Poem of the Day: Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Tithonus 

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapors weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes; I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white-haired shadow roaming like a dream
The ever-silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.
     Alas! for this gray shadow, once a man --
So glorious in his beauty and thy choice,
Who madest him thy chosen, that he seemed
To his great heart none other than a God!
I asked thee, "Give me immortality."
Then didst thou grant mine asking with a smile,
Like wealthy men who care not how they give.
But thy strong Hours indignant worked their wills,
And beat me down and marred and wasted me,
And though they could not end me, left me maimed
To dwell in presence of immortal youth.
Immortal age beside immortal youth,
And all I was in ashes. Can thy love,
Thy beauty, make amends, though even now,
Close over us, the silver star thy guide,
Shines in those tremulous eyes that fill with tears
To hear me? Let me go; take back thy gift.
Why should a man desire in any way
To vary from the kindly race of men,
Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance
Where all should pause, as is most meet for all?
     A soft air fans the cloud apart; there comes
A glimpse of that dark world where I was born,
Once more the old mysterious glimmer steals
From thy pure brows, and from thy shoulders pure,
And bosom beating with a heart renewed.
Thy cheek begins to redden through the gloom,
Thy sweet eyes brighten slowly close to mine,
Ere yet they blind the stars, an the wild team
Which love thee, yearning for thy yoke, arise,
And shake the darkness from their loosened manes,
And beat the twilight into flakes of fire.
     Lo! ever thus thou growest beautiful
In silence, then before thine answer given
Departest, and thy tears are on my cheek.
     Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears,,
And make me tremble lest a saying learnt,
In days far-off, on that dark earth, be true?
"The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts."
     Ay me! ay me! with what another heart
In days far-off, and with what other eyes
I used to watch -- if I be he that watched --
The lucid outline forming round thee; saw
The dark curls kindle into sunny rings;
Changed with thy mystic change, and felt my blood
Glow with the glow that slowly crimsoned all
Thy presence and thy portals, while I lay,
Mouth, forehead, eyelids, growing dewy-warm
With kisses balmier than half-opening buds
Of April, and could hear the lips that kissed
Whispering I knew not what of wild and sweet,
Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing,
While Ilion like a mist rose into towers.
    Yet hold me not for ever in thine East;
How can my nature longer mix with thine?
Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold
Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet
Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam
Floats up from those dim fields about the homes
Of happy men that have the power to die,
And grassy bowers of the happier dead.
Release me, and restore me to the ground.
Thou seest all things, thou wilt see my grave;
Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn,
I earth in earth forget these empty courts,
And thee returning on thy silver wheels.

--Alfred, Lord Tennyson

I've always thought that immortality has its downside. Imagine spending eternity in the company of the kind of people who are supposed to merit it, with no one to gossip with and no one to gossip about. The Greeks imagined it differently in the Tithonus myth: an immortal soul in an ever-aging body. If Tennyson had had a sense of humor, he might have made more of that premise, but his poem does have some lovely sounds and images.

Poem of the Day: Jean Toomer

Georgia Dusk 

The sky, lazily disdaining to pursue
     The setting sun, too indolent to hold
     A lengthened tournament for flashing gold,
Passively darkens for night's barbecue,

A feast of moon and men and barking hounds,
     An orgy for some genius of the South
     With blood-hot eyes and cane-lipped scented mouth,
Surprised in making folk-songs from soul sounds.

The sawmill blows its whistle, buzz-saws stop,
     And silence breaks the bud of knoll and hill,
     Soft settling pollen where plowed lands fulfill
Their early promise of a bumper crop.

Smoke from the pyramidal sawdust pile
     Curls up, blue ghosts of trees, tarrying low
     Where only chips and stumps are left to show
The solid proof of former domicile.

Meanwhile, the men, with vestiges of pomp,
     Race memories of king and caravan,
     High priests, an ostrich, and a juju-man,
Go singing through the footpaths of the swamp.

Their voices rise ... the pine trees are guitars,
     Strumming, pine-needles fall like sheets of rain ...
     Their voices rise ... the chorus of the cane
Is caroling a vesper to the stars.

O singers, resinous and soft your songs
     Give virgin lips to cornfield concubines,
     Above the sacred whisper of the pines,
Bring dreams of Christ to dusky cane-lipped throngs.

--Jean Toomer

A great, strange talent, Toomer almost got lost in the infamous "tragic mulatto" myth, becoming a kind of one-book-wonder after the success of Cane. (He lived for 44 years after its publication, never producing another book to be compared with it.) But what gives a poem like this one its unique power is its sense of double consciousness: looking at a scene that's almost a Southern stereotype from both inside and outside, and reporting it in a voice that (as Toomer was himself able to do) merges black participant with white observer.

