Poem of the Day: William Carlos Williams

Poem 

As the cat
climbed over
the top of 

the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down

into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot

--William Carlos Williams

Poem of the Day: W.H. Auden

Musée des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong, 

The Old Masters: how well they understood 

Its human position; how it takes place 

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; 

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting 

For the miraculous birth, there always must be 

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating 

On a pond at the edge of the wood: 

They never forgot 

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course 

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot 

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse 

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. 

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away 

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may 

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, 

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone 

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green 

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen 

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, 

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. 

--W.H. Auden 

Auden's wryly observant poem is maybe the most familiar example of poetry as art criticism, and has been widely imitated. Some of the imitations are direct homages to Auden's poem, like Billy Collins's:

Musée des Beaux Arts Revisited 

As far as mental anguish goes, 

the old painters were no fools. 

They understood how the mind, 

the freakiest dungeon in the castle, 

can effortlessly imagine a crab with the face of a priest 

or an end table complete with genitals. 

And they knew that the truly monstrous 

lies not so much in the wildly shocking, 

a skeleton spinning a wheel of fire, say, 

but in the small prosaic touch 

added to a tableau of the hellish, 

the detail at the heart of the horrid.

In Bosch's The Temptation of St. Anthony, 

for instance, how it is not so much 

the boar-faced man in the pea-green dress 

that frightens, but the white mandolin he carries, 

not the hooded corpse in a basket, 

but the way the basket is rigged to hang from a bare branch; 

how, what must have driven St. Anthony 

to the mossy brink of despair 

was not the big, angry-looking fish 

in the central panel, 

the one with the two mouse-like creatures 

conferring on its tail, 

but rather what the fish is wearing: 

a kind of pale orange officer's cape 

and, over that, 

a metal body-helmet secured by silvery wires, 

a sensible buckled chin strap, 

and, yes, the ultimate test of faith -- 

the tiny sword that hangs from the thing, 

that nightmare carp, 

secure in its brown leather scabbard.

--Billy Collins 

I'm sure William Carlos Williams also knew Auden's poem, but he found a particularly musical way to evoke his chosen painting:

The Dance 

In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess, 

the dancers go round, they go round and 

around, the squeal and the blare and the 

tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles 

tipping their bellies (round as the thick-

sided glasses whose wash they impound) 

their hips and their bellies off balance 

to turn them. Kicking and rolling about 

the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those 

shanks must be sound to bear up under such 

rollicking measures, prance as they dance 

in Breughel's great picture, The Kermess.

--William Carlos Williams           

Poem of the Day: Wallace Stevens

The Idea of Order at Key West

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.

The water never formed to mind or voice,

Like a body wholly body, fluttering

Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion

Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,

That was not ours although we understood,

Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.

The song and water were not medleyed sound

Even if what she sang was what she heard,

Since what she sang was uttered word by word.

It may be that in all her phrases stirred

The grinding water and the gasping wind; 

But it was she and not the sea we heard. 

For she was the maker of the song she sang. 

The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea 

Was merely a place by which she walked to sing. 

Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew 

It was the spirit that we sought and knew 

That we should ask this often as she sang. 

It if was only the dark voice of the sea 

That rose, or even colored by many waves; 

If it was only the outer voice of sky 

And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled, 

However clear, it would have been deep air, 

The heaving speech of air, a summer sound 

Repeated in a summer without end 

And sound alone. But it was more than that, 

More even than her voice, and ours, among 

The meaningless plunges of water and the wind, 

Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped 

On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres 

Of sky and sea. 

                        It was her voice that made 

The sky acutest at its vanishing. 

She measured to the hour its solitude. 

She was the single artificer of the world 

In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea, 

Whatever self it had, became the self 

That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we, 

As we beheld her striding there alone, 

Knew that there never was a world for her 

Except the one she sang and, singing, made. 

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know, 

Why, when the singing ended and we turned 

Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights, 

The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there, 

As the night descended, tilting in the air,

Mastered the night and portioned out the sea, 

Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles, 

Arranging, deepening, enchanting night. 

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon, 

The maker's rage to order words of the sea, 

Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, 

And of ourselves and of our origins, 

In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds. 

--Wallace Stevens

I guess it's worth noting here that the poem's Ramon Fernandez is not the Philippine basketball player, and that Stevens claimed he wasn't the literary critic of the same name, but just a Hispanic name he picked at random. So that's one enigma in this poem you don't have to deal with.

Poem of the Day: William Empson

Missing Dates

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.

It is not the effort nor the failure tires.

The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It s not your system or clear sight that mills

Down small to the consequences a life requires;

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.

They bled an old dog dry yet the exchange rills

Of young dog blood gave but a month's desires

The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It is the Chinese tombs and the slag hills

Usurp the soil, and not the soil retires.

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.

Not to have fire is to be a skin that shrills.

The complete fire is death. From partial fires

The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It is the poems you have lost, the ills

From missing dates, at which the heart expires.

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.

