Poem of the Day: Wallace Stevens

To an Old Philosopher in Rome 

On the threshold of heaven, the figures in the street 
Become the figures of heaven, the majestic movement
Of men growing small in the distances of space, 
Singing, with smaller and still smaller sound, 
Unintelligible absolution and an end --

The threshold, Rome, and that more merciful Rome 
Beyond, the two alike in the make of the mind. 
It is as if in a human dignity 
Two parallels become one, a perspective, of which 
Men are part both in the inch and in the mile. 

How easily the blown banners change to wings ... 
Things dark on the horizons of perception, 
Become accompaniments of fortune, but 
Of the fortune of the spirit, beyond the eye, 
Not of its sphere, and yet not far beyond, 

The human end in the spirit's greatest reach, 
The extreme of the known in the presence of the extreme 
Of the unknown. The newsboys' muttering 
Becomes another murmuring; the smell 
Of medicine, a fragrantness not to be spoiled ... 

The bed, the books, the chair, the moving nuns, 
The candle as it evades the sight, these are 
The sources of happiness in the shape of Rome, 
A shape within the ancient circles of shapes, 
And these beneath the shadow of a shape 

In a confusion on bed and books, a portent 
On the chair, a moving transparence on the nuns, 
A light on the candle tearing against the wick 
To join a hovering excellence, to escape 
From fire and be part only of that of which 

Fire is the symbol: the celestial possible. 
Speak to your pillow as if it was yourself. 
Be orator but with an accurate tongue 
And without eloquence, O, half-asleep, 
Of the pity that is the memorial of this room, 

So that we feel, in this illumined large, 
The veritable small, so that each of  us 
Beholds himself in you, and hears his voice 
In yours, master and commiserable man, 
Intent on your particles of nether-do, 

Your dozing in the depths of wakefulness 
In the warmth of your bed, at the edge of your chair, alive 
Yet living in two worlds, impenitent 
As to one, and, as to one, most penitent, 
Impatient for the grandeur that you need 

In so much misery; and yet finding it 
Only in misery, the afflatus of ruin, 
Profound poetry of the poor and of the dead, 
As in the last drop of the deepest blood, 
As it falls from the heart and lies there to be een , 

Even as the blood of an empire, it might be, 
For a citizen of heaven though still of Rome. 
It is poverty's speech that seeks us out the most. 
It is older than the oldest speech of Rome. 
This is the tragic accent of the scene.
 
And you -- it is you that speak it, without speech, 
The loftiest syllables among loftiest things, 
The one invulnerable man among 
Crude captains, the naked majesty, if you like, 
Of bird-nest arches and of rain-stained vaults. 

The sounds drift in. The buildings are remembered. 
The life of a city never lets go, nor do you 
Ever want it to. It is part of the life in your room. 
Its domes are the architecture of your bed. 
The bells keep on repeating solemn names 

In choruses and choirs of choruses, 
Unwilling that mercy should be a mystery 
Of silence, that any solitude of sense 
Should give you more than their peculiar chords 
And reverberations clinging to whisper still. 

It is a kind of total grandeur at the end, 
With every visible thing enlarged and yet 
No more than a bed, a chair and moving nuns, 
The immensest theatre, the pillared porch, 
The book and candle in your ambered room. 

Total grandeur of a total edifice, 
Chosen by an inquisitor of structures 
For himself. He stops upon this threshold, 
As if the design of all his words takes form 
And frame from thinking and is realized. 

--Wallace Stevens 

This is an inexhaustible poem, one that lends itself to readings and rereadings and yet never yields up everything within. The old philosopher of the title is George Santayana, whose last years were spent under the care of the nuns of a convent in Rome. When Stevens was a student at Harvard, he became acquainted with Santayana, who taught in the philosophy department. The usual way of explicating such a poem might be to try linking its ideas to Santayana's, but I really think Stevens is using the philosopher as a symbol of the thinking mind trying to make sense of the external world even as death is about to extinguish that mind. For me the key lines in the poem (as well as the most beautiful ones) are: 

A light on the candle tearing against the wick 
To join a hovering excellence, to escape 
From fire and be part only of that of which 

Fire is the symbol: the celestial possible. 

This is not a poem about raging against the dying of the light; it's about joining that light -- call it God, call it imagination, call it the Oversoul. Better yet, call it the celestial possible. Which is the earthly impossible.

Poem of the Day: Richard Lovelace

To Althea, from Prison 

When Love with unconfinéd wings 
Hovers within my gates, 
And my divine Althea brings 
To whisper at the grates; 
When I lie tangled in her hair 
And fettered to her eye, 
The gods that wanton in the air 
Know no such liberty. 

