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.
No longer mourn for me when I am dead Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell Give warning to the world that I am fled From this vile world with vilest worms to dwell. Nay, if you read this line, remember not The hand that writ it, for I love you so That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot, If thinking on me then should make you woe. O, if, I say, you look upon this verse When I, perhaps, compounded am with clay, Do not so much as my poor name rehearse, But let your love even with my life decay, Lest the wise world should look into your moan And mock you with me after I am gone.
Shakespeare's #71 was Mark Van Doren's favorite, the only sonnet (he felt) in which the closing couplet is not a mere afterthought or summary. What's your favorite?
Here is an excerpt. from "Two Cultures of the Prose Poem" by John Taylor
Ponge's strategy for destroying concepts provides a telling parallel to T. S. Eliot's notion of "forcing . . . language into its meaning." [In "Great American Prose Poems," David] Lehman includes Eliot's strange and initially quite violent prose poem "Hysteria," dated 1917, about the narrator being so "involved" in a woman's laughter that he is "lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat.") These acts of linguistic and per ceptual violence—"destruction was my Béatrice," claimed Mallarmé—belong to the modern poet's and prose-poet's role. Proverbial French "abstractions" in poetry often represent a paradoxical desire to break through them and, by this act, to catch sight of unusual slices or levels of reality..
Elsewhere I have suggested that American poets tend to begin with a fact and work toward an idea, while their French counterparts begin with an idea and work toward a fact. In the French prose poem, one of these initial ideas may indeed entail smashing through ideas, as the poet—rather like Edson's taxi—would smash through a brick wall keeping him or her from an ardently desired reality. In other words, for a prose poet like Ponge, the objectifying poetic process, aiming at grasping the "thing-in-itself," must necessarily take into account the ab-original idea, the inconvertible starting point, which is often the Cartesian cogito ergo sum as well as its logical consequence: "Because I am, the outside world also exists." Because Ponge's poems are not so much about things as about how he endeavors to break through conceptual obstacles (beginning with the solipsistic Cartesian departure point) and thus about how he envisions writing about the things in question, the paradox of his ideally self-effacing strategy is that he emerges, as a narrator, all the more imposingly. Yet his point about concepts is well made, and his language is exceedingly well crafted. In The Garden of Languages, Macé similarly identifies a "cancer of sense," as he declares in one prose poem, that can hatch "its black eggs beneath a thousand metaphors of love." Could it be that somewhere in this neighborhood exists a meeting point for French and American writers, where the French aspiration to break through concepts and attain a kind of "reality" encounters the demotic proclivities that Lehman discerns in American prose poetry?
In any event, Lehman rightly underscores the French contribution to the prose poem. Like most commentators, he attributes its birth to Aloysius Bertrand's collection Gaspard de la Nuit, posthumously published in 1842. Such an attribution seconds remarks made by Baudelaire [pictured above], who paid homage to Bertrand as a mentor when he began composing his own prose poems in 1857. Baudelaire's efforts were eventually gathered in the now-famous volume Petits poèmes en prose, which was first entitled Le Spleen de Paris when an initial sampling of it appeared in 1864. Soon thereafter, Rimbaud arrived on the scene. He boldly added new dimensions to the genre with A Season in Hell and Illuminations. As Lehman aptly remarks,the prose poems in Illuminations are like dream landscapes and journeys, visionary fragments, brilliant but discontinuous. They represent a considerable advance in abstraction and compression, and they are revolutionary, too, in recommending a breakdown in order, 'a willful derangement of the senses,' as a necessary regimen.
Finally, Mallarmé, Max Jacob (1876-1944), Henri Michaux (1899-1984), Pierre Reverdy (1889-1960), René Char (1907-88), and the aforementioned Ponge, "made Paris the indisputable capital of the prose poem," as Lehman points out.
Add to that list Jean Follain (1903-71), a selection of whose mysterious, subtly crafted prose poems have now once again been made available in English, in the White Pine Press volume. (Some versions included in this important volume were originally published, long ago, in small press editions.) Follain strikes the perfect balance between stylistic grace and semantic enigma. He employs not the slightest formal trick. He does not need to: his gaze over the surface of the world actually (and discretely) probes very deep. Besides bringing out the "chant [that] goes up from every object"—with so much more naturalness than Ponge—and creating touching, melancholy atmospheres, Follain ponders time and again the significance of an everyday world that seemingly possesses no more coherence than a myriad of simultaneous disparate occurrences. He juxtaposes the occurrences in a way depicting life as a hodge-podge, at best a motley tapestry, of vanishing moments:
A boy is troubled on a day petals pour down and dogs are stolid. Girls get straight up out of bed, sun falls on their torsos, a wasp buzzes in the fold of a curtain; the calendar on the wall grows warm. Men are drinking in the blind alley where some feeble plants poke up. A conference searches for peace without finding it. In a bedroom, a turn-of-the-century breastplate gleams, well polished. When French regiments wore ones like it, Maurice Maindron wrote cloak-and-dagger novels; he loved armor, a love inspired by his taste for coleoptera. Now a May beetle the color of dead leaves proceeds across the glittering breastplate at this moment—possible as all things are possible—this moment which will never return.
