Poem of the Day: Marianne Moore

What Are Years?    

   What is our innocence, 
what is our guilt? All are 
   naked, none is safe. And whence 
is courage: the unanswered question, 
the resolute doubt -- 
dumbly calling, deafly listening -- that 
in misfortune, even death, 
      encourages others 
      and in its defeat, stirs 

   the soul to be strong? He 
sees deep and is glad, who 
   accedes to mortality 
and in his imprisonment rises 
upon himself as 
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be 
free and unable to be, 
      in its surrendering 
      finds its continuing. 

  So he who strongly feels, 
behaves. The very bird, 
   grown taller as he sings, steels 
his form straight up. Though he is captive, 
his mighty singing 
says, satisfaction is a lowly 
thing, how pure a thing is joy. 
      This is mortality, 
      this is eternity. 

-- Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore was famous for her three-cornered hat and her love of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and if she's famous at all today, it's probably for her poem about poetry called "Poetry," which is in almost every anthology used in introduction-to-poetry courses. It's the one with the line about "imaginary gardens with real toads in them." So people were shocked when the 1967 edition of The Collected Poems of Marianne Moore was published and she had revised "Poetry" to read as follows, in its entirety: 

I, too, dislike it.

    Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in 

    it, after all, a place for the genuine.

I suspect a lot of poets would like to cut the hell out of their anthology pieces, especially if they're always being asked "What did you mean by ...?" 

I find a lot of Moore's poems a little too arch and clever, but there are three or four that I really cherish. Her poem "Peter" is one of the few poems about a cat to rival Christopher Smart's. "What Are Years?" is often read as a simple inspirational poem of the "stand up straight, wash your hands, eat your vegetables" variety. And to some extent it is just that. But there's real emotional anguish leading to the recognition that "satisfaction is a / lowly thing" that comes only to the humble. She has found in it a place for the genuine: She knows why the caged bird sings.   

