Penguins on Parade: Victorian Verse!

Some Penguin Classics aren't really classics, no matter how attractively Penguin packages them. This is true of Western canon works mistakenly venerated (Joseph Conrad springs to mind, but oh, there are others), and it's also true of excellent modern volumes prematurely elevated. One such volume is The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse from 1997, edited and introduced by Daniel Karlin. It's an excellent anthology, perhaps even better than the last Victorian verse anthology we discussed here, but as an anthology, it's virtually newborn - it certainly hasn't withstood the tests of time long enough to claim the 'classic' distinction. Whereas there are plenty of poetry anthologies out there that have proven their 'classic' status but still haven't been given (or bought) a spot in the Penguin Classics lineup.

One of those - the first of those? - would surely be The Oxford Book of English Verse in the original Arthur Quiller-Couch edition, and that's actually relevant to our proceedings today, since the Quiller-Couch has got to rank as one of the all-time best Victorian verse anthologies (even though it was intending to be much more than that). Neither the Quiller-Couch nor the far more magisterial Helen Gardner edition of The Oxford Book of English Verse has been honored with a Penguin Classic (understandably enough, since it's a dog-eat-dog world out there in the land of publishing, and I'm the only one daft enough to think being a Penguin Classic should be a privilege other publishers would surrender copyrights to achieve), but here this Karlin concoction has my second-favorite colophon.

He's certainly done everything he can to earn it. His Introduction is a gem of learning and wit, and the highlight of it is his offer of a mock-amalgam of all Victorian verse and its typical crutches. This is hilarious stuff:

The purple shades of evening

Flit o'er the Angel child

Whose woeful mother's weeping

Resounds across the wild.

He joined the gallant Navy

And found a watery grave.

Ah, better far than being

An orphan factory slave!

Or worse, in evil city

A village lass to sink

And fall a prey to Mammon

And bestial vice, and drink.

She hears the thrush's singing

And cooing of the dove

And blesses the dispenser

Of goodness, peace, and love.

So back she goes contented

Towards her humble home

And curtseys to the Parson

Who's on his way to Rome.

And as the Squire passes

Like Lancelot of yore

She shrieks, swoons and expires

And is never heard of more.

And one of the strangest and most daring noteworthy things about his anthology is how much room he gives not to the expected greats of the period but to much lesser-known (today, anyway) poets who come perilously close to echoing that deadly parody - like Eugene Lee-Hamilton and "A Snail's Derby":

 Once, in this Tuscan garden, Noon's huge ball

So slowly crossed the sky above my head,

As I lay idle on my dull wheeled bed,

That, sick of Day's inexorable crawl,

I set some snails a-racing on the wall -

With their striped shells upon their backs, instead

Of motley jackets - black, white, yellow, red;

And watched them till the twilight's tardy fall.

And such my life, as years go one by one:

A garden where I lie beyond the flowers,

And where the snails outrace the creeping sun.

For me there are no pinions to the hours;

Compared with them, the snails like racers run:

Wait but Death's night; and, lo, the great ball lowers.

Of course, the bulk of the book is indeed commandeered by those great expected names. There's plenty here from Wordsworth, the Brownings, the Brontes, and Christina Rossetti, as well as generous selections from the greatest of all Victorian poets, Lord Tennyson, almost always pitched at his most fervid:

 

She left the web, she left the loom,

She made three paces thro' the room,

She saw the water-lily bloom,

She saw the helmet and the plume,

She look'd down to Camelot.

Out flew the web and floated wide;

The mirror crack'd from side to side;

'The curse is come upon me,' cried

The Lady of Shalott

Keen-eyed readers will know at once why I chose that particular verse - yes, because "The Lady of Shalott" is the subject of this anthology's opulent cover-illustration, a painting of the same name by the great William Holman Hunt, whose "The Awakening Conscience" may be the single dumbest pre-modern painting ever created (for sheer stupidity, it can't compete with blank white canvases hung in galleries and called art, but then, what can?). "The Lady of Shalott" gives a much more accurate demonstration of this artist's wonderful talent, even if you might not be able to make that out from the battered, much-reinforced cover of my paperback.

If you're at all a fan of poetry, your own copy of The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse will quickly become equally dog-eared. It's that good.

 

Poetry Anthologies!

I could hardly let National Poetry Month come to a close without paying some kind of tribute to the main venue where most readers encounter poetry, now could I? Once, ages ago, that venue would have been the bard in the hall, the singer on the portico, but for most readers since Gutenberg, the main place where they encounter poetry is in books - and not just any books, but poetry anthologies. Poet jostling against poet, centuries eliding into centuries, styles and movements recklessly colliding with their polar opposites. Most readers out there first read poetry in just such heterogeneous company ... it was only later, as a mature-feeling act of adulthood, that some of them began buying entire books of poetry written by only one person.

Since the poetry anthology is perfectly adapted to pedagogy, they proliferate in schools, and this forces us to specify our terms. In terms of sheer numbers in print and sheer numbers of eyeballs that have scanned its pages, by far the most important poetry anthology of all time is the Norton Anthology of Poetry, the various incarnations of which have been mainstays in schools for three or four generations. But there are two kinds of poetry anthologies: the itemized tour and the personal statement. The Norton Anthologies are very much the former - they have to be, if they're going to work in classrooms. And while I don't discount the viral vitality of all literature (you can get infected regardless of the vector), I'm concentrating today on the other kind of poetry anthology, the personal statement. These are usually no less scholarly, and in their hearts they'd certainly like to be as impartially inclusive ... but they're not boardroom-generated, so they end up being as much reflections of their creators as they are reflections of the state of the art when they're made.

The ground-breakers in (more or less!) modern times were Palgrave's Golden Treasury and Quiller-Couch's Oxford Book of Verse ... and the main thing we notice about their original versions today is how narrow and parochial they seem, how limiting their personal statements are. We know there's a bigger verse-world out there than all those syrupy pastorals, but you certainly can't tell that from the neat and well-tended confines of the volumes themselves. I've got three very different - one can't help but think "better" volumes in mind.

The first is one that might actually compete with the Norton Anthology for academic sales: Hayden Carruth's hugely popular 1970 book The Voice That Is Great Within Us. There was a time when I could walk into the ramshackle apartment of any young poet and find a dog-eared copy of this book with its signature white cover. Carruth was a rotten poet himself, but with the overseeing of this particular volume, he hit a fascinating balance - like all the best 'personal statement' poetry anthologies, this one can be very pleasurably read from front to back like a novel, rather than picked and pecked through. Although I'll peck for you now, since I'd like to share one poem I love from each of the three anthologies mentioned here. From Carruth's book it's got to be Countee Cullen's quick ditty "Incident":

Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee;
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, "Nigger."

I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember.

