Home » poems (Page 33)

Category Archives: poems

“A Dream Within a Dream”

Posted on by | 1 Comment
Is all that we see or seem But a dream within a dream?

Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

We tend to undervalue the poems, stories, and essays of Edgar Allan Poe. Currently, I am reading a slim volume of his complete poem; and I am amazed at what simple means he uses to achieve such strong and vivid effects. Take this one, for example:

A Dream Within a Dream
By Edgar Allan Poe

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

This is a poem even a child can understand. Yet few adults, however brilliant, could put it so well.

He Couldn’t Breathe

Posted on by
Eric Gardner Died of a Police Chokehold in 2014

Eric Gardner Died of a Police Chokehold in 2014

One could complain forever about brutality of life in America, especially when one doesn’t have white skin. Instead, I wanted to present this little poem by Ross Gay, a teacher and gardener living in Bloomington, Indiana. I would rather celebrate Eric Garner’s life, as this poem does. The title is the same as the first line: “A Small Needful Fact.”

A small needful fact
Is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, that with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe.

Garner’s widow, Esaw, pictured above with a beautiful smile, said to the press, “My husband was not a violent man. We don’’t want violence connected to his name.”

This poem was reprinted by Truthdig.Com, for which I thank them.

Attacked by One of Their Own

Posted on by
James Laughlin Visits Burma

James Laughlin Visits Burma

Every once in a million years, someone from the hated 1% not makes a positive contribution to the culture but also attacks his fellow millionaires. James Laughlin (1914-1997) was not only a poet of some repute, but also the founder and publisher of the New Directions paperbacks that are to be found all over my library, including my favorite volume of stories by Jorge Luis Borges:

One of My All-Time Faves

One of My All-Time Faves

Interestingly, James Laughlin was from the Laughlins of Jones & Laughlin Steel Company, founded in 1852 and one of the giants of American manufacturing.

Imagine what his family thought of the following poem attacking corporate executives for their intransigence in a remarkably modern way:

Confidential Report

The president of the
corporation was of the

opinion that the best
thing to do was just

to let the old ship
sink as pleasantly &

easily as possible be-
cause it was plain as

day you couldn’t op-
erate at a profit as

long as that man was
in the white house &

now he was there for
good you might just

as well fold yr hands
and shut yr face and

let the old boat take
water till she sank.

Now it is quite obvious that the president of whom Laughlin was talking was Franklin D. Roosevelt, though I can see the same thing being said about Obama, Carter, or even Clinton.

 

“Barely Freed from the Nettles”

Posted on by
Pablo Neruda’s Home, “La Sebastiana,” in Valparaíso

Pablo Neruda’s Home, “La Sebastiana,” in Valparaíso

Since I intend to visit Chile this November after crossing the Andes by way of San Carlos Bariloche, I plan to read as much of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s work as I can. I thought I would start by selecting the following from his collection, Canto General:

The Poet

I used to wander through life amid
an ill-starred love: I used to keep
a little page of quartz
to rivet my eyes to life.
I bought kindness, I was in the market
of greed, I inhaled envy’s
most sordid waters, the inhuman
hostility of masks and beings,
I lived a sea-swamp world
in which the flower, the lily, suddenly
consumed me in their foamy tremor,
and wherever I stepped my soul slid
toward the teeth ofthe abyss.
That’s how my poetry was born, barely
freed from the nettles, clutched
above solitude like a punishment,
or its most secret flower sequestered
in the garden of immodesty until it was buried.
And so isolated like the dark water
that inhabits its deep corridors,
I fled from hand to hand, to each
being’s alienation, to daily hatred.
I knew that was how they lived, hiding
half of their beings, like fish
from the strangest sea, and in the murky
immensities, I encountered death.
Death opening doors and roads.
Death gliding along the walls.

Neruda died suspiciously soon after Salvador Allende, the socialist President of Chile, was found dead by “suicide.”

I hope to visit Neruda’s two houses in the Valparaíso area, La Sebastiana (shown above) and Isla Negra.