(translation: Mary Feeney and William Matthews)
As precursors of the English-language prose poem, Lehman cites the King James Bible, Shakespeare's prose (in Hamlet), John Donne's sermons, Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and Hell," and other pertinent examples. Let me add that similar prose-poem antecedents in French literature can be identified as far back as Aucassin et Nicolette (late twelfth or early thirteenth century), a love story alternating verse and poetic prose, and perhaps even in the metrically cadenced prose sermons of Saint Bernard (1091-1153). As to more recent (pre-Baudelairean) periods, prototypes of the prose poem emerge in certain prose passages of the plays of Molière (1622-73), in various "pensées" by Pascal (1623-62), in sermons by Bossuet (1627-1704), in Télémaque by Fénelon (1651-1715), in sundry descriptions of nature by Rousseau (1712-78) or Chateaubriand (1768-1848), not to forget in some of Montesquieu's Persian Letters (1721).
Click here for the entire essay as pubnlished in Michigan Quartery Review,Spring 2005. See, too, https://poets.org/poet/john-taylor
As all these, through her eyes, have stopt her ears.
On my First Son
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy.
Seven years tho' wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O, could I lose all father now! For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon 'scap'd world's and flesh's rage,
And if no other misery, yet age?
Rest in soft peace, and, ask'd, say, "Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry."
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such,
As what he loves may never like too much.
see also https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2024/06/sonnet-73-great-poems-of-the-world-episode-2-with-david-lehman-and-mitch-sisskind-.html
I found a ball of grass among the hay And proged it as I passed and went away And when I looked I fancied something stirred And turned again and hoped to catch the bird When out an old mouse bolted in the wheat With all her young ones hanging at her teats She looked so odd and so grotesque to me I ran and wondered what the thing could be And pushed the knapweed bunches where I stood When the mouse hurried from the crawling brood The young ones squeaked and when I went away She found her nest again among the hay. The water o’er the pebbles scarce could run And broad old cesspools glittered in the sun.
*
Solitude
There is a charm in Solitude that cheers A feeling that the world knows nothing of A green delight the wounded mind endears After the hustling world is broken off Whose whole delight was crime at good to scoff Green solitude his prison pleasure yields The bitch fox heeds him not--birds seem to laugh He lives the Crusoe of his lonely fields Which dark green oaks his noontide leisure shields
*
Clare on grammar: “do I write intelligable I am generally understood tho I do not use that awkward squad of pointings called commas colons semicolons &c & for the very reason that altho they are drilled hourly daily weekly by every boarding school Miss who pretends to gossip in correspondence they do not know their proper exercise for they even set grammarians at loggerheads and no one can asign them their proper places.”
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Address delivered by Abraham Lincoln at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. November 19, 1863
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Only until this cigarette is ended, A little moment at the end of all, While on the floor the quiet ashes fall, And in the firelight to a lance extended, Bizarrely with the jazzing music blended, The broken shadow dances on the wall, I will permit my memory to recall The vision of you, by all my dreams attended. And then adieu,—farewell!—the dream is done. Yours is a face of which I can forget The color and the features, every one, The words not ever, and the smiles not yet; But in your day this moment is the sun Upon a hill, after the sun has set.
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
SYON lyes waste, and Thy Ierusalem, O Lord, is falne to vtter desolation; Against Thy Prophets, and Thy holy men, The sinne hath wrought a fatal combination; Prophan'd Thy name, Thy worship ouerthrowne, And made Thee liuing Lord, a God vnknowne.
Thy powerfull lawes, Thy wonders of creation, Thy word incarnate, glorious heauen, darke hell, Lye shadowed vnder man's degeneration; Thy Christ still crucifi'd for doing well; Impiety, O Lord, sits on Thy throne, Which makes Thee liuing Lord, A God vnknowne.
Man's superstition hath Thy truth entomb'd, His atheisme againe her pomps defaceth; That sensuall vnsatiable vaste wombe, Of Thy seene Church, Thy vnseene Church disgraceth; There liues no truth with them that seeme Thine own, Which makes Thee liuing Lord, a God vnknowne.
