may you always be the darling of fortune

The end of April is always a little sad, for me. I love that National Poetry Month is this awesome once-a-year thing that I do, and it wouldn't be nearly as awesome if it was just all poetry all the time around here; plus, that would get boring, and eventually I would run out of things I wanted to post (I say this every year; it's always true). Even so, April always seems so short, and I am always a little melancholy when the end of the month rolls around -- not least because May is invariably batshit crazy, and April 30th always, one way or another from year to year, feels like the last breath of calm before the storm. But I'll get through the storm, and I have a lot of things to look forward to. May, as usual, will be about equal parts intense and exhausting and wonderful. And summer's just around the corner.

Poetry month definitely doesn't exist in a vacuum, so thank you to everyone else who posted poetry, and everyone who requested poetry or commented on poetry or read poetry; thanks for reading with me, friends. ♥

March 10th and the snow flees like eloping brides
into rain. The imperceptible change begins
out of an old rage and glistens, chaste, with its new
craving, spring. May your desire always overcome

your need; your story that you have to tell,
enchanting, mutable, may it fill the world
you believe: a sunny view, flowers lunging
from the sill, the quilt, the chair, all things

fill with you and empty and fill. And hurry, because
now as I tire of my studied abandon, counting
the days, I'm sad. Yet I trust your absence, in everything
wholly evident: the rain in the white basin, and I

vigilant.

—Jane Miller (b. 1949), "May You Always be the Darling of Fortune" from Many Junipers, Heartbeats (Copper Beach Press, 1980).

toward the summer isle

I am in a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad mood, and having kind of a shitty day, but here is a poem that makes me feel just a little less like killing everyone in the world.

Some day, when trees have shed their leaves
   And against the morning's white
The shivering birds beneath the eaves
    Have sheltered for the night,
We'll turn our faces southward, love,
   Toward the summer isle
Where bamboos spire the shafted grove
   And wide-mouthed orchids smile.

And we will seek the quiet hill
   Where towers the cotton tree,
And leaps the laughing crystal rill,
   And works the droning bee.
And we will build a cottage there
   Beside an open glade,
With black-ribbed blue-bells blowing near,
   And ferns that never fade.

—Claude McKay (1889-1948), "After the Winter" in this case from Claude McKay: Complete Poems (University of Illinois Press, 2004).

ninety-seven stanzas about a house

One of things about National Poetry Month is that it generally seems best to post poems that are relatively short. This is both a problem and an advantage: while I have been known to excerpt epics, and while I did once post the entire first book of Paradise Lost, it really does make more sense to post poems that can be read comfortably in one go, that can be typed up or copied and pasted and edited in a relatively short amount of time, that don't fill too much space. It makes more sense that way, and it also means that you guys are probably more likely to enjoy the poems. Longer poems take longer to read, and take up more time, and time is usually at a premium for me, in April.

But sometimes, I need to break my own rules. Sometimes, I need to post a poem that encapsulates -- if a poem as this metaphysically crazy can ever be said to encapsulate anything -- a lot of my feelings about the 17th century, that is about a house and a landscape and the history of a place, that is about contemporary politics, and family, and the English Civil War, and patronage, that does intensely bizarre things with metaphysical conceits, that collapses space and time and mythology, that has evil lesbian nuns and bondage sex with trees and a character that breaks the fourth wall from inside the poem. If you like Alice in Wonderland, you will probably like this poem; if you like science fiction, you might like this poem. I love this poem, but let it never be said that it is not utterly fucking batshit. It contains multitudes.

So here you are: Andrew Marvell's Upon Appleton House:

I.

Within this sober frame expect
Work of no foreign architect;
That unto caves the quarries drew,
And forests did to pastures hew;
Who of his great design in pain
Did for a model vault his brain,
Whose columns should so high be raised
To arch the rows that on them gazed.

II.

Why should of all things Man unruled
Such unproportioned dwellings build?
The beasts are by their dens exprest:
And birds contrive an equal nest;
The low-roofed tortoises do dwell
In cases fit of tortoise-shell:
No creature loves an empty space;
Their bodies measure out their place.

III.

But he, superfluously spread,
Demands more room alive then dead.
And in his hollow palace goes
Where winds as he themselves may lose.
What need of all this marble crust
T'impark the wanton mote of dust,
That thinks by breadth the world t'unite
Though the first builders failed in height?

IV.

But all things are composed here
Like Nature, orderly and near:
In which we the dimensions find
Of that more sober age and mind,
When larger-sized men did stoop
To enter at a narrow loop;
As practising, in doors so strait,
To strain themselves through heaven's gate.

V.

And surely when the after age
Shall hither come in pilgrimage,
These sacred places to adore,
By Vere and Fairfax trod before,
Men will dispute how their extent
Within such dwarfish confines went:
And some will smile at this, as well
As Romulus his bee-like cell.

VI.

Humility alone designs
Those short but admirable lines,
By which, ungirt and unconstrained,
Things greater are in less contained.
Let others vainly strive t'immure
The circle in the quadrature!
These holy mathematics can
In ev'ry figure equal man.

VII.

Yet thus the laden house does sweat,
And scarce indures the Master great:
But where he comes the swelling hall
Stirs, and the square grows spherical;
More by his magnitude distrest,
Then he is by its straitness prest:
And too officiously it slights
That in it self which him delights.

VIII.

So Honour better lowness bears,
Than that unwonted Greatness wears
Height with a certain grace does bend,
But low things clownishly ascend.
And yet what needs there here excuse,
Where ev'ry thing does answer use?
Where neatness nothing can condemn,
Nor pride invent what to contemn?

IX.

A stately frontispice of poor
Adorns without the open door:
Nor less the rooms within commends
Daily new furniture of friends.
The house was built upon the place
Only as for a mark of grace;
And for an inn to entertain
Its Lord a while, but not remain.

X.

Him Bishop's-Hill, or Denton may,
Or Bilbrough, better hold than they:
But Nature here hath been so free
As if she said 'Leave this to me'.
Art would more neatly have defac'd
What she had laid so sweetly wast;
In fragrant gardens, shady woods,
Deep meadows, and transparent floods.

XI.

While with slow eyes we these survey,
And on each pleasant footstep stay,
We opportunly may relate
The progress of this house's fate.
A nunnery first gave it birth.
(For virgin buildings oft brought forth),
And all that neighbour-ruin shows
The quarries whence this dwelling rose.

XII.

Near to this gloomy cloister's gates
There dwelt the blooming virgin Thwaites,
Fair beyond measure, and an heir
Which might deformity make fair.
And oft she spent the summer suns
Discoursing with the subtle nuns.
Whence in these words one to her weaved,
(As 'twere by chance) thoughts long conceived.

XIII.

'Within this holy leisure we
Live innocently as you see.
These walls restrain the world without,
But hedge our liberty about.
These bars inclose the wider den
Of those wild creatures, called men.
The cloister outward shuts its gates,
And, from us, locks on them the grates.

XIV.

'Here we, in shining armour white,
Like virgin Amazons do fight.
And our chaste lamps we hourly trim,
Lest the great Bridegroom find them dim.
Our orient breaths perfumed are
With incense of incessant prayer.
And holy-water of our tears
Most strangly our complexion clears.

XV.

'Not tears of grief; but such as those
With which calm pleasure overflows;
Or pity, when we look on you
That live without this happy vow.
How should we grieve that must be seen
Each one asSpouse, and each a queen;
And can in heaven hence behold
Our brighter robes and crowns of gold?

XVI.

'When we have prayed all our beads,
Some one the holy legend reads;
While all the rest with needles paint
The face and graces of the saint.
But what the linen can't receive
They in their lives do interweave
This work the saints best represents;
That serves for altar's ornaments.

XVII.

But much it to our work would add
If here your hand, your face we had:
By it we would Our Lady touch;
Yet thus She you resembles much.
Some of your features, as we sewed,
Through every shrine should be bestowed.
And in one beauty we would take
Enough a thousand saints to make.

XVIII.

'And (for I dare not quench the fire
That me does for your good inspire)
'Twere sacrilege a man t'admit
To holy things, for heaven fit.
I see the angels in a crown
On you the lilies show'ring down:
And round about you glory breaks,
That something more then human speaks.

XIX.

'All beauty, when at such a height,
Is so already consecrate.
Fairfax I know; and long ere this
Have marked the youth, and what he is.
But can he such a rival seem
For whom you heav'n should disesteem?
Ah, no! and 'twould more honour prove
He your devoto were, than love.

XX.

'Here live beloved, and obeyed:
Each one your sister, each your maid.
And, if our rule seem strictly penned,
The rule it self to you shall bend.
Our abbess too, now far in age,
Doth your succession near presage.
How soft the yoke on us would lie,
Might such fair hands as yours it tie!

XXI.

'Your voice, the sweetest of the choir,
Shall draw heav'n nearer, raise us higher.
And your example, if our head,
Will soon us to perfection lead.
Those virtues to us all so dear,
Will straight grow sanctity when here:
And that, once sprung, increase so fast
Till miracles it work at last.

XXII.

'Nor is our order yet so nice,
Delight to banish as a vice.
Here pleasure piety doth meet;
One perfecting the other sweet.
So through the mortal fruit we boil
The sugar's uncorrupting oil:
And that which perished while we pull,
Is thus preserved clear and full.

XXIII.

