poetry never stood a chance

The end of April is always a little bittersweet, for me -- I mean, I suppose I could post poetry all year round, but then you guys would probably hate me, and also I might get bored. Thirty days out of the year is really about right, but I'm always sad to see poetry month end. Shout-outs this year to all the other awesome people on my flist posting poetry and inspiring me to post poetry.

I don't know where April has gone, either -- it seems like this year is moving at warp speed. I'll be in New York before I know it. Meanwhile, San Francisco is gorgeous, yesterday's travel was entirely painless, and the answer to the million dollar question is that Midwest/Frontier does still serve free chocolate chip cookies.

I have been waiting to post this poem for weeks, but it was always very clear to me that it had to conclude the month. Among other things, it is -- very apt, for some of the big things I am thinking about right now. And always.

I

When my dreams showed signs
of becoming
politically correct
no unruly images
escaping beyond borders
when walking in the street I found my
themes cut out for me
knew what I would not report
for fear of enemies' usage
then I began to wonder

II

Everything we write
will be used against us
or against those we love.
These are the terms,
take them or leave them.

Poetry never stood a chance
of standing outside history.
One line typed twenty years ago
can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
to glorify art as detachment
or torture of those we
did not love but also
did not want to kill

We move but our words stand
become responsible
for more than we intended

and this is verbal privilege

III

Try sitting at a typewriter
one calm summer evening
at a table by a window
in the country, try pretending
your time does not exist
that you are simply you
and the imagination simply strays
like a great moth, unintentional
try telling yourself
you are not accountable
to the life of your tribe
the breath of your planet

IV

It doesn't matter what you think.
Words are found responsible
all you can do is choose them
or choose
to remain silent. Or, you never had a choice,
which is why the words that do stand
are responsible

and this is verbal privilege

V

Suppose you want to write
of a woman braiding
another woman's hair—
straight down, or with beads and shells
in three-strand plaits or corn-rows—
you had better know the thickness
the length the pattern
why she decides to braid her hair
how it is done to her
what country it happens in
what else happens in that country

You have to know these things

VI

Poet, sister: words—
whether we like it or not—
stand in a time of their own.
No use protesting I wrote that
before Kollontai was exiled
Rosa Luxembourg, Malcolm,
Anna Mae Aquash, murdered,
before Treblinka, Birkenau,
Hiroshima, before Sharpeville,
Biafra, Bangla Desh, Boston,
Atlanta, Soweto, Beirut, Assam
—those faces, names of places
sheared from the almanac
of North American time

VII

I am thinking this in a country
where words are stolen out of mouths
as bread is stolen out of mouths
where poets don't go to jail
for being poets, but for being
dark-skinned, female, poor.
I am writing this in a time
when anything we write
can be used against those we love
where the context is never given
though we try to explain, over and over
For the sake of poetry at least
I need to know these things

VIII

Sometimes, gliding at night
in a plane over New York City
I have felt like some messenger
called to enter, called to engage
this field of light and darkness.
A grandiose idea, born of flying.
But underneath the grandiose idea
is the thought that what I must engage
after the plane has raged onto the tarmac
after climbing my old stairs, sitting down
at my old window
is meant to break my heart and reduce me to silence.

IX

In North America time stumbles on
without moving, only releasing
a certain North American pain.
Julia de Burgos wrote:
That my grandfather was a slave
is my grief; had he been a master
that would have been my shame.
A poet's words, hung over a door
in North America, in the year
nineteen-eighty-three.
The almost-full moon rises
timelessly speaking of change
out of the Bronx, the Harlem River
the drowned towns of the Quabbin
the pilfered burial mounds
the toxic swamps, the testing-grounds

and I start to speak again.

~Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), North American Time, 1983.

not brighter rise

I think I do Jonson something of a disservice, by posting only one of his poems, and posting that same poem every year. He wrote a lot of poems, and they weren't all to the memory of his beloved and what he hath left us. A little repetition may be called for, at least for the sake of my slightly sardonic, but very real, affection for Ben. It's kind of shocking that I didn't post this poem last year, but I suppose I wasn't totally hooked yet in April.

This morning, timely rapt with holy fire,
I thought to form unto my zealous Muse
What kind of creature I could most desire
To honor, serve, and love; as poets use.
I meant to make her fair, and free, and wise,
Of greatest blood, and yet more good than great;
I meant the day-star should not brighter rise,
Nor lend like influence from his lucent seat.
I meant she should be courteous, facile, sweet,
Hating that solemn vice of greatness, pride;
I meant each softest virtue there should meet,
Fit in that softer bosom to reside.
Only a learned and a manly soul
I purposed her; that should, with even powers,
The rock, the spindle, and the shears control
Of destiny, and spin her own free hours.
Such when I meant to feign, and wished to see,
My Muse bade, 'Bedford write', and that was she.

