POEMS, POETS, POETRY

An Introduction
and Anthology

Helen Vendler
HARVARD UNIVERSITY

&
Bedford Books of Sr. Martin's Press
Boston
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Acknowledgments
:L
Sherman Ale.vie, "EvuLuticm1 and Rjiservati-oti Love S6*ig" reprinted (font Tin
if Frintydniitltig © 1992 by Shertnati Alexte, by permission ol 1 l.my-
ing Loose Press "On die Am trait from Bosto n to New York City" reprinted
from Fir.9 Indian en rfn- Afiwrr © 1993 by Sherman Alexic, by permission oi
Hanging Loose Press,
Elizabeth Alexander, "Nineteen" and "Ode" from 77ie Venus Ht&tnirt, by Eliza
herb Alexander, Used by permission of the University Press of Vtrgiili.1
Paula Gunn Allen, "Zen Americana" reprinted from Coyotes Daylight I dp. Albu
Ljuerique: I .a Confluent' t.i Press, & 1978. Reprinted hy permission til die
author.
jichtUndfÿgnttHIS and Copyrights are conUrttied at flit hath ef flrr initdf. (m VOgtS 6dO 7
udncti AuJjfifltfi arr rxH’jUran if the Copyright po\te. It is ct violoticm eftIlf law to irpppdrrcd'
these sekttiotts l>y any IMCUFIU u-h otsotvtri without the written permission < f the copyright
holdn
 Preface:
About This Book

This book offers ways to read and understand poems with the
pleasure they deserve. Its nine chapters in Part I approach the poem from
various directions, in the conviction that any artwork invites consider¬
ation from different perspectives. Chapter 1, "The Poem as Life/' uses
several short poems to show how a poetic utterance springs from a
—
life-moment sometimes a private one (falling in love), sometimes a
public one (the decline of an aristocracy). Chapter 2, “The Poem as
Arranged Life," considers the same poems that appear in Chapter 1 , but
this time treats them as arrangements, rather than as utterances; it asks
why the poem takes the imaginative shape it does, and how its elements
have been ordered. In Chapter 3, "Poems as Pleasure," aspects of poetry'
that give pleasure are mentioned and illustrated: formal aspects such as
rhythm and rhyme, of course, but also construction and images; the¬
matic aspects such as poignancy and wisdom, too, but in addition to
these an individual personal language proper to each poet. Chapter 4,
"Describing Poems,” and Chapter 5, “The Play of Language," suggest
some useful ways of describing poems — by the class of poems they
belong to, by the little plots they act out through grammar and syntax,
by the speech acts they engage in. by the agents they choose to do the
work of the poem, and so on.
Chapter ft, "Constructing a Self/’ moves on to the psychological
world of the poem. Since each poem is a fictive speech by an imagined
speaker, how does the author make that speaker convincing? How is a

v
vl PREFACE: ABOUT THIS lioot

credible self constructed on the page? The more abstract lyric self of
Chapter ft — un gendered, of tio specified age or race, of no determined
—
country ‘is contrasted, in Chapter 7, "Poetry and Social Identity,”
with the lyric self which is socially marked, as we encounter a speaker
making clear her sex, or his race, or his age, or her sexual orientation.
Our sense of the purpose and the audience of a poem depends to a great
extent on how the self of the speaker is defined. Chapter fl, "History and
Regionally,11 takes up the topics of time and space — the two great axes
—
on which all literature turns as they apply to lyric poetry . And finally,
in Chapter 9, "Attitudes, Values, Judgments,” the largest questions we

can put to a literary work

— — questions about its attitudes, values, and
judgments are raised and discussed with respect to some crucial ex¬
amples, old and new.
Each of these chapters takes up several poems by way of illustra¬
tion, and each is followed by a section called “Reading Other Poems"
that introduces a small group of poems which can be usefully read in the
light of that chapter. These arc usually short poems, and range from the
canonical to the recent. The anthology of Part II that follows these nine
—
chapters is intended to provide a wide sampling -more than 250 po¬
—
ems from the literature of lyric, including some poems longer and
more complex than those cited in the chapters. Arranged alphabetically
by author, the anthology includes poems by more than a hundred poets,
many of them represented in significant depth so as to suggest the range
of an individual poet’s work. Finally, my appendices on prosody, gram¬
mar, speech-acts, rhetorical devices, and lyric subgenrei exist to provide
further illustration of points taken up substantively hut not exhaustively
in individual chapters. They can help consolidate and extend — when
—
assigned as home reading the demonstrations given in class,
also prepared a brief instructor’s manual in which I discuss some of the
I have

issues of teaching poetry and suggest exercises that have, over the years,
helped mv students understand and appreciate poetry. The manual also
comments on most of the poems in Part I that are not discussed in the
text’s nine chapters.

Acknowledgments

I'd like to thank ail the reviewers who helped improve this book
by the IT detailed and incisive Suggestions, among them Charies Allied,
University of California, Uerkeley; Paul Fry, Yale University; Vincent
U. Leitch, Purdue University; Jcrcdith Memn, Ohio State University;
Robert Phillips, University of Houston; David Softcld, Amherst College;
 PkthAct: An our THIS BOOK vii

Susan Schweik, University of California, Berkeley; and George Stadc,

Columbia University. 1 am grateful to Charles Christensen, joan Fein-
berg, and Stephen Scipione at liedford Honks for their interest in this
project, for their intuition about the shape it might take, and for their
alert editorial guidance. ] would also like to thank Elizabeth Schajf, Ann
Sweeney, Laura Arcari, Mark Rcimold, Alanya Harter, Maria Ascher,
Bill McKenna, and Stasia Zomkowski, I was assisted throughout by my
graduate assistant, Nick Halpem, now of North Carolina State Univer¬
sity, and by my administrative assistant, Susan Welby. Finally, I want to
express my warmest gratitude to Sylvan l!a met, who first suggested )
write such a book, who had faith in its completion, and who selflessly
read, as a friend, every word. His detailed comments were invaluable;
and his patient counsel, in the ups and downs of revision, was appreci¬
ated more than he will ever know and more than I can ever say.
r
 About Poets
and Poetry

Poets possess two talents: one is imagination, the other is a mastery

of language. Many people, writers and nonwriters alike, see the world
imaginatively: to accompany such people to a party or an exhibition or
a play is to see the event more keenly and more vividly than one might
have done atone. The world takes on more color; things art seen from
a new slant; events are freshly interpreted and highlighted: a vivacity of
response is summoned up. With one sort of imaginative person, every¬
thing is seen more darkly: the guests at the party seem trivial, grotesque;
the exhibition is tragic; the play is an emblem of despair. In the company
of an imaginative person of a different son, we see the world, as the
cliche ha? it, through rose-colored glasses: people seem better, the world
kinder, the cause for optimism stronger. In short, imaginative people
have the gift of making others see the world as they see it- And as the
poet Wallace Stevens put it, “Things seen are things as seen,"
While many imaginative people are content to let their sense of the
world, conveyed through conversation, vanish as they speak, writers feel
compelled to set down their perceptions in writing. Writers often see the
imagination, as Stevens saw it, as a “third planet." Just as a given scene
bolts one way in sunlight, another way in moonlight, so it looks yet a
third way in the light of the imagination. "There's a certain slant of
light." says Emily Dickinson; "In this blue light, 1 can take you there,"
prom iscsj one Graham in "San Scpolcrcr." That is the implicit invitation

be
 ABOUT POETS AND POETKY

offered by all 'writers: (hat you will sec things in a new light, the light of
their construction of the world,
—
We read imaginative works whether epic, fiction, drama, or
poetry — in order to gain a wider sense of the real. Our hunger to know
the world, bom with us and eager in childhood, finds one of its chief
satisfactions in learning about the responses of others. Of course we are
pleased to learn that others share our views, but we are also keenly
interested to find out that others see the real differently from ourselves.
This is partly a matter of temperament (say. mournful versus humorous),
partly a matter of experience (male VCTSUS female, young versus old),
partly an accidental matter of what happens in a writer’s historical epoch
(war versus peace) Some forms of literature (we can call them the social
genres), such as epic, fiction, and drama, make us look at the wide
pan urama of a social group
— a nation, a village, a family. Though all of
the social genres used to be written in poetry (Milton. Chaucer, Shake¬
speare), nowadays the social world is usually observed through prose,
We know one America through the eyes of Herman Melville, another
through Edith Wharton, yet another through Ralph Ellison. Each of
them induces us to live for a while in the light of a fresh imagining of
the United States. And in addition to an imaginative view of America,
each of these writers has a mastery oflanguage
— Melville's encyclope¬
dic and torrential language of whaling, Wharton's fastidious language of
social difference, and Ellison’s brooding and intense intellectual language
of the "invisible man."
But besides the narrative and dramatic social genres, there exists the
large body of poetry we call lyric. Lyric is the genre of private life: it is
what we say to ourselves when we are alone. Thee may be an addressee
m lyric (God, or a beloved), but the addressee is always absent. (The
dramatic monologue, a form Browning made famous, has a silent ad¬
dressee on stage, but this is the exception to the rule of the absent
addressee.) In a way, imagination is at its most unfettered in lyric because
the writer need not give a recognizable portrait of society, as the novelist
or dramatist must, Liecause the lyric represents a moment of inner med¬
itation, it is relatively short, and always exists in a particular place

— —
"here” and a particular time "now.” It may speak about the there
and then, but it speaks about them from the here and now. It lets us into
—
the innermost chamber of another person's mind, and makes us privy to
what he or she would say in complete secrecy and safety, with none to
overhear.
The diary is the nearest prose equivalent to the lyric, but a diary is
seen by a reader as the words of another person, whereas a lync is meant
to be spoken by its reader as if the reader were the one uttering the
 ABOUT I’ O E T S \HD POETRY si

words. A lync poem is script for performance by its reader. It is, then,
the most ultimate of genres, constructing a rwinship between writer and
reader. And it is the most uni versa! of genres, because it presumes that
that reader resembles the writer enough to step into the writer’s shoes
and speak the lines the writer has written as though they were the
reader’s own:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry ] could not travel both
And he one traveler, long ! stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

— ROBERT FROST, "Tht Road Not T liter11

To read these tines is to be transformed into the hesitating speaker. We

do not listen to him; we become him,
Sometimes, of course, the speaker is more narrowly specified, as a
certain type ot person or even as an individual. Yet even when there is
3 clear disparity of personal character as when I, a twentieth -century
white American woman, am reading Idake's lyric spoken by a little black
boy in eighteenth century England — the lyne poet expects that t Will
put myself into the subject-position of the little black boy, and make the
boy's words my own. Though some theorists have suggested that wc
“overhear” the speaker of lync (making lyric into a kind of mono-drama
of which we arc the audience), it is more often true that I do not, as a
disinterested spectator, overhear the lyric speaker; rather, the words of
die speaker become my own words. This imaginative transformation of
selt is what is offered to ns by the lync.
Because lyric is a short form (unlike the epic or The verse-tale), it
must be more concise than narrative or drama. Every word has to count.
So does every gap. fit fact, lyric depends on gaps, and depends even
more on the reader to fill in the gaps. It is suggestive rather than ex¬
haustive. As the poet W. B. Yeats said in a !925 letter, referring to
(but perhaps with lus own writing ot lyric in mind), “Tell a little
A' Jit' is Hamlet; tell all & he is nothing. Nothing has life except the
incomplete. In the following pages, suggestions are made on how to go
11

about exploring a lyric, in order to fill in us gaps and make the most of
its hints, so that the course of its emotions can be understood ill their full
subtlety.
Even though lyric sometimes makes greater demands on us than do
the more explicit genres, a poem always (if it is successful) attracts us
enough to make us willing to bear with it while wc try to understand it
 xii ABOUT POETS AND POETRY

better. A poem, said Coleridge, can communicate while it is still im¬

perfectly understood. It can communicate because it exhibits a mastery
of language, in addition to an imaginative sense of the world. We are
drawn in by words used in unusual anti compelling ways — ways that
appeal to the senses of sight and hearing and bodily tension as well as to
the mind. Wt are also drawn in by the architecture of the poem — the
manner in which its parts are arranged, so is 10 make a structure that
reflects emotional intensity. We are drawn in by its volatility and its
surprising resources of strategy. And finally, we arc drawn in because
every poem enters into a continuing conversation with its culture —
querying it, amplifying it. rebelling against it. subverting it, aestheticiz-
ing it, enhancing it. Robert Frost, in "‘The Gift Outright,1' says that
when the English came to the American continent, they found a land
"still utisToried, artless, un enhanced,1' Our present anthropological
awareness means that no twentieth-century poet could think of the
America ot the Puritans as “uns toned” or "artless": the various and
widespread Natn-c American cultures had already covered the American
continent with stories and with arts. The aim of every artist, then and
now. is to contribute those stories, that art, and enhancement that will
endow both place and time with significance.
Lyric has recently undergone, in the United States, many signifi¬
cant changes. T we ntieth -century America is a far more heterogeneous
country than pre twentieth century England, and contemporary Amer¬
ican lyric naturally reflects its own culture atid epoch. The availability of
translations means that an American poet is now almost as likely to be
influenced by a [Jo3isb or South American poet — Czeslaw iVlilosz or
b.ihlo Neruda as by all English or American poet Lyric Speakers are
more ready to define themselves sexually, ethnically, or racially; vet lyric
still hopes for the reader's willingness to place himself or herself in the
writer's subject-position, Because the dominant influence on a medium
is always the medium itself as it has existed through time, the dominant

influence on English language verse is still English as it has been used by

preceding poets. That is why one is unlikely to read contemporary
poetry well without having read thy poetry of England from which it
descends. I he selections here are all in English (lyric poetry being no¬
toriously untranslatable) and art' divided be tweed poems that have stood
up well over time, and other, more recent poems which, while they may
reflect some long-corn in uing concerns in American life (racism, war,
religious faith) also take on new modes, in both content (Adrienne
••
Rich’s feminism, W. S. Merwin's ecological concern) and style [the
reticence ot Elizabeth Bishop, the dream-idiom ofjohn Berryman, the
"'snapshots" of Robert Lowell),
r
 ABOUT POETS AND POETRY xiiL

Like ii L arts, lyric is meant to give pleasure imaginative, linguis¬

tic, intellectual, and moral. If one hasn't enjoyed a poem and been
moved by it, one hasn't really experienced it as an artwork, There arc
moments m hie when one poem suit; and another doesn’t. The poems
in fliis book will not invariably please everybody, because each of US
brings a unique life -experience, and a different expectation of art, to the
page. Nonetheless, many of these poems have won and kept readers
because in them readers have found the most moving revelation of
all— that of their own inner life, enacted in words adequate to both
sorrow and joy. The rule of thumb for the encounter with any art is to
dwell on what moves you or gives you pleasure, and skip over, for the
time being, what leaves you cold. Hue il you remember that someone.
somewhere; has been fiercely attracted by each of these poems, you may¬
be willing to give the ones you first neglect a second chance. Often, a
door that has been shut can open marvelously at the second knock.
i.
 Contents

Preface: About This Book v

About Poets and Poetry ix

Part I
Poems, Poets, Poetry;
An Introduction 1

I. The Poem as Life 3

The Private Life 4
WILLIAM BLAKE, Infant 4
LOUISE GLUCK, V\e Srirtm/ Children 4
L. L. CUMMINGS, in just —
WALT WHITMAN, Hours Continuing Long fi
EUMUNO W.M.I r.R, Of rhr lÿisr koss-j in the 7

The Public Life S

MICHAEL HARPER, American History S
CHARLES SJMIC. Old Couple 9
ROBERT LOWELL, Hour 9
Nature and Time 11
ANONYMOUS, Vie Cuckoo Song II
DAVF SMITH. The Spring Poem 12

xv
XVi CONTENTS

JOHN KEATS. The Human Seasoÿu 12

WilLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Sonnet 60 (lake ar tltr Liwff mtfer tcward the
pebbled .TJifJifJ <i

lit Brief: The Poem as Life U

Reading Other Poems 14
. Stft. THOMASWYATT, They FSee From Me 15
JOHN MILTON, Orr the Life Moffaae in Piedmont 16
BEN JONSON, On My Firaf Son 16
JOHN KEATS, I-Wit’H l Flaw Feats, 17
EMILY DICKINSON, A rumour Fellow in ffie Crcrjr 17
LANGSTON HUGHES. Theme for tngtiih fi
ROBERT HAYDEN, Those IVbiter Sundays 19
DYLAN THOMAS, DO ,VO t Co Gentle into Drttr Gtnnf JViflftj 19
SYLVIAPLATHT Daddy 20
RITA DOVE, Flash Cards 23
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA, Faring /[ 23

2. The Poem as Arranged Life 25

The Private Life 25
WILLIAM BLAKE. Infant Joy 26
WILLIAM BI-AKE.. Infant Somno 26
LOUISE GLUCK, Ihe School Children 30
E. E. CUMMINGS, in Just —
33
WALT WHITMAN, Hour* Continuing l-emg 35
EDMUND WALLER, Qf the LMSI Venes in the Rook 37
The Public Life 41
MICHAEL HARPER, American History 41
CHARLES SIMIC, Old Couple 42
ROJIERT LOWELL. Shuttle Hour 44
Nature and lime 47
ANONYMOUS, fire Cuckoo Song 47
DAVE SMITH, The Spring Poem 48
JOHN KEATS, 7TJE Human Seasons 49
Wll l-IAM Si i AK rspr AH I , Swrtfl 60 (Like a;, the MWPK mate ftwaini the
pebbled shore) 51
In Brief: The Poem as Arranged Life Si

Heading Other Pocmf 54

ANONYMOUS, Utrd Randal 55
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, dinner 29 fHhen in disgrace with fortune and
rtitn's eyes / 56
 C- ONTE Tv rs Xvii

CmOlOCK TH HftOANE, Tithbonie's Elegy S7

JOHN tiQMN!:,
H Vaiediftictt: Torbiddhtg Mtvmtmg 51
ROBERT HERRICK, UponjwlWs Clothes 53
-"GEORGE HERBERT, LSW (HI) 59
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 1 Wnm!e red Lonely As a Cloud 59
jOl J N KfiATS, IAI Belli £>amf sarii Merti 6tt
WALT WHITMAN. A NofetlfiS Patient Spider 61
EMILY DICKINSON, Btceittse 1 Soutd not stop jot Death
THOMAS HARDY, The C?t f of the Twain
—
65
62

ROBERT FROM. 77if Rond Not Taken 64

LoljrSt ERDRICH, 1 Pindigo 61

3. Poems as Pleasure 67
Rhythm 63
Rhyme 72
13EN JONSON, On Ctti 74
Structure 16
WILLIAM CARLOS WILI IAMK, Rwrr
GWENDOLYN BROOKS, We. Rent (fool 19
linages 81
WILLIAM BLAKE, lÿndon 32
Argument S3
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, The Auininiiic Shepherd m His IA? V? 33
fsJK WAITER RAU-.CII, Ihr Xymph’s Reply so the Shepherd 84
Poignancy $S
WILL [AM WORDSWORTH, A iJumiifr did my spirit seal 85
Wisdom 86
A New language

Finding Yourself 88
Lu Brief: Poems as Pleasure 89
Reading Other Poems 89
WltUAM SI IAKJ SI-I ARI , .SVIHIT 130 {My unstress' eyes .m1 uothipr; like
the am) 91
Kf>[SE3i.T HERRICK. TO the Virgins, fo AM-e AfuJj of Tout 91
WILLIAM BLAKE, 7he Siik Rose 92
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 77IC Solitary keaÿr 92
. GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS, Pied Ihauty 93
THOMAS HARDV, The Darkling TIIJHJII 93
xviii CONTENTS

D, H LAWRENCE, Bavarian Geminiis SN

THEODORE ROETHKE, JMfjp Papa's Waltz 95
Wit J.IAM CAR i.os WILLIAMS, The Dance 95
DEREK WALCOTT, Die Season of Phantasmal Peace 96
LUCIE BROCK-BROI.DO, Domestic Mysticism 97
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER, Nineteen 9B

4, Describing Poems 101

Poftic Kinds 101
Narrative verm* Lyric; Narrative in Lyric 101
ADRIENNE RICH, Necessities of Life 102
PHILIP LARKIN, Talking in Bed 104
Classifying Lyric Poems 105
Content Genres 105
EMILY DICKINSON, 77u> Heart asks Pleasure —first — 106
Speech Acts 108
CARL SANDBURG, Ctaa 1 10
Outer Form 111
Line-Width m
Rhythm 112
Poem Length 11}
Combinatorial Form-Names II?
Inner Structural Fomt 115
Sentences 114
ROBERT HERRKIK, TTH Argument of His Book 114

Petson 115
Agency 116
RANDALL JARRELL, Tire Death of the Ball Turret Gunner 1 16

Tenses 11 7
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, A jfrmbcr did my spirit seat ill
Images, or Sensual Words IJS
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON, Ntu> TngLmd 1 1B
Exploring a Poem 119
JOHN KEATS. On First Loefcrriÿ ime Chapman's Hornet 119
 CONTENTS xix

In Brief: Describing Poems 12S

Heading Other Poems 129
GEOFLGE HERBERT, Faster Wing} 130
WiLiiA.M SHAKESPEARE. Scmkit 129 (Th' expense of spirit J'C a was rr of
shame) 131
ANDREW MARVELL, 71rf Carden 131
. JOHN MILTON, When / Considet Hun' My Lijjlir It Spent 133
JOHN KEATS, Ode to a A/jÿlrtrpiipTli* 134
. MATTHEW ARNOLD, DOW Bench 136
ROBERT FROST, Metufyg Walt 13 7
EZRA POUND, TJir Rh'er-Mtrchatit’i Wife, a Letter 139
MARK STRAND, Courtship 140
SEAMUS HEANEY, From the Frontier of Writing 140
JORIE GRAHAM, Strn Sepofero 141
SHERMAN ALEX'IE, Evolution 142

5. The PJay of Language 145

Sound Units 145
Word Roots 146
Words 147
Sentences 14 7
k-OHFRT FROST. hy Woods on a Snoury Everting 14S
EMILY DICKINSON, The Heart asks Pleasure -first— —150
implication 150
The Ordering of Language 152
GEORGE HERBERT, Prayer (l) 152
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Sonnet 66 {Tired u>ith nil these, for restful death I
cry) 153
MICHAEL DRAYTON. Stmt [/inYJj no help 155
In Brief; The Play of language 15?
Reading Other Poems 1 J?
JOHN DONNE, Holy AJPIHN 14 (Halter nay heart, three-persoiied Cod; for
You ) 160
GEOILGE HERBERT, Redemption 161
JOHN KEATS, To Autumn 161
ROBERT BROWNING, My Lan Duchess 162
HENRY REED, Naming of Parti 164
WILL [AM DUJLER YEAIS, 77ir Wild at Cook 165
WALLACE SI EVENS. The Ethptme of Ict'Cnam 165
xx CONI tsTi

H. D., Oread 166

E. E, CUMMIMCS, r-p-o-p-tl'e-s-s-a-g-r 166
ELIZABETH BISHOP, One An 16 7
JOJ-1N BERRYMAN, fn td, & t«JJ add 167
LORN A DEE CERVANTES, Poenta pant ios Californio? Xluertos 168

6. Constructing a Sdf 171

Multiple Aspects 171
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, SCFFFIN .10 fVMint to iht' ststierns oi sitvei silent
thought) 172
Change of Discourse 173
Space and Time 174
SEAMUS HEANEY, Mid-Ttrm Broth 174
Testimony 175
Motivations 176
Typicality 1 76
Tone AS Marker of SeBhood 177
GF.RARD MANLEY HOPKINS, Spring and Pall 178
imagination 180
EMILY DICKINSON', 1 heard J Fly buzz — itdien 1 dird — 18)

Persona
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, Crazy Jane Talks with tkt Bishop 186
In Brief: Constructing a Self 188
Reading Other Poems 188
JOHN DRY DEN, Sytad the Fair I90
WALT WHITVIAN, I $mv in Lsititiarui n Live-Oak Grentiug 191
EMILY DIOR IN SON, T»\ Xobodyl IHIA iirc you ? 191
WH-LLAM BUTLER YEAIS, An irr.Jj Airman Foitrtrt His DTHFIJ 192
THOMAS HARDY. Ihe Ruined Maid 192
T. S. ELIOT, The Love Song of f Alfred Pr>froth 193
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, TO Elsie 197
COUrflT.E CULLLN, Heritage 19<J
MARIANNE MOORE, TO a 5IMBI Roller 202
ELIZABETH BISHOP, Crusoe TFJ England 202
AN N E SEXTON. Her Kin <1 20 7
CHARLES WRioMT, Self- Portrait 208
CARL PHILLIPS, Afrits Says 208
 CONTENTS If 1C 1

7, Poetry and Social Identity 211

ADRIENNE RICH, Mothti-tn-Law 212
ADRIENNE RICH, Prospective Immigrants Please Note 216
LANGSTON HUGHES, Genius Child 219
LANGSTON HUGHES, Me and the Mule 220
LANGSTON HUGHES* H$I U> LOW 221
SEAMUS HEANEY. Ttrminut 222
In Brief: Poetry and Social Identity 225
Reading Other Poems 225
ROBERT SOUTHWELL., The Ruming Rake 226
THOMAS NASHE, A Utany itr TTmr of Plague 227
JOHN MILTON, TO the Lord General Cntmuell 228
ANNE BRADSTREET, A Letter to Her Husband Absent upon Public
Employment 229
WILLIAM BLAKE. The Little Bleak fay 229
EDWARD LEAR, HOW Pleasant to Mr. Lear 230
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS, Felix Randal 231
SYLVIA PLAT H, The Applicant 232
G-ARKT-i'! HONGO, Iht Hongo Store / 29 A-Ji/ej lÿdcano f Hilo, Hawaii
233
DAVID MURA, An Argument: On 1942 234
RITA DOVE, Wingfoot Lethe 234

8. History and Regionality 237

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, A sluntbet did my spirit seal 237
History 238
HERMAN MELVILLE, TJIC Maidr rntc yitgfrtia 239
ROBERT LOWELL, The March 1 241
LANGSTON HUGHES, World Wat II 243
WILFRED OWEN, Duke Et Decorum Est 245
Region all ty 246
SHERMAN ALEXIE, On the AmtraSe from Hilton to New York City 247
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, Composed upon Westminster Bridge,
Sfyirfmijff 3, 1802 250
In Brief History and Regionally 251
Reading Other Poems 252
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLI-RIDGI;. Kuhla Khan 253
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. Unrs Composed a Few Miles nivur Titftom
Abbey on Aa&jriig flic fajjfef of the Wye During a Tour 255
xxii CONTENTS

JOHN KEATS, Ode on a Grecian Uni 259

WALT WHITMAN, Whtn Lilaa Last w the Deotyjtd Biootn'd 260
WILLIAM SUTLER YEATS, Easter 1916 268
W'ALLACE STEVENS, Anecdote of the Jar 270
ROBERT LOWELL, For the Union Dead 270
ELIZABETH BISHOP, BrazHj-JatiHary f. 1502 273
ROBERT HAYDEN, Night, Death. Mississippi 2 74
wr. S M ERWIN, Fhe Asians Dj'iiiJ 275
l)!-m:K WALCOTT, The
Gulf 276
SIMON J. ORTIZ, Betid in the Rii>er 279
JOKIE GRAHAM, Wltat the End h For 280

9, Attitudes, Values, Judgments 28.J

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Sonnet 76 /\\Oiy is my verse so barren of ntu>
pride 7) 285
ROBERT LOWELL, Epilogue 288
hi Brief: Attitudes, Values, Judgments 292
Reading Other Poems 292
/JOHN MELTON, Lyeidas 293
MEN JONSON, Still to Be !\:eat 299
RICHARD LOVELACE, TO Litas to, Cain# to the 299
ElIZAHii lll BARRFTT IIROWNENC, i /liij- DI> I Love Thee? 299
WALT WHITMAN, It-'lfrri / Fkard the Leam'd Astronomer 300
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, Mem 300
ROBINSON JEFFERS, SJii«e, Perishing Republic 301
ROBERT FROST, 7lir Gift Ontnght 301
ALLEN GINSBERG, Sunflenm Sutra 302
l OOlSE GLUCK, Mock Orange m
RITA DOVE, Pjrcfry 305
MICHAEL S. WEAVER. TTtf Picnic, on Homage to Civil Rights 30 7

Part ll
Anthology 309

ELIZABETH ALEXANDER, Ode 311

SHERMAN ALEXIE, Kfitwrifien Love Song 311
I’AIJI.A G L'NEJ Al.LKN, Zrrr Americana 312
A It, AMMONS, TTJC City hmits 313
A. R. AMMONS, finjfrr Mewing 313
ANONYMOUS, Sit [‘titriik Spins 316
ANONYMOUS, Western Wind 317
 eoN TeN i xxiii

MAI THEW ARNOLD, ShalAcspt&f 317

MATTHEW Te Marguerite
ARM 0U>, 318
JOHN ASHBERY, 7?rr ftn’«r<r $19
JOHN ASHESERY, Paradoxes and OA7fir(tf(«rs 320
JOHN ASHBERY, Street Musicians 320
W. H. AUDEN, AS 1 Walked Out One Evening 321
W- I t. AUDEN, MuSec des Beaux Arts 322
JOHN BERRYMAN, Dream Sang -I 323
JOHN BERRYMAN, Dream Sang 45 324
JOHN BERRYMAN, Dream Song 384 324
PRANK BIDARI, Ellen Weft 325
FRANK BIHART. TO My father 334
ELrzAfjETH BTSHOP, At the Fiskhouses 335
ELIZABETH BISHOP, TTir Fish 337
ELIZABETH BISHOP, Poem 339
ELIZABETH BISHOP. Satina 341
WILLIAM BLAKE, Ah Sun-flower 342
W ILIIAM BLAKE, TJnf fkstien of Ltnt 342
W 11.11AM HL.AKE, TV Lamh 342
WILLIAM BLAKE, The Tyger 343
MICHAEL BLUMENTHAL , A Marriage 344
MICHAEL BLUMENTHAL, Wishful Thinking 344
LUCIE BROCK-BROIDQ, panowmore 345
EMILY BRONTE, NO Coward Sou! U .'time 346
EMILY BRONTE, Remembrance 347
GWENDOLYN BROOKS., 'Hie BMPI Eaters 348
GWENDOLYN BROOKS, Kitchenette Building 348
GWENDOLYN BROOKS. Ihe Mother 349
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. From Sotineit from the Portuguese
1 (I though/ how OPIIY Theocritus had sung) 350
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. A Musical Instrument 350
Roililkl H ROW NINO, Childe Roland to the Dari; Tower Cams 351
ROBERT BROWNING, Memorabilia 358
ROBERT BURNS, O, Wert "/IriiJH u-r the Could Blast 358
ROBERT BURNS, A Red, Red Rose 359
GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON, She Walks in Beauty 359
GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON, When We TH*> Parted 360
LORNA UEE. CT-RV ANTES. Poem for the Young Write Man Wlto Asked Mt
Hi’iu /, An Intelligent, ItVA-Rcmi Person Could Believe in rhe H:rr
Bfiutffff Races 361
LORNA DEE CERVAN I ES, Refugee Ship 362
MARILYN CHIN, Altar 363
MARILYN CHIN, Autumn Isores 363
AMY Cl-AMPITT. A Procession at Candlemas 364
JOHN Cl ARE. Badger 368
ixiv CoNTiN rs

JOHN CLARE, First Lane 369

JOHN CLARE, i AM 3 ?l>
HENRI COLE. 40 Days and 40 Nights 370
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERJDGE, Dejection: An Ode 172
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE., 'Ihr /time of the Ancient Maiinet 316
W II.LIAM COWi:n, Hie Castaway 393
WILLIAM COWFER, Epitaph on a Haro 393
HART CRAN'E, 77jf lirnheir Tenner 396
MART CRANE, TO Brooklyn Bridge 397
ROBERT CREEL EY, A Marriage 393
COUNT LE CULLEN, Incident 399
EL E, ClHMtMiS, anyone fired J'FF JI pretty lii'U' town 399
E E. CUMMINGS, may I feel mid he 400
EMU Y [)l( KIWON, After great pain, a format feeling tomes - 401
EMILY DICKINSON, Tht Brain is wider than the Shy
EMILY DICKINSON, / like a boh of Agony
— 402
402
EM]| Y Dit KI.NM in, Aljk'i Madness is dininest Sense 402
EMILY DICKINSON, Mfy. Life had stood — a Loaded Gun — 403
EMILY DICKINSON, Safe IFF their Alabaster Chdfrtfacrs — il859i 403
EMIIY DICKINSON. Stt/e IFF ifcffr Alabaster Gfittmlrcn - (1861) 404
EMILY DICKINSON, Success is counted sweetest 404
EMILY DICKINSLIN) The Soul selects her own Society — 404
EMILY DICKINSON, TJfrrr'i a certain Slant of light 403
EMILY DICKINSON, Wild Mights
D-O.NM:,
— Wild Mights!
406
405
IOJJIS The Cpnotjiiatiort
JOHN DONNE, Death, be riot proud 407
JOHN I>ONNE, TJJF SH/I Rising 407
RITA DOVE, Adoitnerve H — 403
RITA DOVE, Dusting 409
JOHN DRYDEN, TO the Memory of Mt. Oldham 410
PAUI l.AURENOE DUNBAR, Harriet Bceehir Stowe 410
PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR. Robert Could Shaw 41!
PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR, We Wtar the Mask 41 1
T. S. !ii IOT. Manna 412
T" . S ELIOT, Preludes 413
T. S. El IOT, Sweeney among the Nightingales 4 15
RAI.|J]I WAI.IJO EMERSON, Concord Hymn 416
ICALINI WALDO EMERSON. 71ir 416
LOUISE EEUJRICH, / l Via Sleeping Where the Black Oaks More 417
LOUISE ERDIUCH, The Strange People 418
ROBERT FROST. Birdies 4 19
ROBERT FROST. Design 421
JAMES GALVIN, Independence Day, 1956: .-I Fair) Tale 421
A] .LEA GlNSBIKO, Arneriia 422
I.OUJSI Cl 0('K. All Halim* 425
 CON ]' t N rs XXV

LOUISE GLUCK* Tfrr White Ulitt 126

JOP.IE GRAHAM, Of Toned Sightes and Trusty Frrefaincss 426
JOKIE GRAHAM, SI)H7
Sdyj 428
THOMAS GRAY, Elegy Wrinm in a Gtsmtry Cffutrliyard 428
THOM GUNN, The JW<S» with N%hi SUTBÿ 432
THOM GUNN, My 5niJ Captains 433
H- U., Helen 433
THOMAS I TARDY, Afterwards 434
THOMAS HARDY , Channel Firing 435
JOY HARJO, Santa Ft 436
MICHAEL HARPER. NtjjJffwiiirr Regiwi ResponsMhty 436
ROBERT I IAYD-EN, Frederick Douglass 437
ROBERT HAYDEN, Mounting Poem for the Queen of Sunday 438
SEAMUS HEANEY, Boglaud 439
SEAMUS HEANEY, Punishment; 439
GEORGE HERBERT. TTZC C,>Mn.r 441
GEORUE HERBERT. Redemption 442
ROBERT HERRICK, Comma's Going A-Maying 442
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS, Cod’s Grandeur 444
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS, \O nvrcf, there IJ uw. Piuhtd past pitch
of grief 444
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS, The WiMUioiw 44S
A. K. HOUSMAN, ijJiWj'rjr of Trees, the Chen-)' JYJLT' 445
A. E, HOUSMAN, With Rue My Heart Is Luieti 446
LANTSTON HUGHES, Harlem 446
LANGSTON HUGHES, I, Too 446
LANGSTON HUGHES, Suidde's Note 44 7
LANGSTON HUGHES, The Weary Blues 44 7
BEN JON SON, Came, My Celia 448
UEN JONSON, TO the Memory of Afj1 Belotied, the ,ÿjdfJi,pr Afr. 11 ilhnm
Shakespeare 448
JOHN KEATS, In drew nigh ted December 451
JOHN KEATS. Ort Silting Dcmm to Rd’.idf Kinÿ Ltÿr t'Jpjfc Hÿufpd 431
JOHN KEATS, 77]ÿ LhArtg Hand 452
ETHERIDGE KNIGHT, A potmfor Myself{Or Blues for a Mississippi Blink
Boy} 4 92
KENNETH KOCH. Variations on ri Theme by William GinJoj Williams
453
YUSEH KOMUNYAKAA, Boat People 453
YUSEE KOMUNY.AKAA, A/}1 J,'u|,Jpd,r',T LwfJflKrs 454
PHILIP LARKIN, High Windwvf 455
PHILIP I-ARKIN. Mr Bleaney 456
PHILIP LARKIN, Reasons for Attendance 456
PHILIP LARKIN, 7?ru Be The Verse 457
D, H LAWRENCE. lire English .-l r,1 So Nice! 45 7
xxvi Co\ r t N l s

DENISE LKVERTCJV, 77ic Athe of Marriage 458

DEMISE LEVERTOV, 0 Taste and See 459
Li-Young LF.E. The Interrogation 459
HENRY WAJISWOR-TH LoNGFliU-OW, Aftermath 461
HENRY WADSWORTH I .OMC FELLOW, 77tf Jett>iih Cemetery at Heuyott
461
HI.NRY WADSWORTH I.ONONLI.OW, V?ir Tide R lies, the TUe Falls
463
AUDB_E Loft r>E, Hanging Fire 463
RUPERT LOWELL, Suiting Home from Rapalio 464
ARCHIBALD MACLEISH, ,4r.< Poetiea 466
ANDREW MARVELL, An Hermann Ode 466
ANDREW MARVEL L, TO His Coy Mistress 470
HERMAN MELVILLE, 77RI Beg 471
HERMAN MI.I.VII.J E, Fmgttieats of ,T J.j.r; t.rKKJlk' Poem of i he In-yl.'ii:
Century 473
HERMAN MELVILLE, Monody 473
JAMES ML-RRIII, 71rr ffreter? Home 473
JAMES MERRILL, An Upuwrd Look 476
W. S. MILL VIM. Fora Coming Extinction 4 77
W S. MERWIN, For the Anniversary of My Death 478
'JOHN MILTON, L‘ Allegro 478
JOHN Mir. TOM, On Shakespeare 482
MARIANNE MOORE, Ajffir/ 483
MARIANNE MOORE, The Steeple-fork 484
MARIANNE MOORE, TO A Snail 486
TJIYLIAS MOSJ, Luttcheouotet Freedom 486
FRANK O'HARA. AV? Maria 487
FRANK O’HARA, Wh }’ l Am Sot a Painter 488
WILFRED OWEN, Anthem for Doomed Youth 489
WILFRED OWEN, Disabled 489
CARL PHILLIPS, fVisTj'njj 491
SYLVJA 1>LA'1 H, Bladibertying 492
SYLVIA PI ATH, l.ulge 493
SYLVIA [‘LATH. Duly Lazarus 493
SYLVIA HI AI LJ, Morning Song 496
ELIIOAR AlIAN iJOL, Annabel D’f 497
EDGAR ALLAN POE, TO Helen 498
Ai EKAMDER POPE, From Art Essay on Man (Epistle 1} 498
FAR A I’oiJNlt, Jid' Garden 500
EÿHA POUND, itt <s Station of the Metro 501
SIR WALT EIL RALEGH, T7IA LKT 501
ADRIEN M RICH. Dii'inij into the Wretk 503
ADRIENNE RICH. 7 lie Middle- Aged 505
ADRIENNE RICH. Snapshots of a Doughter-inAÿm 506
 CO NT [MTS T£*vi!

ALBERTO Rios, Mi A buck 510

ALBERTO RIOS, Teodoro Lima's 7W Kisses 511
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON, Eras Taramws 512
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON, Richard Cory 513
THEODORE ROETHKT, dingy for jane 514
THEODORE ROETHKE, TJJF Welting 514
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI, Up-Hill 515
ANNE SEXTON, SH£Hÿ t l-'T'i r'ft1 and list Sewn Ehvarfs 515
Wrs.l |AM SHAKESPEARE, Fear No A/orC the Heat t)' tile $im 520
WILLIAM SHAKES HARE, Full Fathom Five 520
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Awner 18 (Shall 1 compart thee to a mmmer’i
day?) 521
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, SOINTPI 116 (Let me not to the marriage of true
minds) 521
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, England in 1819 522
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, Ode in the Wen Wind 522
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, Ozymmdiai 524
SHE PHILIP SIDNEY, From Astrvphel =JHIÿ .Strife
1 (Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show) 525
31 (With hot/1 sad steps, Oh AJURFF, tl:Oii r/iFFifc'n the
ikies) 525
LESLIE MAILMON SlIKO, Prayer to the Pacific 526
CHARLES SIMIC, Cihtiron'f Cos#o)eigy 52 1
CHARLES SIMIC, Kurt 527
CHRISTOPHER SMART, From jubilate 521
CHRISTOPHER SMART, On a Bed of Guernsey Lilies 530
DAVE SMITH, OH ,I Field Trip at Fredericksburg 531
Sr&VIE SMITH, Sat Waving but Prawning 532
STEVIE SMTTH, Prfity 532
GARY SNYDER, Axe Handles 533
GARY SNYDER, HOW Poetry CIRJIFJ to Me 5,34
GARY SNYDER, Riprap 534
'EDMUND SPENSER, Epitkalwnion 535
EDMUND SPENSER, From "Amoretti''
SiijrrPfF 75 (One day I wrote her name upon the flrand) 546
WALIAOE STEVENS, Vte Idea of Order at Key West 546
WALL ACI STEVENS. 71IF Planet en fljf Table 548
WALLACE STTVENS. TJIF Stww Man 548
WALLACE STEVENS. Sunday Morning 549
WALLACE STEVENS, rhineett ITrij'; of Looking at n Blackbird 552
MAILS SIICAND, JN 'things irliolf 554
JONATHAN SWIPT, A Description of the Morning 555
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, From hi Metnoriam A, H. H.
7 (Dari: house fy which ante mart1 1 Stand) 5 j,T
99 (Risest thou thus.dim dawn, again) ,5.S6
jucviii CONTENTS

106 (Ring out, wild bells, to rftf wild sky) 556

121 (Sad Hetper o'er the buried sun) 557
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, Tears, Idle Tears 5SS
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, Utyaes 558
DYLAN THOMAS, Fem Hill 560
DYLAN THOMAS, In My Craft or Sullen An 562
HENRY VAUGHN, They Are All Cette into the World of Light! 562
DEREK WALCOTT, RHJ'III of a Great House 564
EDMUND WALLER, 565
ROSANNA WARREN, in Cm’? Coeur, Missouri 566
JAMES WELCH, Harlem, Montana: Just Off the Reservation 567
JAMES WELCH, The Man from Washington 568
WALT WHITMAN, A Hand-Mirror 568
WALT WHITMAN, From Senj of Myself
I (1 celebrate myself,and fing myself) 569
6 tA tlrild mid, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands)
569
52 (The spotted hau>k swoops by and ateuses me, he complains of my
gab and my loitering) 570
WALT WHITMAN, Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night 571
RICHARD WILBUR, Cerraÿr Street, 1955 572
RICHARD WILBUR, Tift Writer 573
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, Landscape with the fall of lean** 573
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, TJif Raper from PdssnMrfe 575
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, Spring and AH 576
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, TTiÿ L just to Say 576
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, My Heart Leaps Up 577
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, Ode 577
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, The World is Too Much with Us 583
CHARLES WRIGHT, Laguna Bluet 583
JAMES WRIGHT, A Blessing 584
JAMES WRIGHT, Small Frogs Killed on the Highway 584
SIR THOMAS WYATT, Forget Not Yet 585
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, Among School Children 5 ft!>
WILLIAM buTLER YfcATS, Oaum by the Salley Gardens 588
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, T?te Lake Isle oflmtisfree 588
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, Leda and the 589
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, Sailing to Bytamium 589
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, The Serond Coming 590

Appendices 593
Appendix 1. On Prosody 593
Appendix 2. On Grammar 609
 CONTENTS XXIX

Appendix 3. On Speech Acts 612

Appendix 4. On Rhetorical Devices 615
Appendix 5, On Lyric Subgenres 617

Index of Terms 62 7

Index of First Lines 629

Index of Authors and Titles 637

Chronological Index 649

POEMS, POETS, POETRY

An Introduction
and Anthology
 -
i
 I

POEMS, POETS, POETRY

An Introduction
*
i
 1

The Poem as Life

Poems have their origins in ]ifer especially in the formal or informal

ceremonies that occur at crucial moments or phases in a single private
—
life birth, adolescence, marriage, death — or at public moments
when we collectively commemorate a war, a religious feast, a holiday.
Equally, poems show life lived in a spatial environment, whether im¬
mediate (one's house, one's region) or cosmic (the world, the galaxy);
they also show seasonal or ritual moments of time. The first questions to
ask of any poem are What piece ojlife, private or public, is it fomented with?
and Whew. and when is this life being Hired?
Of course, cliche haunts all the well-known and well-worn occa¬
sions oi life-. In the occasions of private life shown us hy greeting cards
or popular magazines, babies are “lovable," brides are “beautiful," fif¬
tieth wedding anniversaries are “happy'1; in the public life, cliche tells us
that young men should fight in War, that cities are thriving communities,
and that Americans should take pride in their country's history. We are
also accustomed to cliches of time and space, often hearing, for example,
that the springtime of life leads only to the narrow space of the grave. As
we trace some of these crucial aspects of life through poems, the first

—
thing to notice is how the poet manages to avoid cliche* how he or
she brings originality to the moment. We look in this chapter at a
sample of several poems, the first group representing events in private
life~ the second group chiefly taking up moments in public life, and
the third group expressing some place in space or some moment in the

3
4 THE POEM AS LIr i

natural seasons of Time. In Chapter 2 sve will look again at the same
poems, to see how they are not only representations of lift' but also
works of art.

The Private Life

"Write ,1 poem about a birth," says the culture to the poet: and
what the poet writes (speaking in the person of a newborn baby) may
shock die reader;

WILLIAM BLAKH
Inf,ml Sorrotv
My mother groaned, my father wept —
Into the dangerous world I leapt.
Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.
Struggling in my father's hands,
Striving against my swaddling bands,
Bound and weary, 1 thought test
To sulk upon my mother’s breast,

Precisely because our culture does not usually sav that a baby resembles
“a ft end hid in j cloud. ’ we find the poem arresting. It makes us >top
and think. Now let us look at the next phase of life, childhood,
The child’s first day of school is an event marked by conventional
behavior (new clothes, an apple fat the teacher, says the cliche). Louise
Gluck has written a poem about how a mother feds seeing her child go
into the power of a new authority, who triiv or may not be kind to
the child:

LOUISE GLUCK
7 lie School Children
The children go forward with the it little satchels.
And all morning the mothers have labored
to gather the late apples, red and gold,
like words ill another language.
And on the other shore
are those who wait behind great desks
to receive these offer in gs.
 Tut P JW V A I 1: [.IFF 5

s
How orderly they are —
the nails
mi which the children hang

their overcoats of blue or yellow Wool.

And the teachers shall instruct them in silence
and the mothers shall ?Lour the orchards fat a way out,
drawing to themselves die gray limbs of the fruit trees
bearing so little ammunition.

The new clothes and the apples for the teacher are here, but they have
been made strangely sinister. Onto again, the reader is made to stop and
think. What is so disturbing about this poem?
Next, the child comes to the apparently quiet period between
infancy and puberty, a period psychologists cull "latency" because sex
Lialitv seems dormant. At this time, intense same-sex friendships form;
the child is never seen without 1m or her "best friend," so much so that
Eddie and Hill become a single noun "Have you seen Eddie andUill"’
Hut gradually hormones change Eddie and Hill into adolescents, and the
pagan god of se>; (whom E. E. Cummings here identifies with goat-
footed lJa», the god of all) makes Ins appearance. We know that in
heterosexual development the twos nine’, ‘'eddieandhiH'' and "betty-
and Libel, so inseparable, will toon, with real anguish and yet with
painful anticipation of sexual joy. split up, leave their childish games,
and re-form into the new twosomes “eddieandbettv" and "hillandis-
bel":
/
F, E, Cu.UMINtiS
in Just-
spring when- the world is mini-
luscious the little
lame balloonman
whistles far and wee
and eddicandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring
when the world is puddle -wonderful
the queer
old balloonman whistles
fa r and wee
and bettyandisbd co me dancing
 6 Tut POEM AS LIFE

from hop-scotch and jump-rope ond

ids
spring
and
the
goat -tooted
balloonMan whistles
far
and
wet

The reader senses something threatening and seductive in the balloon-

man, and knows that this is not a simple poem about spring hop -scotch
i

and jump-mpe. Also, the typographic arrangement is puzzling. What is

Cummings up to?
The young man or woman will experiment with love, and will dis¬
cover that there is something inherent in many relationships which makes
them dissolve. As adolescents take their first step into adult emotional re¬
lations, they learn what it is to be troubled in love, even forsaken. [ Elis
is a love poetu by Walt Whitman to a male lover who has deserted him,
bin it soon turns into a poem for everyone who has been deserted

WALT WHITMAN
Hours Continuing Long
I louts continuing long, sore and heavy hearted.
1 fours of the ikisk, when I withdraw to a lonesome and unfre|
unented spirt, seating myself, leaning my face in mv hands;
Homs sleepless, deep in the night, when 1 go forth, speeding
swiftly the country roads, or through the city streets, or
paring miles and miles, stifling plaintive cries;
1 lours discouraged, distracted — for the one I earn lot content
myself without, soon I saw him content himself without
me;
Hours when 1 am forgotten (O weeks and. months are passing,
but 1 believe lain never to forget!}
Sullen and suffering hours! fl am ashamed — but it is use¬
less — I am what 1 am;)
Hours of my torment — I wonder if other men ever have the
like, out of the like feelings?
Is there even one oilier like me distracted - his friend, his
lover, lost to him?
Is he too as I am now? Poes he Mill rise in the morning, de-

.
 THE !J R I v ft T E LIFE 7

jected. thinking who is lose to him? and AT night, awaking;

think who is lost?
Hoes he coo harbor his friendship silent and endless? harbor his
anguish and passion?
Does some stray reminder; or the casual mention of a name,
bring the tit bark upon him, tacit udfl and tfeprest?
Does he see biciKelf reflected in me? In these hours, Joes he see
the fare of his hours reflected?
1'he phases of life succeed one another, nid we could go on to give
examples of poems about parenting, maturity, loss, and old age. l\ieuis,
in short, trace the general and special phases of life down (O ITS end in
death, arid, in religious poems, even to the afterlife. Each ot these phases
—
can provoke many different responses joy, bitterness, bravery, sto¬
icism Here, for instance, is a seventeenth century poem about the last
phase of life by a writer who, 10 his grief, has grown too dim of sight to
read or write; but he will never be too old, he says, to think and perceive
and praise God. With the last power of his failing eyesight, he ‘'indites,11
or writes, the final poem in bis manuscript book: a poetn of thanksgiv¬
ing, He is able to do so because its subject the praise ot God —
turns
him into pure soul unencumbered by body;

EDMUND WALLER
Of the I*4s( Vines m the. Book
When we for age could neither read nor write,
The subject made us able to indite;
The soul, with nobler resolutions decked,
The body stooping, does herself erect.
No mortal parts are requisite to Taise
Her that, unbodied, can her Maker praise.
The seas arc quiet when the winds give o’er;
So calm are we when passions are no more!
For then we know how vain it was to boast
Of fleeting things, so certain to be lost,
Clouds of affection from our younger eyes
Conceal that emptiness which age descries,
The soul’s dark cottage, battered and decayed,
Lets in new light through chinks that time has made;
Stronger by weakness, wiser men become,
As they draw near to their eternal home.
Leaving the old, both worlds at once they View,
Thai stand Upon the threshold of the new
8 THE POEM AS Lift

Tilts poem of the very last phase oflifc show's the poet leaving the earthly
world and standing upon the threshold of heaven. Though many of the
thoughts Waller expresses are conventional religious ones, he succeeds
in making them fresh.
These poems of the private life are all meant to be said by anyone,
by everyone. We will come later, in a chapter about place and history,
to. poems that are more personally specific than these — poems that
could be said only by a person belonging to a particular subgroup in.
society,

The Public Life

Some public poems commemorate communal celebration

Thanksgiving or the Fourth ofjuly or Christmas, (What can a poet do to
write a new kind of Christmas poem? Well, he can stage his poem a day
—
early and write “The Night before Christmas,” as Clement Moore did.)
Public poems often concern crucial single public events. Here is Michael
Harper's poem joining two events in the history of American blacks
the blosving-up of an Alabama church in which four young black girls
—
were killed, and an imagined episode in the slave trade at the time of the
American Revolution (the phrase "middle passage,” in line 4, refers to the
route that slave ships once took from Africa to the South):

MICHAEL HARDER
American History
Fiirjohii Ctilhhmi
Those four black girls blown up
in that Alabama church
remind me of five hundred
middle passage blacks,
in a net, under Water
in Charleston harbor
so nrdnvjfe wouldn't find them.
Can't find what you can’t see
can you?

“History" rarely ends with a question mark, but Harper’s cynical ques¬
tion replicates the cynicism of the slave dealers.
Other public poems are written about the state of common life,
shared by some population in a certain rime and place. We might tend
to think of such poems as written about violent wrongs such as genocide
 THF P U II L I C LIFE 9

or slavery, but Charles Simic’s “Old Couple*' is about the plight ot'a
—
(ion — —
hidden group of victims the urban poor in old ago. for whom all
possible scenarios 'eviction, murder, illness, death (roni rualttutri—
are equally frightening:

CHARLES SIMIC
Of J Couple
They’re wading to be murdered,
Or evicted. Soot]
They expect to have nothing to eat.
As tar as I know, they never gn out.
A vicious pain's coming, they think.
St will start in the head
And spread down to the bowels.
They 'll be carried ofl on stretchers, howling.

In the meantime, they watch the street

From their fifth floor window.
It has rained, and now it looks
Like it's going 10 snow a little.
! see him get up to lower the shades.
if their window stays dark,
[ know that his hand has reached hers

Just as she was about to turn on the lights.

Who is the watcher here? Does he shave the life ot the old couple, and
if so, how?
Of course, the private life and the public life .ire not separate issues.
and there are many poems m which ihe- two are mirror images of each
other. In Robert Lowell's "Skunk Hour." the decline of the inhabitants
of the Maine town where the speaker lives mirror his mvn decline into
voyeurism and madness. LJesides the public life and the prtvare life,
“Skunk I lour" invokes the life of nature, which has .1 sturdy strength
(pictured in the dauntless invading “mother skunk am! her column of
kittens’ } lacking m the public and private spheres:

ROBERT LOWELL
. Skunk Hour
For Elizabeth Bishop
Nautilus Island's hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
10 THE POEM AS LIFE

h-er sheep si ill graze above the sea.

Her son's a bishop. Her farmer
is first selectman tn onr village;
she's in her dotage.
Th listing for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria's cenuiry,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore.
and lets them fall.
The season’s ill —
we've lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L, L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstcrmen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.
And now our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for tall;
his fishnet’s ft I led with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler's bench and awl;
there is no money in his work,
he'd rather marry.
One dark night,
my Tudor ford climbed the hill's skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turnet! down,
they by together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .
My mind's not right.
A car radio bleats,
"Love, O careless Love, , , I hear
my ill -spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat, . . .
I myself am hell;
nobody's here
only skunks, that search
in the moonlight lor a bite to ear,
They march on their soles up Mam Street;
white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red tire
Linder the chalk-dry and spaT spire
of the Trinitarian Church.
 NATuk E AND TIME 11

I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air —
a mother skunk with her colli mi) of kittens swills the garbage pail.
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour crcani, drops her ostrich tail,
anti will not scare.

What relations are implied here between the town's public life and the
speaker’s private life, between his private life and the life of nature?

Nature and Time

The poem-as-life notices, besides the inevitable themes of public

and private life, two Other great intertwined subjects nature (the
earth, the sun, the moon, the stars, animals, plants} and time, with its
seasons and mouths, lie cause nature and time are such ancient resources
for poetry, perhaps the hardest achievement is to write an original poem
about, say, spring. An anonymous thirteenth-century poet began our
spring poetry, as he heard the cuckoo (the herald of spring) and saw all
of nature come to life. At that time, there was only one word, “sum¬
mer," for the new season after winter; the word '’spring" was a later
invention.
Sumer is ieumen in.
I.hude0 sing, cuccu! loud
Groweth sed and bluweth mcd° meadow
And springth the wude mi,

Sing, cuccu!
Awe° bleieth after tomb, CUT
LhouihD after calve oi,° lauvltl i L4'
Buliuc stertetli,0 bucke verceth0
Miiric sing, cuccu!
— leaps t breaks wind

Cuccu, cuccu,
Wei singes thu. cuccu.
Ne swik0 thu never nu! slop

The spring songs of the Middle Ages generated a whole series of seasonal
poems.
A contemporary poet, Dave Smith, writes his spring poem in an
auto junkyard, using a pun on the word “spring' ' to make new sap rise
even in rusty stech
12 THE I'OEM AS Lirt

DAVE SMITH
77ie Spring Poem
hi'i'ry poet ‘htmld write it Spring pm'f n .
— LOUISE GLUCK
Yes, but wc muse be sure of venues
such as proper heat and adequate form.
That's what poets ate for, is my theory'.
1 his then is J Spring poem. A ear warms
its rusting hulk in a meadow; weeds slog
tip its Hanks in martial weather, April
or late March our month. There is a fog
is

of spunky mildew and sweaty tufts spill

from the damp rump of a back seat- A spring
thrusts one gleaming tip out, a brilliant tooth
uncoiling from Winter’s tension, a ring
of insects along, working our the Truth.
F.ach year this car, melting around that spring,
hears nails trench from boards and every' squeak sing.

We feel that the rusting car warms into new life partly because it has
been used by courting couples who have lent their presence to the
phrases Smith uses for the back seat —
its "damp rump,” its "spunky
mildew and sweaty tufts." When even a metal spring puts out new
shoots, when even nails spring iree from the boards they have been
ham meted into, we know that spring is irresistible
The seasons have become a constant resource for poets describing
stages of human life, so that m reading poems as life we can’t tail to think
o f Keats *s sonnet on the human seasons, which sets out the great analogy
between nature and ourselves

JOHN KEATS
The Human Seasons
Four seasons til! the measure ot the year;
Four seasons are there in the mind of nun.
He hath his lusty spring, when fancy dear
Takes in all beauty with an easy span;
Fie hath his summer, when luxuriously
He eh ews the honied cud nt fair spring thoughts,
Till, in his soul dissolv'd, they come to be
I’tirt of himself. He hath his autumn ports
 NATUHE A N LI TIME 13

Anti havens of repose, when Ins tired wings

Are folded up, and he content ro look
On mists in idleness: to let fair things
lJass by unheeded as a threshold brook.
He hatli InS winter too of pile mis feature,
Or else he would forget his mortal nature,

A poet can choose any one of the ' human season'" ansi find its coun¬
terpart in the natural world.
When poets describe Time* they tend to employ many of the
—
images of passing time that have entered cultural memory such motifs
as the waves of the sea, the progress of the sun from dawn to dusk, the
fail of great men, the tragedy of early death. Time the Grim Reaper, and
so on. Here, us tug such time -honored resources, is Shakespeare on
fiine, In his first model of how we imagine Time (lines \ 4), the
moments of our life .ire seen as waves ot the sea, all alike; in his second
mode) (lines 5-8), the moments of our !itc are like the dramatic rise and
eclipse of a sun, or the rise and fall of a tragic hero; and in his third model
{lines U-12), we scarcely have time to live before LJeath scythes us
down, one after the other.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Sonnet 60
Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their cud,
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent0 toil ail forwards do contend. repetitive
Nativity,0 once iti the main0 oflight, birth f rtvr
drawls to maturity, wherewith being Crowned,
Crooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave doth now it is gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish0 set on youth, beauty
A ttd delves rhe parallels0 in beauty's brow, j'urrom
Feeds on the rarities of nature"* truth.
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow,
And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,
. Praising thy worth, despite his Cruel hand.

What does Shakespeare sec against Time in the couplet?

 1
14 THE POEM AS LJPE

Iti Brief; The Poem as Life

The first thing to notice about any poem is what piece of life (a
disappointment in love, the death of a parent, ail absence from a friend,
a crisis of personal confidence, a moment of fear) the poem is about,
Lyric poems spring from moments of disequilibrium: something has
happened to disturb the status quo. Hope has come to rebuke despair;
love has come to thaw coldness; envy has come to upset happiness;
shame has come to interfere with self-esteem. Jfyou can't find the piece
of life that the poem is about, read the poem again, speaking it aloud in
your own voice. It helps to ask, “Under what circumstances would J
find myself saying these words?’" The poem is written for you to s<ay. Yeti
are the speaker of every lyric poem you read. Thai is what a lyric poem
is: it is a speech made for you to utter. (We will come later to poems
—
spoken to a silent listener by a defined character not you, but for
—
instance a madman or i Renaissance duke -poems that wc call dra¬
matic monologues.)
Once you have made a plausible hypothesis about what piece of
life the poem is shout, you can go on to see how the poem, though afouit
life, is not life. This is the subject of our next chapter, which returns to
these poems,

Reading Other Poems

Think about the following poems as utterances coming out of a

particular life-situation. Try to make deductions from each one. What
has recently happened to the speaker? What aspect of his or her life has
the speaker been thinking about? Is this a private life-situation (a family
death, for instance) or a public situation (a religious massacre, a war
memorial)? What stage of life has the speaker reached; How much does
the speaker tell you about his or her feelings? You might ask, too,
whether these are the feelings and the remarks you might expect lo find
expressed in this situation (comparing them with what people might
normally say or feel),
How do Thomas Wyatt’s feelings change as he reacts to having
been jilted? Do John Milton’s remarks about revenge surprise you?
What feelings arise tu Ufiijnnscm when his beloved first son dies? What
does John Keats most regret when he thinks he will die while he is still
young (as he did}? Why do you suppose Emily Dickinson represented
herself as a boy in the poem about coming across a snake? Can you
describe the feeling at the dose of Dickinson’s poetu in different words?
 READING OTHER POEMS IS

Art* Dylan Thomas’s words the usual ones addressed by a son to a dying
father?
“Theme tin iln j'lisli li" and “ Those Winter Sundays” are by black
writers: one takes up the tension between a black student and his white
teacher in a Frtihman English class; the other doesn’t mention race at all.
When do you think a Lite-situation might lead ro the mention of race,
and when not? Jenson's poem expresses the feelings of a father for his
son; cam you compare it to Robert Hayden’s poem expressing (be feel¬
ings oi a son for his father? Hmv do these compare with the ted mgs
expressed by Sylvia Plath when she thinks about her relation to her
timber? And with Rita Dove's recollection ot her childhood evenings
with her father in “Flash Cards"?
Both Milton and Yusef Kotnunyakai look at large social issues: in
Milton’s case, the massacre of a large number of Protestant “heretics’ by
Catholic forces in northern Italy; in Konumyakaa’s case, the residue ot’
the Vietnam War as represented by the Vietnam War Me mortal in
Washington. In what way do the tones adopted by these two poets
differ? How do you chink a poet decides how “loudly” to speak when
he or she speaks ot public issues?

tit THOMAS WYATT ' 7 Xki.-L 0$c =, -*

They Flee From Me
They flee from me. that sometime did me seek.
With naked foot stalking in my chamber,
! have seen them, gentle, tame, and meek.
That now are wiki, and do tior remember
That sometime they put themselves itt danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range,
Uusily seeking with a continual change.
Thanked be Fortune it hath been otherwise,
Twenty times better; but once in special.
In thin array, after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown front her shoulders did tall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small. 0 rferp dei
And therewith all sweetly did me kiss
And softly said. “Dear heart, how like you this?"
It was lit) dream, 1 lay broad waking.
Uuc all is turned, thorough my gentleness,
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
And 1 have leave to go, ot her goodness,
16 TM I: POEM AS LIFE

And she al.su to use newfan glen ess.

Blit since chat I so kindly am served,
i fain would know what she hath deserved.

JOHN MILTON W- t b TH )
Oft the iMte Massacre in Piedmont
Avenge. O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose hones
L it scattered on the Alpine mountains cold.
F.ven them who kept thy truth so pure of old
When all our fathers worshiped stocks'3 and stones, tdols
Forget nut: in thy book record their gruans
Who were thy sheep and in their ancient fold
Slain by the b!oodv Piedmontese tii.it rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To Heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O'er all th" Italian fields where still doth sway
I ho triple tyrant," [hat from these may grow
A hundredfold, who having learnt thy way
Farly may fly the Babylonian woe. '

BH.N JONSON < ' 3

A
On Afp J-’i>jf Son
Farewell, thou child of my right hand,* and joy;
My siij was too much hope ot thee, loved boy:
Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on tile just day,
O could 1 lose all. father now! for why
Will nun lament the state he should envy,
To have so soon ’scaped world’s and flesh's rage,
And, if no other misery, yet age?
4 ..s )
iLest in soft peace, and asked, say, “Here doth he i ,yj *'
'ÿ

j if
i ,>
TIILJ Vaudni'., or WaLdenvrt, $ Protenant people living ill tile
mu I ) i iv<-< ri- M : p-iJT
of It.ik. were1 subjected m Ifioa to i bloody fiercer utrcui because they refused to accept
[jthntirnnii
I he pope, claiming .iLuhnritv on can'll and in haven and iie-LI.
at
'
frequently identified die Roman Catholic cluirrh with tiibylon.
l’rivieirÿins

'A literal translation of the Hebrew “LSenjamiii," flit hoy's name Joiuoti’s son
cv.i, bun] in )5Wi and died of the plague in IfnOU.

,
 READING OTHER P O E M S 17
I-,* c-i
-iTj J t
LSen Jon son
his best piece of poetry .J--L
J
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such 1s
r *L*- »-/lL
As what he loves may never like too much.
*’ U

JOHN KEATS /
/ . —
-i i

When I Have Ffa TS h a., n ts

*ÿ
When 1 have fears that I may cease to be ,
S*-*
Before mv pen ha1- gleaned ms1 teeming brain,
Before high-pi ted books, in charge fry, c ii Tin on infers
Hold itke nch garners the full ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starred face, r l

Huge cloudy symbols ot a high romance, ~T

*
And think that 1 may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand ot chance;
r? fiv f
And when E fed, fair creature of an hour. w.
±p\ '*-*
That I shall never look upon thee more,
W-lfl
Never have relish in the faery power .7,m v r
—
Of unreflecting love! then on the shore t*
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think

( fff3 '
. v."
EMILY DICKINSON
,/f itiirrmi'
-V r'-i

Fef/ow? in the Gmss

—
Till Love and fame to nothingness do sink.
,r jv

, IV*
I

-.<r

A narrow Fellow in the Grass

Occasionally rides
— —
,.Lr . , -it
You may have met Him
Hss notice sudden is
—
did you not

The Grass divides as with a Comb

— ,t f

A spotted shaft is seem —

And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on —
He likes a Boggy Acre
A floor too cool tor Corn -
Yet when a flow and Barefoot —
I more than once at Noon
Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure u
it wrinkled, and was gone —
 18 THU POEM * s LIFE

Several oi Nature's People

1 know, and they know me
I feel for them a era report
—
Ot cordiality —
But never met this Fellow
Attended, or alone
Without a tighter breaching
And Zero at the Hone —
(<?02 tU7) LANGSTON HUGHES
Theme for English B
The instructor said,
Cji> JIOTFJC and utile
a page tonight,
And let that page tame out of you —
Then, if will he hue,
/I L J
1 wonder if it's that simpler A.
fiK U <-
1 am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem,
[ went to school there, then Durham, then here
- ' L
to this college on the hill above Harlem. fV
t‘
1 am tile Only colored Student in mv class. A‘!> ,t *

Tlie siejw from the hill lead down into Harlem,

through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas,
Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,
the Harlem Branch Y, where 1 take the elevator
up to my room, sit down, and write this page:
•’
It’s not easy to know what is true tor you or me A1’
at twenty-two, my age. But 1 guess Tm what
I _ feel and sec and hear, Harlem, [ hear you:
hear yon, hear me - we two - you, me. talk on this page.
(J hear New York, too.) Me who? —
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
! like to work, read, learn, anti understand life, / r
V3 i4
1 like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records -
Bessie.' bop, or Bach.,
1 guess being colored doesn’t make me ttpf like
9
t
the same things, other tulks like who arc other races,
jS -
t
.*iJ
A !
Smith AfVifiin Aiik'hwn blue* tinÿr
| -i*“ J
£t7 trf
y*V
A*-
J r t > -fe. & Cÿ.

- 3 < *
f
 fc Jr *ÿ' |i- - f \f ) r* Crfrt / /i <— -j i.f / i-.
G
...J CVÿ .1 1

Eh E A D i N c OTHER 1J O t M S 19

So .will my, page, bt colored that I write?

-/-£ n- it y
-'- 7 -‘
C
- £ÿ,

Being me, .it wiE] not be white.

—
*v*

But it will be
A /*, . t
f
, eL '
a part of you, instructor.
You are white — f . ru, „ J
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you. AfJ I i

That’s American.
Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me.
Nor do ] often want TO l>e a part of you.
.L
V-1 liuc we ane, that's true!
As i Icam from you,
f
.
J guess you learn from me —
t
although you’re older and white — —
and somewhat more tree.
}+T
This rs my page for English B.
7 elf-} r}
ROBERT HAYDEN
Those Winter Sundays
j"

Silt i da vs too mv father got up early * < J . i -.v

and ptir Ins clothes on in iEie blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
hanked hres blaze. No one ever thanked him,
i I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking
r When die rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly i would rise and dress,
.1 caring the chronic augers of that house.
A 1
V*
jSpeakmp in differently to him,
who had driven out the cold
, and polished my good shoes as well at. t •

A--’/ What did 1 know, what did I know

l
ofJoYt's austere and lonely offices?
jUtt .Gi.r,. I
as .-Cÿ * i sV
.'T1 £. *
DYLAM THOMAS
Do iVof Co Gent{{ into That Good Night
Do not go gendi into that good niglit,
Old age should burn and rave at close oE day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light,

dd--L-ÿ|rn
— — j i. . *T 4 r r i.-w-,
20 THE POF.M AS Lift

though wise men at their end know dark is right.

lit cause their words had forked no Lightning they
Ho not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the hint wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against rhe dying of the light.
Wild men who caught autf sang the sun in Sight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze likemeteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears. I pray,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

SYLVIA PLATH
Daddy
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I hive lived like a font
l:or thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy, 1 have had TO kill you.
You died before I had time —
Marble heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly Statue with one gray toe'
Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In rhe waters off beautiful Nan set.
J used to pray to recover you.
Ach. dll.3

{)cto I’lathh Jiibdn rallied a for, which led HI the septicemia [Jut
killed him
Genii a nr "Ah, you/1 Tile second -person I'lmiiJiflT form (<f») is used for intimates.
 KEA DiM c OTHER POEMS 21

Jn the German tongue, in the Polish town

Scraped flat by the roller
Of waSÿ, wars, wart.
Hut the name of the town is common.
My Polar St ' friend
Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw,
It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,J
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene
An engine, air engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew,
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, lielscn.
1 began to talk like a Jew.
]think I may well be a Jew,
The snows of the Tyrol,4 the dear beer of Vienna7
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Tame pack and my Tame packK
1 may be a bit. of a Jew,
3 have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe,’1 your gobbledygoo.
And your neat moustache
And your Aryan' eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You —
1
Derogatory slang for '‘Polish."
J
German: "1,1J,[
"'Nasi concentration camps.
"Alpine region of.Austria.
Capital r>f Austria. Plith's mother wu of Austrian djjiccn c ; Austria w:it Armcned
hi the Nazis,
"Pack uf cards used m fortune telling.
" The Nazi air tdree.
Word used by Nazis to characterize thou1 of "pure'" or unadulterated German
stock.
1
iVlan rs'-senshling a German armored tjnk.

L
 22 Tut POEM LIFE

No! God but a swastika13

Sn black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot m the face, the brute
13 rate heart of a brute like you.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,1'
In the picture 1 have of you,
A deft in sour chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for chat, no not
Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you,
At twenty t tried to die
And get back, back, hack to you,
1 thought even the bones would do.
13ut they pulled me out of the sack.
And they stuck me together with glue,
And then i knew what to do,
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf '' look
1

And a love tit the rack and the screw . 1:1

And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I’m finally through,
The black telephone's off at the root.
I he voices just can't worm through.
If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two
The vampire who s.iid he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
—
Seven years, if’ you want to know.
Paddy, you can lie back now,
J here s a stake in vour tat black heart1'1
And the villagers tieverliked you,

,J
Symbol of the Nazi party.
"Orm I’ladt was t professor of entomology at iJoston University
1*
German: "M\ Mnifiide. the tide ofHitlers manifesto.
"

” Ei-ick, screw: instruments of torture,

"
Traditionally, j vampire was buried at 1 crossroads with J stake ibniuyh
bis heart

hi
 RkAUJNG OTHER POEMS 23

They are dancing and stamping on you,

They always kmu> it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, fm through.

RITA DOVE / cyÿ-u hp

Flash Cards Wpi

In math ] Was the whiz kid, ikccper

of.oratiges and.apples.. Wtiit you don't nndmtand,
" ..
uiaster, my father said; 'the faster r.. ( ,
J
I answeredt'|th.e faster they, came. f
r (3>
I could see one bud on the teacher's geranium,
one dear bee sputtering at the wet pane.
The tuiip trees always dragged after heavy rain
30 I tucked my head as my boots slapped home.
My father put up his feet after work
and relaxed with a_highball and 77if Life of UncoUtÿy*
After supper' we drilled and I -climbed the dark
before slee~p> before a chin voice hissed
numbers as I spun on a wheel, 1 had to guess. -
P+L
hfn, I kept saving. I’m only ffti.

r ) YUSEF ItOMUTWAKAA
r-
-<
J
'ÿ+

-1

* *V .u1
t Lh , (A
t.j**
_
Facing It
My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
f said I wouldn't,
dammit: No tears.
I’m stone. I’m flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning, t turn
— —
this way the scone lets me go.
i turn that way I’m inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference
I go down the 5&.022 names,
11 THE IHIEH AS L!E E

half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap’s white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Urush strokes Hash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plant in the sky.
A white vet’s image Hnats
closer to mer then his pale eyes
look through mine. I’m a window,
Hit’s lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s crying to erase names:
No, she’s brushing a boy's hair,
 2

The Poem ArrangedasLife

The preceding chapter , “Tin* Poem a1. Life,” suggested that poems
originate in crucial mom CUTS of private liter (tor instance, marriage) or
public lile (for instance, a ary era), and that they are set in
recognizable places (in a junkyard, for example) or rimes (in spring), Hut
to speak ot the poem "as life" is not to say that it is simply a transcription
of what has occurred Life itself is a continuation of successive moments
m one stream Art interrupts the stream and constructs one segment or
level of the stream for processing. In a single act, it describes, analyzes,
and confers form on that segment. The form it confers by its ways of
organizing the poem makes visible the contour ot that life-moment as
the poet perceives ir The pom discovers the emotional import of that
lifo- moment by subjecting it to analysis; the analysis then determines
how die moment is described, and the invented organizational form that
replicates it. These are remarks that will become clear when see' look at
particular poems, so let us go back to our poems-as-lifc to see how they
are arranged life— th.it is. in what way they are formal constructions of
life. What organizational patterns have the poets chosen?

The Private Life

1 Hake’s baby, in ot all For Hlake, every moment in life could be

seen either of two ways
in —
innocently or with experience. The in¬
nocent way of seeing a baby is wh-n we might call both a cliche and ,i

25
26 THE POEM AS AHRANCED LIFE

truth: a baby is beautiful, guileless, smiling, appealing, the joy of its

mother's days. In an earlier poem, “Infant Joy," Blake shows us what the
innocent mother, in her fantasy, would like the baby to sav to her as he
tells her how to name him (stanza 1), and what she would then say to
him (stanza 2):

WILLIAM BLAKE
Infant Joy
“I have no name,
I am but two days old.”
"What shall I call thee?”
"] happy am,
Joy is my name.”
"Sweet joy befall thee!”
"Pretty joy!
Sweet joy but two days old,
Sweet joy I call thee;
Thou dost smile,
I sing the while
—
Sweet joy befall thee!”

But a baby is also the bundle of tension that will generate its future
sorrows, as Blake asserts in "Infant Sorrow,'' the companion -poem to
“Infant Joy." If you think back, he suggests, to how awful it was to be
a baby when you were one, then you will see infancy from the point of
view of “experience" rather than the maternal doting "innocence."
You will remember how dangerous the world seemed to you when you
were small, how helpless you felt, how little power you had over your
environment and your belongings, how often you cried in frustration,
how fiendish your unsatisfied shrieks must have seemed to your parents,
how you must have longed to wrest personal control of your physical
self from your parents" attentions. This remarkable sympathetic descrip¬
tion of bahyhtMidfrom the point cf vie w of the rebellions and unhappy Imby was
Blake's originating insight; he then had to arrange his intuition of the
baby’s rage into an analytic and poetic shape.

WILLIAM BLAKE
Infant Sottou*
My mother groaned, my father wept
Into the dangerous world I leapt,
—
 THE PKEVATE LIFE 11

Helpless, naked, piping load,

Like a fiend hid in a cloud.
Struggling in my father's hands,
Striving against my swaddling hands,
Bound and weary, I thought best
To sulk upon my mother’s breast.

Blake analyzes the baby into two aspects, its physical body and its
mental operations; he gives a stanza to each aspect. The main verb of the
first stanza is the physical word "leapt"; the main verb of the second
stanza is the mental word "thought." First the baby leaps into the world;
then he thinks about his condition and decides what attitude to take
toward it (he finally decides to sulk, after fruitlessly struggling and striv¬
ing)
If the diwiofJ ifJfo /he physiwl end the menial is the most basic analytic
move of the poem (causing it to divide itself into two stanzas), what
other shapes does Blake confer on his piece of life? We notice chat the
baby’s mother and father are present in each of the stanzas: by repeating
the shape "parents/ baby, parents/babyT" Blake shows us that the baby
does not exist alone but lives always in dependency on his parents. First,
they preside at his birth, while his mother groans in labor and his father
weeps in sympathy. Next, they literally enclose him, as they occupy the
first and last line of the second stanza; the baby is held in his father’s
hands in the first lint and supported on his mother's breast in the last.
This environmental "parencs/baby, pstrenis/haby" shape is superimposed
on the first shape ("baby/body, baby/mind") that we perceived. Just as
the first shape made concrete
— physically represented
—
Blake's ana¬
lytic separation of the baby into body and mind, the second shape shows
Blake’s perception of the baby's total physical and moral impotence. He
must continue to live (stanza 2) in the power of his parents who gave
him existence (stanza l), and it will be a long time before he will be old
enough TO have the independence he furiously craves.
Blake confers a third analytic shape on the poem with all the
adjectives that the baby uses about himself "helpless," "naked," "pip¬
ing,” "like a fiend hid," “struggling" "striving" “bound," and
"weary." These arc all realistic except "like a fiend hid,” The realistic
adjectives tell us how much any infant already knows about his intol¬
erable condition; but the adjectival comparison, "fl am] like a fiend hid
in a cloud." tells us that the baby cat] summon up a very strange analogy.
We conclude (as would Blake, a Christian), that the baby lias come into
this life from a previous supernatural existence where he knew angels
arid devils. The baby (to his dismay) realizes that in this horrible new'
28 THE POEM AS Ap.kANG£n LIFE

struggling embodied state he is more like the fiends he remembers than

like the angels he resembled in heaven. The adjectival division of the
baby’s Self-awa roifjj into an “earthly’1 one (conscious of being naked,

— —
struggling, etc.) and a "supemii/Hru/’’ one (recalling fiends and pre¬
sumably their counterpart angels known to his former life) reflects
the baby’s rage and self-division.
The fourth analytic shape Blake confers on his picture of the baby's
state is a grammatical one
— a contrast between present participial ad¬
jectives and ncmlL-ing” adjectives. We see in this shape Blake’s contrast
—
bettveen doing and feeling between the baby’s participial adjectives of
action (" piping," ‘’struggling," "striving") and his other adjectives of
feeling (“helpless," “naked," “like a fiend," “bound,” “weary"), The
present participles show us what the baby can do (he can pipe, he can

—
struggle, he can strive); the other adjectives tell us how he feels his
sufferings and his self-estimation as a fiend. We can understand his
struggling and striving; but the unusual word “piping” cells us that in
—
Blake’s view the baby is not screaming or shrieking he is making a
song, "Piping” is a musical word, and it represents the beginning of
language (or at least vocal expression) in the baby. He is full of sorrow,
but he is also expressing his sorrow vocally.
There are other verbal effects we could mention; for instance, the
fact that the baby is shown actively "leaping" into the world, rather than

—
passively "being bora"; that the successively weaker participial line-
beginnings ‘'Struggling," “Striving," "Bound” — enact (act out,
give us in miniature) the baby’s eventual resignation into his sulky state;
that the little couplets (pairs of rhyming lines) demonstrate Blake's de¬
cision to use the simplest sort of rhyme for the baby’s speech; that the

—
space between the stanzas represents the transition from being bom to
living. But as we look back on the task the poet set himself "Find a
shape for saying how life seems to the baby as he’s botri and just after¬
ward"
— we see that the poem has had to find several shapes for just
that. To the extent that the poem exhibits analytic shapes, it has been
removed from the stream of undifferentiated moments of existence and
brought into the formal world of art. A poem that at first looks like 3
description ("Helpless, naked, piping loud; l Like a fiend hid in a
cloud”) is in fact an analysis of aspects of the baby’s condition, arranged
in ways (such as division into physical atid mental, parents in each stanza,
recall of heavenly preexistence, a contrast between acting and foeling)
that show how the baby perceives life.
To sum up; by "analytic shape” I mean any meaningful patterning
in the poem that "acts out” one of the insights the poet has had about
the experience treated by the poem. It is as though in this poem Blake,
 THE PRIVATE LIFE 29

with a poet’s instinct, thought, "How shall I show that the baby is a
mind as well as a body:" and decided, LTll make a two-stanza poem,
with the main verb in the first stanza a body-word, and the main writ in
the second stanza a mind-word" (Shape 1). Then he thought, "How-
will l show the baby’s dependence on its parents?" and decided, “I’ll put
the lioittti “mother" and “father” in each stanza to show that the baby
is always dependent on his parents" (Shape 2). Then, “How will [ show
the baby’s previous supernatural life? liy having him, amid all his realistic
self-adjectives, include one supernatural adjectival comparison alluding to
that previous life" (Shape 3), Then, “How can I show what the baby is
feeling as well as what the baby is doing? ITL give him present-participial
adjectives of doing and non- “trig" adjectives of feeling" (Shape 4). These
decisions organize the poem, giving it structures that are dynamic ones,
constantly overlapping and interlocking, making up the overall Organi¬
zation of the poem.
Of course, such patterns occur in lightning-quick ways to the
trained mind of the poet. A composer does not say, “I think this is the
point for a diminished seventh,” or “Perhaps it would be effective to
follow eighth-note triplets with a dotted quarter note." No, the com¬
poser “hears the music" and writes it down; it is only later that analysts
demonstrate the patterns that make the music seem intended, not cha¬
otic. A poet, too, “hears tile poem,’’ writes it down, and then further
refines its visible patterns, Naturally, when a given pattern precedes the
composition of the poem ("1 want to write a sonnet"), much will be
dictated by the preexistent formal requirements; but even then, the swift
internal processes of composition organize the temporal, spatial, gram¬
matical, and syntactic shapes of the poem more by instinct than by
conscious plan. One could say that artists are people who think naturally
in highly patterned ways,
As [hi? summary shows, it is up to the reader to notice patterns
such as those Blake uses, "How is it that the main action of the baby is
a body-action in stanza 1 and a mind-action in stanza 2? What does this
tell me about the baby’s condition:" Or, “How is it that among all these
realistic adjectives suiting the baby’s state I find this one weird one —
‘like a fiend hid in a cloud’? How does the newborn baby know about
fiends Eliding in clouds? What does this tell me about the baby's mind?”
A pattern shows that the poet has analyzed, and then replicated tti
language, some aspect of the content of the poem. We can therefore call
a pattern an analytic shape. (In we El -written poems, most of ilte larger
perceived patterns will be analytically meaningful.) Much is explained to
us about the baby by the patterns we have seen. The main-verb patient
tells us that the baby is composed of mind and body, which do separate
30 T Ed E POEM AS ARRANGED LIFE

things. The noun-mptm pattern {“ mother,” "father”) tells us of the baby's

dependency. The realistti/siipematu rxtl adjectival pattern of contrast tells us
of the baby's memory of a past state. The pment-partiaplal adjectii’es /other
adjectives pattern shows us the baby doing and tbs' baby feeling. These few
patterns remind us that there can be shapes of:

1. simple meaning-contrast (the antonyms “leapt” and ''thought”);

2- word-repetition (“mother," “father”);
3. series, whether similar or broken (“like a fiend" breaks the realistic
series and therefore stands out);
4. grammatical contrast (here, presen t-partscipial adjectives versus
other adjectives, showing us actions versus feelings).
T o discern the patterns in any poem, you may have to notice, then, such
things as contrasts of meaning, repetitions of Words, items in series, and
grammatical emphases. Them having seen such patterns, you can begin
to ask yourself if they show you something about the situation in the
poem that makes sense of the experience depicted.
We can ask, now, how does Louise Gliick give formal shape to the
fust day of school?
As we’ve seen, Gliick takes her cast of characters and their props
from our conventional picture of the first day of school: there are chil¬
dren with their new primary -color clothes (“overcoats of blue or yellow
wool"), their first book-bagÿ or lunch-boxes ("their little satchels”}, and
their apples (from their family's orchard) for the teachers. The teachers
“wait behind . . . desks. “ The mothers are left behind as the children "go
forward" to school. So far, so ordinary. No one would be surprised to
be totd these details about the first day of school. Hut Gluek gives us
more, and more sinister, details:

LOUISE GLUCK
77ie School Children
The children go forward with their little satchels.
And all mottling the mothers have labored
to gather the late apples, red and gold,
like words of a nothcr language.
And on the other shore
are those who wait behind great desks
to receive these offering,
How orderly they are — the nails
on which the children hang
their overcoats of blue or yellow' wool,
 [ H JL P it I V A I t L J l1 h. 31

And the teachers shall instruct them in silence

and the mothers shall scour the orchards for .1 way out,
drawing to themselves the gray limbs of the fruit trees
bearing so little ammunition.

We perceive poetic shape mostly through oddness. There are sev¬

eral oddnesses here. The apples are said to be "like words of another
language.” Tils' school is said to be "oil the other shore" of some
unspecified body of water 1 he teachers’ (ordinary) desks are said to be
“great" desks — and the teachers vsaitT like gods, to receive “ offerings."
The only detail given about the school itseli is that it has an orderly row
of nails serving ;>s coat liookv The limbs of the fruit r revs in the orchards
which rhe mothers “scour" for "a way our" are “gray," and the apples
are seen, at the end of the poem, ils “.nil munition.” These are the
oddnesses any account of [he shapes oi the poem would have to make
sense of.
We also perceive shape through the dinsion into stanzas —
here,
four of them, with their appropriate dramatis personae, or cast of char
acters. Stanza 1 is for the children, the matters, and the apples; stanza 2 is
for the teachers and the apples; stanza 3 is for the tun'Iff. and stanza 4 is for
the ft'urftt'H (doing one tiling at sehocJ) and the ruefJit're [doing another
thing ill the orchards with apples). Why is this the way the characters
come oit the stage? Why do the nails have J -stanza to themselves? Why
isn’t the word “apples” mentioned in the last stanza?
We perceive shape through series: the apples, which were "ss'ords
from another language" in stanza I , and “these offerings" in stanza 2, are
“ammunition” in stanza 4. The apples are the only image that changes.
and they become more pathetic a_s the poem goes on.
At this point, we can say iliar the first basic shape that the poem
confers on the opening of school is a spatial one. There is a terrible and
dangerous separation of teacher-territory from mother- territory- : they lie
on opposite shores of a watery divide. The two regions speak different
languages, and the apples are the only words in the teacher language that
can bridge the gap. The two regions are also in conflict; but the teachers
—
have nails and the mothers have only apples as propitiatory offerings,
as ammunition against the teacher's power. The mothers' desperate
work ["all morning the mothers have labored"; “the mothers shall scour
the orchards”) to protect the children is bound to fail they have “so /
little ammunition ’ from the already withering fruit trees (next year's
apples will be of no use, since the children w ill be wholly socialized into
their public school-selves by then), flic day will come when the chil¬
dren will have to go to school without an apple 10 offer to those
mysterious strangers, the teachers, who speak another language, who

_
32 THE POEM AS A it a AN C; EH LIFE

wait behind their monumental "great desks." What will happen then?
The spatial shape of the great divide into two territories is matched
by the tcmpoml shape of the poem. By “temporal shape" I mean what
happens to the poem as it progresses in time. Here, as the poem advances
from stanza 1 to stanza 2 to stanza 3, the gaze of the narrator narrows
from the home group (mothers and children) to the people behind the
“great desks” to the sinister single objects “orderly . . . nails.” Then the
gaze of the narrator broadens again, to the children firmly in the power
of the teacher (who will quell their native language and reduce them to
the silence and orderliness of socialization) and the mothers, on the other
shore, who will wildly seek a way, by scouring the orchards for apples
(which they now think of solely as “ammunition”) to fight the trap that
is closing on their children.
These two axes, Space and Time, are often used to organize po¬
ems. In Gliick’s poem, the first represents the analysis of the life-event
into different regions (home and school), and the second represents the
analysis of the life -event into successive temporal stages (here, from
—
the child’s point of view leaving home, seeing the teacher behind the
"great desk," divesting yourself of your new coat and leaving an effigy
of yourself hanging on a nail, and being ‘instructed in silence" by the
teacher). The last stanza of the poem, unlike all the rest (which are
written in the present tense) Is written in the furore tense: the teachers
"shall instruct” the children; the mothers “shall scour" the orchards.
This is a prophetic future tense (otherwise the phrases would read “will
instruct” and "will scour"). The future tense represents a prediction
from the main present- tense account in the poem, but it is a logical
conjecture from the very1 first words, “The children go forward,"
The purpose of Gliick’s two main shapes, one of space and one of
time, is to make the transition from home to school sinister. We imagine
primary-school children walking to a school close by. but we learn (in the
shape of the two regions) that the school is on "another shore,” We imag¬
ine a cordial relation between home and school, but the temporal plot
show's us an alienation between them (“another language”) so that the
mothers must try propitiation ("offerings”) and then open con Hut ("am¬
munition") to save the children. These two sinister shapes of widening
space and future loss “act out," most of all, the mothers' sense chat their
children are far off, in the power of alien beings, in danger, and essentially
without hope of rescue. This reinterpretation of the conventionally
cheerful view of the first day of school forces us to rethink our previous
notion: Is not the first day of school really more like Gluck’s idea of it than
like rhe conventionally happy version? The artist’s distrusL of group “or¬

.
der” and “silence” lies behind this critique of early education.
 T HI: H tt. f V A t E L J h£ 33

The shape t tint E. E, Cummings puis on life is simpler. He sepa¬

rates the two sexes, and shows us what ape they are by their games
(marbles and piracies for (he boys, hop-scotch and jump-rope for the
girls). He makes the children same-sex Siamese twins, so to speak —
eddieandbill and bettyandisbel. He troubles their same-sex play by an
apparently insignificant figure of pleasure, a balloon man:

£. E. CUMMINGS
in Just—
spring when the world is niud-
luscious the little
lame balloon man
whistles iar and wee
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring
when the world is puddle-wonderful
the queer
old balloon man whistles
far and we e
and betryandisbel come dancing
from hop- scotch and jump rope and
it’s
spring
and
the
goac-footed
balloonMan whistles
fir
and
wee

The balloornnan enters three limes with Ins seductive whistle. We are
left to imagine its ultimate sexual effect on the pread descent children
but the e fiber is not in doubt because he draw's the couples away from
their same-sex childhood play, forecasting their regrouping into sexual
couples. In rile triple appearance nr' the ballomnnun. wr find him char¬
acterized by different adjectives — "litth lame,’ “queer old," and
34 THE PotM AS A k K A N C; t D L. I F- I

"goat-footeÿ,” He also acquires an honorific capital “M” in his Iasi

appearance, 'where we see the goat- fret which proclaim him a iiatLm.1-
spirii, even a god —
therefore he is a balloon Man. (In ancient Greece
the god of nature was the goat-footed Pan.) We call the phrase repeating
the return of the balloonman a refrain:
The little lame balloon man whistles far and wtc
The queer old balloon man whistles far and wee
The go at- footed balloon Man whistles far and wee

We notice that other things ill the poem also come round thrice:

__
in just- / Spring when the world is mud- / luscious
it’s/ spring / when the world is puddle-wonderful
it‘s / spring

We can now see that the “plot” of the poem is:

), Spring, balloon man. boys together;

3. Spring, ballon niVlan.

_
2. Spring, balloon man, girls together;
i

When we ask ourselves; What does Cummings imply about the com
plerion of the poem? What it the missing plot element? We answer; ''girl
with boy, boy with girl."
To his Siamese -twin trick, and his triple balloOTtman retrain, and
his triple appearance of spring, and the "missing” sexual conclusion to
his plot, Cummings adds yet another dement of shape
graphic arrangement of these things, fhe “horizontal"
—
his typo¬
whistling —
“whistles far —
and wee" -looks as though it is happening
within the space we move in. lint the “vertical" whistle —
whistles
far
and
wee

makes it gradually, like a Pied Piper,

seem as though the bd loom nan is
receding in space, taking the newly sexual couples off with him. Typo¬
graphically speaking, too, the important word "spring” always comes
first in the lines m which it appear-..
There is an odd stop, inserted at the line-break, between the
adjectives characterizing the balloonman at first: “little- - [Is he tame?
Yes. maybe.] /lame baUoomtiaii"; “queer
because he's old, not lame? Yes, maybe.) / old
—
[Poes he walk that way
balloonmim.” And then
 ! H t. Is R I V A T t L I J- L-. J5

the puzzle is resolved: lie’s not lame; he's not old; he walks oddly
because he is “go at- footed." And there's no more hesitation; he’s a
god — he’s the balloon Man.
It we were talking about the life- moment Cummings has selected,
we would say it is the spring of life — the moment when childhood
ends, same-sex friendships break up, adolesce tits hear the alluring call of
sexuality, and sexual couples first form. That is a summary of the poem,
but it has not explained the shapes Cummings has invented to act out the
lift-moment. Only an examination of form m Cummings, typo¬ —
graphic us well as verbal form — shows us how the poem mam (rep¬
resents by several formal shapes) the moment it has chosen, and makes
us see the processes of that moment, how it gradually unfolds in time,
with both pathos and joy.
We have said chat Whitman’s “Hours Continuing Long" is a poem
of forsaken love: its first tine tells us that its special subject is how bttg the
hours seem to the one forsaken. How does the poem act out the length
of the hours?

WALT WHITMAN
Hoitn Continuing Long
Hours continuing long, sore and heavy hearted.
Hours of tlie dusk, when 1 withdraw to a lonesome and unfre¬
quented spot, seating myself, leaning my face in my hands;
Hours sleepless, deep in the night, when I go forth, speeding
swiftly the country roads, or through the city streets, or pac¬
ing miles and miles, stifling plaintive cries;
Hours discouraged, distracted —lot the one t cannot content my¬
self without, soon I saw him content himself without me;
Hours when 1 am forgotten (O weeks and months ate passing, but
I believe I am never to forget!)
Sullen and suffering 1lours! ([ am ashamed —
but it is useless [ —
am what I am;)
I lours or im torment I wonder if other men ever have the like,
out of the like feelings?

lover, lost to him?

—
Is there even one other like me -distracted —
his friend, his

Is he loo as I am now: ( kies he still rise in the morning, dejected,

thinking who is lost to him? and at night, awaking, think
who is lost?
Does he too harbor his friendship silent arid endless: harbor his
anguish and passion?

_
 3b I'm. A s ARRANGED LTFL

I )oes son K.L strLn reminder, or the casual mention of ,i nannc, hiring
the fit back upon him, odeum and deprest?
Does he see Himself reflected in rue? In these hours, does he see the
face of his hours reflected?

Certainly the successive long weary lint's beginning svith the word
"Hours” — there are ss\ oh these, five in a row, then an interruption
—
("Sullen and suffering hours!’ ). then another one act out the theme
of the poem, We will have ro account for the interruption, hut for the
moment we can say that the first seven tines of the poem make us see and
feel, by a series of statements exhaustedly resembling one another, the
inert!,a of the weary hours,
Then the poem makes its major change of shape, turning from one
grammatical form (jfiifcmi'ntr) to a different one (jpie.cffiuis). We see now
that it is basically a f red-parr poem, the parts distinguished by this central
grammatical turn. Do the two parts differ in anything besides grammat¬
ical form? Part I is sole is1 about the speaker; but Mart Id wonders whether
there are "other men” like the speaker, or even “one other like me."
Before the poem began, there was of course “one other like” the
speaker — his lover. The speaker was one of two; now he is alone; he
would like to be one of at least two again. The usual hope might be to
find another lover, but that i> a path that this poem does not. cannot,
take, since the speaker is still roo much in love to imagine finding a new
lover. No —
the speaker will imagine that there is another person as
defected as he is himself, a brother in suffering, who will be his tw£El in

endurance. This is a replacement strategy; the lost Ipvet is “replaced” by

the imagined twin-in-grief
What causes tins evolution in the poem? Can we explain what
motivates the transition from solitary grief to the imagining of a fellow
sufferer? IT may come from a wish to replace the lost lover; but the poem
suggests another motivation, too. Let us took at the two- 1 me central
turning, point of the poem, beginning with the line (bat does not open
with “Hours" and continuing into the line where statements turn to
questions:
Sullen and suffering hours! (I am ashamed
am what I am;)
—
but it is useless I —
Hours of my torment 1 wonder if other men ever have the like,
out of the like feelings?

We can see that the first movement out ot the self tsiss jrd society is one
of unexplained shame: “If others could see me, they would rebuke me;
and yes. I am ashamed —
but it is useless —
I am what I am.” Ws*do not
to
 T HI: PRIVATE Lilt 37

know, ami will never know, whether the poet IS ashamed ot his hnrao-
sexuality (lie suppressed this poem from his collection Leaves of Grass) or
of his sullen dejection (Whitman strongly wished to appear a positive
poet of democratic strength). Eventually the poet sumiises that some
group of men might not recoil from him, because they themselves have
had similar feelings. At least [here may be one such man and the —
poem then does a reprise in the third person ("Does he too harbor his
friendship silent and endless?”) of what the speaker had previously said
of himself in tine tint person ("I withdraw to a lonesome and oil ire
quented spot,” etc,},
This shape -doing something once, then doing it again differ¬
ently — is one see have already seen in Cummings’ poem, where we
saw spring come three times md heard the balloonman whistle three
times. Mere, love is expressed in the hirst person, via statements, and then
in the third person, via questions; this shape tells LIS that what seemed at
tirst shamefully personal may perhaps be shared by others, perhaps by
everyone. It is like hearing a melody twice, the tirst time in the major
key, the second time in the minor. Art thrives on such variations.
Waller’s poem, though ii is written in nine five-beat couplets, is
separated by paragraph indentations (rather than by the conventional
white space) into three stanzas of six lines each, suggesting to us that it
has a three-part shape. (Sfaitirt is an Italian word meaning a room or J
stopping place. A stanza in a poem is, so to speak, one room in the house
that is die poem as J whole.)

EDMUND WALLER
Of the Last Verses it i the Booh
When we tor age Could neither read nor write,
The subject made us able to indite;
'I' he soul, with nobler resolutions decked,
The body stooping, does herself erect.
No mortal parts are requisite to raise
Her chat, unbodied, can her Maker praise.
The seas are quiet when the winds give o'er;
So calm are we when passions are no more!
for t lie 11 we know how vain it was to boast
Of fleeting things, so certain to be lost
Clouds of affection from our younger eyes
Conceal that emptiness which age descries.
The soul’s dark cottage, battered and decayed,
3K I HE IJ o i: ,y A s A nH A M {; F.- D LrrE

Lets in new light through chinks that time has made;

Stronger by weakness, wiser men become,
As they draw near to their eternal home,
Leaving the old. both worlds at once they view,
That stand upon the threshold of the new.

As we scan the poem for pattern, we notice that the poem men¬
tions i tlpteff of it'd tig m each of its three parts, ,ind seems in each stanza
to redefine old age in terms of seeing, We can write out a thematic
statement for each stanza:

1. I he poet in old age finds his sight dimming,, so chat Ire is losing the
capacity to read and write; “We for age could neither read nor unite,
And nonetheless he does write, if only this last poem, because of
the urgency of oncoming death: "The subject made us able to
indite. The poet's topic
impending death — —
how to praise Cod even in the face of
raises the soul to new efforts. It writes uirhotit
its eyes: "No mortal pans are requisite to raise1’ the soul to its
written prayer.
2. The poet finds chat old age sees the wwfjf more keenly than youth did:
in youth, clouds of emotion made us think the world full of good
things, but age descries the world's true emptiness. This is an
improvement on the approaching physical blindness ot stanza 1.
3. The poet finds something even better to say. The internal spiritual
vision of the old writer not only descries the emptiness of the
world; it can also view, with "new light," the “eternal home" to
which the old draw near:
Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view,
That stand upon the threshold of the new.

This brave expanding shape L<I am going blind"; “No, I see

better than 1 did when my eyes were clouded by youth’s desires"; "I find
that by my new light of wisdom, I can sec not just earth, hut my eternal
home" —is one of increasing praise of God tot true enlightenment,

even m physical blindness. Insight grows as sight fails,

It tli is three-part shape is the basic crescendo shape tit the poem,
what other subordinate shapes can we see? First of all, there are many
ways in which one can refer to the self:
We cou LI neither read nor write
77;f son! erects herself as JIJC body scoops
 T i i £ !J R i v \ T p. LIFE 19

Stic | the mid] praises her Maker

We (like seas after windi) are calm after the storm of passion; nr
know the vanity of earthly things; what cur younger eyei missed
/Ijjr frhe allegorical quality] descries
77jf foui’.i dark cottage [die lets m new light
<\fcti become wiser as they draw near heaven
77ji'}' who, leasing the old world, stand on the threshold ot the new
world, view both worlds at once
Sometimes the self is a generalized “we" (which we nonetheless, be¬
cause of the past tense of "made,” interpret as a single person; if the lines
read "When we for age can neither read nor write / The subject makes
us able to indite,” see would see the remark as applying to all of us; The
poet refers to him sell as "we perhaps to introduce his double nature: he
is composed of an erect soul and a stooping body. The soul can act alone,

can indite without the eyes.

The next "we1’ is the truly generalized "we.1” speaking of all men:
"We all are calm after the 5 to mi of passion," This is rhe present tense of
objective description, the scientific present tense —
(“AU men are mor
tab" “Hope springs eternal." “All fair in
is love and war"). Another
universal generalization is set forth under the allegorical word "Age,"
meaning "Old People." “Age sees more than Youth' would be the
"norma!'' wav of putting the rase, hut Waller mixes his references,
third-person singular and first-person plural: descries more than our
younger eyes,”
Next, soul and body return, but now in the graphic metaphor ot
"The soul's dark cottage, bartered and decayed." with its “chinks" made
by time. At this moment, the author is at the greatest point of objectivity
about his own body, looking at it from the outside, so to speak, and
seeing how battered and decaved it is, hov its walls have chinks of ruin
iti them. Yet at the very same moment, he sees what it is like inside.
tilled, with “new light" coming through those veiy chinks. The sign of
his objectivity is the search tor and discovery ot this visual metaphor (the
body as a decaying cottage) tn represent himself outside and inside, to
hinlselt and his reader.
Next, he returns to a generalization about all mor (meaning men
and women) — how they (third -person plural) become wiser as they
grow older. and stronger, paradoxically, by weakness Finally, in the last
generalization, he lakes a Subset ot old men - the dying, those on the
threshold of departure, 77icy (third -person plural igiin. but thi> time.

_
40 THE POEM AH ASAR-ANGED LIIE

because it refers to the subset of which lie is the only present member,
more like the initial plural lW” winch we interpreted as the singular]
see eternity as well as time. This panoramic vision attained by the
— —
dying as they view both worlds at once is the prize claimed by the
poet for himself, though he modestly puts it in terms of all the dying.
The constantly changing names by which the poet refers to him¬
—
self singular (“we,” “Age,” “the soul’s dark cottage"), dual (“body,"

old")
—
"soul”); and plural ("wc," "men," "they that stand upon the thresh¬
provide what anthropologists call a "thick description" of the
person speaking, enabling us to see the many headings under which the
poet classifies himself, A poem that said “I” all the way through would
seem much poorer, and would not visibly represent, by a pattern of
different naming, the coining separation of the body and soul that so
much in the poem reflects.
There are other shapes in the poem. Perhaps the most notable one
appears in the contrast between the couplets that are said freely, without
pauses, and those that are more complex in their pauses. The things that
are said freely, without stops, rend to be truisms of a sort:
The seas are quiet when the winds give o’er;
So calm are we when passions arc no more!

Clouds of affection from our younger eyes

Conceal that emptiness which age descrics.

Thcsc couplets are epigrammatic (by which we mean that they say
something in a short, pointed, conclusive. " wrapped -up" way).
Other couplets, by their pauses, emphasise conflicts, tensions, and
divided views:
The soul, with nobler resolutions decked,
The body stepping, does herself erect.

Stronger by weakness, wiser men become,

As they draw near to their eternal home,
Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view,
That stand upon the threshold of the new.

The sentences themselves, in their use or deletion of pauses, act out the
alternation in the poem between truisms about old age and the gradual
discoveries the speaker himself is making
 TUT P 1.1 in r r; LIFT 41

The Public Life

As we mm from the private to the public life, we come to this very

brief poem by Michael Harper —
which nonetheless has the compre¬
hensive title “American I listory." It consists of two parts. The first is a
personal statement [“Those girls remind me of five hundred blacks"),
and the second is the sardonic quip following it, spoken by someone
who seems to he giving us a knowing wink: "Can't find what you can't
see i cm you?”

MICHAEL HARP*!*
American History
f'drjaiin CÿiilLiknn

Those four black girls blown up

in that Alabama church
remind me of rive hundred
middle passage blacks,
in a net, under water
in Charleston harbor
so micpal; wouldn't find them.
Can’t find what you cart1! see
can you?

The “invisibility" ol blacks ill American culture has been a per

si stein theme ot black authors; Ralph Hibson called his famous autobio¬
graphical novel ImHsibii Han. A few blacks more or less, m racist
contexts, would scarcely be noticed. The furor caused by the death of
four young black girls when a bomb exploded in a black church was one
of the signs of the rising civil rights movement; yet those who placed the
bomb didn't care how many blacks they killed. Harper's anecdote of
American ship-captains drowning slaves so they would not be stolen, .is
1,1
items of value, by British (rOOps suggests the perennial invisibility" ot
blacks throughout American history, from the very beginning. The wry
quip at the end ol the poem makes even more horrible the “success" ot
—
hiding by murder —
the valuable slaves to keep them from the red¬
coats.
By calling his poem "American History" Harpet suggests tii.it the
episodes he recounts represent, better than textbooks hearing that name,
the real narrative ot American events. I he real American history remains
to be written, the poem implies. So we must see. between these two
—
markers the in visibility of drowned blacks in the Revolution, the
42 r IE t POEM AS, AHRANCEII [. IEE

invisibility of bombed blacks in the twentieth century —

.1 whole silent

procession of comparable incidents, decade by decade, from the seven¬

teenth Oe jittery till today. In this wav., by evoking the shape "normally”
belonging to the title "American History" (a long textbook ftiLI of
patriotic self-glorification). Harper makes ns see his little shape us one
that could be extended into a very big one.
We come to another marginalized group in public life, Charles
Siruic’s aged poor:

CHAKJJ;SSIMIC
Old Couple
They’re waiting to be murdered.
Or evicted. Soon
They expect to have nothing to eat,
As far as I know, they never go out.
A vicious pain's coming, they think.
It will start in the head
And spread down to the bowels,
They’ll be carried off on si ret diets, howling,
In the meantime, they watch die street
From their fifth floor window.
It has rained, and now it looks
[ ike Lt\ going to snow a little.

T see hi tn get up to lower the shades.

[I their window stays dark.
I know that his hand has reached her.
just as she was about to turn on the lights.

If we quickly sum up the subject of each ot the four stanzas of Simics

“Old Couple,” we might come up with something like this:
I. Three possible futures tor the old couple — murdered] evicted,
starved;
2. Another possible future — terminal illness:
3. The present interim before one ol these horrors happens;
4. The suppositions of the speaker w atching them.

A quick summary of this sort at least shows that the horrors die
down, by stanza 3, to die brief and fragile peace fcrf the interim moment
at the end; rliis decline in horror is one overall shape ol (lie poem Hut
 T i r f;. ]J u ts L |JC LIE-K 4J

it leaves nut the presenceof the person watching [hi1 old! couple, it is tit is
person who speaks the poem, and we identify' him, since dm is nor a
dramatic monologue, with the author of the poem He knows, in stanza
l, whit tilt' old people are thinking. He comment; on their behavior
("As tar.is i know, they never go out"’). He watches them compulsively
(“I see him gel up to lower the shades"), I le even invents what they do
when lie cannot observe then) ("l know that his hand has reached
hers").
If the shape of the old people's lives is a downhil] dread ot con¬
tinual terror, what is the shape ot the watcher's life? I 'he poet asks us to
imagine the passing days of a watcher in a nearby building. At some
point in the past, he noticed the old couple across the way; perhaps at
ihac point they were still going but for walks or to the store That seetns
to have stopped. But when they were still visible in the neighborhood,
the watcher noted their mutual devotion, which causes him now to
imagine the old man reaching tor Jns wife's hand. The watcher is so
conscious of the few tilings dir- old couple can look at that he has
reduced his own consciousness to the tenuousness of theirs: “It has
rained, and now it looks / Like it's going to snow a little" —
an obser
vat ion ot no real importance, except to people who have nothing else
but the weather to observe (but it also suggests worsening weather, one
more threat), Tin' old couple have become so real to the watcher that
he has absorbed choir terrors into his own mind. He knows that one of
these days he will either see them taken out on stretchers, howling in
pain, or see their possessions on the sidewalk as they are evicted with no
place to go, or he will hear that they have been murdered, or that
someone lias found them dead of malnutrition in their apartment. There
are simply no other possible futures to imagine tor them; the watcher
knows tit is.
As soon as we see the watther/speaker as the principal conscious¬
ness in the poem, wc read the work as a protest -poem against the
conditions of modern urban life. I lie neglect by society ot its most
helpless members menus ih.it anyone in a modern city becomes neces¬
sarily a watcher of cases like tins. Nobody can be tree of horror and guilt.
as the probable future seeps from the victims to their neighbors.
The two interlocking shapes tlie heading Tor- disaster life-shape
of the old couple, die ongoing and speculative lift -shape of the watcher
-- make up the figure of the poem. Spatially, we are given two rooms —
the implied room of the watcher, the room of the old couple across the
streets temporally, we are presented with the several envisaged plots of the
old couple meeting their end, each plot as terrifying as the other. The plots
exhaust all possibilities. I he old couple have no one to rescue them —

__
 44 THE POEM AS ARRANGED LIE-E

they will end in a public hospital wand for the indigent, in a shelter for the
homeless, out on the street after being evicted, in the morgue after being
murdered, Or in their bed, Starved,
Many poems have two or more interlocking shapes. We have seen
such shapes in "Infant Sorrow" (the baby as mind and body; the baby as
dependent on parents; the baby as part human, part supema tu ral; the
baby as a doing creature and a feeling creature), and again in "Old
Couple" (the successive shapes of the couple's envisaged horrifying
futures; the watcher's steady -state speculative shape). When several over¬
lapping and interlocking shapes are present at once in a poem, it be¬
comes potentially more interesting
is—
— because more complex, as life
than poems that have only one shape. The ideal poem would have
a temporal shape, a spatial shape, a rhythmic shape, a phonetic shape, a
grammatical shape, a syntactic shape, and so oil
— each one beautifully
worked out, each one graphically presenting in formal terms an aspect of
the emotional and intellectual import of the poem. One way we dis¬
tinguish more accomplished poems from less accomplished ones is the
control of the artist over a number of shapes at once. Other things being
equal, the more shapes that are being controlled, the more pleasure one
derives from the poem because more of its inner life has been thought
through, analyzed, and made visible in form by its creator.
The manuscript drafts of Robert Lowell's “Skunk Hour" show
—
that it originally began in the way that a traditional lyric might “One
dark night," etc. The present stanza 5 was the beginning of the poem:

ROBERT LOWELL
SKUNK Hour
For Elirabeih Biskop
Nautilus Island's hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son’s 3 bishop. Her farmer
is first selectman in Our village;
she's in her dotage.
Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria's century,
she buys up all
the eyesores lacing her shore,
and Jets them fall.

hi
 THE Pun I i < 1. 1 E- t 45

The season’s iil —

we’ve lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap trom ail L L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstcrmcn.
A red fox stain covers Bine Hill.
And now our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for fall;
his fishnet's filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler's bench and awl;
there is no money in his work,
he’d rather marry.
One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull:
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town, . , .
My mind's not right.
A car radio bleats,
"Love, O careless Love. . 1 hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if ruy hand were at its throat, . ,
! myself am hell;
nobody’s here
—
only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for 3 bite to cat.
They march on their soles up Main Street;
white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red firs'
under the chalk dry and spar spite
ol’the Trinitarian Church.
i stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air —
,t mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail.
She jabs her Wedge-head m a Cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.

-
stantly visible;
—
Lowell brackets bis “lyric center ’ stanzas S anti fi —
with a sei of
"characters’' tore and a set of animals air. This three-part shape is in¬
46 THE POEM AS A P. H. A MJ E LJ 1. J J- >.

I. Grotesque inhabitants of my Maine town;

2, Myself;
3, A mother skunk and her kittens taking over the town.

Each of the three parts has an inner shape of ns own. In the first pan, the
native “hermit heiress" owns two stanzas, while the lesser summer mil¬
lionaire and ''fairs' decorator," transients both, own only one stanaa
each. (The manuscript suggests that all of these are figures for rite poet
himself, Whereas the final version says “There is no money tu his
work, / he'd rather many" about the "fairy decorator,” in the draft the
poet says this about himself: “There is no money in this work, / I’d
rather marry '). Lowell inherited his house in Cast me, Maine, from his
aunt who lived there, hut he only went there sum titers, like the “sum¬

Brahmin lineage
—
mer millionaire." No longer living in one of the roles proper to his,
hermit, or bishop, or landowner the speaker has
declined into the un virile role of an artist, comparable to that of the man
whom the town contemptuously terms the "fairy decora tor."
After presenting these disguised figures tor himself in the first part
of the poem, the speaker shows us himself in the second part as a voyeur,
aware of his own madness as he spies on lovers in cars The gradually
intensifying shape of this middle part is one of mortified self-watching:
"My Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull,’’ not “1 drove up the hill"
A tid it is one of psychological self-judging: “My mind’s not right." And
it is one of medical self-diagnosis: “I hear / my ill -spirit sob in each
blood cell." Finally, it is one of erhicat self-dam nation: “I myself am
hell " After the disengaged tone of detached social commentary which
dominates the first part of the poem describing Castine, these damning
first-person sentences chill the blood.
Then come the skunks. Nature takes over from Lite decadent cul¬
ture ofCasiine, The skunks invade the town. The mother is the general;
her offspring are her military "column. “ We are watching the barbarians
(disciplined, vital, fiery,'-eyed) take over Kerne (declining, degenerate,
chalk-dry). The vivid verbs used of the skunks energize the exhaustions
and distresses <>1 the poem: the skunks siwdr, and march; the mother
skunk wills the garbage pail, jabs her head into the tup. tltops her tail, will
ntfi scare. The speaker is (almost) glad to resign his inherited world to the
skunks; certainly he is in no shape to govern it, or even to live m it, any
more. It is a poem of total abdication from rule by the originally ruling,
now depleted, Brahmin class. It was Lowell's revenge on his own her¬
itage, which he always regarded with mixed admiration and con tern pi.
And it shows his heritage gradual I \ disappearing back into nature, as all
cultures eventually do,
 NATURE A N n TIMI 47

Nature and Time

Almost the whole appeal of the little medieval spring SOilg we jaw
as our first example of nature poetry conies from its rhythm. Here [ have
marked the "silent e\” which Avene pronounced ("nil”) in the Middle
Ages, so that the original rhythm can he heard:
Sumer is icumen in,
Lhude sing, cuccu!
Crowe th sed and bloweth med
And springtb the wude nu.
Sing, cuccu!
Awe bleteth after lamb,
Lhouth after calve cut
liulluc sterteth, bucke verteth —
Murie sing, cuccu!
Cuccu, cuccu.
Wei singes thu, cuccu.
Ne swik thu never nu!

At first, as we expect m a simple ballad quatrain (ÿ four line stanza with

alternating tour- beat and three-beat lines), a four-beat line ("SUmer IS
iCUMen IN") is here followed by a three-brat line {"[.HUdc SING.
cuCU!") and another four-beat line is followed by a three-beat line, all
of them abour the renewing of vegetation. Hut to our surprise an un¬
expected three -heat echo line is added as a fifth line "Sing. Cuccu!"
rhen the poem starts up again. Naturally, see expect mother 4/ 3 f
4/3 pattern, and we tmd it, yet this second quatrain is not about
vegetation but about the renewing of animal life (ewe and lamb, cow¬
an J calf, bullock and buck). We might even expect another echo-line,
and we receive it
surprise—
— “Cuccu, cuccu.” Hut this is followed by another
two more three beat lines, a little congratulation to the hat
biugtr of spring; “Wei singes tint, CUCCU. / Ne swik thu never mil" The
hit of the whole makes us recognize it as a song, even though we find
ii in printed form.
besides its rhythmic shape, then, this little two-stanza poem has
exhibited a logical shape, separating the vegetative springing of seed and
mead and wood (stanza I i from the animal springing of bullocks (stanza
2), and it has also made a pleasing alternation between description
(“Sumer is icuineu in") and direct add mess ("Sing, cuccu! M), It has ever)
displayed .mother shape: in boil) stands some verbs precede their nouns
("Groweth sed." "Lhouth after calve cu") and some do not ("Sumet is
48 THE POEM AS Akk A N t; t- O LIFE

icumen in," "Uullucsterteth”). These changes make for unpredictability,

and therefore pleasure, since we derive pleasure in poems, just as in life,
not only from pattern but from the interruption of pattern, if everything
were unpredictable we would have chaos, but what we usually find in a
good poem is the unpredictable within an overarching purposivencss.
Dave Smith’s poem on spring uses one of the oldest European lyric
forms, that of the sonnet, (did. Smith's sonnet is a hybrid one, with a
Shakespearean rhyming octave and a Petrarchan sestet, eft-fee:

DAV£ SMITH
The Spring Poem
fcWty piX’l ilhUjM iJ'ntF li Spring potm.
— LOUISE ClUCK

Yes, but wc must be sure of verities

such as proper heat and adequate form.
That’s what poets are for, is my theory,
This then is a Spring poem. A car warms
its rusting hulk in a meadow; weeds slog
up its flanks in martial weather. April
or late March is our month. There is a fog
of spunky mildew and sweaty tufts spill
from the damp rump of a back seat. A spring
thrusts one gleaming dp out, a brilliant tooth
uncoiling from Winter's tension, a ring
of insects along, working out the Truth.
Each year this tar, melting around that spring,
hears nails trench from boards and every squeak sing.

Although Smith, in homage to Shakespeare’s spring sonnets

(“From you have f been absent in the spring,’’ etc.}, has given his spring
sonnet a Shakespearean octave, he has not divided his sonnet neatly, in
Eerms of thought-units, into three quatrains and a couplet, as Shake¬
speare usually did. Instead, Smith’s poem begins as a reply to the remark
by Louise G I lick, couching its reply in stern theoretical language about
proper and adequate verities. It then announces its own existence: “This
then is a Spring poem.”
The rest of the poem is description: an actual present- tense de¬
scription of the rusting car, followed (in the closing couplet) by a
habitual -present- tense description of what happens "each year," reas¬
suring us that the previous present- tense process has happened before
and happens, in fact, every year. But there is one odd moment in the
 i\ A T Ll El E- AN J > T1 M L 49

description of weeds, fog. mildew. tufts, spring, nails, and

boards. If is the phrase about the insects who gather on the metal
spring: they are ‘’working out the Truth.." The word "truth is the '

Anglo-Saxon form of the L annate word 'Verity" (used earlier in line

1 in the plural, “venties"), so we know that the inserts arc experi¬
encing “proper heat and adequate form and are stand-ins for the poet
seeking his verities. As the metal tooth of the spring uncoils, so the
weeds and the rest ot nature are uncoiling from winter tension, and
the poet has to follow along that uncoiling motion, tracing the path of
truth as the insects trace the new path afforded them by the newly
sprung spring.
From the end of line 4 through line 12. each line spills over into the
next one as the scene uncoils before US, Motiving is end-stopped, ev¬
erything: ts grow mg and expanding. (Poems usually indicate a pause at
the end of" a line either by a break in thought or by the use of a comma,
a period, or some other mark of punctuation; when lines “run over, we
are to inter an ongoing rush of thought ot feeling.) The last two lines of
Smith's poem, though, because they tell us what happens "every year "
instead of w hat is happening “now'," are a neat couplet; they represent
not discovery but summary. Smith has given us first, the theory1 of the
spring poem, then the spmig poem m action, and finally the spring poem
in habitual summary, showing us his three responses to Gluck’s de¬

—
mand -“I know the theory. I know the thing itself, and 1 know it
happens every7 year.7’ He also shows ns that he is aware Shakespeare did
it first, while refusing, as a Modernist; to follow the Kenaissance neatness
of the four Shakespearean separate thought-units, one for each quatrain,
one tor the couplet,
Keats's sonnet on the human season? is written in mutation of
fi hakes pc a re, meaning that it has tour quatrains and a couplet. Spring
happens in quatrain 1, summer in 2, autumn in 3. and winter in the
couplet: we can see Keats’s orderly arrangement at work. Since not only
this procession uf the four seasons but also itx analogy to human life
(from spring-youth to winter -old age,' are all predictable once the sub¬
ject is decided upon, how will Kents nuke Ins. (krtuVvn in advance)
process aesthetically interesting?