'For such indeed are all our arts;
Still handling nature's finest parts.
Flowers dress the altars; for the clothes,
The sea-born amber we compose;
Balms for the grieved we draw; and pastes
We mould, as baits for curious tastes.
What need is here of man, unless
These as sweet sins we should confess.

XXIV.

'Each night among us to your side
Appoint a fresh and virgin Bride;
Whom if Our Lord at midnight find,
Yet neither should be left behind.
Where you may lie as chaste in bed,
As pearls together billeted.
All night embracing arm in arm,
Like crystal pure with cotton warm.

XXV.

'But what is this to all the store
Of joys you see, and may make more!
Try but a while, if you be wise:
The trial neither costs, nor ties.'
Now Fairfax seek her promised faith:
Religion that dispensed hath;
Which she hence forward does begin;
The nun's smooth tongue has sucked her in.

XXVI.

Oft, though he knew it was in vain,
Yet would he valiantly complain.
'Is this that sanctity so great,
An art by which you finelier cheat
Hypocrite Witches, hence avaunt,
Who though in prison yet enchant!
Death only can such thieves make fast,
As rob though in the dungeon cast.

XXVII.

'Were there but, when this house was made,
One stone that a just hand had laid,
It must have fall'n upon her Head
Who first thee from thy faith misled.
And yet, how well soever ment,
With them 'twould soon grow fraudulent
For like themselves they alter all,
And vice infects the very wall.

XXVIII.

'But sure those buildings last not long,
Founded by folly, kept by wrong.
I know what fruit their gardens yield,
When they it think by night concealed.
Fly from their vices. 'Tis thy 'state,
Not thee, that they would consecrate.
Fly from their ruin. How I fear
Though guiltless lest thou perish there.'

XIX.

What should he do? He would respect
Religion, but not right neglect:
For first Religion taught him right,
And dazzled not but cleared his sight.
Sometimes resolved his sword he draws,
But reverenceth then the laws:
For Justice still that Courage led;
First from a judge, then soldier bred.

XXX.

Small honour would be in the storm.
The court him grants the lawful form;
Which licensed either peace or force,
To hinder the unjust divorce.
Yet still the nuns his right debarred,
Standing upon their holy guard.
Ill-counselled women, do you know
Whom you resist, or what you do?

XXXI.

Is not this he whose offspring fierce
Shall fight through all the universe;
And with successive valour try
France, Poland, either Germany;
Till one, as long since prophesied,
His horse through conquered Britain ride?
Yet, against fate, his spouse they kept;
And the great race would intercept.

XXXII.

Some to the breach against their foes
Their wooden saints in vain oppose
Another bolder stands at push
With their old holy-water brush.
While the disjointed abbess threads
The jingling chain-shot of her beads.
But their loud'st cannon were their lungs;
And sharpest weapons were their tongues.

XXXIII.

But, waving these aside like flies,
Young Fairfax through the wall does rise.
Then th'unfrequented vault appeared,
And superstitions vainly feared.
The relics false were set to view;
Only the jewels there were true.
But truly bright and holy Thwaites
That weeping at the altar waites.

XXXIV.

But the glad youth away her bears,
And to the nuns bequeaths her tears:
Who guiltily their prize bemoan,
Like gypsies that a child hath stol'n.
Thenceforth (as when th'enchantment ends
The castle vanishes or rends)
The wasting cloister with the rest
Was in one instant dispossessed.

XXXV.

At the demolishing, this seat
To Fairfax fell as by escheat.
And what both nuns and founders willed
'Tis likely better thus fulfilled,
For if the virgin proved not theirs,
The cloister yet remained hers.
Though many a nun there made her vow,
'Twas no religious house till now.

XXXVI.

From that blest bed the hero came,
Whom France and Poland yet does fame:
Who, when retired here to peace,
His warlike studies could not cease;
But laid these gardens out in sport
In the just figure of a fort;
And with five bastions it did fence,
As aiming one for ev'ry sense.

XXXVII.

When in the east the morning ray
Hangs out the colours of the day,
The bee through these known allies hums,
Beating the dian with its drums.
Then flowers their drowsy eyelids raise,
Their silken ensigns each displays,
And dries its pan yet dank with dew,
And fills its flask with odours new.

XXXVIII.

These, as their Governor goes by,
In fragrant volleys they let fly;
And to salute their Governess
Again as great a charge they press:
None for the virgin Nymph; for she
Seems with the flowers a flower to be.
And think so still! though not compare
With breath so sweet, or cheek so fair.

XXXIX.

Well shot, ye fireman! Oh how sweet,
And round your equal fires do meet;
Whose shrill report no ear can tell,
But echoes to the eye and smell.
See how the flowers, as at parade,
Under their colours stand displayed:
Each regiment in order grows,
That of the tulip, pink, and rose.

XL.

But when the vigilant patrol
Of stars walks round about the pole,
Their leaves, that to the stalks are curled,
Seem to their staves the ensigns furled.
Then in some flow'r's beloved hut
Each bee as sentinel is shut;
And sleeps so too: but, if once stirrd,
She runs you through, nor asks the word.

XLI.

Oh thou, that dear and happy isle
The garden of the world ere while,
Thou Paradise of four seas,
Which heaven planted us to please,
But, to exclude the world, did guard
With wat'ry if not flaming sword;
What luckless apple did we taste,
To make us mortal, and thee waste?

XLII.

Unhappy! Shall we never more
That sweet militia restore,
When gardens only had their towers,
And all the garrisons were flowers,
When roses only arms might bear,
And men did rosy garlands wear?
Tulips, in several colours barred,
Were then the Switzers of our guard.

XLIII.

The gard'ner had the soldier's place,
And his more gentle forts did trace.
The nursery of all things green
Was then the only magazine.
The winter quarters were the stoves,
Where he the tender plants removes.
But war all this doth overgrow:
We ordnance plant and powder sow.

XLIV.

And yet their walks one on the sod
Who, had it pleased him and God,
Might once have made our gardens spring
Fresh as his own and flourishing.
But he preferred to the Cinque Ports
These five imaginary Forts:
And, in those half-dry trenches, spanned
Power which the ocean might command.

XLV.

For he did, with his utmost skill,
Ambition weed, but conscience till.
Conscience, that heaven-nursed plant,
Which most our earthly gardens want.
A prickling leaf it bears, and such
As that which shrinks at every touch;
But flowers eternal, and divine,
That in the crowns of saints do shine.

XLVI.

The sight does from these bastions ply,
Th' invisible artillery;
And at proud Cawood Castle seems
To point the batt'ry of its beams.
As if it quarrelled in the seat
Th'ambition of its prelate great.
But o're the meads below it plays,
Or innocently seems to graze.

XLVII.

And now to the abyss I pass
Of that unfathomable grass,
Where men like grashoppers appear,
But grashoppers are giants there:
They, in there squeaking laugh, contemn
Us as we walk more low then them:
And, from the precipices tall
Of the green spires, to us do call.

XLVIII.

To see men through this meadow dive,
We wonder how they rise alive.
As, under water, none does know
Whether he fall through it or go.
But, as the mariners that sound,
And show upon their lead the ground,
They bring up flowers so to be seen,
And prove they've at the bottom been.

XLIX.

No scene that turns with engines strange
Does oft'ner then these meadows change,
For when the sun the grass hath vexed,
The tawny mowers enter next;
Who seem like Israelites to be,
Walking on foot through a green sea.
To them the grassy deeps divide,
And crowd a lane to either side.

L.

With whistling scythe, and elbow strong,
These massacre the grass along:
While one, unknowing, carves the rail,
Whose yet unfeathered quills her fail.
The edge all bloody from its breast
He draws, and does his stroke detest;
Fearing the flesh untimely mowed
To him a gate as black forebode.

LI.

But bloody Thestylis, that waites
To bring the mowing camp their cates,
Greedy as kites, has trussed it up,
And forthwith means on it to sup:
When on another quick she lights,
And cries, 'He called us Israelites;
But now, to make his saying true,
Rails rain for quails, for manna, dew.'

LII.

Unhappy birds! What does it boot
To build below the grasses root;
When lowness is unsafe as height,
And chance o'ertakes what 'scapeth spite?
And now your orphan parents call
Sounds your untimely funeral.
Death-trumpets creak in such a note,
And 'tis the sourdine in their throat.

LIII.

Or sooner hatch or higher build:
The mower now commands the field;
In whose new traverse seemeth wrought
A camp of battle newly fought:
Where, as the meads with hay, the plain
Lies quilted o're with bodies slain:
The women that with forks it fling,
Do represent the pillaging.

LIV.

And now the careless victors play,
Dancing the triumphs of the hay;
Where every mowers wholesome heat
Smells like an Alexander's sweat.
Their females fragrant as the mead
Which they in fairy circles tread:
When at their dances end they kiss,
Their new-made hay not sweeter is.

LV.

When after this 'tis piled in cocks,
Like a calm sea it shows the rocks:
We wond'ring in the river near
How boats among them safely steer.
Or, like the desert Memphis sand,
Short pyramids of hay do stand.
And such the Roman camps do rise
In hills for soldiers' obsequies.

LVI.

This scene again withdrawing brings
A new and empty face of things;
A levelled space, as smooth and plain,
As clothes for Lely stretched to stain.
The world when first created sure
Was such a table rase and pure.
Or rather such is the toril
Ere the bulls enter at Madril.

