In speaking with Brian and Laura this evening, I decided I should post two of my favorite poems. I linked to them some time ago in a long-winded post with no discernible thesis, but they are good enough to be posted on their own. I started to write something up about each one, but I think it’s better just to let the poems speak for themselves:
Silence
by Edgar Lee Masters
I HAVE known the silence of the stars and of the sea,
And the silence of the city when it pauses,
And the silence of a man and a maid,
And the silence for which music alone finds the word,
And the silence of the woods before the winds of spring begin,
And the silence of the sick
When their eyes roam about the room.
And I ask: For the depths
Of what use is language?
A beast of the field moans a few times
When death takes its young.
And we are voiceless in the presence of realities—
We cannot speak.
A curious boy asks an old soldier
Sitting in front of the grocery store,
“How did you lose your leg?”
And the old soldier is struck with silence,
Or his mind flies away
Because he cannot concentrate it on Gettysburg.
It comes back jocosely
And he says, “A bear bit it off.”
And the boy wonders, while the old soldier
Dumbly, feebly lives over
The flashes of guns, the thunder of cannon,
The shrieks of the slain,
And himself lying on the ground,
And the hospital surgeons, the knives,
And the long days in bed.
But if he could describe it all
He would be an artist.
But if he were an artist there would be deeper wounds
Which he could not describe.
There is the silence of a great hatred,
And the silence of a great love,
And the silence of a deep peace of mind,
And the silence of an embittered friendship,
There is the silence of a spiritual crisis,
Through which your soul, exquisitely tortured,
Comes with visions not to be uttered
Into a realm of higher life.
And the silence of the gods who understand each other without speech,
There is the silence of defeat.
There is the silence of those unjustly punished;
And the silence of the dying whose hand
Suddenly grips yours.
There is the silence between father and son,
When the father cannot explain his life,
Even though he be misunderstood for it.
There is the silence that comes between husband and wife.
There is the silence of those who have failed;
And the vast silence that covers
Broken nations and vanquished leaders.
There is the silence of Lincoln,
Thinking of the poverty of his youth.
And the silence of Napoleon
After Waterloo.
And the silence of Jeanne d’Arc
Saying amid the flames, “Blessèd Jesus”—
Revealing in two words all sorrow, all hope.
And there is the silence of age,
Too full of wisdom for the tongue to utter it
In words intelligible to those who have not lived
The great range of life.
And there is the silence of the dead.
If we who are in life cannot speak
Of profound experiences,
Why do you marvel that the dead
Do not tell you of death?
Their silence shall be interpreted
As we approach them.
Lapis Lazuli
by William Butler Yeats
(For Harry Clifton)
I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow,
Of poets that are always gay,
For everybody knows or else should know
That if nothing drastic is done
Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out,
Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in
Until the town lie beaten flat.
All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia;
Yet they, should the last scene be there,
The great stage curtain about to drop,
If worthy their prominent part in the play,
Do not break up their lines to weep.
They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;
Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.
All men have aimed at, found and lost;
Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:
Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.
Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,
And all the drop-scenes drop at once
Upon a hundred thousand stages,
It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.
On their own feet they came, or on shipboard,
Camel-back, horse-back, ass-back, mule-back,
Old civilisations put to the sword.
Then they and their wisdom went to rack:
No handiwork of Callimachus,
Who handled marble as if it were bronze,
Made draperies that seemed to rise
When sea-wind swept the corner, stands;
His long lamp-chimney shaped like a stem
Of a slender palm, stood but a day;
All things fall and are built again,
And those that build them again are gay.
Two Chinamen, behind them a third,
Are carved in lapis lazuli,
Over them flies a long-legged bird,
A symbol of longevity;
The third, doubtless a serving-man,
Carries a musical instrument.
Every discoloration of the stone,
Every accidental crack or dent,
Seems a water-course or an avalanche,
Or lofty slope where it still snows
Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch
Sweetens the little half-way house
Those Chinamen climb towards, and I
Delight to imagine them seated there;
There, on the mountain and the sky,
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.
I recently sent the following email:
This is just to say
I have put the program
organdon_input.sas
into the directory
U:\TIS-Access\SAS Programs\HRSA Grant
and modified the program to use the file
All Surveys – Round One.txt
in the same directory.
And then I thought of Jon.
And then I thought of Hoke.
And then I thought of this:
I have deleted
the data
that were in
the shared drive
and which
you were probably
saving
for analysis.
Forgive me–
with a single command,
so many ones
become zeroes.
And so I thought I’d share it.
Ave Atque Vale
by Billy Collins
Even though I managed to swerve around the lump
of groundhog lying on its back on the road,
he traveled with me for miles,
a quiet passenger
who passed the time looking out the window
enjoying this new view of the woods
he once hobbled around in,
sleeping all day and foraging at night,
rising sometimes to consult the wind with his snout.
