Theodore Roethke*

Theodore Roethke (1908 – 1963)

Theodore Huebner Roethke was born in Saginaw, Michigan, the son of Otto Roethke and Helen Huebner, who, along with an uncle owned a local greenhouse. As a child, he spent much time in the greenhouse observing nature. Roethke grew up in Saginaw, attending Aurthur Hill High School, where he gave a speech on the Junior Red Cross that was published in twenty six different languages. In 1923 his father died of cancer, an event that would forever shape his creative and artistic outlooks. From 1925 to 1929 Roethke attended the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, graduating magna cum laude. Despite his family’s wish that he pursue a legal career, he quit law school after one semester. From there he spent 1929 to 1931, taking graduate courses at the University of Michigan and later the Harvard Graduate School. There he met and worked with fellow poet Robert Hillyer.

When the Great Depression hit Roethke had no choice but to leave Harvard. He began to teach at Lafayette College, and stayed there from 1931 to 1935. It was here where Roethke began his first book, Open House. At Lafayette he met Stanley Kunitz, who later in life, became a great support and friend. By the end of 1935 Roethke was teaching at Michigan State College at Lansing. His career there, however, did not last long. Roethke was hospitalized for what would prove to be a bout of mental illness, which would prove to be reoccurring. However the depression, as Roethke found, was useful for writing, as it allowed him to explore a different mindset.

By the time he was teaching at Michigan State Roethke’s reputation as a poet had been established. In 1936 he moved his teaching career to Pennsylvania State University, where he taught seven years. During his time there he was published in such prestigious journals as Poetry, the New Republic, the Saturday Review, and Sewanee Review. His first volume of verse, Open House, was finally published and released in 1941. Open House was favorably reviewed in the New Yorke, the Saturday Review, the Kenyon Review, and the Atlantic; W. H. Auden called it "completely successful." His first work shows the influence of poetic models such as John Donne, William Blake, Léonie Adams, Louise Bogan, Emily Dickinson, Rolfe Humphries, Stanley Kunitz, and Elinor Wylie, writers whose verse had shaped the poet's early imagination and style.

In 1942 Harvard asked Roethke to deliver one of their prestigious Morris Gray lectures. Then in 1943 he left Penn State to teach at Bennington College, where he met Kenneth Burke, whom he collaborated with. The second volume of Roethke's career, The Lost Son and Other Poems was published in 1948 and included the Greenhouse poems. Roethke described the glasshouse, in An American Poet Introduces Himself and His Poems in a BBC broadcast, on the 30th of July 1953, as "both heaven and hell.... It was a universe, several worlds, which, even as a child, one worried about, and struggled to keep alive."

He penned Open Letter in 1950, and explored eroticism and sexuality with I Need, I Need, Give Way, Ye Gates, Sensibility! O La!, and O Lull Me, Lull Me. He later wrote Praise to the End! in 1951 while at Washington University, and a telling Yale Review essay, How to Write Like Somebody Else in 1959. Roethke was awarded Guggenheim Fellowship in 1950, the Poetry magazine Levinson Prize in 1951, and major grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Institute of Arts and Letters the year after. In 1953 Roethke married Beatrice O'Connell, whom he had met during his earlier years at Bennington. The two spent the following spring honeymooning at W. H. Auden's villa at off the coast of Italy. There Roethke began editing the galley proofs for The Waking: Poems 1933-1953 which was published later that same year, and won the Pulitzer Prize the next year. It included major works such as Elegy for Jane and Four for Sir John Davies, which was modeled on Davies's metaphysical poem Orchestra.

During 1955 and 1956 the Roethke and his new wife traveled Europe, on a Fulbright grant. The following year he published a collection of works that included forty-three new poems entitled Words for the Wind, winning the Bollingen Prize, the National Book Award, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Prize, the Longview Foundation Award, and the Pacific Northwest Writer's Award for it. The new poems included his famous I Knew a Woman, and Dying Man. Roethke began a series of reading tours in New York and Europe, underwritten by another Ford Foundation grant.

While visiting with friends at Bainbridge Island in 1963, Washington, Roethke suffered a fatal heart attack. During the last years of his life be had composed the sixty-one new poems that were published posthumously in The Far Field in 1964--which received the National Book Award--and in The Collected Poems in 1966.

*Biography (with edit) from PoemHunter

Narcissus*

Narcissus

He viewed afoot a silv’ry lake
And took himself to take a drink-
Then beauty moved his thirsting soul,
As there he bent above the brink.

No mortal flesh this seemed to he
Who marveled at its dear design-
Behold, a face beheld him back,
Whose symmetry was pure divine!

Handsome was the heav’nly sight
That rip’ling lay within the clear;
He touched his finger to its cheek
And wavelets had it disappear.

When agitation placid came
He dared- from love- new love embrace;
But wading through the wat’ry void
Disturbed the beauty of its face.

Again it came, again he touch’d;
Again the figure fluctuates.
Lamenting there aside that bank
He cursed himself and all the Fates:

“What awful light is cast below
That tells me what I see is I:
The boy within the shimm’ring gleam,
‘Tis me, O wretch’d me- but why?”

Then Nemesis who linger’d there,
With fatal judgment in her vest,
Remorseless cast the final lot
Which grew despairing in his breast.

Bereft of love’s requited touch
He pounded moans upon his chest,
And stagg’ring ‘mongst the wind’d reeds
There came by Nyx eternal rest.

His deathbed there’s a thing of woe,
A cautionary tale some fear:
The Naiads, Dryads- all the Nymphs,
Warn self-love grows a flower there.

-jwm


*See comments area for brief background to the poem.

God in the Quad: A Knox Limerick

What’s interesting about the philosopher and bishop George Berkeley is his ontological proof for the existence of God. According to the bishop things have being only insofar as they’re perceived- that tree, this child, that can of corn … all these literally owe their existence to being perceived by one of my five senses. That screen, those letters, and presumably that cup of coffee you're holding would have absolutely no existence were it not for your perceiving them this very second. 

In fact, according to Berkeley, we can hardly validate the existence of anything without immediate reference to one or more of the senses. 

Think about it: Can you prove your neighbor across the way exists at this very moment without the use of one of these senses? Memory doesn’t count- these are images of your neighbor in the past. A quick phone call doesn’t work- your using a sense: hearing. For all accounts and purposes, your neighbor simply doesn’t exist. 

What a strange world Berkeley would have us in: things entering and exiting our perceptions (that is to say, entering and exiting existence itself, having being one moment and non-being the next). How can this be? Berkeley has a solution. 

If things owe their existence to being perceived, and cannot logically pop in and out of existence based on our perceiving them one moment and not the next, then how do we account for their existence apart from our perception of them? Berkeley’s answer is that there’s an Infinite Perceiver, namely God. 

Things exist independently from their being perceived by one another because God perceives them all from an infinite perspective. 

Therefore, and perhaps to your grief, your neighbor does exist; when you walk out of the room you can be assured that that coffee cup you set down will still be there when you return, since a Higher Perception keeps it from plunging into non-being. 

This is the approach taken by Berkeley to show how God might exist within the parameters of a logical system of 'empirical' philosophy. He means to impart to us the possibility of an ontological proof based ever so strictly on our perceptions as sentient beings (hence his partial classification as an empirical philosopher, as strange as that may be). 

With that said, this blog site is not dedicated to philosophy- it dedicates itself to poetry. Berkeley’s principle of perception, existence and God are presented here because his ideas are expressed beautifully (and philosophically) in a limerick written by Monsignor Ronald Knox : God in the Quad. 

Here's that limerick below: God in the Quad 

There was a young man who said "God 

Must find it exceedingly odd 

To think that the tree 

Should continue to be 

When there's no one about in the quad." 