LVII.

For to this naked equal flat,
Which Levellers take pattern at,
The villagers in common chase
Their cattle, which it closer rase;
And what below the scythe increased
Is pinched yet nearer by the beast.
Such, in the painted world, appeared
Dav'nant with th'universal herd.

LVIII.

They seem within the polished grass
A landskip drawen in looking-glass.
And shrunk in the huge pasture show
As spots, so shaped, on faces do.
Such fleas, ere they approach the eye,
In multiplying glasses lie.
They feed so wide, so slowly move,
As constellations do above.

LIX.

Then, to conclude these pleasant acts,
Denton sets ope its cataracts;
And makes the meadow truly be
(What it but seemed before) a sea.
For, jealous of its Lords long stay,
It tries t'invite him thus away.
The river in itself is drowned,
And isles th'astonished cattle round.

LX.

Let others tell the paradox,
How eels now bellow in the ox;
How horses at their tails do kick,
Turned as they hang to leeches quick;
How boats can over bridges sail;
And fishes do the stables scale.
How salmons trespassing are found;
And pikes are taken in the pound.

LXI.

But I, retiring from the flood,
Take sanctuary in the wood;
And, while it lasts, my self embark
In this yet green, yet growing ark;
Where the first carpenter might best
Fit timber for his keel have pressed.
And where all creatures might have shares,
Although in armies, not in paires.

LXII.

The double wood of ancient stocks
Linked in so thick, an union locks,
It like two pedigrees appears,
On one hand Fairfax, th'other Veres:
Of whom though many fell in war,
Yet more to heaven shooting are:
And, as they Nature's cradle decked,
Will in green age her hearse expect.

LXIII.

When first the eye this forest sees
It seems indeed as wood not trees:
As if their neighbourhood so old
To one great trunk them all did mould.
There the huge bulk takes place, as ment
To thrust up a fifth element;
And stretches still so closely wedged
As if the night within were hedged.

LXIV.

Dark all without it knits; within
It opens passable and thin;
And in as loose an order grows,
As the Corinthean porticoes.
The arching boughs unite between
The columns of the temple green;
And underneath the winged choirs
Echo about their tuned fires.

LXV.

The nightingale does here make choice
To sing the trials of her voice.
Low shrubs she sits in, and adorns
With music high the squatted thorns.
But highest oaks stoop down to hear,
And list'ning elders prick the ear.
The thorn, lest it should hurt her, draws
Within the skin its shrunken claws.

LXVI.

But I have for my music found
A sadder, yet more pleasing sound:
The stock-doves whose fair necks are graced
With nuptial rings their ensigns chaste;
Yet always, for some cause unknown,
Sad pair unto the elms they moan.
O why should such a couple mourn,
That in so equal flames do burn!

LXVII.

Then as I careless on the bed
Of gelid strawberries do tread,
And through the hazels thick espy
The hatching throstle's shining eye,
The heron from the ash's top,
The eldest of its young lets drop,
As if it stork-like did pretend
That tribute to its Lord to send.

LXVIII.

But most the hewel's wonders are,
Who here has the holt-felster's care.
He walks still upright from the root,
Meas'ring the timber with his foot;
And all the way, to keep it clean,
Doth from the bark the woodmoths glean.
He, with his beak, examines well
Which fit to stand and which to fell.

LXIX.

The good he numbers up, and hacks;
As if he marked them with the axe.
But where he, tinkling with his beak,
Does find the hollow oak to speak,
That for his building he designs,
And through the tainted side he mines.
Who could have thought the tallest oak
Should fall by such a feeble stroke!

LXX.

Nor would it, had the tree not fed
A traitor-worm, within it bred.
(As first our flesh corrupt within
Tempts impotent and bashful Sin.
And yet that worm triumphs not long,
But serves to feed the hewel's young.
While the oak seems to fall content,
Viewing the treason's punishment.

LXXI.

Thus I, easy philosopher,
Among the birds and trees confer:
And little now to make me, wants
Or of the fowls, or of the plants.
Give me but wings as they, and I
Straight floating on the air shall fly:
Or turn me but, and you shall see
I was but an inverted tree.

LXXII.

Already I begin to call
In their most learned original:
And where I language want, my signs
The bird upon the bough divines;
And more attentive there doth sit
Then if she were with lime-twigs knit.
No leaf does tremble in the wind
Which I returning cannot find.

LXXIII.

Out of these scattered sibyl's leaves
Strange prophecies my fancy weaves:
And in one history consumes,
Like Mexique paintings, all the plumes.
What Rome, Greece, Palestine, ere said
I in this light mosaic read.
Thrice happy he who, not mistook,
Hath read in Nature's mystic book.

LXXIV.

And see how Chance's better wit
Could with a masque my studies hit!
The oak-leaves me embroider all,
Between which caterpillars crawl:
And ivy, with familiar trails,
Me licks, and clasps, and curls, and hales.
Under this antic cope I move
Like some great prelate of the grove,

LXXV.

Then, languishing with ease, I toss
On pallets swoll'n of velvet moss;
While the wind, cooling through the boughs,
Flatters with air my panting brows.
Thanks for my rest ye mossy banks,
And unto you cool zephyrs thanks,
Who, as my hair, my thoughts too shed,
And winnow from the chaff my head.

LXXVI.

How safe, methinks, and strong, behind
These trees have I encamped my mind;
Where Beauty, aiming at the heart,
Bends in some tree its useless dart;
And where the world no certain shot
Can make, or me it toucheth not.
But I on it securely play,
And gaul its horsemen all the day.

LXXVII.

Bind me ye woodbines in your twines,
Curl me about ye gadding vines,
And oh so close your circles lace,
That I may never leave this place:
But, lest your fetters prove too weak,
Ere I your silken bondage break,
Do you, O brambles, chain me too,
And courteous briars nail me though.

LXXVIII.

Here in the morning tie my chain,
Where the two woods have made a lane;
While, like a guard on either side,
The trees before their Lord divide;
This, like a long and equal thread,
Betwixt two labyrinths does lead.
But, where the floods did lately drown,
There at the evening stake me down.

LXXIX.

For now the waves are fall'n and dried,
And now the meadow's fresher dyed;
Whose grass, with moister colour dashed,
Seems as green silks but newly washed.
No serpent new nor crocodile
Remains behind our little Nile;
Unless itself you will mistake,
Among these meads the only snake.

LXXX.

See in what wanton harmless folds
It ev'rywhere the meadow holds;
And its yet muddy back doth lick,
Till as a crystal mirror slick;
Where all things gaze themselves, and doubt
If they be in it or without.
And for his shade which therein shines,
Narcissus-like, the sun too pines.

LXXXI.

Oh what a pleasure 'tis to hedge
My temples here with heavy sedge;
Abandoning my lazy side,
Stretched as a bank unto the tide;
Or to suspend my sliding foot
On th'osiers undermined root,
And in its branches tough to hang,
While at my lines the fishes twang!

LXXXII.

But now away my hooks, my quills,
And angles, idle utensils.
The young Maria walks tonight:
Hide trifling youth thy pleasures slight.
'Twere shame that such judicious eyes
Should with such toys a man surprise;
She that already is the law
Of all her sex, her age's Aw.

LXXXIII.

See how loose Nature, in respect
To her, itself doth recollect;
And ever thing so whisht and fine,
Starts forthwith to its bonne mine.
The sun himself, of her aware,
Seems to descend with greater care,
And lest she see him go to bed,
In blushing clouds conceales his head.

LXXXIV.

So when the shadows laid asleep
From underneath these banks do creep,
And on the river as it flows
With ebon shuts begin to close;
The modest halcyon comes in sight,
Flying betwixt the day and night;
And such an horror calm and dumb,
Admiring Nature does benumb.

LXXXV.

The viscous air, wheres'e're she fly,
Follows and sucks her azure dye;
The jellying stream compacts below,
If it might fix her shadow so;
The stupid fishes hang, as plain
As flies in crystal overta'ne,
And men the silent scene assist,
Charmed with the sapphire-winged mist.

LXXXVI.

Maria such, and so doth hush
The world, and through the ev'ning rush.
No new-born comet such a train
Draws through the sky, nor star new-slain.
For straight those giddy rockets fail,
Which from the putrid earth exhale,
But by her flames, in heaven tried,
Nature is wholly vitrified.

LXXXVII.

'Tis she that to these gardens gave
That wondrous beauty which they have;
She straightness on the woods bestows;
To her the meadow sweetness owes;
Nothing could make the river be
So crystal-pure but only she;
She yet more pure, sweet, straight, and fair,
Than gardens, woods, meads, rivers are.

LXXXVIII.

Therefore what first she on them spent,
They gratefully again present.
The meadow carpets where to tread;
The garden flowers to crown her head;
And for a glass the limpid brook,
Where she may all her beauties look;
But, since she would not have them seen,
The wood about her draws a screen.

LXXXIX.

For she, to higher beauties raised,
Disdains to be for lesser praised.
She counts her beauty to converse
In all the languages as hers;
Not yet in those her self employes
But for the wisdom, not the noise;
Nor yet that wisdom would affect,
But as 'tis heaven's dialect.

LXXX.

Blest Nymph! that couldst so soon prevent
Those trains by youth against thee meant;
Tears (wat'ry shot that pierce the mind;)
And sighs (Love's cannon charged with wind;)
True praise (that breaks through all defence;)
And feigned complying innocence;
But knowing where this ambush lay,
She 'scaped the safe, but roughest way.

