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Aubade

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British Poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

When one wakes up in the middle of the hour of the wolf, one is likely to think of one’s own death, which is waiting somewhere in the wings. British poet Philip Larkin wrote a great poem about that feeling:

Aubade

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 anasthetic 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.

“An Ever-Fixèd Mark”

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William Shakespeare

Here is perhaps my favorite poem about love, Sonnet #116 by William Shakespeare. There’s nothing there about “a summer’s day” or Moon or June, but it covers its subject admirably.

Sonnet #116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

This one’s for you, Martine.

From Concord to India

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Brahma (from the Hindu Portal)

I ran across this short poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) about Brahma, the creator of all things in the Hindu religion. He is depicted as having four faces, one facing in each of the directions.

Brahma

If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
I am the hymn the Brahmin sings.

The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

For some background on “the sacred seven,” check out this website.

Kubla Khan

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English Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

The sttory is that Coleridge’s most famous poem, “Kubla Khan,” was the result of an opium dream that was rudely interrupted by an inopportune caller from Porlock. Maybe we should thank this caller, because if the poet wrote it differently it might not be the frenetic classic that we have come to know.

Kubla Khan

Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Within the Circuit of This Plodding Life

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Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

We don’t spend much time studying the poems of Henry David Thoreau. Considering that I believe him to be the greatest American essayist and thinker of the nineteenth century, I think we should read everything he ever wrote. (At present, I am beginning to read his voluminous Journals.) Here is one of my favorites among his poems:

Within the Circuit of This Plodding Life

Within the circuit of this plodding life
There enter moments of an azure hue,
Untarnished fair as is the violet
Or anemone, when the spring strews them
By some meandering rivulet, which make
The best philosophy untrue that aims
But to console man for his grievances
I have remembered when the winter came,
High in my chamber in the frosty nights,
When in the still light of the cheerful moon,
On every twig and rail and jutting spout,
The icy spears were adding to their length
Against the arrows of the coming sun,
How in the shimmering noon of summer past
Some unrecorded beam slanted across
The upland pastures where the Johnswort grew;
Or heard, amid the verdure of my mind,
The bee’s long smothered hum, on the blue flag
Loitering amidst the mead; or busy rill,
Which now through all its course stands still and dumb
Its own memorial,—purling at its play
Along the slopes, and through the meadows next,
Until its youthful sound was hushed at last
In the staid current of the lowland stream;
Or seen the furrows shine but late upturned,
And where the fieldfare followed in the rear,
When all the fields around lay bound and hoar
Beneath a thick integument of snow.
So by God’s cheap economy made rich
To go upon my winter’s task again.

Hometown Waiting for You

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Bedford, Ohio

Novelist Thomas Wolfe was right: You really can’t go home again. When I graduated from high school in Bedford, Ohio in 1962, most of my graduating class left Cleveland. It was at a time when the population of “The Mistake on the Lake” was plummeting. When I was in grade school, it was the seventh largest city in the United States. A scant few years later, factories and businesses were shutting down at a fearsome rate.

To make things worse, when I returned to Cleveland for a visit, I was promptly infantilized, even after I graduated from an Ivy League College and worked as a computer programmer at System Development Corporation in the late 1960s, I was always remembered as the snot-nosed kid. So be it.

Here is a nifty poem by Joyce Carol Oates on the subject, from a slightly different slant:

Hometown Waiting for You

All these decades we’ve been waiting here for you. Welcome!
You do look lonely.
No one knows you the way we know you.
And you know us.

Did you actually (once) tell yourself—I am better than this?
One day actually (once) tell yourself—I deserve better than this?

Fact is,you couldn’t escape us.
And we have been waiting for you. Welcome home!
Boasting how a scholarship bore you away
like a chariot of the gods except
where you are born, your soul remains.

We all die young here.
Not one of us outlived young here.
Check out obituaries
in the Lockport Union Sun & Journal.
Car crash,
overdose.
Gunshot, fire.
Cancers of breast,
ovaries, lung,
colon. Heart
attack, cirrhosis
of liver.
Assault, battery.
Stroke! And—
did I say over-
dose? Car
crash?

Filling up the cemeteries here.
Plastic trash here.
Unbiodegradable Styrofoam here.
Three-quarters of your seventh-
grade class now
in urns, ash and what remains
in red MAGA hats.

Those flashy cars
you’d have given your soul
to ride in,
just once, now
eyeless
rusting hulks
in tall grass.
Those eyes you’d
wished might crawl
upon you like ants,
in graveyards
of broken glass.

Atwater Park where
you’d wept
in obscure shame
and now whatever
his name who’d trampled
your heart, he’s
ash.

Proud as hell
of you though
(we admit)
never read a
goddamn word
you’ve written.

We never forgave you. We hate winners.

Still, it’s not too late.
Did I say overdose?
Why otherwise are you here?

“Being a Ghost”

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Crowd of people with phones

I was reading an old copy of The New York Review of Books from May 23, 2019, when I came across a poem by Robert Pinsky that caught my attention. Pinsky is a former Poet Laureate of the United States who composed one of my favorite poems, “Samurai Song,” which I urge you to read. In the poem below, Pinsky takes on the smartphone zombies our time:

Being a Ghost

When they die I become a ghost
Afloat from room to room as vague
In grief as when I can’t find my keys.

Some say zombies became popular
Just when phones became so smart
We began staring into them entranced.

Alone without my dead to phone
I’m left adrift as when I can’t
Remember a name I know I know.

Shadowy appalled ghost-mind aghast
At the crowd of names stranded alive
Ashore outwaiting my shadowy boat.

The last stanza surely refers to Charon, the boatman to Hades on the River Styx. The fare: One obol.

“I Asked A Thief To Steal Me A Peach”

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The following short poem by William Blake (1757-1827) is not what one would expect. The All Poetry page from which I copied the poem contains an interesting comment, saying that the poem is“Part of Pickering Manuscript; distinguished by blunt depiction of collaborations across moral dichotomies.” That’s an interesting way of putting it.

I Asked A Thief To Steal Me A Peach

I asked a thief to steal me a peach:
He turn’d up his eyes.
I ask’d a lithe lady to lie her down:
Holy and meek she cries.

As soon as I went an angel came:
He wink’d at the thief
And smil’d at the dame,
And without one word spoke
Had a peach from the tree,
And ’twixt earnest and joke
Enjoy’d the Lady.

Hap

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British Poet and Novelist Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

Although most readers know Thomas Hardy as a novelist, do they know that in mid-career he gave up on the novel and concentrated on producing a body of verse that is as great as his prose, as the following poem demonstrates:

Hap

If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!”

Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.

But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
—Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . .
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

“A Night of Dark Intent”

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Poet Robert Frost (1874-1963)

I came out to California in 1966 after getting my college degree at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.With Robert Frost, his movement was in the opposite direction: Born in San Francisco, he is best known for the poems he wrote while living in New Hampshire.

I had the good fortune of seeing Frost give a poetry reading at Dartmouth in the last year of his life. Then, years later, Martine and I visited his home in Franconia, New Hampshire in 2005.

The following poem is one of his most un-New-England works:

Once by the Pacific

The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves hooked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent,
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God’s last Put out the Light was spoken.