Poem of the Week 9/10/2007: from The Odyssey, Book VI

from The Odyssey, Book VI

But when the girl was ready to go home--
about to yoke the mules and fold the clothes--
gray-eyed Athena set her mind on still
another stratagem, so that Odysseus
might come to see the gracious girl who then
could lead him down to the town of the Phaecians.
The daughter of the king, as she was tossing
the ball to one of her companions, missed
her throw; the ball fell into a deep pool.
The girls cried out. Their shout was loud. They woke
Odysseus. And as he sat up, he thought:

"What misery is mine? What mortals must
I meet in this new land that I now touch?
Are they unfeeling beings--wild, unjust?
Or do they welcome strangers--does their thought
include fear of the gods? That cry I heard,
the cry that captured me, was tender--like
the voice of young girls--voice of nymphs who haunt
the steepest mountain peaks, the springs that feed
the rivers, and teh green of grazing lands.
Can men with human speech be here--close by?
But I must try--must see with my own eyes."

And now he burst out of the underbrush;
with his stout hand he bore a leafy branch
from that thick wood, to hide his nakedness.
He moved out as a mountain lion would
when--sure of his own strength, his eyes ablaze--
through driving wind and rain, he stalks his prey,
wild deer or sheep or oxen; he'll attack
a cattle-fold, however tight the fence
that pens the herd--the hunger's so intense.
So did Odysseus seem as he prepared
to burst into the band of fair-haired girls,
though he was naked, he was ravenous.
But he-his form was filthy, fouled with brine--
struck them as horrible; and terrified,
they scattered on the shore, one here, one there,
among the sandpits jutting out to sea.
The daghter of Alcinous was left
alone: her spirit had recieved the gift
of courage from Athena, who had freed
the limbs of the young girl from fear and trembling.

She did not flinch or flee. She faced him firmly.

Homer

It took me all four years of college to see why people have loved the Odyssey for thousands of years; these are strong, noble people living real lives. In a real way. I guess it is hard now to think of what it might mean to be a strong person, but the Odyssey presents us with situation after situation wherein Odysseus resists. Like Nausicaa, Odysseus is capable of standing still, restraining himself from pleasurable situations in favor of experience, of life.

This passage raises the question for me: how much strength does it take to face whatever situation you are faced with? Though Odysseus's willingness to experience is especially evident in his thoughts as he wakes up--I remember the line, "I must try--must see with my own eyes" from paper prompts about Odysseus and experience freshman year--I think who is really admirable is Nausicaa. As Odysseus enters, he is animal-liike, and presumably frightening. Homer emphasizes his disgusting, ravenous, fierce aspects, from the brine encrusting his skin to his starved body. He "stalks" towards the girls (a literary critic might say that his sexual starvation

Poem of the Week 9/3/2007: Peach

Peach

Would you like to throw a stone at me?
Here, take all that's left of my peach.

Bloodred, deep;
Heaven knows how it came to pass.
Somebody's pound of flesh rendered up.

Wrinkled with secrets
And hard with the intention to keep them.

Why, from silvery peach-bloom,
From that shallow-silvery wine-glass on a short stem
This rolling, dropping, heavy glovule?

I am thinking, of course, of the peach before I ate it.

Why so velvety, why so voluptuous heavy?
Why hanging with such inordinate weight?
Why so indented?

Why the groove?
Why the lovely, bivalve roundness?
Why the ripple down the sphere?
Why the suggestion of incision?

Why was not my peach round and finished like a billiard ball?
It would have been if man had made it.
Though I've eaten it now.

But it wasn't round and finished like a billiard ball;
And because I say so, you would like to throw something at me.
Here, you can have my peach stone.

D.H. Lawrence 1929

Poetry loves the world, yes!~ And don't you want a peach now? What kind of miracle is this peach? I love the voice in this poem. Sometimes poetry takes itself so seriously. Sometimes people do?

It's peach season in Washington. Well, almost the end of peach season. This poem, though, looks very hard at a peach from the 1920s. A peach eighty years ago was as fresh as the peaches I saw today. Humans have loved peaches for a very long time. Where did that long-ago peach go? And its admirer? Interesting that the poem has a line about the circular renewal of matter; the thought, "somebody's pound of flesh offered up" implies that the peach is flesh of other things--animals, grass.

We have all heard that organic matter re-enters the earth, becoming life again. I guess that Lawrence's poem made that idea more real for me--this peach really *was* once, and then it passed. Like the thrown peach stone from one person to another!

Poem of the Week 8/27/2007: On Anothers Sorrow

On Anothers Sorrow

Can I see anothers woe,
And not be in sorrow too.
Can I see anothers frief,
And not seek for kind relief.

Can I see a falling tear,
And not feel my sorrows share,
Can a father seehis child,
Weep, nor be with sorrow fill'd.

Can a mother sit and hear,
An infant groan an infant fear--
No no never can it be.
Never never can it be.

And can he who smiles on all
Hear the wren with sorrows small,
Hear the small birds grief & care
Hear the woes that infants bear--

And not sit beside the nest
Pouring pit in their breast,
And not sit the cradle near
Weeping tear on infants tear.

And not sit both night & day,
Wiping all our tears away.
O! no never can it be.
Never never can it be.

He doth give his joy to all.
He becomes an infant small.
He becomes a man of woe
He doth feel the sorrow too.

Think not, thou canst sigh a sigh,
And thy maker is not by.
Think not, thou canst weep a tear,
And thy maker is not near.

O! he gives to us his joy,
That our grief he may destroy
Till our grief is fled & gone
He doth sit by us and moan

William Blake 1790

What a complex end this poem has--we are given compassion for redemption, is this correct? In the beginning, Blake writes that it is impossible to see suffering without taking it on ourselves. The savior suffered and suffers with us every moment so that we can be relieved, so that we can partake in eternal joy.

This is fundamentally a poem of trust and brotherhood--the lord has made a pact with us, it seems, abiding by a high rule of human life in order to help us live. Furthermore, it asks to trust in our suffering, to not be afraid of suffering because it is always suffered in kinship with others. Through this co-suffering, it is implied, suffering will end. And this we ought to trust.

Poem of the Week 8/20/2007: The Angel

The Angel

I Dreamt a Dream! what can it mean?
And that I was a maiden Queen:
Guarded by an Angel mild:
Witless woe, was ne'er beguil'd!

And I wept both night and day
And he wip'd my tears away
And I wept both day and night
And hid from him my hearts delight

So he took his wings and fled:
Then the morn blush'd rosy red:
I dried my tears & armed my fears,
With ten thousand shields and spears.

Soon my Angel came again;
I was arm'd, he came in vain:
For the time of youth was fled
And grey hairs were on my head.

William Blake 1790

This poem speaks of the human drive to self-concealment. The queen does not want to be made vulnerable, and so she hides both the real reason for her suffering and later must guard that out of her fear. In doing, she loses what could have saved her--an angel.

Of course, Blake cannot be shortened and simplified so extremely. There is a question as to the angel's role in her self concealement; could his comfort have actually enabled her suffering? In other works, Blake has written, "Opposition is true friendship;" our friends ought not enable every vice we have, but challenge us to stay our course, to keep pushing ourselves. To the angel's credit, his presence does seem to symbolize some kind of innocent state--not only does he, like a parent, wipe away her tears, he is associated with youth. When he returns, she is old, implying that his earlier comradeship occurred in youth.

So, though perhaps enabled by the angel, the Queen's reaction was violent and dualistic. Rather than opposition, which holds two forces agaist one-another, she wishes to cut off any chance of vulnerability, of being challenged internally.

I believe that Blake puts us in an uncomfortable position within the poem, for self-concealment is obviously something to which all people are prey. If one has any grain of self-knowledge, one cannot judge this woman, but only ask what might have happened had she not hidden so much from a being that loved her.

Poem of the Week 8/14/2007: Ulysses

Ulysses

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I 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, but honour'd of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of 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 like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,--
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, 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 honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but 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 friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push 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 I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we 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.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Like the ancients, as my professor mentioned recently, Tennyson's poem demands of us: What is a life lived well?.