LXXXXI.

This 'tis to have been from the first
In a domestic heaven nursed,
Under the discipline severe
Of Fairfax, and the starry Vere;
Where not one object can come nigh
But pure, and spotless as the eye;
And goodness doth it self entail
On females, if there want a male.

LXXXXII.

Go now fond sex that on your face
Do all your useless study place,
Nor once at vice your brows dare knit
Lest the smooth forehead wrinkled sit
Yet your own face shall at you grin,
Thorough the black-bag of your skin;
When knowledge only could have filled
And virtue all those furrows tilled.

LXXXXIII.

Hence she with graces more divine
Supplies beyond her sex the line;
And, like a sprig of mistletoe,
On the Fairfacian oak does grow;
Whence, for some universal good,
The priest shall cut the sacred bud;
While her glad parents most rejoice,
And make their destiny their choice.

LXXXXIV.

Meantime ye fields, springs, bushes, flowers,
Where yet she leads her studious hours,
(Till Fate her worthily translates,
And find a Fairfax for our Thwaites)
Employ the means you have by her,
And in your kind yourselves prefer;
That, as all virgins she preceds,
So you all woods, streams, gardens, meads.

LXXXXV.

For you Thessalian Tempe's seat
Shall now be scorned as obsolete;
Aranjuez, as less, disdained;
The Bel-Retiro as constrained;
But name not the Idalian Grove,
For 'twas the seat of wanton love;
Much less the dead's Elysian fields,
Yet nor to them your beauty yields.

LXXXXVI.

'Tis not, what once it was, the world;
But a rude heap together hurled;
All negligently overthrown,
Gulfs, deserts, precipices, stone.
Your lesser world contains the same.
But in more decent order tame;
You, heaven's center, Nature's Lap.
And Paradise's only map.

LXXXVII.

But now the salmon-fishers moist
Their leathern boats begin to hoist;
And, like Antipodes in shoes,
Have shod their heads in their canoes.
How tortoise-like, but not so slow,
These rational amphibii go?
Let's in: for the dark hemisphere
Does now like one of them appear.

—Andrew Marvell (1621-1678), "Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax," generally agreed to have been written sometime in the summer of 1651. Spelling modernization and editing courtesy of The Poems of Andrew Marvell, edited by Nigel Smith, revised edition (Longman, 2007). (I did think about just copying and pasting from the Virginia EText, but in this case I really do prefer the 21st century spelling and punctuation.)

sane and spring-like

I have big plans for the rest of the month (not really big plans, just a spreadsheet), so here is one last sonnet for the road. Okay, actually, I am breaking a rule: here are two last sonnets for the road, because today I cannot choose. I always forget how fucking flawless Edna St. Vincent Millay's sonnets are until I'm reading them again, and then they knock the breath right out of me. Angry feminist readers and complicated, multi-various love are pretty much the fastest ways to my heart.

Oh, oh, you will be sorry for that word!
Give back my book and take my kiss instead.
Was it my enemy or my friend I heard,
"What a big book for such a little head!"
Come, I will show you now my newest hat,
And you may watch me purse my mouth and prink!
Oh, I shall love you still, and all of that.
I never again shall tell you what I think.
I shall be sweet and crafty, soft and sly;
You will not catch me reading any more:
I shall be called a wife to pattern by;
And some day when you knock and push the door,
Some sane day, not too bright and not too stormy,
I shall be gone, and you may whistle for me.

*

I pray you if you love me, bear my joy
A little while, or let me weep your tears;
I, too, have seen the quavering Fate destroy
Your destiny's bright spinning—the dull shears
Meeting not neatly, chewing at the thread,—
Nor can you well be less aware how fine,
How staunch as wire, and how unwarranted
Endures the golden fortune that is mine.
I pray you for this day at least, my dear,
Fare by my side, that journey in the sun;
Else must I turn me from the blossoming year
And walk in grief the way that you have gone.
Let us go forth together in the spring:
Love must be this, if it be anything.

—Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), Sonnets VIII and V (respectively) from The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems, 1920, of which I have a beautiful and battered first edition that I picked up in a used bookstore one poetry month past, and may mean that I never post any Edna St. Vincent Millay poems that do not appear in this book.

where you are on the dial of a certain day

It is difficult to write an aubade,
a song about noon, or a few crepuscular lines
without stopping to realize
just where you are on the dial of a certain day,

which is at least a beginning
and better than the usual blind rush
into the future, believed to reside
over the next in an infinite series of hills.

I'm all for noticing that the light
in the tops of the trees
is different now with the grass moist
and cold, the heads of flowers yet unfolded,

all for occupying a chair by a window
or a wayside bench for an hour—
time enough to look here and there
as the caravan of time crosses the sand,

time to think of the dead and lost friends,
their faces hidden in the foliage,
and to consider the ruination of love,
a wisp of smoke rising from a chimney.

And who cares if it takes me all day
to write a poem about the dawn
and I finish in the dark with the night—
some love it best—draped across my shoulders.

—Billy Collins (b. 1941), "The Lamps Unlit" from Ballistics, 2008.

Submitted without commentary, tonight; but it was a pretty good day, all things considered.

ah! bright wings

I suppose the advantage of failing to post any sonnets in the first half of the month is that I get to thematize them in the second half of the month. The other advantage is that I get to post some seriously badass sonnet-writers. I thought it was probably time for some Hopkins.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), "God's Grandeur." In manuscript, noted as "Standard rhythm counterpointed" and dated to February 23, 1877. It's actually a little weird that I haven't posted this one before, because I feel like it's way up there on the list of poems by Hopkins that people usually know. I love him a lot. This isn't even a sprung rhythm poem, but fuck me that enjambment. And the repetition and the alliteration and the rhyme punch, and seriously, like, I can just never get enough of how fucking brilliant a poet he was.

kick off my sandals

I acknowledge my status as a stranger:
Inappropriate clothes, odd habits
Out of sync with wasp and wren.
I admit I don't know how
To sit still or move without purpose.
I prefer books to moonlight, statuary to trees.

But this lawn has been leveled for looking,
So I kick off my sandals and walk its cool green.
Who claims we're mere muscle and fluids?
My feet are primitives here.
As for the rest—ah, the air now
Is a tonic of absence, bearing nothing
But news of a breeze.

—Rita Dove (b. 1952), "Reverie in Open Air," 2003.

I really could fill a whole month just with poems by Rita Dove.

and (constant stars)

Today is Shakespeare's death day and alleged birthday -- also St. George's day, but that is mostly irrelevant to the point at hand -- and I like to celebrate during National Poetry Month, because I can, and because while my specific interests and concentrations have wandered fairly far afield from the inestimable William Shakespeare, I owe him and his poetry more than I can possibly say. This year, I am branching out from poems about Shakespeare the person to poems about things Shakespeare wrote. I have, of course, posted poems about things Shakespeare wrote before now (earlier this month, in fact: Letter from Elsinore), but I really do like the idea of posting poetic transformative works, especially for and of Shakespeare. This poem is about The Winter's Tale, which is one of my favorite plays.

How soft it rains, how nourishingly soft and green
Has grown the dark humility of this low house
Where sunrise never enters, where I have not seen
The moon by night nor heard the footfall of a mouse,
Nor looked on any face but yours
Nor changed my posture in my place of rest
For fifteen years—oh how this quiet cures
My pain and sucks the burning from my breast.

It sucked out all the poison of my will and drew
All hot rebellion from me, all desire to break
The silence you commanded me. . . . Nothing to do,
Nothing to fear or wish for, not a choice to make,
Only to be; to hear nor more
Cock-crowing duty calling me to rise
But slowly thus to ripen laid in store
In this dim nursery near your watching eyes.

Pardon, great spirit, whose tall shape like a golden tower
Stands over me or seems upon slow wings to move,
Colouring with life my paleness, with returning power,
By sober ministrations of severest love;
Pardon, that when you brought me here,
Still drowned in bitter passion, drugged with life,
I did not know . . . pardon, I thought you were
Paulina, old Antigonus' young wife.

—C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), "Hermione in the House of Paulina" in this case from Poems (Harcourt, 1964, 1992).

And a sonnet, to be going on with. I like Shakespeare's sonnets -- which are way weirder than a lot of people give them credit for -- and unless I post poetry for 150 more years (I have in years past posted sonnets 144, 116, and 29), I will probably never run out of Shakespeare sonnets to post.

Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck;
And yet methinks I have astronomy,
But not to tell of good or evil luck,
Of plagues, of dearths, or seasons' quality;
Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell,
Pointing to each his thunder, rain, and wind,
Or say with princes if it shall go well,
By oft predict that I in heaven find:
But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive,
And (constant stars) in them I read such art
As truth and beauty shall together thrive,
If from thyself to store thou wouldst convert;
Or else of thee this I prognosticate,
Thy end is truth's and beauty's doom and date

—William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Sonnet XIV.

Thanks for everything, Will. Keep on keepin' on.

to the flashing water

I did say we were having a sonnet shortage. Time to remedy that, don't you think?