The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

--William Empson 

Empson's reputation rests largely on his literary criticism, and especially on his first book, Seven Types of Ambiguity (which, as a professor of mine once remarked, constitutes an eighth type of ambiguity all on its own). But he was a provocative poet, too, as this strangely morbid villanelle should demonstrate.

Poem of the Day: Edward Thomas

Lights Out 

I have come to the borders of sleep, 

The unfathomable deep 

Forest where all must lose 

Their way, however straight, 

Or winding, soon or late; 

They cannot choose. 

Many a road and track 

That, since the dawn's first crack, 

Up to the forest brink, 

Deceived the travelers, 

Suddenly now blurs, 

And in they sink. 

Here love ends, 

Despair, ambition ends; 

All pleasure and all trouble, 

Although most sweet or bitter, 

Here ends in sleep that is sweeter 

Than tasks most noble.

There is not any book 

Or face of dearest look 

That I would not turn from now 

To go into the unknown 

I must enter, and leave, alone, 

I know not how. 

The tall forest towers; 

Its cloudy foliage lowers 

Ahead, shelf above self; 

Its silence I hear and obet 

That I may lose my way 

And myself. 

--Edward Thomas

Poem of the Day: Vernon Watkins

Waterfalls

Always in that valley in Wales I hear the noise 

     Of waters falling. 

                              There is a clump of trees 

          We climbed for nuts; and high in the trees the boys 

               Lost in the rookery's cries 

                    Would cross, and branches cracking under their knees

Would break, and make in the winter wood new gaps. 

    The leafmould covering the ground was almost black, 

          But speckled and striped were the nuts we threw in our caps, 

               Milked from split shells and cups, 

                    Secret as chestnuts when they are tipped from a sack, 

Glossy and new. 

                         Always in that valley in Wales 

     I hear that sound, those voices. They keep fresh 

          What ripens, falls, drops into darkness, fails, 

               Gone when dawn shines on scales, 

                    And glides from village memory, slips through the mesh, 

And is not, when we come again. 

                                                  I look: 

     Voices are under the bridge, and that voice calls, 

          Now late, and answers, 

                                              then, as the light twigs break 

               Back, there is only the brook 

                    Reminding the stones where, under a breath, it falls. 

--Vernon Watkins

Poem of the Day: Robert Frost

Spring Pools 

These pools that, though in forests, still reflect
The total sky almost without defect,
And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,
Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,
And yet not out by any brook or river,
But up by roots to brink dark foliage on.
The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods --
Let them think twice before they use their powers
To blot out and drink up and sweep away
These flowery waters and these watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday.

--Robert Frost

This is the Frost I most admire: the observer, not the ironic moralist.

Poem of the Day: Samuel Beckett

what would I do without this world faceless incurious 

where to be lasts but an instant where every instant 

spills in the void the ignorance of having been 

without this wave where in the end 

body and shadow together are engulfed 

what would I do without this silence where the murmurs die 

the paintings the frenzies towards succour towards love 

without this sky that soars 

above its ballast dust 

what would I do what I did yesterday and the day before 

peering out of my deadlight looking for another 

wandering like me eddying far from all the living 

in a convulsive space 

among the voices voiceless 

that throng my hiddenness 

--Samuel Beckett

Poem of the Day: Paul Laurence Dunbar

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes --
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
     We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
     We wear the mask!

--Paul Laurence Dunbar

In his day, Dunbar was best known for dialect poems like "When Malindy Sings," which black poets were expected to produce. He wore the mask, but not happily. 

Poem of the Day: John Betjeman

The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel 

He sipped at a weak hock and seltzer
     As he gazed at the London skies
Through the Nottingham lace of the curtains
     Or was it his bees-winged eyes?

To the right and before him Pont Street
     Did tower in her new built red,
As hard as the morning gaslight
     That shone on his unmade bed,

"I want some more hock in my seltzer,
     And Robbie, please give me your hand --
Is this the end or beginning?
     How can I understand?

"So you've brought me the latest Yellow Book:
     And Buchan has got in it now:
Approval of what is approved of
     Is as false as a well-kept vow.

"More hock, Robbie -- where is the seltzer?
     Dear boy, pull again at the bell!
They are all little better than cretins,
     Though this is the Cadogan Hotel.

"One astrakhan coat is at Willis's --
     Another one's at the Savoy:
Do fetch my morocco portmanteau,
     And bring them on later, dear boy."

A thump, and a murmur of voices --
     ("Oh why must they make such a din?")
As the door of the bedroom swung open
     And TWO PLAIN CLOTHES POLICEMEN came in:

"Mr Woilde, we 'ave come for tew take yew 
     Where felons and criminals dwell:
We must ask yew tew leave with us quoietly
     For this is the Cadogan Hotel."

He rose, and he put down The Yellow Book.
     He staggered -- and, terrible-eyed,
He brushed past the palms on the staircase
     And was helped to a hansom outside.

--John Betjeman

I like to imagine the encounter of Oscar Wilde, the consummate aesthete, and John Betjeman, the laureate of British nostalgia, in heaven. Betjeman treats the great injustice of Wilde's arrest with slyly sympathetic humor, which may, after all, be the way Wilde would like to have seen it treated.