Poem of the Day: John Crowe Ransom

Here Lies a Lady

Here lies a lady of beauty and high degree,
Of chills and fever she died, of fever and chills,
The delight of her husband, an aunt, an infant of three
And medicos marveling sweetly on her ills. 


First she was hot, and her brightest eyes would blaze
And the speed of her flying fingers shook their heads. 
What was she making? God knows; she sat in those days 
With her newest gowns all torn, or snipt into shreds. 


But that would pass, and the fire of her cheeks decline 
Till she lay dishonored and wan like a rose overblown, 
And would not open her eyes, to kisses, to wine; 
The sixth of which states was final. The cold came down. 


Fair ladies, long may you bloom, and sweetly may thole!
She was part lucky. With flowers and lace and mourning,
With love and bravado, we bade God rest her soul 
After six quick turns of quaking, six of burning.

--John Crowe Ransom

Ransom belonged to a group of literati that gathered at Vanderbilt University in the 1920s and called themselves "the Fugitives." It was a pretty distinguished bunch, but also a provincial one, doing its thing far from the literary center of the country, and some of its members, such as Donald Davidson, were so reactionary that they fell out with the more progressive ones, like Robert Penn Warren, during the Civil Rights era. Ransom's voice is that of the Southern gentleman, a type not much honored these days, and his archaisms ("snipt," "thole") strike some people as precious (in the bad sense). But maybe it's my Mississippi roots showing, for I feel soothed and delighted when I read him.

Poem of the Day: William Blake

Mock on, Mock on Voltaire, Rousseau; 
Mock on, Mock on, 'tis all in vain. 
You throw the sand against the wind, 
And the wind blows it back again. 

And every sand becomes a Gem 
Reflected in the beams divine; 
Blown back, they blind the mocking Eye, 
But still in Israel's paths they shine. 

The Atoms of Democritus 
And Newton's Particles of light 
Are sands upon the Red sea shore, 
Where Israel's tents do shine so bright.

--William Blake 

For some reason, I can never read this poem without thinking of A Hard Day's Night: 

Reporter: Are you a mod or a rocker?
Ringo: Um, no. I'm a mocker.

Being somewhat of Voltaire's and Ringo's disposition, I take a little offense at Blake's mockery of mockers. Yes, what he's getting at is the sterility of Enlightenment materialism and, more in Rousseau's case than in Voltaire's, the negativism of revolutionaries. But in Candide Voltaire turned his mockery on Leibnizian rationalism, and Rousseau's valorizing of the natural seems right in line with Blake's own way of thinking. Still, when you get into prophetic mode the way Blake did, it's hard to maintain nuance. As for Democritus's atoms and Newton's particles, I have a feeling that Blake would have been gratified by the advent of quantum physics, in which things turn out to be both particles and waves.

Poem of the Day: Edwin Muir

The Horses

Barely a twelvemonth after 
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came. 
By then we had made our covenant with silence, 
But in the first few days it was so still 
We listened to our breathing and were afraid. 
On the second day 
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer. 
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north, 
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day 
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter 
Nothing. The radios dumb; 
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens, 
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms 
All over the world. But now if they should speak, 
If on a sudden they should speak again, 
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak, 
We would not listen, we would not let it bring 
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick 
At one great gulp. We would not have it again. 
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep, 
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow, 
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness. 
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening 
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting. 
We leave them where they are and let them rust: 
"They'll moulder away and be like other loam." 
We make our oxen drag our rusty ploughs, 
Long laid aside. We have gone back 
Far past our fathers' land.   
                                            And then, that evening 
Late in the summer the strange horses came. 
We heard a distant tapping on the road, 
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again 
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder. 
We saw the heads 
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid. 
We had sold our horses in our fathers' time 
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us 
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield 
Or illustrations in a book of knights. 
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited, 
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent 
By an old command to find our whereabouts 
And that long-lost archaic companionship. 
In the first moment we had never a thought 
That they were creatures to be owned and sued. 
Among them were some half-a-dozen colts 
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world, 
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden. 
Since then they have pulled our ploughs and borne our loads, 
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts. 
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning. 

--Edwin Muir 

Muir lived through two World Wars, so it's no wonder that the threat of yet another should have stirred him to verse. And to a poem, written during the Cold War, that predicts a cataclysmic "seven days war" eliminating the industrial civilization of radios and tractors for a return to a horse-powered "Eden."

