The Best American Poetry

"Strike into it Unasked" [poem by Gjertrud Schnackenberg]

"Strike Into It Unasked" [by Gjertrud Schnackenberg above and below left; below right, Gerard Manley Hopkins]

 

Poetry’s “impulse, like electricity, crossing the space, leaves its signature.”  
                                                                                  --W.S.Graham

 

 No wonder that a flash of sparks
Spills out from what I touch—the LaserJet,

Brimming with static shock,
Suspends invisible electron-clouds

Across the laser-paper’s Radiant White
To print “The Windhover”

Electrostatically—
Hopkins’ creation-poem, spelled out

In powder-particle black sparks hard-hurled
From underlying fire—

The substrate of his poetry
The veiled fire of Christ,

Suffused, incarnate, metaphysical—
And poetry is where

A bird of prey is teetering
Among wind-angles

Intermittently, a fleck
Amid cloud-rhythms, then

A flickering along the morning’s
Diamond-edged peripheries,

At such a height, it’s there—
Then not—then there again—

Without my realizing it,
Between “The Windhover” and me,

A space is opened, sparking, live,
And I’ve reached through it, unaware

It will flame out, will flare
In a split-second of brute force

To jump a gap that’s imperceptible
Until I touch the page, and instantly

Hopkins crosses the space
Without a step—

The wonder of it, that the briefest touch
Can instigate a shock that’s mutual,

As if sheer being, in and of itself,
Is equally as shocked by my existence

As by its own, and equally as startled
To exist as I am here—

Electrons’ phantom-loads, drawn off,
Reel back, and hurt me

With a strike as unequivocal
As if it’s understood—a law, a truth,

A given—that brute force alone keeps
For itself the power to disclose

The presence of a shining residue
Pent in the fallen world—

Fallen, but even so, The world is charged
With power enough to stop the heart—

Electrons, always in the present tense,
Without locality or mass

Or temperature or light—invisible,
Yet capable of spreading in a flash

Across the surfaces of all that is—
Like consciousness lit

For a moment by the thought
That God is worldling, worldling now

And here—even the blearest things,
Objects we overlook, inanimate,

Inert—the sparking doorknobs,
Shining paper dust, magnetic

Clinging combs, the laser printer’s
Thermoplastic case—

Even the blearest things can stun,
Be stunned, are sites

Of inscape-metaphysics where
Materia has taken hold

Of “whatness,” “suchness,” “isness,”
“Hereness,” laced with fire of stress—

But even so, such objects only pend
As fragments of a universe

Awaiting a beholder—
Consciousness—

The outbreak of a hidden voltage
Stricken from the ore

Of Hopkins’ poetry: titanium,
The paradisal mineral

Whose lightweight metal sheds
The brightest, clearest-selved sparks

And most heartstopping firefalls
Before it lets its shining dust

Sheer off, go dark, fall back into itself—
Like humankind—How fast

 His firedint . . . is gone . . .
In an . . . enormous dark—I stand among

My own footfalls, the imprints of my soles
Mysteriously electrified

And vanishing across the carpet
Where I’ve trod and trod, as if my purpose

All along has been to try
To make it visible—the field of force

That hovers over Hopkins’ poetry
And brims at margins, boundaries,

White peripheries,
The blinding thresholds where I try

To cross a space as charged and bare
And emptied as the room at 85

St. Stephen’s Green, where Hopkins left
His battered shoes behind, because we’re meant

To come to God barefoot, and left
The treadmire toil there (“there”

Meaning “here”) Footfretted in it—dust—
And left the footfalls of his poetry

Behind, in disarray,
Scattered, and insufficiently “explained”—

(“Novel rhythmic effects,” dismissed
By literary interlocutors

As needless, odd, and disagreeable—
A later critic was “repulsed”)—

But poetry’s selfbeing selves itself
Without self-explanation, selves

Without explanatory power,
The way divine creation does—

The way the starry night
Appears—

And Hopkins, as a Greek professor, knew
The ancient word for the divine

Creation is poiema—poetry—
And, as a poet, he discerned

Poiema’s fire is rapturous and wild
And sudden as a talons-first assault

Out of the blue—Christ’s
Striking-in—and knew

That poetry is where a falcon stalls
Midair, prepares to jettison

The cloudbuilt, white
Wingbeaten falcon-footholds

Where contrary winds have brought
The falcon to its highest pitch

Of being—heights upwind
From which to dive headfirst

And upside-down, hard-hurled,
With wings pressed shut,

Its livid, bright, outriding feet
Drawn back and up,

As if a falcon’s feet are useless, weak,
Superfluous impediments

To raptor-plummeting—
Useless, until

The final instant of a strike
So shocking, so unguessed-at, unforeseen,

No prey on earth is able to prepare
For how a nearly imperceptible

And distant hovering
Transforms itself into a

Fraction-of-a-second mortal blow,
The instrike, talons-first, a heralding

Of chaos in the yellow talon-flames
And blackout-wingbeats mantling

The sight of it—the site
Where He consumes the flesh and blood

Of His annihilated prey,
Whose lacerated innocence

He takes into Himself, the way
The world’s wildfire subsumes

A single flame, to signify
No partial flame exists,

All flames are whole—
As He was first internalized

When He had selved Himself
Into the first and last

Immortal sustenance,
So now His prey is selved

As it becomes a part
Of Him, the Eucharist reversed—

As in a flash, a circuit, broken
Violently, is violently restored,

Its suddenness the signal trait
That Jesus emphasized, a sign

The gap is closed between
The kingdom and creation where

God is upstream, and flows
To Christ our Lord— 

“Yet I am idle,” Hopkins wrote,
Burned out, a socket scorched

Through its interior, without
A visible connection

To its source—useless,
Without effect, like poetry unable

To explain itself, or say
What good it does, or what it’s for—

A transcreation of the downstream power
Coursing through what is,

In a creation where all things
 Are brimming with a brilliant signature

That will fall, gall, and gash
Itself across the space it opens,

Crossing it—
The way a windhover’s

Headlong freefall crazes
The atmosphere with friction-speed

And turns itself into a shining trace—
A blowing-by

As rapturous as if creation
Were an end unto itself

And it’s enough that poetry
Strike into it unasked, 

And leave a spilling out of sparks
Torn from the firedint’s continuum

Before the strike—a glimpse
Of the creation, surging past-- 

 

from The Paris Review

 

from The Paris Review

The Conqueror Worm [poem by Edgar Allen Poe]

Who better to usher in Halloween than Edgar Allan Poe, the master of horror, suspense, and the macabre. Does your lifelong fear of being buried alive originate with Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”? Do you ever lie awake imagining a heart is beating from beneath the floorboards? You have Poe to thank for your nightmares. He brilliantly locates our collective fears and animates them in the short stories and poems written over the course of his brief and mysterious life. His ballad “Annabel Lee” hovers over Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,” whose protagonist’s first love is “Annabel Leigh.”  (“When I was a child and she was a child, my little Annabel [Leigh] was no nymphet to me”). Then there’s  “The Conqueror Worm,” an appropriately creepy poem that comes to us from beyond the grave. Poe describes a theater performance; the actors are “mimes,” the hero is a large worm that eats the actors. The curtain falls. Boo!

The Conqueror Worm

Lo! ’t is a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.

Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly—
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their Condor wings
Invisible Wo!

That motley drama—oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased for evermore
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.

But see, amid the mimic rout,
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.

Out—out are the lights—out all!
And, over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
While the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, “Man,”
And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.

