Favourite Pomes

[Soniaslut]

Samhain

BY ANNIE FINCH

(The Celtic Halloween)

In the season leaves should love,
since it gives them leave to move
through the wind, towards the ground
they were watching while they hung,
legend says there is a seam
stitching darkness like a name.

Now when dying grasses veil
earth from the sky in one last pale
wave, as autumn dies to bring
winter back, and then the spring,
we who die ourselves can peel
back another kind of veil

that hangs among us like thick smoke.
Tonight at last I feel it shake.
I feel the nights stretching away
thousands long behind the days
till they reach the darkness where
all of me is ancestor.

I move my hand and feel a touch
move with me, and when I brush
my own mind across another,
I am with my mother’s mother.
Sure as footsteps in my waiting
self, I find her, and she brings

arms that carry answers for me,
intimate, a waiting bounty.
“Carry me.” She leaves this trail
through a shudder of the veil,
and leaves, like amber where she stays,
a gift for her perpetual gaze.

Annie Finch, “Samhain” from Eve, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Copyright © 1997 by Annie Finch.

[Tift]

This poem is thought to have been inspired by the breakdown of marriage negotiations
between Queen Elizabeth I and Francis, Duke of Anjou in 1581.
She was quite fond of him and called him her “frog”.

On Monsieur’s Departure
by Queen Elizabeth I

I grieve and dare not show my discontent,
I love and yet am forced to seem to hate,
I do, yet dare not say I ever meant,
I seem stark mute but inwardly do prate.
I am and not, I freeze and yet am burned,
Since from myself another self I turned.

My care is like my shadow in the sun,
Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it,
Stands and lies by me, doth what I have done.
His too familiar care doth make me rue it.
No means I find to rid him from my breast,
Till by the end of things it be supprest.

Some gentler passion slide into my mind,
For I am soft and made of melting snow;
Or be more cruel, love, and so be kind.
Let me or float or sink, be high or low.
Or let me live with some more sweet content,
Or die and so forget what love ere meant.

[Tift]

Untitled by Elizabeth Bishop

It is marvellous to wake up together
At the same minute; marvellous to hear
The rain begin suddenly all over the roof,
To feel the air suddenly clear
As if electricity had passed through it
From a black mesh of wires in the sky.
All over the roof the rain hisses,
And below, the light falling of kisses.
An electrical storm is coming or moving away;
It is the prickling air that wakes us up.
If lightning struck the house now, it would run
From the four blue china balls on top
Down the roof and down the rods all around us,
And we imagine dreamily
How the whole house caught in a bird-cage of lightning
Would be quite delightful rather than frightening;
And from the same simplified point of view
Of night and lying flat on one’s back
All things might change equally easily,
Since always to warn us there must be these black
Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise
The world might change to something quite different,
As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking,
Change as the kisses are changing without our thinking.

It may not have mattered or been clear to the reader that this was a lesbian love poem,
but it apparently did so to Bishop, who censored herself, being still uncertain about
her sexual inclinations at the time. It was written, according to Alice Quinn’s detailed
and invaluable notes, either in the late 1930s for Louise Crane, a college friend,
or for Marjorie Stevens, a woman she was living with in Key West between 1941 and 1946.
(from NYRB 27.04.2006)

[Tift]

Two poems from Gwendolyn Brooks

The Crazy Woman

I shall not sing a May song.
A May song should be gay.
I’ll wait until November
And sing a song of gray.

I’ll wait until November
That is the time for me.
I’ll go out in the frosty dark
And sing most terribly.

And all the little people
Will stare at me and say,
“That is the Crazy Woman
Who would not sing in May.”

Sadie and Maud

Maud went to college.
Sadie stayed home.
Sadie scraped life
With a fine toothed comb.

She didn’t leave a tangle in
Her comb found every strand.
Sadie was one of the livingest chicks
In all the land.

Sadie bore two babies
Under her maiden name.
Maud and Ma and Papa
Nearly died of shame.

When Sadie said her last so-long
Her girls struck out from home.
(Sadie left as heritage
Her fine-toothed comb.)