~Ben Jonson (1572-1637), LXXVI "On Lucy, Countess of Bedford", from Epigrams, in The Works of Benjamin Jonson, 1616. (Epigrams was not at all incidentally dedicated to William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke. I heart Pembroke).

The footnote for the Countess of Bedford in the Norton Critical Edition of Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets reads, "Daughter (1581-1627) of Sir John Harington, the Countess of Bedford was friend and patron to Jonson, Donne, Daniel, and other literary figures; she took part in several of Jonson's masques." I suppose I have in fact written 15,000+ words on why that kind of footnote makes me angry, so we can probably move on. The real question is whether Jonson did actually try to get Bedford to bail him out of jail.

ask yourself: where is it snowing?

In the first version, Persephone
is taken from her mother
and the goddess of the earth
punishes the earth—this is
consistent with what we know of human behavior,

that human beings take profound satisfaction
in doing harm, particularly
unconscious harm:

we may call this
negative creation.

Persephone's initial
sojourn in hell continues to be
pawed over by scholars who dispute
the sensations of the virgin:

did she cooperate in her rape,
or was she drugged, violated against her will,
as happens so often now to modern girls.

As is well known, the return of the beloved
does not correct
the loss of the beloved: Persephone

returns home
stained with red juice like
a character in Hawthorne—

I am not certain I will
keep this word: is earth
"home" to Persephone? Is she at home, conceivably,
in the bed of the god? Is she
at home nowhere? Is she
a born wanderer, in other words
an existential
replica of her own mother, less
hamstrung by ideas of causality?

You are allowed to like
no one, you know. The characters
are not people.
They are aspects of a dilemma or conflict.

Three parts: just as the soul is divided,
ego, superego, id. Likewise

the three levels of the known world,
a kind of diagram that separates
heaven from earth from hell.

You must ask yourself:
where is it snowing?

White of forgetfulness,
of desecration—

It is snowing on earth; the cold wind says

Persephone is having sex in hell.
Unlike the rest of us, she doesn't know
what winter is, only that
she is what causes it.

She is lying in the bed of Hades.
What is in her mind?
Is she afraid? Has something
blotted out the idea
of mind?

She does know the earth
is run by mothers, this much
is certain. She also knows
she is not what is called
a girl any longer. Regarding
incarceration, she believes

she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter.

The terrible reunions in store for her
will take up the rest of her life.
When the passion for expiation
is chronic, fierce, you do not choose
the way you live. You do not live;
you are not allowed to die.

You drift between earth and death
which seem, finally,
strangely alike. Scholars tell us

that there is no point in knowing what you want
when the forces contending over you
could kill you.

White of forgetfulness,
white of safety—

They say
there is a rift in the human soul
which was not constructed to belong
entirely to life. Earth

asks us to deny this rift, a threat
disguised as suggestion—
as we have seen
in the tale of Persephone
which should be read

as an argument between the mother and the lover—
the daughter is just meat.

When death confronts her, she has never seen
the meadow without the daisies.
Suddenly she is no longer
singing her maidenly songs
about her mother's
beauty and fecundity. Where
the rift is, the break is.

Song of the earth,
song of the mythic vision of eternal life—

My soul
shattered with the strain
of trying to belong to earth—

What will you do,
when it is your turn in the field with the god?

~Louise Glück (b. 1943), "Persephone the Wanderer" from Averno, 2006.

for rhymes to catch at and let go

It's a clear, cool, gorgeous night -- after dinner and before dessert, we walked around the square and watched the sunset. The full moon came out while we were inside, and on the drive home the moonlight on the lake was almost unrealistically beautiful. At home, the night air smelled overwhelmingly of lilacs.

Every year I think, "Maybe I won't post any Browning this year," and then I post Browning. He sneaks up on me.

I

I wonder do you feel to-day
As I have felt since, hand in hand,
We sat down on the grass, to stray
In spirit better through the land,
This morn of Rome and May?

II

For me, I touched a thought, I know,
Has tantalized me many times,
(Like turns of thread the spiders throw
Mocking across our path) for rhymes
To catch at and let go.

III

Help me to hold it! First it left
The yellowing fennel, run to seed
There, branching from the brickwork's cleft,
Some old tomb's ruin: yonder weed
Took up the floating weft,

IV

Where one small orange cup amassed
Five beetles,—blind and green they grope
Among the honey-meal: and last,
Everywhere on the grassy slope
I traced it. Hold it fast!

V

The champaign with its endless fleece
Of feathery grasses everywhere!
Silence and passion, joy and peace,
An everlasting wash of air—
Rome's ghost since her decease.

VI

Such life here, through such lengths of hours,
Such miracles performed in play,
Such primal naked forms of flowers,
Such letting nature have her way
While heaven looks from its towers!

VII

How say you? Let us, O my dove,
Let us be unashamed of soul,
As earth lies bare to heaven above!
How is it under our control
To love or not to love?