 

        -- Edgar Allan Poe

(Ed note: The poster, above, is from the final of three films by British director Michael Reeves before his untimely death from a barbiturate overdose at age 25. Have you seen it? -- sdl)

---

The Bravest Grope a Little [by Amanda Smeltz]

A brief reading of Emily Dickinson’s We Grow Accustomed to the Dark.

We grow accustomed to the Dark --
When light is put away --
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Goodbye --

A Moment -- We uncertain step
For newness of the night --
Then -- fit our Vision to the Dark --
And meet the Road -- erect --

And so of larger -- Darkness --
Those Evenings of the Brain --
When not a Moon disclose a sign --
Or Star -- come out -- within --

The Bravest -- grope a little --
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead --
But as they learn to see --

Either the Darkness alters --
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight --
And Life steps almost straight. 

The poem formally performs the encounter with darkness Dickinson describes:

Physical sensation of lights going out in stanza one.

Halting attempt to get one’s bearings back, stanza two.

A turn toward metaphoric darkness – & all its possible meanings – in stanza three.

Then! Ethical instruction in stanza four. The Bravest – grope a little…

And in stanza five, the results: what happens if someone in the darkness is brave.

I admire the halting motions of the early stanzas of this poem, all those dashed clauses inside the lines, emulating the uncertainty of being in literal dark. Then in the last two stanzas, the caesurae, the halting go away almost entirely.  She suggests, in the lines’ fluidity, what gracefulness awaits the brave.

I especially admire the slant rhyme at the poem’s end: sight / midnight / straight. Dickinson wants us to be brave in the dark and grope around for insight. Noted. But that slant rhyme lets us know she doesn’t think life will go perfectly straight from our bravery. I like that measured encouragement. Dickinson knows too much about life to suggest we’ll get perfect sight back after being plunged into darkness. Anyone who’s grieved a death or had something wretched and wrong happen knows that. Losses are real.

But I also like that mischievous moment where she says, listen. If you grope around in the dark, as you should, you will crack your skull into a tree. That moment where I stub my toe – Fuck! – because I was rooting around in my dark kitchen at 3 am for treats and end up with a bodega BLT all over my couch, a pig in shit.

What am I trying to say?  It’s hard to feel okay when I am having an Evening of the Brain. When life plunges me into darkness. I won’t feel okay and I shouldn’t. Anyone who tells me to smile at my job while I feel lost can go pound sand. But if I can at least muster the courage to feel around a bit in my discomfort and confusion… perhaps I will find new contours in the room. Or at least the roast beef in the back of my fridge. 

-- Amanda Smeltz

from the archive; first posted October 14, 2013

"Sprezzatura" [by Robert Hass]

Sprezzatura

Eugenio Montale asked me if there was an American word
for sprezzatura, particularly with respect to poetry.
In respetto di poesia, he said. And I said yes, in American
We call it ‘moose’ and mentioned several poets,
Frank O‘Hara among them, who were quite famous,
As fame goes in our sort of work, for their moose.
He wondered if there were an American expression
To convey the general concept of ‘Eugenio Montale.’
And I said, Yes, we call it ‘George Seferis.’ I also observed
—I was showing off, but how often  do you get to talk
to Eugenio Montale--that, in my view, the prose of  Seferis,
Especially his diaries from the last years of the war
And the slow waking to the depth of that devastation after,
Were even greater than his poems, though his poems 
At their best gave off pure light, like the glare
From the white walls on the cliffs above the harbor in Skios
Which could make the eyes ache. He canted his head
Politely and asked if among Americans the worship
Of the Virgin Mary was a custom. And I said that it was
And that in the cities of the Middle West and probably
The towns, it was especially intense among the mothers
Of children with grave illnesses who heaped flowers
In enormous quantities before her altar and he nodded.
And they light candles? he asked. And I said, Yes, candles.

from Summer Smoke, the brilliant new collection by Robert Hass (Ecco, 2020). Hass was the guest editor of the 2001 edition of The Best American Poetry. Photo credit: Miriam Berkley.

From the archive; first posted September 25, 2020

Happy birthday, Dorothy Parker (and Stacey Lehman! -- on August 18)

Happy Birthday, Dorothy Parker & Your "quondam dreams"

Symptom Recital

I do not like my state of mind;
I'm bitter, querulous, unkind.
I hate my legs, I hate my hands,
I do not yearn for lovelier lands.
I dread the dawn's recurrent light;
I hate to go to bed at night.
I snoot at simple, earnest folk.
I cannot take the gentlest joke.
I find no peace in paint or type.
My world is but a lot of tripe.
I'm disillusioned, empty-breasted.
For what I think, I'd be arrested.
I am not sick, I am not well.
My quondam dreams are shot to hell.
My soul is crushed, my spirit sore;
I do not like me any more.
I cavil, quarrel, grumble, grouse.
I pond on the narrow house.
I shudder at the thought of men . . .
I'm due to fall in love again.

--Dorothy Parker

 

Poem in the Manner of Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker,
who wrote witty stories,
did not foresee
that spectacles would be-
come fashion accessories.
“Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear glasses.”

Today, for a lark,
I sat in Washington Square Park
I thought of Miss Parker,
and what she might say
assessing the spectacles of our day:
“Even the nicest lasses
Have tattoos on their asses.”

-- David Lehman

"Video Blues" [by Mary Jo Salter]

Video Blues

My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy,
and likes to rent her movies, for a treat.
It makes some evenings harder to enjoy.

The list of actresses who might employ
him as their slave is too long to repeat.
(My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy,

Carole Lombard, Paulette Goddard, coy
Jean Arthur with that voice as dry as wheat ...)
It makes some evenings harder to enjoy.

Does he confess all this just to annoy
a loyal spouse? I know I can't compete.
My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy.

And can't a woman have her dreamboats? Boy,
I wouldn't say my life is incomplete,
but some evening I could certainly enjoy

two hours with Cary Grant as my own toy.
I guess, though, we were destined not to meet.
My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy,
which makes some evenings harder to enjoy.

Mary Jo Salter

"Love's Philosophy" [by Percy Bysshe Shelley]

Love's Philosophy

The fountains mingle with the river,
And the rivers with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix forever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In another's being mingle--
Why not I with thine?

See, the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower could be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea;--
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley (August 4, 1792 - July 8,1822). 

Hello Johnny! from Don Juan Canto I, CXXIII [by Lord Byron]

'Tis sweet to hear the watch-dog's honest bark
     Bay deep-mouth'd welcome as we draw near home;
'Tis sweet to know there is an eye will mark
     Our coming, and look brighter when we come;

                    -- from Don Juan Canto I, CXIII by Lord Byron

(Ed note: Every reading of Don Juan yields a new pleasurable discovery. Johnny wasn't in our lives when I first read Byron's poem so this passage did not leave a lasting impression. -- sdh)

On His Birthday: Ben Jonson’s “My Picture Left in Scotland” [by David Lehman]

Ben Jonson (born June 11, 1572, in London).

My Picture Left in Scotland

I now think Love is rather deaf than blind,
      For else it could not be
           That she,
     Whom I adore so much, should so slight me
And cast my love behind.
I’m sure my language to her was as sweet,
     And every close did meet
     In sentence of as subtle feet,
     As hath the youngest He
That sits in shadow of Apollo’s tree.

O, but my conscious fears,
          That fly my thoughts between,
          Tell me that she hath seen
     My hundred of gray hairs,
     Told seven and forty years
   Read so much waste, as she cannot embrace
   My mountain belly and my rocky face;
And all these through her eyes have stopp’d her ears.

