Mind of Winter

Antony and Cleopatra

by William Haines Lytle, 1826–1863

I AM dying, Egypt, dying!
  Ebbs the crimson life-tide fast,
And the dark Plutonian shadows
  Gather on the evening blast;
Let thine arm, O Queen, enfold me,
  Hush thy sobs and bow thine ear,
Listen to the great heart secrets
  Thou, and thou alone, must hear.

Though my scarred and veteran legions
  Bear their eagles high no more,
And my wrecked and scattered galleys
  Strew dark Actium’s fatal shore;
Though no glittering guards surround me,
  Prompt to do their master’s will,
I must perish like a Roman,
  Die the great Triumvir still.

Let not Cæsar’s servile minions
  Mock the lion thus laid low;
‘T was no foeman’s arm that felled him,
  ‘T was his own that struck the blow:
His who, pillowed on thy bosom,
  Turned aside from glory’s ray—
His who, drunk with thy caresses,
  Madly threw the world away.

Should the base plebeian rabble
  Dare assail my name at Rome,
Where the noble spouse Octavia
  Weeps within her widowed home,
Seek her; say the gods bear witness,—
  Altars, augurs, circling wings,—
That her blood, with mine commingled,
  Yet shall mount the throne of kings.

And for thee, star-eyed Egyptian—
  Glorious sorceress of the Nile!
Light the path to Stygian horrors,
  With the splendor of thy smile;
Give the Cæsar crowns and arches,
  Let his brow the laurel twine:
I can scorn the senate’s triumphs,
  Triumphing in love like thine.

I am dying, Egypt, dying!
  Hark! the insulting foeman’s cry;
They are coming—quick, my falchion!
  Let me front them ere I die.
Ah, no more amid the battle
  Shall my heart exulting swell;
Isis and Osiris guard thee—
  Cleopatra—Rome—farewell!

Autumnal

by Ernest Dowson, from Verses, 1896

Pale amber sunlight falls across
   The reddening October trees,
   That hardly sway before a breeze
As soft as summer: summer’s loss
   Seems little, dear! on days like these.

Let misty autumn be our part!
   The twilight of the year is sweet:
   Where shadow and the darkness meet
Our love, a twilight of the heart
   Eludes a little time’s deceit.

Are we not better and at home
   In dreamful Autumn, we who deem
   No harvest joy is worth a dream?
A little while and night shall come,
   A little while, then, let us dream.

Beyond the pearled horizons lie
   Winter and night: awaiting these
   We garner this poor hour of ease,
Until love turn from us and die
   Beneath the drear November trees.

Limerick (III)

from Generic Literature by Steve White

There once was an X from place B
That satisfied predicate P
He or she did thing A
In an adjective way
Resulting in circumstance C

Maybe my brain is not functioning entirely properly, being three days from freedom, but I found this poem to be rather fun. There’s some more good generic stuff at Mr. White’s website.

Jenny Kissed Me

by Leigh Hunt

Jenny kissed me when we met,
  Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
  Sweets into your list, put that in.
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
  Say that health and wealth have missed me;
Say I’m growing old, but add—
  Jenny kissed me!

Dearest Cynara, I have broken faith; come what may, life is beautiful today.

I had the greatest lexicographic moment of my life when I looked up the word ‘cromlech’ after reading this poem.

The Cromlech

by Louis MacNeice

From trivia of froth and pollen
White tufts in the rabbit warren
And every minute like a thicket
Nicked and dropped, nicked and dropped,
Extracters and abstracters ask
What emerges, what survives,
And once the stopper is unstopped
What was the essence in the flask
and what is Life apart from lives
And where, apart from fact, the value

To which we answer, being naive,
Wearing the world upon our sleeve,
That to dissect a given thing
Unravelling its complexity
Outrages its simplicity
For essence is not merely core
And each event implies the world,
A centre needs periphery.

This being so, at times at least
Granted the sympathetic pulse
And granted the perceiving eye
Each pregnant with a history,
Appearance and appearances—
In spite of the philosophers
With their jejune dichotomies—
Can be at times reality.

So Tom and Tessy holding hands
(Dare an abstraction steal a kiss?)
Cannot be generalized away,
Reduced by bleak analysis
To pointers demonstrating laws
Which drain the colour from the day;
Not mere effects of a crude cause
But of themselves significant,
To run-of-brain recalcitrant,
This that they are and do is This…

Tom is here, Tessy is here
At this point in a given year
With all this hour’s accessories,
A given glory—and to look
That gift-horse in the mouth will prove
Or disprove nothing of their love
Which is as sure intact a fact,
Though young and supple, as what stands
Obtuse and old, in time congealed,
Behind them as they mingle hands—
Self-contained, unexplained,
The cromlech in the clover field.