Stiller Freund der vielen Fernen, fühle,
wie dein Atem noch den Raum vermehrt.
Im Gebälk der finstern Glockenstühle
laß dich läuten. Das, was an dir zehrt,

wird ein Starkes über dieser Nahrung.
Geh in der Verwandlung aus und ein.
Was ist deine leidendste Erfahrung?
Ist dir Trinken bitter, werde Wein.

Sei in dieser Nacht aus Übermaß
Zauberkraft am Kreuzweg deiner Sinne,
ihrer seltsamen Begegnung Sinn.

Und wenn dich das Irdische vergaß,
zu der stillen Erde sag: Ich rinne.
Zu dem raschen Wasser sprich: Ich bin.


Silent friend of many distances, feel
how your breath enlarges all of space.
Let your presence ring out like a bell
into the night. What feeds upon your face

grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered.
Move through transformation, out and in.
What is the deepest loss that you have suffered?
If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.

In this immeasurable darkness, be the power
that rounds your senses in their magic ring,
the sense of their mysterious encounter.

And if the earthly no longer knows your name,
whisper to the silent earth: I'm flowing.
To the flashing water say: I am.

—Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), II, 29 from The Sonnets to Orpheus, 1923, translated by Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage International, 1989). I like Rilke a whole lot, even though sometimes I am not at all sure what he is talking about. That's okay, though; sometimes, that's poetry. It is even remotely possible that some day I may post a Rilke poem that has nothing to do with his Orpheus obsession.

sleeping dragon's sudden eyes

I've been feeling like crap all weekend, and as a result have watched a lot of Once Upon a Time, which I stopped watching in the middle of the first season for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture (I got bored), but have been really enjoying on this go. I can see why I got bored, and the show has a lot of ups and downs, but it's pretty refreshing to watch something that is quite this much about ladies being awesome. I was planning on posting some Chesterton at some point, anyway, and this one is thematically relevant.

I cut a staff in a churchyard copse,
I clad myself in ragged things,
I set a feather in my cap
That fell out of an angel’s wings.

I filled my wallet with white stones,
I took three foxgloves in my hand,
I slung my shoes across my back,
And so I went to fairyland.

But lo, within that ancient place
Science had reared her iron crown,
And the great cloud of steam went up
That telleth where she takes a town.

But cowled with smoke and starred with lamps,
That strange land’s light was still its own;
The word that witched the woods and hills
Spoke in the iron and the stone.

Not Nature’s hand had ever curved
That mute unearthly porter’s spine.
Like sleeping dragon’s sudden eyes
The signals leered along the line.

The chimneys thronging crooked or straight
Were fingers signalling the sky;
The dog that strayed across the street
Seemed four-legged by monstrosity.

‘In vain,’ I cried, ‘though you too touch
The new time’s desecrating hand,
Through all the noises of a town
I hear the heart of fairyland.’

I read the name above a door,
Then through my spirit pealed and passed:
‘This is the town of thine own home,
And thou hast looked on it at last.’

—G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), "Modern Elfland," from The Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton, 1927.

always stay rooted to somewhere

Variations on a theme: wintercreek posted this poem yesterday, and I almost posted this poem yesterday. I really love this poem, and I have never posted it, and it is really wonderful, so here you are:

After learning my flight was detained 4 hours,
I heard the announcement:
If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic,
Please come to the gate immediately.

Well—one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there.
An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress,
Just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly.
Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her
Problem? we told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she
Did this.

I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly.
Shu dow-a, shu- biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick,
Sho bit se-wee?

The minute she heard any words she knew—however poorly used—
She stopped crying.

She thought our flight had been canceled entirely.
She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the
Following day. I said no, no, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just late,

Who is picking you up? Let’s call him and tell him.
We called her son and I spoke with him in English.
I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and
Would ride next to her—Southwest.

She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it.

Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and
Found out of course they had ten shared friends.

Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian
Poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering
Questions.

She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies—little powdered
Sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts—out of her bag—
And was offering them to all the women at the gate.

To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
Sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California,
The lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same
Powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies.

And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers—
Non-alcoholic—and the two little girls for our flight, one African
American, one Mexican American—ran around serving us all apple juice
And lemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar too.

And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands—
Had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing,

With green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always
Carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought,
This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.

Not a single person in this gate—once the crying of confusion stopped
—has seemed apprehensive about any other person.

They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too.
This can still happen anywhere.

Not everything is lost.

—Naomi Shihab Nye (b. 1952), "Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal."

and when the sun rises we are afraid

Posting poetry this week has been difficult. On the one hand, I find great solace in poetry, especially in difficult times; on the other hand, this week I have wanted the poems I post to say more than I think they ever really can. It's times like these that I wish I wrote my own poetry, and am simultaneously very glad that I don't; I'm not a very big fan of feeling like I'm living in a historical moment, or a dystopia, or the apocalypse. (And I really wish I was all-the-way kidding about any of those things.) The point is, poetry is hard right now. I wish I had a poem that encapsulated all of the things I want to say. In lieu of that, however, I figure erring on the side of Audre Lorde is probably better than erring on the side of Percy Shelley.

For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures
like bread in our children's mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours:

For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother's milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.

And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid

So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive

—Audre Lorde (1934-1992), "A Litany for Survival" from The Black Unicorn, 1976.

possible, unthinkable

I had like seven other poems I was going to post today, for a wide variety of reasons, but I am having one of those days where nothing quite goes according to plan. Not necessarily in a bad way, just Thursday. Anyway, Dorianne Laux has a way with a phrase that astounds me. This isn't the poem of hers that was actually on my spreadsheet, but like I said: not everything always goes according to plan.

The slate black sky. The middle step
of the back porch. And long ago

my mother’s necklace, the beads
rolling north and south. Broken

the rose stem, water into drops, glass
knobs on the bedroom door. Last summer’s

pot of parsley and mint, white roots
shooting like streamers through the cracks.

Years ago the cat’s tail, the bird bath,
the car hood’s rusted latch. Broken

little finger on my right hand at birth—
I was pulled out too fast. What hasn’t

been rent, divided, split? Broken
the days into nights, the night sky

into stars, the stars into patterns
I make up as I trace them

with a broken-off blade
of grass. Possible, unthinkable,

the cricket’s tiny back as I lie
on the lawn in the dark, my heart

a blue cup fallen from someone’s hands.

—Dorianne Laux (b. 1952), "What’s Broken" from Facts About The Moon, 2007.

study our manuscripts

Have you guys noticed that there has been a really distinct lack of sonnets around here, this month? This is still not a sonnet. In fact, there are no (formal) sonnets in all of Donne's "Songs and Sonnets." Donne reserves the actual sonnet form -- associated inevitably with sex and romance, and with thanks to Petrarch (that's an oversimplification, but the point stands) -- to talk to God. I mean, wouldn't you?

I'll tell thee now (dear love) what thou shalt do
To anger destiny, as she doth us,
How I shall stay, though she esloygne me thus,
And how posterity shall know it too;
How thine may out-endure
Sibyl's glory, and obscure
Her who from Pindar could allure,
And her, through whose help Lucan is not lame,
And her, whose book (they say) Homer did find, and name.

Study our manuscripts, those myriads
Of letters, which have past 'twixt thee and me,
Thence write our annals, and in them will be
To all whom love's subliming fire invades,
Rule and example found;
There the faith of any ground
No schismatique will dare to wound,
That sees, how Love this grace to us affords,
To make, to keep, to use, to be these his records.

This book, as long-lived as the elements,
Or as the world's form, this all-graved tome
In cypher writ, or new made idiom;
We for Love's clergy only are instruments,
When this book is made thus,
Should again the ravenous
Vandals and Goths invade us,
Learning were safe; in this our universe,
Schools might learn sciences, spheres music, angels verse.

Here Love's Divines—since all divinity
Is love or wonder—may find all they seek,
Whether abstract spiritual love they like,
Their souls exhaled with what they do not see,
Or, loth so to amuse
Faith's infirmity, they choose
Something which they may see and use;
For, though mind be the heaven, where love doth sit,
Beauty a convenient type may be to figure it.

Here more than in their books may lawyers find,
Both by what titles mistresses are ours,
And how prerogative these states devours,
Transferr'd from Love himself, to womankind,
Who, though from heart and eyes,
They exact great subsidies,
Forsake him who on them relies;
And for the cause, honour, or conscience give,
Chimeras, vain as they, or their prerogative.

Here statesmen (or of them, they which can read),
May of their occupation find the grounds,
Love and their art alike it deadly wounds,
If to consider what 'tis, one proceed.
In both they do excel
Who the present govern well,
Whose weakness none doth, or dares tell;
In this thy book, such will there something see,
As in the Bible some can find out alchemy.

Thus vent thy thoughts; abroad I'll study thee,
As he removes far off, that great heights takes;
How great love is, presence best trial makes,
But absence tries how long this love will be;
To take a latitude
Sun, or stars, are fitliest view'd
At their brightest, but to conclude
Of longitudes, what other way have we,
But to mark when, and where the dark eclipses be?

—John Donne (1572-1631), "Valediction to his Book," from "Songs and Sonnets," first published in print in the Poems of 1633. I made some slightly random editorial decisions about punctuation and orthography. One of these days I'll post a satire or a verse letter, but I really fucking love the songs and sonnets. Even if none of them are sonnets.

hour on hour to me

It has been a very long couple of days, and I am very tired, but here is a poem to be going on with. I think I got this one from wintercreek, who has impeccable taste in poetry.

