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.

Sunday Poetry XXVIII -- TEXTBOOK POETRY 2

Like last week (not to mention the next few weeks to come), I'm going through an old secondary English lit textbook.  The two for-sures will be the first and last poems the book has to offer, and I hope to be caught by--caught because maybe I've never read it before, particularly like it or hate it, or am flabbergasted that it's found its way into the textbook at all--a few others in between.

(I suppose it's some sort of commentary on the recent economic condition of public schools--because I really haven't been out of the secondary English classroom for long--that all the textbooks I've got in my personal collection are from the late eighties and early nineties.)

Prentice Hall Literature, Bronze

1991, 1989

The Village Blacksmith

Henry Wordsworth Longfellow

Under a spreading chestnut-tree

      The village smithy stands;

The smith, a mighty man is he,

      With large and sinewy hands;

And the muscles of his brawny arms

      Are strong as iron bands.

His hair is crisp, and black, and long,

      His face is like the tan;

His brow is wet with honest sweat,

      He earns whate'er he can,

And looks the whole world in the face,

      For he owes not any man.

Week in, week out, from morn till night,

      You can hear his bellows blow;

You can hear him swing his heavy sledge,

      With measured beat and slow,

Like a sexton ringing the village bell,

      When the evening sun is low.

And children coming home from school

      Look in at the open door;

They love to see the flaming forge,

      And hear the bellows roar,

And catch the burning sparks that fly

      Like chaff from a threshing-floor.

He goes on Sunday to the church,

      And sits among his boys;

He hears the parson pray and preach,

      He hears his daughter's voice,

Singing in the village choir,

      And it makes his heart rejoice.

It sounds to him like her mother's voice,

      Singing in Paradise!

He needs must think of her once more,

      How in the grave she lies;

And with his haul, rough hand he wipes

      A tear out of his eyes.

Toiling,--rejoicing,--sorrowing,

      Onward through life he goes;

Each morning sees some task begin,

      Each evening sees it close

Something attempted, something done,

      Has earned a night's repose.

Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,

      For the lesson thou hast taught!

Thus at the flaming forge of life

      Our fortunes must be wrought;

Thus on its sounding anvil shaped

      Each burning deed and thought.

Upon Mistress Susanna Southwell,

Her Feet

Robert Herrick

            Her pretty feet

            Like snails did creep

      A little out, and then,

As if they started at Bo-peep,

Did soon draw in again.

Three Haiku

Basho, translated by Daniel C. Buchanan

On sweet plum blossoms

The sun rises suddenly.

Look, a mountain path!

Has spring come indeed?

On that nameless mountain lie

Thin layers of mist.

Temple bells die out.

The fragrant blossoms remain.

A perfect evening!

The Flower-Fed Buffaloes

Vachel Lindsay

The flower-fed buffaloes of the spring
In the days of long ago,
Ranged where the locomotives sing
And the prarie flowers lie low:
The tossing, blooming, perfumed grass
Is swept away by wheat,
Wheels and wheels and wheels spin by
In the spring that still is sweet.
But the flower-fed buffaloes of the spring
Left us long ago,
They gore no more, they bellow no more:--
With the Blackfeet lying low,
With the Pawnee lying low,

Lying low.

Winter

Nikki Giovanni

Frogs burrow the mud

snails bury themselves

and I air my quilts

preparing for the cold

Dogs grow more hair

mothers make oatmeal

and little boys and girls

take Gather John’s Medicine

Bears store fat

chipmunks gather nuts

and I collect books

For the coming winter

A Song of Greatness

Chippewa Traditional

Mary Austin

When I hear the old men

Telling of heroes,

Telling of great deeds

Of ancient days—

When I hear that telling,
Then I think within me

I, too, am one of these.

When I hear the people

Praising great ones,

Then I know that I too—

Shall be esteemed:

I, too, when my time comes

Shall do mightily.

Miracles

Walt Whitman

Why, who makes much of a miracle?

As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,

Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,

Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky, 

Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water, 

Or stand under trees in the woods, 

Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night 

with any one I love, 

Or sit at table at dinner with the rest, 

Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car, 

Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon, 

Or animals feeding in the fields, 

Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air, 

Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet 

and bright, 

Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring; 

These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles, 

The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place. 

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, 

Every cubic inch of space is a miracle, 

Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same, 

Every foot of the interior swarms with the same. 

To me the sea is a continual miracle, 

The fishes that swim—the rocks—the motion of the waves—the 

ships with men in them, 

What stranger miracles are there?

Sunday Poetry XXI -- One for My Daughter, One for Me

The quality of a poem is a very subjective thing.

Slumber Party

My party was the best one yet!

My friends came by and spent the night.

We had a crazy pillow fight.

We laughed until we cried.

My party was the best one yet!

We ate popcorn and watched TV.

We played dress-up and sang off-key.

We danced.  At least, we tried!

My party was the best one yet!

We whispered secrets all night through.

We listened to some records, too.

We played two games, or three.

My party was the best one yet!

And you know why it was such fun?

My friends!  Yes, each and every one

was there along with me.

—from Minnie and Me, My Favorite Book

***

I Tramp a Perpetual Journey

by Walt Whitman

I know I have the best of time and space, and was never measured and

    never will be measured.

I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!)

My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods,

No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,

I have no chair, no church, no philosophy,

I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange,

But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,

My left hand hooking you round the waist,

My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road.

Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,

You must travel it for yourself.

It is not far, it is within reach,

Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know,

Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land.

Shoulder your duds dear son, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth,

Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go.

If you tire, give me both burdens, and rest the chuff of your hand

    on my hip,

And in due time you shall repay the same service to me,

For after we start we never lie by again.

This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look'd at the crowded heaven,

And I said to my spirit When we become the enfolders of those orbs,

    and the pleasure and knowledge of every thing in them, shall we

    be fill'd and satisfied then?

And my spirit said No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond.

You are also asking me questions and I hear you,

I answer that I cannot answer, you must find out for yourself.

Sit a while dear son,

Here are biscuits to eat and here is milk to drink,

But as soon as you sleep and renew yourself in sweet clothes, I kiss you

    with a good-by kiss and open the gate for your egress hence.

Long enough have you dream'd contemptible dreams,

Now I wash the gum from your eyes,

You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every

    moment of your life.

Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore,

Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,

To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout,

    and laughingly dash with your hair.