When flowing cups run swiftly round, 
With no allaying Thames, 
Our careless heads with roses bound, 
Our hearts with loyal flames; 
When thirsty grief in wine we steep, 
When healths and draughts go free, 
Fishes, that tipple in the deep, 
Know no such liberty. 

When, like committed linnets, I 
With shriller throat shall sing 
The sweetness, mercy, majesty, 
And glories of my King; 
When I shall voice aloud how good 
He is, how great should be, 
Enlargéd winds, that curl the flood, 
Know no such liberty. 

Stone walls do not a prison make, 
Nor iron bars a cage; 
Minds innocent and quiet take 
That for an hermitage. 
If I have freedom in my love, 
And in my soul am free, 
Angels alone, that soar above, 
Enjoy such liberty.

--Richard Lovelace 

Sometimes I'm surprised that anyone survived the 17th century, what with poets being sent to prison and all. But that enforced leisure sometimes made for wonderful verse. Lovelace did two spells in stir, in 1642 and again in 1648-49. "To Althea" was written during the first one. Althea may or may not have been a woman named Lucy Sacheverell, and she may or may not have been the same woman he called Lucasta, in his other "familiar quotations" poem, "To Lucasta, Going to the Wars." (The one with the lines "I would not love, dear, so much, / Loved I not honor more." I've always wondered if the writer named Honor Moore had parents with a literary sense of humor.) And then there was Amarantha, whom he wanted to dishevel her hair. In short, Lovelace wasn't. But he wittily turned his love poems in ardently idealist directions, celebrating freedom and honor.

Poem of the Day: Edward Thomas

The Path 

Running along a bank, a parapet 
That saves from the precipitous wood below 
The level road, there is a path. It serves 
Children for looking down the long smooth steep, 
Between the legs of beech and yew, to where 
A fallen tree checks the sight: while men and women 
Content themselves with the road and what they see
Over the bank, and what the children tell. 
The path, winding like silver, trickles on, 
Bordered and even invaded by thinnest moss 
That tries to cover roots and crumbling chalk 
With gold, olive, and emerald, but in vain. 
The children wear it. They have flattened the bank 
On top, and silvered it between the moss 
With the current of their feet, year after year. 
But the road is houseless, and leads not to school. 
To see a child is rare there, and the eye 
Has but the road, the wood that overhangs 
And underyawns it, and the path that looks 
As if it led on to some legendary 
Or fancied place where men have wished to go 
And stay; till, sudden, it ends where the wood ends. 

--Edward Thomas

One of the great victims of the murderous nonsense that was World War I, Thomas wrote under the influence of Robert Frost, who said once that Thomas's regrets were the inspiration for "The Road Not Taken." I have to say that I like Thomas's directness more than Frost's irony -- when I read Frost I always have to ask "what's he really getting at?" I picked "The Path," of course, partly to contrast with "The Road Not Taken," but also because of its prophetic poignancy. The wood ended too soon for Thomas.      

Poem of the Day: John Milton

When I consider how my light is spent 
     Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide, 
     And that one talent which is death to hide 
     Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent 
To serve therewith my Maker, and present 
     My true account, lest he returning chide; 
     "Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?" 
     I fondly ask; but Patience to prevent 
That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need 
     Either man's work or his own gifts; who best 
     Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state 
Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed 
     And post o'er land and ocean without rest; 
     They also serve who only stand and wait."

--John Milton

Sonnets are easy to write, hard to write well. The easy part is that the rhyme draws you on, spurs the mind toward the goal of finding that echoing word. The hard part is that you can easily lose the sense in search of the sound. Milton, of course, never wrote a word of nonsense in his life -- unless you regard his theology as nonsense, which is another issue entirely. His use here of the Italian sonnet form saves him from the trap that even Shakespeare fell into: contradicting the entire drift of the sonnet in one swift couplet. Some of the strength of this sonnet, sometimes titled "On His Blindness," lies in Milton's skillful use of enjambment, which keeps the flow of thought moving past the rhyme, as in

                                               though my soul more bent 
To serve therewith my Maker, 

where an end-line pause on "bent" suggests one meaning for the word, i.e., "curved or crooked" (perhaps under the weight of his disability), while the enjambment leads on to another meaning, "strongly inclined or determined." In fact, the poem is a model of all sorts of poetic and rhetorical tricks. 
 

Poem of the Day: Robert Frost

The Road Not Taken 

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, 
And sorry I could not travel both 
And be one traveler, long I stood 
And looked down one as far as I could 
To where it bent in the undergrowth; 

Then took the other, as just as fair, 
And having perhaps the better claim, 
Because it was grassy and wanted wear; 
Though as for that the passing there 
Had worn them really about the same. 

And both that morning equally lay 
In leaves no step had trodden black. 
Oh, I kept the first for another day! 
Yet knowing how way leads on to way, 
I doubted if I should ever come back. 