JOHN KLATS
The Human Seasons
hour seasons till the measure of the year;
Four seasons are there in the mind ot num
 50 THE POEM AS ARRANGE!} L I F I

He hath his lusty spring, when fancy clear

Takes in all beauty with an easy span:
He hath his summer, when luxuriously
He chews the honied cud of lair spring thoughts,
Till, m his soul dissolv'd, they come to be
Part of himself. He hath his autumn pons
And havens of repose, when his tired wings
Are folded up, and he content to look
On mists in idleness: to let fair things
Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook.
He hath his winter too nt pale misfeature,
Or else he would torget ins mortal nature.

First of all, Keats doesn't speak of the seasons of the human

body
— doesrt t say, “Man has his spring, ot youth, hss summer ot ma¬
turity, his autumn of decline, and his winter of death." That cliche
was too well known. He decides to put the seasons inside man's wind.
Docs the mind, like the body, have seasons? And if so, what ate they
like (since the mind, in the ordinary sense, docs not grow old}? Briefly
put, what Keats says is that in youth the mind rinds an easy pleasure
in spanning the whole world, absorbing everything beautiful. In men¬
tal summer, nun reconsiders the "fair thoughts' of his spring, redi-
goting them till they dissolve in Ins soul and become totally
internalized, part of himself. During his mental autumn, he rests, folds
his wings, and doesn't try TO see everything — he is “content to look
on mists in idleness." At this Stage, he allows fair things to "pass by
Lin heeded." as a cottager might fail to notice the brook that flows by

beyond his threshold. What does the man look on in winter? Not "all
beauty." not "fair Things," not even "mists" — rather, he looks on
“pale nntieaturc." Why must he look on the diseased and tile de¬
formed? Because otherwise, he would "forger his mortal nature " He
would toTger that he too must grow pale and die, it he looked tank-
on the beautiful or the misty.
This is a brief summary of a complex poem, but it is enough to
those the rapid progress ot the Kcatsian seasonal sketches — the winged
fancy of spring, the cud chewing ot summer during (he pondering Of
beamy m the soul, the ports and havens for man’s autumn migration, the
folding ot his tired wings among the mists ot uncertainty, the threshold
brook passing by unheeded outside the house of (as Keats called himself)
the “spiritual cottager " Keats’s poems often lead us along by a succes¬
sion ot such descriptions. Without the unexpectedness or all these lightly

drawn images, the procession ol the seasons might he mo predictable.

And Keats lets each ot the first three seasons slip into the next almost

h.
 NATL; K r A M t> TIMT St

imperceptibly, imitating the way df nature. Only winter in unmistakably

set .(part in the couplet, as m isle attire replaces feature.
In Chapter I, we looked at Shakespeare’s three models of life in
Sort i let 60: the Steady-state model of successive waves in winch each
moment of life resembles its predecessor and its successor; the rise-and-
cclipse-of-the-sim model that sketches a catastrophic view ot life; and
the chi rtf worst, model, in which we do not even have time tu grow
before we are scythed down. 1'lns structure in itself would have seemed
sufficient to many poets, It> fact, it would have seemed too much. Often,
poems offer only one model of whatever they are discussing. Hut Shake¬
speare found it irresistible; very often, to let each of his quatrains set up
a model different trom those set up by the others. The intellectual tension
—
thereby generated "Is life a steady-state procession? Ora single long
climb and fall? Or nothing bEit successive and premature annihila¬
—
tions?*’ involves the reader strongly in the progress of the poem:

WILIIAM SH A.K.F.SPEANN
Sottnef 60
Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end,
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity, once in rhe main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crowned,
Crooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish sL-i on youth,
A [id delves the parallels m beauty's brow,
Feeds on the rarities id nature’; truth,
And nothing stands but for Ins scythe to mow.
Ami yret to times m hope my verse shall stand,
Ihmsing thy worth, despite his cruel hand,

Each of Shakeÿeare’s three models I ittie h .1 mini- poem m

of
itself. Hie first model displays itself in balanced ceremonious (oil unin¬
terrupted lines, like successive waves, making its analogy calmly, as a
sermon might:
Metaphor Like as the waves . . . shore,
Literal truth bo do siur minutes . . . end,
Elaboration Each changing , , . before,
hi sequent toil . . . contend.

J
52 THE POEM AS ARRANGED LIFE

The next model is far more troubled, and it? pace is charted by it?
governing words in or: “crouds, 'r “troim rd,1’ ‘"(rooked. ”

Wherewith being crowned

— eclipses

Crawls to maturity

!
Nativity 'Gainst his glory fight
(once in the main of light)

And Tittle that gave

---doth now his gift confound.

We see nativity crawl up to crowning, then crookedness fight it to death.

Time gives on the left, takes away on the right. This is what we think of
as the tragic model embedded in those of Shakespeare's plays that show
the rise and fall of a character like Macbeth or Othello. It is completely
different from Shakespeare's steady-state model in quatrain 1.
Shakespeare’s third model consists neither of steady-state waves
nor of rising and eclipsed sun. It shows us a drastic speed-up in his rate
of extinction. It took three lines for the sun to be extinguished; now the
deaths occur at the rate of one per line for two lines, and then several per
line:
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth,
And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow.

These destructions take place with appalling rapidity, but, what is worse,
the way they are related by the syntax of the clauses puts death before
lived life Transfixing precedes flourishing, wrinkles [delved “parallels")
precede the appearance of the beautiful brow, devouring precedes the
growing of the rare items in nature’s garden. Finally, life itself is seen to
exist for scything, and for that alone: "Nothing stands but /er his scythe
to mow," The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was later to say bitterly,
remembering this line, that matt was bom for death: "It is the blight man
was bom for.”
Shakespeare’s three mini-poems, three incompatible models of life,
have now been sketched in his sonnet. They arc all about Time, and how
nothing stands. The couplet, in revenge, shifts from “Time” to “times,’1
 IN B k t r, F : T H i- POEM *s A Kk A N ct E n LIFE 53

and makes them “times in hope” that is, the envisaged Hi lure The
couplet also shifts tmm “nothing stands" to something standing. In future
times (“times in hope”), when the organic world has died, the inorganic
world ot art, which the scythe cannot mow down, will stand.
And yet to tuner in hope my verse shall standt
Praising your worth. despite his cruel hand.

which opens with the same cr- of doom which we remember from the —
This boast niiÿht seem to vanquish Time, if the poem did not end with
the ha [id of Time itself, characterized by an adjective “cruel" -

tragic series "crawls." "crowned," "crooked." "time! ' comes from the
—
Latin crwOr, “blood11 and Time's bloody hand is seL over against
the “hand." OT handwriting, that creates verse praising worth. It is some
—
thing of a standoff but even that is a victory tor the rarities ot art’s truth.
After the three competing models ot natural life, each more destructive
than the fast. Shakespeare has dosed his sonnet with a model of the vii
durance — not forever, hut at least to “time*, in hope’’ —
of his verse.
This second look at our Original poems suggests chat one can't fully
understand a poem until one sees the various shapes into which meaning
lias been arranged- We have seen steady- state shapes, and shapes of
increase and decrease; shapes ot Contrast and alternation; shapers ot series,

both internally consistent and inconsistent; slopes of pointed metrical

emphasis, of space and time. E here is no lack of shapes for poets to
imitate — every human action conducted over time offers such a shape,
of success or failure, of stasis or catastrophe, of contest nr conciliation,
The dynamism of such shapes gives dynamism to poetry.

In llriefi The Poem as Arranged Life

We have seen, by taking a second look at the poems introduced in

Chapter !. how each of these' poems is not only an utterance springing
from a life -situation, but also a construction, an arrangement. The ele¬
ments that can enter into the arranging ot a poem are very various. The
author can be arranging a round-pattern while arranging a list of parallel
elements, and also, simultaneously, ads'ai icing the plot through a series ot
changes in tense or mood. Or the author can he setting up a stanza form
i the same time as a logical form: the stanza form may tell us that the
poem is a ballad, while the construction may tell us tint the poem is built
on a logical contrast between “tiltin' and “nosv," A poem may say “the
Same thing" three times ("E am gnawing old"), but each time nuy use
a different model ror aging and thus convey .1 dillerent emphasis, [ ones
 54 THE POEM AS A IUC A n i i > L i n1

of voice (MO be varied, from protest to resignation, while iiuotbrr de¬

ment is held constant (say, the tense of til e verbs), By learning to look
at each level of organization — jn hone tic, grammatical, syntactic, psv
cbologsca], temporal, spatial, and so on you learn to see the work the
a LI th or is doing to make the poem both interesting on many levels and
coherent in ns arrangements. We will he looking at all of these levels in
greater detail in subsequent chapters.

Reading Other Poems

The following poems have strong and visible structures Think lira!
about tile lift' -situation out of which each emerges, and then begin to
explore the way in which the life-s it nation has been imagined and
arranged, "Lord Randal," tor instance, is structured by rise stages of its
narrative, as are George Herbert's "Love,'1 John Keats’s “La Mellr Dam
sans Merci,” Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could nut stop for death,11
and Louise Erd rich's "W indigo.” Hoes each oft h esc poems begin at the
outset of its narrative, or do some begin in the middle? Keats's poem
begins at the end of the story. Why would a writer decide to begin at the
end? Mow many people speak m “La Belle Dame11?
Given that every plot has a beginning and an end, the writer has
i lie most, tree play in composing the middle. At the beginning of Her¬
bert’s poem, tire sinful soul has arrived, alter death, at the gate erf heaven;
at the end of the poem, the soul sits down and participates ill the
heavenly banquet. What happens in the middle? How many stages arc
there between beginning and end? John Donne’s poem doesn’t reach
the beginning of its story about a husband’s departure oti a journey
must go” - -
—
until it has traversed a long comparison of the way virtuous
“1

meft die and the way virtuous spouses part. How does Donne end Ins
plot5 What are the stages through which Silhu takes us throng}] her tale
of supernatural abduction?
Shakespeare, Robert Herrick, and Robert 1- rust, on the other hand.
use contrastive structures to explore hvo different Stales: Shakespeare
contrasts depressionand elation; Herrick presents a woman clothed and
the same woman naked; Frost contrasts the life lived and the life unlived,
Rather than contrast, Wall Whitman uses analogy: He explains Iris own
actions through those of a spider. How does the structure of each of
these poems reinforce the contrast or the comparison ? What is the
imaginative spin put on each poem by die images chosen?
Wordsworth writes a poem about experiencing life and then re¬
membering it. recounting how he sees a host ol daffodils and later finds
h
 READING OTHER POEMS 55

them Hashing on the i finer screen of memory. However, he gives life

three stanzas and memory only one, Call you speculate why? Yet mem¬
ory has the “last word." which is, in J poem, a place of dominance. Can
you think of other ways of arranging this material (say, putting memory
first, or giving equal time to life and memory, or alternating trom life to
memory several times)? How would each of these change the effect of
the poem?
Thomas Hardy’s poem about the collision of an iceberg and the
Titanic begins m the present, with the sunken ship- Where does it end?
W litre else could it have begun or ended?
The most tightly structured of all flies r poems is probably "Tidh
borne’s Elegy." Each of its three stanzas is constructed on roughly the
same plan, but with variations. Can you describe the basic plan and
specify how it vanes in each start zl? I ry rearranging the stanzas. Would
it be the same poem if you interchanged stanzas I and 3? Can you see
how the tenses change in the poem?

ANONYMOUS
T<ord Randal
I
"O where ha’ you been, Lord Randal, my son?
And where ha' you been, my handsome young man?”
:JI ha’ been at the greenwood: mother, mat my bed soon,
For I’m wearied wf huntin', aud tain wad lie down.?
qU&j
2
“And wha there, Lord Randal, my son?
met ye
And wha met you there, my handsome young man?”
"O I met \vf my true-love; mother, rtiak my bed soon,
For I’m wearied wi’ fumdiT. and fain wad In- down."
j

"And what did she give you. Lord Randal, my sou?

And what did she give you, my handsome young man"
“Eels tried iti a pan; mother, mak my bed soon,
Tor I'm wearied wi’ huntin', and fain wad lie down ’’
4
"And wha gat vour leavin's, Lord Randal, my son?
And whj gat your leivin’s, my handsoiiK young man?"
"My hawks and my hounds: mother, male my he: I soon.
For I’m weaned wi’ huntin’, and fain wad he down."
S6 THE POEM AS A K. is A M t; I O I irr

5
“And what becam of them, Lord Randal, my sour
And what becam of them, niy handsome young man?"
"They stretched their legs out and died; mother, mak my bed
soon,
For I’m wearied wi’ huntin', and rant wad lie down,”
6
“O fear you are poisoned. Lord Randal, my soil!
[
1 fear you are poisoned, my handsome young man!"
“O yes, I am poisoned; mother, mak my bed soon.
Fur I’m sick at the heart, and I fain wad He down."
7
“What d ye leave to yoti.r mother, Lord Randal, my son:
What d’ ye leave to your mother, my handsome voting man?"
"Four and twenty milk kyc°; mother, mak my bed sooti, fnit/e
Fur I'm sick at the heart,, and J fain wad lie down."
a
"What d' ye leave to your sister. Lord Randal, my son":
What d’ ye leave to your sister, my handsome young man?”
“My gold and my silver; mother, mak mv bed soon,
For I’m sick at the heart, and 1 t;am wad lie down."
9
"What ct' ye leave to your brother. Lord Randal, my son:
What d' ye leave to your brother, my handsome voting nun?"
“My houses and my lands; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m sick at the heart, and 1 fain wad lie down."
10
“What d' ye leave to your true-love, Lord Randal,, my soli?
What d’ vc leave to your true-love, mv handsome young man?"
“! leave her hell and fire; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m sick at the heart, and 1 fain wad lie down."

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Sonnet 29
When, in disgrace0 with fortune and men's eyes, di.f/Jjtvr
J
] all alone beweep my outcast state.
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless0 cries, futik
Anti look upon myself, and curve my face,

.
 k 3-. A 15 I N C. O 1 HtR 1" O E M i 57

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope.

Featured like him. like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art and that man’s scope,
With what [ most enjoy contented least;
Yei in these thoughts myself almost despising,
—
Haply J think on thee and then my state,
Like to the lark ar break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then ! scorn to change my state with kings.

CH1DIOCK TlCHBOR-VE
Tichbome’s EFfjjj/
Written with hit h«is? in the Tiairi’r before l>\< mention
otm
My prime of youth is but a trust of cares,
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,
My crop of com is but a field of tares,
And all my good is but vain hope of gam;
The day is past, ami vet l saw no sun,
And now t live, and now my life is done,
My tale was heard and yet it was not told,
My truit is fallen and yet my leaves are green.
My youth is spent and yet I am not old,
1 saw the world and yet 1 was not seen;
My thread is cut and yet it is not spun,
And now [ live, and now my life ts done.
S sought my death and found ir in my womb.
t looked tor life and saw it was a shade,
I trod rhe earth and knew it was my tomb,
And now [ die, and now i was hut made;
My glass0 is full, and now my glass is run, fjemy'fjjsr
And now f live, and now my life is done.

JOHN DONNE
A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
The breath goes nose, and some say, No;
58 THE POEM AS ARS.AN«ED LIFE

So let 11? melt, and mite no noise.

No tear floods, nor sigh -tempests rtiove.
'Twere profanation ot OUr joys
To tell the laity our love,
Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,
Men recto n what it did and meant;
[liit trepidation of the spheres,
T hough greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary0 lovers’ love earthly
{Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.
11 Lit we by a love so much refined
That our selves know not what it is,
1 n ccr-ass tired of the mind.
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss,

Our semis therefore, winch are one,

two
Though I nutsc go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin coni passes arc two;
Thy soul, the fixed toot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th1 ocher do.
And though it in the center sir,
Yet svheu the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must
Like th' other foot, obliquely ran:
Thy firmness makes my circle fust,
And makes me end where 1 begun.

ROUERI HERRICK
Upon Julia's Chutes
Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
[ hen, then, rtiethinks, how sweetly flows
That liquefaction id' her clothes.
 R FA [> 1 NG OTHER POEMS 59
1
Next, when I fait mine eyes, and see
Th.it brave vibration, each way tree,
O, liow that flittering taketh me!

GiiORGii HERBERT
Love {///)
Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
lint quick -eyed Love, observing me grow slack
from my tint entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
lacked anything.
li I
"A guest," l answered, "worthy to be here":
Love said, "You shall be he.’
“1, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
1 cannot look on thee,"
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
“Who made the eyes but l?”
"Truth, Lord; but 1 have marred them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve."
“And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
“My dear, then I will serve."
“You must sit down," says Love, “and taste my meat."
So I did sit and eat,

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
/ Wandered Limely .djf a Cloud
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats oti high o’er Vales and hills,
Wiled all at once 1 saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils,
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering .mJ dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the star-'. that shme
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

J
60 THE POEM AS ARRANGED l. J E H

Tin.1 waves beside them danced; hue they

Outdid Lite sparkling waves in glee;
A poet cuuld not but be gay,
in such a jocund company;
! gazed — —
and gazed bur little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch 1 lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that Inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dancer with the daffodils.

JOHN KEATS
La Belle Dame sans Merti 1
O what can ad thcC, Knight at arms.
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the Lake
And no birds sing!
O what ean ail thee, Knight at amis,
So haggard, and so woebegone?
The squirrel’s granary is full
And the harvest’s done.
I sec a lily on thy brow
With anguish moist and lever dew,
Arid on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withered! too.
"I met a Lady in the Meads,0 rrteadoivs
Full beautiful, a faery’s child,
I ler hair was long, her foot was light
And her eyes were wild.
"I made a Garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant Zone;0 bclf
She looked at me as she did love
And made sweet moan,

The beautiful lady without ittrrty.

 RMAIJINC OTHEK POEMS 61

"1 sec her my pacing steed

And nothing else saw ail day long,
For sidelong Would she bend and sing
A faery's song.
"She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, ansi manna dew,
And sure in language strange she said
'1 love thee irue.r
"She cook me to her elfin grot
And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And then: i shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four,
"And tli ere she lulled me asleep,
And t lie re I dreamed. Ah Woe betide]
The latest0 dream 1 ever dreamt last
On the cold hill side.
"1 saw pale Kings, and Princes too,
Pale warriors, death -pale were they all;
They cried. LL.i belle d attic sans meiti
Hath thee in thrall!'
"I saw their starved lips the gloani
in

With horrid warning gaped wide,

And I awoke, and found me here
On the cold hill's side,
“And this is why I' sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering;
Though the sedge is withered from the Lake
And no birds sing.”

WALT WHITMAN
A Noiseless Patient Spider
A noiseless patient spider,
! mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
IT launch’d forth tiLnum. filament. filament, out of itself,
Ever tinreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
 62 THF. I'lJtM AS Auk ftNCf i) I, iff

And you O my soul where you stand*

Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to
connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor
hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my son],

EMILY DICICINSON
Beounfi? T could not stop for Death
Because I could not stop for Death
——
He kindly stopped for me —
The Carriage held hut just Ourselves —
And Immortality.
We slowly drove —
He knew no haste
And I had put away f *
My labor and my leisure too, m-

—
i

For His Civility

We passed: the School, where Children strove
—
At Recess jin the Ring-j-
Wc/ passed' the Fields of Gazing Grain
%e passed the Setting Sun s. —
-
— +ÿ
* 1

;Or rather — He passed Us

The Dews drew quivering and chill
— —
r

For only Gossamer, my Gown —

My Tippet0 —
only Tulle , — shoulder cape
We paused. before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground —
The Roof was scarcely visible —
u

f
The Cornice
—
—
in the Ground
Since then ="tis Centuries]— and yet
—

_
Feels shorter than the Day
\A
1. first .surmised the Horses' Heads
Were, toward Eternity —
/
M; A «-T *. ~~
-7
J
j<a_a

f < ,f JT L J-l

JL
 R E-A DING OTHEH POEMS 63

THOMAS HARDY
The Convergence tif the Twain
Lives on the loss of the Titmv
1
in a solitude ot the sea
Deep [rum humati vanity,
And the Pride oi L.ite that planned her, stilly couehei site.
2
Steel chambers, lace the pyres
Of her silamandrine tires,
Cold currents thrid,° and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres thread
3
Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
Tlie sea-worm crawls —
grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

4
Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie light] ess, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind,
5
Dim [noon -eyed tish.es near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: “What litres this vaingloriousness down here?"
A
Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

7
Prepared a sinister mate
For her —
so gaily great —
A Shape of Ice, tor the time tat and dissociate.
H
And as the smart ship grew
in stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too
t>4 Tui k (n M AS ARRANGED LIFE

9
Alien cli try seemed to be:
No mortal eye could see
llie intimate welding of" their later history,
to
Or sign that they were bent
IW paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,
It
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said “Nowl” And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres,

ROBERT FROST
The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry l could not travel both
And he one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as i could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
fn leaves no step had trodden black,
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
[ doubted it 1 should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and l —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

.
 ft FAD I Nc; OTHEH PtJtfcMS

LOUISL EKDHJCII
IVindigo
The- IVinJigo is ci firih-mmiq, ti'jjitjy IYI'IIFIM ii'fr/i a JFF.IFJ buried ileefi inside iif

il. In iLifri;' Chippcuki times, a young jÿiri vanquishes lilts nmuilrr fey forcing
ftitiliiiii hiftl rfnn-n rfi llimr, Fÿrfl’ÿ}- irbasiHji rfid1 AIIFFJHIF el the con' of iir
Von knew I was coming for yon, litcJij- one,
when the kettle jumped into the fire.
Towels flapped on the hooks, -+ i i
r
and the dog Crept otl, groaning, i

to the deepest part of the woods.

In the Luckies of dry brush a thin laughter started up,
Mother scolded the food warm and smooth in the pot
and called you to eat.
But I spoke in the cold trees:
JVCEC ene, t have rome for rhilct hide mid tic still.
The sumac pushed sour red cones through the ait.
Copper burned in the raw wood.
You saw me drug coward you.
Qli touch me, I murmured, and licked the soles of your feet.
You dug your hands into my pale, melting [iir.
1 stole you off, a huge thing in my bristling armor.
Steam rolled tram my wintry arms, each leaf shivered
from the bushes we passed
untd they stood, naked, spread like the cleaned spines of fish,
Then your warm hands hummed over and shoveled themselves fill)
ol the ice and the Snow I would darken arid spill
all night running, until at last morning broke (he told earth
and 1 carried you home,
a river shaking in the sun.
4
 3

Poems as Pleasure

Every artwork exists to evoke pleasures chat are easier to feet chan
to describe. Music, for instance, gives rhythmic pleasure and melodic
pleasure and harmonic pleasure, in different proportions in different
pieces. Some paintings afford the pleasure of recognizable representa¬
tion; some (purely abstract or non objective) do not. Sketches in black-
and-white and sketches in color both give pleasure, but of different
kinds. Wc cm say in general chat all artworks appeal Co our {apparently
inborn) love of patterning, whether the rhythmic and melodic pattern¬
ing wc hear in music, or the visual patterning wc sec in a painting or 3
quilt, or the patterning of volume that we see in architecture, from a
cathedral to a cottage, Pattern and rhvthm arc very closely connected, so
closely that people talk of the rhythm of repetition in tile successive
vaults of a church nave, or the rhythm of repeated curves in a painting,
Since the base of ill organic life is repetition (repeated motion in
growth and form), and since human life, by its heartbeat and breathing,
is innately rhythmic, wc can suppose that there is a biological basis for
our recognition of, and apparently instinctive pleasure in, repetition.
Besides our almost unconscious biological patterns ot breathing and
—
sleeping, we enjoy simple repetitive patterned body motions rocking
a baby, swimming, riding a bicycle, Babies learn by patterned repetition,
and the pleasure of learning and recognizing new and old patterns is
probably the source of our deepest pleasure in an. Most of the true and
wise things said in artworks have also been said (in less-patterned and

67
6tt I'otwi, AS PLEASURE

unrhytlmiic ways) m philosophy and letters and newspaper edit oiials and
conversation, where they also may HI like us as true and wise, but not as
art. In distinguishing literary artworks from other verbal pieces of truth
or wisdom, we tend to be moved hy the more intense patterning of the
artwork.
The excess of patterning, beyond what is necessary to convey para¬
ph rasa hie meaning, gives the work what we sometimes call “literariness."
—
Just H J painting can use its elements of pattern line [bold or delicate),
,1

color (moody or cheerful), and visual allusions (such as posing a figure

in gesture known to ns from Greek sculpture) — to "say" more
than merely “Here is a young woman naked," nr ''Here is a house in a
field," so poems too convey their effects through their manner as much
as through their matter. In using pattern in excess of what is strictly nee
cssarv for prose meaning, the poet reveals an intent to make art as well
as to represent being. I he representational urge ot most poets is very
strong, and every serious poet has something serious to say. Yet though
poet such as Yeats often says “the same thing" in his essay*, letters, and
speeches — —
works which we would not tend to call art as he has said
m a poem, wc feel .1 great difference in the manner of the saying. What,
then, are the pleasures we find m poems that we cannot find in a prase
paraphrase of the same poem or in an essay advocating the same ideas?

Rhythm

The firsr and most elementary pleasure m all poetry is rhythm.

Poetry is far more visibly rhythmic than most prose, and its rhythms are
recurrent. Even m free verse, where lines are of im predictably different
lengths and may not rhyme, we often hear the same rhythms re c Lining.
T. S. Eliot's character j . Alfred !Yu frock, for instance, both wants to
encounter experience (especially sexual experience) and wants to run
away from it. His "theme rhythm,'1 as a fellow tear her once pointed out
to mi-, is a little initial skip {'") in which nt-v unstressed syllables arc
followed by one stressed syllable: “Let ui GO. but the little excited
skip can't be kept up
"ordinary" rhythm ot
— each time I frock uses it, it dies out into the
one unstressed syllable followed hy one stressed
syllable “Let us CO, then. YOU ami I ’’ And the subsequent lines
continue to begin with a skip and die out into .1 walk, off and on,
throughout the poem, right down to the line that is the third iron) the
end, which is the last time we hear the skip:

We have i INGered in the chambers of the sea

bv sea girls Wreathed in seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

.
 RHYTHM 69

Good free verse at ways matches its rhythms to the emotional content of
its utterance — in Pm frock’s words, “As if a magic lantern threw the
nerves in patterns on a screen.*’
But free verse, though it is a major form in contemporary poetry,
is a relatively recent invention. Most poetry in most languages, histor¬
ically speaking, has had a regular rhythm (though much of it has not had
rhyme). English verse began in An glen Saxon poetry with no rhyme but
a strong four-beat rhythm, ami that four-beat rhythm is still very natural
to us. In Anglo-Saxon poetic rules, at least three of the four stressed
words in a line had to begin with the same consonant-sound (“cat” and
"king,' even though they begin with different consonants, begin with
the same consonant-sound). A modem poet writing in four-beat lines
reminds us, by his matching stressed consonant-sounds and words (see
those italicized below) that he knows the old forms. Here is the begin¬
ning of Wallace Stevens's “A Postcard from the Volcano,” in which the
dead (like the dead buried in Pompeii by the eruption of Mount Vesu¬
vius) speak to the generations following them who are excavating their
buried city:
Children picking up our bones
Will Merer kuou' that these lucre once
As quick* as foxes on the bill: fast, aliiv
And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;
And least will guess that with our bones
Wc left much more, left what still is
The Jcok of things, left lufuti uv felt
At what H* saw,

After the conquest of England by the French in KIG6, Anglo-

Saxon forms of poetry gave way to newer forms that counted by syllables
instead of solely by stress, Gradually, a stable set of possible English
rhythms evolved and were given names borrowed from Greek meters
(iambic, trochaic, and so on; see appendix “On Prosody" in this vol¬
ume). A number of rhymed stanza-fonm (such as the sonnet and the
villanellej were adapted from European models. Poets can always invent
new rhythms and new stanza-forms (as Gerard Manley Hopkins did in
the second half of the nineteenth century, and as the free- verse poets did
in the twentieth century). They can also revive or adapt older forms
(Wallace Stevens, tor instance, made the pentameter three-line stanza of
Dante his favorite form, though he did not use Dante's rhymes). The
70 POEMS AS PLEASURE

more you rod, the more vou tend lo notice the rhythms poets write in,
and how the stanzas rhyme,
Rhythm itself is a distinct pleasure, Here are sonic samples of
things people have liked:
Nursery rhythms, strong and emphatic:
Ding, dong, bell,
Pussy's in the well,
Who threw her in?
Little Johnny Thin.
Who pulled her out?
Little Tommy Stout.

The insistent hypnotic rhythms (ONE-two-three-four) of Edgar

Allan Poe's four-beat lines in “The Raven":
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
As I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly I heard a tapping,
As of someone gendy rapping, rapping at my chamber door,

The excited and syncopated five-beat rhythms of Hopkins’s “The Star¬

light Night":
Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!
Down in dim woods the diamond-delves! the elves’-eyes!
The complex four-beat rhythms of Algernon Charles Swinburne's
"When the Hounds of Spring," where dactyls (ONE- two- three) and
trochees (ONE-two) predominate:
And PAN by NOON and BACCHus bv NIGHT,
FLEET er of FOOT than the FLEET-foot KID,
FOLLows with DANCing and FILLS with deLIGHT
The MAEnad AND the BASSand;° Bacchus's devoteti
And SOFT as LIPS chat LAUGH and HIDE,
The LAUGHing LEAVES of the TREES diVIDE,
And SCREEN from SEEing and LEAVE in SIGHT
The GOD purSUing, the MAlDen HID.

When rhythms become too insistent, they seem like parodies of

themselves. For "Hiawatha," Henry Wadsworth Longfellow picked up
the four-beat trochaic rhythm (ONE-two) of the Scandinavian epics,
but because it is not, in its unrhymed form, a native narrative rhythm in

A
 RHYTHM 71

English, it becomes tedious, as in tins description of Hj;iu itha making .1

picture of the earth:
Hoi the earth he drew .] straight line,
For the sky a bow above it;
White the space between for day-time,
Filled with little Stars fur night- time:
On rhe left a point for sunrise,
On the right a point for sunset.
On the top a point for noon-tide.

Such a repetitive rhythm was bound to give nse to parodies. George A.

Strong’s runs, in part:
Ot the skin he made him mittens,
Made them with the fur side inside,
Made them with the skin side outside.

Most English verse is made up of rhythms less insistent chan those

1 base been illustrating. The usual English rhythms are one-TWO [iam¬
bic; or ONE -two (trochaic), and the usual English line has three or four
or five stresses. In most Verse, the pleasures of rhythm come from the
tension between the basic metrical scheme of the line (one-TWO,
one-TWO, one-TWO, one-TWO, one-TWO, as it you were co say,
five timet. "Untie, untie, Utllie, untie, untie’') and the actual spoken
intonation of ihe line. The underlying scheme of all of Shakespeare's
dramatic poctrv is “Untie tin tic untie Unlit untie." but what we actually
find is an enormously flexible spoken line:
Tomorrow, anti tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this pet tv pace tro-m day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time.

We hear the undersong ut the pitffni if ichtatif as a L hitd might mechan¬

ically recite it, as if to .1 metronome:
ToMOkkow. AND toMORRow. AND toMORRow,
Creeps EN this PETTv RAUL from DAY to DAY,
To THE last SYLLable OF teCORDed TIME

And we also sense the oversong oi the natural intonation oj the uvnri as
. they would be ordinarily spoken:
TOMORROW, and toMORRow, and toMORRow.
CREEPS IN this PETTy PACE from DAY to DAY.

_
To the LAST SYLLable of reCORIXd TIME
12 POEMS AS PLEASURE

A good actor makes ail amalgam of metrical scheme and natural into¬
nation, so chat the audience hears a rhythm that keeps both the undersong
of five beats and the oversong of urgent speech. One of the hardest
things to do in poetry is to write hundreds oflines obeying the same
icheme (as Milton does with his unrhvmed five-beat lines in Paradis? Lost)
while varying the rhythm, so that the reader's ear docs not tire. Of course,
composers do the same. Every measure of a musical piece in 4/4 time
has four beats to the measure, but not every measure is composed of
four quarter- notes. There are eighth-notes, sixteenth -notes, half-notes,
whole notes, held notes, notes with tnlls on them, and so on.
Knowing the musical weight, so to speak, of every possible syllable
in the language is the gift of great poets. Some syllables are heavy, some
light; some long, some short; some open, some closed; some nasal, some
mellow; some sharp, some sweet. Keats, in his poem “If by dull rhymes,"
advises him self and other poets to care at least as much for syllabic wealth
as King Midas cared for his gold, and not to repeat lifeless and worn-out
strategies:
Let us inspect the lyre, and weigh the stress
Of every eh cud, and see what may be gained
By ear industrious, and attention meet;
Misers of sound and syllable, no less
Than Midas of his coinage, let us be
Jealous of dead leaves in the bay wreath crown.
Rhythms should be recurrent but not boring, ilcarable but not predict¬
able.

Rhyme

We seem to be bom liking sounds that match. Children make up

games with simple counting rhymes. “One, two, button my shoe" still
lives, chough no one wears high-button shoes any more. Rhyme makes
tor conclusiveness and the sense of an ending. Once you accept the
principle of rhyme, you can do many various things with it.
Rhythmically speaking, the simplest rhymes are monosyllables
—
day, say. You get a different effect tfom disyllables reason, treason. The
effect often becomes comic once you get trisyllables —
—
temptation, rela¬
tion, You can combine words having different numbers of syllables —
lover, discover.
Graphically speaking, the simplest rhymes are those that are spelled
the same — day, say. You get 3 different effect, even with monosyllables,
 RHYME 73

when they arc spelled differently

— day, weigh. When you have three
monosyllables, all with different spelling, the sense of poetic invention is
even stronger
— day, weigh, fey. Though amateur poets tend to rhyme
monosyllables spelled the same way, poets interested in technical inven¬
tion tend to investigate all the possibilities of more complicated poly¬
syllabic and differently spelled rhyming words,
Grammatically speaking, the simplest rhymes arc those in which
both words are the same part of speech —say, two verbs {weigh, neigh)
or two nouns (cal, Jml). As soon as you have two words that are matched
by rhyme but that don’t match in ocher ways
—
(rfiiy, imjjfr)
— say. a noun and a verb
you feel a slight shock of difference.
Semantically speaking, the most satisfactory rhymes are ones in
which the two rhyming words have some mean vng-relation to each
other. The meaning-relation may be one of sameness (high/sky) or
di ffere n ce ( island/ highland).
Some poets care a great deal more about making their rhymes
meaningful than others do. Comic poets especially like to make points
by ridiculous rhymes: here is Lord Byron on the young Don Juan’s
classical education, which Juan’s mother (Donna Inez) must counte¬
nance but which she finds shocking. Wc can imagine how Byron amused
himself rhyming “goddesses,” '‘bodices," and “Odysseys":
His classic studies made a little puzzle,
Because of filthy loves of gods and goddesses,
Who in the earlier ages raised a bustle,
But never put on pantaloons or bodices;
His reverend tutors had at rimes a tussle,
And for their Aeneids, Iliads, and Odysseys,
Were forced to make an odd sort of apology,
For Donna Inez dreaded the Mythology.

To make end-rhymes, one must have at least two lines, explaining

why Keats thought of a kiss as a rhyme (and perhaps of a rhyme as J kiss
of language). Arranging lines (usually rhyming lines, but not necessarily
so) in a perceptible shape makes a Stanza, One of the Well-known stanza
forms in English is a stanza of six five-beat lines rhyming abekf. That is,
the first and third lines rhyme on one sound
— here designated ni; the
second and fourth lines rhyme on a different sound, ft and the fifth and
sixth lines rhyme on yet another sound, (. Though this can be used in j
long poem (it is in fact called the "Venus and Adonis stanza" because
Shakespeare used it in his narrative poem of that name), it is also used by
Ben Jonson in his one-stanza satiric poem on a lustful gjutron allegori¬
cally named “Gut":
74 POEMS A S PIEASUHE

BEN JONSON
OH Gut
tint ears .ill day and lechers ail the flight;
So all Ins meat he tastcih over twice;
And, striding so to doable Ins delight,
He makes himself a thoroughfare of vice,
'I Inis in his belly ran he change a sin:
Lust it comes out, that gluttony went in,

Most poems written in stanza-tumi, unlike “Ott (but/' consist of more

than one stanza. Stanzas have nlines (see appendix “On Prosody"), and
poems using the same stanza forms belong to a recognizable family.
Yeats may use a stanza-form associated with Geoffrey Chaucer; Keats
may use the son net-form we associate with Shakespeare. As we read the
later poet, we are reminded of the earlier one (and as we read the earlier
one, we sometimes think forward to how7 a later poet will write in ibis
stLUiza-fbrni), Poets make certain stanza -forms their own. Dante wrote
the whole of the Diwur Comedy in three-line pentameter stanzas with
interlaced rhyme, and ever since, anyone writing in this form or one of
its modern adaptations —
from Percy liysshe Shelley in the nineteenth
century through Wallace Stevens and Seamus Heaney m the twentieth
century —'evokes Dante,
Some stanzaic forms undergo interesting changes over time. Early
narrative ballad-. were Written in .1 stanza rhyming uf.vb, meaning that
Only the second and fourth lines rhymed. Usually the first line had tour
beats, the second three, the third four, and the fourth three (which we
represent as 4/3/4Z3). The early ballads were primarily stories in verse:
the important feature in them was a plot of love, mystery, or adventure
that moved incrementally on. often ro disaster. Characterization and
emotional reaction and description were kept to a minimum. Here is a
representative ballad stanza, clearly interested in setting up a story:
There lived a wife at Usher's Well,
And a wealthy wife was she;
She had three stout and stalwart sons,
And sent them o'er the sea.

In the nineteenth century, William Wordsworth, though he was still

interested in telling stories, was more concerned with the inner states
and emotional responses accompanying events than in the events them¬
selves. lie invented what he called "lyrical ballads"; they were still
written in rite- ballad stanza, and were allied to storytelling, but their

ML
 R S-[ Y M Fl 75

emphasis was “lyrical” —

that is, emotional and private rather than tac¬
tual and plot -governed. Here is the ending of one of Wordsworth’s
lyrical ballads;
bhe lived unknown, and few could knots'
When Lucy ceased to be;
[Jut she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!

If o tli "The Wife ot Usher’s Weil" and Wordsworth's poem have the
same —
stanzaic arrangement four beats, three beats, four beats, three-
heats — with the second and fourth lines rhyming (and ill Wordsworth’s
poem the tirst and third lines rhyming as wtU). Whenever we see this
4/3/4 /3 rhyming stanza turn up, we are reminded that it goes back to
our earliest folk poetry. When later poets want to write in an archaic
way, they often Use this stanza (see Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s "Rime of
the Ancient Mariner” and Keats's “La Eiclic Dame sans M.erci'’)-
The ballad stanza is four hues long, and 10 is called 3 quatrain, as are
all stanzas of four lines, lint there are orher kinds of rhymes that a
quatrain can use besides atvlr or abab. It can use titibb, as in “lnt.int
Sorrow’’:

LMV mother groaned, my lather wept.

Into the dangerous world I leapt,
Helpless, naked, piping loud;
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

Or a quatrain ran rhyme abba, a form that Alfred, Lord Tennyson used
in his tong elegy "In Memoriam":

Ring out. wild bells, to the wild sky,

The flying cloud, the frosty light:
Tin- year is dying in the night;
King out, wild bells, and let him die.

Several different variables combine to make stanzas: rhe length ot

the stanza (here, in our examples, four lines); the stress length of the
individual lines (4/3/4Z3 in the ballads, 4/4/4Z4 in Blake’s and Ten¬
nyson's poems); the arrangement of the rhymes (whether lilhih, aiibh, or
.WI(NJ): and the combination of stressed and unstressed syllables. Poets
- experiment with all these variables to make the different kinds of stanzas
named below (which are described at fuller length in the appendix lLOn
Prosody"):
76 Va£Mi ft S I* L t \ S U K E

Two lines: couplet

Three lines: tercet
Four linci: quatrain
Five lines: cinquain
Six lines: sixain or sestet
Seven lines: rime royal (rhyming ababbei)
Eight lines: ottava riina (rhyming abababa)
Nine lines: Spenserian stanza (rhyming ababbeba)
Fourteen lines: sonnet
I3y and large, the longer stanzas listed above are written in five-beat
widths. l?ut almost any combination of" width (number of beats per line)
and length (dumber of lines) and rhyme has been tried by someone. The
important thing is LO notice what the poet Ins been up to in the way of
metrical form — rhymes, Hue-width, and stanza-shape and to recall,
if you can, other poems that have the same stanza it shape as the one you
are reading. One of the pleasures offered by poetry is a technical cons¬
ulship among poems, recognizable it you are used to registering the
stanza ic shapes they take,

Structu re

The structures of a poem are the intellectual or logical shapes into

which its thoughts are dynamically organized. Any overarching structure
can have many substructures We saw, in “Infant Sorrow," a general
structure in which the firs: stanza shows 11s the physical baby, the seen mi
the baby as thinker. Within that general structure we saw- others the
presence of the parents in each stanza, the decline from sfnijy'fifjf to
Uniting 10 bound, and so on. Perhaps the greatest pleasure given by poetry
is the sense that dynamic structure and thought arc so intimately con¬
nected that each gives coherence to [lie other. We sometimes express
this by saying that the structure of the poem enacts (acts out, dramatizes)
by way ot a dynamic evolution of form what the poem irfjts by way of
assertion.
Him1 does one come to pe revive the structure by which the poem
conveys its assertions: As we saw in Chapter 2, H takes something like
X-niy vision, by which you look for pat re ms, 1 bitterns occur at many
levels it) poetry, just as they do in the physical u inverse: one can look tor
patterns in subatomic behavior, in atomic behavior, in moleailat be¬
havior, md so UN, all 1 lie way up to the patterns % if the planets and the
 STRUCTURE 77

stars.If you think of a poem as a small universe, you can begin looking
at the smallest patterns (the binding-together of certain words by rhyme
or by similar initial sounds) or at the larger patterns (the number of
sentences and their relations to each other as a dynamic pattern of
thinking). One level of investigation may not yield much: the poem you
are looking at may not rhyme, and there may be only a relatively small
number of alliterating words (words beginning with the same consonant-
sound). At this point, you would probably give up looking for inter¬
esting sound-patterns, and move on to sentence -relations. Or, Oil
another level, rhe poem may not have many descriptive phrases repre¬
senting people or a landscape — it may be mostly statement (say, of
philosophical truths). At this point, you would stop looking for a pattern
of descriptive images, and perhaps move on to patterns of diction. Or,
on another level, that of plot, nothing much may seem to happen. Do
not be discouraged; if the energy of the poem is not in plot, it may be
in its grammatical play; if it is not in grammatical play, it may be in
images; it it is not in images, it may be in rhythm.
What, for instance, could we find to say about this poem, called
simply "Poem," by William Carlos Williams?

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

Poem
As the cat
climbed over
the top of
the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot
carefully
then the hind
stepped down
into the pit of
the empty'
flowerpot

There certainly isn't much that is philosophical or intellectual hen;. In

fact, if the four stanzas were written out as the one sentence they arc, it
wouldn't seem like a poem at all: "As the cat climbed over the top of the
jamcloset. first the right Idrefoot, carefully, then the hind, stepped down
 78 POEMS AS PLEAS USCL

into the; pit of the empty flowerpot." And the "plot" —

way
— a cat finding its
is an ordinary event seen every day. A good strategy in exam¬
ining a poem is always to see why the poet w rote our its sentences in the
way he or she did- Williams divided his sentence into four stanzas, each
of three lines. How did he decide where to break his sentence, and why
did he group the twelve pieces three -by- three: If we reread the poem
asking the questions that the pause after each line encourages us to ask,
we can see the meaning of Williams's line-breaks:

As the cat did wfial?

climbed over over what?
the top of of what?
the jamcloset how?
first the right paw? Year leg?
forefoot then? (a mistaken question; it turns
out WitBams wanted we to ask "how?")
carefully then what?
then the hind did what?
stepped down where?
into the pit of oops! if what?
the empty what has d "prV" anyhow?
flowerpot not what you expected, kittyeat!

Well, this more or less shows me why Williams put his unsteady little
pauses where he did. But why did he group his lines three by three? This
action inserts three "major pauses" at certain points to punctuate the
"minor pauses" at the end of each line. The first major pause comes
when the cat stops before the descent into unknown regions (which it
cannot see) from the top of the jameloset, The second comes after the
right forefoot has found (huirah!) 2 place to poise. The third comes after
the hind leg successfully (wheel) moves to folio w the forefoot. Then
comes the farcical end, when the poor cat finds itself trapped inside a
deep flowerpot instead of safe on s flat surface-
Wilhams's lines consist, sometimes, of only a single word
— "fore¬
foot, ” "carefully,” "flowerpot.” Each line represents a cat-step, so these
are particularly fraught steps. Some lines have two words — these arc-
steps of medium difficulty-. We end up feeling that the lines of three Or
even four words
—
"As the cat." “the top of," “first the right." “irtto the
pit of," are almost carefree, almost lilting,
As for Williams's stanzas, they arc all adverbial, ornaments attached
M
 79

to the centra] main verb, “stepped.” There is the "as" stanza, the "first*'
Stanza, the "then" stanza, and the ’into" stanza, they are at] equal in
length, as though the eat had made ton x neat forays into what il hoped
svould be stability', but what it found was captivity. Clearly the initial
confident icncatneneis and the ultimate bewildering failure ot the cat
delighted Williams as a little emblem of human venturing. Whenever a
poet calls a poem “Poem" it means that the story told in the poem
resembles the making of poetry itself Like the cat, the poet ventures out
into the hazards ot thin air., places a "root" (a metrical foot, no doubt}
on a possible landing, tries another foot after it. and may find farce
instead of success,
It would he of no use this poem looking for hamioruous
to go to
melody, or philosophical assertion, or nature description, or rhyme, ot
so ng -rhythm, or historical insight, or Freudian drearmvork, or gender
problems. Each poem leads you to the questions it makes sense to ask it
It makes sense to ask this poem about its twelve hues and its Jour stanzas
and its three whue spaces and its line- breaks; it makes sense to ask what
the cat expected and what the cat found; it makes sense to ask why the
poet gave this humble anecdote the honorific name "Poem." It makes
sense, too, to ask what the poet who writes such a poem understands
poetry to be — to which we might answer that it is the imaginative
perception ut’the ordinary; and the comic perception of hazards-and
landings; and the emblematic perception of how an animal's small ven¬
tures might be like ours.
Let US look fbr a moment at a very different sort of poem alto¬
gether. "Wc Ikcal Cool," by Gwendolyn 1) rooks:

GWENDOLYN UROOKS
We Real Cool
TJlf Pool PJjJ-W.i.
JJJ ihr CuWfM SWrf

Wr real cool. We
Lett school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June, We
Die soon.

a.
SO POEMS AS PLEASURE

The first thing that strikes anyone reading this poem is that its sentences
are arranged "wrong." it “should” read,
We real cool.
We left school.
We lurk late.
We strike straight.

And so on. f lie second thing that strikes the ear is that most nt t her poem
is spoken in the present tense, but two things break that pattern —the
past tense in "We left school" and the implied future tense
it? in the "We die soon” that ends the poem.
— or is

The subtitle of the poem tells us who is speaking seven pot) l

players at the Golden Shovel pool room. The diction of the poem —
“We real cool" instead of "We're real cool"
are black,
— tells us the pool players
as they omit the verb LLco be.” Wrhy are the poem’s rhymes
displaced to the “wrong" place in the lines, and why do its tenses
change? How do these practices of the poet enact something about the
seven pool players1 And how, we might add, are we to explain riant all
their sentences comist of three words? And why do their sentences have
so many internal binding sounds — "lurk late,” “strike straight,’’ "sing
sin," “thin gin," "jazz June”? All the answers to such questions must he
conjectural, hm the analyst's aim is- to make the conjectural answers as
plausible as possible, so that they “account for” those patterns in which
the composing poet, and the responsive reader, fake pleasure.
hi answering the questions that the poem makes LIS ask, we notice
that instead of a “rhyme" at the end of .each line, the insistent “We"
appears down the right margin. “We" is the real word binding these
seven adolescents together — they are a group giving each other soli¬
darity. We get so used to seeing “ We' " at the end of every line one.
two, three, four, five, six, seven - - that when we “miss” it at the end of
line H we know that its absence is a sign of the imminent death of the
—
group. The poverty-stricken sentences after all, the first complete
sentences made by babies consist of two or three words, “Me Want
that,” "1 go bed" — are a sign that indeed these young men have “left
school" and its more complex possibilities of Ijiiiguagc, Nonetheless,
their syntactic ally simple sentences are lull of a fed for language if —
they had stayed in school, they might have produced, among them, a
poet or two. They like groups tit words that sound “jazzy,” and they like
singing and playing games — all, inetin it ions chn me (eristic of poets. The
trouble is the gin and the sin and the gambling and the school leaving
and the lurking into late hours,
 IMAGES SI

It makes sense ta ask this poem question! about its rhymes, its syntax,
its tenses, its word placement, in order to know who these “cool11 a do¬
les cents are, how the ptet enacts ihdr solidarity, their gifts, their appetites,
Lind their mistakes, it makes sense, once one knows that tins is a poem
about young black dropouts, to ask what the poet's feelings about them
are — “young, talented with words, dimmed." It makes sense to ask tins
poem about Its wit (these young meti make their every word count —
their three-word sentences hive three hi I! beats}, [t makes sense, too, to
ask it about racial questions (the white world ts entirely alwent - why?).
It makes sense to pur the poetu in .1 genre — die genre of elegy, especially
die subgroup of elegies that mourn people who died much too young.
Tins is an elegy w ith no visible offer of consolation —- there is no better
purpose served by the deaths of the young men, no envisaged heaven for
them to go to after their death, uo legacy they leave behind them ot chil¬
dren begotten or accomplishments completed. IT makes sense, ns we I to
ask to whom the young men are speaking. To us: To themselves: Highly
literate readers may recall a “we" elegy spoken by the small band ef Spar¬
tan soldiers who died in 480 u.C., at I hermopybe, an elegy that is perhaps
tlie classical ancestor of this poem:
Go tell the Spartans, thon who passes: by.
Til at here, obedient to their laws, we lie.

We can then see the poem 110c simply as an elegy by Gwendolyn brooks
tor these young men, but as their self- epitaph. Which could be inscribed
on their grave: “We / I Die soon." The apparent future tense of the last
line then becomes a genera I iced present tense about the fate of all such
— —
adolescents: “We people like us always die soon.”
The important thing is to be accustomed to looking, in any poem,
at several levels— the sound, the rhythms and rhymes, the grammar, the
images, the sentences, the plot, the assertions, the allusions, the self-
contradictions. Somewhere the energy of the poem awaits yon. The
moment you see the main and subordinate patterns, you smile, and Lt
“all makes seme.”

Images

Though people sometimes refer m "images” in poems, a word is

not the same ihing as a picture, Words refer: images represent When
poets use nouns or phrases referring to something that .111 .irtiÿt could
represent bv graphic means :,i painting or sketch), they use them either
tor descriptive purposes or as illustrative examples. The images can be
82 POEMS AS PLEASURE

either literally pictorial ("This is the forest primeval") or figurative, as

when Wordsworth says of a rural woman that she is LA violet by a mossy
stone, / Half hidden from the eye.” Shakespeare’s three images in Son¬
net 60 for time's action {ocean waves; a sun that rises and is eclipsed, a
repeated destructive attack by a spear, a spade, a maw, a scythe) give
three illustrative ways of thinking about life: life is a steady state in which
each moment, wavelike, resembles the next; or, life is a glowing nse
followed by a catastrophic blackout; or, life is experienced as a contin¬
uous and premature and universal execution. These are not compatible
images, and the poem makes us see each later image obliterating the
former model(s),
[mages, in fact, serve in poems as a shorthand for argument. It is
quicker to show than to tell. It is a rule of thumb in poems that when a
second, different, image follows a first, the second one is somehow im¬
portantly supplementing, or indeed correcting or supplanting, the first,
because of some perceived inadequacy in the first image (otherwise, the
poem would not have needed the second). So, when William Blake wan¬
ders through London despairing at the evils of modern life, lie first men¬
tions, as a major evil that comes to mind, "the mind-forg’d manacles" of
false beliefs. But he does nut stop there. He replaces the manacles with the
institution that imposes them, and which permits the exploitation of the
—
poor and the powerless the Church. Yet the Church is not the worst
evil: after all, to lose one’s litc is worse than to be manacled in mind or
to be poor, and so Blake goes on to indict the monarchy, which sends its
sons off to be killed. Yet even that image of evil does not suffice. He must
—
supplement Church and Palace with one more, the worst the corrup¬
tion of the sexual life which, by prostitution and syphilis, blinds the new¬
born infant in the cradle, Blake’s images rise, supplementing and even
replacing one another, to the fatal last word in the last line:

WILLIAM BLAKE
London
I wander throT cadi charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every lace L meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
in every Cry of" every man,
In every Infant's cry of fear,
in every voice, in every ban,
The mi nd -forg’d manacles 1 hear.
 A k <i uM E N r S3

How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry

Every' black rung church appalls;
And :hc hapless Soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down Palace; walls,

But most thro' midnight streets I hear

How the youthful Harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born Infant’s tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

It is necessary to see the climactic order of Blake’s images [“But ittnsj 1

hear") in order to set them in relation to each other. Every image heeds
to be related to others in the same poem, hut in an imaginative, not a
mechanical, way. You need to enter die mind of the speaker, make
yourself into the speaker, and ask yourself how you are connecting
things in your ongoing expression,

Argument

A poem often looks as though it is making an argument, lint

“real” arguments are made in prose (theological tracts argue about
God, philosophical books argue ethics or metaphysics, political papers
argue politics). Arguments in poems are miniature imitations of "real"
arguments, and are often designed to show the moves in the argu¬
mentative game other than to make a full argument in order to per¬
suade a “real-life" person, The debates in poems are often
sophisticated games, as when J ’‘shepherd" (really a courtier in pastoral
disguise) tries to persuade a "nymph” (an aristocratic young woman
playing at being a rustic shepherdess) to love him. Site counters with
a mini-sermon on die transience of all earthly love, relenting at the
end to wish things were otherwise:

CHISTOPHEU MAHI.OWF.
The Passionate Shepherd to His lÿiv?

Come live with me .and be my I ewe,

And ve will all the pleasures prove0 < 'Xpc/itttfe
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepv mountain yields.
fi4 t* o [MS .s s PLEASURE

And we will sit upon the rocks,

Seeing the shepherds feed their Hocks,
By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.
And ! will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A of flowers, and a kirtlc
Cap
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;
A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold;
A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps anti amber studs:
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me, and be my love.
The shepherds’ swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May morning..
[1 these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me anti be my love,

Ssft WALTER RAI.LGH

The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd
[f all the
world and love were young.
And truth in every shepherd's tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move
To live with thee and be (by love.
Time drives the Hocks from field to fold
When rivers rage and rocks grow cold,
And Philomel? become tli dumb; the uightiiijinfe
The rest complains of cares to come.
The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward winter reckoning yields;
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
isfancy’s spring, but sorrow's fall.
Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtlc, and thy posies
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten —
In tolly ripe, in reason rotten.
 POIGNANCY 85

Thy belt ot straw and ivy buds.,

Thy coral clasps and amber studs.
All these in me no means can move
To come to thee and be thy love.
But could youth last and love still breed,
Had joys no date1, nor age no need, cud
Then these delights niv mind might move
To live with thee and be thy love.

There extsi within poetic tradition debates between body and soul,
between gardeners and mowers, between God and man, between the
owl and the flightirtgale, between the flower and the leaf, between a
philosopher and a poet. Such debates usuaSlv raise perennial cpiestions —
hedonism versus asceticism, night versus day, the mirthful man versus
the pensive man, the active life versus the contemplative life, and so on.
Partly because such c|Lie>ti-ons cannot be settled, the pleasure in a poem oi
argument lies in seeing wliat strategic moves, and what new speakers.
can be invented for such perennial arguments.

Poignancy

We often say a poem is "moving." What makes a poem moving'

Normally, it is the relation between the situation implied in the poem
(say, lover at a girl's window) and the utterance ofibepoem (plaintive,
or svittrv, eir ecsianc).
Often, the situation in ,i poem changes .is the poem develops, and
the utterance changes along with the new event or the new pcrcepiion.
We never expect, for instance, that anyone we love will be taken from us,
however logically we may "know" that death comes to everyone. Some¬
how we 'repress" (as we now say) our knowledge that those we love
1

most are themselves mortal. Words worth's speaker in a famous poem says
that Ins mind (he calls it his "spirit’ ) "slumbered when it exempted his
beloved from the threat of mortality. In the first status of the poem , the
insidious vsord "seemed' holds the forthcoming catastrophe:

W 1 1.1.l AM Wo It DS WORTH
A slumber did my spirit seal
A slumber did my spirit seal;
l had no human tears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch ot earthly years.
86 !J O £ M S AS p t 1: A SU ft. E

A white space intervenes between stanza l and stanza 2. When we begin

stanza 2, we sec that the girl has died between the two stanzas —
that the
white space represents her death, The first stanza was delusion; the
second is reality:
No motionhas she now, no forte;
She neither hears nor secs;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal Course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees

What is poignant here is, first of all, the speaker's rota) suppression of the
narrative of her death. He does nor say, “But then she sickened and
she died” — it is TOO painful for him to say that bald sentence. He makes
her sri]| the subject of his second sentence, as she was the subject of the
last part of his first sentence: “She seemed ... She has now . . . ; Site
neither hears rior sees But the sentence of stanza 2 is all negation in its
11

predicates: Motion? No. Force: No. Hears? No. Sees? No. We then
realize, looking back, that there was a comparable negation in stanza J.
Can feel earthly years? No. But that Was preceded by the verb “seemed.''
Now. it proves untrue. She can feel the touch of earthly years, so much
so that the word the speaker lightly used of her in stanza 1 — “thing11 —
turns out to be the accurate word. She is now a thing, as rocks and stones
and trees are things, and she is as inertly rolled round, day and night, by
the planet’s motion as they are.
It the poignancy is partly in the speaker's mistake, and partly in his
unwitting Lise ot the word “thing," it lies also, in stanza 2, in Ins stem
truthfulness He speaks in strictly inorganic physical terms motion, force,
diurnal course, rocks, s rones He has mentioned hearing and seeing,
organic to tic dons, onlv to deny them. Nonetheless, he ultimately re
lersts: in placing his beloved nut only with rocks and stones and planetary
motion, but also — and lastly —
with organic and living trees, he gives
her a posthumous association with life. The poem, would be very d:t
terent — and almost in Hu nun
—
if the last line read. "With granite.
stones, and rocks.” The poignancy ofarw poem comes with die struggle
between uttering truth and honoring the undertow of strong feeling.

Wisdom

Poems descend in part from wisdom literature —

prayers, spells,
-
riddles, epigrams, proverbs, aphorisms. “What ott was thought but ne’er
so welt expressed” (Alexander Pope) is one description of poetry, and
we respond (especially when wc are young) to what poetry can tell us
 A r\ - tt LAM;U*I;I S?

abuuL line iiar i esperiiejice. Countless adolescents have memorized lines

such as "Hmv do l love thee? Let me cornu the is .iys" ( Elizabeth Barrett
Browning). Poetry1 is the most concise form of literature, and LT hos
perfected techniques tor rapid and deft exposition (partly by the short
hand arguments of imagery). Many people read poetry chiefly for the
\v;sdon> they tmd there, scarcely knowing that the wisdom seems wiser
for having been expressed so met nor ably, There is a psychological wis¬
dom in lyric: one or its functions is to give in a believable representation
of what Matthew Arnold called “the dialogue of the mind with itself, f
When we see a credible representation of grief, or rebellion, or delusion,
we ted tiie assuaging assent chat conies from a ratification of something
we have Celt but have not previously seen represented. “Strength came
where weakness was not known to be. " as Wordsworth says of a similar
experience. It is important to everyone to find bis or her own experi-
eaice mirrored back; some hnd ibis mirroring chiefly in novels, others in
poetry, depending on personal taste, flic chiding variety of voices in
lyric, each available to any reader as .1 vicarious voice in which to speak,
lets us move through many experiences comparable to our own. Often
we find (as we are being John Donne — "Sweetest love, I do not
—
go / For weariness of thee" or Elizabeth lisshnp —"l caught a tre¬
mendous fish"
— ) that the exhilaration of having a new voice and new
insight reverberates back into our "real'’ experiences of a comparable
sort.

A New Language

Each major artist creates in distinctive way. Though early

Becthoveii can sound like Mozart. or early Mozart like Haydn, in their
maturity they end up sounding different from the predecessors whom
they imitated 111 youth. We can walk into LI museum and say, "That’s a
Van Gogh," or “That's a Picasso," because each major painter has a
distinctive way of representing and coloring the world. Poets are the
same: we can n II (after .1 while) Tennyson from William Butler Yeats,
and Milton from Edmund Spenser, and Adrienne Rich from Anne
Sexton, even though in many cases there arc resemblances in subject
matter It is not subject matter that distinguishes artists, it i*. treatment
There arc hundreds of portraits of distinguished-looking men, but any
one who has spent some time in museums can tell .1 Velasquez from a
Hals, and either trout a Cezanne.
A distinctive style is created in part by the artist anti in part by the
epoch 111 which the artist works: One can tell a Renaissance painting
SS M lJL EASUUE

from a nineteenth-century pi ruing, a piece of anonymous fiftcenth-

century music troni a piece oi anonymous seventeenth-century music, (J
will say more about this in the chapter “Hi story and Regions tiry.’’)
Within what any given epoch permits, many styles ate possible (as one
can tefl from Looking at twentieth -century American painting or po¬
etry), Wordswonh sait! that the poet must create the taste by which he
is enjoyed; that is, the poet trains the audience to like a new sort of art.
[ he training takes time, and each new poet you lead is training you to
like a new personal shorthand of images and a systematically original
language. If a poet does not appeal ro you now, look again at the work
in ten years, and you may like it then. Acculturation is fast in some cases.
slow in others. Lint it many people have found a poet's language mem¬
orable, you may some day find it memorable, too, Each person’s taste
hovers at a different evolutionary moment. A person brought tip on
Christian prayer comes to Christian religious poetry with great ease;
someone who has never heard a Christian prayer or hymn may take a
long rime to get used to George Herbert or Christina Rossetti. Ail
ecologist may not he put off by the scientific vocabulary7 in the poems ot
A. 1C Ammons or Amy Clam pin; someone who has never heard of the
Cambrian shield or pheromones may be more apprehensive. The rule of
thumb is to let the poem work on you over time.

Finding Yourself

The '.trangest experience reading poetry, as in writing it, is to

in

find yourself in it, to be yourself in it. We sometimes speak of this as

finding a "favorite poet." This is a poet whose writing is so close to your
own way ot seeing and thinking that there seems no barrier at ull be¬
tween you and the poet. Such a poet is .1 powerful reflecting mirror of
your own siTisibihry and creativity, In that poet's work, you find your¬
self "more truly and more strange” (as Wallace Stevens put it in 'Tea at
the Falai of Hoon”). Sometimes poets are mirrors for a whole gener¬
ation, Lind become bestsellers on that account —
as T. S. Idiot and
Robert I rost and Adrienne Rich and Allen Ginsberg have been ill the
United States in die twentieth century Other American poets, just as
good, remain known to relatively few readers (who nonetheless claim
them .is intensely as the country Lit large claims the bestsellers}. Samuel
Johnson said (in his ’Preface to Shakespeare”} that it sens only after a
century had passed, and the topical interest of .1piece ot literatim.' had
died down, that one could tell whether it would last. Luckily, you do
not have to worry about the potential durability ot works in which you
 REAIÿTNC. OTHER PotMs 89

find a voice and a reflecting mirror; that question will take care of itself.
The important thing is to fee! companioned, as you go through life, by
a host of poems which speak to your experience. And, in the long run,
the poems you first read because you wanted to find out about love or
death you tv ill read again because of the living quality' of the voice that
speaks in them, that quality wc call “style,"

In Brief; Poems as Pleasure

No single poem offers all the pleasures of poetry. As you read, you
will sometimes be caught up in the lilt of a rhythm, sometimes intrigued
by plot; at other times you may be struck by ail insight, moved by the
poignancy of tone, or puEzled and pleased by a subversive and unex¬
pected move by the text. The important thing is to be ready for what¬
ever the poem offers, and to take it on its own terms, not requiring
philosophical discourse from a song, or simplicity from a knotted
problem -poem. The single best way to gain pleasure from a poem is to
read ir aloud; if you let the poem take you on its journey, you will know
intuitively where it has led you. The next pleasure is to find words for
what you felt and thought on that journey; and the next is to find what
aspects of the poem — structure, images, argument — generated those
feelings and those thoughts. Chapter 4 will suggest some ways by which
you can describe the various aspects of poems from which these plea¬
sures arise.

Reading Other Poems

All the following poems combine representation and strong pat¬

terning. Jloth Theodore Roethke and William Carlos Williams declare
by their titles that they will employ strong rhythmic patterning. Can you
graph the rhythms their lines enact'
Some poets can create strong patterns in very brief poems, William
Blake's “The Sick Rose” consists {if one were to consider it clinically) of
six lines of diagnosis followed by two of prognosis (or forecast of die
course of the rose’s disease). Do the rhymes in any way suggest the plot?
Gerard Manley Hopkins's "sonnet" of Ted need proportions —a six-line
“octave11 followed by a four-and-a-bulf-Une “sestet"
two ways of talking about “dappled" beauty — — is divided into
beauty that is spotted,
variegated, multiple. What is the pattern of discussion in the first part
of tile poem, offered in words like ''skies," “trout," "trades”? And in
90 P tl E MS AS l’ l J-. A SUf I

[lie second, offered in words like “all things/’ "whatever is fickle," and
so on?
Rhythms tan differ greatly* from the lilt of "My Papa’s Waltz" to
the slow dark movement of D. M. Lawrence’s "Bavarian Gentians" to
the long-breathed lines or’ Derek Walcott’s "The Season of. Phantasmal
Peace," Read each of these aloud to heir the difference in yourselfas
you become the person speaking the poem. Mow much can you say
about tht' tones of voice of the speaker as they issue from you?
Sometimes a structural pattern ran be borrowed, as we saw ii> this
chapter with the passionate shepherd's invitation and the nymph’s reply
(in winch she borrows the shepherd’s sunza-tbrm and vocabulary). I he
anterior structure generating a poem is sometimes well known in the
poet’s culture; smmeteers, for instance, were accustomed to praise their
lady’s beauties one by one. I o understand Shakespeare's mock mu reply
LO such a practice, you need to imagine that he has just read a poem
beginning; llMv mistress' eye? shine brightly like the sun; / Go r,il is not
n Hire red than her lips' red, / She walks on air, she does not tread the
ground, ** and so on. “I don’t know about yatt mistress,” says Shake¬
speare, “but rHihe has no such powers. My mistress’ eyes are nothing /iltf
[lie stiii.'' How precisely can you deduce from Shakespeare's reply the
anterior claims of praise that he is mocking?
Description in lyric often proceeds by successive images, piled up
in a montage of evidence. What is the picture you get of the speaker
or "Domestic Mysticism'' trorn her successive self descriptions? Are
these descriptions arranged in any rough order trorti beginning to end?
Look at the rhymes of William Wordsworth’s eight- lute stanza in
"
rhe Solitary Reaper." How is the first halt of the stanza different from
the second hall"? Does the poet make any use of the' difference?
Both Robert Herrick's “To the Virgins, to Maks' Much of
Time” and Thomas Hardy’s “ T he Darkling "Thrush" .ire poems giving
moral advice, in the form ot argument against an implied other moral
position. Should virgins hasten to marry or nut? At the end of the old
century, should one despair or not? What means ot persuasion does
each author find to make the message seem not Only Wise but also
moving? Rephrase (he advice in a prose proposition, Does it lose its
poignancy?
IT you were asked by a friend to describe Blake’? style in "The
Siik Rose." or Lucie llrock-Hroidnh sts le irr "Domestic Mysticism.”
can you think of three or four adjectives you might use tor an ausVver?
I mally. can you see the patterning- by pronouns (“l versus "he )
in Elizabeth Alexanders poem about a summer love affair? How docs it
change from stanza to stanza?

L
 K r AD f Mi OT II EK J1 1: tui 91

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Sonnet U0
My mistress’ eyes are nothing [ike the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
It snow he white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head,
1 have seen roses damasked,0 red and white, varitgated
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than itt the breath tit at from my mistress reeks.
i love to hear her speak, yet well 1 know
That music hath a iar more pleasing sound;
I grant T never saw a goddess go;0 Wiliti
My mistress, when site walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love .is tare
As any she belted with false compare.

ROBERT HERRICK
T(J the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a—flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.
The glorious lamp ot heaven, the sun,
The higher heTs a-gertmg.
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he’s to setting,
Thai age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are wanner;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
rimes still succeed the former.
I hen he not coy, but use your time.
And. while ye may, go marry;
bor, hash tig lost but once your prime,
You may forever tarry.

r
92 POEMS AS PLEASUM

WILLIAM BI AKL
77if Sick Rose
O Rose, thou an sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed,
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Docs thy life destroy.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
TTif Scditary Reaper
Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gendy pass]
Alone she cuts and binds the gram,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.

No Nightingale did ever chaunt

More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travelers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands:
A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard
In springtime from the Cuckoo bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides,

Will no one tell me what she sings?

Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
—
And battles long ago;
Or is it some mure humble lay,
Familiar matter of today?
borne natural sorrow, loss, or pain.
That has been, and may be again?
 READING OTHER POEMS 93

Whatc'er the theme, the Maiden sang

As if her song could have no ending;
J saw her singing at her work,
And o’er the sickle bending
—
E listened, motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more,

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things —
For skies of couple-colour as a bnndcd cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Frcsh-firecoa! chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced
— fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows howr)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change;
ITaise him,

THOMAS HARDY
The Darkling llirush
r leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre -gray,
And Whiter1s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like string of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land's sharp Statures seemed to he
The Century’s corpse out!earn,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
 Po F. M s AS P I. ! A S U Ft F.

And every spirit upon earth

Seemed fervouriess as i.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy i SI] mi ted;
An aÿetl thrush, Frail, gaunt, and small,
III blast-be rufHed plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for caroling*
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

D, H, LAWRENCE
Bavarian Gentians
Not every man has gen,dans in his house
insoft September, at slow, sat! Michaelmas.

Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark

darkening the daytime, torch -like with the smoking blueness of
Pluto's gloom,
ribbed and torch like, v. ith their blaze tit darkness spread blue
down flattening into points, flattened under the Sweep ot white
day
torch-flower of the blue smoking darkness, Pluto's dark-blue da?;:,
black lamps from the halls oi libs,1 burning tfark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as De meter's pale lamps give off
light,
lead me then, lead the way.

1
Ihs is J I Coma 1 1 ijjnbL- for Pluto, the ruler of rhe un-J ervorld . Pii abducted
PeTwpiiftne Proserpine), the tla filter ..I I Jertlctcf I R uti la 1 1 Ceres) E:ich v':‘r-
(Komar
Persephone lived With Htm for ns innrttln .ind therj spent irtmnhs wuh her mother
i
 IS : A JJ I -S' (i O T If Eft lJ d I v, S 95

Reach me gentian, give me a torch!

LI
let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of tins flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue LS darkened on
blueness
even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted Septem¬
ber
to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the -.lark
and Persephone herself is but a voice
or .1 darkness invisible etitbldcd in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on
the lost bride and her groom.

TniiOnoftt ROETHKE
My Papa's Waits
The whiskey on your breath
tlould make a small boy dizzy:
but I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf:
My mother's Countenance
Could nor unfrown itself.
The hand that held tin wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.
Yon beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt.
Then waltzed me off to bed
Stilt dinging to your shirr.

Wiu iAtf CARI OS WILLIAMS

77re Dance
In UreiaghelV great picture. The Kenness,
the dancers go round, (hey go round and

Pieter Bruegel (Jso speHcd Breughel) ‘.he Elder (1521?-1569) seas 3 Flemish
painter tamed -.'i his picturo of peasant liti-. sndi is [hat nf an open ,L:I fVmval, sir
" KeVniesj.’’
 96 HOEMS AS PLEASURE

around, the squeal and the blare and the

tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies [round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling about
the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in llreughers great picture. The Kemiess.

DEREK WALCOTT
The Season of Phantasmal0 Peace imaginary
Then all the nations of birds lifted together
the huge net of the shadows of this earth
in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues,
stitching and crossing it. They lifted up
the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes,
the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets,
—
the shadow of a frail plant on a cirv sill
the net rising soundless as night, the birds' cries soundless, until
there was no longer dusk, or season, decline, or weather,
only this passage of phantasmal light
that not the narrowest shadow dared to sever.
And men could not see, looking up, what the wild geese drew,
what the ospreys trailed behind them in silvery ropes
that Hashed in the icy sunlight; they could not hear
battalions of starlings waging peaceful cries,
bearing the net higher, covering this world
like the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing
the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes
of a child fluttering to sleep;
it was the light
that you will see at evening on die side of a hill
in yellow October, and no one hearing knew
what change had brought into the raven's cawing,
the kitldeer’s screech, the ember-circling chough
such an immense, soundless, auti high concern
for the fields and cities where the birds belong.
-
except it was their seasonal passing, Love,

hi
 fit ENDING OTHER POP MS 97

made season less, or, from the privilege ot their birth,

something brighter chan pity for the wingless ones
helms1 the in who shared dark holes in windows arid in houses,
and higher they Sifted the net with soundless voices
above all change,, betrayals of tailing suns,
and this, season lasted one moment, like the pause
between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace,
but, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long.

LUCIE BR<>oit-Bn.oir>o
Domestic Mysticism
In thncp 10,000 seasons, 1 will tome hack to this world
In a white cotton dress, Kingdom of After My Own Heart.
Kingdom of fragile. Kingdom ot Dwarves. When I come home,
Teacups will quiver in their Dresden saucers, pentatonic dlitlles
Will move in wind. A covey of alley cats will swarm on die side
lJorch & perch there, portents with quickened heartbeats
You will feel against your ankles as you pass through.
After the first millennium, we were supposed to die out.
You had your face pressed up against the coarse dyed velvet
Of the curtain, always looking out for your own transmigration:
What colors you would wear, what cut of jewel,
What kind of pageantry, if your legs would be tied
Down, if there would be wandering tribes ot minstrels
Following with woodwinds in your wake.
This work of mine, the kind of work which takes no arms to do,
Is least noble of all. if > peopled by Wizards, the Forlorn,
The Awkward, the Winkers, the Spoon-Fmgyred, Agnostic Lisperv
Stutterers of Ifrayer. the Flatulent, the Closet Weepers,
The Charlatans 1 am one of those, In January, the month the owls
Nest in. I am a witness A ,i small thing altogether, The Kingdom
Oflngratitudc. Kingdom of Lies. Kingdom of tfai r Dan I
! go on dropping words like Intle pink hsh eggs, unawares, slightly
Illiterate, often on the mark. Waiting for the clear whoosh
Of fluid to descend A' cover them. A train like a sils'er
Russian love pill for the sick .it heart passes by
My bedroom window in the night at the speed of mirage.
In the tuna millennium, I will be middle aged 1 do not do well
In the marrow of things. Kingdom of Trick. Kingdom ot Drug.
98 POEMS AS PLEASURE

in a lung-shaped suburb of Virginia, my sister will be childless

inside the ice storm, forcing the narcissus.. We will send
Each other valentines. The radio blowing out
Vaughan Williams on the highway's purple moor.
At nine o'clock, we will put away our sewing to speak
Oi lofty things while, in the pantry, Little plants will nudge
Their frail tips toward the light we made last century.
When 1 come home, the dwarves will be long
in their shadows &i promiscuous. The alley cats will sneak
Inside, curl about the legs of furniture, close the skins
inside their eyelids, sleep. Orchids will be intercrossed & sturdy.
lbc sun will go down as I sit, thin armed, small breasted
in my eoitou dress, poked with eyelet stitches, a little lace,
In the queer light left when a room snuffs out.
1 draw a bath, enter the water as a god enters water:
Fertile, knowing, kind, surrounded by glass objects
Which could break easily if mishandled or ill-touched,
Everyone knows an un worshipped woman will betray yon.
There is always that promise, E like that. Kingdom of Kinesis.
Kingdom of Benevolent. 1 will betray as a god betrays.
With tenderheartedness. I've got this mystic streak in me.

ELIZABETH ALEXANDER
Nineteen
That summer in Culpepper, all there was to eat was white:
cauliflower, flounder, white sauce, white ice-cream.
I srutek around with an older man who didn't tell me
he was married. E was the baby, drinking rum and Coke
while the men smoked reefer they'd stolen from the campers.
[ tiptoed with my lover to poison-ivied fields, camp vans,
I never slept. Each fortnight 3 returned to the city,
hlack and dusty, with a garbage hag of dirty clothes.
At nineteen it was my tirst iQiiimcr a wav from home.
! Eis beard smelled musty His eyes wt re black, LlTluL ladies love my
hair,"
he’d say, and like a fool I’d smile. He knew everything
about marijuana, how dry it had to he to hum,
how to crush it, sniff it, how to pick the seeds out. He s<ud
he learned it all in Vietnam. He brought his son to visit
 READING OTHER POEM'S W

after one of his days off I never imagined a mother,

"Can J steal J kissf" fie said, the first think night in the field.
f asked and asked about Vietnam, how each sear felt,
what combat was like, how the jungle smelled. He listened
to a lot of Marvin Gaye, was all he said, and grabbed
between my legs. I d creep to mv cot before morning.
I'd eat that white food This was before I understood
that nothing could be mined in one stroke. A sudden
storm came hard one night; he bolted up inside the van.
"The rain sounded just like that," he said, “on the roofs there."
 4

Describing Poems

There are many ways of describing poems. As new sorts of poems

arc invented, as cross-fertilizing among Cultures takes place, we need to
come up with new descriptions, But it is useful to know some of the
ways in which critics have described poems in the pastT and to leam a
handy set of methods for exploring a poem to find things worth de¬
scribing in it. This chapter is a quick look at some techniques you can
use to describe a poem you have read.
The large category “poetry" has often been divided into subcat-
egorics. We are concerned here not with the longer genres, epic poetry
and dramatic poetry, but with the smaller kind? of relatively short po¬
etry. Here are some of them. (A longer list can be found in the appendix
"On Lyric Subgenres.'')

Poetic Kinds

Narrative vertus Lyric; Narrative in Lyric

—
We tend to distinguish narrative poems from lyric poems. A narrative
poem (for instance, a ballad) cells a story for example, about the
murder of Lord Kandall. or (as in the case of “Frankie and Johnny")
about the revenge a woman took on her unfaithful lover. A lyric, on the
Other hand, may contain the germ of a story —
say, a man's regret that

101

4
102 DESCRIBING POEMS

a love affair is ending — but the poem dwells less on the plot than on the
man's feelings {despair, grief, resentment, and so on). Wordsworth put
(be two kinds together and tailed some of his short poems ’'lyrical
—
ballads" meaning poems that, although they imply or even tell a
story, make the characters' feelings more important than the plot- Nar¬
rative and lyric sometimes overlap, because most narrative poems in¬
clude feeling and reflection as well as plot, and most lyric poems have an
implied plot of sorts.
Lyric poems in which there is a distinct narrative interest often show
changes in tense: “Once I did this but now J am no longer di>ic, and in
the future I xvill never do it again.” (Poems that are primarily lyric med¬
itations on a single subject arc often phrased in the present tense alone:
“The txpe nsc o f spi n t in a waste of shame f 1s lust i n acti on ”) To see tb e
L

way verb tenses organize the narrative plot ofa poem, let’s look at a poem
by Adrienne Rich, spoken by a woman who has emerged from the ex-
haustionS of motherhood and is thinking that she will at last have a private
life again, She retraces her own birth and ambitious adolescence, then
shows her inner deprivation as her life (once she became a mother) was
handed over to others in what sometimes seemed to her a form of slavery;
she concludes with her present anticipation ofa new
— but aging
I have put the main verbs in uppercase so as to emphasize the tense
— self.

changes; the present participles {which help make presentness) in italic;

and the past participles (which help make pastness) in boldface:

ADRJENNF. RICH
Necessities of Life
Piece by piece I SEEM present
to re-enter the world; I first UEGAN past
a small, fixed dot, still SEE present
that old myselt, a dark-blue thumbtack
pushed into the scene,
a hard little head protruding
from the pointillist's buzz and bloom,
After a time the dot
BEGINS to ooze. Certain heats present
MELT it- Now I WAS hurriedly present /past
BLURRING into ranges
of burnt red. burning green,
 1‘GhlK K I N Its 103

whole biographies SWAM up and

SWALLOWED me like Jonah. ;>itsr

Jonah! 1WAS Wittgenstein, past

Mary WoHstonecraft, the soul
of Louis Jouvet, dead
in a blown -up photograph.
Till, wolfed almost to shreds.
i LEARNED to make myself pasi
unappetizing. Scaly as a dry bulb
thrown into a cellar
I USED myself, LET nothing use me. past
Like being on a private dole,
sometimes more like kneading bricks ut Egypt.
What life WAS then, WAS mine, past
now and again TO LAY infinitive
one hand on a warm brick
and TOUCH the sun’s ghost infinitive
with economical joy,
now and again I O NAME infinitive
over the bare necessities,
So much tor those days. Soon
practice MAY MAKE me middling-perfect, ELI modal future
DARE inhabit the world future
trenchant irt motion as an cel, solid
as a cabbage-head. [ HAVE invitations: present
a curl of mist STEAMS upward present
from J field, visible as my breath,
houses along a road STAND waiting present
like old women Ljrj'ffi'trjj, breathless
TO TELL these tales. infinitive
One can see the narrative here unfolding in the verbals (tensed
verbs, infinitives, present and past participles), and can watch the past
becoming momentarily present in memory (in present participles like
“protruding" and ‘'kneading'"): 1 he future becomes tenseless, and
thereby infinitely extendable, by means of an infinitive (“breathless / to
104 l> b > <. k i B : c: P t> H M S

cell their tilts"). IT is ill way’s useful to look for the narrative in all poems,
and to decide how much of die poem is narrative versus how much
"stays the same' as it meditates for a while without changing its stance.
Some poems are almost purely meditauw Here ES the contempo¬
rary poet Philip Larkin on estrangement between two people who have
been lovers for .1 long time. You will notice that “nothing happens, 11

that the speaker is still in the same predicament at the end as at the
beginning. The whole poem, except for the general statement ot the first
line, takes place in the present tense, as many meditations do:

PHII.IP LARKIN
Talking in Bed
Talking in bed ought ro be easiest,
Lying together there goes hack so tar,
An emblem of two people being honest.
Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind’s incomplete unrest
Liutlds and disperses clouds about the sky,
And dark towns heap up on the horizon,
None nt tins cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind.
Or not untrue and not unkind.

The narrative here —

concerning the way talk becomes harder
and harder as lovers gradually grow apart —
is less important than the
meditation on this problem conducted by the poet, as he says many
things about it: that i miniate talk should be easy, that he and his com¬
panion have a common past, that bed used to be the place where
honesty had a chance, that the outside restless and menacing world is
no help, and that there is no explanation for the increasing difficulty1
summed up in the last two lines. Here, the .successive items reflected
on in the meditation are the principle of i merest, converging on the
final redefinition of the problem in the last two lines. A meditative
poem asks you to notice all its successive “cakes" on the subject being
considered,
In- short, look tor the plot in narrative lyrics where the tenses
change, and look for i iHvrriiW 1

on a subject in meditative lyrics.

 POETIC KI NDS IDS

Classifying Lyric Poems

Lyric poems themselves are generally classified in three ways: by
™JtfJif, by speech act, and by miter form.
Content: We coni d classify the poems by Rich and Larkin accord¬
ing to their am tent, calling Rich's an antobiograpky and Larkin's a
love-poem,
Speech ati; Or we could classify the two poems according to their
speech aits, calling Rich's a confessional narration and Larkin's a tiicrf-
itation on estrangement.
Oiftcrform: Or we could classify1 the poems according to their outer
form, describing Rich’s as a poem ft? iinrhymed couplets and Larkin's
as a poem in unrhymed tercets.
Each of these classifications requires that we investigate the poem
—
for something different for what its content is, what sort of speech
acts it is engaging in, and what outer Form it displays.

CONTENT GEMCES: Here arc some of the most frequent kinds (or
genres, the French word for “kinds") of lyric poems identified by content;
The love poem
The dawn poem (in which one of the lovers, usually, is waked by
the sun and speaks)
The nocturne (a night scene)
The pastoral (a poem spoken by a shepherd; loosely, a poem in the
countryside)
The elegy (a poem mourning a death)
The cpithalamion {a poem celebrating a wedding)
The prayer
The autobiography
The flower poem
The sea poem
The travel poem
The birthday poem

There are enough poems of all the above sorts so that any poet
writing a travel poem is bound to remember other travel poems, and
so on. The poet expects the reader, often, to know how such poems
usually go (a travel poem, for instance, normally reaches a destination).
10<J D E St k L EH .N O Pot MS

Tin.1 poet then often "changes the rules," and violates the very ex¬
pectation*. that the poem lias, set up. The seventeenth -century poet
George Herbert, lor instance, in a poem called "Pilgrimageÿ leads ns
bv his title to expect that he will find a destination, but all he finds is
"a lake of brackish waters” instead of a place of spiritual healing.
flower poems, to give another example, usually praise the flower, but
William Make writes of a f ‘sunflower, weary of time" and makes us
wonder about the weariness of the flower, The dawn poem is usually
spoken by one lover to the other, as in fitwiep and Jiilict\ John Donne
makes his dawn poem unusual by addressing the sun: “Busy old fool,
Unruly sun!” In every case, a poet writing with a known Content will
want to do something new and interesting with that content. The
more poems you have read, the more pleasure you will get trom read¬
ing a new poem, since you will be alert to the new thing the poet is
doing. It b die “new twist,” as well as the old thing done very well
in a new way, that gives the pie a sure -
The first poet to invent a kind sets a problem: What do lovers say
when the sun conies up and interrupts their lovemaking? Every subse¬
quent poet finds a new solution to the problem. No one solution is
better, in theory, tin an any other; anti a rich poetic problem is one that
keeps on generating new solutions.
Emily Dickinson, for instance, wrote a prayer-poem describing a
heart praying to an invisible power. The success of the poem de¬
pends on our having a sense that the ustfal prayer is addressed to God,
has a reverential tone, and asks tor some hoped -tor good: only il we
know these normal conditions will we see Dickinson’s blasphemy Dick¬
inson tells us in the first stanza that someone is being addressed by the
Heart, htir ir is not until the second stanza that that person addressed is
described as an "inquisitor,” a torturer. And the hoped-for i;ood asked
for by die I leart changes as rile poem goes on, giving the poem its
dynamit shape or inner form, as the praying Heart changes from
someone demanding pleasure to an abject prisoner craving trom God
“the privilege to die”:

EMILY DICKINSON
The Heart asks Pleasure
The Heart asks Pleasure first
— —
first
— —
And then —
Excuse from Pain —
—
And then - those little Anodynes0 painkillers
That deaden suffering —
 I1 O JL 1 I L. KINDS J U7

And then
And then
—— il go
to to sleep
it should be
—
The will of its Inquisitor
The privilege lo die —
This two-stanza description of a prayer is organized as a list ot goods
asked for. Its dynamic shape can be indicated as a long chain of petitions,
all of them the direct objects of the verb "asks'1:

The Heart asks: Pleasure (first)

& then Excuse from Pam
& then Anodynes
& then to go to sleep
fk then
(if it should be the will of its
Inquisitor) the privilege to die

Why does Dickinson divide this single list into two stanzas? What makes
stanza 2 worth separating from stanza l? As soon as we ask this question
we realize that we don't know, in stanza 1 , whom the Heart is addressing
with its prayer. If we translate Dickinson's narrative into the Heart s
direct pleas, the young Heart says: "I want Pleasure." Pleasure never
comes; that prayer goes unanswered "Well, then, I want to have no
more Pain," says the Heart, still believing that its unknown Addressee in
heaven would prefer to bestow pleasure or at least painlessness on the
petitioner. Put the pain goes on, unabated. "Well, then, please give me
some drugs to lessen the suffering,1’ asks the Heart, t hrough the first
.
stanza the Heart still wants ro maintain onsciousness, even if it should
he consciousness dulled by a sedative. I brought the first stanza the Heart
still believes in the potential benevolence of the Person listening to these
demands.
But no anodynes ate forthcoming, and the Heart foresees that its
life will be one ot unrelieved Suffering. "Ac least let me sleep," prays
the Heart, now will LII g to forgo consciousness. Hut that prayer goes
Unanswered, too; ntghts of insomniac suffering succeed Jays full ot
undeadened pain. It is at this point chat the Heart redefines the person
addressed. This person on high is clearly totally nonbcnevolcnt, having
denied the Heart any morse! of pleasure, having even denied a letup
in pain, refusing to give painkilling medicines, withholding even the
relief from pain given by sleep. What can we call such a torturer?
Dickinson reaches to the Renaissance image of a church -licensed
torn tier, an Inquisitor. The Inquisitor has total power, the tortured

_
108 DESCRiwmts POEM'S

Heart, none. Once you recognize that the person in charge of your
destiny is a and that you are totally in his power, nothing is
torturer
left for you but to he abject, to cringe, to say, "Oh Inquisitor, if it be
thy will, grant me the privilege of dying." It is to this suicidal point
that the Heart comes at the end of her prayer, when she is willing (as
she was not in the first stanza) to forgo consciousness entirely. She
now dearly perceives (as she did not in the first stanza) that she is in
the hands not of a benevolent God but of a relentlessly cruel one. At
last we see why Dickinson divided her list of petitions in two,
fhc petitionary form described in this poem is that ot a Christian
prayer. A poem describing a "standard'1 Christian prayer might say:

The soul asks peace of mind,

And then for virtue’s power,
And then for hope arid chanty
In every evil hour;
And then for faith in grief,
And then —if it should be
The will of its C re a ten- God
His face at death to see.
—
A "conventional" prayer-poem of this Sort is the "ghost- mod cl"
behind Dickinson's blasphemous rewriting of the genre. Dickinson
expects her reader to react strongly to her departure from the con¬
ventional ways of talking to God- All poets expect readers to know
[from ordinary social behavior) what sort of content would normally
appear in the usual prayer, or the usual wedding song, or the con¬
ventional funeral speech, and to measure the poem’s departures in
content from the norm.

SPEECH ACTS: When we classify poems by their speech acts, we

draw attention to their mam ft of expression more than to their content.
! can apologize tor any number of things — mv tardiness, or my mis¬
takes, or my clothing
—
but in each of these cases my speech act (what¬
ever its content) is an apology. Similarly, I can protest about rime, or
death, or love — but in every cast, my speech act is a protest. Since the
language of moat poems can be chougln of as a series of utterances hy a
speaker, the poet expects you to (rack the person’s successive speech acts,
lust as you might do in life when you might say, "first, she critiased rue,
then she apologized, then she explained why she was upset, and finally she
allied it we could still be friends." A poem's speech acts need to be

A
 POETIC KINDS. 109

followed and identified in this way: “The speaker dedates his love,
just
and then vows that he will always be faithful, while protesting the indif¬
ference of his beloved and reproaching her for it,” Here are a few speech
acts that often organize poems [a longer list is provided in the appendix
“On Speech Acts'1};
Apology
Apostrophe [a direct second-person address to another, usually of
higher rank)
Declaration
Boast
Command
Interrogation
Exclamation
Description
Hypothesis
Rebuttal
Narration
Prayer
Debate or dialogue
Reproach
We have seen a tto nation of autobiography in Rich's poem “Ne¬
cessities of Life," a narration of prayer in Dickinson's "The Heart asks
—
Pleasure first — A poem whose speech act was prayer would be,
unlike the Dickinson poem, addressed dirccdy to God, like George
Herbert's “Discipline,” which begins,

Throw away thy rod,

Throw away thy wrath,
O my God,
Take the gentle path.

Or the speech act of a poem can be a Command. Commands are normally

given by people; one way of being original in a command-poem would
be to have the commands given by something that normally doesn't talk.
This is what Carl Sandburg docs in his poem "Grass,” where the grass
speaks. This poem surveys the sites of famous battles during the Napo¬
leonic Wars, the Civil War, and the First World War;

_
110 Dtsr ii USING POEMS

CARJL SANDUURG
Gws
lJile the bodies high at A Listed it r and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work —
I am the jÿras-s; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
A tid pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work.

This poem contains other speech acts besides its repeated commands
(“pile,” “shovel under,” "let me work”). It also contains a repeated
tf//- definition {"I am the grass") and a piece of narration “Two years . . .
and passengers ask . . . what place is this?" If we were mapping tins poem
by the grass's Speech acts, numbering the commands m sentience (1, 2,
and so on), it would read:
Command 1a {“pile")
Eemmands 2a and 3a {“shovel under,” “let me work")
Sttf-definiti&n la {"1 am the grass")
Command lb ("and pile”)
Command 1 C (“and pile")
Cotnittfrldl 2b and 3b (“shovel under" and “let me Work”)
iWarrathm (“passengers ask”}
(Inserted Miestiott by passengers: "What . . . ?")
(Inserted question by passengers: "Where . . . ?")

SelJ-iicftilitidii lb (“1 am the grass")

Command 3c (“let me work”)

When we “map" a poem by its speech acts, we are often enabled

to see its skeletal structure and to describe it precisely, saying, "This is a
poem of repeated ™rji!djids by the grass. The grass defines itself by its
work of covering- over the dead of all battles, important in their day but
sOOn forgotten, as the (pjcsfrunt asked be- later passers -t>y, iiatr.trcd by the
grass, reveal." This is a tar more esacr way of describing a poem than to
 POE: TIL KIN IT; 111

mention only Its theme, saying, "This poem is about the way in which
past battles arc soon forgotten /’ En noting the way the poet has made tins
thematic cliche memorable - by having die grass be the speaker, and by
giving it relatively few and repeated speech acts to use — one sees the
poem not merely as a statement about sear but as a constructed piece of
art. Since the language of misst poems cats he thought of as a Series of
utterances by a speaker, the poet expects the reader to track and identify
the speech acts, just as we do in life Here, the repetitiveness of form is
used to emphasize the sameness of all soars, as burial follows burial
repeatedly,

Ou i f-.R FORM: A poem can also be classified according to various

aspects of its outer farm, having to do with meter, rhyme, and stanza-
fontt. (The appendix "On Frosodv’’ describes these aspects more tullv.)
With respect to prosody, here are a few examples of kinds of naming.
Line-Wtdlft, borne form-names have to do with the tej'dfJi of the
poetic line. A pentameter poem is a poem in fines beats uniki

When I / see BIRCH / es BEND / to LEFT / and RIGHT . . .

I LIKE /to THINK /some BOYS / been SWING / ing
THEM,

A trimeter poem is a poem in lines three beats wide:

It is TIME / that i MADE / my WILL;

I CHOOSE / upSTAMD 1 ing MEN,

Fhc single most import a itt thing to remember in deciding hots many
beats a line has is that you cannot ascertain this in isolation. You need to
look at the lines surrounding ic, and, il it occurs in .1 poem with stanzas,
at matching lines in other stanzas. The reason you need surrounding or
matching lines is that many lines, taken by themselves, could be rend ill
different ways Take the line from Ha fillet’s famous soliloquy "To be or
not to be: that is the quest ton " You could read this line, taken by itself,
in two different ways:

To BE or NOT to he: THAT is the QUESTiort, {4 hetits)

To BE or NOT to LiL: l’HAT is the QUESTion. {5 heals)

We decide that the line is meant m have five beau because* the lines
surrounding it in Hamlet’s speech mostly seem to tall into place 11 we
tead tSieni with five beats:

1
112 D t if: k I u i N'C lJ uEHs

To DIE, to SLEEP; to SLEEP, perCHANCE TO DREAM, (J)

And IN that 5LEED of DEATH what DREAMS may
COME (j)
When WE have SHUFFlcd OFF this MQKtal COIL (5)
Most GIVE us PAUSE.
This gives us the evidence we need to decide that we should read our
dubious line as “To EE or NOT to BE; THAT is the QUESTiou "
with five beats.
Similarly, the line vs'ith which William Butler Yeats begins his
poem ''Faster 1ÿ16" is “1 have met them at dose of dav.L' Taken by
itself, we could read rhis line perfectly reasonably as having four beats ("f
HAVE met THEM at CLOSE of DAY") if it were followed by another
four-beat line, as m this piece of doggerel;
I have met them at dose of day, (4)
But they have never greeted me, 14)
And though I now am old anti gray. [4)
I think that we cannot agree, (4)
in point of tact, though, Yeats's line is followed by a long series ot lines
that all have three beats each, which make-: us read it, too, with a
three-beat rhythm —
,J[ have MET them at CLOSE of DAY”;

1 have MET them at CLOSE of DAY P)

CO Ming with VlVid FAces, (.3)
From CO UN Ter or DESK among GREY (-1)
EIGHTeenth-CENtury HOUSes. (-*)
The rule of thumb, then, is always to look at lines ingroups when
you are deciding how many beats they have. Hind another stanza in the
poem matching the one you are dubious about, and see it its pattern is
dearer. (All si mil at stanzas in a poem have the same arrangement of
beats.) The best way to ' hear" the heats of ,i poem is to read it aloud,
and to notice the natural stresses ot the sentences as you read, deciding,
in dubious cases, how to read die tine by comparing it with others.

Hhyfhm. Some form names have to do with the rhythm of the line
Rhythms ate either rising (one-TWO, one-TWO would be an exam¬
ple; or hillnt\> (ON E-rwo-three, ON E-rwo -three would be an exam¬
ple). Shakespeare’s blank verse has a two-syllable rising rhythmic unit
represented as otie-TWO, '. Five of these building units make up the
"

Shakespearean line —
per beats ivicie, in a rump rhythm:
"To DIE, to SLEEP, to SLEEP, perCHANCE to DREAM " FalHÿ

I
 POETIC K.iNt>S 1 1 3

rhythm is much heavier than

rising rhythm, and is often used to imitate
marching, hoofbeats, or some form of r a tv power, as m flight’s poem on
the TYget that goes ONE two, ONE- two: “TYger, TYger, D URN mg
BRIGHT / IN the FOResis OF the NIGHT."
Poemÿ Length. Some form-names have to do with the length of the
trJid/f pwpfj: Wallace Stevens's “Sunday Morning” is a poem in eight C<IH-
rtve, in which each ivmfo (a single long stanza) h.vs Jifieen lines. The name
sonnet normally means that the poem in spies!ion has fourteen tines,
Combinatorial horm-A'ames. Some form -names have to do with the
width mitf rhythm ami length rtriff rhymes of the rHrrft poem: a
“Shakespearean sonnet" ts a poem with lines five beats whir in a two-
syllable nirn$ rhythm; it ii fourteen lines long, and the lines rhyme iifttifi
rdof efef gg (making three quatrains in alternate rhyme and a rhyming
couplet).
These qualities of form are explained systematically In the appendix
"On Prosody." They need to be observed routinely, in the case oi every
poem yon read. Once you have described its content (a spring poem, an
elegy) and its successive speech acts a narration, a plea), look at the outer
form. How many lines does the whole poem haver How many stanzas?
Are they all the same shape? How wide is the line? Where do the rhymes
come? What is the overall rhythm? It helps to jot down what you
observe in the margin next to the poem on the page (“Elegy; lament,
protest, consolation; fifteen alternately rhymed pentameter quatrains m
rising rhythm"). That way you bas e l handle on the poem the next time
you look at it.

INN Lie SmuciTUnAL FOUJvr Desides its outer form (“This is a

poem m quatrains ill falling rhythm rhyming — a description of
D lake's “1 yger"), every poem lias internal JfntrtifraJ /eon This is its dy
namic shape, which derives from the curve traced by the emotions of the
poem as they change over its duration I hat emotional curve is plotted
hy connecting two. three, or more points or the poem, a rise from
depression to hope to joe. for instance >i i leclitie from triumph

through doubt to despair. Very few poems represent an unchanging

steady state of the same emotion all through.
Some poems .-ire two-part {fiipiury) poems, like William Words¬
worth's “A slumber slid mv spirit seal" (which we saw changing from
illusion to stern knowledgi. or like Dickinson s '"Ihv Heart asks He.i-
—
s u re first " (which we S;LW changing its conception of God from
benevolence to cruelty). Another fundamentally binary form is the de-
114 D ESC Mb l NO Pu-EMi

bate poem, where A speaks, then 11 challenges A, then A replies to B,

back and forth.
There Lire also many three- part (ternary) poems, which often take
on the internal structure of beginning, modulation, end (a song-form
preserved in lyric). We have seen an example of three-part form in
Edmund Waller's "‘On the Last Poem in the Book.”
Internal fornii are infinitely variable, since (hey represent emo¬
tional response, always volatile. One well-known internal structure is
that of the "surprise” ending, where the last few lines reverse everything
that has gone before. George Herbert’s poem "The dollar” is full of
rebellion against God, until the very end:

lint as l raved, and grew more fierce and wilde

At every' word,
Me thou glu I heard one calling, Chitdl
And 1 replied. My Lord,

In investigating the internal Structure ot a poem, one should try to

divide it into parts along its “tault tines." Where does the logic of tits:
argument seem to break; Wheto does the poem change from first person
to second person? Where does the major change in tense ot speech act
tike placer Here are some of the ingredients of internal structural form
that will help yOu to explore a poem.
Sentences. I’oems the whole, made of sentences, and sen¬
arc, on
tences are an important internal structuring principle of poems. For
instance, there will often be a procession of short sentences, and then
one very long sentence, or vice versa. The poet means ns to notice bow
many sentences there are in a poem, and how they relate to one another,

There may be a generalizing sentence (“How do I love thee? Let me

count the ways”) followed by many particulars; or many small instances
eadlng up to more Important ones, as in Robert Herrick s summary of
i is. poetic subjects, ending at the hope ot salvation;

ROBERT HERRICK
The Argument of His Book
i sing of brooks, ot blossoms, birds, and bowers,
Of April, May, of June, and July flowers,
1 -.Ing ol Maypoles, hock carts, wassails, wakes,
Of bridegrooms, brides, and ol their bridal cakes,
1 write of youth, of love, and have access
lly these to sing of cleanly wanton ness.

L
 PofTH KINDS I IS

1 of" dews, of rains, and* piece by piece.

Of balm, of oil, of spjcc, and ambergris.
1 sing of rimes t rant-shifting, and ! write
How roses tirst came red and lilies white.
1 write of groves, of twilights, and I sing
['tie court ot Mab° and ot the fairy king. queen of the fairiei
! write of heU; i sing {and ever sliail)
Of heaven, and hope to have it after all.

You can often discover a lor about a poem by copying out its successive
sentences LII prose, putting each one under its predecessor. You can then

ask yourself bow they resemble one another, and how they differ, and
why.
Pcrwiir Sentences arc written either in the firsr person (I/iuc irr the
singular, itf/io m the plural}; tire second person (pun — archaic tonus
are thou in the nominative singular, litre in the objective singular, and ye
in the plural) ; or the third person (h$fhim, f ht/her, and it in the singular;
they /titan in the plur.ii). A JirrfiifC of person as a poem goes along is a
significant structuring dev ice A change to the second person, addressing
a person (“you") in the poem who hasn’t appeared before, usually raises
the temperature of a poem, as when Wordsworth, after a long mono¬
logue in "Tintern Abbey," turns to liis sister, saying, "For thou art with
me here upon i lie banks / Of this fair river," and we leam for the first
time that he is not alone. An elegy often begins by trying to keep the
dead person "alive" by directly addressing him or her. and may then
subside into the third person, speaking no longer of "you" but of "the
body." as Robert Lowell does in his elegy for his mother. "Sailing
Home for Ikapallo.’ I Ee is bringing Ins mother's body from Italy ( where
she had: died) ho rue ro New England, and we gradually see Charlotte
Lowell uam from being a "you" to being "the corpse’’:
Your nurse could only speak Italian,
but after twenty minutes I could imagine your final week,
and tears ran down my cheeks. . . .
Wlien [ embark I'd from Italy with my mother’s body,
the whole shoreline ot the Golf t) di Gcwtira0 Gr ill of Genoa
was breaking into fiery7 flower.

Mother travelled first class in the hold.

In the grandiloquent lettering on Mother’s coffin,

H6 1} E S C R 1 B l N t'l PltEMS

Lpuvll bad been misspelled LOVEL.

The corpse
was wrapped like in Italian tin foil,

Person reveals the poet’s relation to the world. Is the poet in the world
—
of "you" or ‘W‘ other persons —
or in a solitary world inhabited
only by the Ml" of the poem? Or a world with no addressees, full ot "its"
and “theins"?
Agency. Every sentence has a subject; the subject is the agent of the
Verb, Many poems have one subject ("I") tor every sentence: in them,
agency never changes. Others have a single change in agency: see, tor
instance, Randall Jarrell's “The Death of the Hall Turret Gunner/1 in
which the subject of all the main verbs is "I" until the last line, when,
because the ball turret gunner has been killed, the "I" vanishes and
“they" lake over. The "I" who .acted becomes the “me" who is acred
cm. Here is the complete poem:

RANDALL JARRELL
The Death of the Bait Turret Gutitier
From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my w<*t fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightman: fighters.
When I died tltey washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Some poems have a different subject for every sentence —

these
make the reader rake on several different perspectives at once. See, tor
instance, Lowell’s "Skunk Hour," where in the first stanza alone there
are four different subjects which govern verbs:

Nautilus Island’s hermit

still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
j'r,- iii

her sheep still graze above the sea.

I let swf’.s a bishop. Her fanner
is first selectman in our village:
tire’s in her dotage.

Heiress, sheep, son, fanner: all govern verbs (“lives/’ “graze.1 isf
"is”; I hese agents are all linked in art da bonne system of center and
satellites. The hermit heiress has her cottage, her sheep, her son, and het

j
 POETU: KINDS 117

fanner (an fortunately, there is also her dotage. Which she is in). The
heiress still in some sense owns her sheep, her son, and her fartneT
{they are all torn); hut because they are all given independent existence
as agents ill the poem* we know they are no longer hers, really. They
are separate from her, separate subjects; and the only things that are
really hers now are her cottage and her dotage; only these two rhym¬
ing nouns, among "her" possessions, are not independent agents gov¬
erning a verb. By (jjdtf ng agency through a poem urt can tel! who IJ ntJrtTjf
it as it gets along. In "Skunk Hour," the various inhabitants of the
seaside town at first “own" the poem; then the disturbed speaker
"owns” the poem while he carries out his voyeuristic acts; but finally
it is the mother skunk with her column of kittens who "owns" the
poem and the town, as in the last stanza the troubled speaker yields
agency to the .skunk:

I stand, on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air —
a mother skunk with her column of kittens SICJ'WS the garbage pail,
Shitjabs her wedge -head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and uhll not Scare.

It is important to know who “owns," by agency, each part of every

poem.
Tenses. Sentences are written in tenses, and tenses are also an
important internal structuring aspect ol the poem, making it move in
time (as we saw in Adrienne Rich’s “Necessities of Life”) from past to
present to future. Teme-ciianges ask to be noticed. Sometimes, even
often, they are the main point of the poem. As we sawr earlier, in
Wordsworth's "A slumber did my spirit seai." the first stanza is in the
past tense, the second iti the present cense. The first stanza stands for
delusion (“scented''); the second stanza for reality'; and the white gap
between the two tenses represents the death of the beloved. ! lere are the
tensed verbs:

WILLIAM WORIiS WORTH

A slumber did my spirit seal
A slumber did my spirit seal;
1 had no human fears;
She seemed a thing that could rutfieI
The touch of earthly years.
1 IK |}£ S C R J tt [ N <1 p o I VI $

No men cm has she now, no force‘s

She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, anti stones, and trees.
The main structuring agent of the poem is the irnse-chtmge, bracketing
the invisible (infinite, muonsed) white-spice moment of the girl's death.
Images! er Sensual Words, "We thought m images,” said Robert
Lowell in a poem to his friend and fellow poet John tferryman. Though
words in poetry can only refer and not really picture, a linkage of
—
references in the same category of sc use-perceivable words say. many
words about the moon, such as “bright/1 "beams,1' "round," "white,"
and so on
— tend to create the impression of the object to which they
all refer Linked words (referring especially to the senses of sight and
hearing} help to structure many poems. These words can be all of one
sort (a collection of names of different flowers, for instance, in Milton's
“Lycidas") or they can be of different sorts: that is. a series of specific
nouns like "tiood," "earthquake,” "fire,” and “shipwreck" can all help
to construct the single abstract category "catastrophe." There are sys¬
tematic ways in which the concrete words that some refer to as ‘images"
may be assembled, too: they may be arranged in pantile], or in contrast, or
in a ranked hierarchy. When Edwin Arlington Robinson wrote a sonnet
called "New England," he sketched the region by images:

ErciffiN ARLINCJTO.N ROBESON

New England
Here where the wind is always north -north -east
And children learn to walk OTI frozen toes,
Wonder begets an envy of all those
Who boil else where with such a lyric yeast
Of love that von Will hear them at a feast
Where demons would appeal for some repose,
Still clamoring where the chalice overflows
And crying wildest who have drunk tile least.
Passion is here a soilurc of the wits.
Were told, and I ove a cross tor them to bear:
Joy shivers in the corner where site knits
And Conscience always has the roe hi rig-chair,
Cheerful as when she tortured into fits
The Jrirst cat that was -ever killed by Care

Jl
 F- x i* 1- o M N'o; A t* o t M 1 19

Wc usually call the first sort of irtSigc-s (wind, children) “realistic" images,
and the second kind (in which JH abstract quality like Joy or Conscience
is turned into a person who can sit in a rocking-chair) "personification.”
11 ci t of course in a dcfmtriort-ptiem like this one the "realistic chastising
1

wind and freezing children are a* symbolic ot Ness England as t lonscience

in her rocking-chair. All concrete words in poems, even “realistic’' ones
like "wind" or "comer," work together to suggest something more than
themselves alone. One could say that each of these word-images has a
pa rr-to- whole relation to the theme of the whole poem. In Robinson’s
poem, each is a mini sketch of the meteorological and moral awfumCSs (to
this New England poet) of New England. It is often useful to wide out
the scries ot concrete sense-words in a poem and sec what meaningful
emotional curve links them together, or see when the categories ol words
change sharply (as they do here from the concrete to the abstract), giving
a dynamic shape to the whole list.

Exploring a Poem

What follows is a series ot things to note when you run through a

poem to see what its parts are and how they lit together: Let UH use tins
list on a sonnet by John Keats, called “On First Looking into Chapman’s
Homer.” T he anthology will tell us, in footnotes, a few things wc have
to know to understand the references in the poem; Keats did not know
Greek, and so he tirsr read Homer's Cidysscy in the Renaissance trans¬
lation by George Chapman; Apollo is the Greek gut! ot poetry; Keats
believed (mistakenly) that it was the Spanish conquistador Cortez who,
in exploring Panama (“Darien” j, discovered the Pacific Ocean (in re
aliry it was Balboa, but the historical error doesn’t matter for the imag¬
inative purposes of the poem). Keats tells us what Lt is like, even fur a
reader sis experienced in poetry as lie. to come across Homer’s Odyssean
epic (from which he draws his opening travel imagery, for the first time:

JOHN KI-ATS
On First l&&king into Chapman's Homer
Much have 1 travcll'd m the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have 1 been

- Which bards in fealty ° to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse bad I been told
That deep -brow'd Homer ruled .is his demesneÿ;
otleÿiana'

domain
Yet did 1 never breathe its pure serene* iUi)iiS.<phcrt:
120 D E S ctua I N C P t > i vi s

Till 1 heard Chapman speak out loud and bold

Then felt 1 like so PI it watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his fecit*; vino
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific arid lU his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise —
Silent, upon a peak in iJanen.

How do we go about exploring such a poems Let us try a series of steps.

1. Meaning
This is the usual sort ol information-retrieval reading that we do
with any passage of prose or verso We come up with a summary of
greater or lesser length giving the import tit the passage as we make sense
of it. I lore, we might arrive at something like “ flic speaker says that he
had traveled through a lot of golden terrain had read a lot of po¬
—
ems and people had told him about the Homeric domain, but he had
never breathed its air till he heard t ihapman speak out. Then he felt like
an astronomer discovering a new planet; or like the explorer who dis¬
covered the Pacific, whose men, astonished by his gaze, guessed at his
discover. . This sort of meaning-paraphrase is necessary, but less useful
"

m poetrv than in prose. In many poems there is rather little in the way
of plot or character or message or “information" in the ordinary sense.
and chat htde can be quickly sketched (perhaps initially, especially in the
case nf a complex poem, by the teacher to tin; class). Hoping to learn
things about the poem that are more interesting than simply “what it
says" in prose, we try to construct its

2. Antecedent Scenario
What lias been happening txfore the poem starts? What has dis¬
turbed the status quo and set the poem in motion? Here, we know what
has happened: the speaker Iras picked up Homer (in Chapman's trans¬
lation) for the first time, and has had a revelatory experience- Nut the
antecedent scenario is not always given EO US SO clearly. If it is not
evident right away, otic moves on hopefully to

J. A Division into Structural Partt

Because small units .ire more easily handled than big ones, and
because the process id a poem, even One as short ,is a sonnet, can l be
addressed all at once with a single global question like “What's going on
here?" we divide the poem into pieces. One way of dividing this poem
 tXPLOaiN S r A lJ O E M 121

up is to notice that it hilts, by its. rhymes, info two large purts; “I nevet
knew Homer till 1 rend Chapman11 (,thf,JuWi.f) and “Then f felt like this”
(cdaicct). The hist part takes tip the first eight lines, connected by the two
rhyme -sounds represented by -old (rhyme 4) and -cen (rhyme fj); and the
second part takes tip the last lines, connected by a new set ot rhyme-
sounds, represented by -res (rhyme r) and -en (rhyme d). There are other
ways, besides this S:fi division, its divide this poem into parts, as we shall
see, but let ns work first within this ti;6 division-by -rhyme. in order to
suggest a meaningful relation of die parts, it is useful to look at

4. The Cihtuix
Iti Keats’s sonnet, the climax seems to come whetl Cortez stares at
the Mantle — the high point ot the poem. What is special about this
experience' Why does it replace the image of the astronomer discov¬
ering a nets' planet? hi lyric poems, the various parts lend to cluster
around a moment of special significance - which its attendant parts lead
up to, lead away from, help to clarify, and so on. The climax usually
manifests itself by such things as greater intensity of tone, an especially
significant metaphor, a change iti rhythm, or a change in person, Having;
located the climax, one can now move back to

5. The Other Parts

About each part, it is useful to ask how it differs from the other
parts. What is distinctive in ic by contrast to the other members of the
poem? Does something shitt gears? Does the tense change? Does the
predominant grammatical form change? (For example, docs the poem
stop emphasizing nouns and start emphasis' mg participles?) Ts a new
person addressed? Have we left a general overlook for certain particulars?
Here, we notice that the first four lines talk in general about states,
kingdoms, and islands. I he next four lines talk about pm special “wide
expanse,” the one ruled by Homer. The next part says, “I fell like an
astronomer discovering a new planet." And the last part produces a new
comparison: “I felt like an explorer discovering ,1 new ocean, accom¬
panied by his companions." Some questions immediately .arise: Why
doesn't the poem end after the poet says, “I felt .is though I had dis
covered a new planet"? Why doc, lie feel he needs a setanii comparison?
And why, in 1 the second comparison, does lie need not only a single
discoverer comparable to the astronomer, hut a discoverer ariampatiied by
tl .(icit/i 1>1 aompitil iOHS (“all bis men’1)? Once these four parts (general
realms; Homer’s expanse; solo astronomer / planet; Cortez and men /
Pacific Ocean) have been isolated, one can move on to the game called
I
J
 122 [>E s CH..ID r «.d Po E SI S

6. bind the Skeleton

WIUT is the dynamic tytve of emotion on which the whole poem
is arranged? "1 am much travelled, and have visited [presumably by ship]
many islands: however, 1 had never visited the Homer-expanse till i
heard Chapman; then I breathed the air of the Homer- expanse, and ii
was like finding” — like finding what? The first stab at comparison
(“like finding a new planet") isn't quite right —you can’t walk on a
planet and explore it anti get to know it the way you get to know islands
and states. Well, what would be a better comparison? And the speaker
realizes that whereas other poets seem feudal lords of a given piece of
earth — a state, a kingdom, an island — Homer is different ttof jmi in
decree but inkind. He is, all by himself, an tict'i™. A new ocean, unlike a
planet, is something on one’s own plane that one can actually explore;
yet it is something so big that it must contain many new islands and
realms within it. When we understand this, we can identity the curve of
astonishment m the poem when the H pm cr-exp/t use (a carefully chosen
word that doesn't give away too much) turns out to be not just another
piece of land, and not some faraway uninhabitable body in the sky, but
a whole un exp]ora hie ocean, hitherto unguessed at. The tone has
e hanged from one of ripe experience (“Much have [ travelled”) to one
of ignorance (die speaker has never breathed the air of the vast Homeric
expanse, though others had, and had told him about it), to tire revelation
of the “wild surmise'' —
we have found not- just another bounded ter¬
rain, but an unsuspected ocean! TSiis curve of emotion, rising from an

almost comp Li cent sense of experience to an astonished recognition, is

the emotional skeleton ot the poem. We can then ask about

7. Gittrifs the Poet Plays with rhe Skeleton

If “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer," by its content, LS a
then/ now poem ("I used not to know Homer / Now 1 do”), what is
the event bridging the then and the now; It is reading Homer in Chap
man's translation. “[Leading” is not an "event” in the usual sense: most
rhen/now poems (like "A slumber did! niv .spirit seal’ ) are about some
more tangible event (a death, ati absence, a catastrophe), Keats plays a
game, then, with the then/now poem in making its fulcrum .in expe¬
rience i >f reading, Uy saying that reading, too, is an Event, Keats makes
the then/ 1 low poem new.
if this is a riddle-poem (and il is: “What is Homer land like?"),
how is the riddle prepared? It is prepared by a series of alternatives: “I
have seen realms, states, kingdoms, islands.' Some "expanse is ruled by
Homer, but I have not seen it yet. Will it be a realm; a state; a kingdom?
m
 EXPLOKTÿC A Ptu M 123

another island? The first “answer” 10 the riddle is. "None of lire above;
Homer-land is a itfft' pkariff!'1 [lm that is the wrong answer (one can't
travel to and explore a new planet, and the speaker it exploring Homer),
so the poem tries again 10 answer die riddle, and this time does it
correctly; “None of the above; Hornet -expanse is a jrt: ic world'1 Tile
poet has played a game with out sense of the poem as a riddle by
answering nor in the category we anticipated front his former travels (a
piece of land) but nt an unexpected one (ocean), thus making the
riddle -poem new.
Keats plays another game with the ignorance;1discovery skeleton by
making lu> poem a hero-poem. He makes the reward at rite end of the
—
emotional curve cite discovery of the new ocean — not a solitary ex¬
perience (like that of the “watcher of the skies" seeing the planet), bin a
communal one. We normally think of reading as an uneventful private
act. Why did Keats make it heroic? furthermore, why did he show the
heroic dKcovery being made not by a single explore* but by a company
of explorers? Cortez is not alone on cite isthmus of Panama, but is ac¬
companied by “all his men / Looking] at each other with a wild sur¬
mise." When one discovers the Homeric “expanse" one reads alone, but
one becomes thereby .1 member of a Company of people who have dis
covered Homer — those people who had “oft . . . told” the speaker
about H enter. A. feat like Homer's writing the Odyssey is as heroic as the
exploits of Achilles: mastery of such an intellectual discovery is itself a
form of heroic exploration Such a cultural discovery, Keats implies by the
presence of Cortez's men. is collective, not private. Keats thought of him¬
self as a poet among poets; a reader of [ iomer among readers of Hornet;
an explorer among explorers. And in this way lie made the hero-poem
both newly intellectual and newly communal and democratic.
Having seen the genre games that the poet plays with his skele¬
ton - as a then/now poem, a riddle-poem, a hero -poem — one can go
on to ask about

S, Language
Q1 course, WLL have been looking at language ill along, but now wc
can do it more consciously How many sentences does the poem have?
{ T wo. ) Where does the break between sentences come? ; After line -k)
This gives us. as I promised earlier, a new division into parts: not the 8:6
ot the then/now structure, but the 4:10 of the knowledge/discovery
structure, which locates for us rlie moment in which traveled compla
cency turns to longing for Homeric acquaintance. Poetm often have several
tsverlapptng itumwt stnututfs. U is one ol the signs of a complex poem that
124 DESCRIBING POEMS

its rhymes may be dividing the poem one way, its theme another way,
its action from inception through dimax another way, its grammar
another way, its sentences yet another way. Each of these divisions has
something to tell us about the emotional dynamic of* the poem.
What parts of speech predominate in the poem? (For a further ex¬
planation of these, see the appendix '“On Grammar."), In Keats's sonnet,
the chain of nouns of spa.ee — “realms," "states,” "kingdoms," "is¬
lands," "expanse," "demesne,” "planet," "Pacific"
unifying link.
— stands out as one

What other words, regardless of whether they are different parts of

speech, make a chain of significant relation? You might notice how words
—
of seeing and watching "seen,” "watcher." "ken,” “eagle eyes,"
"stared," “looked at" — connect the parts of the poem as do the nouns
of space.
What are expressed iti the diction? (We notice traveling,
sailing, exploring, astronomical observation, feudal loyalty, and so on.)
Is the dirfion modern or ancient? (Keats uses archaic words like
" realms of gold," “goodly," "bards,” "fealty," "demesne," “pure se¬
rene." and "ken,” which help us sense how long Homer has been alive
in our culture.) A close look at language always leads to

9, Tone
The calm beginning, in the voice of ripe experience (“Much have
! travelled") mounts to the excitement of the “wild surmise," which
then suddenly is confirmed by the breathless "silent” of the last line, and
by the image of the "peak." corresponding to this heightened moment.
Reading a poem aloud as if it were your own utterance makes you able
to distinguish the various tones of ookt it exhibits, and to name them. At
this point, we can turn to

10. Agency and Speech Acts

Who has agency in this poem? We notice that the main verbs are
.ill governed by the "I” who speaks the poem: "1 have travelled . . . and
seen . . . [andj have been . . . [and] had been told . . . yet [never] did I
breathe . , . I heard . . . Then felt l.H But we notice that in the subor¬
dinate clauses a great many other subagencies are present. Bards hold
islands. Homer rules an expanse, Chapman speaks out, the new planet
swims into ken, (Cortez stares at the Pacific, and his men look with wild
surmise at each other, it is by the interpenetration of the rather colorless
main verbs denoting the sedentary activity of reading, and the other
more public or active actions of the other agents, that Keats draws his
 Ex j> i OR I N n A HaEM 125

new acquaintance with the Odyssey into large realm? of’ cuicur.nl activity
The speech act of this poem Ji a single long tiarryfioti of the speaker's
more remote and recent pasts. ( he Unusual thing about the speech act
(narration) and agency (a single main agent) is that they stop so soon: the
last narrative verb by the agent is "1 hen telt !” in line 9. Atter that, the
attention of the poem never conus back to the speaker but instead
expands out to the most exalting sorts of cultural discovery —
that ot an
astronomer, that of explorers.

