by John Lithgow
A Supermarket in California
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
Berkeley, 1955
Listen to Ginsberg read “A Supermarket in California” at
www.poetryarchive.org. It makes his imaginary conversation
with Whitman quite real.
Favorite Poems
“Song” “Bricklayer’s Lunch Hour”
“In the Baggage Room at Greyhound” “America” “Howl”
This Ginsbergian stream-of-consciousness account of a visit to the grocery store reminds me of T. S. Eliot’s “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” in its dreamy, late-night, semiconscious mood. Ginsberg was a tremendous sensualist—what’s more sensual than walking among peaches, melons, all the smells, color, juice, so full of life? No wonder he invokes the other great sensualist, Walt Whitman. I love Ginsberg’s happy willingness to connect with the phantom of this poet (and another poet ancestor, Federico García Lorca) in the humble aisles of a grocery store.
Famous for his slightly kooky sense of humor, he could look at a supermarket and see the ridiculousness of it all—babies in the tomatoes! He both luxuriates in the abundance and is made uncomfortable by the embarrassment of riches. But he also delves into his own mind with stunning courage. He goes deep inside and hides nothing—even admitting that he feels “absurd” writing the poem. Fellow poet William Carlos Williams said of Ginsberg, “He avoids nothing but experiences it to the hilt. He contains it. Claims it as his own—and, we believe, laughs at it.”
Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.
—Allen Ginsberg
Robert Herrick
The Cavalier Poet
(1591–1674)
Robert Herrick is one of those literary figures about whom little is known, and not just because he was born more than 400 years ago. Details of his childhood are sketchy, though it is known that his father died when Herrick was quite young and he was apprenticed for some years before entering St. John’s College at Cambridge. There he became known as one of the “Sons of Ben,” popular young writers who idolized the poet Ben Jonson. Herrick and others in this crowd were criticized by the Puritans for writing about such frivolous subjects as romance. They were dubbed the “Cavalier poets” for their association with the court of King Charles I, and known for their saucy style, use of common language, and man-about-town manner. The Cavaliers were a bit of a literary Rat Pack, but they produced some of the most enjoyable and distinctive poems of the period, and were an important bridge between the poetic traditions that came before and after them.
Though Herrick was a fun-loving fellow who thoroughly enjoyed the social life in London, in 1623 he was ordained as an Episcopal minister and sent to the quiet countryside of Devon, where he settled into his life’s work. I love that the unmarried Reverend Herrick went on to write hundreds of poems celebrating the feminine charms of lasses and ladies and mistresses, most famously a giant body of work devoted to someone named Julia, though there are plenty of others he toasts, including Sylvia, Anthea, Perilla, and Dianeme. Besides the fact that this man of the cloth spent so much of his free time daydreaming about women, it is also funny to consider that several literary historians believe that most of these ladies were fictional. In other words, for all the glorious detail he uses to describe them and his feelings for them, they were likely all in his head!
No matter. The rapture Herrick voices in a verse about Sylvia’s bracelet or her petticoat or even her teeth—well, it’s clear he had a wonderful appreciation of women that found its perfect expression in the Cavalier style. He wrote about flowers and poverty and fortune and family and mortality and royalty and even fairies with equal warmth and good humor.
The Beggar to Mab, the Fairy Queen
Please your Grace, from out your store,
Give an alms to one that’s poor,
That your mickle may have more.
Black I’m grown for want of meat;
Give me then an ant to eat,
Or the cleft ear of a mouse
Over-sour’d in drink of souce;
Or, sweet lady, reach to me
The abdomen of a bee;
Or commend a cricket’s hip,
Or his huckson, to my scrip.
Give for bread a little bit
Of a pease that ’gins to chit,
And my full thanks take for it.
Flour of fuzz-balls, that’s too good
For a man in needy-hood;
But the meal of milldust can
Well content a craving man.
Any orts the elves refuse
Well will serve the beggar’s use.