Places I love come back to me like music,
Hush me and heal me when I am very tired;
I see the oak woods at Saxton's flaming
In a flare of crimson by the frost newly fired;
And I am thirsty for the spring in the valley
As for a kiss ungiven and long desired.

I know a bright world of snowy hills at Boonton,
A blue and white dazzling light on everything one sees,
The ice-covered branches of the hemlocks sparkle
Bending low and tinkling in the sharp thin breeze,
And iridescent crystals fall and crackle on the snow-crust
With the winter sun drawing cold blue shadows from the trees.

Violet now, in veil on veil of evening
The hills across from Cromwell grow dreamy and far;
A wood-thrush is singing soft as a viol
In the heart of the hollow where the dark pools are;
The primrose has opened her pale yellow flowers
And heaven is lighting star after star.

Places I love come back to me like music—
Mid-ocean, midnight, the waves buzz drowsily;
In the ship's deep churning the eerie phosphorescence
Is like the souls of people who were drowned at sea,
And I can hear a man's voice, speaking, hushed, insistent,
At midnight, in mid-ocean, hour on hour to me.

—Sara Teasdale (1884-1933), "Places," from Flame and Shadow, 1920.

amid such choruses of desire

I find this poem both utterly beautiful and utterly devastating.

who would believe them winged
who would believe they could be

beautiful      who would believe
they could fall so in love with mortals

that they would attach themselves
as scars attach and ride the skin


sometimes we hear them in our dreams
rattling their skulls      clicking their bony fingers

envying our crackling hair
our spice filled flesh


they have heard me beseeching
as I whispered into my own

cupped hands      enough not me again
enough      but who can distinguish

one human voice
amid such choruses of desire

—Lucille Clifton (1936-2010), "sorrows," September 2007.

and seven planets blazing in her hair

It's my birthday! I HAVE SURVIVED THE YEAR OF ROCKSTAR DEATH. Today's celebratory plans involve lighting cupcakes on fire with a blowtorch, so I may not survive the year of rockstar death by very much, but at least I will have a good time. (Possibly we should invite the firemen from next door to my party.) I've already been out to brunch, and put on a lot of glittery eye makeup; later this afternoon, we are having a bunch of people over for a birthday shindig, because I have great friends, and I think my birthday is a pretty good excuse to have a party. I flatly refuse to have anything other than an excellent day. What else are birthdays for?

Well. Birthdays are also for Auden. It's actually sort of shocking that I haven't posted this one, before.

By all means sing of love but, if you do,
Please make a rare old proper hullabaloo:
When ladies ask How much do you love me?
The Christian answer is cosi-cosi;
But poets are not celibate divines:
Had Dante said so, who would read his lines?
Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever,
And do not listen to those critics ever
Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books
Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks,
As though the Muse preferred her half-wit sons;
Good poets have a weakness for bad puns.

Suppose your Beatrice be, as usual, late,
And you would tell us how it feels to wait,
You're free to think, what may be even true,
You're so in love that one hour seems like two,
But write—As I sat waiting for her call,
Each second longer darker seemed than all
(Something like this but more elaborate still)
Those raining centuries it took to fill
That quarry whence Endymion's Love was torn;
From such ingenious fibs are poems born.
Then, should she leave you for some other guy,
Or ruin you with debts, or go and die,
No metaphor, remember, can express
A real historical unhappiness;
Your tears have value if they make us gay;
Oh Happy Grief! is all sad verse can say.

The living girl's your business (some odd sorts
Have been an inspiration to men's thoughts):
Yours may be old enough to be your mother,
Or have one leg that's shorter than the other,
Or play Lacrosse or do the Modern Dance,
To you that's destiny, to us it's chance;
We cannot love your love till she takes on,
Through you, the wonders of a paragon.
Sing her triumphant passage to our land,
The sun her footstool, the moon in her right hand,
And seven planets blazing in her hair,
Queen of the Night and Empress of the Air;
Tell how her fleet by nine king swans is led,
Wild geese write magic letters overhead
And hippocampi follow in her wake
With Amphisboene, gentle for her sake;
Sing her descent on the exulting shore
To bless the vines and put an end to war.

If half-way through such praises of your dear,
Riot and shooting fill the streets with fear,
And overnight as in some terror dream
Poets are suspect with the New Regime,
Stick at your desk and hold your panic in,
What you are writing may still save your skin:
Re-sex the pronouns, add a few details,
And, lo, a panegyric ode which hails
(How is the Censor, bless his heart, to know?)
The new pot-bellied Generalissimo.
Some epithets, of course, like lily-breasted
Need modifying to say, lion-chested,
A title Goddess of wry-necks and wrens
To Great Reticulator of the fens,
But in an hour your poem qualifies
For a State pension or His annual prize,
And you will die in bed (which He will not:
That public nuisance will be hanged or shot).
Though honest Iagos, true to form, will write
Shame! in your margins, Toady! Hypocrite!,
True hearts, clear heads will hear the note of glory
And put inverted commas round the story,
Thinking—Old Sly-boots! We shall never know
Her name or nature. Well, it's better so.

For given Man, by birth, by education,
Imago Dei who forgot his station,
The self-made creature who himself unmakes,
The only creature ever made who fakes,
With no more nature in his loving smile
Than in his theories of a natural style,
What but tall tales, the luck of verbal playing,
Can trick his lying nature into saying
That love, or truth in any serious sense,
Like orthodoxy, is a reticence?

—W. H. Auden (1907-1973), "'The Truest Poetry Is The Most Feigning'," September 1953. This is one of my favorite versions of Auden: acerbic and brilliant, and a little wry, and a lot meta, sarcastic and sharp and kind of bitter (also totally right about the myth of plain style, come the fuck on), and kind of right about the things poetry can't do; and yet also forever believing in poetry, despite everything, and against all odds (true hearts, clear heads). I really, really love Auden.

flowing and flown

nonmodernist posted this poem earlier in the month, and I told her I was probably going to steal it eventually; eventually turns out to be today, when the earthy, ordinary, slightly mythic quality of Elizabeth Bishop makes me feel a little less lost in the endlessly, frustratingly cerebral (but not in the fun way) project that is grading essays.

Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water.
The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs
and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up
to storerooms in the gables
for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.
All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,
swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,
is opaque, but the silver of the benches,
the lobster pots, and masts, scattered
among the wild jagged rocks,
is of an apparent translucence
like the small old buildings with an emerald moss
growing on their shoreward walls.
The big fish tubs are completely lined
with layers of beautiful herring scales
and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
with small iridescent flies crawling on them.
Up on the little slope behind the houses,
set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass,
is an ancient wooden capstan,
cracked, with two long bleached handles
and some melancholy stains, like dried blood,
where the ironwork has rusted.
The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.
He was a friend of my grandfather.
We talk of the decline in the population
and of codfish and herring
while he waits for a herring boat to come in.
There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.
He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,
from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,
the blade of which is almost worn away.

Down at the water’s edge, at the place
where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp
descending into the water, thin silver
tree trunks are laid horizontally
across the gray stones, down and down
at intervals of four or five feet.

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals… One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me. He was interested in music;
like me a believer in total immersion,
so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.
I also sang "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God."
He stood up in the water and regarded me
steadily, moving his head a little.
Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge
almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug
as if it were against his better judgment.
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
the clear gray icy water… Back, behind us,
the dignified tall firs begin.
Bluish, associating with their shadows,
a million Christmas trees stand
waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended
above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

—Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), "At the Fishhouses" from The Complete Poems, 1927-1979.

by a sunne-beam

I have been reading George Herbert all day. I love George Herbert, and I am not even a little bit sorry. If George Herbert was a My Little Pony, he would be in a television show called "My Little Herbert: God is Magic" and he would probably be a unicorn, and his cutie mark would be a picture of a book inside a heart inside a church. I was initially going to post one of Herbert's sonnets about scriptural hermeneutics, tonight, but then I got distracted by sunbeams -- possibly because it was raining; anyway, the idea is that if I am very lucky, posting this poem tonight may mean that I will get up early and be awesomely productive tomorrow (because this is, on some level, very much a poem about how hard it is to get up in the morning). That's the plan, anyway, because I have a lot of work to do this weekend. Help me, George Herbert, you're -- wait, no, wrong story.

            I cannot ope mine eyes,
      But thou art ready there to catch
      My morning-soul and sacrifice:
Then we must needs for that day make a match.

            My God, what is a heart?
      Silver, or gold, or precious stone,
      Or starre, or rainbow, or a part
Of all these things, or all of them in one?

            My God, what is a heart,
      That thou shouldst it so eye, and wooe,
      Powring upon it all thy art,
As if that thou hadst nothing els to do?

            Indeed mans whole estate
      Amounts (and richly) to serve thee:
      He did not heav'n and earth create,
Yet studies them, not him by whom they be.

            Teach me thy love to know;
      That this new light, which now I see,
      May both the work and workman show:
Then by a sunne-beam I will climbe to thee.

—George Herbert (1593-1633), "Mattens" from The Temple, published posthumously in print in 1633. There is a better than average chance that I am going to write a whole dissertation chapter on George Herbert and the publication of The Temple and how friendship is magic.

language uncommon and agile as truth

Some days are Adrienne Rich days, and there's just nothing you can do about it except post some Adrienne Rich. I usually love her poetry, so this is not a hardship.

