The Poets' Corner
Page 10
“Bright Star” “On the Grasshopper and the Cricket”
“This Living Hand”
To Autumn
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barréd clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
The great beauty of Poetry is that it makes everything, every place interesting.
—John Keats
Keats wrote this poem after enjoying a glorious autumn day, which he described to a friend as warm and “better than the chilly green of spring.” And how vivid his depiction, in the first stanza especially, with the feeling of ripening to the point of bursting, the trees bent with apples, swollen gourds, an overflowing of honey. What a wonder, these sensuous, glowing images of the sights and sounds and smells of ripeness in the season of harvest.
Ode: an elaborate form of lyrical verse with classical Greek origins. The English ode generally takes a serious, meditative approach to subjects such as nature or art.
When autumn itself becomes a character in the second stanza, we see it as we’ve never seen it before, dozing and lazily watching the season come to its end. The poem personifies autumn and the autumnal moment in the cycles of life, which Keats appreciated perhaps more than any other. He accepted how life and death mix, spring bringing new life, summer the fullness of life, and autumn the inevitable conclusion.
We’re all a part of the passing of seasons and the passing of time, from youth to our elder years. When Keats asks, “Where are the songs of Spring? . . . Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,” he reminds us that age has its music, to be savored and experienced as richly as youth. He seems to be expressing a joyous gratitude, even in the face of his own death.
The noted critic Harold Bloom called “To Autumn” one of the “most beautiful of all Keats’s odes, and as close to perfect as any shorter poem in the English language.” I’m inclined to agree.
La Belle Dame Sans Merci
Ah, what can ail thee, Knight at arms,
Alone and palely loitering;
The sedge is wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.
Ah, what can ail thee, Knight at arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.
I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever dew;
And on thy cheek a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
I met a lady in the meads
Full beautiful, a faery’s child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long;
For sideways would she lean, and sing
A faery’s song.
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She look’d at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna dew;
And sure in language strange she said,
I love thee true.
She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she gaz’d and sighed deep,
And there I shut her wild sad eyes—
So kiss’d to sleep.
And there we slumber’d on the moss,
And there I dream’d, ah woe betide,
The latest dream I ever dream’d
On the cold hill side.
I saw pale kings, and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
Who cry’d—“La belle Dame sans merci
Hath thee in thrall!”
I saw their starv’d lips in the gloam
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke, and found me here
On the cold hill side.
And this is why I sojourn here
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.
Philip Larkin
The Librarian
(1922–1985)
Philip Larkin was one of the most acclaimed English poets of the second half of the twentieth century, and for good reason. He had a uniquely modern yet straightforward voice and wrote of scenes and people that rang remarkably true.
Larkin was born in Coventry, England, and educated at St. John’s College at Oxford. Biographers and critics have speculated that he had an unhappy childhood, which contributed to his often gloomy perspective. After graduating from Oxford, he became a librarian at a municipal library, then assistant librarian at a university, and finally the head librarian at the University of Hull, a position he held until his death.
His first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published in 1945, but his later work, The Whitsun Weddings, for which he won the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, established his reputation as a premier English poet. The title poem is an extraordinary representation of England from the window of a train on Whitsunday, a very old Christian holiday celebrated by the Church of England. This holiday features festivals, weddings, baptisms, processional walks, even the occasional rolling of a wheel of cheese around town—quite a lot to witness from a train. What a clever way to capture so many aspects of postwar English life, almost like a documentary.
But this was no ordinary documentary. Larkin was a bit of a hard case—unsentimental, antisocial, sometimes bitingly critical of the modern world. Besides the vividly detailed scenes, the poems in this volume also reflected Larkin’s particular worldview, a somewhat glum, fatalistic outlook, tempered with a love of country, and presented in a brilliantly inclusive, accessible way.
Favorite Poems
“The Whitsun Weddings” “Church Going”
“Home Is so Sad” “This Be the Verse” “Going, Going”
Besides being a librarian and poet, Larkin was a novelist, essayist, and jazz critic. He cited as his greatest influence the novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, which might explain his affection for colloquial language and the English countryside.
Days
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.
I love the structure and pace of this poem. It is obviously very carefully crafted, but at the same time it feels light and airy. It sounds almost like a conversation with a child, in the first stanza especially, though it touches on one of the most timeless and compelling of the universal questions—why are we here? But couched in the context of a day, the answer is quite hopeful and cheery. We’re here to be and to be happy.
Deprivation is for me what daffodils were to Wordsworth.
—Philip Larkin
Then comes the satirical adult reality, the harsh truth of it. It should be as simple as just being happy in a day, but humankind is inclined always to try to explain things (the priest) and fix them (the doctor), mucking up the simplicity of being happy to be here on earth.
The image of the priest and the doctor in their long coats is terrific. You can just see them frantically running across the field of history, waving their arms, making a commotion, doing their best to make it impossible to be happy in a day. It seems to me that the question “Where can we live but days?” doesn’t need an answer. That may be because I do think days are to be happy in.
Edward Lear
The Trickster
(1812–1888)
Edward Lear described his own poems as “nonsense pure and absolute,” but that was the highest and truest compliment anyone could give his work. Lear invented nonsense as a literary form, amusing his Victorian contemporaries at the same time he was challenging them to consider a less rigid way of viewing the world. Nonsense is the opposite of sense and order and reveals the contradictions and absurdities of things that are otherwise familiar to us. In 1888, Sir Edward Strachey called nonsense a “true work of the imagination, a child of genius, and its writing one of the fine arts.” With his delicious wit and his wonderful visual capacity, Lear was the master of nonsense.