If, Kuat/f Sot Tdfrftj

What are the roads not taken in the poem? The sonnet might have
ended with the comparison ot the sc It to an astronomer. Would this
have been as satisfactory? Or the expanse ruled over by Homer might
have been shown as a new continent rather than is a new ocean. Would
this have been equally revealing? Or the poem might have been written
in the third person instead ot the tirst person:
Many have travelled in the realms ot gold,
And they have goodly states and kingdoms seen:
Round many western islands have they been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Is this as dramatic as the first person? Or the poem might haw heyim with
the reading of Chapman's Homer, instead of leading up to it:
I once heard Chapman speak out loud and bold;
He told me of i wide expanse unseen,
(Better than other states and realms ot gold)
Thai deep-brow'd Homer ruled as Ins demesne.
'Then felt I like stout Cortez on his peak.
When with his eagle eyes he saw the sea. . . .
We can see how presenting the climax in line o, as m this rewriting,
creates a very different structural shape from the 4;]ÿ know ledge /dis¬
covers- structure building up to the Pacific, It is useful to think oi
plausible roads not taken by a poem, because they help to identity the
roads that iiftr taken. With a clear idea of the function ot each piece ot
the poem within the whole, and of the dynamic curve of emotion
governing [he order iri which the pieces appear, we can then pas* on ie

12. Genre, Form, mid Rhythm

What is the nnifrnf genre of the poem? A dramatic change between
[hen and now: a poem about reading: a poem about a hem; a poem
126 DtsCKituxo POE its

about collective experience. (It can be compared to other poems about

newness, about reading, about heroes, about collectivity.)
What is the jpeerfr dtl genre of the poem? A narration ill the first
person of a significant event marking one life-period off from another;
and an askittg-a-riddte: ’What is reading Homer like?" {It can be com¬
pared to other first-person narrations and to other riddle-poems.)
What is the formal genre of the poem? A sonnet (using the usual
five-beat rising-rhythm line found in sonnets) rhyming abksabba ccicdrd.
[It can be compared to other sonnets rhyming the same way.) About
form* we always need to ask how it has been made vivid; see below for
remarks on Keats’s rhythm. We can then move on to the last issue,
which is always

13, The Imagination

What has the poet’s imugtnaimi invented that is striking, or memo¬
rable, or beautiful: We Can tell, from the metaphors of sailing, that before
writing his poem Keats had been reading Homer's Odyssey, and had been
thinking about what Odysseus had discovered as he sailed from realm to
realm, from island to island. Wanting to describe his own first reading of
Homer, Keats imaginatively borrows from the very book he has been
reading, using the image of travel, saying that reading poetry in general
is like voyaging from Shakespeare-] and to Milton- kingdom to Spenser-
statc, but that reading Homer is not like finding just another piece oflsnd
to visit: it is like finding a ness planet, or, even better, a whole unexpected
new ocean to sail in. Keats imagined these large analogies — sailing, as¬
—
tronomical observation, discovering an ocean for the act of reading in
general, and for reading Homer in particular; they enliven the sonnet.
What makes the poem touching is the imagined change from the com¬
placency of the well-traveled speaker to the astonishment of the discov¬
erer of Homer, and the poet’s realization that in reading Homer he has
joined a company of others who have also discovered the Homeric ocean,
sharing his "wild surmise." It is characteristic of Keats ro see poetry' as a
collective act: he said in a letter. "I think I shall be among the English poets
after my death,” nor I think I shall be famous after my death."
L

But the imagination is not invested in themes and images alone.

The imagination of a poet has to extend to the rhythm of the poem as
welt. What the imagination has invented here that is rhythmically mem¬
—
orable is the change from the stately first ten lines because even the
astronomer doesn't have to do anything hut look through his tele¬
scope
— to the strenuous broken rhythms of the heroic last tour lines,
with their four sharply differentiated parts:
 EXPLORING A POEM 127

like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes he scared at the i>a-
—
I, Or
dfic
2. And all his men took/d at each other \v:th a ssold surmise -
3- Silent,
4, Upon a peak in Darien.
The intent, piercing stare of "stout Cortez": the amazed mutual con¬
jee cure or his men; the sudden, short, transfixed silence £>f die whole
group; the summit ok foreign experience on which the action takes
—
place each of these four facts is given its own rhythmically irregular
phrase, so different from the undisturbed and measured pentameter nar¬
ration in "Then felt I like some watcher ot the skies / When a new
planet swims into Ins ken." A poem needs hndjjindifrVf rliylllmi as well as
imaginative transformation of content.
You will, of course, read insist poems without investigating them
in this detailed way for their inner processes. But as soon as you want to
know how a poem u/arks, as well as what it says, and niiy it is poignant nr
compelling, you will find yourself beginning to study it, using methods
like the ones sketched here Soon, it becomes almost second nature for
you to notice sentences, tense-changes, speech acts, tonal variants,
changes of agency, rhythms, rhymes, and other ingredients of internal
and outer structure. Just as an archaeologist studies ruins, while the rest
of us simply walk through Pompeii not understanding much of what wt
see. a student of poetry becomes more than simply a reader. You be¬
come more like a conductor who studies the musical score before con
ducting the piece in performance.
You can experience a poem with great pleasure as a general reader;
or VOLI can a ho learn how to explore it. to gain the more experienced
pleasure that a student ot architecture feels inside a Renaissance palace,
or that an engineer feels looking at the Sail Francisco [lay Bridge. In
every case, study adds to what you are able to perceive. Poems —
because they are short and written in your own mother tongue —
are
very rewarding dungs to study as well as to read, to learn by heart as see11
,1% to study, [ hey keep you Company in life.

Exploring a poem under the broad headings given above will

almost always lead you to a deeper understanding of the poem as a work
of art, constructed in a dense and satisfying and surprising way. I hough
we almost always respond first rn the quickly sensed "message” of a
poem, the reason foi out response [even i1 wp do not at rim know this)
is the arrangement tit the message (on many intersecting planes) into a
striking and moving form To give a poem its due as a work of art, we
need to he able to sec it as an arranged message. Looking through the
128 D E SC ft [ i» I hi G Pot W S

poem thoroughly helps us realize the kind of work [he poet puts into
construct!fig this urgent expression of life as it is seen, sensed, and
reflected on. Even the simplest of short poems tv ill show imagination
and architectural construction,

In Brief: Describing Poems

When von are looking tor useful ways to describe a poem, this
checklist of questions can guide your exploration;
1. Meaning. Can you paraphrase in prose the general outline of the
poem;
2, Antecedent srcitdrio: What has been happening before the poem
begins; What lias provoked the speaker into utterance' How has a
previous equilibrium been unsettled; What is the speakei upset
about?
many; Where do the breaks come?
3, Division into parts: Hots
4. The climax', How do the other parts tail into place around it:
3. The other parti: What makes you divide the poem into these parts'
Are there changes in person; In agency? In tense? In parts of
speech?
U. Tind the skeleton: What is the emotional curve on which the whole

poem is strung? (It even helps to draw a shape -— a crescendo,

perhaps, or an hourglass-shape, or a sharp ascent followed by a
steep decline — so you’ll know how the poem looks to you as a
whole.)
7. Gd/pjt’j ui'rfi fftf sfcfJpftw: How is this emotional curve made new?
8. Language: What are the COST texts of diction; chains of significant
relation, parts of speech emphasized; tenses; and so on?
[), Tow: Can you name the pieces of the emotional curve the —
changes in [one you cun hear in the speaker's voice as the poem
goes along?
10. Agency and its speech acts: Who is die main agent in the poem, and
does the main agent change as the poem progresses: See what the
main speech art of the agent is, and whether that changes. Notice
oddities about agency and speech acts.
1 1. Roads not taken: Clan you imagine the poem written in a different
person, or a different cense, or with the parts rearranged, or with an
additional stanza, or with one stanza left out, conjecturing by such
means why the poet might have wanted these pieces in (his order?
 READING OTHER POEMS 129

12. Ct'JifPj: What are they by content, by speech act. by outer form.?
15. Tire itrMÿFiitfron; What luis it invented that is new, "striking, mem¬
—
orable in content, in genre, in analogies, in rhythm, in a
speaker1

Reading Other Poems

If yon were to give a genre-name by comem to each of" the poems

below, you could begin, "Herbert: prayer-poem: Shakespeare: lust
poem; Marvell: poem of rttneit,’ and go on through the list down tc
"Alexis?. decline- poem." li VQU were to give a ten re -name be torm
to each one. you could begin. "Herbert: shaped poem: Shakespeare:
sonnet. Marvell; poem in eight-line, four-couplet stanzas,'' down to
“Alexic: pot nr ;n tercets," and sc on. It you were to group them
according to what person they were spoken in, you could say. "Herbert:
third person and first person; Shakespeare: third person: Marvell: Itrst
and third person.' JII J so forth. It vou were to name them bv speech act.
you could say. "Herbert: apostrophe; Shakespeare; definition; Marvell;
mixed expostulation, narrative, question, commendation " 1 ry making
—
such a list, and see how each question content? form? person? speech
act?— gives you a different purchase on the poem. You can expand that
purchase by expanding the number or questions you put to the poem.
For instance, where is the climax? Does the poem have a hippy ending?
From what position participant, observer, judge -- does the speaker
operate? The following are me re Is some sample questions
What ts the emotional curve traced by Shakespeare in hiv speaker’s
feelings about lust? By Ezra Pound m the young wife’s feelings? Can you
sec how the tones ot voice change with the tee lings? How many dif¬
ferent emotional responses to the fact of It is blindness does Milton ex¬
press?
Helix lus the poet s imagination worked on the material? Asjonc
Graham secs Piero della Francescas painting ot the young nut majestic
standing Virgin, pregnant and unbuttoning her dress before she goes into
labor, boss does the poets imagination respond to the painting? As Mark
Strand imagines courtship, how does he make it comic? As Heaney
imagines that the anxiety of writing is like onfrnnticig police at a border
checkpoint, how Joes he make that confrontation vivid? As Sherman
Alcxie imagines the decline of life on an Indian reservation, through
what example does he convey it:
In longer poems like "Ode to a Nightingale,’" “Dover Beach." and
"Mending Wall,’ the mote scannings you make the more you sec. You

.
1 3U D BSC RJ B INI G P O t M s

inn begin anywhere that interests you. Anything you notice helps to
build up vour picture ot the poem's world. In "Dover Beach" you
might notice how one setting —
on die English coast leads to an¬ —
other
other
—
—
the Aegean Sea, and how one topic love leads to an¬ —
the ebbing nt religious faith. These large structural blocks make
you perceive how the poem is composed, and enable you to look at the
—
micro-structures within each part. You can even begin your scanning at
the end of the poem: when you look at the close of “Ode to a Night¬
ingale" and see that it ends with two unresolved cjttestions, you are more
prepared for its inner vexations. Be patient with your scannings; each
new run-through reveals more of the strategy' of the poem, and enables
you to describe the energies of the poem better.

GF.ORGF. HERBERT
Easter Wings
Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,
Though foolishly he lost the same,
Decaying more and more
Till he became
Most poor:
With thee
O lei me rise
As larks, harmoniously,
And sing tins day thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me,
My tender age in sorrow did begin;
And still with sicknesses and shame
Thou didst so punish sin,
Thar l became
Most thin.
With thee
Lei rue combine,
And fed this day thy victory;
For, if I imp my wing uti dime,
Addiction shall advance the flight in me.

1 <a nr a ft fca lllff s HIL: .i itaruaycd wiri£ so as TO improve powers of flight. iA [orm

from falconry.)

A.
 kEADJNCr OTHtR iJOE Mi 131

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Sortnef 129
Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and dll action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame.
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight:
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a Swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad:
Mad. in pursuit, and m possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in prnot.* and proved, a very woe; in flic experience
Before, a jOv proposed: belund, a dream.
All dais the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to tins hell.

ANDREW MARVELL
The Garden
How- vainly men themselves amaze
To win the palm, the oak, or bays.1
And their incessant labors see
Crowned from some single herb, or tree,
Whose short and narrow-verged shade
Does prudently their toils upbraid;
While all flowers and all trees do close
To weave the garlands of repose)

Pair Quiet, have I found thee here,

And Innocence, thy sister dear?
Mistaken long, 1 sought you then
In busy companies ot men.
Your sacred plants, it here below,
Only among the plants will grow;
Society is all but rude
To ibis delicious solitude.
.

Awards for military, civic, ur poetic achievement.

132 D E sc IM m KG I'OLMS

No white nor red was ever seen

So amorous as tins lovely green,
Fond lovers, cruel as their flame,
Cut in these trees their mistress' name:
Little, alas, they know or heed
How tar these beauties hers exceed!
Fair trees, wheresoe'er your barks 1 wound,
No name shall but your own be found.
When we have run our passion's heat,
Love hither makes his best retreat.
The gods, that mortal beauty chase,
Still in a tree did end their race:
Apollo hunted Daphne so,
Only that she might laurel grow;
And Pan did alter Syrinx speed,
Not as a nymph, but for a reed."
What wondrous life is this 1 lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons, as I pass.
Iiisnared with flowers, I fall on grass.
Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,0 from ten pleasure
Withdraws into its happiness;
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;'
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Fir Other worlds and other seas,
Annihilating all dial's made
To a green thought in a green shade.
Here at the fountain's sliding foot,
Or at some fruit tree’s mossy root,
(.lasting the body's vest aside,

escape Apollo, turned into n laurel tree. SyiniK. tti escape li'an,
IJlfilliiL’, (o
(Limed into a reed. Marvell implies rb.it Apollo .slid I’an denied these (xansfoniiatLans. '

Alluding m tin popular notion that the Hoi i and t'nm.i of the land hive Hum
parallels in Lite sea.
 ktA i i L N r, OTHER Ho!i M S 1J3

My sou] intothe houghs dots glide;

There, like a bird, it shs and sings.
The IT whets and combs its silver wings,
And. dll prepared lor longer flight,
Waves in its plumes the various light.
Such was that happy garden -stare,
While man there walked without a in.ice:
After a place so pure and sweet,
What other help could yet be meet!
but ’twas beyond a mortal's share
To wander solitary there:
Two paradises twere iu one
To live in paradise alone
Host' well the skillful gardener drew
Of Howers and herbs rhts dial new,
Where, from above, the milder sun
Does through a fra gram zodiac run.
And as i: works, th' industrious bee
Computes its time as well as we!
How could such sweet and wholesome hours
lie reckoned but with herbs and flow err?

JOHN MILTON
lllieti I Consider How My Light Is Spent
When T consider how my light is spent
fire half my days in this dark world and wide.
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more beut
To serve therewith my Maker, jud present
My true account, lest he returning chide:
“Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?”
1 tondly ask; but Patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need
Hither mail's wort or his own gifts.; who bes[
Hear his mild yoke, they serve him best. Mis state
Is kingly. Thousands .u his bidding speed
And post o’er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait."
134 DESCRIBING POEMS

JOHN KÿATS

Ode to a Nightingale
1
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock1 I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards2 had sunk:
!Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
—
In some melodious plot
Of becchen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease*
2
O, lor a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora0 and the country green, goddess of flowers
Dance, and Provencal song,1 and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,4
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
3
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and specter-thin, and dies,
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,

' A plant which produces a powerful sedative* and from which it is also possible
to produce a poison*
2
Souls waiting in Hades to be reborn drink the waters of Lethe in order to forget
their past existence*
J
Provence was the home of the medieval troubadors,
* A fountain near Mount Helicon in Greece; its water induced poetic inspiration.
 READING OTHER POEMS 135

Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,

Or new Love pine at them beyond tomorrow.

4
Away! away! for 1 will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,3
But on the viewless0 wings of Poesy, invisible
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Clustered around by all her starry Fays;0 fames
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

5
I cannot see what flowers arc at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed0 darkness, guess each sweet perfumed
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets covered up in leaves;
And mid-May’s eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

6
Darkling0 I listen; and for many a time in darkness
1 have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou an pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and l have ears in vain
To thy high requiem become a sod.
—
5
Bacchus is the Greek god of wine, often represented in a chariot drawn by
leopards ("pards1*).
136 DESCRIBING POEMS

7
Thou wast Tiot born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the selfsame song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth. when, sick lor home.
"

She stood in tears -amid the alien com;

The same that ofttitnes hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Ol perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
HS
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the limey cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive .mthem lades
Past the near meadows, over the' still stream,
Up the hill side; and now *tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades;
Was it a vision, or a waking dream5
Pled is that musk:
—
Do 1 wake or sleep?

MATTHEW ARNOLD
Dover Beach
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs ol England stand,
Glimmering and vast, our 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 mnon-hLmchcd land,
Listen! you bear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling.
At their return, up the high strand,

En chc Old Testament, Ruth tv is ,i faithful widow who followed her mother-
in-law nr- land.
to a hue i
 READING OTHER. POEMS 137

lie gin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous ci&nce slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles tong ago
Heard It on tire Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misers'; 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,
Hut now 1 only hear
[is melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
It e treating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world,
Ah, love, let us he true
To one another] for the world, which seems
To lit before us likt a land of dreams.
So various, ?o beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor los e, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we arc here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

/ ROBERT FHOST
Mending Wail
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
Tli at sends the froze n-gjou nd-swe II under it.
Arid spills the upper boulders in the Sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast,
The work tit hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
Hut they would have the rabbit out of’ hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. I he gaps 1 mean,
No one lias seen them made or heard them made,
US DESCRIBING POEMS

Hut at spring mending time we find them r h c cc .

I lei my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the Will between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each,
And some art loaves and some so nearly balk
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs ate turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with Bundling them,
Oil, just a no Liter kind of outdoor game,
One ott a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and 1 am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under hk pities, I tell him,
He only says, ''Good fences make good neighbors.”
Spring is the mischief in me, aEid ! w onder
If I could put a notion in bis head:
" 1 1 Tiy dn they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? lint lie re there are no cows.
Before I built a will I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
I hit wants it down." 1 could say “hives ’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it rbr himself I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly hv the top
in each hand, like an old -stone savage armed,
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Nor ot woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind Ins lather's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so wdl
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

4
 R f A pING O'lHEh Pot MS i.19

EZRA POUND
The River-MerchatiTs Wife; a Letter'
While mv hair was still cut straight across my to re head
f played about the trout gate, pulling flowers,
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we event on living in the village ot Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
AT fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed , being bashful.
Lowering my head. I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand limes, f never looked back.
At fifteen 1 stopped scowling,
i desired my dust 10 be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should 1 climb the look out:
At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Kn-to-yen, by die river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses.
Too deep to dear them away!
The leaves tall early this autumn, m wind.
The paired butterflies lire already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I gross1 older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the nver Kiang.
Plcaie let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

Adapted from the Chinese of Li To 7007-762 Ernest FeneHota (1853-I90N).

an American orientalist ami collector, nude the transJarmn from which Pound worked.
140 1) E SC H.I IU NG PtlEHS

MARX STRAND
Courtship
There is a girl you like so you tell her
your penis is big, but rhat you cannot get yourself
lo use it. Its demands are ridiculous, you say,
even self-defeating* but to be honored somthuw,
briefly, inconspicuously in the dark,
When she doses her eyes in horror,
you take it all back. You cell her you’re almost
a girl yourself and can understand why she is shocked.
When she is about to walk away, you tell her
you have no penis, chat you don’t
know what got into you. You get on your knees.
She sudden I v bends down to kiss your shoulder and you know
you're on the nght track. You tell her you want
to bear children and that is why you seem confused.
You wrinkle your brow and curse the day you were born.
She tries to calm you, but you lose control,
You reach for her panties and beg forgiveness as you do.
She squirms and you bowl like a wolf. Your craving
seems monumental. You know you will have her.
Taken by storm, she is the girl you will marry,

SEAMUS HEANEY
From ffie Frontier of Writing
The tightness and the mines* round that space
when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect
its make and number and, as one bends his face
towards your window, you Catch sight of more
beyond, eyeing with intent
on a hill
down cradled guns that hold you under cover
and everything is pure interrogation
until a rifle motions and you move
with guarded unconcerned acceleration —
it little emptier, a little spent

as always by that quiver in the self,

subjugated, yes, and obedient.

J
 KEAHINCI OTHER lJ O E M S 141

So you drive on to the frontier of writing

where it happen* again. The guns on tripods;
the sergeant with his on -off mike repeating
data about you, waiting for the squawk
of clearance: the marksman training down
out of the sun upon yon hkc a hawk,

And suddenly you're through, arraigned yet freed,

as if you’d passed from behind a waterfall
on the black current of a tarmac road

past armour-plated vehicles, out between

the posted soldiers flowing and receding
like tree shadows into the polished windscreen.

JORIF. GRAHAM
San Sepolcro'
In this blue light
I Can take you there,
snow having made me
a world of bone
seen through to. This
is my house,
my section of Etruscan
wall, my neighbor’s
lemon trees, and, just below
the lower church,
the airplane factory,
A rooster
crows all day from mist
outside the walls.
There’s milk on the air,
ice on the oily
lemon skins. How dean
the mind is,
holy grave',li is this girl
by Piero

A tuivn in Italy whi mote rrjnsjarei (a "h<fJy jÿfaVL-.”

 142 DESCRIBING POEMS

delb Francesca1, unbuttoning

her blue dress,
her mantle of we-atlier,
to go into

labor. Come, we can go in.

It is before
the bird) of god. No-one
has risen yet

and
line
wings
——
to the museums, to the assembly
bodies
the open air
to
market. This is
what the living do: go in.
It's a long way.
And the dress keeps opening
from eternity
to privity, quickening.
inside, at the heart,
is tragedy, the present moment
forever stillborn.
but going in, each breath
is a button
coming undone, something terribly
nimble - fingered
finding all of the stops.

SHERMAN Ai.F.xtF.
Evolution
Huff at LJ UdJ opens a pawn shop on the reservation
(
right across the border from the liquor store 6ÿ
and he stays open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
and the Indians[come running in with jewelry
- v
e*

k\ television sets, a VCR, ,i full-length beaded buckskin outfit

r
I it took Inez Muse 12 years to finish. Huffalg UJU
takes everything the Indians have to offer, keeps it

1
Piero della Frnncifsc] (l420?-]492b Italian pimter.
 jt-ghr*
_
REAMING OTHEH HOEMS 143

-
-4. ’*'
all catalogued and filed m a storage room, The Indians
pawn their hands, saying the thumbs tor last, they pawn
S &*>*- , *-
their skeletons, tailing endlessly from the skin
and when the last Indian has pawned everything
hut his heart,. Buffalo Hill takes that tor twenty bucks
doses up the pawn shop, paints ,1 new sign over the old
calls his venture THE MUSEUM OF NATIVE AMERICAN
CULTURES
charges the Indians hvc bucks a head to enter.

A-"
t r
A r

yd" *ÿ f 1
 5

The Play of Language

Language is the principal taw material out of which poets construct

their experiments (rhythmic patterns are the other chief raw materials).
By the single word ‘'language" sve mean many things:

Sound Units
The sound units ot a poem are its syllables. The word "enemy" has
three successive sounds, en-th-met. Readers are conscious of a sound
effect when they hear rsvo end-words rhyme; hm poets arc conscious nt
dif the sounds in their lines, just as [hey are of the rhythms of a line. Poets
"bind" words together in a line Iny having them share sounds, whether
consonants {alliteration, as in “ (waken or vowels {attnunjife, as in
“when . . si’ssintis''), This makes the words sound as if they "belong’1
together bv natural affinity. Note how Shakespeare uses the vowel
sounds cJi and nh and the consonant sounds n, f, ih, s, and «J in rhis line
from Sonnet 20: "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought. . ."
Ciood poets tend to bind together words that have an important
meaning- connection, as Robert frost does in this line from "Birches":
"When I see torches fend to left and right . . .tT and as Sylvia Plath does
in these lines from "Anel":
Stun irp dirk/tfjf.
Then the fu.bffJ«cdcif toue
Pvtir of tor and distances . . .

145
146 THE !3 I X V *>F LANCUA:CE

Word Roots

These are the pieces of words that come from words in earlier
languages, often Greek, L-.irm. nr Anglo-Saxon. Poets usually are aware
of the roots of the words they use. Many of these roots are preceded by
prefixes, which also retain rheir original meanings, such as:
re- ("again”): return, revolve, repair, represent, etc.
ex- ("out of"): explain, expire, exhale, etc,
pre- ("in front of"): precede. prefer, preclude, etc.
com- {fiuu, "with"): compare, commemorate, commend, etc,

de- {"away from”): delete, defer, delay, defend, etc.

We have two main streams of language in English: our basic short words
generally come from Anglo-Saxon, and our more complicated words
from Latin (often through French). In the past, English was closer to
Latin and French than it is today (during the Renaissance, for example.
educated people usually kneWseveral languages), and poets drew on that
closeness, In Sonnet 15, Shakespeare wrote:

When t consider everything that grows

Holds in perfection but a little moment.
That this huge stage presen re th naught but shows
Whereon the stars in secret influence comment;
When i perceive that men as plants increase,
Cheered and checked even by the selfsame sky.

ITicn the eo&ceit oi this inrcvjstant stay

Sets you most rich in youth before my sight , , ,

Here, he expected his readers tn knots' that "consider" comes from a

root (which we also find, for instance, in the word “sidereal") meaning
“stars" — a word that appears in line 4. He also expected them to notice
chat the word “consider “ is composed at two parts, iw r- .iitd -siifer. and
chat the next "I" verb ("perceive”) is followed by a noun ("conceit")
which combines the con- of “consider” with the -cciuc of “ perceive.1'
Perhaps he also expected at least some ot his readers to sec hew. tile foit-
of "consider1 and "conceit'’ is repeated in "itiruiistant" (and char the
word “you" is contained in "youth”).
Wo aiow live in an age when most readers arc not schooled in Latin
and therefore are less likely to recognize the Larin implications in English
 SENTENCES 147

words, Stilt, vvc can easily find this information, especially for a word
that seen is on usually i in porta n I in a poem. by consulting a dictionary.

Words

The meaning of a word in a poem is determined less by its dic¬

tionary definition (a single word like ‘'stage" or “store" can have many
definitions in i comprehensive dictionary) than by the words around it
Every word in a poem enters into relation with the other words in that
poem. These relations, can be of several kinds;
1. thanalit (or meaning} relation — as we would connect “stars" and
“sky" in the quotation above;
2. phonemic relation --as we would connect “stage,” “stars,” :,se-
It
crei;
14
selfsame," "sky." and, "stay" in the quotation above by
their initial s s and rrV
3. grammatical relation
phoHttfiictilly by
—
their
as "cheered" and “checked" (already linked
sounds, and thematically by their being ant¬
onyms of each Other] are both verbal adjectives modifying “men":
4,
—
syntaait relation as "When 1 consider” and "When I perceive"
introduce dependent clauses in "I," both modifying the main
clause “Then the conceit . . . sets you,”
tach word, then, exists in several "constellations'' of relation, all of
which the reader needs to notice in order to see the overlapping struc¬
tures of language in the poem.

Sentences

When we think about a poem, it's useful to write out its sentences
in ordinary prose order, and then see what has been done to them in
verse. For each sentence, it's indispensable to identify the grammatical
iubjeit —
and the predicate — the verb telling what the grammatical subject is or
—
the person, place, or tiling in charge of the verb, so to speak

(present tense), was or did (past tense), or will be or will do {future

tense';. In the c nurse of a poem, subjects can change (the poet can say. "T
lose you" and then say kbit love me"), p rcdicates can change (the poet
can say, "! /CIY you'1 and then. "I hale you”), and tensei can change (the
poet Can say, "I Jrw you now. arid later say. "Uui J ittl! nor I'OS 'F you
tomorrow"). By Tracking these changes of subject, predicate, and tense
i 48 THE l1 L. A. ¥ OF LA N £ ilk o E

you can see the dynamic oft he poem: where atid with whom it began,
what's happening to it, when: it's going, and where it ends up.
The more complex the poem, the more necessary this, tracking is,
if you’re to get a firm sense of who is doing (or saying) what when, in
(ach part. But even a “simple” poem repays attention of this son. Jn
Robert Frost's “Stopping by Woods on a Sflbwy Evening,1’ the gram¬
matical ,N( hjn-r alone changes from " T " to “house” to “he” {the Owner)
to “horse” to ’’he” (the horse) ter “sound” to "woods" to "l”.

ROBERT FROST
Stepping by fVoaih on a Snowy Evening
Whose woods these are f chink / know.
His hoax is m the village though;
Hr will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow,
My little fuxte must think it queer
To stop without a fa mi house near
Between the woods anti frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives Ins harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Ot easy wind and downy flake.
The iMPOtfr arc lovely, dark anti deep
But / have promises to keep,
And miles to go before / sleep,
And miles to go before 1 sleep.

One tan imagine a version of this poem (I apologise for its crudeness)
in which the subject never changes, and is "1" throughout:

I know these woods, their owner too,

I feel in watching them some fear,
l sense my little horse’s rue,
Pausing without a farmhouse near
[ hear his harness hells now shake
In wonder ;it my strange mistake.
f hear the sound ot tailing snow,
All easy wind and downy flake.
 1
ST; N T E N C r s 149

1 love the woods so dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep.
And. miles to go before [ sleep,
And miles to go before 1 deep.

Why does frost, do you think, give a rutyYcr-position not only to himself
but also to the owner of the woods and to his horse? And why does he
also give it to inanimate things (the woods that till up with snow, the
sound of the wind)? The short answer is that everything in a poem that
has subject-position is “alive" and can ''do things": the owner of the
woods is alive enough to see (but won't) the trespasser; the little horse
is alive enough to query his master’s odd behavior: the woods ate alive

enough to be “lovely, dark and deep"; and the silence in the snowy
woods is deep enough to make the sound "of easy wind and downy
dake" come alive, too. The whole world ot the poem, in short, is
animate and aru snared This is far ni; -.re interesting, at least in Frost’s
View of nature, than to have the speaker the only live person in the
seen e .
Sentence* are. grammatically speaking, made up of words which
function in different ways. Some words can function in several different
ways: for instance, the word "stage" can be either a noim (“Have you
built the .rfriyi’ yeti") or a writ ("Will they sfiTiy a Shakespeare play this
season?’’). The poet intends you to notice how each word Jiinniom, as
well .is what it jtfemu.
There are conventional names in grammar for words in their func¬
tions. You probably remember the basic names of most of the “parts of
speech" (as they are called); if not, you might want to turn to the
appendix “On Grammar” to refresh vour memory .
In clarifying the /undrew of each word in a poem, you can see the
parade ot mam statements (nouns plus verbs) making up the logical
skeleton of the poem, and you can distinguish these main clauses from
the poet s ornamental or explanatory additions. A-,k yourself, about each
nwm piece of the skeleton. “What would be lost if 1 deleted tins state¬
ment?" (What would be lust it wc let: out the little horse's query in
"Stopping by Woods." tor instance?) I heu ask yourself what purpose is
served by the pieces outside the noun-verb skeleton — explanations,
additions, and ornaments Sometimes, .is in Dickinson's “The Heart
asks," the ’’add-ons'' to die main skeleton arc of crucial importance.
Here is the poem with its add-ons printed in italics:

'

i
150 Tut l1 LAV Uf LA (i t .ÿ A i J

— —
EMILY DICKINSON
The Heart asks Pleasure jirst
The Heart asks Pleasure first — —
And then
And then
—
—
Excuse jtom Pain
those little Anodynes
—
Shot deaden suffering —
And then — to go to sleep —
And then — ij it should frf
77if wit! of j'is Inquisitor
The privilege to die.

Think what the hart skeleton would be: “The heart asks pleasure and
excuse and anodynes and to go to sleep and the privilege to die/' It is
the adjectives and adverbs that punctuate the poem into its successive
phases of torture.

Implication

liecau.se poems are short, they depend more on implication than

longer works, such as novels, do. A novel has time and leisure to spell
things out: a poem compresses the maximum into each word. Because
a poem can only suggest, not expatiate, it requires you to supply the
concrete instances tor each of its suggestions, Ac the end of Ins late poem
"The "I mver,” William Butler Yeats draws an escalating list of the ills of
old age, gradually arriving at the wont of all. I le fears, he says,

, , , the wreck of body,

Slow decay of blood,

1 esty delirium
Or dull decrepitude,
fir what worse evil come —
The death of friends, or death
Of every brilliant eye
That made a catch in the breath.

A lyric poet like Yeats expects you to think concretely as he speaks ab¬
stractly, since his words are to be yours. Whai do you mean when you
tell me tli.it you fear in yourself "the wreck of body"? Perhaps paralysis,
perhaps a wasting disease —
it doesn't matter, but you must (in reading
die line to yourself or speaking it aloud) have something actively in mind
that corresponds in ytwrmind to Yeats's words. “Slow decay of blood
 IMP I t AT[o M 15 I

perhaps, remembering Yeats’s Lise ot 4 -blood" elsewhere, you will con

nect this phrase with the cooling of the hot blood of passion, "Testy
delirium": you may think ot brain damage from strokes, or incoherence
from fever. “I Dull decrepitude": you may think of senility. For “the
death of friends," you might chink of the triend you would miss the
most. Then you arrive at the strange periphrasis (indirect way of speak¬
ing) marking the climax: Wh.it, Yeats makes LCS ask. is worse than bodily
aging, worse than mental decay, worse than the death of friends? What
ES this “death / Of every brilliant eye / That made a catch in the breath"?

The "death / Of every brilliant eye" is an indirect way of speaking of the

death of a beautiful astd beloved face — the worst event of all, the
disappear ante of the one face in the world that Was everything to YOU.
Perhaps, Yeats implies with "every." there were several such laces m Ins
long life.
This process of paying attention to words, their functions, their
logical arrangements in sentences, and their implications is what we
real I v in can bv “close” reading. It means spelling out, in your own
mind -- since the words of a poem are given to you to say as if they wm
ye nr 01 rn — what the generalizing phrases of the poem mean itf your own
caso as you extend their implications to yourself. Only then can you
speak the words of the poem with conviction,
Lvric always generalizes. It is a blueprint of life, not a detailed
transcription of it (as a hovel can seem to be). Lyric, as Elizabeth Bishop
said, is a map, not a photograph. Lyric is an algebraic equation, giving
you .v and y {decay, decrepitude, delirium) and asking you to rill in the
poet’s equation with your own “real numbers.” A lyric asks you to he
its co-creator, as yog supplv your own i tuner particulars for its general¬
izations,
Implication can be present in rhythm as well as iti words. In
Chapter 4, for instance, we saw the excited broken rhythms succeeding.
in the close, the stately opening rhythms in Keats’s “On First Looking
into Chapman’s Homer." In every cast, you can discover implication by
asking "Why?" Why is Yeats’s list given in this order? Why do Keats’s
rhythms change at the end: Why isn't Keats's first metaphor (an astron¬
omer discovering a new planet) good enough, so that he has to progress
to a better metaphor (the discovery of the Pacific Ocean hv an explorer
and bis men)? As Samuel Taylor Coleridge said “Poetry is the best
worth in the best order." Your Task, as a student or poetry, is to form
hypotheses about why the poet arranged these words in this order till the
poem seemed a satisfying whole. Your reflections cm these matters will
bring you into the heart of the poem. Will give you increasing pleasure,
and ss ii| nuke the poem an increasingly satisfying whole to vou,
152 THE PLAY OF LANGUAGE

The Ordering of Language

Because poetry is a temporal art, it has to unfold sequent!ally, one

piece after another. First 1 say *, then y, then z. But the logical relations
among A, y. and z may not be additive or sequential ones. X, y, and z
may instead be radii of the same circle, as in George Herbert's sonnet,
“Prayer” where the successive definitions all relate radially to the one
subject:

/>

li
AVU
VWIi if
ii

//
. y

'’"I'. M
— ntAvai

fei
yy,,,
//ii nV* 3 . V5JO<

GEORGE HEHJJEUT
Prayer (I)
Prayer, the church’s banquet, angels' age.
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heaven and eanh:
Engine against th’Almiglity, sinner's tower.
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
 THE ORDERING OF LAMC.UACI 153

The six-days' world transposing in an hour,

A kind of tune, which all thing; hear and fear:
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed,
The Milky Way, the bird of Paradise,
Church bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.

This list of all the things that prayer is might best be represented as radii
of a circle: Herbert’s order is one of radial amplification of one concept,
prayer. But does the poem, in addition to its radial order, have a temporal
order? That is, does something “happen" to the concept of prayer as the
poem progresses? Most readers will be aware that thinking of praver as
’‘reversed thunder" is not the same in feeling-tone as thinking of it as
"softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss," You may want to
track the changes in mind of die speaker as the poem progresses, as the
—
speaker exchanges one metaphor for another ’ only to give up entirely
on metaphor at the end, In short, a poem can have more than one
"shape"
—
unfolding.
here, it has both a static radial shape and a dynamic temporal

Frequently rhe ordering of a poem's language offers a gradual

clarification of meaning. At first, in Sonnet 66, Shakespeare’s speaker
sees only a procession of terrible miscarriages of justice in the world:

WtLi.iAM SHAKESPEARE
Stmuef 66
Tired with all these, for restful death I cry:
As to behold desert a beggar bom,
And needy nothing trimmed in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely stmmpcted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced. . , .
At this point, most readers (especially those who have been imagina¬
tively “filling in" the implications of Shakespeare's categories with their
own current examples of the same vices) will begin to sec that these
' actions have no agents. Who reduced the deserving (“desert"} to beg¬
gary? Who misplaced honor, bestowing it on the unworthy instead of
the worthy: Who has seduced the maiden? As the procession of wrongs

.
154 Tut; I' LAY OF LANGUAGE

continues in the poem, the speaker's vision becomes clarified: he can see
now not only the victims but their victimize™ accompanying them;

And strength by limping way disabled,

And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly, dociot-likc, controlling skill, . . .

The procession is now advancing two-by-two, instead of one-by-one;

for instance, "strength" is hampered by "limping sway" (incompetent
authority). Then, the two-by-two procession is interrupted by an anom¬
alous solo figure;
And simple truth miscalled simplicity,

Who can this be but the poem itself (in the person of its author)? Its
“simple truth” is called, wrongly, “simplicity” (“political naivete,” in
modern terms) by its detractors. Finally, we come, at the end, to the
chief authority figure, who in a liturgical or court procession would be
the Bishop or King. Here we see the chief agent of all the miscarriages
of justice, leading his ultimate allegorical victim:
And captive good attending captain ill.

Captain 111 is a secularized form of Satan, "the prince of this world,” Just
as the speaker of Shakespeare's sonnet sees more clearly as the procession
winds on, so do we, until the author of all evil is revealed. This leaves
the speaker with no hope of amelioration. Because 111 is Captain, and
Good is always Captive in his power, there is no visible justice in this
world. And so the speaker, though he is still longing for death, decides
against it, not out of hope but out of protectiveness for his beloved:
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that to die. I leave my love alone.

"Alone” is a terrible word in the evil world of this sonnet. In danger of

being alone, strumpeted, tongue-tied, disgraced, disabled
these circumstances, could abandon his beloved?
— who, in

We can see the "shape” of this poem in several ways:

1 . As a long procession bracketed by the speaker’s two declarations of

exhaustion;
2. More precisely, we can see the procession itself subdivided into
three main parts: one- by -one, two-by-cwo, and a final archetype
(generalizing personification) of Good in captivity to HI;
3. Or we can sec a single shape (disillusion and exhaustion) for the

L
 THE OiUitoiJNQ of LANGUMÿ 155

Mm thirteen lines, “redeemed” by inu* 14, which reveals that the

speaker has cme value, love, as yet uncorrupted by the world,
The more ways we sec the governing linguistic order oi the poem, the
more human complexity we caei perceive within it.
The ordering ot ex peri cure in shapes ot radial or logical clarifica¬
tion
— clarification by hierarchy, clarification by a comparison of then
to now, clarification by here versus there, or clarification by nseand
—
decline (to name only four common “shapes") is what gives poetry
its aura of mastery. Even when iis “content” ss tragic — as in Dickin-
jpn's list of the heart's Shakespeare’s procession of injus¬
— requests, or
tice tbfc fact that the list has been ordered into an understood set or
a hierarchy reassures us that the mind can understand what the heart
cannot endure, and that the imagination can find a linguistic shape for
the structures nt reality, even tor those that arc most tragic.
There is no linguistic ingredient too small to attract Lhe poet's
interest. Wallace Stevens makes poems that turn on the difference be¬
tween the definite anti indefinite article ("the" versus “a"); Yeats con¬
structs a poem {“In Memory ot Eva Gore- Booth and Con Markiewicz")
that turns on a movement from 'T' to “you” to "wc” as a sign of
re conciliation of enemies. Shakespeare can build a whole sonnet
'‘Th ’expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” Sonnet 129) on a contrast
between nouns and adjectives (nouns give essence, we are reminded;
adjectives give qualities). The play of language is the chief cause for the
aesthetic success of any poem Without play at many levels of language,
from phonemes to logical structures, a poem is merely pro.se with line-
breaks added,
Let's look it a sample poem, Mu-haul Drayton's “Since there's no
help. ' to try to bring to bear on it what this chapter has said about
examining the language of a poem very closely at several levels —
sound -units, its etymological roots, its sentences with their words func¬
its

tioning as parts of speech, its subjects and predicates, tenses and moods,
Us imaginative phy of language, and Ets processes oi implication. The
poem is spoken by a young man whose beloved, we infer, has just
declared that their love affair is over:

MICHAEL DRAYTON
A’ifice there’s no help
Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part;
l- Nay, l have done, you get no more of me,
And 1 am glad, yea glad with all my heart
Thai thus so cleanly ! myself can free;
15* THE 1J L A Y OF L A N O U A G E

Shake hands forever, caned all our vows.

And when we meet at any time again,
I3e it not seen in either of our brows
Tfi.it we one jot of former love retain.
Now at the last gasp of love's latest breath,
When, Ills pulse tailing, passion speechless lies.
When faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
And innocence is closing up his. eyes:
Now lit thou wonlist, when all have given In i ill over,
From death to lift thou mightst him yet recover.

Here are the- main independent clauses of the first sentence of the poem,
which occupies the octave, or first eight lines, of the sonnet. The clauses
are here written out as statements, with the subjects in boldface ami the
prediwtes italicized:
Come let us kiss and part
I have done
You ijcr no more ot me
1 aits glad
usj shake hands
\lei us] fdiHel vows
he it not .fffif

The first sentence, then, moves through several verbs in the hortatory
—
mood ‘let us kiss and part,” “let us shake hands," “let us cancel all
uur vows," “[let] it not be seen" —
interspersed with verbs in the
indicative mood, one ill the past tense (“1 have done”) and two in the

. ... .
future tense (“you [will] get no more of me anil “when we [si i all] meet
at any [future] time") The subjects change from us to 1 to you to I to
us to it* All oi these changes are indexes of the speaker's troubled state,
a s he darts from mood to mood, from tense to ten.se, and trom subject
position to object position Although of the dependent clauses add
information ("Since there's no help,” "that thus so cleanly 1 myself can
free." "that we one jot of former love retain"), yet the skeleton above
of the main clauses makes the import of tilt1 sentence dear.
The case is very different when we come to the second sentence,
which takes up the last six lines (the sestet) of the sonnet. It has only one
main clause: “Thou nii)>fitst him recover." AH the other clauses are strung
from this one. "Thou mights: him recover*1 — when?
Now at the last gasp of love’s latest breath
[Nosv] when passion speechless lies
 THE OKHHUMC in- I A N <; u A t; j. 137

[Now] when flrnli is kneeling by hk Ked

[Now] when innocence is closing up bn eyes
Now when nil have given him over

All of these adverbial clauses “lead up" like the steps of a staircase to rhe
main clause, giving the sestet its long suspense. In this wav the relatively
straightforward march of main clauses in the Octave changes dramatics ly
once we meet the long delay of the main clause in die sestet.
When we look at the kind ot words these two sentences are
composed of, we notice that with a few exceptions tike “cancel” and
“retain,” most of the words of the octave are those short brisk worth
we tend to associate with our Anglo-Saxon linguistic heritage —
“help," “come,” “kiss," "get,” “glad," "heart," “clean,” and so on.
When we come to the sestet, the number of Latin- or Romance-
—
derived words rises “pulse,” “tail,” “passion," “faith," “inno¬
cence," “close," “recover." Even if readers do not recognize the roots
of .>11 these words, they will sense how the more ceremonious sestet
departs from the brisk colloquial nature ot die words in the octave,
not only because of’ the rise of La tin -derived words but also because
ot the suspended syntax,
It is clear that the speaker speaks about himself in fire first person
(“1"} in the octave: “Nay, [ have done, you get no more of me." Hut
m the sestet, we see a change in language: instead of speak my. directly
about himself, [he speaker speaks in the third person of someone called
“Passion" who is lying on hk “bed of death," whose “puke fis] failing,”
who is emitting the last gasp of love's breath. This dying person is
attended by two mourners: Faith is kneeling by his deathbed, and In¬
nocence is closing the eyes of the dying man. T h is little third person
'

tableau is a way of avoiding first-person speech (otherwise, by the prin¬

ciple of inertia, the speaker would have continued as he began). T he
change to the third person makes us ask, “What would this closing
tableau have been like il it, like the octave, had been put m the first
person”’
Now, at the last gasp of my loving breath,
My passion has no words to say its thee,
1 seem to lose the faith I had, and death
Of love is death of innocence in me.
Now if thou won Idst, when I have given love over,
From death to life thou mighrst me vet recover,

We can see that it’s more dignified to ,ÿk the woman to rescue "I Lis
1
sissi! tin j n to say. “Please, even at this last gasp of passion, rescue nr!’,”
158 THE P L A V OF LANGUAGE

Because the octave has. been phrased in the hortatory (“let us” j and
indicative :“l am glad”) moods, we especially notice, when we come to
the sestet, that turns for its main clause to the LcWmbmi/ mood: “Now
it

if thou Kÿr ildft . . . / thou mights! him recover," This holds out a grain
—
ofhope it she iwr lid do this, she might bring him back to life, This is
"politer" than saying, in the imperative. “Do this, and he will be cured."
It is a plea, not a conun and.
After the relatively plain octave, iii which the words me linked bv
the concept of saying farewell and canceling vows, we come to two
conspicuous sets of linked svords in the sestet- One is a set of abstract
— Love, Passion, Faith, and Innocence. They are the actors in the
—
nouns
little tableau. The other set of words is medical and time real -'gasp,”
“breath," "pulse failing," "speechless," "bed of death," “closing . .
J
eyes,' "life.' ‘recover." Normally, we find human beings in the situ¬
ation where here we find Passion
— dying among mourners. Drayton
brings together in the sestet two incompatible sets of linked words —
one abstract, one medically concrete — and constructs his surprising
little third person tableau with them to show' us how the lover leeL: he
is not teatly dying physically, but emotionally “a deathbed scene" Is the
best description for what is happening to his passion — arid he hopes
tli at externalizing his inward feelings in this theatrical table a ti may per¬
suade Ins beloved to have pity on him.
We see from the closing tableau, and the plea with which it ends,
that the speaker put on his original bluster ["Nay, 1 have done, you get
no more of me; f And 1 am glad, yea glad") to hide the real dismay md
despair that his closing tableau reveals.
These are only some of the moves we could make in beginning to
study the language of this poem, and to ask the questions it provokes:
“Why the change in person between octave and sestet?” “Whs the
introduction of the little tableau?" "Why is the sestet so ceremoniously
written after the colloquial Language of the octave"’ "Why ss the main
clause ot the sestet in the conditional mood?" “Why is the mum clause
of the sestet so long suspended adverbially before we get to it?"
Ot course, we eventually have to move on from the use of Ian
guage to the wider purposes ot the poem Drayton s conception ot
passion, and its relation to love, faith, and innocence, md his apt psy¬
chological observation Ot the defenses put up by the jilted loser, before'
the lover breaks down into his final abject plea. But that is material tor
A longer study, in which we might compare this poem to others written
by Drayton,, and get a better idea ot his general poetic procedures. In
each case, though, the first place to begin is With [lie play of language.
In it, we find the imagination at work,
 KEADTNt: OTHER I'UEMS 159

In Brief: The Play of Language

Since the language of lyric is condensed, every word carries weight,

and all aspects of grammar and syntax (parts of speech, speech acts, even
word roofs) are full of significance. Poets are people steeped in language:
“For many years," said Emily Dickinson, "my lexicon was my only
companion," It is helpful to look at each sentence by itself and at its
chief agent, and at what the agent does. What are the interesting or
unusual words in the sentence? What speech acts are taking place? What
is implied in the "white space" berween sentences or stanzas? Is the
organization linear (start-to-finish), radial (a duster of phrases around a
center), or recursive (doubling back on itself)? Does the language change
from concrete to abstract, or vice versa? Language gives you the manner
of the poem, as well as its matter.

Reading Other Poems

There is no poem that does not play with language. As the fol¬
lowing poems demonstrate, some are more overt about it, some less so,
Language is both spoken and written, and the poet thinks about both
aspects: how the poem sounds, how it looks ott the page. Not every¬
thing written can be spoken: see E, E, Cummings’s poem on the wray the
grasshopper rearranges hii ltmbs while leaping. If you trace the stages of
the grasshopper's motions, how does Cummings mimic them?
Track the gestures implicit in the language pf the Duke as he talks
to the envoy arranging the new marriage, See how inconspicuously
Robert Browning uses rhyme, and how the Duke’s syntax shapes his
powerful ongoing sentences. In the case of George Herbert's sonnet,
you ought ask how the language of the speaker refleets his initial mis¬
take; in the case of Wallace Stevens's two-room poem, ask what you see
in the first room, the kitchen, versus what you see in the second room,
the bedroom, and how language is invented to match the reality in each
room.
Sometimes a poet makes up a new personal language, as John
Berryman often did in his Dream Song?. His protagonist, 1 Icnry, talks one
way when he is drinking in a bar; angry with his wife; another way when
he has a vision from an airplane; a third way when he’s sick in the
hospital, fearing death. Can you find adjectives to describe each phase of
his language?
Repetition of language is one of the weapons ill the armory of
poetry, and certain verse-forms entail the “fore grounding" of one or

4
160 THE PLAY OE LANGUAGE

two lines by repetition What are the repeated lines in Elizabeth bishop's
villanellc "One Art"! Can you describe the effect on the reader of
having them recur so often? To how many tilings are these lines applied?
The play or’ language is deeply felt when a poem has to convey
changes over time. Can you sec the time spec i tied in each of Keats’s
stanzas in iris autumn ode? What sort of language predominates in each
stanza (for example, the infinitiveÿ in stanza 1)? What sort of noises end
the poem? Can vou compare the language used to guide the readti
through the time sequence in Keats to the language that guides mentions
of time in Yeats's poem about the swans? What son of language does
Yeats use about himself, by contrast to the language lie uses about [lie
swans?
Both John Donne’s “Batter my heart" and H.D.'s “Oread" are
poems structured by commands. Who is being commanded? Can they
be commanded? What kind oi language appears in the commands? Can
the commands be obeyed? Do some commands differ from others?
Imagine each poem rewritten as narrative rather than command: Can
you then see the poet's attraction to this syntactic form:
Henry Reed’s poem “The Naming of Parts" is structured by rep-
etition and by puns: What are their expressive functions?
Sometimes the play of language is structured on the relation of one
dialect to another {as 1 Jerry nun uses slang ,md invented Words along
with standard English), sometimes on the relation ot one language to
another (as Lorn a Dee Cervantes asserts the perpetual presence, in her
mind, ot both Spanish and English). What is your reaction to this mixed
dictum? (There is an old tradition ot mixed diction in English poetry.
beginning with poems written partly in English and partly in Latin )

JOHN DONNE
Hply 5tniiief 14
Uatter mv heart, three -person ed Cod; for You
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek tn mend;
That l may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurped town, to another due,
Labor to admit You, but O, to no entl;
Reason, Your viceroy IE» me, me should defend.
Hut is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly 1 love You, and would be ietved fain, -
Ihu am betrothed unto Your enemy.
 R E A D$M o OTHER POEMS 161

Divorce me, untie or break that knot agam;

Take me to You, imprison me, lor I,
Except You enthrall me, never shall be lree,
Nor ever chaste, except You ravish toe.

GEORGE HERBERT
Redemption
Having been tenant long to a rich lord.,
Not thriving, I resolved to be bold,
And make a suit unto him, to afford0, grunt
A new small-rented lease, and cancel the old,
In heaven at his manor l him sought;
They told me there that he was lately gone
About some land, which he had dearly bought
Long since on earth, to take possession.
1 straight returned, and knowing Ins great birth,
Sought him accordingly in great resorts;
In cities, theaters, gardens, parks, and courts;
At length 1 heard & ragged noise and mirth
Of thieves and murderers; there 1 him espied.
Who straight, YO\IT suit it granted, said, and died.

JOHN KEATS
To Autumn
l
Season ot mists anti mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend ot the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines da at round the thatch -eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed Cottage trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core:
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And stilt more, later flowers for the hues,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
for Summer has o’er- brimmed their clammy cells,

d
1 fi2 TUT Y I A Y or LANGUAGE

2
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind,
Or on a !i alt-re ape d furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and. all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady rhy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou wat chest the last oo rings hours by hours.
3
Where are the songs of Spring? Aye, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too
While barred clouds bloom The soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble -pi a ins with rosy hue;
—
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows,0 borne aloft lotv-groiviag mllows
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies.
And lull -grown lambs Loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden -croft;1
And gathering swallow's twitter m the skies.

ROBERT BROWNING
My Last Duthess
Ferrara
That's my last duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. J call
Til at piece a wonder, now: Fra Fandolt s hands
Worked busily a Jay, and there she Stands.
WilITt please you sit and look at her? I
“Fra Pandolf" by design* for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,

Sm.il! held Ji rhe of a ]irnpertv, cutci] Inud to uriotliL'i proprietor.

 KiMDiMii O J H fe k I'OE M 5 163

13nt to myself they turned {since none puts by

The curtain 1 have drawn Jar you, bin I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you LO turn and ask tit us, Sir, ’twas not
Her husband’s presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess" cheek: perl taps
Fra Pa ndolf chanced IO say “Her mantle laps
Over my lady's wrist too much," or "Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-Hush that dies along her throat"': such stilt!
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart
— —
how shall I say!1 too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, ’twas all one! Ms- favor at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious Fool
Iiroke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace — all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech.,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men — good! but thanked
Somehow — [ know not how — as it site ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody's gift. Who'd stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? Even bail you skill
In speech — —
which I have not to make your will
Quite dear to such an one, and say, '"Just this
Or rh,u in you disgusts me; here you miss,
Or there exceed the mark" - and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits, to yours, for sooth, and made excuse,
— E’en then would be some scooping; and 1 choose
Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene’er I passed her; bin who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew: I gave commands,
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As it alive. Will't please you rise? We'll meet
The company below, then. I repeat,
The Count vour master's known munificence
Is ample warrant that no just pretense
164 THE PLAY OF LANGUAGE

Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;

Though his fair daughters self as I avowed
Ai starting, is my object. Nay, we’ll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-hoise, thought a rarity,
Which Claus oflnnsbruck cast in bronze for me!

HENRY REED
Naming of Parts
Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. Hut today,
Today we have naming of parts, japonic!
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
And today we have naming of parts.
This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not gjot. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our Case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always released

With an easy dick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
Any of them using their finger.
And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.
They cal! it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece* and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and
forwards,
For today we have naming of parts,

_
 R E \t> ] N c OTHER P O E M S 165

WILLIAM ULTLER YE ATE;

77ÿ Wild Su>atu at Coole
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a stilt sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine -a nd-fifty swans,
The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since 1 first made my count;
t saw, before I bad well finished,
Alt Suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings
t have looked upon those bnEliant creatures,
And now my hearr is sore,
Alt's changed since i. hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head.
I'rod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the told
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
lesion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still,
Hut now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build.
Uy what lake's edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day
To find they have down away?

WALLACE STEVENS
7Tie Emperor of Ice-Cream
Call the roller of big cigars.
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the svenebes dawdle in such dress
 1
166 THE PLAY OF LANGUAGE

As they are used to wear, and Icr the boys

Bring flowers in Iasi month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream,
Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fan tails once
And spread it so as to cover Iter face.
II heT homy feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

H.D.
Oread
Whirl up, sea —
whirl your pointed pules.
splash your great pines
on our rocks.
hurl your green over us.
.cover us with your pools of fir,

E. E, CUMMINGS
r-p-o-p-h -e-s-s-a r
r-p'O-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r
who
a)s w(e loo)k
upnnwgath
PPEGORHRASS
eringint (o-
aTHE) :1
eA
!p;
S
(*
rlvlnG .gRrEaPsPhOs)
to
rea (be) rran (com)gi (e) ugly
, grasshopper,

A [lymph of the mountains and inli-

 READING OTHER. POEMS ! 67

ELIZABETH BISHOP
One Art
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intern
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day, Accept the fluster

ot lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The arc of losing isn't hard co master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster
places, and names, and ash ere it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or

nexr-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The an of losing isn't hard to master.
1 lost Esvo Cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some re at ms 1 owned, two rivers, a continent.
1 miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
Even losing you (the joking Voice, a gesture
[ love) 1 shan't have lied. It's evident
the art ot losing's not tots hard to master
though ir may look like (IT’riYc b.r; like disaster

JOHN BERRYMAN
Henry sats in de bar & was odd
Henry sacs in de bar & was odd,
off in the glass from the glass,
at odds wif de world & its god,
his wife is a complete nothing,
Sc Stephen
getting even.
Henry sacs in Je plane A was gay,
Careful Henry nothing said aloud
but where a Virgin out of cloud
co Iter Mountain dropt in light,
his thought nude pockets & the plane buckc.
‘Parni. me, lady.' 'Grright.'
Henry lay in de netting, wild,

.
white the brainfever bird did scales;
 1611 THE PLAV OF LANtiuncr

Mr. Heartbreak, the New Man,

come to farm a crazy land;
,1m image of the dead on the huge mail

of a newborn chili

LORN* DRR CERVANTES

Poenta para tos Californios Muertos'
G?N'f Jnj'tyff fin Mexican CaUfbniiiii . . .
— KAQUE OUTSIDE A.ICESTAUltAWl .
IN LtJS ALTOS, CALIFORNIA, 197a
V J

l 1
fhcsc older die
towns
1
r-'

--A into’ stretches of freeway.

The high scaffolding cuts a dean cesarean ’

i , > l
across belly valleys atid fertile dust,
c. i”- ir~*
What a bastard child, this city
A lost in the soft
Horando de las madres,'
Californios moan like husbands ot the raped,
/\rty
husbands de la tierra.
tierra h madre,4 ’
V

1 ran my fingers
across this brass plaque.
Its cold stirs in me a memory
oi silver buckles and spent bullets,
<A of embroidered si) awls and dark rebozos, .c,
*ÿVl Yo recuerdo los antepasados muertos.

V . p
_r.
- y *
i- t
|
Los recuerdo en la sangrc,
la sangre fort il.' +H
if
.

What refuge did you find here,

Californios?
ancient
Now at this restaurant nothing remains

l-'eietn tisi rhc dead CaliFomics, (Ccjb/i'nmW - orijpnj] inhabitants when Cali¬
fornia Was still Mexico.)
’
A caesarean is i surgical incision of the walk of the ihdmTtEn ami uterus for
delivery of ollsjnring.
1
Crying of the mothers
* Of the land, the mother earth.
!
A rehnro IS a (mig shawl by iVlcyifin women.
1
[ remember the dead ancestors, I remember them in my hltnid, my fertile bloud,

.
 READING OTHER POEMS 169

but thin old oak and in ill -pi act'd plaque -

Tc ii true chat you still live here
m the shadows. of these wince, high-class houses?
Soy la hija pnbrecita
pt ro puifido maldecir eitas fantasmas blancas,
-as fantasmas tuyfc5 delicti aqtii quedarst,
Lulas las tuyas,
Tn this, place 1 see nothing but strangers.
On the shelves there are bitter antiques,
yanqui remnants
y estos no de los Californios.”
A blue jay shrieks
above the pungent odor ot crushed
eucalyptus and the pure scent
Cs**-*f-
—*

of oge,

A -y>M& ¥1**ÿ

f* *-f- 'ÿ -i*

r

1
‘j \f--f f
j ,-j* . •• •
' •* r *'*’
q •_ p tÿij~

-TVC
— J
;
t-*- 1 <a.u

r'-*'v'-ÿ
(n...i ci6tf -ÿi
L

1
')
htfi.
trt

'.
' .

1 ;ini niily your pm>r dmgjiter, but J can tune these white ghosts. Only ynur
ghosts should reins ill here, only yours.
" And these not of the Californio*
 6
Constructing a Self

If you are a poet wanting to create, on paper, a self into whose

shoes 3 reader wil] be willing to step, a self whose voice a reader will
willingly take on, you have probably only a short space {maybe 150
words) in which to give your lyric speaker credibility. You must create
a personality provoked into speech; tones of voice tracking both prov¬
ocation and response; and enough variability of expression to make for
fierivc robustness. How to do it?

Multiple Aspects
The single most successful way is to give your speaker not only a
present but a past, and often not just a yesterday, but the day before that,
and the year before that, and five yean before that. {See Wordssvorth's
"Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey11 for a stunning
lengthy version of this process.) You invite your reader to "turn into"
the speaker, uttering the sentences of the poem; you construct a whole
temporal self available to be inhabited, J believable "thickly described”
life to be entered. Here is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30, "When to the
sessions ofsweet silent thought,” in which a speaker with a multiphascd
past comes alive:
'

171
Ill CONSTRUCTING A SELF

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARL
Sorurff JO
When to the sessions ot sweet silent thought
I summon up remembranee of tiling past,
I sigh tie lack of many a thing I sought,
And with aid wots new wail my dear dune's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
FOT precious friends hid in death s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long' since canceled woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanished sight;
I lien can ( grieve it grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe ceil o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new payr as it not paid before,
But if the while* J think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.

The speaker (whose initial “when" means “whenever”) is referring to

a senes of habitual actions. I bis in itself gives the speaker a continuous
lite stretching from the past to the present; he often has sessions of silent
thought when he voluntarily summons past things to mind. In fact,
when he docs this, he finds himself in tears — an unusual event for him:
"Then can l drown an eye, unused to flow
We’re now in a better position to reconstruct the speaker's nuil-
ttphased life. Lei’s call the time when he as yet did not have a friend
T ", , the next phase and so on:
Tj: He doesn’t yet have friends A, U, C.
T.,: He makes friends with A, B, C.
X,: He enjoys the friendship over time.
Tt: Friends A, li, C rlic-
/ He weeps at the moment of their dcatlb.
Tfi: Gnef turns to stoicism; his tears stop.
7’7; He spends a long time without weeping; his tears arc "unused
to How,”
1 K: He often summons up, voluntarily, the old gnet so that he can
“drown" again in tears for his dead friends,
This pattern recurs throughout the poem. as. for instance: lie “wefcp[s]
,ihdh love’s long iiiitf (tmtehti woe,” He was without love; then had it;
tiler: lust it, ,md wept in woe'; chat woe was (apparently) canceled, and
he was dry eyed for a long time; now lie can weep afresh for that woe.

I
 CHANCE lit DISCUIJR'IH 173

Jn fact, this process, many times safely and even luxuriously repeated.
now suddenly awakens such grief in the speaker that he pays his debt of
grief anew: “I new pay," he says, “as if not paid before.'' This is a fright¬
ening experience. He thought he could .summon up at will old griefs,
and almost enjoy renewing them m “sessions of riwet silent thought."
Yet suddenly the session is no longer sweet hut painfully acute — grief
recurs as if for the first time, It is this acute grief which pitches the
speaker into looking for consolidem in his present state; at least he has
.1 friend now. friend Z:

But it the while 1 think on thee, dear friend,

All losses are restored and sorrow's end.
This discovery of present joy stabilizes the character ofthe speaker at one
point in his multi phased life, lint the overall effect of the sonnet is to
make us know the speak ci as someone who has undergone many psy¬
chological phases — mv, grief, stoicism, loss, renewed grief — over
time, and this confers on him a "reality" of prolonged existence which
we take on as we speak his words.

Change of Discourse

Another way, if you are a poet, to give your speaker credibility is

to let her change discourses in midstream. In "Diving into the Wreck,"
Adrienne Rich lets her practical, well- equipped speaker drift into hyp¬
notic reverie once she’s under water;
! put on
thq body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask. . . .
! go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I craw] like an insect down the ladder .
This is the place.
And 1 am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in bis armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I a m he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes

L whose breasts still bear the stress. .. .

174 CONSTRUCT!KG A SELF

By the end, after this entrance to incantatory and androgynous language,

the personality of the speaker seems to have more than one facet. The
— —
more facets practical, mystical, bafHed, exalted the “thicker" the
description,

Space and Time

Yet another way of giving historical believability to your speaker
is, in the course ofyour poem, to relocate him or her in space and time,
In “Mid-Term Break," the Irish poet Seamus Heaney (pronounced
“Sharrms Heney") writes about his return home from boarding school
for the funeral of his four-year-old brother, killed by a car. (“College”
in the first line refers to a boarding school )

SHAM us HEANEY
Mid-Terttt Break
I sat all morning in
the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbors drove me home.
In the porch 1 met my father crying
—
He had always taken funerals in his stride —
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.
The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When J came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand
And tell me they were “sorry for iny trouble."
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand
In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs,
At ten o’clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the mirses.
Next morning 1 went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; l saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,
Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him dear.
A four foot box, a foot for every' year.
 T LSI tMOMY 175

We first sec the speaker in the morning at his hoarding school, after lie
has been notified of his brother’s death; [text we sec him being driven
home; next he is on die porch at home; next inside the house; next,
present at everting when the body is brought from the hospital by an
ambulance; next, the following morning, upstairs seeing the body of his
brother laid out on the bed; next, seeing Ins brother in the coffin belore
the funeral. The living presence ofthe speaker over two days, in several
places, makes him sear; a “real person,” into whose believable narrative
we can enter. We track the changes in space and time by a scries of
markers in the poem:
Space Time
in the college sick bay all morning
hotne two o’clock
in the porch
I came in
whispers ... as toy mother held
mv hand
tiie ambulance arrived at ten o’clock
up into the room . . bedside next morning
the four loot box

Poets expect vou to “track," even if unconsciously, such relocations of

the speaker in space and time, as you "become" the person svho goes
from school ro the porch, from the porch to the room inside, from the
downstairs to the Lip stairs, and who, in the end, however reluctantly,
cakes up a motimer’s position next TO the coffin.

Testimony

Speakers also can be made credible by their intimate knowledge of

a given historical time and place and its inhabitants. We fed this ill F-. E.
Cummings's speaker who satirizes “the Cambridge ladies who live in fur¬
nished souk"and mocks their taste for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; we
feel it equally in the speaker of Andrqw Marvell's “Horatian Ode" who
Seems to have observed the execution of Charles I, to know the details or
Cromwell’s campaign in Ireland, a ml to be aware of British parliamentary
instability. Walt Whitman speaks as a witness to The events recounted in
“Song of Myself : "I am the man; E suffered; I was there," arid his Civil
’

War poems offer vivid, almost cineftiatically detailed accounts of real

*
events in "A March in the Night Hard Press’d" or "Cavalry Crossing a
ford." Even in a poem of symbolic experience, like- Samuel Taylor
17b CONSTRUCTING A $E L F

Coleridge's “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the mariner tells so many

particular details ofhts supernatural experiences, along with many natural
ones, that we are drawn to find both halves of his tale reliable.

Motivations
How does the poet lead us to understand the selves that are so
sketchily created on the page, in whose voices we find ourselves speak¬
ing? We tend, as the poem goes on. to fill in its gaps, and to think that
Shakespeare's speaker weeping afresh has a whole "real life” in between
his reported bouts of grief, stoicism, and renewed weeping. We assume
that Coleridge's Ancient Mariner is being truthful about how he passes,
like night, from land to land retelling his tale, and that he had a life
before he shot the albatross. We also invent plausible reasons for the tact
that a speaker who has formerly spoken of his estrangement from his
beloved (“Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part") can say. only
thirteen lines later, that his beloved could resuscitate love “from death to
life,” fly postulating reasonable motivations, justifications, and conclu¬
sions in the gaps between words or lines, wc ascribe to the speaker a
11
realness” that literature is designed to offer in order to persuade us of
its insights about experience.

Typicality
Yet another aspect ofcredibility in a lyric speaker comes from typ¬
icality, a powerful resource oflyric. Anyone can put himselfor herselfinto
the unstipulated place and indefinite rime of Shakespeare’s speaker sum¬
moning up remembrance of things past, Even when die place and subject
are specific (as they are in “the Cambridge ladies"), anyone, male Or fe¬
male, who lived in Cambridge might be the speaker of the poem. Even
when the event is wholly personal, as in "Mid-Term Hreak,” the emo¬
tions ofthe stunned adolescent recalled by the speaker arc those that any
adolescent in such a situation would probably experience. To create such
a representative set of reactions, Heaney, like many lyric poets, deletes
many particular autobiographical details (the presence of his siblings, the
specific religious ceremonies surrounding a borne Wake in Ireland such as
the recitation ofthe rosary) in order to make the experience related in the
poem typical, rather than narrowly personal.
A lyric, then, wants us to be rts speaker. We are not to listen to the
speaker, but to ittakc wtrschvs into the speaker. We speak the words ofthe

.
 TONE AS MARKER OT SEI FHOOD 177

poem as. though we were their first utterers. The speaker's past is our
past; his motivations are ours, his emotions nurs, his excuses ours, his
predictions ours. A poem is a ;;et of instructions tor voicing; listened to
carefully, it tells us how to say its sentences — regretfully, apprehen¬
sively, bitterly, elatedly. We tall these ways of voicing the tunes of the
poem. They are sufficiently typical that any reader can utter them.

Tone as Murker of Selfhood

Though poetry has become a written an. it has never lost its roots
in speech. And since the first thing a poem asks of you is to read it aloud
as though you were saying it as your emr iivnts, you must sound angry if
“you” are angry, sad if '’ynu"f are sad- The poem itself tells you how to
sound. Every lyric is Uttered in response to a situation that has disturbed
some former equilibrium: “you" have been told someone no longer
loves you (“Since there"s no help"), or that your brother has been killed
in an accident (“Mid-Term Break”), or that “We don’t tike modem
poetry" (the “Cambridge ladies." says Cummings, "believe in Christ
and Longfellow, both dead”}. Robert Frost went so far as to say. “Ev¬
erything written is as good as it is dramatic,...[A poem isj heard as sung
Or spoken by a person in a scene
— in character, in a setting.'' because
you cannot know the whole situation of the speaker till you have read
the whole poem, you often arc not sure what set ot intonations to give
the poem as you/mf read it aloud but as you get to know it better, it
begins to speak itself believably in your mind, and irs speaker’s character’
and emotions, mediated through the tones of utterance, become youn.
Take, for example, the first stanza of Emily Dickinson’s poem.
spoken above the many graves of her Dickinson ancestors in the cem
etery of Amherst, Massachusetts:

Sate in their Alabaster Chambers

Untouched by Morning —
And untouched by Noon —
Sleep the meek members nf the Resurrection —
Rafter of satin
And Root ot srnne.

1s it good or bad for [he dead to be "H.itc" in their mausoleums or graves?

Is it good or had to be “untouched" by morning and noon? Is ii
desirable to be ensconced under satin rafters and a roofofstone? In what
tone are you to say these lines?
17ft C O N s T K U C T t$t i A Stir

As you ge! to know the poem, vou may decide that Dickinson
thought iT was certainly a deprivation TU exist insensible to both morning
and noon; that she is judging the dead as timid ("meek") people who
always wanted to be “safe”: now', titdeed, and ironically, they are. When
you learn that Dickinson rewrote the poem to remove the implication
ot resurrection — substituting "lie” tor "sleep" in line 4 — you may
decide dun she thought her dead ancestors had been cheated by their
credulous beliefs in an afterlife to which they would awaken. And how
ever fine it may be to have satin rafters in your coffin, those rafters exist.
after all, under that claustrophobic mausoleum- roof “of stone." Your
tone might well then become ironic as you read the words "safe" and
“untouched," seeing those words as die poet's gibe at the conventional
timidity of her ancestors’ lives,
in telling someone else how yon see this poem, you probably
would have to say, "I hear Dickinson being critical of the dead, with J
dismissive and a i most contemptuous tone in her description ot them ;is
"sate" and ‘untouched,’ ’’ Anti itt speaking tile poem aloud, you, as the
speaker of these sentiments, would make your own voice take on that
dismissive tone, hi this way,every poem suggests to its readers the tones
with which they might give voice to it; and conversely, the tones vem
feel to be present, as you get to know the poem well, give you dues to
the perceptions and emotions ofthe self, constructed in the poem, that
generates those tones.
Here, for instance, is a short poem in which an adult, who knows
suffering well, comes upon a young girl who is crying because the leaves
are falling from the trees in the wood called "Golden grove," The adult
chinks her griet trivial and childish, and rebukes her for wasting her tears
on trees, prophesying that life soon enough will give her more serious
things to cry about. Hut she continues nevertheless to cry,asking ichythc
leaves have to till!, The poem turns on the adult's response to the child’s
" WhyT' I’ve marked, next to the lutes, the tones ot voice they suggest.
(in the third hue from the end, “ghost guessed" means, approximately,
“your spirit Intuited.”)

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Spring and Fall
To it Yaiitfg Child
Margaret, .ire you grieving iwtittriiiji disbelief
Over Golden grove un!caving?
I eaves, like the things ot man, you putranisins' reprwdi
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
 rO N E AS MARttk Q F SELFHOOD 179

Ah, rhe heart grows older rfirWy pruphccy if rationalfuture

It will come to such sights colder
Hy and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds ot wanwoed leafmeal lie; regret
And yet you will weep and know why. impatience
Now no matter, child, the name: insight, surprised
Sorrow's springs are the same. TtcvgnitiM <jnd iii/jrijSiwn
Nor mouth had, no, nor mind expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed; self-reproach
It is the blight man was bom for, universal despair
It is Margaret you mourn for, mf
By the end, the speaker is ashamed at rebuking Margaret's rears, and sees
that adult gnet and ehild grief are one; both lament the tonsequences ot
the fall of man - - the temporality and mortality of all things. En "track¬
ing the tones" of such a poem, readers can differ over the exact name of
etch tone, but every reader will hear changes of tunc over the length of
the poem. Uttering this poem, you must at first be the superior and
patronizing ad tilt: then, as you come to acknowledge your own short
sigh ted ness, you feel the heavy weight of human destiny — that we are
all born lor blight, and that our tears, even when they seem to be shed
tor falling leaves, .ire in re.ilil) died for our implicit recognition ot our
own fats:. As you perceive the tones and say the words of this adult
speaker, his selfhood — m his original pride ot superior knowledge ansi
—
his subsequent willingness to be ashamed of himself becomes poten¬
tially credible.
The speaker’s change in view has to he persuasively "put Over" by
your own voice as von speak (even it only mentally) the words, or the
poem will lack it' striking effect ol self-rebuke and final shared grief.
However, lyric poems are usually rimer meditations, not dramatic or de¬
claimed speeches; One Can't he iln Orator OT an actor in Speaking a lyric
aloud. One hits to be n self, musing aloud over intici responses, not
someone addressing an audience, or even someone speaking aloud in
solitude like an actor delivering a soliloquy. Even when there is an
a utl it or (here, Margaret), the Ivnc represents the inner speech or medi¬
tation of its uiterer, and must sound inward and reflective rather than
outer directed and rhetorical. As William Butler Yeats said, "Out ot the
quarrel with others, wc make rhetoric; out ofthe quarrel with ourselves,
poetry." All the rones ut .1 poem are the tones of an inward, not an
outward, quarrel; the credible self in the lyric is the private divided self'
ol the inner life. Even in 1 dramatic monologue (which is publicly
addressed to jrnothc i person, is Robert Browning's Duke addresses the
ambassador), if IS important to perceive the revelation of the inner litre ot
180 CONSTHUI: r I N-(i A SEIF

the speaker by the poem. The Duke reveals himself to be jealous and
homicidal, even (hough he may not be aware how much of himself is
visible in his outwardly smooth and aristocratic speech. To see a dra¬
matic monologue as simultaneously a self-protective public speech and
an unconsciously self-revealing document is to read it as dramatic lyric
demands, doubly.

Imagination
The selves constructed in poems needn't have original ideas (in
fact, few ofthem do), but they must have imagination — and the imag¬
ination of the reader of the poem must somehow (by art) be drawn into
the imagination ofthe speaker, The word “imagination” covers almost
anything unusual and nonfactual in the way the self conveys thought.
Often something Said “imaginatively" is logically absurd, as in this cou¬
plet from William Blake’s "Auguries of Innocence”:
If the Sun and Moon should doubt.
They’d immediately go out-
This is an imaginative way of saying that life lives on faith, and that
skepticism is corrosive to radiant living. Here is another example, this
rime from W. H. Auden’s ballad "As 1 Walked Out One Evening":

The glacier knocks in the cupboard.

The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the teacup opens
A lane to the land of the dead,
Such imaginativeness in the poetic selfasks you to free-associate: even in
the cupboard ofthe food supply, a coming ice Age is making itself heard;
even in the midst oflovetnaking, aridity appears; a small flaw in a cup
suggests the great Flaw in Life, that we arc not immortal.
— —
Why as the question is often put do the poets (or their con¬
structed poetic selves) say what they mean in "other” words? No poet
would agree with putting the question this way. Boots tell us that in
poems they say exactly what they mean in words chosen precisely to
mean what they (the words) say. "Ued-desert-sigh,f is an exact transcrip¬
tion, in Auden's speaker’s mind, of what he felt in bed; “crack-lane-
death," he thinks when he takes that teacup out of the cupboard; and
even though he may dose the door of the cupboardt a freeaing-hidden-
 IMAGINATION 18 1

thing, [he rigor morris of the human relations in chi: kcuse, makes its
knocking heard behind the silent wood,
John Ashbery, in "Self-Ponrait in a Convex Mirror," calls the
surface of a poem its "visible core." The emotion jl t ore o! Auden’s
poem, which we infer from the appearance on its surface of the glacier
and the desert, is the inner reding of dread that Auden's speaker feels
even in the midst of the “safest" surrotan dings — Iris kitchen, his bed.
And the dread seems to be lodged not in him but in his very cups and
clipboards; they seem uneasy, disturbed. Hawed Psychologists call this
reaction “projection" — when we “project" onr inner emotion upon
the world so that outside things seem uneamiv or threatening, it would
n$t be accurate, in this case, for the poet to say, “I feel dread and
aridity — that would be a generalizing summary', not a transcription of
"

how concretely lie leels a threat in every object at home, And poets wish
to give accurate transcripts of feeling, as well as accurate transcripts ofthe
structures of reality.
"How would J be feeling if I said exactly Shis?'" is the question
readers must ask as they read the words about the doubting sun uttered
by tire self that Li lake constructs. And the answer is something like, “I’d
be feeling that i t the sun suddenly went out. it would be like my starring
to doubt my belief in Clod everything would go black." f he animism
by which the sun stul moon become doubters like us, or by which a
desert can sigh in a bed, is part of imagination's capacity to make the
whole world alive. A credible self in poetry is one who can make us feel
as he or site does. The poet shows; the poet docs not simply tell. The
poet transmits things "on the pulses," as Keats said; the senses are re¬
produced in words-
Words like “dread," “suspicion," “skepticism," and "faith" arc
words from the discourses of psychology and theology, rather than
words from the senses or feelings. The senses and the feelings are po¬
etry’s stock in trade; words like "cup” and “desen,’’ Msun" and “moon."
never age in the way intellectual discourse does.
It is easy to describe, when reading striking excerpts like the ones
from lllakc and Auden, how the poet is using language "imaginatively"
and creating a “flesh-and-blood sell." Hut what about poems that seem
tactually written, without the odd personal defections of language that
characterize an idiosyncratic sell: Here is a passage from Tennyson's
“Mariana" which may seem largely like straightforward natural Jesenp
non.a passage transcribed by a camera rather than uttered by a defined self:

About a stone-cast from the wall

A s!LILCS’ with blacken’d sealers slept,

t
182 CONiLklci INL; St:i i

And o’er if many, round and small,

The cluster'd marisb-mosses crept,
Hard by a poplar shook alway,
All silver-green with gnarled bark:
For leagues no other tree dirt mark
The level waste, the rounding gray.

There are in the stanza two relatively inconspicuous metaphors: the

sluice j/ccps, the mosses creep. Sleeping waters and creeping vegetation .are
not in themselves notably imaginative. Everything else the wall, the
sluice-chan nd, the round small marsh-grasses, the single shaking silver-
green poplar with its gnarled hark, the ievel waste ot land meeting the
rtiu Elding gray of the horizon - seems factual, transcribed, u nil 1 fleeted
by imagination. Of course the passage is highly decorative in terms of
sound, bur where is the imagination, nr the imagining self?
-
It is only when WC see the whole of“Manana " — which contains
seven of these stanzas — that we realize what the imagination is con¬
tributing to the poem. Tennyson is representing in "Mariana1’ the stream
of consciousness nt a girl waiting,, with increasing hopelessness, tor her
lover to come. Because site lias nothing else to occupy her mind, she
itotes, minutely and exhaustedly, every item in her surroundings, every
small change ofatmosphere during the long hours as they pass: St is in the
accumulation ofseven stanzas' worth ol mounting ennui, apprehension,
and loathing that we see Tennyson's imagination at work creating the
imagination oi Mariana. Me gives each stauZa its own peculiar atmo¬
sphere. We have already seen the unpromising "blacken’d waters" and
"level waste” outside; here is a stanza in which Manana perceives the
inside atmosphere, as the day wears on without the arrival other lover;

Ail day within the dreary house

The doors upon their hinges creak'd;
The blue fly sung in the pane; die mouse
Behind the moldering wainscot shriek'd.

The buzz ofthe fly, the shriek of the mouse, [he creak of tile hinges —
by these details we undetieand the hope within hopelessness with which
Mariana listens for the slightest sound ofan arrival, and is rewarded only
by these tiny interruptions of the deathly silence.
Where a poem offers such “facts" as the blackened waters or the
creaking hinges, they are always facts seen through the lens oi a partic¬
ular feeling, which has been imagined by the pact, and ascribed to the
imagination of the speaker. It is the successive feelings enacted by the
 1 M AC E N A '] 1 »lsl 1 K3

poem which wit] lead you to see how the imagination is at work, even
in the most FLI ct na.] lines. Hiere is not a Ver,' great distance between
Tennyson’s "factual” mouse squeaking behind the wainscot and Au¬
den's glacier knocking m the cupboard. Both of them serve chiefly as
transcripts of the believable feelings of die constructed self rather than as
a record of actual things.
Another way poets often show imagination operating in their fic-
rivu selves is to take a conventional timeline —
birch, youth, maturity',
old age, death {for example), or spring, summer, autumn, winter and
place the poem in a spot on the timeline chat no one else has used- —
Dickmson (remembering Ten tieson's “Mariana” where “the blue fly
sung in the pane") inserts her (posthumous)speaker, who is recalling her
own death, into the timeline of life at its very last gasp, the moment
when she actually died. It is imaginative to employ a speaker speaking
—
posthumously, but chat had been done before for instance, by George
Herbert in “Love (ll!).Tr Dickinson’s speaker takes the old tradition of
“holy dying" and revises it blasphemously:

EMILY DICKINSON
—
l heard a Fly buss when 1 died —
1 heard a F'lv buzz — when I died —
-
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Soilness in the Air —
Between the Heaves of Storm —
The Eyes around — had wrung them dry -
And Breaths were gathering turn
For that last Onset - when the King
Be witnessed — in the Room —

—
I willed my Keepsakes Signed away
What portion of me he
Assignable “and then it was
There interposed a F3y —
With Blue — uncertain stumbling Buzz —
Between the light and me —
And then the Windows failed — and then
1 could not see to see
—
Dickinson is perfectly aware that the death of a Christian ought u> take
place when God, the "King,” come-, ro take the soul to heaven, and she
1K4 Cl)Ml U CTINC A S E: 1 r

shows the mourners waiting precisely for "that lo ST Onset.” But instead
of Christ’s "This day thou shall be with me in Paradise,” die speaker
reports a “blue — uncertain stumbling lituv,” and dies. In inventing
this sacrilegious rendering of the conventional "'happy death” of the
Christian believer, Dickinson lias foitJad a way for imagination to re¬
represent death, this time in wholly bodily and nihilistic form. Dickinson
itt this instance has inserted her tictivc (and credibly blasphemous) self
into die human timeline at the very last second.
Other poets, using the seasonal timeline, will also make their Ac¬
tive selves speak out somewhere new. Wallace Stevens does not say, "At
the beginning ofspring" (a cliche), but rather, “At the earliest ending of
winter"("Mot Ideas About the Thing but the Tiling Itself”); he does
not say, “The leaves have all fallen" (a cliche for .tut it run}, hut rather,
“The last leaf that waj going to liiil had fallen" ("An Ordinary Evening
in Mew Haven”). The poet can likewise choose an unusual moment in
a timeline by referring tn the hours of the day; "There’s a certain slant
of light," says Dickinson — the first time in literature that a writer has
alluded to the light on late winter afternoons These imaginative per¬
ceptions make a poetic self arrearing, as well as believable,
Another strategy7 of the poetic imagination is to insert into 3
genre — say, the sonnet — where the reader might expect a conven
tional topic (love or death), anew topic, such as prayer (Herbert) or the
massacre fof “heretics" (Milton) or a car junkyard (Dave Smith). This
"rum'' ot the speaker surprises the reader and refreshes the genre; the
expectations ofthe sonnet form become roomier, sleeper, riskier. Or the
imagination can borrow a form from another literature and write a poem
ill that form in English, as Edward FitzGerald borrowed the Persian
Kubaiyat and Allen Ginsberg borrowed the sutra (a Buddhist form)
in Ins “Sunflower Sutra." Or a poet's imagination can Hoot the
moral expectations of society; Thomas Hardy’s “ruined maid" is quite
happy in her new circumstances — ‘One’s pretty lively when mined,1
said she."
An imaginative self can range freely through space and time, and
call a-T Startling questions like, "What it this present were the world's
la.st night:" (Donne), It can draw unusual comparisons, as when the
birches bent by the Weight of vanished snow seem to Frost "like girls on
hands and knees th,ir throw their hair / Before them over their heads to
dry in the sun." It matters less how the imaginative sell renews feeling —
through a surreal phrase tike Auden's “glacier . . in the cupboard,"
through an old image like ban revived as Cummings's balloon Man,
through a genre-violation like Milton’s sonnet ot “slaughtered saints,
or through blasphemy, as when Dickinson substitutes a fly for Christ in
 Hi t lH.i

the deathroom — than that it renews feeling through a reconceiving ot

familiar circumstance,
The real appeal of the imagination, when it appears in a poetic
speaker, is that one never knows what it will do next. Tonight the Last
Judgment? Doubt eclipsing the sun and the moon? A speaker fldaressihg
us from beyond the grave? For every self you meet speaking in poetry,
the first question — and the last question — to ask is: "Where in these
worlds do t see the imagination at work?1’ Without imagination, the
noblest idea is empty of porfir interest, and the most heartfelt confession
merely a twice-told talc. With imagination, the world is made new; and
seen sharply, dearly, at an angle. We go to poetry, as ro fiction; for the
shock of the newly seen. " I lungs seen," says Stevens, “are things .is
seen." It i> in the “as'1 of a credible speaker that the imagination lives.

Persona

There are many ways to refer to the self who speaks a poem.
Sometimes,in obviously autobiographical lyrics, we simply use the name
ofthe author: "Keats Writes about reading Homer for the first rime." In
ttiis sort of shorthand, we mean, by the word "Keats," ‘the author as lie-
lets us see himself in the speaker of this poem, in his lictive poetic self.”
The author’s furtive self overlaps with, but is not identical to. his “real”
sell, because a poem obeys many laws(of form, ot structure, of language)
which may deflect it from factual accuracy.
iLobert Lowed begins his poem “Bright IJay in Boston" with the
phrase, "Joy of standing up my dentistÿ" In fact (as he later said) he had
kept his dentist appointment, and only after it was over had he taken the
walk recorded in the poem. But — as he also said — the felt impulse to
skip the dentist, which in life lie had not obeyed, made a "truer" emo¬
tional beginning to the poem. We can say, then, that “Lowell" stood up
his dentist, while Lowell did not. It is often easiest, once one has made
dear that one means the author rather than the person, to say "Keats"
or "Lowell" in referring to the speaker of a poem.
But there are poems where the speaker is clcarl v not the author:
Yeats, for instance, writes several poems in the voice of an old woman
whom he calls "Crazy Jane ' It is customary, in such cases, to refer to
the speaker or the poem as a "person!*1 adopted by Yeats. Flic word
"persona” comes from the Latin verb perronsre — “to speak through a
—
mask." Only when the speaker is wearing a mask that is, cannot
possibls be seen as the actual author because of a difference ot age. or
1 &<> CONST H UC MM; SELF

sex, —
or national origin does it make sense to speak of a "persona.”
Otherwise it is preferable to refer simply to “the speaker.”
Why would a poet adopt a persona? Why does an educated, pros¬
perous poet want to take on die voice ot a poor old woman ot the roads'
What is there that the poet wants to express that he can utter only in
Crazy Jane’s voice? These are the questions that anyone writing on
Yeats’s [ate poetry must ask. 1 1 ere is the most famous of Crazy Jane'-.
poems. In it, Jane encounters the Bishop, who once (as we know from
another poem in the sequence) was a priest in the parish whereJane atid
her lover, Jack, lived; lie banned Jack from the parish, supposedly for
religious reasons Now,in old agte, Crazy jane and the Bishop once again
exchange words;

WILLIAM BUTLEH YEATS

Crazy Jane Talks with f/ie Bishnp
I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
“Those breasts are Hat and fallen now,
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some ioul sty,"
"Fair and foul are near ot km,
And fair needs foul,” I cried,
“My friends are gone, but that’s a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart's pride,
’*A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can he sole or whole
That, has not been rent ”

We can deduce, front the Bishop’s opening remarks about the state of
—
Crazy Jane’s breasts char they arc “Hat and fallen now" — that he had
improperly noticed their unriat and unfallen shape in the past, and that
when It L' banished Jack it was because ofjealousy rather than piety After
the first stanza, the rest of’tile poem is Jane's. We notice that ihe can say
tilings that a philosophical poet like Yeats might fed called upon, i! he

i
 PERSONA 187

spoke in his own voice, to qualify tort her (“fair needs foul,’ far in¬
stance); but as the voice oi peasant wisdom (speaking, we should notice,
in an adaptation ot an old folk ballad). Crazy Jane does not need to be
philosophically subtle. And although her final assertion — that “Love
—
hat pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement" is based on a
dry proverbial remark(“We are bom between urine and feces”), she c.in
phrase that observation more passionately because it is her own female
body that in in question; to the Bishop's stable “heavenly mansion” she
opposes the nomadic “mansion" oi Love, a tent pitched in “the place of
excrement,”
Crazy jane says things, in short, that Yeats as .1 philosophically
educated person, and as a man, could not say in fsis Own person. Thai is
the usefulness ofadopting a persona. Well brought-up girls, in Dickin¬
son's day, were not allowed to roam the fields barefoot; and so, when
Dickinson wants tq show the terror of encountering a snake underfoot,
she has a boy speak her poem. When you see an obvious persona
speaking a poem (as in so many of browning's “dramatic monologues"),
ask yourself what the persona is being used to express that the poet could
riot believably Convey in a contemporary “real life" voice. Poets often
take on (he voice of someone long dead: black poets like Robert Hay¬
den and Rita Dove have written in the voice ofslaves, to give vicarious
utterance to those who were historically denied literacy and const*
quetuly expression in writing, William Blake did the same, when he
spoke in the persona ot a "little black boy," showing the boy already
corrupted by Christian teaching:
My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but O! my soul is white:
White as an angel is the English child:
But 1atn black as if bereav’d oflight.

The assumption of the persona of 3 black child by a white poet, or

ot a female persona by a male poet, lias been criticized by those who
believe that only a black can speak of the black experience, only a
woman of a woman’s experience. Many have retorted thaF the very
function tit the imagination is to enable us to imagine the Other, and
that only by such leaps of the imagination across the gaps of gender, race,
and ige can poetry induce its readers to practice that enabling tellow-
fceling. Readers svlio might not have refleeted oil class issues, or issues
of religious tyranny, or issues of the place of the sexual m the spiritual,
can be brought, by Crazy Jane’s encounter with the Bishop, to think of
these issues afresh It does not matter who wrote the lyric, if the self
188 C O N ST ft- u C. T I N C. \ S !. h

presented in chc lyric is a credible out invested with imaginative power,

Because every speaker of a lyric is a constructed speaker, made "alive"
by the imagination, and delineated in the play of language, a poem asks
that as you step into the shoes of the speaker, you notice how language
has been arranged to make that act possible.

In Brief: Constructing a Self

As you read a poem, ask yourself questions about the speaker
constructed within the poem. Where is he or she in time and space?
Over how long a period? With what motivations? How typical? Speak¬
ing in what tones of voice? Imagining life how? Resembling the author
or different from the author? The more you can deduce about the
speaker, the better you understand the poem. If you think ahout what
has been happening to the speaker befot? the poem begins (if that is
implied by the poem), you will understand the speaker better,

Reading Other Poems

The constituents ofselfhood that arc being emphasized in any one

poem can be seen from both content and form. What kind of a self do
you feel you have if you find a tree to be a close relative, is Walt
Whitman’s speaker does? What kind ofa selfdo you fed you have ifyou
speak meditatively and slowly, as Whitman's fiqtivc self docs?
You can ask these questions of each of the poems that follow,
What kind of a selfdo you feel you have if you call yourself"nobody."
as Emily Dickinson's speaker docs? You might expect that Thomas
Hardv’s "ruined maid" would feel herself to be a nobody (and SO she
might, in another poet’s hands). But she feels herself quite a somebody,
Why? Does the rhythm of Hardy’s poem reinforce or contradict the
attitude taken by the fictive speaker toward the prostitute?
What kind of a self usually utters a “love song”? Do you find that
kind of a self in T. S. Eliot’s poem? How docs J'rufmck's prophecy of
his selfin old age (“Do I dare to cat a peach? / J shall wear white flannel
trousers, and walk upon the beach") help to construct your idea of his
present self? The free-verse rhythms in which Ihufnock speaks betray his
personality, too. How? Eliot gradually assembles traits ofPrufrock (be¬
ginning with his name) so that we understand him better and better as
the poem proceeds. Can you characterize these traits?
A poem need not always say “I” for us to understand what the
 ktAutNG OTHER POEMS 189

speaker is like, and what he or she values or regrets, A self can be

constructed by analogy with another self, a persona (whether historical
or imagined). A persona, by definition, differs markedly (by sex, by age,
by country of origin, and so on) from the author. How much of Elis¬
abeth Bishop's own self can you deduce from the things she makes her
alter ego (Active other self) Robinson Crusoe say? What does Crusoe
regret? What does he value?
The selfofthe speaker can sometimes only be deduced from what
he or she says observing another. As you address (speaking Marianne
Moore’s poem aloud) a person so overbearing as to be like a steamroller*
what can you deduce (by contrast) about what Moore’s speaker would
prefer as scoria] behavior? John Drydcn's little song 'Sylvia the Fair”
enables you to deduce the speaker’s attitude toward sexuality. How
would you characterize it?
When we come to more explicitly social identities (often imposed
by others rather than self-chosen), we arrive at speakers who must
construct an identity in part from pregiven materials (as Counter Cullen
and Carl Phillips do). How does Cullen’s speaker confront this problem
in ’Heritage"? How are the contrasting positions imagined in this "di¬
alogue ofthe mind wiih itself’? Can you speculate why Cullen gave his
speaker the strong rhythmic fonts seen here (technically known as tro¬
chaic tetrameter rhyming couplets), rather than constructing the selfof
his speaker in. say, meditative blank verse, often used for such poems of
internal debate (as, say, in Shakespeare’s soliloquies)? How do Cullen s
methods of defining himself vis-a-vis Africa compare with those of
Phillips? To what extent is the speaker of each poet a type rather than a
unique individual?
Because a self is often constructed, whether in a novel or a poem,
around a decisive moment of crisis or choice* we can find the selfhood
crystallizing around a single episode, William Butler Yeats’s airman is an
Irishman in the British army, defending England though he has never
lived there, participating in a war in which his own country (Ireland)
was neutral. Alone in his airplane, he sees his life clearly, and a young
indeterminate self suddenly crystallizes, [n what rhythms does he speak?
Are they uncertain and wavering* or strong and emphatic? How, both
negatively and positively, does he delineate his newly discovered self?
On the other hand* sometimes a Self is constructed as much by
social conditions as by a moment of decision. How did Elsie (in real life,
"William Carlos Williams's household help) end up the way she did?
Williams imagines a group of social causes that cooperate to keep many
Elsies from having a rewarding and independent life: each of them has
contributed to the kind of self Elsie now is. Cati you connect these

1
190 COIMS'IH-UCIINC: A S£L I

causes to her self as it is described? And can you construct a plausible

picture of tbc speaker's self from his personal and social feelings, about
Elsie?
In contrast to the selfchosen in a moment, there is the selfassumed
to be stable: Anne Sexton's speaker assumes she belongs to a typical
category of persons (“Her Kind”), and Charles W right, though he
writes many self-portraits, confers a temporary stability on the speaker of
each one. How do Sexton and Wright assemble a stable speaking self
through images?

JOHN DKYDEN
Sylvia the Fair
t
SYLVIA, the the bloom of fifteen,
fair, in
Felt an innocent warmth as she lay On the green;
She had heard of a pleasure, and something she guess'd
By the towzing, and tumbling, and touching her breast.
She saw the men eager, but was at a loss.
What they meant by their sighing, and kissing so close;
By their praying and whining,
And clasping and twilling,
And panting and wishing,
And sighing and kissing,
And sighing and kissing SO dose.
2
"Ah!" she cried, Mah! for a languishing maid,
In a country of Christians, to die without aid!
Not a Whig, or a Tory, or Trimmer1 at least,
Ora Protestant parson, or Catholic priest,
To instruct a young virgin, that is at a loss,
What they meant by their sighing, and kissing so close!
By their praying ansi whining,
And clasping and twining,
And panting and svishing,
And sighing and kissing,
And sighing and kissing so dose"

A rrim tner is one who inclines to either of two opposing politicÿ] panics. as
interest dictates.

l
 K E A t*EN Q OrNtR I’OhMi 191

.?
Cupid, in shape.' of a swam, did appear,
He saw the sad wound, and in pity drew near;
Thun shov’d htLr his arrow, and bid her not fear,
For the pain was no more chan a maiden may hear.
When the balm was mtus’d. she was not Jl a loss.
What they meant by their sighing and kissing so dose:
By their praying and whining.
And clasping and twining,
And panting and wishing,
And sighing and kissing.
And sighs nil and kissing so close.

WALT WHITMAN
/ Saw in LouuiattH a Live-Oak Growing
1 saw in Lotiisiana a live-oak grossing,
All alone srood it and die moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves ot
dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusts-, made me think ot myself,
But J wonder’d boss it could utter joyous leaves standing alone
there without its friend near, for 1 knew I could not,
And I broke osfa twig with a certain number ofleaves upon it, and
twined around it a little moss,
And brought it away, and have placed it in sight in my room,
It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,
(For I believe lately I think ot little else than of them,)
Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly
love:
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in .Louisiana
solitary in a wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without J friend .1 lover near,
1 know very' well 1 could not.

EMILY DICKINSON
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you — Nobody — Too:
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise — you know!
192 COJÿiT(LUCT I N C A SELF

How dreary — to be — Somebody!

—
How public like J Frog —
To tell one's name — the livelong June
—
To an admiring liog!

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
1 know tli at 3 shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that l fight I do not hate,
Those that ! guard 3 do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartin1j poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier Eh an hetore.
Nor law, nur duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
J )mve to this tumult in the clouds;
1 balanced all, brought al! to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death,

THOMAS HARDY
77ir Ruined Maid
“O'Media, my dear, this does everything crown!
Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?
And whence such fair garments,, such prosperi-ty?"
“O didn't you know I’d been ruined?” said she.
"You lett us in tatters, without shoes or socks,
1 ired of digging potatoes, arid spu tiding up docks;
And now you've gay bracelets and Isright feathers three!"
"Yes: that's how we dress when We're ruined." said she.
"At home in the barton0 you said 'thee’ and ‘thud/ firtn
And lfhik OOI1,’ and '(heas oon.’ and 't’other'; hut now
Your talking quite tits 'ce for high com pa ny!"
“Some pohsh is gained with one’s riiui,” said she.
 It r. A (I i N o OTHEK POEMS 19J

"Your hands were like paws then, your fate blue and bleak
Hut now I’m bewitched by your delicate cheek,
Atitl your Bttle gloves fit as on any la -del"
“We never do work when we're ruined.' said she. '

“You tiled 10 call home-life a hag-ridden dream,

And you’d stgh, and you'd sock.; but at present you seem
To know nor of megrims0 or melancholy!** four spirits
“True, One’s pretty lively when ruined,” said she.
"I wish l had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,
And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!”
"My dear — a raw country girl, such as you be,
Cannot quite expect that. You ain’t ruined," said she.

T. S. ELIOT
The Love Song ofJ. Alfred Prufrock
S'itf Otdrfff dft Him
A perKHin die riiiii iDFJidf.tr dJ ipondo,
Qtifitj itruu'ijj j(i2Fid fenza [»i't scossr.
.Ihr jjnreuxrfrf jiimiiidi di fiicilDjiinib
jVotl (DOin FFK3 Jl'cHJ], s't'odo if 1TTO,
Smea trma if frifjmia if n.fppJitfp, 1
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 nr Michelangelo.
i
From iJame's fiÿnus,(jnro 11, Liu-s M-fifi, Outdo d„ MonTftVliro speaks -jti vi
1 1 HI lie questions him: "It I thought [li;il my rrpii were To be bn w mconf who Would
ever rerum in the world, thii ftame would be still, without further motion lint tinrv rui
one hjb ever returned dive From this depth, if svhlt I hear is true. I answer yuu without
fear ofshame."
194 Coiÿt&UtTlNttASF.Ll

The yellow fog chat rubs us hack upon the window-panes;

The yellow smoke chat rubs its muzzle on the window-pants
Linked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon die pools that stand in drains,
Lee fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped bv the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soil October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For the yd loss1 smoke that slides along the street.
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there wflj be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There wilt be time to m Older and create,
And time for alt 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 tor 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 Lime
To wonder, "Do I dare?” and, “l>o I dare?M
Time to turn hack and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair -
[They will say: “Hose his hair is growing thin!"]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the thin.
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —
[They will say; "But boss- 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:
[ line known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
l have measured out my life with coffee Spoons;

-'The Greek poet Hesiod (eighth century 1' <' ) wrote il'wits JN.V Duyr, J. poem
ibfun country' life.

ii
 R£A DJ N G O I H E St i' O EM! 1 V*

I know the voices living with a dying full

tleneath the music from a farther mom.
So how should I presume?
And S have known the eyes already, known them .ill
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 \ begin
To spit out all tile butt-ends of my days arid ways?
And how should l presume?
And i have known the anus already, known them all —
Anns that are feraceletcd and white and bare
|13ut in tlie lamplight, downed with light brown haidj
Is It perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that He along a table, or wrap about a shawl
And should 1 then presume?
And hotv should 1 begin?

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

And watched the smoke that nses from the pipes
O( lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? , , .
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the doors of silent seas.

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!

$m not tied bv long fingers,
Asleep , , , tired , , or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should f, after tea and cakes and ices.
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
lint though 1 have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head |grown slightly h.ild] brought in
upon a platter,'
I am no prophet — and here's no great matter:
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

'
Thf head ofJohn (Ilf Hnfirm wm IL-IIVETI'J .MI placet
.1 r,i Salome (iVUtthew
14: I-]];.
CONSI HLK: NNC A S EL I

And 1 have seen the eternal Footman bold 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 otf the matter with a smile,
l'o have squeezed the universe into a bail
To roil it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus/ come from the dead,
Gome back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"1 —
Ifone, 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 beet) 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 skirls that trail along the
door —
And this, and so much more? —
It is impossible to say just what 1 mean!
13 ut 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 <>ff 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 he;

Am air attendant lord, one that will do
1 o swell a progress,0 start a scene or two, royal procession
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy root,
Deferential, glad he oi use,
to
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence,® but a bit obtuse; sententioustms
At tunes, indeed, almost ridiculous
Almost, at times, the Fool,

1
l.ai.irus was raised from the dead by Jesus (John 1 1; 1—44),

i
 READING O TIIEU Mot Mi 197

I grow old ! grow old . . .

. . .

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall i my hair behind? Do 1 date to eat a peach?
part
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
f have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
! do not think that they will sing to me.
1 have seen them nding 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 ot the sea
By sen -girls wreathed with seaweed ted and brown
Tilt human voices wake LIS, and we drown.

WILLIAM C Atu.os WILLIAMS

To Elsie
The jinm products of America
go c razy —
mountain folk from Kentucky
or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and
valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between
devil-may-cart men who have taken
IO railroading
out ofsheer lust ofadventure -
and young skttenÿs. bathed
in tilth
from Monday to Saturday
to be tricked out that Right
/with gauds0 jntvlry
from imaginations which have no
peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and Ham it

k
19H C tiN STR u t; T[ N c A Sn i

sheer rays
emotion
— succumbing without
save numbed terror

under some hedge ftf choke-sherry

Or viburnum -
which they cannot express —
Unless it be that marriage
perhap s
with a dash of Indian blood
will throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round
with disease or murder
i hat she’ll he rescued by an
agtut
—
reared by the s&ue and
sent out at fifteen to work m
some Wd -prised
house the suburbs —
tn
some doctor’s family, some Elsie —
voluptuous water
expressing with broken
brain the truth about us
her great
—
ungainly hips and flopping breasts
addressed to cheap

and rich young men with fine eyes

as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky
and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth
while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields sit gulden nod iu
the Stifling heat of September
Somehow
it seems to destroy us
 READING OTHER PC.II- MS 199

It is only in isolate flecks that

something
is given ofF

No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car

COUNTEE CULLEN
Heritage
For FlarofilJackman
What is Africa to me:
Copper son or scarlet sea,
Jungle star or jungle track,
Strong bronzed men, or regal black
Women from whose loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes hisfathers loved,
Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,
IVhat is Africa to me?
So 1 be, who all day long
Want no sound except the song
Sung by wild barbaric birds
Goading massive jungle herds,
Juggernauts of flesh that pass
Trampling tall defiant grass
Where young forest lovers lie,
Plighting troth beneath the sky.
So I lie, who always hear,
Though I tram against my ear
Llorh my thumbs, and keep them there,
Great drums throbbing through the air.
So f lie. whose fount of pride,
Dear distress, and joy allied,
Is my somber flesh and skin,
With the dark hlood dammed within
Like great pulsing tides of wine
That, I fear, must burst the fine
Channels ofthe chafing net
Where they surge and foam and Irct.
200 C O MSt H, U CT I N G A SELF

Africa? A book one thumbs

Listlessly, (ill slumber comes.
Unremcmbcrcd are her bats
Circling through the night, her cats
Crouching in the river reeds,
Stalking gentle flesh that feeds
By the river brink; no more
Does the bugle-throated roar
Cry that monarch claws have leapt
From the scabbards where they slept.
Silver snakes that once a year
Doff the lovely coats you wear,
Seek no covert in your fear
Lest a mortal eye should see;
What’s your nakedness to me?
Here no leprous dowers rear
Fierce corollas in the air;
Here no bodies sleek and wet,
Dripping mingled rain and sweat,
Tread the savage measures of
Jungle boys and girls in love.
What is last year's snow to me,
Last year's anything? The tree
Budding yearly must forget
—
How its past arose or set -
Bough and blossom, flower, fruit,
Even what shy bird with mute
Wonder at her travail there,
Meekly labored in its hair.
One three centuries removed
From the scenes hisfatfieri loved,
Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,
What is Africa to me?

So( lie, who find no peace

Night or day, no slight release
From the unremittent beat
Made by cruel padded feet
Walking through my body's street.
Up and down they go, and back,
Treading out a jungle track.
So 1 lie, who never quite
 READING OTII F H POEMS 201

—
Safely sleep from rain .IT flight
1 can never rest at all
When the rani begins to fall;
Like a SOill gone mad with pain
1 mmt match its weird retrain;
Ever must I twist and squirm,
Writhing like a baited worm,
While its primal measures drip
Through my body, crying, "Scop!
DofF this new exuberance.
Come and dance the Lover’s Dance!”
!n an old remembered way
Rain works cm me night and day.
Quaint, outlandish heathen gods
Black men task ion out of rods,
Clay, and brittle bits of stone,
In a likeness like their own,
My conversion came high-priced;
I belong to Jesus Christ,
Preacher of Humility;
Heathen gods are naught to me.
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,
So l make an idle boast;
Jesus of the twice-turned check,
Lamb of God, although t speak.
With my mouth thus, in my heart
Do I play a double part.
Ever at Thy glowing altar
Must my heart grow sick and falter,
Wishing He 1 served were black,
Thinking then it would not lack
Precedent of pain ro guide it.
Let who would or might deride it;
Surely then this flesh would know
Yours had home a kindred woe.
Lord, 1 fashion dark gods, TOO,
!>a ring even to give You
Dark despairing features where.
Crowned with dark rebellious IS.UT,
Patience wavers just so much as
Mortal grid compels, while touche's

.
202 CONSTRUCTING A SELF

Quick and hoc of anger, rise

To smitten check and weary eyes,
Lord, forgive me if my need
Sometimes shapes a human creed.
All day long and all night through,
One thing only must I do:
Quench my pride and cool my blood,
Lest l perish in theflood,
Lest a hidden ember set
Timber that I thought was wet
Bunting like the dryest flax,
Melting like the merest wax,
Lest the grave restore its dead.
Not yet has my heart or head
In the least way realized
They and l are civilized.

MARIANNE MOORE
To a Steam Roller
The illustration
is nothing to you without the application.
You lack half wit. You crush all the particles down
into close conformity, and then walk back and forth on
them,
Sparkling chips ofrock
arc crushed down to the level of the parent block,
Were not “impersonal judgment in aesthetic
matters, a metaphysical impossibility,” you

might fairly achieve

it. As for butterflies, 1 can hardly conceive
of one’s attending upon you, but to question
the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists.

ELIZABETH BISHOP
Crus<?f in England
A new volcano has erupted,
the papers say, and last week l was reading
where some ship saw an island being bom:
 k E A b t N t; OiHtu POEMS 203

at first a breath of steam, ten miles away;

and then a black fleck — basalt, probably —
rose m the mate's binoculars
and caught on the horizon like a fly.
They named it. B tit my poor old. island's still
un-rediscovered, un-re™ in able,
None of the books lias ever got it right.
Well, I had fifty-two
miserable, small volcanoes 1 could climb
with a few1 slithery Strides —
volcanoes dead ash heaps.
I used to sit on the edge of the highest one
arid count the others standing up,
naked and leaden, with their heads blown off.
I’d think that if they were the size
I thought volcanoes should be, then I bad
become a giant L
and it I had become a giant.
3 couldn't bear to think what size
the goats and turtles were,
or the gulls, or the over lapping rollers
— a glittering hexagon of rollers
closing and closing in, but never quite,
glittering and glittering, though the sky
was mostly overcast.

,V5v island seemedto be

a sort of cloud-dump. All the hemisphere's
left-over clouds arrived and hung
above the craters — tli eIt parched throats
were hot to touch.
Was dial why it rained so much;
And why sometimes the whole place hissed?
The turtles lumbered by. high-domed,
hissing like teakettles.
{And I'd have given years, or taken a few,
for any sort of kettle, of course.)
The folds of lava, running out to sea,
would hies, I'd turn. And then they'd prove¬
to be more turtles
The beaches were all Java, vanegated,
black, red, and white, and gray;
204 CONÿTKUCTI.'JC. A S L L F

the marbled colors made a fine display,

And I had waterspouts. Oh,
Haifa dozen at a rime, far out,
they'd come and go, advancing and retreiimg,
their heads in cloud, (heir feet in moving patches
of scuffed -up white,
Glass chimneys, flexible, attenuated,
sacerdotal beings of glass .. . I watched
the water spiral up in them like smoke.
IkautifuE. yes. bur not much company.
I often gave way to self-pity.
"Do ] deserve this? f suppose I must.
I wouldn't be here otherwise- Was there
a moment when ! actually chose this?
1 don't remember, hut there could have been."
What's wrong about self-pity, anyway?
With my legs dangling down familiarly
over a crater's edge, I told myself
“Pity should begin at home.” So the more
pity 1 felt, the more I felt at home.
The stm set in the sea; the same odd sun
rose from the sea,
aiid there was one of u and one of me.
The island had one kind of everything:
one tree snail, a bright violet- blue
with a thin shell, crept over everything,
over the one variety of tree,
a sooty, scrub affair.
Snail shells iay tinder these in drifts
and, at a distance,
you’d swear that they were beds of irises.
There was one kind of berry, a dark red.
t tried it, one by one, and hours apart,
Sub-acid, and not bad, no ill effects;
and so l made home-brew. J’d dnnk
the awful, feiy, stinging stuff
that went straight TO my head
and play my home-made flute
(I think it had the weirdest scale on earth]
'
and, dizzy, whoop and dance among the goats.
Home-made, home made! lint aren’t we all?

i
 READING OTHER POEMS 205

I felt a deep affection for

the smallest of my island industries.
No, not exactly, since the smallest was
a miserable philosophy.
Because 1 didn't know enough,
Why didn’t I know enough of something?
Greek drama or astronomy? The books
I’d read were full of blanks;
—
the poems well, I tried
reciting to my iris-beds,
“They flash upon that inward eye,
which is the bliss . . The bliss of what?
One of the first things that I did
when 1 got back was look it up.
The island smelled of goat and guano.
The goats were white, so were the gulls,
and both too tame, or else they thought
1 was a goat, too, or a gull.
ftiid, baa, baa and shriek, shriek, shriek,
baa . .. shriek ... baa . .1 still can’t shake
them from my ears; they’re hurting now,
The questioning shrieks, the equivocal replies
over a ground of hissing rain
and hissing, ambulating turtles
got on my nerves,
When all the gulls flew up at oncet they sounded
like a big tree in a strong wind, it? leaves.
I’d shut my eyes and think about a tree,
an oak, say, with real shade, somewhere,
I’d heard of cattle getting island-sick.
I thought the goats wene.
One billy-goat would stand ort the volcano
I’d christened Mont d'Espoit or Mount Despair
(I'd time enough to play with names),
and bleat and bleat, and sniff the air.
I d grab his beard and look at him.
His pupils, horizontal, narrowed up
and expressed nothing, or a little malice,
1 got so tired of the very colors!
One day l dyed a baby goat bright ted
with my red berries, just to see

.
206 CONSTRUCTING A SELF

something a little different.

And then his mother wouldn’t recognize him.
Dreams were the worst. Of course l dreamed offood
and love, but they were pleasant rather
than otherwise. But then I’d dream of things
like slitting a baby’s throat, mistaking it
for a baby goat, I ’d have
nightmares of other islands
stretching away from mine, infinities
of islands, islands spawning islands,
like frogf eggs turning into polliwogs
of islands, knowing that 1 had to live
on each and every one, eventually,
for ages, registering their flora,
their fauna, their geography.
just when I thought I couldn't stand it
another minute longer, Friday came
(Accounts of that have everything all wrong.)
Friday was nice.
Friday was nice, and we were friends.
If only he had been a woman!
I wanted to propagate my kind,
and so did he, I think, poor boy.
He’d pet the baby goats sometimes.
and race ivith them, or carry one around.
— Pretty to watch; he had a pretty body.
And then one day they came and took us off)
Now f live here, another island,
that doesn’t seem like one, but who decides?
My blood was full of them; my brain
bred islands. But that archipelago
has petered out. I’m old
I’m bored, too, drinking my real tea,
surrounded by uninteresting lumber.
The knife there on the shelf —
it reeked of meaning, like a crucifix,
It lived. How many years did I
beg it, implore it, not to break?
I knew each nick and scratch by heart,
the bluish blade, the broken tip,
 R E A Df$w G OTHER POEMS 207

tin: lines of wood-grain on tin: handle . , ,

Now it won’t look at me at all.

The Living soul has dribbled away
My eyes rest on it and pass on.
The local museum’s asked me to
leave everything to them:
the flute, the knife, the shrivelled shoes,
my shedding goatskin r rouse rs
(moths have got in the fur),
the parasol that took me such a time
remembering the way the nbs should go.
It still will work but, folded up,
looks like a plucked and skinny fowl.
How can anyone want such things?
— And Fridas1, im dear Friilav, died of measles
Seventeen years ago come March.

AN NIL SEXTON
Her Kind
f have gone out, a possessed witch,
ha Lin ting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, 1 have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light;
lonely thing, twelve-fingered,1 out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quire-
I have been her kind.
I have found the warm caves in (he woods.
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the slippers for the worms ansi the elves;
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood
[ have been her kind.

I have ridden in yonr can., driver,

waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh

'
Witches were chisisÿhi co h.ise sbv lingers on iLÿell liarid
208 CONM nut rJNO * Sr LF

and my ribs crack while your wheels wind,2

A woman like thar is nor ashamed to die,
I have been her kind.

CHARLES WHJUHT
St'if-Porlrcii <
Someday they'll iind me out, and my lavish bands,
Full moon at my back, fog groping the gone horizon, the edge
Of the continent scored in yellow, expectant lights,
White shoulders of suit, a wolf-colored sand,
The ashes and bits of char that will clear my name.
1 ill then, I'D hum to myself and settle the whereabouts,
Jade plants and oleander float in a shine.
The leaves of the pepper tree turn green.
My features are sketched with black ink in a slow drag through the
iky,
Waiting to be filled in.
Hand that lifted me once, lift me againT
Sort me and flesh me out, fix tny eyes,
From the mulch and the undergrowth, protect me and pass me on.
From my own words and my certainties,
From the rose and the easy check, deliver me, pass me on.

