Sunday Poetry LII -- The Most Beautiful Lines in Poetry

Gustave Dore

I don't remember who said it.  I read the quotation somewhere along the line.  Someone important.  You know, like all quotations.  At least the ones we remember.

Anyway, whoever the important person was, he said that the lines from Canto 33 of L'Inferno in which Count Ugolino recounts his story, between chomps at the back of Ruggieri's head, are the most beautiful lines in poetry.  Or else, that's how I remember the quotation going.  

Whatever the quotation, though, and whoever said it, you are the only judge who counts.

From the Longfellow translation –

“Thou hast to know I was Count Ugolino,

  And this one was Ruggieri the Archbishop;

  Now I will tell thee why I am such a neighbour.

That, by effect of his malicious thoughts,

  Trusting in him I was made prisoner,

  And after put to death, I need not say;

 But ne'ertheless what thou canst not have heard,

  That is to say, how cruel was my death,

  Hear shalt thou, and shalt know if he has wronged me.

A narrow perforation in the mew,

  Which bears because of me the title of Famine,

  And in which others still must be locked up,

Had shown me through its opening many moons

  Already, when I dreamed the evil dream

  Which of the future rent for me the veil.

This one appeared to me as lord and master,

  Hunting the wolf and whelps upon the mountain

  For which the Pisans cannot Lucca see.

With sleuth-hounds gaunt, and eager, and well trained,

  Gualandi with Sismondi and Lanfianchi

  He had sent out before him to the front.

After brief course seemed unto me forespent

  The father and the sons, and with sharp tushes

  It seemed to me I saw their flanks ripped open.

When I before the morrow was awake,

  Moaning amid their sleep I heard my sons

  Who with me were, and asking after bread.

Cruel indeed art thou, if yet thou grieve not,

  Thinking of what my heart foreboded me,

  And weep'st thou not, what art thou wont to weep at?

They were awake now, and the hour drew nigh

  At which our food used to be brought to us,

  And through his dream was each one apprehensive;

And I heard locking up the under door

  Of the horrible tower; whereat without a word

  I gazed into the faces of my sons.

I wept not, I within so turned to stone;

  They wept; and darling little Anselm mine

  Said: 'Thou dost gaze so, father, what doth ail thee?'

Still not a tear I shed, nor answer made

  All of that day, nor yet the night thereafter,

  Until another sun rose on the world.

As now a little glimmer made its way

  Into the dolorous prison, and I saw

  Upon four faces my own very aspect,

Both of my hands in agony I bit;

  And, thinking that I did it from desire

  Of eating, on a sudden they uprose,

And said they: 'Father, much less pain 'twill give us

  If thou do eat of us; thyself didst clothe us

  With this poor flesh, and do thou strip it off.'

I calmed me then, not to make them more sad.

  That day we all were silent, and the next.

  Ah! obdurate earth, wherefore didst thou not open?

When we had come unto the fourth day, Gaddo

  Threw himself down outstretched before my feet,

  Saying, 'My father, why dost thou not help me?'

And there he died; and, as thou seest me,

  I saw the three fall, one by one, between

  The fifth day and the sixth; whence I betook me,

Already blind, to groping over each,

  And three days called them after they were dead;

  Then hunger did what sorrow could not do."

Sunday Poetry LI -- "An Arboreal Fairtytale," by UGn X

There are few pieces of writing—very few—that I’ve both produced myself and of which I’m particularly proud.  This is one of them, and I expect that no one will ever really get it.  And that’s just fine (and that’s no commentary on your certainly shrewd aptitude for poetry interpretation, but commentary on my own poetics).  There’s an awful lot of truth to the notion that poets (dare I qualify myself as one of them? —maybe “artist” is safer, less specific, right?) write as much for themselves as anyone else, if not entirely for themselves and no one else.  I can’t say that that’s entirely the case here, as this is one of many poems I wrote for a novel I’m featuring over on one of my other blogs (and, you may have already noticed, I’m leaving in place the attributive eponym for the “actual” angst-ridden composer, Eugene Cross (get it??)).  It’s also, like I said, one of my very favorite poems.  It was tremendously fun to write—to piece together, really—and, apart from acknowledging off some of my favorite artists and themes, plays to all the stuff I love best about my poetry—or, at least, about my favorite poems.  Is it successful?  Yeah.  Very.  After all, I wrote it for myself (well, and for Eugene Cross), and I love it!  Of course, that begs the question, then, Why am I bothering to put it here, particularly out of the context of its novel home?  Because I’ve got nothing else I want to share for Sunday Poetry today, and I’ve always wanted this one to be more out there than, well, you know, just being “out there.”