Filled with adventure, every hour is used for exploration and life, inner and out. Ulysses' suffering has been great, as well as his enjoyment. We find, in the last stanza, that Ulysses is a true hero, for he is willing to die at any moment. Rilke discusses the idea of the hero, not because he does sacrifice himself, but because he is willing to. I wonder how often we are willing to risk anything any more. Even in Greek timees, it must have been rare, for those heroes were *heroes* because they would do so. To risk anything, to constantly seek... can we be heroes any more?

Poem of the Week 8/7/2007: from The Country of Marriage

rom The Country of Marriage

I.

I dream of you walking at night along the streams
of the country of my birth, warm blooms and the nightsongs
of birds opening around you as you walk.
You are holding in your body the dark seed of my sleep.

II.

This comes after silence. Was it something I said
that bound me to you, some mere promise
or, worse, the fear of loneliness and death?
A man lost in the woods in the dark, I stood
still and said nothing. And then there rose in me,
like the earth's empowering brew rising
in root and branch, the words of a dream of you
I did not know I had dreamed. I was a wanderer
who feels the solace of his native land
under his feet again and moving in his blood.
I went on, blind and faithful. Where I stepped
my track was there to steady me. It was no abyss
that lay before me, but only the level ground.

VI.

What I am learning to give you is my death
to set you free of me, and me from myself
into the dark and the new light. Like the water
of a deep stream, love is always too much. We
did not make it. Though we drink till we burst
we cannot have it all, or want it all.
In its abundance it survives our thirst.
In the evening we come down to the shore
to drink our fill, and sleep, while it
flows through the regions of the dark.
It does not hold us, except we keep returning
to its rich waters thirsty. We enter,
willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy.

VII.

I give you what is unbounded, passing from dark to dark,
containing darkness: a night of rain, an early morning.
I give you the life I have let live for the love of you:
a clump of orange-blooming weeds beside the road,
the young orchard waiting in the snow, our own life
that we have planted in the ground, as I
have planted mine in you. I give you my love for all
beautiful and honest women that you gather to yourself
again and again, and satisfy--and this poem,
no more mine than any man's who has loved a woman.

Wendell Berry

Poem of the Week 7/23/2007: from A Kumquat for John Keats

from A Kumquat for John Keats

Today I found the right fruit for my prime,
not orange, not tangelo, and not lime,
nor moon-like gloes of grapefruit that now hang
outside our bedroom, nor tart lemon's tang
(though last year full of bile and self-defeat
I wanted to believe no life was sweet)
nor the tangible sunshine of the tangerine,
and no incongruous citrus ever seen
at greengrocers' in Newcastle or Leeds
mis-spelt by the spuds and mud-caked swedes,
a fruit an older poet might substitute
for the grape John Keats thought to be Joy's fruit,
when, two years before he died, he tried to write
how Melancholy dwelled inside Delight.* / /
and if John keats had only lived to be,
because of extra years, in need like me,
at 42 he'd help me celebrate
that Micancopy kumquat that I ate
whole, straight off the tree, sweet pulp and sour skin--
or was it sweet outside, and sour within?
For however many kumquats that I eat
I'm not sure if it's flesh or rind that's sweet,
and being a man of doubt at life's mid-way
I'd offer Keats some kumquats and I'd say:
You'll find that one part's sweet and one part's tart:
say where the sweetness or the sourness start.

I find I can't as if one couldn't say
exactly where the night became the day,
which makes for me the kumquat taken whole
best fruit, and metaphor, to fit the soul
of one in Florida at 42 with Keats
crunching kumquats, thinking, as he eats
the flesh, the juice, the pith, the pips, the peel,
that this is how a full life ought to feel,
its perishable relish prick the tongue,
when the man who savours life's no longer young,
the fruits that were his futures far behind.
Then its the kumquat fruit expresses best
how days have darkness behind them like a rind,
life has a skin of death that keeps its zest.

*Cf. John Keats, "Ode on Melancholy," lines 25-26

...

Tony Harrison 1981


I have cut a significant portion of this poem, because of limited space and because the poem spins into sentimental personal and social reflections. It is enough, for now, to get a taste of the kumquat Mr. Harrison would like us to mull over the course of this poem. Perhaps it will be helpful for the reader to know that Keats was a Romantic Era poet who died young; after the deaths of many family members from Tuberculosis, he had the premonition that he would die young, and many of his poems wrestle with issues of life and death, love and beauty. They are intensely compact works of art, almost effortlessly holding the reins of emotion, reflection and beauty, letting each lead as it sees fit. Metaphor is key to his work, from which Tony Harrison takes the cue for this poem.

Though not the densest or most profound poem ever written, I find it clever, fun to read, and a good reminder of the dualities we carry within life. One question it raises, I think, is: Do you know you are going to die? How often is this a reality? Does your life really carry with it the skin that keeps its zest? Interesting.

Poem of the Week 7/18/2007: from Don Juan, Canto 1

from Don Juan, Canto 1

VI

Most epic poets plunge "in medias res"

(Horace makes this the heroic turnpike road),

And then your hero tells, whene'er you please,

What went before -- by way of episode,

While seated after dinner at his ease,

Beside his mistress in some soft abode,

Palace, or garden, paradise, or cavern,

Which serves the happy couple for a tavern.

VII

That is the usual method, but not mine --

My way is to begin with the beginning;

The regularity of my design

Forbids all wandering as the worst of sinning,

And therefore I shall open with a line

(Although it cost me half an hour in spinning)

Narrating somewhat of Don Juan's father,

And also of his mother, if you'd rather.

VIII

In Seville was he born, a pleasant city,

Famous for oranges and women -- he

Who has not seen it will be much to pity,

So says the proverb -- and I quite agree;

Of all the Spanish towns is none more pretty,

Cadiz perhaps -- but that you soon may see;

Don Juan's parents lived beside the river,

A noble stream, and call'd the Guadalquivir.

IX

His father's name was Jóse -- Don, of course, --

A true Hidalgo, free from every stain

Of Moor or Hebrew blood, he traced his source

Through the most Gothic gentlemen of Spain;

A better cavalier ne'er mounted horse,

Or, being mounted, e'er got down again,

Than Jóse, who begot our hero, who

Begot -- but that's to come -- Well, to renew:

X

His mother[4] was a learnéd lady, famed

For every branch of every science known

In every Christian language ever named,

With virtues equall'd by her wit alone,

She made the cleverest people quite ashamed,

And even the good with inward envy groan,

Finding themselves so very much exceeded

In their own way by all the things that she did.

XI

Her memory was a mine: she knew by heart

All Calderon and greater part of Lopé,

So that if any actor miss'd his part

She could have served him for the prompter's copy;

For her Feinagle's[5] were an useless art,

And he himself obliged to shut up shop -- he

Could never make a memory so fine as

That which adorn'd the brain of Donna Inez.

XII

Her favourite science was the mathematical,

Her noblest virtue was her magnanimity,

Her wit (she sometimes tried at wit) was Attic all,

Her serious sayings darken'd to sublimity;

In short, in all things she was fairly what I call

A prodigy -- her morning dress was dimity,

Her evening silk, or, in the summer, muslin,

And other stuffs, with which I won't stay puzzling.

XIII

She knew the Latin -- that is, "the Lord's prayer,"

And Greek -- the alphabet -- I'm nearly sure;

She read some French romances here and there,

Although her mode of speaking was not pure;

For native Spanish she had no great care,

At least her conversation was obscure;

Her thoughts were theorems, her words a problem,

As if she deem'd that mystery would ennoble 'em.

XIV

She liked the English and the Hebrew tongue,

And said there was analogy between 'em;

She proved it somehow out of sacred song,

But I must leave the proofs to those who've seen 'em;

But this I heard her say, and can't be wrong

And all may think which way their judgments lean 'em,

"'T is strange -- the Hebrew noun which means 'I am,'

The English always used to govern d--n."

