Poem of the Day: Patrick Kavanagh

Lecture Hall 

To speak in summer in a lecture hall
About literature and its use
I pick my brains and tease out all
To see if I can choose
Something untarnished, some new news

From experience that has been immediate,
Recent, something that makes
The listener or reader
Impregnant, something that reinstates
The poet. A few words like birth-dates

That brings him back in the public mind,
I mean the mind of the dozen or so
Who constantly listen out for the two-lined
Message that announces the gusto
Of the dead arisen into the sun-glow.

Someone in America will note
The apparent miracle. In a bar
In Greenwich Village some youthful poet
Will mention it, and a similar
In London or wherever they are

Those pickers-up of messages that produce
The idea that underneath the sun
Things can be new as July dews --
Out of the frowsy, the second-hand won ...
Keep at it, keep at it while the heat is on

I say to myself as I consider
Virginal crevices in my brain
Where the never-exposed will soon be a mother.
I search for that which has no stain,
Something discovered vividly and sudden.

--Patrick Kavanagh

Poem of the Day: Gerard Manley Hopkins

Spring and Fall 

TO A YOUNG CHILD

Márgarét, áre you grieving 

Over Goldengrove unleaving? 

Leáves, like the things of man, you 

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you? 

Áh! ás the heart grows older 

It will come to such sights colder 

By and by, nor spare a sigh 

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie; 

And yet you will weep and know why. 

Now no matter, child, the name: 

Sórrow's springs áre the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed 

What heart heard of, ghost guessed: 

It is the blight man was born for, 

It is Margaret you mourn for.

--Gerard Manley Hopkins

Poem of the Day: C. Day Lewis

Almost Human 

The man you know, assured and kind, 

Wearing fame like an old tweed suit --- 

You would not think he has an incurable 

Sickness upon his mind. 

Finely that tongue, for the listening people, 

Articulates love, enlivens clay; 

While under his valued skin there crawls 

An outlaw and a cripple. 

Unenviable the renown he bears 

When all's awry within? But a soul 

Divinely sick may be immunized 

From the scourge of common cares. 

A woman weeps, a friend's betrayed, 

Civilization plays with fire -- 

His grief or guilt is easily purged 

In a rush of words to the head. 

The newly dead, and their waxwork faces 

With the look of things that could never have lived, 

He'll use to prime his cold, strange heart 

And prompt the immortal phrases. 

Before you condemn this eminent freak 

As an outrage upon mankind, 

Reflect: something there is in him 

That must for ever seek 

To share the condition it glorifies, 

To shed the skin that keeps it apart, 

To bury its grace in a human bed -- 

And it walks on knives, on knives. 

--C. Day Lewis 

The poet was 53 when his wife gave birth to a son who would become a famous actor, and father and son were never close. But there's something in this poem that seems to me to link them: the theme of playing with masks, of the mutability of identity. Day Lewis père was a communist who became that most establishmentarian of things, the poet laureate. And Day-Lewis fils (he resumed the hyphen that his father had dropped) is the most chameleon-like of actors.

Poem of the Day: Thomas Hardy

The Convergence of the Twain 

LINES ON THE LOSS OF THE TITANIC

          1
          In a solitude of the sea
          Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

          2
          Steel chambers, late the pyres
          Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

          3
          Over the mirrors meant
          To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls -- grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

          4
          Jewels in joy designed
          To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

          5
          Dim moon-eyed fishes near
          Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?"

          6
          Well: while was fashioning
          This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

          7
          Prepared a sinister mate
          For her -- so gaily great --
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

          8
          And as the smart ship grew
          In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

          9
          Alien they seemed to be:
          No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,

         10
         Or sign that they were bent
         By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,

         11
         Till the Spinner of the Years
         Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

--Thomas Hardy

Yes, it's hokum, this personification of the Titanic as human pride and the Iceberg as nature's might. But is it any hokier than James Cameron's version?

Poem of the Day: Richard Eberhart

 The Groundhog   

In June, amid the golden fields, 

I saw a groundhog lying dead. 

Dead lay he; my senses shook, 

And mind outshot our naked frailty.

There lowly in the vigorous summer 

His form began its senseless change, 

And made my senses waver dim 

Seeing nature ferocious in him. 

Inspecting close his maggots' might 

And seething cauldron of his being, 

Half with loathing, half with a strange love, 

I poked him with an angry sstick. 

The fever arose, became a flame 

And Vigour circumscribed the skies, 

Immense energy in the sun, 

And through my frame a sunless trembling. 

My stick had done nor good nor harm. 