The Seafarer

Posted on by | 2 Comments
Viking Craft

Viking Craft

Several days ago, I quoted an Anglo-Saxon poem called “The Wanderer.” Today, I give you a somewhat longer piece, which was translated by Ezra Pound in 1911. According to Wikipedia:

The poem is told from the point of view of an old seafarer, who is reminiscing and evaluating his life as he has lived it. The seafarer describes the desolate hardships of life on the wintry sea. He describes the anxious feelings, cold-wetness, and solitude of the sea voyage in contrast to life on land where men are surrounded by kinsmen, free from dangers, and full on food and wine. The climate on land then begins to resemble that of the wintry sea, and the speaker shifts his tone from the dreariness of the winter voyage and begins to describe his yearning for the sea. Time passes through the seasons from winter — “it snowed from the north” — to spring — “groves assume blossoms” — and to summer — “the cuckoo forebodes, or forewarns.”

Then the speaker again shifts, this time not in tone, but in subject matter. The sea is no longer explicitly mentioned; instead the speaker preaches about steering a steadfast path to heaven. He asserts that “earthly happiness will not endure,” that men must oppose “the devil with brave deeds,” and that earthly wealth cannot travel to the afterlife nor can it benefit the soul after a man’s death.

Generally speaking, I am not a big fan of Ezra Pound, but in this early version, I think he surpasses himself. This is “The Seafarer” by that greatest of Anglo-Saxon poets, Anonymous:

May I for my own self song’s truth reckon,
Journey’s jargon, how I in harsh days
Hardship endured oft.
Bitter breast-cares have I abided,
Known on my keel many a care’s hold,
And dire sea-surge, and there I oft spent
Narrow nightwatch nigh the ship’s head
While she tossed close to cliffs. Coldly afflicted,
My feet were by frost benumbed.
Chill its chains are; chafing sighs
Hew my heart round and hunger begot
Mere-weary mood. Lest man know not
That he on dry land loveliest liveth,
List how I, care-wretched, on ice-cold sea,
Weathered the winter, wretched outcast
Deprived of my kinsmen;
Hung with hard ice-flakes, where hail-scur flew,
There I heard naught save the harsh sea
And ice-cold wave, at whiles the swan cries,
Did for my games the gannet’s clamour,
Sea-fowls, loudness was for me laughter,
The mews’ singing all my mead-drink.
Storms, on the stone-cliffs beaten, fell on the stern
In icy feathers; full oft the eagle screamed
With spray on his pinion.
Not any protector
May make merry man faring needy.
This he little believes, who aye in winsome life
Abides ‘mid burghers some heavy business,
Wealthy and wine-flushed, how I weary oft
Must bide above brine.
Neareth nightshade, snoweth from north,
Frost froze the land, hail fell on earth then
Corn of the coldest. Nathless there knocketh now
The heart’s thought that I on high streams
The salt-wavy tumult traverse alone.
Moaneth alway my mind’s lust
That I fare forth, that I afar hence
Seek out a foreign fastness.
For this there’s no mood-lofty man over earth’s midst,
Not though he be given his good, but will have in his youth greed;
Nor his deed to the daring, nor his king to the faithful
But shall have his sorrow for sea-fare
Whatever his lord will.
He hath not heart for harping, nor in ring-having
Nor winsomeness to wife, nor world’s delight
Nor any whit else save the wave’s slash,
Yet longing comes upon him to fare forth on the water.
Bosque taketh blossom, cometh beauty of berries,
Fields to fairness, land fares brisker,
All this admonisheth man eager of mood,
The heart turns to travel so that he then thinks
On flood-ways to be far departing.
Cuckoo calleth with gloomy crying,
He singeth summerward, bodeth sorrow,
The bitter heart’s blood. Burgher knows not —
He the prosperous man — what some perform
Where wandering them widest draweth.
So that but now my heart burst from my breast-lock,
My mood ‘mid the mere-flood,
Over the whale’s acre, would wander wide.
On earth’s shelter cometh oft to me,
Eager and ready, the crying lone-flyer,
Whets for the whale-path the heart irresistibly,
O’er tracks of ocean; seeing that anyhow
My lord deems to me this dead life
On loan and on land, I believe not
That any earth-weal eternal standeth
Save there be somewhat calamitous
That, ere a man’s tide go, turn it to twain.
Disease or oldness or sword-hate
Beats out the breath from doom-gripped body.
And for this, every earl whatever, for those speaking after —
Laud of the living, boasteth some last word,
That he will work ere he pass onward,
Frame on the fair earth ‘gainst foes his malice,
Daring ado, …
So that all men shall honour him after
And his laud beyond them remain ‘mid the English,
Aye, for ever, a lasting life’s-blast,
Delight mid the doughty.
Days little durable,
And all arrogance of earthen riches,
There come now no kings nor Cæsars
Nor gold-giving lords like those gone.
Howe’er in mirth most magnified,
Whoe’er lived in life most lordliest,
Drear all this excellence, delights undurable!
Waneth the watch, but the world holdeth.
Tomb hideth trouble. The blade is layed low.
Earthly glory ageth and seareth.
No man at all going the earth’s gait,
But age fares against him, his face paleth,
Grey-haired he groaneth, knows gone companions,
Lordly men are to earth o’ergiven,
Nor may he then the flesh-cover, whose life ceaseth,
Nor eat the sweet nor feel the sorry,
Nor stir hand nor think in mid heart,
And though he strew the grave with gold,
His born brothers, their buried bodies
Be an unlikely treasure hoard.

