XLV
In this, our last Poetry Pairing for the school year, Marianne Moore’s “That Harp You Play So Well” is matched with the essay “Sing to Me, O Muse (But Keep It Brief),” by David Lehman.
To view all of the Poetry Pairings we’ve published in collaboration with the Poetry Foundation since 2010, and to find activity sheets to help with teaching them, visit our collection.
Editor of the influential literary magazine The Dial and author of several collections, Marianne Moore achieved both literary success and a degree of celebrity, famous for her tricorn hat and cape.
That Harp You Play So Well
By Marianne Moore
From “Pouters and Fantails”
Oh, David, if I had
Your power, I should be glad–
In harping, with the sling,
In patient reasoning!
Blake, Homer, Job and you,
Have made old wine-skins new.
Your energies have wrought
Stout continents of thought.
But David, if the heart
Be brass, what boots the art
Of exorcizing wrong,
Of harping to a song?
The sceptre and the ring
And every royal thing
Will fail. Grief’s lustiness
Must cure that harp’s distress.
In the 2014 Sunday Book Review essay “Sing to Me, O Muse (But Keep It Brief),” David Lehman writes about what could be lost in a technology-oriented culture.
Maybe I dreamed it. Don Draper sips Canadian Club from a coffee mug on Craig Ferguson’s late-night talk show. “Are you on Twitter?” the host asks. “No,” Draper says. “I don’t” — he pauses before pronouncing the distasteful verb — “tweet.” Next question. “Do you read a lot of poetry?” Though the hero of “Mad Men” is seen reading Dante’s “Inferno” in one season of the show and heard reciting Frank O’Hara in another, the question seems to come from left field. “Poetry isn’t really celebrated anymore in our culture,” Draper says, to which Ferguson retorts, “It can be — if you can write in units of 140 keystrokes.” Commercial break.
The laugh line reveals a shrewd insight into the subject of “poetry in the digital age,” a panel-discussion perennial. The participants agree that texting and blogs will influence the practice of poetry in style, content and method of composition. Surely we may expect the same of a wildly popular social medium with a formal requirement as stringent as the 140-character limit. (To someone with a streak of mathematical mysticism, the relation of that number to the number of lines in a sonnet is a thing of beauty.) What Twitter offers is ultimate immediacy expressed with ultimate concision. “Whatever else Twitter is, it’s a literary form,” the critic Kathryn Schulz has written. True, the hard-to-shake habit causes its share of problems, “distractibility increase” and other disturbing symptoms. Nevertheless there is a reason Schulz got hooked on this “wide-ranging, intellectually stimulating, bighearted, super fun” activity.
The desire to make a friend of the new technology obliges us to overlook some major flaws: The Internet is hell on lining, spacing, italics; line breaks and indentation are often obscured in electronic transmission. The integrity of the poetic line can be a serious casualty. Still, it is fruitless to quarrel with the actuality of change, though in private we may revel in our physical books and even, if we like, write with pencil on graph paper or type our thoughts with the Smith-Corona to which we have a sentimental attachment. One room in the 2013 “Drawn to Language” exhibit at the University of Southern California’s Fisher Museum of Art was devoted to Susan Silton’s site-specific installation of a circle of tables on which sat 10 manual typewriters of different vintages. It was moving to behold the machines not only as objects of nostalgia in an attractive arrangement but as metonymies of the experience of writing in the 20th century. Seeing the typewriters in that room, I felt as I do when the talk touches on the acquisition of an author’s papers by a university library. It’s odd to be a member of the last generation to have “papers” in this archival and material sense. Odd for an era to slip into a museum while you watch.
The one-minute poem may not be far off. With its need for speed, Twitter’s 140-character constraint brings the clock into the game. Poetry — a byte-size kind of poetry — has been, or soon will be, a benefit of attention deficit disorder. (This prediction is not necessarily made in disparagement.) Unlike the telephone, social media relies on the written, not the spoken, word, and I wonder what will happen when hip-hop and spoken-word practices tangle with the virtues of concision, bite and wit consistent with the rules of the Twitter feed. On the other hand, it is conceivable that the sentence I have just composed will be anachronistic in a couple of years. Among my favorite oxymorons is “ancient computer,” applied to my own desktop.
https://archive.nytimes.com/learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/05/13/poetry-pairing-that-harp-you-play-so-well/
Desolation Row
-- Bob Dylan
When we two parted
In silence and tears,
Half broken-hearted
To sever for years,
Pale grew thy cheek and cold,
Colder thy kiss;
Truly that hour foretold
Sorrow to this.
The dew of the morning
Sunk chill on my brow—
It felt like the warning
Of what I feel now.
Thy vows are all broken,
And light is thy fame;
I hear thy name spoken,
And share in its shame.
They name thee before me,
A knell to mine ear;
A shudder comes o'er me—
Why wert thou so dear?
They know not I knew thee,
Who knew thee too well—
Long, long shall I rue thee,
Too deeply to tell.
