therefore, I challenged her: “Lay on, Macduff,
And damned be him who cries first, ‘Hold, enough!”

The boys guffawed, and Justice began to laugh
Like a manic on a broken phonograph.
Bartender, make it straight and make it three—
One for the Negro…one for you and me.

- by Melvin B. Tolson
__________________________________________________________

Not many poets get portrayed in film, but Melvin Tolson was played by Denzel Washington in The Great Debaters. That movie, of course, focuses on his role as a successful debate coach, rather than his role as one of the great poets of America.

This poem begins with a pun - the ex-judge is not at the bar in court, he is at a drinking hole, where he attempts to deal with the guilt of injustice. This judge knows that he went along with society - the boys - and made a mockery of justice. Even though the judge had fought for democracy and lost a leg in Flanders Fields (the subject of another famous poem, of course), he returned home and abused democracy and justice by hanging a negro "to gain a judge's seat."

Melvin Tolson was born in Moberly, Missouri, raised in northern Missouri and Iowa, and graduated from Lincoln High School here in Kansas City in 1919. He undoubtedly saw first hand the corrosive effects of racism on justice. Indeed, Lady Justice is not merely blindfolded in the poem, it is bandages that cover her eyes, and she is manic at the end of the poem.

This is an ugly subject for a poem, and it is made bearable only by the skill of the poet. The regular rhyming couplets provide a breezy tone, and the pun at the very beginning relaxes the reader. When read by the poet, the piece seems almost comical, despite its bleak subject.

Tolson shows off a bit of erudition as he quotes one of my favorite Shakespearean lines. MacBeth, who has been assured that he will not be killed by man "of woman born" has just found out that MacDuff was born by a Caesarean delivery, and is thus uncommonly qualified to kill him. Just as MacBeth undertook his doomed battle, the ex-judge knows that Lady Justice has defeated him, and he finds himself an ex-judge, drinking with a bartender and the memory of a hanged man.

It's an astonishingly gentle poem, given the author and given the subject matter. Where's the rage? Where are the calls for vengeance? Instead, Tolson satisfies himself with the humbling of the ex-judge, and his too-late awareness that his participation in injustice has left him a lesser man.

Sunday Poetry: Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies, by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies

Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age
The child is grown, and puts away childish things.
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.

Nobody that matters, that is. Distant relatives of course
Die, whom one never has seen or has seen for an hour,
And they gave one candy in a pink-and-green stripèd bag, or a jack-knife,
And went away, and cannot really be said to have lived at all.

And cats die. They lie on the floor and lash their tails,
And their reticent fur is suddenly all in motion
With fleas that one never knew were there,
Polished and brown, knowing all there is to know,
Trekking off into the living world.
You fetch a shoe-box, but it's much too small, because she won't curl up now:
So you find a bigger box, and bury her in the yard, and weep.

But you do not wake up a month from then, two months,
A year from then, two years, in the middle of the night
And weep, with your knuckles in your mouth, and say Oh, God! Oh, God!
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies that matters, – mothers and fathers don't die.

And if you have said, "For heaven's sake, must you always be kissing a person?"
Or, "I do wish to gracious you'd stop tapping on the window with your thimble!"
Tomorrow, or even the day after tomorrow if you're busy having fun,
Is plenty of time to say, "I'm sorry, mother."

To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died, who neither listen nor speak;
Who do not drink their tea, though they always said
Tea was such a comfort.

Run down into the cellar and bring up the last jar of raspberries; they are not tempted.
Flatter them, ask them what was it they said exactly
That time, to the bishop, or to the overseer, or to Mrs. Mason;
They are not taken in.
Shout at them, get red in the face, rise,
Drag them up out of their chairs by their stiff shoulders and shake them and yell at them;
They are not startled, they are not even embarrassed; they slide back into their chairs.

Your tea is cold now.
You drink it standing up,
And leave the house.

