Tag Archives: poetry

“To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing” by William Butler Yeats

09 Wednesday Nov 2016

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William Butler Yeats

Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who were it proved he lies
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors’ eyes;
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.

__________

“To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing” by William Butler Yeats (1916).

For the Time Being

28 Monday Dec 2015

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W.H. AudenAlone, alone, about a dreadful wood
Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind,
Dreading to find its Father lest it find
The Goodness it has dreaded is not good:
Alone, alone, about our dreadful wood.

Where is that Law for which we broke our own,
Where now that Justice for which Flesh resigned
Her hereditary right to passion, Mind
His will to absolute power? Gone. Gone.
Where is that Law for which we broke our own?

The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.
Was it to meet such grinning evidence
We left our richly odoured ignorance?
Was the triumphant answer to be this?
The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss,

We who must die demand a miracle.
How could the Eternal do a temporal act,
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible:
We who must die demand a miracle.

__________

Pulled from W.H. Auden’s 1942 poem “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio”. You’ll find it in his Collected Poems.

I hope all of you have had wonderful Christmases and holidays.

Three others I read this time of year:

“Innocence” by Patrick Kavanaugh

11 Wednesday Nov 2015

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Patrick Kavanaugh

They laughed at one I loved —
The triangular hill that hung
Under the Big Forth. They said
That I was bounded by the whitethorn hedges
Of the little farm and did not know the world.
But I knew that love’s doorway to life
Is the same doorway everywhere.

Ashamed of what I loved
I flung her from me and called her a ditch
Although she was smiling at me with violets.

But now I am back in her briary arms
The dew of an Indian Summer morning lies
On bleached potato-stalks—
What age am I?

I do not know what age I am,
I am no mortal age;
I know nothing of women,
Nothing of cities,
I cannot die
Unless I walk outside these whitethorn hedges.

__________

“Innocence” by Patrick Kavanagh, which you’ll find in his Selected Poems.

If you ever hoof it to the village of Inniskeen in County Monaghan, Ireland, you’ll find Patrick Kavanagh’s grave among the pale wooden crosses in the village cemetery. According to pilgrims who’ve made the trek, some of the locals will still reminisce about the native son (Kavanagh died in Dublin in 1967). As one resident told a recent visitor: “I knew Paddy. His mother couldn’t read and his father was a cobbler. Paddy was not a good farmer… he paid no heed to his fields.”

Not surprisingly. His mind was on — or perhaps already in — the city. Like many poets of the day, from Yeats to Wilde to Goldsmith, Kavanagh migrated to Dublin, walking the fifty-mile journey for the first time in 1931, at the age of twenty-seven. He would be internationally known within the decade, largely due to his poems about common life “On Raglan Road” and “The Great Hunger”.

It’s clear he scorned the grubby, provincial life of his boyhood, with its emotional and material deprivation, its spiritual nullity. In his poem “Stony Grey Soil”, he levels a series of accusations against the stubborn soil of Monaghan: “the laugh from my love you thieved”, “you fed me on swinish food”, “you flung a ditch on my vision”. (There’s that “ditch” accusation he’s looking to rescind in “Innocence”.)

I’ll let Christian Wiman explain the rest of the poem and its relation to spiritual innocence, in his recent lecture “When You Consider the Radiance: Poetry for Preachers and Prophets”. It’s where I first heard of the poem, and I recommend watching the whole thing. Wiman’s reading of “Innocence” is set to start below.

Read on:

“The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry

11 Sunday Oct 2015

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Ireland 2005 504

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

__________

“The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry. Find it in his Selected Poems.