VIII

I would that you were all to me,
You that are just so much, no more.
Nor yours nor mine,—nor slave nor free!
Where does the fault lie? What the core
O' the wound, since wound must be?

IX

I would I could adopt your will,
See with your eyes, and set my heart
Beating by yours, and drink my fill
At your soul's springs,—your part my part
In life, for good and ill.

X

No. I yearn upward, touch you close,
Then stand away. I kiss your cheek,
Catch your soul's warmth,—I pluck the rose
And love it more than tongue can speak—
Then the good minute goes.

XI

Already how am I so far
Out of that minute? Must I go
Still like the thistle-ball, no bar,
Onward, whenever light winds blow,
Fixed by no friendly star?

XII

Just when I seemed about to learn!
Where is the thread now? Off again!
The old trick! Only I discern—
Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.

~Robert Browning (1812-1889), "Two in the Campagna" from Men and Women, 1855.

not language but a map

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

~Jack Gilbert (b. 1925), The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart

Via wintercreek, who posted this poem earlier in the month. I fell in love.

call in answer to the shrouded heart

A quien no escucha el mar en este viernes
por la mañana, quien adentro de algo,
casa, oficina, fábrica or mujer,
o calle o mina o seco calabozo:
a éste yo acudo y sin hablar ni ver
leego y abro la puerta del encierro
y un sin fin se oye vago en la insistencia,
un largo trueno roto se encadena
al peso del planeta y de la espuma,
surgen los ríos roncos del océano,
vibra veloz en su rosal la estrella
y el mar palpita, muere y continúa.

Así por el destino conducido
debo sin tregua oír y conservar
el lamento marino en mi conciencia,
debo sentir el golpe de agua dura
y recogerlo en una taza eterna
para que donde esté el encarcelado,
donde sufra el castigo del otoño
yo esté presente con una ola errante,
yo circule a través de las ventanas
y al oírme levante la mirada
diciendo: cómo me acercaré al océano?
Y yo transmitiré de la ola,
un quebranto de espuma y arenales,
un susurro de sal que se retira,
el grito gris del ave de la costa.

Y así, por mí, la libertad y el mar
responderán al corazón oscuro.


To whoever is not listening to the sea
this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up
in house or office, factory or woman
or street or mine or dry prison cell,
to him I come, and without speaking or looking
I arrive and open the door of his prison,
and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,
a long rumble of thunder adds itself
to the weight of the planet and the foam,
the groaning rivers of the ocean rise,
the star vibrates quickly in its corona
and the sea beats, dies, and goes on beating.

So, drawn on by my destiny,
I ceaselessly must listen to and keep
the sea's lamenting in my consciousness,
I must feel the crash of the hard water
and gather it up in a perpetual cup
so that, wherever those in prison may be,
wherever they suffer the sentence of the autumn,
I may be present with an errant wave,
I may move in and out of windows,
and hearing me, eyes may lift themselves,
asking "How can I reach the sea?"
And I will pass to them, saying nothing,
the starry echoes of the wave,
a breaking up of foam and quicksand,
a rustling of salt withdrawing itself,
the grey cry of seabirds on the coast.

So, through me, freedom and the sea
will call in answer to the shrouded heart.

~Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), "Deber Del Poeta" or "The Poet's Obligation", from Plenos Poderes or Fully Empowered, 1961-1962, translated by Alastair Reid. Neruda always makes me wish that my Spanish was actually good enough to read anything whatsoever in the original.

storm the gates of nothingness

Just a little one, today. I swear I'm not only posting Sassoon because of all the Generation Kill -- he was on my spreadsheet! I really adore the WWI war poets; this one is also not exactly a war poem. (Still, I can probably guarantee that if I ever do end up writing Generation Kill fic, it will have a lot of Classical allusions and randomly reference Siegfried Sassoon.)

Tossed on the glittering air they soar and skim,
Whose voices make the emptiness of light
A windy palace. Quavering from the brim
Of dawn, and bold with song at edge of night,
They clutch their leafy pinnacles and sing
Scornful of man, and from his toils aloof
Whose heart’s a haunted woodland whispering;
Whose thoughts return on tempest-baffled wing;
Who hears the cry of God in everything,
And storms the gate of nothingness for proof.

~Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967), "Thrushes" from Counter-Attack and Other Poems, 1918.

Meanwhile, I am back in bed with the internet and a cup of tea, for a while: the perfect Saturday morning. I may even be able to refrain from murdering the air-raid-siren birds outside my open window. We'll see how it goes.

while thy book doth live

I try not to repeat myself in National Poetry Month. There's so much wonderful poetry in the world that posting the same poems over and over again would, I think, rather defeat the purpose; I have a spreadsheet for a reason. Still, I do have one annual tradition.

