Poem of the Day: Wilfred Owen

Dulce et Decorum Est 

Bent  double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue, deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! -- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime ...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, --
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est 
Pro patria mori.

--Wilfred Owen

Anger is not an emotion conducive to great poetry, except perhaps when it finds its outlet in satire, as in the best poems of Dryden and Pope. And except when the anger is the great anger of war. (The Wrath of Achilles, for example.) And except when the poet is as equal to the task as Owen was, and the war was as futile, brutal, causeless and useless as the First World War.

Poem of the Day: Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Snowstorm 

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, 

Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields, 

Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air 

Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven, 

And veils the farmhouse at the garden's end. 

The sled and traveler stopped, the courier's feet 

Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit 

Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed 

In a tumultuous privacy of storm. 

    Come see the north wind's masonry. 

Out of an unseen quarry evermore 

Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer 

Curves his white bastions with projected roof 

Round every windward stake, or tree, or door. 

Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work 

So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he 

For number or proportion. Mockingly, 

On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths; 

A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn; 

Fills up the farmer's lane from wall to wall, 

Maugre the farmer's sighs; and, at the gate, 

A tapering turret overtops the work. 

And when his hours are numbered, and the world 

Is all his own, retiring, as he were not, 

Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art 

To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone, 

Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work, 

The frolic architecture of the snow. 

--Ralph Waldo Emerson 

I have to admit that I like Emerson's poetry a lot more than his prose.

Poem of the Day: Archibald MacLeish

You, Andrew Marvell 

And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth's noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night:

To feel creep up the curving east
The earthy chill of dusk and slow
Upon those under lands the vast
And ever climbing shadow grow

And strange at Ecbatan the trees
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange
The flooding dark about their knees
The mountains over Persia change

And now at Kermanshah the gate
Dark empty and the withered grass
And through the twilight now the late
Few travelers in the westward pass

And Baghdad darken and the bridge
Across the silent rier gone
And through Arabia the edge
Of evening widen and steal on

And deepen on Palmyra's street
The wheel rut in the ruined stone
And Lebanon fade out and Crete
High through the clouds and overblown

And over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls
And loom and slowly disappear
The sails above the shadowy hulls

And Spain go under and the shore
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more
The low pale light across that land

Nor now the long light on the sea:

And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on...

--Archibald MacLeish

Say this about MacLeish: He had chutzpah. Not only did he recast the book of Job into a now-forgotten play, J.B., which won him a Pulitzer Prize, but in this poem he invokes one of the greatest poems in the language. "You, Andrew Marvell" is skillfully done, but it's a bit of a travelogue, lacking the wit and passion of the poem it alludes to. Otherwise, MacLeish is most famous for the couplet that ends his poem "Ars Poetica":

A poem should not mean
But be.

Some of of us think a poem should do both.

Poem of the Day: John Keats

Ode to a Nightingale 

1

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains 

     My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, 

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains 

     One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: 

'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, 

     But being too happy in thine happiness -- 

          That thou, light-wingéd Dryad of the trees, 

               In some melodious plot

     Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, 

          Singest of summer in full-throated ease. 

2

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been 

     Cooled a long age in the deep-delvéd earth, 

Tasting of Flora and the country green, 

     Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!

O for a beaker full of the warm South, 

    Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, 

          With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, 

               And purple-stainéd mouth; 

     That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, 

          And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

3

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget 

    What thou among the leaves hast never known,

The weariness, the fever, and the fret

     Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,

     Where youth grows pale, and specter-thin, and dies, 

          Where but to think is to be full of sorrow 

                And leaden-eyed despairs, 

      Where Beauty cannot keep  her lustrous eyes, 

          Or new Love pine at them beyond tomorrow. 

4

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,

     Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,

But on the viewless wings of Poesy, 

     Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:

Already with thee! tender is the night,

     And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,

          Clustered around by all her starry Fays; 

               But here there is no light,

     Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown 

          Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

5

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, 

     Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, 

But, in embalméd darkness, guess each sweet 

     Wherewith the seasonable month endows 

The grass, the thicket, and the fruit tree wild;

     White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;  

          Fast fading violets covered up in leaves;

               And mid-May's eldest child, 

     The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,

          The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. 

6

Darkling I listen; and for many a time 

     I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Called him soft names in many a muséd rhyme,

     To take upon the air my quiet breath;

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

     To cease upon the midnight with no pain, 

           While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

               In such an ecstasy!

     Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain -- 

          To thy high requiem become a sod.

7

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

     No hungry generations tread thee down;

The voice I hear this passing night was heard 

     In ancient days by emperor and clown;

Perhaps the selfsame song that found a path 

     Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,

          She stood in tears amid the alien corn;

               The same that ofttimes hath 

     Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam

          Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.          

8

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

     To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well 

     As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.

Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades 

     Past the near meadows, over the still stream,

          Up the hill side; and now 'tis buried deep 

               In the next valley-glades: 

     Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

          Fled is that music: --Do I wake or sleep?

