Bartlett's Poems for Occasions

by Geoffrey O'Brien

The cooling waters came down.

  Then the green grass sprouted,

  And the little red flowers blossomed,

  The pine tree pointed his finger to the sky,

  And the oak spread out his arms,

  The lakes cuddled down in the hollows of the ground,

  And the rivers ran down to the sea;

  And God smiled again,

  And the rainbow appeared,

  And curled itself around his shoulder.

  Then God raised his arm and he waved his hand

  Over the sea and over the land,

  And he said: Bring forth! Bring forth!

  And quicker than God could drop his hand,

  Fishes and fowls

  And beasts and birds

  Swam the rivers and the seas,

  Roamed the forests and the woods,

  And split the air with their wings.

  And God said: That’s good!

  Then God walked around,

  And God looked around

  On all that he had made.

  He looked at his sun,

  And he looked at his moon,

  And he looked at his little stars;

  He looked on his world

  With all its living things,

  And God said: I’m lonely still.

  Then God sat down —

  On the side of a hill where he could think;

  By a deep, wide river he sat down;

  With his head in his hands,

  God thought and thought,

  Till he thought: I’ll make me a man!

  Up from the bed of the river

  God scooped the clay;

  And by the bank of the river

  He kneeled him down,

  And there the great God Almighty

  Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,

  Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,

  Who rounded the earth in the middle of his hand;

  This Great God,

  Like a mammy bending over her baby,

  Kneeled down in the dust

  Toiling over a lump of clay

  Till he shaped it in his own image;

  Then into it he blew the breath of life,

  And man became a living soul.

  Amen. Amen.

  JAMES WELDON JOHNSON

  AMERICAN (1871-1938)

  THE UNKNOWN AND THE UNKNOWABLE

  To what shall I compare

  To what shall I compare

  This world?

  To the white wake behind

  A ship that has rowed away

  At dawn!

  THE PRIEST MANSEI

  JAPANESE (C. 720)

  TRANSLATED BY ARTHUR WALEY

  Gazing Through the Night

  Gazing through the

  night and its stars,

  or the grass and its bugs,

  I know in my heart these swarms

  are the craft of surpassing wisdom.

  Think: the skies

  resemble a tent,

  stretched taut by loops

  and hooks;

  and the moon with its stars,

  a shepherdess,

  on a meadow

  grazing her flock;

  and the crescent hull in the looser clouds

  looks like a ship being tossed;

  a whiter cloud, a girl

  in her garden

  tending her shrubs;

  and the dew coming down is her sister

  shaking water

  from her hair onto the path;

  as we

  settle in our lives,

  like beasts in their ample stalls—

  fleeing our terror of death,

  like a dove

  its hawk in flight—

  though we’ll lie in the end like a plate,

  hammered into dust and shards.

  SHMUEL HA NAGID

  HEBREW/SPANISH (993-1056)

  TRANSLATED BY PETER COLE

  Written at the Ise Shrine

  Although I do not know

  At all whether anything

  Honorably deigns to be there,

  Yet in extreme awe

  My tears well forth.

  SAIGYO?248-175?

  JAPANESE (1118-1190)

  TRANSLATED BY ARTHUR WALEY

  The Rose

  The rose has no “why,” it blooms because it blooms.

  It doesn’t watch itself or wonder if anyone sees it.

  ANGELUS SILESIUS

  GERMAN (1624-1677)

  TRANSLATED BY GEOFFREY O’BRIEN

  The Fly

  Little Fly,

  Thy summers play

  My thoughtless hand

  Has brush’d away.

  Am not I

  A fly like thee?

  Or art not thou

  A man like me?

  For I dance

  And drink & sing:

  Till some blind hand

  Shall brush my wing.

  If thought is life

  And strength & breath,

  And the want

  Of thought is death;

  Then am I

  A happy fly,

  If I live,

  Or if I die.

  WILLIAM BLAKE

  ENGLISH (1757-1827)

  Silence

  There is a silence where hath been no sound,

  There is a silence where no sound may be,

  In the cold grave—under the deep deep sea,

  Or in wide desert where no life is found,

  Which hath been mute, and still must sleep profound;

  No voice is hush’d—no life treads silently,

  But clouds and cloudy shadows wander free,

  That never spoke, over the idle ground:

  But in green ruins, in the desolate walls

  Of antique palaces, where Man hath been,

  Though the dun fox, or wild hyena, calls,

  And owls, that flit continually between,

  Shriek to the echo, and the low winds moan,

  There the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone.

  THOMAS HOOD

  ENGLISH (1799-1845)

  Enosis

  Thought is deeper than all speech,

  Feeling deeper than all thought;

  Souls to souls can never teach

  What unto themselves was taught.