But if this may seem too much
For an alms, then give me such
Little bits that nestle there
In the prisoner’s panier.
So a blessing light upon
You and mighty Oberon:
That your plenty last till when
I return your alms again.
This is a poem full of astounding notions, not the least the idea of a starving beggar pleading with a tiny fairy queen to fashion somehow a meal for him. Queen Mab is a fairy famous in Irish folklore as the bringer of dreams, whom Shakespeare first wrote about in a speech by Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. And Oberon, mentioned near the end of the poem, is the king of the fairies in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
It’s quite captivating, combining talk of fairies and magic with the brutal reality of a wretchedly poor man, and mixing lighthearted fancy with something so grim and gruesome. “Black I’m grown for want of meat”—that’s a stark and haunting image, especially right next to a line asking for an ant to eat or the ear of a mouse. But there’s a hint of hope in it, and a heartening dollop of gratitude, as only could be expressed by someone who has absolutely nothing. The beggar asks the fairy for alms, a small bit of food, and by the end you feel sure he’ll return the favor, if ever given the chance. This is the sort of matter-of-fact good nature that I have always loved about the Cavaliers.
Favorite Poems
“Delight in Disorder” “To Daffodils”
“To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”
“The Argument of His Book” “To Sylvia, to Wed”
“Upon Julia’s Clothes”
Sons of Ben: self-description of the dramatists and poets who proclaimed the ardent admiration for the poet Ben Jonson. Robert Herrick, who counted himself as a Son of Ben, wrote “His Prayer to Ben Jonson” to honor the influence Jonson had on his own work:
When I a verse shall make,
Know I have pray’d thee,
For old religion’s sake,
Saint Ben, to aid me.
Make the way smooth for me,
When I, thy Herrick,
Honouring thee, on my knee
Offer my lyric.
Candles I’ll give to thee,
And a new altar,
And thou, Saint Ben, shalt be
Writ in my Psalter.
Be my mistress short or tall
Be my mistress short or tall
And distorted therewithall
Be she likewise one of those
That an acre hath of nose
Be her teeth ill hung or set
And her grinders black as jet
Be her cheeks so shallow too
As to show her tongue wag through
Hath she thin hair, hath she none
She’s to me a paragon.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Reluctant Poet
(1844–1889)
Gerard Manley Hopkins had one of the most important days of his literary career in 1918, twenty-nine years after he died. On that day, his friend and fellow poet Robert Bridges published a volume of Hopkins’s work called Poems. During his lifetime, Hopkins only shared his poetry privately with a small circle of friends. He was a religious man, and he sacrificed fame as a poet in favor of becoming a Jesuit priest. In 1867, he swore to “write no more.” He destroyed all of his poetry and did not write again until 1875.
It took a deeply moving tragedy to inspire Hopkins to take up writing again. In 1875, a German ship, the Deutschland, was shipwrecked during a storm near the Thames River and five nuns were among those who drowned. His poem “The Wreck of the Deutschland” introduced what he described as “sprung rhythm,” a new form that gave room for more unaccented syllables. Hopkins said, “[I] had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which now I realised on paper. . . . I do not say the idea is altogether new . . . but no one has professedly used it and made it the principle throughout, that I know of.” This was a modest assessment—his new form was groundbreaking and enormously innovative.
Hopkins was aware of his otherness as a poet; he wrote in a letter to a chum, “No doubt, my poetry errs on the side of oddness.” “The Wreck of the Deutschland” was so unconventional that the editor of a Jesuit magazine, the Month, according to Hopkins, “dared not print it.” Hopkins was a champion of eccentricity and celebrated the unusual as a sign of the multitude and marvels of the world.
Sprung rhythm: a term coined by Gerard Manley Hopkins to describe a form of free verse that featured a regular rhythm intended to imitate the rhythm of natural speech.