(I have more mixed feelings about her politics, which were sometimes phenomenally feminist and groundbreaking and wonderful, and sometimes deeply problematic and transphobic; but if I stopped loving poets because I disagreed with some of their politics I would be super screwed when it comes to most poetry. It is, as always—at least, I think so—very much worth being aware of the nuance and complexity and occasional awfulness of people and their ideas; but that doesn't mean you can't love some (or even a lot) of what they have to say, even while you hate some of the other things they have to say. Loving problematic things.)

If I've reached for your lines   (I have)
   like letters from the dead that stir the nerves
dowsed you for a springhead
   to water my thirst
dug into my compost skeleton and petals
   you surely meant to catch the light:

—at work in my wormeaten wormwood-raftered
   stateless underground
      have I a plea?

If I've touched your finger
   with a ravenous tongue
      licked from your palm a rift of salt
if I've dreamt or thought you
   a pack of blood   fresh-drawn
      hanging darkred from a hook
higher than my heart
   (you who understand transfusion)
      where else should I appeal?

A pilot light lies low
   while the gas jets sleep
      (a cat getting toed from stove
into nocturnal ice)
   language uncommon and agile as truth
      melts down the most intractable silence

A lighthouse keeper's ethics:
   you tend for all or none
      for this you might set your furniture on fire
A this we have blundered over
   as if the lamp could be shut off at will
      rescue denied for some

and still a lighthouse be

—Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), "For This" from Fox, 1999.

In not entirely unrelated news, I have been feeling exceptionally lucky in my friends and chosen family, this week. You guys are great, you know that?

hands on the openable book

A couple of weeks ago I was having a really extraordinarily bad day, and Molly sent me this poem. Sending me this poem was a really good call.

Just days ago we sat upon this rock
Watching the ignorant armies marching past
With the scholar's sense of knowing more than they.
Now you are in England
And the soldiers somewhere as grave,
And I seem to know nothing at all.
Oh, I can name you stones, planets, stars,
By Agricola, Linnaeus, and Tycho;
Words I know, objects, machineries, but mechanism
Has ceased to be sufficient for events.
I still do not believe in ghosts, say I.
A lamp burns blue from gasses in the flame,
Light blooms in unstruck conduits of the eye
And the shape-seeking mind gives it shadow substance:
I saw a phosphene with a silvered beard.
It was easier for the others: they believed.
Unpolished by the wheels of Wittenberg
They roughly knew that death sleeps not
When trouble wakes it. We were so very cold.
What did you see by darkness, then? Your mind
Had always a good eye, and your soul
Always a muted voice. Some recollection
Was it, some fatherly advice
On power, trust, and counsels in the court
Rose up to haunt you, and you called it Father.
Why there I have deduced it, QED.
I will believe that men are stricken mad
When I can think naught else, as I believe
That they are dead when I do see a corpse.
Recall that night in the days of our study
We went up to the tower in Wittenberg
Because the old professor, Johann Faust
The wondersmith, the one who could not choose
If God had mercy, promised us a wonder.
Shortly he gave it, with his body and crossed timbers
And a thunderclap. Demons, you said,
Had rent him. I never thought you
More than metaphorical. Surely
Something in an alembic had gone wrong,
A spark touched to a firework, perhaps
Those strange heavy metals he said were Philosopher's Stone.
He swore he could wall Germany with brass
And all knew he meant cannon: Gustavus Aldophus
Taught the world that trick. You and Rosencrantz and I
Looked on Faustus in pieces among his instruments:
Thence Ros went off to form that fond attachment
To Guildenstern with his horrid clarinet,
Flowering Narcissus. You said demons,
Meaning more I think now than I thought then.
I confess to this air that I saw first and mainly
Anatomized Man, in exploded view,
And wondered which of all those riven vessels,
Those open hollow parts, had spilled his soul.
There's a mystery wants answering.
You did not stab Polonius in the brains,
Nor heart, nor anything particularly.
(The doctors never thought to open him;
A lung, the liver portal veins, I'd guess.)
You did not stay to see the transference
Of wounds. Your thrust went further than you know.
Here is where we define Horatio's courage.
If I put this message to paper and ink
Instead of casting it on water after you
Would I tell you, reasonable friend,
How Ophelia's reason cries out in its sleep?
They gave me charge of the distracted maiden,
Thinking her safe thus, I suppose;
How flattering to my mind. Though safe she was,
Not just because she was, in my faith, yours,
But out of simple fear. Not simple. Mine.
I think she knew it. It was she who kissed
My palms as if they smoked, then ran, light-foot,
Trailing blossoms, laughing. Laughing, laughing,
There was never such laughter at Wittenberg,
Nor demons either. And now the girl is tended
By some old hen who fears to go near water.
Does any of this matter to you, damn it,
Who turned her aside for reasons I trust are good
Who'd have her without taking her? At school
You thought on sex. I heard you through the walls.
Of course it's not a cloud of autumn light;
It's awkward and it's noisy and it's humid
And leaves you feeling half like Jupiter
And one third set to vomit. Do I shock you?
Oh yes, friend, women have delighted me,
As, I should hope, I them. Consider it
Research, hands on the openable book,
Affording here and there to the caring student
A subtle glimpse of Time and God.
No. No. It is my faith to understand,
Not to disprove, your motives. I would know,
And now that I am here, I think I do.
My parents' house had walls and doors and roof,
Elsinore none of these. The place is open
As diagram in a book; here read the legend:
A represents a whispering-gallery,
B indicating a confessor's alcove,
C shows a hollow underneath the stairs.
This is no house, it is a theatre,
A cockpit in continuous performance,
All actors, all audience, no interval.
You hurt me when you would not take my oath
Of silence, but you did not mean to do:
You only knew your ground, the listeners' kingdom,
Where intimacy's the rarest paradox.
I wonder if this place does wound the mind,
Echoing nights with auditors and ghosts
(Memories I mean, the ghosts I will acknowledge)
Toxic with stone-dust, lead in wine and paint,
The moldy wheat that dements villages?
It is the time, near war, too near to death,
The witchfinder's needle bearing down,
Demanding, scream or be burned alive?
I learned in Wittenberg, I learn here
To watch men die and women suffer
With the same Apollonian detachment I kept
For the droppings of unidentified wildlife
And tumors in jars, driven by the passion
Of glands undiscoverable by knife, and the thought
That the world might not be left
So bad as when one entered;
If demonless Wittenberg and haunted Elsinore
Were brought together in some essential coitus
Would the child be good?
Gone friend, what do you dream
What my philosophy dreams of?
Words fall in water, and the world shall end
No different for Horatio's tenancy.
Down yonder hill two clowns are digging holes
For dead men. Every doctor knows
Whence comes his study-matter; I'll go there
And see if spades have brought up interest.
There's motion, out to sea. A pirate sail,
Black sheet on silver water. That's a legend:
Of grief and trouble come to royal fathers,
Trouble and grief come unto princely sons.

—John M. Ford (1957-2006), "Letter from Elsinore," 1993. (In this case, from Heat of Fusion and Other Stories, 2004).

I love so many things about this poem. I love how it positions Hamlet in history, how the play exists (as it really must) in the same world as Faustus; I love Horatio, and I love that we know what comes after this -- a pirate sail -- and Horatio sort of does, too, but not quite, because he's in the middle of the story; I love that the poem is both about renaissance education and lives in a world of renaissance education, as a letter, and as a fictional letter imagined from one fictional character to another (cf. Ovid's Heroides); and of course, I love that it's a transformative work.

Happy birthday, Mike.

slow-burning signals

In keeping with the theme of poets writing about other poets (it really is a theme), I was going to post Derek Walcott's poem to Pablo Neruda, today; but then I needed to post this one, instead. I'll save the Neruda poem for another year.

Joyce was afraid of thunder,
but lions roared at his funeral
from the Zurich zoo.
Was it Zurich or Trieste?
No matter. These are legends, as much
as the death of Joyce is a legend,
or the strong rumour that Conrad
is dead, and that Victory is ironic.
On the edge of the night-horizon
from this beach house on the cliffs
there are now, till dawn,
two glares from the mile-out-
at-sea derricks; they are like
the glow of the cigar
and the glow of the volcano
at Victory's end.
One could abandon writing
for the slow-burning signals
of the great, to be, instead,
their ideal reader, ruminative,
voracious, making the love of masterpieces
superior to attempting
to repeat or outdo them,
and be the greatest reader in the world.
At least it requires awe,
which has been lost to our time;
so many people have seen everything,
so many people can predict,
so many refuse to enter the silence
of victory, the indolence
that burns at the core,
so many are no more than
erect ash, like the cigar,
so many take thunder for granted.
How common is the lightning,
how lost the leviathans
we no longer look for!
There were giants in those days.
In those days they made good cigars.
I must read more carefully.

—Derek Walcott (b. 1930), "Volcano" from Sea Grapes (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971). Sometimes Derek Walcott leaves me kind of speechless with awe -- speaking of thunder.

heard melodies are sweet

I didn't post a poem yesterday, and then I had kind of a bad night -- insomnia, which sometimes happens -- and this morning I feel a little bit like I was run over by a truck, because not sleeping is actually really bad for you. On the plus side, here is a poem about John Keats.