Poem of the Day: John Milton

From Paradise Lost, Book IV, lines 205-318 

Beneath him with new wonder now he views
To all delight of human sense expos'd
In narrow room Nature's whole wealth, yea more,
A Heaven on Earth: for blissful Paradise
Of God the Garden was, by him in the East
Of Eden planted; Eden stretch'd her Line
From Auran Eastward to the Royal Tow'rs
Of Great Seleucia, built by Grecian Kings,
Or where the Sons of Eden long before
Dwelt in Telassar; in this pleasant soil
His far more pleasant Garden God ordain'd;
Out of the fertile ground he caus'd to grow
All Trees of noblest kind for sight, smell, taste; 
And all amid them stood the Tree of Life,
High eminent, blooming Ambrosial Fruit
Of vegetable Gold; and next to Life
Our Death the Tree of Knowledge grew fast by,
Knowledge of Good bought dear by knowing ill.
Southward through Eden went a River large,
Nor chang'd his course, but through the shaggy hill
Pass'd underneath ingulft, for God had thrown
That Mountain as his Garden mould high rais'd
Upon the rapid current, which through veins
Of porous Earth with kindly thirst up-drawn,
Rose a fresh Fountain, and with many a rill
Water'd the Garden; thence united fell
Down the steep glade, and met the nether Flood,
Which from his darksome passage now appears,
And now divided into four main Streams,
Runs diverse, wand'ring many a famous Realm
And Country hereof needs no account,
But rather to tell how, if Art could tell,
How from that Sapphire Fount the crisped Brooks,
Rolling on Orient Pearl and sands of Gold,
With mazy error under pendant shades
Ran Nectar, visiting each plant, and fed
Flow'rs worthy of Paradise which not nice Art
In Beds and curious knots, but Nature boon
Pour'd forth profuse on Hill and Dale and Plain,
Both where the morning Sun first warmly smote
The open field, and where the unpierc't shade
Imbrown'd the noontide Bow'rs: Thus was this place,
A happy rural seat of various view:
Groves whose rich Trees wept odorous Gums and Balm,
Others whose fruit burnisht with Golden Rind
Hung amiable, Hesperian Fables true,
If true, here only, and of delicious taste:
Betwixt them Lawns, or level Downs, and Flocks
Grazing the tender herb, were interpos'd,
Or palmy hillock, or the flow'ry lap
Of some irriguous Valley spread her store,
Flow'rs of all hue, and without Thorn the Rose;
Another side, umbrageous Grots and Caves
Of cool recess, o'er which the mantling Vine
Lays forth her purple Grape, and gently creeps
Luxuriant; meanwhile murmuring waters fall
Down the slope hills, disperst, or in a Lake,
That to the fringed Bank with Myrtle crown'd,
Her crystal mirror holds, unite thir streams,
The Birds thir choir apply; airs, vernal airs,
Breathing the smell of field and grove, attune
The trembling leaves, while Universal Pan
Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance
Led on th'Eternal Spring. Not that fair field
Of Enna, where Proserpin gath'ring flow'rs
Herself a fairer Flow'r by gloomy Dis
Was gather'd, which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world; nor that sweet Grove
Of Daphne by Orontes, and th' inspir'd
Castalian Spring might with this Paradise
Of Eden strive; nor that Nyseian Isle
Girt with the River Triton, where old Cham,
Whom Gentiles Ammon call and Lybian Jove,
Hid Amalthea and her florid Son,
Young Bacchus, from his Stepdame Rhea's eye;
Nor where Abassin Kings thir issue Guard,
Mount Amara, though this by some suppos'd
True Paradise under the Ethiop Line
By Nilus head, enclos'd with shining Rock,
A whole day's journey high, but wide remote
From this Assyrian Garden, where the Fiend
Saw undelighted all delight, all kind
Of living Creatures new to sight and strange:
Two of far nobler shape erect and tall,
Godlike erect, with native Honor clad
In naked Majesty seem'd Lords of all,
And worthy seem'd, for in thir looks Divine
The image of thir glorious Maker shone,
Truth, Wisdom, Sanctitude severe and pure,
Severe, but in true filial freedom plac't;
Whence true authority in men; though both
Not equal, as thir sex not equal seem'd;
For contemplation hee and valor form'd,
For softeness shee and sweet attractive Grace,
Hee for God only, shee for God in him:
His fair large Front and eye sublime declar'd
Absolute rule; and Hyacinthine Locks
Round from his parted forelock manly hung
Clust'ring, but not beneath his shoulders broad:
Shee as a veil down to the slender waist
Her unadorned golden tresses wore
Dishevell'd, but in wanton ringlets wav'd
As the Vine curls her tendrils, which impli'd
Subjection, but requir'd with gentle sway,
And by her yielded, by him best receiv'd,
Yielded with coy submission, modest pride,
And sweet reluctant amorous delay.
Nor those mysterious parts were then conceal'd,
Then was not guilty shame: dishonest shame
Of Nature's works, honor dishonorable,
Sin-bred, how have ye troubl'd all mankind
With shows instead, mere shows of seeming pure,
And banisht from man's life his happiest life,
Simplicity and spotless innocence.

-- John Milton 

Milton seems to me the third greatest poet in English, after Shakespeare and Chaucer, particularly for his ability to roll like thunder in great cascades of blank verse. I read these lines aloud (well, under my breath) as I was typing them, and it made me aware once again how much mastery he had over the sound of the language, and the various tricks -- assonance, alliteration, chiasmus ("Flow'rs of all hue, and without Thorn the Rose"), oxymoron ("coy submission, modest pride"), and so on -- that he brings to his verse. 

Of course, one reason I'm aware of all these things is that my copy of Paradise Lost is heavily scribbled over with the notes I took from my grad-school Milton course, which was taught by Douglas Bush. There was nothing Miltonic about Mr. Bush himself; he was a small, elderly man (though at the time he taught me he was probably younger than I am today) with a dry (oh, hell, it was dull) classroom delivery. But he knew his Milton. There's a probably apocryphal story that someone once asked him about a trip he took by train from Boston to Los Angeles, and Bush said that it was unfortunate that he forgot to bring a book with him. "But, Mr. Bush," the other person said, "I thought you used to recite poetry to yourself when you didn't have a book with you." "I did," said Bush. "But Paradise Lost only got me as far as St. Louis." 

For his course, we had to memorize a certain number of lines from Paradise Lost ourselves, and write them out on the final exam. I chose the passage beginning "Not that fair field / Of Enna..." which is why I posted it here. (My friend Russell Merritt decided to memorize one of Milton's Latin poems, and since his room was next to mine in the dormitory, I got to listen to him recite it and act as prompter. It begins: "In se perpetuo tempus revolubile gyro..." but that's all I remember. I'll bet Russell can still remember all of it.) 

Mr. Bush's particular bêtes noires were critics who subscribed to the idea that Milton was of the devil's party without knowing it, an idea proclaimed by Blake and picked up by Byron and Shelley, among others. The fact remains, however, that Satan is the most compelling figure in Paradise Lost, and his defiance of authority is immensely attractive. The passage above is actually from Satan's point of view -- his first glimpse of Eden -- as Milton reminds us when he notes that "the Fiend / Saw undelighted all delight."