Ben Jonson (1572-1637) wrote, to bend one of his own formulations, not for a time but for the ages. England’s first poet laureate, the acknowledged leader of the “tribe of Ben,” the most melodious of the musically rich poets of the seventeenth century, Jonson enjoyed an academic reputation that was, I had thought, beyond dispute. William Pritchard praised Ian Donaldson’s biography (Oxford UP) in the Hudson Review (“superb”) but not without raising a worrisome question. Is it because Jonson’s verse is accessible that critics and scholars have neglected him in favor of the major metaphysicals, John Donne, Andrew Marvell and George Herbert?

It came as news to me that Jonson’s stock has slumped, but I trust Pritchard’s judgment on this score. Pritchard valiantly defends the poet, quoting liberally from his plays and closing with a beautiful stanza from the Cary and Morison ode. But nothing in the piece is quite equal to its opening, a quotation from T. S. Eliot’s essay on the poet: “To be universally accepted; to be damned by the praise that quenches all desire to read the book; to be afflicted by the imputation of the virtues which excite the least pleasure; and to be read only by historians and antiquaries — this is the most perfect conspiracy of approval.”

I want to advocate Jonson’s cause not merely because I share his birthday (June 11) but more pertinently because he balances plain speech with metaphorical invention as beautifully as Donne if less flamboyantly. I aim for precisely the same balance in many of the poems I write.

Donne was a poet of paradox and passion, Jonson, a poet of wisdom and restraint. But the distinctions between them, though useful, fade against their common accomplishment — the ability to develop a conceit to the far ends of ingenuity and to do so in living language.

In Jonson’s poetry the language lives, the language sings. “My Picture Left in Scotland” makes its case with irresistible music and no small amount of wit. The conceit of the poem is an inversion of the customary notion that love is blind. The poem’s music, managed with exquisite triple rhymes, should indeed be evident to all but the deaf. No, it is not the poet’s sentences, as subtle as they are sweet, that doom him in the eyes of a certain “she,” who lives far away. The blame goes rather to the image in the cameo he has left her. It is the picture of a gray-haired man, forty-seven years of age, while she is presumably in the bloom of youth.

In the picture she has “Read so much waste, as she cannot embrace / My mountain belly and my rocky face; / And all these through her eyes have stopp’d her ears.” The pun on “waste” (i.e., waist), nearly rhyming with “embrace” and “face”; the use of “Read” as the verb of choice, as if it were understood that this poem, like all others, is a kind of speaking picture; the landscape of the body rendered so vividly, “mountain belly” and “rocky face” — all these together explain why you see the hapless fellow here, alone and palely loitering, a victim of unrequited love. The poem’s case-clinching last line is a perfect row of monosyllables: “And all these through her eyes have stopped her ears.” So truth defeats fancy. But at the same time wit defeats self-pity: the poem’s bravado, the celebration of its own logic, is a triumph over adverse circumstance.

Commentary copyright © 2020 by David Lehman

David Lehman’s recent books include One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir (Cornell University Press) and Playlist: A Poem (Pittsburgh).  

from Marsh Hawk Press's series of Poetic Influences.

Catullus, Sappho, and Jackie DeShannon [by Susan Brind Morrow]

Catullus (above left) is the best translator of Sappho (right), managing to create both a sense of the original and something that stands as an original poem on its own.

Catullus was (according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary) “doctus,” learned, “but he used doctrina in his own way.” He was an original mind, and a real wit who knew how to insult people. Intelligence and skill are the soul of wit, and one marvels at the crystalline economy of words at which Catullus is truly unsurpassed.

Take Catullus 85,

Odi et amo. quare id faciam fortasse requiris
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior

I hate and I love, why do I do this you may ask.
I don't know but I feel it and am on the cross

Catullus uses the technique of elision, running words together for effect, to merge the words hate and love into one, creating an implicit sense of the tension between two opposing forces that are tearing one apart. He then runs the sound of senti-et excrucior together, as though feeling and pain were inextricably linked.He ends the couplet with a word he has made up excrucior/excruciate (a word that is so apt it has been used ever since). Catullus uses it as sort of a joke, a word-play that describes what he is doing: He is not merely complaining about suffering in love. He is creating a classic Greek poetic structure and a word that points to what it is: ex crux, a cross, a chiasmus.

That Catullus was a highly trained and brilliant writer first, and a lover second, is indicated by the fact that he called his girlfriend Lesbia in a nod to Sappho, a famous poet who had lived on the island of Lesbos six hundred years before he was born.

In his memoir Speak Memory Nabokov describes the desired amorata of a young man from an aristocratic family as a rich older woman whose husband is preoccupied with affairs of state. Lesbia was just such a person, and she was only available to Catullus, one of her many lovers, from time to time.

Thus Catullus writes,

Caeli, Lesbia nostra,
Lesbia illa, illa Lesbia
Quam Catullus unam plus quam se atque suos amavit,
Nunc in quadriviis et angiportis
Glubit magnanimis Remi nepotis

Caelus, our Lesbia,
Lesbia this, this Lesbia,
Whom Catullus loved more than himself and his own,
Now in alleys and doorways
Strips for the rich descendants of Rome

(There is much scholarly speculation about Catullus’s intended meaning of glubit- which means to peel)

That Sappho was sapphic would have been news to Catullus. Sappho wrote songs to be performed at weddings, in which the focus was naturally the bride who moved like the moon among stars, or was like the first hyacinth of spring, smashed into the snow by the shepherds with their feet.

Catullus was not a professional writer like Sappho. He was an intellectual who belonged to the urban society of his day. He came from a rich family. His father entertained Caesar. He had, as he says more than once, too much free time. Until he died at the age of thirty (apparently by his own hand), he wrote for himself. Catullus begins his little book, which contains some of the finest poetry ever written in any language, with the phrase

To whom shall I give this charming little book...

It is difficult to capture the sense, beauty and complexity of these two great masters in another language, (although Ben Johnson’s 'tis with us perpetual night is a good call for perpetua una dormienda). Catullus (51) is the best translator of Sappho (31), managing to create both a sense of the original and something that stands as an original poem on its own. Both poems are filled with tactile words and phrases that closely capture the physical response of falling in love. Catullus, typically making up words, uses: tintin/tinnitus- my ear’s ring, for Sappho’s epirrombeisi (as though the ears were full of bees). Sappho has wonderful lines like greener than grass am I. She uses the Greek words sick, cold, and troma, trembling. Catullus has flamma demanat- flame descends my limbs, for Sappho’s lepton d’autika xro pur, a slender flame runs under my skin. Sappho has glossa eage (my tongue breaks), Catullus, lingua sed torpet (my tongue stiffens).

The best translation of this poem around today was written by 21 year old Jackie DeShannon in 1963 and recorded by Bruce Springsteen in 1975, Every Time That You Walk in the Room. Deshannon (one of the great songwriters of her time, who wrote Needles and Pins in her teens) unknowingly captures the classic verses, and the force, delight and excitement of the actual writing of Catullus and Sappho. DeShannon (singing it in this YouTube clip) may have been around Sappho's age when Sappho wrote the original:

"God has Pity on Kindergarten Children" [by Yehuda Amichai]

God has pity on kindergarten children.
He has less pity on school children
And on grownups he has no pity at all,
he leaves them alone,
and sometimes they must crawl on all fours
in the burning sand
to reach the first–aid station
covered with blood.

But perhaps he will watch over true lovers
and have mercy on them and shelter them
like a tree over the old man
sleeping on a public bench.

Perhaps we too will give them
the last rare coins of charity
that Mother handed down to us
so that their happiness may protect us
now and on other days.

