Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.
* * *
The poem was written a year and half before the attacks and it is eerily prescient. Though its landscape is inspired by a different country, Poland and its Ukranian villages abandoned in the Post-Yalta years Zagajewski observed on a trip with his father, it remarkably mirrors the aftermath of 9/11 as image by image, a June day, stylish yachts and ships, a white room and its billowing curtains, a concert where music flared, telegraphs reasons to go on living in a newly broken world. In the poem, Zagajewski captures what he refers to as the “contest between beauty and disaster.” The poem is both terrifying and consoling. Of the poem, Zagajewski writes: “It’s the way I have always seen the world. When I was growing up I saw a lot of ruins in postwar Poland. This is my landscape. Somehow it stayed with me, this feeling that the world is wounded or mutilated and that its executioners sing joyfully.”
When the towers tumbled at the World Trade Center this poem about a militated world after terrorism offered Americans a way to move forward among the deluge. Readers posted it on their refrigerators, on bulletin boards, and websites as communities gathered bringing bottles of water and provisions to shelters, hospitals, the Red Cross and to firefighters. All of us who were in New York City will remember the glaringly perfect blue skies of that day, so incongruous with the terrorists’ act, and the overall atmosphere of disbelief as the vibrant city mourned the thousands of loved ones lost, and Americans stood frozen in front of their television sets trying to comprehend the improbable act of destruction while somewhere the executioners sang.
MORTALITY
THE CHILD IS FATHER TO THE MAN
Gerard Manley Hopkins
MY HEART LEAPS UP
William Wordsworth
In the basket of my mother’s walker she keeps that day’s printed-out menu, which they pass out every morning in the care home where she lives. When I ask her about it she says that this way she can remember what day it is, as the date is printed on top of the menu. Every Thursday she likes getting her nails done. Sometimes when I come to visit our nails are coincidentally painted the same color and this pleases her. She likes going to the hairdresser and attending the films they show every week at the little theater at the care home. When she goes to the movies, she sees her friend Bob and they sit in the front row together and sometimes hold hands. In rows behind them sit their aides. Every week they look forward to it like young lovers.
When I come to visit I take my mother out for lunch or we sit in the little garden outside the care home. I ask her to tell me stories about when she was young. On her finger, she wears the diamond wedding ring my father gave her. Years ago, long after her second marriage had ended, she dug it out of her jewelry drawer and put it on and never took it off again. She also legally changed her name back to the surname of her first husband, my father. She turns the ring around on her finger and sometimes I catch her staring at it in a moment of reflection. She tells the same story of how she met my father. I’ve heard it hundreds of times, but I don’t care. After they fell in love, they poked their fingers with a pin and drew blood and then rubbed their fingers together to symbolize their union. We go through her photo album and the photos elicit other memories. I recognize that if I don’t find out all my answers or hear her stories now I never will. She’s in her mid-eighties. When I look at her face, still beautiful under its folds of soft skin, and into her brown eyes, I see myself reflected back to me, and a sudden awareness of my own mortality creeps in. I also see something that was never there before, a growing acceptance of her own life and its limitations. I don’t know how this has happened but it has. And my own resentments and impatience toward her too have over the years miraculously slipped away. Now I am my mother’s keeper. With my sisters, we pick my mother’s clothes for her. We set up her doctor’s appointments and handle her finances and buy her toothpaste and the extra-soft toilet paper she likes. As once my life depended on her, now hers depends upon me. But still, in her presence I am her daughter, her little girl.
THE CHILD IS FATHER TO THE MAN
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
‘The child is father to the man.’
How can he be? The words are wild.
Suck any sense from that who can:
‘The child is father to the man.’
No; what the poet did write ran,
‘The man is father to the child.’
‘The child is father to the man!’
How can he be? The words are wild!
* * *
“The child is father of the man” is an idiom originating from the poem “My Heart Leaps Up” by William Wordsworth.
MY HEART LEAPS UP
William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So it is now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
In the Wordsworth poem the speaker looks upon a rainbow and remembers how he felt as a child and reflects that the child within us gives rise to who we are as adults. The Hopkins poem is born out of his quarrel with Wordsworth’s conceit. When I fall into the Hopkins poem as an adult taking care of her mother, I find within it the strange reality that happens as parents age and suddenly the child becomes the caretaker of the parent. And yes, agreed, when this happens it is “wild!” Critics have read the Wordsworth poem as an ode to nature and to Wordsworth’s deep connection to the natural world through the life cycle. Poems are often born out of quarrels and quandaries. Hopkins quarrels with Wordsworth, with himself, and with the universe in “The Child is Father to the Man.” Hopkins was a complicated person. In Lives of the Poets, Michael Schmidt writes, “He became a Catholic against the wishes of his family; a Jesuit against the advice of his friends; a disciple of Scotus against the orthodoxy of his order; he had made himself alone.”