In secret we met—
In silence I grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee?—
With silence and tears.
The head of each stalk is heavy with the gold of our error.
Look! Look! he is climbing the last light
Who knows neither Time nor error, and under
Whose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swings
Into shadow.
Long now,
The last thrush is still, the last bat
Now cruises in his sharp hieroglyphics.His wisdom
Is ancient, too, and immense.The star
Is steady, like Plato, over the mountain.
If there were no wind we might, we think, hear
The earth grind on its axis, or history
Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar.
Ah, wherefore with infection should he live,
And with his presence grace impiety,
That sin by him advantage should achieve
And lace itself with his society?
Why should false painting imitate his cheek
And steal dead seeing of his living hue?
Why should poor beauty indirectly seek
Roses of shadow, since his rose is true?
Why should he live, now Nature bankrout is,
Beggared of blood to blush through lively veins,
For she hath no exchequer now but his,
And, proud of many, lives upon his gains?
O, him she stores, to show what wealth she had
In days long since, before these last so bad.
Sestina for Susan Sontag
--by Tom Disch
Susan, you must allow me to condescend
This once. I suppose you mean well, but
Is Godot what they really need off there
in Sarajevo? Wouldn't it be more worthwhile,
And amusing, to offer some gallows comedy
About the awful life they've all been living?
Of course, everyone needs to earn a living,
And Beckett may be a better bet than "Muse, descend,
And help me write, right now, the comedy
All Yugoslavia's been waiting for." Better the butt
Of a few ephemeral lampoons while
The neverending crisis lasts than for there
To be new proofs that the Muse is rarely there
When she is summoned. Bad faith? Who's not living,
After all, one kind of lie or another? And while
There are hopefuls and a stage to send
Clowns on, there's life at the box office. But
Can't we, in hindsight, posit an original comedy?
One germane to the situation: a comedy
of terrorism that would show unshaven Serbs their
Visages, complacently corrupt as Joey Butt-
Afuoco, smirking and working for a living
In prime time; show Croats gloating at the end
Of what little civilization they had; as, meanwhile,
Muslims pray for a new jihad. What would Simone Weil
Have woven from such contradictories, what comedy
of a Godot-less and godless world without end,
Rhymeless and unreasoning? Susan, Susan, there
Would be more comfort in Sarajevo from the Living
Theater's Frankenstein than from the droning sackbut
Of Samuel Beckett. Leave them alone. But,
If you must meddle, offer an evening of Kurt Weill.
Have Bob Hope tell them life's worth living.
Appease them with sentimental comedy
By anyone but Beckett, and let is moral be: There,
With the grace of God, go we. But don't condescent.
Pretend you're human. And smile. Send but
A sentence to where they're waiting: Life's worthwhile,
And all's forgiven in the comedy we are still living.
--- by Tom Disch (Poetry magazine, March 1996)
(Ed note: In 1993, Susan Sontag went to Sarajevo to stage a production of Waiting for Godot. Thomas Michael Disch was a celebrated American science fiction writer, critic, and poet. You can read more about him here. sdl)
An odd duck and a great one!
Spring and Fall
to a young child (1880)
Click here to see how the fellows feel about Bob Dylan's "Desolation Tow."
Afternoon darkens into evening. A man falls deeper and deeper into the slow spiral of sleep, into the drift of it, the length of it, through what feels like mist, and comes at last to an open door through which he passes without knowing why, then again without knowing why goes to a room where he sits and waits while the room seems to close around him and the dark is darker than any he has known, and he feels something forming within him without being sure what it is, its hold on him growing, as if a story were about to unfold, in which two characters, Pleasure and Pain, commit the same crime, the one that is his, that he will confess to again and again, until it means nothing.
from Almost Invisible. For other poems we have posted by Mark Strand, along with notes on them, click here and here.
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
-- the sublime last stanza of "Fern Hill"
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art–
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors–
No–yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever–or else swoon to death.
The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle.
Why not I with thine?—
See the mountains kiss high heaven
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth
And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
What is all this sweet work worth
If thou kiss not me?
O wearisome condition of humanity!
Born under one law, to another bound;
Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity;
Created sick, commanded to be sound.
What meaneth nature by these diverse laws?
Passion and reason, self-division cause.
Is it the mark or majesty of power
To make offenses that it may forgive?
Nature herself doth her own self deflower
To hate those errors she herself doth give.
For how should man think that he may not do,
If nature did not fail and punish, too?
Tyrant to others, to herself unjust,
Only commands things difficult and hard,
Forbids us all things which it knows is lust,
Makes easy pains, unpossible reward.
If nature did not take delight in blood,
She would have made more easy ways to good.
We that are bound by vows and by promotion,
With pomp of holy sacrifice and rites,
To teach belief in good and still devotion,
To preach of heaven’s wonders and delights;
Yet when each of us in his own heart looks
He finds the God there, far unlike his books.
Ed note: Aldous Huxley uses the first six line as an epigraph for his novel Point Counter Point.
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.
Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