Poem of the Day: Christopher Smart

From Jubilate Agno

For I will consider my cat Jeoffry. 
For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him. 
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way. 
For is this done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness. 
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer. 
For he rolls upon prank to work it in. 
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself. 
For this he performs in ten degrees. 
For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean. 
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there. 
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended. 
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood. 
For fifthly he washes himself.. 
For sixthly he rolls upon wash. 
For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat. 
For eighthly he rubs himself against a post. 
For ninthly he looks up for his instructions. 
For tenthly he goes in quest of food. 
For having considered God and himself he will consider his neighbor. 
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness. 
For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance. 
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying. 
For when his day's work is done his business more properly begins. 
For he keeps the Lord's watch in the night against the adversary. 
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes. 
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life. 
For in is morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him. 
For he is of the tribe of Tiger. 
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger. 
For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses. 
For he will not do destruction if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation. 
For he purrs in thankfulness when God tells him he's a good Cat. 
For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon. 
For every house is incomplete without him, and a blessing is lacking in the spirit. 
For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the departure of the Children of Israel from Egypt. 
For every family had one cat at least in the bag. 
For the English Cats are the best in Europe. 
For he is the cleanest in the use of his forepaws of any quadruped. 
For the dexterity of his defense is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly. 
For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature. 
For he is tenacious of his point. 
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery. 
For he knows that God is his Saviour. 
For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest. 
For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion. 
For he is of the Lord's poor, and so indeed is he called by benevolence perpetually -- Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat. 
For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better. 
For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in complete cat. 
For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants in music. 
For he is docile and can learn certain things. 
For he can sit up with gravity, which is patience upon approbation. 
For he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment. 
For he can jump over a stick, which is patience upon proof positive. 
For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command. 
For he can jump from an eminence into his master's bosom. 
For he can catch the cork and toss it again. 
For he is hated by the hypocrite and miser. 
For the former is afraid of detection. 
For the latter refuses the charge. 
For he camels his back to bear the first notion of business. 
For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly. 
For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services. 
For he killed the Ichneumon rat, very pernicious by land. 
For his ears are so acute that they sting again. 
For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention. 
For by stroking of him I have found out electricity. 
For I perceived God's light about him both wax and fire. 
For the electrical fire is the spiritual substance which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast. 
For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements. 
For, though he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer. 
For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped. 
For he can tread to all the measures upon upon the music. 
For he can swim for life. 
For he can creep. 

--Christopher Smart

Even if you didn't know it, you might guess that Smart is one of the oddest English writers from an age that saw quite a few oddities (e.g., Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, James Boswell). His idiosyncratic verse is not what one expects from the eighteenth century. Jubilate Agno was not published until 1939, when readers were more likely to be tolerant of its eccentricities, and less likely to dismiss it as the scribblings of a madman. 

From having met and associated with quite a few cats in my day, I can attest that Smart got at the essentials of felinity better than any other poet. (Certainly better than Old Possum's twee verses.) All of my household's cats have been mixtures of gravity and waggery, and I'm sure most of them could spraggle upon waggle, although none at command.     

Adam and Evil

This review appeared today in the San Francisco Chronicle:

ORDINARY THUNDERSTORMS

By William Boyd

Harper, 416 pp., $26.99

We are all Adam's kindred, and in Adam's fall we sinned all. The protagonist of this novel is named Adam Kindred, which is a pretty good indication that William Boyd wants us to think of him as an Everyman.

That's a shrewd move for a thriller writer, which is what Boyd, a versatile novelist to say the least, has become for this book. We all want characters who resemble us in some way, especially when they're put in situations as discomfiting as the one Adam Kindred finds himself in: without a job or a place to live, without the accouterments of everyday life such as credit cards and cell phone, without a family or even an identity, and on the run from both the police and the man who wants to kill him. He becomes a contemporary version of Shakespeare's “unaccommodated man,” not naked on a heath but holed up in the shrubbery on the banks of the Thames in London, drinking river water and eating a snared seagull.