-- Yehuda Amichai

This is a grand and famous poem. It is the first poem in the Selected Amichai translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell (Harper, 1986). Someone has tinkered it with it but only very slightly. The variations from the text here are three: in the third to last line, there's a comma after "Mother handed down to us"; in the pentultimate line, "their happiness will protect us" [rather than "may protect us"]; and the last line is "now and in other days" [rather than "on other days"].

Leaving aside the ethical question of taking someone else's translation and making it your own just by changing one or two words, I wonder which version of the ending readers prefer. For what it's worth, I like "may" more than "will." Toward the very end of the 1850 edition of "The Prelude," Wordsworth changed "may" into "will" in the last clause of these lines from the original (1805) edition: "what we have loved, / Others will love; and we may teach them how." I've always felt that this change was a mistake.

Mitch Sisskind notes that the poem "discloses the authentic and seemingly arbitrary or even heartless aspect of divine judgment, 'gevurah.' As Job said of god: 'though he slay me, yet i will honor him.' As Mel Brooks asked of God: 'Why do you have to be so strict?'"

-- DL

John Donne's "Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Eve"

 ‘TIS the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s,
Lucy’s, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks ;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays ;
The world’s whole sap is sunk ;
The general balm th’ hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed’s-feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr’d ; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be:
At the next world, that is, at the next spring ;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness ;
He ruin’d me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death—things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that’s good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have ;
I, by Love’s limbec, am the grave
Of all, that’s nothing. Oft a flood
Have we two wept, and so
Drown’d the whole world, us two ; oft did we grow,
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else ; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death—which word wrongs her—
Of the first nothing the elixir grown ;
Were I a man, that I were one
I needs must know ; I should prefer,
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means ; yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love; all, all some properties invest.
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.

But I am none ; nor will my sun renew
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
At this time to the Goat is run
To fetch new lust, and give it you,
Enjoy your summer all,
Since she enjoys her long night’s festival.
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year’s and the day’s deep midnight is.

-- John Donne (1572- 1631)

"Considered by many to be the greatest of all Capricorn odes." -- Alastair Crowley

Marvelous Poets: Dante. . and more on Marvell [by David Lehman]

There is something cold and terrifying about Dante. Of the three books composing his "Divine Comedy," the most compelling has always been the "Inferno," which Dante envisioned in painstaking detail down to the last punishment meted out to a Florentine enemy or rival. Justice, not love, reigns supreme where the entering souls are told to "abandon all hope." True, the architect of the medieval afterlife fell in love with Beatrice at first sight. But she was nine years old at the time. In Emerson's words, Dante was "a man to put in a museum, but not in your house." Now along comes Harriet Rubin's "Dante in Love" (Simon & Schuster, 274 pages, $23.95) to challenge this piece of received wisdom. It is a nice irony that Dante, the most precise and measured of poets, so systematic and controlled, should provoke an ecstatic mash note disguised as literary criticism slash self‑help.

How did Dante become Dante? And how can the reader follow suit and become "a great crafter too, whom life's losses do not undermine, but inspire?" Rubin promises that the tale of the poet's nineteen‑year exile from war‑riven Florence starting in 1302 will provide a model for the reader's own journey of spiritual self‑realization. Not everyone will find it germane that Dante "was born a Gemini," though I have a weakness myself for astrology (which in Dante's day "was psychology," Rubin helpfully explains) and regret that she did not go further and reveal his rising sign.

Whatever its defects, this over‑the‑top encomium does at least quote Dante, and there you can't go wrong. Rubin doesn't stick to one translation but democratically samples five of them. Here's the opening of "The Inferno" as rendered in 2002 by the Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson (whom Rubin quotes): "Halfway through the story of my life / I came to in a gloomy wood, because / I'd wandered off the path, away from the light." That's a far cry from the 1976 prose translation of Charles Singleton (not quoted by Rubin): "Midway in the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost." I prefer the straightforward prose version, which aims to give the plain sense of the original and doesn't strain for poetic effect.

You can spend an enjoyable summer comparing translations. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's (1865‑67), which the poet James Merrill admired intensely, holds up remarkably well. (Here's how Longfellow handles the opening of "The Inferno": "Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark, / For the straightforward pathway had been lost.") In 1949 Dorothy Sayers, better known as the creator of master sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey, duplicated the original's notoriously difficult "terza rima" pattern, which requires lines one and three of every three‑line stanza to rhyme with the second line of the subsequent stanza. (It's much harder to do this in English than in Italian.) John Ciardi's 1954 version, which less ambitiously rhymes lines one and three of each stanza and leaves it at that, succeeds nevertheless in conveying the feel of Dante's verse structure. Allen Mandelbaum (1980) opts for blank verse, which reads well, while Robert Pinsky (1994) favors off‑rhyme. Both are among the more notable attempts to create a contemporary American equivalent to Dante's rich vernacular measure.

Why does Dante attract so many translators? Because of the challenge and because, though difficult, it is not impossible. ("The Inferno" is in this way unlike Goethe's "Faust," which no one has satisfactorily translated.) Why do the versions of Dante differ so dramatically? Perhaps because the translators tend to be poets themselves.

Andrew Marvell (1621‑1678) has been called "the greatest minor poet in the English language." There's plenty of competition for this curious distinction, but the case for Marvell is strong, especially if you like ambiguity and elegance in equal measure. Marvell happens to be one of the great mystery men of English letters. He had a gift for foreign languages, was an avid fencer, and lived a shadowy life on the continent that led to speculation that he was a spy or double agent. For twenty years he served as a member of parliament. He did not produce a large amount of poetry, but what he wrote was, as Spencer Tracey said of Katharine Hepburn's anatomy, "cherce," as becomes abundantly clear reading "Marvell" in the new Everyman's Library Pocket Poets edition (ed. Peter Washington, 256 pages, $ 12.50).

Probably Marvell's most famous poem is "To His Coy Mistress." Never was a declaration of lust less passionate and more logical, like a brilliantly witty legal brief. The poem employs a carpe diem (seize the day) argument. We won't be young forever, so let us make merry while we can. But Marvell develops the argument as one would a syllogism. He begins with wild hyperbole. If we had "world enough and time," he would woo the maiden "ten years before the flood" and not mind if she should turn him down until the second coming.

But with the inevitable "but," the tone changes drastically: "But at my back I always hear / Time's winged chariot hurrying near." Marvell assures the lady that someday "worms will try / that long‑preserv'd virginity" of hers, and closes this part of the poem with a sarcastic couplet for the ages: "The grave's a fine and private place, / But none I think do there embrace." T. S. Eliot liked the poem's concluding image – the lovers rolled into a ball – so much that he lifted it for "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

When Oliver Cromwell returned to England after subjugating Ireland in 1650, Marvell greeted him with "An Horatian Ode" that set some sort of record for ambiguity. This stately, grave ode can be read as straightforward praise of the conquering hero who had beheaded King Charles I and would, as the poem predicts, go on to suppress the Scots. But subtle critics have propounded the opposite interpretation, contending that the ode has a secret royalist agenda and is deeply critical of Cromwell. And so this mid‑seventeenth‑century poem became a perfect object lesson in mid‑twentieth‑century literary criticism.

Read Marvell's "The Garden" for his double vision of paradise lost and paradox gained. Perhaps the best recent gloss on another Marvell masterpiece, "The Definition of Love," is Greg Mottola's 1994 movie "The Daytrippers," which pivots around a wife's discovery of a note in her husband's pocket with these lines on it: "Therefore the love which us doth bind, / But fate so enviously debars, / Is the conjunction of the mind, / And opposition of the stars." What do the lines mean in their marital situation? Are they code? The rest of the movie is the working out of a riddle: what kind of love is it that is "begotten by despair / Upon impossibility"?