“Here Is Man Brief”

Posted on by | 3 Comments
Scene from the Bayeux Tapestry

Scene from the Bayeux Tapestry

This was a world that almost seemed to know it wasn’t going to be around long. Anglo-Saxon poetry is not plentiful, but what exists has a sadness that is touching. The following is an excerpt from “The Wanderer” as translated by Clifford Truesdell IV:

Where went the rider? Where went the giver of treasure? Where went the high seats? Where are the halls of feasting? Alas for the bright cup! Alas for the mailed warrior! Alas for the prince’s glory! How time vanishes, darkens under night’s helmet as if it never were. Stands now where stood beloved companions a wall, wondrous high, snake-like mottled. Spears’ might took off the warriors, slaughter-greedy weapons, notorious fate; and storms smite these stone walls; snow falling binds the earth, winter’s tumult. When dark comes night’s shadow deepens, sends from north fierce hail-fall, to harrow men. All is hardship in earth realm, Fate’s course undoes world under heaven. Here are goods brief, here is friend brief, here is man brief, here is kin brief.

Virtually all known Anglo-Saxon poems and fragments can fit into a slim paperback edition. I myself own two such collections, and find myself coming back again and again.

Silvina Ocampo and Our Other Selves

Posted on by
Another Great Argentinean Writer for Your Consideration

Another Great Argentinean Writer for Your Consideration

She is incredibly well connected insofar as Argentinian literature is concerned. Her husband was Adolfo Bioy Casares, who was a frequent collaborator with Jorge Luis Borges. Her sister, Victoria Ocampo, published the literary magazine Sur, for which both Bioy Casares and Borges wrote. In her own right, Silvina Ocampo is a superb writer of short stories. (Thus Were Their Faces is an excellent collection published by New York Review Books, which I have just finished reading.) Together with Borges and Bioy Casares, she edited a book of fantasy and horror stories called The Book of Fantasy which was published in 1990.

I like the following poem because it seems to have been influenced by Borges. Or was it she influenced Borges?

In Every Direction

We go leaving ourselves in every direction,
in beds, in rooms, in fields, in seas, in cities,
and each one of those fragments
that has ceased to be us, continues being
as always us, making us
jealous and hostile.
“What will it do that I would like to do?”
we think. “Who will it see that I would like to see?”
We often receive chance news
of that creature . . .
We enter its dreams
when it dreams of us,
loving it
like those whom we love most;
we knock at its doors
with burning hands,
we think it will return in the illusion of belonging to us
mistaken as before
but it will keep being treacherous and unreachable.
As with our rivals we would kill it. We will only be able
to glimpse it in photographs. It must survive us.

New York Review Books has also published a volume of her poetry translated into English that I will probably be ordering soon. The above poem is from that edition.

