I skipped two entire days of National Poetry Month, partly because it has been a busy week, and partly because my ISP was having difficulties, and at several crucial junctures I lost internet service entirely. However, to make up for lost time, I am posting the person who probably takes the title ‘Poet With A Capital P’, Wordsworth. I am not really much of a fan of his; I have always agreed with these lines, which I read somewhere: “There are two voices; one is of the deep/ And one is of an old demented sheep/ And Wordsworth, both are thine…” But still: guess what’s in bloom in my garden?
The Daffodils
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils,
Beside the lake, beneath the treees
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay;
Ten thousand saw I at a glance
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay
In such a jocund company!
I gazed – and gazed – but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
— William Wordsworth
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride,
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
A.E. Housman
Housman could find the morbid in anything, but he did it beautifully.
Morbid, you say?
– Abel Meeropol
There is something specifically for you here, Hilzoy.
Anyone interested in Wordsworth who has access to the NY Review of Books should read or at least grep through this article by James Fenton as noted here. There’s a great description of pivotal meetings between Wordsworth and Coleridge and W. and Keats, in both of which W.’s monumental sense of his self-worth led him to try to crush the rival poet.
They ask me why I live in the green mountains.
I smile and don’t reply; my heart’s at ease.
Peach blossoms flow downstream, leaving no trace —
And there are other earths and skies than these.
Question and Answer in the Mountains, Li Po
Heretik — thanks; I like it, and I was touched.
By the way, my Unitarian Jihad name is Sister Howitzer of Mild Reason, which I find strangely apt.
Something I hope will amuse…
hilzoy, I cannot read that poem without thinking of Bullwinkle’s Corner (“hello, poetry lovers”). In the Jay Ward rendition, Bullwinkle is arrested and appears before Judge Boris for having picked some protected daffodils. “Thirty daffodils, that will be thirty dollars and thirty days.”
I can’t quote the whole thing from memory, but I do recall..
A web search turns up this.
You are most welcome, Hilzoy. I much admire what you present over here.
My Unitarian Jihad name is: Brother Gatling Gun of Reasoned Discussion. Strangely apt as well.
Why does poetry matter?
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
W.C Williams
The Bear
1
In late winter
I sometimes glimpse bits of steam
coming up from
some fault in the old snow
and bend close and see it is lung-colored
and put down my nose
and know
the chilly, enduring odor of bear.
2
I take a wolf’s rib and whittle
it sharp at both ends
and coil it up
and freeze it in blubber and place it out
on the fairway of the bears.
And when it has vanished
I move out on the bear tracks,
roaming in circles
until I come to the first, tentative, dark
splash on the earth.
And I set out
running, following the splashes
of blood wandering over the world.
At the cut, gashed resting places
I stop and rest,
at the crawl-marks
where he lay out on his belly
to overpass some stretch of bauchy ice
I lie out
dragging myself forward with bear-knives in my fists.
3
On the third day I begin to starve,
at nightfall I bend down as I knew I would
at a turd sopped in blood,
and hesitate, and pick it up,
and thrust it in my mouth, and gnash it down,
and rise
and go on running.
4
On the seventh day,
living by now on bear blood alone,
I can see his upturned carcass far out ahead, a scraggled,
steamy hulk,
the heavy fur riffling in the wind.
I come up to him
and stare at the narrow-spaced, petty eyes,
the dismayed
face laid back on the shoulder, the nostrils
flared, catching
perhaps the first taint of me as he
died.
I hack
a ravine in his thigh, and eat and drink,
and tear him down his whole length
and open him and climb in
and close him up after me, against the wind,
and sleep.
5
And dream
of lumbering flatfooted
over the tundra,
stabbed twice from within,
splattering a trail behind me,
splattering it out no matter which way I lurch,
no matter which parabola of bear-transcendence,
which dance of solitude I attempt,
which gravity-clutched leap,
which trudge, which groan.
6
Until one day I totter and fall —
fall on this
stomach that has tried so hard to keep up,
to digest the blood as it leaked in,
to break up
and digest the bone itself: and now the breeze
blows over me, blows off
the hideous belches of ill-digested bear blood
and rotted stomach
and the ordinary, wretched odor of bear,
blows across
my sore, lolled tongue a song
or screech, until I think I must rise up
and dance. And I lie still.
7
I awaken I think. Marshlights
reappear, geese
come trailing again up the flyway.
In her ravine under old snow the dam-bear
lies, licking
lumps of smeared fur
and drizzly eyes into shapes
with her tongue. And one
hairy-soled trudge stuck out before me,
the next groaned out,
the next,
the next,
the rest of my days I spend
wandering: wondering
what, anyway,
was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that
poetry, by which I lived?
–from Body Rags, Galway Kinnell
The Bells of Heaven
’TWOULD ring the bells of Heaven
The wildest peal for years,
If Parson lost his senses
And people came to theirs,
And he and they together
Knelt down with angry prayers
For tamed and shabby tigers,
And dancing dogs and bears,
And wretched, blind pit ponies,
And little hunted hares.
— Ralph Hodgson
The Hippopotamus
T. S. Eliot
THE BROAD-BACKED hippopotamus
Rests on his belly in the mud;
Although he seems so firm to us
He is merely flesh and blood.
Flesh and blood is weak and frail,
Susceptible to nervous shock;
While the True Church can never fail
For it is based upon a rock.
The hippo’s feeble steps may err
In compassing material ends,
While the True Church need never stir
To gather in its dividends.
The ‘potamus can never reach
The mango on the mango-tree;
But fruits of pomegranate and peach
Refresh the Church from over sea.
At mating time the hippo’s voice
Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd,
But every week we hear rejoice
The Church, at being one with God.
The hippopotamus’s day
Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts;
God works in a mysterious way\u2014
The Church can sleep and feed at once.
I saw the ‘potamus take wing
Ascending from the damp savannas,
And quiring angels round him sing
The praise of God, in loud hosannas.
Blood of the Lamb shall wash him clean
And him shall heavenly arms enfold,
Among the saints he shall be seen
Performing on a harp of gold.
He shall be washed as white as snow,
By all the martyr’d virgins kist,
While the True Church remains below
Wrapt in the old miasmal mist.
I love poetry; truly I do. But, for the love of god and all that is holy, how in the sweet Emily Dickinson does one get a Unitarian Jihad name?
I love poetry; truly I do. But, for the love of god and all that is holy, how in the sweet Emily Dickinson does one get a Unitarian Jihad name?
xanax, here you go…
— the Jackhammer of Compassion
Oh, be sure to read Jon Carroll’s column too.
The Neutron Bomb Of Looking At All Sides Of The Question?????
Holy Cripes!
How ’bout just “The Deadly Equivocator”???
I just got a name from the Reformed Unitarian Jihad that I like even better: Sister Burning Flame of Balance.
xanax: seem pretty fitting to me…
seems. seems. must proofread.
hilzoy (or should that be Oh, Burning Flame of Balance), you’d get no argument from my wife. However, she’d likely respond “So decide already.”