In honor of yesterday’s anniversary of the establishment of the Library of Congress, a poem about libraries by Nikki Giovanni.

A LIBRARY
(for Kelli Martin)

a Library Is:

a place to be free
to be in space
to be in cave times
to be a cook
to be a crook
to be in love
to be unhappy
to be quick and smart
to be contained and cautious
to surf the rainbow
to sail the dreams
to be blue
to be jazz
to be wonderful
to be you
a place to be
yeah… to be

That sums it up.

(poem credit)

William Shakespeare was supposedly born right around this day: his actual date of birth is not known, but his baptism date is. Shakespeare was baptized April 26, 1564–if in fact that is his real name!!!

Um, sorry about that. We’ve recently watched Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile and I’ve got Hercule Poirot on the brain.

I wouldn’t dream of trying to add anything to the centuries of wit, wisdom, and yes, some wackiness that’s been written about a man who was quite possibly the single greatest writer in the history of the English language. I’ll just get out of his way and let him do his own communicating.

Here is the Sonnet No. 2.

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,
Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tatter’d weed, of small worth held:
Then being ask’d where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,
To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use,
If thou couldst answer ‘This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count and make my old excuse,’
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.

Why did I choose the Second Sonnet, as opposed to the first? Well, I wanted to start at the beginning, and the copy of the sonnets that I used for reference (a book called  Shakespeare for Lovers) actually got the first two sonnets exchanged! This one was listed as the Sonnet #1, so when I went to look up the Sonnet #1 to make sure I’d read it right (Shakespeare really thinks the person to whom he is speaking should go get themselves a baby!), I discovered a different sonnet than the one I’d read. But now I’ve got it straightened out.

I hope the rest of the book is in correct order….

One of the pieces we played in the concert band in my first year of college was a piece by Elliot Del Borgo, called Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. It was a dramatic work, sometimes atonal, with a single motif binding the whole work together and some very interesting sonic effects along the way: stacked chords, a mid-section that puts the percussion on display, and call-and-answer fanfares. We liked playing it a good deal; it’s one of those showpieces where everybody in the ensemble has something interesting to do at some point.

It was more than a month into rehearsing the thing before Dr. Lee, our band director, informed us that the piece was actually based on a poem of the same title, by Dylan Thomas. The piece isn’t meant as a specifically programmatic setting or depiction of the poem, but rather a sonic meditation on the themes of the poem, so Dr. Lee felt it might help us if we actually heard the poem, so he had someone–one of the flute players, if I remember correctly–read it to us.

“Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” is technically a villanelle, in which nineteen lines are divided into five three-line stanzas and closed out by a four-line stanza. Thomas’s poem is clearly about death, and though he speaks in general terms throughout–referring to “good men”, “wild men”, “wise men”, at the end he turns his attention specifically to his father, exhorting him to approach death as Thomas has said everyone else does: with rage against the dying of the light.

Thomas’s father actually died five years after the poem’s publication, so it’s uncertain as to whether Thomas wrote this poem with specific intent regarding his own father’s mortality, but still…I suspect this sentiment is common for those of us whose fathers have not get grappled with the dying of the light.

Here’s the work by Del Borgo:

And here is Mr. Thomas’s poem.

In 8th grade, I was skeptical about all the stuff my English teachers the last few years had been saying about things like meaning and symbolism and all the rest of it. I would read a work, be it a poem or a story or whatever, and I’d just…mentally file it away as something I read. Then the teacher would do a lesson on what the piece meant, or what this thing signified–“On page 4 the hero plucks a chrysanthemum flower. What do you think this means?” Oh, I dunno, he likes flowers?–and this always bored me and made me wonder if the teachers were making all of this up.

Then, along came a poem called “Up Hill” by Christina Rossetti. She lived during the Victorian era, roughly contemporary with Tennyson (he was 20 years her senior, but he died in 1890 and she in 1894). I don’t recall the exact scenario, but I remember very clearly reading “Up Hill” in class and suddenly realizing that it’s about death: its inevitability, the fact that it cannot be avoided forever, and that it awaits us all. But Rossetti’s portrayal of death: an inn to which all come for rest “when the slow dark hours begin” is an encouraging one. The final mystery may not be such a terrifying one.

Of course, it’s too simplistic to boil this poem down to just “it’s about death”, but for a wet-behind-the-ears reader in 8th grade, it was a start. If nothing else, I started thinking that maybe, just maybe, my teachers were on to something with all this “symbolism” stuff.

“Up Hill” by Christina Rossetti

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.

One of my favorite collections is An Anthology of World Poetry, edited by Mark Van Doren, a poet and scholar who lived in the 20th century. Van Doren’s collection is an extensive gathering of poems in translation from all over the world, and spanning many hundreds of years. It is a fantastic book to simply dip into, and it’s a reminder that humans have been at the business of poetry for as long as there have been humans at all.

(Trivia note: Van Doren’s son, Charles, would achieve notoriety of his own by being at the center of a big scandal in the 50s involving teevee quiz shows.)

Here we have a poem by Japanese poet Saigyo Hoshi, who lived 1118-1190…meaning he lived nine hundred years ago. That’s a lot of water under the poetic bridge, isn’t it? Saigyo apparently spent a great deal of his life journeying alone throughout Japan, and a love of nature pervades his work.

“Seven Poems”, by Saigyo Hoshi

1.

In my boat that goes
Over manifold salt-ways
Towards the open see
Faintly I hear
The cry of the first wild-goose.

2.

Mingling my prayer
With the clang of the bell
Which woke me from my dreams,
Lo, ten times I have recited the
Honorable Name.

3.

Since I am convinced
That Reality is in no way
Real,
How am I to admit
That dreams are dreams?

4.

Startled
By a single scream
Of the crane which is reposing
On the surface of the swamp,
All the other birds are crying.

5.

Those ships which left
Side by side
The same harbor
Towards an unknown destination
Have rowed away from one another!

6.

Like those boats which are returning
Across the open sea of Ashiya
Where the waves run high,
I think that I too shall pass
Scatheless through the storms of life.

7.

Although I do not know
At all whether anything
Honorable deigns to be there,
Yet in extreme awe
My tears well forth.

—

The third poem here is the one that stands out for me, not just for the simple style of its wisdom, but for the fact that it makes such a stark contrast with the other six. No sharp images or sounds or tactile senses conveyed there–just a single philosophic thought, dropped in the middle of the larger work.

Saigyo repeats that maneuver in the seventh poem, in which he suggests that tears may be the only good response to “extreme awe”. This whole poem feels like meditations interrupted by nature–or are the meditations interrupted at all? Perhaps Saigyo is simply showing that a meditative life will not necessarily be strongly shaped by the non-poetic world, except by way of inspiration.

Poetry, like all art, must reflect and address all matters within the mess we call The Human Condition, which means that poetry can’t only be focused on positive matters or on beauty. Poetry must also look unflinchingly at the awfullest aspects of our character. I own a collection of poems written in response to the Holocaust. Here is one of those poems.

By Peter Porter.