“He Never Sallied from His Library”

Posted on by
Did Quixote Imagine It All?

Did Don Quixote Imagine It All?

One reason I love this poem about the Knight of La Mancha is that its author, Jorge Luis Borges, was a bookworm like myself. Therefore, he could speculate as to whether the good Don dreamed all his adventures from the comfort of his own library.

Readers

Of that knight with the sallow, dry
Complexion and heroic bent, they guess
That, always on the verge of adventure,
He never sallied from his library.
The precise chronicle of his urges
And its tragic-comical reverses
Was dreamed by him, not by Cervantes,
It’s no more than a chronicle of dream.
Such my fate too. I know there’s something
Immortal and essential that I’ve buried
Somewhere in that library of the past
In which I read the history of the knight.
The slow leaves recall a child who gravely
Dreams vague things he cannot understand.

The translation is by A.S. Kline in this choice selection of Borges’s poetry on the Internet.

Life is different when you’re a reader. During my least favorite time of the year—tax season—I am lifted out of any temptation to depression by solving crimes with Chesterton’s Father Brown and Gaston Laroux with his mysterious Yellow Room; fighting the War of the Roses with Shakespeare’s Henry VI; becoming part of the mysterious search for Malory through a painterly landscape in Geoff Dyer’s The Search; and enjoying the world of books with Anatole France’s Sylvestre Bonnard.

After a day fighting with numbers, bits, and bytes, I vanish into my library and go tilting at my own windmills.

“A Web of Cigarette Smoke and Revery”

Posted on by
This Could Have Been the Place

Could This Have Been “Hotel Insomnia”?

I have just finished reading a strange surrealistic novel—one which made me want to find a poem to match. Here it is: “Hotel Insomnia” by Serbian-American poet Charles Simic.

Hotel Insomnia by Charles Simic

I liked my little hole,
Its window facing a brick wall.
Next door there was a piano.
A few evenings a month
a crippled old man came to play
“My Blue Heaven.”

Mostly, though, it was quiet.
Each room with its spider in heavy overcoat
Catching his fly with a web
Of cigarette smoke and revery.
So dark,
I could not see my face in the shaving mirror.

At 5 A.M. the sound of bare feet upstairs.
The “Gypsy” fortuneteller,
Whose storefront is on the corner,
Going to pee after a night of love.
Once, too, the sound of a child sobbing.
So near it was, I thought
For a moment, I was sobbing myself.

He received a Pulitzer Prize in 1990; and, in 2007, he was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

“The Lark Sings for Itself and God”

Posted on by | 2 Comments
Hungary’s National Poet, Sándor Petofi (1823-1849)

Hungary’s National Poet, Sándor Petőfi (1823-1849)

Now that I am able to spell Hungarian words correctly, I will try to write more blogs about my exploration of my heritage. Today, we have a poem by Sándor Petőfi who died at the Battle of Segesvár during the 1848 Revolution against Austrian rule, where he was shot by Russian troops allied with the Austrians.

Why Are You Still Singing Gentle Bards? (Mit Daltoltok Még ti, Jámbor Költők)

Why are you still singing gentle bards,
in times like these what good is the song?
The world can hardly hear your words,
the noise of war drones on and on.

Lay down your lute, wholesome boys,
your beautiful music falls too flat.
Even the lark’s melodious voice
disappears amid thunderous claps.

Or maybe not. Birds don’t really care
if down here they are even heard?
In the vast blueness of their air,
the lark sings for itself and god.

When sorrow or joy touches our hearts
songs fly from us so naturally,
and sail on the waves of a steady wind
like the tattered leaves of a rosewood tree.

So let us sing lads, like we used to,
but even louder, so our lutes will vie
with the clamor of a disturbed earth,
and add a note or two to the clearing sky.

Half the world in rubble … a bleak vision
and though it troubles our hearts and heads
let our souls descend on these harsh ruins,
and our songs like ivy gently spread.

At home, I have Petőfi’s complete poetic works in a volume I purchased in Budapest, when I was there in 1977. The above poem was translated by Arlo Voorhees and is one of several that appears at Pilvax Online Magazine. I may also in future add some translations of my own.