To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name,
Am I thus ample to thy book and fame;
While I confess thy writings to be such
As neither man nor Muse can praise too much.
’Tis true, and all men’s suffrage. But these ways
Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise;
For seeliest Ignorance on these may light,
Which, when it sounds at best, but echoes right;
Or blind Affection, which doth ne’er advance
The truth, but gropes and urgeth all by chance;
Or crafty Malice might pretend this praise,
And think to ruin where it seem’d to raise.
These are as some infamous bawd or whore
Should praise a matron. What could hurt her more?
But thou art proof against them, and, indeed,
Above the ill-fortune of them, or the need.
I, therefore, will begin. Soul of the age!
The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage,
My Shakespeare, rise! I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie
A little further, to make thee a room:
Thou art a monument without a tomb,
And art alive still, while thy book doth live,
And we have wits to read, and praise to give.
That I not mix thee so, my brain excuses;
I mean, with great but disproportion’d Muses.
For, if I thought my judgment were of years,
I should commit thee, surely, with thy peers.
And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine,
Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe’s mighty line.
And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
From thence, to honour thee, I would not seek
For names; but call forth thund’ring Aeschylus,
Euripides, and Sophocles to us,
Paccuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead
To life again, to hear thy buskin tread
And shake a stage; or when thy socks were on,
Leave thee alone, for the comparison
Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome
Sent forth; or since did from their ashes come.
Triumph, my Britain! Thou hast one to show
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time!
And all the Muses still were in their prime,
When, like Apollo, he came forth to warm
Our ears, or, like a Mercury, to charm.
Nature herself was proud of his designs,
And joy’d to wear the dressing of his lines,
Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit
As, since, she will vouchsafe no other wit.
The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes,
Neat Terence, witty Plautus, now not please;
But antiquated and deserted lie,
As they were not of Nature’s family.
Yet must I not give Nature all! Thy art,
My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part.
For though the Poet’s matter Nature be
His art doth give the fashion. And that he
Who casts to write a living line, must sweat
(Such as thine are), and strike the second heat
Upon the Muses’ anvil, turn the same
(And himself with it), that he thinks to frame;
Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn!
For a good Poet’s made as well as born;
And such wert thou! Look how the father’s face
Lives in his issue; even so, the race
Of Shakespeare’s mind and manners brightly shines
In his well-turned and true-filed lines;
In each of which he seems to shake a lance
As brandish’d at the eyes of Ignorance.
Sweet Swan of Avon! what a sight it were
To see thee in our water yet appear,
And make those flights upon the banks of Thames
That so did take Eliza, and our James!
But stay, I see thee in the hemisphere
Advanc’d, and made a constellation there!
Shine forth, thou star of poets, and with rage
Or influence, chide, or cheer the drooping stage;
Which since thy flight from hence hath mourn’d like night,
And despairs day, but for thy volume’s light.

~Ben Jonson (1572-1637), To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare and What He Hath Left Us, preface to the First Shakespeare Folio of 1623. Sometimes I feel like this annual tradition is rather unfair to Jonson, whom I also love. Sorry, Ben.

Happy alleged birthday, Will. Thanks for, you know, everything.

some gala day

Bring me the sunset in a cup,
Reckon the morning’s flagons up,
And say how many dew;
Tell me how far the morning leaps,
Tell me what time the weaver sleeps
Who spun the breadths of blue!

Write me how many notes there be
In the new robin’s ecstasy
Among astonished boughs;
How many trips the tortoise makes,
How many cups the bee partakes,—
The debauchee of dews!

Also, who laid the rainbow’s piers,
Also, who leads the docile spheres
By withes of supple blue?
Whose fingers string the stalactite,
Who counts the wampum of the night,
To see that none is due?

Who built this little Alban house
And shut the windows down so close
My spirit cannot see?
Who’ll let me out some gala day,
With implements to fly away,
Passing pomposity?

~Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), XXXIX, "Bring me the sunset in a cup", from "Part Two: Nature", Complete Poems, 1924.

Happy Earth Day! I never quite know how I feel about Emily, but I like this one. Meanwhile, it is kind of a beautiful day.

livelier liquor than the muse

‘Terence, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can’t be much amiss, ’tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,
It gives a chap the belly-ache.
The cow, the old cow, she is dead;
It sleeps well, the horned head:
We poor lads, ’tis our turn now
To hear such tunes as killed the cow.
Pretty friendship ’tis to rhyme
Your friends to death before their time
Moping melancholy mad:
Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad.’

Why, if ’tis dancing you would be,
There’s brisker pipes than poetry.
Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?
Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.
Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world’s not.
And faith, ’tis pleasant till ’tis past:
The mischief is that ’twill not last.
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where,
And carried half way home, or near,
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
Then the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad;
And down in lovely muck I’ve lain,
Happy till I woke again.
Then I saw the morning sky:
Heigho, the tale was all a lie;
The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet,
And nothing now remained to do
But begin the game anew.

Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure,
I’d face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
’Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul’s stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.

There was a king reigned in the East:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all the springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.
—I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.

~A.E. Housman (1859-1936), LXII, "Terence, this is stupid stuff", from A Shropshire Lad, 1896.

Oh, Hous. Molly prohibited herself from posting Housman, this month, but she didn't prohibit me from posting Housman. Sometimes I think Stoppard may have done me a great disservice with The Invention of Love. I am way too invested in A.E. Housman. Stop falling in love with straight boys, Hous!

of ordered impulse mariners await

Did you guys know that Benjamin Disraeli wrote a sonnet about his enormous crush on Wellington? I did not know this! Although to be fair to Disraeli, most of Britain had a pretty enormous crush on Wellington for about fifty years. Wellington was also much too old for Disraeli, and anyway I ship Disraeli and Gladstone. Yes, yes I do.

Not only that thy puissant arm could bind
The tyrant of a world; and, conquering Fate,
Enfranchise Europe, do I deem thee great;
But that in all thy actions I do find
Exact propriety: no gusts of mind
Fitful and wild, but that continuous state
Of ordered impulse mariners await
In some benignant and enriching wind,--
The breath ordained of Nature. Thy calm mien
Recalls old Rome, as much as thy high deed;
Duty thine only idol, and serene
When all are troubled; in the utmost need
Prescient; thy country's servant ever seen,
Yet sovereign of thyself, whate'er may speed.

~Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield (1804-1881), Prime Minister 1868 and 1874-1880, "Wellington", 1840.

Appearing in The Stowe Catalogues, priced and annotated by Henry Rumsey Forster in 1848, p. xlii; British Museum. No title appears on the sonnet. According to Mr. Forster: 'Mr. Disraeli, M.P., while a guest at Stowe, in 1840, composed the following beautiful lines in allusion to [a silver statuette by Cotterell]; they were written out at the time, and subsequently always placed on the table with the statuette.' (Bibliography to the 1904 Gosse and Arnot edition of Disraeli's Endymion, Vol. 2). God bless Google Books.

That concludes your random Victorian trivia for the day. Please tip your waitress.

like a rumour without any echo

I failed to post a poem yesterday because I felt like death on a triscuit. I still kind of feel like death on a triscuit, but I've been sitting on this poem for a long time, and I think today is the right day.

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that grey vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History.

First, there was the heaving oil,
heavy as chaos;
then, like a light at the end of a tunnel,

the lantern of a caravel,
and that was Genesis.
Then there were the packed cries,
the shit, the moaning:

Exodus.
Bone soldered by coral to bone,
mosaics
mantled by the benediction of the shark's shadow,

that was the Ark of the Covenant.
Then came from the plucked wires
of sunlight on the sea floor

the plangent harps of the Babylonian bondage,
as the white cowries clustered like manacles
on the drowned women,

and those were the ivory bracelets
of the Song of Solomon,
but the ocean kept turning blank pages

looking for History.
Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors
who sank without tombs,

brigands who barbecued cattle,
leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore,
then the foaming, rabid maw

of the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal,
and that was Jonah,
but where is your Renaissance?

Sir, it is locked in them sea-sands
out there past the reef's moiling shelf,
where the men-o'-war floated down;

strop on these goggles, I'll guide you there myself.
It's all subtle and submarine,
through colonnades of coral,

past the gothic windows of sea-fans
to where the crusty grouper, onyx-eyed,
blinks, weighted by its jewels, like a bald queen;

and these groined caves with barnacles
pitted like stone
are our cathedrals,

and the furnace before the hurricanes:
Gomorrah. Bones ground by windmills
into marl and cornmeal,

and that was Lamentations—
that was just Lamentations,
it was not History;

then came, like scum on the river's drying lip,
the brown reeds of villages
mantling and congealing into towns,

and at evening, the midges' choirs,
and above them, the spires
lancing the side of God

as His son set, and that was the New Testament.

Then came the white sisters clapping
to the waves' progress,
and that was Emancipation—

jubilation, O jubilation—
vanishing swiftly
as the sea's lace dries in the sun,

but that was not History,
that was only faith,
and then each rock broke into its own nation;

then came the synod of flies,
then came the secretarial heron,
then came the bullfrog bellowing for a vote,

fireflies with bright ideas
and bats like jetting ambassadors
and the mantis, like khaki police,

and the furred caterpillars of judges
examining each case closely,
and then in the dark ears of ferns

and in the salt chuckle of rocks
with their sea pools, there was the sound
like a rumour without any echo

of History, really beginning.

~Derek Walcott (b. 1930), The Sea is History.