Maud, who went to college,
Is a thin brown mouse.
She is living all alone
In this old house.

[Tift]

A Bed of Forget-Me-Nots
Christina Georgina Rossetti

Is love so prone to change and rot
We are fain to rear forget-me-not
By measure in a garden plot? —

I love its growth at large and free
By untrod path and unlopped tree,
Or nodding by the unpruned hedge,
Or on the water’s dangerous edge
Where flags and meadowsweet blow rank
With rushes on the quaking bank.

Love is not taught in learning’s school,
Love is not parcelled out by rule;
Hath curb or call an answer got? —
So free must be forget-me-not.
Give me the flame no dampness dulls,
The passion of the instinctive pulse,
Love steadfast as a fixed star,
Tender as doves with nestlings are,
More large than time, more strong than death:
This all creation travails of —
She groans not for a passing breath —
This is forget-me-not and love.

[Tift]

Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns
by Marianne Moore

With their respective lions —
” mighty monoceroses with immeasured tayles ” —
these are those very animals
described by the cartographers of 1539,
defiantly revolving
in such a way that the hard steel
the long keel of white exhibited in tumbling,
disperses giant weeds
and those sea snakes whose forms, looped in the foam, ” disquiet shippers. ”
Not ignorant of how a voyager obtained the horn of a sea unicorn
to give Queen Elizabeth,
who thought it worth a hundred thousand pounds,
they persevere in swimming where they like,
finding the place where lions live in herds,
strewn on the beach like stones with lesser stones —
and bears are white;
discovering Antarctica, its penguin kings and icy spires,
and Sir John Hawkins’ Florida
” abounding in land unicorns and lions;
since where the one is,
its arch enemy cannot be missing. ”
Thus personalities by nature much opposed,
can be combined in such a way
that when they do agree, their unanimity is great,
” in politics, in trade, law, sport, religion,
china-collecting, tennis, and church going. ”
You have remarked this fourfold combination of strange animals,
upon embroideries
enwrought with ” polished garlands ” of agreeing indifference —
thorns, ” myrtle rods, and shafts of bay, ”
” cobwebs, and knotts, and mulberries ”
of lapis-lazuli and pomegranate and malachite —
Britannia’s sea unicorn with its rebellious child
now ostentatiously indigenous to the new English coast;
and its land lion oddly tolerant of those pacific counterparts to it,
the water lions of the west.
This is a strange fraternity — these sea lions and land lions,
land unicorns and sea unicorns:
the lion civilly rampant,
tame and concessive like the long-tailed bear of Ecuador —
the lion standing up against this screen of woven air
which is the forest:
the unicorn also, on its hind legs in reciprocity.
A puzzle to the hunters, is this haughtiest of beasts,
to be distinguished from those born without a horn,
in use like Saint Jerome’s tame lion, as domestics;
rebelling proudly at the dogs
which are dismayed by the chain lightning
playing at them from its horn —
the dogs persistent in pursuit of it as if it could be caught,
” deriving agreeable terror ” from its ” moonbeam throat ”
on fire like its white coat and unconsumed as if of salamander’s skin.
So wary as to disappear for centuries and reappear,
yet never to be caught,
the unicorn has been preserved
by an unmatched device
wrought like the work of expert blacksmiths —
this animal of that one horn
with which nothing can compare –
throwing itself upon which head foremost from a cliff,
it walks away unharmed,
proficient in this feat, which like Herodotus,
I have not seen except in pictures.
Thus this strange animal with its miraculous elusiveness,
has come to be unique,
” impossible to take alive, ”
tamed only by a lady inoffensive like itself —
as curiously wild and gentle;
” as straight and slender as the crest,
or antlet of the one-beam’d beast. ”
Upon the printed page,
also by word of mouth,
we have a record of it all
and how, unfearful of deceit,
etched like an equine monster of an old celestial map,
beside a cloud or dress of Virgin-Mary blue,
improved ” all over slightly with snakes of Venice gold,
and silver, and some O’s, ”
the unicorn ” with pavon high, ” approaches eagerly;
until engrossed by what appears of this strange enemy,
upon the map, ” upon her lap, ”
Its ” mild wild head doth lie. ”
*
*
*
*