I shall be telling this with a sigh 
Somewhere ages and ages hence: 
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by, 
And that has made all the difference. 

--Robert Frost

Everyone knows this poem. Or everyone thinks they do. Frost cultivated a reputation for simple folksy New England wisdom while writing poetry that slyly undercuts its own simplicity. Many of Frost's poems lend themselves to simplistic, greeting-card interpretations. Is his most famous poem, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," pure Currier-and-Ives nostalgia or is it a dark meditation on emptiness and futility? (Or is it, as us grad-school cynics used to claim, about stopping by woods to take a leak?) 

Anyway, the reason many people misread "The Road Not Taken" is that they take the last stanza at face value, instead of reading it in context. For in context, that "road less traveled by" is nothing of the sort. It's "just as fair" as the other road; the diverging roads are "about the same" and "equally" covered with leaves. It's not a poem about choices, it's about excuses.                                 

Poem of the Day: George Herbert

The Collar 

     I struck the board and cried, "No more; 

                I will abroad!
     What? shall I ever sigh and pine? 

My lines and life are free, free as the road, 

     Loose as the wind, as large as store. 

               Shall I be still in suit? 

     Have I no harvest but a thorn 

     To let me blood, and not restore 

What I have lost with cordial fruit? 

               Sure there was wine 

     Before my sighs did dry it; there was corn 

               Before my tears did drown it. 

     Is the year only lost to me? 

               Have I no bays to crown it, 

No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted?

                   All wasted? 

     Not so, my heart; but there is fruit, 

               And thou hast hands.

     Recover all thy sigh-blown age 

On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute

Of what is fit and not. Forsake thy cage,  

               Thy rope of sands, 

Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee 

     Good cable, to enforce and draw, 

               And be thy law, 

     While thou didst wink and wouldst not see. 

               Away! take heed; 

               I will abroad. 

Call in thy death's-head there; tie up thy fears. 

               He that forbears 

     To suit and serve his need, 

               Deserves his load."

But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild 

               At every word, 

Methought I heard one calling, Child!

               And I replied, My Lord.

--George Herbert

Say this about the "metaphysical poets": They, and especially Herbert, were skillful dramatists, who knew how to use meter, and even the spacing of lines on a page, to create tension, to evoke spiritual struggle. Wrangling his way toward self-discipline and the solace of commitment, Herbert twists and turns his words and images until the final quatrain eases into comfort.        

Poem of the Day: William Butler Yeats

When you are old and gray and full of sleep, 
And nodding by the fire, take down this book, 
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look 
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; 

How many loved your moments of glad grace, 
And loved your beauty with love false or true; 
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, 
And loved the sorrows of your changing face. 

And bending down beside the glowing bars 
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled 
And paced upon the mountains overhead 
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars. 

--William Butler Yeats

The last time I did a Yeats poem, I maybe overstressed the virtues of the late poetry, so here's one from when he was not yet 30. The diction is simpler, and there's no politics, Irish mythology, or cosmological gyres at work, but the mastery of language is as breathtaking as it would ever get. And even here the preoccupation with aging that runs through the late poems is anticipated. 

Poems of the Day: Robert Herrick

The Night Piece, to Julia 

Her eyes the glowworm lend thee; 
The shooting stars attend thee; 
     And the elves also, 
     Whose little eyes glow 
Like the sparks of fire, befriend thee. 

No will-o'-the-wisp mislight thee; 
Nor snake or slowworm bite thee; 
     But on, on thy way, 
     Not making a stay, 
Since ghost there's none to affright thee. 

Let not the dark thee cumber; 
What though the moon does slumber? 
     The stars of the night 
     Will lend thee their light, 
Like tapers clear without number. 

Then, Julia, let me woo thee, 
Thus, thus to come unto me; 
     And when I shall meet 
     Thy silvery feet, 
My soul I'll pour into thee. 

Upon Julia's Clothes 

Whenas in silks my Julia goes, 
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows 
That liquefaction of her clothes. 
Next, when I cast mine eyes, and see 
That brave vibration, each way free, 
O, how that glittering taketh me! 

--Robert Herrick

Are there more accomplished love poems in English than Herrick's? Has anyone better evoked the sound and feel of silk? Has anyone better skirted the boundaries of explicitness? (Of course, I have to recall the experience of a friend who assigned her class "Upon Julia's Clothes" and got this paraphrase: "When Herrick sees Julia wearing silk, he has a liquefaction in his clothes.") I picked two poems today because I couldn't choose which one I liked more.