 Reply: 

"Dear Sir: Your astonishment's odd; 

I am always about in the quad. 

And that's why the tree 

Will continue to be 

Since observed by, Yours faithfully, God."

Of the Poem: 

 Here in our poem a quad is essentially the courtyard of a campus, or a quadrangle thereof. 

The word Limerick comes from the name of a town in Ireland, and limericks as a poetic form are said to have emerged there (but this is far from certain). What is certain is that they were made popular by Edward Lear's Book of Nonsense. 

The subject matter of limericks by tradition is usually risqué, next-to inappropriate, and commonly humorous. 

A stanza consists of five lines whose rhyme scheme is AABBA. Lines 1, 2, and 5 usually have seven to ten syllables, while lines 3 and 4 will usually have five to seven. 

One of the most popular limericks is Hickory Dickory Dock. 

About our limerick above, do you remember this question: If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? This poem, along with our bishop, contends that God always perceives the tree, and that therefore anything it does- even crashing to the ground- is being observed. Therefore yes, the tree is heard.

When the Frost is on the Punkin

James Whitcomb Riley, a man who had a hand in bringing Dunbar to wider recognition of the American literary culture, is another poet whose works are almost all in dialect.

Here’s a further example of a poem done in dialect. As you read it keep in mind that Riley was born and raised in Greenfield, Indiana (hence the nickname: the Hoosier Poet). The Old National Road cut right through Indiana and brought many visitors across the boy's path, so much so that he acquired an ability to 'read' the dialect of where these visitors were from. I'm quite certain this bore influence on his works.


When the Frost is on the Punkin

WHEN the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock,
And you hear the kyouck and gobble of the struttin' turkey-cock,
And the clackin' of the guineys, and the cluckin' of the hens,
And the rooster's hallylooyer as he tiptoes on the fence;
O, it's then the time a feller is a-feelin' at his best,
With the risin' sun to greet him from a night of peaceful rest,
As he leaves the house, bareheaded, and goes out to feed the stock,
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock.

They's something kindo' harty-like about the atmusfere
When the heat of summer's over and the coolin' fall is here—
Of course we miss the flowers, and the blossoms on the trees,
And the mumble of the hummin'-birds and buzzin' of the bees;
But the air's so appetizin'; and the landscape through the haze
Of a crisp and sunny morning of the airly autumn days
Is a pictur' that no painter has the colorin' to mock—
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock.

The husky, rusty russel of the tossels of the corn,
And the raspin' of the tangled leaves as golden as the morn;
The stubble in the furries—kindo' lonesome-like, but still
A-preachin' sermuns to us of the barns they growed to fill;
The strawstack in the medder, and the reaper in the shed;
The hosses in theyr stalls below—the clover overhead!—
O, it sets my hart a-clickin' like the tickin' of a clock,
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock.

Then your apples all is gethered, and the ones a feller keeps
Is poured around the cellar-floor in red and yaller heaps;
And your cider-makin's over, and your wimmern-folks is through
With theyr mince and apple-butter, and theyr souse and sausage too!...
I don't know how to tell it—but ef such a thing could be
As the angels wantin' boardin', and they'd call around on me—
I'd want to 'commodate 'em—all the whole-indurin' flock—
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock.

An Easy Goin' Feller: Poem In Dialect (Dunbar)

Paul Laurence Dunbar is one of the most widely known- and probably one of the best- poets to write in dialect. My favorite poem of his is without qualification The Poet and His Song (a poem written in Standard English), yet every time I read one of his dialect poems (or any such poem for that matter) I’m always moved in a way that doesn’t happen with Standard English reads.

Both have their beauty, but poems in dialect seem to me to impart an apperception of culture that poems in grammatically correct English cannot. It is in this sense that I feel poems in dialect are prettier and more interesting. (Don't get me wrong, almost all of my favorite poems are in 'correct' syntax.)

I don’t know quite yet if I have a favorite dialect poem done by Dunbar, but I find this one below delightful (not to mention its message is good).


An Easy Goin' Feller

Ther' ain't no use in all this strife,
An' hurryin', pell-mell, right thro' life.
I don't believe in goin' too fast
To see what kind o' road you've passed.
It ain't no mortal kind o' good,
'N' I would n't hurry ef I could.
I like to jest go joggin' 'long,
To limber up my soul with song;
To stop awhile 'n' chat the men,
'N' drink some cider now an' then.
Do' want no boss a-standin' by
To see me work; I allus try
To do my dooty right straight up,
An' earn what fills my plate an' cup.
An' ez fur boss, I'll be my own,
I like to jest be let alone,
To plough my strip an' tend my bees,
An' do jest like I doggoned please.
My head's all right, an' my heart's meller,
But I'm a easy-goin' feller.

Paul Laurence Dunbar*

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872 to 1906)

Paul Laurence Dunbar was the first African-American poet to garner national critical acclaim. Born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1872, Dunbar penned a large body of dialect poems, standard English poems, essays, novels and short stories before he died at the age of 33. His work often addressed the difficulties encountered by members of his race and the efforts of African-Americans to achieve equality in America. He was praised both by the prominent literary critics of his time and his literary contemporaries.

Dunbar was born on June 27, 1872, to Matilda and Joshua Dunbar, both natives of Kentucky. His mother was a former slave and his father had escaped from slavery and served in the 55th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment and the 5th Massachusetts Colored Calvary Regiment during the Civil War. Matilda and Joshua had two children before separating in 1874. Matilda also had two children from a previous marriage.

The family was poor, and after Joshua left, Matilda supported her children by working in Dayton as a washerwoman. One of the families she worked for was the family of Orville and Wilbur Wright, with whom her son attended Dayton's Central High School. Though the Dunbar family had little material wealth, Matilda, always a great support to Dunbar as his literary stature grew, taught her children a love of songs and storytelling. Having heard poems read by the family she worked for when she was a slave, Matilda loved poetry and encouraged her children to read. Dunbar was inspired by his mother, and he began reciting and writing poetry as early as age 6.

Dunbar was the only African-American in his class at Dayton Central High, and while he often had difficulty finding employment because of his race, he rose to great heights in school. He was a member of the debating society, editor of the school paper and president of the school's literary society. He also wrote for Dayton community newspapers. He worked as an elevator operator in Dayton's Callahan Building until he established himself locally and nationally as a writer. He published an African-American newsletter in Dayton, the Dayton Tattler, with help from the Wright brothers.

His first public reading was on his birthday in 1892. A former teacher arranged for him to give the welcoming address to the Western Association of Writers when the organization met in Dayton. James Newton Matthews became a friend of Dunbar's and wrote to an Illinois paper praising Dunbar's work. The letter was reprinted in several papers across the country, and the accolade drew regional attention to Dunbar; James Whitcomb Riley, a poet whose works were written almost entirely in dialect, read Matthew's letter and acquainted himself with Dunbar's work. With literary figures beginning to take notice, Dunbar decided to publish a book of poems. Oak and Ivy, his first collection, was published in 1892.

Though his book was received well locally, Dunbar still had to work as an elevator operator to help pay off his debt to his publisher. He sold his book for a dollar to people who rode the elevator. As more people came in contact with his work, however, his reputation spread. In 1893, he was invited to recite at the World's Fair, where he met Frederick Douglass, the renowned abolitionist who rose from slavery to political and literary prominence in America. Douglass called Dunbar "the most promising young colored man in America."

Dunbar moved to Toledo, Ohio, in 1895, with help from attorney Charles A. Thatcher and psychiatrist Henry A. Tobey. Both were fans of Dunbar's work, and they arranged for him to recite his poems at local libraries and literary gatherings. Tobey and Thatcher also funded the publication of Dunbar's second book, Majors and Minors.

