Poem of the Day: Walt Whitman

To a Locomotive in Winter 

Thee for my recitative, 
Thee in the driving storm even as now, the snow, the winter-day declining, 
Thee in thy panoply, thy measur'd dual throbbing and thy beat convulsive, 
Thy black cylindrical body, golden brass and silvery steel, 
Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling at thy sides, 
Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar, now tapering in the distance, 
Thy great protruding head-light fix'd in front, 
Thy long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate purple, 
The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack, 
Thy knotted frame, thy springs and valves, the tremulous twinkle of thy wheels, 
Thy train of cars behind, obedient, merrily following, 
Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack, yet steadily careering; 
Type of the modern -- emblem of motion and power -- pulse of the continent, 
For once come serve the Muse and merge in verse, even as here I see tee, 
With storm and buffeting gusts of wind and falling snow, 
By day thy warning ringing bell to sound its notes, 
By night thy silent signal lamps to swing. 

Fierce-throated beauty! 
Roll through my chant with all thy lawless music, thy swinging lamps at night, 
Thy madly-whistled laughter, echoing, rumbling like an earthquake, rousing all, 
Law of thyself complete, thine own track firmly holding, 
(No sweetness debonair of tearful harp or glib piano thine,) 
Thy trills of shrieks by rocks and hills return'd, 
Launch'd o'er the prairies wide, across the lakes, 
To the free skies unpent and glad and strong.

--Walt Whitman 

In the American literature section of the written exam at the end of my first year of graduate school, I was given a choice of essay topics, one of which was to defend or refute the premise, "All modern American poets are followers of either Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson." That's one of those "well, duh" premises that turn out to be harder to defend or attack than they look at first glance. Whitman is to Allen Ginsberg as Dickinson is to Elizabeth Bishop, except.... 

But it's true that superficially, Whitman and Dickinson seem poles apart. Here's her poem about a locomotive to contrast with Whitman's: 

I like to see it lap the miles --
And lick the valleys up --
And stop to feed itself at Tanks --
And then -- prodigious step

Around a Pile of Mountains --
And supercilious peer
In Shanties -- by the sides of Roads --
And then a Quarry pare

To fit its Ribs
And crawl between
Complaining all the while
In horrid -- hooting stanza --
Then chase itself down Hill --

And neigh like Boanerges --
Then -- punctual as a Star
Stop -- docile and omnipotent
At its own stable door --

Both poems are about motion and power and noise, and yet Dickinson's is about something familiar and tamable, like a horse, docile but still omnipotent. Whitman's locomotive is some alien monster, lawless and fierce, and yet Whitman hopes to tame it, to make it serve as his Muse. Both trains are also whimsical: Whitman's cars merrily following, Dickinson's chasing itself downhill. 

Whitman's is the darker poem, perhaps because it was written some 20 years later than Dickinson's, the "dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack" suggesting the encroachment of industrial pollution. Dickinson, though herself reclusive, sees the train as an emblem of freedom, of the ability to reduce mountains to molehills, and yet there's something arrogant about the train's peering into shanties. 

Myself, I prefer Dickinson, but I have to give Whitman his due. As original as she was, there's still something Old World about her. Whitman is the echt American, loudmouthed and expansive, while secretly filled with doubts and evasions.  

Poem of the Day: William Butler Yeats

Lapis lazuli carving given to Yeats by Henry Talbot De Vere ("Harry") Clifton

Lapis Lazuli

(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 the 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.

--William Butler Yeats

Oh, how glad I am that I don't have to teach this great poem today and deal with the elephant in the room: Gay. We know that Yeats didn't mean it in the currently dominant sense of the word. Well, not entirely. Even in his day, the word "gay" could be used in a sexual sense, meaning "licentious." In the Punch cartoon above, from 1857, the joke hinges on a recognition that the women are prostitutes, and obviously not very joyful ones. And there is perhaps a buried sense lurking even in Yeats's poem that artists are sexually loose, perhaps effeminate. But it's also likely that Yeats, who knew a lot of odds and ends of stuff, had in mind the Provençal gai saber, the "joyous wisdom" alluded to by Nietzsche in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, a title that was first translated into English as The Joyous Wisdom but is now known by Walter Kaufmann's title, The Gay Science.