XV

Some women use their tongues -- she look'd a lecture,

Each eye a sermon, and her brow a homily,

An all-in-all sufficient self-director,

Like the lamented late Sir Samuel Romilly,

The Law's expounder, and the State's corrector,

Whose suicide was almost an anomaly --

One sad example more, that "All is vanity"

(The jury brought their verdict in "Insanity").

XVI

In short, she was a walking calculation,

Miss Edgeworth's novels stepping from their covers,

Or Mrs. Trimmer's books on education,

Or "Coelebs' Wife" set out in quest of lovers,

Morality's prim personification,

In which not Envy's self a flaw discovers;

To others' share let "female errors fall,"

For she had not even one -- the worst of all.

XVII

Oh! she was perfect past all parallel --

Of any modern female saint's comparison;

So far above the cunning powers of hell,

Her guardian angel had given up his garrison;

Even her minutest motions went as well

As those of the best time-piece made by Harrison:

In virtues nothing earthly could surpass her,

Save thine "incomparable oil," Macassar!

XVIII

Perfect she was, but as perfection is

Insipid in this naughty world of ours,

Where our first parents never learn'd to kiss

Till they were exiled from their earlier bowers,

Where all was peace, and innocence, and bliss

(I wonder how they got through the twelve hours),

Don Jóse, like a lineal son of Eve,

Went plucking various fruit without her leave.

Lord Byron 1824

I will add the footnotes soon! For now, I hope that you can notice the narrator's contradictory tone. In this satire, Byron is poking fun at any number of things; in this excerpt, he laughs at the conventions of heroic verse, which can take itself Very Seriously. I also recommend that you read this out loud to yourself after reading it silently once, because the rhythm of this poem gallops along, a fact that becomes more impressive when one realizes that this is a fraction of one of sixteen cantos.

Poem of the Week 7/11/07: Man and Camel

Man and Camel

On the eve of my fortieth birthday
I sat on the porch having a smoke
when out of the blue a man and a camel
happened by. Neither uttered a sound
at first, but as they drifted up the street
and out of town the two of them began to sing.
Yet what they sang is still a mystery to me—
the words were indistinct and the tune
too ornamental to recall. Into the desert
they went and as they went their voices
rose as one above the sifting sound
of windblown sand. The wonder of their singing,
its elusive blend of man and camel, seemed
an ideal image for all uncommon couples.
Was this the night that I had waited for
so long? I wanted to believe it was,
but just as they were vanishing, the man
and camel ceased to sing, and galloped
back to town. They stood before my porch,
staring up at me with beady eyes, and said:
"You ruined it. You ruined it forever."

Mark Strand

Sorry no close read right now, for this one certainly needs some untangling.

Poem of the Week 7/2/2007: Dante's Inferno, from Canto VI

from Canto VI, Dante's Inferno


We were passing over shades sprawled
under heavy rain, setting our feet
upon their emptiness, which seems real bodies.

All of them were lying on the ground,
except for one who sat bolt upright
when he saw us pass before him.

'O you who come escorted through this hell,'
he said, 'if you can, bring me back to mind.
You were made before I was undone.'

And I to him: 'The punishment you suffer
may be blotting you from memory:
it doesn't seem to me I've ever seen you.

'But tell me who you are to have been put
into this misery with such a penalty
that none, though harsher, is more loathsome.'

And he to me: 'Your city,* so full of envy
that now the sack spills over,
held me in its confines in the sunlit life.

'You and my townsmen called me Ciacco.
For the pernicious fault of gluttony,
as you can see, I'm prostrate in this rain.

'And in my misery I am not alone.
All those here share a single penalty
for the same fault.' He said no more.

I answered him: 'Ciacco, your distress so weighs
on me it bids me weep.

ll. 59-84: Dante and Ciacco discuss the future of Florence. Dante asks of the afterlife of five townsmen. Ciacco responds:

And he: 'They are among the blacker souls.
Different vices weigh them toward the bottom,
as you shall see if you descend that far.

'But when you have returned to the sweet world
I pray you bring me to men's memory.
I say no more nor answer you again.'

With that his clear eyes lost their focus.
He gazed at me until his head dropped down.
Then he fell back among his blind companions.

Dante Alighieri, translated by Robert and Jean Hollander

*Florence


I offer this filled out reading in hopes that you will all forgive my having neglected the PotW last week and the close-reads for some time now!

To read this selection of the Inferno, it will help, I think, to give background on the poem and its events for those who have not read it. Dante, the character, begins on a journey through hell after losing his way on the path of truth. Virgil, the poet, appears as a guide, and the two have so far moved through the circles of apathetic individuals, limbo (virtuous heathens and unbaptized babes), and lust. In that of lust, we witnessed Dante's encounter with Francesca, a woman who tells her story of giving into romantic love, which causes Dante to faint from pity. At the beginning of this excerpt, we are in the middle of the third circle of Hell: that of Gluttony.

As with every level of hell, we must ask ourselves, what are the conditions of the punishment? For gluttony, punishment seems to be absolute nothingness--no humanity, no pain, no change in the weather, and no physical form (one then wonders what Dante and Virgil see, and upon what they are walking). All memory of its inhabitants is effaced from "the sunlit world." In this case, those punished are denied their humanity even in the shadows of memory. Physically, we get the feeling that they are merged with their landscape, for Virgil and Dante step over them as if they were the ground. Little wonder Dante calls this penalty "the most loathsome," for they are less-than-human, capable of nothing. In his comment, we recieve a value judgment about the beauty of our own lives: that we are given so much. One question to ask yourself might be: why is nothingness an apt punishment for gluttony?

Which brings us to another question. If the state here is one of nothingness, then how is it possible that Ciacco recognized Dante? This moment is striking, for among so much barrenness, to be suddenly seen, to be picked out by a sinner, associates Dante with the sin. The suddenness of Ciacco's waking acts out what it would be to see sin for oneself. However, there is no way of logically explaining why Ciacco wakes up. Perhaps it is to teach Dante about the sin, and so has a positive outcome. The poem's Christian framework would suggest that the waking up is given by God to help Dante on his way. And so Ciacco's sin is perhaps somewhat redeemed?

The question of "what is good" in this encounter also arises after reading this section. After all, if Ciacco is allowed to enter consciousness for Dante, and this will help, it seems basically positive. Moreover, he is a sympathetic character--not only does he respect Dante's questions, answering them fully, my notes tell me that he is one of the best sinners in Hell. In history, he was engaged in improving Florence. Moreover, he is honest about his sins, not begging them to be excused or claiming his innocence to a human, which would betray a lack of remorse, egoism and blasphemy. Finally, his plea to be remembered is difficult to remain cold to, perhaps because it expresses the innate human impulse of loving one's life, one's place in the world. He wants simply to exist. Ciacco tries to, implores Dante...

And yet he is damned. Confusing, because it goes against our innate reaction. But, no matter what qualites we may admire, there is no doubt that they were not enough to excuse him from his sin, for God sent him there, and God's judgment would be infalliable.

Dante thus gives us a problem that reveals tension in ourselves. There are three levels here: sin (gluttony), sympathy (for Ciacco), and true morality (the implicit, objective judgment of God). By (most likely) aligning the reader's response in the middle of two visible sides, Dante helps us see what we are. Reading the Inferno is an experience, one that brings us back to ourselves, and this, perhaps, is one aspect of his writing that makes him so great.

Poem of the Week 6/18/2007: The Hollow Men

The Hollow Men



Mistah Kurtz—he dead

A penny for the Old Guy

I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer --

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer --

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

T.S. Eliot 1925

This poem brings up the questions: what could we do to fix this sort of problem? Are we like this? What would happen if I looked at the newspaper once a day, or perhaps the content of my conversations? It's kind of a memento mori poem, in that it reminds us that we are kind of dead right now. Not that death is coming, but that it is here, and that many things have internally ground to a halt.

Reading this one, I hope that you don't worry too much about the symbolism in particular. What is more helpful, I think, would be to move through the text a few times and let it affect you as it will.