Last night he must have wandered
onto the road, hoping to slip
behind the curtain of soft ferns on the other side.
I see these forms every day
and always hope the next one up ahead
is a shredded tire, a discarded brown coat,
but there they are, assuming
every imaginable pose for death’s portrait.
This one I speak of, for example,
the one who rode with me for miles,
reminded me of a small Roman citizen,
with his prosperous belly,
his faint smile,
and his one stiff forearm raised
as if he were still alive, still hailing Caesar.
When I was in Amherst with my parents, we stopped into the Jeffrey Amherst Bookstore, where my father bought all his textbooks in his college days. They were having a bit of a sale, and on the table in front of the store I found a heavily discounted copy of Billy Collins’ Nine Horses. I should not be buying books right now, as I have no room in my apartment (seriously—boxes take up most of the floor space in my room, so that I can barely maneuver (is it wrong to want to spell that with the œ ligature?)), and I don’t have a ton of cash on hand, either. Of course, I bought it. One of the first poems I opened to when I had a chance to glance through it was “Ave Atque Vale.”
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by Algernon Charles Swinburne
Remembrance may recover
And time bring back to time
The name of your first lover,
The ring of my first rhyme;
But rose-leaves of December
The frosts of June shall fret,
The day that you remember,
The day that I forget.
Some weeks ago Alan posted a pair of poems pertaining to obliscence. I meant to say something about these when they were first posted, but I *ahem* forgot. Just over a month ago I turned old, so the workings and the failings of memory have featured prominently in my recent ruminations. I have also been somewhat more casually contemplating the operation of memory and the rôle of forgetfulness for some time, so I certainly appreciated his posting these two poems.
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aesop revised by archy
by Don Marquis
a wolf met a spring
lamb drinking
at a stream
and said to her
you are the lamb
that muddied this stream
all last year
so that i could not get
a clean fresh drink
i am resolved that
this outrage
shall not be enacted again
this season i am going
to kill you
just a minute said the lamb
i was not born last
year so it could not
have been i
the wolf then pulled
a number of other
arguments as to why the lamb
should die
but in each case the lamb
pretty innocent that she was
easily proved
herself guiltless
well well said the wolf
enough of that argument
you are right and i am wrong
but i am going to eat
you anyhow
because i am hungry
stop exclamation point
cried a human voice
and a man came over
the slope of the ravine
vile lupine marauder
you shall not kill that
beautiful and innocent
lamb for i shall save her
exit the wolf
left upper exit
snarling
poor little lamb
continued our human hero
sweet tender little thing
it is well that i appeared
just when i did
it makes my blood boil
to think of the fright
to which you have been
subjected in another
moment i would have been
too late come home with me
and the lamb frolicked
about her new found friend
gambolling as to the sound
of a wordsworthian tabor
and leaping for joy
as if propelled by a stanza
from william blake
these vile and bloody wolves
went on our hero
in honest indignation
they must be cleared out
of the country
the meads must be made safe
for sheepocracy
and so jollying her along
with the usual human hokum
he led her to his home
and the son of a gun
did not even blush when
they passed the mint bed
gently he cut her throat
all the while inveighing
against the inhuman wolf
and tenderly he cooked her
and lovingly he sauced her
and meltingly he ate her
and piously he said a grace
thanking his gods
for their bountiful gifts to him
and after dinner
he sat with his pipe
before the fire meditating
on the brutality of wolves
and the injustice of
the universe
which allows them to harry
poor innocent lambs
and wondering if he
had not better
write to the paper
for as he said
for god s sake can t
something be done about
it
archy
I figured I had to post something. This one has great phrasing combined with a pitch perfect point on politics and morality. And it’s fun to boot.
I’ve gone and done it again, exercising my authority over this little corner of the webiverse. I upgraded the WordPress software to fix a few annoying bugs (like its former refusal to alphabetize the post categories) and plug some security leaks. Please let me know if I’ve broken anything in the process. And, as always, I take requests.
You may need to hold down the ‘Ctrl’ button while reloading the post page and/or the main MoW page to see any changes (holding ‘Ctrl’ down tells your browser to pull a full new copy, rather than pulling it from its cache). Otherwise, enjoy the new-and-improved Mind of Winter.
For You, Who Didn’t Know
by Nancy Willard
At four A.M. I dreamed myself on that beach
where we’ll take you after you’re born.
I woke in a wave of blood.
Lying in the back seat of a nervous Chevy
I counted the traffic lights, lonely as planets.
Starlings stirred in the robes of Justice
over the Town Hall. Miscarriage of justice,
they sang, while you, my small client,
went curling away like smoke under my ribs.