Thanks to my friend Matt Sitman for bringing this one to my attention. If you don’t read Matthew’s work on Commonweal magazine, I recommend you do. You can start with his newest piece, “Sex and the Synod”, about the church’s posture toward the sexual revolution. I especially liked this:

The task of genuine Christian discernment in these matters is to sift through the gains and losses of the sexual revolution rather than dismiss it in one swoop and reply only with a steadfast no. Christians, and the church, must be able to distinguish between learning from history and experience and simply being fashionable. There really is a difference…

In his opening homily at the Synod on Monday, Pope Francis spoke of a “Church that journeys together to read reality with the eyes of faith and with the heart of God.” That posture of critical openness, of believing the realities we experience might actually teach us something, finds its negation in Reno’s no. It all reminds me of a line from a favorite novel of mine, found in a letter written by an aging minister to his son: “Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.”

It echoes Updike’s liberating response about his belief, pulled from this interview:

Questioner: I remember reading that you said that other belief systems were religions of No, and you chose a religion of Yes.

John Updike: Yes, I did. And that terminology I got from Karl Barth, who I found of the twentieth century theologians to be the most comforting as well as the most uncompromising. He does dismiss all attempts to make theism naturalistic… He’s very definite that it’s Scripture and nothing else. I find this hard to swallow, but I like to see Barth’s swallowing it, and I like his tone of voice. He talks about the Yes and No of life, and says he loves Mozart more than Bach because Mozart expresses the Yes of life.

I took the above shot in Ireland.

Three more from Berry:

Berry Center

“Blackbird” by C.K. Williams

27 Sunday Sep 2015

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Fall

There was nothing I could have done—
a flurry of blackbirds burst
from the weeds at the edge of a field
and one veered out into my wheel
and went under. I had a moment
to hope he’d emerge as sometimes
they will from beneath the back
of the car and fly off,
but I saw him behind on the roadbed,
the shadowless sail of a wing
lifted vainly from the clumsy
bundle of matter he’d become.

There was nothing I could have done,
though perhaps I was distracted:
I’d been listening to news of the war,
hearing that what we’d suspected
were lies had proved to be lies,
that many were dying for those lies,
but as usual now, it wouldn’t matter.
I’d been thinking of Lincoln’s
“…You can’t fool all of the people
all of the time…,” how I once
took comfort from the hope and trust
it implied, but no longer.

I had to slow down now,
a tractor hauling a load of hay
was approaching on the narrow lane.
The farmer and I gave way and waved:
the high-piled bales swayed
menacingly over my head but held.
Out in the harvested fields,
already disliked and raw,
more blackbirds, uncountable
clouds of them, rose, held
for an instant, then broke,
scattered as though by a gale.

__________

“Blackbird” by C.K. Williams, which you’ll find in his collection Wait.

Williams, who for three decades taught at Princeton, passed away last Sunday. His poems are sometimes challenging, always ambitious, and unusually sincere as they traverse public and private life. I think “Blackbird” is a good example of this ability, as well as of Williams’s knack for speaking with emotion and cunning intelligence in the same breath.

For many years, his poems and critical essays were included in The New Yorker. Most are worth a read, though the opening line of his tribute to his friend the poet Galway Kinnell resonates today:

About the death of any friend one feels sadness; with some, though, that sadness is tempered by gratitude, by a feeling of privilege to have been able to live in the world at the same time as the one who’s gone.

“Blackbird” is basically a mash up of Larkin’s “The Mower,” Bly’s “Awakening,” and “On Being Asked to Write a Poem against the War in Vietnam” by Hayden Carruth. If you want to stick with Williams, his “Repression” is a good place to start.

The photo: snapped outside Charlottesville, Virginia.

C. K. Williams

“Days” by Philip Larkin

20 Sunday Sep 2015

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Leaves

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

__________

“Days” by Philip Larkin, which you’ll find in his Complete Poems.

“Solving that question” is just a euphemistic way of saying… well, what activity involves a priest and doctor? There couldn’t be a more Larkinesque way of capping off a poem about finding contentment in life’s diurnality. The lone image in the poem, those long coats coming from over the fields, seems to me to suggest something like foreignness and opportunism.

I took the picture in northern Virginia.