Poem of the Week 6/11/2007: Archaic Torso of Apollo

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Commentary to come!

Poem of the Week 6/4/2007: Leda and the Swan

Leda and the Swan*

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 feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
A 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?

William Butler Yeats 1924

*In Greek mythology, Leda, raped by Zeus, the supreme god, in teh guise of a swan, gave birth to Helen of Troy and the twins Castor and Pollux. Helen's abduction by Paris from her husband, Menelaus, caused the Trojan War. Leda was also the mother of Clytemnestra, who murdered her own husband, Agamemnon, on his return from the war. Yeats saw Leda as the recipient of an annunciation that would found Greek civilization, as the Annunciation to Mary would found Christianity.

---

As with many of Yeats' poems, there are a number of ways of approaching it; this does not bespeak the relativity of interpretation, but rather the layered meanings in each of his rich and complex poems. "Leda and the Swan" leaves open the question of the meaning of her suffering, which reflects the greater extent of human suffering.

1. the rape is described vividly, so that the body of the swan is pawing at ourselves
2. the consequences of that rape are given--not triumphant, but dark. Ests. causality and fate. Also narrative POV-some distance from the rape, though we are so close in with her, we sit in a position that knows beyond her but not within her. An uncomfortable place for the reader to be, becasue we feel the pain, we know the consequences, but we cannot find a bridge between the two, no way of unifying the experience.
3. the final stanza leaves the question completely open, for the possibilities are: knowledge is redeeming and power is transfered. the knowledge is dark, and power is acted over her. What do we do with her suffering? we are meant to be compromised and have no way of closing the wound, no way of settling ourselves, of reconciling cause and effect.


Sorry to leave this in outline format. I'll hopefully return to make it more elegant and more comprehensible. The above is the densest explanation of my thoughts about the poem as they currently stand.

Poem of the Week 5/30/2007: O Taste and See

O Taste and See

The world is
not with us enough
O taste and see

the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if 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.

Denise Levertov

Ms. Levertov's poem flashes by like the world from a subway train, moving with as much energy. By calling us to live, though, she integrates growth with the speed of the modern world. Levertov is working with several elements here. First, she responds to a Wordsworth sonnet, which begins, "the world is too much with us." His lines express grief and anguish at the failure of the French Revolution, the weight that overcomes all humans. Since the French Revolution, times have changed. Now, we don't live enough, we don't respond enough. There is less joy and freedom than there used to be--merely lines of movement along subways, sidewalks, roads, and offices. So when we end up in the orchard, we ought to free ourselves!

She also responds to the Adam and Eve story, and to a Christian morality that no longer has a place in this world (though this interpretation of the A and E myth is only one level of its interpretation). Rather than denying outselves, with the paradoxical puritanism of work and capitalism, we ought to live more.

Perhaps, though, we might say that she is merely encouraging the small appeasement of desires, the endless deferment of experience by little pleasues of the modern world. So I will attempt to frame this in a way that will give her credit, with Foucault at my side. When I talk of the puritanism of capitalism, I mean the double-standard of repression and appeasement. A good example here is sexuality. We have a lot of rhetoric about sex being forbidden, a lot of paranoia about sexual harassment, a lot of messages of abstinence, safety, and responsibility. Sex is a transgression, nowadays. And yet, we are conversely called to do it all of the time. That is, any time somebody says "no" about it, they actually bring it up. They make you think about doing it, and so make you complicit in it. So the double standard of the media makes sex both transgressive, which makes it tempting and forbidding, but it brings it up. Hm. After writing all of this, I am not sure whether my argument holds. I am trying to say that there is a difference between responding to transgressive social norms and really following what ought to be.

The former implies still some kind of restriction, because society regulates our actions by pulling them into a discourse, by telling us what to think and when to think it. The latter has to do with enlarging ourselves by experience. By really living, by being grateful for everything that we have been giving, this beautiful world, which though sad and difficult, ought still be lived in. We need to engage, Levertov says, and we can in such a way as to grow.

Thanks for bearing with this thought-process of a PotW.

Poem of the Week 5/21/2007: Death Poem of Koho Kennichi

Death Poem of Koho Kennichi

To depart while seated or standing is all one.
All I shall leave behind me
Is a heap of bones.
In empty space I twist and soar
And come down with the roar of thunder
To the sea.

Koho Kennichi 1316
Died on the twentieth day of the tenth month, 1316 at the age of seventy-six

In Japan, there is a tradition of death poems: poems written just before the moment of death. Koho Kennichi was a Zen Monk in Japan in the 14th Century. A few notes will be helpful in order to understand this poem. First, departed "while seated or standing" treats the position in which it is worthy to die if one is enlightened. Ultimately, this position is merely a form, for bones are the only thing that remain of the physical form.

The next three lines are somewhat more mysterious, and I have only a few thoughts as to their ultimate meaning. If Koho is enlightened, as the sitting or standing comment implies, the "empty space" *might* refer to the open, unified realm of the absolute. His moving toward the sea as death approaches is then the particular manifestation of the infinite (his Buddha-seed, as it were) rejoining the sea of ultimate reality. Death for the enlightened person is Pari-Nirvana, the final extinction of ties to samsara.

Poem of the Week 5/10/2007: from Duino Elegies

The Ninth Elegy

Why, when this short span of being could be spent
like the laurel, a little darker than all
the other green, the edge of each leaf fluted
with small waves (like the wind's smile)--why,
then, do we have to be humanm, and, avoiding fate,
long for fate?

Oh, not because happiness,
that quick profit of impending loss, really exists.
Not out of curiosity, not just to exercise the heart
--that could be in the laurel, too...

But because being here means so much, and becaues all
that's here, vanishing so quickly, seems to need us
and strangely concerns us. Us, the first to vanish.
Once each, only once. Once and no more. And us too,
once. Never again. But to have been
once, even if only once,
to have been on earth just once--that's irrevocable.

And so we keep on going and try to realize it,
try to hold it in our simple hands, in
our overcrowded eyes, and in our speechless heart.
Try to become it. To give it to whom? We'd rather
keep all of it forever... Ah, but what can we take across
into that other realm? Not the power to see we've learned
so slowly here, and nothing that's happened here.
Nothing. And so, the pain; above all, the hard
work of living; the long experience of love--
those purely unspeakable things. But later,
under the stars, what then? That';s better left unsaid.
For the wanderer doesn't bring a handful of that
unutterable earth from the mountainside down to the valley,
but only some word he's earned, a pure word, the yellow
and blue gentian. Maybe we're here only to say: house,
bridge, well, gate, jug, olive tree, window--
at most, pillar, tower... but to say them, remember,
to say them in such a way that the things themselves
never dreamed of existing so intensely. When this silent
earth uyrges lovers on, isn't it her secret reason
to make everything shudder with ecstasy in them?
Doorsill: how much ir means to a pair of lovers
to wear down the sill of their own
dorr a little more, them too, after so many
before them, and before all those to come... gently.

This is the time for what can be said. Here
is its country. Speak and testify. The things
we can live with are falling away more
than ever, replaced by an act without symbol.
An act under crusts that will easily rip
as soon as the energy inside outgrows
them and seeks new limits.
Our heart survives between
hammers, just as the tongue between
the teeth is still able to praise.

Praise the world, to the angel, not what can't be talked about.
You can't impress him with your grand emotions. In the cosmos
where he so intensely feels, you're just a novice. So show
him some simple thing shaped for generation after generation
until it lives in our hands and in our eyes, and it's ours;
Tell him about things. he;ll stand amazed, just as you did
beside the ropemaker in Rome or the potter on the Nile.
Show him how happy a thing can be, how innocent and ours;
how even grief's lament purely determines its own shape,
serves as a thing, or dies in a thing--and escapes
in ecstasy beyond the violin. And these thingsm, whose lives
are lived in leaving--they understand when you praise them.
Perishing, they turn to us, the most perishable, for help.
They want us to change them completely in our invisible hearts,
oh--forever--into us! Whoever we finally may be.