So here it is.  I welcome, as always, you thoughts, whatever they happen to be. 

An Arboreal Fairytale and Moral in Three and a Half Stanzas

On a Caravaggio plateau, under

               black and red skies: desolate and shadowed;

               naked, exposed, the stunted stem, naught but

               an arthritic claw, clutches dark feathers;

vibrant Rackham verdure—slight, sketchy, lush—

               unwittingly hosts the agonized stick:

               cowering ill-confidence, faithless and

               grasping, desperate in its green innocence;

Remedios Varo woods are sharp and

               thick and heavy under a sky swirling

               with physics.  Thin, difficult; stretch! just not

               sufficient in the great grand majestic;

               a Basho workbench

               supports the potted leaf tree:

elegant

for its crooks and folds.

—UGn X

Sunday Poetry L -- "193"

Emily Dickinson

According to rough chronological estimate, the following poem was Emily Dickinson’s 193rd poetical effort (of 1775 all together).

I’ve never spent a great deal of time—and certainly never for more than two or three little pieces at a time (you know, buzzing flies and death and whatnot) —with the bitty woman’s stuff, but a couple days ago I stumbled upon this one, which I’d never before read, and darn it if it hasn’t stuck with me.  I don’t have it “figured” yet, and maybe I won’t, but I sure like it (it has something to do—each separate from the other—with the quotation marks around Peter, and the mystery sitting somewhere between the poem and why of Dickinson's writing it).

I shall know why – when Time is over –

And I have ceased to wonder why –

Christ will explain each separate anguish

In the fair schoolroom of the sky –

He will tell me what “Peter” promised –

And I – for wonder at his woe –

I shall forget the drop of Anguish

That scalds me now – that scalds me now!

Sunday Poetry XLIX -- A Frosty New Year

Sometimes good stuff can come from bad things.  For example, I’ve been sick for four days now.  Pretty crappy.  While I don’t recommend it to anyone—being sick—it has afforded me significantly more time for reading for pleasure than I generally permit myself.  The past few days it’s been poetry, specifically a collection called Six American Poets, anthologized and edited by Joel Conarroe (who, among other things, chairs the National Book Foundation).  It’s this book that introduced me to my most recent favorite poet, Wallace Stevens, and which has introduced poems by its other five poets (Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and Langston Hughes) that I was not previously familiar with.  I want to share two of these today.

Robert Frost, for me, is the kind of writer that I really don’t want to like—rather, I want to hate him—and the further I am from my most recent read of any of his stuff, the more successful I am (unfortunately, the opposite, as we shall soon see, is also true).  So late last night, or early-early this morning, as I sat uncomfortably and picked up the above-pictured book for distraction, I was annoyed when I stumbled upon some notes from Conarroe that lauded the old country boy.  The notes drew up my curiosity—and my unrighteous indignation—and I turned to Frost’s section of the collection.  (See, here’s the thing, the very reason I so badly want to hate Frost is the same reason that I just can’t: he is so good.  Almost too good, really.)  One of the following poems is my new favorite of his, the other, not so much, though it gave me some significant cause to think, especially about stuff, particularly the apparently bad stuff, that’s happened over the last year—well, year-and-a-half or so.  I say apparently bad, because … well … you’ll see.

For the first of the two, I need to go through a typical deconstruction; however, as Conarroe does an excellent job in his notes (to which I flip duly back), I’ll simply quote him at length.

Poem first:

Design

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,

On a white heal-all, holding up a moth

Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth –

Assorted characters of  death and blight

Mixed ready to begin the morning right,

Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth –

A snow-drop spider, a flower like a frothm

And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,

The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?

What brought the kindred spider to that height,

Then steered the white moth thither in the night?

What but design of darkness to appall? –

If design govern in a thing so small?