Mr. Bush was around before feminist criticism gained the influence it has today, but he was defensive about what may as well be called sexism in the poem (e.g.,  "Not equal, as thir sex not equal seem'd; / For contemplation hee and valor form'd, / For softeness shee and sweet attractive Grace, / Hee for God only, shee for God in him"). It is pretty indefensible from a modern point of view. But Milton had an unhappy marriage -- lord knows he was hard to live with -- and he argued for a kind of "no-fault" divorce in several pamphlets that got him in trouble with the authorities. That trouble also influenced his famous argument against censorship in Areopagitica, where he wrote, "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat." Milton was a pretty complicated man. 

Actually, the best that can be said about Milton is that he wrote Paradise Lost, which, whatever you may think of its theology (and I don't think much of it myself), is a magnificent, if daunting, work of art. Samuel Johnson admired it too, but even he observed, "None ever wished it longer." 

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them

Barney Frank tries to fight the right-wing lie machine: 

This is what American political discourse has sunk to. 

Poem of the Day: Andrew Marvell

The Garden 

How vainly men themselves amaze 

To win the palm, the oak, or bays; 

And their uncessant labours see

Crown'd from some single herb or tree, 

Whose short and narrow verged shade 

Does prudently their toils upbraid; 

While all flow'rs and all trees do close 

To weave the garlands of repose. 

Fair quiet, have I found thee here, 

And innocence thy sister dear! 

Mistaken long, I sought you then 

In busy companies of men. 

Your sacred plants, if here below, 

Only among the plants will grow. 

Society is all but rude, 

To this delicious solitude.

No white nor red was ever seen 

So am'rous as this lovely green. 

Fond lovers, cruel as their flame, 

Cut in these trees their mistress' name. 

Little, alas, they know, or heed, 

How far these beauties hers exceed! 

Fair trees! wheres'e'er your barks I wound, 

No name shall but your own be found. 

When we have run our passions' heat, 

Love hither makes his best retreat. 

The Gods, that mortal beauty chase, 

Still in a tree did end their race. 

Apollo hunted Daphne so, 

Only that she might laurel grow, 

And Pan did after Syrinx speed, 

Not as a nymph, but for a reed. 

What wond'rous life in this I lead! 

Ripe apples drop about my head; 

The luscious clusters of the vine 

Upon my mouth do crush their wine; 

The nectarine and curious peach, 

Into my hands themselves do reach; 

Stumbling on melons, as I pass, 

Insnar'd with flow'rs, I fall on grass. 

Meanwhile the mind, from pleasures less, 

Withdraws into its happiness: 

The mind, that ocean where each kind 

Does straight its own resemblance find; 

Yet it creates, transcending these, 

Far other worlds, and other seas; 

Annihilating all that's made 

To a green thought in a green shade. 

Here at the fountain's sliding foot, 

Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root, 

Casting the body's vest aside, 

My soul into the boughs does glide: 

There like a bird it sits, and sings, 

Then whets, and combs its silver wings; 

And, till prepar'd for longer flight, 

Waves in its plumes the various light.

Such was that happy garden-state, 

While man there walk'd without a mate: 

After a place so pure, and sweet, 

What other help could yet be meet! 

But 'twas beyond a mortal's share 

To wander solitary there: 

Two paradises 'twere in one 

To live in paradise alone. 

How well the skillful gardener drew  

Of flow'rs and herbs this dial new; 

Where from above the milder sun 

Does through a fragrant Zodiac run;  

And, as it works, th'industrious bee

Computes its time as well as we. 

How could such sweet and wholesome hours 

Be reckon'd but with herbs and flow'rs! 

-- Andrew Marvell

Marvell is my favorite 17th century poet -- excluding Shakespeare, who really belongs mostly to the 16th century, but not excluding Milton, whom I admire more than enjoy. This is a much commented-on poem, and I don't want to add commentary to it. I'd rather go think some green thoughts.

Poem of the Day: Rudyard Kipling

The White Man's Burden   

Take up the White Man's burden -- 

    Send forth the best ye breed -- 

Go bind your sons to exile 

   To serve your captives' need; 

To wait in heavy harness 

   On fluttered folk and wild -- 

Your new-caught, sullen peoples, 

   Half devil and half child. 