- by Edna St. Vincent Millay
__________________________________________________________

This poem is not characteristic of Edna St. Vincent Millay. She was masterful with meter, and wrote over 200 tightly knit sonnets. She had the demonstrated ability to work with rhyme without lapsing into singsong. Her body of work is meticulous and clever.

This poem is a wreck. Bereft of rhyme and sustained meter, it seems to spill from the poet - a style more reminiscent of a conversation with a friend on the couch than of Shakespeare.

But, even in the absence of recognizable meter, Millay uses her subtle hand to reinforce the subject matter. The death of a distant relative is a "blah-blah-blah whatever" non-emotive sentence with trivial details. The death of the cat is brushed off as well, but there is horror in the details, and its proximity to the heart is obvious. The speaker is not being totally honest here, and Millay allows us to know it.

The dishonesty of the speaker is revealed completely as the real subject of the poem crashes to the fore in the midst of the discussion of the cat. This poem is not about the Kingdom of Childhood - it is a mourning of the speaker's mother. The speaker can't help it - she attempts to keep her emotions in check as she discusses burying her cat that will not curl up anymore, and suddenly her knuckles are in her mouth and she's crying "Oh God, Oh God" in the middle of the night.

The poem and the speaker bust wide open. She feels regret for intemperate words that cannot be breezily apologized for later in the immensity of time. She imagines them dead at her table - ghosts? - but she cannot force a reaction from them. They ignore her tea, her flattery, her raspberry jam, even her screaming in their faces. It's as if they are not there . . . and they are, awfully, not.

The inability to conjure her tea-loving mother slaps her back into brief sentences, and she leaves her home, as, eventually, we all leave our homes and go into the world without our parents.

Here is a recording of Edna St. Vincent Millay reading her poem. This is a rare instance where I think the poem suffers by this treatment. Millay employs a soaring, "poetical" voice to deliver a poem that should sound more like a friend in a late-night despairing telephone call. But, if you listen closely, she breaks out of that voice a few times and the urgency and the pain of this poem ring through.

Sunday Poetry: The Night Game, by Robert Pinsky

The Night Game

Some of us believe
We would have conceived romantic
Love out of our own passions
With no precedents,
Without songs and poetry--
Or have invented poetry and music
As a comb of cells for the honey.

Shaped by ignorance,
A succession of new worlds,
Congruities improvised by
Immigrants or children.

I once thought most people were Italian,
Jewish or Colored.
To be white and called
Something like Ed Ford
Seemed aristocratic,
A rare distinction.

Possibly I believed only gentiles
And blonds could be left-handed.

Already famous
After one year in the majors,
Whitey Ford was drafted by the Army
To play ball in the flannels
Of the Signal Corps, stationed
In Long Branch, New Jersey.

A night game, the silver potion
Of the lights, his pink skin
Shining like a burn.

Never a player
I liked or hated: a Yankee,
A mere success.

But white the chalked-off lines
In the grass, white and green
The immaculate uniform,
And white the unpigmented
Halo of his hair
When he shifted his cap:

So ordinary and distinct,
So close up, that I felt
As if I could have made him up,
Imagined him as I imagined

The ball, a scintilla
High in the black backdrop
Of the sky. Tight red stitches.
Rawlings. The bleached

Horsehide white: the color

Of nothing. Color of the past
And of the future, of the movie screen
At rest and of blank paper.

"I could have." The mind. The black
Backdrop, the white
Fly picked out by the towering
Lights. A few years later

On a blanket in the grass
By the same river
A girl and I came into
Being together
To the faint muttering
Of unthinkable
Troubadours and radios
.

The emerald
Theater, the night.
Another time,
I devised a left-hander
Even more gifted
Than Whitey Ford: A Dodger.
People were amazed by him.
Once, when he was young,
He refused to pitch on Yom Kippur.

by Robert Pinsky
________________________________________

There is so much to love in this poem - so much to engage people of all interests. It's a wonder this poem is not an icon of our world - quoted like Caddy Shack, Animal House or Monty Python by people in all stations. It touches upon romantic love, the importance of success, and, most importantly, baseball.