--John Keats 

I think that if it comes to defending civilization against the barbarian hordes, this poem will be one of the works I'll squirrel away in a lockbox along with Bach's cello suites, Mozart's operas, a few Vermeers, Jane Austen's novels and the films of Preston Sturges.

Poem of the Day: Edna St. Vincent Millay

Dirge Without Music

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground. 
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned 
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned. 

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust. 
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew, 
A formula, a phrase remains, -- but the best is lost. 

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love, --
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled 
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve. 
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world. 

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave 
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind; 
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave. 
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

--Edna St. Vincent Millay

I suppose the only Millay poem that anyone knows anymore is this one:

First Fig

My candle burns at both ends; 
     It will not last the night; 
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends -- 
     It gives a lovely light! 

And maybe that's as it should be. Millay was not a great poet, being more given to attitude than to originality of thought and expression. About today's poem, you want to tell her that nobody's asking her to approve. The tone is that of a Vassar grad living in Greenwich Village, which she was. And yet, as an expression of a particular era, the 1920s, it's an almost perfect poem. Not for all time, but of an age, to reverse the formula. And the more valuable for being that.    

Poem of the Day: Percy Bysshe Shelley

To a Skylark

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! 

     Bird thou never wert, 

That from Heaven, or near it, 

     Pourest thy full heart

In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. 

Higher still and higher 

     From the earth thou springest 

Like a cloud of fire; 

     The deep blue thou wingest, 

And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest. 

In the golden lightning 

     Of the setting sun, 

O'er which clouds are bright'ning, 

     Thou dost float and run; 

Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun. 

The pale purple even 

     Melts around thy flight; 

Like a star of Heaven, 

     In the broad daylight 

Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight, 

Keen as are the arrows 

     Of that silver sphere, 

Whose intense lamp narrows 

     In the white dawn clear 

Until we hardly see -- we feel that it s there. 

All the earth and air 

     With thy voice is loud, 

As, when night is bare, 

     From one lonely cloud 

The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflowed. 

What thou art we know not; 

     What is most like thee? 

From rainbow clouds there flow not 

     Drops so bright to see 

As from thy presence showers a rain of melody. 

Like a Poet hidden 

     In the light of thought, 

Singing hymns unbidden, 

     Till the world is wrought 

To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not: 

Like a high born maiden 

     In a palace tower, 

Soothing her love-laden

     Soul in secret hour 

With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower: 

Like a glowworm golden 

     In a dell of dew, 

Scattering unbeholden 

     Its aërial hue 

Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view!

Like a rose embowered 

     In its own green leaves, 

By warm winds deflowered, 

     Till the scent it gives 

Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-wingéd thieves:

Sound of vernal showers 

   On the twinkling grass, 

Rain-awakened flowers, 

     All that ever was 

Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass: 

Teach us, Sprite or Bird, 

     What sweet thoughts are thine:

I have never heard 

     Praise of love or wine 

That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

Chorus Hymeneal, 

     Or triumphal chant, 

Matched with thine would be all

     But an empty vaunt, 

A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want. 

What objects are the fountains 

     Of thy happy strain? 

What fields, or waves, or mountains? 

     What shapes of sky or plain? 

What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain? 

With thy clear keen joyance 

     Languor cannot be: 

Shadow of annoyance 

     Never came near thee: 

Thou lovest -- but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.

Waking or asleep, 

     Thou of death must deem 

Things more true and deep 

     Than we mortals deamm, 

Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

We look before and after,

     And pine for what is not: 

Our sincerest laughter 

     With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. 

Yet if we could scorn 

     Hate, and pride, and fear; 

If we were things born

     Not to shed a tear,

I know not how thy joy we ever should come near. 

Better than all measures 

     Of delightful sound, 

Better than all treasures 

     That in books are found,

Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

Teach me half the gladness 

     That thy brain must know, 

Such harmonious madness 

     From my lips would flow 

The world should listen then -- as I am listening now.

--Percy Bysshe Shelley

 
I don't know whether to prefer the Shelley version or the Johnny Mercer-Hoagy Carmichael version. But then I don't really have to choose, do I?

Poem of the Day: Claude McKay

America

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth, 
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess 
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood, 
Giving me strength erect against her hate. 
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood, 
Yet as a rebel fronts a king in state, 
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer. 
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there, 
Beneath the touch of Time's unerring hand, 
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.

--Claude McKay

The sonnet concentrates the imagination wonderfully. For a form originally associated with love poetry, it has mutated into one for all occasions. Donne and Hopkins wrote them about God; Milton wrote them about going blind and turning 23 years old; and Wordsworth even wrote sonnets about writing sonnets. But I don't think anyone ever used the sheer concentrated power of the 14-line poem as effectively as McKay did to express his anger about racial injustice in America, here and in "If We Must Die" and "The White City". Brave and bitter poetry.    

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.