by John Lithgow
The poem also shows what a wonderful dramatist Eliot is. It has a very specific shape and drama to it. He even creates a main character in the street-lamp. The sharp images contribute to the sense of drama—the corner of the woman’s eye “twists like a crooked pin”; “a twisted branch upon the beach eaten smooth”; “the smallpox cracks” on the face of the moon; and finally, to end the story, “the last twist of the knife.” That’s high drama, and yet the whole poem still manages to feel like a dream or a sleepwalk.
The poems for which Eliot is best known, such as The Waste Land and the Four Quartets, are hard work, worth the effort for all they reveal, but deeply challenging and hard to just dip into. I like this poem because it allows me a wonderful taste of Eliot’s intelligence, his keen eye for detail and his storytelling skill, without the hard climb of some of his other work.
Favorite Poems
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” “The Hollow Men”
“Whispers of Immortality” “Sweeney Among the Nightingales”
“The Naming of Cats”
Robert Frost
The Naturalist
(1874–1963)
Robert Frost penned perhaps the most quoted lines of American poetry ever written: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.” The road less traveled is a catchphrase now, a motto for mavericks, risk-takers, and rugged individualists. Frost was all of these, of course. A free spirit to his bones, he attended both Dartmouth and Harvard, but did not graduate from either, leaving instead to follow his own path. He loved his New England home, but when his farm in New Hampshire failed, he moved to England with his wife, Elinor Miriam White, in 1912. While in England, he wrote about his New England and met other poets such as Robert Graves, Rupert Brooke, and Ezra Pound, who took a particular interest in his work. His second collection of poems, North Boston, brought him international recognition. He returned to the United States in 1915, and by the 1920s, he was the most celebrated poet in America until his death in 1963.
Frost believed in writing in language that was actually spoken; he loved the sound of the human voice and claimed that “all poetry is a reproduction of the tones of actual speech.” Although he avoided experimenting in contemporary forms of the time, he was a thoroughly modern poet who explored complex universal themes.
For a farmer-poet, Frost walked in some tall cotton: he won four Pulitzer Prizes in his career, a mountain in Vermont was named after him in 1955, and he read a poem, “The Gift Outright,” at John F. Kennedy’s presidential inauguration in 1961.
A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.
—Robert Frost
Birches
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
Every time I read this poem, I have a very vivid memory of an incident from my childhood when I was about ten. My family was taking a long drive in the western Massachusetts countryside. We stopped the car to walk in the woods and I went wandering off on my own. I came upon a rotting block and tackle and a piece of rope. I tied the rope around my feet, threw the end of the rope over a limb of the tree, and pulled myself upside down so I was hanging suspended by my own hold on the rope. I was about six feet up when I saw that the rope was going to break—I was terrified. Eventually it did break and I had a nasty fall that took the wind right out of me. It was thrilling but scary, a hair-raising moment that totally embodied the breathless thrill of being a child. When Frost writes, “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches,” I think he’s saying, what is a life without thrill? And perhaps his reference to love toward the end is the ultimate thrill, the heady sensation of falling in love like falling to earth.
Favorite Poems
“Mending Wall” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
“The Road Not Taken” “Design” “To Earthward”
The storyteller in the poem feels in his bones the outdoors and the seasons. You feel the poet amiably, gently twisting this deep sense into a wonderful metaphor. Frost knew of the literary trends of the day—the experiments, radical new poems—but he continually wrote in straightforward, everyday speech. Not that he was a simple man—he had a razor-sharp mind—but he chose his own path. Frost never shied away from the hard stuff; he used the landscape to explore the depths of his feelings. His poems are full of the quiet Vermont mountains, stacked one upon the other, the ferns in the woods, the dark night. Frost saw everything, and his deep love and respect for nature showed him entire worlds inside of snowdrops or the nests of birds. He took his beautiful America and gave it back to his readers not idealized as much as fully appre
ciated.