And Conarroe’s breakdown:

What a scary little dance of death this is!  It is, of course ostensibly nothing more significant than a couple of insects, yet in Frost’s artful handling we are exposed to a dramatic moment that suggests something ominous about the “design” of nature.  The poem is a sonnet, its first section setting up a situation and the final lines offering a comment on that situation.  (“A true sonnet,” Frost said, “goes eight lines and then takes a turn for the better or worse and goes six lines more.”)  The work itself is a “thing so small,” with its design revealed by the orderly meter and rhyme, as well as by the series of contrasts that gradually emerge—between whiteness and darkness, life and death, innocence and depravity, morning and night.  Al this in fourteen carefully plotted lines.

The situation could hardly be more ordinary: the speaker, walking along a country road, notices a spider on a flower holding a dead moth, a signed we’ve all seen.  From the beginning, though, this telling suggests that there is something more than usually unsettling about this.  For one thing, the spider is “dimpled,” “fat,” and “white,” words that taken together in this context somehow sound obscene.  The repetition of “white,” a word associated with purity, is clearly ironic, as is the reference to “satin cloth,” which suggests, among other things, a bridal gown.  Ironic too are the kite (a child’s harmless toy) and, of course, the incongruously named “heal-all,” which, usually blue, has inexplicably turned white.  There is cynicism in the phrase “mixed ready to begin the morning right,” which conjures up a homey breakfast of fresh coffee and orange juice and not a ghastly little daybreak repast.  “Froth,” suggesting foaming at the mouth, reinforces the unwholesome atmosphere.

The speaker is moved to speculate about this depraved scene—depraved, at least, in his morbid telling—asking, for example, why the usually blue “heal-all” is an albino, and hence “kindred” to the murderous spider, and what agency “steered” the moth to its seemingly predestined liaison.  The implication is that if some overriding natural design is responsible for so insignificant an event, what hope has any of us.  This fatalistic point of view may express the poet’s own sense of things during a period of personal despondency, but whether or not it does is less important than the fact that he makes us believe it does.

Whatever the possibly grim biographical implications, the poet could not resist engaging in wordplay—Frost like to make language dance to the “whack of his quip.”  I had read the poem many times before I realized that “appall” has as its root meaning the idea of “making pale.”  This related not only to the bleaching of the “blue and innocent heal-all,” which becomes implicated in the death, but also to all the other references to white (and blight) that make up the poem’s own design.  I also realized, again only after many readings, that “govern” has a secondary meaning of “steer,” which adds a final irony to the speaker’s expression of revulsion.  What, after all, has steered him to this grisly ballet? 

Pretty good, huh?  So, begrudgingly, I flipped through the Frosties for shorter pieces that I could dig into without too much commitment.  Naturally, as I’m left handed, and as I was flipping, rather than turning, the pages, I started with the very last poem of the section.  It’s fairly typical Frost: folksy, country-ish, and Yankee, and it included a piece of apparently (there’s that word again—told you we’d get back to it) random and brutal violence.

The Draft Horse

With a lantern that couldn’t burn

In too frail a buggy we drove

Behind too heavy a horse

Through a pitch-dark limitless grove.

And a man came out of the trees

And took our horse by the head

And reaching back to his ribs

Deliberately stabbed him dead.

The ponderous beast went down

With a crack of a broken shaft.

And the night drew through the trees

In one long invidious draft.

The most unquestioning pair

That ever accepted fate

And the least disposed to ascribe

Any more than we had to to hate,

We assumed that the man himself

Or someone he had to obey

Wanted us to get down

And walk the rest of the way.

I don’t want to beat home the point of this one.  Like I said before, it’s not my favorite, nor do I think in any way does it even compete with the best, of Frost’s stuff.  But it made me think.  And it’s still making me think.  Here’s the basics of it, I guess: a couple years ago I lost my job.  It felt a little bit like that great ponderous horse pulling along my family and me had been killed.  Well, we’ve done a lot of walking since the death of our beast, and I’m sure glad we’re where we are now, rather than where we were before its end.

Happy New Year – may you be granted some piece of perspective.

