The Poets' Corner

by John Lithgow

  Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee!

  He is called by thy name,

  For He calls Himself a Lamb.

  He is meek & He is mild,

  He became a little child.

  I a child & thou a lamb,

  We are called by His name.

  Little Lamb, God bless thee!

  Little Lamb, God bless thee!

  I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.

  —William Blake

  Gwendolyn Brooks

  The Visionary

  (1917–2000)

  When Gwendolyn Brooks began writing at age seven, her mother predicted, “You are going to be the lady Paul Laurence Dunbar.” She was first published at age eleven, and by sixteen was contributing weekly poetry to the Chicago Defender newspaper. The precociously talented Brooks went on to exceed her mother’s prophecy and became a great poet in her own right.

  Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, and raised in Chicago. She lived through the aftermath and disillusionment of World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and the tumultuous civil rights movement. Poetry for Brooks was always a social act. Tackling tough issues head-on, she used her verse to address segregation, postwar bitterness, and the enormity of the civil rights movement. She traveled all over the country, giving talks and workshops in schools, libraries, and prisons. She was the first black writer to receive the Pulitzer Prize, for Annie Allen in 1949. In 1968 she was named poet laureate for the state of Illinois, and from 1985 to 1986 was the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. As a leader in the Black Arts movement in Chicago in the 1960s and ’70s, Brooks encouraged black poets to find their voice—and who could help but be inspired by the piercing clarity of her own?

  Favorite Poems

  “the sonnet-ballad” “do not be afraid of no”

  “The Bean Eaters” “kitchenette building”

  “Speech to the Young: Speech to the Progress-Toward”

  We Real Cool

  The Pool Players.

  Seven at the Golden Shovel.

  We real cool. We

  Left school. We

  Lurk late. We

  Strike straight. We

  Sing sin. We

  Thin gin. We

  Jazz June. We

  Die soon.

  I love how spare and lean this poem is. What a perfect example of the powerful punch within something so simple—it’s a downright scary poem. At a reading at the Guggenheim Museum in 1983, Brooks said, “I wrote it because I was passing by a pool hall in my community one afternoon during schooltime and I saw therein a little bunch of boys . . . and they were shooting pool. But instead of asking myself, ‘Why aren’t they in school?’ I asked myself, ‘I wonder how they feel about themselves.’” Brooks listened to people: their inflections, their favorite words, the way they seemed to want to portray themselves.

  Brooks’s style is distinctive. She took the sermons she heard at church, the blues, jazz, and black spirituals and melded them with traditional forms like the ballad and the sonnet. In a priceless recording of “We Real Cool,” Brooks recites like a Beat poet. Her old voice warbles from word to word at a syncopated rhythm. She stays on the “We,” then jumps down to the next line suddenly. The alliteration moves it along like a blues song, making the abrupt ending that much more powerful. There is not one word in “We Real Cool” that is unnecessary—every single one belongs and does a whole lot of work for the poem.

  Brooks showed the courage of ordinary people in the face of hardship, at a time when America badly needed her gutsy and compassionate voice.

  Listen to Gwendolyn Brooks read “We Real Cool”

  (recorded May 3, 1983, at the Guggenheim Museum) at

  http://poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15433.

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  The Beloved

  (1806–1861)

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning was one of the most cherished poets—male or female—of her time. Her poems are powerful and gripping, and her personal life was like a Lifetime drama. Educated at home, as a child she borrowed her brother’s tutor and studied Latin, history, philosophy, and literature. She “ate and drank Greek” and even taught herself Hebrew so she could read the Old Testament. She was writing epic poems by the time she was twelve.

  Barrett Browning struggled with debilitating illness throughout her early life, though she wrote steadily and gained popularity in the 1830s. At the age of thirty-nine, she was living an invalid’s life of seclusion in her father’s house. She received visitors, but almost never left her bedroom. Still, her life had a second act waiting to unfold.

  Her 1844 volume, entitled simply Poems, established her as one of Britain’s most popular and revered poets. She received buckets of fan mail, including one letter from a Mr. Robert Browning. He wrote, “I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart—and I love you too.” Her severe father had forbidden all eleven of his children ever to marry, but Elizabeth and Robert quietly exchanged some 574 letters over twenty months and fell head over heels in love. One morning, Robert came to Elizabeth’s room, and, with him, she shed what she called her “graveclothes” and walked out of the bedroom on her own two feet for the first time in six years. The lovers eloped and settled in Florence, Italy, where Barrett Browning regained her strength, wrote feverishly, and raised a son, the aptly nicknamed Pen.