More Larkin:

“Sonogram” by Paul Muldoon

23 Sunday Aug 2015

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Ireland - Inch Beach

Only a few weeks ago, the sonogram of Jean’s womb
resembled nothing so much
as a satellite map of Ireland:

now the image
is so well-defined we can make out not only a hand
but a thumb;

on the road to Spiddal, a woman hitching a ride;
a gladiator in his net, passing judgement on the crowd.

__________

“Sonogram” by Paul Muldoon, which you’ll find in his T.S. Eliot Prize-winning collection The Annals of Chile. Muldoon would go to earn even greater honors, picking up a Pulitzer for poetry eight years later for Moy Sand and Gravel.

Speaking to The Paris Review in 2004, Muldoon reflected on how wild metaphors can form the basis of some of the best poetry (as showcased in “Sonogram” and its effortless, playful smirk, its images for the female then male drives to be freed):

Well, I think many poems begin with an instant. I was driving home from New York with my four-year-old son and in the Lincoln Tunnel, out of nowhere, he said, Those lights are like tadpoles, and then this morning he came up with the bright idea that we’re like horses. I think that the impulse to find the likeness between unlike things is very basic to us, and it is out of that, of course, which the simile or metaphor springs. So a poem moves towards some sort of clarification, and the creation of a space in which sense, however fleetingly, may be made.

Muldoon then moved into a short reflection on children, which again ties nicely into the above work:

One of the things you discover about children of course is that they come, not exactly fully formed, but quite formed, in terms of their personalities. And I can imagine myself around three or four being a right little smartass, in the way that my children come up with the most extraordinary things, but I’m programmed to accept them. That was probably more difficult for my parents to deal with… One is never going to get it right, no matter what one does. Of course that’s one of the things one understands as a parent, that one’s children are going to have to find something against which they can react. Most of these reasons are emblematic rather than real. So I think the invention of a life is not such a far-fetched notion, I think it happens all the time.

I took the above picture on Inch Beach in Ireland, not too far from Muldoon’s place of birth.

More short poems that spin on brilliant metaphors:

Paul Muldoon

“Provide, Provide” by Robert Frost

02 Sunday Aug 2015

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Robert Frost

The witch that came (the withered hag)
To wash the steps with pail and rag
Was once the beauty Abishag,

The picture pride of Hollywood.
Too many fall from great and good
For you to doubt the likelihood.

Die early and avoid the fate.
Or if predestined to die late,
Make up your mind to die in state.

Make the whole stock exchange your own!
If need be occupy a throne,
Where nobody can call you crone.

Some have relied on what they knew,
Others on being simply true.
What worked for them might work for you.

No memory of having starred
Atones for later disregard
Or keeps the end from being hard.

Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all. Provide, provide!

__________

“Provide, Provide” by Robert Frost. You’ll find it in his Collected Poems. The poem is also cited movingly in the 50th chapter of Julian Barnes’s excellent book Nothing to Be Frightened Of.

Randall Jarrell called this poem a subtle description of how “wisdom of this world… demonstrates to us that the wisdom of this world isn’t enough.” There’s no level of material success or social status — nor is there a level of knowledge about either — that will save you from the brute realities of life.

Writing about “Provide, Provide” in his book Modernist Quartet, Frank Lentricchia observes that,

The entire tone and manner is that of the public poet speaking to his democratic culture. The diction is appropriately drawn from the accessible middle level, with the exception of “boughten,” a regionalist trace of the authentic life, meaning “store-bought” as opposed to “homemade,” the real thing as opposed to the commodified version; no major problem if the subject is ice cream or bread, but with “boughten friendship” we step into an ugly world. The bardic voice speaks, but now in mock-directives (“Die early and avoid the fate,” “Make the whole stock exchange your own”), counseling the value of money and power; how they command fear; how fear commands, at a minimum, a sham of decency from others (better that than the authenticity of their meanness). Genuine knowledge? Sincerity? Devices only in the Hollywood of everyday life. Try them, they might work.

