Poetry Corner

Parent Cafe
81

<p>I love CP Cavafy’s poems. Although most of us only read him in translation, his distinctive voice is immediately recognizable. For this reason, he has spawned an industry of followers who write “after Cavafy” poems. The one below is from Don Patterson, a Scottish poet and jazz musician, from his collection Landing Light, which won the Whitbread prize in 2003</p>

<p>This little pencil sketch –
it’s certainly him.
It was made quickly, one long
charmed afternoon
on the Ionian. Yes, I’d say
it caught his looks –
though I have him more handsome;
so much the sensualist, you’d say
he was lit up with it….Yes he looks
so much more handsome,
now my heart calls him
from so long ago. So long.
All these things are very old – the sketch,
And the boat, and the afternoon.</p>

82

<p>Weren’t pretty much all of Keat’s poems written “shortly before his death”? :(</p>

83

<p>Yes, very true, Mmom. But this was one of the last.</p>

<p>It never seizes to astonish me what he did in his short time here.</p>

84

<p>This is fun. Here is another one, I’m not a big Stevens fan, but. . .</p>

<p>Anecdote of the Jar<br>
by Wallace Stevens </p>

<p>I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.</p>

<p>The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.</p>

<p>It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.</p>

85

<p>Edna St. Vincent Millay</p>

<p>Love is not all; it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink,
And rise and sink, and rise and sink again;
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want, past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.</p>

86

<p>ATomom, one of my favorites!</p>

<p>(this is such a great thread, reminding me of so much good stuff I haven’t read for a while.)</p>

87

<p>It seems that we should have (at least) one by the newly named Poet Laureate, Charles Simic, who is not only a fascinating poet but also has had a fascinating, if at times horrific, life (born in Belgrade three years before the Nazis invaded, he lived there through bombings by the Nazis and, later, the Allied forces). </p>

<p>Here’s one:</p>

<p>Country Fair</p>

<pre><code> for Hayden Carruth
</code></pre>

<p>If you didn’t see the six-legged dog,
It doesn’t matter.
We did, and he mostly lay in the corner.
As for the extra legs,</p>

<p>One got used to them quickly
And thought of other things.
Like, what a cold, dark night
To be out at the fair.</p>

<p>Then the keeper threw a stick
And the dog went after it
On four legs, the other two flapping behind,
Which made one girl shriek with laughter.</p>

<p>She was drunk and so was the man
Who kept kissing her neck.
The dog got the stick and looked back at us.
And that was the whole show.</p>

88

<p>Someone put part of this one, but I think the whole poem is worth quoting:</p>

<p>MY life closed twice before its close;<br>
It yet remains to see<br>
If Immortality unveil<br>
A third event to me, </p>

<p>So huge, so hopeless to conceive,<br>
As these that twice befell.<br>
Parting is all we know of heaven,<br>
And all we need of hell. </p>

<p>Emily Dickinson, of course. AS I’m sure many of you know, the way to memorize most of Emily’s poems (and Hardy’s too) is to sing them to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas”. Try it!</p>

89

<p>Who said there’s no public for poetry.</p>

<p>garland: I never had quite so elevated a birthday! Sounds like a peak moment. I am going to borrow yours, not as my birthday, just as a lovely image/memory.</p>

<p>BTW: I was assistant curator of the Yeats’ Archives at Stony Brook University. We got a mass of xeroxed material from Jack Yeats and had to collate it and make it into a scholar’s archives. My most special speciality (please to say as Brits do) was the astrology charts. No one else knew how to read them!. Gosh, there were many.</p>

90

<p>The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.</p>

<p>To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.</p>

<p>Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.</p>

<p>Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:</p>

<p>Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.</p>

<p>So set, before the echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.</p>

<p>And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.</p>

<p>I particularly have a connection to this one as my older son pasted it on his journal cover during High School. ( our H.S. had a tragedy, a beloved teacher died while jogging, he was my son’s and many other’s mentor. My son began a memorial 5k in this teacher’s memory).</p>

91

<p>So many of these poems sound in my head because they were read by consumate actors in movies.</p>

<p>The last, Meryl Streep in OUT OF AFRICA.</p>

<p>The Auden poem from FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL by John Hannah.</p>

<p>The ee cummings from HANNAH AND HER SISTERS read by Barbara Hershey, and another I noticed here that I don’t recall.</p>

