Here’s a melancholy poem to autumn by e e cummings. Here in Southern California, the trees don’t drop their leaves: They just accumulate dust or burn down. But I remember November from my days in Cleveland and New Hampshire:
cruelly, love
walk the autumn long; the last flower in whose hair, they lips are cold with songs
for which is first to wither, to pass? shallowness of sunlight falls, and cruelly, across the grass Comes the moon
love, walk the autumn love, for the last flower in the hair withers; thy hair is acold with dreams, love thou art frail
—walk the longness of autumn smile dustily to the people, for winter who crookedly care.
November 2 in the Catholic liturgy is All Souls’ Day, or in Mexico, El Dia de Los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. Here is a poem by Alberto Rios, a Hispanic resident of Arizona.
November 2: Día de los muertos
1
It is not simply the Day of the Dead—loud, and parties. More quietly, it is the day of my dead. The day of your dead.
These days, the neon of it all, the big-teeth, laughing skulls, The posed calacas and Catrinas and happy dead people doing funny things—
It’s all in good humor, and sometimes I can’t help myself: I laugh out loud, too. But I miss my father. My grandmother has been gone
Almost so long I can’t grab hold of her voice with my ears anymore, Not easily. My mother-in-law, she’s still here, still in things packed
In boxes, her laughter on videotape, and in conversations. Our dog died several years ago and I try to say his name
Whenever I leave the house—You take care of this house now, I say to him, the way I always have, the way he knows.
I grew up with the trips to the cemetery and pan de muerto, The prayers and the favorite foods, the carne asada, the beer.
But that was in the small town where my memory still lives. Today, I’m in the big city, and that small town feels far away.
2
The Day of the Dead—it’s really the days of the dead. All Saints’ Day, The first of November, also called the día de los angelitos—
Everybody thinks it’s Day of the Dead—but it’s not, not exactly. This first day is for those who have died a saint
And for the small innocents—the criaturas—the tender creatures Who have been taken from us all, sometimes without a name.
To die a saint deserves its day, to die a child. The following day, The second of November, this is for everybody else who has died
And there are so many, A grandmother, a father, a distant uncle or lost cousin.
It is hard enough to keep track even within one’s own family. But the day belongs to everyone, so many home altars,
So many parents gone, so many husbands, so many Aunt Normas, so many Connies and Matildes. Countless friends.
Still, by the end of the day, we all ask ourselves the same thing: Isn’t this all over yet?
3
All these dead coming after—and so close to—Halloween, The days all start to blend,
The goblins and princesses of the miniature world Not so different from the ways in which we imagine
Those who are gone, their memories smaller, their clothes brighter. We want to feed them only candy, too—so much candy
That our own mouths will get hypnotized by the sweetness, Our own eyes dazzled by the color, our noses by the smells
The first cool breath of fall makes, a fire always burning Somewhere out there. We feed our memories
And then, humans that we are, we just want to move quickly away From it all, happy for the richness of everything
If unsettled by the cut pumpkins and gourds, The howling decorations. The marigolds—cempasúchiles—
If it rains, they stink, these fussy flowers of the dead. Bread of the dead, day of the dead—it’s hard to keep saying the word.
4
The dead: They take over the town like beach vacationers, returning tourists getting into everything:
I had my honeymoon here, they say, and are always full of contagious nostalgia. But it’s all right. They go away, after a while.
They go, and you miss them all over again. The papel picado, the cut blue and red and green paper decorations,
The empanadas and coconut candy, the boxes of cajeta, saladitos, Which make your tongue white like a ghost’s—
You miss all of it soon enough, Pictures of people smiling, news stories, all the fiestas, all this exhaustion.
The coming night, the sweet breads, the bone tiredness of too much— Loud noise, loud colors, loud food, mariachis, even just talking.
It’s all a lot of noise, but it belongs here. The loud is to help us not think, To make us confuse the day and our feelings with happiness.
Because, you know, if we do think about our dead, Wherever they are, we’ll get sad, and begin to look across at each other.
The Argentinian poet Jorge Luis Borges could not play with a cat without thinking of those other cats he saw at the Buenos Aires Zoo too large and too ferocious for play.
To a Cat
Mirrors are not more silent nor the creeping dawn more secretive; in the moonlight, you are that panther we catch sight of from afar. By the inexplicable workings of a divine law, we look for you in vain; More remote, even, than the Ganges or the setting sun, yours is the solitude, yours the secret. Your haunch allows the lingering caress of my hand. You have accepted, since that long forgotten past, the love of the distrustful hand. You belong to another time. You are lord of a place bounded like a dream.
The Taoist sage Lao Tzu (floruit BCE 500), author of the Tao Te Ching, is one of those figures at the nexus of three great religions: Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. Below is Sam Hamill’s translation of the second section of the Tao Te Ching, as printed in the Shambala Library edition of The Poetry of Zen:
Beauty and ugliness have one origin. Name beauty, and ugliness is. Recognizing virtue recognizes evil.
Is and is not produce one another. The difficult is born in the easy, long is defined by short, the high by the low. Instrument and voice achieve one harmony. Before and after have places.