After two weeks under the Italian sun,
he would dash off a note to Fanny Brawne:
"Weather marvellous. Fully recovered.
Come soon and bring summer dresses."
And she would come. She would pull
his miraculous heart to her breast,
and they would listen to every bird's song.
The odes would win a silly contest,
and they would use the prize money
to build a small house on a Greek island.
They would spend the next twenty years
perfecting the art of the human body.
They would eat fine olives and swallow
the sound of each wave's roll onto the beach.
They would make love under the night sky
with such tense clarity that the moon
would become the bright face of God.
One morning the man would pick up his pen,
sit by the window, write, "I was happy
to be John Keats," and never write again.

—Dan Albergotti, "Revision." Originally printed in The Virginia Quarterly Review, 81.4 (Fall 2005).

One of my favorite things in poetry -- and, indeed, in literature in general -- is poets writing about other poets. This may turn out to be something of a theme.

pray that the road is long

When you start on your journey to Ithaca,
then pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.
Do not fear the Lestrygonians
and the Cyclopes and the angry Poseidon.
You will never meet such as these on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine
emotion touches your body and your spirit.
You will never meet the Lestrygonians,
the Cyclopes and the fierce Poseidon,
if you do not carry them within your soul,
if your soul does not raise them up before you.

Then pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many,
that you will enter ports seen for the first time
with such pleasure, with such joy!
Stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and corals, amber and ebony,
and pleasurable perfumes of all kinds,
buy as many pleasurable perfumes as you can;
visit hosts of Egyptian cities,
to learn and learn from those who have knowledge.

Always keep Ithaca fixed in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for long years;
and even to anchor at the isle when you are old,
rich with all that you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.

Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would never have taken the road.
But she has nothing more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not defrauded you.
With the great wisdom you have gained, with so much experience,
you must surely have understood by then what Ithacas mean.

—C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933), "Ithaca," 1911. Translated from the Greek by Rae Dalven, from The Complete Poems of Cavafy (Harcourt, 1976).

gabbysilang introduced me to Cavafy, and this was the first poem of his that got under my skin. I like a lot of his poems, although as always with things translated I wish I could read them in the original (which I may be able to do after I take six weeks of intensive Greek this summer, although that is Ancient Greek, so maybe not), and I especially like the blend, in his poems, of the ancient world and modern poetry, of politics and eroticism and mythology and history. This poem is less sexy and less queer than many of his poems, sadly, but I like its quietness, and I like what it has to say. (I also like that it is both very like and very unlike my usual favorite poem on this topic that is not by Homer. One equal temper of heroic hearts. Can you go home again?)

sunlight darkness

"Worse than the sunflower," she had said.
But the new dimension of truth had only recently
Burst in on us. Now it was to be condemned.
And in vagrant shadow her mothball truth is eaten.
In cool, like-it-or-not shadow the humdrum is consumed.
Tired housewives begat it some decades ago,
A small piece of truth that is it was honey to the lips
Was also millions of miles from filling the place reserved for it.
You see how honey crumbles your universe
Which seems like an institution – how many walls?

Then everything, in her belief, was to be submerged
And soon. There was no life you could live out to its end
And no attitude which, in the end, would save you.
The monkish and the frivolous alike were to be trapped
                              in death's capacious claw
But listen while I tell you about the wallpaper –
There was a key to everything in that oak forest
But a sad one. Ever since childhood there
Has been this special meaning to everything.
You smile at your friend's joke, but only later, through tears.

For the shoe pinches, even though it fits perfectly.
Apples were made to be gathered, also the whole host of the
                               world’s ailments and troubles.
There is no time like the present for giving in to this temptation.
Once the harvest is in and the animals put away for the winter
To stand at the uncomprehending window cultivating the desert
With salt tears which will never do anyone any good.
My dearest I am as a galleon on salt billows.
Perfume my head with forgetting all around me.

For some day these projects will return.
The funereal voyage over ice-strewn seas is ended.
You wake up forgetting. Already
Daylight shakes you in the yard.
The hands remain empty. They are constructing an osier basket
Just now, and across the sunlight darkness is taking root anew
In intense activity. You shall never have seen it just this way
And that is to be your one reward.

Fine vapors escape from whatever is doing the living.
The night is cold and delicate and full of angels
Pounding down the living. The factories are all lit up,
The chime goes unheard.
We are together at last, though far apart.

—John Ashbery (b. 1927), "The Ecclesiast" from Rivers and Mountains, 1966. Some of you may recognize the last stanza from the epigraphs to Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass.

For my brother (who would probably have hated this poem, but as he is dead he does not get a vote), and with thanks to starlady.

more than a pound of wit

Mine own John Poins, since ye delight to know
The cause why that homeward I me draw,
And flee the press of courts, whereso they go,
Rather than to live thrall under the awe
Of lordly looks, wrapped within my cloak,
To will and lust learning to set a law:
It is not for because I scorn or mock
The power of them, to whom fortune hath lent
Charge over us, of right, to strike the stroke.
But true it is that I have always meant
Less to esteem them than the common sort,
Of outward things that judge in their intent
Without regard what doth inward resort.
I grant sometime that of glory the fire
Doth touch my heart; me list not to report
Blame by honour, and honour to desire.
But how may I this honour now attain,
That cannot dye the colour black a liar?
My Poins, I cannot from me tune to feign,
To cloak the truth for praise without desert
Of them that list all vice for to retain.
I cannot honour them that sets their part
With Venus and Bacchus all their life long;
Nor hold my peace of them although I smart.
I cannot crouch nor kneel to do so great a wrong,
To worship them, like God on earth alone,
That are as wolves these sely lambs among.
I cannot with my word complain and moan,
And suffer nought, nor smart without complaint,
Nor turn the word that from my mouth is gone.
I cannot speak and look like a saint,
Use wiles for wit, and make deceit a pleasure,
And call craft counsel, for profit still to paint.
I cannot wrest the law to fill the coffer
With innocent blood to feed myself fat,
And do most hurt where most help I offer.
I am not he that can allow the state
Of him Caesar, and damn Cato to die,
That with his death did scape out of the gate
From Caesar's hands (if Livy do not lie)
And would not live where liberty was lost;
So did his heart the common weal apply.
I am not he such eloquence to boast
To make the crow singing as the swan;
Nor call the lion of coward beasts the most,
That cannot take a mouse as the cat can;
And he that dieth for hunger of the gold
Call him Alexander; and say that Pan
Passeth Apollo in music many fold;
Praise Sir Thopas for a noble tale,
And scorn the story that the Knight told;
Praise him for counsel that is drunk of ale;
Grin when he laugheth that beareth all the sway,
Frown when he frowneth and groan when is pale;
On others' lust to hang both night and day:
None of these points would ever frame in me.
My wit is nought—I cannot learn the way.
And much the less of things that greater be,
That asken help of colours of device
To join the mean with each extremity,
With the nearest virtue to cloak alway the vice;
And as to purpose, likewise it shall fall
To press the virtue that it may not rise;
As drunkenness good fellowship to call;
The friendly foe with his double face
Say he is gentle and courteous therewithal;
And say that favel hath a goodly grace
In eloquence; and cruelty to name
Zeal of justice and change in time and place;
And he that suffer'th offence without blame
Call him pitiful; and him true and plain
That raileth reckless to every man's shame.
Say he is rude that cannot lie and feign;
The lecher a lover; and tyranny
To be the right of a prince's reign.
I cannot, I; no, no, it will not be!
This is the cause that I could never yet
Hang on their sleeves that way, as thou mayst see,
A chip of chance more than a pound of wit.
This maketh me at home to hunt and to hawk,
And in foul weather at my book to sit;
In frost and snow then with my bow to stalk;
No man doth mark whereso I ride or go:
In lusty leas at liberty I walk.
And of these news I feel nor weal nor woe,
Save that a clog doth hang yet at my heel.
No force for that, for it is ordered so,
That I may leap both hedge and dyke full well.
I am not now in France to judge the wine,
With sav'ry sauce the delicates to feel;
Nor yet in Spain, where one must him incline
Rather than to be, outwardly to seem:
I meddle not with wits that be so fine.
Nor Flanders' cheer letteth not my sight to deem
Of black and white; nor taketh my wit away
With beastliness; they beasts do so esteem.
Nor I am not where Christ is given in prey
For money, poison, and treason at Rome—
A common practice used night and day:
But here I am in Kent and Christendom
Among the Muses where I read and rhyme;
Where if thou list, my Poins, for to come,
Thou shalt be judge how I do spend my time.

—Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542), "Mine own John Poins" from the Egerton and Devonshire Manuscripts, and based on the tenth satire of Luigi Alamanni (but "Englished" and personalized by Wyatt), probably written during Wyatt's banishment from court in 1536. Spelling and punctuation taken from the Norton Anthology, for the most part, and therefore somewhat modernized.

Sir Thomas Wyatt is usually credited with bringing the Petrarchan sonnet into English, which he did; this is not a Petrarchan sonnet, obviously. I like sonnets -- and early English translations of Petrarch have a lot going for them -- but this is an epistolary poem and a satire about the court and the country. It's about whether it's possible (in exile or otherwise) to be both a courtier and a scholar at the same time, whether reading and writing and scholarship belong solely to the reclusive and contemplative life, and whether you can be a courtier and speak the truth. It's about how to do right by the state when you are banished from public life -- or, indeed, when you are not; and it's about the duty of the courtier, and how wrong everybody else (but the writer, of course) is about what that means.