These calves, grown muscular with certainties;
This nose, three medium-sized pink strawberries
— But I exaggerate. In a little you will leave:
I’ll hear, half squeal, half shriek, your laugh of greeting—
Then, decrescendo, bars of that strange speech
In which each sound sets out to seek each other,
Murders its own father, marries its own mother,
And ends as one grand transcendental vowel.
(Yet for all I know, the Egyptian Helen spoke so.)
As I look, the world contracts around you:
I see Brünnhilde had brown braids and glasses
She used for studying; Salome straight brown bangs,
A calf’s brown eyes, and sturdy light-brown limbs
Dusted with cinnamon, an apple-dumpling’s …
Many a beast has gnawn a leg off and got free,
Many a dolphin curved up from Necessity —
The trap has closed about you, and you sleep.
If someone questioned you, What doest thou here?
You’d knit your brows like an orangoutang
(But not so sadly; not so thoughtfully)
And answer with a pure heart, guilelessly:
I’m studying. …
If only you were not!
Assignments,
recipes,
the Official Rulebook
Of Basketball—ah, let them go; you needn’t mind.
The soul has no assignments, neither cooks
Nor referees: it wastes its time.
It wastes its time.
Here in this enclave there are centuries
For you to waste: the short and narrow stream
Of life meanders into a thousand valleys
Of all that was, or might have been, or is to be.
The books, just leafed through, whisper endlessly …
Yet it is hard. One sees in your blurred eyes
The “uneasy half-soul” Kipling saw in dogs.
One sees it, in the glass, in one’s own eyes.
In rooms alone, in galleries, in libraries,
In tears, in searchings of the heart, in staggering joys
We memorize once more our old creation,
Humanity: with what yawns the unwilling
Flesh puts on its spirit, O my sister!
So many dreams! And not one troubles
Your sleep of life? no self stares shadowily
From these worn hexahedrons, beckoning
With false smiles, tears? …
Meanwhile Tatyana
Larina (gray eyes nickel with the moonlight
That falls through the willows onto Lensky’s tomb;
Now young and shy, now old and cold and sure)
Asks, smiling: “But what is she dreaming of, fat thing?”
I answer: She’s not fat. She isn’t dreaming.
She purrs or laps or runs, all in her sleep;
Believes, awake, that she is beautiful;
She never dreams.
Those sunrise-colored clouds
Around man’s head — that inconceivable enchantment
From which, at sunset, we come back to life
To find our graves dug, families dead, selves dying:
Of all this, Tanya, she is innocent.
For nineteen years she’s faced reality:
They look alike already.
They say, man wouldn’t be
The best thing in this world — and isn’t he?—
If he were not too good for it. But she
— She’s good enough for it.
And yet sometimes
Her sturdy form, in its pink strapless formal,
Is as if bathed in moonlight — modulated
Into a form of joy, a Lydian mode;
This Wooden Mean’s a kind, furred animal
That speaks, in the Wild of things, delighting riddles
To the soul that listens, trusting …
Poor senseless Life:
When, in the last light sleep of dawn, the messenger
Comes with his message, you will not awake.
He’ll give his feathery whistle, shake you hard,
You’ll look with wide eyes at the dewy yard
And dream, with calm slow factuality:
“Today’s Commencement. My bachelor’s degree
In Home Ec., my doctorate of philosophy
In Phys. Ed.
[Tanya, they won’t even scan]
Are waiting for me.…”
Oh, Tatyana,
The Angel comes: better to squawk like a chicken
Than to say with truth, “But I’m a good girl,”
And Meet his Challenge with a last firm strange
Uncomprehending smile; and—then, then!—see
The blind date that has stood you up: your life.
(For all this, if it isn’t, perhaps, life,
Has yet, at least, a language of its own
Different from the books’; worse than the books’.)
And yet, the ways we miss our lives are life.
Yet … yet …
to have one’s life add up to yet!
You sigh a shuddering sigh. Tatyana murmurs,
“Don’t cry, little peasant”; leaves us with a swift
“Good-bye, good-bye … Ah, don’t think ill of me …”
Your eyes open: you sit here thoughtlessly.
