Poem of the Day: Langston Hughes

Theme for English B

The instructor said,

     Go home and write 
     a page tonight. 
     And let that page come out of you -- 
     Then, it will be true.

I wonder if it's that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here
to this college on the hill above Harlem.
I am the only colored student in my class.
The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem,
through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas,
Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,
the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator
up to my room, sit down, and write this page:

It's not easy to know what is true for you or me
at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I'm what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you:
hear you, hear me -- we two -- you, me, talk on this page.
(I hear New York, too.) Me -- who?

Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records -- Bessie, bop, or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn't make me not like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write?
Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white --
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That's American.
Sometimes perhaps you don't want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that's true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me --
although you're older -- and white --
and somewhat more free.

This is my page for English B.

--Langston Hughes

There is something restrained about Hughes' verse, something guarded, even when he's trying to write in the idiom of jazz or blues or in the voices of Harlem. Here, where he's assuming a persona based on his own experience as a young black man in a white college, he doesn't let go even though the instructor has asked it of him: the anger is muted, ironic. The sense of a powerfully restrained tension born of the necessity of self-concealment haunts every line. It's the voice of someone always doomed to be an outsider, not only a black man in a white world, but also perhaps a closeted gay man, which many think he was. "I like to ... be in love," he writes -- not "I like to love" or "I like to make love," but something more passive: being but not doing.

Poem of the Day: Walt Whitman

Vigil strange I kept on the field one night;
When you my son and my comrade dropt at my side that day,
One look I but gave which your dear eyes return'd with a look I shall never forget,
One touch of your hand to mine O boy, reach'd up as you lay on the ground,
Then onward I sped in the battle, the even-contested battle,
Till late in the night reliev'd to the place at last again I made my way,
Found you in death so cold dear comrade, found your body son of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)
Bared your face in the starlight, curious the scene, cool blew the moderate night-wind,
Long there and then in vigil I stood, dimly around me the battle-field spreading,
Vigil wondrous and vigil sweet there in the fragrant silent night,
But not a tear fell, not even a long-drawn sigh, long I gazed,
Then on the earth partially reclining sat by your side leaning my chin in my hands,
Passing sweet hours, immortal and mystic hours with you dearest comrade -- not a tear, not a word,
Vigil of silence, love and death, vigil for you my son and my soldier,
As onward silently stars aloft, eastward new ones upward stole,
Vigil final for you brave boy, (I could not save you, swift was your death,
I faithfully loved you and cared for you living, I think we shall surely meet again,)
Till at latest lingering of the night, indeed just as the dawn appear'd,
My comrade I wrapt in his blanket, envelop'd well his form,
Folded the blanket well, tucking it carefully over head and carefully under feet,
And there and then and bathed by the rising sun, my son in his grave, in his rude-dug grave I deposited,
Ending my vigil strange with that, vigil of night and battle-field dim,
Vigil for boy of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)
Vigil for comrade swiftly slain, vigil I never forget, how as day brighten'd,
I rose from the chill ground and folded my soldier well in his blanket,
And buried him where he fell.

--Walt Whitman

Whitman's mastery of the long breathless sweep of verse (and despite what his detractors say, this is verse, not prose) was never better shown than in this poem. Both rhapsody and dirge, war-poem and love-poem, it is broken only by commas and a sole semicolon, until it reaches a full stop after the devastating final six-word line.

Poem of the Day: Laura Riding

With the Face 

With the face goes a mirror
As with the mind a world.
Likeness tells the doubting eye
That strangeness is not strange.
At an early hour and knowledge
Identity not yet familiar
Looks back upon itself from later,
And seems itself.

To-day seems now.
With reality-to-be goes time.
With the mind goes a world.
With the heart goes a weather.
With the face goes a mirror
As with the body a fear.
Young self goes staring to the wall
Where dumb futurity speaks calm,
And between then and then
Forebeing grows of age.

The mirror mixes with the eye.
Soon will it be the very eye.
Soon will the eye that was
The very mirror be.
Death, the final image, will shine
Transparently not otherwise
Than as the dark sun described
With such faint brightnesses.

--Laura Riding

Time, mortality, identity, memory -- such grand themes. And they're all here in a poem that's both simple and intricate, as it would have to be to contain them. The obvious comparison is to Emily Dickinson, but though Riding is also inevitably linked with the Fugitives and with Robert Graves, she is her own considerable poetic self.

Poem of the Day: Herman Melville

Shiloh

A Requiem (April 1862)

Skimming lightly, wheeling still,
     The swallows fly low
Over the field in clouded days,
     The forest-field of Shiloh --
Over the field where April rain
Solaced the parched one stretched in pain
Through the pause of night
That followed the Sunday fight
     Around the church of Shiloh --
The church so lone, the log-built one,
That echoed to many a parting groan
          And natural prayer
      Of dying foemen mingled there --
Foemen at morn, but friends at eve --
     Fame or country least their care:
(What like a bullet can undeceive!)
     But now they lie low,
While over them the swallows skim,
     And all is hushed at Shiloh.