CARL E1HII.LIPS
Africa Says
lielore you arrive, forget
the landscape the novels are filled with.
the dull retro-colon ial glamour
of the Uritish Sudan, Tunis's babble,
the Fat Man, Fez, the avenue that is Khartoum.
Forget the three words you know of
this continent: fiiirdkii, hakshrcfh,
ifssassin, words tike chipped knives thrust
into all isolation pf sand and night.
These will get you only so far.

2 111 (he iiwcmecrtth

century, wrometl thought to be wishes were often torrureJ
pn the (which -iireTched the victim's body rill the borln broke}, then burned MI
the slfike.
 READING OIHEI POEMS 2W

Jn the dreams of the first night,

Africa may seem just another body to
sleep with, a place where you can lay
your own broken equipment to rest.
You have leisure to wonder at her being
a woman, at your being disappointed
with this. You dome around to asking
what became ofher other four fingers,
how she operates on six alone.
You wipe the sweat from
your chest with her withered hand, raised
and two-fingered; observe, as she sleeps,
how that hand casts the perfect
jackal on a wail whose color
is the same as that ofthe country
itself, a dark, unpalatable thing who
uses a bulbed twig to paint her lids
in three parallel zones that meet and
kiss one another. She smells of henna or
attar, or rises steeped in musk that in other
women does not stray from between the legs.
She says she has no desire to return
with you. Don’t be surprised if
she takes nothing you offer, and moves
on bare feet away from you, or if
you wake feeling dose to something,
the gauze damp and loose at your face.
And should you choose to leave, know better
than to give the city' a farewell sweep of
the eye. To the pith-hdmeted mosques, the slim
and purposeless bouievardiers, the running
sores at the breasts of the women who beg
beside stalled trains, you were never here.
For this reason, you may decide to stay put,
thinking you have left nothing finished.
You may have an urge
to make each move count.
You may have learned nothing at all,
 7

Poetry and Identity

Social

] lit identityofthe lyric Speaker(by contrast to the speaker of satire

or of dram a lie monologue, for instance), has historically been "open-
ended," meaning chat the words of the speaker could be spoken hv any
reader within ihe Culture. In the past, in literate cultures, both Western
and Pastern, education was preliminary to the fmolt*} professions; and
writers, who usually came from the group of those so educated, directed
their writings to people who belonged to the same group and possessed
the same culture. As we Look at the lyrics being produced today, especially
in the United States, wj£ can sec a marked change in the concept roll ofthe
lyric speaker. The speaker often is not “neutral," hut is given a defined
nationality, race,class, sex. or sexual preference,so that we may say,“This
is a poem spoken by an African American,” or "The speaker is a mother
who addresses her sister," or “This is a gay love poem spoken by one man
to another,” or "This is a poem spoken m Hispanic dialect.”
The choice pf identity in a poem is up id the Writer, for whom
identity is never simple All writers know that besides the forms of'
identity listed above {winch Can be combined into Such a mixture as
"African American middie-class gay male”) there are other important
identity components such as religion, generation (elder or younger),
family roles, social roles, and ns on. There is a riddle-game called “Who
ire you:" to test how people primarily identify themselves: answers by
the same person could vary from “I'm a Marine" tq "I'm Eric’s father"
to “I’m a Catholic" to “I’m a Chicano" to “I'm Joan's husband" to

211
212 POETRY AND SOCIAL. IDENTITY

"I'm the suspect” — all payable by the very same person, depending on
the situation and the context When you read a poem with a dearly
identified speaker, you need to ask yourself which one or more of his or
her inevitably many identities the writer is invoking,
Tiie poet Adrienne Rich, ibr instance, has poems entitled "A
Marriage in the 'Sixties,” "Sisters,” “Ai the Jewish New Year,"
"Twenty-One Love Poems," "Mother-in-Law," "Heroines,” and
"Grandmothers.," in which she presents herself. Successively, as a wife, a
sister, a perplexed Jew, a woman writing love poems to a woman, a
lesbian daughter-in-law, an investigator of class privilege, and a grand-
el a Lighter. These are identities belonging to Rich insofar as she is an
individual; lti other poems Rich adopts a collective identity (“we" or
“you") which makes the speaker representative of a class, such as
"women" or "poets." Here arc two of Rich's identity -poems. Can we
say why the identities the poet chooses are relevant Lo the poems? The
lirsc poem is a dialogue between the mother-in-law (who speaks aloud,
in italics) and the daughter-in-law (who silently replies when her
mother-in law says, " I ell me something"):

ADRIENNE RICH
Mcther-itt-Lauf
Tell me something
you say
Not: What arc yon working on now, is there anyone special,
how is the job
do yoLi mind coming back to an empty house
what do you do oil Sundays
Tell me sometlting , , ,
Some secret
we both know and have never spoken?
Some sentence that could flood with light
your lift, mine?
‘l‘dl me what dangfilers tell their toothers
fiwyiwljere iff the itvrld, and l and only l
even have ft* psk. . . ,
Tm me something.
Lately, I heat it; Tell me something true,
daughter-in-law, before we part,
cell me something true before I die
And time was when ! tried.
VHIN married my run, ,ih?d je
rfmHiff its you are, potf "nc my daughter

J
 POET tc V A MU SOCIAL !P ENTITY 2U

Tell me... .
I've been trying to tdl you. mother-in-law
ttiaT ] illink I'm breaking in two
and half oi me doesn’t even want to love
I can polish tins table to satin because 1 don't care
I am trying to tdl you. i envy
the people in menu] hospitals their freedom
and I can't live on pkegbos
or Valium, like you
A cutlemon scoitrs the smell offish nivay
You'llfeel better when the children ore in school
I would try to tell you, mother-in-law
but my .1 tiger takes fir| from yours ind in the oven
the meal bursts into flames
Doughter-in-laio, before ivr part
tetl me something trur
I polished the table, mother- it i-law
and scrubbed the knives with half a lemon
the way you showed me to do
1 wish J could rdl you —
Tell me!
They think I’m ireak iTtirJ hold
things hark from me. I agreed to this years aÿo,
Daughter-itt-laut, strange JTS yon sire,
tell me something true
tell me something
Your son is dead
years, I am a lesbian,
ten
my children are themselves.
Mother-in-law, before we part
shall we try again: Strange as 1 am,
strange as you arc? What do tnoihers
ask their own daughters, everywhere m the world:
Is there a question5
Ask me something.
If we sort out the speaker's multiple identities as she reveals them
to tis here, we find out that she is a daughter-in-law, a member of a
younger generation addressing « member ot the older generation, a
person with a job. a person Living alone, a mother, at widow, and
3 lesbian. We also are given a glimpse into her past, when she was the
mother of voting children noi vet in school, a voting woman taking
lessons from her mother-in-law on hosv to polish a table and how to
214 I' o t i H. Y AND S oc i A i IDENTITY

remove A fish MII ell from knives by rubbing them with a lemon,i young
woman With a dangerously submerged auger. Tins double exposure
older identity su pen m posed on younger identity' — is a familiar tech¬
—
nique u) lyric poetry, serving as it does to point up changes in identity
over time, Hut the constant in the poem is the mother-in-law, saying
now as she said then, “Te/f me something/' while the daughter-in-law
answers now, as she did nor then, “Ask me something." In her youth,
the daughter-in-law was afraid to tell the truth because what she would
have said ("1 think I ni breaking in two") was too frightening to artie
ulate even to herself. Now she JS prepared to try to create a bridge of
honest speaking between herself and her mother-in-law: "Your son is
dead / ten years, 1 am a lesbian." Hut it is not enough ro speak die truth;
she wants an answering gesture from her mother-in-law, wants her to
show some interest in her daughter-in-law’s life “What are you
working on now?” “fs there anyone special?" “How- is the job?"
almost anything. You will notice that in this poem Rich is not mobi¬ —
lizing identities (“I am a poet”; "I am half Jewish") that she vv)l] use for
other poems. Why not: In what way is each of the identities she does
bring out here useful to the poem? A good rule of thumb is that in a
poem where you see multiple identities, past as well as present, each of
them is in some way necessary to make the poem work.
The relation between son and father (from the point of view of the
son) has been frequently explored in literature, Rich broadens the topic
of relation between rhe generations into daughter in law and mother
in-law a relation not often explored, if ever, in lyric. And though the
relation to one’s mother-in-law has been made the subject of frequent
jokes. Rich shows it as one which entails well-meaning gestures on both
sides (the mother- in-law giving household advice, the daughter-in-law
cotiking a meal for the mother-in-law) but in which no truth-telling is
possible, until, late in the day, the speaker senses that a desire for truth
hovers in the mother in -law’s question, so that it becomes “Tell me
something true before we pari." Hie brutal |ahiWtt- "Your son ;s
dead / ten years, J am a lesbian, / my children are themselves" — sur¬
prises us. It is of course a clearing of the ground, as though the speaker
demands that these faets be accepted before any further truths are pos¬
sible. The tenuous relational links between the two women — “You
married my son; we are both women: your children are my grandchil¬
dren” — are all true, but they are not the whole truth, "Ymir son is
dead; i am i lesbian and you are nut; the children are no longer children
—
or grandchildren but adults” these are the facts that must be accepted,
says tlie daughter-in-law, before any further intimacy is possible. The
hopeful end of the poem "Ask me something" -- is a request for that
further intimacy, on a new basis, in the few years left,

1
 IT1 t> £ I H. v AND S O L: f A L I D t M'I : V 215

The junctures at which mother-ih-lsw and daughter-in-law (fleet

are of course the son/husband, grandchildren, common-seK junctures.
Being LI daughter-iti-law is an identity negotiated around these junc¬
tures. What happens when the people enabling (be junctures disappear?
With the son dead, .ind the children grown, does the daughter-in-law
identity have any reality left? la ordy an estranged generational relation
present older heterosexual woman, younger lesbian woman? Or can
a new identity bond — a mother-daughter one — be formed? “What
do mothers / ask their own daughters everywhere in the world? / Is
there a question? //Ask me something.”
ljy investigating a particular facet of identity — lie re, the tin ex
plored. one (in literature) of daUghter-iii-law-hood - the poet renews
and deepens identity itself. At the same lime, no poem was ever made
viable by its topic alone. What does Rich do to stylize the identity
juncture she wants to explore? And what do her chosen sty]izacions tell
about experience?
first of all. as 1 have said. Rich creates a double exposure of her
young seif and her older self this tells us that although there is a sepa¬
ration between Rich as angry young mother at id Rich as older lesbian
living alone, the later self has not forgotten or obliterated her younger
self — there is a continuity of the ego Over time. Another principal tactic
is Rich’s use of a repeated refrain of double address ("Mother-in-law."
“Daughter-in-law" — names people don't usually use in address); she
borrows tins repeated double address from a famous ballad, "Ldward,
Edward”:

“Why does your brand0 so drop with blood, niyfrd

Edward, Edward?
Why does your brand so drop with blood,
And why so sad gang ye,° Q?” jfO you
“O, I have killed my hawk so good,
Mother, mother:
O, J have killed my hawk so good.
And I had no more but he, O.”

Yet another stylization is the repetition ofrequest f‘ Fed me something,"

“Ask me something"). Fourteen times "cell recurs, three times "ask." If
we graphed the poem, it would he a series of spirals rummy hack, again
—
and again, to those two points "Ti ll me," “Ask me.” Phis stylized
recurrence represents the wish ofthe two women to stay in touch in spite
'

ofthe disappearance ofthe former links between (hern. Fhe poem is writ¬
ten in good filth, hoping that one will ask so that the other can tel!.
It is not enough, therefore, ro point out 111 what identity or tden-
216 POETRY AND SOCIAL IDENTITY

Tities a p«tn is written. We need to see how that identiry, conferred by

biology or by society, may be subjected to critique by the imagination
(as it is here), and how it is stylized into poetry.
Here, by contrast, is one of Rich's poems in which the identity1 of
the speaker is not vtiy strongly particularized. The speaker, however,
offers a new collective identity to a group of people addressed as “Pro¬
spective Immigrants," Presumably the speaker is someone who immi¬
grated some time ago, and who speaks from the other side ofthe door
that the new group may or may not choose to pass through:
ADWENNE RICH
Prospective Immigrants Please Note
Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.
If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.
Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.
[f you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily
to maintain your altitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely
but much will blind you,
much will evade you.
atwhat cost who knows:
The door itself
makes no promises.
It is only a door.
To go through the door is to join a group of which the speaker is
presumably one member. In this poem, Rich does not speak as a mother,
a wife, a widow, a daughter-in-law, a Jew, a poet, a lesbian, or even as
a woman. Her identity' is "Immigrant," “One Who Has Gone through
the Door," This is a slightly more panic ularizetf identity- than “person"
or “self" or “soul" (our names for the speaker of the normative gen¬
eralized lyric of the past), but it is noi very much more specific
 lJ (.) K T n v AM) SOCIAL IDENTITY 217

What can we deduce from the poem about the collective identity
ofthose svho immigrate tu this nets land? Thai it is painful to remember
your old name here; that there is a double consciousness here, and an
acquiescence in event; that you will see more clearly; chat you will
confront much, What can we deduce about those who choose not to go
through the door? That they can retain their old names; that it is not
ignoble to choose to stay where they are (they can live worthily, main¬
tain their attitudes, hold on to their position, even die bravely), but they
will be to some degree blind, to some degree unconscious, TO some
degree penalized.
This poem clearly draws on actual experiences of immigrants to
the United States, who oiien lost their own names ai Ellis Island when
the Inspectors of Immigration affixed new ones to them. Immigrants
to America found strange new things to look at and strange new
events to undergo; they learned to live with the double consciousness
of the hyphenated American. And the poem draws oil the experience
of those who stayed home in Europe and chose not to emigrate
who held to what they knew, and paid the price of never finding a
New World.
Vet we fed that this is a poem not about physical immigration but
about spiritual immigration. The “'prospective immigrants'' do not have
to cross oceans or wait at Ellis Island or undergo quarantine; they have
only to open a nameless door. Once through the door, they cannot go
back. Clearly, however, the speaker is glad of his/her own past decision
to join the immigrant group; the poem is, after all, an invitation to new
vision and an abjuring ot blindness. This poem is an example of an

ancient literary genre: tile immemorial promise of a better 'pmtual life.

How does Rich stylize her warning to prospective immigrants
about joining the Immigrant community? She does it by making her
poem fork into the two possible decisions — to go through the door, or
not;

Co or mtgo through doer (lines 1-5)

Go (lines 4-9) ,\W yc (lines 10—1H)

CiW flood
XX Rid
(lines 4- 6) (lines 7-9) (lines 10-15) (lines 16-1 H)

lltc <Wr (lines 19-21)

213 I’UETRV AND SOCIAL IDENTITY

At the end, Rich brings LLS back to the very door where we begin,
waiting tor ns to make our choice, because entry to a more complex
level of inner life is a choice open to all. Rich’s speaker is neither
gendered nor identified in any other was — nor are her co-immigrants
or the prospective immigrants. In writing about an authorwho has, over
the course ot a career, spoken in many different identities, you will want
to decide which identity is [or which identities are) operative in any
given poem, and why*
An author who encounters an identity already preconstrut-red fol¬
ium or her by society (“You are a HOIIHII"; “YOU are Be>ston Irish";
"You area black male’’) is inevitably made conscious ofidentity questions
by encountering the stereotypes attached by society to certain identities
Langston Hughes, Writing not only about him-self but about the wider
Harlem community,shows particular awareness not only ofrace identity
in itself, as society constructs it, but of alternative identities within the
same group, constructed by die group about itsclt. Sometimes, as in the
poem "Dream Variations,” he writes about him self as black:

Rest at pale evening

A tali, slim tree , , ,
Night coming tenderly
Black like me.

But sometimes, as in “Cross,” he is i speaker of mixed race:

My old man died hi a fine big house,

My ma died in a shack.
I wonder where l"m gonna die,
Being neither white nor black:

Sometimes, as ill “I, Too.” he is declaredly American as Well as black-

I. too, sing America;

I am the darker brother.

Sometimes, as in "Afro- American Fragment," he is African American

Subdued and time-lost

Arc the drums — and yet
Through some vast mist of race
There comes this song
L do not understand,

I
 POETRY AMP SOCIAL IDENTITY 219

This song of atavistic land,

Of bitter yearnings lost
Without a place
So long,
—
So far away
Is Africa's
Dark face,

And sometimes he is identified not by color, but only by his exceptional

—
intelligence which perhaps in childhood isolated him, even more
than his color, as a social "monster," The North, as Hughes points out
—
in other poems, does not lynch blacks as the South did but the North
finds victims it wants to kill spiritually, among them children distin¬
guished by exceptional talent or intelligence:

LANGSTON HUGHES
Genius Child
This is a song for the genius child.
Sing it softly, for the song is wild.
Sing it softly as ever you can
Lest the song get out ofhand. —
Nobody lows a genius child.
Can you love an eagle,
Tame or wild?
Wild or tame,
Can you love a monster
Of frightening name?
Nobody loves a genius child.
—
Kill him and let his soul run wild!

How does Hughes bring imagination to the theme ofthe marginalized

"genius child"? And how does he stylize his poem? He suggests that
even to mention the genius child is dangerous — any song about him is
"wild” and likely to “get out of hand," The tribe will recognize the
song as something outside their culture, and will persecute the song and
the singer as well as the genius child. I3ut then the imagination of the
poet does 9 IHO-degree turn. He understands the feelings of the tribe.
Could any of us love another species, a monster? And that is how the
genius child appears to people. The refrain is absolute: nobody, abso-
220 P 1:r T K v A jj.D SOCIAL IDENTITY

lutely nobody loves the child — and we are (0 believe that "nobody"
include i hr genius child's parents, his siblings, his teachers, Ins peers.
—
The surprising and horrifying solution a “lynching" to set the pariah
free — is the most Unsparing in all of Hughes's wort. Culture no longer
has any room for a wild soul: it LS J kindness to put it to death,
Hughes was himself a genius at the assuming Lit different identities
within the black community,, male and female, upright and delinquent,
upper-class and lower-class, educated and uneducated Here he is in one
of the poems written in “black English'':

LANGSTON HUGHES
Me and the Mule
My old mule,
He’s got a grin on his face.
He's been a mule so long
He's forgot about his race.
I’m that old mule
—
Black — and don’t give a damn!
You got to take me
Like I am.

A poem like tins makes LLS think about the mule's '’race" - - half horse,
half donkey. The gradual consolidation ofthe mule’s "identity" consoles
his owner, who makes the half-humorous, half-serious analogy with
himielfi live long enough and you become just yourself, not someone’s
notion of you. "You" says the black speaker to his white audience, “got
rn take me / Like I am.” “You got to" — the whites have no choice,
because this hlack knows himself so well he yields none of his individual
autonomy to white society. Hughes styliaes iris poem by giving us the
mule’s “success" first to “guarantee” his speaker's eventual triumph. By
the end, the speaker's grin matches the one he imagines on the mule.
OUT identities are constructed, according to the modern paradox,
by others. We are taught to see ourselves first as our parents see us
("Sally’s the one who’s good at spores"), next as nut peers see us
("You’re black!" "You’re just a girl!"), next as society as a whole sees
us ("Statistics show that a high percentage ofscientists are males”), and
eccEi as literature conceives ns("What are little girls made ot'Sugar and
spice and everything nice"). It is against these disabling conceptions

from outside that inner authenticity makes its struggle. And the disabling
conceptions — say, of race — do not have to come from “outside the
 PO £ I R Y AND SOL t A L IDENTITY 221

group itself. One ot’ Hughes’s most stinging poems embodies the mor¬
tified hatred of “upper-class” blacks for “lower-class” ones:

LANGSTON HUGHES
High to Low
God knows
We have our troubles, too
One trouble is you:
—
you talk too loud,
cuss too loud.
look too black,
don’t get anywhere,
and sometimes it seems
you don’t even care,
The way you send your kids to school
stockings down,
(not Ethical Culture)
the way you shout out loud in church,
(not St, Phillips)
and the way you lounge on doorsteps
just as if you were down South,
(not at 409)
the way you clown
—
the way, in other words,
you let me down
—
me, trying to uphold the race
and you —
well, you can see,
we have our problems,
too, with you.

The blacks who are looked down on by the Ethical Culture / St. Phillips
set (the names arc those of a fashionable school and church) are already
having pejorative identities (“loud," "too black," “don’t care1’) con¬
structed tor them by their very own fellow blacks. Add these to the
identities constructed for them by the surrounding whites, and the con¬
struction of an authentic selfhas two strikes against it before it can begin.
Even the notion of what an “authentic sell ” might be is modeled by
cultural expectations into which we are bom.
Poetry' is one ofthe great means in which one identity reaches out

I
222 POETRY AND SOCIAL IDENTITY

to another, tries to explain itself to another, brings up images to clarify

itself(Rich’s meal bursting into flames in the oven, Hughes’s grinning
and omen'mule), finds a diction that speaks its mind,and rinds a stylized
form to enact its appeal. There is a danger that a reader will take the
identity in a lyric as more simple chan it is, and will mentally invoke a
stereotype of the female speaker or the black speaker or the gay speaker
or the Catholic speaker. But good poems are thoroughly considered
constructions; and in order for the poem to be interesting, the author
must critique or reinvent the social stereotype. A lyric to keep in mind
when reading identity-poems is Seamus Heaney's “Terminus,” a poem
announcing that a poet’s identity' is always at least a double one, because
any peer worthy ofthe name has “second Thoughts.” Heaney, a North¬
ern Irish poet, grew up on a farm but within sight ofindustry, in a rural
place where people still used horses to drasv wagons but took the train
to go to the city. One “terminus" or border of the farm was the “march
drain" — the creek marking the line ("march") between two parishes,
Heaney, as a child, lived also along divides in the -world of words — on
the borderline between his parents’ secular proverbs and their Biblical
—
stories both equally stimulating to the nascent poet's mind. And he
lived between the present (Northern Ireland governed by England) and
the better past (before the Irish earls, defeated by the British, fled to
France in 1798, ending Irish independence). “Is it any wonder,” the
poet asks, given all these influences on my identity, that “when I
thought / I would have second thoughts?” Any reflective poet has “sec¬
ond thoughts" about both inherited and acquired “identities," and it is
those “second thoughts,” and their origins, that Heaney so well iden¬
tifies:

SF.AMUS HEANEY
TVrmtnHS

When I hoked° there, I would find fished

An acorn and a rusted bolt.
Jfl lifted my eyes, a factory chimney
And a dormant mountain,
If I listened, an engine shunting
And a trotting horse.
Is it any wonder when I thought
I would have second thoughts?
 POETRY A ND SotiM. IDEM TIT V 221

II
When they spoke ofthe prudent squirrel's hoard
It shone like gifts at a nativity,
When they spoke ofthe mammon of iniquity
The coins in my pockets reddened like stove-lids,
[ was the march drain and the march drain's banks
Suffering the limit of each claim.
in
Two buckets were easier carried than one.
I grew up in between,
My left hand placed the standard iron weight.
My right tilted a last grain on the balance.
Baronies. parishes met where l was bom.
When I stood on the central stepping stone
] was the last eari on horseback in midstream
Still parleying, in earshot of his peers.
Though a poem like Heaney's particularizes much about his identity'
(Irish, rural, Catholic, modem), it still does not specify idiosyncrasies
that would point him out as a single individual. Even Rich’s self-
identification as lesbian widow, mother of children, daughter-in-law,
could fit many people-
Thc most extreme reach of the “identity poem” is a poem that
specifies its speaker so completely that he or she becomes entirely unique.
No one but frank O'Hara could speak the poem entitled “The Day
Lady Died," a poem showing O'Hara’s humdrum day suddenly brought
to a stunned halt as he sees a newspaper headline announcing the death
of the iamnus jazz singer Billie Holidav. The poem goes, ill part:

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday

three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because 1 will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner . . .
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for I’atsy with drawings by Bonnard . . .
and for Mike I just stroll into the FARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then 1 go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
224 p fl E TR v AI4P SOCIAL I [? IT N T I T V

and the tobacconist in the Ziegfcld Theatre and

casually ask for .1 carton of Ganlobes and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YOlkK POST with her fact on it.
Nobody but Frank O'Hara is doing just these things in this, order on tilts
specified dare, buying presents for specified friends named Patsy and
Mike. In such a poem, not only are time and Space fully specified, but
persona] identity is unmistakably that of only one person. The construc¬
tion of a speaker in stidi a poem is as far as possible from the normative
lyric construction of a "universal" or “representative" speaker, like the
one in an anonymous English love song who says (as almost anyone in
the world might say), “Love me little, love me long, / Is the burden ot
my song":

Constant love is tn oderate ever,

And it wi|] through life persevere;
Give me that, with true endeavor
I will it restore,
Why would the lyric poet sometimes want to construct a specif ted
speaker instead ot a universal oner Perhaps as modern life has grown
more heterogeneous, it seems harder to some poets to speak tor every¬
one. In England, before the turn of the century, there was a relatively
small educated class confined to one island nation possessing only two
universities. In such 3 country7, with such an audience, the lyric poet
could address his cultivated audience as though his Speech and theirs
were one. The poet in contemporary America, with its diversity oftypes
and interests, may feel it only reasonable to speak more narrowly — not
always, but sometimes. The uniqueness of each person is one modern
—
article ot faith and by making himself unique, O’Hara suggests that
each person lives a common shared event differently. Many people, on
rh;it day m New York, saw the headline about ltd tie Holiday's death:
but, says tin: poet, your moment and mine were different. Let me tell
you how it was for me; that will make you chink how it was for you.
The appeal to representativeness is still present, but it is an appeal to
sameness-in-difference. Every lyric, no matter how socially specified.
assumes that it speaks a language its readers Call understand — even it" in
rheir own different terms,
 READING OTHER POEMS 225

Tn Brief: Poetry and Social Identity

Reme mbering R ich, remem bcringH ughes,remembering Heaney,
remembering O'Hara, ask yourself, with respect to any identity-poem,
“Between what borders, left and right, does this poem flow? What does
it see when it looks up? or down? or around? Which words shine with
morality? Which redden with shame? How does it see the past? the
present? Jn what communities does it station itself? Against what others
does it contend? To what degree does it specify its own uniqueness?” The
rich contribution ofidentity formation to poetry, especially in the twen¬
tieth century, both criticizes and renews our inherited sense of the lyric
speaker, reminding us that if we stand in the shoes ofthe poem, we do so
not only in general ways but also in our own individualized way.

Reading Other Poems

Besides an idiosyncratic and unique personal identity, all of us have

social identity, arising from groups to which we belong orare consigned,
As you read the following poems, consider what portion ofsocial iden¬
tity each speaker claims as his or her own, or ascribes to his characters.
Robert Southwell's speaker* for instance, has a vision identify ing him as
a Christian believer; Thomas Mashe s speaker is a victim ofthe plague
for whom the whole world has narrowed into one gFeat mortuary;John
Milton's speaker shows himself solely as a supporter of a collective
—
cause he never says "I," only “we.” In short, we may know only one
identifying trait of the speaker from the thematic content of the poem.
(We may know other traits from the speaker’s tone, the images used, and
SO on,)
By contrast, how many personal identifying traits can you fmd in
Anne Hradstreet’s poem? What difference does it make in the effect of
a poem to have the self of its speaker so narrowly specified? Would you
rather read a poem that you can speak without feeling that a particular
person uttered it — a poem that can be uttered by almost anyone, be¬
cause its feelings are so general, and its speaker so apparently universal?
Or would you rather feel that the poem is introducing you to the lift and
speech of a unique individual? (Neither one of these is better than the
other; but wc all have varying aesthetic responses, and you may prefer
one to the other; reflect on why you do.)
If you are not a Christian, how are you able to read Southwell’s
poem with imaginative sympathy? If you deplore Cromwell's actions,
how can you read Milton’s poem and be convinced by it? Explore your
226 POETRY AND SOCIAL IDENTITY

own answers to these questions, which are profound ones and affect all
art. Carl a non-Christian respond to a painting ofthe nativity ofjesus, or
a pacifist to a poem, like Milton’s, about a military general? Can a white
person respond to Kita Dove’s portrait of her widowed grandmother's
first participation in an “integrated" social occasion?
Is the drama of a poem spoken by a socially specified individual
{Edward Lear describing himself as others might see him, Gerard Manley
Hopkins speaking as a Catholic priest) different front that of a poem
spoken by an abstract speaker? William Blake’s persona, the little black
boy. is a type rather than a person; but though we imagine ourselves in
his shoes, speaking his words so full of pathos, are we not also objective
observers, realising the extent to which he is parroting what he has been
taught (souls are white, angels are white, and so on):
Sylvia Plath's "applicant" gets her identity from her envisaged
social role. What is that role: Does it allow for any personal individu¬
ality? Cm you compare Plath’s view of the individuality allowed within
marriage to Anne Bradstreet’s view? (You do not have to choose; the
very purpose ofreading poetry is to let you sec the world through many
different lenses,)
What does it do to your perception of the identity of the speaker
ofthe poem when he has the same name as the writer ofthe poem, as
in Garrett Hongjo’s poem, “The Hongo Store?” Docs this poem allow
you to conflate author and speaker5 If not, why not? What is the use, to
Blake, ofthe persona ofthe little black boy, when the poet couid equally
wdl have written a poem protesting slavery in his own adult voice? And
why do you think he hid the little black bov speak in "heroic qua¬
—
trains” broad pentameter alternately rhyming quatrains, usually used
for a philosophic or noble subject?
I'oems exploring social identity' must often face the fact that not all
members of the social group share the same attitudes. In David Mura’s
poem about the internment ofJapanese Americans during World War
II, what are the attitudes dramatized? In what docs the conflict consist?

ROBERT SOUTH WEII.

T7tc Burning Babe
As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow,
Surprised I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow;
And lifting up a fearful eye to view what tire was near,
A pretty babe all burning bright did in the air appear;
Who.scorched with excessive heat, such Hoods of tears did shed
 Rt-.AuiNi; OTHJ-JK. POEMS 227

As though his floods should quench his dames which with his tears
were fed.
“Alas," quoth he, "but newly born in fiery heats l fry,
Yet none approach to warm their hearts Or fed my fire but U
My faultless breast the furnace is, the fud wounding thorns,
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;
The fuel justice liyeth on, and mercy blows the coals,
The metal in this turn ace wrought are men's defiled souls,
For which, as now on fire [ ain to work them to their good,
So will I melt into a bath to wash them in my blood."
With this he vanished out of sight and swiftly shrunk away,
And straight 1 called unto mind that it was Christmas day,

THOMAS NASHE
A Litany in Time Plague
Adieu, farewell, earth’s bliss;
This world Uncertain is;
Fond are life’s lustful joys;
Death proves them all but toys;
None from bis darts can fly;
1 am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!
Rich men, trust not in wealth,
Cold cannot buy you health;
Physic himself must fade.
All dungs to end are made,
The plague full swift goes by;
I am sick, i must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!
Beauty is but a flower
Which wrinkles will devour;
11rightness fills from
the air;
Queens have died young and fair;
Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.
i am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!
Strength stoops unco the grave,
Worms feed on I lector brave;
Ssvords may not tight with fate,
228 I’ot IKY AND SOCIAL IDENTITY

Farrh still holds ope her gate.

“Come, come!” the bell?, do cry,
1 jin stick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us.
Wit with his wan ton ness
fasteth death's bitterness.;
Hell’s executioner
Hath no ears for to hear
What vain art can reply.
i am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us.
i laste, therefore, each degree,
To welcome destiny;
Heaven is our heritage,
tarth hut a player's stage;
Mount we unto the sky.
I am sick, i must die.
Lord, have mercy on us,

JOHN MILTON
To the Lord General Cromwell
Cromwell, out chief of men, who through a cloud,
Not of war only, but detractions rude,
Guided by faith and matchless fortitude,
To peace and truth the glorious way hast ploughed,
And on the neck of crowne3 Fortune proud
Hast reared God's trophies, and His work pursued,
While Darwen stream, with blood of Scots imbrued
And Dunbar field, resounds thy praises loud,
And Worcester’s laureate wreath; yet much remains
To conquer still; peace hath her victories
No less renowned than war: new foes arise,
Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains.
Help us to save free conscience from the paw
Of hireling wolves, whose gospel is their (paw.

A r:ver nejr Pirsbon, where Cromwell won J victory ::i jt-H Dtulbar .J m l
Worcester were also ik sites of victories.
 PLEADING OTHER POEMS 229

ANNE BRADSTREET
A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment
My head, my heart, mine eyes, my life, nay, more,
My joy, my magazine0 of earthly stone,
If two be one, as surely thou and I,
How stayest thou there, whilst I at Ipswich lie?
So many steps, head from the heart to sever,
if but a neck, soon should we be together.
1, like the Earth this season, mourn in black,
My Sun is gone so far irfs zodiac,
Whom whilst I joyed, nor storms, nor frost I felt,
His warmth such frigid colds did cause to melt.
My chilled limbs now numbed lie forlorn;
Return; return, sweet Sol, from Capricorn;
In this dead time, alas, what can 1 more
Than view those fruits which through thy heat 1 bone?
Which sweet contentment yield me for a space,
True Living pictures of their father’s face,
O strange effect! now thou art southward gone,
I weary grow the tedious day so Jong;
But when thou northward to me shalt return,
I wish my Sun may never set, but bum
Within the Cancer of my glowing breast,
The welcome house of him my dearest guest.
Where ever, ever stay, and go not thence,
Till nature’s sad decree shall call thee hence;
Flesh of thy fresh, bone of thy bone,
1 here, thou there, yet both but one.

WILUAM BLAKE
The Little Black Boy
My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And 1 am black, but OJ my soul is white;
White as an angel is the English child;
But I am black as if bertav’d of light.
My mother taught me underneath i tree,
And sitting down before the heat of day,
She temk me on her lap and kissed me.
And pointing to the east, began to say;

I
230 POETRY A N r> SOCIAL IDENTITY

“Look on the rising sun: there God does live,

And gives his tight, and gives his heat away;
And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive
Comfort in morning,joy in the noon day.
“And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love,
And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face
Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.
“For when our souls have learn'd the heat to bear.
The cloud will vanish; we shall hear his voice,
Saying; ‘Come out from the grove, my lose A' care,
And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice.' ”
Thus did my mother say, and kissed me;
And thus i say to little English boy;
When 1 troni black and he from white cloud free.
And round the tent of God like lambs sve joy,
I’ll shade him from the heat till he can bear
To lean in joy upon our father’s knee;
And then I ‘11 stand and stroke his silver hair,
And be like him, and he svill then love me.

EDWARD LEAR
How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear
How pleasant to know .Mr. Lear!
W'ho has written such volumes ot stutl !
Some think him ill-tempered and queer,
But a few think him pleasant enough,
His mind is concrete and fastidious,
His nose is remarkably big;
His visage is more or less hideous,
His beard it resembles a wig,
He has ears, andtwo eyes, and ten lingers,
Leastways if you reckon two thumbs;
Long ago he was one ol the singers,
But now he is one of the dumbs.
He sits in a beautiful parlor,
W'lth hundreds of books on the wall;
 READING OTHER IJ O EWÿ 231

Ho drinks a great deal of Marsa la,

Bui rtevef gets tipsy at all
Ho has many friends, laymen and clerical;
Old Foss is the name of his cat;
His bndy is perfect!v spherical,
fie weareth a ruiiciiile hat,
Whep he walks in a waterproof white.
The children run after him sol
Calling out, “He's come out in his mght-
Gown, that crazy old Englishman, oh!”
He weeps by the side of the ocean,
He weeps on the top of the hill:
He purchases pancakes and lotion,
And chocolate shrimps from the mill.
He reads but he cannot speak Spanish.
He cannot abide ginger- beer;
Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish.
How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!

GERARD MANTEY HOPKINS

Fe/ix Randal
Felix Randal the farrier,0 O is he dead then? blacksmith
my duty' all ended.
Who have watched his mould of man, big-boned arid
hardy-handsome
Pining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it and some
Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended?
Sickness broke him. Impatient, he cursed at first, but mended
Being anointed and all; though a heavenlier heart began some
Months earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom
Tendered to him. Ah well, God rest him all road ever lie offended!
This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears.
Mv tongue had ra light thee comfort, touch had quenched
thy tears,
Ths- tears that touched im heart, child, Felix, pour Felix Randal,
How tar from then forethought ot, all thy more boisterous years,
When thou at tire random0 gnm forge, powerful ramshackle
amidst peers,
232 POETRY AND SOCIAL IDENTITY

Didst fcttlcc for the great grey drayhorse his bright shape
and battering sandal!

SYLVIA PLAIH
The Applicant
First, are you our sort of a person?
Do you wear
A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,
A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,
Stitches to show something’s missing? No, no? Then
How can we give you a tiling?
Stop crying.
Open your hand,
Empty? Empty. Here is a hand
To till it and willing
To bring teacups and roll away headaches
And do whatever you tell it.
Will you marry it?
It is guaranteed
To thumb shut your eyes at the end
And dissolve ot sorrow.
We make new stock from the salt.
1 notice you are stark naked.
How about this suit
—-
Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.
Will you marry it?
It is waterproof shatterproof, proof
Against fire and bombs through the roof.
Believe me, they’ll bury you in it.
Now your head, excuse me, is empty,
I have the ticket for that.
Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.
Well, what do you think ot that?
Naked as paper to start
But in twenty-five years she'll be silver,
In fifty, gold.
A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk.
 READING OTHER POEMS 233

It wort's, there is nothing wrong with it.

You have a hole, it’s a poultice,
You have an eye. it's an image,
My boy. it’s your last resort,
Will you marry it, marry it. marry it.

GARRETT HONGO
T7te Hottgo Store
29 Miff* Volcano
Hito, Hawaii
From a Photograph
My parents felt those tumblings
Coming deep from the earth's belly,
Thudding like the bell of the Buddhist Church.
Tremors in the ground swayed the baihinette
Where 1 lay squalling in soapy water.
My mother carried me around the house,
Hack through the orchids, ferns, and plumeria
Of that greenhouse world behind the store,
And jumped between gas pumps into the ear.
My father gave it the gun
And said, "Be quiet,” as he searched
The frequencies, flipping for the right station
(The radio squealing more loudly than 1 could cry).
And then even the echoes stopped —
The only sound the Ethel's grinding
And the bark and crackle of radio news
Saying stay home or go to church.
“Dees time she no blow!"
My father said, driving back
Over the red ash covering the road,
“J worried she went go for broke already!”
So in this print the size of a matchbook,
The dark skinny man. shirtless and grinning,
A toothpick ill the comer ol his smile,
Lifts a naked baby above his bead
—
Behind him the plate glass of the store only cracked
234 POETRY AND $»CLM luts i i J Y

DAVID MURA
An Argument: On 1942
For 3/}' Mother
W-ar Row's Chop $uey and Jinostike's grocery,
the temple where intense hovered and inspired
dense evening chants (prayers for Buddha's mercy,
colorless and deep), that day he washed , , ,
No, no, no, she tvlts. me. Why bring it back?
The camps are over. (Abo overly dramatic.}
Forget jJieyiÿ-stairred fu mrfrifct,0 scry sauce / scarf
mothi° on a stick: rice cakes
You’re like a terrier, David, gnawing a bone, an old. old trick . . .
Mostly we were bored. Women cooked and sewed,
men played blackjack, dug gardens, a hcnjo,Q toilet
Who noticed barbed wire, guards in the towers?
We were children, hunting stones, birds, wild flowers.
Yes, Mother bid tins of utsftemstta and eel
beneath the bed. And when the last was peeled,
clamped tight her lips, grossing thinner and thinner.
liut cancer not the camps made her throat blacker
, ,.And she didn't die then . . . after the war. in St. Paul,
you weren't even born. Ob [ know, I know, it's all
part ot your |ob, your way. but why can't you glean
how far we've come, how much i can't recall —
David, it was so long ago — how useless it seems . ,.

RJTA DOVF
IVingfoot Lake
<hidepnidi'iin' Da y, 11)64)
On her 36th birthday, Thomas had shown her
her first swimming pool. It had been
his 6v ante Color, exactly — just
so much of it, (lie swimmers* white arms jutting
into the chevrons of high society.
She had rolEcd tip her window
and told him to drive pn, fast.
 READING OTHER POEMS 235

Now this act of mercy: four daughters

dragging her to their husbands’ company picnic,
white families on one side and them
on the other, unpacking the same
squeeze bottles of Heinz, the same
waxy beef patties and Salem potato chip bags.
So he was dead for the fust time
on Fourth ofJuly
— ten years ago

hid been harder, Waiting for something to happen,

and ten years before that, the giris
like young horses eyeing the track.
Last August she stood alone for hours
in front ofthe T.V. set
as a crow’s wing moved slowly through
the white streets of government.
That brave swimming
scared her, like Joanna saying
Mother, we’if Afro-A merictins now!
What did she know about Africa?
Were there lakes like this one
with a rowboat pushed under the pier?
Or Thomas' Great Mississippi
with its sullen silks? (There was
the Nile but the Nile belonged
to God.) Where she came from
was the past, 12 miles into town
where nobody had locked their back door,
and Goodyear hadn’t begun to dream of a paik
under the company symbol, a white foot
sprouting two small wings.
 8

History and Regionality

Poetry is always interested in time and space. Sometimes these can

be very generally expressed, as we saw in “A slumber did my spirit seal."
Time ill this poem means simply past versus present.; space encloses hrst
two individuals, then the whole planet:

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
A slumber did my jjji'rit seal
A slumber did my spirit seal;
1 had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

Wat poetry is not only interested in such large general uses ofspace
and time. Et is also interested in time specified — in history. Especially
for nations emerging from colonial status — America after the Revolu¬
—
tion, Ireland after 1916 Instory needs to he made freshly significant,
newly sacred. Important dates need to be memorialized (as “The Star-
Spangled Banner” commemorates the battle ot Fort McHenry; as

2.37
 HISTORY AND REGIONALLY

William Butler Yeats's "Easter 1916" meditates on Ireland's Easter Ris¬

ing). Important heroes and heroines need to be immortalized (as John
GrecirleafWhittier's "Barbara Frietchie” salutes a semilegendary heroine
of the Revolution; as Yeats's "A Rose Tree" salutes Fadraic Pearse,
executed for his part in the Easter Rising). And poetry about history is
not only celebratory. Problematic aspects of history have to be investi¬
gated (as Herman Melville queries war enthusiasm in “The March into
Virginia” during the Civil War; as Adrienne Rich decries the 1953
execution of Ethel Rosenberg in "For Ethel Rosenberg"; as Seamus
Heaney scrutinizes the violent conflicts in Northern Ireland in
"North”).

History

Immediate challenges arise for a lyric poet who is writing a poem

about (or within or against) history. In the first place, written history' is
a narrative genre, and the history of a complex event (the American
Revolution, the Civil War in England leading to the execution of
Charles J, the Easter Rising) is not only narratively complicated, but
always politically disputed. The English narrate the American Revolu¬
tion from a point of view (that ofthe losing side) very different from the
celebratory view taken in American history books. Propaganda always
exists on both sides of any historical question, as on both sides of any
disputed ethical question. It is up to the poet to see beyond the simpli¬
fications of propaganda (always unfair to the intricacy of any disputed
event) and to present the crises of history in a way that does not diminish
their ambiguity and their painfulness.
How does the poet incorporate history within the miniature di¬
mensions of the lyric? There are several central techniques:
1. Focusing on a problem rather than on incidents;
2- Finding an emblematic scene or scenes,
3. Finding a symbolic or mythological equivalent for a historical ep¬
isode;
4. Seeing the human inside of the event as corresponding to the
historical outside;
5. Finding an epigrammatic summation;
6, Adopting a prophetic or philosophic view larger than that of a
mere eyewitness,
Let us see how these techniques come into play in Melville's Civil
War poem written in fear and dismay after the Union forces were twice

.
 HISTORY 239

routed by the Confederate army in the first and second battles of Ma¬
nassas(sometimes called the first and second battles of Bull Run). The
Union army — composed of young, patriotic, impulsive, untried re¬
cruits — marched gaily into battle, only to suffer carnage. The few who
survived had to march into battle once again, knowing, this cimet the
horrors ahead. Was their original innocence of any value? Can naive
ignorance be of ultimate political use? Melville begins his consideration
by reflecting on this problem: he admits how little we would under¬
—
take if we knew beforehand the “lets and bars" obstacles and hin¬
drances — that we would encounter:
HERMAN MELVILLE
The March into Virginia
Ending in the Eint Manassas (July 1861)
Did all the lets and bars appear
To every just or larger end,
Whence should come the trust and cheer?
Youth must its ignorant impulse lend
Age finds place in the rear, —
All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys,
The champions and enthusiasts of the stater
Turbid ardours and vain joys
NOE barrenly abate
—
Stimulants to the power mature,
Preparatives of fate.
Having stated the paradox that enthusiasm for svar is both ignorant(“All
wars are boyish, and are fought by boys”) and useful (the boys’ "vain
joys” and patriotic ardor bring forth the fruit of mature power, through
which one can hope for the reinstatement of the Union), Melville can
go on to set the scene of the boys’ heedless march into Virginia:
Who here forecasterh the event?
What heart but spurns at precedent
And warnings of the wise,
Contemned foreclosures of surprise?
The banners play, the bugles call,
The air is blue and prodigal.
No berrying parts', pleasure-wooed.
No picnic party in the May,
'
Ever went less ioth than they
Into that leafy neighbourhood.

.
240 HISTORY AND RECIDNALJIV

After this naturalistic scene painting, Melville breaks into 3 foreboding

symbolic discourse of myth. The intoxicated glee of the boys, compa¬
rable to that of the devotees of the wine god Bacchus, will lead them
into being sacrificed- They resemble, ill fact, the Hebrew children sac¬
rificed to the idol Moloch:

In Bacchic glee they file roward Fate,

Moloch's uninitiate;
Expectancy, and glad surmise
Of battle's unknown mysteries.

From his prophetic and mythological distance, Melville then returns, in

close focus, to a last snapshot ofthe emotional state of the naive boy.s as
they “file toward Fate":

All they fed is this: ’tis glory,

A rapture sharp, though transitory,
Yet lasting in belaureled story.
So they gaily go to fight,
Chatting left and laughing right.

At this point, the speaker ofthe poem, who had begun philosophy
ically and had continued scenicaliy, becomes once again a prophet,
foreseeing the end of these boys, some dead, some surviving the shame
of defeat to fight, a year later, the battle of second Manassas:

lint some who this blithe mood present,

As on in lightsome files they fare.
Shall die experienced ere three days are spent
Perish, enlightened by the volleyed glare;
Or shame survive, and, like to adamant,
—
The throe of Second Manassas sharc.
We can now see that Melville epitomizes the war for us by show¬
ing us three stages in an emblematic young soldier's experience: his
initial gaiety and desire for fame and glory, his "enlightenment" in the
volleyed glare as he learns, perishing, what war is; or, for one who
survives the shame of defeat, a third stage, beyond mere "enlighten¬
ment," in which the soldier becomes "like to adamant" in his stony and
steeled knowledge of degradation, violence, and death. By his philo¬
sophic problematic ng ofignorance arid courage, by his visual scenes of
carefree young soldiers, by his penetration of their emotional attitudes,
 HISTORY 241

by bis shorthand references to die mythic Bacchus and Moloch to rep¬

resent poles of blithe ignorance and pitiless extinction, by his schema¬
tizing the experience of war in three stages, and by his final prophecy
that the boys “shall die experienced" or shall share "the throe ofSecond
—
—
Manassas" Melville puts a year ofthe Civil War, and the problems it
raised for him, into the short confines of lyric,
Not all ofthese techniques appear in every historical poem, but the
poet always needs some of these strategies to make history' pliable to
lyric. Though Melville intermittently takes a philosophic position above
the scene of battle, it is clear from his inner snapshots of the recruits1
feelings that he sympathizes with the Union side, hoping that the youth¬
ful Union forces' “turbid ardours" will be useful to the country in
stimulating its ultimate Fate.
In some history poems, the poet is immediately engaged, writing
from within a particular moment, representing himself or herself as a
historically specified person, ofspecified political or historical allegiance.
and (as We will see) of specified geographic angm, This tradition in
American verse begins with Leaves of Crass, in which the author named
himself and his home: “Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the
sort ” and specified even his age, "1, now thirty-seven years old in
perfect health begin.” However, we notice that even this socially spec¬
ified self also identifies himself as “a kosmos,” that is, a representative
universe. The lyric poet, even when engaged in social self-specification,
intends representativeness as well. This is the case in Robert Lowell’s
unrhymed sonnet about the March on the Pentagon in 1967 protesting
the Vietnam War. Lowell took pan in the March (vividly described later
by Norman Mailer in TJif Annies of the .\ight), as the protesters went,
several abreast, toward the Pentagon — only to be routed by the Army:

ROBERT LOWELL
77IC March t
For Dwight :Macdonald
Under the too white marmoreal Lincoln Memorial,
the too tall marmoreal Washington Obelisk,
gazing into the too long reflecting pool,
the reddish trees, the withering autumn sky,
the remondess, amplified harangues for peace —
lovely to lock arms, to march absurdly locked
(unlocking to keep my wet glasses from slipping}
to see the cigarette match quaking in my fingers,
242 HrsTOttY AND R.ECIOMALJ I v

then to step off like green Union Army recruits

for the first Bull Run, sped by photographers.
the notables, the girls , .. fear, glory, chaos, rout...
our green army staggered out on the miles-long green fields,
met by the other army, the Martian, the ape, the hero,
his new-fangled rifle, his green new steel helmet.

it is clear that Lowell is remembering Melville's poem about the

"green Union Army recruits / for the first Bull Run” as he writes of his
own first foray into battle. But he is a middle-aged man, feeling absurd
in the fraternal political gesture of locked amis, hating {as only a poet
could) the awful propaganda slogans of the March being relentlessly
boomed out over his head by the marchers’ public address system. Nor
does the poet feel akin to the ideology affirmed by the state architecture
ofWashington: its marble monuments inspired by Rome(“marmoreal”)
and Egypt (“obelisk”), its supersiied conception of itself(which he see?
as too white, too tall, too long). He is no hero
— his glasses keep
slipping, his hands quake with fear. The poem is scenic with a vengeance
for its first eight lines, but the scenes are always infused with the poet’s
attitude toward what they show. Just when we wonder whether any¬
thing philosophic, epigrammatic, prophetic, or emblematic might come
along to sum up and give point to Lowell's procession of scenes, we
meet just what we have been expecting — first the allusion to Melville
as an epigrammatic summing up of ignorance about to be turned into
experience, then an emblematic series of nouns (“fear, glory, chaos,
rout”) summing up the stages of both political protest and armed war.
The poem returns, at the end, to a scenic mode, this time a scene not of
a march but of a confrontation, as the “green army" ofthe protesters is
met by the real Army in tactical gear. We see three “green’s" in suc¬
cession: the green (inexperienced) protesters, the “miles-long" ideolog¬
ically too-big green (grass) fields ofthe Washington Mall, and the literal
green metal ofthe Army soldier's helmet. This “irrational” repetition of
“green” in several different contexts makes the dosing scene feel epi¬
gram mafic, "tied together," “final."
And the closing scene, unlike the literal scenes preceding it, has
elements ofthe surreal. What does it seem like when you find yourself,
as an American protester, being confronted inimitally by your own
American Army, composed of green recruits like yourself? And how do
you feel about the Army now? You have a confused set of impressions
as you sec your first soldier in riot gear: “He looks like a Martian,
something out ofscience fiction; no, with his hulking posture he looks
more like an ape; but wait, this is OUT Army, he’s a hero; odd, he seems
 HL STORY 243

to have i new-fangled kind of ntic, not the kind 1 remember from

newsreebj lie’s the archetypal warrior, archaic, lie[meted, like the war¬
riors ol Troy, only his helmet is new, and it is made of steel, not
bronze." Some such latent content is contained v, ithin the last two lines,
a content more “intellectual" than the scenes with which the poem
opened, and therefore able to satisfy our desire that the poet “make
something" — l! only by revealing how confusing it is to be opposing
your own American Amiy - of his experience Though Lowell’s poem
is about .i specific historical event, and represents the poet himself not
only in lus physical being [Ins fear, his glasses) but also in lib political
raking of sides, it is a representative poem, too, about the confused
emotions Lowell feds in protesting the actions of his own govern¬
ment — a set of emotions anyone might feel,
A simpler “propaganda" poem written by a participant in the
Match would probably not have shown a sweating and awkward pro¬
tagonist with his glasses slipping down his nose; it scon Id certainly not
have called the peace messages ' the nsfierseJm. amplified bitfanguts for
peace1*; and it would not have seen the Army soldier as both ape and
hero. Its-, Lowell’s accuracy, both to bis own. motives for marching (the
critique of America’s imperial ambitions) and TO his own sense of ab¬
surdity (including his mixed reactions to the Army soldier) that makes
the poem humanly believable,
Even the simplest “history" poem usually has scene, epigram, feel¬
ing, and "philosophic" comment. I Lereis Laugstoti Hughes's little song-
and-echo poem, “World War 1]“;

LANGSTON HUGHES
World War ll
What a grand time was the wad
Oh, my, my!
What a grand time was the war!
My, my, tny!
In wartime we had tun,
Sorry that old war is done!
What a grand time was the war.
My, my!
Echo:
Did
Somebody
Die?
244 HISTORY ANI> RECIONAUTY

—
Here, Hughes is not writing as a socially specified singular self as a
black poet or as "Langston Hughes,” a man of a certain age living in a
certain city; rather, he writes a public chorus for the late 1940s, and
counterpoints the chorus with a single satiric and epigrammatic echo.
Hughes can sympathize with the chorus of voices praising wartime;
following the catastrophe of the 1929 Depression and its long dreary
aftermath of stinted lives, the plentifuljobs (in defense, in war work, in
communications and services) brought about by the war effort rejuve¬
nated many a poor family. The chorus has not a single dissenting voice,
as all join in for the refrain, ‘'Oh, my, my,” Who utters the haunting
echo? Is it the philosophic poet? Is it a forgotten Gold Star mother? Is it
the voice of history? Whoever it is. each of its words is significant. The
—
chorus'words all ran together horizontally “[n wartime we had fun."
But the Echo's voice runs vertically:

Did
Somebody
Die?

This is the way oracles speak: every word with a line to itself, every word
capitalized, every word in italics- These arc sacred words, whereas the
words of the chorus are profane words. By such simple means Hughes
shows us two comments on history, both “correct,” but irreconcilable.
One of the problems in reading history poems is that one has to
know something about history, and about the import of historical events
within a given culture. Someone who knew nothing about the Civil
War, or the March on Washington, or about the economic boom
brought by World War l|, would have difficulty' taking in the attitudes
and implications of these poems by Melville, Lowell, and Hughes. To
this extent, lyric poets writing history poems have to depend on the
shared knowledge ofa common culture — and American readers wish¬
ing to understand an English poem about, say, the English Civil War
have to learn, perhaps, many things that an English reader would have
learned in school and that the poet took for granted in composing the
poem. It is up to the poet to give the reader as much information as
possible in the poem, but there is a limit to what can be conveyed in a
short space. The generalized lyric usually has a longer shelf-life than the
historically specified lyric because it does not make such particular
demands on the reader. Yet nothing matches the vivid scenic, topical,
and philosophic intensity ofthe best history poems, especially as they arc
first encountered by the audience to whom their topic is an urgent and
contemporary one.

I
 HISTORY 245

“Revisionary" history poems atm to turn the received view of a

given historical circumstance upside down. War was Created heroically
by classical literature, and the quotation from the Roman poet Horace,
"Duke el decorum est pro patria mori" (“It is sweet and fitting to die
forone’s country"), had been taken as the epitome ofthe proper attitude
for young men going off to war. The introduction of Such inhuman
lighting methods as poison gas in World War l made a revisionary view
of war almost inevitable, and the most famous poem of that war, dis¬
mantling armed struggle as a noble act, was composed by the English
poet Wilfred Owen, who died in the war in 1918, You will see that in
spite ofthe revisionary aims ofthe poem, it uses the familiar strategies of
scenic presentation, crucial event, emotional insight, a mythic interlude
(here, a recurrent dream), and epigrammatic summation (via Horace), It
is spoken not by someone removed at a philosophic distance, but by one
of the soldiers undergoing a gas attack:

WILFRED OWEN
Duke Et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hagj, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge,
Men marched asleep, Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shud, AH went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines'1 that dropped behind, gas shells
—
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time:
lint someone still svas yelling out and stumbling
And fiound’nng like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through die misty panes and chick greeti light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning,
(F in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we Hung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
246 HISTORY AND KEGIONAUTY

Come gargling from the froth -corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Duke et decorum est
Pro patria mori,
Owen chooses as a form for his poem the alternately rhyming
iambic pentameter four-line stanza known as the “heroic quatrain’’
because it was used for noble narratives. The irony of attaching its
heroic lineage to the squalor and tragedy of gas warfare must have
appealed to the revision ary poet. “Dulce Et Decorum Est" reads at
first like a realistic, unshaped report. Owen jams his quatrains together
to obscure the regularity of his form (one can read the poem without
realizing, at first, that it is written in rhyming quatrains)- However, his
report is “broken” by the shortest passage

— — the two-line recurrent

dream of the dying gassed man which is marked off from the nest
of the poem not only by its brevity and its dream-based present tense,
but also by its repetition of an identical rhyme-word: “drowning”
rhymes with “drowning,”

Regionality

—
When the generalized space of lyric the vague spatial context.
say, “A slumber did my spirit seal” — gives way to a particular cli¬
of
mate, geography, and scenery, we say that we have a regional poem.
Wordsworth's poetry has made the Lake District ofnorthern England a
place of tourism and literary pilgrimage; Hopkins made the scenery of
North Wales enter English poetry: Longfellow, Whittier, Frost, and
Lowell became famous for their poems of New England; Robinson
Jeffers immortalized Big Sur on the California coast: and Elizabeth
Bishop, though American by birth, wrote many memorable pcumis about
the landscapes of Brazil. These art only a few relatively recent examples,
In older countries, descriptive poems (and landscape paintings) blanket
the whole landscape: there is scarcely a town in Italv that has not been
represented by a painter or a poet of classical or modern times
The power of imagination to clothe a landscape in powerful allu¬
sive images is nowhere better seen than in Robert Lowell's “The Quaker
Graveyard in Nantucket." This is a powerful, violent, and tumultuous
poem, boiling up from the page as it follows the poet's meditations as he
 It. i c l o MAI r r V 247

looks nit ilit graveyard in NantudteE where the Quaker whalers buried
their dead; Yet when one gee4; and looks at that very graveyard, it is
simply a placid green slope, fbr rile most pari unmarked by headstones.
lr is Lowell's poem that lias transformed that placid and uninformative
.space into a powerful container of ocean combers, whaling ships,
wounded whales, harpoons, dead bodies, arid fearful prayers. Tn visit che
graveyard before, and then after, reading Lowell’s poem is to see how
regional poetry clothes the land in reminiscence, intimations of history,
and imaginative power. The same is true of Longfellow's poem " The
Jewish Cemetery in Newport.” One might easily pass by an old cem¬
etery with graves inscribed in Hebrew letters; but after reading Long¬
fellow’s meditation on the early Jewish settlers, now vanished into
“the long, mysterious Exodus of death,” one sees the cemetery with
different eyes.
Though European colonizers thought the New World bare of
culture, Native Americans had already consecrated certain lands and
mountains as sacred, and had composed poetry about them, rhis first
acculturation of space in the United States has been iti great part lost.
with many of the Indian languages and their oral literatures fallen into
extinction; But an imaginative claim to American territory is now being
repeated by Native American poets tike Sherman Alexie, who recalls, in
his poem “On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City," a well
meaning woman whose ideas of American history, American landscape,
and American literature start with the Revolutionary period and end
with Thorean:

SHERMAN ALEXIE
OII the Amtrakfrom Boston tu New York City
The white woman across the aisle from me says, “Look,
look ar all the history, chat house
On the lull there is over two hundred years old."
as she points our the window past me
it i to svhat she has been taught. I have learned
little more about American history during my few days
back East than what l expected and t"aT less
of what we should all know of" the tribal stories
whose architecture is 15,000 years older
than the comers of the house that sits
imiseumed cm the bill “Walden Pond,"
the woman on the train asks, "[Did you set Walden Pond"'
248 HISTORY A N n KECIONALITY

and ! don’t have a cruel enough heart to break

her own by telling her there are five Walden Ponds
on my little reservation out West
and at least a hundred more surrounding Spokane,
the city I pretend to call my home, “Listen."
I could have told her. “I don't give a shit
about Walden, f know the Indians were living stories
around that pond before Walden's grandparents were bom
and before his grandparents’ grandparents were born,
1
I’m tired ot hearing about Pon-fucking-Henley saving it. too,
because that's redundant, tt" Don Henley’s brothers and sisters
and mothers and fathers hadn’t come here in the first place
then nothing would need to be saved."
But I didn’t say a word to the woman about Walden
Pond because she smiled so much arid seemed delighted
chat 1 thought to bring her an orange juice
back from the food car. I respect elders
of every color. All I really did was eat
my tasteless sandwich, drink my Diet Pepsi
and nod tny head whenever the woman pointed out
another little piece of her country’s history
while 1, as all Indians have done
since this war began, made plans
for what I would do and say the next time
somebody from the enemy thought I was one of their own,
The first English colonists, as Robert Frost says in “The Gift
Outright," felt estranged in America because their own culture was
English, They lived on land they had conquered, but they were still
"unpossessed" by it. It was not until they (we)broke the tie to England,
Frost argues, that we could give ourselves to the land “vaguely realizing
westward, / But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced," It was the hope ot
writers to give that land sEories, art, enhancement. By writing narrative
poems life “The Wreck of the I lesperus” (about t wreck oil the Ness1
England shore), "Evangeline” (about the exile of the Acadians), and
Hiawatha (about Indians of New England), Longfellow hoped to give to

Don Henley: A popular musician who Organired benefit concerts to save Wal¬
den pondfrom real estate developers, 1
 R Ef;[Of*'A 4 : I V 24<#

the unstoried Lind the jura of legend lint Longfellow also wrote New
England regional lyrics without narrative aim, like his famous poem
about the coastal waters, “ The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls'
The tide rises, the tide tails,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls:
Along i he sea-sands damp and brown
The traveller hastens toward the town,
And the tide rises, the tide falls,

Is this J poem that a poet who had grown up in Tulsa would write?
Probably not; and in sensing chat a child ot the desert or the prairie
would find rhythms not in the tides but perhaps in the winds, would
write not about the wreck of the Hesperus but about the devastation
caused by a tornado, we begin to see how the poetry ot a large country
like the United States (or Russia, or China) necessarily begins to have a
large component of regional difference.
LSut the “regional" poet can also be one whose sense of a place is
sharpened by coming to that landscape late in life, Elizabeth bishop s
poems ot brazil, such as "Questions of Travel." convey the mixed sense
of estrangement combined with wonder and amazement chat is felt by
one to whom the tropics were a late revelation;

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams

ham,' too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow- morion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes. . . „
Should we have Stayed at home and thought of here? . . .
But surely it would have been a pity
not ro have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated iti their beauty.
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed Ul pink, , , ,

The poet never describes landscape without entering it ki nest hel¬

ically. feeling the motion of the crowded streams, humanizing the trees
into noble pan con li mists. Landscape in poetry is always pryjeded tfHtuwrd

/win the writitig self, which lias, before the composition of the poem, ab¬
sorbed it ,md colored it with the personality ot the writer, it is not "Lon¬
don that wc see in William Make's “London." which begins,“1 wander
’
2J0 HISTORY AND IUÿIONALJU

through each charter’d street.” but rather Loudon-as-interpreted by-

Blake. Similarly, it is not “London" that we sec in Wordsworth1*
'‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge," but rather 'London-aj- 1

i 1 1fcrp ret ed- by-Word swor i h" or WOTds worth - to n i ed-into - London.’
11 f

Because Wordsworth loved tranquil and sublime scenery, line bustle of

daytime London repelled him; yet he found a way to discover "his" Lon¬
don, a London that could resemble hitn and his way of being. It was the
London ofdawn,when the air was free ofsmoke and the Thames was Ifec
of barges a Ltd the streets free of noise, when the architectural features of
the city seemed almost like items in a natural landscape:

WJI.I.IAM WORDSWORTH
Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
Earth hath anything to show more fair:
not
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the m timing; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air;
Never did smt more beautifully steep
In liis splendour, valley, rock, or lull;
tirst
Ne’er saw L never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth ar his own sweet will:
15e.tr find! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying Still!

just as the “history poem" must have a problem, and scenes to

illustrate it, and a point nt view from which to consider it, and a
summing-up of insight some wh ere in its close, so the “geography poem
must have a problem
—
and scenes, and a point of view, and a “solu
Lion," if only temporary, to the problem. That is, description is never
“merely description.” Wordsworth's powerful visual sense, repelled by
daytime London, is nonetheless forced to concede aesthetic beauty to
dawn Loudon - is forced oven to concede that the sight of man’s most
ambitious creative product — a city — is more impressive than the sight
of' nature: “Never did sun more beautifully steep . , , valley, rock, or
hill." As the list “valley, rock, or hill” is compared to the list “Ships,
towers, domes, theatres, arid temples," it is dear that the City wins.
 IN B Rd E F : H IM OHV ANH R.ECLOHALLTY 251

N LI cure has “majesty.” ofcourse, but its majesty' in not "touching" an rhe
majesty of the human city, a human product, is. Yet the beauty of the
morning is only a temporary "garment” that the City briefly wears; and
rlie tension between the satisfying, because unchanging, beauty of the
valley or hill and the temporary, but touching, majesty of the City gives
the poem its oscillations of feeling as the poet wrestle's with Ins own taste,
and concedes to the fallen majesty ofthe human over the serene majesty
of his beloved nature.

In Brief: History and Regionally

Irl thinking about histone poems, the mam thing to remember is

chat there is always a tension between the copiousness of history and the
brevity of lyric. To see how a structure as brief as lyric can present,
speculate on, and judge history is to see a form straining against its own
limits When it succeeds, it strikes us as a triumph ofstyle over difficulty.
It is also use till to remember that the history poem has been a genre
chiefly undertaken, until recently, by men, since they were the group
admitted to warfare, political lights, and historical decision making. As
women increasingly take on political responsibility, history' will be
"owned" by women as much .as by men, and “poems on affairs of slate”
will be written by men and women alike. The notable public poems
written m the last several years by such poets as Adnenne Rich, Amy
Clampitt; and June Graham (on such topics as the atomic bomb, the
Vietnam War Memorial, and the U 52 bombers on perpetual alert) show
the increasing intervention of women’s poetry m political life.
When you encounter a poem of geography or regjonaliry, ask
yourself how it embodies a problem and how landscape has been “lyr
icized" — that is, made a bearer ofhuman feeling. Usually there will be¬
at least two points of view in the- poem (as in Bishop's mixed feelings
about Brazil, and Wordsworth's mixed feelings about London), these
points oi view represent an emotional, and even a moral, quarrel within
the poet. As Marianne Moore says In “The Steeple-Jack," speaking of a
New England town in LI storm, "It is a privilege to SCe so / much
confusion.' And that is indubitably true. At the same time, her protag¬
onist. "sees boats //at sea progress white and rigid as if in / LI groove"
and likes that “elegance of which / the source is not bravado " Should
the modern American poem throw itself open to the privilege of con¬
fusion, or should it have a formal elegance not defensive but self-
generated? Moore wants — and attains — both; she is famous for her
252 HhiOK Y ‘VD REGIÿKAHTY

profusion of detail and her unobtrusive elegance of formulation. Her

New England town is herself and she becomes its displays, whether
dynamic or rigid. It is always the author that the landscape reveals to us;
and the landscape of lyric is always revelatory because the author is
within it, projecting it from its preliminary reconstitution in (lie imag¬
ination.

Reading Other Poems

Ask yourselfwhat the time-axis and [he space-axis is for each ofthe
poems that follow. Does the poem take place over time, and if so, how
many episodes does it show?(You can trace, through "Tintcm Abbey,
Wordsworth’s entire development to adulthood, from his "glad annual
movements" as a child to hjs politic at disillusion to his present restora¬
tion,.j Docs the poem bring in several different spaces? {Look at "Ttmern

Abbey ’ and see whether it all takes place outdoors.} Some poems, like
W. S Merwirfs "The Asians Dying" (about the Vietnam War) treat
only one episode of time. How is that episode made significant? Does
the poem refer as Robert Hayden’s docs to a tunc in the hEstoric.il past?
It so, what docs that epoch mean to the speaker1 Why would a
nineteenth-century man such as Keats write a poem about ancient
Greece, or a twentieth-century woman such as bishop write a poem
about si xtee nth-century Brazil? It the poem treats a contemporary epi¬
sode (as Whitman treats Lincoln’s death, as Yeats treats the 1916 Irish
insurrection), hose is the chaos of history ordered into the brief space of
a lyric?
Docs the poem move from space to space as it goes along, or does
it remain in one place? How big is the space delineated in the poem?
(That is, would Stevens’s "Anecdote” be a different poem if it lacked the
words "wilderness" nr “Tennessee ?) It the poem treats imagined spaces
(is Coleridge does in the fantastic visions tifÿKubla Kli,nl"(l, how arc
those spaces laid out and demarcated? Derek Walcott writes the rela¬
tively new genre, the airplane poem: he cakes oft" from Love Field,
Dallas, and contemplates the state of the nation ifom an enormous
height (a height no one could see from prior to the twentieth century),
What advantages(and disadvantages) come from writing at such a spatial
distance? Does Ins adaptation of Dante's terta rinia suggest a (perhaps
hellish) expanse to be gazed at?
Jorie Graham contemplates a barbed-wire-enclosed field full of
B-52 bombers on perpetual alert, kept running always in case they muse
respond instantly to .111 enemy threat Her field of vision then takes in
 READING OTHTP. Por.sis 253

two more episodes

— of the murder of the first
one of a mam age, one
poet, Orpheus, Can you fink these three episodes, one in pub fie space,
one in private spate, one in mythological space? Lowell's For the
11

Union Dead,” too, takes place in several spaces, and also over several
times, stretching from the R evolutionary War to the poet's current
America of forced school integration and New England decline (sym¬
bolized by the destruction of the Boston Common to make an under
ground garage for the cars that have invaded the city) Can you track
Lowell’s spaces and times, and suggest some reasons why the poem does
not proceed chronologically in time or iu some ordered spatial way?
Simon Ortiz's poem, too, is ordered by both space and time, as arc many
quest poems. What are its temporal and spatial coordinates* What is the
object of its quest? Robert Hayden’s poem enacts itself in a time and
place tersely announced by its title. What do the two parts of the poem
tell us about ‘'eight" and “Mississippi”?

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

ffitbfd KW
Or JI Hdiofi in a Drrain. H Fraginart
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A ststdy pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bea ring tree;
And here Were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery'
But obi that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place] as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
by woman wailing for her demon lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

' Ruler of the Mongol dynasty m thirteenth century China. Coleridge has in¬
vented the iripo£r<irhy and place names in die poem
254 HISTORY AND REGIONALITY

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

A mighty tout]tain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man.
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A stinny pleasure dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once 1 saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played.
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could 1 revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ‘twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should sec them there,
And all should cry. Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And dose your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

I
 ttEARirtc; Or i! ik Pot M 5 255

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
Lines Composed a Feu* Miles above Tirttem Ahhey on
Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour
July 13, 179ft
Five years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft mEand murmur. Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape svath the quiet of the sky.
The Jay is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
I hose plots of cottage ground, these orchard tufts.
Which .it this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are dad in one green hue, and lose themselves
’Mid groves and copses. Once again i see
These hedgerows, hardly hedgerows, little lines
Of sportive wood mn wild; these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit’s cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sics alone.
These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye;
but Ott, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities. I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind.
With tranquil restoration feelings too
Of unremvmbered pleasure; such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On tli at best portion ot a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unnemembered, acts
Of kindness and ot love. Nor less, 1 trust,
To them f may have owed another gift.
256 HISTORY AUD REGIO.NALITY

Of aspect more .sublime; that blessed mood,

In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened — that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on —
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In bods1, and become a living soul,
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power ofjoy.
We see into the life of things.
If this
Be but a vain belief, yet, ohi how oft —
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Ofjoyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart —
How oft, in spirit, have J turned to thee,
O sylvan Wyef thou wanderer Through the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!
And now, with gleams of half- extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity',
The picture ofthe mind revives again:
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
for future years. And so 1 dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these lulls: when like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Ofthe deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led — more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads than one
Who sought the thing he loved For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
—
To me was all in all. 1 cannot paint
What then 1 was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,
 READING OTHER POEMS 25?

The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,

Their colors and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye, — That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures, Not for this
Faint 1, noT mourn nor murmur; other gifts
Have followed; for such loss,[ would believe,
Abundant recompense. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor gracing, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And J have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought.
And rolls through all things. Therefore am 1 still
A lover of the meadows and the woods.
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
-—
Of eye, and car both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognize
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being,
Nor perchance,
If l were not thus taught, should 1 the more
Suffer my genial spirits to decay:
For thou art with me here upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,'

He it referring to his niter, Dorothy Wordsworth ( 1771—1 writer and

diirist.
258 HISTORY AND REGIONAL ITY

My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice 1 catch

The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once.
My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege.
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy; for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e*er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain winds be free
To blow against thee; and, in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling place
For all sweet sounds and harmonics; oh! then,
if solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Oftender joy wilt thou remember me,
And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance
If 1 should be where 1 no more can hear
—
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
—
Of past existence wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together; and that I, so long
A worshipper of Nature, hither came
Unwearied in that service; rather siy
—
With warmer love oh! with far deeper zeal
Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
 READING OTHER POEMS 259

Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,

And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!

JOHN KEATS
Ode on a Grecian Urn
1
Thou still bride of quietness,
pn ravished
Thou foster child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?1
What men or gods are these? What maidens loath?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
2
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter: therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual tar, but, more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
l3old Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
—
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed

Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied.
Forever piping, songs forever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
Forever warm and still to be enjoyed,

Traditional pistard landscapes.

2fjfl HiSTOkY AMU KnOICUVALTTY

Forever panting, anti forever young;

AN breathing human passion far above,
'['hat leaves a heart high -Sorrowful and cloyed,
A bunfung forehead, and a parching tongue.
4
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands dressed?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets forevermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.
5
G A trie shape! Fair attitude! with brede0 embroidery
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, Silent form, dost tease tis out of thought
As doth eternity; Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of Other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
''/joiiify i'i truth, truth btauty, — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye peed to know..’’

WAI T WHITMAN
FFTicn Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom ’4
1
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
1 mourn'd, and yet shall mourn uiih ever-returning spring.
Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac bloom mg perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.
 REAPING OTHER POEMS 261

2
O powerful western fallen star!
O shades of night — Q moody, tearful night!
—
O great star disappear’d O the black murk that hides the star!
O cruel hands that hold me powerless — O helpless soul of me!
O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul.
J
Jn the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the white-wash’d
palings,
Stands the lilac -bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich
green,
With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume
strong 1 love,
—
With every leaf a miracle and from this bush in the dooryard,
With delicate-color'd blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich
green,
A sprig with its flower I break,
4
In the swamp in secluded recesses,
A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.
Solitary the thrush,
The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song.
Song of the bleeding throat,
Ueath’s outlet song of life, (for well dear brother 1 know,
It" thou wast not granted to sing thou would’st surely die.)
5
Over the breast of the spring, the land, amid cities,
Amid lanes and through old woods, where lately the violets peep'd
from the ground, spotting the gray debris,
Amid the grass in the fields each side of the lanes, passing the
endless grass,
Passing the yellow-spear’d wheat, every grain from its shroud in
the dark-brown fields uprisen,
Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink m the orchards,
Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave,
Night and day journeys a coffin.
262 HISTORY A NO RECIONALITY

6
Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,1
Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land,
With the pomp of the inloop rd flags with the cities draped in black,
With the show ofthe State? themselves as of crape-veil’d women
standing,
With processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night,
With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and the
unbared head?,
With the waiting depot, the arriving cofFm, and the sombre faces,
With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising
strong and solemn,
With all the mournful Voices of the dirges pour’d around the
coffin,
The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs
these you journey,
— where amid
With the tolling tolling bells’ perpetual clang,
Here, coffin that slowly passes,
I give you my sprig of lilac.
7
(Nor for you, for one alone,
Blossoms and branches green to coffins all 1 bring,
For fresh as the morning, thus would 1 chant a song for you O sane
and sacred death.
All over bouquets of roses,
O death, I cover you over with roses and early lilies,
But mostly and now the lilac that blooms the first,
Copious 1 break, 1 break the sprigs from the bushes,
With loaded arms I tome, pouring for you,
For you and the coffins all of you O death.)
S
O western orb sailing the heaven,
Now I know what you must have meant as a month since I w alk’d,
As 1 walk’d in silence the transparent shadowy night,
A? I saw you had something to tell as you bent to nic night after
night,

.
1
Lincoln's funeral procession traveled from Washington. I1C-, to Springfield,
I Hi noil, Hopping along the way SO that people could honor the slain president.
 READING OTHER POEMS 26i

As you droop'd from the sky low down as if to my side,(while the

other stars all look'd on,)
As we wander’d together the solemn night,(for something I know
not what kept me from sleep.)
As the night advanced, and I saw on the rim of the west how full
you were of woe,
As I stood on the rising ground in the breeze in the cool trans¬
parent night,
As I watch’d where you pass’d and was lost in the nethetward black
of the night,
As my soul in its trouble dissatisfied sank, as where you sad orb.
Concluded, dropt in the night, and was gone.
9
Sing on there in the swamp,
O singer bashful and tender, I hear your notes, I hear your call,
1 hear, I come presently, \ understand you,
But a moment I linger, for the lustrous star has detain’d me,
The star my departing comrade holds and detains me.
10
O how shall 1 warble myself for the dead one there I loved?
And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has
gone?
And whst shall my perfume be for the grave of him I love?
Sea-winds blown from east and west,
Blown from the Eastern sea and blown from the Western sea, till
there on the prairies meeting,
These and with these and the breach of my chant,
1'll perfume the grave of him I love,
1\
O what shall I hang on the chamber walls?
And what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls.
To adorn the burial-house of him I love?
Pictures of growing spring and farms and homes,
With the Fourth-moil til eve at sundown, and the gray smoke lucid
and bright,
With floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking
sun, burning, expanding the air,
With the fresh sweet herbage under foot, and the pale green leaves
of the trees prolific,
2<t4 HISTORY JL EG I O N A LITV

In the distance the flowing glaze, the breast of the river, with a
wind -dapple here and there,
With ranging hills on the banks, with many a line against the sky,
and shadows,
Atid tile citv at hand with dwelling! so dense, and stacks of chim¬
neys,
And all the scenes of life and the workshops, and the workmen
homeward returning.
12
Lo, body and soul — this Land,
My own Manhattan with spirts, and the sparkling and hurrying
tides, and the ships,
The varied and ample land, the South and the North in the light,
Ohio's shores and flashing Missouri,
And ever the far-sprtading prairies Cover’d with grass and corn.
Lo, the most excellent sun so calm and haughty,
The violet and purple mom wirh just-felt breezes,
The gentle soft-bom measureless light,
The miracle spreading bathing all, the fulfill’d noon,
The coming eve delicious, the welcome night and the stars,
Over my cities shining all, enveloping man and land.
13
Sing on, sing on you gray-brown bird,
Sing from the swamps, the recesses, pour your chant from the
bushes,
Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines.
Sing on dearest brother, warble your needy song,
Loud human song, with voice of uttermost woe.
O liquid and free and tender!
—
O wild and loose to my soul O wondrous singer!
You only 1 hear — yet the star holds me,(but will soon depart,)
Yet the lilac with mastering odor holds me.
14
Now while i sat in the day and look'd forth,
In the dose ofthe day with its light and the fields ofspring, and the
farmers preparing their crops,
In the large unconscious scenery of my land with its lakes and
forests,
 K tAUinui OTHER. POEMS 265

In the heavenly aerial beauty, (after the perturb'd winds and the
storms,)
Under the arching heavens ofthe afternoon swift passing, and the
voices of children and women,
The many-moving sea-tides, and l saw the ships how they sail’d,
And the summer approaching with richness, and the fields all busy
with labor.
And the infinite separate houses, how they all went on, each with
its meals and minutia of daily usages,
And the streets how their throbbings throbb’d, and the cities

—
pent lo, then and them,
Falling upon them all and among them all, enveloping me with the
nest,
Appear'd the cloud, appear’d the long black trail,
And 1 knew death, its thought,and the sacred knowledge ofdeath.
Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me,
And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,
And I in the middle as with companions, and as holding the hands
of companions,
I fled forth to the hiding receiving night that talks not,
Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the
dimness,
To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still.
And the singer so shy to the rest receiv'd me,
The gray-brown bird I know receiv'd us comrades three,
And he sang the carol of death, and a verse for him I love.
From deep secluded recesses,
From the fragrant cedars and the ghastly pines so still.
Came the carol of the bird.
And the charm ofthe carol rapt me,
As 1 held as if by their hands tny comrades in the night,
And the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird.
Come lovely and soothing death,
Undulate round the uvrld, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day , rii llir night, to all, ten Ciitli,
&n»irr or later delicate death,
Prais'd he thefathomless universe,
For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,
266 HISTOKY AKO KECTOK/LITV

—
Andfor love, su>eet love but prunet praise!praise!
For the sttre-enmnding arms of cool-enfolding death.
Dark mother always gliding near with softfeet,
Have time chanted for thee a chant offiilles t welcome?
Then l chant itfor thee, l glorify thee above all,
I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.
Approach strong deliveress.
When H is so, when thou hast taken them Ijoyously sing the dead,
Lost in the lovingfloating ocean of thee,
Laved in theflood of thy bliss O death.
From me to thee glad serenades,
Dancesfor thee l propose saluting thee, adornments and/castingsfor thee,
And the sights of the open landscape and the high-spread sky are fitting,
And life and tkefields, and the huge and thoughtful night.
Tfte night in silence under many a star,
Tfie ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know,
And the soul turning to thee O vast and well-veil'd death ,
And the body gratefully nestling dose to thee.
Over the tree-tops Ifloat thee a song,
Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriadfields and the prairies
wide,
Over the dense-pack'd cities all and the teeming wharves and ivays,
Ifloat this carol with joy, with joy to thee O death.
id
To the tally of my soul,
Loud and strong kept up the gray-brown bind,
With pure deliberate notes spreading filling the night,
Loud in the pines and cedars dim,
Clear in the freshness moist and the Swamp-perfume,
And I with my comrades there in the night.
While my sight that was bound in my eyes undosed,
As to long panoramas of visions.
And I saw askant the armies,
]saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags
Home through the smoke of the battles and pierc'd with missiles I
saw them,
And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and tom and
bloody,
 IL t A D!N c OTHER POEMS 26?

And at last but a few shreds left on the staRs.(and all in silence,)
And the staffs all splinter'd and broken.
f saw battle-corpses, myriads of them*
And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,
I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers ofthe war*
But J saw they were not as was thought,
They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer'd not,
The living remain’d and suffer’d, the mother suffer’d,
And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer'd,
And the armies that remain'd suffer’d,
16
Passing the visions, passing the night,
Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades’ hands,
Passing the song of the hermit bird Aid the tallying song of my
soul,
Victorious song, death’s outlet song, yet varying ever-altering song.
As lose and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding
the night,
Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning* and yet again
bursting with joy,
Covering the earth and filling the spread of the heaven,
As that powerful psalm in the night 1 heard from recesses,
Passing, I leave thee lilac with heart-shaped leaves,
I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with
spring.
1 cease from my song for thee,
From my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, communing
with thee,
O comrade lustrous with silver face in the night
Yet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night,
The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird,
And the tallying chant, the echo arous'd in my soul,
With the lustrous and drooping star with the countenance full of
woe*
With the holders bolding my hand nearing the call of the bird.
Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep,
for the dead I loved so well,
—
For the sweetest, wisest sou! ofall my days and lands and this for
bis dear sake,
Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.
268 HISTORY AND REGIONAL IT Y

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Easter 19161
I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid facts
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before 1 had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
being certain that they and I
Hut lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A ternble beauts* is bom.
That woman’s days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers'ÿ
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;’
This other his helper and friend*
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man 1 had dreamed

The title refers to tin* Enter Rebellion on Apnl 2a, 191 ft Republicans seized
buildings and a part in the center of Dublin. They were killed or captured by Apnl 29
and the leaders were executed in May
Yeats's friend. Countess Mjrkiewiez, nee Constance Gore-Booth 1 1 fK>S-1927 !ÿ.
was involved in the rebellion
Pacruk Pearve(I879- 1916), the founder <>f St Enda’s School (or liny J( Kaih-
fiimhan near Dublin, was one of the leaders ofthe tebdlion He was also a poer. (The
winged horse is Pegasus, a symbol ot poetic inspiration.)
1
Thomas MacDonagh (1H7H poei ami dramatist.
 READING Onun POEMS 269

A drunken, Vainglorious lout.'

He had done most hi tier wrong
To some who are near my lie art,
Yet J number him in che song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly;
A terrible beauty is born.
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream,
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow ofcloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within JC;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live;
The stone’s in the midst of all.
Too Song a sacrifice
Can mate a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
Thar is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur mime upon name,
As a mother names her child
Whet: sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after ajl?
E-or England may keep faith
For all that is done and said fi

’ Major Thomas Mai Etude un married 10 Maud Cuimc, whom Yeats loved
'ÿ

Ellwand had prom Bed Home Rule ior Ireland.

270 l€ I STORY ANl) K f-. U H>N M I TV

We know [heir dream; enough

To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess oflove
bewildered them till they died'
E write it out in a verse —
MacDonagh and MjcDridc
And Connolly and Pc arse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly;
A terrible beauty is born.

WALLACE STEVENS
Anecdote of the Jar
I placed a jar in rennessee,
Aiid round it was, upon a hill.
li made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill,
The wilderness rose up tea it.
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon rite ground
And tall and of a port in air,
It look dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

ROBERT LOWELL
For the Union Dead
l-Relitiquiinl OIIUII'H Sentm Rem AiUirnm.
The old South Boston Aquarium stands
jn a Ssh.ir.i ot snow now, Its broken windows are boa riled.

5t>ldiets who died lighting lor the North in ihv Civil War. The poem is written
bronze l"..L|: - rt-Eit r opposite the Massachusetts Sdte J-inuse on Beacon Street, in
Bottom the nLcimnut'iit, by Augustus St. Gaudeits(]H4ÿ-1 Hl>7y coiiuittTiitiniei Colonel
Robert fMould Shaw itliei cnuunjnded the tint all- Negro regiment in thc
North, and who was killed while Leading In attack on Fort Wagner m Smith Carolina
'I hr monument represents Slum on horseback flanked by Negro fom soldiers.
!
Lu-wt'll has changed the iimriptiou On the rtUSiIltbSleiH ti'Om the singular to the
plural, so rlut it reads: " I hey leave everything behind to serve ihe Republic.'
 READ INC. OTHEK POEMS 27]

The brume weathervane cud ' hiiÿ lost half its scales.
The airÿ1 tanks are diy.
Once m,y nose cfjwled like a snail on the glass;
my hand singled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses ot the cowed, compliant tish.
My hand draws back. 1 often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
ofthe fish and reptile. One morning Iasi March,
! pressed against the new barbed and galvanized
fence on the Boston Common.4 Behind their cage.
yellow dinosaur Steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up cons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage."1

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic

sandpilcs in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling State home,
shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St, Gardens’ shaking Civil War relief.
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.
Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
Jt the dedication,
William James" could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe
Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city’s throat,
Its Colonel is as lean
us a compass-needle.
He has an angry wrenlike vigilance.
a greyhound's gentle tauiness;

’Codfish, the lymbol of Boston,

* E’jrk 1.ic ILK1, the StJ to House.
'Tho emisrruciicjii of the jiingc beneath the C.onmion wai attended by j>rart and
corruption
" Philosopher Hid psychologic [!W2-mO}

_
212 H 1 STQ k V A N 13 l< i: f.l rON.ILITV

hv seems to wince at pleasure,

and suffocate for privacy.
He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in nun’s lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die —
when lie leads his black soldiers to death,
he Cannot hend his hack.
(In a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of(he Grand Army of the Republic.
The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year —
wasp-w,listed, they dole over muskets
and muse through their sideburns , .
Shaw’s lather wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with Ins "niggers."'
The ditch is nearer,
There are no statues for the last war here;
oti Hoylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima bailing
over a M osier Safe, the “Rock of Ages”
that survived the blast, Space is neater,
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school children*1 rise like balloons.
Colonel Shaw
is rid mg on his bubble,
he Waits
for the blessed break.
The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cats nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

Shaw’s father could have had his Man's body brought hni tie (officers bod that
privilege, while infantry were buried where rhey Cell), but lie refilled. knowing his sen'1'
affection fiSe his men.
School in the South were beiny forcibly desegregated m

.
 REAPING OTHIK POEMS 27J

ELIZABETH BISHOP
Brasil, January 1, 1502
.. . rmbroiderrd ritffjur . . . laprstiicd landscape.

— LANDSCAPE iSTO iSKT,

SIK KENNETH CLAKK

Januaries, Nature greets our eyes

exactly as she must have greeted theirs:
every square inch filling in with foliage —
big leaves, little leaves, and giant leaves,
blue, blue-green, and olive,
with occasional lighter veins and edges,
or a satin underleaf turned over;
monster ferns
in silver-gray relief,
and flowers, too. like giant water lilies
—
up in the air up, rather, in the leaves
purple, yellow, nvo yellows, pink, —
rust red and greenish white;
solid but airy; fresh as ifjust finished
and taken off the frame.
A blue-white sky, a simple web,
backing for feathery detail:
brief arcs, a pale-green broken wheel,
a few palms, swarthy, squat, but delicate;
and perching there in profile, beaks agape,
the big symbolic birds keep quiet,
each showing only half his puffed and padded,
pure-colored or sported breast,
Still in the foreground there is Sin:
five sootyr dragons near some massy rocks,
The rocks are worked with lichens, gray moonbursts
splattered and overlapping,
threatened from underneath by moss
in lovely hell-green flames,
attacked above
by scaling-ladder vines, oblique and neat,
"one leaf yes and one leaf no" (in Portuguese).
The lizards scarcely breathe; all eyes
are on the smaller, female one, back -to,
her wicked tail straight up and over.
red as a red-hot wire,
274 HLSTOJCY AND IUCIDNALI TV

just so the Christians, hard as nails.

tiny as nails, and glinting,
in creaking armor, came and found it all,
not unfamiliar:
no lovers' walks, no bowers,
no cherries to be picked, no lute music,
but corresponding, nevertheless,
to an old dream of wealth and luxury
already out of Style when they left home —
wealth, plus a brand-new pleasure,
Directly after Mass, humming perhaps
L’Hiwiine amii or some such tune,
they ripped away into the hanging fabric,
each out to catch an Indian for himself —
those maddening little women who kept calling,
calling to each other (or had the birds waked up?)
and retreating, always retreating, behind it,

ROBERT HAYDEN
Night, Death, Mississippi
I
A quavering cry. Screech-owl?
Or one of them?
The old man in his reek
and gauntness laughs —
One of them, I bet
—
and turns out the kitchen lamp,
limping to the porch to listen
in the windowless night,
13c there with Boy and the rest
if I was well again.
Time was. Time was.
White robes like moonlight
fn the sweetgum dark.
Unbuckcd that one then
and him squealing bloody Jesus
as we cut it off.
Time was. A cry?
A cry all right,

.
 KfAiiiNn OTHELR POEMS 275

He hawks and spiÿs,

fevered as by groirtfire.
Have ns a bottle,
Boy and me -
he’s earned him a bottle
when he gets home.
—
II
Then we bsLat them, he said,
beat them iill om arms was tired
and the big old chains
messy and red,
OJems burning cn tht lily miss
Christ, it was better
than hunting bear
which don't know svhy
you want him dead.
O night, naurhead and blocdyhtnics night
You kids fetch Paw
some water now so’s he
can wash that blood
off him, she said.
O night betrayed fty darkness not its uicn

W. S, MEIIWIN
The Atians Dying
When the forests have been destroyed their darkness remains
The ash the gTeat walker follows the possessors
Forever
Nothing they will come to is real
Nor for long
Over the watcrCuutses
Like ducks in the time of the ducks
The ghosts of the villages trail m the sky
Making a new twilight
Rain falls into the open eyes ofthe dead
Again again with its pointless sound
When the moon finds them they are the color of everything

L
276 HISTORY AND REGLONAUTY

The nights disappear like bruises but nothing is healed

The dead go away like bruises
The blood vanishes into the poisoned farmlands
Pain die horizon
Remains
Overhead the seasons rock
They are paper bells
Calling to nothing living
The possessors move everywhere under Death their star
Like columns ofsmoke they advance into the shadows
Like thin flames with no light
They with no past
And fire their only future

DEREK WALCOTT
77tt; Gulf
For firth ami Barbara Harriion
t
The airport coffee tastes less of America.
Sour, unshaven, dreading the exertion
of tightening, racked nerves fuelled with liquor,
some smoky, resinous bourbon,
the body, buckling at its casket hole,
a roar like last night’s blast rating its engines,

watches the fumes of the exhausted soul

as the trans-Texas jet, screeching, begins
its flight and friends diminish. So, to be aware
of the divine union the soul detaches
itself from created things, "We’re in the air.'’
the Texan near me grins. All things these matches
from LBjV campaign hotel, this rose
given me at dawn in Austin by a child,
this book offables by Borges,1 its prose

1
Lyndon bainesjobtuon thirty-sixth president ofthe United States.
Luis borgB (]899-1986), Argentine writer.
 R K A in M; O iH£k POEMS 277

a stalking, moonlit tiger, What was willed

on innocent, mm -streaked Dallas, the beast's davv1
curled round that hairspring rifle' is revealed
on every page as lunacy or feral law;
circling that wound we leave Love Field-
Fondled, these objects conjure hotels,
quarrels, new friendships, brown limbs
nakedly moulded as these autumn hills
memory penetrates as the jet climbs
the new clouds over Texas; their home means
an island suburb, forest, mountain water;
they are the simple properties for scenes
whose joy exhausts like grief, scenes where we learn,
exchanging the least gills, this rose, this napkin,
that those we love are objects we return,
that rhis lens on the desert's wrinkled skin
has priced our flesh, all that we love in pawn
to that brass ball, chat the gifts, multiplying,
clutter bind choke the heart, and that 1 shall
watch love reclaim its things as I lie dying,
My very flesh and blood! Each seems a petal
shrivelling from its core. I watch them bum,
by the nerves’ flare I catch their skeletal
candour! I3cst never to be bom,
the great dead dry. I heir works shine on our shelves,
by twilight tour their gilded gravestone spines,
and read until the lam pi it page revolves
to a white stasis whose detachment shines
like a propeller’s rain bowed radiance.
Circling like us; no comfort for their loves!
I!
The cold glass darkens. Elizabeth wrote once
chat we make glass the image of our pain;
I watch clouds boil past the cold, sweating pane

'Reference m the assassination of President Johji f Kenneitv in iJallas oil No

vember 22. 1063-
27A HJS [ OkY AMD ReirUlNUllTY

above die Gulf All styles yearn to be plain

as life. The face of the loved object under glass
ts plainer still. Yet, somehow, ai this height,

above this cauldron boiling with its wars,

our old earth, breaking to familiar light,
that cloud -bound mummy with self-healing sears
peeled of her cerements again looks new;
some cratered valley heals itself with sage,
through that grey, Jading massacre a blue-
lighthearted creek flutes of some siege
to the amnesia of drumming water,
Their cause is crystalline: the divine union
of these detached, divided stares, whose slaughter
darkens eaeh summer now, as one by one,
the smoke of bursting ghettos clouds die glass
down every coast where filling station signs
proclaim the Gulf, an air, heavy with gas,
sickens the state, from Newark to New Orleans.
JfJ
Yet the South felt like home. Wrought balconies,
the sluggish nver with its tidal drawl,
the tropic air charged with the extremities
of patience, a heat heavy with oil,
ca neb rakes, that legendary jazz. But fear
thickened my voice, that strange, familiar soil
prickled and barbed the texture of my hair,
my status as a secondary soul.
The Gulf, your gulf, is daily widening,
each blood-red rose warns of that coming night
when there’s no rock cleft to go hidin' in
and all the rocks catch fire, when that black might,
their stalking, moonless panthers turn from 1 ftm
whose voice they can no more believe, when the black X's
mark their passover with slain seraphim,
IV
The Gulf shines, dull as lead. The coast of Texas
glints like a metal rim. I have no home
as long as summer bubbling to its head
 R. E MM N G OTHER POEMS 279

boils for that day when in the Lord Cod’s name

the coals of fire are heaped upon the head
ofall whose gospel is the whip and flame,
age after age, the uninstruct big dead.

SUWON J, ORTIZ
Bend in the Rivet
Flicker flies by.
His ochre wing
is tied to prayer sticks.
Pray for mountains,
the' cold strong shelter,
Sun helps me to see
where Arkansas River
ripples over pebbles.
Glacial stone moves slowly;
it will take a while.
A sandbank cuts sharply
down to s poplar log
buried in damp sand.
Shadow lengths tell me
it is aftemooil-
There are tracks
at river's edge, raccoon,
coyote, deer, crow.
and now my own.
My sight follows
the river upstream
until it bends.
beyond the bend
is more river
and, won, the mountains.
We shall arrive.
to sec, soon,
2fl0 Hist onv ANb R h t ; J t> N A i iT y

JOHJE GRAHAM
What the End Is For
Cjjami J''irrj£f, .Vnrl/r f3iif’i’r.i

A boy just like you took me OUT to see them,

t:hc five hundred Li o2\ on alert on the runway,
fully loaded fully manned pointed in ill the directions.
running every minute
of every day.
They sound like a sickness of the inner car,
where the heard foams up into the noise of listening,
where the listening arrives without being extinguished!.
The huge hum soaks up into the dusk.
The minutes spring open. Six is too many.
From where we watch,
front where even watching ss an anachronism,
from the 23rd of March from an open meadow,
the concertina wire iti its double helix
designed to tighten round a body if it turns
is the last path the sun can find to take out,
each barb haring gold like a braille being read,
then off with its knowledge and the sun
is gone..; .
1 hat s when the lights On all the extremities, like an outline like
dress,
become loud in the story7,
and a dark I have before
not seen
sinks in tei hold them one
by one.
Strange plot made to hold SO many inexhaustible
screams.
Have you ever heard in a croud muttering*; of
blame
that will not modulate that will not riser
He tells me, your stand-in, they stairstep up.
He touches me ro have me look more deeply
in
to where for just a moment longer
color still lives:
die belly wlure so that it Looks like sky. the top
some kind of brown, some soil — How does it look
 KEAIJINO OTHER POEMS 181

from up there now

chiii meadow we lie on CHIT bellies in, this field Iconography
tdls me stands for sadness
because the wind can move through if uninterrupted?
what is it the wind
would have wanted to find and didn’t
lea lilfg down through this endless admiration unbroken
because we’re too loss1 dir it
to find us?
Arc you still there tor me now in that dark
we stood in for hours
letting it sweep as far as it could down over us
unwilling to move, irreconcilable? What he
wants to tell me,
his whisper more like a scream
over this eternity of engines never not running,
is everything: how the crews assigned to each plane
for a week at a time, the seven boys, must live
inseparable,
how they stay together for life,
how the wings are given a life of
seven feet ofplay,
how they drop practice bombs called fhopes over Nevada,
how the measures for Counterattack in nit
have changed and we
now forego firepower for jamming, for the throwing
of false signals The meadow, the meadow lutms, love, with the
planes,
as il every last blade of grass were wholly possessed
by this practice, wholly prepared. The last time 1 saw you,
We stood facing each other as dusk came on.
1 leaned again it the refrigerator, you leaned against the door
The picture window behind you was slowly extinguished,
the tree went our. the two birdfeeders, the metal braces on them.
T he light itself took a long time,
bits in puddles stuck like the useless
splinters ot memory, the chips
of history, hopes, laws handed down /fete, hold these he says, these
grasses these
tom pods, In.1 s..iys, smiling over the noise another noise, take these
he says, nly hands wrong for
 282 H I S t O ft Y ANT) R.ECION.U I J Y

The purpose, here,

not-v isi hip-from-the-jly, prepare yourself vvith these, boy
and
bouquet of
thjstlew&ed and won and william and
timothy. We stood there Your face went out a long time
before the rest of it. Can’t see you anymore I said. Not, 1,
you, "whatever you still were
replied.
When I asked you to bold me you refused.
When I asked you to cross the SIK feet ot tooni to hold me
you refused- Until 1
Couldn't rise out ot the patience either any longer
to make us
take possession.
Until we were what we must have wanted to In-:
shapes the sh a pel essness was taking back.
Why should 1 lean out;
Why should I move?
When the Maenads tear Orpheus limb from limb,
they throw his head
out into the river.3
Unbodied it sings
all the way downstream, all the way to the single ocean.
head floating in current downriver singing,
until the sound of the cataracts grows,
until the sound of the Open ocean grows and the voice.

1
Orphetit WM tom m fpecM by Maenad*. savage female follower* of Dionysus,
god drunkenness ami revelry. Orpheus's severe;! hea.it, floating down (lie tlira .
of
river, Hebms, reached tile island of Ltvfcni, die home ofljmi ]K*C(ry, where ir WJS
tuinei!. ,

1
to
 9

Attitudes, Values,Judgments

You're under no obligation to like all the remarks or attitudes you

come across in art. Past artists reflect the prejudices and beliefs of their
time, just 3S OUT" twentieth-century writers will reveal, to later readers,
the (Frequently unconscious) presumptions and beliefs of our era. It is
notoriously hard to believe that morally we are much superior to our
ancestors. Social attitudes may progress in one or another area (we in
America no longer recommend public hangings or beheadingsh hut we
are sure to seem as backward and ignorant to our descendants as even
Our recent ancestors seem to us.
Nor are artists necessarily morally better than others in their private
or public actions. Genius does not guarantee moral probity in the or*
dinary activities of life. What, then, are the moral obligations of artists
insofar as they are artists? (As people, they exist under the same moral
imperatives as anyone else, and are conditioned by their cultures in their
interpretation of those imperatives,) How — to put our question an¬
—
other way Can artists betray their artistic principles?
They can betray themselves as artists, and their art itself, by saying
what society wants to hear, rather than what seems true; by papering
over the actual with the agreeable or the socially enjoined; by falling into
the comfortable habits of the past instead of reinventing their medium.
If, however, the artist has the talent to work the medium accurately to
—
reveal in stylized language the structure of reality as it is delivered by
—
perception, emotion, and thought without being cowed by conven-

2M

m
284 A t r J T u n E s , VALUES, j u D G ME&J t s

tion or audience response, there is a chance that the artwork will suc¬
ceed.
This does not mean that J work lias to he composed entirely freely,
with no external conditions laid upon it. On the contrary. Many com¬
missioned artworks have been spectacularly successful
paintings in the Sistme Chapel, Rich's
—
Michelangelo’s
for Sunday services,
cantatas
Milton’s “Lycidas," written tor an anthology verse compiled m honor
of a schoolfellow who was drowned* in fact, nothing is more stimulating
to some artists than a patron's saying, “)‘d tike you to make a painting
in a semicircular shape to tit that space over the door; and I’d like it to
represent Apollo; and you may have exactly four ounces of gold leaf to
decorate it with.” Poetry is less often commissioned than music, sculp¬
ture, or painting, yet William Lilake represents Ins Songs of Itinoa'iia' as
“commissioned" by a chiId-Muse:

Piping down the valleys wild

Piping songs of pleasant glee
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me,
“Pipe a song about a Lamb”;
So 1 piped with merry cheer.
“Piper, pipe that song again" —
So I piped, he wept to hoar.
And Shakespeare's sonnets seem to luve begun as a commissioned se¬
quence urging an aristocratic young mart to marry and beget an heir.
A poem sometimes seeks out its own commissions, so to speak, by
casting itself as a letter replying to a request or a question, Gerard Manley
Hopkins’s friend and fellow poet Robert Bridges asks Hopkins, in a
letter, why he has sent him no poems lately, in response, Hopkins sends
a verse-letter in the form of a sonnet ("To R.B.") explaining that
inspiration lias forsaken him:
Swetil tire, the of muse, my soul needs tins;
sire

I want the one rapture of an inspiration,

Oh then if iti my lagging lines you miss
The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation,
My winter world, that scarcely breathes that bliss,
Mow yields you, with some siÿlis, our explanation.
Wc may suppose that this poem might never have been written without
the pressure of Bridges'* “commissioning" question. It is always useful,

1
 ATTITUDES, VALUES, JUDGMENTS 285

in considering the attitudes of a poem, to ask what has occasioned it. Has
an anterior question, reproach, or command brought it into being? Ifwe
do not ask this question, we arc likely to mistake the poem’s attitudes,
values, and tone.
Let me give an example, Shakespeare's Sonnet 76 has usually been
read as a self-interrogation in which Shakespeare laments the barrenness
and sameness of his poems, improbably enough, according to this read¬
ing, Shakespeare thought ill of his own work, accusing himself of a
boring similarity in all his poems:

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Sonnet 76
Why is my verse so barren of new pride?
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do 1 not glance aside
To new-fbund methods and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one. ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,* uvl!-knoum garment
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth and where they did proceed?

If this were all we had of the poem, we might indeed think Shakespeare
is reproaching himself. But the next part ofthe sonnet shows that this is
an “answer-poem,” replying to an implied question previously asked by
Shakespeare's young patron: “Why do you bring me nothing but son¬
nets, old-fashioned poems?” Shakespeare replies, "O know, sweet love,
I always write of you”:

And you and love are still my argument;

So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told.
Armed with this knowledge of implied question and answer, we
can now better imagine the "antecedent scenario” of the poem, The
fashionable young man, who has by now received many sonnets from
Shakespeare, is surprised that his poet keeps writing in this old-fashioned
form, already in existence for over two hundred years. Other poets have
gone on to new things. Why can’t his poet write a satire, or a pictur-
286 ATTITUDES, V A L u L s , j u p ft iw e N T 5

esque mini-narrative, or a debate-poem? "Why,” says the up-to-date

young man to the poet, '“are you always writing the same qld sonnets,
all the same sort, 50 that everyone who sees them says, lOh, of course,
another piece by Shakespeare’? ” At>d he continues,"How about doing
something new next rime?" Shakespeare, only too conscious of the
young man’s ignorant and trendy dismissal of his incomparable poems,
gives the soft answer that turns away wrath, repeating and quoting the
young man’s reproach, but finding nonetheless a way to defend himself
We can now reconstruct the poem as it should be read: not as
Shakespeare’s reproach to himself but as his reproof ofthe young man:
IVhy [you ask] is my verse so barren of "new pride"?
So far from "variation” or “quick change"?
Why with the time do 1 not glance aside
To "new-found methods" and to "compounds" strange?
Wiiy write I still “all One/’ "ever the same,"
And keep invention in a “noted weed,”
That every word doth almost "tell my name.”
Showing their birth and where they did proceed?
O know, sweet love, 1 always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument:
So all my best is dressing old words new.
Spending again what is already spent:
Far as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told,

This deft but gentle rebuke reminds the young man, at the close, that
nobody looks up at the sky at dawn and says, "The sun again! How boring

— —
and repetitive!” There are things so precious -the sun and love being
among them that we never have enough ofthem.And poetry, after all,
never has new 1writs — all the words are already present in the language.
|
The only thing any poet can do is “dress that is, arrange|old words new,"
rc-spcnding the words that poetic predecessors have already spent,
Our view of the attitudes expressed by the speaker in this sonnet
depends very' much on whether we see it as iflfripWi Or as a rebuke la
the young man. This reminds us that before we can evaluate the attitudes
and values expressed in a poem wc must try to be as accurate as possible
in describing them. These arc delicate questions; and the sophistication
of poems(and ofthe people who write them) warns us against too hasty
a judgment, One has to understand a poem well before judging it. (And
really understanding the implications of a poem usually depends on
having read many other poems by that poet.)
 A t'TiTUDESj VALUES, JUDGMENT! 287

Evaluation depends on where you stand with respect to the things

described in a poem. Until fairly recently, the poems that Langston
Hughes wrote about Harlem — representing such realities as sexUal in¬
tercourse before mamage, marital infidelity, children bom out of wed¬
lock, prostitution and pimping, and the strife between Jewish landlords
and black tenants — were simply not represented in general anthologies
of American poetry or anthologies of poetry by blacks. Much of
HugbesT subject matter seemed indecent to whites and blacks alike j and
black anthologists wanted to print poems that were “a credit to the
race.” Hughes's veracity — his refusal to betray the structure of reality as
—
he saw it for something more acceptable is today much admired, but
was in his lifetime often criticized, Judges were judging not his an —
represented in his striking sequences on Harlem and his adaptation of
—
jazz rhythms but what they saw as his failure to condemn immorality,
on the one hand, and his washing dirty- social linen in public, on the
Other.
It is not desirable to let a difference in values blind us to the imag¬
inative mastery- oflanguage and form in such poets as the atheist Robinson
Jeffers(whose nihilism was much criticized) or the social realists Langston
Hughes and Allen Ginsberg. The nineteenth-century anthologists who
censored Charies Baudelaire’s depiction of lesbianism are replaced in our
day by those who censor Ginsberg's depiction of homosexuality, The ac¬
curate representation of reality is, for the artist, the highest morality-. It is
immoral ro conceal the way human beings live, or what human beings
think. The tension between allowing an artist free expression and, for
instance, shielding the sensibilities ofthe young is a real one; and most
societies have worked out a gradual scale according to which the young
can be exposed to art of increasing moral complexity.
However, in countries with active political or religious censorship,
where free expression is not permitted at all, artists perform marvelous
end-runs around forbidden topics. During the Cold War years, inge¬
nious Eastern European poets in Russia, Poland, Hungary-, and other
Iron Curtain countries constructed allegorical poems which were seem¬
ingly “harmless" but which everyone could read as a coded critique of
the regime. Even under censorship, art will find a way to be free —
though sometimes the artist may suffer imprisonment and death.
It is impossible not to notice the attitudes and values expressed in
a poem, In fact, they are often the first thing we do notice. Yet a
criticism of attitudes and values alone does not come to grips with what
a poet really has to offer, which is a personal sense of the world, an
idiosyncratic temperament, a unique imagination, and a new linguistic
lens through which readers may see the world afresh.

L m
288 ArifITUD ES, VALUES, JUDGMENTS

How, then, arc we to evaluate the success of a poem it we cannot

base our judgment on its attitudes and values? Robert Lowell, in the
poem “Epilogue," printed lasT in his find boot;, Day by Day, suggests
one way. Despairing of his unrhymed modern "snapshots" of" reality', he
asks why he Can't make something as beautiful as the radiant interiors
painted by the seven teenth-cehtury Dutch artist Jan Vermeer. He is
thinking particularly df.one painting, which shows a girl readings letter:
Lowell imagines her "yearning" tor its absent writer. She stands by a
casement window from which light steals across the wall behind her,
illuminating the map on the wall (which is, in Vermeer and elsewhere,
a figure for the .ihs tract!on of art). Here is the poem:

ROBERT LOWELL
Epilogue
Those blessed structures, pint and rhyme —
why are they no use to me now
1 want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
1 hear the noise of my own voice:
Tire [winter1s vision is not a lens,
if imnbles to caress tin tight.
13 ut sometimes everything l write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
I1ray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the s tin's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning,
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

At its middle, the poem collapses in despair; "All's misalliance.

I hit then the poet gets a second wind: What ts wrong with describing his
 A IT i 'f U u E s VALUES, JUDGMENTS 289
,

lift truthfully as he sees it? “Vet why nut say what happened?" He
resolves his poem by realizing tliLH though his “snapshots” may nor took
superficially like Vermeer's paintings, he and. Vtmiter have in common
die artist’s truest motive — accuracy oi representation, The artist can
vow accuracy, but he or she must pray for the other ingredient in
successful art — grace. “Pray mr iht grate of accuracy," the poet teils
himself One part of his function as a poet is a duty to set down con¬
temporary facts of life before they disappear; hut he can only hope and
pray that by the grace of aesthetic power he can give to the people ot his
centuryr(who will otherwise be anonymous numbers in a census, "poor
passing facts' ) their "living name'." That living name is conferred only
by the grace of art its aesthetic power that often seems bestowed from
the outside, like religious "grace," By the end of the poem, the poet can
stop referring to his work by the ugly and clipped wort! “snaps hot.’" and
—
cm speak of it as “writing with light” a “photo-graph." He, like
Vermeer, will also become a writer with light it he can attain “the grace
ofaccuracv.”
This poem suggests that we must judge any poem we read as a
representation ot its author's perception of reality; but we must also
judge n as an experiment in its medium, according to its portion of
“grace" — what Hopkins called "the roll, the rise, thy carol, the cre¬
ation."
If, in one direction, we judge poetry, it is also true that in another
the poem judges us. It looks at us with a steady gaze and dares
us to judge Ourselves by' its revelations. “The poet judges, not as the
judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing,” said Walt
Whitman. To observe and convey reality is itself a judgment on reality,
even if the poem makes no explicitjudgment on the reality conveyed.
Rita Dove, a contemporary African American poet, writes about
the “poetic justice” of art in a poem about a painting she saw in Ger¬
many by a modern painter. Christian Sch.i.d. He had painted, in rlie
twenties, m Berlin, a portrait ot two circus “freaks' sine ofthem was a

man with a bone disease that caused his shoulder bones to protrude like
wings. He was billed as “Agosta the Winged Man." The other “freak"
was a perfectly normal black woman who, billed as “Rasli.i, the Black
Dove, was displayed as an exotic jungle creature, dancing entwined
with a boa constrictor. The black Rita Dove, seeing "the Black
Dove
depicts— Sc
who. but for an accident of time, could have been h erst- 11 —
had, the painter, planning the double portrait he is about to
begin, attempting to decide where its power evil] lie Is it in the mer-
cilessness of his unsparing view of bis subjects? No,
290 ATTITUDES , VALUES, JUDGMENTS
The canvas,
not his eye. was merciless. . .
Schad would place him'1 Aÿoshi
On a throne, a white sheet tucked
over his loins, the black suit jacket
thrown off like a cloak.
Agosta had told him
of the medical students
at the Charite,* a lioipttil
that chill arena
where he perched on
a cot, his torso
exposed, its crests arid fins
a colony of birds, trying
to get out . . .
and the students,
lumps caught
in their throats, taking notes.
Ah, Rjsha’s
foot oil the stair.
She moved slowly, as jf she carried
the snake around her body
always, . .
,

Agosta in
classical drapery, then,
and Rasha at his feet.
Without passion. Not
the canvas
but their gaze,
so calm,
was merciless.

Is it the pointers eye, seeing die social marginalization of his subjects

{one black, one deformed) that is merciless in its accuracy? t)r is it the
canvas, demanding how paint shall be used, and now the picture will be
composed, that is merciless? Sc had decides that neither of these is true,
It is neither his eye nor the canvas that is merciless, hut the gaze of his
two subjects, saying, “I lere we are. This is how we were seen, in Berlin,
in 1929." The gaze is merciless because it is. like the portrait which

i
 A T n T u i> fiJS „ VALUES, JutiCMtsii 291

dtfpicts it, “without passion." The painting is not propaganda; it is not

"social protest art”; it is simply an accurate transcription (with the
"grace" of its compositional arrangements with which Sehad lias taken
such care) oi “Ideality, Berlin, 1929/' Nothing more than this is neces¬
sary; but how hard it is to ensure that the eye and the canvas and the gaze
maintain this accuracy ot perception -without exaggeration, without
deletion.
There have been other suggestions by poets on how to make and
judge art, each understandable within its culture and its century. The
religious poet George Herbert thought that if one wrote for God
alone, one would write well: "It J please him, I wnte tine and wit¬
he.” Similarly, Milton said, in “Lycidas,” that the poet should look tor
true fame only from the "pure eyes / And pertect witness of all
judging Jove," These reflections suggest that the poets did not find
the immediate judgment of contemporaries a reliable measure for
any poet.
We, too, can be warned by such remarks that poems that last for
a long
time tend to satisfy7 many criteria oi success, and to interest
many generations offuture winters. It is, m the last analysis, chiefly by
the admiration of other writers that writers become "canonized/1 fn
one strand of the canonical male hue (male because until recently only
males were educated in complex uses of language) Spenser admires
Chaucer. John Milton admires Spenser, Wordsworth admires Milton,
Keats admires Wordsworth, Tennyson admires Keats, Kliot admires
Tennyson; Auden admires Eliot, Merrill .admires Auden, and so it has
gone. It is no accident that almost every contemporary woman poet in
America, from Adrienne Rich through Jorie Graham to Lucie brot k-
liroido, has written a poem to nr about Emily Dickinson, or that
Dickinson herself wrote a poem about her favorite woman poet, khz
abeth Barrett Browning, or chat Elizabeth Bishop wrote a poem to
Marianne Moore, creating a comparable ongoing line of female "can¬
onization ” It is also true that canonization crosses gender hues: T. S.
Lliot and Wallace Stevens and William Garins Williams and A- R.
Ammons admired the poetry of Marianne Moore; Hopkins admired
Christina Rossetti, Dickinson admired Emerson; and Moore admired
I .1 Fontaine, It TS the admiration tit poets for each other's accomplish¬
ments in the medium of language that keeps poeiry alive; arid poets
keep poetry honest in their fine timed admiration of any writing that
is not only "accurate with respect to the structures of reality" but also
til 11 ot “the grace ot accuracy." giving the "poor passing tacts" of ev¬
en' era their "living name.”
292 A r TIT kJ [> E S , VALUES, J U D G M E N I S

In Brief: Attitudes, Values,Judgments

It we keep the honorific name “poetry" to mean “verse that
suteeds in achieving lasting interest over time," we are still uncertain of
the amount of “poetry" being produced by our own century. There is
a great deal of verse being written, all of it. of course, of documentary
interest to sociologists or anthropologists or cultural critics. For such
scholars, the Overt message, Or representation of life ill a poem, meins
more dtan tile skill with which that message or representation has been
arranged. We all read for message and picture, but readers with a strong
commitment to poetry as an art require in it those new symbolic struc¬
tures. invented by talented artists of every age, that both affront and
refresh. An experienced reader of poetry is soon bored by the already
known and the elithed; but the previously unheard, the previously
Unknown, arranged in a form true to a temperament, and transmitting a
—
shock of pleasure this makes for the renewal of both life and art. It is
this capacity of poetry to rewrite the old that we value in it, that we
search out in it, and that wc judge it be.

Reading Other Poems

Each of the following poems expresses a strong moral attitude: that

is. least two sets of opposing values are presented, and the poet
at
{through a sympathetic or unsympathetic speaker) court's out in favor of
one set. This entasis describing, or at least implying, the contrasting set
of values that the poet repudiates. In each poem, trace the way the
repudiated value is presented — whether m John Milton's corrupt bish¬
ops, or Rita Dove's dictator, or Walt Whitman's astronomer, or William
Butler Yeats’s imperial rulers, or Robinson Jeffers's decayed democracy,
or Louise Gluck's speaker's sexual partner. Does the poet imply that the
reader already agrees with his or her preferred valuer
Sometimes the poet's preference may be surprising {see jonson,
Lovelace, Whitman, and Gliick). The pacifist poer has to set himself
against the public values o-f his society (see Jeffers). I he woman poet has
to examine the cliches ol women’s advance mefll, ITI these cases, when
the poet cannot count on the agreement of the reader, what sort of
persuasive means does he or she employ?
Sometimes a poe-m which seems to express values admired by the
poet’s contemporaries can later be subject to question Robert Frost was
invited to read Ins sonnet "The Gift Outright' at the inauguration Of
President John F. Kennedy What arc the patriotic values expressed in
 READING OTHEK POEMS 293

the sonnet? How might they be viewed now by a Native American

reader? How do you respond when you read both "with the grain" of
the poem and also ‘‘against the grain"?
It is a useful exercise to read strongly moral poems from the poet’s
view and also from a different viewpoint. What might Lucasta have said
back to the man going off to war; or Ben jonson's addressee back to the
poet; or an astronomer back to Whitman? Or how might the recipient
of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's love-sonnet have felt? (Would you
want to be loved “with the passion put to use" ofabandoned religious
belief?) What would a believer in original sin make of Ginsberg’s "Sun¬
flower Sutra." with its belief in original innocence:
Dove* though she opposes the slave-holding and slave-murdering
Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, lets him speak and articulate his
motives in order that her reader may get inside his mind. Though finally,
in reading these poems, you may come to sympathize with the poet's
view, it is useful to position yourselfj at least temporarily, on both sides
of the question being debated- That way you sharpen your sense of the
attitudes being expressed, the values being contested, and the judgments
being made. In Michael Weaver’s "Picnic," the only mention of the
oppositions aroused by the Civil Rights movement of the 1%0s comes
at the end. in the phrase “reluctant laws and bloodied heads.” Can you
expand this phrase to show the reasons for the joy of the picnickers?