  We are spirits clad in veils;

  Man by man was never seen;

  All our deep communing fails

  To remove the shadowy screen.

  Heart to heart was never known;

  Mind with mind did never meet;

  We are columns left alone,

  Of a temple once complete.

  Like the stars that gem the sky,

  Far apart, though seeming near,

  In our light we scattered lie;

  All is thus but starlight here.

  What is social company

  But a babbling summer stream?

  What our wise philosophy

  But the glancing of a dream?

  Only when the sun of love

  Melts the scattered stars of thought;

  Only when we live above

  What the dim-eyed world hath taught;

  Only when our souls are fed

  By the Fount which gave them birth,

  And by inspiration led,

  Which they never drew from earth,

  We like parted drops of rain

  Swelling till they meet and run,

  Shall be all absorbed again,

  Melting, flowing into one.

  CHRISTOPHER CRANCH

  AMERICAN (1813-1892)

  Flower in the crannied wall

  Flower in the crannied wall,

  I pluck you out of the crannies,

  I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,

  Little flower—but if I could understand

  What you are, root and all, and all in all,

  I should know what God and man is.
<
br />   ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

  ENGLISH (1809-1892)

  When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer

  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.

  WALT WHITMAN

  AMERICAN (1819-1892)

  Four Trees—opon a solitary Acre

  Four Trees—opon a solitary Acre —

  Without Design

  Or Order, or Apparent Action —

  Maintain —

  The Sun—opon a Morning meets them —

  The Wind —

  No nearer Neighbor—have they —

  But God —

  The Acre gives them—Place —

  They—Him—Attention of Passer by —

  Of Shadow, or of Squirrel, haply —

  Or Boy —

  What Deed is Their’s unto the General Nature —

  What Plan

  They severally—retard—or further —

  Unknown —

  EMILY DICKINSON

  AMERICAN (1830-1886)

  Magna Est Veritas

  Here, in this little Bay,

  Full of tumultuous life and great repose,

  Where, twice a day,

  The purposeless, glad ocean comes and goes,

  Under high cliffs, and far from the huge town,

  I sit me down.

  For want of me the world’s course will not fail:

  When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;

  The truth is great, and shall prevail,

  When none cares whether it prevail or not.

  COVENTRY PATMORE

  ENGLISH (1823-1896)

  A man said to the universe

  A man said to the universe:

  “Sir, I exist!”

  “However,” replied the universe,

  “The fact has not created in me

  “A sense of obligation.”

  STEPHEN CRANE

  AMERICAN (1871-1900)

  Buddha

  As if he listened. Stillness: a distance . . .

  We stop short and no longer hear it.

  And he is a star. And other big stars,

  that we don’t see, are ranged about him.

  Oh he is everything. Are we really waiting

  for him to see us? Should he need to?

  And even if we threw ourselves down before him

  he would stay deep and hear himself like a dumb beast.

  For what draws us to his feet

  has been growing inside him for a million years.

  He: who forgets what we experience

  and experiences what is beyond us.

  RAINER MARIA RILKE

  GERMAN (1875-1926)

  TRANSLATED BY GEOFFREY O’BRIEN

  The Darkling Thrush

  I leant upon a coppice gate

  When Frost was spectre-gray,

  And Winter’s dregs made desolate

  The weakening eye of day.

  The tangled bine-stems scored the sky

  Like strings of broken lyres,

  And all mankind that haunted nigh

  Had sought their household fires.

  The land’s sharp features seem’d to be

  The Century’s corpse outleant,

  His crypt the cloudy canopy,

  The wind his death-lament.

  The ancient pulse of germ and birth

  Was shrunken hard and dry,

  And every spirit upon earth

  Seem’d fervourless as I.

  At once a voice arose among

  The bleak twigs overhead

  In a full-hearted evensong

  Of joy illimited;

  An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,

  In blast-beruffled plume,

  Had chosen thus to fling his soul

  Upon the growing gloom.

  So little cause for carollings

  Of such ecstatic sound

  Was written on terrestrial things

  Afar or nigh around,

  That I could think there trembled through

  His happy good-night air

  Some blessèd Hope, whereof he knew

  And I was unaware.

  THOMAS HARDY

  ENGLISH (1840-1928)

  The Unknown Bird

  Three lovely notes he whistled, too soft to be heard

  If others sang; but others never sang

  In the great beech-wood all that May and June.

  No one saw him: I alone could hear him

  Though many listened. Was it but four years

  Ago? or five? He never came again.