When Robert Frost was invited to recite a poem at President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961, he intended to read a poem called “Dedication,” which he had written for the occasion. But when he stood to speak, he discovered he couldn’t read his notes and didn’t know the poem well enough yet to recite it from memory, so he did a quick switch and recited a poem he could remember—“The Gift Outright.” This short poem, which speaks of America as the land that “was ours before we were the land’s,” was an instant sensation.
William S. Gilbert
The Topsy-Turvy Poet
(1836–1911)
William S. Gilbert is acknowledged to be the great-granddaddy of song lyricists. With his collaborator, the composer Arthur Sullivan, he created a beloved repertoire of fourteen comic operettas, which are still performed with an almost religious fidelity to their first nineteenth-century London productions. These “Savoy Operas” include The Mikado, The Pirates of Penzance, and H.M.S. Pinafore. My guess is that all the great lyricists—Loranz Hart, Dorothy Fields, Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, Noel Coward, Oscar Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, et al.—were surely Gilbert and Sullivan fans in their formative years.
Are lyricists poets? This is open to discussion. Where a poet writes for himself and his reader, a lyricist must serve the needs of composer, singer, plot, and audience. He must observe rhyme and meter far more rigorously than a poet. He must provide his singer with singable words and phrases. He must tell a story or shape a song with the skill of a fine cabinetmaker. And the songs must connect with an audience the moment they are sung: we can’t linger over lyrics the way we might slowly savor a poem.
That said, Gilbert strikes me as a dazzling poet. “Love Unrequited,” from the operetta Iolanthe, is a tour de force of comic rhymed verse. Better known as “The Nightmare Song,” it is the best example of a Gilbert and Sullivan “patter song,” to be sung at breakneck speed, one syllable per note, with lots of tongue-twisting and breathless pacing. Presented on the page, rather than sung, its wit leaps out at you.
A bit of context: like all Gilbert and Sullivan plots, Iolanthe is whimsical and convoluted. It is a satirical take on Britain’s House of Lords, but also a fairy tale. After a series of absurd plot twists, the operetta ends when the Peers of the Realm run off with a whole bevy of fairies and the Lord Chancellor ends up marrying the Fairy Queen. As they hurtle to this ridiculous climax, the Lord Chancellor is tormented by a dream. When he awakens he sings “The Nightmare Song,” appearing here without its brief introduction.
Love Unrequited, or the Nightmare Song
When you’re lying awake with a dismal headache, and repose is
taboo’d by anxiety,
I conceive you may use any language you choose to indulge in,
without impropriety;
For your brain is on fire—the bedclothes conspire of usual slumber to
plunder you:
First your counterpane goes, and uncovers your toes, and your sheet
slips demurely from under you;
Then the blanketing tickles—you feel like mixed pickles—so terribly
sharp is the pricking.
And you’re hot, and you’re cross, and you tumble and toss till there’s
nothing ’twixt you and the ticking.
Then the bedclothes all creep to the ground in a heap, and you pick
’em all up in a tangle;
Next your pillow resigns and politely declines to remain at its usual
angle!
Well, you get some repose in the form of a doze, with hot eye-balls and
head ever aching.
But your slumbering teems with such horrible dreams that you’d very
much better be waking;
For you dream you are crossing the Channel, and tossing about in a
steamer from Harwich—
Which is something between a large bathing machine and a very small
second-class carriage—
And you’re giving a treat (penny ice and cold meat) to a party of
friends and relations—
They’re a ravenous horde—and they all came on board at Sloane
Square and South Kensington Stations.
And bound on that journey you find your attorney (who started that
morning from Devon);
He’s a bit undersized, and you don’t feel surprised when he tells you
he’s only eleven.
Well, you’re driving like mad with this singular lad (by the by, the
ship’s now a four-wheeler),
And you’re playing round games, and he calls you bad names when
you tell him that “ties pay the dealer”;
But this you can’t stand, so you throw up your hand, and you find you’re as cold as an icicle.