Like the original Adam, Boyd's Adam is a sinner, a man whose moral fittings are not as snug and tight as they might be. And as he meditates on what he did to deserve his suffering, he makes explicit his connection to his ancestral namesake: “One stupid mistake – one lapse, one near-unconscious answering of an atavistic sexual instinct – that was all it took to put a perfectly secure life, a fairly happy and prosperous life, in free fall. Tell Adam and Eve about it, he thought, with some bitterness, some self-reproach.”

How he got this way is, as much as how he gets out of it, is something for the reader of this well-plotted novel to discover, and not for the reviewer to disclose. But plot isn't the only attraction of the novel. It's also rich in setting and characterization. We explore the circumstances of Adam's fall not only from his point of view but also from a variety of others, including an assassin, a policewoman, a drug company CEO, and a prostitute. They all bring with themselves back-stories as intriguing and complex as Adam's, and each presents the reader with a mystery to solve. Why, for example, is the prostitute named “Mhouse”?

And the novel teems with secondary characters, even with what you might call walk-on characters, each of whom is strikingly individualized; they pop into the imagination the way Dickens's minor characters do. Which is as it should be: One of the inspirations for the novel that Boyd has cited is Dickens's “Our Mutual Friend,” which begins with a body being dragged from the Thames. And Boyd makes a Dickens-like use of the city itself, the modern, polyglot, multiracial city that fringes the Thames, its neighborhoods strung out in a panorama ranging from the most affluent to the most sordid.

Also like Dickens, Boyd uses the novel for commentary on the times in which he lives, including the role of the military-industrial complex. The assassin, a veteran of every war since the Falklands, works for a Blackwater-like “security consultancy” firm called the Risk Averse Group. The CEO heads Calenture-Deutz, a pharmaceuticals company that is about to announce a breakthrough cure for asthma and is therefore the object of a takeover by another Big Pharma company. But since truth is not only stranger but also more mutable than fiction, Boyd takes pains not to make his fiction too topical, too bound to a particular year. To add a just-a-bit-in-the-future color to the novel, he invents his own street slang -- “monkey” for crack cocaine, for example, or “green, green peas” as a small boy's expression of delight – which he leaves to the reader to decipher.

As noted, Boyd is a versatile writer. “Ordinary Thunderstorms” is a very different kind of novel from his previous one, the spy thriller “Restless,” or from “Any Human Heart,” his exploration of 20th century history, or from his 1981 debut novel, “A Good Man in Africa,” which earned him comparisons to Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis. It may be that this versatility, this bit of the literary chameleon, has deprived Boyd of the kind of fame that comes to the more easily pigeonholed. But all of his books have a very smart author in common. The only problem with “Ordinary Thunderstorms” is that some readers may be so swept along by the thrill of the chase that they may not stop long enough to admire how smart it is.

Poem of the Day: Robinson Jeffers

Hurt Hawks 

I

The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder, 
The wing trails like a banner in defeat, 
No more to use the sky forever but live with famine 
And pain a few days: cat nor coyote 
Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons. 
He stands under the oak-bush and waits 
The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom 
And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it. 
He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse. 
The curs of the day come and torment him 
At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head, 
The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes. 
The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those 
That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant. 
You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him; 
Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him; 
Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him. 

II

I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk; but the great redtail 
Had nothing left but unable misery
From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved. 
We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom, 
He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death, 
Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old 
Implacable arrogance. I gave him the lead gift in the twilight. 
          What fell was relaxed, 
Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what 
Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising 
Before it was quite unsheathed from reality. 

--Robinson Jeffers 

The man who has been called the greatest California poet was, like most Californians, born somewhere else. And Californians used to boast about Jeffers so much that the rest of the country seems to have decided that he must be overrated (like John Steinbeck). He is rarely mentioned in the same breath as writers like Eliot and Frost. But it takes only a careful reading of a poem like this one to realize that Jeffers had a powerful gift for observing nature and drawing the emotional essence from it. Is it sentimental? Perhaps there's too much anthropomorphizing of the wounded hawk, and perhaps that famous line about preferring to kill a man than a hawk has just a hint of posturing to it. But the sentiment is Jeffers's own, and I think we should honor it as such.    

Poem of the Day: Edward Taylor

Upon a Spider Catching a Fly

Thou sorrow, venom elf: 
     Is this thy play, 
To spin a web out of thyself 
     To catch a fly? 
          For why?

I saw a pettish wasp 
     Fall foul therein, 
Whom yet the whorl-pins did not clasp
     Lest he should fling 
           His sting. 

