by John Lithgow
so here is away and so your is a my
(with a down
up
around again fly)
forever was never till now
now i love you and you love me
(and books are shuter
than books
can be)
and deep in the high that does nothing but fall
(with a shout
each
around we go all)
there’s somebody calling who’s we
we’re anything brighter than even the sun
(we’re everything greater
than books
might mean)
we’re everyanything more than believe
(with a spin
leap
alive we’re alive)
we’re wonderful one times one
Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel . . . the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself. To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
—E. E. Cummings
What an absolutely ecstatic poem. When you read “if everything happens that can’t be done,” your voice does exactly what Cummings describes: you leap, you spin, you fly. Your mouth moves quickly, contorting and bouncing onto the next word. I love how Cummings creates a delirium of excitement; it’s almost a doggerel, with its loopiness and crazy contradictions. Cummings has a great ear for rhythm: the poem reads at times like a playground chant or a song. He is intimate and chummy, confiding in the reader in those parentheses. He shatters every notion that poems are dusty tomes of iambic pentameter and flawless rhyme schemes. He plays with ideas in this poem, tossing them up like pickup sticks—how well they land in a pattern that’s all about the glorious state of love.
Cummings detested conformity and artificiality, and often poked sharply at American society in his poems. While he was working in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps in World War I, his pacifist beliefs even led to him being thrown into a French prison camp under suspicion of espionage, an experience Cummings molded into a novel, The Enormous Room. Throughout his career, he was criticized for his fragmented writing and individualistic style. But by the time he died in 1962, he was one of the most widely read and beloved poets in America. In a 1925 poem to Picasso, to whom he felt a kinship and admiration, Cummings says, “you hew form truly.” I say it takes one to know one.
Favorite Poems
“my father moved through dooms of love”
“maggie and millie and molly and may”
“All in green went my love riding” “Spring is like a perhaps hand”
“since feeling is first”
Emily Dickinson
The Cloistered Poet
(1830–1886)
A young Emily Dickinson was so pleased with one of her school compositions that she described it in a letter to a friend as “exceedingly edifying to myself as well as everybody else.” She was witty and even wrote the humor column for the Amherst Academy newspaper. But the funny schoolgirl who was in love with her own words at fifteen would not grow up to be a celebrated writer of prose. She would always love words—and her mid-nineteenth-century New England was a literary hive—but Dickinson withdrew entirely from the outside world, living her adult life in seclusion in her family’s home in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her companions, she once wrote to an editor, were “hills . . . and the sundown, and a dog large as myself, that my father bought me. They are better than beings because they know, but do not tell.” Holed up in Amherst, she nevertheless carried on a voluminous personal correspondence with friends, family, and publishing acquaintances. Her letters reveal an engaging young woman who cared and thought deeply about people, literature, religion, and other concerns of the day. But she preferred time with books, certainly her easiest friends, and poetry was her chosen mode of transport.
Dickinson was extremely prolific and often included poems in the letters she wrote to friends. But her greatness as a poet was not recognized in her lifetime. Upon her death in 1886, her family discovered more than 800 of her poems, handwritten and bound in small booklets. Her first volume of poems was not published until 1890.
Favorite Poems
“The Mystery of Pain” “I cannot live with You” (640)
“Because I could not stop for Death” (712)
“I heard a Fly buzz—when I died” (465)
“A Bird came down the Walk” (328)
There is no Frigate like a Book (1263)
There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry—
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll—
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human soul.
There’s usually no mistaking an Emily Dickinson poem—the dashes, the capitalization, the distinct vocabulary. I’ve always admired her choice of nouns and verbs over adjectives and adverbs. The emphasis is on the idea the words are expressing more than the words themselves. (Although how often is it that we get to roll a “frigate” off the tongue?) I also love how this poem, in so few words, reflects the joy of creating on the one hand, and savoring on the other. A librarian’s favorite, this famous Dickinson poem is a perfect example of her elegant and spare work. Her poems are deceptively simple—this one is a celebration of the fact that written words can carry emotion and that the comfort of language is free to all of us.
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.
—Emily Dickinson
The most triumphant Bird I ever knew or met (1265)
The most triumphant Bird I ever knew or met
Embarked upon a twig today
And till Dominion set
I famish to behold so eminent a sight
And sang for nothing scrutable
But intimate Delight.
Retired, and resumed his transitive Estate—
To what delicious Accident
Does finest Glory fit!
John Donne
The Metaphysical Poet
(1572–1631)
Although Donne cleaved to love, death, and religion as the great themes in his work, the forms in which he wrote were far- ranging. He was equally eloquent in any genre, from songs, sonnets, and love poetry to sermons, religious poems, Latin translations, elegies, and epigrams. Hallmarks of his writing are startling extended metaphors, inventive wordplay, clever and indirect argument, and unusual syntax. His education in secular and religious law, his experience in the navy, his membership in Parliament, and his appointment as royal chaplain and dean of Saint Paul’s Cathedral all contributed to his poetry’s remarkable imagery: rags of time; the round earth’s imagin’d corners; our eye-beams twisted, and did thread our eyes upon one double string.
Donne’s deeply personal and ambivalent relationship to religion was illuminated in his brilliant, entertaining sermons, for which he was famous. In fact, one of his most quoted phrases is from a sermon, not a poem: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” He also struggled with a profound, unresolved fear of death, especially after his wife died at age thirty-three after the birth of their twelfth child. (Only seven children survived.)
But Donne was a master of paradox, and even as he wrestled with mortality and physical and spiritual disease, he was capable of witty investigations of lighter subjects, such as the poem that follows. For Donne, the world was always there waiting for his exploration.