2 from Wallace Stevens (Couldn't Wait for Sunday)

I think that, apart from the awesomeness of the poetry, T.E. Hulme remains my favorite poet because I know a greater portion of his work than any other poet.  If you know a thing about Hulme, you will know what a lame claim it is to know all the poetical works of the guy.  That he died when he was only 34 doesn't help me.  That said, I know practically nothing about Wallace Stevens.  First, I only just "discovered" him a couple days ago.  Second, he lived a long full life.  Third, he wrote a lot of poetry.

He is also the newest of my favorite authors (a list to which I haven't added a name in years).

Here are two of his poems (the first must be read aloud; the second is my new personal anthem (I've never had a personal anthem before -- this is very exciting)):

Bantams in Pine-Woods
Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan
Of tan with henna hackles, halt!

Damned universal cock, as if the sun
Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail.

Fat!  Fat!  Fat!  Fat!  I am the personal.
Your world is you.  I am my world.

You ten-foot poet among inchlings.  Fat!
Begone!  An inchling bristles in these pines,

Bristles, and points their Appalachian tangs,
And fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos.

*

The House Was Quiet
and the World Was Calm
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm.  The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Sunday Poetry XLIII -- Harper's Anthology Disappoints, So I Apologize with William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Willams

Here's the biggest problem with poetry (2-fold): Primarily, there's so (maybe even too) much of it, and this is only exacerbated by the fact that its very nature undermines its potential to deliver its payload to any save the very determined few.

I sat down eager to dig up a few good pieces and post them here for your enjoyment.  I'd just come in from the garage where I found Harper's Anthology: Poetry and sat down at the computer.  I haven't gone through this particular anthology before (kind of the point, really, for bringing it in -- and half the impetus for me doing Sunday Poetry in the first place), opened the front cover.  Here is what I found at the outset (minus, of course, publication details and reservations of rights, etcetera):

           “  Colleges … have their indispensible office—to teach elements.  But they can only highly serve us when they aim not to drill but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and by the concentrated fires set the hearts of their youth on flame. ”

                             —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Well, so far so good, I thought.  I like Emerson; and some of my favorite literary experiences were had via college collections.  It was the preface, following, that gave me cause to pause – and fear:

           “  Harper’s Anthology is a series of three volumes: Prose, Poetry, and an accompanying Manual of Instruction.  The last-named volume contains a brief statement of general ideas which underlie the collection as an educational instrument, together with some suggestions for its use in relation to composition. ”

From here I went on to the table of contents and became so depressed I hardly have the energy to type, much less find a poem to share. 

Not that the poems in the collection are bad, but because they are the very works—maybe even all of them—that create a problem with poetry, at least for students, even greater than the one I mentioned at the top: Poetry is boring.

I’m not saying poetry should pander to the lowest common denominator.  Not at all.  I’m all about the … er … exclusion of those who … uhm, never mind.  Anyway, I like a lot of these poems, even love some of them.  But I don’t see how the editors who penned the preface could be the same editors who honestly believed they were upholding the standard set by Emerson, of youthful hearts aflame.

So, all that said, I’m putting Harper’s back in the garage.  I’ll be right back with, hopefully, something … uhm … well, not better … more, let’s say, appealing to the modern, casual reader.

[10 minutes later – and with Six American Poets: An Anthology in tow]

I grabbed it because I’m short on space and shorter on patience, and this book’s got William Carlos Williams in it, whom I love, and I plan to find a poem of his I haven’t yet read and present it here.

[30 minutes later – and I can’t post just one (dang! I love WCW!)]

Mezzo Forte

Take that, damn you; and that!

          And here’s a rose

     To make it right again!

          God knows

     I’m sorry, Grace; but then,

It’s not my fault if you will be a cat.

Short Poem 

You slapped my face

oh but so gently

I smiled

at the caress

Mujer

Oh, black Persian cat!

Was not your life

already cursed with offspring?
We took you for rest to that old

Yankee farm, — so lonely

and with so many field mice

in the long grass —

and you return to us

in this condition — !

Oh, black Persian cat.

Complete Destruction

It was an icy day.
We buried that cat,

then took her box

and set match to it

in the back yard.

Those fleas that escaped

earth and fire

died by the cold.