Poem of the Day: A.E. Housman

     "Terence, this is stupid stuff: 
You eat your victuals fast enough; 
There can't be much amiss, 'tis clear, 
To see the rate you drink your beer, 
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make, 
It gives a chap the belly-ache. 
The cow, the old cow, she is dead; 
It sleeps well, the horned head: 
We poor lads, 'tis our turn now 
To hear such tunes as killed the cow. 
Pretty friendship 'tis to rhyme
Your friends to death before their time 
Moping melancholy mad: 
Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad." 

     Why, if 'tis dancing you would be, 
There's brisker pipes than poetry. 
Say, for what were hop-yards meant, 
Or why was Burton built on Trent? 
Oh many a peer of England brews 
Livelier liquor than the Muse, 
And malt does more than Milton can 
To justify God's ways to man. 
Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink 
For fellows whom it hurts to think: 
Look into the pewter pot 
To see the world as the world's not. 
And faith, 'tis pleasant till 'tis past: 
The mischief is that 'twill not last. 
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair 
And left my necktie God knows where, 
And carried half-way home, or near, 
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer: 
Then the world seemed none so bad, 
And I myself a sterling lad; 
And down in lovely muck I've lain, 
Happy till I woke again. 
Then I saw the morning sky: 
Heighho, the tale was all a lie; 
The world, it was the old world yet, 
I was I, my things were wet, 
And nothing now remained to do 
But begin the game anew. 

     Therefore, since the world has still 
Much good, but much less good than ill, 
And while the sun and moon endure 
Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure, 
I'd face it as a wise man would, 
And train for ill and not for good. 
'Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale 
Is not so brisk a brew as ale: 
Out of a stem that scored the hand 
I wrung it in a weary land. 
But take it: if the smack is sour, 
The better for the embittered hour; 
It should do good to heart and head 
When your soul is in my soul's stead; 
And I will friend you, if I may, 
In the dark and cloudy day.

     There was a king reigned in the East: 
There, when kinds will sit to feast, 
They get their fill before they think 
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink. 
He gathered all the springs to birth 
From the many-venomed earth; 
First a little, thence to more, 
He sampled all her killing store; 
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound, 
Sate the king when healths went round. 
They put arsenic in his meat 
And stared aghast to watch him eat; 
They poured strychnine in his cup 
And shook to see him drink it up: 
They shook, they stared as white's their shirt: 
Them it was their poison hurt. 
--I tell the tale that I heard told. 
Mithridates, he died old.

--A.E. Housman

Housman is one of those poets that people outgrow -- and then maybe grow back into. It's true that there are a few too many Housman poems with speakers moping about turning 20 or 21 or 22, about athletes dying young, about the passing away of rose-lipt maidens and lightfoot lads. He seems to be the poet of post-adolescent sentimental Weltschmerz. But there comes a time in life when one maybe likes to recall one's own post-adolescent sentimental Weltschmerz, and then only Housman will do. 

The response of "Terence" (A Shropshire Lad was originally titled The Poems of Terence Hearsay until the publisher wisely talked him out of it) to his friend's critique is a kind of poetic manifesto, a defense of melancholy that contains three or four of Housman's most memorable lines. The trouble is, one likely remembers "malt does more than Milton can" more than one remembers the moral of the Mithridates anecdote: a little poison (i.e., poetic truth) every day keeps the undertaker away. 

Poem of the Day: John Donne

From Holy Sonnets 

14 

Batter my heart, three-personed God; for You 
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; 
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me,'and bend 
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new. 
I, like an usurped town, to'another due, 
Labor to'admit You, but O, to no end; 
Reason, Your viceroy'in me, me should defend, 
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue. 
Yet dearly'I love You,'and would be lovéd fain, 
But am betrothed unto Your enemy. 
Divorce me,'untie or break that knot again; 
Take me to You, imprison me, for I, 
Except You'enthrall me, never shall be free, 
Nor ever chaste, except You ravish me. 

--John Donne 

When I posted yesterday's poem, it put me in mind of this one. Not just because of the powerfully emotional religious content (it is as much a "terrible sonnet" as Hopkins's is a "Holy Sonnet"), but because Donne's experiments with verse anticipate those of Hopkins by 250 years or so. The marks ['] that indicate the linkage of one vowel sound to another, to keep the pentameter line, for example: 

Yet dear | ly'I love | You,'and would | be lov | éd fain  

And the harshness of the diction: 

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend

These are verbal tactics that shocked the poets of the eighteenth century, and which we don't see again until Blake and, later, Browning. Yet Donne is as much a master of innovation as Hopkins, and perhaps as much an inimitable poet. Of course, what makes this uniquely Donne is the mingling of sexual violence -- of rape, in a word -- with religious imagery. Hopkins flirted with such things but, perhaps because of his own sexual insecurity, never used them with such raw power as Donne.