Marianne Moore altered her earlier poems numerous times
throughout her life – this is the original version first published in 1924 –
the words in quotation marks are taken from numerous sources
(the poet wrote about her use of quotes “I very nearly can’t
eat when I think of the good ones I had to omit”) one in particular
“cobwebs and knotts, and mulberries” is from a description of
Queen Elizabeth’s dresses “a forepart of white satten, embroidered
all over with pansies, little roses, knotts, and a border of mulberries,
pillars, and pomegranates, of Venice golde, sylver, and sylke of
sondrye colours One forepart of green satten embrodered all over
with sylver, like beasts, fowles and fishes” “A petticoat embrodered
all over slightly with snakes of Venice gold and silver and some O’s,
with a faire border embrodered like seas, cloudes and rainbowes.”

If you’ve read this far then I will assume there was something
of interest and so not apologise for rambling on.

When asked by a visitor why her poems did not rhyme, Marianne
Moore’s mother interrupted and said “don’t enlighten him”.

[Tift]

The Freedom of The Moon
by Robert Frost

I’ve tried the new moon tilted in the air
Above a hazy tree-and-farmhouse cluster
As you might try a jewel in your hair.
I’ve tried it fine with little breadth of luster,
Alone, or in one ornament combining
With one first-water start almost shining.

I put it shining anywhere I please.
By walking slowly on some evening later,
I’ve pulled it from a crate of crooked trees,
And brought it over glossy water, greater,
And dropped it in, and seen the image wallow,
The color run, all sorts of wonder follow.
.
.

[Tift]

Night
by Mary Frances Marshall Butts

The snow is white, the wind is cold–
The king has sent for my three-year-old.
Bring the pony and shoe him fast
With silver shoes that were made to last.
Bring the saddle trimmed with gold;
Put foot in stirrup, my three-year-old;
Jump in the saddle, away, away!
And hurry back by the break of day;
By break of day, through dale and down,
And bring me the news from Slumbertown.

[Tift]

Florida
by Elizabeth Bishop

The state with the prettiest name,
the state that floats in brackish water,
held together by mangrove roots
that bear while living oysters in clusters,
and when dead strew white swamps with skeletons,
dotted as if bombarded, with green hummocks
like ancient cannon-balls sprouting grass.
The state full of long S-shaped birds, blue and white,
and unseen hysterical birds who rush up the scale
every time in a tantrum.
Tanagers embarrassed by their flashiness,
and pelicans whose delight it is to clown;
who coast for fun on the strong tidal currents
in and out among the mangrove islands
and stand on the sand-bars drying their damp gold wings
on sun-lit evenings.
Enormous turtles, helpless and mild,
die and leave their barnacled shells on the beaches,
and their large white skulls with round eye-sockets
twice the size of a man’s.
The palm trees clatter in the stiff breeze
like the bills of the pelicans. The tropical rain comes down
to freshen the tide-looped strings of fading shells:
Job’s Tear, the Chinese Alphabet, the scarce Junonia,
parti-colored pectins and Ladies’ Ears,
arranged as on a gray rag of rotted calico,
the buried Indian Princess’s skirt;
with these the monotonous, endless, sagging coast-line
is delicately ornamented.

Thirty or more buzzards are drifting down, down, down,
over something they have spotted in the swamp,
in circles like stirred-up flakes of sediment
sinking through water.
Smoke from woods-fires filters fine blue solvents.
On stumps and dead trees the charring is like black velvet.
The mosquitoes
go hunting to the tune of their ferocious obbligatos.
After dark, the fireflies map the heavens in the marsh
until the moon rises.
Cold white, not bright, the moonlight is coarse-meshed,
and the careless, corrupt state is all black specks
too far apart, and ugly whites; the poorest
post-card of itself.
After dark, the pools seem to have slipped away.
The alligator, who has five distinct calls:
friendliness, love, mating, war, and a warning–
whimpers and speaks in the throat
of the Indian Princess.

[Tift]

As I Walked Out One Evening
by W.H. Auden

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
‘Love has no ending.

‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,

‘I’ll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

‘The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.’

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
‘O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

‘In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

‘In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

‘Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver’s brilliant bow.

‘O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you’ve missed.

‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

‘Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.

‘O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

‘O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.’

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.

(1940)

[Tift]

Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop met in 1947
and started a correspondence which lasted for
30 years. Lowell used Bishop’s letters for material
he would write about her, in particular 4 unrhymed sonnets
“For Elizabeth Bishop” published in his 1973 History.
The last line “unerring Muse …” … the ‘smoothest compliment.’

For Elizabeth Bishop 4
by Robert Lowell

The new painting must live on iron rations,
rushed brushstrokes, indestructible paint-mix,
fluorescent lofts instead of French plein air.
Albert Ryder let his crackled amber moonscapes
ripen in sunlight. His painting was repainting,
his tiniest work weighs-heavy in the hand.
Who is killed if the horsemen never cry halt ?
Have you seen an inchworm crawl on a leaf,
cling to the very end, revolve in air,
feeling for something to reach to something? Do
you still hang your words in air, ten years
unfinished, glued to your notice board, with gaps
or empties for the unimaginable phrase–
unerring Muse who makes the casual perfect?

[Tift]

anyone lived in a pretty how town
E. E. Cummings – 1894-1962

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn’t he danced his did.

Women and men (both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain

children guessed (but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that no one loved him more by more

when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone’s any was all to her

someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then)they
said their nevers they slept their dream

stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)

one day anyone died i guess
(and no one stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was

all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
no one and anyone earth by april
wish by spirit and if by yes.

Women and men(both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain
.
.
.
.

E. E. Cummings
“Edward Estlin Cummings is known for his radical experimentation with
form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax; he abandoned traditional techniques and structures
to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression.” (c. poets.org)

[Tift]

Reindeer were introduced to Alaska in the summer of 1891
from Siberia – 16 were procured by barter to feed the
Esquimo population as the whale was almost exterminated
and it was determined that the inhabitants should not be
fed at government expense. (Sheldon Jackson was the man
who organised the whole thing)

Marianne Moore was a lifelong lover of animals which shows
throughout her work … William Carlos Williams, a friend
and poet wrote to her saying that the last line “hit between
the eyes like a bullet from space.” She replied Of course a
poet “sees things others never notice” and added “A bullet.
Who in the world would think it or take the trouble to write me.”

I have to add that when you hand feed a Reindeer
it’s muzzle has the texture of the softest velvet
~
~
~
~
~
Rigorists
by Marianne Moore

“We saw reindeer
browsing,” a friend who’d been in Lapland, said:
“finding their own food; they are adapted

to scant reino
or pasture, yet they can run eleven
miles in fifty minutes; the feet spread when

the snow is soft,
and act as snowshoes. They are rigorists,
however handsomely cutwork artists

of Lapland and
Siberia elaborate the trace
or saddle girth with sawtooth leather lace.

One looked at us
with its firm face part brown, part white – a queen
of alpine flowers. Santa Claus’ reindeer, seen

at last, had gray-
brown fur, with a neck like edelweiss or
lion’s foot-leontopodium more

exactly.” And
this candelabrum-headed ornament
for a place where ornaments are scarce, sent

to Alaska,
was a gift preventing the extinction
of the Esquimo. The battle was won

by a quiet man,
Sheldon Jackson, evangel to that race
whose reprieve he read in the reindeer’s face.

[Tift]

Flannery O’Connor wrote her only poem in 1953 as she said in a letter
“The Poetry Society of Georgia is offering 50 bucks for one and I
thought I would bite … This is my first and last. I think it is a
filthy habit for a fiction writer to get into.”

She had a passion for collecting chickens and the peacock was
the ultimate addition. In her short essay The King of The Birds
she wrote about the first arrival … “The peacock I bought had
nothing whatsoever in the way of a tail, but he carried himself
as if he not only had a train behind him but a retinue to attend it.”

