kiss the apocalypse goodbye

Three days late for April 26, a poem that makes me feel things about a lot of things, but maybe especially the wildness of the English language. I just really love poetry, is the thing.

Never fear. I know the difference between
arteries and ardor, arbor and treed,
my bower and a weak-kneed need, a harbor
where one might moor tonight and a port worth
the oars’ effort to come ashore for, a bit
part and the serpent’s gravid apple. I won’t
flatter myself first or lasting, or
presume to fast and feint a martyr, making
mockery of sacrifice, fatten
for some sweet slaughter. I must believe that I’m
not on your mind. On your body? Sure.
That said, your body has a few ideas
so bright that we might meet some night and render
a dark room light as the last day before
the world ends, that doom that was supposed to dawn
today, but by now, hours worn on and in,
we know there’s no such luxury as fine
as that finality for now. For now,
at least, I’ll have to kiss apocalypse
goodbye, resign myself to this more mundane
pain, the solace of the solstice, year’s
earliest sunset and its longest night.
I try to catch that fade of color with,
without a flash. Both tries prove terrible.
The horizon smudges up against the sky’s blur
like a child’s heavy-handed landscape
and inept erasure. They’ll have to do.
The pictures that I have of you will never
do you justice, either, neither a camera’s
snap nor some synaptic crackle long
elapsed can come remotely close to holding
you. How else would you have it? You need
never fear. I need you, but I only need you
where you are: there, never far, never near.

—Dora Malech, "To the You of Ten Years Ago, Now," from The New Yorker, April 29, 2013.

counter, original, spare, strange

Sometimes, when I'm not sure what poem I'm in the mood for and don't have a plan for the day, I go back through my spreadsheet in search of inspiration and realize that, although I have posted almost all of my favorite Gerard Manley Hopkins poems, there are some I have missed.

Glory be to God for dappled things –
     For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
          For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
     Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

          And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
     Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
          With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                                   Praise him.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), "Pied Beauty," Summer 1877. The note on this poem in my edition of Selected Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Dover, 2011, ed. Bob Blaisdell) says, "Curtal Sonnet: sprung paeonic rhythm," because Hopkins is, as always, baller.

a small unfocused blur, a standing chill

Today is poems about death day! "But Olivia," you may ask, "didn't you post a poem about death yesterday?" I did; did I mention that there might be more poems about death than usual, this year? I picked this one out in advance, though, because although it is depressing as hell, it's also a classic, and it's such a powerful, effective, brilliant kind of poem (the enjambment alone, good lord, and don't even get me started on the rhyme scheme) that I thought maybe it was time to post it. Warnings for anxiety, depression, drinking, and the terrifying awareness of mortality, which may feel especially close right now, as does, I think, this poem; please take care of yourselves.

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

—Philip Larkin (1922-1985), "Aubade," originally published in the Times Literary Supplement, 23 December 1977, and written between 1974 and 1977; Larkin completed the poem after his mother's death in 1977. The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, edited by Archie Burnett (New York, 2012), has phenomenal notes, and one of my favorites on this poem is from a letter where Larkin told a friend, "I get up at 6 when I can and try to add to a poem about DEATH. Not making much progress, but one can only hope—to finish the poem, I mean." Anyway, this poem resonates with me a lot, and so does the way he describes it, with delightfully morbid humor.

and the deep river ran on

It's always a little bit of a challenge, deciding what Auden poem to post each year. This actually wasn't the one I was planning on, but it's a classic, and it has some pretty phenomenal metaphors, as well as being a killer poem in general.

As I walked out one evening,
   Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
   Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
   I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
   "Love has no ending.

"I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
   Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
   And the salmon sing in the street,

"I'll love you till the ocean
   Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
   Like geese about the sky.

"The years shall run like rabbits,
   For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
   And the first love of the world."

But all the clocks in the city
   Began to whirr and chime:
"O let not Time deceive you,
   You cannot conquer Time.

"In the burrows of the Nightmare
   Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
   And coughs when you would kiss.