Written for Bloomberg, May 26, 2004.

A Question from Emily Dickinson [by David Lehman]

I have a great fondness for two-line poems.

Robert Frost's poem "The Span of Life" is a perfect couplet, enacting the life of a dog as if in a diptych representing youth and old age:

The Span of Life

The old dog barks backward without getting up.
I can remember when he was a pup.

– Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Many of the best two-line poems perform a verbal feat of some kind. The form is an invitation to the maker of epitaphs, including irreverent ones. From John Dryden:  "Here lies my wife. Here let her lie. / Now she's at rest, and so am I."

Stacey reminds me of Howard Nemerov's masterpiece of succinctness:

Bacon & Eggs

The chicken contributes,
But the pig gives his all.

Some two-line poems act like object lessons in montage technique, Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" being the most famous example.

Rarer is the two-line poem that asks a question, a rhetorical question in a sense, but not in the sense that it asserts a self-evident proposition as when Yeats concludes "Among School Children" (not a two-line poem) by asking "How can we know the dancer from the dance?"

Emilt Dickinson's #1095, without a title to help direct us, qualifies as such a question:

To whom the Mornings stand for Nights,
What must the Midnights – be!

The poem ends with an exclamation, rather than a question mark, and what is signified is wonder. But I maintain that the ratio deserves to be completed. If mornings are nights, what, then, are midnights? And whaty causes the poet to utter he exclamation? Think about it.  -- DL

– Emily Dickinson, (1830-1886)

“On Heaven” [by Ford Madox Ford]

On Heaven
--To V.H., who asked for a working Heaven

That day the sunlight lay on the farms;
On the morrow the bitter frost that there was!
That night my young love lay in my arms,
The morrow how bitter it was!

And because she is very tall and quaint
And golden, like a quattrocento saint,
I desire to write about Heaven;
To tell you the shape and the ways of it,
And the joys and the toil in the maze of it,
For these there must be in Heaven,
Even in Heaven!

For God is a good man, God is a kind man,
And God's a good brother, and God is no blind man,
And God is our father.

I will tell you how this thing began:
How I waited in a little town near Lyons for many years,
And yet knew nothing of passing time, or of her tears,
But, for nine slow years, lounged away at my table in the shadowy sunlit square
Where the small cafes are.

The Place is small and shaded by great planes,
Over a rather human monument
Set up to Louis Dixhuit in the year
Eighteen fourteen, a funnny thing with dolphins
About a pyramid of green-dripped, sordid stone.
But the enormous, monumental planes
Shade it all in, and in the flecks of sun
Sit market women. There's a paper shop
Painted all blue, a shipping agency,
Three or four cafes; dank, dark colonnades
Of an eighteen-forty Mairie. I'd no wish
To wait for her where it was picturesque,
Or ancient or historic, or to love
Over well any place in the land before she came
And loved it too. I didn't even go
To Lyons for the opera, Arles for the bulls,
Or Avignon for glimpses of the Rhone.
Not even to Beaucaire! I sat about
And played long games of dominoes with the maire,
Or passing commis-voyageurs. And so
I sat and watched the trains come in, and read
The Libre Parole and sipped the thin, fresh wine
They call Piquette, and got to know the people,
The kindly, southern people...

Until, when the years were over, she came in her swift red car,
Shooting out past a pram; and she slowed and stopped and lighted absently down,
A little dazed, in the heart of the town;
And nodded imperceptibly,
With a sideways look at me.

So our days here began.

And the wrinkled old woman who keeps the cafe,
And the man
Who sells the Libre Parole,
And the sleepy gendarme,
And the fat facteur who delivers letters only in the shady,
Pleasanter kind of streets;
And the boy I often gave a penny,
And the maire himself, and the little girl who loves toffee
And me because I have given her many sweets;
And the one-eyed droll
Bookseller of the rue Grand de Provence, -
Chancing to be going home to bed,
Smiled with their kindly, fresh benevolence,
Because they knew I had waited for a lady
Who should come in a swift, red, English car,
To the square where the little cafes are.
And the old, old woman touched me on the wrist
With a wrinkled finger,
And said: 'Why do you linger? -
Too many kisses can never be kissed!
And comfort her - nobody here will think harm -
Take her instantly to your arm!
it is a little strange, you know, to your dear,
To be dead!

But one is English,
Though one be never so much of a ghost;
And if most of your life has been spent in the craze to relinquish
What you want most,
You will go on relinquishing,
You will go on vanquishing
Human longings, even
in Heaven.

God! You will have forgotten what the rest of the world is on fire for -
The madness of desire for the long and quiet embrace,
The coming nearer of a tear-wet face;
Forgotten the desire to slake
The thirst, and the long, slow ache,
And to interlace
Lash with lash, lip with lip, limb with limb, and the fingers of the hand
With the hand
And...

You will have forgotten...
But they will all awake;
Aye, all of them shall awaken
In this dear place.
And all that then we took
Of all that we might have taken,
Was that one embracing look,
Coursing over features, over limbs, between eyes, a making sure, and a long sigh,
Having the tranquility
Of trees unshaken,
And the softness of sweet tears,
And the dearness of the dear brook
To wash away past years
(For that too is the quality of Heaven,
That you are conscious always of great pain
Only when it is over
And shall not come again.
Thank God, thank God, it shall not come again,
Though your eyes be never so wet with the tears
Of many years!)

ii

And so she stood a moment by the door
Of the long, red car. Royally she stepped down,
Settling one long foot and leaning back
Amongst her russet fires. And she looked round...
Of course it must be strange to come from England
Straight into Heaven. You must take it in,
Slowly, for a long instant, with some fear...
Now that affiche, in orange, on the kiosque:
'Six Spanish bulls will fight on Sunday next
At Arles, in the arena'... Well, it's strange
Till you get used to our ways. And, on the Mairie,
The untidy poster telling of the concours
De vers de soie, of silkworms. The cocoons
Pile, yellow, all across the little Places
Of ninety townships in the environs
Of Lyons, the city famous for her silks.
What if she's pale? it must be more than strange,
After these years, to come out here from England
To a strange place, to the stretched-out arms of me,
A man never fully known, only divined,
Loved, guessed at, pledged to, in your Sussex mud,
Amongst the frost-bound farms by the yeasty sea.
Oh, the long look; the long, long searching look!
And how my heart beat!
Well, you see, in England
She had a husband. And four families -
His, hers, mine, and another woman's too -
Would have gone crazy. And, with all the rest,
Eight parents, and the children, seven aunts
And sixteen uncles and a grandmother.
There were, besides, our names, a few real friends,
And the decencies of life. A monstrous heap!
They made a monstrous heap. i've lain awake
Whole aching nights to tot the figures up!
Heap after heaps, of complications, griefs,
Worries, tongue-clackings, nonsenses and shame
For not making good. You see the coil there was!
And the poor strained fibres of our tortured brains,
And the voice that called from depth in her to depth
In me... my God, in the dreadful nights,
Through the roar of the great black winds, through the sound of the sea!
Oh agony! Agony! From out my breast
It called whilst the dark house slept, and stairheads creaked;
From within my breast it screamed and made no sound;
And wailed... And made no sound.
And howled like the damned... No sound! No sound!
Only the roar of the wind, the sound of the sea,
The tick of the clock...
And our two voices, noiseless through the dark.
Oh God! Oh God!

(That night my young love lay in my arms...