Take up the White Man's burden -- 

   In patience to abide, 

To veil the threat of terror 

   And check the show of pride; 

By open speech and simple, 

   An hundred times made plain, 

To seek another's profit, 

   And work another's gain. 

Take up the White Man's burden -- 

   The savage wars of peace -- 

Fill full the mouth of Famine 

   And bid the sickness cease; 

And when your goal is nearest 

   The end for others sought, 

Watch Sloth and heathen Folly 

   Bring all your hope to nought. 

Take up the White Man's burden -- 

   No tawdry rule of kings, 

But toil of serf and sweeper -- 

   The tale of common things. 

The ports ye shall not enter, 

   The roads ye shall not tread, 

Go make them with your living, 

   And mark them with your dead! 

Take up the White Man's burden -- 

   And reap his old reward: 

The blame of those ye better, 

   The hate of those ye guard -- 

The cry of hosts ye humour 

   (Ah, slowly!) toward the light -- 

"Why brought ye us from bondage, 

   "Our loved Egyptian night?" 

Take up the White Man's burden -- 

   Ye dare not stoop to less -- 

Nor call too loud on Freedom 

   To cloak your weariness; 

By all ye cry or whisper, 

   By all ye leave or do, 

The silent, sullen peoples 

   Shall weigh your Gods and you. 

Take up the White Man's burden -- 

  Have done with childish days -- 

The lightly proffered laurel, 

   The easy, ungrudged praise. 

Comes now, to search your manhood 

   Through all the thankless years, 

Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom, 

   The judgment of your peers! 

-- Rudyard Kipling

Sometimes a bad poem is worth reading. And this is definitely a bad poem, not so much in its heavy-footed metrics and clunky, obvious rhymes, but in the racist, imperialist, colonialist message insisted on in the first line of each stanza. 

Every poem has a persona, of course, a speaker not to be identified with the poet. And it would be nice to be able to read this one as a dramatic monologue in the persona of a well-meaning imperialist of the 1890s. After all, Kipling won the Nobel Prize in Literature. But I'm afraid that I have to go along with George Orwell's view: 

It is no use pretending that Kipling's view of life, as a whole, can be accepted or even forgiven by any civilized person. It is no use claiming, for instance, that when Kipling describes a British soldier beating a 'nigger' with a cleaning rod in order to get money out of him, he is acting merely as a reporter and does not necessarily approve what he describes. There is not the slightest sign anywhere in Kipling's work that he disapproves of that kind of conduct--on the contrary, there is a definite strain of sadism in him, over and above the brutality which a writer of that type has to have. Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting. 

So why read him? To borrow another phrase from a Kipling poem: "Lest we forget -- lest we forget." Kipling's belief that "white men" have a moral duty to bring "civilization" to the "savages" is older than his poem: It was one of the "justifications" advanced by pre-Civil War Southerners for slavery. And you'll find it still, sometimes in coded form but sometimes not, in the pages of the National Review and the Weekly Standard. It is in the heart and soul of neoconservativism. It's what got us into Vietnam and Iraq. Although, if Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld had read Kipling's poem, they might have been warned that they wouldn't be greeted with flowers as liberators but with "The blame of those ye better, / The hate of those ye guard." One mitigating factor cited by Kipling's defenders is that he is clearly aware, in this poem and others, of the hard labor and the human cost of imperialism. Moreover, Kipling himself suffered that human cost with the loss of his only son in World War I.

To be fair, even Orwell had praise for Kipling's fiction, which demonstrates imagination and even empathy toward those "new-caught, sullen peoples, / Half devil and half child." But as an antidote to the poison of "The White Man's Burden" you should read Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost or Caroline Elkins's Imperial Reckoning. 

Backward Into Medievalism

Andrew Sullivan on that poll on what Republicans believe:

It has a parallel in the way in which non-violent Islamists have doubled down on medievalism as they feel an overwhelming sense of their own failure to succeed in modernity. There is a profound insecurity and dysfunction in these subcultures which cannot make the transition to modern life and thereby surrender more totally to the ancient past and to hatred of those who succeed. The hatred of Obama - a clearly decent and obviously Christian man - is not about him. It's about them. It's about their resentment of a man who has integrated his own identity and made a place for himself in a pluralist world. They cannot do that - so, like Palin, they invent a world of ancient virtues and moral absolutes that they routinely fail to live up to in reality. I mean: look at Palin's family and Obama's. Whose is the more traditional? And yet Palin is allegedly the avatar of family values - and Obama is a commie subversive.