  Oftenest when I heard him I was alone,

  Nor could I ever make another hear.

  La-la-la! he called, seeming far-off —

  As if a cock crowed past the edge of the world,

  As if the bird or I were in a dream.

  Yet that he travelled through the trees and sometimes

  Neared me, was plain, though somehow distant still

  He sounded. All the proof is—I told men

  What I had heard.

  I never knew a voice,

  Man, beast, or bird, better than this. I told

  The naturalists; but neither had they heard

  Anything like the notes that did so haunt me

  I had them clear by heart and have them still.

  Four years, or five, have made no difference. Then

  As now that La-la-la! was bodiless sweet:

  Sad more than joyful it was, if I must say

  That it was one or other, but if sad

  ’Twas sad only with joy too, too far off

  For me to taste it. But I cannot tell

  If truly never anything but fair

  The days were when he sang, as now they seem.

  This surely I know, that I who listened then,

  Happy sometimes, sometimes suffering

  A heavy body and a heavy heart,

  Now straightway, if I think of it, become

  Light as that bird wandering beyond my shore.

  EDWARD THOMAS

  ENGLISH (1878-1917)

  Of Mere Being

  The palm at the end of the mind,

  Beyond the last thought, rises

  In the bronze decor,

  A gold-feathered bird

  Sings in the palm, without human meaning,

  Without human feeling, a foreign song.

  You know then that it is not the reason

  That makes us happy or unhappy.

  The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

  The palm stands on the edge of space.

  The wind moves slowly in the branches.

  The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

  WALLACE STEVENS

  AMERICAN (1879-1955)

  Copyright Acknowledgments

  Yehuda Amichai (translated by Benjamin Harshav and Barbara Harshav): “What Did I Learn in the Wars” from Even a Fist Was Once an Open Palm with Fingers by Yehuda Amichai. Copyright © 1991 by Yehuda Amichai. English-language translation copyright © 1991 by HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

  A. R. Ammons: “Winter Scene.” Copyright © 1968 by A. R. Ammons, from The Selected Poems, Expanded Edition by A. R. Ammons. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  Anonymous, ancient Egyptian (translated by John L. Foster): “Love of you is mixed deep in my vitals” from Love Songs of the New Kingdom, translated from the ancient Egyptian by John L. Foster and illustrated with hierog
lyphics drawn by John L. Foster, copyright © 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974. By permission of the University of Texas Press.

  Ariwara no Narihara (translated by Richard Lane): “That it is a road” from Anthology of Japanese Literature, copyright 1955 by Grove Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  John Ashbery: “Summer,” from A Double Dream of Spring. Copyright © 1970, 1969, 1968, 1967, 1966 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., for the author.

  W. H. Auden: “Stop all the clocks,” copyright 1940 and renewed © 1968 by W. H. Auden, “O the valley in the summer,” copyright 1937 and renewed © 1965 by W. H. Auden. “Musée des Beaux Arts” copyright 1940 and renewed © 1968 by W. H. Auden, “Lay your sleeping head, my love,” copyright 1940 and renewed © 1968 by W. H. Auden, from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.

  Ingeborg Bachmann (translated by Mark Anderson): “A Kind of Loss” reprinted by permission of Mark M. Anderson.

  Mary Barnard: “Now” © 2003 Barnardworks.

  John Berryman: “Life, friends, is boring” Dream Song #14 “Life, Friends” from The Dream Songs by John Berryman. Copyright © 1969 by John Berryman. Copyright renewed © 1997 by Kate Donahue Berryman. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

  Bhartrihari (translated by Andrew Schelling): “Her quick eyes,” copyright Andrew Schelling, with permission of the translator; from Dropping the Bow: Poems from Ancient India (Broken Moon Press: Seattle, 1991).

  Bhavabhuti (translated by Andrew Schelling): “Through the whole night we slowly,” © 1998 by Andrew Schelling, reprinted by permission of City Lights Books.

  Elizabeth Bishop: “In the Waiting Room” and “One Art” from The Complete Poems 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

  Jorge Luis Borges (translated by Alastair Reid): “You,” © 1977, 1995 by Maria Kodama, reprinted with the permission of The Wylie Agency, Inc., from The Gold of the Tigers translated by Alastair Reid. English translation © 1997 by Alastair Reid. Reprinted by permission of the translator.

  William Bronk: “I Thought It Was Harry.” William Bronk Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, with permission of the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York.

  Gwendolyn Brooks: “the sonnet-ballad,” reprinted by consent of Brooks Permissions.

  Basil Bunting: “Mesh cast for mackerel” from Complete Poems, copyright © 2000 by the Estate of Basil Bunting. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.