I love you — and yet — and yet — I love you.
Don’t cry, little peasant. Sit and dream.
One comes, a finger’s width beneath your skin,
To the braided maidens singing as they spin;
There sound the shepherd’s pipe, the watchman’s rattle
Across the short dark distance of the years.
I am a thought of yours: and yet, you do not think …
The firelight of a long, blind, dreaming story
Lingers upon your lips; and I have seen
Firm, fixed forever in your closing eyes,
The Corn King beckoning to his Spring Queen.
* * *
Half-soul = A misquotation of Kipling’s poem in which a dog prays to his god (his master) and complains about his “distressed half-soul.”
Worn hexahedrons = Books (their geometrical shape).
Tatyana Larina = Jarrell imagines talking about the girl to this character in Alexander Pushkin’s novel Eugene Onegin, herself a country girl who becomes a sophisticated lady after Lensky, the lover of a friend, dies in a duel.
Sunset = In old age, youth’s rosy clouds drift away, and we begin to see who we are.
Lydian mode = A musical scale resembling a major chord.
Wooden Mean = The “golden mean” of classical geometry is considered a perfect proportion; she’s not perfect.
Angel = Jarrell likens graduation, and being thrust into the “real world,” to the touch of the angel of death.
Blind date = Life’s disappointments.
Corn King = Naomi Mitchison’s 1931 novel The Corn King and the Spring Queen, set in ancient Greece and Egypt, features a young heroine and takes its title from the pagan ritual in which temporary rulers were eventually torn to pieces and scattered on the fields as a fertility rite.
* * *
* * *
IMMORTAL VERSE
A traditional theme of love poets that shows up often in Shakespeare’s sonnets is the immortalizing of the beloved’s temporal beauty through the poet’s eyes. Archibald MacLeish can’t help agreeing, while seeming to argue with Shakespeare and scoff at such sentiments.
* * *
“NOT MARBLE NOR THE GILDED MONUMENTS”
William Shakespeare
Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this pow’rful rhyme,
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
’Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room,
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.
* * *
Museum of Antiquities
The Venus de Milo, a famous Greek statue of Aphrodite that now shelters in the Louvre, is a byword for classical beauty. But she’s missing the arms her sculptor gave her. She had not yet been discovered when Shakespeare wrote this sonnet, but he might say she proves his point.
Sluttish = Slovenly and grimy.
Broils = Disturbances (from freezing and thawing).
* * *
“NOT MARBLE NOR THE GILDED MONUMENTS”
Archibald MacLeish
(for Adele)
The praisers of women in their proud and beautiful poems,
Naming the grave mouth and the hair and the eyes,
Boasted those they loved should be forever remembered:
These were lies.
The words sound but the face in the Istrian sun is forgotten.
The poet speaks but to her dead ears no more.
The sleek throat is gone — and the breast that was troubled to listen:
Shadow from door.
Therefore I will not praise your knees nor your fine walking
Telling you men shall remember your name as long
As lips move or breath is spent or the iron of English
Rings from a tongue.
I shall say you were young, and your arms straight, and your mouth scarlet:
I shall say you will die and none will remember you:
Your arms change, and none remember the swish of your garments,
Nor the click of your shoe.
Not with my hand’s strength, not with difficult labor
Springing the obstinate words to the bones of your breast
And the stubborn line to your young stride and the breath to your breathing
And the beat to your haste
Shall I prevail on the hearts of unborn men to remember.
(What is a dead girl but a shadowy ghost
Or a dead man’s voice but a distant and vain affirmation
Like dream words most)
Therefore I will not speak of the undying glory of women.
I will say you were young and straight and your skin fair
And you stood in the door and the sun was a shadow of leaves on your shoulders
And a leaf on your hair —
I will not speak of the famous beauty of dead women:
I will say the shape of a leaf lay once on your hair.
Till the world ends and the eyes are out and the mouths broken
Look! It is there!