It was Dunbar's second book that propelled him to national fame. William Dean Howells, a novelist and widely respected literary critic who edited Harper's Weekly, praised Dunbar's book in one of his weekly columns and launched Dunbar's name into the most respected literary circles across the country. A New York publishing firm, Dodd Mead and Co., combined Dunbar's first two books and published them as Lyrics of a Lowly Life. The book included an introduction written by Howells. In 1897, Dunbar traveled to England to recite his works on the London literary circuit. His national fame had spilled across the Atlantic.

After returning from England, Dunbar married Alice Ruth Moore, a young writer, teacher and proponent of racial and gender equality who had a master's degree from Cornell University. Dunbar took a job at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. He found the work tiresome, however, and it is believed the library's dust contributed to his worsening case of tuberculosis. He worked there for only a year before quitting to write and recite full time.

In 1902, Dunbar and his wife separated. Depression stemming from the end of his marriage and declining health drove him to a dependence on alcohol, which further damaged his health. He continued to write, however. He ultimately produced 12 books of poetry, four books of short stories, a play and five novels. His work appeared in Harper's Weekly, the Sunday Evening Post, the Denver Post, Current Literature and a number of other magazines and journals. He traveled to Colorado and visited his half-brother in Chicago before returning to his mother in Dayton in 1904. He died there on Feb. 9, 1906.

*Biography from AfroPoets.Net

No Second Troy: A Yeats Poem

Edith Maud Gonne, who was born in England, would eventually acquire anti-British sentiments through the influence of Lucien Millevoye, a French political activist. Her revolutionary spirit would thrust her into the midst of the Irish independence movement. William Butler Yeats came to love her dearly, so much so that on a few occasions he asked her hand in marriage- Maud declined all of them. In fact, and to Yeats’ grief, she married Major John MacBride (an Irish nationalist).

Maud’s rejection of his proposals, her nationalistic tendencies and the men that these tendencies attracted (coupled with the pressing and climatic tension between Ireland and Britain), produced in our poet a series of reflections that ultimately found expression in the following poem:


No Second Troy

WHY should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great.
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?


Of the Poem:

The poem seems to be divided into two parts: lines 1 through 5 deal more in the empirical realm (from emotional pain to political defiance and out rage), while lines 6 through 12 veer off into the ethereal- and apocalyptic- world of ancient Troy and its Helen.

WHY should I blame her that she filled my days / With misery describes the pain of Yeats’ unrequited love.

… that she would of late / Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways refers to Irish nationalists drawn to both her beauty and her nationalistic tendencies. That Yeats refers to them as ‘ignorant’ implies Maud’s intelligence.

My favorite line of the poem is: Or hurled the little streets upon the great, where ‘little streets’ is a reference to Irish nationalists and commoners rising up against the strength of a great British Empire. Yeats, it seems, has little confidence that the level of what they desire- an autonomous Ireland- would be met by an equal level of courage, hence the line: Had they but courage equal to desire.

Lines 6 through 10: Yeats exalts his would-be love by etherealizing her as above what he condemns in his own time (not natural in an age like this / Being high and solitary), and predicates upon her qualities of a goddess (peaceful, nobleness, beauty), even a warrior goddess (fire, like a tightened bow, most stern).

His language between lines 6 and 12 is suddenly one of allusions, memories and ideas that the earily Greeks would have known. He continues in line 11 with an allusion to Fate and Necessity, two ideas most certainly known by ancient Greeks, when describing her actions as being necessitated by her character (those attributes mentioned through lines 6 and 10): what could she have done, being what she is ...

Then comes- once again with Yeats- an apocalyptic consideration, a consideration which seems to me to be a synthesis of the empirical and ethereal tones of the poem as a whole: Was there another Troy for her to burn. In one breath Yeats refers to both Helen of Troy and 'Maud of Ireland’- where Ireland, another Troy, is set ablaze by a large and formidable foe (the fate of ancient Tory).

What I love about this poem is that it expresses so much- more than I dare attempt to touch on here- in just a few lines. Poets that do this (and do it well) leave me staggering in awe.

To know a poem in its context, even if vaguely, makes it so much more interesting and beautiful. Yeats would write notes and little comments about the works he produced; because he did this, some of his poems-poems that would normally be too remote for me to ‘feel’- have become some of my favorite to read and know. Context is a pretty thing.

The World Within

I wrote this sonnet a little over a year ago. Though the temptation to edit its content is still with me, it's my favorite poem (perhaps because it was my first sonnet).


WE EMERGED on earth from eternal skies
Whose nursing root is our efficient cause,
Where the song of angelic whistle flies
And all its creation to God gives pause.

Yet we shun the thought of internal land-
Boastful and clinging to our thistled plots;
The refrains of heaven we cannot stand-
Content without Him in our wayward lots.

What is the world without heaven within,
Or Eden’s flowery patch void of scent?
Weep when you hear the serpent’s violin,
And weep when reprobates cannot repent.

But rejoice if your own feeble heart weeps,
Since it is awake, even though it sleeps.

-jwm

The Rhyme Renaissance: A Harvard Poet

Take five minutes of your time to view this video. It’s of Harvard student’s poetry reading. The subject, aside from a history of poetry in five minutes, is what role does rap have in relationship to it … you’ll be surprised (perhaps somewhat swayed) by the conclusion that a young Harvard student proposes.

It’s an honest and innocent question I’ve held many a self dialogue about, and personally think worthy of wonder: to what extent is rap to be considered poetry by definition?

Despite the often brutal nature and violent topics propagated by contemporary rap artists, despite its real-world internal and external conflicts, rapacious diminishment of genders , and its misguided exaltation of money and wealth, rap music still adhere (albeit loosely) to a metrical pattern, a rhyme scheme, and other such poetic attributes. Let me put the question clearly: Is rap poetry?

I would love to hear input form anyone- especially anyone who writes or teaches poetry, or anyone who listens to or produces rap lyrics. Lend me arguments for or against the question; give me an example, post a link, whatever …. my ears are open.

To enlarge video click the small box under 'You' where YouTube is posted

Der Panther: A Rilke Poem

Imagine the height of happiness and freedom. Imagine living it, being it. Imagine that this blissful autonomy is all you‘ve known all your free and happy life. Then imagine crushing subjugation ending all of it in seconds. Would you not wish for freedom’s return; would you not pine away in melancholy at the loss of those former years? Here’s a question: Is it possible to forget it altogether?

Rilke’s Der Panther is a poem that wants to understand the mesmerizing strength of subjugation and the latent potency of freedom that lies within it. His example is drawn from the captivity of a large panther whose freedom, knowing no limit in a state of nature, is now next to nothing.

His poetic method was to behold things in the "silence of their concentrated reality." I imagine our poet standing before this cage, watching this large cat pace back and forth, back and forth … when suddenly the revelation: His freedom is dying in captivity. Then the poem:


The Panther*

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly--. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.

Of the Poem (Side Note):

Rilke, like so many other poets I’ve come to study, was heavily influenced by mysticism. He seems at times particularly existential (strange though that might be).

Sounding much like the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who abhorred ‘existentialism’, Rilke sees the human mind as an opening through which reality is made manifest- indeed, through which reality has its own being! He seems to want to convey what his own poetic mind has known- but to whom? He says:

"Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one; you can't impress him with glorious emotion; in the universe where he feels more powerful, you are a novice. Show him something simple which, formed over generations, lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze."**

In the 1990 movie ‘Awakening,’ Robert De Niro plays a patient suffering from a crippling state of catatonia- it’s so severe that he’s unable to move the smallest part of his body, unable even to speak. The patient, feeling his body a prison from which there was no escape, is likened to Rilke's Panther.