Dance Russe

If I when my wife is sleeping

and the baby and Kathleen

are sleeping

and the sun is a flame-white disc

in silken mists

above shining trees, —

if I in my north room

dance naked, grotesquely

before my mirror

waving my shirt round my head

and singing softly to myself:

“I am lonely, lonely.

I was born to be lonely,

I am best so!”

If I admire my arms, my face,

My shoulders, flanks, buttocks

Against the yellow drawn shades, —

Who shall say I am not

the happy genius of my household?

I post the next poem, one of my favorites, only because it lends brilliant contrast to the one that  follows, that so perfectly follows in format:

From Spring and All

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chicken

Breakfast

Twenty sparrows

on

a scattered

turd:

Share and share

alike.

Sunday Poetry XLII -- Never the Same Twice :: Lisel Mueller

“  When I am asked

    how I began writing poems,

    I talk about the indifference of nature.  ”

Alone, these words are fantastic.  Right?  Brilliant.  Sure.  Genius?  …

(See?  I’ve got this thing with “genius,” going back, as far as I can tell, to the day I learned my dad prayed that none of his kids would be one.  (Dad:  prayer answered.)  I guess I bring it up again because there seems to be this indelible connection between the definition—at least in practice—of genius and that of art—art being, or any work thereof, as difficult to define as genius is to identify or, maybe more so, explain.)

…  But it’s the rest of the poem that brings this thing really around to make a glorious connection I didn’t anticipate.  Perhaps it’s this convergence—or the millions just like it that happen all over the world all the time—that drew me in and bubbled up that word—“genius”—again from its little locker back there.

Here’s the poem:

When I am Asked

by Lisel Mueller – Pulitzer Prize winner, 1996

When I am asked

how I began writing poems,

I talk about the indifference of nature.

It was soon after my mother died,

a brilliant June day,

everything blooming.

I sat on a gray stone bench

in a lovingly planted garden,

but the day lilies were as deaf

as the ears of drunken sleepers

and the roses curved inward.

Nothing was black or unbroken

and not a leaf fell

and the sun blared endless commercials

for summer holidays.

I sat on a gray stone bench

ringed with the ingenue faces

of pink and white impatiens

and placed my grief

in the mouth of language,

the only thing that would grieve with me.

It’s those last three lines, right? —that metaphysical power of words—particularly for those who know how, even a little, to really use them?

So I picked out the book, Mueller’s Alive Together, just an hour or so ago from a box of my books I picked out from a mountain of them out in my garage.  (I think this is the benefit of having sold all my bookshelves: I can’t just pick out all the same old books because I have no idea where they are.)  This is another of the books I inherited back at the Saginaw Arts and Sciences Academy from my predecessor.  Unlike the others, this one is full of that teacher's annotations.  Normally, this would bother me, particularly as I’m generally so averse to writing in books that it took me three-quarters of a semester before I started highlighting my law books.

Anyway, by way of the poem above, the experience of reading by way of another reader’s reading, and an interesting thing I heard at church this morning—remarkably apropos—I think I’m a step closer to understanding the confluence of genius in art (if nowhere else).

Hugh Nibley, a once religious studies and linguistics professor at Brigham Young University, was the source of the quotation that caught my attention.  I don’t have the quotation in front of me, nor have I found it online, but here’s the gist of it:  That scripture isn’t the words before us, penned by the prophets, but the experience of reading those words.

That’s pretty big, particularly religiously—well, if you’re one who happens to read scripture, anyway—but nearly as much so for the reader of literature, the viewer of art, and, most approachably, the listener of music.  When I’m trying to pin down why it is I think a certain work, or a certain artist, is genius, it usually begins with not the substance of the art itself, but the ineffable experience that blooms or emerges or ka-pows right there in that intangible space somewhere between my senses and the work.  Even afterward, trying to rationalize it, trying to objectify it, remove that emotional response, I can never separate myself from that initial experience, which brings me to the next of the poems from Mueller:

A Farewell, A Welcome

               After the lunar landings

Good-bye pale cold inconstant

tease, you never existed

therefore we had to invent you

               Good-bye crooked little man

               huntress who sleeps alone

               dear pastor, shepherd of the stars

               who tucked us in               Good-bye

Good riddance phony prop

con man moon

who tap-danced with June

to the tender surrender

of love from above

Good-bye decanter of magic liquids

fortuneteller par excellence

seduce  incubus medicine man

exiles’ sanity       love’s sealed lips

womb that nourished the monstrous child

and the sweet ripe grain Good-bye

               We trade you in as we traded

               the evil eye for the virus

               the rose seat of affections

               for the indispensbile pump

we say good-bye as we said good-bye

to angels in nightgowns                 to Grandfather God

Good-bye forever Edam and Gorgonzola

cantaloupe in the sky

night watchman, one-eyed loner

wolves nevertheless

Aae programmed to howl             Good-bye

               forbidden lover good-bye

               sleepwalkers will wander

               with outstretched arms for no reason

               while you continue routinely

               to husband the seal, prevail

               in the fix of infant strabismus

good-bye ripe ovum        women will spill their blood

in spite of you now          lunatics wave good-bye

accepting despair by another name

Welcome new world to the brave old words

peace    Hope     Justice

truth Everylasting             welcome

ash-colored playground of children

happy in air bags

never to touch is never to miss it

Scarface hellow we’ve got you covered

welcome untouchable     outlaw

with an alias in every country

salvos and roses               you are home

our footprints stamp you mortal

***

I was going to put up one more of her poems (this one inspired by Martin Gardner, no less!), but I think I’ll leave it here.  

Sunday Poetry XLI -- Chimney-Sweeps

As most of you know, I am now in law school.  While I embrace the material (and it is, truthfully, remarkably exciting and engaging stuff), I definitely miss my regular indulgence in the otherwise finer literatures of fiction and poetry.  And what with the extraordinary quantity of reading I’m doing, and that just simply to keep afloat, I feared I’d never—at least for these next three years—be able to, well, take to calmer, more artistic waters.  It turns out my fear is only mostly affirmed; while I certainly don’t have time to read much else of anything save the Law, such studies recall with not inconsiderable frequency the general, essentially mundane, but overall poignant, concerns and citizenry that inspire pretty much everything any great author has ever treated.  Property Law has done it now, and with significance, twice (I mentioned it over at my other blog, should you care to look).  Wednesday, it recalled, though less directly even than Kafka, William Blake.

A London chimney-sweep, whose title, we’re lead to assume from the judge’s opinion and holding, was superior in the boy than as to any previous owner (save, of course, the mythical first owner who never appears in such cases), found a jeweled brooch.  While the case further disregards the socio-political treatment and purview of the little dirty boys hired out, Dickensian-style, to the upper and middle classes of the citified home-owners, we do get a glimpse of it out from between the lines.

The boy takes the brooch to a local jeweler for appraisal.  The proprietor's apprentice, who answers his call, claims it worth but a pittance and takes the brooch, awarding the boy the “estimated” cash value.  The boy, however, doesn’t want the money; he wants the brooch, which, naturally, the apprentice refuses.  What I don’t get is what happens next.  Somehow, the chimney-sweep manages to hire a lawyer (and I suspect this speaks more of the tremendous range of class of legal service providers available in London than any likely, or even possible, condescension of the highbrow), and win a judgment from the court awarding him something like 65 pounds.  Those of you who know at least as much as the little bit I do about 19^th century money in England should get the significance of this.  What you may not get is the true earth-shaking-ness that this award was landed by a chimney-sweep!

Perhaps Blake can give an indication.

If you’re unfamiliar with Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (essentially parallel pieces exploring the differences in life and the examination thereof as dependent upon Reader's perspective, that of innocence or experience, or the given situation in life, chiefly by age, which is, of course, always some point along the continuum between either innocence or experience), I highly recommend you read them—a lightning fast read, even if you take the time to get what he’s doing.  I’m not going to get into it all here, but at least be aware that Blake understood, and with the aforementioned Dickensian perceptivity, what life meant to a chimney-sweep boy: something as black and hopeless as the soot they’re coated in.  Oh, and the mortality rate was staggering!  Yeah, and they were kept in small herds by pimps who often beat and abused them.  (Okay, I’ll stop.  Enjoy the poetry.  They, are, I think, some of the very finest there are, and certainly among my favorites.)

The Chimney-Sweeper

by William Blake

from Songs of Innocence

When my mother died I was very young,

And my father sold me while yet my tongue

Could scarcely cry ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep!