Poem of the Day: John Keats

Ode on a Grecian Urn 

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, 
    Thou foster child of silence and slow time, 
Sylvan historian, who cast thus express 
    A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: 
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape 
    Of deities or mortals, or of both, 
         In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? 
    What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? 
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? 
        What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? 

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard 
    Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; 
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd, 
    Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: 
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave 
    Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; 
        Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, 
Though winning near the goal -- yet, do not grieve; 
    She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, 
        For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! 

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed 
    Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu; 
And, happy melodist, unwearied, 
    For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
    For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd, 
        For ever panting, and for ever young; 
All breathing human passion far above, 
    That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd, 
        A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. 

Who are these coming to the sacrifice? 
    To what green altar, O mysterious priest, 
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, 
    And all her silken flanks with garlands drest? 
What little town by river or sea short, 
    Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, 
        Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn? 
And, little town, thy streets for evermore 
    Will silent be; and not a soul to tell 
        Why thou art desolate, can e'er return. 

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede 
    Of marble men and maidens overwrought, 
With forest branches and the trodden weed; 
    Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought 
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! 
    When old age shall this generation waste, 
        Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe 
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
    "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all 
        Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

--John Keats

Back when I used to teach try to teach poetry to undergraduates, I told them that every poem has a plot, even the short ones. That was to get them away from trying to find the "moral" of the poem, or the prettiest lines. Otherwise, in this poem they'd run to the last two lines and tell me things like, "The poet is saying here that beauty is truth." Which we all know to be a lie.  

So I'd tell them that Keats's poem is like a five-act play, the typical structure of which is something like this:

I. Exposition 
II. Conflict 
III. Crisis 
IV. Struggle 
V. Resolution  

I. The exposition in Keats's first stanza tells us that someone is looking at (thanks to the title) a Greek urn, and has a lot of questions about the images on it. 

II. The conflict arises in the second stanza when the speaker tries to answer the questions by relating the images frozen in time on the urn to the world of change we know, in which music fades, leaves fall, and lovers consummate their relationship. 

III. This conflict reaches a crisis point in the third stanza when the speaker moves from a celebration of the happiness shown on the urn to a realization that human passion cloys and wearies. 

IV. So the struggle to make sense of the images continues when he looks at another side of the urn on which some sort of religious procession is taking place, but imagines that the figures have come from a town to which they can never return. 

V. Which leads us to the fifth stanza's resolution: an admission that we are teased out of thought by the urn's impossibly idealized vision of human life, one in which joy never fades. So why is it a "friend to man" if it tells us a lie, if it's a "Cold Pastoral" representation of warm and mutable and messy existence? For some that's a flaw in the poem, a flat-out contradiction of everything that has gone before. 

But if we think of the poem as a drama, as the struggle of the poem's speaker to come to terms with art and life, then the lie is understandable. I think Keats's point is that art presented his speaker with an image of beauty -- of unfading love, of things immutable and immortal -- that we can hold as an eternal verity, something about us that will still be around when our generation has faded, changed, and died. The urn is a friend to humankind for much the same reason that we cherish the snapshots in our photo albums: they are a permanent record of the way we once were and will never be again. Whether we regard this truth as a melancholy one or a happy one is up to us, but there is a kind of beauty about it. 


And my point is that a poem is more than the sum of its parts, however dazzling or quotable those parts may be.  Understanding its structure is essential to understanding what it has to tell us. 

American Taliban

Markos Moulitsas is writing a book called American Taliban, for which he commissioned a poll of people who identify themselves as Republicans. Here are some of its findings: 

Should Barack Obama be impeached, or not? 

Yes 39
No 32
Not Sure 29

The poll doesn't even specify what he should be impeached for. Being a Democrat?  

Do you think Barack Obama is a socialist? 

Yes 63
No 21
Not Sure 16

Do you believe Barack Obama was born in the United States, or not?
Yes 42
No 36
Not Sure 22

This one makes my head hurt: 

Do you believe Sarah Palin is more qualified to be President than Barack Obama?

Yes 53

No 14

Not Sure 33

These are really nauseating, too: 

Should openly gay men and women be allowed to serve in the military?

Yes 26

No 55

Not Sure 19

Should same sex couples be allowed to marry?

Yes 7

No 77

Not Sure 16

Should gay couples receive any state or federal benefits?

Yes 11

No 68

Not Sure 21

Should openly gay men and women be allowed to teach in public schools?

Yes 8

No 73

Not Sure 19

And as for religion:

Should public school students be taught that the book of Genesis in the Bible explains how God created the world?