Lear was the twentieth born in his family, and was raised by his eldest sister in a suburb of London. He was artistically gifted and began working as an illustrator at the age of fifteen, drawing birds, flowers, and butterflies. In 1832, the London Zoological Society commissioned him to create bird illustrations, the same year the Earl of Denby invited him to live on his estate. Lear wrote his first volume of verse, A Book of Nonsense, for Denby’s grandchildren. A serious artist who wanted to devote himself to landscape painting, he became popular as a poet almost instantaneously and the call to write more and more of his wonderful nonsense continued throughout his life.
Lear was a lifelong traveler, making many trips through Europe, Asia, and the Middle East and spending considerable time in Italy, where he died. Every single thing he saw along the journey of his life, including his own face in the mirror, was fodder for his irreverent, preposterous rhymes. In a poem titled “How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear,” he writes, “How pleasant to know Mr. Lear! / Who has written such volumes of stuff! / Some think him ill-tempered and queer, / But a few think him pleasant enough. / His mind is concrete and fastidious, / His nose is remarkably big, / His visage is more or less hideous, / His beard it resembles a wig.”
Favorite Poems
“The Daddy Long-legs and the Fly”
“The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo”
“The Dingle Bank” “The Quangle Wangle’s Hat”
“There was an old man with a beard”
The Owl and the Pussy-Cat
The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat:
They took some honey, and plenty of money
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
“O lovely Pussy, O Pussy, my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!”
Pussy said to the Owl, “You elegant fowl,
How charmingly sweet you sing!
Oh! let us be married; too long we have tarried,
But what shall we do for a ring?”
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the Bong-tree grows;
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood,
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.
“Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring?” Said the Piggy, “I will.”
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.
Lear’s limericks: Edward Lear’s trademark free-form limericks, which were as long or as short as he felt like making them, usually (though not always) featured first and last lines that ended in the same word. Even though at the time they weren’t yet known as limericks, Lear is known for turning them into a favorite form of light verse. The following limerick was typeset on the cover of the first edition of A Book of Nonsense, and referred to Derry Down Derry, the pseudonym he used for that book:
There was an Old Derry down Derry,
who loved to see little folks merry,
So he made them a book, and with laughter they shook
at the fun of that Derry down Derry.
I consider Edward Lear, along with A. A. Milne, to be the most important influence on my own writing for children. His kind of doggerel—so musical and sayable and quotable—is dear to my heart and is my favorite way to reach readers of all ages. There are few poems in the world that are as fun to recite as “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat.”
The poem is merry and silly, yet absolutely beautiful: you can see Lear’s painterly eye in the vivid, unforgettable, utterly credible images. The “pea-green boat,” the “five-pound note,” and singing under the stars to “a small guitar.” And there is a childlike sensibility to the telling, though it is about a very grown-up thing, running off to get married—the couple being an owl and a pussycat, no less!
The unlikely mix of animals of all shapes and sizes is everywhere in Lear’s work. He gets us to look at all kinds of unlikely relationships and scenarios and to consider that not everything has to make sense to be true. What’s more wonderfully real than two lovers, hand in hand, dancing by the light of the moon?
Lear never for a minute disbelieves his poems; he is never self- conscious or winking at his own jokes. Sure, he’s a trickster and a showboat—how else to explain the audacity to make up a word like “runcible” just to complete the meter! But now the phrase “runcible spoon” has entered the lexicon to describe a forklike spoon. Nonsense? I don’t think so!
The Jumblies
I
They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,
In a Sieve they went to sea:
In spite of all their friends could say,
On a winter’s morn, on a stormy day,
In a Sieve they went to sea!
And when the Sieve turned round and round,
And every one cried, “You’ll all be drowned!”
They called aloud, “Our Sieve ain’t big,
But we don’t care a button! we don’t care a fig!
In a Sieve we’ll go to sea!”
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they wen
t to sea in a Sieve.
II
They sailed in a Sieve, they did,
In a Sieve they sailed so fast,
With only a beautiful pea-green veil
Tied with a ribbon by way of a sail,
To a small tobacco-pipe mast;
And every one said, who saw them go,
“O won’t they be soon upset, you know!
For the sky is dark, and the voyage is long,
And happen what may, it’s extremely wrong
In a Sieve to sail so fast!”
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.
III
The water it soon came in, it did,
The water it soon came in;
So to keep them dry, they wrapped their feet
In a pinky paper all folded neat,
And they fastened it down with a pin.
And they passed the night in a crockery-jar,
And each of them said, “How wise we are!
Though the sky be dark, and the voyage be long,
Yet we never can think we were rash or wrong,
While round in our Sieve we spin!”
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.
IV
And all night long they sailed away;
And when the sun went down,
They whistled and warbled a moony song
To the echoing sound of a coppery gong,
In the shade of the mountains brown.
“O Timballo! How happy we are,
When we live in a Sieve and a crockery-jar,
And all night long in the moonlight pale,
We sail away with a pea-green sail,
In the shade of the mountains brown!”
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.
V
They sailed to the Western Sea, they did,
To a land all covered with trees,