Yeats's late poems, of which this is one, are among the great artistic treasures given us by people in their later years, like Beethoven's late quartets, or Verdi's Otello, Falstaff and Requiem. We like to celebrate people who died young -- Byron, Shelley, Keats, Mozart -- but we should also be thankful for the ones who matured into wisdom and poured that wisdom into their art. It was a point I stressed in a review for the Mercury News of the second volume of R.F. Foster's magnificent biography of Yeats:

Was William Butler Yeats the last great poet to write in English? The last, that is, who could stand comfortably with Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth and Keats?

Of the poets from the generations that followed Yeats (who was born in 1865), only a few -- perhaps T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost or Wallace Stevens -- would even be considered for that pantheon, but they seem somehow frail and spidery in the company of Milton and Wordsworth. And as for contemporary poets, how many English or American poets under the age of 50 can you name?

It may be that the great age of poetry in English is over, and that 1939, the year in which Yeats died, can serve as the terminal date on its tombstone. So it seems appropriate to ask, when faced with the second volume of a 1,500-page biography of Yeats that has taken its author, R.F. Foster, 17 years to write: Is Yeats -- is any poet -- worth such an effort?

The first volume of Foster's biography was published in 1997. His second volume begins when Yeats was 50. Offhand, I can't think of any other writer whose greatest work was ahead of him at that age, but these were the years when Yeats produced such poems as ''The Second Coming,'' ''A Prayer for My Daughter,'' ''Leda and the Swan,'' ''The Tower,'' ''Sailing to Byzantium,'' ''Among School Children,'' ''Lapis Lazuli,'' ''Long-Legged Fly'' and -- in the last year of his life -- ''The Circus Animals' Desertion.''

He also married, fathered two children, served as a senator (a non-elective position) for the Irish Free State, continued his involvement with the Abbey Theatre, founded an Irish Academy of Letters, fought against censorship and for the separation of church and state, toured the United States, won the Nobel Prize and even took a leading role in designing the new Irish coinage.

And he indulged in several extramarital flings, had a vasectomy as part of a ''rejuvenation'' treatment, used a blue rinse on his whitening hair, flirted with fascism and grew more deeply involved with the occult, which resulted in his near-unreadable mystico-mythical theory of history, ''A Vision.'' There were times while reading Foster's fascinatingly detailed account of Yeats' life when I marveled that so much nonsense could coexist with so much wisdom. How did a man who could have been an obscure crank, devoted to astrology and communicating with spirit guides, become a great poet?

But it's to Foster's credit that he never stops to wrestle with such possibly unanswerable questions. Foster -- who is a professor of history at Oxford, not a literary biographer -- simply has a wonderful story to tell, and he tells it with a novelistic mastery, careful to put Yeats in his time and place and to delineate that time and place skillfully. As Foster told an interviewer for the Guardian, Yeats was ''not a loony misplaced southern Californian, but a quintessential Irish Protestant looking for his own kind of magic. As a Protestant, your relationship with the Irish land was extremely complicated and compromised.''

And it's Yeats' struggle to make sense of the complications and compromises that constitutes both the drama of his life and the essence of his poetry. Yeats once famously wrote, ''We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.'' But in fact he blurred that distinction more often than not, and the strength and sinew of much of his greatest verse comes from the tension between Yeats and his country, a readiness to quarrel with those whose vision of Ireland differed from his. And some of his best earlier verse had come out of the lovers' quarrels with the beautiful revolutionary Maud Gonne.

By the time this second volume opens, Gonne was separated from her husband, John MacBride, and was living in France. For his participation in the Easter Rebellion of 1916, MacBride was executed, earning his place in Yeats' ambivalent tribute to the rebels, ''Easter 1916,'' as the ''man I had dreamed/A drunken, vain-glorious lout'' who ''had done most bitter wrong/To some who are near my heart'' but had been ''Transformed utterly'' by his participation in the rebellion.

MacBride's death opened the way for Yeats to make yet another play for Gonne. Thwarted once again, he turned his attentions to her 22-year-old daughter, Iseult. Rebuffed by her, he married 24-year-old Georgie Hyde Lees, whose fascination with the occult matched his own. The marriage didn't begin well -- the groom had a psychosomatic breakdown, perhaps not unexpected from a 52-year-old man getting married for the first time, and to a woman less than half his age.