Maybe I'll post a second poem today, to make up for yesterday. Or maybe I won't -- anything's possible. Meanwhile, Derek Walcott.

starshine and clay

This is only a little poem, but it packs a punch; that's one of my favorite things about Lucille Clifton poetry, I think: it sneaks up on you.

won't you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

~Lucille Clifton (1936-2010), "won't you celebrate with me", from The Book of Light, 1993.

It's still too early in the season for rhubarb, but I bought ramps and spinach at the farmer's market this morning, and I am going to make a coffee cake with strawberries this afternoon, rhubarb or no rhubarb. I am so thrilled about being in Madison through August -- even with the humidity and the mosquitoes, I love this town in the summer. And I'll be back in New England for autumn.

pepper and light

To Marc Crawford
from whom the commission

Whose broken window is a cry of art
(success, that winks aware
as elegance, as a treasonable faith)
is raw: is sonic: is old-eyed première.
Our beautiful flaw and terrible ornament.
Our barbarous and metal little man.

"I shall create! If not a note, a hole.
If not an overture, a desecration."

Full of pepper and light
and Salt and night and cargoes.

"Don't go down the plank
if you see there's no extension.
Each to his grief, each to
his loneliness and fidgety revenge.
Nobody knew where I was and now I am no longer there."

The only sanity is a cup of tea.
The music is in minors.

Each one other
is having different weather.

"It was you, it was you who threw away my name!
And this is everything I have for me."

Who has not Congress, lobster, love, luau,
the Regency Room, the Statue of Liberty,
runs. A sloppy amalgamation.
A mistake.
A cliff.
A hymn, a snare, and an exceeding sun.

~Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), "Boy Breaking Glass", from Blacks (Chicago: Third World Press, 1987). Have I seriously never posted Gwendolyn Brooks before? My spreadsheet says so; clearly this must be remedied. (Although, the same could be said of any number of poets -- poetry month could keep me busy for a very long time.)

or steps leading into the sea

She is neither pink nor pale,
And she never will be all mine;
She learned her hands in a fairy-tale,
And her mouth on a valentine.

She has more hair than she needs;
In the sun 'tis a woe to me!
And her voice is a string of coloured beads,
Or steps leading into the sea.

She loves me all that she can,
And her ways to my ways resign;
But she was not made for any man,
And she never will be all mine.

~Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), Witch-Wife. I swear I'm not only posting this poem because I was listening to Wicked today.

better hemispheres

My favorite poem in the entire world is John Donne's A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, but I'm not going to post it, because I posted it on my birthday three years ago, and I posted it a year and a half ago for a poetry meme, and I try not to repeat myself too often. Here is a different John Donne poem about love; this one is for you guys.

I wonder by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? Were we not wean'd till then?
But suck'd on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers' den?
'Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be;
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.

And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone;
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown;
Let us possess one world; each hath one, and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres
Without sharp north, without declining west?
Whatever dies, was not mix'd equally;
If our two loves be one, or thou and I
Love so alike that none can slacken, none can die.

~John Donne (1572-1631), The Good-Morrow.

Thus far today I have had excellent Thai food, put money in the bank, gotten free iced tea and a cupcake at my favorite tea house, and tried on ridiculous hats. I also did a little bit of work, and laughed at my Mom when she called to wish me happy birthday from a Starbucks line in an airport, and started planning my summer vacation to Mexico. Later, I am going to go sit by the lake with some friends, and eat fried food, and probably wish I had bug spray, because it is gorgeous, and very hot, and feels like summer.

the plentiful imagery of the world

You are the bread and the knife,
The crystal goblet and the wine...
—Jacques Crickillon

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman's tea cup.
But don't worry, I'm not the bread and the knife.

You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.

~Billy Collins, "Litany", from Nine Horses, 2002.

wring-world right foot rock

I think I learned about pathetic fallacy too young; now I can never be entirely sure if I'm depressed and gloomy because of the weather, or if the weather is depressed and gloomy because of me. Not that I think I'm a tragic hero (really not), but I never quite feel like I can blame my bad mood on the weather, either. What if it is my fault?

Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?

Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

~Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89), "Carrion Comfort", 1885, and titled by the editor of the 1918 edition of Hopkins: Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Robert Bridges (London: Humphrey Milford, 1918).

God. How so good, GMH?

panopticon

Last year, I posted Rita Dove's "Ludwig Van Beethovens' Return to Vienna", from Sonata Mulattica (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009). I hadn't read the rest of Sonata Mulattica at the time, but I checked it out of the library for poetry month this year. The whole collection (she calls it "A Life in Five Movements and a Short Play", and it really is exactly that) is utterly brilliant, and I highly recommend it; it's a historical novel -- or maybe a play -- in poetry: poetic and musical and layered and character-driven and political.

Of course, the problem with it being character-driven, and largely narrative, is that it turns out to be very difficult to excerpt. I don't really feel like I can do justice to the collection's protagonist, or its scope, with a single excerpted poem; what I can do is illustrate one particular moment of setting and time (out of a much larger movement and life; this poem is still much better in the context of the whole book). And really, while she is very, very good at many different kinds of poetry, Rita Dove especially excels at the dramatic monologue.