Yes 77

No 15

Not Sure 8

Do you believe that the only way for an individual to go to heaven is though Jesus Christ, or can one make it to heaven through another faith?

Christ 67

Other 15

Not Sure 18

We're doomed.

Poem of the Day: Gerard Manley Hopkins

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection

Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy on an air- 
built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs | they throng; they glitter in marches. 
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, | wherever an elm arches, 
Shivelights and shadowtackle in long | lashes lace, lance, and pair. 
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous | ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare 
Of yestertempest's creases; | in pool and rut peel parches 
Squandering ooze to squeezed | dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches 
Squadroned masks and manmarks | treadmire toil there 
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd | nature's bonfire burns on. 
But quench her bonniest, dearest | to her, her clearest-selvèd spark 
Man, how fast his firedint, | his mark on mind, is gone! 
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark 
Drowned. O pity and indig | nation! Manshape, that shone 
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, | death blots black out; nor mark 
                               Is any of him at all so stark 
But vastness blurs and time | beats level. Enough! the Resurrection, 
A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping, | joyless days, dejection. 
                               Across my foundering deck shone 
A beacon, an eternal beam. | Flesh fade, and mortal trash 
Fall to the residuary worm; | world's wildfire, leave but ash: 
                                In a flash, at a trumpet crash, 
I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and 
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, 
                                 Is immortal diamond. 

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins

Like Dylan Thomas or E.E. Cummings (though he's greater than either of them), Hopkins was sui generis, a poet better left unimitated. All that stuff about "inscape" and "instress" and "sprung rhythm" remains his and his alone, and no matter how hard I try, I can't make them work for me. That caesura ( | ) he marked in this poem, for example. It's Hopkins imitating Anglo-Saxon poetry, but I don't really sense it when I read the poem. But it doesn't really matter.

Your first reading of one of his poems is a paraphrase: Nature is in flux, mutable, like clouds and wind and fire. Human beings are in flux, too, and no matter how brilliant our lives, we die. But at the Resurrection we become immortal. On your second reading you pick through all the unfamiliar and sometimes cobbled-together words (chevy, shivelight, shadowtackle, footfretted, firedint), knowing that Hopkins loved Anglo-Saxon roots, to try to wrest some sense out of them. (Even if you don't succeed, don't worry about it. Make up your own meaning if you have to: Hopkins did.) 

But the third reading is the best, because you can start to relax and listen to the sounds and go with the flow and begin, however faintly, to sense the ecstatic experience that Hopkins went through writing it. Even if you don't believe what he's saying (I don't), you believe that he believed it. And for a poet that's enough.   

Poem of the Day: T.S. Eliot

Five-Finger Exercises 

I. Lines to a Persian Cat 

The songsters of the air repair 

To the green fields of Russell Square. 

Beneath the trees there is no ease 

For the dull brain, the sharp desires 

And the quick eyes of Woolly Bear. 

There is no relief but in grief. 

O when will the creaking heart cease? 

When will the broken chair give ease? 

When will Time flow away?

II. Lines to a Yorkshire Terrier 

In a brown field stood a tree 

And the tree was crookt and dry. 

In a black sky, from a green cloud 

Natural forces shriek'd aloud, 

Screamed, rattled, muttered endlessly.

Little dog was safe and warm 

Under a cretonne eiderdown, 

Yet the field was cracked and brown 

And the tree was cramped and dry. 

Pollicle dogs and cats all must 

Jellicle cats and dogs all must 

Like undertakers, come to dust. 

Here a little dog I pause 

Heaving up my prior paws, 

Pause, and sleep endlessly.

III. Lines to a Duck in the Park

The long light shakes across the lake, 

The forces of the morning quake, 

The dawn is slant across the lawn, 

Here is no eft or mortal snake 

But only sluggish duck and drake. 

I have seen the morning shine, 

I have had the Bread and Wine, 

Let the feathered mortals take 

That which is their mortal due, 

Pinching bread and finger too, 

Easier had than squirming worm; 

For I know, and so should you 

That soon the enquiring worm shall try 

Our well-preserved complacency. 

IV. Lines to Ralph Hodgson Esqre. 

How delightful to meet Mr. Hodgson! 

                          (Everyone wants to know him) -- 

With his musical sound 

And his Baskerville Hound

Which, just at a word from his master 

Will follow you faster and faster 

And tear you limb from limb. 

How delightful to meet Mr. Hodgson! 