But George -- as she came to be known after Ezra Pound started calling her that -- had a special talent that cemented the marriage: She was adept at ''automatic writing,'' serving as a conduit to the spirit world with which her husband was so eager to communicate. Foster gives us a droll, sly account of the way George manipulated Yeats with the messages she related from the spirits -- she even managed their sex life, and carefully steered him away from his obsession with Maud and Iseult.

Given that Yeats was capable -- as his poetry often demonstrates -- of good sense, I sometimes wonder if his apparent credulity was not in part a pose. A game, after all, is more fun if you pretend that it's real. But Foster also helps us keep in mind that Yeats' pursuit of the esoteric was a way of looking for certainties in a world that seemed more terrible with each year -- the World War, the Bolshevik revolution, the rise of fascism and Nazism, and the outbreak of another World War whose inevitability was apparent in the last months of his life. And always in the foreground there was the violent struggle of his own country for independence.

Yeats may have dabbled in fog-brained mysticism and been tempted by narrow-minded politics, but he neither charged into the one nor retreated into the other. A distaste for democracy betrayed him into an early admiration of Mussolini, and of the Blueshirts in his own country, but while Foster finds Yeats ''elitist and oligarchic,'' he's inclined to downplay Yeats' enthusiasm for fascism. Unlike many of his contemporaries, including Gonne, he never expressed anti-Semitic views, and his friendship with Pound was strained by Pound's increasing fanaticism.

Which is not to say that Yeats would pass even one of our more lenient tests for political correctness, but rather that he lived in uncertain times and reacted to them without the benefit of our hindsight. And more to the point, he managed in his poetry to find a central humanity unfettered by ideology. This is what makes it possible for generation after generation to return to a poem like ''The Second Coming'' and find truth in lines so often quoted that they come to us unbidden: ''The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.''

''The Second Coming'' is larded with esoteric references to ''Spiritus Mundi'' and underpinned by his cyclical theory of history, and it was written in the aftermath of World War I, when the ''blood-dimmed tide'' of revolution had been loosed into his own country. But these are just the specifics that underlie the universal in the poem, as the specifics of Yeats' literary career underlie the universality of aging in ''The Circus Animals' Desertion.''

The brilliant achievement of Foster's biography is that it acquaints us intimately with the specifics, and thereby brings home more clearly how invaluable Yeats' poetry is. No one, I submit, except possibly Shakespeare in ''King Lear,'' has written more powerfully and persuasively on aging than Yeats did in ''The Circus Animals' Desertion.'' To read it, and the other poems that Foster cites in his biography, is to be reminded that poetry does some things that can't be done by the dominant literary genre of our day, the novel, or the dominant media -- film, television, popular music.

In ''Coole Park and Ballylee,'' memorializing his patron, collaborator and friend Lady Augusta Gregory, Yeats wrote:

We were the last romantics, chose for theme

Traditional sanctity and loveliness,

All that is written in what poets name

The book of the people, whatever most can bless

The mind of man or elevate a rhyme;

But fashion's changed. . . .

When they're read today, these lines could be an epitaph for poetry itself.

W.B. YEATS: A Life, Vol. II -- The Arch-Poet

By R.F. Foster

Oxford University Press

Poem of the Day: William Wordsworth

The world is too much with us; late and soon, 
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: 
Little we see in Nature that is ours; 
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! 
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; 
The winds that will be howling at all hours, 
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for every thing, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. -- Great God! I'd rather be 
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; 
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; 
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn. 

--William Wordsworth

I made a discovery last night. I wanted to use a Wordsworth poem because, back when I was a young and foolish graduate student, I rather liked his poetry. But then I started combing through the anthology for something appropriate and found myself nodding off. I think if I ever suffer from insomnia (these days I suffer gladly from the opposite), I'll sit down with a copy of The Prelude. It won't take five minutes before a slumber does my spirit seal. 

Of course, The Prelude's many thousands of lines disqualify it from anything but excerpting here. But I remembered some passages -- the boy rowing out onto the lake at night, the crossing of the Alps, the "spots of time" section that links Wordsworth with Joyce's epiphanies and Proust's moments of involuntary memory -- that stood out for me. But I found even those buried so deep in the blankest of blank verse that I couldn't pluck them forth. And even some of the shorter poems, like "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" and "Ode: Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood" seem to smother their best parts under lines that thud and blunder. 