"In headaches and in worry
   Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
   To-morrow or to-day.

"Into many a green valley
   Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
   And the diver's brilliant bow.

"O plunge your hands in water,
   Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
   And wonder what you've missed.

"The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
   The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
   A lane to the land of the dead.

"Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
   And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
   And Jill goes down on her back.

"O look, look in the mirror,
   O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
   Although you cannot bless.

"O stand, stand at the window
   As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
   With your crooked heart."

It was late, late in the evening,
   The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
   And the deep river ran on.

—W. H. Auden (1907-1973), "As I Walked Out One Evening," 1937, from Another Time, 1940. I think I post more poems from Another Time than I do any other era of Auden, actually—it's not intentional, and I love all eras of Auden, but the poems in Another Time are pretty consistently some of my favorites.

memory speaking in dactyls

I spent a lot of time thinking about this poem while we were in Greece, but I had so many poems I wanted to post while we were there that some of them had to get saved for later, and this is really more of a poem about Latin than about Greek. Luckily, I then missed a whole bunch of days, so here is an extra poem for April 15.

"…forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit…"

This is dactylic hexameter. This is the meter I learned about
back when I first studied Virgil, much longer ago than I'll tell you.
I tell of a lesson that failed; I sing of a student who stumbled.
"This, even this, one day, will be helpful for us to remember…."
That's what the poet said, anyway.

Think of a scratchy recording, a thirty-three rpm relic,
and under the scratches and crackles, a basso declaiming Evangeline:
"This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks"—
that was to show us the meter of Arma virumque cano—
and beating it out on the table,

the hand of an elderly teacher, her finger-joints lumped and arthritic.
Think of old Longfellow's poem, unread now for so many decades.
Think of old classrooms, old desks, old textbooks with fray-cornered covers.
Feel the great age of the Latin, and all this antiquity pressing
on us who were girls of sixteen.

Soothing old rhythms and sounds, but the road where they led me dead-ended.
English is different from Latin, and stresses are different from long-marks.
Scattered and careless, I fumbled the Latin idea of duration.
(Lord, how I cringe when I think of the ways I misscanned the Aeneid,
misunderstanding the sound of it.)

A wonder it happens at all, that young people learn from old epics.
So many ways of mishearing the rustle of papery voices.
Still, there are fragments that stick; we look for them later and find them.
"Tears of things": now that I've shed them, the line that most comes to me lately—
memory speaking in dactyls.

—Maryann Corbett, "A Meditation on Dactylic Hexameter." I am about 98% certain that I got this poem from the wonderful wintercreek, many moons ago, but I don't have any other publication information. Maryann Corbett is pretty cool, though.

where the Doges used to wed the sea with rings

We're in Venice! I should probably be posting Byron, but I just can't make myself do it (sorry, bro). Have some Robert Browning instead; he was just as weird, albeit in a totally different way.

I
Oh Galuppi, Baldassaro, this is very sad to find!
I can hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf and blind;
But although I take your meaning, 'tis with such a heavy mind!

II
Here you come with your old music, and here's all the good it brings.
What, they lived once thus at Venice where the merchants were the kings,
Where Saint Mark's is, where the Doges used to wed the sea with rings?

III
Ay, because the sea's the street there; and 'tis arched by . . . what you call
. . . Shylock's bridge with houses on it, where they kept the carnival:
I was never out of England—it's as if I saw it all.

IV
Did young people take their pleasure when the sea was warm in May?
Balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to mid-day,
When they made up fresh adventures for the morrow, do you say?

V
Was a lady such a lady, cheeks so round and lips so red,—
On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its bed,
O'er the breast's superb abundance where a man might base his head?

VI
Well, and it was graceful of them—they'd break talk off and afford
—She, to bite her mask's black velvet—he, to finger on his sword,
While you sat and played Toccatas, stately at the clavichord?

VII
What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished, sigh on sigh,
Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions—"Must we die?"
Those commiserating sevenths—"Life might last! we can but try!