The poem begins with a slap in the face - it points out the absurdity of thinking that our approach to romantic love could be devised out of whole cloth. We owe so much of what we think and how we behave to precedent - to what society tells and shows us to be the ideal. Poetry, courtly love, even music - we think of these things as somehow inherent in the human condition. Instead, they are human traditions - an accident of history, and an invention of generations.

And then it shifts its attention to Whitey Ford - a dominating pitcher who played in an era recent enough that many readers could remember him. (I never saw him, but he was younger than my mother.) Whitey becomes a monument of caucasianism in the hands of Pinksy, and his overwhelming whiteness becomes a foil to life itself. White is the color of blank paper, while the speaker rolls in the grass with a girl, accompanied by the songs of the troubadors who helped establish the traditions of romantic love.

But tradition and academic discussion of courtly traditions pale in the bright light of baseball. As I write this, the Yankees lead the Phillies in the World Series. Pinsky shows a healthy dose of anti-Yankee sentiment with his dismissal of Ford -

Never a player
I liked or hated: a Yankee,
A mere success

A Yankee - a mere success? In those three lines, Pinsky captures the "so what?" attitude so many of us have toward the Yankees. Given the size of their payroll, given the tradition of Yankee baseball, given the paid-for expectations of the Yankee machine, there is a certain lack of drama in Yankee success.

Pinsky speaks against the elite. In his mind, he invents a Jewish version of Whitey Ford, who refused to play on Yom Kippur (a subtle reference to Hank Greenberg - not a pitcher, and not a Dodger, but a Jew who starred for the Detroit Tigers and refused to play during on Yom Kippur, even though his team was in a pennant race). His feat of imagination had already been loosely created in reality, just as his romantic conquest had been anticipated by generations of courtly lovers.

It's wonderful to find baseball in poetry. It's wonderful to find poetry in baseball. Somehow, having the Yankees in the World Series seems kind of reassuringly traditional.

UPDATE: I'm horrified! The reference to the Jewish left-handed Dodger who refused to play on Yom Kippur was not a reference to Hank Greenberg, it was a reference the amazing Sandy Koufax, a Jewish left-handed Dodger who refused to play on Yom Kippur. Pinsky even served as the voice on a book on tape version of a biography of Sandy Koufax.

Sunday Poetry: The Voice, by Thomas Hardy

The Voice

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever consigned to existlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward
And the woman calling.

by Thomas Hardy
_________________________________________________

This morning, I visited a church north of the river, and sat in front of a couple, perhaps in their 70s. During the homily, I heard the woman whisper urgently, "Joe, say something to me." Her whisper grew more urgent and panicked, and I turned to see her trying to get her husband's attention, while he sat there staring ahead vacantly. I was right in front of him - my eyes met his, but there was no reaction. "He's not here with me," she said in a voice choked with fear and disbelief as friends gathered around her and took Joe from the pew.

I assume it was a stroke, and I hope and pray that Joe, whoever he is, regains his complete faculties. Medicine has improved vastly since a stroke stole most of my father from me in 1982. But what I heard and saw was two lives torn suddenly apart in a quiet moment at church.

Thomas Hardy's poem stems from regret about the sudden loss of his wife. From what I've read, theirs was a marriage that had lost its luster for decades. When his wife died, he was filled with regret that he had not loved more deeply.

This poem employs an unusual dactyl rhythm - DAH duh duh - in the first stanzas. It enhances the "enthralled" state of the speaker as he daydreams his dead lover's voice. At the end, though, choppy trochees and tongue-twisting assonance and alliteration reflect the difficult realization that the speaker is alone, and his lover is gone.

