by John Lithgow
You went into far Ku-to-Yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
—Ezra Pound
In translating this poem by Li T’ai Po (Rihaku in Japanese) from Chinese to English, Ezra Pound made it his own. He believed that Chinese characters were compressed visual metaphors, which he channeled into the gorgeous free-verse English of “The River-Merchant’s Wife.” What a trick, to make this imaginative leap on three levels—Pound is a Western man translating an Eastern poet’s poem in the voice of a woman. There is a tension in these leaps that reminds me of M. Butterfly.
And yet the poem is perfectly believable. You are moved by the haunting voice of this young girl who is not yet twenty years old, but has lived a whole lifetime, going through all the stages of childhood, marriage, the discovery of desire, and then loss. “The paired butterflies are already yellow with August”—how sad for someone so young to be so world-weary.
The poem is certainly a westerner’s tale of the East, but at the same time entirely universal. It gently points to the unknowability of the East by the West.
Pound was influenced by the leanness of Asian poetry. One of his most famous poems, “In a Station of the Metro,” is like a haiku:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
In Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir, Pound recalls seeing a stream of beautiful faces on the Paris Metro, and then spending the rest of the day trying to put the moment into words. He tried to find words “as worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion. And that evening . . . I was still trying and I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not mean that I found words, but there came an equation . . . not in speech, but in little splotches of color.” He wrote a thirty-line poem and then pared it down to just these two simple perfect lines.
It’s not always easy to read Ezra Pound. He throws in snips of Greek, references to Homer and Dante, and maybe William Gladstone, the nineteenth-century British prime minister. You may feel like you’re not in on the joke, that perhaps he’s a little too smart and cultured for you. You may not know that “Burne-Jones” refers to sketches for paintings, or that “Paquin” is a Parisian dressmaker. But it’s enriching to read the poems of a man who seems to have taken in the whole world, from Babylon to Brooklyn. He described his epic work, the Cantos, as “a mosaic of images, ideas, phrases—politics, ethics, economics—anecdotes, insults, denunciations—English, Greek, Italian, Provençal, Chinese.”
Christina Rossetti
The Victorian
(1830–1894)
Christina Rossetti was born in London, one of four children of Italian parents. Her boisterous family turned their home into a lively hub for Italian exiles, where politics and culture were thrashed out long into the night. Their house was filled with a love for art and literature; her father was a poet and so was her brother Dante Gabriel, which inspired Christina to write verse from a young age.
Rossetti was caught between her deep religious faith and worldly delights: she was a devout High Anglican, and an equally passionate poet. She turned down two marriage proposals for religious reasons, despite being quite in love with one of the men, and lived a sequestered, spinsterly life. William Michael Rossetti said his sister was “replete with the spirit of self-postponement.” A true fan of self-discipline, Christina quit playing chess because she enjoyed winning too much, turned down seeing Wagner’s opera Parsifal because it celebrated pagan mythology, snubbed nudity in paintings, and glued paper strips over the anti-Christian parts of Algernon Swinburne’s poem Atalanta in Calydon.
Rossetti’s Goblin Market and Other Poems, published in 1862, was a critical success and established her as the preeminent female poet and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s successor. She tackled the big topics: love and death, religion and renunciation. In an essay on her, Virginia Woolf said, “Your instinct was so sure, so direct, so intense that it produced poems that sing like music in one’s ears—like a melody by Mozart or an air by Gluck.”
Favorite Poems
“Song” “Remember” “In an Artist’s Studio”
“Echo” “I watched a rosebud”
Up-Hill
Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.
Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at that door.
Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.
The structure of this poem is so appealing. A dialogue poem, it never identifies either of the parties involved. The simple banter and singsong rhythm in this tale of a weary traveler belie the seriousness of the conversation, so much so that it comes off almost as a kind of a riddle. Is it about a hard, long trek, and the promise of comfort and a warm bed at the end, with Rossetti cheering us on in our voyage? Or is she telling us that life is hard and death awaits, but you must keep walking up and up? Probably a little bit of both, though artists of her time were famous for wallowing in morbid thoughts, carrying on a kind of swoony infatuation with the ideas of lost innocence and lost youth.