I also found the following comments, from an unknown author, helpful:

Robert Frost doesn’t mince words and refuses to whitewash the hard realities of life. The world & nature are essentially unconcerned about human welfare or wellbeing. The onus to provide for oneself squarely lies on one’s own self come what may, under all circumstances. Morals and ethics may fail to garner support or friendship for oneself in the end.

Terrifying? Yes and no. Superficially yes, actually not. Nowhere does Frost want you to show your back and run away. The poet neither suggests escapism nor a cowardly exit from this world. Rather, there is a clear cut call to gird up your loins and provide provide, whatever the circumstances, whatever the situation to the best of your ability.

More:

“The End” by Mark Strand

28 Sunday Jun 2015

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Woods

Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like
When he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end,
Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back.

When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,
When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down
No longer appear, not every man knows what he’ll discover instead.
When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky

Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus
And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,
Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing
When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.

__________

“The End” by Mark Strand. Find it in his collection The Continuous Life or his essential Collected Poems.

Three favorite Strand works:

Mark Strand

“On a Return from Egypt” by Keith Douglas

21 Sunday Jun 2015

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Keith-Douglas

To stand here in the wings of Europe
disheartened, I have come away
from the sick land where in the sun lay
the gentle sloe-eyed murderers
of themselves, exquisites under a curse;
here to exercise my depleted fury.

For the heart is a coal, growing colder
when jewelled cerulean seas change
into grey rocks, grey water-fringe,
sea and sky altering like a cloth
till colour and sheen are gone both:
cold is an opiate of the soldier.

And all my endeavours are unlucky explorers
come back, abandoning the expedition;
the specimens, the lilies of ambition
still spring in their climate, still unpicked:
but time, time is all I lacked
to find them, as the great collectors before me.

The next month, then, there is a window
and with a crash I’ll split the glass.
Behind it stands one I must kiss,
person of love or death
a person or a wraith,
I fear what I shall find.

__________

“On a Return from Egypt” by Keith Douglas, which you’ll find in his Complete Poems.

Douglas, who strikes me as the Second World War’s echo of Isaac Rosenberg, wrote this, his last poem, two months before his death in the opening hours of the invasion of Normandy. He was twenty-four. Reread the final stanza — which Harold Bloom calls “Shakesperean” in its diction — with this information in mind.

The stanza and particularly its last line embody what Yeats considered the defining characteristic of Romantic poetry, namely, the principle of simplification through intensity.

More:

To Understand the World of Today

14 Sunday Jun 2015

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John- December 2005 668

The woodcutters also starving,
firewood disappeared.

With nothing else
some tore down their homes
and took the wood to market.

It was said the value
of this wood
was not enough to live on
for one day.

Then, I was baffled
finding kindling painted red
and catching glimpses
of gold leaf.

I have heard
that in the distant past,
this nation was governed
with compassion
by certain wise rulers.

The palace was thatched
with common reeds,
the eaves left ragged.

When the emperor saw
smoke rise thinly
from the people’s hearths
he waived already modest taxes.

This was
an act of mercy,
a desire to help
his people.

To understand
the world of today,
hold it up
to the world
of long ago.

__________

From the first section of Hōjōki (The Ten Foot Square Hut) by the Japanese ascetic writer Kamo no Chōmei.

Written in 1212, this poetic essay concerns the 50-year-old Kamo no Chōmei’s decision to renounce his status and material prosperity and withdraw from the capital city of Kyoto following a fire and famine. He would spend the remainder of his life on Mount Hiro, living in a simple, hand-built hut, where he discovered, among other revelations, that in man’s quest to disengage from the world, he may become attached (even obsessed) with detachment. Chōmei’s literary and philosophical shadow lingers large over later writers like Thoreau; just as his work, like the final stanza above, is a stark reminder that the history of man and society isn’t just linear, but cyclical.

I snapped the picture on the other side of the world, in Houston, Texas.