  Favorite Poems

  “A Musical Instrument” “Change Upon Change”

  “A Man’s Requirements” “Irreparableness” “Grief”

  Barrett Browning wrote the Sonnets from the Portuguese, of which the following poem is number 43, between when she met Robert Browning in 1845 and when they were married in 1846. She chose the title because of her husband’s nickname for her: his “Portuguese,” due to her tan skin. It is this mixture of private and public, of strong intellectual force and mysterious winks, that keeps readers rummaging through Barrett Browning’s lovely poems today.

  How do I love thee?

  Let me count the ways

  (Sonnet 43)

  How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

  I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

  My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

  For the ends of being and ideal grace.

  I love thee to the level of every day’s

  Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

  I love thee freely, as men strive for right.

  I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.

  I love thee with the passion put to use

  In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.

  I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

  With my lost saints! I love thee with the breath,

  Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,

  I shall but love thee better after death.

  The Sonnets from the Portuguese are some of the most famous love poems in English. “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” is one of the most recognizable lines in the English canon. In the words of her husband, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poems were strong with “the fresh strange music, the affluent language, the exquisite pathos and true new brave thought.”

  I think when you read this you naturally think of the person you love the most—if you’re lucky enough to love someone that much. Browning deals with every aspect of love: simple love (“most quiet need”), complicated love (“the breath / Smiles, tears, of all my life”), and sacred love (“my childhood’s faith”). She helps you understand love at the same time that you are enveloped in its mystery. Her own life and love echo familiar fairy tales and myths. Her forbidden courtship casts her as a Juliet, her invalid status makes her a sort of Sleeping Beauty, and, of course, she had a Cinderella-story happy ending, complete with prince, casa, if not castle, and fame. In The Ring and the Book, Browning himself compared their courtship to the legends of Andromeda and Perseus and Saint G
eorge and his maiden.

  Luckily, Barrett Browning’s work is as strong as her myth. She was England’s most famous woman poet during her lifetime. Her fans included John Ruskin, Emily Dickinson, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, and mobs of other people admired her for her strong morality and passion. Barrett Browning wrote about causes that moved her: everything from the exploitation of children in coal mines to the risorgimento, the movement to unify Italy as a nation-state. She felt for those who were unjustly held back or discriminated against, perhaps having developed that sympathy from living a stalled life until she claimed it for her own.

  The Best Thing in the World

  What’s the best thing in the world?

  June-rose, by May-dew impearled;

  Sweet south-wind, that means no rain;

  Truth, not cruel to a friend;

  Pleasure, not in haste to end;

  Beauty, not self-decked and curled

  Till its pride is over-plain;

  Love, when, so, you’re loved again.

  What’s the best thing in the world?

  —Something out of it, I think.

  What is genius but the power of expressing a new individuality?

  —Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Robert Burns

  The Ploughman Poet

  (1759–1796)

  Walt Whitman once wrote that no man who ever lived was so beloved as Robert Burns. He explained why: “He had a real heart of flesh and blood beating in his bosom; you could almost hear it throb. The gods, indeed, made him poetical, but Nature had a hand in him first. His heart was in the right place.”

  And so was his intellect and compassion and abiding affection for the land and his country. The Scots loved him for his rowdy, playful way and for his deep fondness for rural Scottish life. I love him best for his ferocious wit and his boisterous use of language—clearly, his language and his country are inextricably bound. Writing in his wild Scottish dialect, he goosed traditional English poetry like a mischievous prankster. And reading Burns aloud, you feel wonderfully as if you’re in on the whole happy song.

  To a Mouse

  (On turning her up in her nest with the plough, November, 1785)

  Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie,

  O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!

  Thou need na start awa sae hasty,

  Wi’ bickering brattle!

  I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee,

  Wi’ murd’ring pattle!

  I’m truly sorry man’s dominion

  Has broken Nature’s social union,

  An’ justifies that ill opinion,

  Which makes thee startle

  At me, thy poor, earth-born companion.

  An’ fellow mortal!

  I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve:

  What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!

  A daimen icker in a thrave

  ’S a sma’ request;

  I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave,

  An’ never miss’t!

  Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!

  It’s silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!

  An’ naething, now, to big a new ane,

  O’ foggage green!

  An’ bleak December’s win’s ensuin.

  Baith snell an’ keen!

  Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste,

  An’ weary winter comin fast.

  An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,

  Thou thought to dwell,

  Till crash! the cruel coulter past

  Out thro’ thy cell.

  That wee bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble,

  Has cost thee mony a weary nibble!

  Now thou’s turn’d out, for a’ thy trouble.

  But house or hald,

  To thole the winter’s sleety dribble,

  An’ cranreuch cauld!

  But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,

  In proving foresight may be vain:

  The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men

  Gang aft agley,

  An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,

  For promis’d joy!

  Still thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!

  The present only toucheth thee:

  But och! I backward cast my e’e,

  On prospects drear!

  An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,

  I guess an’ fear!