I prefer to be reassured by this poem, to be heartened by the experience of those who’ve gone before. The second voice in this poem offers that reassurance. Yes, life is all uphill, right to the very end, and yes, there’s comfort to be found along the way.
Rossetti was trapped between her devotion to the divine and her intense love for the world around her. Woolf says to her, “Your poems are full of gold dust and ‘sweet geraniums’ varied brightness; your eye noted incessantly how rushes are ‘velvet headed,’ and lizards have a ‘strange metallic mail.’ . . . No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes.” Christina Rossetti may have restrained herself from many things she loved, but she let the world in all its bright glory suffuse her poems.
An Apple Gathering
I plucked pink blossoms from mine apple-tree
And wore them all that evening in my hair:
Then in due season when I went to see
I found no apples there.
With dangling basket all along the grass
As I had come I went the selfsame track:
My neighbours mocked me while they saw me pass
So empty-handed back.
Lilian and Lilias smiled in trudging by,
Their heaped-up basket teased me like a jeer;
Sweet-voiced they sang beneath the sunset sky,
Their mother’s home was near.
Plump Gertrude passed me with her basket full,
A stronger hand than hers helped it along;
A voice talked with her through the shadows coo
l
More sweet to me than song.
Ah Willie, Willie, was my love less worth
Than apples with their green leaves piled above?
I counted rosiest apples on the earth
Of far less worth than love.
So once it was with me you stooped to talk
Laughing and listening in this very lane:
To think that by this way we used to walk
We shall not walk again!
I let my neighbours pass me, ones and twos
And groups; the latest said the night grew chill,
And hastened: but I loitered, while the dews
Fell fast I loitered still.
Carl Sandburg
The Patriot
(1878–1967)
When he was nineteen years old, Carl Sandburg left his small hometown of Galesburg, Illinois, due to a bad case of wanderlust. He stowed away inside a railroad car with the intent of seeing what the country had to offer, working his way west through Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado, looking for work and adventure. He even spent ten days in the Allegheny County Jail in Pennsylvania in 1902, after he was caught on a train without a ticket. He traveled the country as close to the land as he could get, digging into the valleys and coasting along its hills, and occasionally tasting the various flavors of cities along the way. H. L. Mencken said that Sandburg was “indubitably an American in every pulse-beat”—he absorbed the country right to the core of his heart.
Sandburg loved the stuff of common life: the daily rhythms of laborers, the tides of energy in cities, dirty hands and hard work. He took on a kind of Johnny Appleseed persona, traveling to meet people, trade poems, and swap songs. In a 1907 lecture called “An American Vagabond,” Sandburg said, “Books are but empty nothings compared with living, pulsing men and women. Life is stranger and greater than anything ever written about it.” His poetry was driven by his passion for these “living, pulsing” things, and reflects the wonderful tangle of hopes and dreams he saw in every corner of the America he loved.
Favorite Poems
“Happiness” “Onion Days” “I Am the People, the Mob”
“Manitoba Childe Roland” “The People, Yes”
Sandburg worked as an advertising copywriter and newspaper reporter in Milwaukee, then moved to Chicago with his wife to write editorials for the Chicago Daily News. He began seeing his poems published in a poetry journal, whose editor, Harriet Monroe, encouraged him to keep working in his plainspoken style. In 1916 his Chicago Poems firmly established his reputation as a poet of note. Subsequent volumes, Cornhuskers and Smoke and Steel, published in 1918 and 1920 respectively, made him famous for his celebration of the American landscape, skyscrapers, smokestacks, and all. His collection Complete Poems received the Pultizer Prize in 1950.