Who is worshipped by all waitresses 

(They regard him as something apart) 

While on his palate fine he presses 

The juice of the gooseberry tart. 

How delightful to meet Mr. Hodgson!
                          (Everyone wants to know him), 

He has 999 canaries 

And round his head finches and fairies 

In jubilant rapture skim. 

How delightful to meet Mr. Hodgson! 

                          (Everyone wants to meet him).

V. Lines for Cuscuscaraway and Mirza Murad Ali Beg 

How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot! 

With his features of clerical cut, 

And his brow so grim 

And his mouth so prim 

And his conversation, so nicely 

Restricted to What Precisely 

And If and Perhaps and But. 

How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot! 

With a bobtail cur 

In a coat of fur 

And a porpentine cat 

And a wopsical hat: 

How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot! 

                            (Whether his mouth be open or shut).

-- T.S. Eliot

Some people will never forgive T.S. Eliot for Cats. But I rather liked it when I saw it, so my grievance with Eliot is the line "April is the cruelest month," which has become a cliché that lands with an annual leaden thud in the ledes of newspaper articles across the land. (Anyway, he got it wrong. He had lived in Massachusetts, so he must have known that March, in which the calendar promises spring but the streets are packed with gray slush, is the cruelest month up there. Here in California, not so much. Maybe November, especially when they start playing Christmas carols too early.)  

No, I really don't like T.S. Eliot. I don't like his Tory politics or his anti-Semitism or his Anglo-Catholicism. (He would have loved Benedict XVI.) And I don't much care for his verse, except for some of the lyrical parts of the "Four Quartets." I don't like the obscure allusions and the early 20th-century ennui. I wish Ezra Pound had cut even more from "The Waste Land." 

But he still demands attention, so I've paid it. In my volume of the Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950, these five little poems are listed as "Minor Works," which seems about right. The best-known is the last one, Eliot's deprecatory self-portrait. (I was told, but can't confirm, that Cuscuscaraway and Mirza Murad Ali Beg were Eliot's cats. The latter seems also to have been the pseudonym of one Godolphin Mitford, a theosophical writer, so far as my Googling can tell. Ah, the Mitfords! Now that's another story.) There's a certain creepy charm about these verses. 

As for reallly creepy, there's Eliot's first marriage, which I wrote about in a review for the Mercury News: 

Was Old Possum really a rat?

That's pretty much the conclusion Carole Seymour-Jones comes to in her biography of Vivienne Eliot, the first wife of T.S. Eliot. Like Nancy Milford, in her biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, and Brenda Maddox, who wrote ''Nora'' about James Joyce's wife, Seymour-Jones examines the effects of marriage on the work of a major 20th-century writer. ''Painted Shadow'' gives us an unsettling point of view on Eliot and his work.

Thomas Stearns Eliot and Vivienne Haigh-Wood were both 27 when they met in 1915 at Oxford, where he was doing postgraduate work. Three months after their meeting, they were married. Marry in haste, repent at leisure: This time the repentance took 32 years, until her death in a mental institution in 1947.

Only a few weeks after they married, Eliot sailed for the United States to attend a family reunion. Vivien (as she had begun spelling her name) stayed behind, and while Eliot was away she began seeing quite a lot of their new friend, Bertrand Russell. After Eliot's return, the two future Nobel Prize laureates and the lively but not particularly well-educated young woman formed a sort of ménage à trois -- Russell even paid the Eliots' household bills -- that lasted almost three years.

Seymour-Jones is convinced that T.S. Eliot was gay, and that Eliot married in hopes that a heterosexual union would ''cure'' him of his desire for his own sex. She finds ''an element of homosexuality by proxy'' in Eliot's apparent acquiescence in his wife's affair with Russell. (Though Russell once denied that the relationship with Vivien was sexual, Seymour-Jones is having none of it.)

In any case, Eliot and Vivien were temperamentally mismatched: She was nervous and impulsive (Virginia Woolf once referred to her as a ''bag of ferrets'' that ''Tom wears around his neck'') while he, again in Woolf's irresistibly quotable words, was ''sinister, insidious, eel-like, also monolithic, masked, intensely reserved.'' And neither was in the best of health: Both repeatedly suffered physical and emotional breakdowns.

But Seymour-Jones sees Vivien as Eliot's ''Muse'' and their marriage as a ''crucible of dysfunction which, rather than hindering the poet's creativity, provoked it.'' The troubles in their marriage may be reflected in the tension between men and women evident in ''The Waste Land'' and other poems. But as Seymour-Jones documents, Vivien also contributed lines to ''The Waste Land'' and suggested changes to the ones Eliot had written. And she was fiercely proud and supportive of his work as a writer.