VIII
"Were you happy?" —"Yes."—"And are you still as happy?"—"Yes. And you?"
—"Then, more kisses!"—"Did I stop them, when a million seemed so few?"
Hark, the dominant's persistence till it must be answered to!

IX
So, an octave struck the answer. Oh, they praised you, I dare say!
"Brave Galuppi! that was music! good alike at grave and gay!
"I can always leave off talking when I hear a master play!"

X
Then they left you for their pleasure: till in due time, one by one,
Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well undone,
Death stepped tacitly and took them where they never see the sun.

XI
But when I sit down to reason, think to take my stand nor swerve,
While I triumph o'er a secret wrung from nature's close reserve,
In you come with your cold music till I creep thro' every nerve.

XII
Yes, you, like a ghostly cricket, creaking where a house was burned:
"Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned.
"The soul, doubtless, is immortal—where a soul can be discerned.

XIII
"Yours for instance: you know physics, something of geology,
"Mathematics are your pastime; souls shall rise in their degree;
"Butterflies may dread extinction,—you'll not die, it cannot be!

XIV
"As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop,
"Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop:
"What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?

XV
"Dust and ashes!" So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold.
Dear dead women, with such hair, too—what's become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old.

—Robert Browning (1812-1899), "A Toccata of Galuppi's," from Men and Women, 1855. The meter of this poem, for those who care about such things, is trochaic octameter catalectic. I TOLD YOU BROWNING WAS WEIRD.

world is suddener

Snow in April is not that uncommon in many of the places I have lived while doing National Poetry Month, but it's uncommon enough that I don't often get to post snow poems. Today, however, as I write this on a train from Boston to New York (we just pulled into Providence), looking out at a snow-dusted New England landscape, this poem feels not only appropriate but inevitable. Or maybe I'm just saying that because my brilliant friend Allie reminded me of its existence yesterday.

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes –
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands –
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

—Louis MacNeice (1907-1963), "Snow," from Poems, 1935. MacNeice was part of Auden's circle, about which I have many, many feelings. As I was looking up the date and publication information, I also stumbled across a fairly lovely short essay about this poem, for those of you who are interested in such things and/or would like some accompanying reading.

walls and stars

You know, I've never posted any Robert Frost? Here are two, since I missed yesterday (and with thanks, as is often the case, to wintercreek):

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

—Robert Frost (1874-1963), "Mending Wall" from North of Boston, 1914.

*

O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud—
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to be wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.
Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says, 'I burn.'
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.
It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end.
And steadfast as Keats' Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

—Robert Frost (1874-1963), "Choose Something Like A Star," 1943.

I'm too tired and cranky to write about this at the moment, but if anybody wants to talk about Frost's metrics some other time, just let me know. METRICS ARE GREAT.

what I do is me: for that I came

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), "As kingfishers catch fire," undated.

Will I ever get tired of posting Hopkins poems and then waving my hands around in awe and bafflement? Signs point to no. Sometimes I think about his utterly bizarre, completely idiosyncratic, glorious revolution of the sonnet, and then I get happy and sad at the same time. He's not like anybody else before or since, and I can never decide whether or not I think that's a good thing.

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.

leave comfort root-room

I am overplaying my hand, a bit, posting Hopkins this early in the month. It was that kind of day, though; maybe one of these years I will post a Hopkins poem that isn't a sonnet. MAYBE SOMEDAY I WILL POST THE EPITHALAMION. Anyway, not today.

My own heart let me more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.

I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst's all-in-all in all a world of wet.

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size

At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
'S not wrung, see you; unforseentimes rather—as skies
Betweenpie mountains—lights a lovely mile.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), "My own heart"

Oh gosh, the things he does with language. It cannot have been easy to live in your head, GMH, but I remain extraordinarily glad that you wrote it all down.

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?

O my chevalier!

Aria made me think of this poem, yesterday:

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! And the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

~Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89), The Windhover, May 30, 1877, revised autograph copy June 22, 1879. I seriously cannot get enough of GMH's sprung rhythm. I love this poem.