JOHN MILTON
Lycidas
hi this mtstituly the author bewails a learned friend, unfortunately drowned
in his passage from Chester on the Irish seas, t637. And by occasion
foretells the ruin of our corrupted clergy, then in their height.
Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more
Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,
I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,
And with forced fingers rude,
Shatter yOur leaves before the mellowing year.
Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear,
Compels me to disturb your season due;
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer,

:
A dirge sting by i single voice.
294 ATTITUDES. VALUES, JUDGMENTS

Who would not sing lor Lyndas? He knew

Himself to sing, and build the lofry rhyme.
He must not riojtr upon his watery bier
Unwept, and welter to the parching wind.
Without the meed ot some melodious tear.
Begin then, sisters of the sacred well0 iturirs
That from beneath the seat ofJove doth spring,
Begin, and somewhat loudlv sweep the string.
Hence with denial vain, arid coy excuse;
So may some gentle Muse“ pOtt
With lucky words favor my destined urn,
And as he passes turn.
And bid fair peace be to my sable shroud,
For wc were nursed upon the selfsame hill,
fed the same dock, by fountain, shade, and rill.
Together both, ere the high lawns appeared
Under the opening eyelids of the mom,
We drove afield, and noth together heard
What time the grayfly winds her sultry horn,
Battening our flocks with the fresh dews of night,
Ofr till the star that rose at evening bright
Toward Heaven's descent had sloped Iris westering wheel.
Meanwhile the rural ditties were not mute,
Tempered to th' oaten flute,
Rough satyrs danced, and fauns with cloven heel
From tire glad sound would not be absent long,
And old Damoetas" loved to hear Our Song.
But O the heavy change, now thou arc gone,
Now thou an gone, and never must return!
Thee, shepherd, thee the woods and desert caves,
With wild thyme and the gadding vine o’ergrown,
And all their echoes mourn.
The willows and the haze] copses green
Shall now no more be Seen,
Farming their joyous leaves to thy soft lays.
As killing as the canker” to the rose, tdnkeni’omt
Or taint-worm to the weanling herds that graÿe,
Or frost to flowers that their gay wardrobe wear,

'

A conventional Maim* Irani panaral pu«ry, possibly re-ferrinjt to ,t Cambridge

tutor.
 READING OTHER POEMS 295

first the
VFV]I C r I tt.' thorn blows;0 blossoms
Such, Lycidas. thy loss to shepherd'; ear.
Where were ye, nymphs, when the remorseless deep
Closed o'er the head of your loved Lycidas?
for neither were ye playing on the steep,
Where your old 1 lards, the famous Druids lie,
Nor on the shaggy top of Mona high,
Nor yet where Deva spreads her wizard stream:'
Av me! I fondle dream
Had ye been there — for what could that have done?
What could the Muse4 herself that Orpheus bore,
The Muse herself, fot her inchinting son
Whom universal Nature did lament,
When by the rout that made the hideous roar,
His gory visage down the stream was sent,
Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore?
Alas! What boots0 it with uncessant care profits
To tend the homely slighted shepherd's trade,
And strictly meditate the thankless Muse?
Were it not better done as others use,
To sport with Amaryllis m the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neaera’s hair?'1
Fame is rhe spur That the clear spirit doth raise
( That last infimntv ot noble mind)
To scorn delights, and live laborious days;
Idut the biir guerdon0 when we hope to find, reward
And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
Comes the blind Fury" with th‘ abhorred shears,
And slits the thin spun life. "Liut not the praise,’
Phdebus0 replied, and touched my trembling Apollo, g<id 11/
cars; poetii inspiration
"Fame is no plant that grows oil mortal soil,
Nor in. the glistering toil
Set ofl to th’ world, nor in broad rumor lies,

'
Mo:ia is rhe Roman name for IHLL Isle ofAnglesey, ofF the Welsh roast. Dm is
the river I fee. which flews into(he Irish Sea In, changes were said 10 foretell good or
ill For En an J Wales.
1
Calliope, she muse ot epic poesry. Her von, Orpheus, seas slain by Thracian
women, and liss bead out into the river Hebms.
p
'Amaryllis and Nrtera: Conventional names for shepherdesses.
"
Atropos, not one ofthe Fumes, but ibe Fate who cuts the (bread of hie.
296 AT in uoEi, V A LU t s , D t: M r N Ti

But lives ami spreads by those pure eyes,

And perfect witness of .ill Jove;
As he pronounces lastly on each deed,
OF so much fame in Heaven expect thy meed”
O fountain Aretbusc,’ and thou honored flood,
Smooth-sliding Minfins cro voted with vocal reeds,
That strain I heard was of a higher mood.
But now my oatD proceeds, CiTfL'n-pipr sotif
And listens to the herald of the seaD Triton
That came in Neptune's plea.
He asked the waves, and asked the felon winds,
“What hard mishap hath doomed this gentle swain? ’
And questioned every gust of rugged wings
That blows from off each beaked promontory;
They knew not of his story,
And sage Hippotades' thetr answer brings, god of \rit>ds
Thai not a blast Was from his dungeon strayed,
The air was calm, and oti the level brine,
Sleek Panope" with all her sisters played. sea nymph
It was that fatal and perfidious bark
Built in th eclipse, arid rigged with curses dark.
Thai sunk so low that sacred head of thine,
Next Camus,8 reverend sire, went footing slow.
His mantle hairy', and his bonnet sedge,
Inwrought with tigureS dim, and on the edge
Like to that sanguine flower inscribed with woe.H
“AhJ who hath ret t, quoth he, “my dearest pledge?"
11

Last came and last did go

Tile pilot ofthe Galilean lake.'0 Saint Peter
Two massy keys he bore nt metals twain
(1 he golden opes, the iron shuts amain).
fie shook his mitered locks, and stem bespake:
"How well could I have spared for ihee, young swam.
Enow of such as for their bellies' sake,
Creep anti intrude, and climb into the fold!
Of other care they little reckoning make,
Than how to scramble at the shearers’ feist,

Aivchusa tv .is ,i nvmph pnrsuid by AtpheuF. Stiv fled under the M.M to Sicily,
where the clmt up as a fountain.
"
Grid (if the river Cam, representing Cambridge University
Tltc hyacinth, suppe>--odLy marked w i r 1 1. T!HL Greek cry of lammtjtEon. "aiii."
 RF,AD TNG O 'I H [ U POEMS 297

A net shove away the worthy hidden guest.

Blind mouthÿ' Tim scarce themselves know how to hold
A sheep-hook, or have learned aughr else the least
That to the faithful herdsman’s art belongs!
What recks it them? What need they? They are sped;
And when they list, their lean and flashy songs
f Irate on their scrannel" pipes o:t wretched straw. meager
The hungry shee'p look up, and are not fed,
But swob i with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly; and foul contagion spread,
Beildes W hat Che gT i I n WOIfwith pri vy paw5 R ornati(AU/J ?li( agenf>
Daily devours apace, and nothing said
But that two-handed engine at the door
Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more."' '
Return, Alpheus,0 the dread voice is past, (sec note 6)
That shrunk thy streams; return, Sicilian muse,
And call the vales, and bid them hither Cast
Their bells and flowerets of a thousand hues
Ye valleys low where the mild whispers use,
Of shades and wanton winds, and gushing brooks,
On whose fresh lap the swart star1' sparely looks,
Throw hither all your quaint enameled eyes,
That on the green turf suck the honeyed showers,
And purple all the ground with vernal flowers.
Bring the rathe0 primrose that forsaken dies, curly
The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine,
The white pink, and the pansy freaked0 with jet* dappled
The glowing violet,
The musk -rose, and the Well attired woodbine.
With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears;
Bid aetiaranthus all his beauty shed,
And daffodillies fill their cups with tears,
To strew the laureate lie arse where Lycid lies.
For so to interpose a little ease,
Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise.
Ay me! Whilst thee the shores and sounding seas
Wash far away, where’er thy bones are hurled,

"Milton has in muni sonic instrument of retribution which will punish the
corrupt s lurgy.
Sirius, tiie Doÿ Stir, associated with the ho: days of late summer.
29# ATTITUDES. V ALLIES , J u DG ME N TS

Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,

Where thou perhaps tinder the whelming tide
Visir’sr the bottom of die monstrous world;
Or whether thou, to OUT moist vows denied,
Sirtrp’st by the fable of licilcrus old,
Where the great vision ofthe guarded mount
Looks toward Nam a nr os and Bayorta’s hold;1
Look homeward angel now, and melt with ruth:
And, O ye dolphins, waft the hapless youth.
Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more,
for Lycidas your sorrow is not dead,
Sunk though lie be beneath the watery floor,
So sinks the day-star0 in the ocean bed, .tidfj

And yet anon repairs his drooping head,

And tncks* his beams, and with new-spangled ore, lirt'JSe'j
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky:
So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high,
Through 'he dear might of him that walked the waves,
Where other groves, and other streams along,
With tiectar pure Ins oozy locks he laves,
And hears the tmexpressive0 nuptial song, inexpressible
In the blest kingdoms meek ofjoy and love.
There entertain him all the saints above!
ID solemn troops arid sweet societies
That sing, and singing in their glory move,
And wipe the tears forever from his eyes.
Now, Lyndas, the shepherds weep no more;
I leiiceforth thou art the genius* ofthe shore, praiectivr defly
in thy large recompense, and shall be good
To all that wander in that perilous Hood.
I bus sang the uncouth swain to tlf oaks and nils,
While the still morn went out with sandals gray;
He touched the tender stops of various quills.
With eager thought warbling his Doric- lay: mslie
And now the sun had Stretched out all the hills,
And now was dropped into the western bay;
At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue:
Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.

LlfUertti is a giant s.iiif so be buried ir I ,md's fr.nd in Corttwail. bt. Mtclfciel's

Mount is aiso in CoimJ. The iilge] Lodki toward NamSiiCos and lijvtirij on the
Spanish coast,
 R FAN INC OTHER POEMS 299

BEN JONSON
Still tv Be Heat
to be neat, still to be dressed,
Still
As von wore going to a feast;
Still bo powdered, still perfumed,
to
Lady, it is to be presumed,
Though art's hid causes arc not found,
All is not sweet, all is not sound.
Give me a look, give me a face
That makes .um pile:tv a grace;
kobes loosely flowing, hair as free;
Such sweet neglect more taketh me
Then all rh’ adulteries of art.
They strike mine eyes, but not my heart

RjtriiAKD LOVELACE
To Lucasta, Guiiy; to the Wars
Tell me not, sweet, I am Unkind
That from the nunnery
Of thy thasie breast and quiet mind,
To war and arms I fly,
True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.
Yet this inconstancy is such
As you loo shall adore;
I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

How Da I Love TTlCC?
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,
1 love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grate.
I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun ant! candle-light.
iCK) A i l 1 ]ÿ UfJfcs , VAi.ui-:\L JUIH;MI:NTS

f love thee freely, as men strive for Right;

1 lav thee purely, .is they turn from Praise,
I love thee with the passion put to use
hi my old griefs,' and with my childhood's taith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With, my lost saints
— —
i love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! and, if God choose,
i shall but love thee better after death.

WAI T WHITMAN
When 1 Hi’itrd the Isarn’d Astronomer
When I heard the 1 earn'd astronomer,
When the proofs,(be figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When ! was shown the charts arid diagrams, to add, divide, and
measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much
applause m the lecture- room,
How SOOT i ut)accountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out ] wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Merit :
Civilisation is hooped together, brought
Under a rule, under the semblance of peace
Liy manifold illusion; but man’s life is thought,
And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality:
Egypt and Greece, good-bye, and good-bye, Rome!
Hermit-, upon Mount Mem or Everest,
(.laverued m night under the drifted SHOW,
Or where that snow and winter's dreadful blast

1
In Hunlii mythology, JVtcru is .i Hcred minium in jf lilt center ofthe world. Jr
is the hurtle of Vishnu, [lie gud i'b<> preserves humanity.
 R t A m M 41 O INI.:S I-1 O E-. MS 301

Beat down upon their naked bodies, know

TN.it day brings found the night, that be tore dawn
His glory and his monuments are gone.

ItooiÿsoN' JEFFERS
5/ijnc, Perishing RepnbtU
While tins America settles in the mould ol its vulgarity, heavily
thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out,
and the mass hardens,
! sadlysmiling remember that the flower lades to make fruit, the
fruit rots to make earth.
Out ot the mother; ami through the spring eMiltanees. ripeness and
decadence; and home to the mother
You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good,
be it stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains:
shine, perishing republic,
for my children, I would have them keep their distance from
tlut
the thickening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's
feet there are left the mountains.

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in Love of man. a clever

servant, insufferable master.
There is the trap that c.uches noblest spirirs, chat caught — they
—
say God. when he walked oil earth.

ROBERT FROST
The Gift Outrfhi
The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed bv.
Possessed by what we now no more possessed
Something we were withholding made us we .i.
302 A r TI r u iJ E s , VALUES, JUDGMENTS

Until we found it Mas oundvcs

Wc were withholding from our 1 rtd of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
[The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
Tu the land vaguely realizing westward,
Hut still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.

ALLEN GINSHERG
1
Sunflower Sutra
I walked on the banks of the tin can banana dock and sat down
under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to
look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry,
Jack Kcrouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, compan¬
ion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue
and sad -eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of
machinery.
Tile oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun sank on top
offinal Frisco peaks, no fish in that stream, no hermit in those
mounts, just ourselves rhetuny-eyed and hungover like old
bums on the riVerbauk, tired and wily.
Look at the Sun dosser, he said, there was a dead gray shadow
against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of
ancient sawdust —
I rushed up enchanted - :t was my first sun Ho wet, memories
—
of Blake’ my visions Harlem
—
and Hells ofthe Eastern rivers, bridges, clanking Joes Greasy Sand¬
wiches, dead baby carriages, black tread]css tires forgotten
and LLnre treaded, the poem of the riverbanfe, condoms A
pots, steel knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck and
the razor sharp artifacts passing into the past —
and the gray Sunflower poised against tine sunset, crackly bleak and
dusty with the smut and smog and smoke ofolden locomo¬
tives in its eye —

1
UudJhisl relii-itsiJs text.
lick Kccnu,[ {1922— 196(J j, IrienJ of Ginsberg's and authot n1 Ort iiirt
other autobiographical novels,
WiLliim Ubke (1757-1827). English poet ant] author of ‘Ah! Sun-flower "
(jtosberg in I'tÿh had h.uJ i vision in which he heird Hi ike's voice mitang his poems.
 READING OTHER POEMS 103

corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a battered

crown, seeds fallen out of its face, soon-io-be-toothless
mouth ofsunny air, sumays obliterated on its hairy head like
a dried wire spiderweb,
leaves stuck out like arms out ofthe stem, gestures from the saw¬
dust root, broke pieces of plaster fallen out ofthe black twigs,
a dead fly in its ear,
Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, 1
loved you then!
The grime was no man’s grime but death and human locomotives,
all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad skin, that smog
of cheek, that eyelid of black misYy, that sooty hand or
phallus or protuberance of artificial worse-than -dirt
—
industrial modem — all that civilization spotting your
—
crazy golden crown —
and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless eyes and ends
and withered roots below, in rhe home-pile of sand and
sawdust, rubber dollar bills, skin of machinery, the guts and
innards of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely tin-
cans with their rusty tongues alack, what more could J name,
the smoked ashes ofsome cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbar¬
rows and the milky breasts of cars, womout asses out ofchairs
& sphincters of dynamos — all these
—
entangled in your mummied roots and you there standing be¬
fore me in the sunset, all your glory in your form!
A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent lovely sun¬
flower existence! a sweet natural eye to the new hip moon,
woke up alive and excited grasping in the sunset shadow
sunrise golden monthly breeze!
Hoiv many flies buzzed round you innocent of your grime, while
you cursed the heavens of the railroad and your flower soul?
Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower? when
did you look at your skin and decide you were an impotent
dirty old locomotive? the ghost of a locomotive? the specter
and shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?
You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower!
And you Locomotive, you arc a locomotive, forget me not!
So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck it at my
side like a scepter,
and deliver my sermon to my soul, andjack’s soul too, and anyone
who’ll listen,
— We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not our dread bleak dusty
30+ A T r I T L D E 5 , YATL UES, J U DCMIN TS

i mage-less locomotive, we're .ill beautiful golden sunflowers

inside, we're blessed by our own seed ik golden hairy naked
accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sun
flowers iti the sunset, spied on by our eyes under theshadow
of the mad locomotive interbank sunset E'nsco hills1 tincan
evening sitdown vision,

LOUISE GLUCK
Mock Orange
It is not the muon. I tell you.
It is these flowers
lighting the yard.
i hate them.
! hate them as 1 hate sex,
the man's mouth
sealing my mouth, the man’s
paralViang body —
and the erv that always escapes,
the low. humiliating
premise of union -—
In my mind tonight
I hear the question and pursuing answer
fused m one sound
that mounts and mounts and then
is split into the old selves,
the tired antagonisms. Do you see?
We were made fouls Of.
And the scent of mock orange
drifts through the window.
How can I rest?
How can I be content
when there is still
rhat odor in the world?
 READING OTHER POEMS 505

DOVE
Par$ley
1. Tht Cant F!eUs
There ii a parrot imitating spring
in the palace, its leathers parsley green.
Out of the swamp the caite appears
to haunt us, and we cur it down. E! General
searches for a word: he is al! the world
there is. Like o parrot imitating spring,
we lie down screaming as rain punches through
and we come up green, We cannot speak an R —
out of the swamp, the cane appears
and then the mountain we call in whispers Karolina '

The children gnaw their teeth to arrowheads.

There is a parrot imitating spring.
ES General has found his word: perejil.
Who says it, lives. He laughs, teeth shining
out ot the swamp. The cane appears

in our dreams, lashed by wind and streaming.

And we lie down. For every drop ot blood
there is a parrot imitating spring,
Out of the swamp the cane appears.
2. Tfcr Palace
The word the general's chosen is parsley.
It is till, when thoughts turn
to love and death: the general thinks
of his mother, how she died in the fall
and he planted her walking cane at the grave
and it flowered, each spring stolidly forming
lour star blossoms. The general

pulls on his boots, he stomps to

her room in the palace, the one without
curtains, the' one with a parrot

1
Dove'moK TW17 On October 2. 1937, Rafael Trujillo (1991-1961). Jic-
laloi of the Dominican Republic, oniere-d 2R|.mhi blacks kilted because they could no:
rnii [h( lercer r m jvivyJ, (hr Spnllljh won: for pirdtr*
2
Properly “Katarina "
m
J06 ATTiTLMSfS, VUUES, J Lf D G M E M J S

in a brass ring. As he paces he wonders

Who can 1 kill today And tor a moment
the little knot of screams
is Still Tile parrot* who has traveled
all the wav from Australia in an ivory
cage, is, coy as 3 widow, practising
spring. Ever since the morning
his mother collapsed in the kitchen
while baking skull-shaped candies
for the Day ot the Dead,3 the general
has hated sweets. He orders pastries
brought op for the bird; they arrive
dusted with sugar on a bed of lace.
The knot in his throat starts to twitch;
In* sees Ids boots the first day in battle
splashed with mud and urine
as a soldier falls at bis feet amazed —
how Stupid he looked! at the sound
of artillery'. / rimr ihoughi it uvuld iittg
the soldier said, and died- Now
the general sees the fields of sugar
cane, lashed by rain and streaming,
He sees his mother’s smile* the teeth
gnawed to arrowheads. He hears
the Haitians sing without Ik's
as they swing the great machetes:
they sing, Kattliina,
mi niadlc, mi amt>l ru nmelte* tlod knows
his mother was no stupid woman; she
could roll an Ik like a queen. Even
a parrot can roll ail ft*! In the hare room
the bright feathers arch in a parody
of greenery, as the last pale crumbs
disappear under the blackened tongue. Someone

November l, the Feast of All hijuls.

J
‘'My mother, my love m death ” hi [he Spanish, the M have beco changed to
fi IO simulate the I [aitjails' inability to roll their r’s
 UtADiNG OTHER. POEMS 307

tall* out his name in a voice

SO like his mother's, a startled tear
splashes the tip of his right boot-
XJy mother, my love in death.
The general remembers the tiny green sprijp
men of his village wore in their capes
to honor the birth of a son. He will
order many, this time, to be killed
for a single, beautiful word.

MICHAEL S. WEAVER
Tin? Picnic, tin Homage to Civil Rights
We spread com quilts and blankets,
mashing the grass under us until it was hard,
piled the baskets of steamed crabs
by the trees in columns that hid the trunk,
put our water coolers ofsoda pop
on the edges to mark the encampment,
like gypsies settling in for revelry
in a forest in Friumania or pioneers
blazing through the land of the Sioux,
the Apache, and the Arapaho, looking guardedly
over our perimeters for poachers
or the curious noses of fat women
ambling past on the backs of their shoes,
The sun crashed through the trees,
tumbling down and splattering in shadows
on the baseball diamond tike mashed bananas.
We hunted for wild animals in the dumps
of forests, fried hot dogs until the odor
turned solid in our nostrils like wood.
We were in the park,
One uncle talked incessantly, because he knew
the universe; another was the priori
who stomped his foot in syncopation
to call the details from the base of his mind;

1
Airier mini story wllei-
308 A i riTuDts, VMUES, JUDGMENTS

another Was a cynic who doubted everything,

toasting everyone around with gin,
The patriarchal council mum bled nn,
while t3icr women took the evening to tune
their hearts to the slow air and buzzing flies,
to hold their hands out so angels could stand
in their palms and give dispensation,
as we played a rough game of softball
in the diamond with borrowed gloves,
singing Chuck Berry and Chubby Checker,
diving in long lines into the public pool,
throwing empty peanut shells to the lion,
buying cotton candy in the aviary
of the old mansion, laughing at monkeys,
running open-mouthed and full in the heat
until our smell was pungent and natural,
while the suu made uur fathers and uncles
fall down in naps on their wives’ laps, and
we frolicked like wealthy children on an English estate,
as reluctant laws anti bloodied heads
tacked God s theses oil Wooden ducts,"
guaranteed the canopy of the firmament above us,

tacked diem: A. did Martin Luther, beginning (lie lÿroii-tianc Reformation

 II
ANTHOLOGY
-
.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER
Ode
The sky was a street map with scars tor
house parties, where blue-lit basements
were fever-dreams of the closest a boy
COtlld get to home after yucca fritters,
rice, pigeon peas, and infinite chicken
made by anyone's mother before the night's
charioteer arrived in his beat- up boat
to spiric the three, or the four, or the five, or
as many would fit in the car to the parly7.
Pennies and pennies bought one red bottle
of Mad Dog Double-Twenty or Boone's Farm.
“Que pasa, y'all, sÿue pass,” Mister James
Brown sweated, and the Chi-Lites whispered pink,
White Catholic school girls never would dance
or grind or neck, or life their skirts to these
black boys with mothers who spoke little
English and guarded their young with candles
for hi saiitos, housework, triple-locked
doorp,jars of tinted water, fierce arm-pinches.
Love is a platter of piatauos.0 plantains
"Did you hear? Did you hear?”— the young men whisper,
but church calls its altar boys Sunday noon
“They danced Latin at the Mocambo RoomJ"
—
The tale has been told again and again
of boys growing old, going bad, making good,
leaving home while the neighborhood rises
and this story ends the same.
or falls,
Now deadlocked vendors sell mechanized monkeys
programmed to beat Laim-Ainerictin mush

SHERMAN ALEXIE
Resemuinn Lave Song
I can meet you
in Springdale buy you beer
& take you home
in my one-eyed Ford

311
 312 I'OtMl, PofLTS, 1’OITRV

] can pay your rent

on HUI> house get you free
food from the HlA
get your teeth fixed at IMS
1 can buy you alcohol
& not drink it all
while you’re away I won’t fuck
any of your cousins
if I don’t get too drunk
1 can bring old blankets
to sleep with in winter
they smell like grandmother
hands digging up roots
they have powerful magic
we can sleep good
we can sleep warm

PAULA GUNN ALLEN

Zen Americana
Un is okay.
Un pretentious. Un decided. Un known.
Un ego is where I want to be. How- do you open
the door to Un? What does the un place look like,
look alike*?
Un beginning; can 1 un wake myself, un sleep
motionless in a bright green chair?
Maybe un lamps light the mom (the un place).
When I get there, maybe it will be dark, un lit
where it has no occasion to be any way.
(Un celebrated.)
(Un repentant.)
(Un regenerate.)
(Un believed,)

k.
 AN I J I OLO oV 313

A, R, AMMONS
The City Limits
When sou consider die radiance, that it docs not withhold
itself but pours ns abundance without selection into even,'
nook and cranny not overhung or bidden; when you consider
that birds’ bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest
ssvervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance ot such resource as illuminates the glow blue
bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts ot .1 natural slaughter or the cm I of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider
that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands arid looks about, the
leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work o! the deepest evils is of a tune svith May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise,

iiasrer Morning
T have a life that did not become,
chat turned aside and stopped,
astonished:
1 hold it in ms3 like a pregnancy or
as on my lap a child
not to gross or grow old but dwell on
it his grave 1 most
is to
frequently return and return
to ask what is wrong, what was
wrong, to see it all by
the light of a different necessity
but the grave will not heal
and the child,
stirring, must share my grave
with me, an old man having
gotten by on what was left
JtJ POEMS, 1JOETS. POETRY

when E go tuck to my home country in these

fresh far-away days, it's convenient to visit
everybody, aunts and uncles, those who used to say,
look how he’s shooting tip, and the
trinket aunts who always had J little
something >cl tlteir pocketbooks, cinnamon bark
or a penny nr nickel, and uncles who
were the rumored fathers of cousins
who whispered of them as of great, if
troubled, presences, and school
teachers, just about everybody older
(and Some younger) collected in one place
waiting, particularly, but not for
tne, mother and father there, too, and others
close, close as burrowing
under skin, all in the graveyard
assembled, done for, the world they
used to wield, have trouble and joy
in. gone
the child in me that could not become
was not ready for others to go,
to go on into change, blessings and
horrors, hut stands there by the road
where the mishap occurred, crying out for
help, come and lix this or we
can't get by. hut the great ones who
were to return, they could not or did
not hear and went on in a Hurry and
now, i say in the graveyard, here
lies the flurry, now it can'r come
back with help or he!pin! asides, now
we all buy tile bitter
incompletions, pick up the knots of
horror, silently raving, and go on
crashing into empty ends not
completions, nut rondures the fullness
has come into and spent itself from
I stand on the stump
of a child, whether myself
or rny little brother who died, and
yell as far as 1 can, I cannot leave this place, for
fur tne it is the dearest and the worst,
 AN I HOLOGY 315

i: is life nearest to life which is

life lost: it is my place where
1 must stand ami tail,
calling attention with tears
to the branches not lofting
boughs into space, to the barren
ait that holds the world that was my world
though die incomplecions
(& completions) burn out
standing in the Hash high -bum
momentary structure of ash, still ir
is a picture -book, letter perfect
Easter morning: S have beet) for a
walk: the wind is tranquil: the brook
works without flashing in an abundant
tranquilicy: the birds are lively with
voice: 1 saw something 1 had
never seen before: two great birds,
maybe eagles, bladswinged, whitenecked
and -headedj came from the south oaring
the great wings steadily; they went
directly over me, high up. md kepr on
due north: but then one bird,
the one behind, veered a little to the
left and the other bird kept on see tiling
not to notice for a minute: the first
began to circle as if looking for
something, coasting, resting its w trigs
oti the down side of some of the circles:
the other bird came back and they both
circled, looking perhaps for a draft:
they turned a few more times, possibly
—
rising — at least, dearly resting
then dew on falling into distance till
they broke across the local bush and
trees: it was a sight of bountiful
majesty and integrity: the having
patterns and routes, breaking
from them to explore Other patterns or
better ways to routes, and then the
return: a dance sacred as the sap in
the trees, permanent in us descriptions
lift POEMS, POFTS. HOE THY

as the ripples round the brook's

ripplestone: fresh as this particular
flood (if bum breaking across, us now
from the sun.

ANOISTYMOUS
Sir Patrick Spans
i
The king sits in IJumferliog town,
Drinking the b!iade-rcida wine; bhx>d-ted
“O whar will 1 get guid sailor,
To sail this ship of mme?”
2
Up and spak an eldem knicht,
Sai at the king's richt knee:
“Sir Patrick Spelts is the best sailor
That sails upon the sea."

The king has written a braid0 letter broad

And signed it wi’ his hand,
And sent it to Sir Patrick Spens,
Was walking on the sand.
4
Ihe htst line that Sir Patrick read,
A loud lauch0 lauched he; laugh
The next line chat Sir Patrick read.
The tear blinded his ee.° eye
5
“G wha is this has done this deed.
This ill deed done to me,
To send me out this tittle o’ the year,
To sail upon (he sea?
6
“Mak haste, mak haste, my mifry men all,
Our guid ship sails (he mom,"
"O say na sae,° my master dear,
-
For I fear a deadly storm.

L
 A NTH O LOG V il7

7
"Late, late yesttt'en 1 saw the new moon
Wi' the auld moon in hir arm,
And 1 fear. f fear, my dear piaster,
That we will tome to harm.”
8
O our Scots nobles were richi lairh0 bath
To weet0 their cork-heeled sboon,*1 wet / shoes
But kng or0 a’ the play were played before
Their hats they swam aboonT above
9
O bng. tang may their ladies sit,
Wt’ their fans into- their hand.
Or ere they see Sir Pa trick Spens
Come sailing to the land.
W
O lang. lang may the ladies stand
Wi' their gold kemsc in their hair, comfit
Waiting tor their ain dear lords,
For they’ll see them na main
ll
Hair' o’er, halt' o'er to Aberdour
lt‘s fifty tadom deep,
And there lies gutd Sir Patrick Spens
Wi' the Scots lords at his feet.

ANONYMOUS
IVestern Wind
Western wind, when will thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my amis
And I in my bed again!

MATTHEW ARNOLD
Shakespeare
Others abide our question. Thou art free.
We ask and ask — thou mnlest and art still,
3 IS POEMS, POETS, POETRY

Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill,

Who to the stars uncrowns his majesty,
Planting his stedfast footsteps in the sea,
Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling-place,
Spares but the cloudy border of his base
To the foiled searching of mortality:
And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know,
Self-schooled, self-scanned, self-honored, self-securet
Didst tread on earth unguessed at — better so!
All pains the immortal Spirit must endure,
All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow,
Find their sole speech in that victorious brow.

To Marguerite
Yes! in the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless Watery w'ild,
We mortal millions live abne.
The islands feel the enclasping flow,
And then their endless bounds they know.
But when the moon their hollows lights,
And they are swept by balms of spring,
Artd in their glens, on starry nights,
The nightingales divinely sing;
And lovely notes, from shore to shore,
Across the sounds and channels pour —
Oh! then a longing like despair
Is to their farthest caverns sent;
For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent!
Now round us spreads the watery plain
Oh might our marges meet again!
—
Who ordered, that their longing’s hre
Should be, as soon as kindled, cooled?
Who renders vain their deep desire?
A God. a God their severance ruled!
—
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumbed, salt,, estranging sea.
 ANTHOLOGY 319

JOHN ASHBERY
T7JC Paittfer
Sitting between the sea and the buildings
He enjoyed painting the sea s portrait.
But just as children imagine a prayer
Is merely silence, he expected his subject
To rush up the sand, and. seizing a brush,
Plaster in own portrait on the canvas.
So there was never any paint on his canvas
Until the people who lived in the buildings
Put him to work; "Try using the brush
As a means to an end- Select, for a portrait,
Something less angry and large, and more subject
To a painter’s moods, or, perhaps, to a prayer."
How could he explain to them his prayer
That nature, not art, might usurp the canvas:
He chose his wife for a new subject,
Making her vast, like ruined buildings.
As if, forgetting itself, the portrait
Had expressed itself without a brush.
Slightly encouraged, he dipped his brush
In the sea, murmuring a heartfelt prayer;
"My soul, when J paint this next portrait
Let it be you who wrecks the canvas."
The news spread like wildfire through the buildings:
He had gone back to the sea for his subject,
imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
Too exhausted even to lift his brush,
He provoked some artists leaning from the buildings
To malicious mirth: “Wc haven't a prayer
Now, of putting ourselves on canvas,
Or getting the sea to sit for a portrait!"
Others declared it a self-portrait.
Finally all indications of a subject
Began to fade, leaving the canvas
Perfectly white. He put down the brush.
At once a howl, that was also a prayer,
Arose from the overcrowded buildings.

L
320 l1 o E M s , POETS. Poixttv

They tossed him, the portrait, from the tallest of the buddings;
And the sea devoured Che canvas and the brush
As though his subject had decided to remain a prayer.

PitYadoxes and Oxymorons

Til is poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.
Look at it talking to you. You look out a window
Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you dofYt have it.
You miss it, it misses you. You nnss each other.
]'hc poem is sad because :t wants to he yours, and cannot,
What's a plain level? It is that and other things,
Bringing a system of them into play, Playr
Well, actually, yes, but 1 consider play to be
A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern,
As in the division of grace these long August days
Without proof Open-ended. And before ran know
It gets lust in the steam and chatter of typewriters.
Et has been played once more. I think you exist only
To tease me into doing it, on yuur level, and then you aren’t there
Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem
Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.

Slrert MwiiciJUS
One died, and the soul was wrenched Out
Of the other in life, who, walking the streets
Wrapped in an identity like a coat, sees on and on
T"he same corners, volumetries, shadows
Under trees. Farther than anyone was ever
Called, through increasingly suburban airs
And ways, with autumn tailing over everytiling:
The plush leaves the chattels in barrels
Of an obscure family being evicted
Into the way it was, and is. The other beached
Glimpses of what the other SVLIS up to:
Fteyblations at hist, So they grew to hats' and forget each other.
So ! cradle this average violin that knows
Only forgotten showtnnes, but argues
The possibility of free declamation anchored
To a dull refrain, the year turning over on itself
 A .N [ 111)1.00 v 321

In November, with the spaced among the days

Mori [it era], the meat more visible on [he bone.
Our question of a place of origin hangs
Lite smoke: how we pie nicked in pine ft)rests.
hi coves with the water always seeping up, and left
Our trash, sperm and excrement everywhere, smeared
On the landscape, to make of us what we could.

W. H. AUIJLN
As I Walked Out One Evening
As [ walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street.
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields ot harvest wheat,
And down by the brimming river
I heard ,1 lover sing
Under an arch nt the railway:
“Love has no ending.
"Til love you, dear. I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,
'Til love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.
"The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my amis I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of tire world.”
Eiut all the docks in the dry
Began to whirr and chime:
"O let riot Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.
"In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.
 322 lJOEMS, PtlETi. I’Oh r IIV

“in headaches and in worry

Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
Tomorrow or rodav,
“Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver’s brilliant bow.
"O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you’ve missed.
"The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the teacup opens
A lane ro the land of the dead.
"Where the beggars rattle the banknotes
And the Giant i.s enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Uuy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.
“O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.
“O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbor
With your crooked heart."
ft was lire, late in [lie evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks hid ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on,

XIusee de$ Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; huw well they understood

Ftftich far ‘'Museum of Fine A ns."

to. km
 ANTHOLOGY 323

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 ofthe wood;
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a comer, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind an a tree.
In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

JOHN BERRYMAN
Dream Song 4
Filling her compact & delicious body
With chicken papnka, she glanced at me
twice.
Fainting with interest, 1 hungered back
and only the fact of her husband & four other people
kept me from springing on her
or falling at her little feet and dying
"You are the hottest one for years of night
Henry's dazed eyes
have enjoyed. Brilliance,” I advanced upon
(despairing) my spumoui. — Sir Bones: is stuffed,
de world, wif feeding girls.
— Black hair, complexion Latin, jeweled eyes
downcast . . The slob beside her feasts . . . What wonders is
she sitting on, over there?
The restaurant buzzes, She might as well be on Mars.
324 POEMS, POETS, POETRY

Where did it ail go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.

— Mr. Bones: there is.

Dream Song 45
He stared at ruin. Ituin stared straight back-
He thought they was old friends. He felt on the stair
where her papa found them bare
they became familiar. When the papers were lost
rich with pals' secrets, he cli ought he had the knack
of ruin. Their paths crossed
and unde they crossed in jail; they crossed in bed,
and over an unsigned letter their eyes met,
and in an Asian city
directionless lurchy at two & three,
or trembling to a telephone’s fresh threat,
and when some wired his head
to reach a wrong opinion, ‘Epileptic’.
But he noted now that: they were not old friends.
He did not know this one,
This one was a stranger, come to make amends
for all the imposters, and to make it stick.
Henry nodded, un-.

Dream Song 384

The marker slants, flowerless, day’s almost done.
I stand above my father’s grave with rage,
often, often before
I've made this awful pilgrimage to one
who cannot visit me, who tore his page¬
out: I come back for more,
I spit upon this dreadful banker’s grave
who shot his heart out in a Florida dawn
O ho alas alas
When will indifference come, l moan &: rave
I’d like to scrabble till I got tight down
away down under the grass
and ax the casket open ha to see
just how he's taking it, which he sought so hard
we’ll tear apart
 ANTHOLOGY 325

the mouldering grave clothes ha & then Henry

will heft the ax once more, his final card,
and fell it on the start.

FRANK BIDART
Ellen West
I love sweets, — heaven
would be dying ori a bed of vanilla ice cream . , .
But my true self
is thin, all profile
and effortless gestures, the sort of blond
elegant girl whose
body is the image of her soul.
— My doctors tell me I must give up
this ideal;
but I
WILL NOT . . . cannot.

Only to my husband I'm not simply a “case.”

But he is a fool. He married
meat, and thought it was a wife,

Why am I a girl?
I ask my doctors, and they tell me they
don’t know, that it is just “given."
But it has such
implications — ;and sometimes,
1 even feel like a girl.

Now, at the beginning of Lllen’s thirty-second year, her physical

condition has deteriorated still further Her use of laxatives in¬
creases beyond measure. Every evening she takes sixty' to seventy
tablets of a laxative, with the result that she suffers tortured vom¬
iting at night and violent diarrhea by day, often accompanied by a
326 IJOEWS , POE ; I'ou nv

weakness of the heart She hai thinned down to a skeleton, and

weighs only 92 pounds.

About five years ago, 1 was in a restaurant,

eating alone
with 3 book. I was
nor married, and often did that . . ,

— I'd turn down

dinner invitations, so 1 could eat atone;
I'd allow myself two pieces of bread, with
butter, at the beginning, and three scoops of
vanilla ice cream, at the end, —
there alone
with a book, both in the book sitting
and out of" it, waited onr idly
watching people, —
when an attractive young man
and woman, both elegantly dressed,
sat next to me.
She was beautiful — ;
with sharp, clear features, a good
bone structure — ;
if she took her make-up tiff
in front of you, rubbing cold cream
again and again across her skin, she still would be
beautiful —
more beautiful.
And lie,
— I couldn't remember when I had seen
so attractive. [ didn’t know why. He was almost
a man

a male version

of her, —
I had the sudden, mad notion that E
wanted to be his lover . . .
— Were they married?were they lovers?
They didn't wear wedding rings.

A
 AN r H t> 1-0(5 y *27

] h eir
’

behavior was circumspect, 1 hey discussed

politics. They didn't touch ...
— I low could 1 discover?
Then, when the first course
arrived, \ noticed the way
each held his fork out for the other
to caste what he had ordered - . -
They did this
again and again, with pleased Hooks, indulgent
smiles, for each course,
more than once for each dish —;
much too much for just friends . . .

— Their behavior somehow sickened me;

tire way each gladly
put thefood the other had offered into his month - ;
] knew what they were. I knew they slept together.
An immense depression came over me ...
— I knew 1 could: never
with such ease allow another to put food into my mouth:
happily myself put food into another's mouth — ;
] knew that to become a wife 1 would have to give up my ideal.

Even as a child.
I saw that the “natural” process of aging
is tor one’s middle to thicken —
One’s skin to blotch;
as happenedto my mother
And her mother.
I loathed 'h\7otutc\ ”
Ac twelve, pancakes
became the most terrible thought there is ...
I shall defeat “Mature,"
In the hospital, when they
weigh me. I wear weights secretly sewn into my belt.
328 PoEMi, POETS, POETH-Y

January 10. The patient is allowed to cat in her room, but conies
readily with her husband 10 afternoon coiled. Previously she had
Stoutly resisted this on the ground that she did not really eat but
devoured like a wild animal. This she demonstrated with utmost
realism, ... Her physical examination showed nothing striking.
Salivary glands arc markedly enlarged on both sides.
January 21. Has been reading Fdiur1 again. In her diary, writes
that art is the ''mutual permeation" nfthe "world ot rhe hods'" and
the "world of the spine." Says that her own poems arc "hospital
poems... weak - without skill or perseverance; only managing to
beat their wings softly."
February H. Agitation, quickly subsided again. Has attached
herself to ,m. elegant, very thin female patient. I lomo-erotic com
ponent strikingly evident,
February 15. Vexation, and torment.Says that her mind forces
her always to think of eating. Feels herself degraded by thm Has
entirely, for the first time ill years. Stopped writ i tig poetry.

T.ilLs' is my favorite singer, but [ vc only

seen her once ;
—
I’ve never forgotten that night , , .
— it was in Tfljte, she had long before
lost weight, her voice
had been, for years,
deteriorating, half itself . . .
When her career began, of course, she was fine,
enormous — ; in the early photographs,
sometimes I almost don't recognize her . . .
The voice too then was enormous
healthy; robust; subtle; but capable of
—
LTiirlc effects, even vulgar,
almost out of
high spirits, too much health ,

Work by fuhlrlil Wolfgang VOil Gonh() about tile m.ipieian of

German Icÿ'tid who enters into a compact with the devil
1
Maria Calias(1 423-1'TTT\, Greek-A mertcan soprano,
'
An Optra by Giacomo Puccini (1 H5H— I ).

j
 ANT H <noc v 329

Hut soon sh£ tclt chat s K(j must lose weight. —

that all 'she waJ trv'ailÿ CO express
was obliterated by her body,
buried in flesh — ;
abruptly, within
four months, she lost at least si,tty pounds , . ,
— The gossip in Milan was that Cailas
had swallowed a tapeworm.
Hut of course she hadn't.
The tapeiwrm
was her soul . .

— !low her so ttl, uncompromising,

insatiable,
must have loved eating the flesh from her bones,

revealing this extraordinarily

mercurial; fragile; masterly creature - . ,

— [3ut irresistibly, nothing

stopped there; the huge voice
also began to change: at first, it simply diminished
in volume, in size,
then the cop notes became
shrill, unreliable — at last,
usually not there at all .. *

— Nn one knows nr/ry_ Perhaps her mind,

ravenous, still insatiable. Sensed
that to struggle with the shreds of a voice
must make her artistry subtler, more refined,
more capable of expressing humiliation,
rage, betrayal - . .

— Perhaps the opposite. Perhaps her spine

loathed the unending struggle
to em body itself, to irijiFzf/csJ icsclt, on a stage whose
mechanics, and suffocating customs,
seemed expressly designed to annihilate spin: ,
— [ know that m Tosect, in the second act,
when, humiliated, hounded by Scatpia.
330 POEMS. HOSTS, POETRY

she sang kissf d’artc

— “I lived for art" —
and in tonnent, bewilderment, at the end she asks,
with a voice reaching
harrowingly for the notes,
“Art has repaid me LIKE THIS?"
1 felt L was watching
autobiography
— an art; skill;
virtuosity
miles distant from the usual soprano's
athleticism,
—
the usual musician's dream
of virtuosity without content .. .
— t wonder what she feels, now.
listening to her recordings.
For they have already, within a few years,
begun to date . . .
Whatever they express
they express through the style of a decade
and a half — ;
a Style sjie helped create . . .

— She must know that now

she probably would not do a trill in
exactly that way, — that the whole sound, atmosphere,
dramaturgy of her recording
have just slightly become those of the past . ,.

— Is it bitter? Docs her soul

tell her
that she was an idiot ever to think
anything
material wholly could satisfy? „ * ,

— Perhaps it says: The only way

to escape
the History of Stylet
is not to have a body.
 AKTHOIOGV 331

Wlien 1 open tny eyes in the morning, my great

mystery
stands before me , . .
— I kiiou' time I an: intelligent! therefore
the inability not to fear foot)
day and -night; this unending hunger
ten minutes after i have eaten , . ,
a childish
dread of eating; hunger which can have no cause, —
half my mind says that all this
is dem&miifg . , ,
11read
for days on end
drives all real thought from my brain ...
Then i think, No. The ideal of being thin
Conceals the ideal
not to have a body — ,

which is NOT trivial .. ,

This wish seems now as much a "given'* of my existence
as the intolerable
fact that I an i dark-complexioned; big-boned;
and once weighed
one hundred and sixty-five pounds . . .
But then 1 think, 1Vo. That’s too simple, —
without a body, who can
iitmirr himself at all?
Only by
acting; choosing; rejecting; have 1
made myself—
discovered who arid what Elien can be . . .
— But then again I think, jVQ This / is anterior
to name; gender; action;
fashion;
MATTER ITSELF,—
- . - crying to stop my hunger with FOOD
332 POEMI, POETS, POETHV

is like trying 10 appease thirst

with ink-

March 30. Result ofthe consul cation: Both gentlemen agree com¬
pletely with my prognosis and doubt any therapeutic usefulness of
commitment even more emphatically than l. All three of us are
agreed that it is not a case of obsessional neurosis and not one of
manic-depressive psychosis, and that no definitely reliable therapy
is possible. We therefore resolved to give in to the patient’s de¬
mand for discharge.

The train-ride yesterday

was far u/orse than I expected . . .
In our compartment
were ordinary people: a student,
a woman; her child;
—
they had ordinary bodies, pleasant faces;
but 1 thought
I was surrounded by creatures
with the pathetic, desperate
desire to be not what they were: —
the student was short,
and carried his body as if forcing
—
it to be taller ;
the woman showed her gums when she smiled,
and often held her
hand up to hide them
the child
— ;

seemed to cry simply because it was

small; a dwarf, and helpless . . .
— t was hungry. I had insisted that my husband
not bring food , , ,
After about thirty minutes, the woman
peeled an orange
to quiet the child. She put a section
into its mouth — immediately it spit it out-
;
 A N I HO L Of,¥ 333

The piece fell to the floor,

— She pushed it with her toot through the dirt
toward me
several inches.
My husband saw me staring
down at the piece .. .
— [ didn't move; how J wanted
TO teach out,
-

and as it invisible
shove it in my mouth
my body
— ;

became rigid. As 1 stared at him,

I could see him staring
at me, —
then helooked aT the student
back to me , , . — ; at the woman
— ; then

I didn’t move.
At last, he bent down, and
casually
threw it out the window.
He looked away.

— I got up to leave the compartment, then

saw hts face,
his eyes
—
were red;
and I saw
— I'm sure 1 s<ne —
disappointment.

On the third day of being home sh* is as if transformed. At break-

tast she eats butter and sugar, at noon she eats so much that — tor
the first time in thirteen years! — she is satisfied by her food and
gets really full. At afternoon coffee she cats chocolate creams arid
Easter eggs. She takes a walk with her husband, reads poems, listens
to recordings, is in a positively festive mood, and ail heaviness
seems to have fallen away from her. She writes letters, the last one
334 POEM'S, POETS, POETHV

a letter to die fellow patient here to whom she had become so

attached. In the evening site takes a lethal dost ot poison, and on
the following mom mg she is dead. "She looked as she had never
looked in life — calm and happy and peaceful.”

Dearest. — 1 remember how

at eighteen,
on Eukes with friends, when
they rested, sitting down to joke or talk.
I circled
around them, afraid to hike ahead alone,
yet afraid to rest
when I was not yet truly thin.
You and, yes, my husband, —
you and he
have by degrees drawn me within the circle:
forced me to sic down at last on the ground.
1 am grateful.
But seimething in me refHit'i it.
— How eager I have been
to compromise, to kill this refuser;

but each compromise, each attempt

to poison an ideal
which often seemed to me sterile and unreal,
heightens my hunger,
E am crippled, I disappoint you.
Will you greet with anger, or
happiness,
the news which might well reach you
before tins letter?
Your Effcn.

To My Father
I walked into the room.
There were objects in the room. I thought I needed nothing
 ANTHOLOGY 335

from them. They began to speak,

hut [he words were unintelligible, a painful cacophony . . .
Then I realized they were saying
the name
of the man who had chosen them, owned them,
ordered, arranged them, their deceased cause,
the secret pattern that made these things order.
1 strained to hear; but
the sound remained unintelligible . . .
senselessly getting louder, urgent, deafening.
Hands over tny ears* at last I knew
they would remain
inarticulate; your name was not in my language ,

ELIZABETH BISHOP
At the Fishhonsa
Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishh ouses
an old man sits netting,
Ins net. in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water.
The five fish ho uses have steeply peaked roois
and narrow, c bated gangplanks slant up
to storerooms itt the gables
for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.
All is silver; the heavy surface ofthe sea,
swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,
is opaque, but the silver ot the benches,
the lobster pots, and masts, scattered
among the wild jagged rocks,
is ot ail apparent trail si Licence
like the small old buildings with an emerald moss
growing on their shoreward svalls.
The big fish tubs are completely lined
with layers of beautiful herring scales
and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
336 POEMS, POETS, POETRY

with small iridescent dies crawling on them.

Up on the little slope behind the houses.
set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass,
is an ancient wooden capstan,
cracked, with two long bleached handles
and some melancholy stains, like dried blood,
where the ironwork has rusted.
The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.
He was a friend of my grandfather.
We talk of the decline in the population
anti of codfish and herring
while he waits for a herring boat to come in.
There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.
He has scraped the scales, rhe principal beauty,
Irom unnumbered fish with that black old knife,
rhe blade of which is almost worn away.
Down at the water’s edge, at the place
where they haul up the boats, tip the long ramp
descending into the water, thm silver
tree trunks arc laid horizontally
across the gray stones, down and down
at intervals of four or rive feet.

Cold dark deep and absolutely dear,

element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals , , . One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me. He was interested in music;
like me a believer in total immersion,5
so 1 used to sing him Baptise hymns.
I also sang “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God."'
He stood up in the water and regarded me
steadily, moving his head a little.
I hen he would disappear, then suddenly emerge
almost in the same spot, with ,i sort of shrug
as if it were against his better judgment.
Cold dark deep and absolutely dear,

Machine tbr raising wrijihi:, by winding cable around a vertical rol.itiny UruiM
'
Form of baptism practiced by some Christian seas.
.1
’Hymn of which the original German veision was wriuen by MaITin Luther
(HK3-1!>4r>).

.
 ANTHOLOGY 337

che clear gray icy water . Back, behind us.

the dignified tali firs begin.
Bluish, associating with their shadows,
a million Christmas trees stand
watting for Christmas. Tile water seems suspended
above the rounded gray anti blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above rhe stones,
icily free above the stones,
above tbe stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and vour hand would bum
as if the water svere a transmutation of fire
that teeds nil stones and burns with 2 dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then brinyr, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly fret-,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rutky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown,

The Fish
[caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
last ill a comer of his mouth.
He didn't tight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered anti venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient seal l-pa per,
and its pattern oi darker brown
was like wall-paper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age
He was speckled with barnacles,
JJ8 POEMS , Pot is, 1'tit : k Y

fine rosettes ot lime,

and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rag> of green weed hung down,
While lus gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
— the frightening gills,
fresh anil crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly —
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like teathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
in his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my scare.
— It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
- if you could call it a lip —
grim, wet, and weapon-like,
hung five old pieces of fish line,
or four and a wire leader
with [he1 swivel still attached,
with all their five big books
grown f trail y in his mouth.
ft green line, frayed ac the end
where he broke it, two heavier lilies,
and a fine black thread
 A NT H OL O C Y 339

s.ti]] camped troni the strain and snap

when it brake and he gat away,
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five- haired beard ot wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw,
i stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool ot bilge
where oil had spread a rain bow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings.
the gunnels — until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And 1 let the fish go.

Poem
About the size or an -old-style dollar bill,
American or Canadian.
mostly die same whites, gray greens, and steel grays
— this little painting (a sketch tor i larger Oner)
has never earned any money in its life.
Useless and tree, it has spent seventy years
as a minor family relic
handed along collaterally to owners
who looked at it sometimes, or didn't bother to.
it must be Nos-a Scotia; oniv there
does one see gabled wooden houses
painted that awful shade ot brown.
Tile other houses, the bits that show, are white.
Elm trees, Sow hills, a thin church steeple
— —
that gray-blue wisp or is it? In the foreground
a water meadow with some tiny cows,
two brushstrokes each, but confidently cows;
two minuscule white geese in the blue wafer.
back -to- back, feeding, and a slanting stick,
Up closer, a wild iris, white and yellow,
fresh -sq niggled from the tube.
340 POEMS, POETS, POETRY

The air is fresh and cold; cold early spring

dear as gray glass; a half inch of bine sky
below the steel-gray storm clouds.
(They were the artist's specialty'.)
A specklike bird is Hying to the left.
Or is it a Hyspeck looking like a bird?
Heavens, I recognize the place, 1 know it!
It’s behind - I can almost remember the farmer’s name.
His barer backed on chat meadow. There it is,
titanium white, one dab. The hint of steeple,
tilaments of brush hairs, barely there,
must be the Presbyterian church.
Would that be Miss Gillespie's house?
Those particular geese and cows
are naturally before my time.
A sketch done in an hour, "in one breath,”
once taken from a trunk and handed over,
lVaut4 yen like this? I'll probably never
!rdi\- rwm to hang these things again.
V'oitr Untie Gragp) tro, mine, my Uttcie George,
he'd he your great*nude, left them all mth Mather
when he wen! bach to England.
You know, he was quitefamous, an R.A. . . .
! never knew him. We both knew this place,
apparently, this literal small backwater,
looked at it long enough to memorize it,
our years apart. How strange. And it's still loved,
or its memory is [it must have changed a lot).

too serious a Word

—
Our visions coincided "visions” is
our looks, two looks;
art “copying from life” and life itself,
life and the memory of it so compressed
they've turned into each other. Which is which?
Life and the memory of it cramped,
dim, on a piece of liristol board,
dim, but how live, how touching in detail
— the little that we get for free,
the little of nur earthly trust. Not much.
About the size of our abidance
along with theirs; the munching cows,
the iris, crisp and shivering, the water
 ANI HOLOGV 341

ill standing from spring freshen,

the yet*to be -dismantled elms, the geese.

Sestina
September rain falls on the h ouse.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.
She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings ort the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,
ltfs timefor tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain musi dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac
on its string. liiTdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.
It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I kn&U', says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.
Uut secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
J42 POEMS, POETS, PoBijtv

into the flower bed the child

has carefully placed in cine front of the house,
Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to tine marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.

WILLIAM BLAKE
Ah Sun-flotrer
Ah Sun-flower, weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun,
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the travellers journey is done:
Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow
Anse troTn their graves and aspire
Where my Sun -flow er wishes to go,

T7ic Garden of Lave

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where 1 used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And “Thou shalt not" writ over the door;
So I turn'd to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore,
And l saw it was filled with graves.
And tomb-stones where dowers should he:
And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys & desires.

77if I.Mmb
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Host thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life A' hid thee feed,
Ltv the stream & o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, wooly, bright;
 ANTHOLOGY 343

Gave thee such a ten tier voice,

Making all the vales rejoice?
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Little Lamb, I'll tell thee,
Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee:
Me is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb.
He is meek tt: he is mild,
He became a little child.
I a child, & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb, God bless thee.
Little Lamb, Cod bless thee,
77k? Tyger
lyger! Tyger! burning bright
EII the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
in what distant deeps or skies
burnt the tire of tin tie eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare sene the fire?
And what shoulder, A what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Hare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down i heir spears.
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did lie who made the L.tilth make thee?
Tyger! Tvger! burning bright
lit the forests ofthe night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
344 POEMS. POETS. POETRV

MICHAEL BLUMENTHAL
A Marriage
For Margie Smiiy! atidjan Ooykren
You are holding up a ceiling
with both amis. It is very heavy,
but you must hold it up, or else
it will fat] down on you. Your arms
arc tired, terribly tired,
and, as the day goes on, it feels
as if either your arms or die ceiling
will soon collapse,
But then,
unexpectedly,
something wonderful happens:
Someone.
a man or a woman,
walks into the room
and holds their arms tip
to the ceiling beside you.

So you finally get

totake down your amis,
You feel the relief of respite,
the blood flowing back
to your fingers and arms.
And when your partner’s arms tire,
you hold up your own
to relieve him again.

And it can gp on like this

for many years
without the house falling.

Wishful Thinking
1 like think that ours will be more than just another story
to
of failed love and the penumbras of desire, I like to think
that the moon that day was m whatever house the aslrologists
would have it in for a kind of quiet, a trellis lust could climb
easily and then subside, resting against the sills and ledges,
giving way like shore to an occasional tenderness, coddling
the cold idiosyncrasies of impulse and weather that pound it
 ANIH O L. O ti v 345

as it holds to its shape against the winds and duststorms of

temptation and longing. I like to think that some small canister
of hope and tranquility Washed ashore that day and we. in
the right place, found it. These are the things 1 imagine
all lovers wish for amid the hot curtiDoencefi tents of love
and promises, their histories and failures washing ashore
like flotsam, their innards, girthed against those architects
of misery, desire and restlessness, their hope rising
.‘gainst the an as it fondles the waves and frolics them -skywards.
! like to think that, if the heart pauses awhile ill a single place.
it finds a home somewhere, like a vagabond lured by fatigue
to an unlikely town and, with a sudden peacetulness, deciding
to stay there. I like to think these things because, whether
or not they reach fruition, they provide the heart with a kind
of solae'e, the way poetry sloes, or all forms of tenderness
that issue our amid the deserts of failed love and petulant desire
1 like to think them because, meditated on amid this pattern
of oil-white and darkness, they lend themselves to a kind of
music, nnt uti like the music a dove makes as it circles the trees,
not unlike the sun and the earth and their orbital brothers.
the planets, as they chant to the heavens their longing tor hope
and repetition amid orderly movement, not unlike the music
these humble wishes make with their cantata of willfulness
and good intentions, looking tor some pleasant abstractions
amid our concretized lives, something tender and lovely to
defy the rimes with, quiet and palpable amid the flickers of flux
and the flames ot longing: a bird rising over the ashes, a dreams

LUCIE 13 ROCK-BR< maty

Cartewmorc
All about CatTowmore1 the lambs
Were blotched blue, belonging.
They were waiting for carnage or
§nuiE This is why they am born
To begin with, to end.
Ik urn ina fits do trot frighten

h location m O.Hietv SNLJO. Ireland, where their is .1 Imp- prehistoric ms'gdnhis

cemetery

,
346 I’OEMS, POETS, POETRY

At anything' gorge in the soil, butcher

Noise, the mere graae ot’ predators.
Alt about Carrowmore
The rain quells tor three days,
I remember how Cold l Was, the botched
Job of travelling, And just so.
Wherever I went I came with me.
She buried her hone barrette
In the grou net’s woolly shaft.
A tear ot her hair, an old gift
To the burnt other who went
First. My thick braid, my ornament —
My belonging I
Remember how cold I will be.

EMIL* BftONTli
\o Coward Soul I$ Mine
No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world's storm -troubled sphere!
I see Heaven’s glories shine,
And Faith shines equal, arming me from Fear.
O God withm my breast,
Almighty ever-present I Hetty!
Lite, ihat m me hast rest
As I, undying Life, have power in thee!
Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men’s hearts, unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered speeds,
Or idlest froth, amid the boundless mam
To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by thy infinity,
So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of Immortality,
With wide-embracing love
Thy spirit animates eternal years,
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears.
 AM KLOLOCV 347

Though earth and moon were gone,

And suns and universes erased to be,
And thou were left alone,
Evers' Existence would exist in thee.
There is not room tor Death,
Nor atom that his might could render void
Since thou an Being and Breath,
And what thou art may never be destroyed

Remembrance
Cold in tire earth — and the deep snow piled above thee,
Ear. far removed, cold in the drears' gravel
Have [ forgot, my only hove, to love thee,
Severed at last by Tiilie's all-severing wave:
Now, when alone, do my thoughts no longer hover
Over the mounta ins, on that nonhem shore,
Besting their wings where heath and fern leaves cover
Thy noble heart forever, ever more:

Cold in the earth — and fifteen wild Decembers,

from those brown hi Us. have melted into spring;
Faithful, indeed, is the spirit that remembers
After such years of change and suffering!
Sweet Love of youth, forgive, if 1 forget thee,
While the world’s tide is bearing me along;
O tlier desires and other hopes beset me,
Hopes which obscure, but cannot do thee wrong!
No later light has lightened tip my heaven,
No second mom has ever shone for me;
Al! my life s bliss from thy dear life was given.
All my life's bliss is in the grave with thee.
Uut, when the days ot golden dreams had perished,
And even Despair was powerless to destroy,
Then did I learn bow existence toold be cherished.
Strengthened, and led without the aid ofjoy.
Then did I check the tears ot useless passion
Weaned my young soul from yearning after thine;
—
Sternly denied rts burning wish to hasten
l>osvn ro that tomb .dreads more than mine.
34& POEMS, POETS, POETRY

And, even yet, I dare not let it languish,

Dare not indulge in memory’s rapturous pain;
Once drinking deep of that divincst anguish,
How could I seek the empty world again?

GWENDOLYN BROOKS
The Bean Eaters
They* eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware.
Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep on putting on their clothes
And putting things away.
And remembering . . .
Remembering, with twinkling; and twinge;,
A; they lean over the bean; in their rented back room that is full
of beads and receipts and dolls and clothes, tobacco crumbs,
vases and fringes.

Kitchenette Building
We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,
Grayed in, and gray, "Dream" makes a giddy sound, not strong
Like "rent," “feeding a wife," “satisfying a man."
But could a dream send up through onion fumes
Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes
And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall,
flutter, or sing an aria dow n these rooms
Even if we were willing to let it in,
Had time to warm it, keep it very clean,
Anticipate a message, let it begin?
We wonder- But not well! not for a minute!
Since Number Five is out uf the bathroom now,
We think oflukewarm watet, hope to get in it,
 AN IKÿLOC v 349

Hie Mother
Abortions will not let you forgot.
You rentember the children you got that you did not get.
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or heat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet,
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh.
Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mot her-eve.
1 have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim hilled
children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
1 have said. Sweets, if 1 sinned, if I seired
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If 1 stole your births arid your nimes,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,
and your deaths,
If 1 poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness t was not deliberate.
Though why should 1 whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine? —
Since anyhow you arc dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
is faulty; oh, what shall 1 say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
it is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.
Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, 1 knew you, chough faintly, and 1 loved, I loved sou
All.
350 POE Mi, Po K|S, PORTKY

EUZAffLTH BARJUITT BKOWNIfJfi

From Sonnet*from (he Portuguese
I
I thought once how Theocritus1 had sung
Of the sweet years, the dear and wished -for years,
Who each one in a gracious hand appears
To bear a gift for mortals, old or young:
And. as 1 mused it in his antique tongue,
J saw, in gradual vision drrough my tears,
The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years,
Those of my own life, who by turns had flung
A shadow across me. Straightway [ was ’ware,
So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move
liehind me. and drew me backward by the hair;
And a voice said in mastery, while I strove, -ÿ

“Guess now who holds thee?’1 — "Peach,” 1 said. But, there,

—
The silver answer rang, <LJNot Death, but Love."

A Musical Instrument
What Was be doing, the great god Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river?
Spreading ruin and scattering ban,0 baleful influence
Splashing and paddling with hoots of ,t goat,
And breaking the golden lilies afloat
With the dragonfly on the river,
He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,
From the deep cool bed of the river,
The limpid water turbidly ran,
And the broken lilies a dying lay,
And the dragonfly had fled away,
Ere he brought it out of the river.
High on the shore sat the great god Pan
While turbidly flowed the river;
And hacked arid hewed as a great god can.
With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed,
Till there was not a sign of the leaf indeed
To prove it fresh from the river.

peroral piiet of the iSrirJ century EM.:.

 AVTHCUO r, v 55 1

He cut it short, did the- great god Pan

(How tall it stood in the river!),
Then drew the pith, [ike the heart oi a man,
Steadily from the Outside ring,
And notched the poor dry empty thing
In holes, as he sat by the river
“Tins is (he way.'1 laughed the great god Pan
(Laughed while he sat by the river),
‘The only way, since gods began
To make sweet music, they could succeed ’
Then, dropping his mouth to a hole m the reed,
He blew in power by the nver.
Sweet, sweet, sweet. O I’an!
Piercing sweet bv cite river!
Blinding sweet, O great god F’an!
The sun on the hill forgot to die,
And the lilies revived, and the dragonfly
Came back to dream on the nver.
Yes half a beast is die great god Pan,
To laugh as he sics by the river,
Making a poet out of a man;
The true gods sigh for the cost and pain —
For the reed which grows nevermore again
As a reed with the reeds in the riser,

RoflFRi BROWNING
“Child? Roland ro the Dark Tower Came”
[Set' Edgar's Seng in Lear!
1
My hrsr thought was, he lied in every word,
That hoary cripple, with malicious eye
Askance to watch the working of his lie
On mine, and mouth scarce able to alTord
Suppression ofthe gke. that pursed and scored
its edge, ill one more victim gained thereby.

Tilt; title :s taken from Shakespeare's Kins Lear fill. iv. !73; A "chiitSe" i- J
medieval terns for J vouch awainng k:iiLfiifiiin,i

a
J52 1'OEMi. POETS, Lko I-. I K V

2
What rise should ho bo sot for, with his staff?
What, save to waylay with his lies, ensnare
Al! travelers who might find him posted there,
And ask the mid? ! guessed what skull-like laugh
Would break, what crutch ’gin'' wnte mv epitaph begin to
For pastime in the dusty thoroughfare,
3
If at his counsel I should turn aside
Into ihat ominous tract which, all agree,
Hides the Dark l ower. Yet aequiescingly
I did turn as he pointed: neither pride
Nor hope rekindling at the end descried,
So much as gladness that some end might be.

For, what with my whole world-wide wandering,

What with my search drawn out through years, my hope
Dwindled into a ghost not fit to cope
With that obstreperous joy success would bring, —
I hardly tried now to rebuke the spring
My heart made, rinding failure in its scope.
5
As when a sick man very near to death
Seems dead indeed, and feels begin and end
The and takes the farewell of each In end,
tears,
And hears one bis! the other go. draw breath
Freeh er outside, f"since all is oler,“ he saith,
“And the blow fallen no grieving can amend;'11)
6
While some discuss if near the other graves
lie room enough for rhi-,, and when a day
Suns best for carrying the corpse away,
With care about the banners, scarves arid staves:
And still the man hears all, and only craves
He may not shame such tender love and Stay.
7
Thus, I had so long suffered in this quest,
Heard failure prophesied so oil, been writ
So many times among “The Hand1’ — to wit,
 ANTHOIOUY JS3

Phe knights whcS to r]io ID:s rk Tower's search addressed

Their steps - that just to fail as they, seemed best,
A tid all the doubt was now — should 1 be fit?
S
So, quiet as despair, 1turned from him,
That hateful cripple, out ot his highway
Into the path he pointed, All [he day
Had been a dreary one at best, and dim
Was settling to ns close, yet shot one grim
Red leer to see the plain catch its estray.'
9
*1’ Fot mark! no sooner was i fairly found
Pledged to the plain, after a pace or two,
Than, pausing to throw backward a last view
O’er the sate road, 'twas gone; gray plain all round:
Nothing but plain to the horizon's bound.
! might go on; naught else remained to do.
10
So, on 1 went J think I never saw
Such starved ignoble nature; nothing throve:
For Mowers — as well expeCt a cedar grove!
Rut cockle, spurge, according to their law
Might propagate their kind, with none to awe,
You'd think; a burr had been a treasure trove.
IS
No! penury, inertness and grimace,
In some strange sort, were the land’s portion. "Sec
Or shut your eyes,’1 said Nature peevishly,
“It nothing skills: 1 cannot help my case:
’Tis the Last Judgment’s tire must cure this place,
Calcine6 its clock and set my prisoners free.” reduce to ash
12
If there pushed any ragged thistle stalk
Above its mates, the head was chopped;
the bents” (oatsc grasses
Were jealous eke, What made those holes and rents

''
Hoii. iiri.il Vic fim who Hss strjyrd
354 POEMS, POETS, POETRY

In the dock's harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to bilk

All hope ot greenness? 'ris a brute must walk
Pash mg0 their life out, with a brute’s intents. I'rrcjfriritf
13
As for die grass, it gross’ as scant as hair
In leprosy; thin dry blades pricked the mud
Which underneath looked kneaded Ltp with blood.
One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-scare,
Stood stupefied, however he came there:
Thrust out past service from the devil's stud!
14
Alive? he might he dead for aught I know,
With that red gaunt co Hoped 3 neck a-stram, riiiycd
And shut eyes underneath the fusty mane;
Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe,
J never saw a brute 1 hated so;
He must be wicked to deserve such pain.

15
I shut my eyes and turned them on my heart.
As a man calls for wine before he lights,
t asked one draught of earlier, happier sights.
Ere ritly I could hope to play illy part.
Think first, fight afterwards — (he soldier’s art:
Otic taste of the old time sets ail to rights.
16
IVoi it! I fancied Cutbbert's reddening face
licncath its garniture of curly gold,
Dear fellow, till 1 almost felt him fold
An ami in mine to fix me to the place,
That way he used. Alas, one night's disgrace!
Out went my heart'-, new tire and left it cold,
11
Giles then, the soul of honor — there he stands
Frank as ten years agowhen knighted first.
What honest man should dare {he said) he durst.
—
Good - but the scene shifts faugh! what hangman hands
Pin to his breast a parchment? His own bands i
Kead it. Poor traitor, spit upon and curst!
 ANTHOLOGY 355

18
Uetter this present vhati a past like that;
Hack therefore to my darkening path again f
No sound, no sight as far as eye could strain.
’Will the night send a liowlet0 or a bat? trusl
I asked: when something on the dismal flat
Came to arrest my thoughts and change their train.
19
A sudden little river crossed my path
As unexpected as a serpent comes.
No sluggish tide congenial to the glooms;
This* as it frothed by, might have heen a bath
—
For the trend's glowing hoof to see the wrath
Of its black eddy bespate0 with flakes bespattered
and spumes.
20
So petty yet so spiteful! All along,
Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it;
Drenched willows flung them headlong in a lit
Of mute despair, a suicidal throng:
The river which had done them all the wrong,
Whate’er that was, rolled by, deterred no whit,
21
Which, while I forded, — good saints, how I feared
To set my foot upon a dead man's cheek.
Each step, or feel the spear I thrust to seek
For hollows, tangled in his hair or beard!
— It may have been a water-rat I speaied,
liut, ugh[ it sounded like a baby’s shriek.
22
Glad was I when I reached the other bank.
Now for a better country, Vain presage]
Who were the struggle rs, what war did they wage,
Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank
Soil to a plash? Toads in a poisoned tank,
Or wild cats in a red-hot iron cage —
23
The fight so have seemed in that fell cinque.
must
What penned them there, with all the plain to choose?
No footprint leading to that homd mews,
356 I'otMi, POETS, PDEIKV

None out of it Mad brewagc set to work

Their brains, no doubt, like galley-slaves the Turk
Pits for his pastime, Christians against Jews,
24

—
And more than that a furlong on why, there!
—
What had use was that engine for, that wheel,
Or brake, not wheel — that harrow' fit to reel
Men's bodies out like silk? with all the air
Of Toph et's° tool, on earth left unaware, Hdrs
Or brought to sharpen its rusty teeth ofseed.
25
Then came a bit of stubbed ground, once a wood,
Next a marsh, it would seem, and now mere earth
Desperate and done with; (so a fool finds mirth,
Makes a thing and then mars it, till bis mood
Changes and off he goes!) within a rooda — quarter-acre
Bog, day and rubble, sand and stark black dearth.
26
Now blotches rankling, colored gay and grim,
Nowr patches where some leanness of the soil’s
Broke into moss or substances like boils;
Then came some palsied oak, a deft in him
Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim
Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils.
27
And just as far as ever from the end!
Nought in the distance but the evening, nought
To point my footstep further! At the thought,
A great black bird, ApollyonV bosom-friend,
Sailed past, nor beat bis wide wing
dragon-penned0 dragon-feathered
That brushed my cap —-perchance the guide I sought.
28
for, looking up, aware l somehow grew,
’Spite of the dusk, the plain bad given place
All round to mountains — with such name to grace

1
In Revelation 9:1 I, an jnÿcl oftht bottomless pit.
 ANTHOI 0C v 357

Mere ugly height1; and heaps; now stolen in view.

—
How thus they had surprised me, solve it, you!
How to- get from them was no dearer case.
19
Yet half I seemed to recognize some trick
()i mischief happened to me, God knows when —
hi a bad dream perhaps. Here ended, then,
Progress this way. When, in the very nick
Of giving up, one timer more, came a dick
As when a crap shuts — you’re inside the den!
JO
Bumingly it came on me all at once,
This was the place f those two hills oil the right,
Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in light:
While to the left, a tall scalped mountain . . . Dunce,
Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce,
After a life spent training for the sight!
if
What in the midst lay but the Tower itself?
Thu round squat turret, blind as the fool?; heart,
built of brown stone, without a counterpart
In the whole world. The tempest’s mocking elf
Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf
He strikes on, only when the timbers start.
n
Not sect because of night perhaps? — why,day
Came hack again ior that! before it left,
The dying sunset kindled through a Heft;
The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay,
Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay, —
—
"Now stab and end the creature to the heft!"

Not hear? when noise was everywhere! it tolled

Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears
Of ail the lost adventurers my peers,
—
How such a one was strong, and such was bold,
And such was fortunate, yet each ofold
Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of yean.
358 POEMS, POETS, POETRY

34
There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met
To view the last of me, a living frame
for one more picture] in a sheet of Hame
] saw them and 1 knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-hom* to tny lips 1 set.
And blew. "Chiide Roland to the Dark Towtr tante.’1
Memorabilia
1
Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
And did he stop and speak to you
And did you speak to him again'
How strange it seems and new!
2
liut you were living before that,
And also you are living after;
And the memory I started at
My starting moves your laughter
—
}

\ crossed a moor, with a name of its own

And a certain use in the world no doubt,
Yet a hand's-breadth of it shines alone
'Mid the blank miles round about;
4
f’or there 1
picked up on the heather
And there I put inside my breast
A moulted feather, an eagle-feather!
Well, l forget the rest.

ROUERT BURNS
O, Wert Thou in the Cattld Blast
O, wert thou m the cauld blast
On yonder lea, on yonder lea,
My plaid it' to the angry airt/5 quarter (of the iriruf)
I'd shelter thee, ]‘d shelter thee.

1
A rouÿii trumpet iruiie from I lie liom of" an on nr cow.
 ANTHOLOGY 359

Or did nusfomine’i bitter storms

Around thee bla\v, around thee blaw.
Thy bield3 should be my bosom, shelter
To share i: a', to share it a".
Or were I in the wildest waste,
Sac black and tune, sae black and bare,
The desert were a paradise,
If thou wert there, if thou wert there.
Or were I monarch o’ the globe,
Wi thee to reign, wf thee to reign,
The brig}) test jewel in my crown
Wad be my queen, wad be my queen.

A Red, Red Rose

O mv luve’s like a red, red rose.
That's newly sprung in June;
O my luve's like the melodic
That's sweetly played in tune.
As fair
art thou, my bonnie bss.
So deep in luve am 1;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a' the seas gang dry.
Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the reiL'ks melt wi' the suit:
O 1 will luve thee still, my dear,
While the sands o' life shall run,
And fare thee week my only luve,
And fare thee weel awhile!
And I will come again, my luve,
Though it were ten thousand mile.

GLORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON

She Walk* in Beauty
!
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless dimes and starry skies;
And all that's best of’ dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
360 POEMS, POETS, POETRY

Thus mellowed to that tender Light

Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
2
One shade the rnote, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling place,
3
And on chat cheek, and o'er that brow.
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win. the tints that glow,
lint cell of days in goodness spent,
A nnnd at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

When We Two Parted

When we two parted
In silence and tears,
Half broken-hearted
To sever for years,
Pale grew thy cheek and cold,
Colder thy kiss;
Truly chat hour foretold
Sorrow to this,
The dew of the morning
Sunk chill on my brow
it felt like the warning
—
Of what I feel now.
Thy vows are ail broken,
And light is thy fame;
I hear thy name spoken.
And share in its shame.
They name thee before me,
A knell to mine ear;
A shudder comes o’er me
Why wert thou so dear?
—
They know not 1 knew thee,
Who knew thee too well —
 ;\N i mmu'rY 3G1

Long, long shiill I rue thee,

Too deeply to tell.
En secret wt met
—
In silence I grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive,
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should 1 greet thee: -
With silence and tears,

TORN A DEE CERVANTES

Poem.for rhe Yeung White Man mm
Asked Afe Hew I, An Intelligentÿ
Well-Read Person Could Believe
in the War Between Rates

In ttiy land there are no distinctions.

The barbed wire politics of oppression
have been torn down long ago. The only reminder
of past battles, lost or won, is a slight
rutting in the fertile fields;
In my land
people write poems about love,
full of nothing but contented childlike syllables.
Everyone reads Russian short Stones and weeps.
There are no boundaries,
There is no hunger, no
complicated famine or greed
E am not a revolutionary.
E don't even like political poems.
E)o you tin nk ! can believe m a war between races?
[ can deny it. 1 can forget about it
when I’m safe,
living on my own continent of harmony
and home, but I am not
there.
I believe in revolution
because everywhere the crosses are burning,
J62 POEMS, POETS, POETRY

sharp-shooting goose-steppers round every corner,

there are snipers in the schools . . .
(1 know you don’t believe this,
Yon think this is nothing
but faddish exaggeration. But they
are not shooting at yon.)
I'm marked by the color of my skin.
The bullets are discrete and designed to kill slowly.
They are aiming at my children.
These are facts.
Let me show you my wounds: my stumbling mind, my
"excuse me” tongue, and this
nagging preoccupation
with the feeling of not being good enough.
These bullets bury deeper than logic.
Racism is not intellectual.
1 can not reason these scars away.
Outside my door
there is a real enemy
who hares me.
[ am a poet
who yearns to dance cm rooftops,
to whisper delicate lines about joy
and the blessings of human understanding.
I try. I go to my land, my tower of words and
bolt the door, but the typewriter doesn't fade out
the sounds of blasting and muffled outrage,
My own days bring me slaps on the face.
Every day I am deluged with reminders
that this is nor
my land
and this is my land.
I do not believe in the svar between races
but in this country
there is war.

Refugee Ship
Like wet cornstarch, I slide ’

past my grandmothers eyes. Bible

 AN I HO L OC V 363

at her side, she removes her glasses.

The pudding thickens.
Mama raised me without language,
!‘m orphaned from my Spanish name.
The words .are foreign, stumbling
on my tongue. I see in the mirror
my reflection; bronzed skin, black hair.
I feel I am a captive
aboard the refugee ship.
Tire ship ih.it will never dork.
i
I El bam> qttc united afraid

MAKJLYN CHIN
Altar
I tell her she has outlived her usefulness.
1 point to the comer where dust gathers,
where light has never touched. But there she sics,
a thousand years, hands folded, in J tattered armchair,
with yesterday's news, “the Golden Mountain Edition."
The morning sun shuts down the broken eaves.
shading half of her sallow face,
On the upper northwest corner (I’d consulted a geomancer),
a deathtrap shines on the dying bougainvillea,
The carcass of a goatmoth hangs upsidedown,
hollowed out. The only evidence
of her seasonal life is a das It
of shim mer>’ powder, a last cry
She. who was attracted to that hare bulb,
who danced around that immigrant dream,
will find her end here, this comer,
this solemn altar.

Autumn Leaves
My dead piled up, thick, fragrant, on the fire escape.
My mother ordered rite again, and again, to sweep it clean.
Alt that blooms must full. 1 learned this not from die Tno,
but from high school biology.
364 POEM Si POETS, PCJEUY

Oh, the contradictions ot hiving a broom and not a dustpan!

1 swept the leaves down, down through the iron grille
and let the dead rain over the Wong family’s pario.
And it was Achilles Wong who completed the task,
We called her:
Thf-ii»e-it,lw-ck<ircii-auiay-nmUhfT-J(tttiily'i-anrunin.
She blossomed, tall, benevolent, notwithstanding.

AMY CLAM PITT

A Procession at Candlemas
1
Moving on or going back to where you came from,
bad news is what you mainly travel with:
a breakup or a breakdown, someone running oft
or walking out, called up or called home:
death in the family. Nudged from their stanchions
outside the terminal, anonymous of purpose

ns- a dock of birds, the bison of the highway

funnel westward onto Route Wf), mirroring
an entity that cannot look into irselt and know

what: makes it what it is, Sooner or later

every trek becomes a funeral procession.
The mother curtained in Intensive Care -
a scene the mind leaves blank, fleeing instead
toward scenes of transhumaricc. J the belled sheep friTHi/?orf of
moving up the Pyrenees, red-tassled pack llamas jlotlts

footing velvet-green precipices, the Kurdish

women, jingling with bangles, gorgeous
on their vug-piled mounts —
already lying dead,
bereavement altering the moving lights
to a processional, ,i feast of Candlemas.
Change as child-bearing, birth as a kind

1
February 2. Observed as 3 church [estiva] in COmmriuoratlOJ) nf rhe presentation
of Christ in the [ertipie and tSie purification of" the Virgin. Mary liter childbirth.

J
 AÿTHOLOGV 365

of shucking off: out »t what began

a? a Mosaic" insuli —
such a loathing
of the common origin, even a virgin,
having given birth, needs, purifying —
to carry fire as though it were a Howrr,
the terror and the loveliness entrusted
into naked [lands, supposing Cod might pave,
might actually need a mother people have
at times found tins a way of being happy.

A Candlemas of moving lights along Ikoutc fill;

lighted candles in 3 corridor from Arlington
over The Potomac, tor every earned flame
the name of a dead soldier: an dement
fragile as ego. frightening as parturition,0 giving binh
necessary and intractable as. dreaming.
The lapped, wheelbomc integument, layer
within layer, at the core a dream of
something precious, ripped: Where are we?
The sleepers groan, stir, re wrap themselves
about the self 's imponderable substance,
or clamber down, numb -footed, half in a drowse
of free 7.1 ng dark, through a Stonehenge
of tuel pumps, the bison hulks slantwise
beside them, drinking. What is real except
what’s fabricated? The jellies glitter
ere a m -capped fit the cafeteria showcase;
gumball globes, Life Savers cinctured
in parcel gilt, plop from their housings
perfect, like miracles. Comb, nail clipper,
lip rouge, mirrors and emollients embody,
niched into the washroom seal I case,
tlie pristine seductiveness ol money
Absently, without inhabitants, this

’
Of o-r reined rut Moses or (he iiraiiuriiim or wrin rifts attributed to him; here, the
Mosaic law di.ii forty days alter childbirth .1 woman must present herself at the temple
for rmial purification,
'Adinÿtoti National Cemetery,
36(i POEMS, POE I S, P O r T KI

nowhere oasis wears the plate name

of Indian Meadows. The westward>4rekking
(ranshumance, onto only, of a people who,

in losing everything they had. lost even

lilt* names they went by. scumbling past
like caribou, perhaps camped litre. Who
can assign a trade-in value to that sorrow?
The monk in sheepskin over tucked -up saffron
intoning to a drum becomes the metronome
of one more straggle up Pennsylvania Avenue
m falling snow, a whirl of" tenderly
remorseless corpuscles, street gangs
amok among magnolias’ pregnant wands,
a stillness at the heart of so much whirling:
beyond the torn integument of childbirth,

sometimes, wrapped like a papoose into a grief

not merely of tile ego, you rediscover almost
the rest-in -peace of the placental coracle.
2
Of what the dead were, living, one knows
so htde a*, barely to recognize
[lie fabric of the back ward -ramifying

antecedents, half noted presences

in darkened rooms: the old, the feared,
the hallowed. Never the same river
drowns rhe unalterable doors ilk An effigy
in olive wood or pear wood, dank
with the sweat ot age. walled in the dark
Uraurnn, Argos, Santos:1 even the unwed
at
Athene,"1 who had no mother, born
—
it’s declared
of some man's brain like every other pure idea,
had her own wizened cull object, kept
out of sight like the incontinent whimperer
in the backstairs bedroom, where no child

' UniltOA 1VJS .H sue kjiosvn from imcierll tunes fur (he wnnhip of Ancmis. Hera
was worshiped at Argos. Samos is no island in the Aegean Sea
'
A diem emerged., fully armed, from the head of her tathcr, Zeus.
 ANTHOLOGY 367

—
ever goes to whom, year after year,
the fair linen of the sacred pcplos*
was brought in ceremonial procession —
flutes and stringed instruments, wildflower-
huttg cattle, nubile Athenian girls, young men
praised for the beauty of their bodies. Who
can unpecl the layers of that seasonal
returning to the dark where memory fails,
as birds re-enter the ancestral flyway?
Daylight, snow falling, knotting of gears:
Chicago, Soot, the rotting backsides
of tenements, grimed trollshapes of ice
underneath the bridges, the tunnel heaving
like a birth canal. Disgorged, the infant
howling in the restroom; steam-table cereal,
pale coffee; wall-eyed TV receivers, armchairs
of molded plastic; the squalor of the day
resumed, the orphaned litter taken up again
unloved, the spawn of botched intentions,
grief a mere hardening of the gut,
a set piece of what can 't be avoided:
parents by the tens of thousands living
unthanked, unpaid but in the sour coin
of resentment. Midmoming gray as zinc
along Route 80, com -stubble quilting
the underside of snowdrifts, the cadaverous
belvedere of windmills, the sullen state
of feed!ot cattle; black creeks puncturing
white terrain, the frozen bottomland
a mtish of willow tops; dragnetted in ice,
the Mississippi. Westward toward the dark,
the undertow of scenes come back to, fright
riddling the structures of interior history:
Where is it? Where, in the shucked-ofT
bundle, the hampered obscurity' that has been
for centuries the mumbling lot of women,

* A linen shawl, cult symbol of Athena; object of the I'anathcnaje procession in

ancient Athens, represented on the Parthenon.
368 POEMS, POETS. 1'OETR.V

did the thread of fine, too frail

ever to discover what it meant, to risk
even the taking of a shape, relinquish
the seed of possibility, unguessed-at
as a dream of something precious? Memory,
that exquisite blunderer, stumbling
like a migrant bird that finds the fly way
it hardly knew it knew except by instinct,
down the long-unentered nave of childhood,
late oil a midwinter afternoon, alone
among the snow-hung hollows of the windbreak
on the far side of the orchard, encounters

sheltering among the evergreens, a small

stilled bird, its Cap of clear yellow
slit by a thread of scarlet
— the untouched
nucleus of fire, the lost connection
hallowing the wizened effigy, the mother
curtained in Intensive Care: a Candlemas
of moving lights along FLoute 80, at nightfall,
in falling snow, the stillness and the sorrow
of things moving back to where they came from,

JOHN CLARE
Badger
When midnight comes a host of dogs and men
Go out and track the badger to his den,
And put a sack within the hole, and lie
Till the old grunting badger passes by.
He comes and hears — they let the strongest loose.
The old fox hears the noise and drops the goose.
The poacher shoots and hurries from the cry,
And the old hare half wounded buzzes by.
They get a forked stick to bear him down
And dap the dogs and take him to the town,
And bait him all the day with many dogs,
And laugh and shout and fright the scampering hogs,
He runs along and bites at all he meets:
They shout and hollo down the noisy streets.
 A NTHOL O G Y

He turns about to face the loud uproar

Anti drives the rebels to their very dour,
The frequent stone is hurled where'er they go;
When badgers fight, then everyone’s a foe.
The dog-, are clapped and iirgeii to join the tray;
The badger t Lin is and drives them all a Way.
Though scarcely half as big, demure and small,
He fi gilts with dogs tor hours and beats them all,
The heavy mastiff,: savage in tile fray,
Lies down and licks his feet and turns away.
The bulldog knows his much and waxes cold,
The badger grins and never leaves his hold.
He drives the crowd and follows at their heels
And bites them through — the drunkard swears and reels,
The frighted women take* the boys away,
The blackguard laughs and hurries on the fray
He tries to reach the woods, an awkward race,
but sticks and cudgels quickly stop the chase
He turns again and drives the noisy crowd
And beats the many dugs in noises loud.
He drives away and beats them every one.
And then they loose them all and set them on.
He falls as dead and kicked by boys and men,
Then starts and grins and drives the crowd again;
Till kicked and tom and beaten out he lies
And leaves his hold and crackles, groans, and dies.

First Lave
l ne'er was struck before that hour
With love so sudden and so sweet.
Her face it bloomed like a sweet flower
And stole my heart ;m.iv complete.
My face turned pale as deadly pale.
My legs refused to walk away,
And when she looked, what could 1 ail?
My life and all seemed tunied to clay.
And then my blood rushed to rue face
And took my eyesight tfuice away.
I ke trees and bushes round the place
Seemed midnight at noonday.
370 P iJ c> t . s . I1 Ci L I ML Y

]could not see a single tiling

Words from my eyes did start —
They spoke as chords do from the string,
And blood burnt round my heart.
Are flowers tire winter's choice?
Is love’s bed always snow?
She seemed tn hear my silent voice,
Not love’s appeals to know,
1 never saw so sweet a face
As that I stood before.
My heart has left its dwelling-place
And can return no more.

I Am
1 am: yet what i am none cares or Knows
My friends forsake me like a memory lost,
] am the self-consumer of my woes —
They rise and vanish in oblivious host.
—
And yet 1 am, and live
—
Like shadows m love’s frenzied, stifled throes
like vapors tossed
into the nothingness ol scorn and noise,
Into the living sen of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of litre or joys,
lint the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest, that i love the best,
Are strange pay. rather stranger than the rest.
E long for scenes, where man hath never trod,
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator God,
—
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Un troubling, and untroubled where I he,
I he grass below above the vaulted sky.

HENUI COLE
40 Days attd 40 flights
Opening a vein he called my radial,
the phleboiomist introduced himself as Angel.
Since the counseling it had been ten days
of deep inversion self- recrimination weighed

.
 ANTHOLOGY Ml

against regret, those useless emotions.

Now there would be thirty more enduring the notion
of Some self-made doom foretold in the palm.
Waiting for blood work with aristocratic calm,
big expectant mothers from Spanish Harlem
appeared cut-out, as if Matisse had conceived them,
Their bright smocks ruffling like plumage before the fan,
they might themselves have been angels, come by land.
Consent and disclosure signed away, liquid gold
of urine glimmering, in a plastic cup, threshold
oflasi doubt crossed, the red fluid was drawn
in a steady hematic ooze from my ami
"Now, darling, the body doesn't he,” Angel said.
DNA and enzymes and antigens in his head
tme as lines in the face in the mirror
on his desk.
1 smiled, pretending to be cheered.
In the way that some become aware of God
when they cease becoming overawed
with themselves, no less than the artist concealed
behind the surface of whatever object or felt
words be builds, so I in my first week
of waiting let the self be displaced by each
day’s simplest events, letting them speak
with emblematic voices that might teach me.
They did - until l happened on the card
from the clime, black-framed as a graveyard.
Could the code 12 22 90 have represented
some near time, December 22, 1990, for repentance?
The second week I believed it. The fourth I
rejected it and much else loved, until the eyes
teared those last days and the lab phoued.
Batk at the dink
— someone’s cheap cologne,
Sunday lamb yet on the tongue, the mind coo] as a pitcher
of milk, a woman’s knitting needles aflutter,
—
Angel’s hand in mind 1 watched the vgrdict-Lips move,
rubbed my ami, which, once pricked, had tingled then bruised.
372 POEMS, POETS, POETRY

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

Dejection: An Ode
Litre. /lift ytitrem 1 iirre iht ptetr Afpgrt,
M iih the eld .Ifrun j'rr irr*' arms;
And I fear, [ fear, my master dear!
11 L" ,<hd!I hiln1 11 deadly JfarPH.
— UrtLLAH OF SITE FATRICK SFthjr.C

l
Well! It the Bird was weather-wise, who made
The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence,
This night, so tranquil now, will not go hence
Unroused by winds, that ply a busier trade
Than those which mold yon cloud in lazy flakes.
Or the dull sobbing draft, that moans and rakes
Upon the strings of this Aeolian kite,'
Which better hr were mute.
For lo! the Ncw-ntoon winter-bright!
And overspread with phantom light,
(With swimming phantom light o'erspread
But rimmed and circled by J silver thread)
i see the old Moon in her lap. foretelling
The coming-ou of rain and squally blast.
And oh! that even now the gust were swelling,
And the slant night shower driving loutf and fast!
Those sounds which oft have raised me, whilst they awed,
And sent my soul abroad.
Might now perhaps their wonted impulse give,
Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live!
2
A grid without a pang, void, dark, and drear,
A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,
In word, or sigh, or rear -
O Lady! in rliis wan and heartless mood,
To other thoughts by yonder throstle wooed,
All this long eve, so balmy and serene,
Have I been gazing on rhe western sky,
And its peculiar tint of yellow green:

An Aenlijn lute or harp is j strinjpsd instrument rh.it produces musical sounds

when touched b\,L current of HIT.
 AM no LOG V 373

And still r gaze— and with how blank an eye!

And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars,
That give away their motion to the sutx;
Those scars, that glide behind them or be tween,
Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen:
Yon crescent Moon, as tixed as it it grew
In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;
] see them all so cjfceeJlently fair,
1 see, not feel, how beautiful they are!
3
My genial spirits [ail;
And what can these avail
To lift the smothering weight from oil my breast?
Jr were a vain endeavor,
Though I should gaze torever
Oil that green light that lingers in the west
1 may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.
4
O Lady! we receive but what we give,
And m our life alone does Nature live:
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!
And would we aught behold, of higher worth,
Than that inanimate cold world allowed
To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd,
Alii from the soul itself must issue forth

Enveloping the Earth

—
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud

And from tile soul itself must there be sent

A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth,
Of all sweet sounds the life and element!
3
O pure of heart! thou nced’st not ask of me
What this strong music in the soul may be!
What,, and wherein it doth exist,
This light, this glory, This fair luminous mist,
This beautiful and beauty-making power.
Joy, virtuous Lady! Joy that ne’er was given,
1

Save to the pure, and m their purest hour,

Lite, acid Life's effluence, cloud at once and shower,
Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power,
374 Pot MS, POETS, POETRY

Which weddiing Nature to i] s. gives in dower

A new Earth and new Heaven,
Undreamt tit by the sensual and the proud —
Jov is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud —
We in ourselves rejoice!
And thence flows all that c barn is or ear or sight,
All melodies the echoes of that voice,
Ali colors a suffusion from that light.
6
I here was a time when, though my path was rough,
This joy within me dallied with distress.
And all misfortunes were but as the stuff
Whence Fanty made me dreams of happiness:
For hope grew round me, like the twining vine,
And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine,
Hut now afflictions how me down to earth:
Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth;
But oh! each visitation
Suspends what nature gave me at im birth,
My shaping spirit of Imagination,
l or not to think of what 1 needs must feel,
But to be still and patient, all 1 cart;
And haply by abstruse research to steal
From my own nature all the natural nun -
This was my sole resource, my Only plan;
Fill that which suits a part infects the whole,
And now is almost grown the habit of my soul.
7
Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind,
Reality’s dark dream!
I tup n from you, and listen to the wind,
Which long has raved unnoticed. What a scream
Of agony by torture lengthened out
That lute sent forth! Thou Wind, that rav'st without,
Hare crag, or mountain tairn,0 or blasted tree, pool
Or pine grove whither woodman never fclomb,
Or lonely house, long held the witches' home,
Met hi riles were fitter instruments tor thee,
Mad Lutamst! who in this month of showers,
Of dark-brown gardens, and of peeping bowers,
Mak’st Devils’ VLIIC, with worse than wintry song.
 ANIIIOLOCY 375

The blossoms, btids, and timorous leaves among.

Thou Actor, perfect in ad tragic sounds!
Thou mighty Foet, e’en to frcniy boid!
What tell’st thou now about?
’Tis of the rushing of an host in tout,
With groans, of trampled men, with smarting wounds
At once they groan with pain, and shudder with the cold!
Hut hush! there is a pause of deepest silence!
—
And all that noise, as of a rushing dowd,
With groans, and tremulous shudderingÿ —
all is over —
It tells another talc, with sounds less deep and loud!
A tale of less affright,
And tempered with delight,
As Otway's3 seif had framed the tender lay —
'Tis of a little child
Upon a lonesome wild,
Not far from home, but she hath lost her way:
And now moans low ill bitter grief and fear,
And now screams loud, and hopes to make her mother hear.
8
'Tis midnight, hut small thoughts have 1 of sleep:
Full seldom may my friend sueh vigils keep!
Visit her, gentle Sleep! with wings of healing,
And may this storm be but a mountain birth,
May alt the stars hang bright above her dwelling,
Silent as though they watched the sleeping Earth!
With light heart may she rise,
Gay fancy, cheerful eyes,
joy lift her spirit, joy attune her voice;
To her may all things live, from pole to pole,
Their life the eddying of her living soul!
O simple spirit, guided from above,
Dear Lady! friend devoutest of my choice,
Thus mayest thou ever, evermore rejoice.

'
Thomas Otivay (]ti52-1 hS5), a dramatist whvic play! imiphasi nt pathos and
SCtlti merit.
 376 POEMS, foi rs, j»6 E I R Y

The Rime nf the Antietu Mariner

hi Seven Parti
Facile ttediK plitn'i <ii<- h'atutdS invisibles rjrr.JiM 1-pfsJ-
bilrs iii rffjrppr unhvnitate. Sed imnim |sir] omnium
fdirnliaui tinis mdiis niarrabit? et gradni el COgnationes
(1 diserim fpjd el ji'rrÿjWorrMJi manera? Q \nd agmit? quae

Seva habitant? Hamm rcrum twiitiam temper ambivit

J ri iÿit rruH rn litimdmlill , fidHppijTiiJppr tPffPjJil. jui’ilt, ItUCffa,

tmi diffitear. qnanthrque ht entinw, mtrqitam in tabula,

Hidijltrii <7 ntelwris uiundi ininginem (tiflteinyhlri: m-

utens assitefacM hodicntiie IT me ntiituUis se tontrahal
jjrppri.(, ft tflt.i subsidat in pnsillaS rggilntianrl. Sid

IVntdti intered iliviÿilaudnnt iSt, tUi>dnii)Ue iewnridus,

1
imertis. di'em
—
nt certa itb ij utHfe, dirfi'rÿJiiinur?
T, BURNET

Pan i
dji ancient Mariner is an ancient Manner
][
rnertctb three Gal¬ And he stoppeth one of three.
lants bidden to a “L5y thy long gray beard and glittering eye,
wedding frast, and
delainclh one-
Now wherefore stoppst thou rne?
The Bndt'jÿooJtl's doors are opened wide,
And I am new of kin;
The guest1; are met, the feast is set:
May's* hear the merry din."

He holds him with his skinny hand,

“There was a ship, quoth lie.
“Hold off! unhand me, guybeard kum!"
F.ftsoons’* Ins hand dropped he. irittUdUiilely

Frnm tlunict s . iieharvlogun Hulaiaphiae: "\ can easily helieve that there ire more
mviuNe thin ’cittblc he it es Ill tile tmlvi'ienf Hm O( rlscir l.imilics, degrees. L on Cl ecdo rjs.
distinction!;, .i 1 1 , 1 I'unctimii, who shall tell (ii? How du tfarv irt; Where aie they found?
About such matter* Llic human muni li.tv always ifcled Without attaining knowledge
Vrl ! ill! Hot tSimbt rii.it HHiimnir. it K well tbr (ho MUII rn coiHi‘n>p|j(v ;ii ill ,i picture
the image of larger and better Wniki, lest the mind, habituated Ui the small concerns
of daily life. limit itself too much and mile entirely nirtimuil thinking. Hut meanwhile
tic mint he on watt It for :i It truth. riding rrdmTies, so that wr may distinguish cenain
from nut ert.ml, d.,\ from m i;ht " litmti-i WJV.I Mivntcfulli-t oUurv 3: niÿJasEi theologian
 ANTHUI or. v 377

'! Tf,_ !I aiding Hu holds him with his glittering rye --

Cttril u spellbound The Wedding Guest stood still.
by |frr fyr of the And listens like a three years’ child:
,i'J ifajiiri!? iJinn,
The Mariner hath his will.
gjnd ronstioiiteil 10
hear hif tole, The Wedding Guest sat on .1 stone:
He cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that an dent man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.
"The ship was cheered, the harbor cleared,
Merrily did we drop
Below the kirk,0 below the hill. rfititrh
Tlte Maimer Sells lielow the lighthouse top.
fi,iH' she ;!NJJ sailed
tnutlni'.ird teisli 0 The Sun came up upon the left,
ithtd drfif /bn Out ot the sea came lie!
Ifwrflff, rdf if Anti he shone bright, and on the right
rtmdtfd the line. Went down into the sea.
Higher and higher every day,
Till over the mast at noon — ”

The Wedding Guest here beat his breast,

For he heard the loud bassoon.
The l Voiding The bride hath paced into the hall.
GIL-JT! henreth di-r Red as a rose is she;
frfliJ.lf FFrjfffr; but Nodding their heads before her goes
lie Mariner rarNjrp-
urili his Stile. The merry minstrelsy.
The Wedding Guest he beat bis breast,
Yet he cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake oil rhat ancient man,
The bright eyed Mariner.
Jltr s/rij3 driven by "And now the STOR.M-HI came, and he
'• jcirwd the Was tyrannous anti strong;
Ynltf P,de.
He struck with his o’erraking wings,
And chased us south along.
With sloping masts and dipping prow,
As wild pursued with veil and blow
Mill treads the shadow of his foe.
And Forward bends his head.
The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,
And southward aye we fled.
 378 POEMS, POETS, POETRY

And now there came both mist and snow,

And it grew wondrous cold:
And Lee, mast-high, came floating by.
As green as emerald.

Tre land of j'nc,

and <>ffearful
And through the drifts the snowy cliftsS
Did send a dismal sheen:
cm
fiiiiiidi trltrre Jif
11ring lltirig HWS Iff
Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken —
if SCOJ.
The ice was all between,
The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was ail around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!0 rnwri

Tiff <1 gTWt SfiT At length did Cross an Albatross,

bird, railed the Thorough the fog it came;
Albatross, MIJIF As if it had been a Christian soul,
through the rwH'-
jog and irw re¬
We hailed it in God's name.
ceived with great It ate the food it ne'er had eat,
joy and hospitality
And round and round it flew.
The ice did split with a thunder- fit;
The helmsman steered us through]
And to! the Aiki- And a good south wind spnang up behind;
tross pnveth a bird The Albatross did follow,
of good ouicu. and And every day, for food or play,
foiloivetb rhe ship Came to the mariners’ hollo!
or it returned

..... . .
i torib \rilrd through
In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,
fag and floating ite. It perched for vesper, nine;
Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,
M
ered die white Moon-shine.
“God save thee, ancient Manner!
The ancient ,U;rn-
rift inhospitably
ktlietli the ptoits
bird of good omen.
From the fiends, that plague thee LIUIS!
—
Why look'st thou so;" With my crossbow
—
L shot the ALBATROSS,

Part U
The Sun now rose upon the right;
Out ot the sea came lie,
Still hid in mist, and on the left
Went down into the id.
 ANTHOLOGY 37ÿ

And r he good south wind still blew behind,

But no sweet bird did follow,
Nor any day for food or play
Onto co the matinee's' hollo!
His shipmates cry And i bad done 3 hellish thing,
outagainst the And it would work 'em woe:
muient Mariner, far For all averted. 1 had killed the bird
killing the bird of
gacd luck,
That made cbe breeze to blow.
Ah wretch! said they, the bird Co slay,
That made the breeze to blow!
Btti trlicn the fag Nor dim nor red, like God’s own head,
cleared off, they The glorious Sun uprist:
justify ike Same, Then all averred, l had killed die bird
and thus iiiirkc
themselves accotn - That brought die fog and mist.
pikes in the crime. Twas right, said they, such birds to slay,
That bring the fog and mist.
I hr fair breeze The fair breeze blew, rite white foam flew,
continues; the ship The furrow followed free;
enters the Pacific We were the first that ever burst
Or Kin, iiitif sails
Into that silent sea.
northward, even ttll
it reaches the Line.
TV ship hath been |>own dropped the breeze, the sails, dropped down,
suddenly becalmed- "Twas sad as sad could be;
And we did speak only to break
The silence of the sea!
All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon.
Day after dav, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
And the Alba¬ Water, water, everywhere,
tross begins r.1 And all the boards did shrink;
fnr avenged, Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink,
The veryr deep did rot: O ChrtSll
That ever this should be!
 380 POEMS, POMS, Pnr.Tiu

YLM, slimy things did crawl with legs

Upon the slimy sea.
About, about, in ruei and rout
The death-fines danced tit night;
The water, like a witch’s oils,
burnt green, and blue and white,
And some in dreams assured were
.d Spirit had fit- Of the Spirit that placed us so;
lotivd llicm; nwr of Nine Fathom deep he had Followed us
f/pr inipisj'Mf inhab¬
From the land of mist and snow,
itants of this
plant'/, neither departed antis nor angels; eoiiceniing idiom the learned Jeu>, Josephus, iiuiY
the PhltOttic illlrf CoPiS(djprilli>fn)lifitp(, Mtihacl Psellns, may he ronsnlted. Titty art very
numerous, there is PPL> climate Or element without iipjd1 ,>r in™-.

And every tongue, through utter drought,

Was withered at the root;
We could not speak, no more than if
We had been choked with soot.
Tie shipmates, iff Ah[ well-a-day! wh.it evil looks
their sore distress, Had I from old and young!
uvuitifain l/itPH' Instead of the cross, the Albatross
the whole gnih ct
the ancient Man¬
About my neck was hung,
ner: fji _:J(JP/ Ifhoreot they Jjirpd(; the dead sea bird n'PdJlfi his neelt.
Part III
Tli ere passed a weary time. Larh throat
Was parched, and glazed each eye,
A weary time! a weary time!
How gtaaod each weary eye,
"I Tie anrj"™; .t far¬ When looking westward, J belleld
mer hchohleth ,1 A something in the sky,
sign PPE the ele¬
ment afar off. At first it seemed a little speck,
And then it seemed a mist;
Et moved and moved, and took at last
A certain shape, J wist,0 knew

A speck, a mist, a shape, 1 wist!

And si ill it neared and neared;
As if it dodged a water sprite,
It plunged and tacked anti veered.
 ANTHOLOGY 381

At IIS nearer J p- With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,

pftweh, >1 St'emeth We could nor laugh nor wail;
fcl'jji fo fit1 a slhy',
Through utter drought all dumb we stood!
Mid ill J dear rtlll-
1 bit my arm, 1 sucked die blood.
twv he freeth fus
nx'rWi j5p#j the And cried, A sail! a sail!
frprufs of thirst.
With throats unslaked, with black lips baked.
Agape they beard me call;
A flash of joy; Gramcrcy! they for joy did grin,
And all at once their breath drew in,
As they were drinking all.
horror follows Sec! see! (I cried) she tacks no more!
I'.ir call if he .1 ship work us weal;
] -lit her to
,'irjrr tomes Oimwrtl
Without a breeze, without a tide,
without iriiid or
She steadies with upright keel!
Hie?
The western wave was all aflame.
The day was well nigh done!
Almost upon the western wave
Rested the broad bright Sun:
When that strange shape drove suddenly
[3etwixt us and the Sun.

It seeinelh him hut Arid straight the Sun was flecked with bars,
flic skeleton of .1 (Heaven's Mother send us grace!)
|n
As if through a dungeon grate lie peered
With broad and burning face.

.Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud)

tprii its ribs are How fast she nears and nears!
•ten as hors on the
Are those her sails that glance in the Sun,
ixt of the selling
$M.
Like restless gossan I eres?
Hr Spiff Jfr- Are those her ribs through which the Sun
Il'flrMrfpl rlriiJ her
Did peer, as through a grate?
Deathtnate, and mi
And is that Woman ail her crew?
•thrr on board the
Is that a DEATH? and are there two?
eetciem ship
Is DEATH that woman's mate?
LiJff vessel, UL-e Her lips were red. W looks were free.
•Jtw1 Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin sv,is as white as leprosy.
The Nightmare I.IEF.-IN-DI s l H was she,
Who thicks man’s blood with cold.
 382 POEMS, POETS, POETRY

Death and Lifc- The naked hulk alongside came,

in-Deaih liMv And the twain were casting dice;
dited for the s hip's “The game is done! I’ve won! I’ve won!”
creu\ and she {the
latter) winntth the Quoth she, and whistles thrice.
aneienl Manner.

A!o twilight within The Sun’s rim dips; the stars rush out:
the fauns af the At one stride comes the dark;
Sun. With far-heard whisper, o’er the sea,
Off shot the specter-bark.

At the rising of the We listened and looked sideways up!

Moon, Fear at my heart, as at a cup,
My lifeblood seemed to sip!
The stars were dim, and thick the night,
The steersman’s face by his lamp gleamed white;
From the sails the dew did drip
Till clomb above the eastern bar
—
The homed Moon, with one bright star
Within the nether tip.

One after another, One after one, by the star-dogged Moon,

Too quick for groan or sigh,
Each turned his face with ghastly pang,
And cursed me with his eye.
Hts shipmates drop Four times fifty living men,
down dead. {And T heard nor sigh nor groan)
With heavy thump, a lifeless lump,
They dropped down one by one,
But Ltfe-in-Death
begins her work on
the undent Mari¬
The souls did from their bodies fly
They fled to bliss or woe!
—
And every souk it passed me by,
ner.
Like the whizz of my cross-bow!
Part IV
The Wedding “I fear thee, ancient Mariner!
Guest fearelh that I fear thy skinny hand!
a Spirit is taMri'nj? And thou art long, and lank, and brown,
to him;
As is the ribbed sea-sand.
I fear thee and thy glittering eye,
And thy skinny hand, so brown,’’ —

h
 As 1 ]i i •L in;’. 383

hint lt)c ancient Fear not, fear not, thou Wedding Guesr!
fa finer atiurelli This body dropped nut down,
hmi oj'ltit bodily
life, ,1lid prv- Atone, alone, alt, a!I alone,
ctnk'lh m relate Atone on a wide wide seat
ha horrible pm- And never a saint cook pity on
tTflCf-
My soul in agony.
Hr dvsyiserh the The many men, so beautiful]
matures oj the And they ail dead did tie:
fjAfr,
And a thousand thousand slims chinas
Lived on; and so did 1.
And i'PiL'iidr rhirr I looked upon the rotting sea,
fbev slumld liiv, And drew my eyes away;
and tJJrfpiiy tie I looked upon the rotting deck,
dead,
And there the dead men lay.
S looked to heaven, and tried to pray;
But or ever a prayer had gushed,
A wicked whisper came, and made
My heart as dry as dust.
! dosed my lids, and kept them close,
And the balls like pulses beat,
For the sky and the sea, and die sea and the sky
Lay like a load cm my weary eye,
And the dead were at my feet,
lint th: curse Iteerh The cold melted from [heir limb'.
sweat
lor him rp? the rye Nor rot nor reek did they;
of rJ|f dead rrrf+i. The look with which they looked on me
Had never passed away.
An orphan’s curse would drag to it el I
A spirit from on high;
but oh! more horrible titan that
Is the curse in a dead man's eye!
Seven days, seven nights, I saw chat curse,
And yet I could not die,
Iti his laiitHness The moving Mootl went up the sky.
•tad fixedness he And nowhere did abide:
yearmlh towards
the joiinreyaiÿ
Softly she was going up,
LWIMII, LT.N ii the And a star or two beside —
iJdr.h jJurf .eftf
i
Het beams beniocked the sultry main.
sojourn, yet still
Like April hoar frost spread.
 384 PQ'EMS, POETS, F.OETRV

FFriu'i' ifpfilWni; iip.'if lint where the huge shadow- Lu .

everyivhere the blue The charmed water burnt a] way
shy belongs re A still and awful red,
them, tirtii is their
appointed test, artd pjijjrpv country and their e-u-’rr pfiUpHriii JuJppid1:-, uVt/i they enter

unannounced, Df lard; that ore t(rl.tiiily expected ittld J'd'j there f.- JI silent joy :il their etmoal.
fly the light oj ihr beyond the shadow of the ship,
Short hr behoHeth 1 watched the water snakes:
God V fpfdlipprj They moved in tracks of shining white,
the great mini .
And when they reared, the elfish light
Fell nfT in hoars' flakes.
Within the shadow of the ship
J watched their rich attire;
13] lie, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coiled and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden tire.
Their fn-jury ond O happy living tilings' no longue
their happiness. Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart.
He bkiseth them And 1 blessed them unaware:
in his heart. Sure my kind saint Look pity on me.
And 1 blessed them unaware.
TV spell begins to The self-same moment I could pray;
break. And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea
Par) V
Oil sleep! it is a gentle thing,
lie loved from poie to pole!
To Mary Queen the praise be given!
She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven,
That slid into my soul.
fly of the The silly0 buckets on the deck, hnrly
holy Mother, lire That had so long remained,
undent Mofiner is 1 dreamt that they were filled vsic.li dew;
refreshed In lit min. And whi‘ii I awoke, ir rained,
My lips were wet, my throat was cold.
My garments ail were dank;
Sure 1 had drunken, in my dreams.
And still my body drank.
 A N l HOI otr Y 3SS

I moved, and could not feel my limbs:

I was so tight
— almost
1 thought that r had died in sleep,
And was a blessed ghost.
He heare/h sounds And sot)]] l heard a roaring wind:
Olid scclh strange !r did not come Linear:
sight* and (Vpprmo- lint with its sound it shook the sails,
lioni in the shy
and the element. That were so thin and sere.
The upper air burst into life!
And a hundred fire-dags sheen,
To and fro they were hurried about!
And to and fro, and in and out,
The wan stars danced between.
And the coming wind did roar more loud.
And the sails did sigh like sedge;
And the rain poured down bom one black cloud;
The Moon was at its edge.
The thick black cloud was cleft, and still
The Moon was at its side:
Like waters shot from some high crag,
The lightning tel) with never a jag,
A river Steep and wide.
The bodies oj the The loud wind never reached the ship,
ship's cmr nrc tn- Yet now the ship moved on!
Spiritcd, nml die Beneath the lightning and the Moon
ilttp ItitSrei OPi;
The dead men gave a groan.
They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose,
Nor spake, nor moved their eves;
It had been strange, even in a dream,
To have seen chose dead men rise.
The helmsman steered, the ship moved on:
Yet never a breeze up -blew;
The mariners all 'gan work the ropes,
Where they were wont to do;
They raised their limbs like lifeless tool’s
We were a ghastly crew.
The body of my brother's son
Stood by me, knee to knee;
The body and ! pulled at one rope,
But he said nought to me.
 336 POEMS, POETS, POETHV

“[ fear thee, ancient Mariner!”

But not by the lie Calm, thou Wedding Guest!
rrm/j of lht‘ men, ’TwiS not those souls that fled m pain,
nor by dementi of
Which to their corses came again,
earth Ot middle atI,
but by n fekWif But a tronp of spirits blest:
trtiity of driivlic
spirt It, sent doum
For when it dawned —they dropped their arms,
And clustered round the mast;
fey the involution of
the guardian saint. Sweet sounds rose slowly through their mouths,
And from their bodies passed,
Around, around, flew each sweet sound,
Then darted to the Sun;
Slowly tire sounds tame buck again,
Now mixed, now one by one.
Sometimes a -dropping from the sky
I heard the sky-lark sing;
Sometimes all little birds that are,
How they seemed! to fill the sea and air
With their sweet jargotiing!1* middwti
And now 'twas like all instruments,
Now like a lonely flute;
And now it is an angel’s song.
That makes the heavens be mute.
It ceased; yet still the sails made on
A pleasant noise till noon,
A noise like of a hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singe rli a quiet tune.
Till noon we quietly sailed on,
Yet never a breeze did breathe:
Slowly and smoothh went the ship,
Moved onward from beneath.
The wtirSomc Under the keel nine fathom deep,
Spirit from the From the land of mist and snow,
South Pale carries The spirit slid: and it was lie
cm the ship uf tor
That made the ship to go.
as the Line, in
obedience let the The sails at noun left oft their time,
attf>elii troop, but And the ship stood still also,
still mjuireth vengeance.
 A N tH.OLOG ¥ 387

The Sutl , right tip above the mast,

Had fixed her to the ocean;
Bui it) a minute .she 'gin stir,
With .i short uneisy motion -
Backwards and forwards half her length
With a short uneasy motion.
Then like a pawing horse let go,
She made a sudden bound:
It flung the blood into my head.
Arid I fell down in a s wound.
Tixe Pehn Spirit's Hots- long in that same fit I lay.
fellcuo demons, the I have not0 to iledarc; nmnot
invisible inhabitants But ere my living life returned,
of the element, take i heard and in my soul discerned
part rpi his UTenp;
iifjfl (n4 of them Two voices in rhe air,
relate, nplc to the
Other, j/r.U pi'Hiifrpff
“Is it he?'' quoth one. “Is this the man?
long jjjii htitsy fox Uy him who died on cross,
tlte ancient A latino With his cruel boss- he laid full low
hath been accorded The harmless Albatross.
to the Polar Spirit ,
wire rettimelh The spirit who bideth bv himself
foutkward. In the land ol mist and snow,
He loved the bird that loved the man
Who shot him with his bow."
The other was a softer voice,
As soft as honey-dew:
Quoth he, “'1 lie marl hath penance done,
And penance more will do.”
I}ar1 Vt

RR.S! VOICE
“But id I me, tell me! speak again.
Thy soft response renewing —
What makes that ship drive on so fast?
What is the ocean doing?"
SECOND VOICE
as a slave before his lord,
“Still
The ocean hath no blast:

—
Hh great bright eye most silently
Up to the Moon is cast
 POEMS, POETS, POETRY

If he may know which way to go;

For she guides him smooth or grim.
See, brother, see! how graciously
She looked! down on him."
FIRST VCIIOF.
I Jji' A larini'r hath LLBut why drives on drat ship so tast,
been nfSf mlit a With out or wave or wind?”
trance; jar the an-
(eJjr eauseth SF.CONID VOICE
thr (ÿ drive ”1 he air is cut away before,
northward faster And closes from behind.
than human life
iOu hi Cnthirr. Fly, brother, fly! more high, more high!
Or we shall he belated:
For slow and slow that ship will go,
When the Mariners trance is abated.''
The supernatural 1 woke, and we were sailing on
"ration r> retarded; As in a gentle weather:
the Mariner *Twas night, calm night, the moon was high;
awakes, anti his
penance begins The dead men stood together.
anew, AH stood together on the deck,
For a charnel -dungeon fitter;
All fixed oil me their stony eyes,
That in the Moon did glitter.
The pang, the curse, with which they died,
Had never passed away:
I could not draw my eyes from theirs,
Nor turn them up to pray.
ihe curse is _fwa!ty And now this spell was snapped; once more
expiated. 1 viewed the ocean green,
And looked far forth, yet little saw
Of what had else been seen -
Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having onte turned round Walks On,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.
But soon there breathed a wind on me.
IMor sound nor motion made:
 AN I HOLOC1Y JS9

Its pith was not upon the sea,

!ri ripple -or in shade,

It raised my hair, it fanned my cheek

Like a meadow-gale of spring
It mingled strangely with my fears,
Yet it tell like a welcoming.
—
Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship,
Yet she sailed softly too:
Sweetly, sweetly7 blew the hreete
O11 me atone it blew,
Oh! dream of joy! is this mdecrl
—
1

And dir swienf

Akrj'ijfr kfhotdfih Tile lighthouse top [ see?
fjj'i pufirnf fi’ddjjlrj'. is this the hill? is this the kirk?
Is tins mine own countree?
We drifted o’er the harbor-bar,
And 1 with sobs did pray —
O let me be awake, my Cod!
Or let me sleep alway.
The barb ot bay was dear as glass,
So smoothly it was strewn!
And on the bay the moonlight lay,
And the shadow of the Miron,
The rock shone bright, the kirk no less,
That stands above the rock:
The moonlight steeped in siEcutucss
The steady weathercock.
And the bay seas white with silent light,
'fJrr jÿJdrdli Till rising from the same,
kdiV r!n- dead bod- Full many shapes, that shadows were,
ifi, Jtt crimson colors Came.
A little distance from the prow
- s rrrJ iipjurar Those crimson shadows were;
—
it) tfjrt'r
own firm; ] turned my eyes upon the deck
Oh, Christ! what sate 1 there!