There was a bitter frost lay on the farms
In England, by the shiver
And the crawling of the tide;
By the broken silver of the English Channel,
Beneath the aged moon that watched alone -
Poor, dreary, lonely old moon to have to watch alone,
Over the dreary beaches mangled with ancient foam
Like shrunken flannel;
The moon, an intent, pale face, looking down
Over the English Channel.

But soft and warm
She lay in the crook of my arm.
And came to no harm since we had come quietly home
Even to Heaven:
Which is situate in a little old town
Not very far from the side of the Rhone,
That mighty river
That is, just there by the Crau, in the lower reaches,
Far wider than the Channel.)

But, in the market place of the other little town,
Where the Rhone is a narrower, greener affair,
When she had looked at me, she beckoned with her long white hand,
A little languidly, since it is a strain, if a blessed strain, to have just died,
And going back again,
Into the long, red, English racing-car,
Made room for me amongst the furs at her side.
And we moved away from the kind looks of the kindly people
Into the wine of the hurrying air.
And very soon even the tall grey steeple
Of Lyons cathedral behind us grew little and far
And was no more there...
And, thank God, we had nothing any more to think of,
And, thank God, we had nothing any more to talk of,
Unless, as it chanced, the flashing silver stalk of the pampas
Growing down to the brink of the Rhone,
On the lawn of a little chateau, giving onto the river.
And we were alone, alone, alone...
At last alone...

The poplars on the hill-crests go marching rank on rank,
And far away to the left, like a pyramid, marches the ghost of Mont Blanc.
There are vines and vines and vines, all down to the river bank.
There will be a castle here,
And an abbey there;
And huge quarries and a long white farm,
With long thatched barns and a long wine shed,
As we ran alone, all down to the Rhone.

And that day there was no puncturing of the tyres to fear;
And no trouble at all with the engine and gear;
Smoothly and softly we ran between the great poplar alley
All down the valley of the Rhone.
For the dear, good God knew how we needed rest and to be alone.
But, on other days, just as you must have perfect shadows to make perfect Rembrandts,
He shall affect us with little lets and hindrances of His own
Devising - just to let us be glad that we are dead...
Just for remembrance.

iii

Hard by the castle of God in the Alpilles,
In the eternal stone of Alpilles,
There's this little old town, walled round by the old, grey gardens...
There were never such olives as grew in the gardens of God,
The green-grey trees, the wardens of agony
And failure of gods,
Of hatred and faith, of truth, of treachery
They whisper; they whisper that none of the living prevail;
They whirl in the great mistral over the white, dry sods,
Like hair blown back from white foreheads in the enormous gale
Up to the castle walls of God...

But in the town that's our home,
Once you are past the wall,
Amongst the trunks of the planes,
Though they roar never so mightily overhead in the day,
All this tumult is quieted down, and all
The windows stand open because of the heat of the night
That shall come.
And, from each little window, shines in the twilight a light,
And, beneath it the eternal planes
With the huge, gnarled trunks that were aged and grey
At the creation of Time.
The Chinese lanthorns, hung out at the doors of hotels,
Shimmering in the dusk, here on an orange tree, there on a sweet-scented lime,
There on a golden inscription: 'Hotel of the Three Holy Bells, '
Or 'Hotel Sublime, ' or 'Inn of the Real Good Will'.
And yes, it is very warm and still,
And all the world is afoot after the heat of the day,
In the cool of the even in Heaven.
And it is here that I have brought my dear to pay her all that i owed her,
Amidst this crowd, with the soft voices, the soft footfalls, the rejoicing laughter.
And after the twilight there falls such a warm, soft darkness,
And still there will come stealing under the planes a drowsy odour,
Compounded of all cyclamen, of oranges, or rosemary and bay,
To take the remembrance of the toil of the day away.

So we sat at a little table, under an immense plane,
And we remembered again
The blisters and foments
And terrible harassments of the tired brain,
The cold and the frost and the pain,
As if we were looking at a picture and saying: 'This is true!
Why this is a truly painted
Rendering of that street where - you remember? - i fainted.'
And we remembered again
Tranquilly, our poor few tranquil moments,
The falling of the sunlight through the panes,
The flutter for ever in the chimney of the quiet flame,
The mutter of our two poor tortured voices, always a-whisper.
And the endless nights when I would cry out, running through all
The gamut of misery, even to a lisp, her name;
And we remembered our kisses, nine, maybe, or eleven -
If you count two that I gave and she did not give again.

And always the crowd drifted by in the cool of the even,
And we saw the faces of friends,
And the faces of those to who one day we must make amends,
Smiling in welcome.
And I said: 'On another day -
And such a day may well come soon -
We will play dominoes with Dick and Evelyn and Frances
For a while afternoon.
And, in the time to come, Genee
Shall dance for us, fluttering over the ground as the sunlight dances.'
And Arlesiennes with the beautiful faces went by us,
And gipsies and Spanish shepherds, noiseless in sandals of straw, sauntered nigh us,
Wearing slouch hats and old sheep-skins, and casting admiring glances
From dark, foreign eyes at my dear...
(And ah, it is Heaven alone, to have her alone and so near!)
So all this world rejoices
In the cool of the even
In Heaven...
And, when the cool of the even was fully there,
Came a great ha-ha of voices.
Many children run together, and all laugh and rejoice and call,
Hurrying with little arms flying, and little feet flying, and little hurrying haunches,
From the door of a stable,
Where, in an olla podrida, they had been playing at the corrida
With the black Spanish bull, whose nature
Is patience with children. And so, through the gaps of the branches
Of Jasmine on our screen beneath the planes,
We saw, coming down from the road that leads to the olives and Alpilles,
A man of great stature, in a great cloak,
With a great stride,
And a little joke
For all and sundry, coming down with a hound at his side.
And he stood at the cross-roads, passing the time of day
In a great, kind voice, the voice of a man-and-a-half! -
With a great laugh, and a great clap on the back,
For a fellow in black - a priest i should say,
Or may be a lover,
Wearing black for his mistress's mood.
'A little toothache, ' we could hear him say; 'but that's so good
When it gives over.' So he passed from sight
In the soft twilight, into the soft night,
In the soft riot and tumult of the crowd.

And a magpie flew down, laughing, holding up his beak to us,
And I said: 'That was God! Presently, when he has walked through the town
And the night has settled down,
So that you may not be afraid,
In the darkness, he will come to our table and speak to us.'
And past us many saints went walking in a company -
The kindly, thoughtful saints, devising and laughing and talking,
And smiling at us with their pleasant solicitude.
And because the thick of the crowd followed to the one side God,
Or to the other the saints, we sat in solitude
In the distance the saints went singing all in chorus,
And our Lord went on the other side of the street,
Holding a little boy.
Taking him to pick the musk-roses that open at dusk,
For wreathing the statue of Jove,
Left on the Alpilles above
By the Romans; since Jove,
Even Jove,
Must not want for his quota of honour and love;
But round about him there must be,
With all its tender jollity,
The laughter of children in Heaven,
Making merry with roses in Heaven.

Yet never he looked at us, knowing that that would be such joy
As must be over-great for hearts that needed quiet;
Such a riot and tumult of joy as quiet hearts are not able
To taste to the full...

... And my dear one sat in the shadows; very softly she wept: -
Such joy is in Heaven,
In the cool of the even,
After the burden and toil of the days,
After the heat and haze
In the vine-hills; or in the shady
Whispering groves in high passes up in the Alpilles,
Guarding the castle of God.