* * *
Shakespeare Was a Liar
Shakespeare’s sonnet, if you read carefully, says nothing about what his beloved actually looks like. And so, MacLeish suggests, we have indeed forgotten her. Instead, he shows us concrete images of his beloved — the particular way she walks, the color of her lips, a leaf in her hair, so that we too may catch a glimpse of the “now” he knew when writing this.
Istrian = Region near Trieste on the Adriatic Sea.
Look! It is there! = Perhaps an echo of the final words of King Lear in Shakespeare’s play, when Lear holds his dead daughter Cordelia and says, “Look there, Look there!”
* * *
5
LOVES ME
“To fall in love is by no means the most stupid thing man does — gravitation cannot be held responsible, however.”
—Albert Einstein
* * *
YOU LOVE ME, YOU REALLY LOVE ME!
Who doesn’t want to be loved? It’s among our most basic requirements, right up there with food, water, and safety, according to the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s famous “hierarchy of needs.” So, perhaps Christina Georgina Rossetti and Paul Laurence Dunbar can be forgiven if they sound a little giddy.
* * *
* * *
Victorian Finery
Rossetti lived during the first flowering of Victorian England’s taste for the ornate and medieval. Much of her best poetry is about love — often unrequited love, unhappy love, and lost love.
Halcyon = Glowing and lustrous, like the feathers of a kingfisher.
Vair = Squirrel fur, often used in medieval garments.
* * *
A BIRTHDAY
Christina Georgina Rossetti
My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a watered shoot;
My heart is like an apple tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me.
Raise me a dais of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.
THOU ART MY LUTE
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Thou art my lute, by thee I sing,—
My being is attuned to thee.
Thou settest all my words a-wing,
And meltest me to melody.
Thou art my life, by thee I live,
From thee proceed the joys I know;
Sweetheart, thy hand has power to give
The meed of love — the cup of woe.
Thou art my love, by thee I lead
My soul the paths of light along,
From vale to vale, from mead to mead,
And home it in the hills of song.
My song, my soul, my life, my all,
Why need I pray or make my plea,
Since my petition cannot fall;
For I’m already one with thee!
* * *
Minstrel Show
Many of Paul Dunbar’s most popular poems and stories are dialect pieces, written in the style of the blackface minstrel shows popular in America in the late nineteenth century. That paid the bills: Dunbar was among the first African-American writers to make a living from his work. He had another side, though.
Meed = Wages.
Mead = Meadow.
* * *
* * *
ROSE AND GERANIUM
An expensive cultured rose and a ninety-nine-cent Kmart geranium — both beautiful in bloom, but also reflective of changing attitudes toward love. e. e. cummings used a lot of modern devices in his poetry (odd capitalization and punctuation, for instance), but the imagery and cadences and sentiments hark back to nineteenth-century poetry. Connie Voisine’s poem, on the other hand, belongs squarely in the twenty-first century.
Myself as = Pause in between, as if there were punctuation.
* * *
SOMEWHERE I HAVE NEVER TRAVELLED, GLADLY BEYOND
e. e. cummings
Somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose
or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as wh
en the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
* * *
Small Beauties
Cummings is suspicious of big ideas, grand abstractions, and sweeping pronouncements. On the page, his lowercase poems convey smallness. Read aloud, the precise images and minute detail of his little loves unfold with vivid particularity. Here, in a twist on classical love poems, it is the poet who is the delicate flower, not the beloved.
* * *
* * *
Love on the Last Day
A massive airplane roars by close overhead, and for a moment the poet thinks it’s the coming of angels at the end of the world — or at least a plane crash. What else comes to mind? A potted plant, hunger, and love.
Angels = Jacob wrestled with an angel (Genesis 32:24 – 30); in aviation jargon, angels = altitude.
* * *
LOVE POEM
Connie Voisine
Although the angels of numbers and letters
wrestle darkness into shapes, and the plane
descending over the I-10 wraps
my car in the gust and sonic draw of velocity —
it too has a flight path and calm passengers and no
fiery end for us — I duck and think so this is it.
Medievals thought hunger lived its own life in the
body, parasitic, our organs entered by it.
Love was like this too, a contagion, the blood-
Love Poetry Out Loud Page 6