Then stood I silent in the day 

Watching the object, as before; 

And kept my reverence for knowledge 

Trying for control, to be still, 

To quell the passion of the blood; 

Until I had bent down on my knees 

Praying for joy in the sight of decay. 

And so I left; and I returned 

In Autumn strict of eye, to see
The sap gone out of the groundhog,

But the bony sodden hulk remained. 

But the year had lost its meaning, 

And in intellectual chains 

I lost both love and loathing, 

Mured up in the wall of wisdom. 

Another summer took the fields again 

Massive and burning, full of life, 

But when I chanced upon the spot 

There was only a little hair left, 

And bones bleaching in the sunlight 

Beautiful as architecture; 

I watched them like a geometer, 

And cut a walking stick from a birch. 

It has been three years, now, 

There is no sign of the groundhog. 

I stood there in the whirling summer, 

My hand capped a withered heart, 

And thought of China and of Greece, 

Of Alexander in his tent; 

Of Montaigne in his tower, 

Of Saint Theresa in her wild lament.

--Richard Eberhart 

This is probably Eberhart's most famous anthology piece -- except maybe for "The Fury of Aerial Bombardment" -- as well as a member of a curious subgenre: the mock-heroic meditation on a dead animal. In fact, I can think of only three examples: this one, Thomas Gray's "On the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes" (one of the most misquoted poems in English), and this last, which is one my favorite poems of all time.

The Death of a Toad

          A toad the power mower caught, 

Chewed and clipped of a leg, with a hobbling hop has got 

     To the garden verge, and sanctuaried him 

     Under the cineraria leaves, in the shade 

          Of the ashen heartshaped leaves, in a dim, 

               Low, and a final glade.

          The rare original heartsblood goes, 

Spends on the earthen hide, in the folds and wizenings, flows 

    In the gutters of the banked and staring eyes. He lies 

    As still as if he would return to stone,

          And soundlessly attending, dies 

               Toward some deep monotone, 

          Toward misted and ebullient seas 

And cooling shores, toward lost Amphibia's emperies. 

     Day dwindles, drowning, and at length is gone 

     In the wide and antique eyes, which still appear 

          To watch, across the castrate lawn, 

               The haggard daylight steer. 

--Richard Wilbur

Poem of the Day: Algernon Charles Swinburne

The Sundew 

A little marsh-plant, yellow green,
And pricked at lip with tender red.
Tread close, and either way you tread
Some faint black water jets between
Lest you should bruise the curious head.

A live thing maybe; who shall know?
The summer knows and suffers it;
For the cool moss is thick and sweet
Each side, and saves the blossom so
That it lives out the long June heat.

The deep scent of the heater burns
About it; breathless though it be,
Bow down and worship; more than we
Is the least flower whose life returns,
Least weed renascent in the sea.

We are vexed and cumbered in earth's sight
With wants, with many memories;
These see their mother what she is,
Glad-growing, till August leave more bright
The apple-colored cranberries.

Wind blows and bleaches the strong grass,
Blown all one way to shelter it
From trample of strayed kine, with feet
Felt heavier than the moorhen was,
Strayed up past patches of wild wheat.

You call it sundew: how it grows,
If with its color it have breath,
If life taste sweet to it, if death
Pain its soft petal, no man knows:
Man has no sight or sense that saith.

O red-lipped mouth of marsh-flower,
I have a secret halved with thee.
The name that is love's name to me
Though knowest, and the face of her
Who is my festival to see.

The hard sun, as thy petals knew,
Colored the heavy moss-water:
Thou wert not worth green midsummer
Nor fit to live to August blue,
O sundew, not remembering her.

--Algernon Charles Swinburne

Poets love to write poems to birds (Shelley's skylark, Keats's nightingale) and flowers (Wordsworth's daffodils). But leave it to kinky old Swinburne to glorify a carnivorous swamp-dwelling plant. And in a love poem.

Poem of the Day: Louis Zukofsky

Tall and singularly dark you pass among the breakers --
Companionship as of another world bordering on this;
To the intelligence fastened by the senses you are lost
In a world of sunlight where nothing is amiss:

For nothing but the sun is there and peace vital with the sun,
The heaviest changes shift through no features more than a smile,
Currents spread, and are gone, and as the high waves appear,
You dive, in the calming are as lost awhile.

How in that while intelligence escapes from sense
And fear with hurled human might darkens upon bliss!
Till as again you stand above the waters
Fear turns to sleep as one who dreamt of falling, an abyss!