<p>And I hear echoes of our garland in the last poem.</p>

<p>“Conjugation of the Paramecium” has all the beauty, vulnerable, terror, and yes, horror, of sex. Shakespeare’s old “beast with two backs.”</p>

92

<p>. . . (as garland was) here’s the poem of his that the poet Donald Hall considers the most beautiful poem in the English language:</p>

<p>During Wind and Rain</p>

<pre><code>They sing their dearest songs –
He, she, all of them – yea,
Treble and tenor and bass,
And one to play;
With the candles mooning each face…
Ah, no; the years O!
</code></pre>

<p>How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!</p>

<pre><code>They clear the creeping moss –
Elders and juniors – aye,
Making the pathways neat
And the garden gay;
And they build a shady seat…
Ah, no; the years, the years;
</code></pre>

<p>See, the white storm-birds wing across!</p>

<pre><code>They are blithely breakfasting all –
Men and maidens – yea,
Under the summer tree,
With a glimpse of the bay,
While pet fowl come to the knee…
Ah, no; the years O!
</code></pre>

<p>And the rotten rose is ript from the wall.</p>

<pre><code>They change to a high new house,
He, she, all of them – aye,
Clocks and carpets and chairs
On the lawn all day,
And brightest things that are theirs…
Ah, no; the years, the years;
</code></pre>

<p>Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.</p>

<p>(And if you’re interested in hearing how this sounds when read by three different contemporary poets - Hall, Philip Levine, and Rosanna Warren - go here:
<a href=“http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/poetry/soundings/hardy.htm[/url]”>http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/poetry/soundings/hardy.htm&lt;/a&gt;)</p>

<p>P.S. For whatever reason, I can’t seem to get the formatting of the lines quite right when I copy them here. Oh, well.</p>

93

<p>Hmmmmm . . . it seems as though that Atlantic Web page may be available only to subscribers. (I didnt know that when I posted the link.)</p>

<p>Anyway, if you’re interested, here’s how Philip Levine’s introduces Hardy’s poem there:</p>

<p>

</p>

94

<p>

According to google the e.e. cummings poem I put in post 2 or 3 - the one that ends “nobody not even the rain has such small hands”.</p>

95

<p>Hmm. I love Thomas Hardy’s novels, and I’ve liked many of his poems, but that was is not my favorite by a long shot!</p>

96

<p>More Robert Frost. At a time when walls are going up between neighborhoods in Bagdad, between Israel and the West Bank, between the U.S. and Mexico, I keep finding myself remembering lines from this poem.</p>

<pre><code> Mending Wall
</code></pre>

<p>Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors’.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.” </p>

<hr>

97

<p>Yes, that one I got. That’s the one Barbara Hershey reads in Hannah and her sisters.</p>

98

<p>atomom, I love that Millay poem in #85. (Of course, I love many Millay poems. I took a poetry course in college and got half the class hooked on Millay.)</p>

<p>And I love the line “Good fences make good neighbors.” I love it almost as much as I love the line in another Frost poem – “Home is the place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you in.”</p>

<p>Here’s another Edna St. Vincent Millay sonnet:</p>

<p>Not in a silver casket cool with pearls
Or rich with red corundum or with blue,
Locked, and the key withheld, as other girls
Have given their loves, I give my love to you;
Not in a lovers’-knot, not in a ring
Worked in such fashion, and the legend plain –
Semper fidelis, where a secret spring
Kennels a drop of mischief for the brain:
Love in the open hand, no thing but that,
Ungemmed, unhidden, wishing not to hurt,
As one should bring you cowslips in a hat,
Swung from the hand, or apples in her skirt,
I bring you, calling out as children do:
“Look what I have! – And these are all for you.”</p>

99

<p>I can’t stay off this thread–there must be a reason why I was a lit. major (twice). </p>

<p>For you, Mollie–my other favorite Millay. It reminds me of how H and I used to act about 20 or so years ago. I hope you and your new H are “very tired and very merry.”
Recuerdo
by Edna St. Vincent Millay</p>

<p>We were very tired, we were very merry –
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable –
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.
We were very tired, we were very merry –
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen each, we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.</p>

<p>We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, “Good-morrow, Mother!” to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.</p>

100

<p>Re: movies–The Shakespeare Sonnet #116 (post #67 by garland) was read by Kate Winslet (and the bum she didn’t marry) in Sense and Sensibility. I love that one.</p>