But as afraid, remote 
     Didst stand hereat 
And with thy little fingers stroke 
     And gently tap 
          His back. 

Thus gently him didst treat 
     Lest he should pet, 
And in a froppish, waspish heat 
     Should greatly fret 
          Thy net. 

Whereas the silly fly, 
     Caught by its leg 
Thou by the throat tookst hastily 
     And hind the head 
          Bite dead. 

This goes to pot, that not 
     Nature doth call. 
Strive not above what strength hath got
     Lest in the brawl 
          Thou fall. 

This fray seems thus to us. 
    Hell's spider gets 
His entrails spun to whip-cords thus, 
     And wove to nets 
          And sets. 

To tangle Adam's race 
     In's stratagems 
To their destructions, spoiled, made base
     By venom things, 
          Damned sins. 

But mighty, gracious Lord 
     Communicate 
Thy grace to break the cord, afford 
     Us glory's gate 
          And state. 

We'll nightingale sing like 
     When perched on high 
In glory's cage, thy glory, bright, 
     And thankfully, 
          For joy.

--Edward Taylor 

Yesterday a snake, today a spider. Not intentionally trying to creep anyone out here. Taylor's little sermon about the wiles of an arachnid Satan -- stroking its waspish enemy into submission, swiftly dispatching the silly fly -- is pretty potent stuff. It's worth comparing Frost's poem about a spider:

Design 

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white, 
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth 
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth -- 
Assorted characters of death and blight 
Mixed ready to begin the morning right, 
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth -- 
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth, 
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white, 
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height, 
Then steered the white moth thither in the night? 
What but design of darkness to appall? -- 
If design govern in a thing so small.

 While Frost's questioning is more to my way of thinking about things -- you might read this as a kind of response to "intelligent design" -- I think Taylor has given us the more satisfying, and wittier, poem.    

Poem of the Day: D.H. Lawrence

Snake 

A snake came to my water-trough 
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat, 
To drink there. 

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree 
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me. 

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom 
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of the stone trough 
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom, 
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness, 
He sipped with his straight mouth, 
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body, 
Silently. 

Someone was before me at my water-trough, 
And I, like a second comer, waiting. 

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do, 
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do, 
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment, 
And stooped and drank a little more, 
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth 
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking. 

The voice of my education said to me 
He must be killed, 
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man 
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off. 

But must I confess how I liked him, 
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough 
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless, 
Into the burning bowels of this earth? 

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? 
Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? 
Was it humility, to feel so honoured? 
I felt so honoured. 

And yet those voices: 
If you were not afraid, you would kill him! 

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, 
But even so, honoured still more 
That he should seek my hospitality 
From out the dark door of the secret earth. 

He drank enough 
And lifted his head dreamiliy, as one who has drunken, 
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black, 
Seeming to lick his lips, 
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air, 
And slowly turned his head, 
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream, 
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round 
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face. 

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole, 
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther, 
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole, 
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after, 
Overcame me now his back was turned. 

I looked round, I put down my pitcher, 
I picked up a clumsy log 
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter. 

I think it did not hit him, 
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste, 
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front, 
At which, in the intense still noon I stared with fascination. 

And immediately I regretted it. 
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act! 
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education. 

And I thought of the albatross, 
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king, 
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld, 
Now due to be crowned again. 

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords 
Of life. 
And I have something to expiate; 
A pettiness.

--D.H. Lawrence

Lawrence, once so central a literary figure, has moved toward the periphery. But I think he'll be back again: There's too much going on in his work, too much pointed criticism of the vitiations of civilized life for him to dwindle into obscurity. And maybe it will be his poetry, often as direct and clear-sighted as this poem, and not his often too-talky, too-preachy novels that will bring him back.

Poem of the Day: John Dryden

Prologue to The Tempest 

or, The Enchanted Island

As, when a tree's cut down, the secret root 

lives underground, and thence new branches shoot; 

So from old Shakespeare's honored dust, this day 

Springs up and buds a new reviving play: 

Shakespeare, who (taught by none) did first impart

To Fletcher wit, to laboring Jonson art. 

He, monarch-like, gave those, his subjects, law; 

And is that nature which they paint and draw. 

Fletcher reached that which on his heights did grow, 

Whilst Jonson crept, and gathered all below. 

