Poem of the Day: William Butler Yeats

Among School Children 

1
I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and histories,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way -- the children's eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

2
I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
Above a sinking fire, a tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to tragedy --
Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato's parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

3
And thinking of that fit of grief or rage
I look upon one child or t'other there
And wonder if she stood so at that age --
For even daughters of the swan can share
Something of every paddler's heritage --
And had that color upon cheek or hair,
And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
She stands before me as a living child.

4
Her present image floats into the mind --
Did Quattrocento finger fashion it
Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
And I though never of Ledaean kind
Had pretty plumage once -- enough of that,
Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

5
What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

6
Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

7
Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother's reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts -- O Presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolize --
O self-born mockers of man's enterprise;

8
Labor is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

--William Butler Yeats

Modernism is over. We are now postmodern, whatever that means. And we now approach the landmarks of modernism -- the novels of Proust and Joyce, the poems of Yeats and Eliot -- armed with the tools of exegesis: concordances and glosses, commentaries and footnotes. We illuminate the obscurities and explicate the personal myths. And certainly the snarls and gnarls of a poem like this one need all those external aids if we want to understand them fully. But sometimes the scholarship imposes its considerable bulk between the essence of the poem: the feeling and the emotion, the sheer mystery of a human experience. So it's gratifying to return to this poem having worked it all out, having figured out its allusions and tracked down its personal references and unsnagged its syntax, and just to appreciate it for what it is simply at heart: a meditation on the antagonism between beauty and mortality, a remembrance of things past and an acceptance of things present. 

Poem of the Day: Robert Penn Warren

Bearded Oaks

The oaks, how subtle and marine,
Bearded, and all the layered light
Above them swims; and thus the scene,
Recessed, awaits the positive night.

So, waiting, we in the grass now lie
Beneath the languorous tread of light:
The grasses, kelp-like, satisfy
The nameless motions of the air.

Upon the floor of light, and time,
Unmurmuring, of polyp made,
We rest; we are, as light withdraws,
Twin atolls on a shelf of shade.

Ages to our construction went,
Dim architecture, hour by hour:
And violence, forgot now, lent
The present stillness all its power.

The storm of noon above us rolled,,
Of light the fury, furious gold,
The long drag troubling us, the depth:
Dark is unrocking, unrippling, still.

Passion and slaughter, ruth, decay
Descend, minutely whispering down,
Silted down swaying streams, to lay
Foundation for our voicelessness.

All our debate is voiceless here,
As all our rage, the rage of stone;
If hope is hopeless, then fearless is fear,
And history is thus undone.

Our feet once wrought the hollow street
With echo when the lamps were dead
At windows, once our headlight glare
Disturbed the doe that, leaping, fled.

I do not love you less that now
The caged heart makes iron stroke,
Or less that all that light once gave
The graduate dark should now revoke.

We live in time so little time
And we learn all so painfully,
That we may spare this hour's term
To practice for eternity.

--Robert Penn Warren

Poem of the Day: A.E. Housman

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now 

Is hung with bloom along the bough, 

And stands about the woodland ride 

Wearing white for Eastertide. 

Now, of my threescore years and ten, 

Twenty will not come again, 

And take from seventy springs a score, 

It only leaves me fifty more. 

And since to look at things in bloom 

Fifty springs are little room, 

About the woodlands I will go 

To see the cherry hung with snow.

--A.E. Housman 

To those of us who are tired of the bogosity of "threescore years and ten" and who may have just seen their seventieth spring, I offer this response by Emily Grosholz to Housman:

Putting On the Ritz 

(For William Jules-Yves) 

After a long, cool winter, 

at last in May a suite 

of warm days wakes the sleepers 

One covered from crown to root 

in thick crepe skirtlets stops 

me, back from hibernation: 

Loveliest of trees, 

big as the Ritz's balletic 

vases charged with bloom.

Not bought, not concocted, 

only improbably real. 

Why am I not surprised? 

My hair is snowed with silver, 

evidence how little room 

fifty springs allow. 

And yet midwinter someone 

burst to life inside me, 

and lately started dancing. 

Just so improbably 

snow hung along the branches 

changed suddenly to flowers. 

--Emily Grosholz

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