Each corse lay flat, lifeless and Hat,

And, by the holy rood!* MOSS of Christ
A man all light, a seraph '-man, lingct-Hl'C
On every corse there stood,
 390 POEMS, POETS. I'OEIRV

This seraph -band, each waved his hand:

Jt was a heavenly sight!
They stood as signals ta the land,
Each one a lovely light;
This seraph-band, each waved his hand,
No voice did they impart —
No voice, but oh! the silence sank
Like music on my heart,
but soon 1 heard the dash of oars,
!heard the Pilot’s cheer;
My head was turned perforce away
And 1 saw a boat appear.
The Pilot and the Pilot’s boy,
I heard them coming, fast:
Dear Lord in Heaven! it was ajny
The dead men could not blast.
I saw a third— I heard his voice:
It is the Hermit good!
I le singeth lotfd his godiy hymns
That he makes in the wood.
He’ll s brieve my soul, he’ll wash away
The Albatross’s blood.
Pert I'll
Tht Hermii iff dtit This Hermit good lives in that wood
Wood Which sfopcs down to the sea.
How loudly his sweet voice he rears.!
l ie loves to talk with nwineres
That come from a far countree.
He kneels at mom, and noon, and eve —
He hath a cushion plump:
It is the moss that wholly hides
The rotted old oak stump.
The skiff-boat neared: i heard them talk.
"Why, this is strange. I trow!
Where are chose lights so many and fair,
That signal made but now?”
ApprOdihith llw
illip with wonder.
"Strange, by my faith!" the Hermit said —
"And they answered not our cheer!
The planks looked warped! and see those sails,
 A Nl'HOLOCY 391

How 1 hm they arc and sere!

3 never ww aught like tt> them,
U Mies'S perchance it were
Brown skeletons of leaves that lag
My for est-h rook along;
When [he ivy tod15 is heavy with snow, bmhy dump
Anti the owlet whoops to the wolf below,
That f LI is tile she wolfs young.”
"Dear Lord! it hath .1 fiendish look,”
The lJi lot made reply,
—
“I am a- feared" “hush on, push nn|"
Said the Hermit cheerily.
The boat came closer to the ship,
Hut I nor spake nor stirred;
The boat came close beneath the ship,
And straight a sound was heard.
'lit? f tup suddtiity Under the water it rumbled on,
fiiik’tth. Still louder and more dread;
It reached the ship, it split the bay;
Tin- ship went down like lead,
j' 7n mtritui A fan¬ St tinned by that loud and dreadful sound,
ner r:' rami m (fit1 Which skv and ocean smote,
Pilot'i boat. Like one that hath beef seven days drowned
My bod)1 lay afloat;
But swift as dreams, myself [ found
Within che Bilot's boat.
Upon rhe whirl, where sank the ship,
The boat spun round and round;
And all was still, save riant the lull
Was telling o[ the sound.
1 moved my lips — the Pilot shrieked
Anti fell down in a fit;
The holy Hermit raised his eyes,
And prayed where he did sit
[ took the oars; the Pilot's boy ,
Who now doth cro*y go,
Laughed loud and long, and ill the while
His eyes went to and fro.
“Ha! hal" quoth lie, “full plain 1 see,
l he Devil knows htivv to row "
 392 POEMS, POETS, FQETHV

And now, si] in my own Coimtrec,

I stood on the firm land!
The Hermit stepped forth from the boat,
And scarcely he could stand.
The aruient Atu ri- "O shrieve me, sJirieve me, holy man!"
fxmiitly ru- Tlic Hermit crossed his brow.
—
nfr
treatelh the Hermit "Say quick," quoth he, "1 bid thee say
fo y/i neve hii ir : and
What manner of man art thou?”
the pomace of life
falls on him, Forthwith tin is frame of mine was wrenched
With a woeful agony,
Which forced me to begin my tale;
And then it left me free.
Aitd iWr Xitel MtOtt Since then, at an uncertain hour,
tktuujihdiit his That agony returns:
future life MI JijLHiy And till my ghastly tale is told,
comttaitieih him to
trawl from laud w
fhis heart within me burns.
land; I pas>, like night, from [and to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
! know the man that must hear me;
To him my talc l teach.
What loud uproar bursts from rhat door!
The wedding guests are there:
13 ut in the garden -bower the bride
And bride-maids singing are;
And hark the lirtk vesper bell,
W'hich biddeth me to prayer!
O Wedding Guest! this soul hath been
Alone on a wide wide sea:
So lonely hwas, that God himself
Scarce seemed there to be.
O sweeter than the marriage feast,
‘Tis sweeter far to meT
To walk together to the kirk
With a goodly company!
To walk together to the kirk,
And all together prayr,
While each to ins great Father bends,
Old me n, and babes, and loving friends
And youths and maidens gay!
 An l HOLOGY 393

yljtiJ teadf, by Farewell, farewell! but this 1 tell

his own fwtiiph'. To thee, thou Wedding Guest!
fner mid rri'rrmrr I ltj prayeth well, who loveih well
Id all things ihal
Both man and bird and bcast.
God mdiir and
loi'i'lh. Hc p rave tli belt, who loveth best
AH things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
The Mariner, whose eye is bright,
Whose heard with age is hoar.
Is gone; and now the Wedding Guest
Turned from the bridegroom's door,
He went like one that hath been stunned.
Anti is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser man,
t ie rose the morrow mom.

WILLIAM COWPEK.
The Castaway
Obscurest night involved the sky.
The Atlantic billows roared,
When such a destined wretch as I.
Washed headlong from on board,
Of friends, of hope, ot all bereft.
His floating home forever left.
JNo braver chief could Albion boast
Than he with whom he went,1
Nor ever ship left Albion's coast.
With warmer wishes sent.
He loved them both, but both in vain,
Nor him beheld, nor her again
Ni.it long beneath the whelming bniiL.
Expert to swim, he lay;
Nor soon he felt his strength decline,
Or courage die away;
But waged with death a lasting strife,
Supported by despair oflife.

1
Ctrwfperh poem is bawd ill! .Ill j undent In Kichumt Walter's A Voyage Round the
World fc)1 .. . ilcBijrr Anstm (1748),
394 POEMS, POETS, POETRY

He shouted; nor his friends hid failed

To cheek the vessel's course,
Hut so the furious Wist prevailed,
That, pitiless perforce,
1 hey left their outcast mate behind,
And studded still before the wind.
Some succor yet they could afford:
And, such as storms allow,
The cask, the coop, the floated turd,
Delayed not to bestow.
liut he (they knew) nor ship, nor shore,
Whate’er they gave, should visit more.
Nor, cruel as it seemed, could he
Their haste himself condemn,
Aware that flight, in such a sea,
Alone could rescue them;
Yet bitter felt it still to die
Deserted, and his triends so nigh.
He long, survives, who lives an hour
In ocean, self-upheld;
And so long he, with unspent power,
His destiny repelled;
And ever, as the minutes flew,
Entreated help, or cried, “Adieu!"
At length, his transient respite past,
His comrades, who before
Had heard his voice in every blast,
Could catch the sound no more.
Hot then, hy toil subdued, he drank
The stifling wave, and then he sank.
No poet wept him; but the page
Of narrative sincere,
I hat tells his name, Ins worth, his age,
Is wet with Anson’s tear.
And tears by bards or heroes shed
Alike immortalize the dead.
I therefore purpose not, or dream,
Descanting on his fare,
To give the melancholy theme
A more enduring date:

i k
 ANTHOLOGY 395

13 ur misery still delights to trace

Its semblance in another’* case,
No voice divine the storm allayed,
No light propitious shone,
When, snatched from all effectual aid,
We perished, each alone:
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelmed in deeper gulfs than lie.

Epitaph on a Hate
Here lies, whom hound did ne'er pursue,
Nor swifter greyhound follow,
Whose foot ne’er tainted mom mg dew,
Nor ear heard huntsman’s hallo’.
Old Tiney, surliest of his kind,
Who. nursed with tender care,
And to domestic bounds confined,
Was still a wild jack-hare.
Though duly from my hand he took
His pittance every night.
He did it with a jealous look,
And. when he could, would bite,
His diet was of wh eaten bread,
And milk, and oats, and straw,
Thistles, or lettuces instead.
With sand to scour his maw,
On twigs of hawthorn he negated,
On pippins' russet peel:
And. when his juicy salads failed,
Sliced carrot pleased him well.
A Turkey carpet was his lawn,
Whereon he loved to bound,
To skip and gambol like a fawn,
And swing his rump around.
His frisking was at evening hours,
For then he lost his fear:
But most before approach mg showers,
Or when a storm drew near.
J96 POEMS, POETS, POETRY

Eight years and five round-roiling moons

He thus saw steal away,
Dozing out all his idle noons,
And every night at play,
I kept him for his humor's sake,
For he would oft beguile
My heart of thoughts that made it ache,
And force me to a smile,
13 ut now, beneath this walnut-shade
He finds his long, last home,
And waits in snug concealment laid,
Till gentler Puss shall come.
He, still more aged, feels the shocks
From which no care can save,
And, partner once of Tiney’j box,
Must soon partake his grave.

HAST CRANE
The Broken Tower
The bell-rope that gathers God at dawn
Dispatches me as though I dropped down the knell
Of a spent day
From pit to
— to wander the cathedral lawn
crucifix, feet chill on steps from hell,
Have you not heard, have you not seen chat corps
Of shadows in the tower, whose shoulders sway
Anti phonal carillons launched before
The stars are caught and hived in the sun’s ray?
The bcILs, I say, the bells break down their tower;
And swing 1 know not where. Their tongues engrave
Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score
Of broken intervals . . . And I, their sexton slave!
Oval encyclicals in canyons heaping
The impasse high with choir. Banked voices slain!
Pagodas, campaniles0 with reveilles outleaping — heft toivers
O terraced echoes prostrate on the plain! , , .
And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company oflove. its voice
 ANTHOtOCY 597

Ail instant in the wind {I know nor whither hurled)

But not tor long to hold each desperate choice.
My word I poured. Bin was it cognate, scored
Of that tribunal monarch of the air
Whose thigh embrotizes earth, strikes crystal Word
—
In wounds pledged once to hope cleft to despair?
The steep encroachments of my blood left me
No answer (could blood hold such a lofty tower
As flings the question true?)— or is it she
Whose sweet mortality stin latent power:
And through whose pulse I hear, counting the strokes
My veins recall and add, revived and sure
The angelus of wars my chest evokes:
What I hold healed, original now, and pure
And builds, within, a tower that is not stone
(Not stone can jacket heaven) — but slip
—
Of pebbles visible wings of silence sown
azure circles, widening as they dip
[JI

The matrix of the heart, lift down the eye

That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower . .

The commodious, tall decorum of that sky

Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its shower.

To Brooklyn Bridge
How many dawns, chill from Ms rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him.
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty —
Then, with inviolate curve, tbrsakc our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
— Till elevators drop us from our day . .
I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;
And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
As though the SUE took step of thee, yet left
J98 POEMS, POETS. POET ay

Some motion ever unspent in thy stride.

implicitly thy freedom staying thee! —
Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite0 speeds to thy parapets, madman
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.
Down Wall® from girder into street nooti leaks, Wall Street
A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene;
All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn . . .
Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.
And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
Thy guerdon0 . . . Accolade thou dost bestow mvard
Of anonymity time cannot raise:
Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.
O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,
Prayer of pariah and the lover's cry,
—
Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path
—condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine amis.

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;

Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City’s fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year , . .
O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, rhe prairies' dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to Cod,

ROBERT CREELEV
A Marriage
The first retainer
he gave to her
was a golden
wedding ring.
 AN I HOI 3Uy

The second - late at night

he woke up,
[caned over on an elbow,
and kissed her.
The third and the last
he died with
and gave up loving
and lived with her.

COUNTEE CuiJ-EN
Incident
For Brit tValrond
Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head- filled with glee,
1 saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me,
Now I was eight anti very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
Arid SO [ smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, Nigger ”
L'

[ saw1 the whole ot Baltimore

From May until December ;
Of all the things that happened there
That’s all that I remember.

E. E. CL1 MM IN c;s
anyone lived in u pretty how town
anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang lus didn't he danced his did.

Women and men (both link and small)

eared for anyone not at all
they Sowed their isn't they reaped the it Same
sun moon scars rain
400 POEMS, POETS, POETHV

children guessed (but only a few

and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more
when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone’s any was all to her
someones married their ev-cryones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then) they
said their nevers they slept their dream
stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)
one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was
all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
noo nc and anyone earth by april
wish by spirit and if by yes.
Women and men (both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain

may i feel said he

may i feel said he
(i'll squeal said she
just once said he)
it’s fun said she
(may i touch said he
how much said she
a lot Said he)
why not said she
 AN i HOLOfiY +01

(let’s go said he
not too tar said she
what’s too tar said he
where you are said she)
may i stay said he
(which way said she
like this said he
if you kiss said she
may i move said In¬
is it love said she)
it you’re willing said lie
(but you’re killing said she
btit it’s life said lie
but your wife said she
now said he)
ow said she
(tiptop said hr
don't stop said she
oh no said he)
go slow said she

(cccome? said hr
Lininini saiti she)

you’re divine! said he

(you are Mine said she)

EMILY DITKIVSON
After great pain, <i format feeling comes
After great pain, a formal feeling comes
—
Tile Nerves sit ceremonious, like T ombs —
The stiff Heart questions Was it He, t fiat hd re,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before:
The Feet, mechanical, go round —
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought11, — Uivfinry. va id
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz Contentment, like a stone —
402 POE#S, i'o E i POI-:T(IV

is the Hour of Lead

Remembered, it outlived,
As Freezing persons, recoil etc the Snow —
First— — —
Chill then Stupor then the letting go —
The Brain
The Brain
—— fa leicfer than the Sky
is wider than the Sky —
—
For put them side by side - -
The one the other will contain
With ease and You — beside — —
The lirain is deeper than the sea
For — hold them - Blue to Blue
——
The one the other will absorb
As Sponges —
Bucket? do — —
The Brain is just the weight of God —
For — Heft them —
Pound for Pound —
And they will differ
As Syllable from Sound
—
if they do
—
J Wte a look of Agony
I like look of Agony,
—
J

-
Because 1 know it’s true
Men do nor sham Convulsion,
Nor simulate, a Throe—
The Byes glaze once — and that is Death —
Impossible to feign
The Beads upon the Forehead
By homely Anguish strung.

Much Madncn if iivintst Stnii

—
Much Madness is divinest Sense
To a discerning Eye
Much Sense —
the starkest Madness
——
'Tis rhe Majority
In this, as All, prevail
Assent ——
and you are sane
— —
Demur ynu're straightway dangerous
And handled with ,i Chain -
 A NT H Hi L o C. v 403

My Life had stood

—
My Life had stood - a Loaded Cun
—
Loaded Gun —
—
—
In Corners till a Day
The Owner passed —
identified —
And carried Me away —
And now We roam in Sovereign Woods - -
And now We hum the Doe —
And every time I speak for Him —
The Mountains straight reply —
And do I Smile, such cordial light
Upon the Valley glow —
It is as a Vesuvinn fire
Had let its pleasure tin rough —
And when at Night —
Our good Day done —
I guard My .VI aster’s Head
’Tis better than the Eider-Duck’s
Deep Pillow
To foe of His
——
to have shared
I'm deadly foe
—
None stir the second time —
On whom I lav a Ye [loss1 Eye —
Or an emphatic Thumb —
He longer must than l
—
Though I than He mav longer live
— —
For I have hut the power to kill,
Without
—
the power to die —
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers —
(Vmbrt cf 1859)
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers
Untouched by Morning
—
And untouched by Noon —
Sleep the meek members oi the Resurrection
Rafter of satin.
—
And Roof of stone
Light laughs the breeze
In her Castle above them
Babbles the Bee in a stolid
—L-.ar,
Pipe the Sweet Birds in ignorant cadence —
Ah. what sagacity perished here!
404 LOEWS, J’OE ! I'mTuv

Su/e in their Alabaster Chambers

(Version i>f 1861}
—
Sate in their Alabaster Chambers —
Untouched by Morning
And untouched by Noon
——
Lie the meek members of the Res Litre chon —
-—
Rafter of Satin and Roof of Sterne!
Grand go the Years ™ in the Crescent
Worlds scoop their Arcs
And Firmaments —
—
—
above them
— —
Diadems
Soundless as docs
— —
row
drop -and Doges1 -- surrender
—
on a Disc of Snow
—
The Soul selects her own Society
The Soul selects her own Society7 —
—
Then - - shuts the Door —
To her divine Majority
Present no more — —
Unmoved — she notes the Chariots
At her low Gate — — pausing
—
Unmoved — an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her iVlat —
I've known her
Choose One
— — from an ample nation

Then — dose the Valves of her attention —

Like Stone —
Success is counted sweetest
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er Succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.
Not one of al! the purple 1 lost
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of Victory

’ Chief tniKisiMifs in Venice from the eleventh ihrouyh the si.vtrentli cemnnes.
 A N I KtliO G V 405

As hi.1 defeated — dying -

On whose forbidden ear
-
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agOmited and clear!

TTit-re’s a certain Slant of light

There's a certain Slant of light,
WmLer Afternoons —
That oppresses, like the I left
Of Cathedral Tunes —
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us
We can find no scar,
—
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are —
None may teach it — Any —
'Tis the Seal Despair —
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air —
When it comes, the Landscape listens —
—
Shadows hold their breath
When it goes, 'tis [ike the Distance
—
On the look of Death —
Wild Nights
Wild Nights —
— Wild Nights!
Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wilil Nights should be
O LIT luxury!
— the Winds —
Futile
To a Heart in port
Done with the Compass
— —
Done with the Chart!
Ik-owing Eden
in —
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor— Tonight —
In Thee!
40* POEM S,, POE IS, l1 p >: i tt v

JOHN' DONNF.
The Canonization
For God’s sake hold your tongue, and lei me love,
Or chide illy palsy, or mv gout,
My five gray hair-*, or ruined fortune, flout,
With wealth vour state, your mind with arts improve,
Take you a course, get you a place,
Observe His Honor, or His Grace,
Or the King’s real, nr his stamped face
Contemplate; what you will, approve,15 fjtppn'fno?
So you will let me love.
Alas, alas, who’s injured by my love?
What merchant's ships have my sighs drowned?
Who says my Teats have overflowed his ground?
When did my colds a forward spring remove?
When did the heats which my veins Jill
Add one more to the plaguy hill?1
Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still
Litigious men, which quarrels move,
Though she and I do love.
Call us what you will, we’re made such by love,
Call her OEie, me another fly,
We're tapers too, and at our own cost die,"
And we in 11s find th' eagle and the dove,
Tbe phoenix’ riddle hath more vvit° Fnrawrt£
Uy us: we two being one, are ir.
So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.
We die and rise the satire, and prove
Mysterious by this lose.
We can die hy it, it not live by love,
And it LIT lilt for tombs and hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;
And if no piece of chronicle we prove,
We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
As well a wel I- wrought urn becomes

1
Weekly list of people Svtiu died of tile phÿee.
'"Die" CSJS sting for ponujmmitmf; the sejcunl jet It was believed th.it rtsis act
reduced cine's life spin.
Mschic.it Unique bird, periodical ly regenerated from ih etsvri :she>.
 AN HOLOfiif (07

The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs;

And by these hymns, all shall approve
Us canonized tor love:
And thus invoke us; You whom reverend love
Made one another's hermitage;
You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage;
Who did the whole world’s soul contract, and drove
Enco the glasses of your eyes
[So made such mirrors, ami such spies,
That they did all to you epitomize)
Countries, towns, courts: I leg from above
A paiiem of your love!

Death, be iwt proud

Death, he not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thoti rhink’si thou dost overthrow
Die not. poor Death, nor vet caust thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must How,
And Soonest our best inert with thee do go.
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to tote , chance, kings, anti desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or c harms can make us sleep ,is well
And better than thy stroke, why swi ll si tfinu then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shall die

The Situ Rising

Ilusv old tool, unruly sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows and through curtains call -.in uvr
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons, run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go * hide
Late school boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride.
Call country an is to harvest offices;
Love, all alike, no season know, HOT dime.
Nor hours, days, mouths, which are the rap of lime,
40tf I'OIMS, POETS. 1'OETH.Y

Thy beams, sn reverend and strong

Why ihouldst thou think'.
[ could eclipse and cloud them wiltj A wink,
But that 1 would not lose her sight so long;
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and tomorrow late tell me,
Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me,
Ask for riiose kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shall hear, All here in one bed by.
She's all states, and all princes, 1,
Nothing else is,
Princes do but play as; compared to this,
Alt honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world's contracted thus;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that’s done in warming us
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere:
1 bis bed thy center is. these walls, thy sphere.

RITA DOVE
Adolescence
— II
Although it is night, I sir in the bathroom, waiting,
Sweat prickles behind my knees, the baby-breasts are alert.
Venetian blinds slice up tire moon; the tiles quiver in pale strips.
Then they come, the three seal men with eyes as round
As dinner plates and eyelashes like sharpened Dries,
They bring the scent oi licorice. One sits m the washbowl,
One on rhe bathtub edge; one leans .lgaaust the door.
"Gan you feel it yet?" they whisper.
I don’t know what let say, again. They chuckle,
Patting their sleek bodies with their hands,
“Well, maybe next time.” And they rise,
Glittering like pools or ink under moonlight,
And vanish. I clutch at the ragged holes i
They leave behind, here at die edge ot darkness.
Night rests like a ball of'fiir on my tongue,
 AN i HOIOGY 409

Dusting
Every day a wilderness — no
shade in sight, lieulah
patient among knic knacks,
the solarium a rage
of light, a grainsterm
as her gray cloth brings
dark wood to life.
Under her hand scrolls
and crests gleam
darker still. What
was his name, that
silly boyr at the fair with
tile rifle booth? And Ins kiss and
the clear bowl with one bright
fish, rippling
wound!
Not Michael
—
-
something finer. Each dust
stroke a deep breath and
the canary; in bloom,
Wavery memory: home
from a dance, the front door
blown open and the parlor
in snow, she rushed
the bowl to the stove, watched
as the locket of ice
dissolved and he
swam free.
That was years before
Father gave her up
with her name, years before
her name grew to mean
Promise, then
Desert- in -Peace.
Long before the shadow and
sun's accomplice, the tree.
Maurice.
410 POEMS. POETS. POETKV

JOHN l}RYnFrN

To the Memory of Mr. Oldhtwi

Farewell, too little, and too lately known,
Whom I began to tlii nk anti tall my own:
For sure our souls were near allied, and thine
Cast m the same poetic mold with mine.
One common note on either lyre did strike.
And knaves and fools we both abhorred alike.
To the same goal did both our studies drive;
The last set out the son nest did arrive.
Thus Nistis fell upon the slippery place,
While h is young friend performed and won the race.
O early ripe! to thy abundant store
What could advancing age have added more?
It might (what nature never gives the young)
Have taught the numbers ol day native tongue
It tit satire needs not those, and wil will shine
Through the harsh cadence of a rugged Ittae;
A noble error, and but seldom made,
When poets are by too much three betrayed.
Thy generous fruits, though gathered ere their prime,
Still showed a quickness, and maturing time
lint: mellows what we write to the dull sweets of rhyme.
Once more, hail and farewell; farewell, thou young,
Itut ah too short, MjrcellusJ of our tongue;
Thy brows with ivy, and with laurels bound;
But fate and gloomy night encompass thee around.

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR

Harriet Beecher Stowe 1
She told the store, and the whole world wept
At wrongs and cruelties it had not known

1
J n Eioolc V of Virgil’s A fiidd, two friends. INhsirs .uni Eurynlus, run leather in
,ifoot race, NIHIIS, the older man, is on the point of winning the rate when he slips and
falls. E-ie cups rhe IK-JSI runner, thm-hy rmhiiiii; lus friend Euryalus in win
The nephew ,:.nd adopted son of Augustus, ivhsi wan expected to M issecd llllll
as emperor, bur who died in 23 H.C
'

—
Harriet IteecIleT Stowe MSil I I H :.U : 1 wrote I 'ivte T-v>\'; Ciifrrrr 1. 1K52). m aim
slavery novel that had art enormous impact eni Anieucin attitudes tow ard slis'en, .
 ANTHOLOGY -til

But far this fearless woman's voice alone

She spoke to Consciences that long had dept:
Her message, Freedom's dear reveille, swept
From heedless hovel to complacent throne.
Command and prophecy were in the tone
And horn :ts sheath the sword of justice leapt,
Around two peoples swelled a fiery wave,
But both came forth tram hinted front the flame.
Blest be the hand that dared be strong to save,
And blest be she who in our weakness came —
Prophet and priestess! At one stroke she gave
A race to freedom and herself to fame

Robert Gould Show'

Why that the thunder voice of Fare
Was it
Should call thee, studious, from the classic groves.
Where calm -eyed Fallas” with still footstep roves,
And charge thee seek the turmoil of the stater
What bade thee hear the voice and rise date,
Leave home and kindred and thy spicy loaves.
To lead tit’ unlettered and despised droves
To manhood’s home and thunder at the gate?
Far better the slow blaze of Learning's light,
The coesl and quiet ot Iter dearer fane,
Than this hot terror of a hopeless fight.
This cold endurance of the final pain, —
Since thou and those who with thee died for right
Have died, the P resent teaches, but in vain!
We Wear the Mask
We wear the mask that grins jttJ lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes
Til is debi we pay to human guile;
—
With torn and bleeding hearts we smite,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

1
Kvbeil Gould Sls.iw ( I HIT- 1863) commanded I he first all- Negro rejpmem m
the N'cnh. lie wav killed sshiW leading m utaek on f on Vt .igin-r it Sowfi Clurofina.
3
Pallas Athena, Greek gOckW <>f wisdom.
 POEMS, POETS, Potun

Why should the world be over-wise,

In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask,
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
lie 11 eat h our feet, and long the mile,
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!

T. S, ELIOT
Marina
Qjfis hif teem, quae rejjitt, quae mimtii piaÿa?1
What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands
What water lapping, the bow
And see tit of pme and the woo dth rush singing through the tog
What images return
O my da Lighter.
Those who sharpen [he tooth of the dog, meaning
Death
Those svlio glitter with the glory' of the humming-bird, meaning
[ Heath

Those who sit in the stye of contentment, meaning

Death
Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals, meaning
Death
Are become unsubstantial, reduced by a wind,
A breath of pine, and the woodsong fog
Uy this grace dissolved in place
What is tins Face, less clear and clearer
The pulse in the ami, less strong and stronger —
Given or lent? more distant than stars and nearer than the eye

1
J n Shakespeare's Ptrides, th e name of the miraculously resum'd daughter.
I Ins iLrij;faph comes from the play Herfulw I'umis phi Madness of Hercules) by
the Roman writer Seneca it? n, A.l>. f>5) Hcnoilb. upon discovering rh a r in Ins
madness he lias killed hit «de ami children, says' "Whar place is rlns, what region, whit
qunner of the world?"
 ANl ff o t afi Y 413

Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feel

Under sleep, where all the waters meet.
Bowsprit tracked with ice and paint cracked with heat.
I made this, ] have forgotten
And remember.
The rigging weak and the canvas rotten
Between one June and another September.
Made this unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own.
The garbuard strake leaks, the seams need caulking.
This form, this face, this life
Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me
Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,
The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.
What seas whai shores what granite islands towards my
timbers
And woodthrush calling through the fog
My daughter.

Preludes
t
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks iti passageways,
Six o'clock.
The bumt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of w ithered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots.
And at the comer of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams Mild stamps,
And then the lighting of the lamps.
It
The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands,
414 POEMS, P O E T S , POETH.V

With the Other mastjucndcs

That (true resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
hi a thousand furnished rooms.
Ill
You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the niuliT reveal mu
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered .igarnsc the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shatters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.
IV
His soul stretched tight across the ski os
That fade behind i city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
1 moved by fancies that are curled
,irrL

Around these images, and cling:

The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
I Tie worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots,
 ANTHOLOGY "115

Sweeney among the Nightingales

(Spot-- wraiptHV nJufiTiv cow'
Apcncck Sweeney spreads hi* knees
Letting liis amis hang down to laugh,
The zebra stripes along his jaw
Swelling to maculate0 giraffe, spin fed
The circles of the stormy moon
Slide westward toward the River Plate.3
Death and ihe Raven drift above
And Sweeney guards the homed gate.1
Gloomy Orion" and the Dog
Are veiled; and hushed the shrunken Stas;
The person in the Spanish cape
Tries to sit on Sweeney’s ktices
Slips and pulls the table cloth
Overturns a coffee-cup,
Reorganized upon the floor
She yawns and draws a stocking up;
The silent mail in mocha brown
Sprawls at the window-sill and gapes;
The waiter brings in oranges
bananas tigs and hothouse grapes;
The silent vertebrate in brown
Contracts and concentrates, withdraws;
Rachel nee Rabinovitch
Tears at the grapes with murderous paws;
She and the lady in the Cape
Are suspect, thought to be in league;
Therefore the man with heavy eyes
Ded i ues the gambit, shows fatigue,
Leaves the room and reappears
Outside the window, leaning in,
Branchs1? of wistaria
Circumscribe a golden grin;

1
Alai I ini struck a rtVOHs] hlctiv wlthui": AgmwilinAll's cry as he
11
is murdered
by Ins wife and her lover (Aeschylus, Ajfamnnntm, I. 1343).
"A over in Argrtitmu..
Tn Hides, I be gate through which true- dreum pj.11.
The constellation tlfinu amt the Dug Sur. Sinus,
J
416 I1 o E M i , POETS , I'omtv

The host with someone indistinct

Converses at the door apart,
Tlit: nightingales are singing near
The Convene of the Sacred Heart,
And sang within the bloody wood
Wheti Agamemnon cried aloud.
And let their liquid siftings fali
To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Concord Hymn
Stofsj jf the Oemplehtut i>)the Battle A/orinmr.Ftf, J\i!y 4, iHj7
Lly rl i L' rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their Hag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And tired the shot heard round the world.
The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.
On tins green hank, by [his soft stream,
We set to-day a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.
Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft; we raise ro them and thce.

77je Stutwstomt
Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: Che whited air
hi idi.'. lulls and woods, the river, and the heaven,
Anti veils the farmhouse at the garden’s end.

' < (lie bi|[liLi of Lextnjrton ind Concord, April IV, 1775
 A Ml HOI.OGY 417

The sled and traveler stopped, the courier1'; feet

Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sir
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm
Come see the north wind's masonry.
Out ot an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Cunts his white bastions with projected root
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly,
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian1 wreaths;
A swan- like form invests die hidden thorn;
Fills up the farmer"; lane from wall to Wall,
Maugre0 the farmer’s sighs; and, at the gate, in spiff oj
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as. he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
iiuiJc in an age, the mad wi ud’s night- work,
The frolic architecture of the snow,

LOUISE EuniticH
I Was Sleeping Wh ere the Black Oaks Alove
We watched from the house
as the rivet grew, helpless.
and terrible in its unfamiliar body,
Wrestling everything into it,
die water wrapped around trees
until tilt 111 life-hold WHS broken.
They went down, one by one,
and the river dragged off their covering
Nests of the herons, roots washed to bones,
snags of soaked bark on the shoreline;
a whole forest pulled through the teeth

Ivi'scntbEjng the tifle vshin- rnarbte from the tlrei'k blind of I’lius
41 a 1'iitMi, POETS, POETRY

of the spillway. Trees surfacing

singly, where the river poured off
into arteries for fields below the reservation.
When at last it was over, the long removal,
they had all become the same dry wood,
We walked among them, the branches
whitening in the raw sun.
Above us drifted herons,
alorie, hoarse- voiced, broken,
settling their beaks among the hollows,
Grandpa said. Tltese are the ghosts of the tree people,
moving above its, unable fo take their rrTf.

Sometimes now, we dream our way back to the heron dance.

Their long wingi arc bending the air
into circles through which they fall.
They rise again in shifting wheels,
How long must we live in the broken figures
their necks make, narrowing the sky.

The Strange People

77 re mittUyx am strange fwpk . , they am beautiful ;<i foot al, and jrt rfjfj'
ate rnrity. M'e do iwf Iran than. Tltry ttfjjx'dr and disappear; they JW litc
shadow tK? the plaint. Beeause of them great beauty, youttg men temtiima
folbit' the antelope and aw fait ,/istfiw. Eetn if those /oafish ones find litem-
itfots <md nitm), ihty art urvfr ayjrrr dglu in their heads.
— MtEITV
TRANSCkme]) ANO
SHfTEJJ, miMCISt tfOSUtf Ol THE CHOU'S,
EDITED BY TkANK LIMDERMAN (1932}

All night 1 am the doe, breathing

his name in a frozen field,
the small mist of the svord
drifting always before me.
And again he has heard it
and J have gone burning
to meet him, the jacktighr
fills my eyes with blue fire;
the heart in my chest
explodes like a hot stone.
Then slung like a sack
in the back of his pickup,
I wipe the death scum
 A N l HOI O G> 41 *>

from my mouth, sit np laughing,

and shriek in my Speeding grave,
Safely shut in the garage,
when he sharpens his knife
and thinks to have me, like that,
I come toward him.
a Jean gray witch,
through the bullets that enter and dissolve.
1 sit m his house
drinking coffee till dawn,
and leave as frost reddens on hubcaps,
Crawling hack into my shadowy body.
AH d,iy, asleep m clean grasses,
! dream oi the one who could realty wound me.

ROHFRT FftOSl
Birdies
When ! sec birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them,
lint swinging doesn't bend them down to suiy
As ice -storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ire a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the surfs warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-emst —
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to hrc.sk; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
lie fore them over their heads to dry in the suit.
Hut I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fset about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy betid them
420 Pof-MS, PoETS, POETKY

As he went out and m fetch the cows

to —-
Some boy too far front town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what be found himself.
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of themT
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of binches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your Face bums and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
 ANT HO LOO* 421

Design
J Found a dimpled spider, fit and white,
On a white heal-alj, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth —
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth
A snow-drop spider, a flower like froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
—
What had that Hower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal -all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?
If design govern in a thing so small.
—
JAMES GAIVIN
Independent Day, 1956: A Fairy Tale
! think this house’s mouth is full of dirt.
Smoke is nothing up its sleeve.
I think it could explode.
Where i am, in the din under the floor, 1 hear
them.
They don't know.
My mother leaves each room my father enters.
Now
she is cleaning things dm are already clean,
My father is in the living
room,
He’s pourtng.
Rum into a glass, gas into i lamp, kerosene into a can,

He pours capped fuses, matches, dynamite sticks into his ji tickets,

He pours
rounds into the 45 which he wilt point skyward and hold next to
his ear

1
The argument Irom design (order in nature) svih often tued is a proof for the
existence of God,
422 POEMS, Potts, POETRY

as if it were idling him things .

Where I am, the spider spins.
The broken
mouse drags a trap through lunar talc; of dust.
Where the bitch whelps is
where 1 wriggle on my belly, cowardly, ashamed, to escape the
Fourth of July.
I think the house is very ready,
It seems to hover like an "exploded
view” in a repair manual.
Parts suspended in disbelief.
Nails pulled back,
aimed,
My father goes out.
My mother whimpers,
There 'll be no supper,
She opens the Firebox and stufR it full of forks.

ALLEN GINSBERG
America
America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1ÿ56.
I can’t stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
I don’t feel good don't bother me.
1 Won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?1
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?2
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what 1 need with my
good looks?

1
Communis: idealists, followers of Leon TrnisJty (1879-1910), the opponent of
Stalin
1
India was suffering a famine, while America had an agricultural Surplus.
 A ;% l JL o E. oc v 423

America after all it is yon and 1 who arc perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want cc> he a saint
There must be scmie other way ft' settle this .irgumeitt.
Burroughs is in Tankers ' 1 dotYt think he’ll come back it's sinister
Are you being sinister or is tins some form of practical joke?
I’m trying to come to the point.
[ refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing 3 know what Pm doing.
America the plum blossoms ane falling.
! haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody
goes Ott trial tor murder.
America 1 fed sentimental about the Wobblies.1
America I used to be a communist when I scats a kid I'm not sorry,
1 smoke marijuana every chance I gcr.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the noses in the closet
When I go to Chinatown [ get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there’s piling Co be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.’
My psychoanalyst thinks Pm perfectly right.
I won’t say the Lurdb Payer.
J have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven’t told you what you did to Unde Max after
he came over from lUissia.
Pm addressing you
Are you going to let your emotional life he run by l ime Magazine?
I’m obsessed by Time Magazine
1 read it every week.
T rs cover stares at me even tune I slink past the comer candyst ore,
1 read it m the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's .ibs ays telling me about responsibility . Businessmen are serious
iMovie producers are serums. Everybody’s serious but me.
It occurs to me that I atn Aiuerit a
! am talking to myself again.

William buTNHighs. (b I'M U -i Incnil n1 (iiluKtg'i .uni .nali.n ,i| the Howl

A'.JtW /jjpiiif ( 1 LJ5CJ J.

living ill
vs.hiVlorwro.
‘ Nickname for members is!" lilt in3nnn.il U u-krrs ; i N he Workt. a umtiu l.utndeiL
' L'i IW5.
1

K. lrl Mans (I'M K-IHH '), t Irrman sushi ;•. il 1 turn nr mil . '.L'.jiliiH . with Friedrich
Ell Ljvlv. is! fl.-i Ci'MIimillt ,1 .'.JFrii.- ln I S4H)
'
424 PotM.i, POETS, POETRY

Asia is rising against me.

I haven't got a chinaman’s chance.
I’d better consider my national resources.
LVIV national resources consist or two joints of marijuana millions of
genitals an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400
miles an hour and twenty five-thousand mental institutions.
I say mi thing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged
who live ill my flowerpots under the light oi tivc hundred
suns,
1 have abolished the whorehouse* oi" France, Tangier* is the next
to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that !'m a Catholic.
America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
! will continue like ! lenry Ford my strophes ate as individual a* his
automobiles more so they’re all different sexes.
America 1 will sell you strophes 52500 apiece S300 down on your
old strophe
America free Tom Mooney*
America save the Spanish Loyalists7
America Sacco & Vanzetti* must not die
f
America I am the Scottsborn boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell
meetings they sold us garbauios1' a handful per ticket a ticket
costs a nickel .and the speeches were tree everybody was
angelic and .sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere
you have no idea what a good clung the party was in 193.5
Scott Nearing was a grand old man a teal mensch Mother
IJloor made me cry J once saw Israel Amtcr1 plain. Every¬
body must have been a spy.

American Lbor aj>n3iTOr in California, accused cfbomb killings and sentenced m

death in 1916 but pinituitd in 1939.
Ihnu- fighiing against Frauen in the Spanish Civil War,
Nicola Sacco and liartulomco Vanieui wet* csteeured in Massachusetts m \i>2~!
'

fora murder connected is irh J robbers1 Sentiment ran high .in.iiiisi them because of their
radical belief.
The "Scnrtsbum boys” were rune bluets who were convicted in Alabama ot the
rape white women in 1931. Liberals and radicals believed the conviction to be
ot two
improved Foi.i year liter (be win cnees were rechtced in four cases and ihe charges
dropped in five.
1,1
Chickpeas.
Scott Nearing (1883-1983), Ella C Mother") Btoor (I8f>2-I95l), and Israel
Anitcr (1(Utl—1954); well-known American Socialists and Communists,
 A IV TH Ol (Hi v 425

America you don't really want to go to war,

America it's them bad Russians,
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them
Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She
wants to take our ears from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs .1 Red Readers' 1 )jgest. Her
wants our auto plants iti Siberia. Him big bureaucracy run¬
ning our fillingscations,
That no good. Ugh. Him make Indium learn read Him need big
black niggers. 1 lah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day.
Help.
America this is quin? serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television
set.
America is this correct'
I’d better get right down to the job.
Tr's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision
parts factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

LOUISE. GI.UCK
All Hallows
Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken, ! he oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been
picked clean, the sheaves
bound evenly and piled at the roadside
among cinquefoil.' .is the toothed moon rises:

Tins is the barrenness

ol harvest or pestilence.
And file wife leaning out the window
with her hand extended, as in payment.
and the seeds
distinct, gold, calling

Halloween [ihon for "All Hallows ER.-r j. October 31 the evening before All
Saints’ Day
’
r'lnii with five lulled learn
426 I'OEMS, POETS, POETRY

Come here
Conte here, little one
And the sou! creeps our of the tree.

rite alii re Lilies

As a mail and woman make
a garden between them like
a bed of start, here
they linger in the summer evening
and tine evening turns
cold with their terror: it
could all end, it is capable
of devastation. All, all
can be lost, through scented air
the narrow columns
uselessly rising, and beyond,
3 churning sea of poppies —
Hush, beloved. It doesn't matter to me
how many summers ! live to return:
this one summer we have entered eternity,
I felt your twq hands
bury nie to release its spiel idor.

Jonsn G HA HAM
Of Forced Sightcs and TrM.tr)' Ferefulitess
Stepless wind, here are the columbine seeds 1 have
collected. What we would do with them is
different. Though both your trick and mine flower blue
and white
wifh four stem tails and yellow underpetals. Stopless
and unessential, half-hiss, haH-
I nil a by, ill fell in among your Jits vs.
it I tell down into your inmd your snow, into the mites
of spirit-drafts you drive, frenetic multitudes,
out from timber to the open ground and back to no
avail, i! I tell down, warmblooded, ill. into your endless
evenness,
into this race you start them on and will not let them win , . .7
If I fell in?
 ANTHOLOGY 427

What is your law to my law, unhurried hurrying?

At my remove from you, today, iti your supremest
calculation, re¬
adjustment, arc these three birds scratching for dead
bark beetles, frozen seeds, too late tor being here yet only
here,
in the stench free

cold. This is another current* river of rivers, this thrilling

third-act love. Who wouldn’t want to stay
behind? They pack the rinds away, the blazing apple cores,
the frantic shadow-wings scribbling the fence posts, window-

panes. Meanwhile you turn, white jury, draft, away,

deep justice done.
I don't presume to cross the distances, the clarity,
but what grows in your only open hands? Or is

digressive love,
row after perfect greenhouse row.
the garden you're out of for good, wind of the theorems,
of proof, square root of light,
chaos of truth,
blinder than the mice that wait you out
in any crack?
This is the best I can do now for prayer
for you —
these scraps I throw
— to you.

my lonely acrobats
tint fall
of your accord
right to my windosvsill: they pack it away, the grains, the
accidents, they pack it deep into the retit
heart of the blue
spruce, skins in with spiky needles. , . , Oh
hollow
charged with forgetfulness,
through wind, through winter nights, we’ll pass,
steering with trumhs, with words,
making of every hour
a thought, remembering
428 POEMS. POETS, POETRY

by pain and rhyme and arabesques of foraging

the formula for theft
under vour sky that keeps
sliding away
married to hurry
and grim song,

Soul Says
(Afterword)
To be so held by brittleness, shapeliness.
By meaning. As where 1 have to go where you go,
I have t(i touch lehat you mini touch,
in hunger, in boredom, the spindrift, the ticket . . ,
Distilled in you (can you hear me)
the idiom in you. the why —
The flash of a voice. The river glints.
The mother cpfft; the tabkdotft up into the u>ind.
—
There a-s the fabric descend? the alphabet of ripenesses,
what is, what eouid have been.
The bread on the tablecloth. Crickets shrill in the grass,
O pluck my magic garment from me. So.
Pays down his robe]
Lie there, my art
—
(This is a form of matter of matter she sang)
(Where the hurry is stopped) (and held) (but not extinguished)
(no)
(So listen, listen, this will soothe you) (if that is what you want)
Now then, I said, I go to meet that which I liken to
(even though the wave break and drown me in laughter)
the wave breaking, the wave drowning me in laughter
—
THOMAS GRAY
Elegy IVritten in a Country Churchyard
The curfew- tolls the knel! of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
 ANTHOHICY 429

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,

And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy fitikhugs lull the distant folds;
Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower
The moping owl does to the moon complain
Of such, as wandering near her secret bower,
Molest her ancient solitary reign.
Beneath those nigged elms, that yew tree's shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a moldcring heap,
Each in his narrow' cell forever laid.
The rude0 forefathers of the hamlet slcep. rustic
The breezy call of incense-breathing morn,
The swallow twittering from the straw- built shed,
The cock’s shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,
No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.
For them no more the blazing hearth shall bum,
Or busy housewife ply her evening care;
No children run to lisp their sire’s return,
Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.
Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,
Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe0 has broke; (hi of soil
How jocund did they drive their team afield!
How bowed the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!
Let not Ambition mock their usefol toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful snnle
The short and simple annals of the poor.
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike the inevitable hour,
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
Nor you. ye proud, impute to these the fault,
If Memory o’er their comb no trophies raise,
Where through the tong-drawil aisle and fretted Vault
Tile pealing anthem swells the note of praise.
Can storied urn or animated bust
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
4 JO POEMS, POETS, FOETKV

Can Honor’4 voice provoke the silent dust,

Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of Death1
Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands that the tod of empire might have swayed,
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.
But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page
Rich with the spoils of time did ne’er unroll;
Chill Penury repressed their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul.
Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark un fathomed caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Some village Hampden,1 that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his Country's blood.
The applause of listening senates to command,
The threats of pain and min to despise,
To scatter plenty o’er a smiling land,
And read their history in a nation’s eyes.
Their lot forbade: nOr circumscribed alone
Then growing virtues, but their crimes confined;
Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne,
And shut the gates of mercy on mankind,
The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide,
To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame,
Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride
With incense kindled at the Muse's flame.
Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learned to stray;
Along the cool sequestered vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

1
One of the leaders of (he OppuSil ion (0 Charles I. He was killed in battle in the
English Civil War.
 AN I HOLOffY 431

Yet these bones from insult to protect

iTt n

Some trail memorial still erected nigh,

With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture decked,
Implores the passing tribute ot a sigh.
Tlicir name, their years, spelt by rite unlettered Muse,
I he place of fame and elegy supply:
And many a holy text around site stress's.
That teach the rustic moralist to die.
For who to dumb Forgetfulness a prey,
This pleasing anxious be i tig e'er resigned.
Left [lie warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast one longing lingering look behind?
On some fond breast the parting soul relies,
Some pit) us drops the closing eye requires;
Even from the tomb the voice of Nature cries,
Even in our ashes live their wonted fires,
For thee, who mindful of the unhonored dead
Dost in these lines their artless tale relate;
If chance, by lonely contemplation led,
Some kindred spin: shall inquire thy fate,
Haply some hoaty-headed swain may say.
“Otr have we seen him at the peep ot dawn
13rushing with hasty steps the dews away
To meet the sun upon the upland lawn,
"There at the foot of yonder nodding beech
That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high,
His listless length at noontide would lie stretch,
And pore upon the brook that babbles by.
“Hard hy VOTI wood, i iocs' shilling as in scorn,
Muttering Ins wayward fancies he would rove,
Now drooping, woetu! wan, like one torlom,
Or crazed svilh care, nr crossed iu ii ope less love.
“One mom 1 missed him on the ensro tiled lull,
Along the heath and near his favorite tree;
Another came: nor yet beside the Till,
Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood Was lie:
“The with dirges due in -,-ul arras
llesi
Slow through the church way path we saw him borne.
452 POETS, POF, I KY

Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay,

Graved on the stone beneath yon aged thorn."
'Hie Epitaph
Here restsIris head upon the lap oj Earth
A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.
Fair Sci'enee0 fiowned not on his humble birth, general knowledge
And Melancholy marked him for her own.
Ijirge was his bounty, and his soul sincere,
Heaven did a recompense as largely send;
He gave to Miser)' all he had, a tear ,
He gained from Heaven {’twas all he qwi/ifrf) a friend.
No farther seek Iris merits to disclose,
Or draw his frailties from their dread abode
[There they alike in trembling hope repose),
The bosom of his Father and his God.

THOM GUNN
The Mat t with Night Sweats
I wake up cold, I who
Prospered through dreams of heat
Wake to their residue,
Sweat, and a dinging sheet,
My flesh was its own shield:
Where it was gashed, it healed,
I grew as I explored
The body I could trust
Even while I adored
The risk that made robust,
A world of wonders in
Each challenge to the skin.
1 cannot but be sorry
The given shield was cracked,
My tnind reduced to hurry,
My flesh reduced and wrecked.
1 have to change the bed,
But catch myself instead
 l H Cl i ( > ( i v 433

Stopped upright where ! am

Hugging my body to me
As if to shield it from
The pains that will go through me.
As if hands were enough
To hold ,m avalanche off.

My Sad Captains
One by one they appear in
the darkness: a few friends, and
a few with historical
names.. How late they start to shine!
hut before they fade they stand
perfectly embodied, Jill
rite past lapping them like a
cloak of chaos, They were men
who, I thought, lived only to
renew the wasteful force they
spent with each hot convulsion.
They remind me, distant now.
True, they are not at rest yet,
but now that they are indeed
apart, winnowed Irom failures,
they withdraw to an orbit
and turn with disinterested
hard energy, like the stars.

H. D.
Helen
All Greece hates
the still eyes in the while face,
the lustre as of olives
where she stands,
and the white hands

file beautiful wife of M eneliu I ter .lli.liinmn bs Pjro Wit the cause ot the
Trojan War.
434 PO£MI , Pofis, I'omiv

All Greece reviles

the wan face when she smiles,
hating it deeper still
when it grows wan and white,
remembering past enchantments
and past LIIS.
Greece sees unmoved,
God's daughter, horn of love.
tile beauty of cool feet
and slenderest knees,
could love indeed the maid,
(July if she were laid,
white ash am id funereal cypresses.

THOMAS HARUY
Aftertvflrds
When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous
stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leas es like wings,
Deliealfc-filmed as new -spun silk, will the neighbors say,
"He was a man who used to notice such things"?
[fit be iti the dusk when, like
an eyelid's soundless blink,
The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon the wind- warp ed upland thorn, a gazer may think,
"To him this must have been a familiar sight."
If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
One may say, "He strove that such innocent creatures should
come to no harm,
Hut he could Ho little for them; and now be is gone,"
it. when hearing that 1 have been stilled at last, they stand at the
door,
Watching the full-scarred heavens that winter sees,
Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face :io more,
"Me was OTIC who had an eye tor such mysteries'?
And will any say when my bell uf quittance is heard in the gloom,
And a crossing breeze ruts a pause in its ou (rollings.
Till they rise again, as tires were a new bell's boom,
“lie hears it not now . bur used to notice such things'"
 At* I HOL O G Y 43S

Channel Firinfl
That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke die cluncel window-squares ,
We thought it was the Judgment-day
And sat upright. While drearisome
Arose the howl of wakened hounds:
The mouse let fall the altar -crumb,
The worms drew back into the mounds,

The glebe0 cow drooled, Till God called. “No; plot oftituci
it's gunnery practice out IT sea
Just as before you went below;
The world is as it used to be;
“All nations striving strong to make
Iked war yet redder. Mad as hatters
They do no more for Christ es sake
Than you who are helpless in such matters.
“That this is not the judgment-hour
For some Of them's a blessed thing,
For if it were they'd have to scout
Hell's floor for so much threatening. . . .
“Ha, ha. It will be warmer when
[ blow the trumpet (it indeed
[ ever do; tor you are moil,
And rest eternal sorely need)."
So down we lav again. J,l wonder,
Will the world ever saner be,’
Said one, "than when He sent us under
In our indifferent century!’
And many a skeleton shook his head
"Instead of preaching forty year,'
My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,
"I wish 1 had stuck to pipes and hecr."
Again the guns disturbed the hour,
Roaring their readiness to avenge.
As fat inland as Stourtoii Timer.
And Can it lot. and starlit Stonehenge.
 fJ t> r: M s, 1J O F. 1 S , I'OETKY

JOY HARJO
Santa Ft'
Tilt? wind blows lilacs out of the east. And it isn’t lilac season, And
1 am walking the street in front of St. Francis Cathedral in Santa Fe.
Oh, and it's a tew years earlier and more. That’s how you toll real
Cline. It t> here, it is there. I he [titles have taken over everything
the sks . i lie narrow streets, my shoulders, my lips, [ talk lilac. And
there is nothing else until a woman the size of a fox breaks through
the bushes, breaks the purple web. She is tall and black and gor¬
geous. She is the size of a fox on the ami of a white man who looks
and tastes like cocaine. She lies for cocaine, dangle* on the arm of
cocaine. And lies to me now from a room in the IJeVargas Hotel,
where she has eaten Iter love®, white powder on her lips. That is
true iiosv; it is nor true anymore. Eventually space curves, walks
over and taps me on the shoulder. On the sidewalk i stand near St.
Francis; lie has been bronzed, a perpetual tan, with birds on his
band, ins shoulder, doer at his feet, i am Indian and in thi> town 1
will never be a saint. I am seventeen and shy and wild. I have been
up until three at a party, hut there is no woman in the De Vargas
Hotel for that story hasn't vet been invented. A man. Whose face I
will never remember, and never did, drives up on a Harley Dav¬
idson. There are lilacs on bis arm, they spill out from the spokes of
his wheels. Fie wants me on his ami, on the back of his lilac bike
touting the flower kingdom ot San Francisco. And for J piece of
time the size of a nickel. 1 think, maybe. ISut maybe is Vapor, has
no anchor here in the sun beneath St. Francis Cathedral. And space
is as solid as the bronze statue of bt. Francis, the fox breaking
through the lilacs, my invention of this story, the wind blowing,

MlCHAFt HARPER
Nightmare liegitis Responsibility1
I place rliesi numbed wrists to the pane
watching white uniforms whisk over
him in the tube-kept
prison

A play Jin William Under Yeats's epitaph t<> 111-, volume ftrsfHmsibililits (1(J13):
“fn lireii [IS l'iy I respoiwMini-s.' I 'm poem :s an elegy tbr Harper's son, who died orlf
d.-.y after birr It Another son had also died shortly alter bill'll
 AN I HdLOCV 437

tear what they will da in experiment

watch my gloved stickshifring gasolined hands
breathe JstXVCii r-i J rferi rfd/niji -pJoist' infirmary tubes
distrusting white-pink mending paperthin
sjlkened end hairs, distrusting tubes
shrunk in his fniPife-jfc/HffyjjJCij
shaven head, in thighs
rfrrfjirtling h itc- luti ids -p irking-1>, ifioi VJ - light
On [Ills Son who will not make his second night
of this wardstrewn intensive a bp ocher
where hts father's asthmatic
hymns of rijsf fit- writ, train done gone
ins mother can only know that he has flown
up into essential calm unseen corridor
going boxscaned home, HJ<IHHT(NJFH, fttvclsonchild
gcmedoiwitown into reseimlittstiugwnrehoiisebÿttcryatid
rnaniti-scn-dtwe-jtQHc / me telling her i) other
train tonight., no music, no brcachstfoked
heartbeat in my infinite distrust of them;
and of" my distrusting self
wlitie-iioftor-who-brealhi'd-for-hrm-atlriiight
say it for two sons gone,
say nightmare, say it loud
pane breaking he a rtm ad 11 e-v
nightmare begins responsibility.

ROBliRT HAYDEN
Frederick Douglass '
When it is finally ours, r h is. treetiom. tins liberty, this beautiful
anti terrible thing, needful to man as any
usable as earth; wllell it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain nutter, diastole, systole,
reHt'S action; when ii is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy niurnbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this I toil glass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten Id his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,

* Frederick Douglass (ca 1 W] 7 IS45), wlio escaped irorn dÿivery IN 1K1H. became
an abolitionist, writer, .NIL! statmiUAil .
438 POEMS, POETS, POETRY

this man, superb in love and logic, this man

shill be remembered. Oh, not with statues' rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths ot bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful needful thing.

Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday

lord's lost Him His mockingbird,
His fancy warbler;
Satan sweet-talked her.
four bullets hushed her,
Who would have thought
she’d end that way?
Four bullets hushed her. And the world a -dang with evil.
Who's going to make old hardened sinner men tremble now
and the righteous rock?
Oh who and oh who will sing jesus down
to help with struggling and doing without and being colored
all through blue Monday?
Till way next Sunday?
All those angels
in their cretonne douds and finery
the true believer saw
when she raned back her head and sang,
all those angels are surely weeping.
Who would have thought
she'd end that way?
Four holes in her heart. The gold works wrecked,
But she looks so natural in her big bronze coffin
among the Broken Hearts and Gates- Ajar,
it’s as if any moment she'd lift her head
from its pillow of chill gardenias
and turn this quiet into shouting Sunday
and make folks forget what she did on Monday.
Oh, Satan sweet- talked her,
and four bullets hushed her,
Lord’s lost Him His diva,
His fancy warbler's gone.
Who would have thought,
who would have thought she'd end that way?

i.
 \ M: in' i ncv 439

SF.AMl?S HEANEY
Borland
For 7 Flaiuigan
Wt have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening --
Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encroaching horizon,
Is wooed into the Cyclops’ eye
Of a tarn. Our un fenced country
Is bog th J 1 keeps trusting
Between the sights of the sun.
They've taken the skeleton
Of the Great Insh Elk
Out of the peat, set it up,
An astounding crate toll of air.

flutter sunk under

More than a hundred years
Was recovered s.iltv and svhite.
The ground itselt is kind, black butter
Melting and opening underfoot,
Missing its last definition
By millions of years.
They’ll never dig coal here.
Only the waterlogged trunks
Of great firs, soft as pulp.
Our pioneers keep striking
Inwards and downwards,
Every layer they strip
Seems camped on before.
The bogholcs might he Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.

Pw/iij/tmmf

]can feel the mg

of the halter at the lupe
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.
4JO POEMS, P a f . s . P o E T R. V

It blows her nipples

to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.
I cm see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the Hoating rods and boughs.
Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak bone, brain firkin:3 container
her shaved head
like a stubble nf black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage.
her noose a ting
to store
the memories of love.
Little adulteress,
before they punished you
you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black tact: svas beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,
1 almost love you
but would have east. L know,
the stones of silence.
1 am the arttul voyeur
of your brain's exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles’ webbing
and .ill your numbered bones:
I who have stood dumb
when ynur betraying sisters,
carded in tar,
wept by the railings.
who would connive
in civilized outrage
 HOIOÿY -<41

yet understand the exact

and tribal, intimate revenge

GEORGE HERBERT
T7re Collar
l struck the board0 and tried, “No more; table
I will abroad!
What? shall 1 ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are tree, free JS the road,
Loose as the wind, as large as store,
Shall I be still in suit?
Have 1 no harvest but a thorn
To let me blood, and not restore
What 1 have lost with cordial fruit?
Sure there was wine
before my sighs did dry it; there was com
Before my tear* did drown it.
!s the year only lost to me?
Have I no bays to crown it.
No dowers, no garlands gay' AH blasted1
All wasted?
Not so, rtiy heart; but there is fruit,
And thou hast hands,
Recover all thy sigh-blown age
On double pleasures; leave thy cold dispute
Of what is fir and not. Forsake thy cage,
Thy rope of sands,
Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee
Good cable, to enforce and draw,
And be thy law,
While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.
Away! take heed;
I will abroad.
Cal! in thy death Vhead there; tie Lip thy fears.
He that forbears
To Sub anti serve his need,
Deserves his load.”
But as I ras ed .nisi gross more fierce and wild
At every word,
Methoughr. 1 heard one calling. Child!
And 1 replied. My Lord,
442 POEMS, POETS, POETRY

Redemption
Having been tenant long to a rich lord,
Not thriving, I resolved to be bold,
And make a suit unto him, to afford5 grant
A new small-rented lease, and cancel the old,
In heaven at his manor 1 him sought;
They told me there that he was lately gone
About some land, which he had deariy bought
Long since on earth, to take possession,
I straight returned, and knowing his great birth,
Sought him accordingly in great resorts;
In cities, theaters, gardens, parks and courts;
At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth
Of thieves and murderers; there I him espied,
Who straight. Your suit is granted, said, and died,

ROBERT HERRJCK
Coritina 's Going A-Mayirtg
Get up! get up for shame! the blooming mom
Upon her wings presents the god unshorn,0 Hpo/Jo, jtW of the sun
See how Aurora5 throws her fair goddess of dautt
Fresh -quilted colons through the air:
Get up, sweet slug- a -bed, and see
The dew bespangling herb and tree.
Each flower has wept and bowed; toward the cast
Above an hour since, yet you not dressed;
Nay, not so much as out of bed:
When all the birds have matins said,
And sung their thankful hymns, 'tis sin,
Nay, profanation to keep in,
Whenas a thousand virgins on this day
Spring, sooner than the lark, to fetch in May,
Rise, and put on your foliage, and be seen
To come forth, like the springtime, fresh and green,
And sweet as Flora,5 Take no care goddess offlouvrs
For jewels for your gown or hair;
Fear not; the teaves will strew
Gems in abundance upon you;
 A IS THO I O (i V 443

Utricles, fbv' childhood ot tliLL day has kept,

Agginsi you come, some orient pearls unwept;
dome and receive them while the light
Hangs on the dew-locks of the night.
And Titan0 on the eastern lull fÿre iiiu
Retires himself, or else stands still
Till you come iortli Wish, dress, he hnet m praying:
Few beads'5 are best when once we go a-Maying, prayers
Come, my Cnrinna. come; arid, coming mark
How each field turns a street, each street a park
Made green and trimmed with trees; see how
Devotion gives each house a bough
Or branch; each porch, each door ere this,
An ark, a tabernacle is,
Made up of whitethorn neatly interwove,
As if here were those cooler shades ot love.
Can such delights be in the street
And open fields, and we not see ’t:
Come, we'll abroad; anti let’s obey
The proclamation made for May,
And sin no more, as we have done, by Staying;
But, my Corinrta, come, let’s go a-Maying

There’s not a budding boy or girl this day

Line is got up and gone to bring in May;
A deal ot youth, ere this, is come
Back, and with whitethorn laden home.
Some have dispatched their cakes and cream
Before that we have left to dream;
And some have wept, and wooed, and plighted troth,
And chose their priest, ere we can cast off sloth,
Many a green-gown has been given,
Many a kiss, both odd and even,
Many A glance, too, has been sent
From out the eye, love's firmament:
Matty a jest told of the keys betraying
This night, and locks picked; yet we'rc not .1- Maying,

Come, let us go while we are in nut prime.

And take the harmless folly of the time
We shall grow old apace, and die
Before we know our liberty
444 P O I! M S , I'OEI S. POE 1 ft V

Our lift'
it short, and our days run
As last away at does the sun;
And, at a vapor or a drop of’ rain
Once lost, caH ne'er ho found again;
So when or you or 1 are made
A fable* song, or fleeting shade,
All love, all liking, ah delight
Lies drowned with us in endless night,
Then while, time serves, and we are but decaying,
Come, my Corimia, come, let's go a -Maying.

GeRAftfi MANLEY HOPKINS

God’s Grandeur
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

it will flame out, like shining from shook toil,

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
Anti wears man’s smudge and s flares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can loot feel, being shod,
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down tilings;
And though the l.i.st lights oh the black West went
Oli, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast a Ltd with ahl bright wings.

No unirtf, there is none. Pitched post pitch ot grief

Mo worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at lore pangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?

My cries heave, herds- long; huddle in a main, a chk‘t-

woe, world-sorrow; on ;m age-old anvil wince and sing —
Then lull, dicn leave off Fury had shrieked "No ling¬
ering! Let me be fell;0 force0 t must be brief,1’ fierce / perforce
 ANTHOLOGY J4S

O (he mind* mind has mountains; dills of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man -fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long out small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Herd creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in ;i whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies svith sleep.

The Windhover
To Christ Our Lord
I caught this morning morning's minion, king¬
dom ofdaylight's da uphill, dapple-da wn-drawn Falcon, in his
riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimplmg wing
In his ecstasy! then ofTi off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and
gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
—
Stirred for a bird, the achieve of. (he mastery of the thing!
Urute beauty and valour and act, uh* air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AW the fire that breaks from thee then* a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, all my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

A, E- HOUSMAN
Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Js hung with bloom along the bough.
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide-
Now, of my threescore years and leu,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look bit things in bloom
Fifty springs arc little room,
- About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
446 I’LitMS, I' O hIS, PO E I H Y

With Rue My Heart Is Laden

With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends 1 had.
For many a rose lipt maiden
And many a lightlbot lad.
Uy brooks too broad tor Leaping
The lightfoot boys, are laid:
The rose lipt girls are sleeping
In fields wlMfre roses fade,

HiirUrti
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sort
And then ran?
—
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over - -
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

LANGSTON HLHSHES
/, Too
lr too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
lint I laugh,
And cat well,
And grow strong.
T o morrow,
I’ll be JE the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
 A M FI I i l OC v 447

"Eat in the kitchen,"

Then,

liesideÿ..
They'll sec how beautiful I am
Arid be ashamed —
I, loo, am America,

Suicide’s iVore
The calm,,
Cool face oh the river
Asked me tor a kiss,

The Weary Blues

Droning a drowsy syncopated tone,
Rocking hark and forth to a mellow croon,
1 heard a Negro play.
Down on l.enox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old yns lighi
He did a lazy sway. . . .
He did a lazy sway, , , ,
To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Bines!
Swaying to and fro on Ins rickety stool
He played that sad raggs tune like a musical fool.
Sweet Ulucs!
Coming from a black mart's soul.
O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
1 heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan —
"Ain't got nobody in all tins world,
Ain’t got nobody but nu self,
Ps gwinc to quit iiu frownin'
And put nia troubles on the shelf"
Thump, thump, thump, went Ins toot on the Moor
He played .1 few chords then he sang some more —
"I got the Weary Blues
'
And ! can't he satisfied.
Cot the Weary Blues
448 P'O EMS, P Li E T S T hitllLT

And can’r be satisfied —

I ain’t happy no mO'
And I wish that I had died "
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
I he singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Wears' Blues echoed through his head
He slept like a rock or a man that's dead,

Bt'ISr JONSON
Come, My Celia
Come, my Celia, let us prove.0 experienee
While we can. the sports of love;
I iniC xv ill not he ours forever;
He at length our gootf will sever,
Spend not then his gifts in vain,
Suns that set may rise again;
But it once we lose this light,
’Trs with LIS perpetual nig!it.
Why should xve defer our joys?
Fame and rumor are but toys.
C a nnot we delude the eyes
Of a tew poor household spies.
Or his easier ears begLiile,
So removed by out wile?
'
Pis no sin love's fruit to steal;
But the sweet thefts to reveal.
To be taken, to be seen.
These have crimes accounted been.

To the Memory of My Beloved, (he Author

Shakespeare
Mr, IViliiam
Amt \n<rt He Hah Left IV
To draxv no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name,
Am I thus ample to thy hook and fame,
While I confess thy writings to be such

1
From Veipcttf-
' Prefixed to ihc turif Folio edition of Shakespeare’s works if)2.ÿJ.
 A \ I HOLOCV 449

As neither man nor Muse can praise too much

I is true, and all men’s suffrage. But these ways
Were not the paths i mesut unto thy praise:
For silliest ignorance on these may light,
Which, when it sounds .it best. l>ut echoes l ight;
Or blind affection, which doth ne'er advance
The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance;
Or crafty malice might pretend this praise,
And thmk to ruin where it seemed to raise
These are as some infamous basvd or whore
Should praise a matron. What could hurt hei morel
Uut thou art proof against them, and, indeed,
Above th“ ill fortune of them, or the need
I therefore will begin. Soul ot the age!
The applause! delight! the wonder of our stage!
JViv Shakespeare, nsc; 1 will not lodge thee by
Chaucer or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie
A little further to make thee a room;
Thou art a m ointment without a tomb,
And art alive still while thy book doth live.
And we have wits to read and praise to give,
That 1 not mix thee so, my brain excuses,
1 mean with great, hut disproportioned Muses;
For, if I thought my judgment were of years,
1 should commit thee surely with thy peers,
And tell how- far thou didst our Lyly outshine,
Or sporting Red, or Marlowe’s mights' Lme.
And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
From thence to honor thee 1 would not seek
For names, but call forth thund'ring Aeschylus,
FrUripides. and Sophocles to ns,
Patuvius, Ace ms, him of Cordova dead,'
To life again, to hear thy buskin' tread
And shake a stage; or. when thy socks were on,
Leave thee alone for the comparison
Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome
Sent forth, or since did ifoni their ashes come
I rinmph, my Britain; thou hast one to show

r Aeschylus, Sophocles. Jin! Kimpiitei the three writers nf Greek tragedy. are
grouped with Fai iiviLis. ACCLLIS. ,ind Settee-*, dues' writers ‘'l Roman tragedy,
'The busk id svas associated wilh Greek Tragedy, ihf sinks with comedy.,
450 POEMS. POETS, POETRY

To whom ait scenes1' of Europe homage owe, stagts

He w»s noT of an age, but for all time!
And all the Muses stilt were us their prime
When like Apollo he came iorth to warm
Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm.
Nature herself was proud of his designs.
And joyed to wear the dressing of his. lines,
Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit,
As, since, she will vouchsafe no ocher wit:
The merry Circek. tart Aristophanes,
Neat Terence, witty Plautus'1 now not please,
But antiquated and deserted lie,
As they were not of Nature's family.
Yet must ! not give Nature all, thy Art,
My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part.
For though the poet's matter Nature be,
His Art doth give the fashion; and that he
Who casts to write a living line must sweat
(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat
Upon the muses' anvil; turn the same,
And himself with it, that he thinks to frame,
Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn;
For a good poet's made as well as horn,
And such wert thou! Look how the father's face
Lives in his issue, even so the race
Of Shakespeare’s mind and manners brightly shines
In his well-turned and true-filed lines,
In each ot which he seems to shake a lance,
As brandished at the eyes of ignorance.
Sweet swan of Avon, what a sight it were
To sec thee in our waters yet appear,
And make those flights upon the banks of Thames
That so did take Eliza and our James!
But stay: 1 see thee in the hemisphere
Advanced and made a constellation there!
Shine forth, thou star of poets, and with rage
Or influence chide or cheer the drooping stage,
Which, since thy flight from hence, Eutli mourned like night,
And despairs day, but for thy volume’s light.

1
Anscnphiiici, Terence, and Plautus were the most iHiOwtlrd comic writers ol
classical limes
 ANTHOLOGY 45 1

JOHN KEATS
In drear nighted December
In drear nighied December,
Too happy, happy [fee,
Thy branches ne'er remember
Their green felicity
The north cannot undo them
—
With a sleety whistle through them,
Nor frozen thawing? glue them
From budding at the prime,
in drear nighied December,
Too happy, happy brook,
Thy bubbling* ne’er remember
Apollo’s summer look;
But with a sweet forgetting
They stay their crystal fretting,
Never, never petting
About the frozen time,

Ah! would twere so with many

A gentle girl and boy
But were there ever any
—
Writh'd not of passed joy?
The feel of not to feel it,
When there is none to heal it,
Nor numbed sense to steel it,
Was never said in rhyme.

On Sittinje Dpivn fo Read King Lear Oner Again

O golden-ton gued Romance with serene lute!
Fair plumed Siren!0 Queen of far away! enchantress
Leave melodizing Ort this win tty day,
Shut up thine olden pages, and be mute:
Adieu! for once again tile fierce dispute
Betwixt damnation and impassioned day
Must I burn through; once mote humbly assay
The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearean fruit.
Chief E’oet! and ye clouds of Albion,0 Dtgland
Begerters of our deep eternal theme,
When through the old oak forest I am gone,
Let me not wander in a barren dream,
452 Pot Mi, POEIS. I'OETLIV

[Jut when ! jin consumed in the fine-,

Give me new Phoenix1 wing* to fly at my desire.

Tit is Living Hand

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb.
So haunt tbv days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldsi wish dime own heart dry of blood
So iti my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience -calmed
I hold it towards you.
—
see here it is —
ETHERIDGE KrsrtGHi
A Poem for Myself
(Or Blues for a Mississippi Black Boy)
I was born in Mississippi:
1 walked barefooted thru the mud.
Born black in Mississippi,
Walked barefooted thru the mud.
But, when 1 reached the age of twelve
! left that place for good.
My daddy be chopped cotton
And he drank his liquor straight.
Said my daddy chopped cotton
And he drank his liquor straight.
When I left that Sunday morning
He was leaning on the barnyard gate.
1 Left my momma standing
Witli the sun shining in her eyes.
Lett her standing in the yard
With the snn shilling in her eyes,
And ! headed North
As straight as the Wild Goose Hies,
1 been to Detroit A' Chicago —
Been to New York city too.
1 been to Detroit and Chicago

l.rjtcmlrirs lnr,l that lives for centuries, then rd-rPMjme'. iwll in fin," mid is rchn-m.
WfltlfJi <sti .1 manuscript pJjie of Keats’s unfinished puern, 1 lie < iap and Hells
"
 A NTHOlOGV 453

Been to New York city too,

Said I done strolled all those funky avenues
I'm still the same old black boy with the same old blues.
Going back to Mississippi
This time to stay for good
Going back to Mississippi
This time to stay for good —
Gonna be free in Mississippi
Or dead in the Mississippi mud,

KENNETH KOCH
Variations on a llteme by William Carlos Williams
1
l chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next
summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and 1 had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.
2
We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then J sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me, 1 simply do not know what 1 am doing.
J
I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the
next ten years.
The mail who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind Oil tilt porch was SO juicy and Cold.
4
List evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Foigivc trie, I was clumsy, and
1 wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!

YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA
Boat People
After midnight they load up.
A hundred shadows move about blindly.
Something dose to sleep
Slides low voices drifting
toward a red horizon. Tonight's
454 1*0 &M$. I'OETS, t'OETil.Y

a black string, the moon’s pull

this boat's headed somewhere.
Lucky to have gotten past
—
searchlights low-crawling the sea,
like a woman shaking water
from her long dark hair.
Twelve times in three days
they’ve been lucky,
clinging to each ocher in gray mist.
Now Thai fishermen gaze out across
the sea as it changes color,
hands shading their eyes
che way sailors do,
minds on robbery & rape.
Sunlight bums blood- orange.
Storm warnings crackle on a radio,
The Thai fishermen turn away.
Not enough water for the trip.
The boat people cling to each other,
faces like yellow sea grapes,
wounded by doubt & salt.
Dusk hangs over the water.
Seasick, they daydream Jade Mountain
a whole world away, half-drunk
on what they hunger to become,

My Father’s LoveteUers
On Fridays he‘d open a can ofjax,
Close his eyes, Si ask me to write
The same letter to my mother
Who sent postcards of desen flowers
Taller than a man. He’d beg her
Lkemm & promised to never
Beat her again. I was almost happy
She was gone, &; sometimes wanted
To slip in something bad.
His carpenter's apron always bulged
With old nails, a claw hammer
Holstered in a loop at his side
Si extension cords coiled around his feet,
Words rolled from under
The pressure of my ballpoint:
 ANTHOLOGY 455

Love, Baby, Honey, Please.

We lingered in (be quiet brutality
Of voltage meters & pipe threaders,
Lost between sentences . . . the heartless
Gleam of a two-pound wedge
On the concrete floor,
A sunset in the doorway
Of the tool shed.
I wondered if she'd laugh
As she held them over a flame.
My father could only sign
His name, but he'd look at blueprints
& tell you how many bricks
Formed each wall. This man
Who stole roses & hyacinth
For his yard, stood there
With eyes closed & fists balled,
Laboring over a simple word,
Opened like a fresh wound, almost
Redeemed by what he tried to say.

PHILIP LARKIN
High Windows
When 1 see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm.
I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
—
And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty yean back,
And thought, 77na/ 7/ fte ike life;
iVo Cod any more, or sweating m the dark

.dfwnt hell and that, or having In hide

What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go douv the long slide
Likefree bloody birds. And immediately
456 POEMS, POETS, POETRY

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:

The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless,

Mr Bleaney
’’This was Mr Blcaney’s room. He Stayed
The whole time he was at the Bodies, till
They moved him.” Flowered curtains, thin and frayed,
Fall to within five inches of the sill,
Whose window shows a strip of building land,
Tussocky, littered, “Mr Bltaney took
My bit of garden properly iti hand.”
lied, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no hook
Behind the door, no room for books or bags
‘TU take it,” So it happens that 1 lie
—
Where Mr Bican cy lay, and stub my fags
On the same saucer-souvenir, and try
Stuffing my ears with cotton -wool, to drown
The jabbering set he egged her on to buy,
1 know his habits — what time he came down,
His preference for sauce to gravy, why
He kept on plugging at the four aways —
Likewise their yearly frame: the Frinton folk
Who put him up for summer holidays,
And Christmas at his sister’s house in Stoke,
But if he stood and watched the frigid wind
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
Telling himself that this was home, and grimied,
And shivered, without shaking off the dread
That how we live measures our own nature,
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, 1 don’t know.

Reasons for Attendance

The trumpet’s voice, loud and authoritative,
Draws rue a moment to the lighted glass
 A MTHOLOtiY 457

To watch the dancers — ill under twenty- five —

Shifting intently* fade to flushed thee,
Solemnly on the bear of happiness.

— -Or so J fancy, sensing the smoke arid sweat,

The wonderful feel of girls. Why he out here?
But then, why he in there? Sev yeti, bur what
Is se\? Surely, to think the Ison's share
Of happiness is found by couples — sheer
Inaccuracy, as far as !"m concerned.
W'hat calls sue is rh,it lifted, rough -tori gned hell
(Art, it you like) whose individual sound
insists J too am individual,
It speaks; 1 hear; others may hear as well,
But not for me, nor I for them; and so
With happiness. *] he refore I stay outside.
Believing this; and they maul to and fro.
Believing that; and both are satisfied,
It no one has misjudged himself Or lied.

This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and did.
They may not mean to, bur they do.
They fill you with the faults they hid
And add some e Kiras, just for you.
Hut they were fucked up in their turn
Uy fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
Ir deepens like a coastal shelf
Get out as earls as you can.
And don't have any kids yourself

D, H. LAWILENCI
The English Are So Xitel
The F.nglish are so nice
So awfully nice
They are the nicest people in [he world.
458 POEMS. POETS. POETRY

And what's more, they 're very nice about being nice
About your being nice as well!
If you're nor nice they soon make you feel it.
Americans and French and Germans and so on
They're a LI very well
lint they're not really nice, you know
They’re not nice in nr jr sense of the word, arc they now?
That’s why one doesn’t have to take them seriously.
We must be nice to them, of course,
Of course, naturally.
ttut it doesn’t really matter what you say to them,
They don't really understand
You can just say anything to them;
13c nice, you know, just nice
But you must never take them seriously, they wouldn't
understand,
Just be nice, you know! oh. fairly nice,
Not ton nice of course, they take advantage
But nice enough, just nice enough
To let them feel they’re not quite as nice as they might be,

DENISE LEVERTOV
The Ache of Marriage
The ache of marriage:

thigh and tongue, beloved,

are heavy with it,
it tlr robs in the teeth
We look for communion
and are turned away, beloved,
each and each
It is leviathan and we
iti its belly
looking for joy, some joy
not to be known outside it

twn by two in the ark of

the aehe of it.
 ANTHOLOGY 45!*

O Taste and See

The world is
not with ns enough.
O taste and see
the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
ii anything all that lives
to the imagination’s tongue,
grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite.
savor, chew, swallow , transform

into our flesh our

deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince.
living in the orchard and being
hungry, and plucking
the fruit.

LI-YOUMG Ltfi
The Interrogation
TLMI streams: one dry. one poured all night by our beds.

m wonder
about neither.
T7jc dry line was dogged with bodies.

I’m through
with memory'.

At which tiindou1 of what house did light icaeh you tedium?

On which step of whose stairway did yniit learn indecision?
I’m through
sorting avenues and doors,
curating houses and deaths.
[Much house did uv flee by night? Width funur <fjJ we flee fry day?
Don't ask me.
Wc stood and watched hum; from one uv tan Jirtiy.
460 POEMS, P U Y T S , POE r u v

lrtn neatly folding

the nights and days, notes
to be forgotten.

fTe diminished. lib itw not spared. There was no piiy.

iii'ie

Neither was their sanctuary. Neither rest,

There were fires itt the streets. We stood among ttjeir, at the tevtl
of their hands, all those wrists, dead or soon ft' die,
No more
letting my survival
depend on memory,
’There was the seat its green volume brought despair.
I here was waiting, there iwrs hawing. There intis
astonishment too. The astonishment of
‘ T thotight you died!" "Hate did yon get out?"
"And Little Tei Tei toothed right by the guards!"
1 grow
leaden with stories.
my son's eyelids
grow heavy.
Who roimi the boat when our father tired?
1 )on '[ ask me,
M'7ro fame along? I I7JLS got left behind?
Ask the sea.
'Hi rough it all there was rte iirtif weeping
came many years later.
I'm through
with memory,
Sometimes a song,
even when there was uvepiug.
I'm through with memory.
Can’t you stilt smell the smoke oti wy body?
 AN I HOLOCY 461

HI=NHY WADSW'ORI M LONti FELLOW

Aftermath
When the summer fields are mmvn,
When the buds are Hedged .and down,
And the dry leaves Strew the path;
With the falling of the snow,
With the cawing of the crow,
One e again the fields we mow
And gather in die aftermath,
Nett the sweet, new grass with flowers
Is this harvesting of ours;
Not the upland * lover bloom;
[Jut the rowen mixed with weeds,
Tangled tufts from marsh and meads,
Where the poppy drops its seeds
In the silence and the gloom.

The Jewish Cemetery at iVem/iifr/

How strange it seems! These Hebrews in the it graves,
Close by the street of this fair seaport town,
Silent beside the never -si lent waves,
At rest in all this moving up and down!
The trees are white with dust, that o’er their sleep
Wave their broad curtains in the sou thivi Lid’s breath,
While underneath these leafy tents they beep
The long, mysterious I:\0du5 of Heath.
And these sepulchral stones, so old and brown,
That pave with level flags their burial-place.
Seem like the tablets of the Law. thrown down
And broken by Mows at the mount. nn\ base

The very names recorded here ate strange,

Of foreign accent, and of different climes;
AIV,L res and Rivera mteia liange
With Abraham and Jacob of old tunes

"Messed be Cod! for he created Death!"

The mourners said, ".md Death is lest and pease;"
Then added, in tile certainty of faith,
"And give tli Life that nevermore shall cease.’*
462 POEMS, POETS, POETKV

Closed arc the portals ot their Synagogue,

No Psalms of David now the silence break,
No Rabbi reads the ancient Decalogue1’ Iff! G'ofFJfJJ/JIjdjHfUfS
In the grand dialect the Prophets spake
Gone are the Living, but the dead remain,
And not neglected; tor a hand unseen,
Scattering its bounty, like a summer rain,
Stilt keeps their graves and their remembrance green.
How came they here: What hurst nf Christian hate,
What persecution, merciless and blind,
Drove o'er the sea —
that desert desolate —
These Ishmacls and Ha gars ot mankind?
They lived in narrow streets and lanes obscure,
Ghetto and ludenstrasd, 1 m mirk and mint;
Taught in the school of patience to endure
The life of anguish and the death of tire.
All their lives long, with the unleavened bread
And bitter herbs of exile and its fears,
The wasting famine of the heart they fed,
And slaked its thirst with marah' of their teats,
Anathema maianathai* was the cry
That rang from town to town, from street to street;
At every7 gate the accursed Mordccai'1
Was mocked and jeered, and spurned by Christian teet.
Pride and humiliation hand in hand
Walked cvith them through the world where'er they went;
Trampled and beaten were they as the sand,
And yet unshaken as the continent.
For in the background figures vague and vast
Of patriarchs and of prophets rose sublime,
And all the great traditions of the Past
They saw reflected in the coming time.

1
German for "Street of Jews."
: The 1 lebrew word lor billerm-w.
"A curie; literally, "Let him be eiiired, the Lord has mm?" (I Corinthians
I (v 72).
' S* the book of' Esther, in which Merdecai reprtwnts the Jew1 devoted to hss
people's welfare.
 A NTH Ol OCV 46i

And (.FILLS-
forever with revetted lank
The mystic volume at the world they read,
Spelling it backward, like a Hebrew book,
Till life became a Legend of the Dead.
But ah! what once has been shall be net morel
The groaning earth in travail and in pain
Brings forth its races, but does not restore,
And the dead nations never nse again.

Tht Tide Rises, the Tide Tulls

The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew0 aills' mignitoTy bird
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
The traveller hastens coward the town,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.
Darkness settles on roofs and wails,
lint the sea, the sea in the darkness calls;
]'he little waves, with their soft, white hands,
Efface die footprints in the sands,
And the tide rises, the tide falls,
The morning breaks; the steeds in the it stalls
Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls;
The day returns, but nevermore
Returns the traveller to the shore,
And the title rises, the tide hills,

AUDRE Lomin
Hanging Fire
lam fourteen
and my skin has betrayed me
the boy 1 cannot live without
still sucks his thumb
in secret
bow come my knees are
always so ashy
what if I die
before morning

i.
464 POEMS. POETS, POETRY

and momma's in tliLL bedroom

with the door dosed,
I have to learn how to dance
in time tor tine next party
my room is too small for me
suppose ! die before graduation
they will sing Sad melodies
but finally
tell the truth about me
l here is nothing | want to do
and too much
that has to be done
and momma's in the bedroom
With the door dosed.
Nobody even stops to think
about my side ot it
! should have been on Math Team
my marks were better than his
why do J have to be
the one
wearing braces
1 have nothing to wear tomorrow
will Ilive long enough
to grow up
and momma's in the bedroom
with the dour dosed.

ROBERT LOWELL
Sailing Home from Rapalfo
[February 1954]
Your nurse could only speak Italian,
but after twenty minutes 1 could imagine your final week,
anti tears ran down fifty cheeks. . . .
When 5 embarked from Italy with my Mother's body,
the whole shoreline of the Golfo ill GerwOa
was breaking into fiery flower

1
A city in northern Italy.
7
Gulf of Cv'no.1,
 A N T H O L OG Y 465

The crazy yellow and aEune sea sleds

blasting like jack-hammers across
the -bubbling wake of our liner,
recalled the clashing colons of my Ford
Mother Traveled first-class in the hold;
her Riforgri-nfliio4 black and gold casket
was like Napoleon's at the Invdtitifs* . . .
While the passengers were tanning
on the Mediterranean in deck-chairs,
our family cemetery in Dunbarton'
lay under the White Mountains
in tiie sub-zero weather.
The graveyard’s soil was changing to stone
so many of its deaths had been midwinter.
—
Dour and dark against the blinding snowdrttrs,
its black brook and fir trunks were ns smooth as masts.
A fence of iron spear-hafts
black bordered its mostly Colonial grave-slates.
The only "unhistoric" soul to come here
was Father, now buried beneath his recent
utiweaihered pink-veined slice of marble.
Even the Latin of his Lowell motto:
Ociitsiottem cognosce,
seemed too businesslike and pushing here,
where the burning cold illuminated
the hewn inscriptions of Mother's relatives:
twenty or thirty Winslows and S-turhv
Frost had given their names .1 diamond edge
In the grandiloquent lettering on Mother's coffin.
IrCHfcll had been misspelled LOVEL
The Corpse
was wrapped like panellone" LII Italian tinfoil,

Tralun tor “sruiklmjt," is of wint.

*A reference M the IUTILIJ vf lr_ily national revival mini nineteenth

.......
;:i ir:-

century.
' The building m 1'irif where Njjujfoiin i' I' "tied
1
A town n> tsii-w Hampshire r : I tiwdlV hem L in ( mcMri!
Latin for ft ticngraze (your) opportunity
"
H
A MiJ.mew- iwect cite
466 P OE to 5 i iJ O t : S , lJ 0 £ F K Y

AÿHIBAIO MACLELSH
An Poetics
A poem should bo palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,
Dumb
As old medallions :o the thumb,
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Oi easement ledges where the moss has grown —
A poem should bo wordless
As the flight of birds.
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,
Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind —
A poem should be motionless in tune
As the moon climbs,
A poem should be equal to:
Not true.
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.
For love
The le&ning grasses and two lights above the St a

A poem should not mean

But be.

ANORI.ÿ' MARVEI.].

An Horatiau Ode
I. :pi'ii OiJHJiir'ri/’.T Uttirm from Ireland'

The forward youth chat would appear

Must now forsake his Muses dear,

' Cron wri] returned from oinqiicnnÿ Ireland EII M;iy 1650, eighteen months
jfter the execution of Charles I. J11 July he would inv&de Scotland
 AMT HOI LU V 467

Nor in the shadows sin [5

His numbers0 languishing: poetiie
'TLS time to leave the books in dust,
And oil the unused armor's rust,
Removing from the wall
The corslet of the hall.
So restless Cromwell could not cease
In the inglorious arts ot peace,
13 LI t through adventurous war
Urged his active star;
And like the three-forked lightning, first
Ureakitig the clouds where it was nursed,
Did thorough his own side
His fiery way divide.2
For "tis all one to courage high,
The emulous or enemy;
And with such to inclose
Is more than to oppose.
Then homing through the air he went,
And places and temples rent;
And Caesar’s head at last
Did through his laurels blast.
’Tts madness to resist or blame
The force ot" angry heaven's dame;
And it we would speak true,
Much to the man is due,
Who, from his private gardens, where
He lived reserved and austere
{As if his highest plot
To plant the bergamot'1),
Could by industrious valor climb
To ruin the great work til time,
And cast the kingdom old
Into another mold;

; Ctom*r(ll
after 1644. Opened -1 wiy i<>r himsdl .iruonn rivjJ p.irlijineiuarv
leaden.
' A species or' ]if .n . also known prince's pear nr trie peir of klllgv
468 POEMS, POETS, PottHV

Though Justice against Fite complain,

And plead the ancient rights in vain;
But those do hold or break,
A.s men are strong or weak.
Nature, chat hateth emptiness.
Allows of penetration less,4
And therefore muse make room
Where greater spirits come,
What field of all the civil wars,
Where his were not the deepest scars?
And Hampton shows what part
He had of wiser art;''

Where,twining subtle fears with hope,

He wove a net of such a scope
Thar Charles himself might chase
To Cansbrooke’s narrow case,
That thence the royal actor borne
rhe tragic scaffold might adorn;
While round the armed bands
Hid dap their bloody hands,

He nothing common did or mean

Upon tliat memorable scene,
But with his keener eye
The axe’s edge did try;

Nor called the gods with vulgar spite

To vindicate his helpless right;
lint bowed his comely head
Down, as upon a bed.
This was that memorable hour
Which first assured the forced power:
So, when they did design
The Capitol's first line,

1
M hough abhorring a vacuum, Nature is even more as'erse io the occupation of
rhe umf space by twobodies nr the same time.
'Charts I fled «> Cnnsbrookc t .mie, which turned OUT to he a cage ("narrow
case" . fir him. it was long believed that Crum Well connived ,it the Hight oft diaries from
Hampton ( Joun to (iurisbrookc (Janie m order «> prod I'arliaintni into executing him
 AN I iini ocv 4(jV

A bleeding head, where they begun,

Did fright the architects to rim;
And yet in that the state
Foresaw its happy fate,'''
And now the Irish arc ash anted
To see themselves in one year tamed;
So much tsne mat] can do
That does both jet and kj toss'.
They can affirm Ins praises best,
And have, though overcome, confessed
How good lie is. how just,
And tit for highest trust.
Nlor yet grown stifFer with comma net,
liur still in the republic’s hand —
I loss- fu he is to sway
That can so well obey!
He to the Commons* feet presents
A kingdom for his first year's rents;
And. what he may. forbears
Ihs tame to make Lt theirs;
And has his sword and spoils imgirt,
To lay them at the public's skirt;
So when the falcon high
Falls heavy from the sky,
She, having killed, no more titles search
But on the nest green bough to perch;
Where, when he tirst does lure,
The falconer lias her sure.
What may not, then, our isle presume,
While victory his crest doe* plume?
What may not others fear,
If thus he crown each year?
A Caesar he. ere long, to Caul
fo Italy an 1 hitmibal,

.1

The omen
'
Pliny tdk in i- A

iv.n
...
inrerfrcifd .is indicating
( f-fi fcwy

,i
JII anecdote JIHIUI U. LIFTMEN triiu found

lie ML! while el i jiiJ" 1 1 j-e i he found JtiOn uf :i Iftlil'h' to Jnpiicf un the T.irpet.in hill in Pm lie
prcHpcrttm future riir KSIINC
470 PaSMS, POETS, P O E T R v

And to JLI ] states not free

Shall climacteric be.
The I Ad no shelter now shed! find
Within his parti -colored mind.
13 ut from this valor sad
Shrink underneath the plaid;
Happy if in. the tufted brake
The English hunter him mistake,
Nor lay his hounds in near
The Caledonian0 deer, Scottish
but tin on, the tear '5 and fortune’s soil,
March indefatigably on!
And for the last effect,
Still keep thy sword erect;
Besides the force it has to fright
The spirits of the shady night,
The same arts that did gain
A power must it maintain.

To His Coy Mistress

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, hdy, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To Walk, and pass our long love’s dav.
Thou by the Indian Gauges’ side
bhouldst rubies find; T by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the flood,
Ansi you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews."
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow;
AM hundred years should go to praise

Tilt (.-arly inhabitants of Scotland lvtre talJtLi Pitb became the warriors painted
ihemstlviB with many color* lor battle (Atmt is Latin for “painted ") Marvell implies
[hat the Sc ties are divided into many parties Dr tactions.
'ÿ( he Humber flows through Hull, (Marvell's native town,
1
Supposed to occur at the end of time,
 AMT n'oiotiY 471

Thine eyes, Lind on thy forehead gaze;

Tuo hundred to adore each breast.
lint thirty thousand to the rest;
Au age at least to every part.
And the lam age should show your heart,
For, lady, you deserve tins State,
Nor would I love at lower rite.
Hut at my back 1 always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder ill before us lie
Deserts of Vast eternity,
Thy beauty dial I no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long -preserved virginity,
And your quaint honor turn TO dust.
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave's ,1 fine and private place,
Hut pi o Lie. 1 think, do there embrace.
Nusv therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dess-,
And while thy svilling soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while We may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once mir time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power,
Let Us toll ill our screEigth anti all
Our sweetness up into one hall,
And tear out pleasures ss-ith rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him rim

HERMAN MFI VILLE

The Berg
A Drram
] saw a ship of martial build
(Hoi standards set, her brave apparel on)
472 1JOEMS, POETS, POETRY

Directed as by madness mere

Against a stolid iceberg steer,
Nor budge it, though the infatuate ship went down,
The impact made huge ice-cubes fall

Hue that one avalanche was all

—
Sullen, in tons that crashed the deck;

No other movement save the foundering wreck,

Along the spui> oi ridges pale,
Not any slenderest shaft and frail,
A prism over glass-green gorges lone,
Toppled; nor lace of traceries fine,
Nor pendent drops in grot or mine
Were jarred, when the stunned ship went down.
Nor sole the gulls in cloud that wheeled
Circling one snow- flanked peak afar,
But nearer fowl the floes that skimmed
And crystal beaches, felt no jar.
No thrill transmitted stirred the loek
Of jack-straw needle-ice at base;
Towers undermined by waves — the block
Atilt impending — kept their place.
Seals, dozing sleek on siiddery ledges
Slipt never, when by loftier edges
Through very inertia overthrown,
The impetuous ship in bafflement went down.
Hard Berg (methoughc), so cold, so vast,
With mortal damps self-overcast;
Exhaling still thy dankish breath —
Adrift dissolving, bound for death;
Though lumpish thou, a lumbering one
A lumbering lubband loitering slow,
—
Inipingers rue thee and go down,
Sounding thy precipice below,
Nor stir the slimy slug that sprawls
Along thy dead indifference of walls.
 AN 1 HOLOGY 473

Fragments of o Lost Gnostic Poem of the

Tireifth Century

Found a family, build a state,

The pledged event is still the same;
Matter in end will never abate
His ancient brutal chum.

Indolence is heaven’s ally here,

And energy' the child of hell;
The good man pouring from his pitcher clear
licit brims the poisoned well.

Monody'
To have known him, to have loved him.
After Idleness long;
And then to be estranged in life,
And neither in the wrong;
And now for death to set his seal —
Ease me, a little ease, my song!
By wintry hills his hermit-mound
The sheeted snow-drifts drape.
And houseless there the snow-bird Hits
Beneath the hr-tree’s crape:
(.Hazed now with ice the cloistral vine
That hid the shyest grape.

JAMF.S MERRILL
The Broken Home
Crossing the street,
[ saw the parents and the child
At their window, gleaming like fruit
With evening’s mild gold leaf.

'Gnosticism was ;i religious movement nflatr antiquity and r!i<- easic t'.Jlnstiaii
era.
1
This poem is jicrhap1- ail elegy lot Nathaniel Ha'sllmmc, called "Vine" ir.
Melville's tone; poem f./juri.
11A POFM1*, IJ o n T s r F* o 1 1 nv

in a roosii on the floor bdow,

Sunless, cooler
—
a. brimming
Saucer of wax, marbly and dim
i have lit what's left of my life.
1 have thrown out yesterday's milk
And opened a book, of maxims.
I he flame quickens. The word stirs.

Tell me. tongue of hre,

Thar you and I are as real
A: least as the people upstairs.

My father,1 who had ftosvu ill World War I,

Might have continued to invest his life
In eloud banks well above Wall Street and wife.
But the race was run below, and the point was to win,

Too lace now, I make out in his blue gaze

(Through the smoked glass of being thirty-six)
Thu soul eclipsed by twin black pupils, sex
And business; time was money in those days.

Each thirteenth year he married- When he died

There were already several chilled wives
In sable orbit —
rings, ears, permanent waves.
We'd felr him warming Lip tor a green bode,
He could afford it. He was "in his prime”
At three score ten. But money was not time.

When my parents were younger this was a popular act:

A veiled woman would leap from an electric, wine-dark car
To the steps of no matter what —
the Senate or the ikitz Bar
Anti bodily, at newsreel Speed, attack
—
Ho matter whom —
A1 Smith or Jose Maria Sett
Or Clemenceau' —
veins standing out on her throat
As she yelled War HtktiiÿrnrJ I'ig! Give in the volt'!,
And svould have to be hauled away in her hobble skirt.

C'hjHei Mi n i II. .vko svis .1 tinjucier JJIJ founder of she broker 11*0 firm Merrill,
Lynch He ami Merrill's mother c veil 111 ally dieorced
A I Inrÿl L Smith f]H7.t 1 044 ji jjut Cfeorpei < [errtemreju (IX4I-|U2!1J Si-L'ie
politicians; Jose M-ma Sen fl-HJfi-l'ris) was .1 j'.untc i
 AN t H HUitiv A1$

What had the man done? Oh, made history.

Her business (he had implied) was jiving birth,
Tending the house, mending the socks,
Always that same old Story
Father Time and Mother Earth,’
—
A marriage on the rocks.

One afternoon, red, satyr-thighed

Michael, the Iris ft serier, head
Passionately lowered, led
The child I was to a shut door. Inside,
131 i nds heat sun from the bed
The green -gold room throbbed like a bruise.
Under a sheet, clad in taboos
Lay whom we sought. Iter haiT undone, Outspread,

And of a blackness found, if ever now, in old

Engravings where the acid btt.
I must have needed to touch it
Or the whiteness —
was she dead?
Her eyes Hew open, startled strange anti cold.
The dog slumped to the door. She reached for me. 1 fled.
Tonight they have stepped east onto the gravel,
The party is over. It's the fall
Of 1931. They love each other still.
She: Charlie, I can't stand the pace.
lie: Come on, honey
— why, you’ll bury us alE!
A lead soldier guards my windowsill:
Khaki rifle, uniform, and face.
Something in me grows heavy, silvery, pliable.
How intensely people used to ieell
Like metal poured at the close of a proletarian novel,
Refined and glowing from the crucible,
I see those two hearts, Tm afraid,
Still. Cool here in the graveyard of good and evil,
They are even so to be honored and obeyed.

In mythology, Cromis ' 1'irii:-.- nut Hhej (mcit'hrr <fr'ihs' itfn; (he parens
of £ws. svlio dethroned hir [Jths-T
476 3J < I r .M s , POETS, POETRY

. . . Obeyed, at i-oas-t , inversely. Thus

i rarely buy it newspaper, or vote.
To do so, I have learned, is to invite
The tread of a stone guest1 within my house.
Shooting tins rusted bolt, though, against him,
i trust 1 am no less, time's child than some
Who on the heath impersonate Poor Tonf
Or on the barricades; rink life and limb
Nor do 1 try to keep a garden, only
An avocado in a glass of water —
Roots pallid, gemmed with air, And later,
When the small gilt leaves have grown
Fleshy and green, I let them die, yes, yes,
And start another. I am earth's no [ess.
A child, a red dog roam the corridors,
Still, of the broken home. No sound. The brilliant
Rag runners halt before wide-open doors.
My old room! Its wallpaper —
cream, medallioned
With pink and brown —
brings hack the first nightmares,
Long summer colds, and Emma, sepia --faced,
Perspiring over broth carried upstairs
Aswim with golden fits I could not taste.
The real Jibuse became a bourdmg-sehool.
Under the ballroom ceiling’s allegory
So: neone at last may actually he allowed
To leant something; or, from my window, cool
Willi [he umtitiement of the entire story,
Watch a red setter" stretch and sink in cloud.

An Upward Lovk
O heart green acre sown with salt
by the departing occupier
lay down your gallant spears of wheat
Salt of the earth each stellar pinch

J
hi Mtnart’i opera Durr Cjtwupiirr, (be Conirtiendatoreh statue rtrnlfi to lile arid
ewers TIK lion's 1i mi id-, seeking eenseÿiicr fnr his <ii Lighter's setha-iion
The name adopted, in Shakespeare's JGrrij Lrsrr b) Edjÿir, disinherited bs Kii
tithei, Gloucester,
n
Tllis is a purl urt “seller" — the du£ JIIS.1 the setting cull.
 A N ] IK) L o t; V 477

flung in blind defiance backwards

now takes its toll Up from his quieted
quarry the lover colder and wiser
hauling himself finds the world turning
toys triumphs toxins into
this vast facility the living come
dearest to die in How did it happen
In bright alternation minutely mirrored
within the thinking of each and every
mortal creature halves of a clue
approach the earth lights Morning star
evening Star salt of the sky
First the grave dissolving into dawn
then the crucial ne crystallizing
from inmost depths of clear dark blue

W. 5* MF.RTSFIN
For a Coming Extinction
Gray whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing
I write as though you could understand
And 1 could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we svere made
On another day
The bewilderment will diminish like an echo
Winding along your inner mountains
Unheard by us
And find its way out
Leaving behind it the future

a
478 POEMS, POETS, POETRY

Dead
And ours
When you will not see again
The whale calves trying the light
Consider what you will find in the black garden
And its court
The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas
The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless
And fore-ordaining as stars
Our sacrifices
Join your word to theirs
Tell him
That it is we who are important

Ft?r the Anniversary of My Death

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveller
Like the beam of a lightless star
Then 1 will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

JOHN MILTON
L’Allegro
Hence loathed Melancholy
Of Cerberus and blackest midnight bom,
Ln Stygian Cave forlorn
'Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy,
Find out some uncouth cell,
Where brooding Darkness spreads his jealous wings, h

The tide is Julian for "The Cheerful Min."

I
 ANTHOLOGY 479

And the night-raven sings;

There under ebon shades, and low-browed rocks,
As ragged as thy locks,
In dark Cimmcnan' desert ever dwell.
Hut come thou goddess fair and free,
In Heaven yclept0 Euphrosyue,' called
And by men, heart- easing Mirth,
Whom lovely Venus at a birth
With two sister Graces more
To ivy-crowned Bacchus bore;
Or whether {as some sager sing)J
The frolic wind that breaches the spring.
Zephyr with Aurora playing.,
As he met her once J-Maying.
There on beds of violets blue,
And fresh-blown roses washed in dew,
Filled her with thee a daughter fair,
So buxom. Withe, and debonair,
Haste thee nymph, and hring with thee
Jest and youthful Jollity,
Quips and Cranks, and wanton Wiles,
Mods, and Becks, and wreathed Smiles,
Such as hang on Hebe's’ cheek, goddess of youth
And love to live in dimple sleek;
Sport that svrinklcd Care derides,
And Laughter holding both his sides.
Come, and trip it as ye go
On the light fantastic toe,
And in thy right hand lead with thee,
The mountain nymph, sweet Liberty;
And if I give thee honor due,
Mirth, admit me of thy crew
To live with her and live with thee.
In unreproved pleasures freer
To hear the lark begin his flight,
And, singing, startle the dull night,
From his watch-tower in the skies,
Till the dappled dawn doth rise;
Then to come in spite of sorrow,

'
A hud in which, xuarduig to Homer, the sun never thorn-.
’Mirth, one of the three1 Gnca
* t his genealogy is invented by Milton
4gU lJ t) CMS. H O li T S . (ÿ* O E T HV

And at my window bid good morrow,

Through the sweeibriar, or the vine,
Or the twisted eglantine.
While the cock with lively din,
Scatters the rear of darkness thin,
And to the stack, or the bam door,
Stoutly struts his dames before;
Oft listening how the hounds and hom
Cheeriy rouse the slumbering mom.
From the side of some hoar hill,
Through the high W'ood echoing shrill.
Sometime walking not unseen
By hedgerow elms, on hillocks green,
Right against the eastern gate,
Where the great sun begins his state,
Robed in flames, and amber light,
The clouds in thousand liveries dight;° clad
While the plowman near at hand,
Whistles o’er the furrowed land,
And the milkmaid singeth blithe,
And the mower whets his scythe,
And every shepherd cells his tale,
Under the hawthorn in the dak'.
Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures
Whilst the landscape round it measures,
Russet lawns and fallows gray,
Where the nibbling flocks do stray,
Mountains on whose bamcn breast
The laboring clouds do often rest;
Meadows trim with daisies pied,
Shallow brooks, and rivers wide,
Towers and battlements it Sees
Bosomed high in tufted trees,
Where peril aps some beauty lies,
The cynosure of neighboring eyes.
Hard by, a cottage chimney smokes,
From betwixt two aged oaks,
Where Corydon and Thyris’ met,
Are at their savory dinner set
Of herbs, and other country messes,

'
Corycton, Thynis, tJ hyll it (fine 8fi), and Thestylis (line 88} ire conventional
names from pastoral poetry.
 AkTHCJLCSOY 481

Which the neat-handed Phyllis dresses;

And then in haste her bower she leaves.
With Thestyhs to bind the sheaves;
Or if the earlier season lead
To the tanned haycock in the mead.
Sometimes with secure delight
The upland hamlets will invite,
When the merry bells ring round
And the jocund rebecks0 sound fiddles
To many a youth and many a maid,
Dancing in the checkered shade;
And young and old come forth to play
On a sunshine holiday,
Til! the livelong daylight fail;
Then to the spicy nut-brown ale,
With stories told of many a feat,
How fairy Mab the junkets eat;
She was pinched and pulled, she said,
And he, by Friar’s lantern0, led, will-o'-thc-ii'isp
Tells how the drudging goblin sweat
To earn his cream-bowl, duly set,
When in one night, ere glimpse of mom,
His shadowy flail hath threshed the corn
That ten day-laborers could not end;
Then lies him down the lubber0 fiend, drudging
And, stretched out all the chimney's0 length. fireplace y
Basks at the fire his hairy' strength;
And crop-full out of doors he flinfp
ETC the first cock his matin rings.
Thus done the tales, to bed they creep,
By whispering winds soon lulled asleep.
Towered cities please us then,
And the busy hum of men,
Where throngs of knights and bartms bold,
In weeds of peace high triumphs hold.
With store of ladies, whose bright eyes
Rajn influence, and judge the prize
Of wit, or amis, while both contend
To win her grace, whom all commend.
There let Hymen0 oft appear _yW of numiagr
In saffron robe, with taper clear,
And pomp, and least, and revelry,
With masque, and antique pageantry;
4H2 POEMS, POETS, POETRY

Such sights AS youthful poets dream

On summer eves by haunted stream,
1 hen to the well-trod stage anon,
Ifjonson's learned sock*’ be on,
Or sweetest Shakespeare, fancy’s child,
Warble his native wood-notes wild.
And ever against eating cares
Lap me in soft Lydian air;
Married to immortal verse
Such as the meeting soul may pierce
In notes, with many a winding bout'5 fnni
Of linked sweetness long drawn out,
With wanton heed, and giddy cunning,
The melting voice through nines tunning;
Untwisting all the chains that tie
The hidden soul of harmony;
Thai Orpheus' self may heave his head
From golden slumber on a bed
Of heaped Elysian flowers, and hear
Such strains as would have won the ear
Of Pluto, to have quite set free
FI is half-regained Enrydtce.
These delights if' thou canit give,
Mirth, with thee I mean to live.

OH Shakespeare
What needs my Shakespeare for bis honored bones
The labor oi an age in piled stones?
Or that Ins hallowed reliqucs should be hid
Under a star-y pointing pyramid:
Dear son of Memory, great heir of Fame.
What need’;t thou such weak Witness ol thv name:
Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Hast built thyself a livelong monument,
For whilst, to th' shame of slow endeavoring art.
Thy easy numbers Row. and that each heart
Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued5 hook invaluable

' The light shoe of ancient comic at lots, a symbol of comedy,

Orpheus. the great musician of classical mythology, pieaded '.VI! h Pluto, god o:
[hi- underworld, ro lilow him [o rwnf hii win:, i-urydicc. PI mo consented [a- Irt
Etlrydice re-tum: but Oipheus, by looking bjtk to be sure she was following, ’.iroti- (he
te mis of his agreement with Pluto, and Eurvdn;e remained in Hades.
 A N't HOI OG¥ 483

Those Delphic lines with deep impression took,

Then thou, our fancy of itself bereaving,
Dost make us marble with too much conceiving,
And so sepulchred in such pomp dost lie
That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.

MARIANNE MOORE
Poetry
I, too, dislike it: there are things that ire important beyond all
this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
it it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
(he same tiling may be said for all of us. that we
do not admire what
sve cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, .1 tireless wolf
under
3 the immovable critic twitching his skin like .1 horse
tree,
that feels .1 flea, the base¬
ball fan, the statistician —
nor is it valid
to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books";1 .ill these phenomena are important. One must

make a distinction
however: w hen dragged into prominence by half poets, the
rcsulr is not poetry,

1
Moore's note: "Diary 7oi..ro)' (Ifurion), p. S4 'Where the boundary' between
prose and poetry lies, 1 shall never be able to indrrM -id The question is raised in
manuals of style, yet the answer to n lies beyond me. I'oetry is verse: prose n not verse
Or else poetry is everything with the ewepru-i of business domninm and school
boohs-'
4fj4 p a)' M 5 , POETS. P O E T R, V

nor til] tli poets among us catl be

"literalists of
the imagination”" above —
insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, gardens with real toads in them/'
shah we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand OTI the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry,

The Steeple-Jack
Revised , 196 l
Riirer would have seen a reason for living
in a town like this, with eight stranded whales
to look at; with the sweet sea air (wining iittp your house
on a fine Jay, troni water etched
with waves as formal as the st ales
on a fish.
One by one in two’s and three's, the seagulls keep
fymg back and forth over the town clock,
or sailing around the lighthouse without moving their wings —
rising steadily with a slight
quiver of the body —
nr Stick
mewing where
a seatbe purple of the peacock's neck is
paled to greenish azure as Dliter changed
die pine green of the Tyrol to peacock blue and guinea
gray. Yon can see a twenty-five-
pound lobster; and fish nets arranged
to dry. The
whirlwind titc-and-drum of the storm bends the salt
marsh grass, disturbs starÿ in the sky and the
star on the steeple; it is a privilege to see so

'
Moure's nule: “YVitlJ Mruy t'j1 (JUPIi iwJ Evil {A IE. LJUIICTI, ItHl.t), j> JH"1, "I he
I mu rjTL'.in Lif'his view >VJS from flic very intensity of hi* vision; he was J. coo lhcr.il realist
of imnginlriprt . ss Others ire of nature; ariJ beciusc he believed tint the liflur seen l>y
rlie ini nd’s eye, when exalted by mipimion. were “eitrrnal existences," symbols of
divine essences, he h.itei! every grace of style that might obscure their iinnilieim.'

a
 A N T I -l n[ ociY

much confusion. Disguised by what

might seem the opposite, the sea¬
side Howers and
trees are favored by the fog so that you have
the tropics at first hand: the trumpet vine,
foxglove, giant snapdragon, a salpiglossis that has
spots and stripes; momilig-gjories, gourds,
or moon-vines trained on fishing twine
at the back door:
cattails, Hags, blueberries and spiderwort,
striped grass, lichens, sunflowers, asters, daisies —
yellow and crab-claw ragged sailors with green bracts — toad
plant,
petunias, ferns; pink lilies, blue
ones, tigers; poppies; black sweet-peas
The climate
is right for the banyan, frangipani, or
not
jack-fruit trees; or for exotic serpent
life. Ring lizard and snakes kin tor the foot, it voqj see tit;
but here they’ve cats, not cobras, to
keep down the' rats. The diffident
little newt
with white pin- dots on black horizontal spaced
out bands lives here; yet there is nothing that
ambition can buy or take away. I he College student
named Ambrose sits on the hillside
with his not- native books and hat
and sees boats
atsea progress white and rigid as il in
a groove. Liking an elegance of which
the source is not bravado, he knows by heart the antique
sugar-bowl shaped summerhouse of
interlacing slats, and the pitch
of the church
spire, not true, front which a man in scarlet Jets
down a rope as a spider spins a thread;
he might be parr of a novel, but on the sidewalk a
sign says C, J Poole, Steeple Jack,
in black and white; and one in red
and white says
48ft iJ £> E M 5 , POETS, POETHV

Danger, The church portico has four fluted

columns, each a single piece of stone, made
modcstcr by whitewash, This would be a fit haven for
waifsT children, animals, prisoners,
and presidents who have repaid
sin-driven
senators by not thinking about them. The
place has a schoolhouse, a post-office in a
store, fish-houses, hen-houses, a three-masted
schooner on
the stocks. The hero, the student,
the steeple jack, each in his way,
is at home.
It could not be dangerous to be living
in a town like this, of simple people,
who have a steeple-jack placing danger signs by the church
while he is gliding the solid-
pointed Star, which on a Steeple
stands for hope,

To a Snail
If "compression is the first grace of style,”
you have it- Contractility is a virtue
as modesty is a virtue.
It is not the acquisition of any one thing
that is able to adorn,
or the incidental quality that occurs
as a concomitant of something well said,
that we value in style,
but the principle chat is hid:
in the absence of feet, "a method of conclusions”;
”a knowledge of principles,”
in the curious phenomenon of your occipital horn,

THYLIAS MOSS
Luttchcouttter Freedom
I once wanted white man’s eyes upon
me, my beauty riveting him to my slum
color, Forgetting his hands are made for my

.
 4 N i i [ 1. 1 1 o . s 4B7

curves, he would raise them to shield his eyes

u net (hey would fly to my breasts with gentleness
stolen from doves.
I've made up my mind not to order sandwich on
light bread if the waitress approaches me
with a pencil. My Bat IS the one I wear
the Sundays my choir doesn’t sing, A dark
bild oil it darkly sways to the gospel music,
trying to pull nectar from a cloth flower.
Psalms are mice in my mind, nibbling,
gnawing, tearing tip my thoughts.
White men are the Walls , l Can't tell anyone
how badly ! want water, in the mirage that
fellows, tire doves unfold into hammers,
They still fly to my breasts.
lie can sc I’m nonviolent I don't act or
react. When knocked from the stool
my body takes its shape from what
it falls into. The white man cradles
his tar baby. Fach magus in mm.
Hi' lathered it. it looks jtisi like him,
the spitting image- He can't let go of
his future. The menu oilers tuna fish,
grits, beef iti a sauce like desire.
He is free to choose from available
choices. The asterisk marks the special.

FRANK O’HARA
..Tne Marta
Mothers of America
let your kids go to the movies!
gel them out of the house so they won t know what you're up to
it’s true that fresh air is good for the body
but what about i he soul
that grows in darkness, embosses! by silvery images
and when you gross old as gross- old you must
they won't hate you

l.ami: "Hail Man'." pras er M the Virgin Mart saluting her as pie Mnpicf of
Cod.
488 !JOEMS. POETS, POETRY

they won't criticize you they won't know

they’ll be in some glamorous country :
they first saw on a Saturday afternoon or playing hookey
they may even be graceful to you
for their first sexual experience
which only cost you a quarter
and didn’t upset the peaceful home
they will know where candy bars come from
and gratuitous bagi 0f popcorn
as gratuitous as leaving the movie before it’s over
with a pleasant stranger whose apartment is in the Heaven on Earth
Bldg
near the Williamsburg Bridge
oh mothers you will have made the little tykes
so happy because if nobody does pick them up in the movies
they won't know the difference
and if somebody does it’ll be sheer gravy
and they’ll have been truly entertained either way
instead of hanging around the yard
or up in their room
hating you
prematurely since you won’t have done anything horribly mean
yet
except keeping them from the darker joys
it’s unforgivable the latter
so don’t blame me you won’t take
if this advice
and the family breaks up
and your children grow old and blind in front of a TV set
seeing
movies you wouldn't let them sec when they were young

Why l Am Not a Painter

l am not a painter, 1 am a poet.
Why? 1 think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. 1 drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINIA in it,"
"Yes, it needed something there."
“Oh." 1 go and the days go by
 ANTHOLOGY 4«y

and I drop in again. The painting

is going on, and 1 go, and the days
go by, ! drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where's SARMINES'”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.
But me? One day I am thinking of
a colon orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, 1 am a real poet, My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, 1 call
it ORANGES, And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

WILFRED OWEN
Anthem for Doomed Youth
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mounting save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
—
And bugles calling for them front sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Disabled
He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark,
And shivered m his ghastly suit of grey,
490 POEMS, POETS, POETRY

Legless, sewn short at elbow. Through the park

Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn,
Voices of play and pleasure after day,
Till gathering sleep had mothered them from him,
About this time Town used to swing so gay
When glow-lamps budded in the light blue trees.
Arid girls glanced lovelier as the air grew dim,
— In the old times, before he threw away his knees.
Now he will never feel again how slim
Girls’ waists are, or how warm their subtle hands,
All of them touch him like some queer disease.
There was an artist silly for his face,
For it was younger than his youth, last year.
Now, he is old; his back will never brace;
Hefs lost his colour very far from here,
Poured it down shell-holes till the veins ran dry,
And half bis lifetime lapsed in the hot race
And leap of purple spurted from his thigh.
One time he liked a bloodsmear down his leg,
After the matches, carried shoulder-high.

—
It was after football, when he'd drunk a peg,
He thought he’d better join. He wonders why.
Someone had said he’d look a god in kilts,
That’s why; and maybe, too, to please his Meg,
Aye, that was it, to please the giddy jilts
He asked to join. He didn't have to beg;
Smiling they wrote his lie: aged nineteen years.
Gemians he scarcely thought of all their guilt
And Austria’s, did not move him. And no fears
Of Fear came yet. He thought of jewelled hilts
For daggers in plaid socks; of smart salutes;
And care of arms; and leave; and pay arrears;
Esprit dc catps; and hints for young recruits.
And soon, he was drafted out with drums and cheers,
Some cheered him home, but not as crowds cheer Goal.
Only a solemn man who brought him fruits
Jlinnticd him; and then inquired about his soul.
Now, he will spend a few sick years in institutes,
And do what things the rules consider wise,
And take whatever pity they may dole.
 A N L H O L : Hr V 49 i

1 onjght he noticed how the wonini’t ryes

Passed I tom him to the strong men that were whole*
How cold and late it id Why don’t they come
And pm him into bed? Why don't they come?

CARL. PHILLIPS
Passing
When the Famous Black Poet speaks.
1 Understand
that his is the same unnervfegly slow
rambling method of getting from A to 13
that J hated in my father,
my father who always told rue
don't shuffle.
The famous Black Poet is
speaking of the dark riser sn the mind
that runs thick with the heroes of color,
Jackie Ik., Bessie, Billie, Mr. Paige, anyone
who knew how to sing or when to run.
1 think of my grandmother, said
to have dropped dead front the evil eye,
of my lesbian aunt who saw cancer and
a generally difficult future headed her way
lit the still water

of her brother’s commode.

1 think of voodoo in the bottoms or soup-cam,
and 1 want to tel) the poet that the blues
is not my name, tbit Alabama
is something I cannot use
in my business.
He is so like my father,
1 don’t ask the Famous Mla< k Poet,
afterwards,
to remove his shoes,
knowing the inexplicable black
and pink I will find there, a rut

gone wrong in five places.

1 don’t ask him to remove
his pants, since that too
492 POEMS, POETS, POE THY

is known, what has never known

a blade, all the spaces between,
where we differ . . .
[ have spent years tugging
between my legs,
and proved nothing, really
1 Wake to the sheets I kicked aside,
and examine where they’ve failed to mend
their own creases, resembling some silken
obstruction, something pulled
front my father's chest, a bad heart,
a lung,
the lung of the Famous Black Poet
saying nothing 1 want to understand.

SYLVIA PLATH
Btackberryittg
Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,
Blackberries On either side, though On the right mainly,
A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea
Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries
Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes
Ebon in the hedges, fat
With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers.
1 had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me,
They accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their
sides.

Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks —

Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.
Theirs is the only voice, protesting, protesting.
I do not think the sea will appear at all.
The High, green meadows are glowing, as if lit from within.
1 come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies,
Hanging their bluegneen bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese
screen.
The honty-feast of the berries has Stunned them; they believe in
heaven.
One more hook, and the berries and bushes end.
 ANT no LOG v 493

The only thing to come now is the sea.