For everyone who has ever lost themselves in a Regency romance, or been briefly -- or more extensively -- obsessed with the Hanoverians.

1811: The Prince Regent celebrates himself

I have always believed that love is
an overflowing, an abundance one needs
to be rid of, to pour into another. That other
can be a man or a woman, dog or hillock
or headdress of ostrich feathers; it can be
sculpture or shoreline or even a sunless day
seeping its silvery light over the Thames.
It may arrive quietly, a moment between moments
in the river of talk, after the hot soup but before
the mutton; or it can be the mutton, too—
its ginger tang and musky finish.
However it comes, the sensation is
massive, inconvenient, undeniable.

If one were to banish extravagance,
all longing would take on edges. Witness
the general, poised on the smoking field,
as he surveys the strewn body bits
with a ghoulish mix of rue and relish;
he has won another snippet of territory
and is hungry for more. Love is rounder
and less dignified; if love brandished a sword
I would kneel and bare my neck.

Some call me gaudy, capricious; it's true
that I drool when I drink and cannot walk the path
from bed to breakfast tray without wheezing.
I'm gouty, corseted, flatulent—but it's all
because I cannot refuse a thing its chance
to shine, to sigh or deliquesce. So let there be
stars in every glass and fireworks over the park,
spun sugar pagodas on mirrored lakes, diamonds,
a footman in ancient armor, crimson drapery;
and down the center of the banquet table
set for two hundred in the Gothic conservatory

an actual stream—pure water cascading
between banks of real moss with tiny flowers—
and fish flashing, gold and silver, down the sluice.

More pineapples, more cherry wine!
Tell the other two thousand guests
gathered in Carlton House
that we are here to show the world
England's swaggering heart;
and that I intend to celebrate all century,
until something even grander arrives—
more outrageous and beautiful—to swallow me
in its monstrous, invisible embrace.

~Rita Dove (b. 1952), "The Regency Fete" from Sonata Mulattica, 2009.

silently and very fast

I was going to save this poem for later in the month, but I have it open in a tab, and I adore it, and I am too tired to go and find something more suited to the day. Did I mention I love this poem? I never can pick a favorite, of his -- I think it might be impossible -- but this is certainly one of them.

(for Cyril Connolly)

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

~W.H. Auden (1907-1973), "The Fall of Rome", from Another Time, 1940.

It is very possible that I am dead of pie. The jury is still out, but there was a lot of pie. And cake. And sandwiches. I think we had enough food to feed about twice as many people as came to my parents' party, and there were a lot of people at the party. I am so tired that I am going to sleep as soon as I finish posting this, even though it is not even 10 pm. Tomorrow I have to get up early (again), and take my brother to the airport, and pack up all my clean laundry and my cooler full of leftovers -- including an entire untouched pie of my very own. Anybody want to come over and help me eat it? -- and then I am going to go home and lie in bed and watch Doctor Who and not cook anything. Or talk to anybody. Or move. I am so glad they only have this party once a decade.

our pockets full of stones

For Maggie, a bit, although I would have posted it regardless. Naomi Shihab Nye is one of those gorgeous living poets I always forget about -- until suddenly I find myself reading her poetry and thinking oh, yes.

for Sitti Khadra, north of Jerusalem

My grandmother's hands recognize grapes,
the damp shine of a goat's new skin.
When I was sick they followed me,
I woke from the long fever to find them
covering my head like cool prayers.

My grandmother's days are made of bread,
a round pat-pat and the slow baking.
She waits by the oven watching a strange car
circle the streets. Maybe it holds her son,
lost to America. More often, tourists,
who kneel and weep at mysterious shrines.
She knows how often mail arrives,
how rarely there is a letter.
When one comes, she announces it, a miracle,
listening to it read again and again
in the dim evening light.

My grandmother's voice says nothing can surprise her.
Take her the shotgun wound and the crippled baby.
She knows the spaces we travel through,
the messages we cannot send—our voices are short
and would get lost on the journey.
Farewell to the husband's coat,
the ones she has loved and nourished,
who fly from her like seeds into a deep sky.
They will plant themselves. We will all die.

My grandmother's eyes say Allah is everywhere, even in death.
When she talks of the orchard and the new olive press,
when she tells the stories of Joha and his foolish wisdoms,
He is her first thought, what she really thinks of is His name.
"Answer, if you hear the words under the words—
otherwise it is just a world with a lot of rough edges,
difficult to get through, and our pockets full of stones."

~Naomi Shihab Nye (b. 1952), "The Words Under the Words", from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, 1995.

dream of our odyssey

My spreadsheet tells me that in four years of National Poetry Month, I have never posted any Walt Whitman. This is still not Walt Whitman, but...