The most august of the three volumes I'm writing about today - indeed, quite possibly the most august poetry anthology in English - is Helen Gardner's mighty successor to the Quiller-Couch Oxford Book of English Verse. I prefer the Gardner even to its own successor, since that later version seems to me to be an Oxford Book that's finally more concerned with what it's not leaving out than with what it's including, if you follow the distinction. Any personal statement that even so much as acknowledges consensus is irredeemably craven, which is why I prefer the magisterial perfection of Gardner's version. Here are all the greatest names of English poetry, to an absolutely remarkable degree unmixed with baser matter, and here, unapologetically, are all the greatest poems by those great names, one after another in an astounding, uplifting fusillade. I'll again pick only one, well-known and well-loved by me: Tennyson's "Ulysses," which starts like this:

It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

And that ends, wonderfully, like this:

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail;

There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,

Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me -

That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

Free hearts, free foreheads - you and I are old;

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Though much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

And naturally, in any post like this, we must come at last to simple personal favorites, and I have one: the magnificent 1998 soup-to-nuts update of Mark Van Doren's Anthology of World Poetry, this one edited by Katharine Washburn and John Major and full of 1300 pages of endless variety and wonder. Where the Gardner volume has one immortal standard after another, this volume is a steady stream of surprises, whole worlds of the unexpected on every page. It's broken down roughly chronologically and sprawls across the whole of recorded human history - African chants, Elizabethan madrigals, Chinese miniatures, Beat imponderables. This is my single favorite poetry anthology, the book I would hand to somebody if they stood next to me in the Poetry section of the Brattle and asked me "What one book should I get?" In part this is due to the elastic range of the contents, because more than anything poetry should be about not letting our aesthetics calcify - but mainly due to the sheer beauty of so much of what's in here. I could pick a dozen examples instantly, but I'll stick to just one: a very loose adaptation of Horace by J. D. McClatchy, a poem called "Late Night Ode" that I've loved for long enough so that some of its terms are already outdated (CNN, beepers...):

It's over, love. Look at me pushing fifty now,

Hair like grave-grass growing in both ears,

The piles and the boggy prostate, the crooked penis,

The sour taste of each day's first lie,

And that recurrent dream of years ago pulling

A swaying bead-chain of moonlight,

Of slipping between the cool sheets of dark

along a body like my own, but blameless.

What good's my cut-glass conversation now,

Now I'm so effortlessly vulgar and sad?

You get from life what you can shake from it?

for me, it's g and t's all day and CNN.

Try the blond boychick lawyer, entry level

At eighty grand, who pouts about the overtime,

Keeps Evian and a beeper in his locker at the gym,

And hash in tinfoil under the office fern.

There's your hound from heaven, with buccaneer

Curls and perfumed war-paint on his nipples.

His answering machine always has room for one more

Slurred, embarrassed call from you-know-who.

Some nights I've laughed so hard the tears

won't stop. Look at me now. Why now?

I long ago gave up pretending to believe

Anyone's memory will give as good as it gets.

So why these stubborn tears? and why do I dream

Almost every night of holding you again,

Or at least of diving after you, my long-gone,

Through the bruised unbalanced waves.

I can't recommend World Poetry eagerly enough - if you ever find a copy, snatch it up. And if you should have the option to spend a few warmly drunken nights exchanging favorite finds with a beautiful young poet, don't hesitate to do that too. It definitely adds to the experience.

The Collected Poetry of Thom Gunn!

Our book today is 1994's The Collected Poems of Thom Gunn, who was born in England and followed his lover to California at the height of the drug-soaked 'counter-culture' movement then cresting there. He dove into that movement with the same studied abandon he released on all the things that interested him, becoming at once its warden and its bard.

At Trinity College he'd absorbed phenomenal amounts of information and spent countless hours straining his way through what he called 'a thicket of forms.' He learned the names and measures of all poetic styles; he learned their limitations and their freedoms; he learned how to do them all, and how to make them do his bidding. In short, he learned what virtually no poets writing today bother to learn: the craft of poetry. Poets - especially young poets - today conceive of the status of 'poet' as something inborn, something cellular that they only need to proclaim in order to brandish. They call themselves 'poets' with the lazy arrogance endemic to work-shirkers, and they scurry from ill-lit reading to ill-lit reading with the bitter collegiality of people who've decided that as bad as 'the scene' is, it sure beats sitting down and studying quatrains. In the tangle of this misperception, "I'm a poet" is tortured into synonymity with sloth, or even disfunction. "I'm a poet" becomes the reason why "I don't write well," or even why "I don't write at all." Show me a 'poet' under the age of 25 today, and I'll show you someone who couldn't pick a sestina out of a police lineup and who thinks quintain is the crusty old shark-killer in "Jaws." And worse: if you confront them with this ignorance, you won't get shame - you'll get a sneer: "I'm a poet - I don't bother with those things."

In the bright new light of a paradise state, Thom Gunn explored all the loose verse-styles making the rounds, and I read all the results (because this is one of the 20th century's greatest poets) with interest and often pleasure, not because I like those looser styles but because I knew that with him they weren't the results of mere cowardice - only genuine craft has the right to abandon itself: poets who don't want to be charlatans learn poetry before they start crapping around with it.

Gunn paid his discipline the honor of knowing it in every quirk and detail, and his "Collected Poems" spans his whole working career, from his earliest volumes like Fighting Terms and My Sad Captains to the late masterworks he created when his fierce talents and fierce heart was confronted with the onset of the AIDS epidemic.

These styles and moods range from the urbanities of Catullus in "A Map of the City":

I stand upon a hill and see

A luminous country under me,

Through which at two the drunk must weave;

The transient's pause, the sailor's leave.

I notice, looking down the hill,

Arms braced upon a window sill;

And on the web of fire escapes

Move the potential, the grey shapes.

I hold the city here, complete:

And every shape defined by light

Is mine, or corresponds to mine,

Some flickering or some steady shine.

This map is ground of my delight.

Between the limits, night by night,

I watch a malady's advance,

I recognize my love of chance.

By the recurrent lights I see

Endless potentiality,

The crowded, broken, and unfinished!

I would not have the risk diminished.

To the deceptively delicate miniature-work of Basho, as in "Considering the Snail":

The snail pushes through a green

night, for the grass is heavy

with water and meets over

the bright path he makes, where rain

has darkened the earth's dark. He

moves in a wood of desire,

pale antlers barely stirring

as he hunts. I cannot tell

what power is at work, drenched there

with purpose, knowing nothing.

What is a snail's fury? All

I think is that it later

I parted the blades above

the tunnel and saw the thin

trail of broken white across

litter, I would never have

imagined the slow passion

to that deliberate process.

And all of it sadly culminates in the grey angers of his greatest book, The Man with Night Sweats, including what is for me one of the most true and agonized renditions of the sheer haplessness of surviving a loved one's death, here at the close of the poem "Lament":

Outdoors next day, I was dizzy from a sense

Of being ejected with some violence

From vigil in a white and distant spot

Where I was numb, into this garden plot

Too warm, too close, and not enough like pain.

I was delivered into time again.

- The variations that I live among

Where your long body too used to belong

And where the still bush is minutely active.

You never thought your body was attractive,

Though others did, and yet you trusted it

And must have loved its fickleness a bit

Since it was yours and gave you what it could,

Till near the end it let you down for good,

Its blood hospitable to those guests who

Took over by betraying it into

The greatest of its inconsistencies

This difficult, tedious, painful enterprise.

Thom Gunn was a resolute explorer. He sought out drugs to learn their gifts (of course they addicted him in the end), he sought out all conversations, always, to learn their speakers, he disdained no 'pop culture' until he'd searched it for both strengths and bankruptcies, and while it's true that his open-mindedness stopped tragically short of appreciating the Legion of Super-Heroes ("there's just too many of them!"), it had few other limits. And his talent, strong and resourceful to the end, met the catastrophe of its age with the only weapons at its disposal. And they were enough.