But then I rediscovered this sonnet, which binds up an emotional state as concisely as any of Shakespeare's, and I remembered why Wordsworth is, after all, a great poet.  

Poem of the Day: Richard Wilbur

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World 

    The eyes open to a cry of pulleys, 
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul 
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple 
As false dawn. 
                            Outside the open window 
The morning air is all awash with angels. 

    Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses, 
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are. 
Now they are rising together in calm swells 
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear 
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing; 

    Now they are flying in place, conveying 
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving 
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden 
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet 
That nobody seems to be there. 
                                                     The soul shrinks 

    From all that it is about to remember, 
From the punctual rape of every blessèd day, 
And cries, 
    'Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry, 
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam 
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.'

    Yes, as the sun acknowledges 
With a warm look the world's hunks and colors, 
The soul descends once more in bitter love 
To accept the waking body, saying now 
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises, 

    'Bring them down from their ruddy gallows; 
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves; 
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone, 
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating 
Of dark habits,   
                           keeping their difficult balance.'

--Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur is one of two famous poets (if that's not an oxymoron) who have sat on my couch. (The other, whom I won't identify, hit on my wife. She and I thought it was very funny.) This was back when I was an academic, and we used to entertain visiting writers after their readings. Wilbur was a perfect gentleman, a little shy and also I fear a little bored at having to answer questions from undergraduates. He brightened when I asked him about his work on Leonard Bernstein's Candide, for which he wrote many of the lyrics. I think he was prouder of that than of much of his "serious" verse. 

This poem is from his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Things of This World, as you might guess from its title. And actually, "things of this world" pretty much sums up Wilbur's subject matter. He likes to write about particularities, things in their "haecciety": laundry hanging on a clothesline, a toad dying after being run over by a lawnmower, a sparrow chiding a vulture, driftwood, potatoes, poplar and sycamore trees. It is gentlemanly verse, quiet, thoughtful, observant, sometimes playful and always meticulous. Kind of the way I wish I was.                 

Poem of the Day: Alfred, Lord Tennyson

From The Princess 

    Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white; 
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk; 
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font: 
The fire-fly wakens: waken thou with me. 

    Now droops the milkwhite peacock like a ghost, 
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me. 

    Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars, 
And all thy heart lies open unto me. 

    Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves 
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me. 

    Now folds the lily all her sweetness up, 
And slips into the bosom of the lake: 
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip 
Into my bosom and be lost in me. 

--Alfred, Lord Tennyson

T.S. Eliot once said that Tennyson had the finest ear of any poet in English since Milton, to which W.H. Auden replied that "he was also undoubtedly the stupidest; there was little about melancholia that he didn't know; there was little else that he did." Thus the Modern dumps on the Victorian, and disillusioned crankiness will always win out over hopeful optimism, which was Tennyson's primary intellectual stance. 

But back to that fine ear, which even Auden was willing to grant him. The silken sounds of this lovely little lyric certainly prove the point. And its interpolation into the plodding tedium of The Princess maybe also proves Auden's other point. A professor of mine once called the line "Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars" a "sterile conceit," which crushed me, because it was a favorite of mine. I see what he means:  The allusion to the myth of Danaë's impregnation by Zeus in the form of a shower of gold (she gave birth to Perseus) doesn't really add anything of substance to the poem. Another professor of mine thinks the image may have been inspired by this painting of Danaë by Titian:

Tennyson's friend Arthur Hallam -- the one he wrote In Memoriam about -- referred to the painting in one of his last letters. 

Some think that Tennyson was aiming for the poetic effect of the Persian verse form known as ghazal; it doesn't strictly follow that structure, but the images of lilies and peacocks and the repeated line endings "with me ... on to me ... unto me ... in me ... in me" give it the flavor of a ghazal, which typically has a refrain.               

Poem of the Day: Algernon Charles Swinburne

From Atalanta in Calydon 

When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces, 
     The mother of months in meadow or plain 
Fills the shadows and windy places 
    With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain; 
And the brown bright nightingale amorous 
Is half assuaged for Itylus, 
For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces, 
    The tongueless vigil, and all the pain. 