That scene and the superimposed narrative of these words left me in awe- “What an absolutely beautiful description of this patient’s malady,” I thought to myself.

This passage (at the time I didn’t realize it was a poem)- this passage and its powerful and penetrating way of expression has stayed with me to this day. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had formally been moved by poetry.

Perhaps this encounter is why Rainer Maria Rilke is one of my favorite poets. Perhaps it's the mystery I find in the man. Who knows for certain ... still, every time I read this poet I cannot but help think that he speaks to us of himself- especially here in this piece.


*View comments area for Der Panther in German
**Quote from Rilke's Duino Elegies

Rainer Maria Rilke*

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)

Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague on December 4, 1875, the only child of an unhappy marriage. Rilke's childhood was also unhappy; his parents placed him in military school with the desire that he become an officer—a position Rilke was not inclined to hold. With the help of his uncle, who realized that Rilke was a highly gifted child, Rilke left the military academy and entered a German preparatory school. By the time he enrolled in Charles University in Prague in 1895, he knew that he would pursue a literary career: he had already published his first volume of poetry, Leben und Lieder, the previous year. At the turn of 1895-96, Rilke published his second collection, Larenopfer (Sacrifice to the Lares). A third collection, Traumgekrönt (Dream-Crowned) followed in 1896. That same year, Rilke decided to leave the university for Munich, Germany, and later made his first trip to Italy.

In 1897, Rilke went to Russia, a trip that would prove to be a milestone in Rilke's life, and which marked the true beginning of his early serious works. While there the young poet met Tolstoy, whose influence is seen in Das Buch vom lieben Gott und anderes (Stories of God), and Leonid Pasternak, the nine-year-old Boris's father. At Worpswede, where Rilke lived for a time, he met and married Clara Westhoff, who had been a pupil of Rodin. In 1902 he became the friend, and for a time the secretary, of Rodin, and it was during his twelve-year Paris residence that Rilke enjoyed his greatest poetic activity. His first great work, Das Stunden Buch (The Book of Hours), appeared in 1906, followed in 1907 by Neue Gedichte (New Poems) and Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge). Rilke would continue to travel throughout his lifetime; to Italy, Spain and Egypt among many other places, but Paris would serve as the geographic center of his life, where he first began to develop a new style of lyrical poetry, influenced by the visual arts.

When World War I broke out, Rilke was obliged to leave France and during the war he lived in Munich. In 1919 he went to Switzerland where he spent the last years of his life. It was here that he wrote his last two works, the Duino Elegies (1923) and the Sonnets to Orpheus (1923). He died of leukemia on December 29, 1926. At the time of his death his work was intensely admired by many leading European artists, but was almost unknown to the general reading public. His reputation has grown steadily since his death, and he has come to be universally regarded as a master of verse.

*Biography from Poets.org

A Birthday Poem: by Nancy

Tomorrow will be my 38th year on this gorgeous planet. I'm very thankful to have had this chance of life- from every element of ill to the highest forms of elation. I thank God for every one of these years, and for seeking me and my well-being in them. I thank Him for my family (especially my little girl), I thank Him for my friends, and thank Him for teaching me about life while living it in the shade of imperfection at times.

*******

A good friend of mine was even so kind as to write a poem in celebration of my 38th year! Actually, as I think about it, of these 38 years here this is the first poem anyone has written to and for me ... thanks Nancy. Below is the poem (untitled for now), and the kind words she attached to it:*

*******

"… a day late and a dollar short?... how about a day early, and no money whatsoever!

To celebrate your day of birth
Cast cares away, seize joy and mirth
Reflect back on blessings great
Look future towards, no dreams abate.

The gift of life is yours today
For many more we truly pray
Forever, always, without end
Best wish go forth to you, my friend.

la'bri-ut yoda sheli



(Sorry for the early delivery. I suppose I should have waited until tomorrow to write something, but once loosed my proverbial horses refused to be reined in) "


*with her consent … תודה רבה שבעה

*******

Side Note:

I've always had this sort of strange curse of 'agelessness' since about the 7th grade: same height, same weight, same facial hair, same everything (minus the immaturity I hope). I jokingly call it a curse, but refuse to deny the 'strangeness' of it.

I wrote a stanza some time ago that refers to this 'anomaly':

It seems to me somewhat a sin
To curse this youthful look of mine.
By cursing am I cursing Him-
The Giver of this youth divine?

My Daughter's Voice: A Father's Day Poem

Just wrote this this Father's Day morning. Today fathers and dads like myself are being lifted up and shown adoration; and yet I somehow suspect that for us fathers this day has little to do with ourselves, and everything to do family (especially our children). I’m sure this is a given, and may even sound cliché … but it had to be said.

This poem I dedicate to my daughter, Chelle (aka Chelles-Bells)



My Daughter's Voice

What hund’red times I must have heard
Her look to me and say the word
That erstwhile I would daily count,
And boast to all the day’s amount.
Ah, myriad a day I hear
That word that still provokes a tear-
Amazed how what my daughter voic’d
Could easy many burdens hoist.

But lo, the word is just a sound
That moves like wind above the ground,
That tinkers with my inner ear
So ‘daddy’ is that thing I hear.
Yet when I hear it I rejoice,
Because it’s this: my daughter’s voice.
This sound, this wind that in me whirl
Reminds me she’s my little girl …

-jwm

Imagery from the Iliad

One of the things I like about poetry is its ability to use imagery from the natural world to convey a thought, an emotion, a situation, etc. There’s a passage in the Iliad where a truce between the two armies dissolves, and war breaks out. The author uses meteorological imagery to describe the clash between the two. Lines 517 through 523 (the first eight lines here) tell the 'literal' account of the conflict, while the following lines employ beautiful imagery.

It's pretty neat.

At last the armies clashed at one strategic point,
they slammed their shields together, pike scraped pike,
with the grappling strength of fighters armed in bronze
and their round shields pounded, boss on welded boss,
and the sound of struggle roared and rocked the earth.
Screams of men and cries of triumph breaking in one breath,
fighters killing, fighters killed, and the ground streamed blood.
Wildly as two winter torrents raging down from the mountains,
swirling into a valley, hurl their great waters together,
flash floods from the wellsprings plunging down in a gorge
and miles away in the hills a shepherd hears the thunder—
so from the grinding armies broke the cries and clash of war.

Iliad Book IV, Lines 517 – 527*

Whoso List to Hunt: A Wyatt Sonnet

She must have been some kind of Helen, this Anne Boleyn. The court of King Henry VIII- at least the men of it- seem to have been entirely enamored by her beauty (a beauty that brought many of them into sharp competition for her hand). Among the would-be suitors was the courtly poet, Sir Thomas Wyatt. The beauty of this Helen produced within him something akin to obsessive desires. Indeed, because the king himself both pursued and ultimately married Boleyn, Wyatt’s obsessive desires were dangerous ones (it’s rumored that he and her were secretly involved).


Whoso List to Hunt

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, hélas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.


Of the Poem:

Coming to terms with Wyatt’s English terms:

-Whoso list: whoever wishes
-hind: female deer
-hélas: alas
-vain travail: futile labor
-deer: playing on the word "dear"
-Sithens: since
-Noli me tangere: "touch me not"

****************

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind

Whoso list to hunt essentially means ‘whoever wishes’ to hunt. The hind, or deer, of the hunt is an obvious reference to Anne Boleyn. The pursuit of her has wearied our poet to the point that he seems to have had enough, and, because so many other suitors seem ahead of him on the chase (particularly Henry himself), he seems to give it up:

But as for me, hélas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.

and

... as she fleeth afore / Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore ...