Earth, isn't this what you want: to resurrect
in us invisible? Isn't it your dream
to be invisible one day? Earth! Invisible!
What's your urgent charge, if not transformation?
Earth, my love, I will. Oh, believe me, you don't
need your Springs to win me anymore--one,
oh, one's already too much for my blood.
I'm silently determined to be yours, from now on.
You were always right, and your most scared
idea is death, that intimate friend.

Look, I'm alive. On what? Neither childhood nor
the future grows less... More being than I'll ever
need springs up in my heart.

Ranier Maria Rilke

I do Rilke a lot--these are probably my favorite poems of all.

Poem of the Week 4/30/2007: In a Dark Time

In a Dark Time

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,*
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of the soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the wrocks--is it a cave,
Or a winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Theodore Roethke 1965

* The heron is a large, solitary wading bird, the wren a small, sociable songbird.

Mr. Roethke's poetry fuses psychological insight, tense verse, and natural imagery to form vibrating, heavy poems like this one. It treats his version of madness--the multiplicity of selves that come up. Not merely multiple personality disorder, Roethke treats the insanity of human consciousness when "the eye begins to see" what is: namely, multiplicity. Day to day, minute to minute, we change. Things come, things go; the narrator is sometimes solitary, sometimes sociable, and never stable. Madness, then, is instead an extreme mode of being, whether that means ideals of experience ("nobility of the soul") rubbing up against the reality of "circumstance" or living on the edge.

Also at work in this poem is the parallel between man and nature; the narrator's psychological state mirrors the chaotic, wheeling forest presented in the poem. Both nature and his mind include a "steady storm of correspondences," which we may read as a storm of thoughts. These thoughts, then, are "ragged," and flowing with many birds (presumably a reference to the heron-wren cycle above?).

Swelling in the third stanza to break in the fourth, the climax of the poem involves him coming out of that madness. The soul keeps buzzing incessantly, another version of the storm of thoughts, and the narrator questions "which I is I?" In other words, among this cyclic multiplicity, is there a self to be rescued? Is there unity, peace, calm among this torrent of thoughts and being?

The poem answers it with insight--when one sees what one is, there is at least unity within multiciplicity, unity in the storm, the "tearing wind."

Poem of the Week 4/23/2007: from The Labyrinth

from The Labyrinth

Since I emerged that day from the labyrinth,
Dazed with the tall and echoing passages,
The swift recoils, so many I almost feared
I’d meet myself returning at some smooth corner,
Myself or my ghost, for all there was unreal
After the straw ceased rustling and the bull
Lay dead upon the straw and I remained…

I could not live if this were not illusion.
It is a world, perhaps; but there’s another.
For once in a dream or trance I saw the gods
Each sitting on the top of his mountain-isle,
While down below the little ships sailed by…

That was the real world; I have touched it once,
And now shall know it always. But the lie,
The maze, the wild-wood waste of falsehood, roads
That run and run and never reach an end,
Embowered in error – I’d be prisoned there
But that my soul has birdwings to fly free.

Oh these deceits are strong almost as life.
Last night I dreamt I was in the labyrinth,
And woke far on. I did not know the place.

Edwin Muir 1949

One of my favorite poets, Edwin Muir wrote in Scotland, largely after World War II. His poems brim with allusion, drawing off of Greek myth and Biblical allegory in response to the horrors he lived through. Like "the Labyrinth," much of his poetry comments on the dark and tangled world that holds little trace to God any more.

Poem of the Week 4/16/2007: The Broken Tower

The Broken Tower

The bell-rope that gathers God at dawn*
Dispatches me as though I dropped down the knell
Of a spent day - to wander the cathedral lawn
From pit to crucifix, feet chill on steps from hell.

Have you not heard, have you not seen that corps
Of shadows in the tower, whose shoulders sway
Antiphonal carillons** launched before
The stars are caught and hived in the sun's ray?

The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;
And swing I 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 campaniles* with reveilles out leaping-
O terraced echoes prostrate on the plain!…

And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love,** its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

My world I poured. But was it cognate, scored
Of that tribunal monarch of the air
Whose thighs embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word***
In wounds pledges 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 stirs 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
In azure circles, widening as they dip

The matrix of the heart, lift down the eyes
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.

Hart Crane 1933

*The angelus bell commemorates the Incarnation of Christ
** Alternating and overlapping melodies played on the bells.
*** Papal documents; here, divinely inspired messages.
*Also campaniles; bell-towers attached to Italian cathedrals.
** In the bells' attempt to transfigure life and to incarnate God, Crane sees an analouge of his own poetic mission.
*** Divine revelation, with which the poet hopes his word is cognate.


I choose Hart Crane for today partially as a response to Eliot. As most did in the 1920s, Crane respected and admired Eliot's poetry, save for its pessimistic message. He thought that some ecstatic experience was still possible, that, "After this [modern] perfection of death--nothing is possible in motion but a resurrection of some kind." This poem, the final one he published, treats the death and rebirth of love, as manifested in Crane's poetry.

Opening with an image (a clanging?) of angelus bells, the first four stanzas treat Crane's resurrection. What was he resurrected from? Well, we get images of Hell, of a stone tower falling, so it seems that he comes from somewhere stony and hellish. And since Crane was dealing with the death caused by modernity (this was ostensibly what he liked and found too pessimistic about Eliot's ultimate conclusion that modernity is nearly inescapable), we may guess that these towers etc were those of the modern world. Therefore, the first four stanzas open with the bells of resurrection breaking bonds and bringing the poet back into a broken world.

As the poem moves forward, we see that these bells are a metaphor for poetry. Inscribed in his veins, the bells begin to move in his blood, their song akin to that of a poem. Indeed, just as the bells announce the coming of the Word of God, divine revelation, his poetry, he hopes, will bring the revelation of love. For Crane's poetic project is one of love, of the breaking of external towers of love and building inner ones.

Poetry builds within him "a tower that is not stone" (for stone can't hold heaven in its vastness), but "visible wings of silence." What are these wings? Perhaps the same feeling of vertigo discussed in the beginning, now greater, more profound, more quietly and privately felt. So perhaps the ripples of images in this poem are like the resonance of bells--they appear in the beginning, and are echoed in the end... is the real resurrection in the final line, with the sky unsealing the earth and letting love out into the open? Beyond the rebirth of the poet, is the reemergence of love the real point of the poem?

Whether Crane's optimism about the possibility of a glorious rebirth from the deathlike world of modernity has come to pass, whether it is coming, or whether he is wrong is, well, a question. What do we pay attention to, the Waste Land of today, or the fact that this kind of end should herald so much more? Perhaps there will be more coming.

Poem of the Week 4/9/2007: from Ash Wednesday

from Ash Wednesday

VI

Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savor of the sandy earth

This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

TS Eliot 1930

(please know that I am riffing ideas in much of this analysis, and that Eliot requires more research, work, and time than I have given him. Esp. as regards the symbolism. This is one of those close reads that frustrates me because I can't get you to see what's going on; I can only talk about it, which can be really unhelpful sometimes)

I have written in my notes for the second to last line, "a cry for wholeness," and indeed this seems to partake in much of Eliot’s vision of the human condition. In this last part of his poem Ash Wednesday, we see that this is one of constant cycling, circling suffering and change. Against the twisting run of thoughts and self, the poem expresses the longing for something still and stable and whole. We are hungry and sad for the truth underlying things; our thoughts waver between the profit and the loss--things we get (pleasure, iPods, attention) and losses (pain, whatever thing we were entitled to.) We are never whole and engaged in the world, just worried about the accumulation of things.

"The dreamcrossed twilight between brith and dying" addresses the fundamental unreality of our experience now--we daydream and plan our way through life. So little of it is here. We miss what is, we try to catch up, and only moments of life are given to us, only tiny scraps of existence to we care to engage in. I had never understood why people want to talk about dreams all of the time, because my life felt real enough, but when I started to pay attention, I found that most things I cared about and thought of pass, slow, fade, or die. Things leave (the center cannot hold)--we cannot hold ourselves to anything, at least not at this stage.