The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick!

Our book today is the 1968 Norton printing of J. Max Patrick's 1963 edition of the complete poetry of Robert Herrick, if that isn't too derivational for you. Patrick's volume is a no-nonsense scholarly affair, the kind of thing that features very few concessions to the educated layman who has always been Norton's key audience. The notes are extensive but often recondite, although they wouldn't have seen themselves as such back fifty years ago. Herrick was steeped in the Greek and Roman classics in the very best way somebody can be: he loved them, he absorbed them through his very reading pores, and he breathed their air when he was singing his songs and composing his verse. Some critics have complained that his verses smell of the lamp, that he's at times merely showing off his pithy allusivity. I disagree: it's not the quotation-hunting fug of the study that fills his verses but instead the quiet joy of the reading-chair, the side-table crowded with much-read and much-beloved volumes, the marvellous feeling that classical world gives of being an actual place, a retreat into sanity from the chaotic modern world.

Herrick certainly knew his fair share of that chaos, although he devoted quite a bit of energy to avoiding it. He was born in London in 1591 to a prosperous goldsmith and banker who the following year died in a fall from one of his house's high windows. Suicide was suspected, and if it had been proven, the family would have lost everything. Herrick's mother - a thoroughly remarkable woman named Julian Stone - called in every favor she could think of and fought to prove accidental death ... and eventually she succeeded. The result was that young Robert could be apprenticed to his uncle, another prosperous goldsmith, and sent to Cambridge, where he got a B.A. in 1617 and an M.A. in 1620. He was ordained deacon and priest in 1623 and was the Vicar of Dean Prior in Devon by 1630.

So by age 38 he had a comfortable living (and a small inheritance from his mother when she died), no wife, no children, and no very pressing demands on his time - which was all good news, since he was an incurable reader and writer in the best English clerical tradition. He filled his days, his months, his years with Ovid and Juvenal and Virgil, and it's perhaps no surprise that by 1640 he was in the Stationer's Register as a writer of poems.

In a normal world, Herrick might have expected to go on like that, serenely serving his flock and filling his evenings with writing in his study. But when Cromwell and Parliament took up arms against King Charles I in 1642, the world stopped being normal. Like most people, Herrick kept his head down and hoped the turmoil wouldn't touch him. But if you believe in your bones that the king is the king and your country is taken over by men who believe otherwise, turmoil will find you - and it found Herrick. He was expelled from his vicarage in 1647.

For twelve long years, he was adrift. It happened to countless other men in the England of his time, and it arguably hit hardest the ones just like Herrick - the ones who for whatever reason found it next to impossible to shift with the times. Those twelve years have resisted detailed historical inquiry - probably his relatives supported him for part of it (despite his long apprenticeship to his uncle years before, it's permissible to believe he was never a very good goldsmith, and those contacts need to be scrupulously upkept anyway, not allowed to wither while you write sermons in Devon). It's possible he tried to be optimistic about the unwanted changes in his life, possible he sought a small re-invention of himself. 1648 was the year his big work, the Hesperides, was published, but we have very little historical indication of what that meant to him.

It should mean more to us today than it does. The Hesperides and the Noble Numbers contain a great many wonderful things. Patrick lays both works out alongside various other verses of various lengths, works that were almost certainly written by Herrick, and the resulting volume is probably the closest we'll ever come to a definitive collection of his work. Here we get our poet using all the voices at his command - never a great array, but all fully inhabited. He can quip:

I'll write, because I'll give

You Critics means to live;

For should I not supply

The Cause, th' effect would die.

And he's not afraid to echo the great authors who provided so many happy hours in his study, as in this salutation to his book as it journeys out into the world:

While thou didst keep thy Candor undefil'd,

Deerely I lov'd thee; as my first-borne child:

But when I saw thee wantonly to roame

From house to house, and never stay at home;

I brake my bonds of Love, and bad thee goe,

Regardless whether well thou sped'st, or no.

On with thy fortunes, then, what e'er they be;

If good I'le smile, if bad I'le sigh for Thee.

Or when he offers a pretty - and familiar - little note on a child who's died:

Here she lies, a pretty bud,

Lately made of flesh and blood:

Who, as soone, fell fast asleep,

As her little eyes did peep.

Give her strewings; but not stir

The earth, that lightly covers her.

The Restoration of course changed his stunned and rootless life back into something resembling its old shape: in 1660 he was returned to his vicarage, and there he lived in resumed peace and presumed happiness until 1674 when death took him at a ripe old age (and, we can hope, quickly and quietly, in his study, after a particularly good night of reading). He had to wait a while for critical reception to warm to his work, but there have been some wonderful recent books about him - most especially Floris Delattre's Robert Herrick from 1912 and S. Musgrove's The Universe of Robert Herrick from 1950 - but as always with poets, he epitomizes himself as well as anybody, including during one of his thrice-yearly melodramatic renunciations of his art:

Ile sing no more, nor will I longer write

Of that sweet Lady, or that gallant Knight:

Ile sing no more of Frosts, Snowes, Dews and Showers;

No more of Groves, Meades, Springs, and wreaths of Flowers:

Ile write no more, nor will I tell or sing

Of Cupid, and his wittie coozning:

Ile sing no more of death, or shall the grave

No more my Dirges, and my Trentalls have.

He kept right on singing about all of those things, naturally - probably right up to the end. Poets have very little choice about that, after all.

Penguins on Parade: Wordsworth!

Some Penguin Classics might almost fairly be said to overdo things, and if ever there were such a case, it's the two-volume edition of the poems of William Wordsworth that came out in the Penguin Classics line in 1990. These two volumes, called The Poems: Volume One and The Poems: Volume Two, are edited by John O. Hayden, and each is a brick of over 1000 pages. They run more or less chronologically for the entire ghastly length of time Wordsworth was churning out poetry, and even at their finished length, horrifyingly, they don't represent the whole of the man's catalogue: his epic, "The Prelude," isn't included here, nor are any of the five or six variant editions of that impenetrably dull work. So, believe it or not, the 2045 pages of these two volumes represent only about a working half of the extant verse. It boggles the mind - I don't know of any other Penguin Classic like it. There are many other 'complete poems' volumes, true, but the life's work in those cases is always that of an ordinary poet, not some dodderer caught in the grip of a logorrhoea mania as helpless as it was unsleeping.

In other words, apart from ruefully satisfying that bitter little rump of Wordsworth-fans that has existed in the world since their idol first decided, at age 15, to write a gaseous ode about something that happened to him five minutes ago (and then keep revising it for the next sixty years), there can't really be any good editorial reason for anybody - even Penguin Classics - to publish two volumes containing every single poem Wordsworth ever wrote. It goes beyond being zealous; it's just plain rude.