From between two hills a sudden wind funnels .it me,
Slapping Its phantom laundry in my face.
These hills are too green and sweet to hast tasted salt.
! follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me
To the hills' northern face, and the face is orange rock
That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space
Of white and pewter lights, and a dm like silversmiths
Beating and beating at an intractable metal,

Edge
The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Creek necessity
Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare
Feet seemto be saving:
We have come so far, it is over,

Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,

One at each little
Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded
Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden
Stiffens anti odors bleed
From rhe sweet, deep throats of the night flower
The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.
She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag,

Lady Lazarus
I have done it again
One year in every ten
! manage it —
LUJIW; was raised from llir dead by lrM.iv
494 POEMS, POETS, Potmv

A sort of walking miracle, my skin

Bright as a Nazi lampshade
My right toot
A paperweight,
My lace a featureless, fine
Jew linen,
Peel off the napkin '
O my enemy.
Do I terrify? —
The nose, the eye pits, the full set of ceeili?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.
Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will he
At home oil me
And 1 a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the eat 1 have tune times to die.
This is Number Three,
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.
What a million filaments.
The peamii-crin idling crowd
Shoves in to see
Them unwrap me hand and foot
I' he big strip tease.
Gentleman, ladies,
—
These are my hands,
My knees,
I may be skill and bone,
Nevertheless, ! am tlie same, identical woman,
Till* first time it happened I was ten,
!t was an accident,

The Nazis, Ln cone nitration ramps, made lampshades of human

' Accord in;; to legend, itm veil or napkin with whirh Veronica wiped lesus’ face,
as he bote the Cross, svaS then impressed with his features.
 A* 1 HOI c.i n Y 495

The second time I meant

To list it out ami not come back at all.
[ rocked shut

As a seashell*
They had to cat] and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Hying
Is an arc, like everything else*
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real,
I guess you could say I’ve a call.
It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical
Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:
“A miracle I”
T hat knocks me out
There is a charge
For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing oi my heart —
It really goes.
And there is a charge, very large charge.
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood
Or a piece of my la air or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy,
I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby
That melts to a shriek.
1 turn and bum.
Ho not think I underestimate vour great concern

.4
496 POEMS, POETS, POETRY

Ash, ash —
You poke and sur,
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there —
A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling,'1
Herr Cod, Herr Lucifer,
Beware
Beware.
Out of the ash
I rise with toy red hair
And ! cat men like air.

Morning 5onij
Love set you going like a fat gold watch -
The midwife slapped your foots oles, arid your ha Id cry
Took its place among the elements.
Our voire? echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue,
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. WLL stand round blankly as walls.
I’m no more your mother
Thao the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Li tta cement at the wind’s hand.
All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses, I wake to listen:
A far sea moves In my ear.
One cry, and f stumble from bed, cow-heavy and Moral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens dean as a cat's. The window square
Whitens and swallows its dull stars, And now you try
Ynur handful of notes;
The clear vowels nsc like balloons.

' JLL-OU left in the crematoria ot the Nazi Concentration camps after [lie bodies of
prisoners had been burned (The U'ndeivd fit of [lie biKties seas used to make soap.)
 A\ l II O l (Hi Y 497

EDGAH ALI.AN POE

Annabel Lee
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
She was a child and / was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea.
But we loved with a love that was more than love
! and my Annabel Lee —
With a love that the winged seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me,
And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud by night
Chilling my Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.
The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,
Went envying her and me:
Yes! that was the reason {as all men know,
In tli is kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud, chilling
And killing my Annabel Lee.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we —
Of many far wiser than we —
And neither the angels in Heaven above
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:
for the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
498 ['OEMS, POETS, POETRY

And so, all the night-tide, I he down by the side

Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride,
in her sepulchre there by the sea
In her tomb by the side of the sea.
—
T*J Hete n
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome.
Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like 1 see thee stand!
The agate lamp within thy hand,
Ah! Psyche,1 from the regions which
Are Holy Land!

ALEXANDER POPE
From An Essay on Man (Epistle I)
Heav’n from all creatures hides the book of Fate,
All but the page prescrib’d, their present state:
From brutes what men, from men what spirits know:
Or who could suffer Being here below?
The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,
Had he thy Reason, would be skip and play?
Pleas'd to the last, he crops the flow'ry Food,
And licks the hand just rais’d to shed his blood.
Oh blindness to the future! kindly giv’n,
That each may Fill the circle mark'd by Heav’n;

"Psyche was married to Cupid, wins came to her only at niÿht; she was forbidden
to look athim. When she stole a glimpse of him sleeping, he awoke and disappeared. She
asked Venus to help her find him Venus, required, among other things, rh»r Psyche
bring hack, unopened, a box from the underworld..
 I In) L On S

Who sees with equal eye, as Gad of all,

A hero perish, or <1 sparrow fall,
Atoms nr systems into ruin hurl'd,
And now a bubble burst, and now .1 world.
(lilies 77—Wl)
What would this Man: Now upward will he soar,
And little less than Angel. would he mare;
Now looking downwards, just as griev'd appears
To want the strength ot" bulls, the fur at’ bears.
Made for hi> use all creatures ii lie call,
Say what their use, had lie the pow'rs of all?
Nature to these, without profusion, kind,
The proper organs, proper pow'rs assign'd;
Each seeming want compensated ur 1 nurse.
Here with degrees of swiftness, there of forte;
All m exact proportion to the state;
Nothing to add, and nothing to abate.
Each beast, each insect, happy 11 1 its own;
Is Heav’n unkind to Man, and Man alone?
Shall he alone, whom rational we call,
Be pleas'd with nothing, if not bless 'd with all?
The bliss of Man (could Pride that blessing tmd}
Is not to think or art beyond mankind;
No pow’rs of body or of soul to share,
Cut what his nature and his stats' can bear.
Why lias not Man 3 microscopic eye?
for this plain reason. Man is not 3 Fly.
Say what the use, were finer optics giv'n,
T inspect a mite, not comprehend the heav'n?
Or touch, if tremblingly alive all o'er,
To smart and agonize at ev'ry pare?
Or quick effluvia darting thro’ the brain,
Hie of a rose m arotturit pain?
(lines 17.f -TON)
Far as Creation's ample range extends.
The scale of sensual, mental pow'rs ascend v
Mark how it mounts, to Man's imperial race,
From the green myriads in the peopled grass
What modes of sight betwixt «. icli wide extreme,
The mole’s dim curtain, and the lynx’s beam
Of smell, the headlong lioness between.
500 1'OElVtS. PlJETS, POfiTftY

And hound sagacious on the tainted green:

Of hearing, from rhe life rbat fills the Hood,
To that which warbles thro' the vernal wood:
The spider’s touch, how exquisitely find
Feels at each thread, and lives along the line:
In the nice5 bee. what sense so subtly true exact
From pois’nOuS herbs extracts the healing dew:
How Instinct varies in the grovling swine,
Compar'd, half- reasoning elephant, with thine:
’Twixt that, and Reason, what a nice barrier,
For ever sep'rate, yet for ever near!
Remembrance and Reflection how ally’d;
What thin partitions Sense from Thought divide:
And Middle natures, how they long to join,
Yet never pass thT insuperable line!
Without this just gradation, could they be
Subjected these to those, or all to thee?
The pow'rs of all subdu’d by thee alone,
Is not thy Reason all these pow’rs in one?
(lines 207-232)

EZRA FOLTNO
The Garden
Eli robe fir paniJr. J

Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall

— SAMAIN

She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,

And she is dying piecemeal
of a sort of emotional anemia.
And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, u tiki liable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.
In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like some one to speak to her,
And ts almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion.

1
French: "dressed fof ('diny Out.1'
 A N ! H Lb L O G V SOI

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a '.v ct. Mack bough

WALTER RALEGH
Si(t

The Lie
Go, soul, the body's guest,
Upon a thankless errmst*
Fear riot to touch, the best;
The truth shall be (jjy warrant.
Go, since \ needs must die,
And give the world the lie.
Say to the court, it glows
And shines like rotten wood,
Say to the church, it shows
W hat’s good, and doth no good
It church and COutt rep!v.
Then give them both the lie.
Tell potentates, they live
Acting by others' action;
Not loved unless they give,
Not strong but by a faction
If potentates reply.
Give potentates the He
Tell men of high condition,
That manage the estate,
Their purpose is ambition,
Their practice only hate
And if they once reply.
Then give them all the l is1
Tell them that brave it most,
They beg tor more by spending,
Who, in their greatest cost,
Seek nothing but commending.
And if they make reply,
Then give them ail the lie.
1

Tell zeal ii wants devotion;

Tell love it is. but lust;
502 POEMS, POETS, POETRY

Tell time it is but motion;

Tell flesh it is but dust,
And wish them not reply,
For thou must give the lie,
Tell age it daily wasteth;
Tell honor how it alters:
Tell beauty how she blasteth;
Tell Favor how it falters,
And as they shall reply,
Give every one the lie.
Toil wit how much it wrangles
In titrkJe0 points of niceness; Jine
Tell wisdom she entangles
Herself in overwiseness.
And when they do reply,
Straight give them both the lie.
Tell physic of her boldness;
Tell skill it is pretension;
Tell charity of coldness;
Tell law it is contention.
And as they do reply,
So give them still the lic.
Tell Fortune of her blindness;
Tell nature of decay;
Tell friendship of unkindness;
Tdl justice of delay,
And if they will reply,
Then give them all the lie.
Tell arts they have no soundness,
But vary by esteeming;
Tell schools they want profoundness,
And stand too much on seeming.
If arts and schools reply,
Give arts and schools the lie,
Tell faith it’s fled the city;
Tell how the country erreth;
Tdl manhood shakes off pity;
Tdl virtue least preferreth,
And if they do reply,
Spare not to give the lie.
 AMTHOLUI'.Y 50J

So when thou hast, as I

Commanded thee, done blabbing
Although to give the lie
—
Deserves no less than stabbing
Stab at thee he that will,
No stab the soul can kill.

AoRiiiNNii RICH
Diving into the Wreck
First having read the bonk of myths,
ant! loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
1 am having to Jo this
not like Cousteau1 with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.
Tli ere is a ladder.
The ladder is always there-
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it's a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.
1 go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
tine blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me.

‘Jjcques ClWsKjra (b 1 V H , Frcni-Jl HULSL'I-WJU-I rsplarrr. inventor of dic

uqualunit. aurhor, and filmmaker.
!>(M POEMS, POETS. Potitv

I crawl like an insect down the ladder

and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.
First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black l am blacking out and vet
ms1 mask ispowerful
it primps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I hive to learn alone
to mm my body without force
in the deep element:
And now: it is easy to forget
what 1 came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes,
The words ire maps.
1 came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
tli an fish or weed
the thing T came for:
the wreck and not tire story of the wreck
the thing itself ant] not the tilytb
i he drowned face always staring

toward the sun

the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.
 ANT HOI or. v 505

This is the place.

And 1 TT)) here, the mermaid whose dark hair

streams black, ihc merman in his armored body
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold
1 am she: I am he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
halt-wedged and left to rot
we are the half -destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book ot myths
in which
our names do nor appear.

The Middle-Aged
Their faces, safe as an interior
Of Holland tiles and Oriental carpet,
Where the fruit-bowl, always filled, stood in a light
Of placid afternoon - - their voices’ measure.
Their figures moving in the Sunday garden
To lay the tea outdoors or trim the borders,
Afflicted, haunted us. For to be young
Was always to live in other peoples' houses
Whose peace, it we sought it. had been made by others.
Was ours at second-hand and not tor long.
The custom of the house, not ours, rhe sun
Fading the silver-blue Fortuny1 curtains.
The reminiscence of a Christmas party

Mamttjauret' of expensive doth

506 H O I. M S . HL.ir.TS, I’OETRV

—
Of fourteen years ago all memory,
Signs of possession and of being possessed,
We tasted, tense with envy, They were so kind,
Would have given us anything; the bow] of fruit
Was filled for us, there was a room upstairs
We must call ours: but twenty years of living
They could not give. Nor did they ever speak
Of the coarse stain on that polished balustrade,
The crack in the study window, or the letters
Locked in a drawer and the key destroyed.
All to be understood by us, returning
Late, in our own time “how that peace was made,
Upon what terms, with how much left unsaid.

Snapshots of a Danghter-in-Law
1
Yout once a beik- in Shreveport,
with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachhud,
still have your dresses copied from that time,
and play a Chopin' prelude
called by Cortot7: “Delicious recollections
float like perfume though the memory*”''
Your mind now, tnoldering like wedding-cake,
heavy with useless experience, rich
with suspicion, rum nr. fantasy,
crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge
of mere fact. In the prime of your life,
Nervy, glowering, your daughter
svipes the teaspoons, grows another way.
2
Banging the coffee-pot into the sink
she hears the angels chiding, and looks out
past the raked gardens to the sloppy sky.
Only a week since They said: Have no patienic.

' Frederick Francois Chopin (1R1N-1H4IJ), Holish composer and pianist who
settled in Haris in I Hill.
r Alfred Conor (JHT7-19tf2), French
pianist.
'CortutV notation un otie of Chopin's preludes.
 ANTHOLOGY 507

The nest time it was: Be insatiable.

Then: Sui'f yotmef; oiJim you (annul saiv.
Sometimes she's let the capstream scald her ami.
a match bum to her thumbnail.
or held her hand above the kettle's ynnut

right in the woolly steam. They are probably angels,

since nothing hurts her anymore, except
each morning's grit blowing into her eyes.
J
A thinking woman sleeps with monsters,
The beak that grips her, she becomes. And Nature.
that sprung-lidded, still commodious
steamer-trunk of tempera atid riierc/
gets stuffed with it all: the mildewed orange -flowers,
the female pills, the terrible breasts
of Boadicea’ beneath flat foxes’ heads and orchids.
Two handsome women, gripped in argument.
each proud, acute, subtle, I hear scream
across the cut glass and majolica
like Furies cornered from their prey:
Tlie argument adfeminam, all the old knives
that have rusted in my back. I drive in yours,
nta sembtable, ma soi’Hrf'

4
Knowing theuiselves too well in one another:
their gifts no pure fruition, but a thorn,
the prick filed sharp against a hint of scorn , . .
Reading while waiting
for the iron to heat,
—
writing, Afjr Life held Stood tf Loaded Cun
7

—
in that Amherst pantry while the jellies boil and scum,

1
A [ctrrnlrt IO Ci(C[o'( phrase "O Temporal O Mores!’1 (“Alai for llnf ik-ÿ'n-
<tracyof th C rimes 3nd the law standard nf Our mottli!")
5
British queen in The time of the Raman emperor Nero. 5he led an unsurressful
revolt igaimt Raman rule

—
The last linr af the poem " An Lecteur'' by Charies ESaudelajm1 n-jds, ” Hypocrite
'ÿ

—
leeteur! mon temblable, nion hTere!" ("Hypocrite render, my double, my broth¬

er!”) Rich alters the Ime 10 ICjd, "niy surer.”

7
A poem bv Emily Dickinson, reproduced earlier m this anthology
5ll*t I' O h M S, ]J t> £ T $ L I'fJITKV

or, more often,

iron -eyed and beaked and purposed as a bird,
dusting everything On the whatnot every day of life.
5
Ditlce riilcm. ditlce locfuensf
she shaves her legs until they gleam
like petrified mammoth-tusk.
6
When to her lute Comma sings’
neither words nor music are her own;
only the long hair dipping
over her check, only ihc song
of silk against her knees
and these
adjusted in reflections of an eye.
Poised, trembling and unsatisfied, before
an unlocked door, that cage of cages,
tell us, you bird, you tragical machine
is this folilisantc douleitr?"' Pinned down
bv love, for you the only natural action,
—
are you edged in ore keen
to prise the secrets of rite vault? has Nature shown
her household books to you, daughter-in-law.
that her sons never saw?
7
i
To have lit {fits uncertain uwhl some stay
which cannot he undermined, is
a *11
of the utmost consequence,
Thus svrote
a woman, partly brave and partly good,
who fought with what she partly untie rstnod.
Hew men about her would or could do more,
hence she was labeled harpy, shrew and whore.

" t.atsn for "sweetly laughing, sweetly speiici n g. " The line
"
riiaptei] from Ho¬
race's Ode 22.
' First hue or",i poem by Tbonus Cjrnpion
1
French for “fertilizing sorrow," "Ufe-giYiitg rnnow,"
" Fioii: Mirv Wollstoiieeraft, Tltoujihis oir iJrr Eductiticm > >f (I7n7).
 1

AN. I IE o t ot; v 509

S
"You all die .IT fifteen," said Diderot,1 '

and turn part legend, part convention

Still, eyes inaccurately dream
behind closed windows blankening with steam
Deliciously, all that we might have been,
all that we were — fire, tears,
wit. taste, martyred ambition —
stirs like the memory of refused adulters'
the drained and flagging bosom of our middle years.

9
Xoi that it is done toeil, hut
that it is done at all?' ' Yes, think
of the odds! or shrug them off forever,
This luxury of the precocious child,
Time’s precious chronic invalid, —
would we, darlings, resign it if we could?
Our blight has been our sinecure-
mere talent was enough for us —
glitter in fragments and rough drafts
Sigh no more, ladies.
Time is male
and m Ins cups drinks to the fair.
Bemused by gallantry, we hear
our mediocrities over-praised,
indolence read as abnegation,
slattern thought styled intuition,
every' lapse forgiven, our crime
only to cast too bold a shadow
or smash the mold straight oil
For that, solitary confinement,
tear gas, attrition shelling.
Few applicants tor that honor.

Pedis Usderot (171-1-17ÿ4) wjs a Fiftich pfiifunplin.

11

1 '
allusion in Samuel |ohnsoii’s reu urk Hi wis ... 'Sir. i woman's jve hldi;i,

is like a dog’i walking on ili< 111:0.1 leg; I- !* nut done well but s..,i JIC Mirpr-sed to
find it done at all-"
510 POEMS, I'oti FOB1] HJ?

W
Well,
she's long about her coming, who must be
more merciless to herselt chan history,
Her mind tull to (he wind, 1 see her plunge
breasted and glancing Hi rough the currents.
taking the light upon her
at least as beautiful as Liny boy
or helicopter,
poised, still coming,
her fine blades making the air wince
but her cargo
no promise then:
delivered
palpable
ours.

ALJJLKJ O RIOS
Mi Abuelti
Where my grandfather is is irt the ground
where you can hear the future
like an Indian with his ear at the tracks.
A pipe leads down to him so that sometimes
he whispers what will happen to .1 man
in town or how be will meet the best
stressed woman tomorrow and how the best
man at her wedding will chew the ground
next to her. Mi abuelo is the mart
who speaks through all the mouths in my house.
An echo ot me hitting the pipe sometimes
to stop him irenu saying my k&ir it
sieve is the only other sound. It is a phrase
that among all others is the best.
he says, md ir?p hair rr a sieve is sometimes
repeated tor hours out of the ground
when 1 let him, which is not ntten.
abuelo should be much more than a JIMH

Spanish: "my grandfather

 \ Ni i m ’ i. o t; v ill

tike you! He s [Lips then, am! s po k \ : / .Uhr ,> j/i.rÿr

Jrÿre has served <1 tils wish the iiiiitudt1
of <1 waiter, who luis niclde L'ITJJ smile ,is iW)1
an 4>tt udio is Jai am , mid they liked me bes r.
bm there is wither? left. Yet 1 know he ground
green coffee beans as a child, and sometimes
he will talk about his wife, and sometimes
about when lie was de.it and .1 mail
cured him by mail and he heard groundhogs
talking, or about how he walked with a cane
he chewed on when he got hungry,
Ac best, nn abuclo is a liar.
f see an old picture of him at nun's with an
off-white yellow center mustache and sometimes
that's all 1 ktiosv for sure, 1 le talks best
about these hills, slowest nui'f.i, and where this man
is going, and I'm convinced Ids hair is a sieve,
tli at Ins fever is cooled now underground.
Mi abuelo is an ordinary man,
[ look down the pipe, sometimes, and sec a

npple- topped stream in its best suit, in tile ground,

Teoduro Luna ’s Two Kisses

Mr, Teodoro Luna in Ins later years had taken to kissing
His wife
Nor so much with his lips as with Ins brows,
This is not to say he put his forehead
Against her mouth —
Rather, he would lift his eyebrows, once, quickly:
Not so vigorously he might be contused with the villain
Famous in the theaters, but not so lit tie as to be thought
A slight movement, one ot accident 1 ins way
He kissed her
Often and quietly, across tables and through doorways.
Sometimes in photographs, and so through the yean* themselves.
This ss.iv bis passion, that only she might set 1 h. chance
He might feel some movement on her lips
Toward laughter.
512 POEMS, POETS , P < 1 1 i it v

EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON

firoj Turantu);'

She fears him, and will always ask

What fated her to choose him;
She meets ill it is engaging mask
Ml reasons to refuse him;
tint what she meets and what she fears
Are less than art the downward years,
Drawn slowly to the fuarnless weirs
Of age, were she to lose him.
Between a blurred sagacity
That once had power to sound him,
And Love, drat will not let him he
J lie Judas that she found him,
Her pride assuages her almost.
As if ir were alone the cost,
He sees chat he will not be lost,
And waits and looks around him.

A sense of ocean and old trees

Envelopes and allures him;
Tradition, touching all he sees,
Beguiles and reassures him;
And all her doubts of what he says
Are dimmed with what she knows of davs —
Till even prejudice delays
And fades, and she secures him.
The falling leaf inaugurates
The reign of her confusion;
The pounding wave reverberates
The dirge of her illusion;
And home, where passion lived and died,
Becomes a place where she can hide,
While all the town and harbor side
Vibrate with her seclusion.

We tell you, tapping on our brows,

I he story as it slum Id be.

"T.ro, [ i Li .in n ns” means "cvrnmnnl love.”

 A r> L H o i oc v SU

As if the story of a house

Were fold, or ever could be;
We’ll have no kindly veil between
Her visions and those we have seen,
As it we guessed vili.it hers have been,
Or sv hat they are or would be.
Meanwhile we do no harm; for they
Thai with a god have striven,
Not hearing much of what we say,
Take what the god has given;
! hough like waves breaking it may he,
Or like a changed familiar tree.
Or like a stairway to the sea
When- down the blind are driven,

Richard Cory
Whenever Hie hand Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at hint:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown.
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
Hut still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Cood -morning," and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich — yes, richer than a king—
And admirably schooled m every grace:
III fine, we thought that he tv as everything
l'o make us wish that we were in his place,
So on we worked, and waited for die light.
AIK! went without chi meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer i light,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
5U ['OEMS. POETS, POETXY

THEODORE ROETHKE
Elegy for Jane
.Vfjr Student, 71twi«i by a
l remember the neckcurk, Jimp anti damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped Tor her,
And she balancrd in the delight of her thought,
A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with hn;
The leases, their whispers turned to kissing;
And the mold sang in the bleached valleys under the rose,
Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure
depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw;
Stirring the clearest water.

My sparrow, you are not here,

Waiting like a fern, making a spiny shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.
If only 1 could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love;
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.

T7ie Waking
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
1 learn by going where I have to go.
Wc rhink by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from tar to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where l have to go.
 ANTHOLOGY 515

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?

The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air*
And* lovely, learn by going where to gp.
This shaking keeps me steady, 1 should know,
What falls away i? always. And is near.
I wake to sleep* anti take my waking slow,
I leam by going where f have to go,

CHHJSTINA ROSSETTI
Up-Hilt
Does the mad wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
WilJ the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From mom to night, my friend.
Bui is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow dark hours begin,
Mayr not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn,

Shall other wayfarers at night?

[ meet
Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at that door.

Shall I find comfort, travel -sore and weak?

Of labor you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea. beds for ill who come.

ANNE 5 EXTON
5nutv W-Ttite and the Seven Du-d rft
No matter what life you lead
the virgin is a lovely number;
cheeks as fragile as cigarette paper,
3 Ih RO BMS, ( h o E-. I S ,
I’OETlSY

arms and logs made dÿLimoges,1

lips like Vin Du ikhoneif
rolling her china -blue doll eyes
open mid slmt.
Open to say,
(iood Day Mania.
and shut for the thrust
of the unicorn.
She is unsoih'd.
She is as white as a bondish.
Once there was a lovely virgin
called Snow White.
Say she was thirteen.
Her stepmother.
a beauty in her own right,
though eaten, of course, by age,
would hear of no beauty surpassing her own.
Beauty is a simple passLon,
but, oil my friends, in the end
you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes.
The stepmother had a mirror to which she referred —
something like the Weather forecast
a mirror chat proclaimed
the one beauty of the land.
She would ask,
Looking glass upon the wall,
who is fairest of us all?
And the minor would reply,
You arc fairest oi us all.
Pride pumped in her like poison.
Suddenly one day the mirror replied,
Queen, you are full fair, 'tis true,
but Snow White is fairer than you.
Until that moment Snow White
had been no more important
than a dust mouse under the bed,
But now the queen saw brown spots on her hand
and four whiskers over Iter lip

1
Fine porcelain made in Limoges, France,
2
It ho lie wine (French).
 A N 1HOL O G V 517

so she condemned Snow White

to be hacked to death,
Bring me her heart, die said to the hunter.
and [ will salt it and eat it.
The hunter, however, let his prisoner go
and brought a boar's heart bach to the castle.
The queen chewed it up like j tube steak.
Now 1 am fairest, she said,
lapping her slim white fingers.
Snow White walked in the wtldwood
for weeks and weeks.
At each turn there were twenty doorways
and at each stood a hungry wolf,
Ins tongue lolling out like a worm,
The birds called out lewdly.
talking like pink parrots,
and the snakes hung down in loops,
each a noose for Iter sweet white neck.
On the seventh week
she came to the seventh mountain
and there she found the dwarf house.
It was as droll as a honeymoon cottage
and completely equipped with
seven beds,seven chairs, seven forks
and seven chamber pots,
Snow White ate seven chicken livers
and lay down, at last, to slecp.
The dwarfs, those little hot dogs,
walked three times around Snow White,
the sleeping virgin They were wise
mid wattled like small czars.
Yes. It's a good omen,
they said, and will bring u> luck
They stood on tiptoes ns watch
Snow White wake up She told them
about the mirror and the killer queen
and they asked her to stay and keep house.
Beware of your ste pm other,
they said,
Soon she will know you .ire here.
While we are away in the mines
5 IS 1‘OEMS, PotTi, PQETKY

during the day, you must not

open the door.
Looking glass upon the wall . . .
The mirror told
and so the queen dressed herself in rags
and went out like a peddler to trap Snow White.
She went across seven mountains.
She came to the dwarf house
and Snow White opened the door
and bought a bit of lacing.
The queen fastened it tightly
around her bodice,
as tight as an Ace bandage,
so tight that Snow White swooned.
She lay on the floor, a plucked daisy,
When the dwarfs came home they undid the lace
and she revived miraculously.
She was as full of life as soda pop,
Beware of your stepmother.
they said,
She will try once more.
Looking glass upon the wall ...
Once more the mirror toid
and once more the queen dressed m rags
and once more Snow White opened the door.
This time she bought a poison comb,
a curved eight-inch scorpion,
and put it in her hair and swooned again.
The dwarfs returned and took out the comb
and she revived miraculously.
She opened her eyes as wide as Orphan Annie.
Beware, beware, they said,
but the mirror told,
the queen came,
Snow White, the dumb bunny,
opened the door
and she bit into a poison apple
and fell down for the final time.
When the dwarfs relumed
they undid her bodice, '
they looked for a comb,
 AN t ULII IXTY 519

but it did no good.

Though they washed her with wine
and nibbed her with butter
it was la no avail,
She by as sriH as a gold piece.
The seven dwarfs could not bring themselves
to bury her in the black ground
so they made 3 glass coffin
and set it upon the seventh mountain
so that ail who passed by
could peek in upon her beauty.
A prince came one June day
and would not budge.
He stayed so long his hair turned green
and still he would not leave,
The dwarfs took pity upon him
and gave him the glass Snow White —
—
its doll's eyes shut forever
to keep in his far-off castle,
As the prince’s men carried the coffin
they stumbled and dropped it
and the chunk of apple flew out
of her throat and she woke up miraculously.
And thus Snow White became the prince’s bride.
The wicked queen was invited to the wedding feast
and when she arrived die re were
red-hot iron shoes.
in the manner of red-hot roller skates,
clamped upon her feet.
First vOur toes Will smoke
and then your heels will turn black
and you will fry upward like a frog,
she was told.
And so she danced until she was dead.
a subterranean figure,
her tongue flicking in and out
like a gas jet,
Meanwhile Snow White held court,
rolling her china- blue doll eyes open and shut
and sometimes referring to her mirror
as women do.
52U POEMS, K©£r$i POETKV

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Fear No More the Hear u' the SHU1
Fear no more the he,it o' the sim£
Nor the FtirioLiK. winter's rages;
Tli on thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimneysweepers, come to dust.
Fear no more the frown o' the great;
1 hou art past the tyrant’s stroke;
Care no more to docile and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak;
The scepter, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.
feat no more die lightning flash,
Nor the all-dreaded thunder stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
Tliori hast finished joy and moan;
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust
Nti ex o reiser
harm thee I
Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consummation have;
And renowned be thy grave!

Full Fathom Fire1

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his Lioties are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth staffer a sea change
into something rich and strange -

From CymMint.
From Tfie Tfra/ril
 ANTHOLOGY 321

Sea nymphs hourly ring his ki it'll:

Ding-dong.
Hark! now 1 heat them Ding-dong, bell

SoitHCt IS
Shall ! comport' ilieo to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds tlo illake the darling buds of May.
And summer's lease hath all too short a date
Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every lair from bur sometimes declines,
By chance or nature s changing course
mu rimmed;0 divaltd of lx-ciuty
lint tiny eternal summer sit all not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou -.ns ’st;° OUlK'ft
Nor shall death brag thou wander’s t ill his shade.
When in eternal lines to time thou grow 'sc:
So long as nten ran breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives tins. .mJ till'- gives lit! to diet

Sonnet 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is tint love
Which a Stem when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover in remove:
(Dili, no! it is an ever fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken:
It is die Star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although Ins height be taken,
Love’s not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief' hours and weeks.
line bears it Out even to the edge nr doom.
if tliis he error and upon me proved,
1 never writ, FIOV no man ever loved.
522 l1 OEMS, POETS, POETSIV

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

England in 1819
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king1
—
Through public scorn
Ikulers who neither see, —
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
mud from a muddy spring;
nor feel, nor know,
But leechlike to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow;
A people starved and stabbed in the u milled field
An army, which libcrtitide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;
—
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
—
Religion Christless, Godless a book sealed;
A Senate — Time's worst statutei unrepealed
Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom'* may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.
—
Ode to the West Wind
1
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leave* dead
Are driven, like glioses bom an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

Pestilence-stricken multitudes; O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low.
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With iivmg hues and odors plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oht hear!

'George III was eighty-one and hopelessly insane in 1819.

The Laws excluding Catholics from office,
'The spirit of political liberty.
 A s 1 H o i. o <; Y S2i

2
Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky's commotion,
Loose clouds like earth's decaying 1 CJV arc shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,
Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine aery surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head
Of some fierce Maenad,* even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith's height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge
Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulcher,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might
Of vapors, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh, hear!
3
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,
Beside a pumice isle m Baiae’s bay,”
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave’s intenser day.
AU overgrown svith azure moss and dowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers
Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know
Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: oh, hear!
4
If I were a dead leaf thou migh test bear;
If [ were a swift cloud to fly with thee:
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

'Women inspired with eccuirc frciuy hv the CreeJc god Dionysus.

1
Near Naples. Italy.
524 POEMS, POETS. POE I lev

Thu impulse of thy strength, only less free

I han thou, O uncontrollable! it even
i were as in tny boyhood, and could be
The comrade ot thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skyey speed
Scarce teemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need,
Oh, lit! tne as a wave, a leaf a cloud!
! tall upon the thorns of Life! I bleed!
A heavy weight til hours his chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
J
Make me th\ lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are failing like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou. Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
11rive my dead th oughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter,as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through mv lips to unawaketied earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter conies, can Spring be far behind?

Ozymaitdias
1 met a traveler trom an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in die desert . . . Near them, on the sand.
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose- frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hind that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

1
fJrrek name for the Eiÿptijn monarch UsmSeS Jl {11*14-1217 ri.e.}.
 ANTHOLOGY 525

Arid on the pedestal these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Ikound die decay
Of th.it colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far awjy.

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY

From Astrophel and Stella
1
Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of rny pain.
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of wot:
Studying inventions fine, her wit? to entertain,
Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow-
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburned bram.
But words came halting forth, wanting Invention's stay;
Invention, Nature's child, fled stepdame Study's blows;
And others’ feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truani° pen, beating myself for spite: idle
“Fool." said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart, and write."
SI
With how sad steps, Oh Moon, thou climb ’st the skies,
How silently, and with how wan a face!
What, may it be that even in heav'niy place
That busy archer11 his slurp arrows tries' Cupid
Sure, if that I Qllg-with- love -acquainted eyes
Can judge of love, thou fed’st a lover’s case;
1 read it in thy looks; thy languished grace,
To me that fed the like, thy state descries.
Then even of fellowship. Oh Moon, tell me,
Is constant love deemed there but want of w it?
Are beauties there as proud as here they be:
Do they above lpvc to be loved, and yet
Those lovers scorn whom that love doth possess?
Do they call virtue there ungratefulness?
526 POE Mi. POETS. POETRV

LESLIE MARMON SJLKO

Prayer to the Pacific
I traveled to the ocejn

distant
southwest land of sand rock
from my
the moving hi tie water
to
Rig as the myth of origin.
Pale
pale water in the yellow white light ot
Sun floating west
to China
where ocean herself was born.
Clouds that blow across the sand arc wet.

Squat in the wet sand and speak the Ocean:

to
I return to you turquoise the red coral you sent tis,
sister spirit of Harth.
four round stones in my pocket I carry back the ocean
to suck and to taste.
Thirty' thousand years ago
Indians came rid mg across the ocean
carried by giant sea turtles.
Waves were high that day
great sea turtles waded slowly out
from the gray sundown sea.
Grandfather Turtle roiled in the sand four times
and disappeared
swimming into the sun.
Artd so from that time
immemorial,
as the old people say,
rain clouds drift trom the west
gift from die ocean.
Green leaves in the wind
Wet earth on my feet
swallowing raindrops
clear from China,
 AN I not o c; Y 527

CHARLES SIMIC
Charon V! Cosmology ferryman of the dead
With only his feeble lantern
To tell him where he is
And every' rime a mountain
Of fresh corpses to load up
Take them to the other side
Where there are plenty more
I'd say by now he must be confused
As to which side is which
I’d say it doesn’t matter
No one complains he’s got
Their pockets to go through
In one 3 crust of bread in another a Sausage
Once in a long while a mirror
Or a book which he throws
Overboard into the dark river
Swift cold and deep

Fork
This strange thing must have crept
Right out of hell,
It resembles a bird’s foot
Worn around the cannibal’s neck,
As you hold it in your hand,
As you stab with it into a piece of meat,
It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:
Its head which like your hst
Is large, bald, beakless and blind,

CHRISTOPHER SMART
From Jubilate Agtto'
For 1 will consider my Cat jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him.

"Jubilate Ajpio" cv is written during SIIIJJT'C inr are rratirui ,n .1 private iti.nliunivc
1

from 1758 10 1765 The manuscript remained unkim"n m dm- public until 1 939
j2E POEMS, POE is, POETRY

For the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships
at
in his way,
For is this done by wreathing his body seven times round with
elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of
God upon hts prayer,
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider
himself.
For this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon his fore-paws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to dear away there,
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the fore paws extended.
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.
For fifthly he washes himself,
For sixthly he rolls upon wash.
For Seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted
upon the beat.
For Eighthly he rubs himself against a post.
For Ninthly he looks up for his instructions,
For Tenthly he goes in quest of food
For having consider'd God and himself he will consider his neigh¬
bour.
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness,
For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it chance.
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.
For when his day’s work is done his business more properly begins.
For he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin &
glaring eyes.
For he counteracts rhe Devil, who is death, by brisking about the
life,
For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
For he is of the tribe of Tiger,
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.
For he has the subtlety and hissing ufa serpent, which in goodness
he suppresses.
For he will not do destruction, if he is well-fed, neither will he spit
without provocation.
For he purrs in thankfulness, when God tells him he's a good Cat.
For lie is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon.
 AM ] MOLtitiY 529

f-or every house is in com pleat without him & a blessing is lathing
in the spirit.
Por [he Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the de¬
parture of (lie t hitdren of Israel from Egypt."
For every family had one cat at least in the bag
For the English Cats .ire the best in Europe.

For the dexterity of his defence is a

to him exceedingly,
.....
For he is the cleanest in the use of his tore paws or .ins quadrupeds1
stance of the love ot" Cod

I’or he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.

For lie is tenacious of his point
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
For he knows that Clod is his Saviour.
For there is nothing sweeter titan his peace when ac rest,
For there is nothing briskei c] inn Ins bfe when in motion.
For he is ol the Lord's poor and so indeed is hr called by benev¬
olence perpetually —
Foor JeolFryi poor JeofTryf the rat has
bit thy throat.
For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that JeotTrv is better
For the divine spin! comes about his body to sustain IT in ornpb-.it i

cat.
For llis tongue is exceeding pure so that it lias in purity what it
wants in music It.
For he is docile and can learn certain tilings.
For he can set up with gravity which is patience upon approbation.
For he can fetch and carry, sshii.li is patience lit employment
For he can jump over a stick which is patience upon proof positive
For he can spraggle upon waggle at tile word of comma nil.
For he can jump from art eminence into his master's bosom
For he can catch the cork and toss it again
For he is hated by the hypocrite and miser.
For the Former ES .iff hud ot detection.
For the Sat re r refuses the charge
For he camels his back lo bear the first notion ot business.
For he is good to think on, i1 mail would express himself neatly.
i

For he made a grr.u figure in Egypt for his signal services.

For lie killed the I cue uni on -rai ’ wn pernicious by land

'No cats jrr merit l midi in the Bible

1
The Ichneumun, ss lin li i f'enifiln n i i-; !. it urn -I I. im I nut higtlly va -
Lied) by the indent Ejjjptiani.
S30 POEMS, POETS, POE IKY

For his ears are so acute that they sting again,

For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention.
For by scroaking of him ] have found out electricity.
For I perceived God’s light about him both wax and fire.
For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends
from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and bcast-
For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
For, cho he cannot fly, he is an excellent ciamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth arc more than any other
quadrupede,
For he can tread to all the measures upon the musick.
For he can swim for life.
For he can creep.

On a Bed Pf Guernsey Lilies

Written in September 1 763
Ye beauties! O how great the sum
Of sweetness that ye bring;
On what a charity ye come
To bless the latter spring!
How kind the visit that ye pay,
Like strangers on a rainy day,
When heartiness despair’d of guests;
No neighbour's praise your pride alarms,
No rival flow’r surveys your charms.
Or heightens, or contests!
LOT thro' her works gay nature grieves
How brief she is and frail,
As ever o'er the falling leaves
Autumnal winds prevail.
Yet still the philosophic mind
Consolatory food can find,
And hope her anchorage maintain:
We never are deserted quite;
’Tis by succession of delight
That love supports his reign.
 As r not otiv 53V

DAVF. SMITH
On a Field Trip jr Fredericksburg'
The big steel shield says maybe
tourist
fifteen thousand got it here. No word
ol either Whitman' or one uncle
I barely remember in the smoke
that filled his tiny mountain house.
If each finger were a thousand of them
I could dap my hands and be dead
up to my wrists. It was quick
though not so fast as we can do it
now, one bomb, atomic or worse,
one silly pod slung on wing* tip,
high up, an egg cradled
by some rapacious mockingbird.
Hiroshima1 canned times their number
nine

iti a Hash. Few had the time

to moan or feel the feeling
ooze back in the groin.
In a ditch I stand
above Marye's Heights, the book¬
boned faces of Brady 's4 fifteen - year- old
drummers, before battle, rigid
as August’s dandelions
all the way to the Potomac
rolling in my skull
If Audubon’ came here, the names
of birds would gush, the marvel
single feathers make
evoke a cloud, a nation,
a gray blur preserved
on a blue horizon, but

1
Site in Virpnia of J Civil War tunic (llcvemher IS, 1WO), i Union defeat.
* Although Wait WVutm.ir: umir alumr rlic I’ml War, his pufim
do nor mention fhe Battle of Fredericksburg
'City in Japan where the lint atomic bomb Was dropped
' Matthew Brady (ea. 1S23-! H'hi). Cml War photographer.

"John James Audubon (17B5- Itisl), Haitian -bom American urmtholopit and
painter of birds.

J
532: POEMS, POETS, POETRY

there is only a wandering child,

one dark stalk snapped off
ill her band, held out to me.
Taking it, 1 try to help her
hold its obscure syllables
One instant in her mouth,
like a drill of wind
at the forehead, the front door,
the black, numb fingernails,

STF.VIF SMITH
Sot IVavhtg but Drowning
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out thin you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chip, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
II must have been tots cold for him his heart gave way,
They said,

Oh, no no tio, it was too cold always

(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving hut drowning.

Pretty
Why is the word pretty so underrated?
In November the lcafis pretty when it falls
The stream grows deep in the woods after rain
And in the pretty pool the pike stalks
He stalks his prey, and this is pretty too,
The prey escapes with an underwater hash
I iut not for long, the great fish has him now
The pike is a fish who always has his prey
And this is pretty. The water rat is pretty
Ills paws are not Webbed, lie cannot shut his nostrils
As die otter can and the beaver, he is tom between
The laud and water. Not '‘torn." he does not mind,

i
 AM I H (.'i i ot; V 533

] hi: owl hunts in the evening md it is pretty

Tilt? kike water below him rustles with ice
There is frost coming from the ground, in the air inisi
Alt this is pretty, it could not be prettier,

GARY S.NYUER
Axe Handles
One afternoon the List week in April
Showing Kai how to throw a ha tehee
One-half turn and it sticks in a stump,
He recalls the hatcher-head
Without a handle, in the shop
And go gets it, and wants it for his own
A broken -off axe handle behind the door
h long enough for .1 hatcher,
We cut it to length and take it
Wirli the hatchet head
And working hatchet, to the wood block.
Til ere I begin to shape the old handle
With the hatchet, and t he phrase
First learned from Ezra Pound
Rings in my cars!
‘'When making an axe handle
the pattern is not far off.'"
And I say tills to K-M
“Look: We111 shape the handle
fiy checking the handle
Of the axe we rut with — "

And he sees. And 1 hear ii again.

It's in Lu |i's M'Ar Fu, fourth century
A.J>. “Essay on Literature' — in the
Preface: “In making the handle
Of an axe
fjy cutting wood with an axe
The model is indeed near ar hand
My teacher Shih-hsi.ing t hen
Translated that and taught it years ago
And l sec: Pound was art axe,
Chen was an axe, I tun an axe
And rtty sou a handle, soon
To be shaping again, model
334 POEMS, POETS, POETRY

And tool, craft of culture,

How we go on,

Ho w Poetry Comes to Me
It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Rangjji of my campfire
J go to meet it at the
Edge of the light

Riprap
Lay down these words
Before Your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
in choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost punies with
Dragging saddles
and rocky su re-foot trails.
I'he World’s like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek- washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As. well as things.

1
Snyder's note: ’’Riprap: cobble of stone laiil on steL-ji slick rock Co mike S trail
for horses in the 111001111111!.''
 AN7 N OLOi V 535

EDMUND SPLNSER
Epilhdlamion
Ye learned sisrers.0 \\-hi uhi have oftentimes llu' nnr.sei
Beene to me ayding, others to adorne;
Whom yc thought worthy of your graceful I ryjnps,
"That even the greatest did not greatly sconie
To heart- theyr names sung in your simple Lyes,
But joyed in theyr prayse.
And when ye list your owne mishaps to moume,
Which death, or love, or fortunes wreck did r.iyse,
Yonr srring co-uld soone to sadder tenor tumc,
And teach the woods and waters to lament
Your dolefull drerimem,
Now lay those sorrowfuU complaints aside,
And having all your heads with girlami erowml,
He[pc me mine owne loves prayses to resound,
Ne let the same of any be divide:
So Orpheus did tor his owne bride,
So I unto my sdfe alone will sing,
Tils1 woods shall to me answer and diy Lcelio ring.
Early before the worlds light giving lumps:,
His golden be.une upon the bib doth spred,
Having disperst the nights utK'benrefull dampe,
Doc ye awake, and with fresh lusty bed
Go to tbe bowrc of my beloved love,
My truest turtle dove,
Bid her awake; for Hymen0 is awake, yad of ipieiri,ÿ'
And long since ready forth ho maskc to move,
With hii bright lead* that Haines w-ich many a Hake, utrdi
And many J bachelor to wiiic on him,
In theyr fresh garments trim.
Ihd her awake therefore and soone her dight.3 r/rw
For lu the wished day is come at Lis:,
That shall for al the payncs and sorrow es past,
May to her usury of k>ng delight
And whylcst she doth her dight,
Doe ye to her otjos and sol.u e sing,
That all the woods may answer .md your ecclio nng.
Bring with you nil the Nvmphes ib.u you
can heart0 ill'll iA\\ Iwoi you
Both of the riscÿ and the tliTTvsis greene:
536 POEMS, POETS, I'OETHV

Anti of the sea that neighbours to her n ears',

A I with gay girlands goodly wel bcscen-e.
And let them also with them bring m hand,
Another gay girland
For my fayre love of lillyes and of roses,
Bound true-love wize with a blew silke riband.
And let them make great store ofbridale poses,
And let them eeke° bring store of other flowers (the
To deck the bndale bowers.
And let the ground whereas her foot shall tread,
For feare the stones her tender foot should wrong
Be strewed with tr.sgr.uit flowers all along,
And diapred lyke the
discolored mead,0 patterned like the Multicolored meadow
Which done, doe it her chamber dore awayi,
For she will waken stray t,
The whiles doe ye this s<mg Linto her sing,
The woods shall to you answer and your Gee ho ring.
Ye Nymphes of Mulliil which with careful) heed,
The silver scaly trouts doe tend full well,
And greedy pikes which use therein to feed,
(T hose troLits and pikes al! others doo excel I )
A:id ye likewise which keepe the rushy lake,
Where none doo fishes take.
Idynd up the locks the which hang scatterd light,
And in his waters which your mirror make,
Behold your faces a> the chrisial] bright,
That when you come whereas my love doth lie,
No blemish she may spie.
And eke ye lightfoot rtiayds which keepe the dee re,
That on the hoary mouiiiaytie use to tow re,"
And the svyldc wolves which secke them to drvoure,
With your stedc darts doo rhace from tomming neer
Be also present heenc,
To helpe to decke her and to help to sing,
That all the woods may answer and your eccho ring.
Wake, now my love, awake; for it is tune,
The Rosy Morne long since left Ti themes bed,

' The i'll* of Mulla, near Spcnveÿi home in Ireland.

To Ltmib Iiinli, a term from falconry.

1
 ANTHOLOGY S37

All ready to her silver eoche to dyme,

And Phoebus gins to shew his glorious bed.
Hark how the cheenefult birds do c haunt thcyr laics
And carroll ofloves praise.
The merry Larkc hir mattiru sings aloft.
The thrush rcplyes, the Mavis
descant6 playes, mebdir eounterpeinl
The Ouzdl shrills, the Ruddock warbles sort,
So goodly ail agree with sweet consent,
To this dayes m eminent.
Ah my dee re love why doe ye sleepe thus long.
When meecer° were that ye should now awake, fitter
T‘ awayt the camming of your joyous make,0 mute
And hearken to the birds lovcleamcd song,
The deawy leaves among.
For they of joy and pleasance to you sing.
That all the woods them answer and theyr eccho ring,
My love is now awake outof her dreame,
And her fay re eyes tike that dimmed were
stari
With darksome cloud, now shew theyr goodly beams
More bright then Hesperus0 his head doth rare. nwniny stii r
Come now ye damsels, daughters of ddight,
Helpe quickly her to djgbr,0 JiinKfJ
But first come ye layre liouies which were begot
Injoves sweet paradice, of Day and Night,
Which doe the seasons of the yeare allot.
And al that ever in this world is fayre
Doe make and still nepayre.
And ye three haildmayds of the Cyprian Queen e.6 \ emw
The which doe still adnrnc her beauties pride,
Helpe to addome my beaut [fullest bnde:
And as ye heT array, still throw bctwcenc0 mm* dml then

Some graces to be scene,

And as ye use to Venus, to her sing,
The whiles the woods shaJ answer and your eccho ring.
Now is my love all ready forth to come.
Let all the virgins therefore well awayt,
And ye fresh boyes that tend upon her groome
Prepare your setves; for he is comming strayt.
Set all your things in seemdy good amy
Fit for so joyful! day,
538 POEMS, POETS. POETIV

The joyfulst day that ever surme did see.

Faire Sun, shew forth thy favourable rqy,
Apid let thy lifull heat IIOL fervent be
For feare of burning her snnshyny face.
Her beauty to disgracc.
O faynest Phoebus, father of the Most,
If ever E did honour thee aright,
{Ur sing the thing, that mote ihv mind delight,
Doe not thy servants simple boorseÿ refuse, request
13ut let this day let this one slay be rnyne,
Let all the rest be thine.
Then I thy soverayne prayses loud wil sing,
That all the woods shal answer and fheyr eccho ring.
Harke how the Minstrels gin to shrill aloud
Their merry Mu sick that resounds from far
The pipe, the tabor,5 and the trembling Croud," drum / I'lW
That well agree withouten breach or jar
13 ut most of all the Damsels doe ddite,
When they their tymbrds" smyte; tiintluiuriuc:
And thereunto doe da u rice and carrol sweet,
That all the sences they doe ravish quite,
The whyles the boyes run up and downe the street,
Crying aloud with strong confused noyce,
As if it were one voyco.
Hymni Jio Hymen, Hymen they do shout,
That even to the heavens theyr shouting shrill
Doth reach, and all the firmament doth fill,
To which the people standing all about,
As in appmvance doe thereto applaud
And loud ad va mice her laud,0 praise
And evermore they Hymett Hymen sing,
That a I the woods them answer and cheyr eccho ring.

Lne where she comes along with portly0 pace rttajestit

Lykc Phoebe0 from her chamber of the East, meon gwifas
A lysing forth to ran her mighty race,
Clad all m white, that seemes5' a virgin best. suits
So is ell it her bese cities that ye would ueene
Some angel! she had beene.
Her long loose yellow locks lykc golden wyre, ’
Spnnckled with perle, and perl mg flowres a tween c,
Doe lyke a golden mantle her attyre,
 ANTHOLOCV 539

And being crowned with a giriand grrene,

Seeme lyke same tnayden Queene,
Her modest eyes abashed to be hold
So many gazers, as on her do stare,
Upon die lowly ground affixed are,
Ne dare lift up her countenance too bold,
lint blush to heart her prayses sung so loud.
So tarre from being proud.
Nathlesse doe ye still loud her prayses sing,
That all the woods may answer and your etc ho ring.
Tell me ye merchants daughters did ye see
So fayrt a creature in your towne before,
So sweet, so lovely, and so mild as she,
Adornd with beautyes grace and vermes store,
Her goodly eyes lyke Saphyrcs shining bright,
Her forehead yvory white.
Her cheekes lyke apples which the sun hath rudded,
Her lips lyke cherryes charming men to byte,
Her brest like to 3 bowlc of crcame uncruddtd,g unnirdhd
Her paps0 lyke lyllies budded, bream
Her snowie necfcc lyke to a marble taw re,
And all her body lyke a pallace fayre,
Ascending uppe with many a stately stayne,
To honors seat and chastities Sweet bowre.
why Static! ye still ye virgins in amaze,
Upon her so to gaze,
Whiles ye forget your former lay to sing.
To which the woods did answer and your eccho ring.
But if ye saw that which no eyes can see,
The inward beauty of her lively spright,
Garmsht with heavenly guifts of high degree.
Much more then would ye wonder at that sight,
And stand astonisht lyke to those which red0 saw
Medusaes mazeful hed.
There dwels sweet love and constant chastity,
Unspotted fayth and comely womanhood,
Regard of honour and mild modesty .
There vertue nynes as Queene in royal throne,
And giveth lawes alone.
The which the base affections doe obay,
And yceld theyr services unto her will,
540 rotMS, POETS, POETAY

Ne thought of thing uncomely ever may

Thereto approach to tempt her mind to ili.
Had ye once secne these her celestial threasures,
And unrevealed pleasures,
Then would ye wonder and her prayses ling,
That al the woods should answer and your eccho ring.
Open the temple gates unto my love,
Open them wide that she may enter in,
And all the postes adorne as doth behove,0 us is proper
And al! the pi Hours deck with girlands trim,
For to recyve this Saynt with honour dew,
That commeth in to you,
With trembling steps and humble reverence,
She commeth in, before th' almighties vew,
Of her ye virgins leame obedience,
When so ye come into those holy places,
To humble your proud faces:
tiring her up to th' high altar, that she may
The sacred ceremonies there partake,
The which do endlesse matrimony make,
And let the roring Organs loudly play
The praises of the Lord in lively notes,
The whiles with hollow thnjates
The Choristers the joyous Anthemc sing,
That al the woods may answere and their eccho ring.
Behold whiles she before the altar stands
Hearing the holy priest that to her speak cs
And blesseth her with his two happy hands,
How the red roses flush up in her cheekes,
And the pure snow with goodly vcmiill stayne,
Like crimsin dyde in grayne,° fast color
That even th’ Angels which continually,
About the sacred Altare doe remaine,
Forget their service and about her fly,
Ofte peeping in her face that seemes more fayre,
The more they on it stare.
I3ut her sad5 eyes still fastened on the ground, serious
Are governed with goodly modesty,
That suffers not one looke to gjauntc awry,
Which may let in a little thought unsownd.
 AN t HtiLtKiV 541

Why blush ye love to give to me your hand,

The pledge of all our band?0 Ihmd
Sing ye sweet Angels, Alleluya sing,
That al] the Woods may answtre and your eccho ring.
Now al is done; bring home the bride againe,
Bring home the triumph of our victory.
Bring home with you the glory
of her gaine,0 the glory of jtaitrinji her
With joyance bring her and with jollity,
Never had man more joyful! day then this,
Whom heaven would heape with blis.
Mate feast therefore now all this live long day,
This day for ever to me holy is,
Poune out the wine without restraint or stay,
Poure not by cups, but by the belly hill,
Poure out to all that wuli
And sprinkle all the postes and Wals with wine,
That they may sweat, and drunken be wiihall,
Crowne ye God Bacchus with a coronal!,
And Hymen also crowne with wreathes of vine,
And let the Graces dauiict unto the rest;
For they can doo it best:
The whiles the maydens doe theyr carroll sing,
To which the woods shal answer and thevr eccho ring.

Ring ye the bels, ye yotig men of the towne,

And leave your wonted labors for this day:
This Jay is holy; doe ye write it downc,
That ye for ever it remember may.
This day the surtne is in his chiefcst bight,
With Barnaby the bright/
From whence declining daily by degrees,
He somewhat loseth of his heat and light.
When once the Crab behind his bade he sees.
But for this time it ill ordained was.
To chose the longest day in all the yearc,
And shortest night, when longest fitter wearc:
Yet never day so long, but late0 would passe, <ft iait

*5*1111 Barnabas's [Jay wn ihc day of [he turner wltwc m Ispriucr'i mnc.
542 POEMS, POETS, POETRY

King ye the bek, to make it wearc away,

And bonefiers make all day,
And damice about them, and about them sing:
That all the woods may answer, and your eccho ring.

Ah when will this long weary day liave end,

And lends me leave to come unto my love?
How slowly do the hounes theyr numbers spend?
How slowly does sad Time his feathers move?
Hast thee O ftyrest Plane t* to thy home tiff Slfll
Within the Western c feme:
Thy tyred steedes long since have need of nest,
Long though it be, at last ] see it gloome,
And the bright evening star with golden creast
Appeare out of the East.
Fayrc chitde of beauty, glorious lampe of love
That all the host of heaven in rankes doost lead,
And guydest lovers through the nightes dread,
How chearefully thoti lookest from above,
And seemst to laugh a twee tie thy twinkling light
As joying in the sight
Of these glad many which for joy doe sing,
That all the woods them answer and their eccho ring.
Now ccassc ye damsels your delights forepast;
Enough is it, that all the day was you res:
Now day is doen, and night is nighing fast:
Now bring the llryde into the brydall boures.
Now night is come, now soone her disaray,
And in her bed her lay;
Lay her in lillies and in violets,
And silken courteins over her display,
And odourd shectes, and Arras0 coverlets. tapestry
Uehold how goodly my faire love does ly
In proud humility;
Like unto Maia,-1 when as Jove her tooke,
In Tempo, lying on the dowry gras.
Twist slecpe and wake, after she weary was,
With bathing in the Acidalian brooke.
Now it is night, ye damsels may be gon,
.
' The eldest and most beautiful of the Pleiades.
 AN I noi in. v 543

And leave my love alone,

And leave likewise your Former lay to sing:
The woods no more shal answers.*, nor your eccho ring.

Now welcome night, thou night so long expected,

That long dates labour doest at last defray,0 pay
And all my cares, which crucll love collected,
Hast sumd in one, and cancelled for aye:
Spread thy broad wing over my love and me,
That no man may us see,
And in thy sable mantle us enwrap,
From feare of petrill and fouJe horror free.
Let no false treason seeke us to entrap,
Nor any dread disquiet once annoy
The safety of our joy:
But let the night be ealme and quietsome,
Without tempestuous storms or sad afray:
Lyke as when Jove with fayre Alcmena" lay. mother of Hercules
When he begot the great Tirynthian grootnc:
Or lyke as when he with thy selfe did lie,
And begot Majesty,
And let the mayds and yongmen cease to sing:
Nc let the woods them answer, nor theyr eccho ring,
Let no lamenting cryes, nor doleful] teams,
Be heard all night within nor yet without:
Ne let false whispers, breeding hidden feares,
Brtakc gentle sleepc with misconceived dout,
Let no deluding dreames. nor dreadful sights
Make sudden sad affrights;
Ne let housefyres, nor lightnings helpdesse harmes,
Nc let the Poukc,' nor ocher evil! spnghts,
Ne let misch ivous wicches svich theyr chamies,
Ne let hob Goblins, names whose sence we sec not,
Fray us with things that be not.
Let not the shricch Oule, nor the Storke be heard:
Nor the night Raven that still0 deadly yds, continually
Nor damned ghosts cald up with mighty spels,
Nor griesly vultures make us once afleard:

'
'The same Puck as in Shakespeare's X \1itbumntrr Silt's Dttiim. This Puck,
however,is an "evil spnght-"
544 I'oEMi, POETS, Put TRY

Nc IOT th’ unpleasant Quyre of Frogs stil] treking

Make ns to wish theyr choking,
Let none of these theyr drery accents sing;.
Ne let tlie woods them answer, nor theyr eccho ring.
Ltot let stil Silence trow mght watches keepe,
That sacred peace miy in assurance rayrce,
And tymely sleep, when it is cyme to sleepe,
May poure his limbs forth on your pleasant play tie,
The whiles act hundred tittle winged loves,
Like divers fethered doves,
Shall fly and flutter round about your bed,
And jri the secret darke, rhat none reproves,
I heir precy stealth es shal worke, and snares slial spread
T’o filch away sweet snatches of delight,
Conce aid through covert night.
Ye Sonnes of Venus, play your sports at will,
For greedy pleasure, cartlesse of your to yes,° atttoroui dttllyiitg
Thinks more upon her paradise ofjuyes,
Then what ye do, a She it good or ill,
All night therefore attend your merry play,
For it will soonc be day:
Now none doth hinder you, that say or slug,
Ne will the woods now answer, nor your Etc ho ring,
Who is the same, which at my window peepes?
Or whose is that fa re face, that shines so bright,
Is it nor Cinthia,0 she that never sleepe*, woon goiitten
Hut walkcs about high heaven al the night?
O fayrest goddesse, do thou not envy
My love with me to spy:
For thou likewise dulse love, though now
unt hough t,* unsuspected
And for a fleece of svoll, which privily,
The Latin ian shephard'1 once unto thee brought,
His pleasures with thee wrought.
Therefore to us be favorable now;
And sith of womens labours thou hast charge,
And generation goodly dost enlarge,
[incline thy will t1 effect our wishful I vow,
And the chast worn be informs with timely seed,
That may our comfort breed:

t-'iidvmimi. a'lfh svitdiii t'y nth Ll/ D Lma k'll in love.

 ANTHOLOGY 545

Til]which we cease our hopeful I hap to sing,

Ne let the woods US amwere. nor our Eccho nng.
And thou great Juno, which with awful might
The lawts of wedlock still dost patronize,
And the religion0 of the faith first plight rjjirrtij'y
With sacred rices hast taught to solemnize:
And eefce for comfort often called art
Of Women iti their smart,0 labor
Eternally bind thou this lovely band,
And all thy blessings unco us impart.
And chott glad Genius, in whose gentle hand,
The hridale bowre and gertiall bed remains,
Without blemish or staine,
And the sweet pleasures of theyr loves delight
With secret ayde daest succour and supply,
Till they bring forth the fruitfull progeny,
Send us the timely fruit of this same night.
And thou fayte Hebe,“ and thou Hymen free, goddess of youth
Grant that it may so be.
Til which we cease your further priyse to sing,
Ne any woods shal answer, nor your Eccho ring.
And ye high heavens, the temple of the gods,
In which a thousand torches Earning bright
Doc burne, that to us wretched eanhly clods,
In dreadful darknesse lend desired light;
And all ye powers which til the same remay ne,
More then we men can faync,° imagine
Ponre out your blessing on us plentiously,
And happy influence upon us raine,
That sve may raise a large posterity,
Which from the earth, w hich they may long possess?,
With lasting happinesse.
Up to your haughty pallaces may mount,
And for the guerdon0 of theyr glorious merit irriwd
May heavenly tabernacles tilers1 inherit,
Of blessed Saints for to increase the count.
So let us rest, sweet love, in hope of this,
And cease till then our tymely joyes (o sing,
The woods no more us answer, nor our eccho ring,
Song made in lieu of many ornament*,
With which my love should July have bene duet,
Which cutting off through hasty accidents,
546 i’otMS, POi-'FS, rO iiTH V

Ye would not stay your dew time to expect,

Lint prompt both to recompens,
Be unto her a goodly Ornament,
And for short time an endlcsse moniment.

75
from “Anwrdli ff
One day E wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Agayne I svrote it with a second band,
But Came the Lyde, and made my paynes his pray.
“Vayiie man," sayd site, “that doesi in vaine assay,
A mortal I tiling so to immortalize,
For 1 my .solve shat] lylte to this decay,
And eek“ my name bee wyped out lykewize."
“Not so,,f quod E, “let baser things devize0 contrive
To dy in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your vcrtiies rare sbalt eternize,
And in the bevens wryle your glorious name.
Where wheiiis death shall alt the world iubdew,
Our love shall livd, and Liter life renew,’*

WALLACE STEVENS
The Idea of Order at Key West
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean,
The sea was not a mask. No more wras she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Lven if what she sang was what she beard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word,
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
E lie grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.
For site was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever -hooded, tragic -gestured sea
 ANIHOLOGV 547

Was merely a place hy which she walked to sing.

Whose spirit is this? wc said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as site sang.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
It it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone, liut it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang, And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then wc,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made,
Ramon Fernandez,1 tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights m the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air.
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
Oh! Ulcssed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins.
[)1 ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

No particular pervuri IS iiitf’mied.

>48 POEMS, POETS, POETRY

Tin Planet AM the Table

was glad he had written his poems.
Arit*]'
They were of a remembered time
Or of something seen that he liked
Other makings of the sun
Were waste and 'welter
And the npe shrub writhed,

His self and rhe sun were one

And his poems, although makings ot his self,
Were no less makings ot the sun.
It wasnot important that they survive,
What mattered Was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,
Some affluence, li only half- perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.

The SfiAH’ \lan

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January atm; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves.
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same hare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

'
The "planet" is an tenia Lj*e for Stevens's Cnflfrn'rf fticwrj (IVS4).
Ariel, the* irce spurn in Shakespeare's play, T7je Intipral, litre represents the poet
 ANTHOLOGY 549

Sunday iWbrtiinjj
/
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,1
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a mg mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice,2
She dreams a little, and she feds the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound,
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre/'

2
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grieving* in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These arc the measures destined for her soul.
}

Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.

No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave

'The woman in (hf poem Jots rot attend a Sunday church service, instead, she
remains in her peignoir and has breakfast
3
The death of Jtsus.
’ The passion and entombment of Jesus
550 POEMI, !' LILTS, POETRY

Large-man nor td motions to his my thy mind.

He moved among LIS, as a muttering king.
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,0 shepherds
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fjilr Or shall tt come to he
The blood of’ paradise' And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall knosvr
The sky will be much fnendlier then than now,
A part of labor arid a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not thEs dividing and indifferent blue.
4
She says, '“] am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?"
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera3 of the grave, ghost
Neither the golden underground/ nor isle
Melodious/' where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary7 south, nor cloudy pain/
Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured
As April’s green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for |nne and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow's wings.
5
She says, “Bui in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss."
Death isthe mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams
And our desires- Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteral EUH on our paths,

' Tiie Llytian fields — in Greek mythology, the heaven ofheirw*.

' Avalon, where King Arthur wal takei: after his death.
The palm was the rewind given TQ Christian martyrs in heaven.
 ANTHOLOGY SSI

The path sick sorrow took, the many paths

Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gate
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plait1.6 The maidens taste stiver tiishei
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.
6
is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river- banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, slecplessly,
7
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer mom
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them. Like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin,0 and echoing hills, angeh
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest,
552 POEMS, POETS. POETRY

x
She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, '"The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay."
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable,
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And. in the isolation of the sky.
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

1
Among twenty snowy mountains.
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
2
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
3
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
4
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a hlackhird
Arc one.
5
I do not know which co prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
 AM HOI OCV 553

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.
6
Icicles tilled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
7
O thin men ot Haddam, i
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
8
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
y
When the blackbird flew our of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
10
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the baw ds of euphony
Would cry out sharply,
If
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach,
Once, a fear pierced hull,

Tflwn in Connecticut-
55+ POEMS. POETS?, POETRY

In tiiat lit- mistook

The shadow &f his equipage
For blackbirds.
n
The nver is moving.
The blackbird must be Hying,
fj

ft was evening all sfaraoon.

It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

MARK STRAND
Keeping Tilings Whole
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
ter fill the spaces
where my body's been.
We all have reasons
for moving.
1 move
to keep things whole.
 A N'T HO LOGY 55S

JONATHAN SWIFT
A Description of the Morning
Now hardly here and there a hackney coach
Appearing, showed the ruddy mom's approach.
Now Betty from her master's bed has flown,
And softly stole to discompose her own.
The slipshod prentice from his master's door
Had pared the dirt, and sprinkled round the floor.
Now Moll had sc hiried her mop with dexterous airs,
Prepared to scrub the entry and the stairs.
The youth with broom y stumps began to trace
The kennel -edge,'1 where wheels had worn the place. giillcr
The sma Skoal man was heard with cadence deep;1
Till drowned in shriller notes of chimney-sweep.
Duns'* at his Lordship's gate began to meet;
And Uric k dust-' Moll had screamed through half a street.
The turnkey now his flock returning sees,
Duly let out a-nights to steal for fees/
The watchful bailiffs take their silent Stands;
And schoolboys lag wit b satchels in rheir hands,

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

From In AfenmrrdJti A. H. H.
7
Dark house, bywhich once more I stand
Hen? in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,
A hand that can be clasped no more
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
—
And like a guilty thing 1 creep
At earliest morning to the door,

1
Coil was hawked ill [fie streer.
2
Bailiffs acting as tie hi collector*.
J
Tinned; a tanned complexion was i ntaik of die working classes.
' Prisoner* were let out Id get money to p*y their J4ikm.
556 POEMS. Pot IS, POETRY

He1 is not here;

but far away
The noise of life begins again;
And ghastly through the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.
99
Risest thou thus, dim dawn, again.
So loud with voices of the birds,
So chick with 1 owing; ot'the herds,
Day, when I lost the dower of men;
Who tremblest thro' thy darkling red
Oil yon swollen brook that bubbles fast
By meadows breathing of the past,
And woodlands holy to the dead;
Who murmurest in die foliage eaves
A song chat slights the coming care,
And Autumn laying here and there
A fiery finger on the leaves;
Who wake nest with thy balmy breath
To myriads on the genial earth,
Memories of bridal, or of birth,
And unto myriads more, of death.
O, wheresoever those may be,
Betwixt the slumber of the poles,
To-day they count as kindred souls;
They know me not, but mourn with me.
m
Ring our, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The dying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in die night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring m the true.

1
Arthur I ferry Halbill (INI 1-1833}, Tennyson's tmJUundy promising friend, f 3e
died suddenly in Vienna, while on temj ci t the Continent with Ins father
 AN ] HOIMI 557

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,

For those that here wc see no more;
King out the feud of rich and poor.
King in redness to all mankind.
Ring out a slowly dying cause
And ancient forms or party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter man tiers, purer laws,

Ring out the want, the care, the sill,

The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
Hut ring the fuller minstrel m.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,

The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.
Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust ot gold;
Ring out the thousand sears of old,
Rmg in the thousand years of peace.
Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

m
Sad H caper* o'er the buried sun the evening sw
And ready, thou, to die with him,
Thau seat chest ail tilings evet dim
And dimmer, and a glory done.

The team is loosened from the wain.0 Ut\WJ|

The boa! is drawn upon the shore:
Thau listen esi to the closing door,
And life is darkened in the brain

Bright Phosphor,* freshet for rhe night. Ihe morning fiat

By thee rhe world's great work is lie aril
Beginning, and the wakeful bird,
Behind thee comes the greater light.
558 POEMS, POETS. POETRY

The market boat is on the stream,

And voices hail it from the brink;
Thou hear’st the village hammer dink,
And sce’st the moving of the team.
Sweet Helper-Phosphor, double name”
For what is one, the first, the last,
Thou, like my present and my past,
Thy place is changed; thou art the same.

Tears, Idle Tears

Fn>m "The Princess"
Tears, idle teats, 1 know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to rhe eyes.
In looking on the happy autumn -fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as rhe last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.
Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.
Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that arc for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more!

Ulysses1
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Matched with an aged wife, 1 mete and dole

1
The morning star and evening scar arc both rhe pianec Venus.
This poem derives from Uly*S«' description of his Jast voyage in Dante's JnfcnNt
(Camo 26).
 AN mOLOCY 559

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

That hoard, and sleep, and feed. ,md know nor me,
I cannot rest from travel; I will drink
Life to the lees. A l! times 1 have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both ssith those
Thai loved me, and alone; on shone, and when
Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyadcs'
Vext the dim sea. E am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have i seen and known - cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, hut honored of them all, -
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
[ am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when f move
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust tmbtimisbed, not to shine in use!
As t!i o ughto breathe were life! Lite piled on iite
Were all too little, and of OTIC to me
Little remains; hut every' hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more.
A b ringer ot new things, and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge tike a sinking star.
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
This is my son, mine own Tdemachus,
To whom I leave the scepter and the isle,
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfill
This labor, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and through soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the pood
Most blameless is he, centered in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to tail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When 1 am gone. He ss'orks Jus work, I mine.

: A cluster of FISH: start lh fhr rnruteJhtH'n T.nsfut Tin's wrne (uyynuH in !brr
tell rain.
560 POEMS, POETS, POET it v

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail;

There gloom the dark, hmad seas. My manners,
Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me,
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, Free foreheads
—
you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.
Death doses all; hut something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;
The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my inends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Pash off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until (die.
It may be chat the gulf’s will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,''
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth aud heaven, rhat which sve are, w-e are,
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

DYLAN THOMAS
Fern Hill
Now as ] was young and easy under the apple houghs
About the tilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honored among wagons i was prince of [he apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

'
The abode after death of those favored by the JJOLIS.
 A NTiloj.m;V 561

And as Jwa? gjreen and carefree, famous imnng the bams

About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
in the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden 1 was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams,

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery'
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As F rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away.
All the moon long t heard, blessed among stables, the night-jars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
flashing into the dark.
And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round chat very day
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, die spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise,
And honored among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as rhe heart was long,
In the sun bom over and over.
1 ran my heedless ways,
My withes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Ikfore the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace,
Nothing ! cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
[n the moon that is always rising,
Nor that nding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
562 !' Q t M S , 1'ini'S, POF.TRV

And wake 10 the firm forever fled from the childless bud
Oh as I was young and easy in die mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though ! sang in my chains like the sea.

In My Craft or Sullen Art

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in rhe still night
When onlv the moon rages
And the losers lie abed
With all their grids in their amis,
! labor by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On rhe ivory stages
Hut for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart

From the raging moon 1 write
Oft these spmdntr pages
Nor for the lowering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
lint for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of The age?,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft ot art.

HENRY VAUGHAN
They Arc Alt Gone into the World of Light!
They are all gone into the world of light!
And I alone sit lingering here;
Their very memory is t.nr and bright.
And my sad thoughts doth clear.

It glows and glitters in my cloudy breast

Like star? upon some gloomy grove,
Or those fiitit beams in which this hill is dressed
Alter the sun’s remove.
 AN I it nr OPY 563

I see them walking in .in air gf glory,

Whose light doth trample on my days;
My days, which are at best hut dull and hoary,
Mere glimmering and decays.
O holy hope, ami high humility,
High as the heavens above!
These are your walks, and you have showed them me
To kindle my eold love.
Dear, beauteous death! the jewel of the just,
Shining nowhere hut in the dark;
What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust,
Could man outlook that mark!
He that hath found some fledged bird’s nest may know
At first sight if the bird be flown;
Hut what fair well or grove he sings in now.
That is to him unknown.
And yet, as angels in some brighter dreams
Call to the soul when man doth sleep.
So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes.
And into glory peep,
If a were confined into a tomb,
star
Her captive flames must needs bum there;
Utit when the hand that locked her up gives room.
She'll shine through all the sphere.
O Father of eternal life, and all
Created glories under Thee!
Resume0 Thy spirit from this world o( thrall f.ilr bdek
Into true liberty!
Lither disperse these mists, which blot and tiil
My perspective0 still as they pass, tclestope
Or else remove me hence unto tl>,iL hill
Where I shall need no glass.
S64 POEMS, POETS. Potikv

DEREK WALCOTT
Ruins of a Great House
Though our bngcs: 51111 5f(j al tight dfflnmoui amt
makes till winter iirrfifj, it taniKt he bffiw we lie

—
deum in darkness, and haw 0115 light in afhfS ,

Stones only, [lie disjecta membra0 of

HROWNE, URN

tills
WJ&SAL'

Great House, _/riipni80fl(j

Whose moth -like jÿirls are mixed with candledust,
Remain to file the lizard’s dragonish daws.
The mouths of those gate cherubs shriek with stain;
Axle and coach wheel silted under the lTltK’k
Of cattle droppings.
Three crows flap for the trees
And settle, creaking the eucalyptus boughs,
A smdi of dead limes quickens in the nose
The leprosy of empire.
“Farewell, green fields,
Farewell, ye happy groves!"0 dflflTIT in
Marble like Greece, Like Faulkner's" South in stone, Paradise
Lost
Deciduous beauty prospered and is gone,
Bui where the lawn breaks in a rash of trees
A spade below dead leaves will ring die bone
Of SOme dead animal or human thing
Fallen trOm evil slays, from evil times.
It seems that the original crops were limes
Grown in the silt that si logs the river's skirt;
The imperious rakes are gone, their bright girls gone,
The river flows, obliterating hurt.
1 climbed a wall with the grille ironwork
Of exiled craftsmen protect tug that great house
From guilt, perhaps, but not from the worm’s rent
Nor from the padded cavalry of the mouse.
And when a wind shook in the limes J heard
What Kipling'' heard, the death of .1 great empire, the abuse
Of ignorance by Bible and by sword,

'ÿSir Thomas Jirpwnf ( ) 682), author afthc treatise Hydrivtaphia: t VJI Burial.
William Faulkner (18V7-1962), American novdist.
' Riidyird Kipling (1fi65 1(J3f))r English novelist and poet.
 A is i H OLOG \ 565

A p-L'tn lawn, broken by low walk of stone,

Dipped to die rivulet, and pacing, ! thought next
Of men like Hawkins, Walter Raleigh, Drake/
Ancestral murderers and poets, more perplexed
in memory now by every ulctrruui crime.
The world’s green age then was a rotting lime
Whose stench became the charnel galleon's text.
The rot remains with us, Lhe men are gone.
lint, as dead ash is lifted in a wind
That fans the blackening ember of the mind,
My eyes burned front the ashen prose of Donne.5

Ablaze with rage I thought,

Some slave is rotting in this manorial lake,
But still the coal of my compassion fo tight
That Atbioi/ too was once
A colony like ours, “part of the continent, piece of the main,"1
Nook-shotien, rook overblown, deranged
Hy foaming channels and the vain expense
Of bitter faction.
Ail in compassion ends
5>o differently front what the heart arranged:
"as well as if a manor of thy friend’s ..."

EDMUND WALLER
Stmjf
Go, lovely rose!
Tell her that wastes her time and me
That now she knows,
When I resemble0 her to thee, i'l'fPipflfi*
How sweet and fair she seems to be.

‘ Sir John Hawkins (1532-1595); Sir Walter Raleigh (15522-16 IB); Sir Francis
Drake [1540?- 1 596). LeiJiny; English explorers,.
’John Donne (1572“1631), English poet
' A poetic iiaiisi tor Great Until in,
Jollrt Dunne, Meiltcaiion 17, Jforn his "Devotions upon Emcrj'enl Occasions,
No mm is in island entire of itself; every man is .1 piece of the continent, a p.m of the
main; if .i riosl be washed away by tile sea. Europe is the Les>-„ as well as if a promontory
were* -IS well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of [lime own were." Walcott quotes tin1-
elding phrase of rhis quotation to close his poem

.
 566 POEMS, POETS, POETKV

Tell her that's young,

And shuns tu have JILT graces s-picrE,
That hactsc thou sprung
In deserts, where no men abide,
Thou IN List have unramm ended died.
Small is the worth
Of beauty from the light retired;
liid her come forth,
Suffer herself to be desired.
Anti not blush so to be admired.
Then die! that she
The common fate of all things rare
May read in thee;
How small a part of time they share
Tli.it are so wondrous sweet and fair!

ROSANNA WARREN
In Creve Coctir, Missouri
(Pulitzer Prize fer i3lwtÿioumaIi'un , I9§9)

Only in Creve Coeur

would an amateur photographer
firebug snap a shot so
uncoil sol able; fireman bent low

over the rag of body hdd

like impossible laundry pulled
too soon from the line, too pale,
too sodden with smoke to fail
in his huge, dark, crumpled embrace.
He leans to the tiny face.
Her hanr stands out like flame.
She is naked, she has no name.
No longer a baby, almost
a child, not yet a ghost,
she presses a doll-like fist
to his professional chest.
Her head falls back to his hand.
Tell LLS that sine will stand
h
 AN tH o i <H;V 567

again, quarrel and misbehave.

He is trying to nuke her breathe.
Strong mart, you know hoW it's done,
you’ve done it again and again
mucking the spirit back
to ns from its lair of smoke.

Well call it a fine surprise,

The snapshot won a prize
though it couldn’t revive her
that uijjit in Creve (iocur.

JAMLIS WtiLCH
Harlem, Montana: Just O(f the Reservation
We need no runners here. Ilooze is law
and all the Indians drink in the best tavern.
Money is itee if you’re poor enough.
Disgusted, busted whites are running
for office in this town. The constable,
a local farmer, plants the jail with wiki
raven-haired stiffs who beg just one more drink.
One drunk, a former Methodist, becomes a saint
in the Indian church, bugs the plaster man
on the cross with snakes. It his knuckles broke,
he’d see those women wail the graves goodbye.
Goodbye, goodbye, Harlem on the rocks,
so bigoted, you forget the latest joke,
so lonely, you'd welcome a battalion of Turks
to rule your women. What you don’t know,
whar you will never know or want to learn —
Turks aren't white, l urks are olive, unwelcome
alive in any town. Turks would use
your one dingy park to declare a need for loot,
Turks say bring it, step quickly, lay down and dead,
1 1ere we are when men were nice. This photo, hung
in the Ness1 England Hotel lobby, shows them nicer
than agreeable to the warring bands of redskins
pie,
who demanded protection money for tire price of food.
Now, only Huttcrites out north are nice. We hate
 SG8 POEMS, PORTS. PGUTKY

them, They arc Eough and their crops arc always good.
We accuse them of idiocy and believe their belief all wrong.
Harlem, your hotel is overturned, your children
are ragged y -asset! bett you go on, survive
the had food from (he two cafes and peddle
your hate for the wild who bring you money.
When you die, if you die, will you remember
the three young bucks who shot the grocery up,
locked themselves in and cried for days, we're rich,
help us, uh God, we're rich

Th e Mu ii from Wash i ngto n

The end came easy for most of us.
Packed away in our crude beginnings
in some far comer of a flat world,
we didn't expect much more
than firewood and buffalo robes
to keep us warm. The man came down,
a slouching dwarf with rainwater eyes,
and spoke to us. He promised
that life would go on as usual,
that treaties would be signed, and everyone —
man, woman and child would be inoculated
against a world in which We had HO part,
a world of money, promise and disease.

WAJ I WHITMAN
A Hand-Mirror
—
Hold it up sternly sec this it sends back, (who is it? is it you?)
Outside fair costume, within ashes and filth,
No more a flashing eye, no more a sonorous voice or
springy' step,
Now some slave’s eye, voice, hands, step,
A drunkard’s breath, unwholesome eater's face, vcnerealceV
Hesh,
Lungs rottingaway piecemeal, stomach sour and cankerous,
Johns rheumatic, bowels clogged with abomination,

Victim of venereal diMM&e.

hm
 ANTHOLOGY 569

Blood circulating dark and poisonous itrtiBli,

Words babble, hearing and touch callous,
No brain, no heart left, no magnetism of sex;
Such from one look in this looking-glass ere you go hence,
Such a result so soon —
and from such a beginning!

From Song of Myself

1
I celebrate myself, and sing myself
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
1 loaf and invite my soul,
l lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, formed from this soil, this air,
Bom here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
lr now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death-
Crecds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, hut never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, 1 permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy,

6
A child said IWiat is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could l answer the child? I do not know what it is any mure
than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green
stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the comers, that wc may
see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the

Vegetation.
Or 1 guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
570 H 1 I r- S.1 *> , I'OET!, POETHV

Kanuck, Fuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff,1 1 give them the same.

! receive them the same.
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
\ enderly will 1 use you curling grass.
ft may be you transpire from die breasts of young men,
It may he if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon
out of their mothers’ laps.
And here you are the mothers’ laps.
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads ot old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark IO come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouth; for
nothing.
I wish t Could translate the hints about the dead young men and
women.
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken
soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and docs not wait at the
end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier

52
The spotted hawk swoops by tnd accuses me, he complains of my
gab and my loitering.
[ too am not a hit tamed, I nits am untranslatable,
L sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the World.

1
A "K.nmi k" ri'fl-rs r<f hcnJi t '..n.nHuii. .J “TlkSfilloe” refers m
,i J native of
Tidewater, Virginia, ami : "Cuff" iclert to UJI African American
 ANTHOLOGY 571

The last scud of day holds back for me,

It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadowed
wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.
[ depan as air. I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
t effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.
f bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles,
You will hardly know who 1 am or what I mean,
But 1 shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fiber your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
l stop somewhere wailing for yoti.

Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night

Vigil strange I kept on the field one night;
When you my son and my comrade dropt at my side that day,
One look i but gave which your dear eyes return’d with a look 1
shall never forget,
One touch of your hand to mine O boy, reach’d up as you lay on
the ground,
Then onward I sped in the battle, the even-contested battle,
Till late in the night reliev’d to the place at last again 1 made my
way,
Found you in death so cold dear comrade, found your body son of
responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)
Bared your face in the starlight, curious the scene, cool blew the
moderate night-wind.
Long there and then in vigil l stood, dimly around me the battle¬
field spreading,
Vigil wondrous and vigil sweet there in the fragrant silent night,
Bill not a tear fell, not even a long-drawn sigh, Jong t gazed,
Then on the earth partially reclining sat by vour side leaning my
chin in my hands,

Comrade
Vigil of —
Massing sweet hours, immortal and mystic hour; with you dearest

silence,
soldier,
not a tear, not 3 word,
love and death, vigil for you my son and my

As onward silently stairs aloft, eastward new ones upward stole,

-J
572 POEMS, POETS, POETRY

Vigil final for you brave boy, (] could not save you. swift was your
death.
J faithfully loved you and cared for you living, I chink we shall
surely mqct again,}
Till a c latest lingering of the night, indeed just as the dawn appear'd,
My comrade I wrapt in his blanket, envelop'd well bis form,
Folded the blanket well, tucking it carefully over head and care¬
fully under feet,
And there and then and bathed by the rising sun, my son in his
grave, in his rude-dug grave I deposited,
Ending my vigil strange with that, vigil of night and battle-field dim,
Vigil for boy of responding kisses, (never again on earth respond¬
ing,}
Vigil for comrade swiftly slain, vigil ] never forget, how as day
brighten’d,
] rose from the chill ground and folded my soldier well in his
blanket,
And buried him where he fell,

RICHARD WILBUR
Cottage Street, 1953
Framed in her phoenix fire-screen, Edna Ward
Bends to the tray of Canton,1 pouring tea
For frightened Mrs. Plath; then, turning toward
The pale, slumped daughter, and my wife, and me,
Asks if we would prefer it weak or strong.
Will we have milk or lemon, she enquires?
The visit seems already strained and long,
Each in his turn, we tell her our desires.
It is my office to exemplify
The published poet in his happiness,
Thus cheering Sylvia, who has wished to die;2
But half-ashamed, and impotent to bless,

1
Dlue-and-white paiKmtd Chincst-cjport porcelain wire; in tlli* a«, rhf EM
service. 1

2
The poet Sylvia PJath (1932-1963) attempted Suicide after her junior year at
Smith College. Later, she died by suicide, it thirty- one.

k
 AN I H a LOG v 573

]am a stupid life-guard who has found,

Swept to hi1; shallows by the tide, a girl
Who, far from shore, lias been immensely drowned,
And stares through water now with eyes of pearl.
How large is her refusal; and how slight
The genteel that whereby we recommend
Life, of a summer afternoon, despite
The brewing dusk which hints that it may end.
And Edna Ward shall die in fifteen years,
After her eight-and-eighty summers of
Such grace and courage as permit no tears,
The thin hand reaching out, the last word bve,
Outliving Sylvia who, condemned to list,
Sh-dl study for a decade, as she must,
To state it last her bn than: negative
In poems free and helpless and unjust.

Tke Writer
In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.
I pause in the stairwell, hearing
from her shut d-oor a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.
Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, arid some of ii heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage,
But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greateus, in which
The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a hunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent,
I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash
And retreated, not to .1 bright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door.
We watched the sleek, wild, dark
574 POEMS, p ot r Poeikv

And iridescent creature

Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
i'o tile hard floor, or the desk-top,
Anid wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,
It lifted of! from a chair back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill ot" the world.
It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten, 1 wish
What E wished you before, but harder.

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

landscape with the Fall af Icarus
According to Breughel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near
the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings’ w ax
(insignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
(his was
Icarus drowning
 ANTHOLOGY 575

The Ra per from Paiienack

was very kind. When she regained
her svits, he said, It's all right. Kid,
I took care of you.
Whit j mess she was m. I hen he added,
You’ll never forget me now.
And drove her home.
Only a man who i> sick, she said
would do a thing like that
It must he so.
Mo one who is not diseased could be
so
to someone else

to
—
insanely cruel. He wants to give it

justify himself. Due if I get a

venerea L infection out oi this
1 won’t be treated.
[ refuse. You’ll find me dead m bed
first. Why ngt? That's
tile way she spoke,
\ wish \ could shoor him. How would
you like to know a murderer?
i may do it.

i’ll knosv by the end of this week.

I wouldn't scream, I bit him
several times
but he was too strong for me.
I can’t vet understand it. I don’t
faint so easily.
When l came to myself and realized
what had happened all I could do
was to curse
and call him every vile name I could
think of. 1 was so glad
to be taken home,

’
I suppose it's my mmd — the feat of
infection. I'd rather a million times
have been got pregnant.
 576 POEMS, POF.TS, POETRY

foulness of it can't
iJni it's the
be cured. And haired, hatred of all
— and disgust.
men

Spring and All

l-i\ tile road to tlm- contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue

—
mottled clouds dnven from the
northeast a cold wand. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen
patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees
AH along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of' bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines —
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches —
They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind —
Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl nt wild carrot lent
tine by one objects are defined
It quickens: clarity, outline ot leaf
But now the stark dignity of
entrance —
Still, the profound change
has. come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken

This Is Just fo Say

I have eaten
the plums

.
that were in
the icebox

ta-
 A N I HOLDGV 577

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so Sweet
and so cold

WILLIAM WOHUSWOH.HI
My Heart Leaps Up
My heart leaps up when E behold
A rainbow in the sky;
So was ir when my life began;
So is it now 1 am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father ot the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Hound each to each by natural piety.

Ode
INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY FROM RECOLLECTIONS
OF EARLY CHILDHOOD

The Child if Lrriicr irf the .UHJJ.

A P!IJ I fwlrf wish ?n y days Hr be
ftuDiit fdfij re frt'/i by itamral piety.

1
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Appareled in celestial light,
The glory and the treshness of s dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore —
1
Turn whereso'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen ! now can tee no more.
578 POEMS, POETS, POE. TRY

2
Thu Rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are hare,
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet 1 know, where'er I go,
That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.
3
Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
And while the voting lambs bound
As to the labor's0 sound. small drum
To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And 1 again am strong:
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
I heir the Echoes through the mo tint ;< ini throng,
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
And all the earth is gay;
Land and sea
Give themselves up to jollity,
And with the heart of May
Doth every ID east keep holiday —
Thou Child ofjoy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd-
boy!
4

Ye blessed Creatures, l have heard the call

Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
VI v heart is at your festival,
My head hath its coronal,
The fullness of your bliss, L feel —I tee! it ,ili-
— Oh, evil day! if 1 were sullen
While Earth herself is adorning,
This Sweet May morning,
 ANTHOLOGY 579

And the Children are telling

On every side*
In a thousand valleys far and wide*
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the Babe leaps up on his Mother’s arm —
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
-— But there’s a Tree, of many, one,
A single Field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

5
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star.
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Mustÿtravel, still is Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

6
Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yeanlings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a Mother’s mind*
And unworthy aim,
tio
The homely Nurse doth all she can
580 MOEMS, HDETS, POETRY

To make her foster child, her Inmate Man,

Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.
7
Dehold the Child among his newborn blisses,
A six-years' Darling of a pygmy size!
See, where mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother’s kisses,
With light upon him from his father’s eyes!
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly -learned art;
A wedding or a festival,
A mourning or a funeral ;
And this hath now his bean,
And unto this he frames his song;
Then will he fit his tongue
To dialogues of business, love, or strife;
But it will not he long
Ere this be thrown aside,
And with new joy and pride
The tittle Actor cons another part;
Filling from time to time his ’‘humorous stage"
With all the Personst down to palsied AgcT
That Life brings with her in her equipage;
As if his whole vocation
Were endless imitation.
S
Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy Soul’s immensity;
Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, rcad'st the eternal deep,
Haunted forever by the eternal mind —
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling di our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day. a Master o’er a Slave,
A Presence which is not to be put by;
 ANTHOLOGY 581

Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might

Of heaven-born freedom on thy being’s height,
Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke
The years to bring the inevitable yoke,
Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?
Full soon chy Soul shall have her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a weight,
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

9
O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive]
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest;
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast —
Not for these f raise
The song of thanks and praise;
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and Outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving abour in worlds not realized,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised;
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain -fight of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
To perish never;
Which neither listless ness, nor mad endeavor,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!
582 POEMS, POETS, POETKY

Hence in a season of calm weather

Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And sec the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear rhe mighty waters rolling evermore,
10
Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song!
And let the young Lambs bound
As to the tabor’s sound!
We in thought will join your throng,
Ye that pipe and ye that play,
Ye that through your hearts today
Feel the gladness of the May!
What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now forever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower,
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be:
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind,
U
And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,
Forebode not any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts 1 fed your might;
I only have relinquished one delight
To live beneath your moTe habitual sway.
I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a newborn Day
Is lovely yet;
The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober coloring from an eye
That hath kept svatch o'er man's mortality;
 ANTHOLOGY

Another race hath been, and Other pafatis0 rpifwls of victory

are won.
Thanks, to the human heart bv which we jive,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest0 flower that blows15 must ordinary / blooms
can give
Thoughts that do often he too deep fur tears.

The World Is Too Much with Us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we by waste our powers;
Little we set in Nature that is ours;
We hive given our hearts away, a sordid boon!* gift
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up- gathered, now like sleeping flowers,
f:or this* for everything, we are out of tune:
E( moves us not, — Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a Creed Outworn;
So might i, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that Would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.1

CHARJI ES WRIGHT
Laguna Blues
Er's Saturday afternoon at the edge of the world.
White pages lift in the wind and fall
Duse threads, cut loose from the heart, float up and fall.
Something’s off-key in rtiy mind.
Whatever it is, ir bothers me all the time,
It’s hot, and the wind blows on what [ have had to say.
I’m dancing a little dance.
The crows pick tip a thermal that angles away from the sea.

In Greek mythology, Frweui is .1 lesser sea to whom Poseidon pave the

ability lo(hinÿc hi' foml 7 ritnn . a merman, is usually represented as blowing on J shell
or conch, calming the wave*.
 584 POEMS, POLLS, P O t J JV Y

I’m singing a tittle song,

Whatever it is, it bothers me all the time.
It's Saturday afternoon and the crows glide down,
Black pages that lift and tall
The castor beans and the pepper plant trundle their weary heads.
Something's off-key and unkind.
Whatever it is, i: bothers me all the time.

JAMES WRIGHT
A Blessing

Just off the highway to Rochester. Minnesota,

Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day. alone.
They npple tensely, they can hardly contain then happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other,
Tli ere is no loneliness like theirs.
At home Ofice more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
1 would like 10 hold the slenderer one in my anus,
for she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane tails wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist,
Suddenly I realize
That il 1 stepped our of my body 1 would break
Into blossom.

Smu/f Frojÿj Killed an the Highway

Still,
I would leap coo
Into the light,

h,
 ANTHOLOGY SSS

Jf I had die chance.

It i-s everything, the wet green stalk of the field
On the other side of the road.
Tncy crouch there, too, taltenng in terror
And take strange wing. Many
Of the dead never moved, but many
Of the dead are alive forever in the split second
Anto headlights more sudden
Than their drivers know,
The drivers burrow backward into dank pools
Where nothing begets
Nothing.
Across the road, tadpoles are dancing
On the quarter thumbnail
Ot the moon. They can’t see.
Not yet.

SIR THOMAS WYATT

Forget Not Yet
Forget not yet the tried intent
Of such 3 truth as 1 have meant;
My great travail so gladly spent
Forget not yet.
Forget not yet when first began
Hie weary life ye know, since whan
The suit, the service none tell can;
Forget not yet,
Forget not yet the great assays,0 trial}
The cruel wrong, the scornful ways,
The painful patience in denays,° denials
Forget not yet.
Forget not yet, forget not this,
How long ago hath been and is
The mind that never meant amiss;
Forget not yet.
Forget not then thine own approved.
The which so long hath thee so loved.
Whose steadfast faith yet never moved;
Forget not this.
586 POEMS, POETS, POETRY

WILLIAM EJLTLER YEATS

Among School Children
1
[ wilt through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in 3 white hood replies;
The children Iram to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and history,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modem way— the children's eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty -vear- old smiling public man.
11
I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
Above a sinking tire, a talc that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
Thai changed some childish day to tragedy —
Told, and it seemed chat our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy.
Or else, to alter Plato’s parable,
into the yolk and white of the one shell,"

111
And thinking of that fit of gnef or rage
I look Upon One child Or t’other there
And wonder if she stood so at that age —
For even daughters ol the swan can share
Something of every paddler’s heritage —
A ttd had that colour upon cheek or hair.
And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
She stands before me as a living child.
/I
Her present image floats into the mind —
Did Quattrocento* finger fashion it
Hollow of check as though it drank the wind

\ hods SAe Lrdj'v Lnb was, in Greek myih. a maiden ravished hs Zeus, whn
tool: the form of a swan.
'
P-ain, in 77w Symposium, Mfggeus ttiac nun was onjÿ nails1 both male and female
but foil into diviiiort Each half now fofijp for (he other half
Italian name for the fifteenth century.
 AKI HO UOC V 5H7

A tid took a mess nt shadows tor its meat?

And J though never of LtrdatJtl kind
—
Had pretty plumage once enough of that.
Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow ,
V
What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollect]cm or the drug decide,
Would think her son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more \vi liters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of Jus setting forth?
n
Plato thought nature but a spume [l)jl
plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;4
World-famous golden -thighed Ih'thagoras
Fingered upon a riddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:1
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare .1 bird.
VU
Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But [hose the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother's reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze re pose -
—
And yet they too break hearts O Presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise
O self-born mockers of Hum’s
—
enterprise;

.
'Yeats wrote to theml "Here is a fragment at' Ml)- last curse upon old -ijte. lr
means thit even the yreaiest men are owls, scarecrows, he ilie rime then Janie has come
Aristotle, remember , was Alexander |itie tJreir'st tutor, hence the um [form ofbirchh'1
re., Anstutlc flagged hit pupil into teaming.
' Yeats is referring 10 the foci rh.it Pythagoras measured the intervals between
notes on a- wretched uring,

I d
5&8 POEMS, POETS, POE I KY

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

Down by the SdHey Gardens

Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;
She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me cake love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.
In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me cake life easy, as the grass grows on chc weirs;
Buc 1 was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

The Lake Isle of Inttisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And i shail have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While 1 stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
i hear it in the deep heart's core.

L
 ANTHOLOGY 589

Leda and the Sitin'

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs:
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But fed the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead,
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak. COuld let her drop?

Sailing to Byzantium
I
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
— —
Those dying generations at their song,
The salmon -falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, bom, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments, of unageing intellect.

1J
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul dap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying1

1
In Greek myth. Leda ished by Zeus, who topk the form of a swap, She
gave birth to Helen. Helen left her husband, Mencius. K> ga with Paris to Troy, thus
causing the Trajan War.
1
That is, '"Nor is there any way to leant (ÿ sing except by studying,"
 590 POEMS, POSTS, POEIHV

Monuments of its own magnificence;

Ami therefore i have sailed the seas and come
To the holy City of By ran Cm in.

Ill
O sages standing in Cod’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall.
Come trnm the holy fire, perne in a gyre,2
And be the singing-master; of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
into the artifice of eternity.

W
Once out of nature I shall never take
IVly bodily form from any natural thing.
liut such a form as Grecian goldsmiths, make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;'1
Or SL-£ upon a golden hough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

77te Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre1
The tal con cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
l he blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full s>t passionate intensity.

7
Swnop down in i whirling movement.
’ Y*a»'s nite "I have read somewhere that in the Emperor's palace a! ffylaiiiium
was a tree made of gold and silver, am: artitici.il lairds sing."
Yean used (he image of
1

two interlocking or cones io symbolic the

to n flicti n p forces of life.
fa
 AN r llOLOOV 591

Surely some revelation in .at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spintus Mundi1
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape w ith lion body and the head of a man
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sum,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows ot the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be bom!

'
Yeats's- tens] ior the Collective human memory.

i,
 *
*
-
!
ft '
 Appendices

Appendix 1. Oti Prosody

Prosody concerns the measure in which poems are written. There

are three kinds of
poems, prosodically speaking
poems in counted lines (wheTe lines have a regular number of
bean);
poems in free verse (where lines have an irregular number of
beats)
poems in prose (usually a short symbolic paragraph}.
This appendix is concerned with poems in counted lines and poems in
free verse. Since free verse is a relatively recent form (Walt Whitman is
the earliest significant American poet of free verse), we will take up
counted poetry first.

Poems in Co unfed UJICJ

Poems in counted lines are written in units we call feet A foot
Consists of one stressed syllable (one "beat," to use the musical term),
usually accompanied by one or two unstressed syllables, We represent s
stressed syllabic by an accent (J) and an unstressed syllable by a symbol
called a breve ('}, Here is an example of a line with four feet:
Whose woods / these arc / 1 think / I know

593
 594 APPENDIX

The number of feer in a line gives the line its (Greek-derived) name, and
tells you how mdt the line is. Natural intonation makes you stress some
words and leave others unstressed, helping you to see how many beats
ate in the line. We eharactenEe a line bv how many stresses (beats) exist
in it: the word “meter” (meaning measure) is the general name for the
length of a counted line:
one beat per line = manometer (from Greek meaning "one,” as in
“monologue”):
two beats per line = dimeter (from Greek meaning “two,” as in
“dialogue”);
three beats per line = trimeter (from Greek meaning “three," as in
“triangle");
four beats pet line = Ifrujmeter (from Greek meaning “four," as in
“tetrahedron");
five beats per line = penntmeier (from Greek meaning “five," as in
“Pentagon");
six beats per line = (lexurFieffr (from Greek meaning "six," as in
“hexagram”);
seven beats per line = heptameter (from Greek meaning “seven.” as
m “heptathlon");
-
eight beats per line octameter (from Greek meaning “eight, ’ as in
“octopus").
Most poems written in English have lines four or five beats wide, Shake¬
speare wrote all of his plays in pentameter lines five beats wide (though
he also inserted prose and short songs from time to time).
When you are looking to see how many beats are in a line, it helps
sometimes to see how- many syllables are in the line. Ten -syllable lines
tend to have five beats each; eight-syllable lines tend to have four beats
each. But it is still natural intonation that tells you where to put the
stresses;

When I l see Hr / ches bend i to left / and right [ten syllables, five
beats]
Golden / lads and / girls all / must |cight syllables, four beats]
Herr arc samples of all the line-widths. It helps to read these atoud, 50
that you can hear the beats,
1. Manometer (one beat per hue, a rare meter), as in the little poem
called “Fleas";
Adam
Had 'em.

h >.
 PROSODY 595

2. Dimeter (two beats). which is likewise rare:

Take her up tenderly,
Lift her with care,
Fashioned so slenderly,
You ng and so fair
-ÿ

THOMAS noon, "The Bridge of Sighs"

3. Trimeter (three beats};

it is time that I wrote my will;
1 choose upstanding men
That climb the streams until
The fountain leap, and at dawn
L>rop their cast at the side
Of dripping stone; 1 declare
They shall inherit my pride.
— V. Ec Y£A1S, "The Tower'1

4. Tetrameter (four beats}:

Whose woods these are 1 think I know
His house is in [he village though,
He will not sec me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with Snow.
— ROBERT FROST, "Stopping by Woods"

5. Pentameter (five beats)

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthens to the ground,
Man comes and tills the soil and lies beneath,
And ,after many a summer dies the swan,
— Aii-ncn, lORit TENNYSON. L'Tiihnnus"

6. Hexameter (six beats), which is sometimes called an Alexandrine

(front the French usage) and which is rare in English verse:
f will arise and go now. and go to Irmisfree,

—
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made.
w. El. Yf.ATS, "The Lake hie of Innisfrce"

The common meters (line -lengths) have been trimeter, tetrameter, and
pentameter, used singly or In combination,

RHYTHM
You have probably noticed that the hits (swings) in each of the
above examples of line-length differ. That is because the lines are written
in different rhythms. T wo dimeter poems can sound very different from
 596 APPENDIX

each other because they ate written in rwo different rhythms. You can
see this by comparing Hood's “The bridge of Sighs,1' given above as an
example of dimeter, with Dorothy Parker's satirical poem on suicide,
"Resume," also in dimeter:

Take her up / tenderly, Razors i pain you

Lift her with / care, Rivers are / damp;
Fashioned so / slenderly, Acids / stain
yon;
Yoting and so / fair. And drugs cause 1 crimp.

To describe the versification of a poem, you have to say not only how
wide its lines arc, but also what rhythm they arc written in. English
rhythms are based on stressed and unstressed syllables. Each stressed syllable
with its associated unstressed syllableÿ} makes a single unit, which we
call a foot.
There are two main kinds of rhythm in English; rfjrriij rhythms and
Jailing rhythms. In a rising rhythm, a foot consists of one or more un¬
stressed syllables leading up to a stressed syllable: "'or

Where the youth / pined away / with desire

And the pale f virgin shroud / ed in snow
Arise / from their graves f and aspire

—
Where my Sun / flower wish / cs to go.
'WILLIAM BLAKE, "Ah Sun -flower "

In a falling rhythm, a foot begins with the stressed syllable, which is

followed by one or more unstressed syllables; f’' or

Tyger, / tygqr, / burning / bright

in the / forests / of the / night,
— WILLIAM BLAKE, “The Tyger"

Metrical feet arc named according to where their stress appears and
how many unstressed syllables they possess. Rising rhythms are either
v
iambic (with two syllables. “ ') or nnapfjrfc (with three syllables, J)- We
*

speak of an iamb or an iambic fool when wc mean ’ an aiidpesl or an

andpestkfoot when wc mean Falling rhythms are either irodwic (with
" "

two syllables, f’) or dactylic (with three syllables, "), The correspond¬
ing nouns are tmdiee and dactyl.
When you read a poem in counted lines, try to see whether the
general movement is a rising one or a falling one. In the two ex¬
amples from lllakc given above, 11 Ah Sun -flower" is Written in rising
anapcstic (three -syllable) feet, and “The T yger" in falling trochaic (two-
syllable) feet.

k ..
 P K o s o i> Y 597

In each tint of “Ah Sun-flower" there are three feet (because there
arc three stressed syllables);

Where the youth t pined away / with desire

In each \me of “The Typer" there are four/cri (because there are
Four stressed syllables):

Typer, / tyger, / burning / bright

If you think of each stressed syllable as a musical beat, the lines of “Ah
Sun-flower' have three beats each ("and a enc and a IJEW and a ifiree");
the lines of "The Tyger" have four beats each ( “one and tun and three
and >«"),
Feet can shed one or more ol their unstressed syllables. Y ou can see
that at the end of each line in “The Tygert” an unstressed syllable is
“missing.” And in "Ah Sun-flower.” in the line "Arise f from their
graves / and aspire," an unstressed syllable is missing in the first foot,
which has only two syllables, “Arise." These irregularities do not occur
so often that they destroy the general impression of the metrical scheme
underlying the poem.
If you hear these rhythms in your ear as you read, you will soon
recognize them. Here arc two more examples, to fill OUT scheme:

—
l found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
ROBERT FROST, "Design"

Read aloud, this reveals itself to have five beats (five stressed syllables);
"and (me and fiw and three and
four and jive." Each of die five units
consists of an unstressed syllabic followed by a stressed syllable (iambic
foot):

I found / a dimp / led spi / dcr, fat / and white.

Listen to Longfellow’s description of the original American forest;

This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks.
— IfENRY WADSWORTH LOWT FELLOW. "Evangeline”

Read aloud, this reveals itself to have six beats {six stressed syllables):
“one and a mu and a three and ii sfour and a five and a six and,” Each foot
(except the last, which has shed one unstressed syllable) consists of a
stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables (dactylic foot):
 598 ApFi N in x

This is the / forest prim / eval // the / murmuring / pines. and

the / hemlocks.

These rising and falling feet occur in lines of different widths.

We have seen, above, trimeter lines ("Ah Sun-flower”) ami tetrameter
lines (“The Tyger"}, Wc have seen pentameter lints (“Design") and
hexameter lines (“Evangeline”), A full description of a line describes its
rhythm and then its width. “Ah Sun-flower" is written in a napes tic tri¬
meter. “The ryger" is Written in trochaic tetrameter. "Design" is
written in iambic pentameter, “Fvangeline” is written in dactylic hex
a meter.
ft is less important that you know these names than that you
recognize a rhythm by ear. Practice tapping out the rhythms above until
they become familiar. Counting out the rhythm and length of a line is
called scanning it.
It ss often difficult, even impossible, to scan a single line taken by
itself. One line can be scanned two or more ways, depending on the
intonation we give it- The rule of thumb is to look at the other lines
matching it. [f they are all five heat lines, then the dubious line is
probably a five-beat line, too, tint do not allow the prevailing rhythm,
when you read a line aloud, to ride roughshod over the sense; the sense
will usually tell you what syllables ought to be stressed,
In all rhythms, some feet are irregular, so that the cadence does not
become intolerably inflexible. Feet ot comparable length can freely sub¬
stitute for each other. Shakespeare often begins one of his iambic (”')
lines with an initial rrochaic foot ('") to give energy to the line:

Why is / my verse / so bar / ren of / new pride:

Each of these metrical schemes is merely a gtid underlying a line. The

lino itself must, by irs intonation pattern, indicate the grid (or you cannot
know what the basic rhythm is supposed to be), but tt Can depart from
the grid in various ways - by substituting a different foot, by having a
tight foot called the pyrrhtc (' ') for unimportant words, or a heavy foot
called the spondee (") for Important words, and so on. What you are
asked to do in scanning the line is to see the underly ing grid, first of all,
and then to note any departures from it- Poets enjoy varying their
rhythms to accord with dramatic emphasis, tone of voice, at id so ott.
They also enjoy breaking their lines with a pause in the middle, which
we call a caesura and represent with a double slash. An iambic pentameter
line can be broken one or more times:

..
h
 PROSODY 599

1 grant Inever saw a goddess go;

My mistress* // when she walks, f l treads on the ground.
And yeti (f by heaven, // 1 think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare,
— SHAKESPEARE, Jnimet ] JO

Rj )YMES AMD STANZA-FORMS

Not all counted poetry is written in rhymes. But because lyric
begin as song (the name “lyric” conies from "lyre"}, simple rhyming
stanza- forms such as those found in the ballad or the hymn became
important in the English tradition. Gradually, as oral poetry gave Way TO
printed poetry (meant to If read rather than sung), stanza -forms of
considerable complexity arose. 1 1ere are some of the most common
rhyming forms in English. When rhyming units are separated by white
space, they are called stanzas.
1, A pair of rhyming lines is called i outfit I Couplets are fre¬
quently run together, not separated as stanzas:

While the plowman near ar hand,

Whistles o’er the furrowed land.
And the milkmaid sihgeth blithe,
And the mower whets Isis scythe,
And every shepherd tells his tale,
Under the hawthorn in the dale.
— JOHN Ml [.TON, H,L’ALlegm”

These couplets are written in trochaic tetrameter. The rhyme scheme of

these lines is indicated thus: aahbcc. Thar is, because the first two lines
rhyme (“hand, ' "land’ ), they can be indicated by RHT, and because the
next two rhyme, they can be indicated by bb. We indicate the rhyme
scheme by these abbreviated lowercase italicized letters.
The herou toupki is an iambic pentameter couplet that is end
stopped (marked by: a heavy pause after the second line of the: couplet),
and frequently pointed and witty, Alexander Pope and |ohn Dryden
used it with brio:

Meanwhile, declining from the noon of [lay,

The SLLLI obliquely shoots his burning ray;
The hungry judges soon the sentence sign.
Ami wretches hang that jurymen may dine,
- ALEXANDER PORE, "The Rape ofihe Lock”
 600 APPENDIX

2. A sianza of three lines is called a renter:

Light the first light ot evening, a> in a room

In which svc sit, and for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.
"Finn]
— WAUAI E STEVENS,
SotlltKJliy nf [hr Entsruir Paramour"

{(TTJ tuna is a form of pentameter tercet with interlinked rhymes {aim beb
idt and so on) used by Dante in the DiVttir Conifdjy It is difficult to carry'
off in English, chough Shelley used it foi his "Ode to the West Wind."
Many poets intend an allusion to 1 )anle when they use loosely rhymed
pentameter tercets,
3, A stanza of four lines is called a quatrain, The commonest
quatrain is the ballad Hanza, m which the first and third lines ate un-
rhy med and have tour heats, while the second and fourth lines rhyme
and have three beats:

It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
"By thy king grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?”
"
— SAMUtL tAVLOfc COL.EJUUGE,
T he Rome of the Ancient Mornier"

Some tetrameter quatrains are rhymed abba, like those in Shakespeare's

"The Phoenix am! the Turtle" and T ennyson's "in Memoriam." I iris
stanza is generally referred to as the "lit Mematiam" stanza;

King out, wild hells, to the wild sky,

The flying cloud, tSie irosty light,
The year is dying in the night;
Ring tint, wild hells, and let him die,
The heroic quatrain is an iambic pentameter quatrain, rhyming etbab:

l know my life's a pain and but a span:

I know my sense is mock’d with everything;
Anti, to Conclude, I know myself a man.
Which is a proud uld s et a wretched thing.
— sin 1 1 n iN IJAVIFS. "Nosce Tcifsiml"
4 A stanza ot six lines is sometimes called a TIJOITH {its French
name) o; a fesirt. The commonest ilsdn rhyme-form is ahabUti A pen-
fa
 PtOSODV 601

rameter quatrain rhyming this, way is called the “Vertus and Adonis' '
stanza, from the poem of that name by Shakespeate:

Look how a bird lies tangled in J net,

So fasc'nd in het arms Adonis ties,
Pure shame and awed resistance made him fret,
Winch bred more beauty in his, angry eyes.
Rain added to a river that is rank
Perforce will force it overflow the bank.

5. The only common seven line stanza is nine royal (so cal let]
because King James I used it) iambic pentameter rhyming ababba.
This is the meter oi many long poems on high themes Chaucer's —
Troiius and Criscyde, for instance. Spenser uses it for lus “Four Hymns":

For love is a celestial harmony

Of likely hearts composed ot stars' consent,
Which join together in sweet sympathy,
To work each other’s joy and true content,
Which they have harbored since their first descent
Oui of their heavenly .bo wets, where they did see

—
And knots1 each other here beloved to be,
rij.StUNO Sl'ILNSEBt, "Hv run to Love"

6. The best-known eight- line form is oltava rim a iambic pen —

tame ter rhyming dArthikr. The final couplet can give [Ids stanza epi¬
grammatic point, and liyron used it with notable wit in his Jong poem
Duti Jiutn. Its greatest modem practitioner has been W. U. Yeats:

Labour is blossoming or dancing where

The body is not bruised tu pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-evcd wisdom out of midnight oil.
tl chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leal, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How ean we know the dancer from the dance?
— vs n vrAtS, "Amung School Children"

7. The best-known nine-line form is the S/imrcn'mi j'Mnfn (so

called because Spenser used it in The 1‘acric Qnceiif). Keats adopted it for
"The Eve of Si, \gnes All irs lines are pentameter, except die last,
"

winch is a hexameter. It rhymes in a closely linked way; abahbthfc.

602 APPt N n t X

St. Agnes’ tve

— Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-coid;
The hare 1Sniped trembling through the frozen grass.
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
NUT nb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seemed caking flight for heaven, without a death,

—
Mast the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith
‘fLiHN HEAT'S.j “The Fvc of Sr. Agtitfs"

There are many unnamed s tan ita -forms. some of them common
ones. For instance, an extra line or two is often added to the ballad
stanza, to make a five- or six-line stanza. Ora refrain (a line repeated after
every stanza) can be added to lengthen the ballad quatrain.

TYPES OF RHYMING POEMS

1. The sonnet is a fourteen-line pentameter poem. There are two
chief forms:
The halitw fPetrardian ) Sonnet consists of an octave and a sestet.
Jhere are embraced rhymes m the octave (the first eight lines): abbaabint
The sestet of a Petrarchan sonnet can rhyme in several different ways,
but the most common arc edeede and (as below) tdtdetr,

Who Will in fairest book of Nature know

How Virtue may best lodged in beauty be,
Let him but learn of Lave to read in thee,
Stella, those fair lines which true goodness show.
There shall lie find all vices’ overthrow.
Not by rude force, but sweetest sovereignty
Of reason, from whose light those nigh thirds fly.
That inward sun in thine eyes shine th so.
And, not content to he Perfection's heir
! hyselt" dost strive all minds that way to move,
Who mark in thee what is in thee most fair.
So while thy beauty draws the heart to love,
As fast thy Virtue bends that love to good.
"But ah," Desire still cries, “give me some food."
— SIK PHILIP sinNtY, ,4imipM suit Sulk, 7]

The (SiulkespraTfcitt) sOntict Consists of three (our -line qua¬

trains, alternately rhymed (tihabfdtdrfcf), and a couplet, gg1.
 PROSODY 6(13

Lee me not 10 the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not iove
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends, with the re mover to remove.
O no, it is an ever fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand' ring bark.
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come,
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
lint bears it out even to the edge of doom.
!f this be error and upon me proved,
i never writ, nor no man ever loved.

There have been many variations on the two basic sonnet forms.
Spenser wrote sonnets that were composed of linked rhymes: cr bah bchc
fried ff. Some poets (Herbert, Yeats) have made hybrid sonnets by at¬
taching Petrarchan sestets to Shakespearean octaves, or vice versa. Oth¬
ers, like George Meredith and Stevens, have written sonnet- like poems
with thirteen or fifteen fines. The odes of Keats basically form their
stanzas by combining a Shakespearean quatrain with a Petrarchan sestet
(they vary the length of line and sometimes double a rhyme, but it is
dear that their elements come from the two sonnet traditions).
2. The fcstitiq is a pentameter poem consisting ot six stanzas of six
lines plus a three-line coda (known as the envoy or envoi). The sestina
"rhymes” on six end-words, which must be repeated in each stanza in
a controlled order, whereby the last end-word m each stanza becomes
the first end-word of the next stanza: abtdef, fabede, efabtd, itefabc, edefob,
bedefd, The envoi must employ two of the end words in each of its three
lines, A good sestina makes this difficult pattern seem natural. The sestina
is easier seen than described. Mere is one (called "Sestina") by Elizabeth
Bishop. The six end-words are “house,” "grandmother," “child,"
“stove," “almanac," and "tears." It may help to knots1 that Bishop was
raised by her grandmother, since her father was dead and her mother was
confined to an insane asylum:
September ram tails on the house.
In the failing light, die old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove.
reading the jokes train the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.
 604 APPENDIX

She thinks that her equinoctial tears

and the rain that beats on the root ot the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings nn the stove.
She cuts stm i e bread and says to the child,
It's timefor to?now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears
dance tike mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up,, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac
on its string. Lhrdlikr, the almanac
hovers half open above tile child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks tire house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.
ft Utfs to be, say's the Marvel Stove.
I 1'ftoii' what 1 know, says the almanac,
With crayons the child draws a rigid bouse
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother,
Lint secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fail down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house,
Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
Tbs’ grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.

3. Tlie t >illanefte is a French form that has been ussrd with notable
success by many modem poets, among them Theodore Koethkc,
William LmpsOn, Dylan Thomas, and llishop. A vi Handle is a poem of
five pentameter tercets rhyming dta, followed by a pentameter quatrain
rhyming a tnhi. in a villanelle, lines 1 and 3 of the first tercet arc repeated
alternately at the end of each foil owing tercet, and they close the final

h. r.
 PROSODY 60S

quatrain. Again, this is easier seen than described, atid in a good villanelle
the repetitions are made to seem natural, Here is Dylan Thomas's vil-
lanclle “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” a poem he wrote
when his father was dying:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should bum and rave at dose of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good, night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light,
Wild men who caught and sang the Sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who sec with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light,

There are many other rhymed poem-forms, such as the rondeau, the
ballade, the panloum. A poet using one of the rhymed poem- fo mis ex¬
pects the reader to recall the tradition of such forms.
4, The ode in English is usually a stanzaic poem, but it has no set
form. An ode is defined by its content: it is a poem of a lofty or sublime
sort, often using the figure of speech called apostrophe, which is an address
to some divine or quasi-divine person or thing. “0 wild West Wind,"
says Shelley; “Thou still unravished bride of quietness," says Keats ad¬
dressing the Grecian urn.

COUNTLIT VERSE THA 1 DOES NOT RHYME

The most common form of counted unrhymed verse is blank ymsc,
un rhymed iambic pentameter lines. This is the verse of Shakespeare's
plays and of Milton's epic poem, Paradise Lost-,
 606 A p p !ÿ M) rx

Thai space the evil anc abstracted stood

From his own evil, and for the time remained
Stupidly good, of enmity disarmed,
Of guile, of hate, of envy, nr revenge.

Blank verse etui also be used in a lyric, as Coleridge uses it in his ]>oeni
"Frost at Midnight”:

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,

Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or [he redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch.