--Herman Melville

Amid the historical and moral stupidity of politicians proclaiming Confederate History Month, it's good to turn to poets like Melville for sanity and truth.

Poem of the Day: Yvor Winters

Time and the Garden 

The spring has darkened with activity,
The future gathers in vine, bush, and tree:
Persimmon, walnut, loquat, fig, and grape,
Degrees and kinds of color, taste, and shape.
These will advance in their due series, space
The season like a tranquil dwelling-place.
And yet excitement swells me, vein by vein:
I long to crowd the little garden, gain
Its sweetness in my hand and crush it small
And taste it in a moment, time and all!
These trees, whose slow growth measures off my years,
I would expand to greatness. No one hears,
And I am still retarded in duress!
And this is like that other restlessness
To seize the greatness not yet fairly earned,
One which the tougher poets have discerned --
Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Greville, Raleigh, Donne,
Poets who wrote great poems, one by one,
And spaced by many years, each line an act
Through which few labor, which no men retract.
This passion is the scholar's heritage,
The imposition of a busy age,
The passion to condense from book to book
Unbroken wisdom in a single look,
Though we know well that when this fix the head,
The mind's immortal, but the man is dead.

--Yvor Winters

It's funny how a writer can be both out of the mainstream and square in the middle of it. No matter how much Winters might have honored tradition -- heroic couplets, for God's sake! -- he couldn't help being a modern poet. Which is what makes his poetry so engaging, and, as in this poem, reminds us that we are what our times make us. The question is whether it's nobler to fight 'em or join 'em. Winters makes a good case for the former.

Poem of the Day: Emily Brontë

Hope 

Hope was but a timid friend --
She sat without my grated den
Watching how my fate would tend
Even as selfish-hearted men.

She was cruel in her fear.
Through the bars, one dreary day,
I looked out to see her there
And she turned her face away!

Like a false guard false watch keeping
Still in strife she whispered peace;
She would sing while I was weeping,
If I listened, she would cease.

False she was, and unrelenting.
When my last joys strewed the ground
Even Sorrow saw repenting
Those sad relics scattered round;

Hope -- whose whisper would have given
Balm to all that frenzied pain --
Stretched her wings and soared to heaven;
Went -- and ne'er returned again!

--Emily Brontë

Even if you didn't know she wrote it, wouldn't "Emily Brontë" be a good guess? The obvious poem to pair it with is by the other Emily:

"Hope" is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—

And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—
And sore must be the storm—
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm—

I've heard it in the chillest land—
And on the strangest Sea—
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb—of Me. 

--Emily Dickinson

Poem of the Day: Allen Tate

Last Days of Alice

Alice grown lazy, mammoth but not fat,
Declines upon her lost and twilight age;
Above in the dozing leaves the grinning cat
Quivers forever with his abstract rage:

Whatever light swayed on the perilous gate
Forever sways, nor will the arching grass,
Caught when the world clattered, undulate
In the deep suspension of the looking glass.

Bright Alice! always pondering to gloze
The spoiled cruelty she had meant to say
Gazes learnedly down her airy nose
At nothing, nothing thinking all the day.

Turned absent-minded by infinity
She cannot move unless her double move,
The All-Alice of the world's entity
Smashed in the anger of her hopeless love,

Love for herself who, as an earthly twain,
Pouted to join her two in a sweet one;
No more the second lips to kiss in vain
The first she broke, plunged through the glass alone --

Alone to the weight of impassivity,
Incest of spirit, theorem of desire,
Without will as chalky cliffs by the sea,
Empty as the bodiless flesh of fire:

All space, that heaven is a dayless night,
A nightless day driven by perfect lust
For vacancy, in which her bored eyesight
Stares at the drowsy cubes of human dust.

-- We too back to the world shall never pass
Through the shattered door, a dumb shade-harried crowd
Being all infinite, function depth and mass
Without figure, a mathematical shroud

Hurled at the air -- blessed without sin!
O God of our flesh, return us to Your wrath,
Let us be evil could we enter in
Your grace, and falter on the stony path!

--Allen Tate

"Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas -- only I don't know exactly what they are," said Lewis Carroll's Alice about "Jabberwocky." I feel that way about Tate's poems. He was a conservative's conservative: a Fugitive, an agrarian, and, later in life, a Roman Catholic, and I think that this poem expresses a kind of moralizing rage against a world that finds its only values in contemplating itself in the looking glass. Still, I like it for the itchiness of its enigmas.

Poem of the Day: Henry David Thoreau

I am a parcel of vain strivings tied
          By a chance bond together,
     Dangling this way and that, their links
          Were made so loose and wide,
                    Methinks,
               For milder weather.