Hardy yearned for the opportunity to relive his life and devote more attention to his love. I hope that Joe and his wife have the opportunity to share future golden moments, and, if not, I hope that they don't regret failing to love fully during the time they had. It's a lesson we see time and time again, in life and in literature.

Sunday Poetry: Epic, by Patrick Kavanagh

Epic

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting "Damn your soul!"
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel -
"Here is the march along these iron stones."
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

- by Patrick Kavanagh
______________________________________________________

How could a property dispute over a small bit of rocky soil compare to the Trojan War, or the gathering storm clouds of World War II? It is absurd to suggest such a thing, just as it is absurd to attach the grandiose title "Epic" to a 14 line sonnet. A shirtless man shouting at his neighbor on some insignificant plot in Ireland does not compare in any rational way to the clashing of god and city-states on the plains of Troy, nor the horror of World War II.

When I first read this poem, I accepted it at face value - the speaker is claiming that in some ways, the McCabe clan shouting at the Duffy clan is the literary equivalent of the Trojan War, and has greater import to local participants than wars across water. And, while the abduction of Helen is a greater event than a disagreement over land ownership, and Helen's face is more likely to launch a thousand ships while McCabe's stripped torso, a lengthy family feud could certainly provide the basis for great literature.

Now, I wonder whether Kavanagh was being more ironic than I thought. His "epic" is 14 lines - an unrhymed sonnet with roughed-up scansion. And the closing words - gods make their own importance. Are those Homer's words, or are they the speaker's? If Homer's, are we to believe that McCabe is the equal to Apollo, who shot arrows at the Greeks from the walls of Troy? It's difficult for a contemporary monotheist to accept that gods are active in the land dispute. Or are those words from the speaker, and Homer is a god for having taken a tribal dispute and crafting it into one of the most important works of literature.

Either way, it is a wonderful poem, and makes us ponder the important events that pass us by without heralding every day.

Sunday Poetry: The Red Poppy, by Louise Gluck

The Red Poppy

The great thing
is not having
a mind. Feelings:
oh, I have those; they
govern me. I have
a lord in heaven
called the sun, and open
for him, showing him
the fire of my own heart, fire
like his presence.
What could such glory be
if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters,
were you like me once, long ago,
before you were human? Did you
permit yourselves
to open once, who would never
open again? Because in truth
I am speaking now
the way you do. I speak
because I am shattered.

- by Louise Gluck
_____________________________________________________________

Poppies hold a disproportionate share of the literary imagination. They grow hauntingly among the crosses In Flanders Fields. They put Dorothy and her posse to sleep on her way to the Emerald City. They appear on tombstones and are offered by veterans before Memorial Day.

Louise Gluck offers her own take on the poppy in this poem, but it is enriched by awareness of the other uses. By speaking as the flower itself, she reverses the typical dialogue. This is not about what a human thinks of poppies, it is about what a poppy thinks about humans. Her poppy sees humans as guarded and closed, unable to show the fire in their own hearts. Unburdened by a mind, the poppy is pure feeling.

For me, this poem is made by its last word. Such an unlikely word for a poem where the poppy is a little didactic and even superior to its audience, lecturing the humans on their failure to open up, and claiming a connection to God because God's glory is of the heart.

What has shattered the poppy? The countless deaths it is associated with? The intensity of its color? The brevity of its life? And how are we shattered?

(Purchase poetry by Louise Gluck here, or at your favorite local bookseller.)

Sunday Poetry: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by T.S. Eliot

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.


Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"

Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair--
(They will say: 'How his hair is growing thin!")
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin--
(They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!")
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all--
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all--
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ...

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

* * *

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep ... tired ... or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet--and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"--
If one, settling a pillow by her head
Should say: "That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all."

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor--
And this, and so much more?--
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
"That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all."

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous--
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

- by T.S. Eliot
__________________________________________________

This is my favorite poem in the world. There is so much in it that is humorous, serious, tragic, pathetic, challenging, mysterious and simply lovely that every time I read it, I read it differently. I first read this poem over 30 years ago, and it has always remained fresh and relevant.