That is why the sage can act without effort and teach without words, nurture things without possessing them, and accomplish things without expecting merit:
only one who makes no attempt to possess it cannot lose it.
In this election season, with all those overweening ambitions in play, I like to think of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) and his poem “Ozymandias.” Can you guess why?
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
When I was studying French literature at Dartmouth College, I fell in love with the poems of Paul Éluard. I could not find a good translation of my favorite poem, “Pour vivre ici,” and I was too lazy to translate it myself without doing an injustice to the poem. (Perhaps, some other time.) Here, however, is another of his poems that I loved:
Liberté
On my school notebooks On my desk and on the trees On the sands of snow I write your name
On the pages I have read On all the white pages Stone, blood, paper or ash I write your name
On the images of gold On the weapons of the warriors On the crown of the king I write your name
On the jungle and the desert On the nest and on the brier On the echo of my childhood I write your name
On all my scarves of blue On the moist sunlit swamps On the living lake of moonlight I write your name
On the fields, on the horizon On the birds’ wings And on the mill of shadows I write your name
On each whiff of daybreak On the sea, on the boats On the demented mountaintop I write your name
On the froth of the cloud On the sweat of the storm On the dense rain and the flat I write your name
On the flickering figures On the bells of colors On the natural truth I write your name
On the high paths On the deployed routes On the crowd-thronged square I write your name
On the lamp which is lit On the lamp which isn’t On my reunited thoughts I write your name
On a fruit cut in two Of my mirror and my chamber On my bed, an empty shell I write your name
On my dog, greathearted and greedy On his pricked-up ears On his blundering paws I write your name
On the latch of my door On those familiar objects On the torrents of a good fire I write your name
On the harmony of the flesh On the faces of my friends On each outstretched hand I write your name
On the window of surprises On a pair of expectant lips In a state far deeper than silence I write your name
On my crumbled hiding-places On my sunken lighthouses On my walls and my ennui I write your name
On abstraction without desire On naked solitude On the marches of death I write your name
And for the want of a word I renew my life For I was born to know you To name you
Herman Melville is not known for his poetry, probably because he wrote it during an optimistic time in American history (i.e., after the Civil War) when his natural pessimism ran against the grain. Below is a poem that harks back to his years at sea aboard a whaler:
The Maldive Shark
About the Shark, phlegmatical one, Pale sot of the Maldive sea, The sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim, How alert in attendance be. From his saw-pit of mouth, from his charnel of maw, They have nothing of harm to dread, But liquidly glide on his ghastly flank Or before his Gorgonian head; Or lurk in the port of serrated teeth In white triple tiers of glittering gates, And there find a haven when peril’s abroad, An asylum in jaws of the Fates! They are friends; and friendly they guide him to prey, Yet never partake of the treat — Eyes and brains to the dotard lethargic and dull, Pale ravener of horrible meat.
I am currently in the middle of the riches of Van Wyck Brooks’s The Times of Melville and Whitman (published 1947), devouring each chapter slowly, mining it for information on obscure 19th century American authors. I am even paying close attention to all the footnotes, in which I found this excerpt of a letter from Edgar Allan Poe to F. W. Thomas written on February 14, 1849. The subject was why Poe wasn’t interested in joining the Gold Rush:
Talking of gold and temptations at present held out to ‘poor-devil authors,’ did it ever strike you that all that is really valuable to a man of letters—to a poet in especial—is absolutely unpurchasable? Love, fame, the dominion of intellect, the consciousness of power, the thrilling sense of beauty, the free air of heaven, exercise of body and mind, with the physical and moral health which result—these and such as these are really all that a poet cares for—then answer me this—why should he go to California?
In fact, Poe wrote a poem on the subject:
Eldorado
Gaily bedight, A gallant knight, In sunshine and in shadow, Had journeyed long, Singing a song, In search of Eldorado.
But he grew old— This knight so bold— And o’er his heart a shadow Fell as he found No spot of ground That looked like Eldorado.
And, as his strength Failed him at length, He met a pilgrim shadow— “Shadow,” said he, “Where can it be— This land of Eldorado?”
“Over the Mountains Of the Moon, Down the Valley of the Shadow, Ride, boldly ride,” The shade replied— “If you seek for Eldorado!”
If the poem sounds vaguely familiar, it was quoted in its entirety in a Howard Hawks Western made in 1967 called, suitably enough, El Dorado. The film starred John Wayne, James Caan, and Robert Mitchum.
William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 is one of those poems which I have read again and again over the decades. The subject is lust, a frequent topic in the Bard’s poems and plays. When I first encountered it, I thought it was a bit on the ugly side; but as time went on, I began to see a certain beauty in it. Tell me what you think of it.
Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action; and till action, lust Is perjured, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame, Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust, Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight, Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had Past reason hated as a swallowed bait On purpose laid to make the taker mad; Mad in pursuit and in possession so, Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme; A bliss in proof and proved, a very woe; Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream. All this the world well knows; yet none knows well To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
Tarnmoor 
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