Yet vnto Thee Lord — mirrour of transgression — Wee who for earthly idols haue forsaken, Thy heauenly image — sinlesse, pure impression — And so in nets of vanity lye taken, All desolate implore that to Thine owne, Lord, Thou no longer liue a God vnknowne.
Yet Lord let Israel's plagues not be eternall, Nor sinne for euer cloud Thy sacred mountaines, Nor with false flames spirituall but infernall, Dry up Thy Mercie's euer springing fountaines : Rather, sweet Iesus, fill vp time and come, To yeeld the sinne her euerlasting doome.
from Caelica by Fulke Greville. "That sensual insatiable vast womb."
So, we'll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.
For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.
Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a roving
By the light of the moon.
from "Don Juan, Canto I"
I want a hero: an uncommon want, When every year and month sends forth a new one, Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, The age discovers he is not the true one; Of such as these I should not care to vaunt, I’ll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan— We all have seen him, in the pantomime, Sent to the devil somewhat ere his time.
Vernon, the butcher Cumberland, Wolfe, Hawke, Prince Ferdinand, Granby, Burgoyne, Keppel, Howe, Evil and good, have had their tithe of talk, And fill’d their sign posts then, like Wellesley now; Each in their turn like Banquo’s monarchs stalk, Followers of fame, ‘nine farrow’ of that sow: France, too, had Buonaparte and Dumourier Recorded in the Moniteur and Courier.
Barnave, Brissot, Condorcet, Mirabeau, Petion, Clootz, Danton, Marat, La Fayette, Were French, and famous people, as we know: And there were others, scarce forgotten yet, Joubert, Hoche, Marceau, Lannes, Desaix, Moreau, With many of the military set, Exceedingly remarkable at times, But not at all adapted to my rhymes.
Nelson was once Britannia’s god of war, And still should be so, but the tide is turn’d; There’s no more to be said of Trafalgar, ’Tis with our hero quietly inurn’d; Because the army ’s grown more popular, At which the naval people are concern’d; Besides, the prince is all for the land-service, Forgetting Duncan, Nelson, Howe, and Jervis.
Brave men were living before Agamemnon And since, exceeding valorous and sage, A good deal like him too, though quite the same none; But then they shone not on the poet’s page, And so have been forgotten:—I condemn none, But can’t find any in the present age Fit for my poem (that is, for my new one); So, as I said, I’ll take my friend Don Juan.
Most epic poets plunge ‘in medias res’ (Horace makes this the heroic turnpike road), And then your hero tells, whene’er you please, What went before—by way of episode, While seated after dinner at his ease, Beside his mistress in some soft abode, Palace, or garden, paradise, or cavern, Which serves the happy couple for a tavern.
That is the usual method, but not mine— My way is to begin with the beginning; The regularity of my design Forbids all wandering as the worst of sinning, And therefore I shall open with a line (Although it cost me half an hour in spinning) Narrating somewhat of Don Juan’s father, And also of his mother, if you’d rather.
In Seville was he born, a pleasant city, Famous for oranges and women—he Who has not seen it will be much to pity, So says the proverb—and I quite agree; Of all the Spanish towns is none more pretty, Cadiz perhaps—but that you soon may see; Don Juan’s parents lived beside the river, A noble stream, and call’d the Guadalquivir.
His father’s name was Jose—Don, of course,— A true Hidalgo, free from every stain Of Moor or Hebrew blood, he traced his source Through the most Gothic gentlemen of Spain; A better cavalier ne’er mounted horse, Or, being mounted, e’er got down again, Than Jose, who begot our hero, who Begot—but that ’s to come—Well, to renew:
His mother was a learned lady, famed For every branch of every science known In every Christian language ever named, With virtues equall’d by her wit alone, She made the cleverest people quite ashamed, And even the good with inward envy groan, Finding themselves so very much exceeded In their own way by all the things that she did.
Her memory was a mine: she knew by heart All Calderon and greater part of Lope, So that if any actor miss’d his part She could have served him for the prompter’s copy; For her Feinagle’s were an useless art, And he himself obliged to shut up shop—he Could never make a memory so fine as That which adorn’d the brain of Donna Inez.
Her favourite science was the mathematical, Her noblest virtue was her magnanimity, Her wit (she sometimes tried at wit) was Attic all, Her serious sayings darken’d to sublimity; In short, in all things she was fairly what I call A prodigy—her morning dress was dimity, Her evening silk, or, in the summer, muslin, And other stuffs, with which I won’t stay puzzling.
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