And I went on talking towards her unseen face:
'So it is, so it goes, in this beloved place,
There shall be never a grief but passes; no, not any;
There shall be such bright light and no blindness;
There shall be so little awe and so much loving-kindness;
There shall be a little longing and enough care,
There shall be a little labor and enough of toil
To bring back the lost flavour of our human coil;
Not enough to taint it;
And all that we desire shall prove as fair as we can paint it.'
For, though that may be the very hardest trick of all
God set Himself, who fashioned this goodly hall.
Thus has He made Heaven;
Even Heaven.

For God is a very clever mechanician;
And if He made this proud and goodly ship of the world,
From the maintop to the hull,
Do you think He could not finish it to the full,
With a flag and all,
And make it sail, tall and brave,
On the waters, beyond the grave?
It should cost but very little rhetoric
To explain for you that last, fine, conjuring trick;
To give to each man after his heart
Who knows very well what each man has in his heart:
To let you pass your life in a night-club where they dance,
If that is your idea of heaven; if you will, in the South of France;
If you will, on the turbulent sea; if you will, in the peace of the night;
Where you will; how you will;
Or in the long death of a kiss, that may never pall;
He would be a very little God if He could not do all this,
And He is still
The great God of all.

For God is a good man; God is a kind man;
In the darkness He came walking to our table beneath the planes, And spoke
So kindly to my dear,
With a little joke,
Giving himself some pains
To take away her fear
Of His stature,
So as not to abash her,
In no way at all to dash her new pleasure beneath the planes,
In the cool of the even
in Heaven.

That, that is God's nature,
For God's a good brother, and God is no blind man,
And God's a good mother and loves sons who're rovers,
And God is our father and loves all good lovers.
He has a kindly smile for many a poor sinner;
He takes note to make it up to poor wayfarers on sodden roads;
Such as bear heavy loads
He takes note of, and of all that toil on bitter seas and frosty lands,
He takes care that they shall have good at His hands;
Well He takes note of a poor old cook,
Cooking your dinner;
And much He loves sweet joys in such as ever took
Sweet joy on earth. He has a kindly smile for a kiss
Given in a shady nook.
And in the golden book
Where the accounts of His estate are kept,
All the round, golden sovereigns of bliss,
Known by poor lovers, married or never yet married,
While the green world waked, or the black world quietly slept;
All joy, all sweetness, each sweet sight that's sighed -
Their accounts are kept,
And carried
By the love of God to His own credit's side.
So that is why He came to our table to welcome my dear, dear bride,
In the cool of the even
In front of a cafe in Heaven.

-- Ford Madox Ford
Friday, July 25, 1914

The Many Generations of the Versatile Ben Jonson

Ben Jonson, England's first poet laureate, wrote great poems conjoining wit and powerful feeling. Consider "My Picture Left in Scotland") about which I have written a short essay, which you will find here).  His poetry, his plays. his great influence have overcome its one-time state of being universally admired and universally ignored, as T. S. Eliot wrote a hundred years ago. He is a great poet and I should do a little column on his elegy for his son, "child of my right hand, and joy." Ben and the son who predeceased him had the same first name. Benjamin, in Hebrew, means "son of my right hand."

Of all the poets born on June 11th, Ben Jonson is unquestionably the most accomplished. An astrological proifile of this Gemini all-star is long overdue.

Less well known is that avatars of Ben continue to perform in important and unexpected ways in our culture. Many of them have added an aitch to their last name perhaps to honor their forerunner or to bless Ha-shem.

In The Wild Bunch, for example, Ben Johnson was Warren Oates's brother. 

Now (according to the September 2022 issue of Kiplinger's) Ben Johnson is head of global ETF research at Morningside, the financial data firm, and he has this to say to nervous investors: Worry "is part of the price of admission. If it's too hard to watch, then step out and look at the trees, which at this time of year are mostly green, unlike the markets."  Note the simile's elegant allusion to Ben Jonson's book Timber, or Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter (1641).

PS. On a separate but related note from the department of onomastics, a double of the late Philip Levine is the former mayor of Miami.

-- DL

Note: Under the title "Ben Jonson tells investors to face the music," we aired this post on August 10, 2022 but a glitch made it unintelligible to readers, so here it is with a new title and a new postscript. It is also worth noting that Philip Larkin is the corpse in an early Perry Mason (1958 or '59) and that yoiu'll meet Jim Tate and Bill Mathews in high-grade noir fiction of the 1950s.

L'Shana Tova: "For I Will Consider Your Dog Molly" [poem by David Lehman]

Molly with Stick, Cayuga Lake, 1981 (c) Glen Hartley

For I will Consider Your Dog Molly 

 

For it was the first day of Rosh Ha'shanah, New Year's Day, day of remembrance, of ancient sacrifices and averted calamities.

For I started the day by eating an apple dipped in honey, as ritual required.

For I went to the local synagogue to listen to the ram's horn blown.

For I asked Our Father, Our King, to save us for his sake if not for ours, for the sake of his abundant mercies, for the sake of his right hand, for the sake of those who went through fire and water for the sanctification of his name.

For despite the use of a microphone and other gross violations of ceremony, I gave myself up gladly to the synagogue's sensual insatiable vast womb.

For what right have I to feel offended?

For I communed with my dead father, and a conspicuous tear rolled down my right cheek, and there was loud crying inside me.

For I understood how that tear could become an orb.

For the Hebrew melodies comforted me.

For I lost my voice.

For I met a friend who asked "is this a day of high seriousness" and when I said yes he said "it has taken your voice away."

For he was right, for I felt the strong lashes of the wind lashing me by the throat.

For I thought there shall come a day that the watchmen upon the hills of Ephraim shall cry, Arise and let us go up to Zion unto the Lord our God.

For the virgin shall rejoice in the dance, and the young and old in each other's arms, and their soul shall be as a watered garden, and neither shall they learn war any more.

For God shall lower the price of bread and corn and wine and oil, he shall let our cry come up to him.

For it is customary on the first day of Rosh Ha'shanah to cast a stone into the depths of the sea, to weep and pray to weep no more.

For the stone represents all the sins of the people.

For I asked you and Molly to accompany me to Cascadilla Creek, there being no ocean nearby.

For we talked about the Psalms of David along the way, and the story of Hannah, mother of Samuel, who sought the most robust bard to remedy her barrenness.

For Isaac said "I see the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the offering?"

For as soon as I saw the stone, white flat oblong and heavy, I knew that it had summoned me.

For I heard the voice locked inside that stone, for I pictured a dry wilderness in which, with a wave of my staff, I could command sweet waters to flow forth from that stone.

For I cast the stone into the stream and watched it sink to the bottom where dozens of smaller stones, all of them black, gathered around it.

For the waterfall performed the function of the chorus.

For after the moment of solemnity dissolved, you playfully tossed Molly into the stream.

For you tossed her three times, and three times she swam back for her life.

For she shook the water off her body, refreshed.

For you removed the leash from her neck and let her roam freely.

For she darted off into the brush and speared a small gray moving thing in the neck.

For this was the work of an instant.

For we looked and behold! the small gray thing was a rat.

For Molly had killed the rat with a single efficient bite, in conformance with Jewish law.

For I took the rat and cast him into the stream, and both of us congratulated Molly.

For now she resumed her noble gait.

For she does not lie awake in the dark and weep for her sins, and whine about her condition, and discuss her duty to God.

For I'd as lief pray with your dog Molly as with any man.

For she knows that God is her savior.