“The cock’s plumage requires two years to attain it’s pattern,
and for the rest of his life this chicken will act as though he
designed it himself. … a peachicken may live to be thirty-five –
he will have nothing better to do than manicure it, furl and unfurl it,
dance forward and backward with it spread, scream when it is
stepped upon and arch it carefully when he steps through a puddle.”

A man selling fence posts got into conversation with her about
peacocks saying he had once eighty peafowl on his farm.
His elderly grandmother said “Either they go, or I go.”
“Who went ?” I asked
“We still got twenty of them in the freezer” he said.
“And how did they taste?”
“No better than any other chicken, but I’d a heap rather
eat them than hear them.”
~
~
~
~
The Peacock Roosts
by Flannery O’Connor

The clown-faced peacock
Dragging sixty suns
Barely looks west where
The single one
Goes down in fire.

Bluer than a moon-side sky
The trigger head
Circles and backs.
The folded forest squats and flies
The ancient design is raised.

Gripped oak cannot be moved.
This bird looks down
And settles, ready,
Now the leaves can start the wind
That combs these suns

Hung all night in the gold-green silk wood
Or blown straight back until
The single one
Mounting the grey light
Will see the flying forest
Leave the tree and run

[Tift]

The Copa belongs to a miscellany of lighter verse attributed
to Virgil (70 – 19 BC) by Servius in the fourth century. His great
name gave it a kind of charmed passage. It’s closeness to the
Virgilian letter and extreme remoteness from his spirit have left
a riddle of authorship. It is so unlike Virgil he may very well have
written it. The manuscript was brought to the abbey of St Riquier
(a commune in the Somme) in 814 by Anglibert a secretary to
Charlemagne but was lost. A copy next appeared in Lombard script
that once belonged to Cardinal Bembo and the text of the first
translation below was his.

Appendix Virgiliana
Dancing Girl of Syria (The Copa)

Dancing girl of Syria, her hair caught up with a fillet;
Very subtle in swaying those quivering flanks of hers
In time to the castanet’s rattle: half-drunk in the smoky tavern,
She dances, lacivious, wanton, clashing the rhythm.
And what’s the use, if you’re tired, of being out in the dust and the heat,
When you might as well lie still and get drunk on your settle ?
Here’s tankards and cups and measures and roses and pipes and fiddles,
And a trellis arbour cool with its shade of reeds,
And somewhere somebody piping as if it were Pan’s own grotto,
On a shepherd’s flute, the way they do in the fields.
And here’s a thin little wine, just poured from a cask that is pitchy,
And a brook running by with the noise and gurgle of running water.

There’s even garlands for you, violet wreaths and saffron,
And golden melilot* twining with crimson roses,
And lilies plucked where they grow by the virgin river,
– Achelois* brings them in green willow baskets-
And little cheeses for you that they dry in baskets of rushes,
And plums that ripen in the autumn weather,
And chestnuts, and the cheerful red of apples.
In brief, here’s Ceres, Love and rowdy Bacchus
-and red-stained blackberries, and grapes in bunches,
And hanging from his withe seagreen cucumber.
And here’s the little god who keeps the arbour,
Fierce with his sickle and enormous belly.

Hither, O pilgrim ! See, the little donkey
Is tired and wistful. Spare the little donkey !
Did not a goddess love a little donkey ?

It’s very hot
Cicadae out in the trees are shrilling, ear-splitting,
The very lizard is hiding for coolness under his hedge.
If you have sense you’ll lie still and drench yourself from your wine cup,
Or maybe you prefer the look of your wine in crystal ?
Heigh ho, but it’s good to lie here under the vines,
And bind on your heavy head a garland of roses,
And reap the scarlet lips of a pretty girl.
-You be damned, you there with your Puritan eye-brows !
What thanks will cold ashes give for the sweetness of garlands ?
Or is it your mind to hang a rose wreath upon your tombstone ?
Set down the wine and the dice, and perish who thinks of to-morrow !
-Here’s Death twitching my ear, “Live” says he, “for I’m coming.”
~
~
~

~
* melilot is a sweet clover

*Achelois was a minor Greek lunar goddess –
her name means “She who drives away pain.”

Latin translation and notes Helen Waddell

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