With the line “(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things,” Eliot expresses his pure grief (brokenness?) at this turning. He does not hope to turn again, and yet here he is. Meekness. Humility. Small sad broken thing. Or rather, “unbroken” thing. This reference keeps things always gauged against a state of brokenness: "Wholeness," then, is just this side of broken, the state in between breaks.

Finishing the seven part poem, the final stanza is the last plea for wholeness, the final prayer to collect oneself, to overcome the smallness and dryness of the air now…By way of commenting on the final stanza, I give you a stanza from the first part of the poem:

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.

Poem of the Week 4/2/2007: The Tables Turned

The Tables Turned
An Evening Scene on the Same Subject

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you'll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun, above the mountain's head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
HIs first sweet evening yellow.

Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the trostle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your Teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless--
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulbess,

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:--
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

William Wordsworth 1798

There's probably little I need to tell you about this poem, because Wordsworth is clear in his message. Come outside! Turn to the world again, for all that thinking will do is twist you in a bind.

I guess that what I can provide here is some historical background, because otherwise some of his frustrations with intellect and books will perhaps be taken a little too strongly. Wordsworth is talking against a society that was first championing rationality--in some way, he is writing at the birth of systematic approaches to knowledge and even art (the academies at that time stressed reproduction of the masters, and systems of drawing). Machines, calculation, and, over and over, rationality were the approaches to knowledge. Furthermore, these were supposedly higher forms of knowing; science and examination and consensus became the champion over experience. Perhaps things aren't so different today, and so Wordsworth's call holds true. Stop reading (yes, even this blog), and go look at the sky tonight, or a flowered tree---- Wordsworth would want us to go outside now, to leave our calculating minds behind, and open us to experience. We might even learn something, who knows?

In the end, I choose this poem because it explicitly asks us to do something that poetry often does to me--it asks us to turn back to the world. Poetry is not an end in itself, but it can point us back toward something more real, and encourages states of openness, reception, unknowing. Keats famously called this "negative capability:" "when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact or reason... with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration."

Perhaps this is the state that both great poetry and nature can put us in--a kind of openness that allows reality to enter just a little bit, a crack in habitual perspective that can change a moment or an afternoon. Small things, maybe, but how many have we missed after all?

Poem of the Week 3/26/2007: What Excuses Have You to Offer

from Mystical Poems of Rumi

1.
What excuses have you to offer, my heart, for so many shortcomings? Such constancy on the part of the Beloved, such unfaithfulness on your own!
So much generousity on your side, on yours such niggling contrariness! So many graces from him, so many faults committed by you!
Such envy, such evil imaginings and dark thoughts in your heart, such drawing, such tasting, such magnificence in him!
Why all this tasting? That your bitter soul may become sweet. Why all this drawing? That you may join the company of saints.
You are repentant of your sins, you have the name of God on your lips; in that moment he draws you on, so that he may deliver you alive.
You are fearful at last of your wrongdoings, you seek desperately a way to salvation; in that instant why do you not see him by your side who is putting such fear into your heart?
If he has bound up your eyes, you are like a pebble in his hand; now he rolls you along like this, now he tosses you in the air.
Now he plants in your nature a passion for silver and gold and women; now he implants in your soul the light of the form of Mustafa.
On this side drawing towards the lovely ones, on that side drawing you to the unlovely; amid these whirlpools the ship can only pass through or founder.
Offer up so many prayers, weep so sorely in the night season, that the echo may reach your ears from the sphere of the seven heavens.

Rumi 13th Century AD

I will offer a better gloss on this poem later. For now, a few notes of clarification. Rumi is a mystic poet writing in the Sufi tradition in Islam. When he talks of the Beloved, he doesn't write of a boyfriend or girlfriend, as we might think of it now, but of Allah or God. I am interested in this poem because it looks at the inconstancy of man as causing suffering, but that suffering itself is redemptive.

Also, I will hopefully post the belated poem of the week this Thursday or Friday.

Yours,
Sarah

Poem of the Week 3/13/2007: Spring and All

Spring and All

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast-a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All 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 of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined-
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

William Carlos Williams 1923

Williams would always want us to read his poems as images only, but it is so difficult to not walk into them carrying some meaning! Perhaps it is not fair to say He Would Not want us to read anything into it. Rather, we might say that he doesn't want to write in a trace of ego. There ought to be no sense of authorial intent. I think that he looks to give us poems with the same kind of meaning that a photo has. So when we look at this poem, we are looking at Spring as such.

So enter landscape, enter the young and tender sprouts of Spring. It is a tenuous time Williams discuses; here, I get the sense that these are the three or four days before Spring arrives in full. The few days that this poem treats are the delicate ones stretching between Winter and Spring. These are the days of major change, of endings and beginnings. To come into the world is difficult, and the time of change is marked with vulnerability. I am not being that specific in this analysis, but I hope that you can infer the moments in the poem I am discussing.

Poem of the Week 3/5/2007: (all ignorance tobaggans into know)

all ignorance toboggans into know
and trudges up to ignorance again:
but winter's not forever,even snow
melts;and if spring should spoil the game,what then?

all history's a winter sport or three:
but were it five,i'd still insist that all
history is too small even for me;
for me and you,exceedingly too small.

Swoop(shrill collective myth)into thy grave
merely to toil the scale to shrillerness
per every madge and mabel dick and dave
--tomorrow is our permanent address

and there they'll scarcely find us (if they do,
we'll move away still further:into now

ee cummings 1944

I just wondered if one reason that ee cummings uses such strange punctuation is that he works to escape the norm--he looks to dive under language and play and play. This is how he can leap about within time and ignorance in this poem. What lighter and more fun images could there be save those of knowledge tobagganing between ignorance and wisdom? Nietzsch writes of this, that truth comes out of error, but nowhere is it so gracefully and easily apparent than right here. It is a gentler way of putting the idea that sometimes we are wrong, and that our knowledge climbs slowly, with many slips and turns.

Our ability for freedom also slips and turns, working to shake the fetters of What Has Been (presumably, since this is written during WWII, guilt, terror, and darkness. ee cummings was also a prisoner of war for a long time, and so there is good reason that he would want to avoid the terrors of war, to sink beneath them in joyous, leaping language). This is not to say that he looks to escape history, but rather that he does not want to chain himself to it. He looks to the future, looks even to where he is right now-- the idea is simple, relinquish the past, and don't let them worry you about your future. cummings' version of this idea, I think, has more to do with carelessness than it does with really sinking into the present, but even that ability to relax, to be what you are and where you are, that's something. Not nothing, anyway.

Poem of the Week 2/26/2006: from Duino Elegies

from Duino Elegies: The First Elegy

Yes, Springs needed you. Many stars
waited for you to see them. A wave
that had broken long ago swelled toward you,
or when you walked by an open window, a violin
gave itself. All that was your charge.
But could you live up to it? Weren't you always
distracted by hope, as if all this promised
a lover? (Where would you have hidden her,
with all those strange and heavy thoughts
flowing in and out of you, often staying overnight?)
When longing overcomes you, sing about great lovers;
their famous passions still aren't immortal enough.
You found that the deserted, those you almost envied,
could love you so much more than those you loved.
Begin again. Try out your impotent praise again;
think about the hero who lives on: even his fall
was only an excuse for another life, a final birth.
But exhausted nature draws all lovers back
into herself, as if there weren't the energy
to create them twice. Have you remembered
Gaspara Stampa well enough? From that greater love's
example, any girl deserted by her lover
can believe: "If only I could be like her!"
Shouldn't our ancient suffering be more
fruitful by now? Isn't it time our loving freed
us from the one we love and we, trembling, endured:
as the arrow endures the string, and in that gathering momentum,
becomes more than itself. Because to stay is to be nowhere.