MYSTERY
TEACHERS
and YOUTH
W. S. Merwin
When I first wake up in the morning, sometimes the fog of dream is thick and I can’t remember for a moment who I am or what I’m meant to be doing. On a frosty morning in November an image of my youngest sister dressed in her powder-blue snowsuit pops into my head. I used to bundle her up in it to take her for a spin in her stroller or to play in the snow. It took ages to put on. Other mornings, I remember her stroking the fur of her black-and-white, beloved cat, Gretel. The quick flicker of her smile. Other days, on awakening, my first thought is of my mother. I fear one day she won’t remember me. I think of the babies I have lost and count back to how old they would be. Or I remember something my son said or did. Now he’s away in college. In moments of recollection, time is irrelevant. I don’t know what it is that pulls me out of my thoughts. Is it the sheath of sun coming through the blinds, or the sudden beep on my iPhone? In that window between sleep and full awakening, doubts, worries, memories, the surreal passage of time creep in, for no particular reason as if these swirls of thoughts and memory lead their own private life inside of us.
TEACHERS
W. S. Merwin (1927–)
Pain is in this dark room like many speakers
of a costly set though mute
as here the needle and the turning
the night lengthens it is winter
a new year
what I live for I can seldom be
lieve in
who I love I cannot go to
what I hope is always divided
but I say to myself you are not a child now
if the night is long remember your unimportance
sleep
then toward morning I dream of the first words
of books of voyages
sure tellings that did not start by justifying
yet at one time it seems
had taught me
* * *
“Teachers” opens in the darkness of the night, where pain turns in silence like a mute turntable. It is winter, a new year. The poet ponders his life and its contradictions. What he lives for, he seldom believes in; whom he loves, he cannot go to; he is always divided. When doubt creeps in, he recognizes he is no longer a child, nor the center of the world; his wishes and desires are not always his own to control. As night turns to morning, they vanish and he remembers his early voyages from his first books, his own first encounters, what they taught him, and how they sustained him. By journey’s end he has found tranquility and acceptance.
In l976, W. S. Merwin moved to Maui, Hawaii, to study Zen Buddhism. He bought an abandoned pineapple plantation that he restored to its natural rain forest ecosystem. “Writing poetry always has to do with how you want to live,” he said. In his later poems, he returns to the exploration of the natural world and mourns our separation from it; nature is a grounding force that gives him the tools to embrace and accept quietude. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice, first in 1971 for The Carrier of Ladders in which the poem “Teachers” appeared and then in 2009 for The Shadow of Sirius, a collection of poems about youth and aging and the mysteries of life. Of its subject, Merwin said, “The shadow of Sirius is pure metaphor, pure imagination. . . . We are the shadow of Sirius . . . the other side is what we never know, the dark, the unknown side that guides us, the mystery, that is always with us too. It gives depth and dimension. . . . Poetry comes out of what you don’t know.”
YOUTH
W. S. Merwin (1927–)
Through all of youth I was looking for you
without knowing what I was looking for
or what to call you I think I did not
even know I was looking how would I
have known you when I saw you as I did
time after time when you appeared to me
as you did naked offering yourself
entirely at that moment and you let
me breathe you touch you taste you knowing
no more than I did and only when I
began to think of losing you did I
recognize you when you were already
part memory part distance remaining
mine in the ways that I learn to miss you
from what we cannot hold the stars are made
“From what we cannot hold the stars are made,” Merwin concludes. To me, the poem, along with being a love poem, describes the essence of the art of poetry and its burning necessity. Perhaps this is finally the very heart of what poetry can do and be. It gives shape to those empty spaces within us that we have no words for until we find them in a poem.
Poems often begin from a question, or a needling of something disturbing or provoking, sometimes even from ignorance. Robert Frost describes the impulse or sensation for how a poem begins as “a lump in the throat; a sense of wrong, a home-sickness, a loneliness.” From there a poet takes elements, either an image, a particular scene or landscape, a memory, maybe only an expression—and appeals to her unconscious, her place of unknowing in hopes that as words, phrases, and fragments take shape, like beads on a string, something original and exciting might evolve. As the poem gestates and comes into being, it gradually becomes clear. It is this mystic negotiation of the knowing and unknowing, that flicker of light in a dark wood that is poetry. And it is through poetry that my own path in the darkness was lit that day when I sat behind my wooden desk in Miss Hudson’s fourth grade classroom. Like that lone traveler in the “The Road Not Taken,” negotiating between the fork in the yellow road, “knowing how way leads to way,” I have never looked back.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
YEHUDA AMICHAI (1924–2000) was born in Würzburg, Germany, and immigrated to Palestine with his family in 1935. He attended Hebrew University. He published nineteen collections of poetry in English and twelve in Hebrew. He was the recipient of numerous awards, including the Israel Prize in 1982, his country’s highest honor. He was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize.