Wyatt also seems to warn other suitors of the futility of the hunt:

Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.

However, and most important, was the danger of pursuing her at all. The poet elaborates on a diamond necklace worn by the deer.

And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

Inscribed on it was a phase (or rather warning): Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am. Noli me tangere is Latin for “touch me not” (the exact same phrase employed by the Vulgate when a resurrected Christ warned Mary that he had not yet ascended to the father- John 20:17). Clearly Caesar is king Henry VIII, hence the warning: Do Not Touch - Property of the King.

The warning went unheard. Eventually several men (along with our poet and Anne herself) were arrested and charged with adultery- some with treason! Wyatt escaped judgment, but others suffered a grisly execution, as did Queen Anne.

I read this poem a while ago and instantly liked it- especially after having learned a little bit about the poem's background, and more so about the poet himself.

Hope you enjoy it as well.

Sir Thomas Wyatt*

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503 - 1542)

Thomas Wyatt was born in 1503 at Allington Castle in Kent, England. His father served as a wealthy privy councilor to both Henry the VII and Henry VIII. Wyatt attended St. John's College, Cambridge, and married Elizabeth Brooke in 1520. Although she bore him two children, they separated shortly after marriage and did not reconcile until 1541.

Wyatt, like his father before him, worked in the court of Henry VIII. Handsome and admired for his skill in music, jousting, and languages, he served first as esquire of the king's body and clerk of the king's jewels in 1524. Though these positions were minor, they helped to establish Wyatt in the king's favor. By 1527, he began a diplomatic career with missions to France and Rome, where he grew acquainted with the French and Italian prosody that would later have profound influence on his literary life.

It was also at this time that Wyatt became acquainted with Anne Boleyn, the king's mistress and soon-to-be wife. Scholars have pointed to suggestions in his poems (particularly "Whoso List to Hunt") and other anecdotal evidence to posit that he was Boleyn's lover. It is difficult, however, to firmly establish their relationship. In 1536 Wyatt was arrested shortly after five men alleged to have been Boleyn's lovers were imprisoned. Boleyn herself was imprisoned and executed for adultery. Wyatt spent only one month in the Tower and shortly thereafter regained Henry's favor. He would serve Henry VIII in various offices in England and abroad for the remainder of his life, and by all accounts was an accomplished diplomat.

Although Wyatt's poems circulated among many of the members of Henry's court, they did not appear in print until after his death. In 1557, ninety-six of his songs appeared in Songs and Sonnetts (Tottel's Miscellany). The remainder of Wyatt's poems, satires, and lyrics would remain in manuscript and slowly come into print during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Along with the Earl of Surrey, Wyatt is commonly credited with introducing the sonnet into English. His love lyrics, many based loosely on the Petrarchan sonnet, deal with courtly love and ill treatment at the hands of his lovers. Among his most famous poems are "Whoso List to Hunt," "They Flee From Me," "What No, Perdie," "Lux, My Fair Falcon," and "Blame Not My Lute." Wyatt also wrote three satires, which adopted the Italian terza rima into English, and a number of penitential psalms. He died of a fever in 1542.


*Biography from Poets.org

My Lovely Jean

I smell the cold in the rain.
It touches me through the screen
And weeps for my gain:
Its nemesis, my lovely Jean.

I found her beauty in the blue
Beyond the loamy medium,
Far beyond the multi-hue,
And further still from all this tedium.
Through it she pulled me to her heart,
And all that I called ‘I’ repined-
Since now its world was torn apart
By Love that pulled me from its bind.

Now pain sleeps in the silhouettes-
In clouded blues above and bold-
And thunders down on Jean its threats,
While shedding tears that smell of cold.

-jwm



Of the Poem:

The idea was to represent redemptive love mythologically. The story is of a person pulled into the heart of the highest heavens and, leaving the viler aspects of nature behind in the clouds, is made one with heavenly Love.

The darker aspect of the poem is Pain (in many ways one's former love), of which the raining sky and those thunderclouds represent.


I chose only to follow a rhyme scheme (there's no intentional meter).

In Search of Eden

In search of Eden, Miltion's fallen feind is approached by Death as he attempts to cross through Death's check point (a gate through whom none are permitted to pass) ... Satan's heroic and brave and war-ready response is awesome (as strange as that sounds):

"Whence and what art thou, execrable Shape,
That dar'st, though grim and terrible, advance
Thy miscreated front athwart my way
To yonder gates? Through them I mean to pass,
That be assured, without leave asked of thee.
Retire; or taste thy folly, and learn by proof,
Hell-born, not to contend with Spirits of Heaven."

Book II, 681 - 687

Blogging Milton

John Milton* is without qualification my favorite poet. There’s simply not enough room in one blog to articulate the depth and scope of this man and his works. It would be obvious overkill to post entire chapters from his epic writings. With that said, I plan to post sections, fragments, and quotes intermittently (some with commentary, others in free suspension).

*The link above leads to the best online biography of Milton I know of (it was simply too large to post here). Just click the poet's name.

Eve's Reflection (Milton Fragment)

It was the heat of the day that drew Narcissus to a pool of water. As he bent over its silvery gleam for a drink an image appeared before him- it was his self. Narcissus, who hadn’t seen himself before, was so enamored by what he saw he instantly feel in love- wishing, as it were, to become one with the object of his delight, kissing the reflection and trying to pull it out of the water. After having realized that what he had viewed was merely a reflection of himself, he became utterly distraught and grief-stricken as the object of his highest desire became suddenly unattainable ...

Ah wretched me! I now begin too late
To find out all the long-perplex'd deceit;
It is my self I love, my self I see.

His unrequited love killed him beside that body of water.



Milton, whose brilliant mind was highly versed in Greek mythology, drew upon the story of Narcissus as he introduces us to Eve. In Book IV of Paradise Lost (449 – 471), Eve recalls her first memories as a human. In her recollection she gives the following account of the very first human face she sees:


That day I oft remember, when from sleep
I first awaked, and found myself reposed
Under a shade on flowers, much wondering where
And what I was, whence thither brought, and how.
Not distant far from thence a murmuring sound
Of waters issued from a cave, and spread
Into a liquid plain, then stood unmoved
Pure as the expanse of Heaven; I thither went
With unexperienced thought, and laid me down
On the green bank, to look into the clear
Smooth lake, that to me seemed another sky.
As I bent down to look, just opposite
A shape within the watery gleam appeared,
Bending to look on me: I started back,
It started back; but pleased I soon returned,
Pleased it returned as soon with answering looks
Of sympathy and love: There I had fixed
Mine eyes till now, and pined with vain desire,
Had not a voice thus warned me; 'What thou seest,
'What there thou seest, fair Creature, is thyself;
'With thee it came and goes: but follow me,
'And I will bring thee where no shadow stays
'Thy coming…


Of the Poem:

Clearly this is a parallel to Narcissus, and there’s no doubt that Milton intends a warning here: That self-love is inherently idolatrous, leads to creature worship (which is essentially theft from God), and is in the end ultimately self-destructive.

It was by unchecked self-complacency that Narcissus destroys himself. His self-love rose to such a height as to count itself the highest image of contemplation, a clear case of idolatry. But Eve is spared. It’s a voice, God’s to be sure, that both warns and redeems Eve from such a narcissistic fate. "Follow me" it implores.

It's interseting that God’s manifestation to Eve was not that of a corporeal, tangible one; but was rather by an unseen Voice. Milton seems to imply that we ought not be drawn away by things seen, but lead by God who is Spirit. There immediately comes to mind several verses from scripture: John 4:24, II Cor 5:7, Heb 11:3, II Cor 4:18 to name a few.