Ranier Maria Rilke 1922

This is the next section of the poem posted on this blog in December; rarely do I place the same poet's work so close together, and never have I discussed the same poem. But I must have read at least forty poems of ee cummings and William Carlos Williams this evening (something to note: at times, the two are nearly indistinguishable. At others, their voices dance off in different directions--cummings towards love, towards ideas, and Williams towards things and images, of course). Unable to find a poem that loves the world without falling over from its own passion, I left the library, left cummings and williams, and came home to Rilke! Sitting there on my desk, the passage opened itself to me, opened its great and subtle affection for the world, its understanding of the place of human longing.

Rilke is interesting in that he is immensely complex and yet, when you read him, it is as if he talks straight to you. People understand innately what he says, but he is difficult to discuss (and do justice to) in writing. Ah--this is a moment when I am frustrated at writing's ability to discuss poetry. I forget that this bind crops up-- poems say what they want to say the best, and the job of the reader is to talk about it. To bring that text to life, into life. I suppose, then, the professional reader's job might be to offer direction to other's thoughts. Hm--of course we invented literary criticism because we want an excuse to write about the things we like to think and talk about. Well then, my suggestion is: read this poem again. Begin again---look how my language just gave over to Rilke! Indeed, he seems to be speaking to the issue above, writing "Begin again, try out your impotent praise again." Whether praise of poetry or of Spring, words so often fail. The praise is impotent, unable to push us forward or onward.

If any of you want to talk about this in person (if you're at UPS, talk to me in person), that would be the way to interact with this poem--words are failing--goodnight!

Poem of the Week 2/19/2007: Frost at Midnight

Frost At Midnight

The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry
Came loud--and hark, again! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings: save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
'Tis calm indeed ! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
This populous village ! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams ! the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not ;
Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, every where
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought.

But O ! how oft,
How oft, at school, with most believing mind,
Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,
To watch that fluttering stranger ! and as oft
With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt
Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,
Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang
From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,
So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me
With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear
Most like articulate sounds of things to come !
So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,
Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams !
And so I brooded all the following morn,
Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eye
Fixed with mock study on my swimming book :
Save if the door half opened, and I snatched
A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,
For still I hoped to see the stranger's face,
Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,
My play-mate when we both were clothed alike !

Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the interspersed vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought !
My babe so beautiful ! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes ! For I was reared
In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe ! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags : so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher ! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw ; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1798

"Frost at Midnight" moves from the most silent and attentive moment of the night to the height of hopeful ecstasy and, suddenly, to a soft quiet once again. The quiet frames Coleridge's blessing for his son--upon seeing the freedom and beauty of a leaf of ash in the fire, the poet memory is pulled to childhood. Next, he is so overcome with hopes for his son--that his son will grow up in the full language of nature, with the full feast of the natural world--that he nearly bursts at the brimming possibility in a life.

For the Romantics, childhood represented the unveiled way of moving through the world, a state unclotted by ego and rational repression. This childhood is something that each human shares, and so to wish that freedom, to even envision it for his son, is to wish that state of innocence for all of us. "Frost at Midnight" is a trilling response to this clear child in all, acknowledging and longing for participation with the things of this world.

Poem of the Week 2/12/2007: St Kevin and the Blackbird

St Kevin and the Blackbird

And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird.
The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside
His cell, but the cell is narrow, so

One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff
As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands
And lays in it and settles down to nest.

Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked
Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life,

Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.

*

And since the whole thing's imagined anyhow,
Imagine being Kevin. Which is he:
Self-forgetful or in agony all the time

From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?
Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth

Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?
Alone and mirrored clear in love's deep river,
'To labour and not to seek reward,' he prays,

A prayer his body makes entirely
For he has forgotten self, forgotten bid
And on the riverbank forgotten the river's name.

Seamus Heaney 1996

Finishing this poem, I am reminded of a quote by (I think!) Frank O'Hara: "A poem should leave its readers distressed, / curious, and ready to believe / It is curious to be alive." What draw me in are Heaney's care and affection with language (something he is ever capable of), the deft with which he invites the reader into the poem, and his treatment of skepticism and prayer within the poem.

In the first section Heaney draws a simple and beautiful allegory of spiritual discipline and awakening. He moves from the initial announcement of the story--"And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird"--to the story, bring us into the present tense and the presence of Kevin. He attends to Kevin's knees, the size of the cell, his exact body position, inviting the reader to imagine in detail the afternoon.

The allegory itself is laden with Christian imagery. Kevin places his hand out the window "as a crossbeam," or forming one axis of the cross. The bird descends, settling in his hand, to form the vertical axis. From the intersection comes an egg, the possibility of sacred experience, and with patience is born a new bird. This bird represents both a mark of spiritual discipline and Ireland, for the blackbird is associated with Ireland. Heaney thus manages to pull together the personal, spiritual, and even the national in the simple story of one saint. Incorporating such breadth in one story underlines the following section's statement of universality, or non-duality.

At the opening of the second section, then, Heaney turns the poem again to the reader, this time addressing skepticism. Rather than using skepticism to dismiss the poem, though, he invites the reader to move deeper into Kevin's thoughts, Kevin's experience. Heaney uses simple questions to soften us to supernatural occurrences; willing to believe after imagining our knees hurt on the cold stone, we can accept earth blossoming beneath his knees.

The final two stanzas express unity with nature, a loss of definitions, boundaries--not a forgetting in the strict, apathetic sense, but the forgetting of nonattachment, a prayer wherein the body enters the cycles of the earth, and in becoming part of them loses itself, its definitions, those names and forms binding and fettering it. As St Kevin stands on the bank of the river of love, he can no longer name it, for the two are no longer separate.

Poem of the Week 2/5/2007: from When Lilacs Last in the Courtyard Bloom'd

8

O western orb sailing the heaven,
Now I know what you must have meant as a month since I walk'd,
As I walk'd in silence the transparent shadowy night,
As I saw you had something to tell as you bent to me night after night,
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 rin of the west how full you were of woe,
As I stood on the rising ground in the breeze in the cool transparent night,
As I watch'd where you pass'd and was lost in the netherward 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 sawmp,
O singer bashful and tender, I hear your notes, I hear your call,
I hear, I come presently, I 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

Oh how shall I 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 what 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 breath of my chant,
I'll perfume the grave of him I love.

Walt Whitman 1865-66

More than Song of Myself, Whitman's most famous poem, I find this and other poems treating death and loss more interesting and profound. Here we get the same communion with nature that Whitman finds in Song of Myself, but with an injection of melancholy, affection, and more. Poetry is one of the great vehicles of melancholy, especially when well executed. Whitman follows in the tradition of Keats and Coleridge's great odes on grief in this elegy written after the death of Abraham Lincoln. I have chosen these three stanzas because they represent a communion with that tradition and because they eclipse particular grief at the death of a well-loved symbol.

Beside the universal quality of this elegy (there are particular charateristics and references too, but more interesting to me is the project of using the individual to transcend the individual--using the particular as entry point to the infinite), I hope that you can notice the breathlessness of the stanzas. The repetition of "as" in the first stanza brings each line in to lap at us like waves, like the slow in and out of breath, the turning of the heavens. In most of his poems, Whitman uses this device--in my mind, he employs it as a kind of chant or invocation, something to mesmerize the reader, bring him into the song...

Though Whitman is a master of song, he discusses the difficulty of singing, writing of it as warbling, of expressing ourselves in the face of enormous grief. It is only in nature that he can find the expression of the love he feels--wow--hear how that doesn't sound as nice in prose as it does in his poetry? That's why people write poems. And this concludes this week's poem of the week, a somewhat poorer discussion than usual.