   What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
   In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
   What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! —and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

   I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
   I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
   I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
   We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

   Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in a hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
   (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and
feel absurd.)
   Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.
   Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
   Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

~Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997), A Supermarket in California, Berkeley, 1955.

crowned my felicity

Yesterday, Mallory posted something depressing but lovely from Tennyson's In Memoriam A.H.H. I have strong feelings about platonic friendship (this should come as a surprise to exactly no one, I work on the seventeenth century), and I require an antidote, because Tennyson's love and grief for Hallam make me cry, and today is not a day for crying.

I did not live until this time
Crowned my felicity,
When I could say without a crime,
I am not thine, but thee.

This carcass breathed, and walked, and slept,
So that the world believed
There was a soul the motions kept;
But they were all deceived.

For as a watch by art is wound
To motion, such was mine:
But never had Orinda found
A soul till she found thine;

Which now inspires, cures and supplies,
And guides my darkened breast:
For thou art all that I can prize,
My joy, my life, my rest.

No bridegroom’s nor crown-conqueror’s mirth
To mine compared can be:
They have but pieces of the earth,
I’ve all the world in thee.

Then let our flames still light and shine,
And no false fear control,
As innocent as our design,
Immortal as our soul.

~Katherine Philips, aka the Matchless Orinda (1631/2-1664), 'To My Excellent Lucasia, on Our Friendship'. First printed (I think, I couldn't double check) in Poems by the most deservedly admired Mrs. Katherine Philips the matchless Orinda. To which is added Monsieur Corneille’s Pompey & Horace, tragedies. With several other translations out of French, (London: printed by J. Macock for H. Herringman, at the sign of the Blew Anchor in the lower walk of the New Exchange, 1667).

(write it)

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

~Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), One Art.

As it turns out, I am a pretty big fan of the villanelle.

sweating in the sun

Molly made fun of me for posting 'I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud'. I do in fact love the Romantic poets unironically -- I didn't always, but I had a very good Romantics professor -- but it must be said that they have a certain earnestness about nature and beauty that does not, perhaps, appeal to everyone. Lyrical Ballads. Anyway. In general, I do prefer poetry glorious and referential and complicated and subtle; I like verse that makes truth dangerous, and landscapes that are not quite so straightforward. Or possibly I am just getting all the poets named William out of the way in the first week.

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

~William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), Landscape With The Fall of Icarus.

slouching towards bethlehem

I may be going to hell for posting this poem on Easter. Plus side: Jews don't believe in hell. Or Easter.

Seriously, though, every year I post a Yeats poem, and every year it isn't this poem, and every year I make some oblique reference to the fact that I'm not posting this poem, and so this year, I am -- whether or not you all had to memorize it in school, as I did. The real truth is that I love this poem.

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?

~William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), The Second Coming, 1919.

into that good night

I have about fifteen minutes until my Doctor Who download finishes, and then it will be time for Steven Moffat and Eleven. I am incredibly excited -- and less nervous than I was, because twitter reports awesome -- and not refreshing my flist until I've watched the episode, which I am totally going to do in the one free hour I have today, before I start prepping for my dinner guests.

But that means that this moment, right here, is the last time I can post this poem, and have it be about Ten.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

~Dylan Thomas (1914-1953), "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night".

Good-bye for real, Tenth Doctor. You drove me crazy, and made me really mad, and I'm looking forward to the next guy, but I loved you, and I'm going to miss you. ♥

daffodils

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such jocund company:
I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

~William Wordsworth (1770-1850), 'I wandered lonely as a cloud' (variously known by me as 'that bloody daffodil poem'), 1804. My curmudgeonly feelings towards Wordsworth in general and this poem in particular aside, I did see daffodils, this week and last -- on my walk yesterday, and in New York -- and in the first flush of spring, they did rather fill me with joy.

Edited to add: Inga reminded me of the BEST THING about this poem. (Warnings for a guy dressed as a squirrel.)

where are the songs of spring?

Good morning, April! April is the cruelest month, breeding | Lilacs out of the dead land, | Mixing memory and desire, stirring | Dull roots with spring rain my favorite month, and it is my favorite month not only because it is the month of my birth, but also because it is National Poetry Month in the U.S. For those of you new to this journal, this will be my -- holy crap -- fourth year posting poetry for National Poetry Month. I post a poem every day, and I endeavor (with varying degrees of success) not to repeat myself. I have a spreadsheet! I look forward to this all year!

This year, I am going to begin with a poem that has nothing to do with spring. I never post this poem, because it's about entirely the wrong time of year -- still, though, it seems a good place to start, with the warm breeze, and the slightly-hazy blue sky, and the birds twittering outside my open window. It's my favorite of his odes, no matter what time of year. And I do like beginning with Keats.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, --
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

~John Keats (1795–1821), To Autumn, 1819.