David Lehman, "For I Will Consider Your Dog Molly" from Operation Memory (Princeton University Press, 1990)

-- sdl

What are the Scariest Poems in the English Language? [by David Lehman]

            What is the scariest poem in the language? I wager that many would select Poe’s “The Raven,” and it is unquestionable that Poe has the ability, in his verse as in his stories, to scare the dickens out of you. "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" will get votes, as it should. There are poems by Emily Dickinson that, like a Magnum .44 wielded by Dirty Harry, could "blow your head clean off." Byron's "Darkness" makes you shudder, and many poems from the Elizabethans and the Metaphysicals make you see a skull and bones on the other side of your pillow. You can, however, make the case that Robert Frost -- Frost, who was once habitually misread as a genial Yankee sage -- has written as dark and frightening a poem as we have.  The French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal confessed himself terrified by the “eternal silence of those infinite spaces.” It is Frost who captures that silence.

            The brilliant sonnet “Design” – in which a spider makes a meal of a moth -- exemplifies the view of nature that informs Frost’s poetry. Nature at work is aesthetically satisfying; it has order, pattern, design; but there is nothing moral or ethical about it. Nature, as opposed to human nature, is indifferent to individual life. Put another way, nature feeds on itself, and life requires death, as the life of the spider requires the death of the moth.

            Humanity is stupid or destructive in Robinson Jeffers’s poems, which take the side of nature against human life. Frost doesn’t go that far, but in his poems the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Man is frail, and the loss of a man may be mourned, but the mourning lasts a mere moment. In Frost’s “Out, Out – “ a boy working with a buzz saw loses his hand in an accident. The results are surprisingly fatal: “No one believed. They listened at his heart. / Little – less – nothing! – and that ended it.” But what truly shocks the reader is not only the death in quick stages -- brilliantly captured in that line with two dashes -- -- but also the moment when the boy, a “big boy / Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart,” pleads, “Don’t let him cut my hand off -- / The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!” We infer that brother and big sister lack parents, and this knowledge deepens the pathos. 

             The ending of “Out, Out –“ seems at first to indict humanity for its essential callousness. They – the same “they” that had listened at the boy’s heart – go right on living: “And they, since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.” Callousness or realism? The ending is similar to the ending of Auden’s great “Musée des Beaux Arts,” in which Icarus, in Brueghel’s painting, falls from the sky to his death in the sea, “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.” Both poems are superb, but Frost’s will give you the chills while Auden’s more analytical approach will make you ponder the thesis that humanity is necessarily indifferent to human suffering.

             Among the scariest of Frost’s poems is “Desert Places.” Compare it to Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man.” Both poems are about “nothing.” It may be that Stevens’s poem is the stronger of the two; it certainly requires enormous attention and rewards numerous re-readings. But “Desert Places” has something that “The Snow Man” with its “distant glitter of the January sun” lacks. “Desert Places” has terror.

              In his "Pensées" (i.e., thoughts), Blaise Pascal wrote: “When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.” Here is the final stanza of Frost's "Desert Places":

            They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
            Between stars – on stars where no human race is.
            I have it in me so much nearer home
            To scare myself with my own desert places.

 Take that, Pascal.-- DL

from the archive; first posted October 31, 2015

When Bad Lines Happen to Good Poems [by Laurence Goldstein]

(Ed note: David Lehman's Bad Line Contest post of September 2 reminded me of this earlier post by Laurence Goldstein. Follow this link to read the many comments on the post when it ran in 2009, then add your own take. sdl)

If you were empowered by the gods to travel back into the canon of poetry in English and change or delete one line, which would it be?  On occasions, sometimes years apart, I’ve put this query to literary acquaintances, and the winner of this unscientific survey is. . . Percy Shelley’s plaintive cry, “I fall upon the thorns of life.  I bleed.”  The reason often given, and it’s clear by the swiftness with which this line is proffered that many of my contacts have not heard the question for the first time, is that this line is a blemish on a great poem that has no other bad line, not even a so-so line, but is poetry at its purest and most consummate perfection.  The poem, of course, is “Ode to the West Wind.”  Actually, I have come to like “I fall upon the thorns of life,” which is thoroughly in tone with the fine succeeding lines, “A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed / One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.”  One has to hear and feel the desperate abandon of the whole passage to appreciate the upsweep of canto 5 when the poet becomes a seer of divine power who, “by the incantation of this verse,” trumpets a prophecy to mankind.

    But “I bleed” is, admittedly, beyond the pale, over the top.  Within the decorum of the poem it reaches too far and the strain of the gasped two words causes an audible snap.  How might we improve the line.  Substitute “, and need” or “, a seed”?  Those are bland enough to not claw at the reader’s taste.  I recall the story of Paul Valéry pausing at a bookstore window and reading two pages of verse from an open book. France’s reigning poetic genius, he tries to improve even one word of the text before him, and fails.  He goes into the bookstore and finds that the book is Racine’s Phèdre.  No, I am not Paul Valéry, and will not presume to tamper with Shelley any longer.

    Another favorite response is (you saw this coming) the last line of the first stanza of Stanley Kunitz’s great poem “Father and Son.”  The speaker pursues the phantom figure of his dead father, who never shared the boy’s childhood (and who, we know, took his life while Stanley was in the womb).  The boy is lost in “the silence unrolling before me as I came, / The night nailed like an orange to my brow.”  The principle is the same as with Shelley:  the high quality of the entire poem casts a brighter light on the offending lapse.  As it happens, a younger and brasher version of myself asked Kunitz about this line on the occasion of his visit to the University of Michigan .  He smiled wanly and gave what I took to be his standard response.  Many people had asked him about the line over the years, but now the poem is so well-known, so often anthologized, even (I reminded him) praised as a precursor to the movement of Confessional Poetry, that it was now too late to change it.  He looked down and said again in a whisper, “Too late.”  Never too late I wanted to reply, but I felt intensely his desire to change the subject.

    There is the problem of failed locutions – Matthew Arnold’s “Who prop, thou ask’st, in these bad

An Evening with the Poems of W. H. Auden [by David Lehman]

Back in 2008, Michael Braziller invited me to give a talk on W. H. Auden at the Philoctetes  Society.  They made a tape of the proceedings, and here it is. Among the poems we talk about are "September 1, 1939." Every year without fail I think of that poem on the first day of the ninth month. For my 1977 review in Poetry of Auden's Collected Poems, click here.  -- DL

 

"Confession" [poem by Charles Baudelaire, tr. Sandra Simonds]

Confession

Once, and only once, Sweet Girl,
my hand on your ass, I felt my spirit.

It was late and snow fell against the moon,
while all of Paris slept, and the cats passed

before the houses, gliding like ghosts.
Suddenly, in the middle of our intimacy,

I heard a rich instrument vibrating,
radiating, from you and there was so

much joy all night until the morning
encircled us. One note escaped from you

like a baby, horrible, sad, something
so small and dead. Poor angel, you

sang this song from your secret cave:
Nothing on earth is certain, people

betray each other, and everything
ends in man’s egotism.

These were hard words from a good
woman. You said that work means

nothing with your closed, cold
hand around my dick.

It’s all mechanical, you said.
Well that really shook me up.

You said love, beauty, all of it’s a lie
and yet I took so much from our

night together and remember it every day
that I walk these streets. I remember

your silence too. And your clear
confidence when you said

Felix, take this confession
and call it my heart.

Sandra Simonds is the author of eight books books of poetry, most recently: Triptychs (forthcoming Wave Books, November 2022), Atopia (Wesleyan University Press, 2019), Orlando, (Wave Books, 2018), and Further Problems with Pleasure, winner of the 2015 Akron Poetry Prize, 2009). Her poems and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Best American Poetry, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is an Associate professor of English and Humanities at Thomas University in Thomasville, Georgia. Find out more about Sandra here. 

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) was a French poet, essayist, art critic, and translator of Edgar Allan Poe.