Tag: poetry

For me, poetry is usually about the beauty of the language and the skill with which it evokes emotion, but there are also times when a skilled poet uses words to convey a visual sense so keen that I feel like I’m there. This is another great reason why writers should read poetry.

I read this poem for the first time this morning, after I literally opened a collection and flipped through it to come to a random stop…here. And this poem hit me between the eyes, so incredibly vivid are the details the poet uses to create his word-picture. This is just amazing.

Working in the Rain
by Robert Morgan

My father loved more than anything to
work outside in wet weather. Beginning
at daylight he’d go out in dripping brush
to mow or pull weeds for hog and chickens.
First his shoulders got damp and the drops from
his hat ran down his back. When even his
armpits were soaked he came in to dry out
by the fire, making coffee, read a little.
But if the rain continued he’d soon be
restless, and go out to sharpen tools in
the shed or carry wood from the pile,
then open up a puddle to the drain,
working by steps back into the downpour.
I thought he sought the privacy of rain,
the one time no one was likely to be
out and he was left to the intimacy
of drops touching every leaf and tree in
the woods and the easy mutterings of
drip and runoff, the shine of pools behind
grass dams. He could not resist the long
ritual, the companionship and freedom
of falling weather, or even the cold
drenching, the heavy soak and chill of clothes
and sobbing of fingers and sacrifice
of shoes that earned a baking by the fire
and washed fatigue after the wandering
and loneliness in the country of rain.

On the poet.

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After a really long cold spell, we’re finally getting some spring-like weather here in WNY. Who knows how long it will last…but as long as it’s here, this poem seems appropriate.

Spring, the sweet spring
Thomas Nashe

pring, the sweet spring, is the year’s pleasant king,
Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,
Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing:
    Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!

The palm and may make country houses gay,
Lambs frisk and play, the shepherds pipe all day,
And we hear aye birds tune this merry lay:
    Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!

The fields breathe sweet, the daisies kiss our feet,
Young lovers meet, old wives a-sunning sit,
In every street these tunes our ears do greet:
    Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to witta-woo!
        Spring, the sweet spring!

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Not all poetry is about positive things. Poetry can be angry and visceral, as in this poem by Wilfred Owen. Owen is known as one of the great poets to write during World War I, and he was actually killed in action on November 4, 1918 — just a week before the armistice ending the war was signed.

The Latin phrase at the end of the poem means: “It is sweet and noble to die for one’s country.”

Dulce et Decorum est
by Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

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The intersection of music and poetry is a fascinating one. There are song lyrics, which are almost always poetry, and then there’s the way in which poetry and music both can sometimes reflect the world in similar ways. There is often a mystery at the heart of both poetry and music, in that the poets and the composers have things to say about the world that really can’t be said in any other way.

This is a poem about music. Someone said something once to the effect that “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” which is clever and pithy and…well, a little wrong. Words can never quite express what music does, but that doesn’t mean that words can’t point the way or capture something of the emotion we feel about a work of music. This poem does something else, though: it expresses gratitude that music even exists.

There is a story here, of course. When Sergei Rachmaninov premiered his Symphony No. 1, the work’s reception was so disastrous that it sent the young composer into a depression that lasted several years, until he finally received therapy that helped him recover enough confidence to finish his Piano Concerto #2, which is merely one of the greatest concertos of all time. Rachmaninov went on to a long life of composition, and lovers of his work — amongst whom I count myself — are indebted to Nikolai Dahl, the physician who conducted Rachmaninov’s therapy.

This poem, by Diane Ackerman, expresses that very gratitude. I read it in a book called The Music Lover’s Poetry Anthology, which I bought whilst in New York City last November. Nikolai Dahl is a curious footnote in music history, but what a footnote!

Rachmaninoff’s Psychiatrist
by Diane Ackerman

I’m listening to Rachmaninoff’s
Piano Concerto No. 2,
which he dedicated to Dr. Dahl,
the psychiatrist who guided him
through the straights of fever,
not long after Sergei had heard
his own first symphony played.
Horrified by its many defects
which seemed a sewage of noise,
he had fled the hall, ashamed,
a quagmire of self-doubt.

We cannot know all the sounds
Dahl and he exchanged,
but rubbing one word against another,
Dahl gradually restored
Sergei’s confidence. History tells
that Dahl used affirmations
and auto-suggestion:
“You will compose again.”
“You will write a piano concerto.”
“You will write with great facility.”
Repeated until the words saturated
His gift from head to fingers.

In truth, nothing can kill a gift,
but it may become anemic
from great shock or stress-
a sprain of the emotions will do,
or a traffic accident of the heart,
or a failure dire as a clanging bell.

For two years, Dahl worked
on Sergei’s shattered will.
at last he collected up his senses
in a burst of blood fury
and composed his triumphant
2nd Piano Concerto,
full of tenderness and yearning,
beguiling melodies, raging passion,
and long sensuous preludes
to explosive climaxes,
frenzy followed by strains
of mysticism and trance.

Loaded with starry melodies,
it was a map of his sensibility,
and a wilderness rarely known
-the intense life of an artist
seen in miniature, with rapture expressed
as all-embracing sound.

Will you tell me if you know,
how Dahl might have received
such a gift? I cannot imagine it.
With hugs and shared enthusiasm?
With an austere thank you?
In his private moments, did he weep
at the privilege allowed him?
For a time he held the exposed heart
of a great artist, cupped his hands
around it like a flame, blew gently,
patiently, until it flared again.

For that, he earned the blessings
of history, and soothed millions
of hungry souls he would never meet.
Listening to Rachmaninoff’s
concerto today, intoxicated by its fever,
I want to kiss the hands of Dahl,
but he is beyond my touch or game.
Allow me to thank you in his name.