--Louis Zukofsky

Poem of the Day: Christina Rossetti

In an Artist's Studio 

One face looks out from all his canvases,
     One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:
     We found her hidden behind those screens,
That mirror gave back all her loveliness.
A queen in opal or in ruby dress,
     A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens,
     A saint, an angel -- every canvas means
The same one meaning, neither more nor less.
He feeds upon her face by day and night,
     And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,
Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:
     Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;
Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;
     Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.

--Christina Rossetti

Yes, it's a poem about the obsession of Christina's brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, with his model and wife, Elizabeth Siddal, the quintessential Pre-Raphaelite woman. But it's also a poem about objectification, about what feminist critics refer to as the "male gaze." A fascinating lot, those Rossettis.

Christina Rossetti, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Poem of the Day: William Plomer

In the Snake Park 

A white-hot midday in the Snake Park.
Lethargy lay here and there in coils,
And here and there a neat obsidian head
Lay dreaming on a plaited pillow of its own
Loops like a pretzel or a true-love-knot.

A giant Python seemed a heap of tyres;
Two Nielsen's Vipers looked for a way out, 
Sick of their cage and one another's curves;
And the long Ringsnake brought from Lembuland
Poured softly through an opening like smoke.

Leaning intently forward a young girl
Discerned in stagnant water on a rock
A dark brown shoestring or discarded whiplash,
Then read the label to find out the name,
Then stared again: it moved. She screamed.

Old Piet Vander leant with us that day
On the low wall around the rocky spacee
Where amid broken quartz that cast no shade
Snakes twitched or slithered, or appeared to sleep,
Or lay invisible in the singing glare.

The sun throbbed like a fever as he spoke:
"Look carefully at this shrub with glossy leaves."
Leaves bright as brass. "That leaf on top
Just there, do you see that it has eyes?
That's a Green Mamba, and it's watching you.

"A man I once knew did survive the bite,
Saved by a doctor running with a knife,
Serum and all. He was never the same again.
Vomiting blackness, agonizing, passing blood,
Part paralysed, near gone, he felt

"(He told me later) he would burst apart;
But the worst agony was in his mind --
Unbearable nightmare, worse than total grief
Or final loss of hope, impossibly magnified
To a blind passion of panic and extreme distress."

"Why should that little head have power
To inject all horror for no reason at all?"
"Ask me another -- and beware of snakes."
The sun was like a burning-glass. Face down
The girl who screamed had fallen in a faint.

--William Plomer

Perhaps Plomer oversensationalizes the otherness of snakes here, but they do seem to inspire a primal fear, as D.H. Lawrence suggested in a somewhat more subtle poem.

Poem of the Day: Emily Dickinson

The Bible is an antique Volume --
Written by faded Men
At the suggestion of Holy Spectres --
Subjects -- Bethlehem --
Eden -- the ancient Homestead --
Satan -- the Brigadier --
Judas -- the Great Defaulter --
David -- the Troubadour --
Sin -- a distinguished Precipice
Others must resist --
Boys that "believe" are very lonesome --
Other Boys are "lost"--
Had but the Tale a warbling Teller --
All the Boys would come --
Orpheus' Sermon captivated --
It did not condemn --

--Emily Dickinson

To understand the unsettled consciousness of nineteenth-century writers, you have to know a little about the higher criticism, and how it shook their world view. Treating the Bible as a man-made text was faith-shattering for many of them, Dickinson included. Thomas Hardy had a different view of it:

The Respectable Burgher on "The Higher Criticism"

Since Reverend Doctors now declare
That clerks and people must prepare
To doubt if Adam ever were;
To hold the flood a local scare;
To argue, though with stolid stare,
That everything had happened ere,
The prophets to its happening sware;
That David was no giant-slayer,
Nor one to call a God-obeyer
In certain details we would spare,
But rather was a debonair
Shrewd bandit, skilled as banjo-player:
That Solomon sang the fleshly Fair,
And gave the Church no thought whate'er,
That Esther with her royal wear,
And Mordecai, the son of Jair,
And Joshua's triumphs, Job's despair,
And Balaam's ass's bitter blare;
Nebuchadnezzar's furnace-flare,
And Daniel and the den affair,
And other stories rich and rare,
Were writ to make old doctrine wear
Something of a romantic air:
That the Nain widow's only heir,
And Lazarus with cadaverous glare
(As done in oils by Piombo's care)
Did not return from Sheol's lair:
That Jael set a fiendish snare,
That Pontius Pilate acted square,
That never a sword cut Malchus' ear;
And (but for shame I must forbear)
That —— —— did not reappear!...
— Since thus they hint, nor turn a hair,
All churchgoing will I forswear,
And sit on Sundays in my chair,
And read that moderate man Voltaire. 

--Thomas Hardy