Come with bows bent and with emptying of quivers, 
    Maiden most perfect, lady of light, 
With a noise of winds and many rivers, 
    With a clamour of waters, and with might; 
Bind on thy sandals, O thou most fleet; 
Over the splendour and speed of thy feet; 
For the faint east quickens, the wan west shivers, 
    Round the feet of the day, and the feet of the night. 

Where shall we find her, how shall we sing to her, 
    Fold our hands round her knees, and cling? 
O that man's heart were as fire and could spring to her, 
    Fire, or the strength of the streams that spring! 
For the stars and the winds are unto her 
As raiment, as songs of the harp-player; 
For the risen stars and the fallen cling to her, 
    And the southwest-wind and the west-wind sing. 

For winter's rains and ruins are over, 
    And all the season of snows and sins; 
The days dividing lover and lover,
    The light that loses, the night that wins; 
And time remembered is grief forgotten, 
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten, 
And in green underwood and cover 
    Blossom by blossom the spring begins. 


The full streams feed on flower of rushes, 
    Ripe grasses trammel a travelling foot, 
The faint fresh flame of the young year flushes  
    From lear to flower and flower to fruit; 
And fruit and leaf are as gold and fire, 
And the oat is heard above the lyre, 
And the hoofèd heel of a satyr crushes 
    The chestnut-husk at the chestnut-root. 


And Pan by noon and Bacchus by night, 
    Fleeter of foot than the fleet-foot kid, 
Follows with dancing and fills with delight 
    The Maenad and the Bassarid; 
And soft as lips that laugh and hide 
The laughing leaves of the trees divide, 
And screen from seeing and leave in sight 
    The god pursuing, the maiden hid. 


The ivy falls with the Bacchanal's hair 
    Over her eyebrows hiding her eyes; 
The wild vine slipping down leaves bare 
    Her bright breast shortening into sighs; 
The wild vine slips with the weight of its leaves, 
But the berried ivy catches and cleaves 
To the limbs that glitter, the feet that scare 
    The wolf that follows, the fawn that flies. 

--Algernon Charles Swinburne

I never read this opening chorus from Swinburne's play Atalanta in Calydon without thinking of this: 

Winterstürme wichen 

Wintry storms have vanished

dem Wonnemond,

before Maytime;

im mildem Lichte leuchtet der Lenz;

in a gentle light springtime shines out.

auf linden Lüften leicht und lieblich,

On balmy breezes light and lovely

Wunder weben er sich wiegt; 

it weaves miracles as it wafts.

durch Wald und Auen weht sein Atem, 

Through woods and meadows its breath blows,

weit geöffnet lacht sein Aug'. 

wide open its eyes are smiling.

Aus sel'ger Vöglein Sange süss er tönt,

Lovely birdsong sweetly proclaims it,

holde Düfte haucht er aus: 

blissful scents exhale its presence.

seinem warmen Blut entbluhen wonniger Blumen,

Marvelous flowers sprout from its hot blood,

Keim und Spross entspringt seinter Kraft. 

buds and shoots grow from its strength.

Mit zarter Waffen Zier bewingt er die Welt;

With an armory of delicate charm it conquers the world.

Winter und Sturm wichen der starken Wehr: 

Winter and storms vanish before their stout defense.

wohl musste den tapfern Streichen 

At these bold blows, of course, 

die strenge Türe auch weichen, 

the stout doors yielded too,

die trotzig und starr uns trennte von ihm.

for stubborn and hard they kept us from the spring.

Zu seiner Schwester schwang er sich her;

To its sister here it flew.

die Liebe lockte den Lenz: 

Love decoyed the spring.

in unsrem Busen barg er sich tief;

In our hearts it was hidden deep;

nun lacht sie selig dem Licht.

now it smiles joyfully at the light.

Die bräutliche Schwester befreite der Brüder;

The sister as bride is freed by her brother.

zertrummert liegt, was je sie getrennt;

In ruins lies all that kept them apart.

jauchzend grüsst sich das junge Paar:

Joyfully the young couple greet one another.

vereint sind Liebe und Lenz!