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A short poem today, short but powerful. One of the band directors at the music camp which featured in yesterday’s post actually wrote a piece for symphonic winds based on this poem, which packs tremendous imagery and emotional power into just four lines. The Western wind has many connotations, few of them bad, and in this case, the speaker is praying for its return so that the “small rain” can return, bringing cleansing and healing. And then, the wish for a return to a familiar warm bed and the arms of a beloved. This is a very old poem, and nothing is known of its writer; in fact, it may be just a fragment of a larger work that is lost to us now. If so, and if the remaining work is as good as this quatrain that has survived to our time, what a loss that must be!

Western wind, when will thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ! If my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again!

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OK, story time. In high school, I attended a summer music camp several times, and then in college, I served there as a camp counselor. This was almost your canonical summer camp, with cabins in the woods and campfires and singalongs and all that stuff, but for music students.

When I was heading into my senior year, I developed a big crush on a bassoon player there, and I tried flirting, which failed badly because I’m terrible at flirting. She was pretty and she had this hippie thing going on that I liked enormously, though, and when I actually conversed with her about stuff, we became pretty good friends, and we exchanged letters during the next couple of school years. All in all, typical. The first letter in the chain came from her, and she was the type to put pretty doodles and jot down poems on the outside of her envelopes, the first of which was the first stanza of this poem by Thoreau.

For that reason, I’ve loved this poem ever since.

Like any writing, poetry should have a personal dimension to it. I can trace many of my favorite books to times and places that are dear to me, for one reason or another; why shouldn’t it be so with poetry?

To the Maiden in the East,
by Henry David Thoreau

Low in the eastern sky
Is set thy glancing eye;
And though its gracious light
Ne’er riseth to my sight,
Yet every star that climbs
Above the gnarled limbs
    Of yonder hill,
Conveys thy gentle will.

Believe I knew thy thought,
And that the zephyrs brought
Thy kindest wishes through,
As mine they bear to you,
That some attentive cloud
Did pause amid the crowd
     Over my head,
While gentle things were said.

Believe the thrushes sung,
And that the flower-bells rung,
That herbs exhaled their scent,
And beasts knew what was meant,
The trees a welcome waved,
And lakes their margins laved,
     When thy free mind
To my retreat did wind.

It was a summer eve,
The air did gently heave
While yet a low-hung cloud
Thy eastern skies did shroud;
The lightning’s silent gleam,
Startling my drowsy dream,
     Seemed like the flash
Under thy dark eyelash.

Still will I strive to be
As if thou wert with me;
Whatever path I take,
It shall be for thy sake,
Of gentle slope and wide,
As thou wert by my side,
     Without a root
To trip thy gentle foot.

I ‘ll walk with gentle pace,
And choose the smoothest place
And careful dip the oar,
And shun the winding shore,
And gently steer my boat
Where water-lilies float,
     And cardinal flowers
Stand in their sylvan bowers.

(Oh, and that girl? The bassoon player? We’re friends on Facebook and she’s still really cool; she works in ecology. And as luck would have it, I still ended up spending my life with a double-reed player.)

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Sometimes there’s a poem whose verse is wonderful, but with whose message you disagree. Such is the case here, for me. Walt Whitman was one of the great poets of all time — in fact, he was probably one of the greatest human artists of all time, in any field — but this poem falters for me.

I first heard this poem read by a faculty member when I was at Wartburg College — I think it was my senior year — when our school’s beloved physics professor, Dr. Donald Roiseland, passed away after a fight with cancer. I heard this poem at his memorial service, and I thought “Well, that was lovely,” and went about my day. Later I dug out my collection of Whitman and looked the poem up…and when I read it back to myself, I wondered about it.

The poem seems to be arguing that the scientific way of looking at things is somehow lacking, and that it removes the beauty inherent in our universe by burying it under numbers and graphs and charts and diagrams; that to hear what science has to say about the world is dispiriting and that one should atone by going out and looking silently upon the world’s beauty.

Well…I have a problem with that, and I have a feeling that Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Jacques Cousteau, and many others would as well. The learned astronomer has not abandoned the beauty of the world; the learned astronomer has exposed more of it.

I think Whitman can be forgiven his view here, given the time in which he lived, but still…I wish he’d have been able to attend upon some of the beauty in those diagrams and charts and figures.

When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
by Walt Whitman

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

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I find prose poems interesting. At first they seem formless, and one wonders why the poet didn’t just write a straight-up story or paragraph, but as you read a good prose poem, the melding of the two forms clarifies. This poem is a good example: it starts as simple description of a small town, but then, the speaker enters a fantasy that spins out as he drives through the town and out the other side. There are echoes of history and Shakespeare in here, all suggesting the kind of life one might live in a small town where the bronze Civil War general stands above the little park in the village center.

Passing Through a Small Town
by David Shumate

Here the highways cross. One heads north. One heads east
and west. On the corner of the square adjacent to the
courthouse a bronze plaque marks the place where two Civil
War generals faced one another and the weaker surrendered.
A few pedestrians pass. A beauty parlor sign blinks. As I turn
to head west, I become the schoolteacher living above the
barber shop. Polishing my shoes each evening. Gazing at the
square below. In time I befriend the waitress at the cafe and
she winks as she pours my coffee. Soon people begin to
talk. And for good reason. I become so distracted I teach my
students that Cleopatra lost her head during the French
Revolution and that Leonardo perfected the railroad at the
height of the Rennaissance. One day her former lover returns
from the army and creates a scene at the school. That evening
she confesses she cannot decide between us. But still we spend
one last night together. By the time I pass the grain elevators
on the edge of town I am myself again. The deep scars of love
already beginning to heal.

(Text via.)

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