“Come hither, Child! And rest:
This is the end of the day,
Behold the weary West!
“Sleep rounds with equal zest
Man’s toil and children’s play:
Come hither, Child! And rest.”
Ernest Dowson, “Villanelle of Sunset”
My brother’s favorite non-classical poet and by extension mine. No poet ever,
in my mind, was as skilled at turning sorrow into sweetness.
“Once upon a midnight dreary, while
I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore –
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
‘’Tis some visitor,’ I muttered, ‘tapping at my chamber door –
Only this and nothing more.’”
Edgar Allen Poe, “The Raven”
There was a time
when this poem was memorized by every school child in America and was often their
introduction to poetry. The insistent rhythm and rhyme scheme, full of strange repetitions
and dark corners create a deep and somber mood. I’ve never understood what was
so scary about the subject. The image of the raven sitting on the bookshelf was
more humorous than terrifying to me.
“Up with me! Up with me into the
clouds!
For thy song, Lark, is
strong;
Up with me, up with me into the clouds!
Singing, singing,
With clouds the sky about thee ringing,
Lift me, guide me till I
find
That spot which seem so to thy mind.”
Wordsworth, “To a Sky-lark”
I have always admired Wordsworth’s attempt to achieve the lightness of a Keats poem in this ode. He tries desperately to rise weightless, and fails boldly, like an elephant thinking it is an eagle.
(Parenthetically, I think skylarks have so
much poetic press just because of their name. In nature, they are hardly the most ethereal or
lofty of birds.)
“At the time that turned the heat of the earth,
At the time when the heavens
turned and changed,
At the time when the light of
the sun was subdued
To cause light to break forth,
At the time of the night of
Makalii (winter)
Then began the slime which
established the earth,
The source of deepest darkness.
Of the depth of darkness, of
the depth of darkness,
Of the darkness of the sun, in
the depth of night,
It is night,
So
was night born”
Queen Lili’uokalani, “Kumulipo”
A beautiful, stirring version of the Hawai’ian creation story, made more full of pathos by the historical reality of Queen Lili’uokalani’s personal tragedy. The web posting has the poem in native Hawai'ian and it is even more haunting with it's mesmeric repeated sounds, likes the waves crashing on the ocean shore.
“A draft brings sway to
Brittle leaves,
Curled limbs of gray
Death-dancing in its light breath:
Ribs exposed, an umbrella
Broken reaching for the canopy.
Small buds glistened once on
Delicate supple fingers
Cavorting with the green and red surround:
The whisper of life-
Shuffling, striving for the
Blue-polished sky.
Winter seized the playful boughs
Too sudden to elude
Too swift to understand:
The hollow, from tip
To root, dancing now with
The memory of life.”
K Mankin, “On a Dead Tree”:
Yesterday,
arborists removed the sweet Japanese Maple from beneath my study window. This poem
is about the illusion of permanence.
“Ah, Fans, let not the Quarry but
the Chase
Be that
to which most fondly we aspire!
For us not Stake, but Game; not Goal, but Race—
THIS is the end of every fan’s
desire.”
Franklin P Adams, “A Ballad of Baseball Burdens”
I cheated on this one. Started in the last stanza to get the gist and substance. The whole is a wonderful litany of baseball names and sounds of times past by a newspaper columnist (who says columns are not a form of poetry?). I love the mock-ballad structure and tone of this piece and the way Adams incorporates the sounds of fandom (“Else you shall feel the brunt of fandom’s ire/ Biff, bang it, clout it, hit it on the knob”).
“Come, my Celia, let us prove,
While we can, the sports of love;
Time will not be ours forever;
He at length our good will sever.”
Ben Jonson “Song to Celia”
Not his
most famous Song to Celia, but an interesting and somewhat bleak version, redolent with whispers of mortality. The opening echoes Marlowe’s “Passionate
Shepherd” to a degree that you wonder if this poem is in part a response to Marlowe’s
death.