This did his love, and this his mirth digest: 

One imitates him most, the other best. 

If they have since outwrit all other men,
'Tis with the drops which fell from Shakespeare's pen. 

The storm which vanished on the neighboring shore, 

Was taught by Shakespeare's Tempest first to roar. 

That innocence and beauty which did smile 

In Fletcher, grew on this Enchanted Isle. 

But Shakespeare's magic could not copied be; 

Within that circle none durst walk but he. 

I must confess 'twas bold nor would you now 

That liberty to vulgar wits allow, 

Which works by magic supernatural things; 

But Shakespeare's power is sacred as a king's. 

Those legends from old priesthood were received, 

And he them writ, as people then believed.

But if for Shakespeare we your grace implore, 

We for our theater shall want it more: 

Who by our dearth of youths are forced to employ 

One of our women to present a boy; 

And that's a transformation, you will say, 

Exceeding all the magic in the play. 

Let none expect in the last act to find 

Her sex transformed from man to womankind. 

Whate'er she was before the play began, 

All you shall see of her is perfect man. 

Or if your fancy will be farther led 

To find her woman, it must be abed. 

--John Dryden

Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare get a pretty bad rap, and some of them, such as Nahum Tate's rewriting of King Lear with a happy ending in which Cordelia marries Edgar, deserve it. But as Dryden's prologue to his version of The Tempest asserts, they did it to honor Shakespeare, not to better him. And really, is adapting Shakespeare to the theater of the times really any different from what Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim did when they turned Romeo and Juliet into a musical about street gangs, or when Giuseppe Verdi adapted Macbeth, Othello and The Merry Wives of Windsor for the opera stage? Not to mention countless film adaptations, modern-dress stagings and transpositions of The Taming of the Shrew to the American West (or the American high school). 

Actually, Dryden's version of The Tempest (co-written with William D'Avenant) was nowhere near as radical as Tate's Lear. And All for Love, his version of Antony and Cleopatra, rewritten to adhere to the so-called "unities," stands on its own. Like Pope, Dryden is a difficult sell to modern readers, and his best poems are his satires, "Absalom and Achitophel" and "MacFlecknoe." But his mastery of poetic technique is unsurpassed.    

Poem of the Day: William Carlos Williams

The Yachts 

contend in a sea which the land partly encloses 
shielding them from the too-heavy blows 
of an ungoverned ocean which when it chooses 

totures the biggest hulls, the best man knows 
to pit against its beatings, and sinks them pitilessly. 
Mothlike in mists, scintillant in the minute 

brilliance of cloudless days, with broad bellying sails 
they glide to the wind tossing green water 
from their sharp prows while over them the crew crawls 

ant-like, solicitously grooming them, releasing, 
making fast as they turn, lean far over and having 
caught the wind again, side by side, head for the mark. 

In a well guarded arena of open water surrounded by 
lesser and greater craft which, sycophant, lumbering 
and flittering follow them, they appear youthful, rare 

as the light of a happy eye, live with the grace 
of all that in the mind is fleckless, free and 
naturally to be desired. Now the sea which holds them 

 is moody, lapping their glossy sides, as if feeling 
for some slightest flaw but fails completely.
Today no race. Then the wind comes again. The yachts


move, jockeying for a start, the signal is set and they 
are off. Now the waves strike at them but they are too 
well made, they slip through, though they take in canvas. 


Arms with hands graspoing seek to clutch at the prows. 
Bodies thrown recklessly in the way are cut aside. 
It is a sea of faces about them in agony, in despair 


until the horror of the race dawns staggering the mind, 
the whole sea become an entanglement of watery bodies 
lost to the world bearing what they cannot hold. Broken, 


beaten, desolate, reaching from the dead to be taken up 
they cry out, failing, failing! their cries rising 
in waves still as the skillful yachts pass over.

--William Carlos Williams

Back in their day, it seemed that Eliot and Frost were likely to be the poets most honored by posterity. But now I think the honors are more likely to go to Stevens and Williams. Eliot's ragged malaise and Frost's folksy irony have dated; Stevens's celebrations of the imagination and Williams's hard-edged directness haven't. "The Yachts" may be a metaphorical depiction of the class struggle, but it has transcended that reading to become what it primarily is: a magisterial use of sight and sound that liberates the imagination instead of restricting it politically, socially or ideologically.