The other day, I decided to try my hand at composing a more modern piece of poetry, but the results were dismal:

A Meta-Analysis of Free Verse in Free Verse
or
Ode on Itself

by Michael Hoke

Imagine
    how beautiful
    this poem could have been
    had you but written it
Yourself

I was struck today, however, when I read a review of Billy Collins’ newest book in the NYT [registration may be required]. It turns out that Collins’ book begins with a poem that starts thusly:

from The Trouble with Poetry

by Billy Collins

I wonder how you are going to feel
when you find out
that I wrote this instead of you

I wrote my piece having Billy Collins particularly in mind, though I did not mean it to be an homage or an imitation, strictly speaking. I haven’t read the rest of the Collins poem, but just looking at the first stanza, I like mine better. [Some less than friendly discussion of the NYT review may be found at MetaFilter.]

Also, I tried to compose a pwoermd today:

by Michael Hoke

VISUALEYES

…but it turns out someone beat me to it.

I think I’m giving up my career ambitions in poetry. I’ll stick to law school.

Snow

by Louis MacNeice

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

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

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

I have nothing to say about this poem at the moment, but it’s by MacNeice, I like it, and it’s been snowing here in Minneapolis today. The plows are going past as I write. There are great phrases, great sounds in the verses. It gets, I think, at the incompleteness of the analytical without doing something silly like being all analytical about it.

I am a huge fan of MacNeice now. Read this poem out loud. He is a poet who has such a mastery over sounds that I often care very little about his themes – though they are nothing to sneeze at, either. (It is almost embarrasing to love a poem so much that has “sunshine” in the title.)

Spring Sunshine

by Louis MacNeice

In a between world, a world of amber,
The old cat, on the sand-warm window-sill
Sleeps on the verge of nullity.

Spring sunshine has a quality
Transcending rooks and the hammerings
Of those who hang new pictures,
Asking if it is worth it
To clamour and caw, to add stick to stick for ever.

If it is worth while really
To colonize any more the already populous
Tree of knowledge, to portion and reportion
Bits of broken knowledge brittle and dead,
Whether it would not be better
To hide one’s head in the warm sand of sleep
And be buried without hustle or bother.

The rooks bicker heckle bargain always
And market carts lumber–
Let me, in the calm of the all-humouring sun
Also indulge my humour
And bury myself beyond creaks and cawings
In a below world, a bottom world of amber.

By far the most impressive part of this, for me, are the lines: The rooks bicker heckle bargain always/And market carts lumber–

Never mind the long silence, I have enjoyed Hoke’s posts and thoughts on Nietzsche. I plan to take some time with him and his solitudes and renunciations.

I have recently been spending some evenings with a fine poet named Warren Carrier, father of Wintry-Minded Ethan. Conversations with him have inspired me to try again to memorize poems – an effort that I was rather serious about for a time right after graduating St. Johns. My plan is to memorize one from each poet who I admire. Perhaps, as my view of each poet changes, I will switch to a new poem of theirs… Plans, plans, treacherous plans.

I want to post two poems to commemorate my new resolve. One from Warren (which I have not yet tried to memorize) and one from Louis MacNeice, which I have. I’ll post the MacNeice separately in case anyone wants to comment on one poem and not the other.

Postcard

by Warren Carrier

He gazed beyond the rocky edge where turning
maples stretched for miles, particulars
of his mind, a village, a white spire.
Above the turquoise atmosphere, an unseen
gravity held all light within itself,
burst like a melon, scattering galaxies.
He thought of the momentary hues of maples,
of human generations, the same, and never
the same, of randomness, of order as change.
The black that cracked into its separate stars,
bloomed from bent and distant light, had come
to this: himself here, gazing and musing,
maples the tint of the sun, a village of beings
unseen under leaves, their immaculate spire.

Excelsior

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The shades of night were falling fast,
As through an Alpine village passed
A youth, who bore, ’mid snow and ice,
A banner with the strange device,
        Excelsior!

His brow was sad; his eye beneath,
Flashed like a falchion from its sheath,
And like a silver clarion rung
The accents of that unknown tongue,
        Excelsior!

In happy homes he saw the light
Of household fires gleam warm and bright;
Above, the spectral glaciers shone,
And from his lips escaped a groan,
        Excelsior!

“Try not the Pass!” the old man said;
“Dark lowers the tempest overhead,
The roaring torrent is deep and wide!”
And loud that clarion voice replied,
        Excelsior!

“Oh, stay,” the maiden said, “and rest
Thy weary head upon this breast!”
A tear stood in his bright blue eye,
But still he answered, with a sigh,
        Excelsior!

“Beware the pine-tree’s withered branch!
Beware the awful avalanche!”
This was the peasant’s last Good-night,
A voice replied, far up the height,
        Excelsior!

At break of day, as heavenward
The pious monks of Saint Bernard
Uttered the oft-repeated prayer,
A voice cried through the startled air,
        Excelsior!

A traveller, by the faithful hound,
Half-buried in the snow was found,
Still grasping in his hand of ice
That banner with the strange device,
        Excelsior!

There, in the twilight cold and gray,
Lifeless, but beautiful, he lay,
And from the sky, serene and far,
A voice fell, like a falling star,
        Excelsior!