So what is going on in this poem? Narratively, the speaker of the poem is struggling with his inability to grab hold of life and love. He wants to declare his love to a woman, but cannot "force the moment to its crisis." That's all.

Stylistically, this poem is structure set to perfect purpose. Rhyme and rhythm are central to the poem, but it does not settle into any single form. The first few lines introduce a strong iambic, rhyming couplet, only to be dashed by the morbid image and non-rhyming "patient etherized upon a table". In those first three lines, we get notice that we are in the hands of a competent master of verse, with a radical's willingness to knock hard against tradition's boundaries.

Prufrock is an English major's playground, chock full of allusions to other works of literature. A quick Google search can put you onto pages of annotations, though I have yet to see one achieve a complete compilation of all that is contained within the poem. T.S. Eliot was a well-read, literate scholar, and his poetry is enriched by a thorough knowledge of other works.

Allusion is a tricky tool, and Eliot is a master for his ability to use it to enrich without obscuring. In lesser hands, allusions to other works can be frustrating and fussy - a crossword puzzle that is meaningless unless you know exactly who "Duke Orsino" is and how he figures into the plot of "Twelfth Night". In Prufrock, though, the allusions deepen and embellish the meaning, but they are not necessary to a thorough enjoyment and understanding of the work.

Take, for instance, "And indeed there will be time". That is a reference to the opening lines of Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress":

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime

If you've never read "To His Coy Mistress", the line still makes sense, and stands on its own. If you have read it, though, and you happen to catch the allusion, it brings a contrast to mind. Marvell's protagonist is not bound by self-doubt in the slightest - he practically begs for some action:

Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Nothing could be further from Prufrock, who frets about whether he should "presume", and

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question

Prufrock is a character who has been with me for 3 decades. It shocked me to learn that Eliot produced this masterpiece when he was 22 years old. He was born over a hundred years ago, into a society that is worlds apart from my own. Yet I still can't eat a peach without thinking of Prufrock.

Sunday Poetry: Musee des Beaux Arts, by W. H. Auden

Musee 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 Breughel'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.

- by W. H. Auden
_________________________________________________

Ordinary life versus the extraordinary. Most people read this poem as a statement of how life continues on, and how ordinary life diminishes the astonishing. Even the spectacular fall of Icarus from the sky (when he ventured too close to the sun and the heat melted the wax of the wings his father had crafted to help him escape the Minotaur's maze) does not draw the attention of the common folk in Breughel's painting of the scene.

It is, of course, a completely accurate reading of the poem. We are like that expensive delicate ship, in that we are vaguely aware of the amazing tragedies and joys that surround us. A friend had a son this past week; another friend was diagnosed with a horrid and terminal disease. I went to the Chiefs game today and I'll go to work tomorrow. As Auden wrote about the day that his friend William Butler Yeats died:

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

Life does go on.

There is another reading, though. The world is an incredibly rich place, filled with exquisite pain and beauty that can stop you at full sail. The old masters saw that - that we cannot always be fully aware of the beauty of each birth, or the tragic failure of those who strive greatly. But it's there, if we look, and if we dare to see and feel it.