Kick me! I pleaded. Give me a sign
that you’re still there!
Train tracks shook our flesh from our bones.
Behind the hospital rose a tree of heaven.
You can learn something from everything,
a rabbi told his Hasidim who did not believe it.
I didn’t believe it, either. O rabbi,
What did you learn on the train to Belsen?
That because of one second one can miss everything.
There are rooms on this earth for emergencies.
A sleepy attendant steals my clothes and my name,
and leaves me among the sinks on an altar of fear.
“Your name. Your name. Sign these papers,
authorizing us in our wisdom to save the child.
Sign here for circumcision. Your faith, your faith.”
O rabbi, what can we learn from the telegraph?
asked the Hasidim, who did not understand.
And he answered, That every word is counted and charged.
“This is called a dobtone,” smiles the doctor.
He greases my belly, stretched like a drum,
and plants a microphone there, like a flag.
A thousand thumping rabbits! Savages clapping for joy!
A heart dancing its name, I’m-here, I’m-here!
The cries of fishes, of stars, the tunings of hair!
O rabbi, what can we learn from the telephone?
My shiksa daughter, your faith, your faith
that what we say here is heard there.
Every time I come back to this poem, there is more there. Let me just point out that the three interjections about the rabbi are quite artfully placed. First, as she speeds to the hospital she considers what can be lost if they lose any time, stopping at the lights, as it is only just for a citizen to do. Then, as she signs papers that she can’t possibly be in a state to understand the meaning of and that could mean her own or the child’s life or death she considers the real significance of words, when put in certain context — as in a contract. Finally, in her relief at the end of the ordeal she considers the power of prayer, believing (for the moment anyway) that what is said here is heard there.
Lee and I have discussed how hard it is to memorize the lines or pieces of ‘free verse’ poems, even the best ones. But I have had those three interjections of the rabbi in my head for days now — in the phrasing that the poet delivers them.
To My Big Nose
from ‘Luck Is Luck’
by Lucia Perillo
Hard to believe there were actual years
when I planned to have you cut from my face—
hard to imagine what the world would have looked like
if not seen through your pink shadow.
You who are built from random parts
like a mythical creature—a gryphon or sphinx—
with the cartilage ball attached to your tip
and the plaque where the bone flares at the bridge
like a snake who has swallowed a small coin.
Seabird beak or tanker prow
with Modigliani nostrils, like those strolled out
from the dank studio and its close air,
with a swish-swish whisper from the model’s silk robe
as it parts and then falls shut again.
Then you’re out on the sidewalk of Montparnasse
with its fumes of tulips and clotted cream
and clotted lungs and cigars and sewers—
even fumes from the lobster who walks on a leash.
And did his owner march slowly
or drag his swimmerets briskly along
through the one man’s Parisian dogturd that is
the other man’s cutting-edge conceptual art?
So long twentieth century, my Pygmalion.
So long rhinoplasty and the tummy tuck.
Let the vowels squeak through my sinuses
like wet sheets hauled on a laundry line’s rusty wheels.
Oh I am not so dumb as people have made me out,
what with your detours when I speak,
and you are not so cruel, though you frightened men off
all those years when I thought I was running the show,
pale ghost who has led me like a knife
continually slicing the future stepped into,
oh rudder/wing flap/daggerboard, my whole life
turning me this way and that.
I think this poem is intended to be a sardonic ode to conceptual art and societal expectations about beauty. That is, a sort of kiss-off to the idea of turning up your nose (so to speak) at prejudgment or close-mindedness. But I fear that it is actually a poem about beauty being subjective – that she is now beyond the ugliness of her nose because it is that nose that (in part) defines her perspective on the world. I say “fear” because I would hope a poet would have something more to say than that beauty is in the nose of the beholder. But, I suppose this could just be my blessed rage for order talking here.
Oh, but I forget to mention that I think her images are great. This is really why I put it here.
Six other poems from ‘Luck is Luck’ can be read on the NYT review site.
[add: I just re-read what I wrote and it makes no sense. Just read the poem. 4:22 PM]
Here are two poems on a related theme. If I have already put up the Bishop poem before, I apologize. First, Billy Collins:
Forgetfulness
by Billy Collins
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
Now, Elizabeth Bishop:
One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Brian’s post about the early bird, lovely post that it was, left a small, very nasal fly inside my head who has been buzzing away, demanding a good swatting. This little essay is meant to be a rolled up piece of paper with which to do away with him.
Brian began by pointing out that metaphors are mortal. He then went on to talk about ‘proverbs’—“lockets with fossils inside”—a suggestion that they die too. I think perhaps Brian was conflating two things here that can be teased apart. Thus the fly.
My question then—Metaphors die, do proverbs?
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