W. H. AUDEN (1907–1973) was born in York, England, and was educated at Christ Church, Oxford. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1948, the Bollingen Prize in 1953, the National Book Award in 1956, and the National Medal for Literature in 1967.
ELIZABETH BISHOP (1911–1979) was born in Worchester, Massachusetts. She is the author of Poems: North & South, A Cold Spring, Questions of Travel, The Complete Poems, and Geography III, along with The Collected Prose (a compilation of essays and stories). She received the Pulitzer Prize in 1956 and the National Book Award in 1970 for The Complete Poems. She was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1950.
ROBERT BLY (1926–) was born in western Minnesota and grew up in a community dominated by Norwegian immigrant farmers and their culture. He attended St. Olaf College in Minnesota before transferring to Harvard University. He studied for two years at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and traveled on a Fulbright grant to Norway, where he translated Norwegian poetry into English. He is the author of more than thirty books of poetry. The Light Around the Body (1967) won the National Book Award. His honors include Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships as well as the Robert Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America.
LOUISE BOGAN (1897–1970) was born in Livermore Falls, Maine. She attended Boston University for a year before leaving to marry. She published six poetry collections and served as the Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress from 1945 to 1946.
EAVAN BOLAND (1944–) was born in Dublin, Ireland, and was raised in London and New York. She attended Trinity College in Dublin. She has published over twenty poetry collections. Among her many awards and honors are a Jacob’s Award, a Lannan Foundation Award in Poetry, and an American Ireland Fund Literary Award.
JOSEPH BRODSKY (1940–1996) was born in Leningrad, Russia. He was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972 after serving eighteen months in a labor camp. He is most known for A Part of Speech (1977) and To Urania (1988) and the essay collection Less Than One (1986), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Brodsky authored fourteen volumes of poetry, as well as several collections of essays. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987 and was appointed United States Poet Laureate in 1991.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS (1917–2000) was born in Topeka, Kansas, raised in Chicago, Illinois, and educated at Wilson Junior College. She was Poet Laureate of Illinois and served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1985 to 1986. Annie Allen (1949) received the Pulitzer Prize. Among her many awards were more than seventy-five honorary degrees from colleges and universities around the country.
LUCILLE CLIFTON (1936–2010) was born in Buffalo, New York, and studied at Howard University from 1953 to 1955. After that, she studied at the State University of New York at Fredonia. She published thirteen poetry collections and numerous books for children. Her many awards and honors include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts, and the National Book Award. She served as the state of Maryland’s Poet Laureate from 1974 until 1985, and she was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
E. E. CUMMINGS (1894–1962) was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard University. He published over thirty works of poetry. His honors and awards include two Guggenheim fellowships, a Ford Foundation grant, and the Bollingen Prize.
EMILY DICKINSON (1830–1886) was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was educated at Mount Holyoke Female Se
minary, but left after a year. She wrote nearly eighteen hundred poems.
PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR (1872–1906) was born in Dayton, Ohio, and did not attend college. He was one of the first African-American poets to gain national recognition. He authored over twenty publications, including poetry collections and works of fiction.
ROBERT FROST (1874–1963) was born in San Francisco, where he lived for eleven years. He attended Dartmouth College and Harvard University but never graduated. In 1912 he moved with his wife and four children to England, where he published his first two books, A Boy’s Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914). He won the Pulitzer Prize four times and served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1958 to 1959.
LOUISE GLÜCK (1943–) was born in New York City and educated at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University. She received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Bollingen Prize. She is a former Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (2003–2004).
ROBERT HAYDEN (1913–1980) was born in Detroit, Michigan, attended Detroit City College (renamed Wayne State University), and continued his education at the University of Michigan. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Poets and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1976–1978). He received a Hopwood Award, the Grand Prize for Poetry at the first World Festival of Negro Arts, and the Russell Loines Award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS (1844–1889) was born in Stratford, Essex, England, and was educated at Balliol College, Oxford. His works include volumes of poetry, notebooks, papers, sermons, and devotional writings.
LANGSTON HUGHES (1902–1967) was born in Joplin, Missouri, and raised in Kansas and Illinois. He published twenty poetry collections along with over thirty other publications, and he was awarded the Spingarn Medal for distinguished achievements by an African American in 1960 and the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1961. He received honorary degrees from Lincoln University, Howard University, and Western Reserve University.
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