Nevertheless, here these two fat volumes sit on the shelf, offering the same mildly dyspeptic reprimand they always have to readers who glance at them, consider for half a second finally grappling with all the Wordsworth in the whole world, and then veer off and take a slim volume of Keats to the park. Being Penguin volumes, they're attractively made and beautifully researched. Hayden's end-notes are masterpieces of succinctness, including both his own glosses on Wordsworth's obscurities (a going business, that) and brief relevant extracts from the glosses of those glossers who've glossed before him. Those obscurities most certainly extend to whole poems, as anybody who's ever actually read "The Prelude" can attest. As noted, these two Penguin volumes don't include "The Prelude," but since they include everything else, there are still plenty of examples of poems that might have turned out sharper and more memorable if they'd been in less sententious hands. Think, for instance, how evocative this one might have been if its author hadn't been so hell-bent on thinly-veiled political commentary:

'Who but is pleased to watch the moon on high'

Who but is pleased to watch the moon on high

Travelling where she from time to time enshrouds

Her head, and nothing loth her Majesty

Renounces, till among the scattered clouds

One with its kindling edge declares that soon

Will reappear before the uplifted eye

A Form as bright, as beautiful a moon,

To glide in open prospect through clear sky.

Pity that such a promise e'er should prove

False in the issue, that yon seeming space

Of sky should be in truth the steadfast face

Of a cloud flat and dense, through which must move

(By transit not unlike man's frequent doom)

The Wanderer lost in more determined gloom.

Still, if you write 10,000 verses in your life, you're bound to write some that Steve will like, even if you do so sarcastically or accidentally. No matter how Wordsworth has bored me over the years (ironic, since I worked for a long time in a bookshop bearing his name), there are poems of his I still turn to every National Poetry Month. Two of those poems are intensely predictable of me, but here they are anyway:

'She dwelt among untrodden ways'

She dwelt among the untrodden ways

Beside the spring of Dove,

A Maid whom there were none to praise

And very few to love:

A violet by a mossy stone

Half hidden from the eye!

Fair as a star, when only one

Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know

When Lucy ceased to be;

But she is in her grave, and, oh,

The difference to me!

And then there's this one, probably my favorite Wordsworth poem:

The Solitary Reaper

Behold her, single in the field,

Yon Solitary Highland Lass!

Reaping and singing by herself;

Stop here, or gently pass!

Alone she cuts and binds the grain,

And sings a melancholy strain;

O listen! for the Vale profound

Is overflowing with the sound.

No Nightingale did ever chaunt

More welcome notes to weary bands

Of travellers in some shady haunt,

Among Arabian sands:

A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard

In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,

Breaking the silence of the seas

Among the farthest Hebrides.

Will no one tell me what she sings?

Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow

For old, unhappy, far-off things,

And battles long ago:

Or is it some more humble lay,

Familiar matter of today?

Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain

That has been, and may be again?

Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang

As if her song could have no ending;

I saw her singing at her work,

And o'er the sickle bending; -

I listened, motionless and still;

And, as I mounted up the hill,

The music in my heart I bore,

Long after it was heard no more.

Of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that those last two poems are frequently anthologized. And come to think of it, they're always included in the various "Selected Poems" Wordsworth volumes Penguin Classics has published over the years. If you take my meaning.

The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse!

Our book today is 1990's  The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse edited by Christopher Hicks, in keeping both with April being National Poetry Month and also with my own ongoing fascination with all things Victorian, which has been true since that little slip of a thing came to the throne and made all the left-hand front-page columns in the Boston papers. Of course, it's a frustrating thing to be fascinated with the Victorian era - more than any other relatively recent time (the ancient Romans surely win for all time), that era has been mischaracterized by subsequent eras, used by them to make points about the present, almost always at the expense of the past. 'Victorian' began appearing in dictionaries as a synonym for 'prissy,' 'moralizing,' and most of all 'repressed' almost before the old queen's corpse was cold, but that was always much more a function of what the Edwardians wanted to believe about themselves than it was ever about the Victorians themselves. Indeed, Victorians who were rude enough to live on into the 'modern' age were always surprised by how new generations described those vanished decades.

To the Victorians, they lived in a young age, one exploding with new and undreamt-of possibilities in science, culture, government - and art. They were far more likely to challenge the past than to venerate it mindlessly. And if they were often maudlin and sentimental, well, before modern societies - especially modern America - criticize them too stridently for that, they might want to look at the books currently topping their own bestseller charts. Any good anthology of Victorian verse will present the reader with an age he never met in school. And Ricks' anthology is quite possibly the best one ever compiled (despite rather too much Arthur Hugh Clough for anybody's well-being).

The fun starts, as it should be so seldom does, with the Introduction (uncredited, but presumably Hicks' own), which bemoans the necessity of all such Introductions and the temptations they provide for the unwary sod called upon to write them:

Then there is the anthologist's temptation to write a review, or at least to see that the reviewers have their work cut out for them; perhaps by covert self-congratulation on the choices and the finds (Remark how unknown are A and B! How hitherto misprized were X and Y!); perhaps, with sheer statistics, by implicit deprecation of the beknighted predecessor.

And further:

The anthologist ought at least not to preclude the chance of being truly surprised, and not just by an unexpected instance of something anticipated; and the trouble with narrowingly circular definitions is that they ensure that the unexpected becomes not only the unlooked-for (and therefore missed) but the uncalled-for (and therefore resisted and resented).

That sense of surprise carries the reader the whole way through this plump volume, even though its A-list roster is as familiar as it is impressive. There's Wordsworth here, and Tennyson, John Clare and both Brownings, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, a clutch of Brontes, all of "Goblin Market," Matthew Arnold, Thomas Hardy, and refreshing amounts of George Meredith and Robert Louis Stevenson. But there are also plenty of lesser lights, shining all the brighter in this more luminous setting, including Digby Mackworth Dolben (1848-1867), whose little "Song"is about as Victorian as Victorian gets:

The world is young today:

Forget the gods are old,

Forget the years of gold

When all the months were May.

A little flower of Love

Is ours, without a root,

Without the end of fruit,

Yet - take the scent thereof.

There may be hope above,

There may be rest beneath;

We see them not, but Death

Is palpable - and Love.

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) is here in all his melodic glory, including this favorite bit from "The Garden of Proserpine":

From too much love of living,

From hope and fear set free,

We thank with brief thanksgiving

Whatever gods may be

That no life lives forever;

That dead men rise up never;

That even the weariest river

Winds somewhere safe to sea.

And there's the aforementioned Arthur Hugh Clough (1819 - 1861), whose excerpt from Dipsychus isn't as well-known today as it should be:

As I sat in the cafe, I said to myself,

They may talk as they please about what they call pelf,

They may sneer as they like about eating and drinking,

But I cannot help it, I cannot help thinking

How pleasant it is to have money, heigh-ho!

How pleasant it is to have money.

And of course there's sonorous Alfred Tennyson (1809 - 1892), without whom any Victorian anthology would be unthinkable. That witty Introduction does right by Tennyson too, correctly telling us that "Tennyson could do things that were entirely beyond the capabilities of Tennyson's apes." Certainly I could go on reading him all day, as in this excerpt from Tithonus:

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,

The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,

Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,

And after many a summer dies the swan.

Me only cruel immortality

Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,

Here at the quiet limit of the world,

A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream

The ever-silent spaces of the East,

Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.

Of course, no anthology can be perfect, because we all make our own mental anthologies from all we read. My own favorite Christina Rossetti poem, for instance, isn't in Ricks' volume. But how could I do even so small a Victorian round-up as this without including it? After all, who knows when I'll get another chance?

Up-Hill

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?

Yes, to the very end.