Love and Spring are united!

--Richard Wagner, Die Walküre, Act I, scene III

(translator unknown)

Well, okay, advantage Wagner. After all, he had his music to plump up his verse. But I think a case can be made for Swinburne as an underrated poet. The rest of Atalanta in Calydon, like most English closet dramas, is fairly dull stuff. But this opening chorus, despite some heavy-footedness in its alliteration and imagery ("lisp of leaves and ripple of rain"), has some lovely moments. And its evocation of the arrival of spring anticipates Wagner's by five years.   

Swinburne's tragedy was to be born British in the age of Victoria. He wanted to be a poète maudit like Baudelaire or Rimbaud, but they do things differently in France, and at his baddest he resembles nothing more than a naughty schoolboy. His alcoholism and masochism led to a nervous breakdown, and when he recovered he became a respectable citizen and even got nominated for the Nobel Prize. Given that the Nobel people managed to overlook Joyce, Proust, Kafka, Borges, et al., we can be grateful that they didn't bite this time. 

Poem of the Day: Wallace Stevens

Anecdote of the Jar 

I placed a jar in Tennessee, 
And round it was, upon a hill. 
It made the slovenly wilderness 
Surround that hill. 

The wilderness rose up to it, 
And sprawled around, no longer wild. 
The jar was round upon the ground 
And tall and of a port in air. 

It took dominion everywhere. 
The jar was gray and bare. 
It did not give of bird or bush, 
Like nothing else in Tennessee. 

--Wallace Stevens

How odd that my favorite 20th-century poet should have been a Taft Republican insurance company executive, of whom a colleague is supposed to have said, on reading his obituary in the New York Times, "I didn't know Wally wrote poems."

Stevens can be a tough nut to crack, unless you keep in mind one thing: his great theme is the transformative power of the imagination. It's what we have instead of religion ("Sunday Morning"); it's an intermediary between us and reality ("Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"); it is God itself and "the ultimate good" ("Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour"). Everything else in Stevens' poetry is just window dressing. 

But what window dressing, what wit, what imagery, what mastery of sound! Take the first line of this one: "I placed a jar in Tennessee." Why Tennessee? Why not Arkansas, or Washington, or Delaware, or any of several other three-syllable states? Of course, he needed a state with some wilderness in it, which maybe rules out Delaware, and Washington introduces that confusion between state and city, but when it comes to "slovenly wilderness," Arkansas would do as well as Tennessee. Except that then we'd have "jar" and "Arkansas," which sounds too easy. 

And then there are those odd tricks of diction: the archaic inversion of "And round it was"; the phrase "of a port in air," which has commentators going in circles; and the mind-bending double negation "It did not give of bird or bush, / Like nothing else in Tennessee," with a further conundrum in the phrase "give of." Almost every one of the poem's 12 lines has something to taunt the explicators. 

But really I think the poem is a response to Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn." It's not an ode, it's an anecdote (which lawyer Stevens probably knew wouldn't stand up as evidence in court). It's not a Greek vase, it's a Tennessee jar. It doesn't have a "brede / Of marble men and maidens overwrought, / With forest branches and the trodden weed"; it's "gray and bare" and doesn't portray any people, or even any birds or bushes. It's as plain and commonplace an artifact as you can find. And yet when he puts it in place, it makes Nature behave. Which is what art does -- even the simplest human creation like a jar sitting on a hill. The "slovenly wilderness" still sprawls, but the imagination has put it into perspective, has tamed it. And "fictive things" (jars, poems, Grecian urns) "Wink as they will."  

Poem of the Day: Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ode to the West Wind 

I

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, 
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead 
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, 

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, 
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou, 
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed 

The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until 
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow 

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill 
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) 
With living hues and odours plain and hill: 

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; 
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear! 

II 

Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky's commotion, 
Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed, 
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean, 

Angels of rain and lightning; there are spread 
On the blue surface of thine aëry surge, 
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head 

Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge 
Of the horizon to the zenith's height, 
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge 

Of the dying year, to which this closing night 
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre, 
Vaulted with all thy congregated might 

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere 
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh, hear! 