I find it amazing that the above passage, selected from a larger work, is a poem on its own. Milton has this way of poeticizing that- whether it be line or stanza, chapter or epic- that renders every minute detail scripted by him poetic. His prolific poetic mind is massive. He is to poetry what Socrates is to philosophy. Of Milton, what poet compares?

John Milton*

John Milton (1608-1674)

John Milton was born in London on December 9, 1608, into a middle-class family. He was educated at St. Paul's School, then at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he began to write poetry in Latin, Italian, and English, and prepared to enter the clergy.

After university, however, he abandoned his plans to join the priesthood and spent the next six years in his father's country home in Buckinghamshire following a rigorous course of independent study to prepare for a career as a poet. His extensive reading included both classical and modern works of religion, science, philosophy, history, politics, and literature. In addition, Milton was proficient in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, and Italian, and obtained a familiarity with Old English and Dutch as well.

During his period of private study, Milton composed a number of poems, including "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," "On Shakespeare," "L'Allegro," "Il Penseroso," and the pastoral elegy "Lycidas." In May of 1638, Milton began a 13-month tour of France and Italy, during which he met many important intellectuals and influential people, including the astronomer Galileo, who appears in Milton's tract against censorship, "Areopagitica."

In 1642, Milton returned from a trip into the countryside with a 16-year-old bride, Mary Powell. Even though they were estranged for most of their marriage, she bore him three daughters and a son before her death in 1652. Milton later married twice more: Katherine Woodcock in 1656, who died giving birth in 1658, and Elizabeth Minshull in 1662.

During the English Civil War, Milton championed the cause of the Puritans and Oliver Cromwell, and wrote a series of pamphlets advocating radical political topics including the morality of divorce, the freedom of the press, populism, and sanctioned regicide. Milton served as secretary for foreign languages in Cromwell's government, composing official statements defending the Commonwealth. During this time, Milton steadily lost his eyesight, and was completely blind by 1651. He continued his duties, however, with the aid of Andrew Marvell and other assistants.

After the Restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660, Milton was arrested as a defender of the Commonwealth, fined, and soon released. He lived the rest of his life in seclusion in the country, completing the blank-verse epic poem Paradise Lost in 1667, as well as its sequel Paradise Regained and the tragedy Samson Agonistes both in 1671. Milton oversaw the printing of a second edition of Paradise Lost in 1674, which included an explanation of "why the poem rhymes not," clarifying his use of blank verse, along with introductory notes by Marvell. He died shortly afterwards, on November 8, 1674, in Buckinghamshire, England.

Paradise Lost, which chronicles Satan's temptation of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from Eden, is widely regarded as his masterpiece and one of the greatest epic poems in world literature. Since its first publication, the work has continually elicited debate regarding its theological themes, political commentary, and its depiction of the fallen angel Satan who is often viewed as the protagonist of the work.

The epic has had wide-reaching effect, inspiring other long poems, such as Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, William Wordsworth's The Prelude and John Keats's Endymion, as well as Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, and deeply influencing the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Blake, who illustrated an edition of the epic.


*Biography from Poets.org

Oscar Brown Jr.: This Beach

I would rather not ruin what Oscar Brown Jr. intends to transmit here by a pre-commentary narrative. Suffice it to say that this is to-date my favorite oration by a poet.

Aside from the obvious, I’ll forego any ‘tags’ that might clue any listener on to the meaning behind his awesome poem: This Beach.

Click the box for better full-screen veiw.

My question to any viewer is this: What's this poem about?

BTW: It has nothing whatsoever to do about race or ethnicity.

A Far Cry from Africa

A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt
Of Africa. Kikuyu, quick as flies,
Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt.
Corpses are scattered through a paradise.
Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries:
"Waste no compassion on these separate dead!"
Statistics justify and scholars seize
The salients of colonial policy.
What is that to the white child hacked in bed?
To savages, expendable as Jews?

Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break
In a white dust of ibises whose cries
Have wheeled since civilization's dawn
From the parched river or beast-teeming plain.
The violence of beast on beast is read
As natural law, but upright man
Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.
Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars
Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum,
While he calls courage still that native dread
Of the white peace contracted by the dead.

Again brutish necessity wipes its hands
Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again
A waste of our compassion, as with Spain,
The gorilla wrestles with the superman.
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?



Of the Poem:

Behind this poem lies the tragedy of both external and internal conflict. The historical backdrop of the poem is the civil uprising of the Mau Mau against British colonialists in Kenya. In the late 1800s British colonies began to settle throughout a territory that native Kikuyu called home. As British colonies began to spread so did the injustices: natives were thrown off of their own land and impoverished by poor work and poor wages.

The subjugation and mistreatment of the Kikuyu only got brutally worse as time progressed. Finally enough was enough. In the 1950s he Muingi (also called Mau Mau) could no longer hold on to empty promises of reparation and economic equality, nor could they tolerate anymore passive complaints- they rebelled violently. As a result, British military forces rapidly expanded and, along with African loyalists, pursued and eventually put to death 11,000 of the rebel force.

Although it served as the catalysis for the independence of the Kikuyu and greater Kenya, the conflicts of the Mau Mau Uprising were savage, bloody, and cruel (both ways). Bitter memories and no doubt latent hostilities followed the bloodshed.

Which leads us to our poet.

Derek Walcott was of mixed heritage: both of (white) English and African decent. He was openly against the colonial subjugation of the people of Kenya (with whom he felt a deep connection). At the same time, and as a result of his direct connection to his English heritage, it grieved him to see them being killed during the Mau Mau Uprising. Thus an internal conflict of loyalty emerged within the poet. His poem ask a solitary question: “With whom do I side?”

The poem is essentially divided (in thought, anyhow) between a poetic narrative of the conflict (lines 1 through 21) and the conflict as it exists with the poet internally.

As one of mixed heritage, and as one knowing personally the challenges of 'ethinic loyalties", the poem really struck a cord with me. I understand it.

Poet: Derek Alton Walcott*

Derek Alton Walcott (1930 - to date)

The recipient of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, Derek Walcott was born in Castries, Saint Lucia, the West Indies, on January 23, 1930. His first published poem, "1944" appeared in The Voice of St. Lucia when he was fourteen years old, and consisted of 44 lines of blank verse. By the age of nineteen, Walcott had self published two volumes, 25 Poems (1948) and Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (1949), exhibiting a wide range of influences, including William Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound.

He later attended the University of the West Indies, having received a Colonial Development and Welfare scholarship, and in 1951 published the volume Poems.

In 1957, he was awarded a fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation to study the American theater. Since then, he has published numerous collections of poetry, most recently Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), The Prodigal: A Poem (2004), and Tiepolo's Hound (2000).

The founder of the Trinidad Theater Workshop, Walcott has also written several plays produced throughout the United States, The Odyssey: A Stage Version (1992); The Isle is Full of Noises (1982); Remembrance and Pantomime (1980); The Joker of Seville and O Babylon! (1978); Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (1970); Three Plays: The Last Carnival; Beef, No Chicken; and A Branch of the Blue Nile (1969). His play Dream on Monkey Mountain won the Obie Award for distinguished foreign play of 1971. He founded Boston Playwrights' Theatre at Boston University in 1981.

His first collection of essays, What the Twilight Says (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), was published in 1998.

About his work, the poet Joseph Brodsky said, "For almost forty years his throbbing and relentless lines kept arriving in the English language like tidal waves, coagulating into an archipelago of poems without which the map of modern literature would effectively match wallpaper. He gives us more than himself or 'a world'; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language."

