Poem of the Day: George Gordon, Lord Byron

Written After Swimming From Sestos to Abydos 

1 

If, in the month of dark December, 

     Leander, who was nightly wont 

(What maid will not the tale remember?) 

     To cross thy stream, broad Hellespont!

2 

If, when the wintry tempest roared, 

     He sped to Hero, nothing loath, 

And thus of old thy current poured, 

     Fair Venus! how I pity both!

3

For me, degenerate modern wretch, 

     Though in the genial month of May, 

My dripping limbs I faintly stretch, 

     And think I've done a feat today.

4 

But since he crossed the rapid tide, 

     According to the doubtful story, 

To woo -- and -- Lord knows what beside, 

     And swam for Love, as I for Glory; 

5

'Twere hard to say who fared the best:
     Sad mortals! thus the gods still plague you!

He lost his labor, I my jest; 

     For he was drowned, and I've the ague.

--George Gordon, Lord Byron

Byron may have been the first postmodern poet: the first to achieve self-glorification through ironic self-deprecation.

Poem of the Day: Conrad Aiken

Summer 

Absolute zero: the locust sings: 
summer's caught in eternity's rings: 
the rock explodes, the planet dies, 
we shovel up our verities. 

The razor rasps across the face 
and in the glass our fleeting race 
lit by infinity's lightning wink 
under the thunder tries to think. 

In this frail gourd the granite pours 
the timeless howls like all outdoors 
the sensuous moment builds a wall 
open as wind, no wall at all: 

while still obedient to valves and knobs 
the vascular jukebox throbs and sobs 
expounding hope propounding yearning 
proposing love, but never learning 

or only learning at zero's gate 
like summer's locust the final hate 
formless ice on a formless plain 
that was and is and comes again.

--Conrad Aiken

When he was at Harvard (at the same time as T.S. Eliot), Aiken trained himself to write verse by attempting a different form every day, "all the way from free verse, Walt Whitman, to the most elaborate of villanelles and ballad forms," he told the Paris Review interviewer. "I didn't give a damn about the meaning, I just wanted to master the form." "Summer" is the simplest of forms -- aabb stanzas -- but the meaning is a hard knot to unpick. That it was written in the postwar '40s gives us a clue -- it has that atomic era tension to it, the sense of the ephemeral about the once-solidest things: "the rock explodes, the planet dies." He also claimed, in the same interview, "I'm not in the least Southern; I'm entirely New England." This despite being born and buried in that most gothic of Southern cities, Savannah. But I see what he means. There's a note of flinty despair in his verse that's at odd with the ironic resignation of most Southern poets.     

Poem of the Day: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Kubla Khan 

OR A VISION IN A DREAM, A FRAGMENT

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree: 
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran 
Through caverns measureless to man 
     Down to a sunless sea. 
So twice five miles of fertile ground 
With walls and towers were girdled round: 
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, 
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; 
And here were forests ancient as the hills, 
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted 
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! 
A savage place! as holy and enchanted 
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted 
By woman wailing for her demon lover! 
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, 
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, 
A mighty fountain momently was forced: 
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst 
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, 
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail: 
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever 
It flung up momently the sacred river. 
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion 
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, 
Then reached the caverns measureless to man, 
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean: 
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far 
Ancestral voices prophesying war! 

     The shadow of the dome of pleasure 
     Floated midway on the waves;
     Where was heard the mingled measure 
     From the fountain and the caves. 
It was a miracle of rare device, 
A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice! 

     A damsel with a dulcimer 
     In a vision once I saw: 
     It was an Abyssinian maid, 
     And on her dulcimer she played, 
     Singing of Mount Abora. 
     Could I revive within me 
     Her symphony and song, 
     To such a deep delight 'twould win me, 
That with music loud and long, 
I would build that dome in air, 
That sunny dome! those caves of ice! 
And all who heard should see them there, 
And all should cry, Beware! Beware! 
His flashing eyes, his floating hair! 
Weave a circle round him thrice, 
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed, 
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

--Samuel Taylor Coleridge

You probably know the story that Coleridge told about this poem: That he was in ill health and an "anodyne" (read: opium) had been prescribed for him, and that he fell asleep while reading about Kubla's palace in Purchas's Pilgrimage and dreamed the poem. But while writing it down, he was "unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock." And when he got back to the dream-poem, he had forgotten the rest. It's a wonderful story, and it's sheer balderdash.

Remember our five-act structure? 

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

We've got it here. Exposition: Kubla builds a pleasure dome. Conflict: There's a chasm, a natural -- as opposed to man-made -- place nearby. Crisis: Nature teaches us that all man-made things are impermanent. Struggle: To preserve that fragile pleasure dome. Resolution: To re-create the pleasure dome through imaginative creation, "symphony and song." 

"Fragment" my foot! If ever there was a complete poem in English, it's this one.  
        

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.