“On Donne’s Poetry,” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
With Donne, whose muse on dromedary trots,
Wreathe iron pokers into truelove knots;
Rhyme’s sturdy cripple, fancy’s maze and clue,<
br />
Wit’s forge and fire-blast, meaning’s press and screw.
Song
Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil’s foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy’s stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.
If thou be’st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee,
Thou, when thou return’st, wilt tell me,
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear,
No where
Lives a woman true and fair.
If thou find’st one, let me know,
Such a pilgrimage were sweet;
Yet do not, I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet,
Though she were true, when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two, or three.
I think it’s fitting that this poem is simply called “Song” because it has all the humor and coldhearted truth of a great country music song. With its laundry list of fantastical things that are impossible to achieve, the poem is a wonderful, playful joke about never trusting a woman. The vivid imagery and musical rhythm contrast with the cynical attitude of the narrator and create a terrific tension. Although the poem is 400 years old, when you read it aloud it sounds as fresh and modern as if it had been written today—a testimony to the inherent magic contained in the words themselves.
The poem reflects familiar symbols of the seventeenth century, which Donne loved to twist and turn into his own private universe, not caring particularly whether it was popular. In fact, John Dryden, an English poet of the next generation, described Donne’s secular poetry this way: “He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of love.” Certainly this particular “Song” would not exactly engage any woman’s heart!
Metaphysics: the branch of philosophy concerned with the study of the nature of being and beings, existence, time and space, and causality.
The Sun Rising
Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school-boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
Thy beams so reverend, and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long.
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and to-morrow late tell me,
Whether both th’ Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou left’st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw’st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, “All here in one bed lay.”
She’s all states, and all princes I;
Nothing else is;
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honour’s mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world’s contracted thus;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy centre is, these walls thy sphere.
Favorite Poems
“Break of Day” “Death, be not proud” (Holy Sonnet 10)
“Air and Angels” “The Ecstasy” “Love’s Growth”
T. S. Eliot
The Modernist
(1888–1965)
Though Thomas Stearns Eliot once said that growing up in St. Louis, Missouri, “beside the big river” influenced his poetry, he was no Mark Twain. His family had deep roots in that Mississippi River town, but Eliot left St. Louis after high school and never looked back. A brilliant student, he attended Harvard and Oxford, traveled in Europe, and settled in to a high literary life in London, where in 1925 he became a director of the publishing firm Faber and Faber, a position he held for the next forty years. He became a British citizen in 1927 and seemed to embody more of an English sensibility than an American one.
Eliot is considered by many to be the most influential poet of the twentieth century. In 1915, when he was only twenty-two years old, the poet Ezra Pound nudged him onto the public stage by arranging for his poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to be published in Poetry magazine. The stream-of-consciousness style and stark imagery of this poem upset both readers and critics, who were still caught up in the idyll of late Romantic–style poetry. Pound recognized that at first Eliot would “puzzle many and delight a few,” but that his long-term contribution would be tremendous. World War I had arrived, and the harsh truth of this first modern war would sweep away Romantic notions forever, leaving artists and writers like Eliot to invent a new vocabulary for this terrible new world.
Eliot’s The Waste Land, which was published in 1922, is considered the anthem of disillusionment of the postwar generation. “The Hollow Men” and Four Quartets continued to forge a new poetic form and reflected Eliot’s vast knowledge of literature, philosophy, religion, and culture. T. S. Eliot was a scholar and a critic whose opinion was highly influential and whose work inspired a whole generation of poets after him. A serious, religious man, he surprised readers with his playful Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, which would become the basis for the long-playing Broadway musical Cats. And it tickles me that one of Eliot’s favorite possessions was a portrait of Groucho Marx, whom he befriended through correspondence later in life. Maybe deep inside, Eliot was just a fun-loving American after all!
Modernist: one who deliberately departed from traditional forms of expression and adopted the innovative forms that distinguish the arts and literature of the twentieth century.
Rhapsody on a Windy Night
Twelve o’clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street-lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
Half-past one,
The street-lamp sputtered,
The street-lamp muttered,
The street-lamp said, “Regard that woman
Who hesitates toward you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see the border of her dress
Is torn and stained with sand,
And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin.”
The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
A broken spring in a factory yard,
Rust that clings to
the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.
Half-past two,
The street-lamp said,
“Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
Slips out its tongue
And devours a morsel of rancid butter.”
So the hand of the child, automatic,
Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay.
I could see nothing behind that child’s eye.
I have seen eyes in the street
Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
An old crab with barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.
Half-past three,
The lamp sputtered,
The lamp muttered in the dark.
The lamp hummed:
“Regard the moon,
La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
She winks a feeble eye,
She smiles into corners.
She smoothes the hair of the grass.
The moon has lost her memory.
A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and eau de Cologne,
She is alone
With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain.”
The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
And female smells in shuttered rooms,
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smells in bars.
The lamp said,
“Four o’clock,
Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key,
The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair,
Mount.
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.”
The last twist of the knife.
Although Eliot is thought of as such an intellectual poet—and indeed, some of his major poems are intellectual touchstones of the modern era—this poem is not intellectual. It’s as universal and accessible as it can be because it’s about the sensuality of memory. As you read, you feel the flickers of memory are familiar to you, in part because Eliot evokes a familiar, dreamy semiconscious state we’ve all experienced. This stroll in the middle of the night features a woman, a child, a cat, a dead geranium, and many other sights and sounds and smells that are snips of the memories of wakefulness. These may not be the exact images that would appear in your mind-wandering late-night stroll, but they still feel perfectly familiar.