III 

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams 
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, 
Lulled by the coil of his crystàlline streams, 

Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay, 
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers 
Quivering within the wave's intenser day, 

All overgrown with azure  moss and flowers 
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou 
For whose path the Atlantic's level powers 

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below 
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear 
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know 

Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear, 
And tremble and despoil themselves: oh, hear! 

IV

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; 
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; 
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share 

The impulse of thy strength, only less free 
Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even 
I were as in my boyhood, and could be 

The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven, 
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed 
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne'er have striven 

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. 
Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! 
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! 

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed 
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud. 

V 

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: 
What if my leaves are falling like its own! 
The tumult of thy might harmonies 

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, 
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, 
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! 

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe 
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! 
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth 
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! 
Be through my lips to unawakened earth 

The trumpet of a prophecy! O, Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? 

--Percy Bysshe Shelley 

People have trouble with Shelley. Partly it's that his revolutionary attitudes seem to us naive, partly that his verse is more rhetorical and less sharply focused in its imagery than his contemporary Keats's. But mostly, I think, it's his name. A line like "I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!" from the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" sounds like something a guy named Percy Bysshe Shelley would do. 

It's too bad about the name Percy, and woe betide the kid whose parents are so cruel as to name him that. (Not that there are many of them; the name peaked in the 1890s and now is virtually nonexistent. I actually had an uncle named Percy, who was born back when it was still popular, but the only other Percys I can think of are Percy Sutton, the former Manhattan borough president, and Percy Kilbride, who played Pa Kettle opposite Marjorie Main's Ma in B-pictures of the 1940s.) 

But Percy Shelley was no pantywaist (neither were Sutton, Kilbride and my uncle for that matter). Nor was he what Matthew Arnold called him, a “beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.” Arnold's attempt to emasculate Shelley probably stemmed, ironically, from that eminent Victorian's shock at Shelley's revolutionary attitudes toward things like marriage and sex. 

Anyway, the "Ode to the West Wind" is one of my half-dozen favorite lyric poems, and I think it has a sweep and power that rivals Shakespeare and Milton. So there. It's also one of those poems that, like Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," has a clear five-act structure: 

Exposition: The autumnal west wind has arrived to scatter dead leaves but also the seeds that will reawaken in the Spring.
Conflict: The destroyer role of the wind seems to predominate over that of the preserver. 
Crisis: Is it possible that only destruction will prevail? 
Struggle: The speaker recognizes that his fear of the wind's power echoes his own loss of hope in the possibility of spiritual and social change and renewal. 
Resolution: The speaker regains faith that renewal will occur, that Spring will follow Winter, and that his words and ideas will spread and take hold. 

But of course it's not just a didactic poem. It's also a brilliant use of terza rima, the meter of Dante's Divina Commedia, which is also about death and rebirth. Shelley is not a hard-edged imagist like Keats. His verse depends on the reader's ability to hold all its elements -- imagery, sound, symbolism, dramatic tension -- in the mind at once. There are few more beautiful stanzas in English than the middle section of the poem, with its evocation of an underwater world that is touched by the wind's power, but it doesn't stand alone. And while I understand the objection that "I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!" is a little too melodramatic, a little too much like "I shrieked and clasped my hands in ecstasy," I argue that it works in context, that it's a dramatic turn that precipitates the reconciliation in the last stanza. 

Poem of the Day: William Shakespeare

Sonnet XXX

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought 
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, 
And with old woes new wail my dear Time's waste. 
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow, 
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night, 
And weep afresh love's long since canceled woe, 
And moan th' expense of many a vanished sight;
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone, 
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er 
The sad account of fore-bemoanèd moan, 
Which I new pay as if not paid before. 
   But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, 
   All losses are restored and sorrows end.

-- William Shakespeare

Not my favorite Shakespeare sonnet. It's one of those in which the final couplet too abruptly cancels out the rest of the poem. Still, it's full of wonderful soundplay, from the sibilants of the opening lines (sessions ... sweet silent ... summon ... remembrance ... things past) to the grieving open vowels of the later lines (moan ... foregone ... woe ... woe ... o'er ... fore-bemoanèd moan ... before). 