Will the day's journey take the whole long day?

From morn to night, my friend.

But is there for the night a resting-place?

A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.

May not the darkness hide it from my face?

You cannot miss that inn.

Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?

Those who have gone before.

Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?

They will not keep you standing at that door.

Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?

Of labour you shall find the sum.

Will there be beds for me and all who seek?

Yea, beds for all who come.

The New Oxford Book of 17th Century Verse!

Our book today is Alastair Fowler's 1991 New Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse, and it's as volatile and tremendous a tribute to National Poetry Month as could be imagined. Opinion among those I've quizzed is decidedly mixed as to the merit of even having a National Poetry Month (one poet of my acquaintance summed things up by saying "it can't possibly have any widespread effect other than to further marginalize the most marginalized literature in America"), but that's surely a debate about browbeating the public, not about the worth of poetry itself. And no other period of human history can rival the 'long' 17th century for verse, that glorious epoch from roughly the final years of Queen Elizabeth I to the advent of the Glorious Revolution. As Fowler here reckons that time, it stretches from George Chapman all the way to Alexander Pope, with stops along the way for Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Herrick, Herbert, Milton, Marvell, and Dryden.

There are lots and lots of other names in this updated version of the Oxford classic, including quite a few names that don't deserve to be here. Fowler is typically British in his diffidence:

A representative selection has meant more Drayton; more Cowley and Marvell; more Oldham and Strode; and many more female poets. It has meant including marginal figures such as the waterman Taylor, the alcoholic Brathwait, and the lunatic Carkesse. It has meant, in fact, including some 'subliterary' verse, and some very minor poets. If literature is the nation's memory, forgotten verse may contain things we need to know.

Or it may not. It's hard to imagine what even mercifully brief extracts from the life-outpourings of Emilia Lanier, John Chalkhill, or John Digby, the Earl of Bristol could teach us about much of anything, but if they and their ilk are the price of admission to the rest of this mighty host, you won't hear me complaining.

There's our old friend Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, writing about the cruelties of mankind and meaning, as she so often does, men, in this excerpt from 1653's "The Hunting of the Hare":

As if that God made creatures for man's meat,

And gave them life and sense, for man to eat;

Or else for sport, or recreation's sake,

Destroy those lives that God saw good to make;

Making their stomachs graves, which full they fill

With murthered bodies that in sport they kill.

Yet man doth think himself so gentle, mild,

When of all creatures he's most cruel wild;

And is so proud, thinks only he shall live,

That God a godlike nature did him give,

And that all creatures for his sake alone

Was made for him to tyrannize upon.

And there's Will Davenant, that weak-willed wit and wannabe wastrel who got his start in literary London while serving in the household of our old friend Fulke Greville and who, amidst stacks and stacks of intensely conventional writing, could occasionally produce something puckish and original, like this from 1673:

O Thou that sleepest like pig in straw,

Thou lady dear, arise:

Open, to keep the sun in awe,

Thy pretty pinking eyes;

And having stretched each leg and arm,

Put on your clean white smock,

And then, I pray, to keep you warm,

A petticoat on dock.

Arise, arise! Why should you sleep,

When you have slept enough?

Long since French boys cried 'Chimney-sweep',

And damsels 'Kitchen-stuff'.

The shops were opened long before,

And youngest prentice goes

To lay at his mistress' chamber door

His master's shining shoes.

Arise, arise; your breakfast stays:

Good water gruel warm,

Or sugar sops, which Galen says

With mace will do no harm.

Arise, arise; when you are up,

You'll find more to your cost,

For morning's draught in caudle cup,

Good nutbrown ale and toast.

And what of William Drummond of Hawthornden, the able poet and late-life friend of Ben Jonson? Drummond let a long and very active literary life, but in less inclusive anthologies than this one he might nevertheless get crowded right off the stage - either in favor of demographically advisable nonentities or to make room for more Shakespeare. Not so here, where we can read bittersweet little ditties like this bit fro Madrigal II.i, written in the first decade of the new century:

This life which seems so fair

Is like a bubble blown up in the air

By sporting children's breath,

Who chase it everywhere,

And strive who can most motion it bequeath:

And though it sometime seem of its own might,

Like to an eye of gold, to be fixed there,

And firm to hover in that empty height,

That only is because it is so light.

But in that pomp it doth not long appear;

For even when most admired, it in a thought,

A swelled from nothing, doth dissolve in nought.

I've praised these wonderful Oxford Books here before, but when it comes to anthologies this wide-ranging and thought-provoking, I don't mind repeating myself. And when I'm delighting in the acuity of Fowler's choices, I don't even mind all the makeweight names he was forced to mix in amongst them.

Poetry Class!

Well, our Nine Lives (of the Poets) is over for now, and so many of you have emailed me that I thought a brief coda was in order. This series got three times the emails most Stevereads posts do - just as the Nine Lives (of the Composers) did last summer, so it's safe to say you can count on seeing more. And several of you have written to, ahem, politely suggest directions that 'more' might take! For what it's worth, I am aware that what was originally intended to be a feature spanning the ages got stuck in the long sixteenth century and just sort of wallowed there ... a slight failing to which I claim only the custom of the country: if we can't indulge ourselves on our own book-blogs, what has Western Civilization achieved, finally? Nevetheless, the lack shall be rectified! Contrary to the impression given this time around, my awareness of poetry extends all the way to the 21st century - and includes both genders - and with any luck, more of that will be expressed next time.

For now, thank you for all the emails, and what better grace-note on which to end our poetry-fest than another instalment of Poetry Class, featuring a work so new the ink is hardly dry on the page! I liked it, so of course I'm hoping you do too:

Very similar, very simile -

a smile, a gesture,  a mark on the air

to wave hello, goodbye, to throw a kiss

across the rainbow distances. "The word love,"

writes syphilitic Paul Gauguin, in his journal in Tahiti,

"I'd like to kick whoever invented it in the teeth."

Gauguin the realist in paradise, painting

cinnamon women in native floral outlines

in real two-dimension, beautiful flat faces.

Then the counterargument: Plato's homely metaphor

of how, in our first life, we were whole,

male and female, but cut in half

by gods no less fearful than Gauguin,

the way we cut eggs in half with a hair,

the eggs hard-boiled, the hair the thread of a tailor.

When is a thing not like another thing,

like the split sweet heart of an apple?

We're so filled with absence,

or as Yeats, after Porphyry, puts it,

the "honey of generation," no wonder we stand

in the street at night, half or wholly drunk, shouting.

That's called "Verisimilitude" and it's by Stanley Plumly, and I found it in the new Atlantic.

Poetry Class!

You sleep with a dream of summer weather,

wake to the thrum of rain - roped down by rain.

Nothing out there but drop-heavy feathers of grass

and rainy air. The plastic table on the terrace

has shed three legs on its way to the garden fence.

The mountains have had the sense to disappear.

It's the Celtic temperament - wind, then torrents, then remorse.

Glory rising like a curtain over distant water.

Old stonehouse, having steered us through the dark,

docks in a pool of shadows all its own.

That widening crack in the gloom is like good luck.

Luck, which neither you nor tomorrow can depend on.

- Drench, by Anne Stevenson

Poetry Class!

Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead!
Sit and watch by her side an hour.
That is her book-shelf, this is her bed;
She plucked that piece of geranium-flower,
Beginning to die too, in the glass;
Little has yet been changed, I think:
The shutters are shut, no light may pass
Save two long rays through the hinge's chink.

Sixteen years old when she died!
Perhaps she had scarcely heard my name;
It was not her time to love; beside,
Her life had many a hope and aim,
Duties enough and little cares,
And now was quiet, now astir,
Till God's hand beckoned unawares, -
And the sweet white brow is all of her.

Is it too late then, Evelyn Hope?
What, your soul was pure and true,
The good stars met in your horoscope,
Made you of spirit, fire and dew -
And, just because I was thrice as old
And our paths in the world diverged so wide,
Each was naught to each, must I be told?
We were fellow mortals, naught beside?

No, indeed! for God above
Is great to grant, as mighty to make,
And creates the love to reward the love:
I claim you still, for my own love's sake!
Delayed it may be for more lives yet,
Through worlds I shall traverse, not a few:
Much is to learn, much to forget
Ere the time be come for taking you.

But the time will come, - at last it will,
When, Evelyn Hope, what meant (I shall say)
In the lower earth, in the years long still,
That body and soul so pure and gay?
Why your hair was amber, I shall divine,
And your mouth to your own geranium's red -
And what you would do with me, in fine,
In the new life come in the old one's stead.

I have lived (I shall say) so much since then,
Given up myself so many times,
Gained me the gains of various men,
Ransacked the ages, spoiled the climes;
Yet one thing, one in my soul's full scope,
Either I missed or itself missed me:
And I want and find you, Evelyn Hope!
What is the issue? let us see!

I loved you, Evelyn, all the while!
My heart seemed full as it could hold;
There was place and to spare for the frank young smile,
And the red young mouth, and the hair's young gold.
So, hush, - I will give you this leaf to keep;
See, I shut it inside the sweet cold hand!
There, that is our secret; go to sleep!
You will wake, and remember, and understand.

"Evelyn Hope" - Robert Browning

Poetry Class!

One Last Kick for Dick

In memory of Richard Poirier (1925 - 2009)

Old age is not for sissies but death is just disgusting.
It's a dog covering a bitch, looking so serious, looking ridiculous, thrusting.
The EMS team forces a tube down your airway where blood is crusting.
Imagine internal organs full of gravel oozing and rusting.
An ancient vase crossing the street on a walker, trudgingly trusting
The red light won't turn green, falls right at the cut in the curb, bursting, busting.
You're your ass covered with dust that your dust mop was sick of dusting.
The windshield wipers can't keep up. The wind is gusting.
A massive hemorrhagic bleed in the brain stem is Emerson readjusting.

Why did the fucker keep falling?
I'm calling you. Why don't you hear me calling?
Why did his faculties keep failing?
I'm doing my usual shtick with him and ranting and railing.
You finally mocked yourself unconscious and into the next world
Where Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the ballroom of the mind, whirled and twirled.
Fifty-three years ago, at the Ritz in Boston, we tried one tutorial session in the bar.
You got so angry you kicked me under the table. Our martinis turned black as tar.
And all because your tutee told you Shakespeare was overrated. I went too far.

- Frederick Seidel

Poetry Class! World Poetry

Our book today - as it has been in the past and no doubt will be in the future - is 1998's magnificent World Poetry, one of the truly indispensable poetry anthologies on any library's shelves. It didn't take many re-readings for this book to move into my inner sanctum, the thousand books I keep in the little room where I sleep and work and yell at my basset hound.

I periodically take it down from its place on my shelf and find new gems in its 1300 pages. Here's a recent trio.

First, the 18th century Chinese poet Yuan Mei, in a translation by Arthur Waley that's typical of the man: creaky but serviceable (a dear old Chinese friend of mine, reading Waley's work, said, "but it reads like a television repair manual!" - to which I could only weakly reply, "well, at least it's clear"):

Growing Old (I)

Now that I am old I get up very early
And feel like God creating a new world.
I come and go, meeting no one on the way;
Wherever I look, no kitchen-smoke rises.
I want to wash, but the water has not been heated;
I want to drink, but no tea has been made.
My boys and girls are behind closed doors;
My man-servants and maid-servants are all fast asleep.
At first I am cross and feel inclined to shout;
But all of a sudden remember by young days -
How I too in those early morning hours
Lay snoring, and hated to leave my bed.

The next is from the 20th century Italian poet, fiercely enthusiastic auto-didact and Nobel laureate Eugenio Montale:

The Lemon Trees

Listen: the laureled poets
stroll only among shrubs
with learned names: ligustrum, acanthus, box,
What I like are streets that end in grassy
ditches where boys snatch
a few famished eels from dying puddles:
paths that struggle along the banks,
then dip among the tufted canes,
into the orchards, among the lemon trees.

Better, if the gay palaver of the birds
is stilled, swallowed by the blue:
more clearly now, you hear the whisper
of genial branches in that air barely astir,
the sense of that smell
inseparable from earth,
that rains its restless sweetness in the heart.
Here, by some miracle, the war
of conflicted passions is stilled,
here even we the poor share the riches of the world -
the smell of the lemon trees.

See, in theses silences when things
let themselves go and seem almost
to reveal their final secret,
we sometimes expect
to discover a flaw in Nature,
the world's dead point, the link that doesn't hold,
the thread that, disentangled, might at last lead us
to the center of a truth.
The eye rummages,
the mind pokes about, unifies, disjoins
in the fragrance that grows
as the day closes, languishing.
These are the silences where we see
in each departing human shade
some disturbed Divinity.

But the illusion dies, time returns us
to noisy cities, where the sky is only
patches of blue, high up, between the cornices.
Rain wearies the ground; over the buildings
winter's tedium thickens.
Light grows niggardly, the soul bitter.
And, one day, through a gate ajar,
among the trees in a courtyard,
we see the yellow of the lemon trees;
and the heart's ice thaws,
and songs pelt
into the breast
and trumpets of gold pour forth
epiphanies of light!

And our last selection today (but not forever - it won't be long before I take this beloved book down again, to consult the news that stays news), the Egyptian-born Lebanese poet Andree Chedid:

Who Remains Standing?

First,
erase your name,
unravel your years,
destroy your surroundings,
uproot what you seem,
and who remains standing?
Then,
rewrite your name,
restore your age,
rebuild your house,
pursue your path,
and then,
endlessly,
start over, all over again.

Poetry Class!

Pentheus - man of sorrows, king
of Thebes - despised the gods, and had no time
for blind old men or their prophecies.
'You're a fool, Tiresias, and you belong
in the darkness. Now leave me be!'
'You might wish, sire, for my afflictions soon enough,
if only to save you from witnessing
the rites of Dionysus.
He is near at hand, I feel it now,
and if you fail to honour him - your cousin
the god - you will be torn to a thousand ribbons
left hanging in the trees, your blood
fouling your mother and her sisters.
Your eyes have sight but you are blind.
My eyes are blind but I see the truth ...'

But before Tiresias had finished with his warning,
even as the king pushed him away,
it had already begun.

He was walking on the earth,
and you could hear the shrieks
of the dancers in the fields, see the people
streaming out of the city, men and women,
young and old, nobles and commoners, climbing
to Cithaeron and the god
who was now made manifest.