  It’s a very simple notion that a mouse has a more uncomplicated life than a man because a man has memories and the mouse does not. But the little tragedy of its unwittingly being upended by a plough puts mouse and man very much in the same boat—who of us doesn’t feel from time to time upended by fate or circumstance or plain bad luck? And a little fearful of more of the same to come. You’re a mouse, I’m a mouse; only Burns could reach out to such a creature with such vivid and utterly convincing empathy.

  Robert Burns, like Shakespeare, is one of those poets whose use of language is so original that you feel you might want to have a special dictionary handy so you don’t miss any of the good jokes. Indeed, Burns aficionados have long compiled glossaries of his words to help themselves and others decipher the dialect and turns of phrase. The lists are loaded with fabulous words like cankrie (grumpy), drouthy (thirsty), and creepie chair (which is essentially where you go when you have a time-out). Go to www.worldburnsclub.com to view a terrific and extensive online Burns dictionary.

  Robert Burns was a man who had calluses on his hands, dirt under his fingernails, and was deeply connected to the earth. And his language was as true as the soil under his feet—when he wrote this poem in 1785, did he have any notion that he would dazzle people from other centuries with words like “snell” or “foggage” or “coulter”? He was an educated man—he could have written “You small, glossy-coated, shy beast” but chose the words of his native land on purpose. With plough in hand and these marvelous words on his tongue, he plumbed the depths of human experience, all within the universe of a single poem, as “To a Mouse.” To give Whitman the last word on why we should turn our ear to the poems of Robert Burns, “He held the plough or the pen with the same firm, manly grasp. And he was loved.”

  Favorite Poems

  “Auld Lang Syne” “Holy Willie’s Prayer” “Tam O’ Shanter”

  “The Jolly Beggars” “Afton Water”

  A Red, Red Rose

  O my luve’s like a red, red rose,

  That’s newly sprung in June;

  O my luve’s like the melodie

  That’s sweetly played in tune.

  As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,

  So deep in luve am I;

  And I will luve thee still, my dear,

  Till a’ the seas gang dry.

  Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,

  And the rocks melt wi’ the sun:

  O I will luve thee still, my dear,

  While the sands o’ life shall run.

  And fare thee weel, my only luve,

  And fare thee weel awhile!

  And I will come again, my luve,

  Though it were ten thousand mile.

  George Gordon, Lord Byron

  The Romantic

  (1788–1824)

  Byron was an aristocrat by title but a scalawag by reputation. He may not have had any choice in the matter, as the son of a man known as Captain “Mad Jack” Byron, the grandson of Vice Admiral “Foulweather Jack” Byron, and the brother of William “the Wicked Lord” Byron. These folks probably weren’t members of the church choir!

  Byron was the personification of the romantic adventurer. Born in London and raised in Scotland, he was plagued from birth by lameness in one leg. He struggled with this handicap his whole life, as much emotionally as physically. Some might argue that his disability was a hindrance to his heroic aspirations, but I’m inclined to guess it challenged him to pursue his boundless passions.

  He became “Lord Byron” at the age of ten, on the death of a great-uncle who passed on the title and
an inheritance that enabled Byron’s proper education and culminated in his attending Trinity College at Cambridge. After university, his Grand Tour of Asia and Europe set him on his lifelong path of adventure.

  Byron was the very definition of an independent spirit. He spoke his mind and was well-known for his sharp political opinions and rough but intelligent criticism of his political opponents. At the age of twenty-four, he became famous for the first of his narrative poems in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. And he quickly became infamous for his various affairs and social misdoings, which caused him to leave England forever to be free of its judgment of his conduct.

  The Byronic hero is a brooding, moody literary type associated with Lord Byron’s poetry and the influence of his persona. This hero is flawed, rebellious, passionate, antisocial, disdainful of the privileged classes, and usually self-destructive. He also is often miserably thwarted in love and must hide an unsavory past. Think of the character of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights or Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre.

  I imagine Byron as the Mick Jagger of his time. Famous the world over, he left a swath of passion and creativity and scandalous relationships in his wake. One of his paramours, Lady Caroline Lamb, notably described him as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” People cheered him, shook their fists at him, even followed him into battle. In 1824, out of sympathy for the movement for Greek independence from Turkey, Byron spent his own money to outfit the Greek naval fleet and set off to fight alongside the Greek rebels. On the way, he fell ill and died a couple of months later. This was the essence of Byron, to throw himself headlong into a rebellious, romantic endeavor, no matter how self-destructive it might ultimately prove to be. Just like a rock star.

  I would I were a careless child

  I would I were a careless child,

  Still dwelling in my highland cave,

  Or roaming through the dusky wild,

  Or bounding o’er the dark blue wave;

  The cumbrous pomp of Saxon pride

  Accords not with the freeborn soul,

  Which loves the mountain’s craggy side,