Walcott's honors include a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, and, in 1988, the Queen's Medal for Poetry. He is an honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

He currently divides his time between his home in St. Lucia and New York City.


*Biography from Poets.org

A Monk's Refrain

Hide me away, O my soul
Shut me in her sacred cell
Let vesper pray’r these speeches quell
'Till dawn bid that the silence null
'Till matin and till lauds are done
'Till hymns and chap’l songs ascend
To Jesus Christ our Lord and Friend
With Spirit and with Father one

-jwm


Of the Poem:

My initial intent was to write a poem about a Carmelite Monk (specifically Juan de la Cruz), while attempting to adhere to a metrical pattern and a rhyme scheme of some sort- so much for the meter!

This has happened to me before… I would start a poem intending at least four quatrains (with which I’m most comfortable and enjoy) and then, after a single stanza or two, an overwhelming sense of completion would set in. No matter how intense the edits, addition, subtractions, altered rhyme scheme, different imagery- in short, no matter what!- that sense of completion would become polluted. And not just mildly.

These two stanzas (now an octet) are almost as they were first written, then that sense of solidification set in, my initial intent was vanquished. So I left it as is for a while, attempted adjustments and even entirely new stanzas, but to no avail. Finally I abandoned myself to its completion, and only then did I feel ‘clean’ about it. I’m very happy with this short poem.

Who Has Seen the Wind: Rossetti Poem

Here’s a neat little poem written by Christina Rossetti. It’s called: Who has seen the wind


Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you.
But when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through.
Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I.
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.


Of the Poem:

I think I like it because it reminds me of John 3:8:

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is everyone that is born of the Spirit.*

There’s no doubt in my mind at all that this verse was in her head when she wrote this. I'll have to ask her.


*KJV, which I think makes it sound better.

The Second Coming: Yeats Poem

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?



Of the Poem:

Yeats was heavily influenced by a mysticism whose theological content derived from a hodgepodge of deep Eastern ideas. Although Yeats was certainly not a Christian, he would throughout his life employ Christian language and themes to convey this or that particular idea. In his apocalyptic poem, The Second Coming, such use is made evident.

Yeats began to work on this poem in January of 1919, during a time when the political atmosphere was highly turbulent: the first World War just ended; the Russian Revolution- to which Yeats was heatedly opposed- had begun (not to mention the festering internal divisions of Ireland’s religious and political communities).

Like the philosopher Hegel (too a mystic minded man), Yeats believed there’s a dialectical process underlying historical events, and further believed that humans have the ability to glimpse it as they all have access to a ‘common consciousness’ not unlike the ‘world soul’ of the Transcendentalists. Note how Yeats derives his poetic vision from it when he says in line 12: a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi / Troubles my sight (where the Spiritus Mundi is the common medium).

The ‘gyre’ of line 1 is probably the most important individual word in the whole poem. This is a Yeatsian term that contains abstract geometrical figures whose superimposed movements work as a scale to determine a particular historical state or time (it’s essentially his crystal ball to historical events). For more on the gyre see comments area.

The repetitious use of words in the poem seem meant to produce within the reader a sort of nervous perception of impending danger or dark times (words like ‘turning’ in line one, ‘loosed’ in 4 and 5, and, along with the title of the poem, lines 10 and 11’s ‘Second Coming’).

Lines 7 and 8 are essentially a paraphrase of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. The ‘stony sleep’ of line 19 is borrowed from William Blake’s somewhat Gnostic myth, The Book of Urizen:

But Urizen laid in a stony sleep
Unorganiz'd, rent from Eternity.
Chapter III. Verse 10

The ‘rocking cradle’ of line 20 coupled with the reference to ‘Bethlehem’ in line 22 is clearly an allusion to the nativity of Christ, which would seem to suggest that the ‘rough beat’ slouching toward that holy city is an entity holding a particular hostility with regards to Jesus and Christianity. My personal take is that the reference is toward an antichrist figure very much similar to the one mentioned in John’s first letter (this despite the many interpretations which seem to rule that conclusion out).

The poem seems to depict a period in history (Yeats’ history to be clear) where a gloomy paradigm shift is at hand; where authority in the highest spiritual sense of the word is on the verge of abrogation (and this by the manifestation of that personae whom Yeats equates with that stony figure: the Sphinx).

If ever there were a poem one could deem as dark and riddled with dreadful prophetic imagery, would it not be this one? Top ten for creepiness for sure. What does it for me is that this poem was not for Yeats a hypothetical narrative or story… no, I am utterly convinced that he expected fulfillment of it.

There’s so much that can be elaborated on here with regard to this poem (and perhaps in time I’ll come back to it). I decided to post it- along with a brief biography from Poets.org- because Yeats was one of the first poets I actively began to read, and this particular poem was one of the first that … well, I’ll say it … really creeped me out.

Does Propriety a Better Poet Make?

Does propriety a better poet make-
Where principles are as by God begot
Within recesses deep where one might take
The musing inspiration from and plot?

Or is it skill and will and wicked dye
That sink into the canvas'd page aframe-
That have aught to share but a holy cry-
Which makes a poet, though morally maim?

Are both- scribing their words- Poetry's heir
So that neither virtue nor vice opposed
Might blemish all their written pages fair-
Where enmity of claim aren't presupposed?

Or will poetry's Muse come choose her heirs
Dividing with stained sickle wheat from tares?

William Butler Yeats*

William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939)

William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1865, the son of a well-known Irish painter, John Butler Yeats. He spent his childhood in County Sligo, where his parents were raised, and in London. He returned to Dublin at the age of fifteen to continue his education and study painting, but quickly discovered he preferred poetry. Born into the Anglo-Irish landowning class, Yeats became involved with the Celtic Revival, a movement against the cultural influences of English rule in Ireland during the Victorian period, which sought to promote the spirit of Ireland's native heritage. Though Yeats never learned Gaelic himself, his writing at the turn of the century drew extensively from sources in Irish mythology and folklore. Also a potent influence on his poetry was the Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, whom he met in 1889, a woman equally famous for her passionate nationalist politics and her beauty. Though she married another man in 1903 and grew apart from Yeats (and Yeats himself was eventually married to another woman, Georgie Hyde Lees), she remained a powerful figure in his poetry.

Yeats was deeply involved in politics in Ireland, and in the twenties, despite Irish independence from England, his verse reflected a pessimism about the political situation in his country and the rest of Europe, paralleling the increasing conservativism of his American counterparts in London, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. His work after 1910 was strongly influenced by Pound, becoming more modern in its concision and imagery, but Yeats never abandoned his strict adherence to traditional verse forms. He had a life-long interest in mysticism and the occult, which was off-putting to some readers, but he remained uninhibited in advancing his idiosyncratic philosophy, and his poetry continued to grow stronger as he grew older. Appointed a senator of the Irish Free State in 1922, he is remembered as an important cultural leader, as a major playwright (he was one of the founders of the famous Abbey Theatre in Dublin), and as one of the very greatest poets—in any language—of the century. W. B. Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923 and died in 1939 at the age of 73.


*Biography from Poets.org

Christina Rossetti: Insight from a Friend

"Have you seen her brother's painting of the Annunciation? Young Christina was his model for Mary. Her expression in the painting is beyond description, but somehow I think it is an expression that she must have worn often for I hear it in her poems."


Thank you, Mr. Doug P. Baker. You're right: Beyond Description ...

In an Artist's Studio: Rossetti Poem

One face looks out from all his canvasses,
One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans;
We found her hidden just behind those screens,
That mirror gave back all her loveliness.
A queen in opal or in ruby dress,
A nameless girl in freshest summer greens,
A saint, an angel; -- every canvass means
The same one meaning, neither more nor less.
He feeds upon her face by day and night,
And she with true kind eyes looks back on him
Fair as the moon and joyfull as the light;
Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;
Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;
Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.