A bunch of violets without their roots,
          And sorrel intermixed
     Encircled by a wisp of straw
          Once coiled about their shoots,
                    The law
               By which I'm fixed.

A nosegay which Time clutched from out
          Those fair Elysian fields,
     With weeds and broken stems, in haste,
          Doth make the rabble rout
                    That waste
               The day he yields.

And here I bloom for a short hour unseen,
          Drinking my juices up,
     With no root in the land
          To keep my branches green,
                    But stand
               In a bare cup.

--Henry David Thoreau

Poem of the Day: Hart Crane

Chaplinesque 

We make our meek adjustments, 

Contented with such random consolations 

As the wind deposits 

In slithered and too ample pockets. 

For we can still love the world, who find

A famished kitten on the step, and know 

Recesses for it from the fury of the street, 

Or warm torn elbow coverts. 

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk 

Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb 

That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us, 

Facing the dull squint with what innocence 

And what surprise! 

And yet these fine collapses are not lies 

More than  the pirouettes of any pliant cane; 

Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise. 

We can evade you, and all else but the heart: 

What blame to us if the heart live on. 

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen 

The moon in lonely alleys make 

A grail of laughter of an empty ash can, 

And through all sound of gaiety and quest 

Have heard a kitten in the wilderness. 

--Hart Crane 

True, there are poems by Crane that seem to me to be nothing more than word salad, but this is not one of them. I think it perfectly conveys both the comic and the sentimental Chaplin, even if like all of Crane's poems it's really about Hart (see "heart" above).

Poem of the Day: Robert Browning

A Toccata of Galuppi's 

1

Oh Galuppi, Baldassare, this is very sad to find! 

I can hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf and blind; 

But although I take your meaning, 'tis with such a heavy mind!

2

Here you come with your old music, and here's all the good it brings, 

What, they lived once thus at Venice where the merchants were the kings, 

Where Saint Mark's is, where the Doges used to wed to sea with rings?

3 

Ay, because the sea's the street there; and 'tis arched by ... what you call

... Shylock's bridge with houses on it, where they kept the carnival: 

I was never out of England -- it's as if I saw it all. 

4 

Did young people take their pleasure when the sea was warm in May? 

Balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to mid-day,

When they made up fresh adventures for the morrow, do you say? 

5 

Was a lady such a lady, cheeks so round and lips so red -- 

On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bellflower on its bed, 

O'er the breast's superb abundance where a man might base his head? 

6 

Well, and it was graceful of them -- they'd break talk off and afford 

-- She, to bite her mask's black velvet -- he, to finger on his sword,

While you sat and played Toccatas, stately at the clavichord? 

7 

What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished, sigh on sigh, 

Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions -- "Must we die?" 

Those commiserating sevenths -- "Life might last! we can but try!" 

8 

"Were you happy?" "Yes." "And are you still as happy?" "Yes. And you?" 

"Then, more kisses!" "Did I stop them, when a million seemed so few?" 

Hark, the dominant's persistence till it must be answered to! 

9

So, an octave struck the answer. Oh, they praised you, I dare say! 

"Brave Galuppi! that was music! good alike at grave and gay! 

"I can always leave off talking when I hear a master play!" 

10 

Then they left you for their pleasure: till in due time, one by one, 

Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well undone,

Death stepped tacitly and took them where they never see the sun. 

11 

But when I sit down to reason, think to take my stand nor swerve, 

While I triumph o'er a secret wrung from nature's close reserve, 

In you come with your cold music till I creep through every nerve. 

12 

Yes, you, like a ghostly cricket, creaking where a house was burned: 

"Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned.

"The soul, doubtless, is immortal -- where a soul can be discerned.

13 

"Yours for instance: you know physics, something of geology, 

"Mathematics are your pastime; souls shall rise in their degree; 

"Butterflies may dread extinction -- you'll not die, it cannot be! 

14 

"As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop, 

"Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop. 

"What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?

15 

"Dust and ashes!" So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold. 

Dear dead women, with such hair, too -- what's become of all the gold 

Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old.

--Robert Browning 

Memento mori. Ubi sunt. Où sont les neiges d'antan? This is Browning's essay into the genre, and a poem I've always rather liked. But I guess I'll have to spoil it for you the way someone did for me, by pointing out that trochaic octameter makes for a rather unwieldy poetic line, even if you drop the last unstressed foot -- as Browning does here, and as Tennyson did in "Locksley Hall." And that the resulting fifteeners in both poems (and Poe's "The Raven") can be sung to the tunes of both "Clementine" and the "Ode to Joy" from the last movement of Beethoven's ninth. (And, of course, you can sing "Herring boxes without topses sandals were for Clementine" to the tune of "Freude, schöne Götterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium," and vice versa.) But you wouldn't want to do that, would you?