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.

Poem of the Day: Edwin Arlington Robinson

New England

Here where the wind is always north-north-east
And children learn to walk on frozen toes,
Wonder begets an envy of all those
Who boil elsewhere with such a lyric yeast
Of love that you will hear them at a feast
Where demons would appeal for some repose,
Still clamoring where the chalice overflows
And crying wildest who have drunk the least.
Passion is here a soilure of the wits,
We're told, and Love a cross for them to bear;
Joy shivers in the corner where she knits
And Conscience always has the rocking-chair,
Cheerful as when she tortured into fits
The first cat that was ever killed by Care.

--Edwin Arlington Robinson

Well, what else would you expect from the author of those cheery little ditties "Richard Cory," "Miniver Cheevy" and "Mr. Flood's Party"?  

Poem of the Day: Kenneth Rexroth

Proust's Madeleine 

Somebody has given my
Baby daughter a box of
Old poker chips to play with.
Today she hands me one while
I am sitting with my tired
Brain at my desk. It is red.
On it is a picture of
An elk's head and the letters
B.P.O.E. -- a chip from
A small town Elks' Club. I flip
It idly in the air and
Catch it and do a coin trick
To amuse my little girl.
Suddenly everything slips aside.
I see my father
Doing the very same thing,
Whistling "Beautiful Dreamer,"
His breath smelling richly
Of whiskey and cigars. I can
Hear him coming home drunk
From the Elks' Club in Elkhart
Indiana, bumping the
Chairs in the dark. I can see
Him dying of cirrhosis
Of the liver and stomach
Ulcers and pneumonia,
Or, as he said on his deathbed, of
Crooked cards and straight whiskey,
Slow horses and fast women.

--Kenneth Rexroth

This poem is in honor of my one hundred and seventieth consecutive day of reading Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. I don't think there were any Elks' Clubs in Combray.

Poem of the Day: Ernest Dowson

Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae

Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine 

There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed 

Upon my soul begtween the kisses and the wine; 

And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

     Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head; 

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion. 

All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat, 

Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay; 

Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet; 

But I was desolate and sick of an old passion, 

     When I awoke and found the dawn was gray; 

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion. 

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind, 

Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng, 

Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind; 

But I was desolate and sick of an old passion, 

     Yea, all the time, because the dance was long: 

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion. 

I cried for madder music and for stronger wine 

But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire, 

Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine; 

And I am desolate and sick of an old passion, 

     Yea hungry for the lips of my desire: 

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

--Ernest Dowson 

What is there to say about a poet whose two most famous poems are famous for having given titles to works more famous than the poems themselves? In this case, a certain novel by Margaret Mitchell and a song by Cole Porter. The other one is in a poem called "Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam." The titles of both poems come from Horace's odes: This one means "I am not what I was under the reign of the good Cynara."