Sunday Poetry: The Death of the Hired Man, by Robert Frost

The Death of the Hired Man

Mary sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table
Waiting for Warren. When she heard his step,
She ran on tip-toe down the darkened passage
To meet him in the doorway with the news
And put him on his guard. 'Silas is back.'
She pushed him outward with her through the door
And shut it after her. "Be kind,' she said.
She took the market things from Warren's arms
And set them on the porch, then drew him down
To sit beside her on the wooden steps.
'When was I ever anything but kind to him?
But I'll not have the fellow back,' he said.
'I told him so last haying, didn't I?
"If he left then," I said, "that ended it."
What good is he? Who else will harbour him
At his age for the little he can do?
What help he is there's no depending on.
Off he goes always when I need him most.
'He thinks he ought to earn a little pay,
Enough at least to buy tobacco with,
won't have to beg and be beholden."
"All right," I say "I can't afford to pay
Any fixed wages, though I wish I could."
"Someone else can."
"Then someone else will have to.
I shouldn't mind his bettering himself
If that was what it was. You can be certain,
When he begins like that, there's someone at him
Trying to coax him off with pocket-money, --
In haying time, when any help is scarce.
In winter he comes back to us. I'm done.'
'Shh I not so loud: he'll hear you,' Mary said.
'I want him to: he'll have to soon or late.'
'He's worn out. He's asleep beside the stove.
When I came up from Rowe's I found him here,
Huddled against the barn-door fast asleep,
A miserable sight, and frightening, too-
You needn't smile -- I didn't recognize him-
I wasn't looking for him- and he's changed.
Wait till you see.'
'Where did you say he'd been?
'He didn't say. I dragged him to the house,
And gave him tea and tried to make him smoke.
I tried to make him talk about his travels.
Nothing would do: he just kept nodding off.'
'What did he say? Did he say anything?'
'But little.'
'Anything? Mary, confess
He said he'd come to ditch the meadow for me.'
'Warren!'
'But did he? I just want to know.'
'Of course he did. What would you have him say?
Surely you wouldn't grudge the poor old man
Some humble way to save his self-respect.
He added, if you really care to know,
He meant to dear the upper pasture, too.
That sounds like something you have heard before?
Warren, I wish you could have heard the way
He jumbled everything. I stopped to look
Two or three times -- he made me feel so queer--
To see if he was talking in his sleep.
He ran on Harold Wilson -- you remember -
The boy you had in haying four years since.
He's finished school, and teaching in his college.
Silas declares you'll have to get him back.
He says they two will make a team for work:
Between them they will lay this farm as smooth!
The way he mixed that in with other things.
He thinks young Wilson a likely lad, though daft
On education -- you know how they fought

All through July under the blazing sun,
Silas up on the cart to build the load,
Harold along beside to pitch it on.'
'Yes, I took care to keep well out of earshot.'
'Well, those days trouble Silas like a dream.
You wouldn't think they would. How some things linger!
Harold's young college boy's assurance piqued him.
After so many years he still keeps finding
Good arguments he sees he might have used.
I sympathize. I know just how it feels
To think of the right thing to say too late.
Harold's associated in his mind with Latin.
He asked me what I thought of Harold's saying
He studied Latin like the violin
Because he liked it -- that an argument!
He said he couldn't make the boy believe
He could find water with a hazel prong--
Which showed how much good school had ever done
him. He wanted to go over that. 'But most of all
He thinks if he could have another chance
To teach him how to build a load of hay --'
'I know, that's Silas' one accomplishment.
He bundles every forkful in its place,
And tags and numbers it for future reference,
So he can find and easily dislodge it
In the unloading. Silas does that well.
He takes it out in bunches like big birds' nests.
You never see him standing on the hay
He's trying to lift, straining to lift himself.'
'He thinks if he could teach him that, he'd be