So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.

There’s little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,

That curled like a lamb’s back, was shaved: so I said,

“Hush, Tom! Never mind it, for when your head’s bare,

You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.”

And so he was quiet; and that very night,

As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight, —

That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,

Were all of them locked up in coffins of black.

And by came an angel who had a bright key,

And he opened the coffins and set them all free;

Then down a green plain leaping, laughing, they run,

And wash in a river, and shine in the sun.

Then naked and white, all their bags left behind,

They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind;

And the angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy,

He’d have God for his father, and never want joy.

And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark,

And got with our bags and our brushes to work.

Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm;

So if all do their duty they need not fear harm.

*

The Chimney-Sweeper

by William Blake

from Songs of Experience

A little black thing among the snow,

Crying! ‘weep! weep!’ in notes of woe!

‘Where are they father and mother? Say! —

“They are both gone up to the church to pray.

‘Because I was happy upon the heath,

And smiled among the winter’s snow,

They clothed me in the clothes of death,

And taught me to sing the notes of woe.

‘And because I am happy and dance and sing,

They think they have done me no injury,

And are gone to praise God and His priest the king,

Who made up a heaven of our misery.’

*

Once enough, you think?  Read them again.  Examine the poetic conventions that hold them together.  Look at how they compare, one to the other.  How do they fit within their respective collections, “Innocence” and “Experience”?  Who is Blake’s audience—is it multifaceted?  What is he saying to those who read?  Are the chimney-sweepers part of that audience? 

Sunday Poetry XL -- "The Third Coast," 1979

There is no more sure-fire way to ensure the "datedness" of a book than subtitling it, in part, with the word "contemporary," in this case, "Contemporary Michigan Poetry," another book, very much like You've Been Told, from a couple weeks ago, that I have (didn't buy, but inherited) but haven't read.  So, today, I will peruse the collection and, in real time, randomly choose three poems.  Here they are, contemporary or not, in all the glory (your thoughts are welcome):

Death and the Pineapple

Dan Gerber, pp 57-58

The fruit itself a giant pinecone

Texture of an apple     the taste

An apple flavored with pine

If I died I couldn’t eat pineapples

Couldn’t slice them with a large knife

Or say the word that conjures the taste

Pie-napple     pine-apple

Couldn’t run my hands

Down the rough sides

Or over the bushy top

Let its juice drizzle down my chin

Or wipe it away

With the back of my hand

Rub it in my hair     gargle it

Ponder the origin of its name

Throw it at a strange and beautiful

Woman on the rue Saint-Jacques

Imagine a trip to Hawaii

The pineapple

Is what we give up when we die

Along with strawberries     coffee and sun

The room hovers about me

One more skull

The trees around the house

The sky around the tree

The stars around the sky

How could I escape so many enclosures

What would I see

What tastes     what sins

And if existence exists in space

What space     I can’t imagine nothing

A house I once visited

Had a pineapple over the door

A pineapple over the newel post

A pineapple in the center of the table

Surely these people had lived

They said it was their family crest

My sign     my life

A galaxy of pineapples

I considered all the pineapples

Growing under the sun

And will enjoy the good of my labor

All the days of my pineapple

For there is a wicked man

Who prolongeth his pineapple

In his wickedness

And not a just man on earth

That doeth good and sinneth not

In the Winter of Tigers

Tom McKeown, p150

In the winter of tigers,

After the zoo closes, the sun

Smokes and thins out, seeds

Leap from an apple’s core,

Wheat whispers loudly

To the earth, to startled snow.

A crow plummets

Through the calm sky

Like a black parachute

That never opens.

In the middle of winter, the tigers

Walk up the snowy mountains

And spread out with the snow,

Until there is only snow and tigers,

And the memories of tigers,

Invisible against the snow.

At St. Mary’s for the Aged

Eve Shelnutt, p235

She thinks God wants a wife.

She would like to lie with Him.

Would He make her pretty,

Or take her as she is?

Where, around Him, do the arms go?

The jealous Sisters see her rise;

Their hands cross on the door.

She dies and, dead,

Is not denied.

The Sisters lifting bones

Are satisfied.