Pentheus stared out in disbelief.
'What lunacy is this? You people
bewitched by cymbals, pipes and trickery -
you who have stood with swords drawn
in the din of battle on the fields of war -
now dance with a gaggle of wailing women
waving tambourines? You wear garlands
instead of helmets, hold fennel wands
instead of spears, and all for some boy!
If the walls of Thebes were to fall
- which they will not - it will be
at the hands of soldiers and their engines of war,
not by the flowers, the embroidered robes
and scented hair of this weaponless pretty-boy.
Find him! Bring him here, where he'll
confess that he's no son of Zeus and these
sacred rites are just a shaman's lie.
Bring him here to me now, in chains!'

His counsellors gathered, muttering restraint,
which just inflamed the king who
like a river in spate
boiled and foamed
at any hindrance in the way.

His men returned, stained in blood
and claiming they saw no sign
of Dionysus, just this priest of his
- a comrade and an acolyte - and they
pushed forward the man, an foreigner,
hands tied behind his back.
Eyes bright with rage, Pentheus
spoke slowly:
'Before you die, I want your name,
your country, and why you came here with this
fraud and his filthy cult.'
Unblinking, the prisoner replied:
'I am Acoetes, from Lydia,
son of a humble fisherman,
now a fisherman myself.
I learnt how to steer, set a course,
to read the wind and stars,
so I left the rocks of home and went to sea.
I'd raised a crew, and on our way to Delos
a storm forced a landfall
on the shores of Chios. The next morning
I sent the men to fetch fresh water
and they came back with a child.
The bosun pulled him up on board, saying
they'd found him in a field, this prize,
this boy as beautiful as a girl, stumbling
slightly from sleep, or wine.
I knew, by the face, by every movement,
that this was no mortal, that I was looking at a god.
"Honour this child," I said to the crew,
"for he is not of us." And to the boy:
"Show us grace and bless our labours
and grant these men forgiveness,
for they know not what they do."
One slid down the rigging, calling
"Don't bother with your prayers on our account,"
and the others circled, nodding and shouting,
their voices fat with greed.
"I am the captain, and I'll have no
sacrilege aboard this ship, and no
harm to our fellow traveller."
"Our plunder," said the worst of them
taking me by the throat
to the cheers and yelps of the rest.
And their noise woke Dionysus for it was him
who opened his eyes -
"Tell me sailors: what's happening?
How did I get here and where am I going?"
One told him not to worry, asked him
to name his port of call.
"Naxos. Turn your course for Naxos,
my home, and you'll find a welcome there."
And so the mutinous crew
swore by all the gods of the sea they would do
just that and told me to set sail.
Naxos lay to starboard but
winking and laughing
they made me steer to port.
"I'll have no part of this," I said,
and was shouldered from the helm.
"No one is indispensable, captain.
Our safety does not lie with you alone."
And the painted prow was turned
away from Naxos, out to the open sea.

Then the god began to toy with them.
Gazing out from the curving deck
across the ocean, feigning tears, he cried:
"These are not the shores you promised me,
these shores are not my home.
What glory is there when men
deceive a boy: so many against one?"
My tears were real, but the mutineers
just laughed at both of us and kept rowing.

Now I swear to you by that god himself
- and there is no god nearer than him -
that this is true: that the ship just stopped.
It stood still on the sea as if in dry dock.
The panicked men pulled harder,
letting out sail to try and find the wind,
but ivy was swarming up the oars
twining tendrils round the blades,
whipping along the decks and up the mast,
dragging at the encumbered sails
till they sagged in heavy-berried clusters.
And now the god revealed himself at last.
Around his brow a garland of grapes;
in his hand a wand, tight-twisted with vine;
and at his feet, the slinking
phantom shapes of wild beasts:
tigers, lynxes, panthers.

Illusions, perhaps, but the crew began to leap
overboard, in terror or madness or both.
One body darkened and went black,
back arcing in a curve; another started to call out
just as his jaws spread wide, his nose hooked over,
his skin hardened into scales. Another, still
fumbling with an oar, looked down
and saw his hands shrinking till they were
hands no more, just fins.
And I watched one, reaching up for a rope, finding
he had no arms
and as he toppled over,
finding he had no legs either:
all torso, he back-flipped into the sea,
tail horned like a crescent moon.
They leapt on every side in a shower of spray:
bursting free of the water, plunging down again
like dancers or tumblers at play.

The only human left of twenty
I stood there shaking
till I heard the god speak out:
"Hold your nerve
and this empty ship
and track us down the coast to home!"
And so I did. And there I joined
his rites and sacrifices, and now I follow him:
Iacchus, Bromius, Liber, Dionysus.'

'Well,' said Pentheus, 'I have listened patiently
to this long, rambling fantasy of yours:
an attempt, no doubt, to diminish my anger
and delay your punishment. Well, it didn't work.
Take him, men, and break him on the rack.
Send him down to Hell.'
And so Acoetes was dragged away
to the cells; but while the fire, the steel,
the instruments of pain, were being prepared
the doors flew open of their own accord
and the chains feel from his hands.

Hearing this - not trusting anyone now -
Pentheus stood and went
to settle things, once and for all.
Alone, he clambered up Cithaeron, the mountain
chosen for these rites, now ringing
with the songs and chants of the maenads,
the celebrants of the god.
And he was stirred by them, roused like a warhorse
at the sound of battle trumpets, their
shiver in the air. The long cries
thrilling through him
he pressed on:
skittish, fevered, feeling again
some passion in him flare.

Halfway up the mountainside,
surrounded by woods, was an open clearing.
Here he stood, in full view. Here he looked
upon the naked mysteries with uninitiated eyes.
The first to see him, the first
to rush at him, the first
to hurl her sharpened wand into his side,
was Agave, his mother,
screaming: 'Come, my sisters, quick!
There is a wild boar here we must kill!'
And the three sisters led the rest
and fell on him in a frenzy,
and Pentheus the king was terrified, crying out,
confessing all his sins. Blood
streaming from a hundred wounds
he called to Autonone: 'I am Pentheus!
Don't you know your own nephew?
Would you do to me
what was done to Acteon, your son?'
But the names meant nothing to her,
and she simply
tore his right arm out of its shoulder.
Her sister, Ino, wrenched off the other
like a chicken's wing.
With no hands left to pray, no arms
to reach for his mother, he just said,
'Mother, look at me.'
And Agave looked, and howled, and shook
the hair from her face, and went to him
and took his head in her hands
and in a throb of rapture
twisted it, clean off.
In her bloody grip, the head swung
with its red strings: 'See,
my sisters: victory!'
And quicker than a winter wind strips
the last leaves from a tree,
so all the others ripped Pentheus to pieces
with their own bare hands.

By this lesson piety was learned,
and due reverence for the great god Dionysus,
for his rites and for this holy mountain shrine.

Pentheus and Dionysus by Robin Robertson ("after Ovid")

Poetry Class!

The oral tradition tore us apart.
It sang in the heart, it chanted of the sun.
It knew the attributes of gods,
naming their triumphs one by one.
We looked far out: that ship was like a bird!
Its sails were wings beneath the stars.
And kennings like swans would visit from afar
to teach us to be travellers.

Such noise, so many voices!
The oral tradition was absurd.
It knew where killings had occurred.
It said it could cure the damaged sky.
It poured a Scotch, and made the roof beams sigh.
It always knew which horse to back.
It loved the work of Kerouac.
It said that we would die.

