Poem of the Day: Henry Vaughan

The World 

I saw eternity the other night 

Like a great ring of pure and endless light,

          All calm as it was bright; 

And round beneath it, Time, in hours, days, years, 

          Driven by the spheres, 

Like a vast shadow moved, in which the world 

          And all her train were hurled. 

The doting lover in his quaintest stran 

          Did there complain; 

Near him, his lute, his fancy, and his flights, 

          Wit's sour delights, 

With gloves and knots, the silly snares of pleasure, 

          Yet his dear treasure, 

All scattered lay, while he his eyes did pour 

          Upon a  flower. 

The darksome statesman, hung with weights and woe, 

Like a thick midnight fog, moved there so slow 

          He did nor stay nor go; 

Condemning thoughts, like sad eclipses scowl 

          Upon his soul, 

And clouds of crying witnesses without 

           Pursued him with one shout.

Yet digged the mole, and, lest his ways be found, 

          Worked undergrounds, 

Where he did clutch his prey. But one did see 

          That policy:

Churches and altars fed him; perjuries 

          Were gnats and flies;

It rained about him blood and tears, but he 

          Drank them as free. 

The fearful miser on a heap of rust 

Sat pining all his life there, did scarce trust 

          His own hands with the dust; 

Yet would not place one piece above, but lives 

          In fear of thieves. 

Thousands there were as frantic as himself, 

          And hugged each one his pelf: 

The downright epicure placed heaven in sense, 

          And scorned pretense; 

While others, slipped into a wide excess, 

          Said little less; 

The weaker sort, slight, trivial wares enslave,

          Who think them brave; 

And poor, despiséd Truth sat counting by

          Their victory. 

Yet some, who all this while did weep and sing, 

And sing and weep, soared up into the ring; 

          But most would use no wing. 

"O fools!" said I, "thus to prefer dark night 

          Before true light! 

To live in grots and caves, and hate the day 

          Because it shows the way,

The way which from this dead and dark abode 

          Leads up to God, 

A way where you might tread the sun and be 

          More bright than he!"

But, as I did their madness so discuss, 

          One whispered thus: 

"This ring the bridegroom did for none provide, 

          But for His bride."

--Henry Vaughan

This is Vaughan's Divina Commedia in miniature. The opening seven lines are among the most stunning I know of: They make me recall what the nighttime sky was like when I lived out of range of urban light pollution. But the satirical portraits that follow aren't bad either. Vaughan was a Welshman, which maybe explains my fondness for his poetry -- I'm Welsh on my mother's side of the family.         

Poem of the Day: Vachel Lindsay

Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight 

(in Springfield, Illinois) 

It is portentous, and a thing of state 
That here at midnight, in our little town 
A mourning figure walks, and will not rest, 
Near the old court-house pacing up and down,

Or by his homestead, or in shadowed yards 
He lingers where his children used to play, 
Or through the market, on the well-worn stones 
He stalks until the dawn-stars burn away. 

A bronzed, lank man! His suit of ancient black 
A famous high top-hat and plain worn shawl 
Makes him the quaint great figure that men love, 
The prairie-lawyer, master of us all. 

He cannot sleep upon his hillside now.
He is among us: -- as in times before!
And we who toss and lie awake for long 
Breathe deep, and start, to see him pass the door. 


His head is bowed. He thinks on men and kings. 
Yea, when the sick world cries, how can he sleep? 
Too many peasants fight, they know not why, 
Too many homesteads in black terror weep. 


The sins of all the war-lords burn his heart.
He sees the dreadnaughts scouring every main. 
He carries on his shawl-wrapped shoulders now 
The bitterness, the folly and the pain. 


He cannot rest until a spirit-dawn 
Shall come; -- the shining hope of Europe free: 
The league of sober folk, the Workers' Earth, 
Bringing long peace to Cornland, Alp and Sea. 


It breaks his heart that kings must murder still, 
That all his hours of travail here for men 
Seem yet in vain.  And who will bring white peace 
That he may sleep upon his hill again? 

--Vachel Lindsay

Best known now, if known at all, for the bumptiousness of "General William Booth Enters Into Heaven" and the naive boomlay of "The Congo," Lindsay had some serious admirers in his time, including W.B. Yeats. His ambition ultimately exceeded his talent, perhaps, but there's a genuine voice at work in his poems, especially this one about Lincoln's restless ghost, stalking the streets as the horror of World War I begins. Lincolnolatry at its purest. 
 

Poem of the Day: Andrew Marvell

To His Coy Mistress

     Had we but world enough, and time, 
This coyness, lady, were no crime. 
We would sit down, and think which way 
To walk, and pass our long love's day. 
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side 
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide 
Of Humber would complain. I would 
Love you ten years before the flood, 
And you should, if you please, refuse 
Till the conversion of the Jews. 
My vegetable love should grow 
Vaster than empires and more slow; 
An hundred years should go to praise 
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze; 
Two hundred to adore each breast, 
But thirty thousand to the rest; 
An age at least to every part, 
And the last age should show your heart. 
For, lady, you deserve this state, 
Nor would I love at lower rate. 
     But at my back I always hear 
Time's wingéd chariot hurrying near; 
And yonder all before us lie 
Deserts of vast eternity. 
Thy beauty shall no more be found; 
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound 
My echoing song; then worms shall try 
That long-preserved virginity, 
And your quaint honor turn to dust, 
And into ashes all my lust: 
The grave's a fine and private place, 
But none, I think, do there embrace. 
     Now therefore, while the youthful hue 
Sits on thy skin like morning glow, 
And while thy willing soul transpires 
At every pore with instant fires, 
Now let us sport us while we may, 
And now, like amorous birds of prey, 
Rather at once our time devour 
Than languish in his slow-chapped power. 
Let us roll all our strength and all 
Our sweetness up into one ball, 
And tear our pleasures with rough strife 
Thorough the iron gates of life: 
Thus, though we cannot make our sun 
Stand still, yet we will make him run. 

--Andrew Marvell

Once, when I was wasting time trying to be a professor of English, I took a poll of my colleagues asking them to name the five greatest poems under 100 lines in English. Yes, it was a silly thing to do, and yes, by demonstrating my fundamentally unserious approach to literature it probably contributed to my not becoming an English professor, but anyway... This poem by Marvell easily made the top five. I think it is probably the wittiest poem in English, with its absolute mastery of voice, of imagery, and of versification. It may also be one of the sexiest.               

Why I STILL Don't Watch TV News

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.