Poem of the Week 1/30/2007: from Jerusalem. Plate 97.

from Jerusalem, a Poem.
Plate 97

Awake! Awake Jerusalem! O lovely Emanation of Albion
Awake and overspread all Nations as in Ancient Time
For lo! the Night of Death is past and the Eternal Day
Appears upon our Hills: Awake Jerusalem, and come away
--
So spake the Vision of Albion & in him so spake in my hearing,
The Universal Father Then Albion stretched his hand into Infinitude.
And took his Bow. Fourfold the Vision for bright beaming Urizen
Layed his hand on the South & took a breathing Bow of carved Gold
Luvah his hadn stretched to the East & bore a Silver Bow bright shining
Tharmas Westward a Bow of Brass pure flaming richly wrought
Urthona. Northward in thick storms a Bow of Iron terrible thundering

And the Bow is a Male & Female & the Quiver of the Arrows of Love.
Are the children of this Bow: a Bow of Mercy & Loving-kindness: laying
Open the hidden Heart in Wars of mutual Benevolence Wars of Love
And the Hand of Man grasps firm between the Male & Female Loves
And he Clothed himself in Bow & Arrows in awful state Fourfold
In the midst of his Twenty-eight Cities each with his Bow breathing-----

William Blake

What I am interested in for this poem is the tension in the third stanza between male and female, and the tension arising between opposites, or from struggle. Let us meditate on the image of an arrow and a bow. The tighter a bow is, the more tension there is within it, but the farther it can shoot an arrow. Tension leads to strength. Therefore, when the man chooses to clad himself in bow and arrows in the final stanza, he is not merely arming himself for war, but covering himself with strength. The "awful" state is also not one of horror, but of awe, of some kind of deep and abiding power within him. As for the fourfold nature of his state, he may be the symbol of the unity of the four Gods listed above (and many other things I am sure. Four is a key number for Blake, and the mode of thought in which he worked. There is little I know about this, but there are some things that I may say even in this small and limited space). He brings together the power of metals, gathering to him the power of metallurgy, which Blake equated with riotous transformation.

Yes! The melting of metals is "breathing bows," is the living fluid of struggle and overcoming.

This perhaps settles the initially offputting line, "Wars of mutual Benevolence Wars of Love"-- how can war and love go together? We don't tend to think that war is good for anybody. Surely Blake isn't merely talking about nationalism here. Maybe historicity is a part of it (I am not familiar with any historical references here; see Erdman for more on this), but it seems that the emphasis cannot just be a man loving his country like a man loves a woman. Romantic love (passioned?) involves reciprocated love. But here Blake seems to say that it also involves war, some kind of destructive tension. Men and women... that's reproduction, the sustained creation of a third through two who are different...

A Letter concerning the Poem of the Week

My favorite quote about poetry is written by Howard Nemerov:

"Poetry is getting something right in language."

Poetry is that which represents the world rightly, whatever piece of the world it regards. Nemerov's definition solves the dilemma of whether prose can be poetic, or whether every thirteen year old's spillover angst is *really* poetry.** It can take the form of a conversation, a song, a quote, an aphorism, poem, or paragraph. So long as the language gets something right about its subject, a precise and undefinable art, it is poetry.

With this understood, I am looking to expand the poem of the week to any form of right language that catches me. Aphorisms will make a frequent appearance from now on; Nietzsche writes that they move from peak to peak of knowledge. They are the crystals of understanding, the hardest and most beautiful expression of truth that require little explanation.

At the risk of filling in knowledge for you (or perhaps to fill in knowledge for myself), I hope to in the future put down my thoughts about various aphorisms and poetry. Ultimately there is not much difference between the two. Often, my favorite part of a poem is not the entirity, but one line, one sure and clear idea nestled among images or events.

I hope that the aphorisms don't appear too corny, as they sometimes can taken out of context, but I suppose that is one of the responsibilities of the new form of the poem of the week.

This change follows some changes in my own intellectual and personal drives. Close-reading is a helpful skill, and I hope that you have learned something if you have read the poems and perhaps my thoughts. However, there is only so much a muscle may grow, especially if my blood begins to flow elsewhere. So, from now on I will offer you different dances between beauty and ideas, which, despite a change in size and focus, remain at the core of this blog.

As always, feel free to email me with any questions, responses, or ideas.

Yours,
Sarah




**of course prose can be poetry, and, sorry, most angsty "poetry" is merely a collection of dripping, overstuffed sentences.

Poem of the Week 1/23/2007

Train

You there, in the middle of your mind,
curled up into a ball but wide awake--
I am awake like you, in the same bed

hearing the train that when it passes
means it's almost morning, though the sky
is dark, though the highway is quiet.

You can follow the train in your mind,
but you cannot follow the train
from little town to little town to Boston,

where in the dark the transactions happen--
something poured, something filled,
something dropped off, something taken--

happen among the loud men at the wharf
before their very first sign of dawn,
and the train in Boston turns around.

I wish our minds were like the train,
passing once a night through the woods,
fading out among the lights and termini,

its load of oil or metal going some place
they want it, returning in the morning,
its mile-long belly not empty, not hungry;

not the wharf, accepting train after train
of junk from the provinces all night,
a throat that tries and tries to swallow dirt.

Dan Chiasson 2006

Now this is a lovely, lonely poem, a meditation on the mind of man and the thoughts of night. Several things are at work: rhythm, long phrases and sentences, and a symbolic explanation of distraction and thought. This poem discusses much that has been passing through my mind--restlessness, hunger, loneliness, the fact that we don't will thought but that it comes to us...

I don't know whether I want to write about this any more or not... it is a beautiful poem, lovely in tone and in content both.

Here's something, everybody, and I don't write this lightly. I don't know if the Poem of the Week is right for me any more. I am doing it more out of mechanical habit than real love for these poems, and that doesn't seem right to me. More and more I find myself wanting to repeat poems, becuase some of the poems that have nestled themselves in my chest aren't going to leave. So... I don't know about the future of the poem of the week. It's something that I will have to think about, and I am sorry that I might think of changing or abandoning this.

Best,
Sarah

Poem of the Week 1/8/2007: from The Drunken Song

from The Drunken Song

O man! Take care!
What does Deep Midnight now declare?
'I sleep, I sleep--
From deepest dream I rise for air:--
The world is deep,
And deeper than day had been aware.
Deep is its woe--
Joy--deeper still than misery:
Woe says: Be gone!
Yet all joy wants Eternity--
--wants deepest, deep Eternity!

Friedrich Nietzsche 1885
Thus Spake Zarathustra trans. Graham Parkes

Though translated, which is not ideal, I was struck by this poem reading Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In context, it is far more beautiful than it is alone, here, but I ask you, when reading it, to imagine yourself rising to eternity, to meet the world head on, to learn that everything is something--every thought, tree, bird, and person is new to you every single second... new and simultaneously eternal, according to Nietzsche's theory of eternal recurrence. Each and every moment is eternal, has the weight of eternity...

Joy and woe are the two deepest emotions, perhaps. Nietzsche writes of their interconnection, of the mingling of love and grief, joy and woe etc. I wish that I could make you all read this book. Well, instead, I will quote another passage. Maybe that will help place the gorgeousness of the poem, or help you feel/understand it.

You higher humans, what do you think? Am I a soothsayer? A dreamer? Drunkard? A dream interpreter? A midnight-bell?
A drop of dew? A haze and fragrance of eternity? Do you not hear it? Do you not smell it? Just now my world became perfect, midnight is also midday--
Pain is also a joy, curse is also a blessing, night is also a sun--be gone! or will you learn: a wise man is also a fool.
Did you ever say Yes to a single joy? Oh, my friends, then you said Yes to all woe as well. All things are chained together, entwined, in love--
--if you ever wanted one time a second time, if you ever said 'You please me happiness! Quick! Moment!' then you wanted it all back!
--All anew, all eternally, chained together, entwined, in love, oh then you loved the world--
--you eternal ones, love it eternally and for all time: and even to woe you say: Be gone, but come back! For all joy wants--Eternity!
- TSZ p. 283

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Poem of the Week 1/1/2007: Sonnet 60

Sonnet 60

Like as the waves make towards 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 the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown'd,
Crooked elipses 'gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.
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:
And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.

William Shakespeare 1609

What better way to start a year than with Shakespeare! With a poem about the ravages of time, no less? Or a beautiful nod to the temporality of all? Check back soon for a close-read.