For a time he reciprocated her loyalty and encouraged her own writing: When he became editor of the quarterly Criterion in 1922, he published many of her reviews and stories. ''It is possible that Eliot first encouraged Vivien's writing to assuage his own guilt,'' Seymour-Jones comments. ''Together they could make a quarterly, even if they could not make a child. And for Vivien her writing could become a substitute for the flesh and blood infant for which she longed. What began in part as therapy became a new career.''

But in the end it succeeded as neither therapy nor career. In 1925 Eliot published Vivien's devastating caricature of the Bloomsbury set and was forced by the scandal that ensued to promise that he wouldn't publish her again. Seymour-Jones thinks he set her up for the fall: ''It seems inconceivable that Eliot as editor would allow a piece of hers to go through of whose contents he was ignorant. To the innocent eye the assumption must be that Eliot encouraged Vivien to risk her reputation by satirizing their closest friends.'' But ''he may have had a darker motive: . . . he was negotiating a new contract . . . for a quarterly in which there would be no place for Vivien.''

And increasingly there was no place in his life for Vivienne -- she returned to the original spelling of her name in 1928. Eliot had begun drinking heavily, and she had grown dependent on various chemicals -- bromides, chloral hydrate, ether. Her use of the strong-smelling ether, which had been prescribed as a numbing agent for neuralgia, particularly drew comment -- Aldous Huxley observed that the Eliots' ''house smelled like a hospital.''

In 1932, Eliot was invited to lecture at Harvard, and he spent eight months in the United States. In 1933, he returned to England -- but not to Vivienne, who was surprised to learn that he had come back without making contact with her. Eliot dodged all encounters with the frenetic Vivienne as she turned into a kind of stalker, trying to arrange meetings with him.

Abandoned by husband, family and friends, she became increasingly erratic: In 1934 she joined Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, and thereafter often showed up at concerts and the theater, in a cloud of ether fumes, wearing the fascist uniform. Finally, in 1938, she was committed to the mental institution where she remained until she died in 1947 -- reportedly from a heart attack but possibly, Seymour-Jones believes, a suicide. Eliot never visited her.

Seymour-Jones surmises that Vivienne was manic-depressive, but that her institutionalization was unnecessary -- her husband and her family simply didn't want to be bothered with her. Her brother Maurice, who had been instrumental in getting her committed, expressed remorse toward the end of his life: ''It was only when I saw Vivie in the asylum for the last time I realized I had done something very wrong. She was as sane as I was.''

Though she has a harrowing story to tell, Seymour-Jones' book can be a bit of a slog -- she's a colorless writer. But ''Painted Shadow'' -- the title for which comes from a line about the protagonist's dead wife in Eliot's play ''The Family Reunion'' -- gives us some intriguing ways of looking at Eliot and his work. Finding the reflection of his tormented marriage in his poems takes them beyond the historical context in which they are often read -- as an expression of the spiritual and intellectual crisis provoked by the First World War -- and into the more universal context of human frailty.

The Eliot of this book is, to say the least, emotionally complex. His stiff-collared, buttoned-down public manner and his cultural ultra-conservatism -- which he once summed up as ''classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion'' -- may have been an attempt to erect a bulwark against psychosexual chaos: Privately, he composed comic verse full of buggery and scatology, and once shocked his friend Conrad Aiken by sending him a page torn from a publication about gynecological disorders.

Seymour-Jones believes that Eliot's misogyny stems from his relationship with his formidable mother and from his intensely repressed homosexuality -- the evidence for which is circumstantial but strong, though Seymour-Jones sometimes works over the evidence a little too bluntly. Nevertheless, women found him attractive: He led at least two women to believe that he was going to marry them before he finally married his secretary, Valerie Fletcher, in 1957, when he was 68 and she was 30.

It was Eliot's moral cowardice, his unwillingness to face up to distasteful realities, Seymour-Jones concludes, that destroyed Vivienne: ''Had Eliot confronted her just once, and spoken to her honestly,'' she comments on his avoidance of Vivienne after his return to England in 1933, ''he might have given her the sense of closure she needed. Instead, his cowardice prolonged her agony -- and his.''

''How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!'' he wrote in one of his poems. No kidding.

PAINTED SHADOW: The Life of Vivienne Eliot
By Carole Seymour-Jones
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 701 pp., $35