Daffodils, bees, bats: all things that are currently in my yard. But isn’t it unfair that National Poetry Month doesn’t extend all year long, so that we would have occasion to produce poems about things that appear in other seasons? Why should cicadas and icicles and geese heading south be excluded, just because they don’t show up in April? In an effort to make National Poetry Month more inclusive, and because I like it, I post the following.
The Mower to the Glowworms
Ye living lamps, by whose dear light
The nightingale does sit so late,
And studying all the summer night
Her matchless songs does meditate,
Ye country comets, that portend
No war nor prince’s funeral,
Shining unto no higher end
Than to presage the grass’s fall;
Ye glowworms, whose officious flame
To wand’ring mowers shows the way,
That in the night have lost their aim,
And after foolish fires do stray;
Your courteous fires in vain you waste,
Since Juliana here is come,
For she my mind hath so displaced
That I shall never find my home.
— Andrew Marvell
Almost nobody commented on the bat post, oddly.
I read the above poem just last night in Auden’s Oxford Book of Light Verse, amusingly enough. I wonder if he might have been thinking of lightning bugs when he wrote the following, from the ever greater “September 1, 1939”:
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
JFTR now that it got thumped on my desk having been cluttering up the bed, that should have been W.H.Auden’s Book of Light Verse. It was originally the OBoLV but I have a revised edition with some poems which were censored from the original restored. I’ll see if I can find those and post them…
I posted oddly on the bat thread, but I attribute that to an inability to follow directions.
Auden is by far one of my favorite poets; ty for the excerpt rilkefan.
No Auden or lightening bugs, but W.S. Merwin’s Unknown Bird:
Out of the dry days
through the dusty leaves
far across the valley
those few notes never
heard here before
one fluted phrase
floating over its
wandering secret
all at once wells up
somewhere else
and is gone before it
goes on fallen into
its own echo leaving
a hollow through the air
that is dry as before
where is it from
hardly anyone
seems to have noticed it
so far but who now
would have been listening
it is not native here
that may be the one
thing we are sure of
it came from somewhere
else perhaps alone
so keeps on calling for
no one who is here
hoping to be heard
by another of its own
unlikely origin
trying once more the same few
notes that began the song
of an oriole last heard
years ago in another
existence there
it goes again tell
no one it is here
foreign as we are
who are filling the days
with a sound of our own
rilkefan: During National Poetry Month I have concluded that I have no sense at all of what people will and won’t comment on. (I loved your bat poem, btw, and the others.) But I would have expected someone to post something like ‘Casey at the Bat’, etc.
And wren: thanks for this and all the poems you’ve posted.