In your shirt and your socks (the black silk with gold clocks), crossing
Salisbury Plain on a bicycle:
And he and the crew are on bicycles too—which they’ve somehow or
other invested in—
And he’s telling the tars all the particulars of a company he’s interested
in—
It’s a scheme of devices, to get at low prices all goods from cough
mixtures to cables
(Which tickled the sailors), by treating retailers as though they were all
vegetables—
You get a good spadesman to plant a small tradesman (first take off his
boots with a boot-tree).
And his legs will take root, and his fingers will shoot, and they’ll
blossom and bud like a fruit-tree—
From the greengrocer tree you get grapes and green pea, cauliflower,
pineapple, and cranberries,
While the pastrycook plant cherry brandy will grant, apple puffs, and
three corners, and Banburys—
The shares are a penny, and ever so many are taken by Rothschild and
Baring,
And just as a few are allotted to you, you awake with a shudder
despairing—
You’re a regular wreck, with a crick in your neck, and no wonder you
snore, for your head’s on the floor, and you’ve needles and pins
from your soles to your shins, and your flesh is a-creep, for your left
leg’s asleep, and you’ve cramp in your toes, and a fly on your nose,
and some fluff in your lung, and a feverish tongue, and a thirst
that’s intense, and a general sense that you haven’t been sleeping in
clover;
But the darkness has passed, and it’s daylight at last, and the night has
been long—ditto, ditto my song—and thank goodness they’re both
of them over!
A cranky contemporary critic has said that Gilbert and Sullivan is more fun to perform than to actually watch. This may be true. I performed in five Gilbert and Sullivan operettas as a student, loving every minute. But I haven’t seen one since.
I couldn’t resist including “The Nightmare Song” in this volume. I suppose this is because I played the Lord Chancellor myself in two different college productions. I remember the crowd’s clamorous response to my big number. But it was W. S. Gilbert, not I, who elicited that response. Nightmares are something we all have in common, and Gilbert’s verbal and psychological pyrotechnics always stopped the show.
But aside from my own personal history with “The Nightmare Song,” I fervently believe that great lyrics belong in the company of great poems, even if just for comic relief.
Allen Ginsberg
The Beat Poet
(1926–1997)
While Allen Ginsberg was studying at Columbia University in New York City in the 1940s, he became friends with Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady (the real-life inspiration for the main character in Kerouac’s On the Road). The tight-knit group spontaneously combusted, bursting out of New York, gathering other writers, poets, and artists,
rolling into San Francisco, and founding the Beat movement. The Beats portrayed a shocking glimpse of the flip side of straight America—they revealed a world of spiritualism, drugs, and sexuality that seemed dangerous and unfamiliar. Like T. S. Eliot’s grim reflection on the state of the world after World War I, the Beats—and Ginsberg especially—painted a dark picture of their truth about American life in the years after World War II. Still, Ginsberg and his friends believed that spiritual life was essential to a person’s existence: “Beat” is short for “beatific,” or “holy.”
Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems (which includes “A Supermarket in California”) was published in 1956 in San Francisco to much clamor, positive and negative, and became the first widely read book of the Beat generation. Its publisher was actually brought to trial on charges of obscenity, and in spite of a firestorm of publicity and controversy over the book, the judge ruled that Howl was not obscene. It went on to become one of the most widely read of the twentieth century and has been translated into twenty-two languages—the “howl” heard round the world.
After living in California and traveling in India, meeting with spiritual gurus and speaking with the sharpest minds of his generation, and founding the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Colorado, Ginsberg returned to New York and settled down in the East Village. His colorful life wrapped around him, he had many visitors and friends, and churned out a steady stream of poetry until his death.
Beat: Allen Ginsberg’s pal Jack Kerouac claims to have coined the term to describe his generation of postwar down-and-outers. It was meant to suggest an overwhelming, worn-out disappointment. The term took on other meanings, as artists and writers came to identify themselves with Ginsberg, Kerouac, and others turning “beat” into a movement. Kerouac later said “beat” had an additional meaning—“beatific,” or sacred and holy. This was particularly so for Kerouac, who frequently visited the theme of spirituality and holiness in his own work. In 1958, the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen described the alienated young people who converged on San Francisco, inspired by Ginsberg and company, as “beatniks.”