Some good perhaps to someone in the world.
He hates to see a boy the fool of books.
Poor Silas, so concerned for other folk,
And nothing to look backward to with pride,
And nothing to look forward to with hope,
So now and never any different.'
Part of a moon was filling down the west,
Dragging the whole sky with it to the hills.
Its light poured softly in her lap. She saw
And spread her apron to it. She put out her hand
Among the harp-like morning-glory strings,
Taut with the dew from garden bed to eaves,
As if she played unheard the tenderness
That wrought on him beside her in the night.
'Warren,' she said, 'he has come home to die:
You needn't be afraid he'll leave you this time.'
'Home,' he mocked gently.
'Yes, what else but home?
It all depends on what you mean by home.
Of course he's nothing to us, any more
then was the hound that came a stranger to us
Out of the woods, worn out upon the trail.'
'Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.'
'I should have called it
Something you somehow haven't to deserve.'
Warren leaned out and took a step or two,
Picked up a little stick, and brought it back
And broke it in his hand and tossed it by.
'Silas has better claim on' us, you think,
Than on his brother? Thirteen little miles
As the road winds would bring him to his door.
Silas has walked that far no doubt to-day.
Why didn't he go there? His brother's rich,
A somebody- director in the bank.'
'He never told us that.'
'We know it though.'
'I think his brother ought to help, of course.
I'll see to that if there is need. He ought of right
To take him in, and might be willing to-
He may be better than appearances.
But have some pity on Silas. Do you think
If he'd had any pride in claiming kin
Or anything he looked for from his brother,
He'd keep so still about him all this time?'
'I wonder what's between them.'
'I can tell you.
Silas is what he is -- we wouldn't mind him--
But just the kind that kinsfolk can't abide.
He never did a thing so very bad.
He don't know why he isn't quite as good
As anyone. He won't be made ashamed
To please his brother, worthless though he is.'
'I can't think Si ever hurt anyone.'
'No, but he hurt my heart the way he lay
And rolled his old head on that sharp-edged chair-back.
He wouldn't let me put him on the lounge.
You must go in and see what you can do.
I made the bed up for him there to-night.
You'll be surprised at him -- how much he's broken.
His working days are done; I'm sure of it.'
'I'd not be in a hurry to say that.'
'I haven't been. Go, look, see for yourself.
But, Warren, please remember how it is:
He' come to help you ditch the meadow.
He has a plan, You mustn't laugh at him.
He may not speak of it, and then he may.
I'll sit and see if that small sailing cloud
Will hit or miss the moon.'
It hit the moon. Then there were three there, making a dim row,
The moon, the little silver cloud, and she.
Warren returned-- too soon, it seemed to her,
Slipped to her side, caught up her hand and waited.
'Warren?' she questioned.
'Dead,' was all he answered

- by Robert Frost
_____________________________________________

I know I've already gone to the well of Robert Frost twice in this series. But he's one of my favorite American poets, and it's been months since I've written about him, and this is probably one that most people have not read, unless they are Frost fanatics or English majors.

This poem is an example of blank verse, by which I mean that the meter is well-established, but Frost does not employ rhyme. Blank verse has a long tradition - and that's a little word play, since it is favored in lengthy poems. "Paradise Lost", Milton's masterpiece, is an example, and the contrast of blank verse's dignity in the hands of Milton compared to the sing-songy annoyance of Alexander Pope's long rhymes shows the advantage of blank verse for sustained reading.

I also admire Frost's restrained use of iambic pentameter. He uses enough variation to prevent the "iambic bongos" effect. The poem offers enough structure to make it hold together, but not so much that the structure dominates the poem.

This poem shows Frost's mastery of dialogue. Notice that you learn enough about Silas to understand the poignancy of his visit without having either of the speakers launch into an improbable biographical narrative. The husband and wife speak naturally to each other about their visitor, and the husband sets the scene by explaining the source of his disapproval before the wife explains that .

For me, the section that stands out is:

'Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.'
'I should have called it
Something you somehow haven't to deserve.'

Perhaps Frost was speaking of his own careful use of words and their placement when he wrote:

He thinks if he could have another chance
To teach him how to build a load of hay --'
'I know, that's Silas' one accomplishment.
He bundles every forkful in its place,
And tags and numbers it for future reference,
So he can find and easily dislodge it
In the unloading. Silas does that well.
He takes it out in bunches like big birds' nests.

There are learned analyses of this poem - probably even a few University theses. But, for me, the length and conversational tone relax me far too much to engage in such a dissection. I particularly enjoy listening to Robert Frost himself read this poem - you can find an audio file of him doing so at this wonderful archive.