And always it tore us two apart.
It gathered on the terraces and in the stands
- we lingered on the stairwells of the heart -
and true to form the game went on.
Someone was carded, another player scored.
The oral tradition roared and roared
- such noise! so many voices! -
then left to join the fighters at the ford.

Soon it returned with ice plant for a wart.
It passed some comments on my school report.
It sang of the kayak and the waka,
it chanted above the creatures of the water;
it gossiped, and stank of honeydew,
And sniggered whene'er I spoke of you.
It said it knew a man who knew a man who said.
It placed this dark caesura in my head.

At night we heard it make lament.
It summoned the battlefields of France,
and killing fields in Africa and Spain,
the topless and the falling towers,
and armies marching over damp terrain,
and suicidal men who flew from shore to shore,
who could not think in metaphor,
and I believe we wept full sore.

We turned to books and parchment then,
touching a word to turn the page.
The oral tradition grew enraged.
Carving the eagle! A bright blade rose
and now some poor scribe's lungs
lay there beside his poor elbows.
The oral tradition loved such woes.
It called a dozen talkback shows.

Such noises! So many voices!
The oral tradition crept from tree to tree.
It sat small children on its knee.
It held out its glass and said, When I say when.
And then, and then, and then, and then -
it whispered that you betrayed me with my friend;
then warbled about the afterlife
and said that you would never be my wife ...

Thus we awoke in the smoky hall at dawn,
and there I assailed you loud and long.
You wept and wailed, and the oral tradition chanted on,
building its blind and paratactic song.
I walked away. The oral tradition
offered up a prayer. I heard it cry: We're out of here!
Such noise, so many voices ... I think I heard
you calling, but I could not hear.

The Oral Tradition, Bill Manhire

Poetry Class!

Every sunrise, even strangers' eyes.
Not necessarily swans, even crows,
even the falling fusillade of bats.
That place where the creek goes underground,
how many weeks before I see you again?
Stacks of books, every page, characters'
rages and poets' strange contraptions
of syntax and song, every song
even when there isn't one.
Every thistle, splinter, butterfly
over the drainage ditches. Every stray.
Did you see the meteor shower?
Did it feel like something swallowed?
Every question, conversation
even with almost nothing, cricket, cloud,
because of you I'm talking to crickets, clouds,
confiding in a cat. Everyone says,
Come to your senses, and I do, of you,
every smell, even burning sugar, every
cry and laugh. Toothpicked samples
at the farmers' market, every melon,
plum, I come undone, undone.

"Delphiniums in a Window Box" by Dean Young

Poetry Class!

When trees toss in high wind and a suspicion
of rain travels across their dark faces,
I long for the old summers under smoky oaks.
Whoever I am, it's not who I thought.

Who is it the rain and wind wake with their sigh?
That tree-lover, summer-lover - try and find him,
was he ever there? Did he love? Was he love?
Shh, say the trees, listen closer, listen closer.

"Wind in Trees" by Henry Shukman

Poetry Class!

Giant Sable Antelope Would Like a Word with History

At night the savannah comes to claim me.
Thirty females and their calves
in search of a leader. Shaggy manes

down each nape. White cheeks
and that dagger of kohl down the nose.
Vibrissae, strands of black glass

under a pure white chin. Nefertiti eyelashes,
each aching hair standing proud
from each whiffy pelt. That ready-to-flee gaze

which unleashes the epinephrin
in me - and in my phantom rival, who drops
to his knees among the black icicles

of our own shadows - antler, hock and severed tip,
sheath and core of twisted tissue, bony spike
and tine like a bifurcation diagram

in chaos theory. What does he know, this slack
Minotaur, challenging me
in my forest of petrified keratin?

I am invincible, being extinct. He brandishes
his pair of ring-ridged horns, arcing back
like sabres. I force him further down,

rough him up a bit
and suddenly as he came he is gone
like a conjurer's rabbit

and around me is my old horizon, filtering
grey sand and puddled stare
of mirages like bubbles in quartz.

There are no windows here. But in our silent
company of Victorian glass eyes
we know that this is night.

You can't fool us, the seen-it-all
and past-all-care, inured to managed air
turned cold to keep the straw in us pest-free,

the DNA of our lost hide and bone intact.
We know that hiss-crack on the roof
is rain. We understand its knack

of conjuring the succulence
we'd dream of still, if they'd preserved
our neural systems. All that inflorescence,

ligule, rhizome; floret, auricle and bract.
Lace blades, foaming in each lewd breeze.
The tremble of rising sap.

- Ruth Padel

Poetry Class!

From the 9 & 16 February New Yorker:

For a few days only,
the plum tree outside the window
shoulders perfection.
No matter the plums will be small,
eaten only by squirrels and jays.
I feast on the one thing, they on another,
the shoaling bees on a third.
What in this unpleated world isn't someone's seduction?
The boy playing his intricate horn in Mahler's Fifth,
in the gaps between playing,
turns it and turns it, dismantles a section,
shakes from it the condensation
of human passage. He is perhaps twenty.
Later he takes his four bows, his face deepening red,
while a girl holds a viola's spruce wood and maple
in one half-opened hand and looks at him hard.
Let others clap.
These two, their ears still ringing, hear nothing.
Not the shouts of bravo, bravo,
not the timpanic clamor inside their bodies.
As the plum's blossoms do not hear the bee
nor taste themselves turned into storable honey
by that sumptuous disturbance.

"French Horn" by Jane Hirshfield

Poetry Class!

Our poem today comes from the 16 January issue of the TLS. It's called "Elegy for a Dead Seal with Surfers" and it's by Eric Bliman:

Wounded, he must have crawled out of the surf
to lie between two boulders, blond and smooth
and his lost brothers. Below the bite,
a stain has soaked his flank's embroidered gold.
I can't help noticing the seabird-emptied sockets,
the frayed, black eyelids tasseled like anemones,
and his face built for underwater speed
and for that child-like play among his kind, which serves
two purposes: grace, and hunting practice.
After his war with sharks or killer whales had ended
in his suffering, he turned back to face the sea,
that other, older brother he left reluctantly.
Trudging back up the footpath, lost in dazzle,
I pass men and women clad all in neoprene
with boogie-boards tucked beneath their arms
like candy-coated tribal shields. They descend
the last few steps from that airy world above
and emerge into this brilliant afternoon
they've set aside for battle.

Poetry Class!

This time by Franz Wright, taken from the latest issue of the New Yorker (as, somewhere out there, John Cotter no doubt heaves a heavy sigh ...):

LEARNING TO READ

If I had to look up every fifth of sixth word,
so what. I looked them up.
I had nowhere important to be.

My father was unavailable, and my mother
looked like she was about to break,
and not into blossom, every time I spoke.

My favorite was the Iliad. True,
I had trouble pronouncing the names,
but when was I going to pronounce them, and

to whom?
My stepfather maybe?
Number one, he could barely speak English;

two, he had sufficient intent
to smirk and knock me down
without any prompting from me.

Loneliness, boredom and terror
my motivation
fiercely fuelled.

I get down on my knees and thank God for them.

Du Fu, the Psalms, Whitman, Rilke.
Life has taught me
to understand books.