Most of the unrhymed verse in English is blank verse, though poets have
also written unrhymed four-beat poems that imitate Anglo-Saxon meter.
Some poets have experimented with stanzas of unrhymed verse in im¬
itation of Greek and Latin verse (svhich did not rhyme, but depended on
a quantitative system contrasting long vowels with short vowels). ! I ere
are two stanzas of Thomas Campion’s "Rose-Cheeked Laura," an im-
i ration of the Greek meter called, after the poet fsappho, stifplb’r. The first
three lines have four beats each, the fourth line two beats:

Rdse-cheeked Laura, come,

Sing thou smoothly with thy beauty's
Silent music, either other
Sweetly gracing.
Lovely forms do flow'
From concent divinely framed:
Heavn is music, and thy beauty’s
Birth is heavenly,

Every so often a new poet will once again imitate classical unrhymed
forms,

Tree Verse
Free verse
—verse in svhich the lines ate of different widths, and
which does not rhyme in any regular ss'ay — was invented by poets who
verse. Poets like Whit¬
had been brought up on rhymed and counted
man. Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, Lowell, mid Bishop all began by
writing conventional verse Whitman was drawn to free verse because
he saw it as a primitive, "bardic" form. Li ho c wrote it in imitation of the

hi
 PHOSODV 607

French pnct Jules Laforgue. Pound wrote it in an attempt to achieve

poetic efftets he thought inhered in the Chinese ideogram. Williams and
Stevens adopted it as a way to free themselves front the hold of English
poets such as Keats. But behind their free verse there lurked always the
shadow of counted verso. Flint’s "The Love Song ofj. Alfred Fmfrock"
keeps threatening to turn into regular pentameter. Pound’s largely tree-
verse “Cantos" include counted and rhymed segments.
The history ot free verse is not yet entirely understood. The United
States was a more hospitable environment for it than England, and a
nativist wish to throw otf inherited English tonus certainly motivated
many American poets. The unit of free verse seems to be the breath:
there is a breath limit to the long line ot free verse (reached by Whitman.
and Ginsberg, to give two notable examples). The theoretical appeal of
tree verse is that it admits an element of chance; it offers .1 model not of
a teleological or providential universe hut of an aleatcr}' one. where the
casual, rather than the fated, holds sway.
Free verse must justify its reasons for breaking a line here rather
than there. It we look at a small free -verse poem, William Carlos
Williams’s "The Red Wheelbarrow,” we must ask why the lines break
where they do:

So much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed WE tii ram
water
beside the white
chickens

We might notice that in each little “stanza” the second line lias only rwo
syllables. This gives symmetry to the poem. The word “upon" literally
hangs off the word "depends," acting nut the meaning of something
which depends (Latin: ilepetukre, "to hang from") on something else.
"The red “wheel" turns into a "wheelbarrow” as we ILITJI the line Rain
turns into rainwater, in the same way. After the inorganic wheelbarrow
and rainwater, we may expect an inorganic object to follow, the word

chickens.
—
white” say “the white / fence.” Instead, the scene comes alive with

Tins very mannered little poem says chat it the eye didn't see
something inviting in the landscape (the shiny glaze the rain has put on
 608 APPENDIX

the redness ol the wheelbarrow; the composition rd the still wheelbar¬

row and the living chit kens: the contrast of red and white), there would
be nothing to write about. “So much depends” on there being some¬
thing out there to gratify and focus the eye. When we understand the
poem, we understand its line-breaks, A free -verse poem that doesn't
justify its line-breaks hardly deserves the name "poem.”

Summary
When you come across a new poem, look at the way it displays
itself' ON the page. Is it a skinny poem or a wide poem? A short poem or
a long <mc? Arc all the tines the same length, or are some shorter than
others: Does it rhyme: Does it have stanzas:
Think of the look of the poem as its body. Is it asymmetrical body
or a ragged body? A solid-looking body or an emaciated one?
As you read it aloud ami listen to its rhythms, teei what it is telling
you. Is it serious or even ponderous? Or does it move with a lilt and a
skip: Does it change its manner of walking, front indolent to hurried5
Does it manifest leisure or anxiety in its rhythms?
I It esc are questions to ask even before you begin to note J rhyme
scheme or count how many beats there ate in a line. After yon have
done the technical noticing and counting, ask yourself how these formal
features match up with the sentiments and emotions that the poem is
expressing. Do the formal features align with those sentiments, or do
they contradict them? It is always worthwhile to pay attention to the
technical work the poet has done on the external form of the poem, it
is, after all, the body the poet Iras chosen to live in tor a determined

period.
For a more complete survey of metrical forms, see Paul Fussed!,
IWtir Meier etn<i Poctie t-ami (New York: Random House. 1965; revised
1979); or 1ohn 1 1ol la rider. Rhyme’s Riaiiw (New Haven, Conn., Yale
University Press, I DA I ), For fuller definitions of terms used here, sec the
Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry und poetics, ed. Alex Preminger ct ai.
(Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1965; rpt. 1993).

L
fa
 Appendix 2, On Grammar

A familiarity with grammatical terms can help you to analyze and

to describe poetry. This appendix provides a brief review of some of the
most common JEKI useful grammatical terms.

Noun
A word that names a person, place, thing, or idea. Examples;
“Adam," "garden." “choir/* “destiny.” In short, a noun names an
essence.

Adjective
A word that tells you something about that essence. ATI adjective
modifies a noun by limiting or describing it- Examples: "the early bird.”
"a false alarm," An adjective expresses something present with nr con
netted to a noun, but not essential: "a nhii wheelbarrow" (not all wheel¬
barrows are red). Adjectives are the chief resource of descriptive
language, as when Shakespeare says (Sonnet 129) that lust is “perjur'd.
murderous, bloody, full of blame, / Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to
trust.'1 The plainness ot nouns is fleshed out by adjectives; and the
complexity of life is such that poetns need a wealth of adjectives to
describe their essential nouns,

Pronoun
A word that stands in for ,i noun. Pronouns Can be used as subjects
(nominative case, as In “On a cloud I saw a child") or as objects (ob¬
jective case, as LLI “And lie laughing said to rue"). In what follows I'll give
the objective rase in brackets after the nominative case,
The jirit-petson singular is “1“ [objective: 'W'j; the jirst-persoii
plural is “we” [“us"J.
The modem secon d person pronoun is, “you" in both the singular and
plural, nominative and objective, though in the past it was more complex.
Then, the second-person singular was “thou” ("thee”], ami rhe plural was
"ye," “Thou" was used both in familiar address and in an exalted form
of address to Clod or a monarch; over time, "you” took its place.
The third-person singular pronouns are “he" [“him"!, “she” [“her j,
and "it"; the plural is “they" ("them”].
A change in person (“]" to “you ”) or in number (“I" to “we") in
a poem is always of profound significance, since, on the general principle
- of menu, a speaker tends to continue in the same person rather than
change, unless the change is somehow provoked, In the poem "in

609
 610 APPEND IX

Memory of Eva Gone-Booth and Con Markiewics,” Yeats himself

changes significantly from I" to "we," as he finally makes common
cause with the sisters he had begun by opposing; and his reference to the
sisters changes from "one or the other" (third-person, people other than
the poet) to “you" (people he addresses) to “we" (part ofa group which
also contains the poet);

Many a time / think to seek

One or iItt other out. . . .

Dear shadows, now >t>u know it all. .,.

We the great gazebo built. . . .

A reader who misses the changes in person and number here misses the
essential drama of the poem, as the poet changes his mind about the
sisters and his relation to them.

Verb
A word that usually conveys either action (“My mother bore me in
the southern wild”) or state (“And ! am black"). Verbs may be
Unking verbs, which join two things that are equivalent (“He seem
tired”; ‘‘3 mil Income a teacher”; “Mary is a doctor”);
Transitive verbs, which take objects both direct and indirect [ ‘I
gave him the book”); or
Intransitive verbs, which do not take an object (“The buildingjWf
down”),

Verbs can appear in two voices:

Active: ”1 do this.”
Passive: “This is done to me.”
They can take on different tenses (past, present, future, and so on);
Simple present: “I sing of heaven,”
Present of habitual action: "Whenever it nrmj, I take my umbrella.”
iTisent of perpetual truth: “Water fmw'is at 2l2QF,'r
Present of stale: “1 am a lawyer.”
k
 fi R A IK M A H. fill

Present "It is raining.'’

program?;
Simple past: knew him, Horatio."
"]

Compound past; “1 have kiioN'ri him ;i long time."

Past progressive: "It was snowing, "
Pinperfect: “1 had fcnepiM him for several years before I met his wife,”
Simple future: “1 iwrH raft him tomorrow,’'
FiifjiH' perfect: “1 will hair called him by Wednesday/'

FNrifrt1 progressive: “3 rerff he telling this with a sigh."

I' hev can appear in different (statement, question, wish, and
so on):

indicative (states an assertion): ‘1 like him."

Interrogative (asks a question): "Do you ftJse him:"
Imperative (gives a command): "Do tins."
(often contrary to tact or hypothetical): "If I were fo do
this, I would be prosecuted-1"
Optative (wish): "Oh, if I could only <fi> f/rarr dune] this!"
Hortatory (enjoining something): "L>:t in fers.'- arid part."
Conditional: “I should like to come if you i mild let me.”
Poems can achieve multiple effects by changing tenses and moods as
they go along.

Adverb
A word that characterizes (limits or describes) a verb, just as an
adjective characterises a notiti. Adverbs answer the questions "‘Where?"
"How?" "Jn what manner?" "When?" “Why?" and so on. Examples:
"Till noon w. L- quietly sailed on"; “tny collar mounting firmly to my
chin." lib nec verbs, like nouns, tend to he bare tilings, the poet uses
adverbs to put a halo of circumstance around the verbs of the poem.
Verbs are also amplified by adverbial phrases "From you have I been
absent rip the spring."
 Appendix 3, On Speech Acts

There are numberless speech acts in which a lyric speaker may

engage. The list char follows is merely a sampling of common ones in
IVEC. It is always 3 good idea to name the Successive speech acts in a
poem, Dues it begin with an apology: Is that followed by a plea: Is that
followed by a claim: Is that followed by a boast: This classifying helps
you to track the emotions that structure a poem.

ACKNOWLEDGING The slackness drops again, bm now 1

know, . . .
ADDRESS Old trooper, J see your child's red crayon
pass.
ADMISSION Alas, ’tis true, 1 have gone here and there,
And nude myself a motley to the view.
APOLOGY Sweet Love of youth, forgive, if I forget
thee,
APOSTROPHE O weld West Wind'
BANISHING Hence, loathed Melancholy!
BOAST Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of ponces, shall outlive this powerful
rhyme.
CELEBRATION J celebrate myself, and sing myself
Cl AIM Mine — by
tion!
the Kight of the White Elec¬

COMMAND Irish poets, learn your trade,

Sing whatever is well made.
CONJECTURE Thou mays: be false, and yet E know it
not.
CONSOI-ATION Eear no more the heat o' the suit.
DEFINITION
DESCRIPTION
—
Kemorse is Memory awake
— —
No do Ltd, no reliqite of the sunken day
Distinguishes the West.
DIALOGUE Does the road wind uphill all the was :
Yes, to the very end,
DREAMING \ dream ot a Lcdaean body, bent
Above a sinking fire.
EXCUMAI ION What a piece of work is a man!

fill
 SPEECH Aon 613

EXHORTATION Be shelled, eyes. with double dark

And find the uncreated light.
EXPOSTULATION Up, up. my friend, and tÿuit your books!
GLNERALIZA HON All this die world well knows, yet none
knows well
To slum the heaven that leads men to this
hell.
IMPRECATION For God's sake hold your tongue, and let
me love.
INSTRUCTION He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy,
INVITATION Come live with me and be my love.
INVOCATION But come, thou goddess fait and free.
LAMENT Alas! 1 have nor hope nor health.
NARRATION
PRESENT It is an ancient Mariner
And he sioppeth one of three.
PAS r 1 wandered lonely as a cloud.
HABITUAL For oft, when on my couch I lie , , ,
They dash upon that inward eve.
HfSTORICAl Calvert and Wilson, l Hake and ("da tide,
Prepared a peace for the people of God.
OATH [ will not harm her, by all saints I swear,
Pl_EA Say, may I be for aye thy vassal blest'
PRAYER Mine, O thou Lord of life, send my roots
nin,

PROPHECY Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to

thee.
QUESTION Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
REBUTTAL Love’s not Time’s fool.
REMINISCENCE I Was thy neighbor Once, thou rugged Pile!
REQUEST Permit me voyage, lover, into your hands
RESOLVE Despair [ will not.

RETRACTION But I run by her death (which word

wrongs her) , , ,
614 APPENDIX

RHETORICAI O chestnut-treeT great-rooted blossom er,

QUESTION Arc you the leal, the blossom, or the bole?
StOHNINti How vainly men themselves amaze
To win the palm, the oak, the bays,
SELF -BLAME 1 see
The lost are like this* and their scourge to
be
As [ am mine, their sweating selves, but
worse.
SELF- Alas, but Morrison fell young:
CORRECTION He never fell, thou fall’st, my toungue.
He stood, a soldier to the last right end.
SELF- I am the mower Damon.
FRFSLNI ATION

SPEEL No exorcise r ha mi thee!

Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
SUPPOSITION Had we but world enough, and time.
SURMISE I cannot see what flowers are at my
feet . a ,
tit, in embalmed darkness, guess each
sweet.
Vow Yes, 1 will be thy priest,

i
 Appendix 4, On Rhetorical L>eviees
These devices, sometimes called “figures of speech," appear in all
speed 1 and writing (voia can find them in advertising, political spec- dies,
and newspapers, as well as in essays, letters, and poems). It helps, if you
wish Lo give a bnct desen ption of what a writer is doing at a given
moment, to know some of these shorthand terms for frequent practices,

ALTERNATIVE A man that looks on glass,

OR.rJHR.iNO On it may stay his eye,
Or, if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And then the heaven espy.
ANALOGY No more be grieved at that which thou
( comparison of A hast done:
and Bf Roses have thorns, and silver fountains
mud.
ANAPHORA All shuffle there, all cough in ink,
(repetition of opening All wear the carpet with their shoes,
word) All think what other people think;
Ail know the man their neighbor knows.
ANTICLIMAX In silk, in crepes, in Garters, and in rags.
ANTITHESIS For 1 have sworn thee fair, and thought
(opposition of A thee bright.
and B) Who an as dark as hell, as black as night.
APPOSITION The Mind of Man,
('list of tiiffe re nt for¬ My haunt, and the mam region of my
mulations of the song.
Mine thing)

CATALOGUE The leaden-eyed shark, the walrus, the

turtle, the hairy sea-leopard.
CHIASMUS by brooks Loo broad fur leaping
(an X'like arrangeÿ The lightfoot boys are laid;
went) The ruse-11 pt girls are sleeping
lit fields where ruses fade.
|brooks : boys :: girls : fields|
HIERARCHICAL Such sweet neglect more taketh me
OROERJNti Than all tJT adulteries of art.
METAPHOR Church bells beyond the star1, heard, the
(cotnputrison uiilsaut soul's blood,
"like" w "as") The land of spices: sonic thing understood.

MS
616 A !' M >J ]) rx

METONYMY Lour beating wings, two beaks, a swirling

(assemblage by parti) mass.
ONOMATOPOEIA And murmuring of innumerable bees.
I'jfwd'fiifrin- sound)

PARADOX There is in God, some say.

{union of dissimilar A deep but dazzling darkness.
qualifies)
PARALLELISM These are thy ’.vo Eiders, Lord nf Power . ..
1 hese are thy wonders, Lord of Love.
PERIPHRASIS The Peer now spreads the glittering forfeit
{tirtumloeutian} wide
|= opens scbsorsJ
PERSONIFICATION Love is swift ot toot.
'ii?r abstraction made Love's a man of war.
irito a person)
PUN Therefore i he with her. and she with me,
{a play isn two And in our faults by lies we flattered be.
meanings of one
word)
QUOTATION My flesh began unto my send in pain,
‘Sicknesses cleave my hones."
SIMILE Like as the waves make toward the peb¬
(comparison irhJj bled shore,
hike” or "as”) So do our minutes hasten to their end,
SYNECDOCHE I >iadems — drop — and Doges — sumcn
(use of the part far der.
the whole)
ZEUGMA Or stain ht'r honor, or her new brocade.
flirt; dissimilar ob¬
jects of same I vrb)
 Appendix 5* On Lyric Subgcnres

Tiiis is a summary ot the kinds ot poems that lyric poets return to

most frequently. It is convenient to be able to name a poem by its kind.
because you can then compare it to others of the same kind,

ADDRESS TO THE I thee, take care, that tak'st niy book.

REAPER
BALIJVD There lived a wife at Usher’s well,
And a wealthy wife was she;
She had three stout and stalwart sons.
And sent them o’er the sea.
CHILD’S POEM "The kittle black boy1’ (Blake)
RAWN POEM Get up! get up for shame! the blooming
(aubetde) morn
Upon her wings presents the god unshorn.
DEATHBED POEM
Di .BATE- POEM
1 heard a Fly buzz
Body
— when 1 died —
O who shall me deliver whole
From bonds of this tyrannic soul? . ..
SUH/
What magic could me thus confine
Within another's grief to pine?
ECHO-POEM Then tell me, what is that supreme de¬
light? Light.
Light to the mind, what shall the will en¬
joy? joy.
EKPHRASIS "Ode on a Grecian Uni" (Keats)
(poCn t tvi <iri nil
object)
ELEGY Felix Randal the farrier, O is he dead
then, my duty all ended?
EMBLEM-POEM "'I he Sack Rose” (Blake)
(dWfjjorrVaf object)
EPIGRAM I am his Highness’ dog at Kew:
(shod, pointed And pray, good sir. whose dog are you?
poem;
EPITAPH Underneath this none doth lie
All of beauty that could die..

fi!7
618 APPENDIX

EPITHALAMION And evermore they Hymen Hymen sing,

(uvdding song) Tli ai al t lie woods, them answer and tbeyr
eccho ring,
HYMN Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
Lift up your gates and sing,
Hosanna in the highest . . .
INSCRIPTION I the poet William Yeats , , .
Restored this tower for my wife (ieorge:
And may these characters remain
When all is ruin once again,
LETTER This is my letter to the world
That never wrote to me.
LOVER’S COM¬ And wilt thou leave me thus?
PLAINT

LULLABY Lull ay, lultay, thou tiny child.

MUSE-POEM "The Solitary Reaper" (Wordsworth)
NOCTURNE 'Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s.
PASTORAL The shepherds’ swains shall dance and sing
(rustic poem) For thy delight each May morning.
POLITICAL POEM “Easter. 1916" (Yeats)
PRAISE- POEM Shall 1 compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
QUEST-POEM “The Pilgrimage" (Herbert)
RELIGIOUS POEM 1 saw eternity the other night.
ROMANCE "The Eve of St. Agnes" (Keats)
(fairy-tale poem)
SEASONAL POEM Sumer is icumcn in,
Lhudc sing cucctil
SELL-REFLEXIVE ! smg of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and
POEM bowers.
SHAPED POEM "Easter Wings" (Herbert)
SONG It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey and a ho and a hey iioniiy
no . . .
TWIN POEMS "The Lamb" and “The I vger" (Blake)
VALEDICTION Adieu, farewell earth's bliss,
 LvR.lt SutiOENKTS &19

VARIATIONS ON “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Ulack-

A THEME bird" (Stevens)

There are many other such that one could name: the bifd poem, the
edogue (a dialogue of shepherds), the georgk (a poem on farming), the
testament (a poem making a wilt), the conversation poem (a poem of a
middle, or familiar, style recounting a conversation among friends), and
so on. The essential thing is to realize that almost any poem is a repeat
of a preceding genre, perhaps an answer to it, perhaps a revision of it.
Thinking “What kind of a lyric is this?” makes you more aware of its
place in a genre tradition, and of its response to that tradition,
.Aoknoss'ledguLems (timtitiued from p JS-}
A R. Ammons, "Fairer Morning" from A Coast oj Tires by A. R AmtUO-tii,
Copyright © 3 S>H I hv A R. Ammons. Reprinted by permission of W . W.
Norton A Company, Inc. "TJIL- City Limits" copyright © 1971 by A R.
Ammoni, from “J Vre Hrlvetrd Poems, Expanded Edition by A. it. Ainniws,
Reprinted by permission ot W. W. Norton A; Company, hie.
John Ashbery, "Paradoxes and Oxymorons" from $hadoir Train 'New York: Vi
king, Penguin, 1 'v1 K I j Copyright © IPSO. 3991 by John Ashbery '‘Stmcr
Musicians from / Jiudrehnat Day* 'New Yurk: Viking Pencil in, 197.- 1 Copy¬
right © 1975, 1976, 1977 by John Ashbery'. “The Painter" from Sump Tree:
{New Haven: Yile University Press, 1956). Copyright © 1956 by John
Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borthlfdt, Inc. lor the .mthnr.
W. II. Auden, “As 1 Walked Out One Evening" and 'Miasee des Ilea us Arts" from
1

IR If. Auden: Collected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson. Copyright 19-P1

and renewed 19<jH by W. H. Auden. Reprinted by pemussinn of Faber and
Faber Limited.
John Berryman, Dream Songs 4. 46, 3b-! and “Henry hats in de bar A svas
odd" from The Dream .Sutiys © [959, 1962, 1964. 1965. 1966. 1967. 1 96b.
1969 bv John Berryman, Reprinted wit!) permission of Farrar, liLraub A
Giroux, Inc.
Frank Uidart, “To My Father" arid “Ellen Weil" from Jrr rJpf Weilent f_,"n Heeled
Perm.- 1967-1990 (Farrar. Istraus & Giroux. Inc., 19911). Reprinted with
permission of Farrar. Straus A Giroux, Inc.
Elirabeth Hi shop, "At the Fish bouses," “SrariL, lanuary 1, 1502," 1‘Crusoe in
England, ’ “Clue Arl. "Poem," Sestina, and “The Fish [rum hlieabelh
‘

Bishop: The Complete Poems 1927-1979® 1979, 19H3 by Alice Helen Metb-
fesse!. Reprinted with permission of Farrar, Straus A Giroux, Inc.
Michael Hlumeiitlul, “A Mirrilge' Ironi Agetinft ftnjiF,ui;v bv Michael ISlumenth.ii.
Copyright © 19H-7 by Michael Hiunientbal. Used by permission ol Viking
Penguin, a division of Penguin Hunks USA, Inc. "Wishful Thinking" from
JArys lie Would Rather Kinftir (Viking Penguin, 19S4). Reprinted by pemus-
snan of the author.
Anne Uradstreet, “A Letter In Her Husband from Poems of Amte BnidstrCet. Copy¬
right © 1969 by Dover Publications, Inc.
Lucie brock-lirtiido, “Carroty um re" from The Afaslrt Letters bv Lucie llrock-
Broidti Copynghl © 1995 by Lutie linoek-tiroido. Repruitetl by permission
of Allred A Knopf InC. "Domestic Mysticism" front A Ifnn(rr bs Lucie
Licoch-Umido. Cnpynght S i9bb by Lucie Brock -Bmido. Repnnted by
permission of Allied A Knupl Inc.
Gwendolyn Brooks , "Kitchenette building." "The bean Eatery," "The Mother,'
and "We Real Cool" Irosu BI'LCIIJ. Copyright© 1991 by Gwendolyn brooks
Reprinted by permission pi [he poet.
I.orna Dec Cervantes, “Refugee Ship," reprinted with permission from the pub¬
lisher of A Deiode oj Hispanic Literatim-: An Rlpmiii'Tjrcry Anthology{Ane Publico
Press- University of Houston, L VR2}. “Poem for the Young White Man Who
Asked Me Ho" I. An Intelligent Well-Read Person Could Believe in rh<-
War Between Race-'' md “Poctiia para Lot Caliltmiias Muertos” from Em-
plumadti, by I oni.i Dee Cervantes., © 199.1. Reprinted by permission of rhe
Uri ventty of Pittsburgh Press,
Marilyn C bin, ' 'Altar" and ' Autumn leaves," rirst published in The Phoenix Com,
the Totract Empty hy Marilyn Chin (Milkweed Editions, 1994). Copyright ©
1994 by Marilyn Reprinted by permission front Milkweed Editions.

620
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 621

Amy Qampitt. "A Procession at Candlemas" from The Kiuÿfifherby Amy Clampiti
Copyright © 19H3 by Ailiy Clarnpitt Reprinted by permission of Alfred A
Knopf Inc.
Henri Cole, “40 Days and 4(1 Nights" from The Look tf Thbigs by Henri Cole.
Copyright © 1994 by Henri Cole Reprinted by permission oi Allred A
Knopf Inc,
H.irt Crane, ''Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge'' and [ fie Broken Tower" from Ctuft-
"

plub: Poems <>i I/.irt Ciuiie edited by Marc Simon. Copyright 1953, © 1958,
1966 by Live-right Publishing Corporation. Copyright © 1 986 by Marc Si¬
mon. Reprinted by permission ofLiveright Publishing Corporation
Robert Creeley, "A Marriage11 from l Ire Collected Poems of WOJNTT Mr)1, Univer¬
sity of California Prow. 1982. Reprinted by permission of the University of
California Press
Countec Cullen, "Heritage" and “Incident" from Or Tint I Stand, 1925. Re¬
printed by permission of the Ar.iistid Research Center. Copyright © The
Amistid Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans, Luulsiana. Ad¬
ministered byJQKR Associates, Ness- York. Nov York.
E F. Cummings, "Anyone lived ill 1 pretts floss town." “in just-." "may E feel said
he, and “r-p-0-p-!l-e-i-S—a-g-r 'are reprtilted tnnil Complete PtHMSl 190-4—
1962 by t. E. Cummings, edited by George J h mi age. by permission of
Live right Publishing Corporation. Copyright © 1923, 1935, 194' l, 1951,
1%3, 19G8', 1991 by the I rustces (or rbe E. E. Cummings Trust. Copyright
© 1976, I9"fi by George Janies Fitmage,
Emily Dickinson, '"A narrow fellow in the grass," "After great pain, ,L fismiil feeling
comes," ''Because 1 could not stop [or death ," "[ like a look ot Agony.
"Mv hie had stood .1 Loaded Curt— ," "Murk Madness is divinest

Sense— "Success is counted sweetest," "Wild Nights — Wild Nights!,"

"1 beard a Fly f mu — when I died," “I'm Nobody! Who are you?," "Safe
m their alabaster chambers" (1ÿ9 and 1861 version:!)., “'I 'he Heart asks
Pleasure — — fust —
“The Urain —
is wider titan the Sky “Tlie Sou]
selects her own Society." end "There's ,i certain Slant of Light" used by
permission of the Publishers and Trustees of Amherst College from The Ru'rrrs
of Emily Dickms-.m. Thomas H Johnson, cd . Cambridge, MA: fhe Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951 , 1955, 1979, 1983 hy
the President and Fellows of 1 larva rd College. All rights reserved. Also from
77jd' (Complete Poems
of Emit)' Did'InuM edited by Thomas H, Johnson. Copy¬
right 1929 by Martha Liielriiisoii ULJILLILI: copy right © renewed 1957 bv
Mary L. Harnpson. By permission ui Lillie, Brown and Company.
Rita Dove, "Adolescence — II," "I lusting." "Parsley," and "Wingtbm Lake from
Selected /Wnis by Rita Dove {Random House), copyright © 1993 by Rita
'

Dove, Reprinted hy permission of the author, “Flash Cards" from Lfr.ni-

,Votes by Rita Dove, Copyright © 1989 by Rita Dove Reprinted by per¬
mission of the author and W, W Norton A Company, Inc.
I . S. Eliot. "Marina," "Preludes," "Sweeney Among the Nightingales," and "The
Lovsr Song ufj Allied Prufroek" from Collated Poems 1909 \ 962 by T S
Eiiot, copyright © 19fi3 Reprinted by permission ut Faber and Faber Limited
Louise Hedrick, “The Strange People," “[ Was Sleeping Where tlie Black Oak-.
Move.” and 'Wi indigo" from jadtlfgjht b\ Louise Erdnch. Copyright © LEW
by Louise ErdneSi. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Co.. Eric
 / I 0 > 77
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s
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f i r *|
* n i;i11 ii i•= j-f i d
i i x|: = M
,
? 9 j f = i ? r,|
* * Uj
l H\ \ jf -«
- *5
sVsvth '/e nÿs.|sii
n rs p 1
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PIff Hi If}?!
?JJS!fiffl«}li45i !! fili Ilf f i fSpflfi
PH P|I3!fi®f
rif»(Pr!Pl$ Ills! Jill!} i*lfi||iE!iiirflE!l
fiimii im* mu iiiiif mil
}fir|;J| MfijRjJ ifpi JIPl? fEillifl'iHl H«fj
rrt
m\ K fin tifi mm e§
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 62 J

19X7. Copyright © 199(1, Reprinted with permission of Farrar, Straus A

Giroux, Inc.
Garrett Kaom Hongo, ' The Hongo Stone" from Ye-fW Light ©]9b2 by Garrett
Kaon* Hongo, Weskyan University Press by pertnfcaon of the University
Press, of New England.
A. E. Housman, "Loveliest of Trees” and '‘With Rue My Heart is Laden'" from The
CWlrrtnJ Poems of A. 11. JfntuiHflFr. Copyright 1939, 1940 by Holt, Rinehart,
and Winston, Inc. Copyright © 1967 by Robert E. Symons. Reprinted by
permission of Henry Holt and Co., Inc,
Langston Hughes, '"Genius Child.” '"Harlem.” "High to Low," "], Ttio," " Me
and the Mute." "’ Suicide's Note," "The Weary Mues." "Theme for English
U," and World War H” from Gu/ktfrd RVFJHJ by Langston Hughes. Copy¬
,l

right © 1994 by the Estate of Lanjpton Hughes. Reprinted by permission of

Alfred A Knopf Inc.
Randall Jarrell, "The Heath of the ball Turret Gunner'" from The Complete RsfrfU
by Rand all Jarrell. Copyright © 1945 and renewal copyright by Mrs. Randall
Jarrell. Reprinted with permission of Fartar. Straus & Giroux, Inc.
Rohinson Jeffers, '"Shine, Perishing Republic" from SeteeteJ Rwfry by- Robinson
Jeffers. Copyright 1925 and renewed 1953 by Robinson jefFeis. Reprinted by
permission of Alfred A Knopf Inc
Etheridge Kniglu, "LA Poem for Myself’ from Pee mrfrom Prison (Broadside Press ©
1966), Reprinted by permission of Broadside Press,
Kenneth Koch, "Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams" from Thank
VCFF and Other Poems © 1962. Reprinted by permission nf the author.
Yusef Komunyakaa, "'Boat People” and '"Fating It" from Dien Qri Dent © I9HK by
Yuself Komunyakaa, "My Father's Lovefettens” from .llagrr City © 1992 by
YuseLf Komunyakaa, Wesleyan University Press by permission of the Uni¬
versity Press of New England.
Philip Larkin. “High Windows,” “Mr. Bksney,” “Talking in Bed," and "'This lie
the Verse” from Philip Lithin: Cotleeled Poems, edited by Anthony Thwaite,
Copyright© 19H9, "Reasons for Attendance"’ by Philip Larkin is reprinted
from The Lew Dmwif by permission of The Marvell Press, England.
D. H. Lawrence, Bavarian Gentians’1' and "The English Arc So Nice!” by D. H,
11

Lawrence, from Thd1 Ciujiyfs-rc ROCJIU of D. id. Dnnrettee bv 13, H. LawretlCC,

edited by V. de Sola Pintu & F. W. Roberts. Copyright © 1964. 1971 by
Angelo Ravagli and C. M. Weekley, Executors of the Estate of Frieda Law¬
rence Ravagh. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin
books U5A, Inc.
Li-Young Lee, "The interrogation" copyright © 1990 by Li -Young Lee. Re¬
printed from The City I'FI iiTiirir I Dine Viw, by Li- Young Lee, with the
permission of UOA Editions. Ltd., 92 Park Avc.. Unockport, NY, 14420.
Denise Levertov, "The Ache of Marriage" and "Q Taste and Sec" from lÿcnis
1960-1967. Copyright © 1966, 1964 by Denise Levertov, Reprinted bv
permission of New Directions Publishing Coip.
Audrc Lorde, "Hanging Fire" from TV Bfatlt L'FFFuFrrt by Andre Lords. Copyright
© I9TK by Audie Lorde. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton Si
Company, Inc.
Robert Lowell, "Epilogue'' from Day hy Duy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977) "For
the Union Dead" troifi fvr FIFC f Yuorj Dead (Farrar, Straus it Giroux,
1964),"The March 1" from Hisletry ( Farrar, Straus &ÿ Giroux, 1973)."Sailing
f>24 Ac K N o IT L i-: r> o M J. N r s

Home from Rapallo" and "Skunk Hour" from Lift Sunlit}, Copyright ©
! 95*, 1959 by Robert Lowell, kcncwal cufiyrtÿhi © 19*17 bv Ha-met Low¬
ell. Reprinted by permission of KjiraT. Straus S; Giroux Sue.
Archibald MacLeitb, *‘Aw Iron] Collttled PotmS 1 9 17- 1 <ig2 by Archibald

MacLeish. Copyright © I9S5 by The Estate of Archibald Macl.eirh. Re-

primed bv permission of Houghton MlfHill Co. Atl rights reserved.
James Merrill, “An Upward Look" front .1 ,S<N fremiti ol Sain by James Merrill.
Copyright © 1995 by James Merrill. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A.
Knopf tnc. ‘"[ fie Broken Home'1 from Selettfd Poems: I946-19&S by James
Merrill. Copyright © 1995 by James Merrill. Reprinted by permission of
Alfred A Knopf Inc.

.....
ft S. Mei-wiut, "bo: i Coining Exriiietion," "hot the Anniversary of My Death"
and [ he Asians Dying" from The Lien © 1967 by ft1 5. Merwm. Reprimed
11

by permission of Georges Borehardf, Inc.

Marianne Moore, Poetry"
Lite Steeple -Jack" "To a Snail" and “To a Steam¬
roller;" Reprinted with the permission of Simon A Schuster from VTif Col¬
lected Aiinii oj .1 Lin'nriiif AILKHT. Copyright © ]933 by Marianne Moore,
renewed 1963 by Marianne Moore and T. S. Eliot.
Thylias Moss, '"Lunch Counter Freedom" horn Small CJ-.’m,5r<;y;rrjLuis . Copyright ©
1 9d3, 1 9cJ(i, 1991. 1 993 by Thyliis Moss, hirst published by The Eeco Press
in 1993.
David Mura, “An Argument: tin 1942” front After 111 LilSf Orrr ifvty (E. P.
Dutton) © 19S9. Reprinted by permission of [lie author.
Frank 0"hfjra, "Ave Marta’ from iht Seletted Poems of Pmtk O’Hara © 1974.
Reprinted by permission of City Lights. "Why J Ain Not j Painter1’ from
Collated iKierm bv Frank O'Hara. Copyright © 1958 by Maureen Gunville-
Smich, Admin Strains of the Estate of Frank O'Hara. Reprinted by permis¬
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Simon J. Ortiz, "Lend m lire River” from Geitigjor ifa Rain © 1976. Reprinted by
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Wilfred Owen, "Anthem for Doomed Youth," “Duke Ft Decorum Esc.” and
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Car' Phillips, "Africa Says" and "Passing1' from In llit Bbotlby Carl Phillips Copy¬
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Sylvia Math, “Daddy.” "Edge," "Lady Lazarus,” “Morning Song," and "The
Applicant" from -InrFby Sylvij Hath Copyright © 19*3 by Ted Hughes,
Copyright renewed. Reprinted liy permission of HarperCo-ilins Publisher
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[he Ifudsoa /frivetr1. Reprinted by permission of HaipnCnllins Publisher, Inc.
and Faber iv F.ibcr Limited.
Ezra Pound. "In .1 3[a tun r: of llte Metro," "The Carden," a mi "The River Mei
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Reprinted by permission Ol New Direction Publishing A 1 urp .
Henry Reed, “ I he Naming u I" Farts" is refinmed from fimry RerJ > Collected ftoirtf,
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J,
 ...
A l KMIWIHICMI MS 62,5

Adrienne Rich, "Ikving inm (Lie Wreck." "Mother-ill Lj'V.” '' N cf e« H i ;s oft it' ."
“Prospective Ji Li i Ei igi mis Flense Note, Snapshots of a Danghw'i m I aw."
and “1 lie Middle-Aged" reprinted ft ora GoJlnriff# EmSy Putins 1959- I9"ilby
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Alberto Rios, "Teodoro Limas Rn Kisses' and "Mi Ahut'lu’ from Icvifara Lima*
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by permission of W. W Noft cm A Company, Inc
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Cory." Reprinted w-Lth the permission of Simon A SchiwtcT from 1'h? Col-
lffted Poems of Ftf word Ati\n$tm Robinson Copyright © 1925 by Edward
Arlington Robinson, renewed 1953 by Rugh Ntvjsor nod Barbara R. Mult.
fheodore Koethke, "Mv Papa's Waltz” copvright 1942 by L feint Magazines Inc
"The Waking” copyrighi 195.3 by Theodore Rnethke "Elegy for jane,”
copyright 195; ' by Theondore Roethke. Poems from Tire Cpffn red R ems oj
Theodor? Rorthke by Theodore Roelhke. Used by permission or Doubleday,
a division of HznlZtll L3oubJediy 13eLI I'liblitiiiiiL; Croup, I no,
Carl Sandburg, ‘' t ifiis " from Cilrrt/lltil'frJ by Cad Sandburg, Copy right 19 1 H by
Holt, Rinehart St Winston. Enc. and renewed 1946 hy Cad Sandburg. Re¬
printed by permission ofH.ircoun Brace & Company
Anne Sexton, “Her KindT' from To Bedivt) .in if Pori llity Rtf; Copyright © 1969
by Anne Swtton, renewed ! OJAH by Linda C. Sexton Reprinted by peniih
sion of Houghton Mitflin Co All rights reserved "Snow White and tils'
Seven ]}tvarfs from Trarrr/enpuJi'oru. Copyright © 1 97 1 hy Aline Sexton,
Reprinted hv pemiiittori EI! I Knighton Mifflin Co. All rights reserved.
Leslie MannOn $ilko, ‘Enver to (he Pacific," Copyright© I9HI by Leslie fvt.imion
'

Sillco, published by Se.Hver Llooks, Ness York. Ness York.

Charles Simk, "Charon's Cosmology" from CAdreuj's Cirr-medcÿy, copyright © 1977
by Charles Simic. "Fori" from DiAniriii/lirrif ffrr fsilt'nte, copyright © 1971 bv
Charles Siinic Reprinted by permission ofGeorgg Braziller. Irte jLOR1 1 iou-
plc’rfroin Weather Einrwoftfit I hoftio ond the infinity © 19143. Reprinted vuth
tlie permission of Station Hill Press
Daw.1 Smith, "tin a Field Tnp .IE Fredericksburg" Hiud "Tile Spnng I'ortn" ©
!97 I 7(i Hv i3,is-e Smith. Used with the pern ii<s inn of die author and of the
University til Illinois LJresv
Stevie Smith, “Not W-LVifig but Urow nmg’ and "Pretty" I nun Colheled Arm.' :-t
S'-. Sr?nrl;, (. opyrigbt © 1972 hi Stevie Smith. Reprinted by permission
New Directions Publishing A hi rp
Gary Snyder. "Axe Handles," "I low Poetry Comes TO Mr." and “Riprap" from
.\';» IVUTHU1; .Wrr And S fleeted Poems hv Clary Snyder Copvright © 1992 by
Gary Snyder. Repri tiled In pc mussion ct Pantheon [ioi>ks. a division of
Random House, lue.
Wallace Steven*. "Anecdote ofihejiit "Sunday Mumni;.:," I he Emperor isi he
"
"

Cream," " Tin- RIL-.I of Order at Key Wot," "The Planet on the Tahle,"
"The Snow Man," .in J "Thirteen Ways of Looking at i lfl.it kb i id" from
CL1Tried ftieinj by W.ul.it e Stevens-, f opyrighr 1923 .ÿ 11 til renewetl 1931 by
W.ill.Kt' Stevens. Repniited liy pemliMion <>! Alfred A. Knnpf luc
 626 A CKN O W I E L> G M EK n

Mark Strand, "Courtship ’ and “Keeping Things Whole" from Sekctrd Poems bv
Mirk Strand. Copyright © V)7'K 19W) by Mark Strand, Reprinted by per¬
mission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc,
Dylan Thomas, J!)o Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night' and "fern Hi!)" from
L'

I hr pLifTjji of Oyi.lrf 7 fnVrtar. Copyright © l '752 by Dylan Thoiva\. Reprinted

by permission of Nets' Directions Publishing Corp. "In My Graft or Sullen
Art" from The Riejdu of D-yftiti Tirn'rrtrts Copyright © I l.J4di b> Nest Directions
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Derek Walcott," K in i is of a Great House," 'The Season of Phantasmal Peace," and
“The Gulf from ’Collected Portia 1948-198-t (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1'fhfn
Reprinted with permission of Farrar. -Straus A Giroux, lnr.
Rosanna Warren. "In Grove Coeur, Missouri" front Stumerf Glass by Rosanna
Warren. Copyright© 199Aby Rosanna Warren. Reprinted by permission of
W. W Norton A1 Company, Inc.
Michael Weaver, "The Picnic, ,m Homage rn Civil Rights." Tirst published in
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fames Welch. "Harlem, Montana: Just Off the Reservation” and “The Man from
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Richard Wilbur, “Cottage Street, 195,V" from 7Tir A iW- Cruder, copyright (£ r-772
by Richard Wilbur, reprinted by permission of Harcourt braes* &ÿ Comp, i y
"The Writer" from Tfic AftFrif-Rwrffr, copyright © 1971 by Richard Wilbur,
reprinted by permission of Harcotm Brace A' Company.
William Carlos Williams, "This I s J LIST To Say," "The Dance, "'To Thief "Poem,"
"The R aper from Passeoack," and ''Spring and All" from Coflotr’.if Poems;
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Publishing Corp Reprinted by permission ot Ness- Directions Publishing
Curp. "Landscape with ilw Frill of foams” from Collected Poems: !9l l ') ft 2,
Volume T! Copyright ‘V. 1 962 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by
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Charles Wngh.t, "Laguna Blurs" and "Self-- Portrait" from The I Vorid oj ihr Ten
I heusand rftinjji Perns !98ti f?9ll hyChtrlcs Wright, Copyright© 1 990.
Reprinted with permission of Farrar, Straus A' Ci tours, Inc,
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/CIFIIJ IVOIPS os Unies Wright 1 !UFilJ Reprinted by permission sit Farrar,
Straus is. (liruus, Inc.
William I) Li tier YeJts, "Among Siho.il Children," "An Irish Airman Foresees His
Death," CritiV Jane '[.liks With the Bishopf "Down by the Salley Gar¬
lL

dens." "Easivt 1916," “Lcd.i and the Nw.in.' " "Mem," "Sailing to Byzan¬
tium," '''the Like Isle of It INI' free," ‘‘The Second Coming," ami" I he Wild
Swans it i oole" repmued by permission of Sinicui & Schuster from 77rir
7 All-Ills of II H V . rr 1 A,n' h’Jj'hi'pl, edited bs Richard ] fimicrail. Copy¬
i

right 19.A4 bv M.icinillau Publishing C.ci,tiipj.tiy, renewed 1L162 bt Bertha

Gcorgje Yeats,
I
 Index of Terms
accuracy, i£.i, 267. 291 eclogue * 619 sinpfrarive mood, 61 1
adjectives, JO, 155, 609 ckphtasrs, 6)7 .Si L‘ i aim commands
'

adverbs, 61 1 elegy, 81. 105. 617 implication 150-51

agency, 116-17, 124, epic poetry, 60S- 6 indicative mood, 156,
126 epigram, 6 1 7 611
Alexandrine, 595 epitaph, 617 interrogation. 109. 611,
alliteration, 145 epithalamitm, 105, 616 615
analogy, 615 exclamation, lOH, 612 of self, 265
auapestic meter, 596/ 596
>ÿ 1 1 a pl'ici r,i , 615 filling rhythms, 111. 112, judgment Kir poetic jus-
anticlimax, 615 596 rice; values
antithesis, 615 figures of speech. 615- !6
apology, 109, 612
apostrophe, 1119 605. 6 12
form, 42, 126. -Scr alsv
individual forms
-
language, 123 24, 159
60. Set .i J ; grammar
:ÿ

apposition, 6 IS inner structure, 115—19 and implication,

articles, definite re nr re! outer, (05. 111-13, 121 (50-5 f
indefinite, 155 re (rain, 34 innovation, 87-88
assonance, J-J5 stalled, 1ft StSnZJ ordering of, 151,
attitudes, 264-66. 166, free verse, 606-8 152-58
292, 295 sentences, see sentences
aubade. 617 genres, 125-26, 127 sound units. MS
of content, 105 word roots. 146-47
ballad, 74, 102, 600, 617 within the lyric, life, poetry's origins in, 3.
ballade , 605 617-19 14-15
binary form, 113-14 georgic, 619 private, 4 -8, 25-27
blank verse, 605-6 grammar, 77, 124, 147, public, 8 T i . 41-46
609-1) rime and nature. I f—
caesura, 598 and fonts, 36-40 13. 4 7-53
canto, J(J moods, 158 line width. 111-12, 608
catalogue, 615 and rhyme, 73 lyric, 87. 101. 102-4,
chiasmus, 615 reuse, ttt reuse 151. 159. 282’i.l, 509
cinquain, 76 Subgenres of, 617-19
cliche, 3, 53. 292, 29.1 heptameter, 594
climax, 121, 128 heroic coupler, 599 meaning, 120, 128. Set-
commands, J 031, 160, 612 hexameter, 594, 595. 598 abe content
conditional mood, 158, history. .See jbe time metaphor. tiJ5
611 antecedent, of poem, meter.
content, 105, 118-19, 120, 128, 285 metonymy, ri 16
120, 127, 128 siting oi poems in, mono merer, 594
coupler, 76, 599 258-46, 2JJ-5J morality, poetic, 283 84.
287. Scr ,ik0 values
dactylic meter, 59t>, i98 iambic meter, 69. 7f.
diction, 124 596, 598 narration, 101, 102-4,
mixed, 160 identity, social, 21' -26. 109, 125, 613
dimeter, 594, 595 Stic JJHP peisona; self nature and time, /J-fJ,
discourse, change of, imagery, 77, -51-W.i, 86- 47-53. ,?re irfoi sea¬
173-74 87, 118-19 sonal poems
' dramatic monologise, imagination. 126-28, nocturne, 105, 618
nv-so 180-85 nouns, 30, 155, 609

627

i
f)2S I N i> E X t) I- T E R _M -1

ocfciTinrrer. 594 riling rhythms, Iff, 596 stanza, 51, 57, 38, i 76
octave, IS6 rutitlezu, 60S arid rhyme, 599-602
Hide, <i05 Spenserian, 76, 601-2
onomatopoeia, 616 scansion, 598 scniCmre, 76-81, 113-19,
optative mood, 611. Set scenario, antecedent, 12(1, 120-21. 12S. Stv also
d Iso
subjunctive mood 128. 235 form; shape
ordering of language. seasonal poems, 12-1.5 subject, 1 47, 156
I5t. 152-58, 615 48-51. 618 generalized. JCC typicality
otrava rima. 76, 601 self! ii'c aim identity, lorial subjunctive mood, 611
aii then tie iry <>f, 22 1 hortatory, 158, 61 1
pantoum, 605 a wa renew of, 21 surra, 18-t
paradox, 6>16 and change of dis¬ syneebdoche, 616
parallelism, 616 course, 175-7-1
participles, .1(1 constructed, 188-90 tense, verb, 32, 71, 103,
parts of specs'll, 124 motivations, of, t"6 1 17-17, 147, 610-n,
pentameter, 111, 594, multiple aspects of, Stv nti<} rime
595, 598 171-73 tercet, 76,600. 604
periphrasis, 6 16 and persona, 185—88 ternary poems. 114
person, grammatical. 38— in space and time, ItriH firihi, fi‘J, 252
40, 115-16, 157. 609 17-1-75 tetrameter, 594.
595, 598
persona, 185—38, Set dbt> and testimony, 1 75—76 time, 3, 32, 5 1-54, 1 74-
identity, social; self and rone, 1 77-80 75, 252. Stc ,ihe his¬
personification, 616 typicality of, 176-77 tory; tense, Verb
Petrarchan sonnet, 602 sentences, 114- IS, 147-50 and nature, 11-13,
plot, 77 sestet, 76, 156-57, 600- 47-51. Set Hf/sci sea¬
antecedent, 120, 123, 601 sonal poents
285 sestina, 605-4 tone, 124, 123, 177-80
poetic justice, 289-91 Shakespearean sonnet. trimeter, 111, 594. 595,
poignancy , 85-36 113, 602-3 598
predicate, 147, 156 shape trochaic meter, 69, 70,
pTonomiS, 609-10 analytic, 26-29, 35, 71, 596, 598
and person, 38—40, 42, 45, 54-55. Set typicality, 176-77
115-16 Htfifl IbnU
prosody, 393—608 Stv of lives, 42-44 values. 283-84, 287-91.
d/su rhyme; rhythm shaped poems, typo¬ 292-93
pyrrhic toot, 598 graphic, 618 verbs , SO, 124, 610-11.
simile, 616 Set (fisc tense , verb
quatrain, 75. 76, 600, sixain, nr sestet versification, 595-99
605 skeleton, of poem, 122- vi I lane lie, 604-5
23, 128, 149 Vince, active I'H'r.UrS pas-

refrain, J.1 sonnet, 4S—5 1, 76, 113, si vi, 6 10

upiuii.iliry, 24i - 53 126, 156, 602-3
nepermnn, 159 60 sound units, 145 wedding poem, let epi-
rhyme. 69, 72 76 spare, 32, 43, I 14 75 thalaniion
and stanza forms, 599 ami rejponallty, 245-43 wisdom. 86-87
602 speech arts, 105, 108 1 f, word order, 15 1
rhythm, 67, 68-72. 77, 125, 126, 127, 128, word roots, 146—47
112- 13, 126, 595-99 61 J 14. ,Srr agency
rime royal. 76. 601 tpoildee, 598 zeugma, 616
Index of First Lines
A buv just like you took me out Ed Anyone lived in a pretty how town,
see them. 280 399
A child solid Whal is dir Grass? fetch¬ Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees.
ing it to me with CLILE hinds. 569 415
A narrow Fellow in the Grass, 17 Ariel was glad he had written bis
A new volcano has erupted, 202 poems, 534
A noise lest patient spider, 6! As a man and woman make, 426
A poem should be palpable and As 1 in hoary winters nighr stood
mute, 466 shivering in the snow. 226
A quavering try- ScrCcch-ow], 214 As I walked out one evening, 32 S
A slumber did ntv spirit seal. 85, As the cat, 77
117, 237 virtuous men pass mildly away, 57
A sudden blow: the great wings Avenge, O Lord., thy slaughtered
beating still, 589 saints, whole bones, 16
Abortions will not let you forget,
349 Batter my heart, fhree-personed
About suffering they were never Cod; for YULI, 160
wrong, 322
About the size of an old-style dollar
339
bill,
According to Breughel, 374
Death
—
Because I should not stop for
, 62
Behold her, single ui the held, 92
Before you arrive, forget, 208
Adieu, farewell, earth's bhss, 22 7 Bent double, like old beggars under
After a great pain, a formal feeling sacks, 2-15
comes — , 4QI

After nnd night they load up, 45 f

Buffalo Bill opens a pawn shop on
the reservation, 142
Ah, dul you once see Shelley plain. Busy old fool, unruly sun, 407
358 By the road to the contagious, hospi-
*

Alt Stiti -dosser, weary of time, 342 tal, 576

All about Cirtowmore the lambs, B1, tbe rude bridge that arched the
34? Hood, 4 16
All Greece hates,, 433
All night I am the doe, breathing, Call the roller of bsg cigars, f 65
418 Civilisation ts hooped together,
Although it is ,i cold evening, 335 brought. 300
Although it is night. I sit in rhsL Cold in the earth -and the deep
bathroom, waiting, 408 snow piled above thee. .1 47
America I've given you ail and turn (flint live with me and be my love,

I'm nothing, 422 83

Among twenty snowy mountains, Come, tny Celia, let us prove, 448
550 Complacencies of the peignoir, .mil
An old. mad, blind, despised, and late, 546
dying king, 522 Cromwell, our chief of men, who
Announced by all the trumpets of through a cloud. 228
the sky, 41 6 Crossing the street. 47.1

619
630 I$£>EX OF FIRST LINES

P-ark house, by which once more I For I will consider my Cat JeufTry,
stand, 55J 527
I JL'.IUI , h<? not proud, though some Forget not yet the tired intent, 585
have called thee, 407 Found a family, build a state. 4 73
Did all ills lets and bam appear, 239 Four seasons fjJi the measure of the
I ?o not go gentle into that good year, 12, 49
night, 19 Framed in her phoenix fire -screen.
Does the mad wind Lip-hill all the Edna Ward, 572
way? 515 From my in other's sleep 9 tell info
Down by the salley gardens my love the State, 1 16
and I did meet, 588 Full fathom tive thy father lies, 521
Droning a drowsy syncopated tunc,
44 7 Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
I 'Hirer would have seen a reason lilt 91
living, 484 Get u p 1
get up for shame! the
blooming morn, 442
Earth hath not anything
more fair, 250
hither yoli will, 2 16
to show

Even now tins landscape is assem¬

things
—
Glory he to God (hr dappled
,
Go, lovely rose! 5(>S
93

Go, soul, the body’s guest, 501

bling, 425 God knows, 221
Every day a wilderness —
no, 409 Gray whale, 477
Every poet, should write a Spring Gut eats all day and lechen .ill the
poem, 12, 48 night, 74
Every year without knowing it I
have passed tbs’ day, 4 78 FI ad we but world enough, -."id
time, 470
Farewell, too little, and too lately Having been tenant long to a nch
known, 410 lord, 161, 442
Farewell, thou child of my r i gh L l ie vat Ln a wheeled chair, waiting
hand, and joy, 16 for dark, 489
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun, He stared at rum. Ruin stared
521 Straight hack, 324
Felix Randal the farrier, O is he Heav’n from all creatures hides the
dead then? my duty all ended, book of Fate, 498
231 I ieten, thy beauty is to me. 498
Filling her compact (N delicious Hence loathed Melancholy, 4 78
body, J2J Henry vats at de bar J5 was odd, 16 7
First, are you OUT sort of person, 232 J (ere lies, whom hound did ne'er
Firs) having read the book ol uivths. pursue, 393
503 FI ere where the wind is always
Five years have passed; five stim- fin rlli— [ i orth— east, J 18
uierv. with the length, 255 1 I o111 it Lip sternly -see this it sends
Flicker Hies by, 279 hack, (who is it? is it you? 568
For God's sake hold your tongue. Hours com inning Long, sore and
and let me love, 406 heavy hearted, 6, dj
 IN Ei fix i >E F iK ii LtNts 631

How do I Jove thee? Let me count i met the bishop OJI EFUL road, 186
the ways, 299 I noVr was struck before that hour,
How many dawns, chill from bis m
rippling rest, 397 I once Wanted * white nun's eyes
Hmv pleasant to know Mr Lear, 230 upon, 486
How strange it seems! these He¬ I place these numb wrists to the
brews m their graves, 46! pane, 4}6
How vainly men themselves amaze, i placed a jar in I 'em lessee, 2~0
131 i remember The reckcurls, Jimp and
damp a? tendrils, 514
] .mi fourteen, 463 I -lit J LI iTiurniiig in the college sick
l am not a painter, I am a poet, 488 bay, 174
l am. yet what i .nil none cares or I sn,w a ship of m.irrial build. 471
knows, 370 I saw in Louisiana a live-oak grow¬
I L'.I 11 I eel the lug, 439 ing, 19 1
1 car meet you ,111 I sing ot brooks, I blossoms, birds,
9 caught ,t tremendous fish , jJ7 and bowers, I 14
I caught this morning morning's I struck the board and cried. “No
nttnior king, sr -f .a more, 44 I
1 celebrate myself, and dng myself, I tell her she lias outlived Iter useful¬
569 ness, 365
I chopped dots u the house that yoLi I chink tlris house’s mouth is full ot'
had been saving to live in ue\t dirt, 42!
sum iner, 453 1 thought mice how Theocritus had
1 to mid .i dimpled spider, tor and sung, 350
white, 42! 1. too, dislike it: there are things that
1 have a Lite that did not become, are un port a nl beyond all tins fid¬
315 dle, 4X3
1 have done it again, 493 I, too, sing America, 446
\ have eaten, 576 I traveled to the ocean, 526
l have gore out, a possessed witch, \ u ake to sleep, and r ike niv waking
207 slow, 514
1 have met them at the close of' day , I wake tip eold, I who, 432
268 I walk through tJie long schoolroom
\ have no name, 26 questioning, 586
] heard a Fly bnitz —
when I I walked into the room, 334
died —, 183 I walked on the banks of the tiuean
i know that 1 shall meet ny fate. banana dock and sit down uudet
142 the huge shade of J Southern
I leant upon a coppice gate. 93 I’aciht locomotive to look at I he
I like a look of Agony, 402 snpisetover the box bouse hills
I like to think that ours will be and cry, 302
more than just a not I lev story, 344 i w.mdet thro' each charter'd street,
- I love sweets, 323 X2
! met .. traveler from ail unique I Wandered lonely .is a cloud. 5 9
land. 524 I Was horn in Mississippi, 1 T 3
632 INDEX p > f- 1 K s i LIMIS

I wen to rhc Garden of Love, ,J*|2 Like wet COtiiilinrh, l slide. *62
I \V LJ I .J r L h c' ,i i go now, .1 mi gt f ti.i l ittle l. 3111b, who matte thee, 342
Imiisfrec, 588 Lord, who crcatedst min in wealth
If all chi' world .Hid love wcfc and store, I3<)
young, 84 l ord’s lobT 1 him I lib mockingbird,
It ''compression is [he first graee of 438
style”, 48$ Love bade me welcome: yet my soil!
I'm Nobody \ Who arc You: 19 1 drew hack, 59
In a field, 554 Love set you going like a fat gold
In 3 solitude of the \n, 68 watch, 496
In lirrughet’s great picture, The Loveliest ot trees, the cherry now,
Kermess, 95 445
In drear [lighted December, 45 1 Loving in truth, and tain in verse

111 her room at the prow of the my love to show, 525

in Just
—
house, 573
,5, 33
In math 1 Was die whiz kid, keeper, 25
In my craft or sullen an, 562
Margaret, ire you grieving, 118
may i fed said he, 400
Mothers of America, 487
In my land there are no distinctions, Moving on or going kick ro where
J61 you came from, 364
hi this him1 light, 14! Mr. i eodom Luna in ins later years
Ill thrice 1U,(H)0 seasons, ! will come had taken to kissing, 511
back to tliis world, 97 Much have I travelfd m die realms
I11 Xanadu did Kuhia Khan, 253 of gold, 1/9
It conics blundering over the, 534 Much Madness is divines! Sense. 403
It is an And cm Mariner, _> 7.6 My black taia: fades, 2.1
It is not the moon, 1 tell you. 304 My dead piled up. this’k, tra grant,
it little profit*, that an idle king, 558 on the fire escape, 363
It s Saturday afternoon at the edge of Mv first thought was, lie lied ill ev¬
the world. 583 ery word, 35 1
IT was many and many a year ago. My head, my heart, mine eves, my
497 life, nny, rmine, 229
My heart aches, arid a drowsy
Januaries, Nature greets our eyes, numbness pains, 134
273 My heart leaps up when i behold,
just Lit! the highway to 1 Loth ester, 577
Minnesota, 584 My life had stood
Gun —402
—
;L Loaded

Lay down these hvutds, 534 My mistress’ eyes .ire nothing like
I :-i me not to liie marriage of tm1 the sun, 91
minds, 520 My mother bon? me In the southern
I et ns go then, you .itnl I, 193 wild, 229
lake .1 skein it loose silk blown My mother groaned, my father
against ,1 wall, 500 wept, 4t 26
I 1 ki1 AS riii' waves make toward ths" My old 1 mile. 220
pebbled shore, 13, 5! My parents felt those rumblings, 233
 1 N J> b X P> F LU.S ! L J N J. N

My prime of youth is but .1 frost of Once riding in old Baltimore, 374

Cam, 57 One afternoon [he lust bvc ek ][1
April, 5J3
Nautilus Island’s hermit, 9, 42 One died, and the soul wjs

No coward -.Util is mine, 346 wrenched out. 320

No matter what life yon lead, ilS One must have a mind of whiter,
-No, no, no, she tells me. Why 552
bring it bad,. 234 Only in Ciijevc Cncur. 566
No there is none, Pitched
worst, Opening j vein he called my radial,
past pitch nr grief, 444 370
Nobody heard him, rhs" dead man, Other- abide our question Thoti art
532 free, 317
Nobody in the latte, and nothing,
nothing hut blackberries, 492 Piece bv piece 3 Seem, 102
Not every man has gentians in Ins Pile the bodies high at Austerliti and
house, 94 Waterloo, 1 10
Now as I SVJS young and easy under Prayer, the church's banquet, angel’s
the apple houghs, 560 age, J 52
Now hardly here and there a hack¬
ney coach, 555 Iking out. wild bells, to the wild
sky, 556
O i;oldeii-tongued Romance with Rises! thou thus, dim dawn, again,
serene lute, 45 1 556
t> heart green acre town with salt, r-p-o-p-h-e-.s-s-a-g-r, 166
476
O ns\ Imre's like a red, red rose, Sad H eSper o'er the buried sun. 557
359 Safe in their Alabaster Chambers
O Rose, thou art sick, 92 (IN61), 403
O, Wert thou ill the c.iuld blast, 35S Season of mists and mellow fruit till -
t) ssild West Wind, thou breath of ness, 161
Autumn s being, 522 September rain tails on the house.
O what can ail thee, Knighr at arms. 341
60 Shall S compare thee m J summer's
t > where ba’ Lord Ran¬
Vs Hi been, day? 520
dal, my sem? S5 She fe.nv him and will always ask.
( Sbss'urest night involved rhe sky. 512
393 She sang beyond the genius of the
O'Melia, my dear, tins dues every sea, 552
thing mown! 192 She told the story, and ilisL sshoU",
One by mie ths‘y appear 111, 4 f.J 410
fine day I wrote her name upon the She as ,1 Iks in beauty, like the night,
strand, 535 359
On hei 36th birthday, rhotnas had SHILL there's no help, cone let LLS

shots!1 her, 234 kiss and part. 155

Oil Fridas s he'd open a SLIM tifja\, Sitting between the sea and the
454 buildings, 319
i
 634 lrvi>i:x or hi Kir LiNts

Someday they'll find me erne, and The caltn, 447

my lavish hands, 21)8 J be children go forward with their
Something there is that doesn't love little satchels, 4, 30
a wall, 137 The curfew tolls the knell of parting
Still, 584 day, 428
Still to be neat, still to be dressed, Tin: dead piled tip, thick, fragrant,
299 cm the fire escape, 363
Stones only, the rfiyecta membra of The end came easy for most of u±.
tins Great House, 564 567
Stoploss wind, hors' tiro the Colum¬ The English are so nice, 457
bine seeds 1 have, 426 Th ’expense of spirit in a waste of
Success IS Counted sweetest, -104 shame, 1,11
Summer is icu men in, / /, 4 7 The first retainer, 398
Sundays too niy lather gut up curls, 1 he forward youth ill at would ap¬
19 pear, 466
SvLvia, the fair,
teen, 190
in the bloom of fif¬ The Heart asks Pleasure
106, 150
—
fjnt ,—
The illustration, 202
I aiking in bed uugjit to he easiest, The instructor said, 18
104 Fhe king sits in Dmtife cling town,
Tears, idle tear., I know not what 313
they mean. 558 The land teas ours before we were
T ell me not, sweet, ! am unkind, the laud's, 30 1
299 The marker slams, flow-ericss. day s
Veil me something, 212 almost done, 324
That IS TUI country for old [lien, l'lie T he old South Boston Aquarium
young, 589 stands, 270
lltji i light your great guns,, un¬ I he pure products of America, 197
awares, 435 The Ikapcr from Hassenack was very
That summer in Culpeper, all there kind. When she regained, 575
was to eat was white, 98 The sea is calm tonight, 136
That's ins' List duchess painted on l'lie sky w.is .1 street map with «aft
the wall, 162 for, 3fJ
fhe ache of ma triage. 4 5 is I he soul asks peace of mind, 108
The airport Coffee tastes less i.if The Soul selects her own Soci¬
America, 2 76
The apparition or these faces in the
ety — , 405

I lie spotted hawk swoops hs and

crowd, Jiff ace uses me, he complains of my
The art of losing isn't hard to mas¬ gab and my loitering, 570
ter, 1ÿ7 The tide rises, die tide tails, 463
! he hell-rope that gathers God at J lie tightness .md the mllleSS round
dawn, 396 (hat space, 141)
The big steel (mins' shield says The tret's arc in their autumn
maybe, JJ 1 beauty, 165
] lie llraJji
—404
is witk t than the \ fie trumpet's voice, loud and J u-
Sky — , diorit.itivi',
h
 I IM n E J\ OF Fr (Lst LIMES 635

['he whiskey on your breath. 95 Those tour blade pel* blown up. H.
The white woman across die aisle 41
frorn me says. “Look, 241 Thou still unravished bride of quiet
The wind blows lilacs out ot the ness, 259
east, 456 Tired with all these, for restful death
The winter evening settles down, 1 Cry, 153
415 To be held by brittleness, shapeli¬
The woman is perfected, 495 ness, 428
The world is, 459 To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on
The world is charged with F)U- gr.iti- thy name, 4 48
dcur of God. 444 To have known him. to have loved
l he world is too much with us, late him, 473
anti soon, 583 Today wrc have the naming of parts.
Their faces, safe as an interior, 505 Yesterday, 164
Then all the nations of birds lifted Turning and turning in Lhe widen¬
together, 96 ing gyre, 590
There is a girl yon like so you tell Two roads diverged in i yellow
her, 140 wood, 64
There is A p.nrTot i in faring spring, Two streams; one dry, one poured
305 all night by our beds, 459
There’s a certain Slant of light, 405 Tygcr! Tygcr! burning bright, 343
] 'll ere was a time when meadow,

grove, and stream, 511 Un is okay. 3 12

These older towns die, I6S Under the too white marmoreal
They ait1 all gone into the world of Lincoln Memorial. 241
light! 562 Vigd Strange 1 kept On the field OTIC
They ear beans mostly, this old yel¬ night, 511
low pair, 548
They flee from me, that sometime We are things of dry hours and (he
did me seek, 15 involuntary plan, 548
They fuck you up, your mum and We have no prairies, 439
dad. 451 We need no runners here. Booze is
They’re waiting to be murdered, 9, law, 567
42 We real cool- We, 79
I his is a song tor the genius child, We spread torn ipiiits and blankets,
219 307
This living hand, now warm and We watched from the house, 4 17
capable, 452 We wear the mask that gnus and
l his poem is concerned with lan¬ lies, 411
guage On .1 very plain level, 320 Well! It the bard was weather-wise,
Ibis strange thing must have crept, who made, 372
527 Western wind, when will thou
7'h-is was Mr Blcartey’s room, He 311
blow,
stayed. 456 What a grand time was the w ar, 243
Those blessed structures, plot and Wh.it happens to a dream deferred,
rhyme, 288 446

s
 636 ! Nit EX OP FikS'i LINES

W'hat is Africa to me, 199 When we two parted, 360

Whit needs ltiy Shakespeare tOT his When you Consider the radiance,
honored bones, 482 that it does nor withhold, 3 14
What passing-bells tor these who die Whenever Richard Cory went
as cattle? 489 down town, JM
What seas what shores what grey Where my grandfather is ss in the
rocks and whir islands, 412 ground, J 10
What, was he doing, the great god While my hair WJS soil cut straight
Fan, 350 across my forehead, 139
Whenas in silks my Julia goes, 58 While this America settles in the
When 1 consider how- my light is mould ot its Vulgarity, heavily.
spent, J.i.i 301
When 1 have Tears that I may cease
to he, / 7
Whit! up, sea — r 166
Whose woods these are I think I
When I hoard the 1 earn'd astrono¬ know, 148
mer, 300 Why is my verse so barren of new
When I linked there. I would find, pride, 285
222 Why is rhe word pretry so under¬
When 1 set- a Couple oT kids, 435 rated? 532
When I see Hirthts I lend to left and Why was it that the thunder, 4! !
right, 4 19
When, in disgrace with fortune a nil
W’ild Nights —
Wild Nights. 405
With hms sad steps. Oh MoOn,
melt’s eyes, 56 thou climb' st the skies. J25
Whet) it is ftnallv ours. this freedom, With only hit feeble lantern, 527
this liberty, this beautiful, 43"? With rue my heart is laden, 446
When lilacs list in the dooryard
bloom'd. 260 Ye beauties! Q floss great [he stlu.
When midnight comes a host or 530
docs and men, 368 Yc learned sisters which have often-
When the Famous lilac k Poet times, 535
speaks, 491 Yes, but wc must be sure ol verities,

W’hcn the forests have been de¬ 12, 48

stroyed their darkness remains, Yes! in the sea of life enisled. lift
275 Yet once more, O ye laurels ami
When the Present has latched its once more, 293
postern behind my tremulous You are holding up a ceiling, 344
stay, 434 You do nor do. yon do not do. 20
When the summer fields arc mown, You knew J seas coining for you,
461 little one, 65
When to the Sessions of sweet silent You, once a belle m Shreveport,
Thought, 172 506
When we foi .igc could neither mad Your nurse could only speak Italian.
nor \s rile, 7,3 7 464
to
 Index of Authors & Titles
40 Days and 40 Nigh ts, 370 John Ashbery

Africa —
Ache of Marriage, The, 458
Adolescence //. 40ft
20ft
After great jiiim, a finnal feeling
Painter, The, 31 V
uinl1 OvjrfftDlMtl, 330
Street Musicians, 320
Asians Dying, Dte, 273
tomes —, 401

Aftermath, 40 1
At the Fislitwuse, 335
Auden, W. H,
Afterwards, 434 As l Walked Out Oh* Evttiitfa
Ah Sun-Jttmvr, 342 32 I
Alexander, Elizabeth Mnsee des Heau.\ ,4rf.t, 322
Nineteen, 9ft Autumn Leaves, 363
Ode, 3 t 1 ,4ur .Ifjirrd, 4ft7
Aiexie, Sherman Axe Handles, 533
Evolution, 142 Badger, 368
OF: the Anltrak [ram Boston to New EJcfi- JTJVSFJ CiÿjljLfFj, 94
York City, 247 Bean Eaters, Tlte, 348
Reservation Love SOHJJ, 3! I
Alt Hallows, 42b
Because 1 could not stopfir death
62
—.
Alien, Paula Gunn Eerfd iti the River, 279
Zen Ameritana, 312 Berg, The, 471
Ahar. 303 Berryman, John
dipirwa, 422 From Dream Songs
Amvrimu History, ft, 41 4 (Filling her compact mpd delirious
Ammons, A. 14. body), 323
Cifj1 J_rFF)jfj, T?Jf, 313 45 tHe stared at min. Ruin Stored
Epufir .Wonting, 313 straight bach), 324
Aftiong School Children, 586 384 (Titt marker slants, fir tvrless,
At) Horatiau Odt, 466 day’s almost done), 324
.He Irish Airman Foresees His Death, Henry sats it r de bar & mas odd.
192 167
.4 FI f Jnoard Ijtek, 476 Bidart, Frank
,4 Ficr dal f of the far, 270 Ellen l Vest, 323
,-4 F a J-J j-J 7> r-J 7_fr, 497 7 1' ,\/j' Father, 334
Anonymous liirches , 4f9
Cwfaa Sejig, The, 1 I, 47 Bishop, Elizabeth
Lord Randal, 55 A i the Fishhouse, 335
Sir Patrick Spent , 336 Brazil, January I, 1502, 273
Western Wind. 317 Cufjne j'rp England, 202
.-lijdifFFi for Dunned Youth, 4ft 9 Fish. The. 337
.4 PI j'l'Frf' lived 6F a Jnn:’ rijn't?, 399 Or An, 167
Applicant, lire, 232 Poem, 339
/IflJrfFPPrFlJ oj Hit TJjf, 1 1 4 Ststuus, 341
Argument: On 1942, Art, 234 lHackhenying, 492
Arnold, Mathew Blake, Wili.am
OtPtrr Beach, 136 Ah Sunflower. 342
Shakespeare, 317 Garden of Li'it'f, Tire, 342
To Marguerite, 318 In fant Joy, 26
Ars Poctica, 466 Infant Sorrow, 4, 26
As I Walked Out Qrre Evening, 321 Limb, Jhr, 342

637

.
638 INDE X OF A L'THDM & Til L E S

Little Black Boy, Thr, 229 Caslauvy, The, 393

London, 82 Cervantes, i-nrna Dee
Suit Rose, The. 92 R efttgee Ship, 362
Tygtt, 'Lite, 343 f-’bcFnfor the Young White Man
Blessing, .4, 5H4 iHrn Asked Mr How I, ,HFJ In¬
likiniemhal, MJchiei telligent IVtS-fLeod Person Could
Marriage, A, 344 [iclictv in the ll'ar Between
Wishful Ti,inking, 344 Races, 361
Bear People, 453 Poenid pilril Ids Californios 3 firerrns,
BeÿfjFdJ, 435 168
Bradstreet, Anne ChtfFiwel Firing, 433
Letter to Her Htukiutd, Absent upon OmreFj'i Cosmology, 527
Public Employmerit. A, 229 Chiide Roland to the Dark Tower
Brain — ji aider than the Sky, Come, 351
The
Bratif,
— , 402
I, 1502, 273
Chin. Marilyn
Altar, 363
UfOek-broidt). LLLSJV Autumn Lcntws, 363
CIJTFD?[DFJ)ITFRR, 345 Csfy Limits, The, 313
DiJiHfildf Afyrfirum, 57 Clampitt, Amy
BrufeeJt Hdfrrt.The, 473 Procession rtf Candlemas, A, 364
Broken Touvr, The, 396 Glare, John
Bronte, Emily Badger, 368
.\’e Coioard Soul Is Mine. 346 First Loire, 369
RfFFlfFFI&FdtJfe, 347 I Am, 370
Uro£iki. Gwendolyn Cole, Henri
bd’iitr Enters, The, 348 40 Days and 40 Nights, 370
Kitchenette Building, 348 Coleridge. Samuel Taylor
Mother, The, 349 DfjtY’ridrr: An Ode, 372
Wt Real Cool, 79 Kuhla Khan, 253
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Ridfjf of the Ancient Mariner, TV,
How Dii / Love Thee?, 299 376
dWdfJlIfeJ Instrument, A, 350 Glhf, Tire. 441
Frotn Sonnets from the Portuguese ! Cuwf, My Celia, 448
il thought how once Theocritus Compoiÿd Upon Westminster Bridge,
hod sung), 350 September 3, 1302, 250
browning, Robert Concord Hymn , 416
Chiide Roland fa rJ*i r Dork Touvr Crwftvoÿertrf of the Tuvin, The, 63
Came, 353 C’un'trFief'j Coitig A-Mttying, 442
3 Icrwrobilio, 35K Cottage Street, 1955, 572
Wy Last Duehrss, 162 Courtship, 140
Burning fii he. Ihe, 22h Cowpfcr. William
burnt;, Robert CrtjfdMddy, 7lrr, 393
(9. Wert Thou in the Could Blast, Epitaph OFF <i Hare, 395
358 Crane, Hart
firB, Red Rose, .'1, 359 Brokm Tmtvr, The, 396
Byrtif]. Lord George Cordon 1 3 Brooklyn Bridge, 397
She Walks TFJ Beauty, 359 (.racy fnu talks with t hr Lullop, 1H6
!f We Two Ported, 300 Crciity, Robert
Canonization, The, 406 Alrtrn'iijJe, A, 398
Gffmmdwn\ 345 Cnuoe in England, 202
 INDEX OF AU r nous & liuti 639

Cttckw $011$, Tilt'. 11, 47 Donne, John

Cullen, Countee Canonization, Tin:, 406
Heritage, 199 Death be not proud, 407
Incident, 399 Holy SpiJPiff 14 (Batter my heart.
Cummings, E. E three-prrsoned (lad; tor VLIHJ,
.joyont’ lira! in a jiri'tty h cur Mill), 399 16(1
in Jmi- , 5, 33 Sun rising, 'the, 407
IIIJ)1 Ifeel sit id he, 400 Valediction: Forbidding .Motiriinio,
r-p-e>-p-h-e-s-s-a-i>-r, 166 A , 37
Daddy, 20 Dove, Rlli
Dance. The, 93
DflrWipfu Thrush, Flu, 93
Adoltseente
Dusting, 409
—
//, 408

Death he not proud, 4d7 Flash Cards, 23

of the He!It Turret Gunner. Vie, Bars ley, 305
1 16 M'iingfeol Dike, 234
Dejection: .In Ode, 372 Dover Beach, 136
Description of the -Morning, /I, 5.55 Don'tt by the Salley Gardens, 588
Design, 421 Drayton, Michael
Dickinson, Emily SIFJCC there’s no help. 155
After gnat pain, a jonna) feeling Dryden, John
tomes
— , 401 Sylvia rhr Fair. 190

—
Because I could twt stop lor la the Memory' of 4 6 Oldham,

—
death , 62 410
—
Brain is wider than the Sky,
Vu 402
,
Duke et Decorum list. 245
Dunbar, Paul Laurence
Heart asks Pleasure
106, 150
— first — , 77z<\ Hornet Beecher Stowe, 41(1
Robert Gould Shaw, 41 1
I h card it Ely buzz
died—. 183
— when 1 Hr l( n1r r/rf Mask, 4 1 I
Dusting, 4l>9
/ like a look of Agony, 402 Easter 1916, 268
Pm S'obody! Who are JWH?, 191 Eitsfcr Morning, 313
fuch 3 Indues; is dirincst sense ,
402
— Easter 11 "tugs,
Edge, 493
‘
1 30

,lfy life had stood

—
Cun , 41 (3
— ,i

narrow Fellow in the grass,

Loaded

.1, 17
Elegy for Jane, 5 1 4
Elegy Written in >i Coiwtty Church*
yard, 428
Safe
’
in their Alabaster Chainin' rs Eliot. T. S
(1859), 403 Cur .S’lijf off. Alfred Put frock,
Sife in their Alabaster Chambers Die, 193
D861), 404 Marina. 4T2
Soul selects her own Society, Vie - , Preludes. 413
404 Sweeney among the Nightingales,
Success is counted sweetest. 404 415
Viere's it certain Slant of light. 405 Ellen Ilf:;t, 325
Wild Sights— Wild Sights!, J05 Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Disabled, 489 Concord / lymn. 416
Diving into the 11 VrcAr , 5o3 'Die, 416
DortrfJdt 3lystieism, 97 Etnjieror of Ice Cream, 7lie, 165
ID Sot Gt> tier It/)' lute Dial Good England m I ft 1 9, 522
Sight, 19 F.nglish Hrr .V Aire, Du, 457

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 1 N 1 11X Of AUTHORS & T [ i i. tv 641

Gray, Thomas Prayer Of 1 52

Elegy 1 1 ndfffr frr <1 Corimfy Church¬ Redemption, 161,442
yard, 428 Heritage, I W
Cutf,
Hie, 276 Merrick, Robert
Gum, Thom AQMtt&tt fljT Hii fjLvfc, The, 1 14
.Uuj u-'j'rh Night Sweats, Ihr, 432 Comma1'. Going A .Maying, 142
A-fy Sad Captains, 433 7"n the Virgins to Make Much of
11 D. Time, 91
Helen, 433 U[xm Julia's Clothes, 58
Orilfd, 1 66 High to Lour, 221
Harid-Mtm>f, ,4. 568 High IViudows, 45 FS
Hanging I w, 463 Jibly .Vtrrpjd'J 14 t Haiti r pppy llitec-
Handy, Thomas prrsiweti Cod: for Yoit}, 160
Afterwards, 434 Hongo, ( mi rett
Channel Firing, 435 Hougo Store/ 29 Miles Volcano/
Convergence the Twain, ihe, 63 Hilo, Hawaii, The, 233
Darkling 77E Tilth, [he, 93 Hopkins, Gerard Man ley
Ruined Maid, The, 192 Felix Feudal. 231
I I,i ejo. Joy Gfrf's Grandeur, 4-14
Siird/u Fe, 436 iVfl Worst, there is none. Pitched
Harlem, 446 post pitch of grief, 444
Harlem, Montana: Inst (.Iff the Restora¬ Homily, 93
tion, 567 Spring orei Fall, !7S
I l.irper, Michael Windhover, 'The, 445
American History, 8, 41 Hurtrj Qwrj'mdjVliJ JJPPJÿ, 6, 35
jYrÿrJrrjifPif iiiÿhrs Respoplii&j'fp'fj’, Housman. A. E.
436 Loveliest of Tun, the Cherry Now,
Harrier Beecher Stowe, 4111 445
Hayden, Robert l Villi RJJI' flfy Heart Is Leiden, 446
Frederick Douglass, 43 7 How Do l Lope lice?, 299
Mourning Poem for the (Jiirr« of Haw Pleasant in K'jrind1 3 lr. Isnr. 2311
Sunday, 438 How Poetry CIPW» to Mr, 534
.YrÿJpJ, /.Virlfi, Mississippi, 274 1 tujfhes, l.in ijp triii
Those IVinter Sundays, 19 Grrrrdd.h Child, 214
Heaney, Seamus MdiHfrii, 446
Bogland, 439 High to Low, 221
From the Frontlet of 1 Vetting, ]4H I, Too. 446
Aftrf-torffi Sresfe. 174 Mr ijjrrf rÿfc Mule, 220
J AJPJ i.-r7i jpieppr , 439 Suicide's Note, 447
TinmnUtf, 222 ‘I limit- fur English W, IS
Heart aski Pleasure
1116, ISO
— —
firud , J7jh', Weary Hines, I hr, 447
I I wM ir.jr II, 243
Helen, 433 i1 /jd rffjjp r SVijjfdjj, 77t('. 12, 49
t ten ry V.JJ-V ii, d( hat S dd«,f odd, 167 I Am, 37n
Her hind, 207 I heard a Hy Twee — itdrctr l died —
. .. .
.
11 of bcrl . George 183
Collar, Lite, 441 I like PP /uoA’ at 'i-ijoary, 462
Faster Wings, I3M t .Sill j'.-'miiijiu .? Giitf-Ciiiic Gnud1-
Iwrc f 111A 59 dritp 191
642 l unfix o r Aumnns & T n'Us

I, Too, 446 Koch, Kenneth

/ Wandered Lonely .-*L- a Claud, 59 Variations on a Thenu hy ll5lliair
1 Wai Sleeping IVlcrre the Black CkiL-i Carlos Williams, 453
ALHV, 417 Kcununyakaa, Yosef
I'm Nobody! [17jif dftr you?, 191 HOJI 453
Lfoi of Order at Key West, Tire. 546 Facing It, 23
ftr a Station of the 4ta«r 501 My Father i Lorelei ten, 454
In Creve Cffifj', Missouri, 566 Kubfa KWr, 253
hr drear flighted Petember, 451 L'Allegro, 478
in Just -, 5, 33 LIT Belle Dwirre j;rn.j AJejrr, 6t I
In My Craft or Sullen An, 562 Lady Lazarus, 493
Incident, 399 Laguna Blues, 583
Independence Day, 1956: A hairy Luir fr/f of Innisfire. Vie, 588
Tak, 421 Lamb, The, 342'
Infant Joy, 26 Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, 573
Infant Sorrow, 4, 26 Larkin, Philip
Interrogation, The, 459 High Windows, 455
Jarrell, Randall Mr Bleaney, 456
Death of the Ball Turret Gunner, Reasons for Atlendiwee, 456
The, 1 16 Talking in Bed, 104
Jeffers, Robinson TJtw fir the Verse, 457
Republic, 301 Lawrence, 19. H.
Jewish Cemetery at Newport, The, 461 Brtfiirn'fifj GrtTfMtfjf, 94
Jenson, 13 en English Are So Nice, The, 457
Come, Afy Celia, 448 Lear, Edward
ON Gut, 74 Heir Pleasant fit Know Aft. Lear,
Oft My First San, 16 230
Still To Be Neat, 299 Leda and the Swan, 589
To the Aft7w<J ry of My Beloved, the Lee, Li-Young
Author Mr. William Shakespeare, Interrogation, TTie, 459
44S Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon
Keats, John Public Employment, A, 229
Human Seasons, The, 12, 49 Levertov, Denise
In drear uighted Dcccmbir, 451 Ache of Marriage, The, 45H
La Belle Dame tans Atom. 60 O Taste and See, 459
LMr on a Grecian Um, 259 Lie, The. 501
Ode to a Nightingale, 1 34 Lines Composed a Few Miles trieur
Of! Sitting Dnjftr to Read Knit; TTtifeni Abbey on iRnfwifiVg; dir
Lear Orve Again, 45 1 Hunts of the K'ye Dffniic a 'Four,
'This Living Hand, 452 255
Tii Autumn, 161 l Many in Time of Phgur, ,4, 227
VpOU First Looking Into Chapman's I Mile li Uk , The', 229

Homer. 119 Liiiiffcii, K2

Whin / Have Fears, 17 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
Keeping Tlritfijs IVhote, 554 Aftermath, 461
Kitchenette lluildhtg, 348 Jewish Cemetery at Neuport, ’The,
K tilths, Etheridge 461
/Wtir for Myself, A. (Or Blues jar a TTjfe' RutSj the Tide Falls, The, 463 .
Mississippi Mark Bay). 452 LjirJ Randal. 55
 INDEX or AUTHOM £ TITLES 643

Lorde, Andre Fora Coming ELvriijr/iinr. 477

Hanging Piff, 463 Pur [lit1 Am\t’ctjary of \ly Death,
Lovt (ill), 59 478
Lovt' Song L'! j- Alfred PtuftQtlt, Til f, Aff Abnelo, 510
193 Mid-Term Break, 174
Lovelace, Richard The, 505
To Dtcarta, Gmnjg lit the Waft, 299 Mi lion, John
Lei-Tfif-st of Tfees, the Chen]' AW. L1Allegro, 478
443 Lyailns. 293
Lowell, Robert On 5I)i!JtejfrjiT-h 482
288 On rite Lite Massacre in Piedmont,
For the Union Dead, 276 ifr
March !, Vie. 241 To the Lord General Cromwell, 228
SdiVinj Home from Rapallo. 464 ilTirjr t Consider How AJj1 Light l;
-SÿurrJf Hour, 7, 44 Spent, 133
Jjmm.vnfifiT Freedom, 436 Afoefe Orange, 304
Lycidas, 293 MUEJEFIVJ1, 473
Mac Lei jh, Archibald Moore, Marianne
,4n- Puff if J, 466 Poetry, 483
Man from l Vasknigton Tne, 568 SteepleJack, The, 484
3(at i udth jYJfdrf SHYUIJ, Tiff, 432 To 4 Snail, 486
,iyf f, The, 241 To a Steam Roller, 202
March into hirginia, Tiff, 239 AfoniiFÿ Song, 4%
Marina, 412 Mens. Thvlias
Marlowe. C h n ct o p h er Ijirr/lra'fEtri'fr f’mtiJDfii, 486
Passionate Shepherd to His Love, Aliifirfr, Tire, 349
Tire, 83 3Ii'flifr-rEJ-7jiijJr 2l2
A , 34 J
. Afourmpÿ Poem for the Queen ..Fr'.Siirjj-
3/rjmfifÿf, .4, 398 day. 438
Marvell, Andrew 3JF Bleanty, 456
Garden, Tiff. 131
Hum run We, AH, 466
AJwrli Madness ir rfiViBrrJ sense ,
402
—
To Hi? Coy Mhiren, 476 Mura, David
may } ftA said lif, 4lKl .4r?m>EfFif Chi \942, ,4FF, 234
3If and the Mult, 23|J Mlirct del He MIX 4fti, 322
Melville, Herman AJiijj'fj/ instrument, r4, 356
Berg, 7?ifr471 AJ}1 Father's LuiTi'i-rfrff. 454
Fragments of j Lost Gnostic Poem of My Heart Lcaps Up, 577
the Twelfth Century, 473 My Last Duchess, 162
—
Afarcli rufu l 'irgmtti, The, 239
Monody, 473
Memorabilia. 358
Mending Wall. 137
—
AJ}1 life had stood
Gwn , 440
A!y Papa's lV4lu, 95
AJ)' Sad Captains, 433
ti Loaded

Merrill. James \iinting ol Parts, UA

Broken Home, Tire. 473 Harrow Fellow in the A. 17
Upward Look, .4)]. 476 N'asbe. Thomas
AW 300 LiiJrt)' TiFFrf of Magitt .4, 227
Jpl

Meru'in, W. S. iVfffjrififj,- of Life,

t( '2
Asians Dj'jFtij, '{Tie, 275 ,Viu' England, 1 18
644 INDEX or AUTHORS & TITLES

Night, Death. Ahssiifippi, 374 Phillips. CAA

jV/ij/limetn1 fkifinr RrsfrcnlsibililY. 436 Africa Says, 208
Nineteen, 98 Passing, 49 1
No Coward Son l Is .Miiu\ 346 Pi'fiTtf, An Homage to Civil Rights,
No IVom, there is limit. Pitched past Vie, 307
pitch of grief, 444 Pied Beauty, 93
Noiseless patient spider. A, 6 l Ptiinei <w the Table, Vie, 548
Net [[IriTry lim Dtotvnmg, 532 Plath, Sylvia
Nymph'i Reply ft: the Shepherd, ~Vtc. Applicant, The, 232
HA Plackberrying, 492
O TJSU and See, 459 Daddy, 20
O, l Vert Viou in tlu Canid Blast, 35 K Edge, 493
O'HJIM, Frank Lady Lazarus, 493
A vc Mariat 4ft7 A toming SuJif. 496
I Hf}' i Atn Net a Painter. 488 Poe, Fdgar Allen
Ode, 31 1 Annabel Lee, 497
Odt, 577 To Helen , 498
Ode an ,i Grecian Cm, 259 Poem. 77
Odt io a Nightingale, I 34 Poem , 339
Odt to the West l-Vmd, 322 Poem for .Myself, A, (Or iildjci for a
Of lArced Sightes and Trusty Errcfid- Mississippi Black Hoy), 432
ntss, 426 Poem for tin l I'ung IVhilt Ainu llfia
Of the last I m rft,- Huai-, 7, 37 Ashed Ate How I, An Intelligent
Old Couple. 42 9, IVtU-Reod Pastill Could Believe HI
On .1 Bed of Guernsey Lilies, 530 lilt ll’nr BtliVtt/l RaCei, 301
On a field Jrip at predericltsburg, 531 Pazin.i para !os Californios A JjHtTto',
On Gut, 74 168
On Af}‘ firjr San, 16 Poetry, 483
Of) Shakespeare, 482 Pope, Alexander
On Sitting Dawn ft1 Read Jiiii£ Lear From .4 HI Ifsay 1 n Alarr (Epistle
1

Once Again, 4.31 l), 498

Of) flu .4 intro f from Bos hoi Vn J
(o j Pound,
York City, 247 Garden, The, 50(1
On th? iÿrte Mctaacn in Piedmont, 16 hi a Station of the Aletro, 501
One Art, 167 Wfwi-.'l/r,rnfijiFir',s (1 rft1: ;r Letter,
Or™d, 106 VJjf, 139
t Inin, Simon J. ISayn (If 152
Bi nd in the Rivet, 279 Prayer (a ihr Pacific, 526
Owen. Wilfred Preludes, 4 1 3
Anthem far DiwffW V'awf/j, 4H'J Pretty, 532
Disabled, 489 PriH,:-.-!oil at c.lrldlantts , A, 364
Duke El Decorum list, 245 pT&Sftteiivr Immigrants Ideate Non, 216
fJzyFFr,rFF(fj<Fj, 522 PuFillbrnfrlS, 439
Painter, Vie, 319 r-p-o-fi.fi-e-l-s-a-g-r, 166
fAtMFi'a.vfj’ and OA'yjflflnuHJ. 379 Kalrÿht Sir Waller
Parsley, 3ff5 Lie, 77jf', 501
Passing, 49| Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd,
PffiJKtFMji' Slirjdirrd Fa Hi.- Lore, I Ire, The, 84
8.3 R ajwr from Passmaek, Vte, 573
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646 INDEX of AUTHORS & TULES

Fork, 527
Old Couple, 9, 42
Soul selects Iter men Sefifty, The
404
—,
Siittf there's tw help, 1 55 Southwell, Robert
Sir Patrick Spens, 316 Burning Babe, Tire, 226
Skunk Hour, 9, 44 Spenser, Edmund
slumber did my spirit seal, A, 85, 1 17, lipitlicilamiort. 535
237 From Amoretti, 75 (One day I
Small Progs Killed on tite Highway, wrote her name upon the strand},
584 546
.Smart, Christopher Spring and All, 576
From Jubilate 527 Spring and Fall, 178
ON a Red of Guernsey Lilies, 530 Spn'iijf Poein. The, 1 2, 48
Smith, Dave Steeple jack, The, 484
QH ct Field Trip at Fredericksburg, Stevens, Wallace
531 Anecdote of the Jar, 270
Spring Poem, The, 12, 48 Emperor of Ice Cream, The, 165
Smith, Stevie Idea of Order at Key Wat, 'the,
Not Waving But Drowning, 532 546
Pretty, 532 Pfaiwf ON tin Table, The, 548
of a Daughterdn-Law, 506 SNOUI Man, The, 548
Sttoti' Man, 77re, 548 Sintcfay jWamirtjj, 549
SHCW Hhite and the Seven Dwarfs, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a
515 Blackbird, 552
Snowstorm, The, 416 Still To Be Neat, 299
Snyder, Gary Stopping by Woods on a Snowy
rljce Handles, 533 Evetting, 148
How Poetry Comes to Me, 534 Strand, Mark
Riprap, 534 Courtship, 140
Solitary Reaper, The, 92 Keeping Things Whole, 554
Sot%, 565 Strange People. The, 418
Sennet 18 (Shall I compare thee fa a Street Musicians, 320
summer’s day?), 521 Success is counted sweetest, 404
Sonnet 29 t When in disgrace with for¬ Suicide's Note, 447
tune and men's ryes), 56 S«H rising, Lite, 407
Sennet JO (When to the sessions of Sunday Morning. 549
sweet silent thought ), 172 Sunflower Suita, 302
Sennet 60 (Like as the N*UWJ mate Stweewey among the Nightingales, 415
toward the pebbled shore), 13, 51 Swift, Jonathan
Sonnet 66 (Tired with all these, for Dfsetjptrivi of the Morning, A,
restful death 1 fry), 153 555
Sonnet 76 (HJty is my verse so barren Sylvia the Fair, 190
of new pride?), 285 Talking in Bed, 104
Sonnet 116 (Let me not to the marriage Tears, Idle Tears, 558
of true winds), 521 Tennyson, Lord Alfred
Sonnet 129 ('Hi 'expense of spirit in a From In Mcmoriam A,H,H-
waste of shame), 131 7 ffJarfc lierHf, by which once meif 1
Sonnet l JO (My mutresj' ryes are noth¬ stand), 555
ing tike the sun), 91 99 ( Rises! thou thus, dim daunt,
Soul Says. 428 again), 556
 JlM&EX OF AUTHOIt'i & T I ] LEi 647

106 (Ring Uddf, \iihl belli, to the i/yon Julia's Clothes, 58

uiU iky), 556 Valrdkiiortt Forbidding ,\ltmmitig, A.
12 l (Scid Hesper o'er the buried 57
mu). 557 Variations on it TTfeme by William Cjr-
rircff's, title Teen, 5 58 tos Wifiiams, 453
Ulysses, 538 Vaughn, Hu my
1 fodorQ Luna's firi’ Kisstf, 511 They Are All Gi'pjf rdJM the World
Terminus, 222 of Light!, 562
'theme fur English li, 18 Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One
'
There's a certain Slant of light, 405 Night. 571
'lltey Are All Gent into the World of I i 'aking, 1 he. 5 1 4
Ugh!. 562 WjlctJLt, Derek
They Dee From Ur, 15 Gulf, The, 276
1'hirtivn Ways of Looking at a Black¬ ftrpjjti of a Great House, 564
bird, 552 Sfctit'N of Huinitismal Peace, The,
This Be the Verse, 457 96
11,ii Is just To Say, 576 WiiDer, Edmund
11ns Lining Hand. 452 Of the LftiJ 1 Tiff in the Book, 7.
Thomas, lOylan 37
Dii fsTti Go Gentle Into Thai Giwrf Song, 565
Night. 19 W.inert, Rosanna
Fem Hill, 560 In (.Irene Gontr, Missouri, 566
In My (Irofi or An, 562 w< Red Cool, 79
I llOfe I i ill TlT Sddd idayS, 1 9 li d1 H ear the Mask, 41 1
richbome, ChiJiiHik Henry Blues, The. 447
Tj'tVittwii.’ 's Elegy. 57 Weaver, Michael
Tide Rises, the Tide Falls, The, 463 Ihcnic, An Homage ft> Civil Rights,
7 ii ii £H(H7, 486 Hie, 307
Tn IT 5’ft'ifnr Raih. 202 Welch, James
Tii Autumn, 161 I larlcm, Montana: fust Off the Res-
1 ii Jiriiiik/yFi Bridge, 397 Cn'otioil , 567
To Elsie, 197 Man from H vrdjjTiifort, The, 568
Tii Helm, 49H Western 11/rptdJ, 317
To His Coy Mistress, 470 [ V7iaf ifie End Is For, 280
Tii Luc,ISM, Going JH r/jf Wars, 299 [tTdfpj / Consider Haul AJ)1 Light Is
To Marguerite, 318 Spent, 133
To My Father, 334 l Wien / HJ ir Ffitfi, 17
T(i the Ijird General Cromwell, 228 r 1 7jc?j I Heard the Lcam 'd Astronomer,
To fj'i i AlnnUry of A/r. f.ildii -.mi , 4HJ 300
Tit the Memory of Ij-r Behn/td, ’he Mini Ulan Last itl the Dooryard
Author Mr. ll'illiam Shakespeare. Bloifin 'd, 26l \
448 111 7[d<ip Parted, 360
tl'Jpd'Pd
To the l irgius to Make Much of lime, Mute Lilies, The, 426
91 Whitman, Wall
Tjÿfr, 7 lif. 343 Hand-Mirror, A, 568
Ulysses, 558 Hour Continuing Long, 6, 35
Up-Hill. 515 1 Fiord1 hi ir.nj:ifPirp?Li a IJtff-Oak
l-pon first Looking Into Chapman's Cntd'tite, 1 9 1
I /mtiiv, t 1 9 Xiitflw patient spider. A, 61
648 INDEX OF AUTHORS A TIJLES

From Song of Myself Lines Competed a Few Miles abmv

I it celebrate myself, and sing my¬ Tinteni Abbey on ReHsiting the
self). 569 Blinks of the Wye During <i
6 (A child said, Wlm is the grass? Tour, 255
fetching it to me with full hands), Aty Heart Leaps Up, 577
569 Ode, 577
52 ('Hie spotted hawk swoops by and slumber did my spirit seal, A, 8x
accuses PPPC, hr Complains of my 1 17r 237
gab and my loitering), 570 Solitary Reaper. 'Hie, 92
I ‘igil Strange I Kept on the Field I Vorld Is TLH> Much with Us, The,
One Night, 571 583
ll'brn I Heard the Leant V World War If, 243
mer, 300 Wright, Charles
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Laguna Blurs, 583
Bloom'd, 260 Self-Portrait, 208
Why f Am i\ol a Painter, 488 Wright, James
Wilbur. Richard Blessing, A, 584
Cottage Street, 1 951. 572 Small Frogs Killed on the Highway,
Writer, Vie, 573 584
HIM lights — Wild Nights!, 405
Wild Swans At Carle, The, 165
Writer. Vie, 573
Wyatt, Sir Thomas
Williams, Williams Carlos Foiget Not Vrf. 585
Dinee, TJrc, 95 77tey Flee From Me, 1 5
Landscape with the Tilt of Icants, Yeats, William Butter
573 Among School Child ten, 586
Awn), 77 Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop,
Paper from Passenack. The. 575 186
Spring and All, 576 Doim by the Salle)' Cardens, 588
771 is 7s Just To Say. 576 Easter 1916. 268
To Elsie\ 1 97 Irish Airman Foresees His Death,
Windhover, Vie, 445 An, 192
[ i indigo, 65 Ldfcf Isle of Inttisfree, Vie, 588
Jf'ittgtfwr Lake, 234 Leda and the Swan, 589
Wishful Thinking, 344 Mem, 300
With Rue My Heart Is Lidn i, 446 fe Byzantium, 589
Wordsworth, William Second Coming. The, 590
Com;wed L I Westminster Bridge, Wild Swans at Cook, Vie, t05
September 5, 1802, 250 Zen Americana, 312
/ I Hindered Lonely ,1s ti CM, 59
Chronological Index
ANONYMOUS Sonnet 66 (Till'd with all these,
77ir Cttekoe iT’nja, 11, 41 for restful death I ery). I 53
Sir Patrick Spens, 513 Sonnet ]8 (Shalt I Compare thee
Lord Randal, 55 to a tunimcTs day?), 521
Western Wind, ill Sonnet !16 (Lt>t me nor to the
5m THOMAS WYATT (1503-1542) ittifnage of the minds), 521
Forget Not Yet, 585 Sormet 129 (Th‘ expense of spirit
lliey Flee From Me. 15 ir a waste of shame). IJJ
EUMUND SI-ENSER (1552-1599) SenpjeJ 29 (When in disgrace with
.4 morel11 75 (One dav I wrote fortune and men's, eyes), 56
her name upon the SenUff 76 [Why is my verse w
strand), 546 barren of new pridet), 225
Fpilhdlcrinion, 555 THOMAS NASHE (1567-71601)
Sm WAITER RAITGK (1554-1618) A Litany in Time of Plaint, 221
77rr Lit, 501 JOHN DON™ (1572- Iff) I)
Tiff Nymph's Reply to the A Valediction: FeriuJdi'Hjj
Shepherd, 84 MWJWIHJJ, 57
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY (1 554- 1586) Holy Sennet 14 (batter my heart,
From ,‘hriropkf/ and Stella three- perconed God; for
1 (Loving in Truth and tain in Yon), 160
verse my love to show), 52J Death, he not fuoud, 402
3 1 (With how sad steps Oh Ihe Cmmtttatimt, 406
Moon, thou dimb'st the The Stw Rising, 401
skies), 525 BEN JESSKGN (1573-1637)
ROBERT SOUTHWELL (C. 1563- CfiiHif, A Jy Celia, 448
1595) On CHI, 74
7hr Burning liohe, 226 On My First Sen, 16
MICHAEL DRAYTON (1564-1631 Still To Bf Neat, 299
Siwrt1 there's no help, 155 7 b the Memnrj' of My Beloved,
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE (1564- thr Author Mt William Stalw-
1593) ipeare. 448
flrr P4.f<MmUr Shepherd to His CHI [ ROCK TiCHEUDiNE (d- 1586)
Love, 83 Hchborne’s tilegy, 51
Wilt I AM SlIARl.MTARE (1 564-1616) ROBERT HERKICK (1591-1674)
Tear No More the Heat <> hpp1
1

ConntM j GnitJÿ A-Mayiitg, 442

Sitn. 520 The .djÿJmrrrrf of His Hnulr. 1 1 4
Full Fathom Five, 520 To the Dugins, to Aftrfcr of
Smtpicf 130 (My mistress' eyes are Time, 91
notlung like the sun), 91 Upon julim Clothes. 58
Sonnet 30 (When to the GEORGE HERBERT (1595-1633)
sessions of sweet silent Edffer Hihÿ, 130
thought), / 7? Lom (Ittj. 59
Sswrirf 6V (Like as the waves Fra JUT (/), 152
make toward the pebbled Redemption, 161
shore), 13. 51 111e Collar, 441

649
650 CHR.ONOLOGII.AL INDEX

EDMUND WALLER (1607-1687) WitiiAM UIAKL: (1757-1827)

Sam;, 565 Ah SuH-flouvr, 342
Of the Last Verses hi the
’
Infant Joy, 26
Book, 1, 31 Infant Somsii', 4, 26
JOHN MILTON (1608-1674) London, 82
L‘Allegro, 478 The Garden of Love, 342
Lytidas, 293 'Pie Lamb, 342
On Shakespeare, 482 The Littie Black Boy, 229
On the Luc Massacre in Pie Sick Rase, 92
Piedmont, 16 The Tyerr, 343
To the Lord General KOltERT UURNS (1759-1796)
Cromwell, 228 A Red, Red KLW, 359
U'heti t Consider Ifott' \ty Light Is O, Wert TJIOM j'rr the Canid
Spent, 133 Blast. 358
ANNE IJRADSTR.EE r (c. 1612-1672) WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-
A Otter to Her Husband, Absent 1850)
Upon Public Employment, 229 A slumber did my spirit seal, 85,
RICKARD LOVELACE (1618-1657) Ml, 237
To Ltuasia, Gomjj IP the Composed upon I Vestminsler Bridge,
Wars, 299 September J, 1802, 250
ANDREW MARVELL (1621-1678) / Wandered Lonely As a Cloud,
An Horatian Ode, 466 59
The Carden, 131 Lines Composed a Fern Miles above
To His Coy Mistress, 470 1 intern Abbey on Revisiting the
HENRY VAUGHN (1622 1695) Banks of the IVye During a
They An All Ciun- itffo the World Tour, 255
of Light!, 562 My Heart Leaps Up, 517
JOHN DRY DEN (1631-1700) Ode, 577
Sylvia the Pair, I 90 The Solitary Reaper, 92
To the Memory <>/ Afr. 7 he I Farid Is 7 <*> A Inch u •itb
Oldham,410 Us, 583
JONATHAN SWIFT (1667-1745) SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE ( 1 772—
A Description oj the Afwriry;, 555 1834)
ALEXANDER PORE (1688- 1744) Dejection; An Ode, 372
From Essay prr Almi / (Epistle t), Kuhla Khan, 253
498 7?ir Kimi' of the Ancient
T GRAY (1716-1771)
H (DMAS Mariner, 376
Elegy Written in a Country Church¬ GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON
yard, 428 (1788-1824)
CHRISTOPHER SMART (1722-1771) She Walks in Beauty, 359
From Agm, 517 IVhrti IVr Two Parted, 360
Oil a Bed of Guernsey Lilies. 530 PERCY UYSSHI SHELLI.Y (1792-1822)
WILLIAM COW PI K (1731-180(1) England in 1819, 522
Epitaph ini a Hare, 395 Ode to the West Wind. 522
Pie Castaway, 393 Otymandias, 524
 CHKOMH OCICAL [ N ]) F. X 651

JOHN CLARI- ( 1 793- 1 864) 106 (Ring out, wild bulls, to the
Vie Badger, 368 wild iky). 556
.
Fits t Love 369 121 (Sad I lespcr o'er the buried
t Am, 370 sun). 557
JOHN KEATS (1795-1821) Tears, Idle Tears , 558
hi rfrcw nighted Dfirmthfr, 451 Ulysses, 558
La Belle Durtte sans Mem, 60 ROBERT BROWNING (1812-1889)
Ode On J! Clteticm ( 'rn, 259 Chitde Roland to the Dark Touvr
Ode to a iXip/iiingale, 134 Came, 351
On Sitting Down to Rend King .Memorabilia, 358
Lear Owe Again , 451 My Last Duchess, 162
The Human Seasons, 12, 49 EDWARD LEAR (1812-1888)
1 h is Living Hand, 452 Hour P/fLtijluf to Krtctir Air.
To Autumn, 161 Dar, 230
Upon First Looking Into Chapman ’s EMILY BRONTE (1818 1848}
Hornet, 1 1 9 No Coward SUM/ Jr Mine, 346
When I Ham' Fears, 17 Remembrance, 34 7
RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803- HERMAN MEI VILLE (1819-1891)
1882) Fragments of a D>st Gnostic
Concord Hymn, 416 Poem, 473
The Snowstorm, 416 .Monody, 4 73
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING Vie Berg, 471
( 1806-1861 ) Vie March Into Virginia, 239
.4 .Musical Instrument, 350 WALT WHITMAN (1819-1892)
Han- Do t Dire Thee?, 299 A Hand-Mirror, 568
From Sorwrfr /FM the Portuguese A Noiseless Patient Spider, 61
1 (i thought how once The¬ Hours Continuing Long, 6, 35
ocritus had sung), 350 1 Saw in Louisiana a LiVf-Qit
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW Growing, 191
(1807-1882) From Song of Myself
Aftermath, 461 1 ([ celebrate myself, and sing
Hie Jewish Cemetery at Newport, myself), 569
461 6 (A child said, Illiflf it
Vie Tide Rises, The Tide Falls. the grass' fetching it
463 to me with full
EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-1849) hands), 569
Annabel Lee, 497 52 (The spotted hawk swoops by
7 ft Helen , 4 98 and accuses me, he complains
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON (1809- of my), 57fJ
1892) t 7 L> r / .Sirjrytf I Kept on the Field
From In Memonam A H.H. One Night. VI
7 (Dark house, by \ehiclt ante more 1 I then I Heard the Darn’d Astrono¬
standi, 555 mer, 300
99 (Kisrst thou thus, dim dawn, llJrcFi LfVdifi Liur i‘rr the Dooryard
again). 556 Bloom'd, 260
652 CHRONOLOGICAL INIJL X

MATTHEW-' ARNOLD (1822-18:18) No N'orii, there if none Pitched past

Dflwr Beach, 136 pitch of grief, 44-f
Shakespeare, 317 Pied Beauty, 93
To Marguerite, 3 1 X Spring ami hall, 1 78
EMII Y DICKINSON (1830-1886) The Windhover, 3-13
A Narrow Fellow in the Grass, 17 A. E. HOUSMAN (1859-1936)

——
After great pain, a formal feeling
comes , 40J
Because i could not stop for
Death , 62
Lovelies i of Trees, the Cherry Note,
443
With Rue My Heart is Leaden,
446
I like a took of Agony, 402 WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS (1865-
—
My life had Stood (! Loaded Gml,
402
1939)
A mons; School Children, 5X6
Much Madness in divines! Sense , — Ait Irish Airman Foresees His
Death, 192
403
Success is counted 404
sweetest, Crazy fane Talks with the Bishop.
Wild Nights — Wild Nights!, 1S6
Down hy the Salley Gardens,
405
I heard a Fly buzz
—
died i 183
—o Jrcri / 5XX
Easter 1916, 263
I'm nobody! HTto are you?, Leda and the Swan, 589
191 Mem, 300
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers Sailing to Byzantium, 589
(1X59), 403 The Dike Isle oj Innisfree, 5 XX
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers The Second Coming, 590
(1X61), 403 lire Wild Stvans at Goole, 165
’Ike Heart asks Pleasure first EDWIN ARLINGTON ROIIINSON
106. 150 (1869-1935)
Die Brain — is wider than the Sky, Eras Tumitnos, 512
404 New England, 11X
Die Soul selects her own Society , — Richard Gory, 513
405 PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR (1872-
7here's a certain Slant of light, 1906)
405 Harriet Beecher Stowe, 410
CHRISTINA ROSSI m (1830 1894) Robert Gould shaur, 411
Up-Hill, 515 IVe l Tear the Mask, 412
THOMAS HARDY (184I 1-1928) ROBERT HROSI (1874-1963)
Channel Firing, 4,1.5 Bmhes, 419
Die Convergence of the Design, 421
Twain, 63 Mending Wali, 137
Du' Darkling Dtriish, 93 Stopping by Woods on a Snowy
Die Ruined Maid. 192 Evening, I4X
GERARD MANIEY HOPKINS (IH44- Hie Gift Outright, 301
1 889) Hie Road Not Taken. 64
Felix Randal. 23 I CARL SANIWURC (1878 1967)
God's Grandeur, 444 Grass, 110
 CHRONOLOGICAL INDEX 653

WALLACE STEVENS (1879-1955) ARCHIBALD MACLEESH

Anecdote of the Jar, 210 (1892-1982)
Sunday Morning, 551 Ars Partita, 466
flit Emperor of Ice Cream , WILFRED OWEN (1893-1918)
165 Anthem for Doomed Youth, 489
Tlte Idea of Order at Key i Vest, Duke ct Decorum Esi, 245
546 Disabled, 489
Hit Planet on the Table, 548 E. E. CUMMINGS (1894-1962)
The Snow Man, 550 anyone lived in a pretty how fount,
Thirteen Ways of Looking at 4
Blackbird, 555
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS (1883-
1963)
—
599
in Just , 5, 55
may Ifeel said he, 400
r-p-o-pdt-e-s-s-a-g-r, 166
This Is Just To Say, 576 HART CRANE (1899-1933)
The Roper from Passenade, 575 To Brooklyn Bridge, 597
The Dance, 95 The Broken Totvet, 596
To Elsie, 197 LANGSTON HUGHES (1902-1967)
Poent, 77 Genius Child, 219
Spring and All, 576 Harlem, 446
Landscape with the Full of learns. High to Lou>, 221
575 I, Too, 446
LL H. LAWRENCE (1885-1930) Me and the Mute, 220
Bavarian Gentians, 94 Suicide's Note, 447
llte English Are Sa Nice!, 457 The Weary Blues, 447
EAKA POUND (1885-1972) '
Theme for English B, 18
In a Station of the Metro, 501 World War II, 245
The Garden, 500 STEVIE SMITH (1902-1971)
The Hirer-Merchant's Wife: Not Waving but
A Letter, 139 Drowning, 552
H. D. (1886-1961) Pretty, 552
Helen, 433 COUNTEE CULLEN (1903-1946)
Oread, 166 Heritage, 199
ROBINSON JEFFERS (1887-1962) Incident, 599
Shine, Perishing Republic, 301 W H. AUDEN (1907-1973)
MARIANNE MOORE (1887-1972) As 1 Walked Out One Evening,
ftofry, 483 321
The Steeple-Jack, 484 Music dcs Beaux Arts, 322
To A Snail, 486 THEODORE ROETHKE (1908-1963)
To a Steam Roller, 202 Elegyfor Jane, 514
T. $. ELIOT ( 1888-1965) 3/y Papa's Walts;, 95
jVftiritM, 412 'lltc Waking, 514
Preludes,415 El I7AUETH BISHOP (1911-1979)
Sweeney Among the Nightingales, At the Fishhouses, 335
415 Brazil, January 1, 1502, 213
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Crusoe in England, 202
195 Vie Fish, 337
654 CHRONOLOGICÿ INDEX

One Art. 167 PHILIP LARKIN (1922-1985)

Poem, 3J9 High Windows, 455
Sesrina, 341 Mr. Bicaney, 456
ROBERT HAYDEN (1913-1980) Reasons for At tenth-nee, 456
Frederick Douglass, 437 Talking in Bed, t04
Mourning Poem for the Queen of This Be The Verse, 45 7
Sunday, 438 KENNETH KOCH (b. 1925)
Night, Death, Mississippi, 274 Variations an o Theme by William
Those Winter Sundays, 19 Carlas Williasm, 45J
JOHN BERRYMAN (1914-1972) A. R AMMONS (b, 1926)
Dream Song 4, 323 Busier Morning. 315
Dream Song 45, 324 The City Limits, 314
Dreamiong 384, 324 ROBERT CREELEY (b. 1926)
Henry sats in dt bar & uw odd, A Marriage, 39S
167 ALLEN GINSBERG (b. 1926)
RANDALL JARREL (3914-1965) America, 422
The Death of the Ball Turret Sunflower Sutra. 302
Gunner, 116 JAMES MERRILL (1926-1995)
DYLAN THOMAS (1914-1953) An Upward Ijrok, 476
Do Not Go Gentle into Thai Good Ihe Broken Home, 473
Night, 19 FRANK O’HARA (1926-1966)
Fern Hill, 560 A tv Maria, 487
In My Craft or Sullen Art, 562 HIty t Am Not a Painter, 488
HENRY REED (1914-1986) JOHN ASHBERY (b. 1927)
The Naming of Parts, 164 Paradoxes and Oxymorons, 320
GWENDOLYN BROOKS (b. 1917) Street Musicians, 320
Kitchenette Building, 348 The Painter, 319
The Bean Eaters, 348 W, S, MERWIN (b, 1927)
‘[he Mother, 349 For a Coming
We Real Cool, 79 Extinction , 4 77
ROBERT LOWELL (1917-1977) For I he Anniversary of My Death,
Epilogue, 288 478
For the Union Dead, 270 The Asians Dying, 275
Sailing Home from JAMES WRIGHT (1927-1980)
Rapdilo, 464 A Blessing, 584
Skunk Hour, 9, 42 Small Frogs Killed on the Highway,
The March 1, 243 584
AMY CLAMPITT (b. 1920) ANNE SEXTON (1928-1974)
A Procession at Candlemas, Her Kind, 207
364 SKOHJ White and the Seven Dwarfs,
RICHARD WILBUR (b. 1921) 515
Cottage Street, 1953, 572 THOM GUNN (b. 1929)
The Writer, 573 My Sitd Captains, 433
DENISE LE VERTOV (b. 1923) The Man uitli Night Sweats, 432
The Aclte of \larridgc, 458 ADRIENNE RICH (b. 1929)
O Taste and See, 459 Diving into the Wrick, 503
 CHRONOLOGICAL IN HEX 655

Mother-in-Law, 212 FRANK UIDART (I>. 1939)

Necessities of Life, 102 Ellen lVat, 325
Prospective Immigrants Please Note. To My Rather, 334
216 SEAMUS HEANEY (b. 1939)
Snapshots of a iTaughtcr-iit-Law, Bogland, 439
506 Front the Frontier of Writing,
The Middle Aged. 505 140
GARY SNYDER (b. 1930)' Mid-Term Break, 174
Axe Handles, 535 Punishment, 439
How Poetry Comes to Mr, Terminus, 222
53d JAMES WELCH (b. 1940)
Riprap, 534 Harlem, Montana; just Off the
DEREK WALCOTT (b. 1930) Reservation, 567
Ruins of a Croat House, 564 The .Man from H'asltirtgton,
7lie Season of Phantasmal Peace, 568
96 SIMON J. ORTIZ (b, 1941)
The Gulf 276 Eieitd in the lirtw 27?
ETHERIDGE KNIGHT (b. 1931) HAVE SMITH (b- 1942)
A poem for Myself (Or Blues OH (i Field Trip at Fredericksburg,
for j Mississippi Black Boy), 531
452 The Spring Poem, 12, 48
SYLVIA PLATH (1932-1963) LOUISE CLUCK (b. 1943)
Daddy. 20 All Hallows, 425
B/rtffefMTTylHjs;, 492 Mock Orange, 304
Edge, 493 Tlte School Children, 4, JO
Lady Lazarus, 4 93 The White Lilies, 426
Morning Song, 496 YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA (b. 1947)
The Applicant, 232 f&itr People, 453
ALDRE LORJJF (1934-1992) Facing It, 23
Hanging Fire, 463 My Father's lafvelr tiers , 454
MARK STRAND (b, 1934} LESLIE MARMON SILKO (b. 1948)
Courtship, 1 40 Prayer to the Pacific, 526
Keeping Things Whole, 554 MICHAEL ULUMENTHAL (b- 1949)
CHARLES WRIGHT (b. 1935) A Marriage, 344
Litguna lilues, 583 Thnking, 344
Self-Portrait, 208 JOIUE GRAHAM (b. 1930)
MJCIHAEI HARPER (b. 1938) Of Forced Sighres and Trusty Fere-
American History, 8, 4 1 fulness, 426
Nightmare Regius Responsibility, San Sepokro, 141
436 Soul Says, 428
GHARUS SIMIC (b. 1938) 11 hat the End Is For, 280
Charon's Cosmology, 52 7 JAMES GALVIN (b. 1951)
Fork, 527 Independence Day, 1956; A Fairy
Old Couple, 9, 42 Tale, 421
PAULA GUN ALLEN (b. 1939) Jny HARJO (b. 195!)
Zen Americano, 312 iwfpiw Fe, 436
656 CHRONOLOGICAL INDEX

CARHETT HONGO (b. 1951) LOUISE EDKICH fb. 1954)

The flange Store/ 29 Miles l oleatto/ / 11 \a Sleeping ll'herr the lii.vk
Hilo, Hawaii, 233 Oaks Move, 4 1 7
MICHAELS WEAVER (b. 1951) The Strange Pltaple, 4 IS
an Heritage let Civil Rights, llie WilidigO, 65
Pinric, 307 THYUAS Moss (b 1954}
RITA DOVE (b. 1952) Ltmchcounter Freedom, 486
—
Atlolcstfitee II, 408 MARILYN CHIN (b. 1955)
Altar, 363
Dusting, 409
Rash Cards, 23 Autumn Leaves. 363
Parsley, 305 Luc it LiKOCK-iikoiuo (b- 1956)
Wingfwt Lake, 234 Carrvuviiere, 345
DAVID MURA (b. 1952) Demesne Mysticism, 97
An /lÿrdJifjirr On 1942, 234 HENRI Com (b. 1956)
ALBERTO RIOS (b, 1952) 40 Diij'j and 40 Nights, 370
A/7 Ahueio, 510 CARL PHILLIPS (b_ 1959)
Teodoro Luna's Tiiv Afriea Says, 208
Kisses, 511 Passing, 491
ROSANNA WARREN (b. 1953) ELIZABETH ALEXANDER (b. 1962)
lit Creve Cocttr, Missouri, 566 Nineteen, 98
LORN A DEE CERVANTES (b. 1954) Ode. 311
Refugee Ship. 362 I.I-YOUNC; LEE (b. 1957)
Poem far the Youttg ELTirlt Mm 77if Interrogation, 459
IVho Asked Mf How 1, Alt lu- SHERMAN ALEXIE (b. 1966)
telligenl, Well-Read Person Evolution, 142
Could Believe in the IVar Be¬ Or) the Amtrak from ftvfiMr M New
'

tween Rates, 36 1 York City, 241

Poetna para las Californios Muertos, Resciratiou Lave Song, 3 1 1
168 I