Poem of the Day: Edgar Allan Poe

Sonnet--To Science

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
     Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
     Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise?
     Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To search for treasure in the jeweled skies,
     Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
     And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
     Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

--Edgar Allan Poe

Well, okay, Diana and the Hamadryads and Naiads have pretty much bought it. But wouldn't Poe, and the other Romantics who decried the inroads of science on the territory of the mythic be surprised that, at the beginning of the 21st century, our bestsellers are about vampires and wizards and more Americans reportedly believe in angels than in evolution?              

Poem of the Day: E.E. Cummings

my father moved through dooms of love 

through sames of am through haves of give, 

singing each morning out of each night 

my father moved through depths of height

this motionless forgetful where 

turned at his glance to shining here; 

that if (so timid air is firm) 

under his eyes would stir and squirm

newly as from unburied which 

floats the first who,his april touch 

dove sleeping selves to swarm their fates 

woke dreamers to their ghostly roots 

and should some why completely weep 

my father's fingers brought her sleep: 

vainly no smallest voice might cry  

for he could feel the mountains grow.

Lifting the valleys of the sea 

my father moved through griefs of joy; 

praising a forehead called the moon 

singing desire into begin 

joy was his song and joy so pure 

a heart of star by him could steer 

and pure so now and now so yes 

the wrists of twilight would rejoice 

keen as midsummer's keen beyond 

conceiving mind of sun will stand, 

so strictly (over utmost him 

so hugely ) stood my father's dream 

his flesh was flesh his blood was blood: 

no hungry man but wished him food;

no cripple wouldn't creep one mile 

uphill to only see him smile.

Scorning the pomp of must and shall

my father moved through dooms of feel; 

his anger was as right as rain 

his pity was as green as grain 

septembering arms of year extend 

less humbly wealth to foe and friend 

than he to foolish and to wise 

offered immeasurable is 

proudly and(by octobering flame

beckoned) as earth will downward climb, 

so naked for immortal work 

his shoulders marched against the dark 

his sorrow was as true as bread: 

no liar looked him in the head; 

if every friend became his foe 

he'd laugh and build a world with snow.

My father moved through theys of we,

singing each new leaf out of each tree 

(and every child was sure that sprin 

danced when she heard my father sing) 

then let men kill which cannot share, 

let blood and flesh be mud and mire, 

scheming imagine,passion willed,

freedom a drug that's bought and sold 

giving to steal and cruel kind, 

a heart to fear,to doubt a mind,

to differ a disease of same,

conform the pinnacle of am 

though dull were all we taste as bright,

bitter all utterly things sweet, 

maggoty minus and dumb death 

all we inherit,all bequeath

and nothing quite so least as truth 

--i say though hate were why men breathe--

because my father lived his soul

love is the whole and more than all

--E.E. Cummings 

I'm not, I fear, a Cummings fan. But many are, so this is for them. And for me it's one of the few Cummings poems that truly justify his typographic trickery and syntactical twists. They depict the struggle to articulate a deep and genuine feeling. (And no, he didn't insist on spelling his name with lowercase letters.)

Poem of the Day: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Chaucer 

An old man in a lodge within a park;
     The chamber walls depicted all around
     With portraitures of huntsman, hawk, and hound,
     And the hurt deer. He listeneth to the lark,
Whose song comes with the sunshine through the dark
     Of painted glass in leaden lattice bound;
     He listeneth and he laugheth at the sound,
     Then writeth in a book like any clerk.
He is the poet of the dawn, who wrote
     The Canterbury Tales, and his old age
     Made beautiful with song; and as I read
I hear the crowing cock, I hear the note
     Of lark and linnet, and from every page
     Rise odors of plowed field or flowery mead.

--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

We suffered through "Hiawatha" or "Evangeline" in school way back when. I don't think they have to put up with all that Gitche Gumee and murmuring pines and hemlocks stuff anymore. In a way it's a pity: 14-year-olds need a good laugh at the moldy oldies. (In my ninth-grade English class, we discovered that  "Evangeline's" dactylic hexameter could be sung to the tunes of several church hymns.) But of course it soured us on old Longfellow and on rumty-tum-tum poetry, and alienated us from our parents and grandparents who cherished it. And it deprived us from learning that Longfellow was not such a bad poet when he wasn't trying to write the Great American Epic. And maybe from encountering this simple and fresh appreciation by a pretty minor poet of a really great one.

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.