Poem of the Day: Richard Eberhart

 The Groundhog   

In June, amid the golden fields, 

I saw a groundhog lying dead. 

Dead lay he; my senses shook, 

And mind outshot our naked frailty.

There lowly in the vigorous summer 

His form began its senseless change, 

And made my senses waver dim 

Seeing nature ferocious in him. 

Inspecting close his maggots' might 

And seething cauldron of his being, 

Half with loathing, half with a strange love, 

I poked him with an angry sstick. 

The fever arose, became a flame 

And Vigour circumscribed the skies, 

Immense energy in the sun, 

And through my frame a sunless trembling. 

My stick had done nor good nor harm. 

Then stood I silent in the day 

Watching the object, as before; 

And kept my reverence for knowledge 

Trying for control, to be still, 

To quell the passion of the blood; 

Until I had bent down on my knees 

Praying for joy in the sight of decay. 

And so I left; and I returned 

In Autumn strict of eye, to see
The sap gone out of the groundhog,

But the bony sodden hulk remained. 

But the year had lost its meaning, 

And in intellectual chains 

I lost both love and loathing, 

Mured up in the wall of wisdom. 

Another summer took the fields again 

Massive and burning, full of life, 

But when I chanced upon the spot 

There was only a little hair left, 

And bones bleaching in the sunlight 

Beautiful as architecture; 

I watched them like a geometer, 

And cut a walking stick from a birch. 

It has been three years, now, 

There is no sign of the groundhog. 

I stood there in the whirling summer, 

My hand capped a withered heart, 

And thought of China and of Greece, 

Of Alexander in his tent; 

Of Montaigne in his tower, 

Of Saint Theresa in her wild lament.

--Richard Eberhart 

This is probably Eberhart's most famous anthology piece -- except maybe for "The Fury of Aerial Bombardment" -- as well as a member of a curious subgenre: the mock-heroic meditation on a dead animal. In fact, I can think of only three examples: this one, Thomas Gray's "On the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes" (one of the most misquoted poems in English), and this last, which is one my favorite poems of all time.

The Death of a Toad

          A toad the power mower caught, 

Chewed and clipped of a leg, with a hobbling hop has got 

     To the garden verge, and sanctuaried him 

     Under the cineraria leaves, in the shade 

          Of the ashen heartshaped leaves, in a dim, 

               Low, and a final glade.

          The rare original heartsblood goes, 

Spends on the earthen hide, in the folds and wizenings, flows 

    In the gutters of the banked and staring eyes. He lies 

    As still as if he would return to stone,

          And soundlessly attending, dies 

               Toward some deep monotone, 

          Toward misted and ebullient seas 

And cooling shores, toward lost Amphibia's emperies. 

     Day dwindles, drowning, and at length is gone 

     In the wide and antique eyes, which still appear 

          To watch, across the castrate lawn, 

               The haggard daylight steer. 

--Richard Wilbur