But I really chose this one because of remembrance of things Proust. This was the sonnet that Scott Moncrief chose to allude to when he went to translate the title À la recherche du temps perdu. Or rather, to mistranslate it. For Shakespeare is writing about what Proust called "voluntary memory" -- the effort to summon up things past -- whereas Proust is equally concerned with "involuntary memory," the way the past looms up unbidden when invoked by some sensory nexus -- a smell, a taste, a sound. True, Proust's narrator goes "in search of lost time" (the currently preferred translation of the title), but he succeeds only when conditions (most famously, the taste of a cookie crumb in a spoonful of tea) favor it. 

Still, you can see how the sonnet might have appealed to Scott Moncrief, for not only is "remembrance of things past" a classier sounding title in English than "in search of lost time," the sonnet itself is concerned with many of the things that troubled Proust's narrator: dead friends, old lovers, obliterated landmarks. But Proust's novel doesn't have a tacked-on couplet or coda to cancel out the sadness of those memories.  

O Calcutta!

The following review appeared today in the San Francisco Chronicle:

A DEAD HAND: A Crime in Calcutta

By Paul Theroux

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 279 pp., $26

There's a house-of-mirrors moment in Paul Theroux's new novel when his narrator-protagonist, a travel writer named Jerry Delfont, meets up in Calcutta with a travel writer named Paul Theroux.

“What I knew about Theroux,” Delfont writes, “is what everyone knew about him. He was known for being intrusive, especially among the unsuspecting – strangers he met on trains, travelers who had no idea who he was, people thinking out loud in unguarded moments. I suspected that much of what he wrote was fiction, since he'd started his writing life as a novelist.” Delfont concludes from their conversation that Theroux is insincere, a phony, driven and competitive and envious. “I also knew that he was going to write about me, about meeting me, and that he'd get everything wrong.” 

So what we have here is Paul Theroux writing about Jerry Delfont writing about Paul Theroux. It's an oddly self-conscious moment, though whether it's self-deprecating or self-aggrandizing on Theroux's part is a little hard to say. It also plays only a tangential role in the plot: Theroux is there to find out what Delfont knows about a mysterious American woman named Merrill Unger, and Delfont isn't willing to let Theroux know that he knows a lot about her. 

There’s a lot Delfont doesn’t know, too, and that forms the plot of the novel. He meets Mrs. Unger (as he continues to think of her even after they’ve become intimate) when she sends a letter to him at his hotel in Calcutta. She explains that her son is an admirer of his writing and that a friend of her son’s  may be in trouble: The friend woke up in a fleabag hotel to find the body of a dead boy on the floor. She wonders if Delfont could help her son’s friend.

Delfont is afflicted with writer’s block, which he refers to as “dead hand.” (That’s not the only explanation of the title the novel provides.) So he goes to see Mrs. Unger and gets involved in more than he expected. He learns that she’s very wealthy, that she runs a kind of home for children she picks up on the Calcutta streets, that she’s a devotee of the goddess Kali, and that she gives a terrific tantric massage. He learns that she despises Mother Teresa, with whom she once worked, as a fame-seeker and celebrity hound who “believed that poverty made people better.”  He learns other things, too, which we won’t go into here, except to cite the warning of his friend Howard, who works at the American consulate: “a lot of foreign women get goddess complexes.”

As a novelist, Theroux has made a kind of specialty of stories about people who go to places where they don’t really belong and consequently get into major messes, the way Allie Fox does in The Mosquito Coast, for example. And Jerry Delfont’s problem is that he – one of the “big pink foreigners”  -- doesn’t belong in “populous Calcutta, city of deformities,” no matter how infatuated he becomes with Mrs. Unger.

In fact, Mrs. Unger herself gives him the bitterest insight: “India [is] a culture of evasions. This country is very dirty. It’s impossible to tell the truth here. The truth is forbidden, especially in writing. Anyway, a truthful book about India would be unbearable – about spite, venom, cruelty, sexual repression, incest, and meaningless crimes.” Later, Delfont would reflect, “Of all the foreigners I met in India, she was the one who was most at home.” 

Is “A Dead Hand” a truthful book about India? It certainly has all those “unbearable” things that Mrs. Unger enumerates. It also has an abundance of richly drawn characters, Mrs. Unger the most enigmatic and scariest of them. Theroux has used his travel writer’s eye and ear and his novelist’s imagination to craft a tense, disturbing, funny and horrifying book around all of them.