Sandburg spent his last years at Connemara, a rolling farm in North Carolina, surrounded by his wife’s champion dairy goats and thousands of books. In the preface to Complete Poems, Sandburg humbly says, “All my life I have been trying to learn to read, to see and hear, and to write.”
Chicago
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your
painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have
seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of
women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this
my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to
be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a
tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage
pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a
battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his
ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked,
sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.
Listen to Sandburg read “The People, Yes” at http://archive.salon.com/audio/poetry/2002/05/06/sandburg/index.html.
This may be the most arrogant poem ever written. Oh, the intimidating, muscle-flexing glory of it! And it’s all true, every word of it, even though those days of commercial supremacy are long gone for Chicago. The city’s hardy sureness of itself is perfectly expressed in this poem. And what a wonderful image of a city as a “husky, brawling” youth, laughing, with “dust all over his mouth”—I love that.
The people of Chicago do have a unique character that is masterfully captured in this poem. They are so proud of where they come from, and it shows in their passion for their sports, theater, art, and architecture. Great Chicago actors I have known—like John Malkovich, Laurie Metcalfe, and Gary Sinise—believe so much in themselves and have a confidence in their work that is extraordinary. This poem is simply ringing with that same confidence. It makes you wish you were from Chicago, doesn’t it?
Sandburg’s poems are rough and raring to go. He uses regular words and phrasing that could be heard at the dock just as easily as in a classroom. He told the New York Times, “Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.” His subject is “the people—the mob—the crowd—the mass.” He experimented with every practical form of expression—award-winning biographies, ballads, fairy tales, folk songs, and, of course, poetry. It makes sense to me that the man who celebrated the crazy-quilt quality of America would whistle so many different tunes.
Honky Tonk in C leveland, O hio
It’s a jazz affair, drum crashes and cornet razzes.
The trombone pony neighs and the tuba jackass snorts.
The banjo tickles and titters too awful.
The chippies talk about the funnies in the papers.
The cartoonists weep in their beer.
Ship riveters talk with their feet
To the feet of floozies under the tables.
A quartet of white hopes mourn with interspersed snickers:
“I got the blues.
I got the blues.
I got the blues.”
And . . . as we said earlier:
The cartoonists weep in their beer.
William Shakespeare
The Bard
(1564–1616)
As there is an entire industry devoted to analyzing, summarizing, and scrutinizing the life and works of Shakespeare, it seems a little silly to try to do that here. Suffice it to say that the great and mighty William Shakespeare left a mark that would affect drama, poetry, art, and even music for centuries to come.
He was born in Stratford-on-Avon, England, where he is believed to have received a good primary education and was exposed to Latin, Greek, and the Roman dramatists. He married at the age of eighteen and had two daughters and one son. Shakespeare worked as an actor and budding playwright in his early years,
but it was one of his first poems, Venus and Adonis, that brought him to the attention of the public.
While he is considered now to be the world’s greatest dramatist, Shakespeare may have considered his poetry to be his most important legacy. His sonnets were published in 1609, in a collection called The Sonnets of Shakespeare. The 154 sonnets contained in this volume are believed to be addressed to a dear friend and to a lady with whom he was in love, though this is one of many subjects of vigorous Shakespearean debate.
William Shakespeare was well-known in his day, but has become perhaps the most famous and admired literary figure in the world in the four centuries since his death. His plays and his poetry—and in the case of the poem featured below, his poetry in his plays—are a legacy on par with the Seven Wonders of the World.
Favorite Poems
“Let me not to the marriage of true minds” (Sonnet 116)
“Blow, blow, thou winter wind” (from As You Like It)
“All the world’s a stage” (from As You Like It)
“When that I was a little tiny boy” (from Twelfth Night)
“It was a lover and his lass” (from As You Like It)
“The Willow Song” (from Othello)
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Though thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
Fear no more the frown o’ the great;
Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke:
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak:
The scepter, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.
Fear no more the lightning-flash,
Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
Thou has finish’d joy and moan:
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.
No exerciser harm thee!