Because Hopkins wasn’t published until nearly thirty years after his death, he is often grouped with modern poets like W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and T. S. Eliot, rather than the Victorian poets who were his contemporaries. Instead of going out of style along with the Victorians, Hopkins fit in with the modern crowd because of his experimental structure and quirky use of words—some say he was a tremendously important influence who paved the way for modernist poetry.
Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise Him.
Just look at Hopkins’s fantastic use of language and rhythm, his artful dexterity with alliteration and the coupling of words. He saw colors and patterns everywhere—even the land itself is patterned and divided into squares of different colors: dark and loamy where it has been ploughed and sown, green for pasture, or left fallow. Hopkins always had an eye out for the striking and unusual bits of natural phenomena: “pied” means having two or more colors, in patches or splotches. A “brinded” cow is one whose coat is brownish orange with bits of gray. In his Journals, Hopkins described “chestnuts as bright as coals or spots of vermilion.” Like an impressionist painter, he also loved light playing on subjects. He cherished—worshiped—the glory of the natural world with all its unexpectedness. This poem is an homage to variety, unpredictability, irregularity . . . dappled things. The last line, “Praise Him,” is perfect—it sounds just like a hymn.
Favorite Poems
“The Windhover” “Inversnaid” “The Habit of Perfection”
“I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day”
“As kingfishers catch fire”
God’s Grandeur
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
A. E. Housman
The Scholar Poet
(1859–1936)
A. E. Housman was an enigma. In his personal life, he was unsociable, fiercely private, and very guarded in his interactions with others. But in his poems, he sheds his thick skin and reveals a sensitive soul in tune with the tenderness of lost love and youth. How to account for these two very different sides of a complicated man?
Housman was born in Fockbury, England. He attended St. John’s College at Oxford, but shocked everyone—including himself—by failing his final exams. He left Oxford and worked as a clerk in the Patent Office in London for ten years, teaching himself Latin and Greek whenever he could find the time. He spent hours in the British Museum, reading ancient texts and translating classical poems and gaining a reputation as a scholar, which led to his appointment as a professor of Latin at University College in London. In 1911, he was appointed professor of Latin at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he stayed for the rest of his life.
His first collection of poems, A Shropshire Lad (1896), astounded his colleagues and students. The quite public laying bare of feeling and nostalgia shocked those who were acquainted with the gruff, often sarcastic scholar. A Shropshire Lad plumbed in deeply personal ways themes such as the loss of innocence, unrequited love, the cruel passage of time, and death. Yet all this is expressed through the fictional character of the Shropshire lad and takes place in a half-made-up place; Housman had never actually set foot in Shropshire; he had only seen its faraway hills as a boy (“blue remembered hills”).
Housman never attempted to reconcile his severe, academic side with the passionate poet that existed somewhere inside him. He was a loner by choice and lived a cold, sterile existence—someone once described his apartment at Trinity as a train station waiting room. Yet he was incredibly curious about the world and delved into ancient texts with passion and hunger. In a lecture, he once said, “At Easter time they hide coloured eggs about the house and the
garden that the children may amuse themselves in hunting after them and finding them. It is to some such game of hide-and-seek that we are invited by that power which planted in us the desire to find out what is concealed, and stored the universe with hidden things that we might delight ourselves in discovering them. . . . The sum of things to be known is inexhaustible, and however long we read we shall never come to the end of our story-book.”
When I was one-and-twenty
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
“Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.”
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
“The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
’Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue.”
And I am two-and-twenty
And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.
I can hear the swooning sigh of a young man, the almost theatrical regret of love and loss, in this poem. In Housman’s Last Poems, he says mournfully, “May will be fine next year as like as not: / Oh ay, but then we shall be twenty-four.” When you’re young, it can all seem so dramatically melancholy, until the weight and passage of time puts age and experience into perspective. And a young man can’t hear that from an older man, no matter how wise—he has to go through it himself. This young man speaks for every young man or woman teetering on the edge between youth and maturity—old enough to feel the very real pain of a broken heart, but young enough to make the mistake of not listening to someone who probably knows better.