Of the Poem:

This happens to be the very first one of Christina Rossetti’s poems that I came to read. While reading it, what first came to mind was the kind of insatiable passion that consumes a person so much so that the object of their desire is reflected in everything they see, hear, or do.

Next was my thought of Plato, who believed that the beautiful objects we behold in our existence are no more than mere reflections or copies of a higher Beauty- a Beauty whose eternal idea and form transcend the temporal and spacial beauties we see in this all too human realm.

Although Christina's poetic use of an artist's studio is quite natural (considering her background with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood), that very first impression mentioned above was not that it represented a particular artist, or a woman, or even art itself ... rather, it seemed to represent an obsession of passion, and not necessarily in the negative sense of obsession. Turns out that initial thought might not have been far off from the poet's intention.

Her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was one of the leading artists of the Brotherhood and had a many young ladies to model for his works. One in particular was Elizabeth Siddal- a somewhat tall, slender, beautiful girl with 'copper' color hair. He was immediately taken by her. And after a short period of modeling for him, he dropped almost all of his other models, and stopped her from modeling for fellow artists. She became very quickly his sole consuming subject- not only in his drawings and paintings, but his poems too.

Unfortunately, Siddal's story is a sad one. Already prone to melancholy and illness, the still birth of her daughter only served to exasperate her problems. After becoming pregnant again, Siddal overdoses on laudanum. It's unclear whether or not this was an accident.

In 1863, a year after her death, Dante produced Beata-Beatrix (the painting above), where his beloved 'Lizzy' bore representation of a praying Beatrice. There's no question that the bulk of Dante's works of art centered on Elizabeth Siddal, that there was within him an insatiable desire to know her beauty and represent it in those works. Obviously I don't know the finer details of their relationship, but I'd like to imagine a time that they were immutably in love, so that even when apart they were together. Edith Piaf's song, Tu Es Partout, contains lyrics to the like:

Tu es partout car tu es dans mon coeur
Tu es partout car tu es mon bonheur
Toutes les choses qui sont autour de moi
Meme la vie ne represente que toi
Des fois je reve que je suis dans tes bras
Et qu'a l'oreille tu me parles tout bas
Tu dis des choses qui font fermer les yeux
Et moi je trouve ca merveilleux

English Translation:

You are everywhere because you are in my heart
You are everywhere because you are my happiness
Everything that is around me
Even life does not represent you
Sometimes I dream that I am in your arms
And you speak softly in my ear
You tell me things that make me close my eyes
And I find that marvelous

I imagine that this is the point of Rossetti's poem (that is, provided it's devoid of sarcasm) ...

Perseus (by Robert Hayden)

I had to post this poem by Robert Hayden- absolutely incredible, the imagery accomplished in a mere 14 lines! If anyone reads this, you've got to let me know what you think.


Perseus

Her sleeping head with its great gelid mass
of serpents torpidly astir
burned into the mirroring shield--
a scathing image dire
as hated truth the mind accepts at last
and festers on.
I struck. The shield flashed bare.

Yet even as I lifted up the head
and started from that place
of gazing silences and terrored stone,
I thirsted to destroy.
None could have passed me then--
no garland-bearing girl, no priest
or staring boy--and lived.



The first time I read this poem I was completely pulled outside of myself by awe. What Robert Hayden accomplishes within a mere 14 (incomplete) lines of poetry is something that is seldom seen. It astonishes the imagination that a whole story, a whole world and realm can be conveyed by so simple a thing as a poem.

In fact, what completely did it for me, the thing that pushed over in me that which was merely in tilt, was John Milton's description of the Garden of Eden. There were no extravagant words employed, and as far as I can remember, Milton almost never even mentioned the Garden. But within 8 lines, and by means of images taken from mythology, Milton expresses what in other words would simply require pages to attain.

Here are those 8 lines below (again, what do you think):


Not that fair field
Of Enna, where Proserpine gathering flowers,
Herself a fairer flower by gloomy Dis
Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world; nor that sweet grove
Of Daphne by Orontes, and the inspired
Castalian spring, might with this Paradise
Of Eden strive...

Paradise Lost, Book IV 268 - 275

Pre-Raphaelite Poet: Christina Rossetti*

Christina Rossetti (1830 - 1894)

Christina Rossetti was born in London, one of four children of Italian parents. Her father was the poet Gabriele Rossetti; her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti also became a poet and a painter. Rossetti's first poems were written in 1842 and printed in the private press of her grandfather. In 1850, under the pseudonym Ellen Alleyne, she contributed seven poems to the Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ, which had been founded by her brother William Michael and his friends.

Rossetti is best known for her ballads and her mystic religious lyrics. Her poetry is marked by symbolism and intense feeling. Rossetti's best-known work, Goblin Market and Other Poems, was published in 1862. The collection established Rossetti as a significant voice in Victorian poetry. The Prince's Progress and Other Poems, appeared in 1866 followed by Sing-Song, a collection of verse for children, in 1872 (with illustrations by Arthur Hughes).

By the 1880s, recurrent bouts of Graves' disease, a thyroid disorder, made Rossetti an invalid, and ended her attempts to work as a governess. While the illness restricted her social life, she continued to write poems. Among her later works are A Pageant and Other Poems (1881), and The Face of the Deep (1892). Rossetti also wrote religious prose works, such as Seek and Find (1879), Called To Be Saints (1881) and The Face of the Deep (1892). In 1891, Rossetti developed cancer, of which she died in London on December 29, 1894. Rossetti's brother, William Michael, edited her collected works in 1904, but the Complete Poems were not published before 1979.

Christina Rossetti is increasingly being reconsidered a major Victorian poet. She has been compared to Emily Dickinson but the similarity is more in the choice of spiritual topics than in poetic approach, Rossetti's poetry being one of intense feelings, her technique refined within the forms established in her time.


*Biography from Poets.org

City Naiad

No, she's not me (whose heart is vain)
She's happy where no glades are seen
Whose glades are city-lights and rain
And puddles in the streets unclean

The vagabonds there seem her kin
Who sleep on papers by the mall
In alleys soaked in piss and gin
That shifty crowds don't see at all

She glides ethereal like God
On sullen ground where many’ve died
And seeks about the slum-filled quad
The sacred pools where many've cried

And here within my cozy life
Where heat and food and rest are clean
I think their life just rosy strife
And God forbid the rain as mean

But not so with her honest eyes
That sees by truth those somber sights
Whose tears reflect the raining skies
And all those amber city-lights

-jwm

City Naiad (Picture)

click the picture for closer view

Italian Quatrain

I see the rolling thunderous approach
As loam emanates from cemented ground;
I see synapsing clouds devoid of sound,
And am jubilantly without reproach.

-jwm

Of the Poem:

Friends and I hiked Mount Sherman last June. The night prior to the hike, when we arrived at the hotel, there on the horizon was a cloud that resembled what I might imagine the aftermath of a nuclear blast to be. It was beautiful (picture above). The following week while it rained I was studying Epictetus (a Stoic philosopher), and read:

"Remember God. Invoke him for your aid and protector, as sailors do Castor and Pollux, in a storm. For what storm is greater than that which arises from these perilous semblances, contending to overturn our reason? Indeed, what is the storm itself, but a semblance? For do but take away the fear of death, and let there be as many thunders and lightnings as you please, you will find that to the reason all is serenity and calm..."

The idea for, and imagery of, the above quatrain emerged from these two events. It's because Epictetus was a Roman citizen that I decided to render this quatrain Italian. I know it's just a stanza, but it's riddled with the perfect amount of Stoic symbolism.