Poetry Redux

[quasimodo1]

James Wright (1927-1980) W.H.Auden chose

Wright's first book, "The Green Wall" for the Yale Younger Poets series in 1957.

James Wright, besides writing poetry and prose, translated Pablo Neruda, Cesar

Vallejo and George Trakl. His themes, alot of them alluringly dark, exibit backrounds

of personal isolation, process of disillusionment, events in an instant of time and

comparisons of youth to age. Some examples of Wright's great poetic lines: in

"Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio" .........."All the proud fathers are ashamed to

go home. Their women cluck like starved pullets, Dying for Love" and in the same

poem......."Therefore, Their sons grow suicidally beautiful, at the beginning of

October". In "A Blessing" he writes........"Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.

And the eyes of those two Indian ponies, Darken with kindness. They have come

gladly out of the willows, To welcome my friend and me." In "Hook" he writes of a

young man accepting help from a Native American outside a bus

station................."Did you ever feel a man hold/ Sixty-five cents/ In a hook, And place

it/ Gently/ In your freezing hand?" quasimodo1

[quasimodo1]

Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982), favorite lines and some facts. from "Delia Rexroth

(died June, 1916)" ............"Under your illkempt yellow roses, Delia, today your are

younger/ Than your son. Two and a half decades-The family monument sagged

askew, And he overtook your half-a-life." from the poem "Vitamins and

Roughage" ..................."The special Hellenic privilege/ Of the special intellect seeps

out/ At last in this irrigated soil./ Sweat of athletes and juice of lovers/ Are stronger

than Socrates' hemlock;/ And the games of scrupulous Euclid/ Vanish in the

gymnopaedia." 1944 from the poem "Empty Mirror" ..........."As long as we are lost/

In the world of purpose/ We are not free. I sit/ In my ten foot square hut./ The birds

sing. The bees hum. The water murmurs over the rocks./ The canyon shuts me in."

1952 Kenneth Rexroth, born in South Bend, Indiana; he was a conscientious

objector during WWII, which was to be anathema during these years. He once

riduculed the editors of the "Partisan Review" as "Brooks Brothers Boys who got an

overdose of T.S.Eliot in some Ivy Leage fog factory." He did have some popularity

with his "great books" column where he discussed Homer, Apuleius, Lady Murasaki,

Montaigne, Cervantes and Tolstoy. These columns were compiled into a book

entitled "Classics Revisited". from "The Signature of All Things" he

writes................."The saint saw the world as streaming/ In the electrolysis of love./ I

put him by and gaze through shade/ Folded into shade of slender/ Laurel trunks and

leaves filled with sun." .{quasimodo1}

[quasimodo1]

Hart Crane's poetry has been criticised

incorrectly by most of the jounalist/critics

today except for the brilliant work of Edward

Dahlberg who addressed his poetry first and his

lifestyle later and on tangent. Most critics,

even the ones Crane called friends, conclude

that he missed the mark he set for himself but

still wrote great poetry, inspired poets and had

some major financial supporters. Philip Levine

contributed to Crane's valuation by writing "On

the Meeting of Garcia Lorca and Hart

Crane"............."Let's not be frivolous, let's
not pretend the two poets gave
each other wisdom or love or
even a good time, let's not
invent a dialogue of such eloquence
that even the ants in your own
house won't forget it. The two
greatest poetic geniuses alive
meet, and what happens? A vision
comes to an ordinary man staring
at a filthy river." (Philip Levine)

Crane

synthesized new transformations in "modern"

poetry, melding ornate Elizabethan forms, the

mysteries of Rimbaud, the unique sympathies

of Whitman...all to fix what he referred to as

"the broken world". His masterpiece "The

Bridge" reads like the age of jazz confronting

"The Waste Land". From "The

Bridge"............................Under thy shadow by the

piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City's fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year . . .

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

.....................



Some of Crane's

poems, not attemping the grandeur of "The

Bridge" are much more reader friendly and

fetching, like

"Forgetfullness".............Forgetfulness is rain at

night,
Or an old house in a forest, -- or a child.
Forgetfulness is white, -- white as a blasted

tree,
And it may stun the sybil into prophecy,
Or bury the Gods.

I can remember much forgetfulness.

.................................


Another

notable poem "Interior" has these great lines

(all excerpts).................................Wide from the

world, a stolen hour
We claim, and none may know
How love blooms like a tardy flower
Here in the day's after-glow.


Crane

wrote a great poetic tribute to Melville called

"At Melville's Tomb". excerpt-"Then in the

circuit calm of one vast coil,/ Its lashings

charmed and malice reconciled,/ Frosted eyes

there were that lifted alters;/ And silent answers

crept across the stars."





In the end, it is

true Crane was mercurial and self-destructive;

in 1932 at the age of 33, he carefully placed his

coat on the railing of a steamship in the Gulf of

Mexico, and went overboard.

{quasimodo1} (To Logos: still working on the clarity of this format)

[nebish]

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota by James Wright....the poetic equivalent of Two-Lane Blacktop

Hart Crane had the brain of a pea, according to ee cummings: HC's poems and endeavours don't seem that way..can you see it..?

[quasimodo1]

To Nebish: I like the "two-lane blacktop" comparison; that doesn't make Hart Crane an Interstate but his poetry is arresting and ambitious. Crane's personal life got very messy but I try to address the poetry more than the poet. And yes, I see it completely. What poet would you choose for another entry? quasimodo1

[quasimodo1]

Jorie Graham, (1950- ), Growing up in Rome, attending the Sorbonne in Paris,

expelled for participating in the student revolt of 1968, then film studies at NYU; she

had realms of experience as resouce for her poetry. One unique element of her

style was to leave a blank space when she arrives at a place in a poem that can't be

defined; it's almost a signature of her style and sign of her confidence. In a poem

she wrote before she adopted this special feature she

writes:........................................... ...."The world

is everywhere able to flow into itself without damage
or confusion. Something we don't know is complete without
us
and continues. On the other side
of the ocean, four dark sails joining to become black

granite cliffs, buckle over the water's end
protecting this finest of erosions."........................................ ...........................(In High Waters)

Graham, now one of the classic contemporary voices of American poetry, won a

Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for her selected poems "The Dream of Unified Field" With a

backround in philosophy, she shocked reviewers in the early 1980's arriving via the

"American Poetry Review" where one critic after reading three of her poems said her

new voice was "like hearing Shostakovich after Tchaikowsky". She resists closure as

inevitable in poems; a reality that many writers reach for while Graham instictively

avoids, the goal being elusive or impossible. Like Penelope at the loom, she keeps

weaving the mystery and the reader hears both body and mind. In "Noli Me

Tangere", the poem begins..............."You see the angels have come to sit on the

delay/ for a while,/ they have come to harrow the fixities,/ the sharp edges/ of this

open/ sepulcher." Being trilingual, language always lingers in close backround. "I

was taught three/ names for the tree facing my window,/

Castagno...chassagne...chestnut."...from an early poem. Her abstract, mystical

qualities shine brightly in

"Prayer".......................................... .................................................. ......"This is the force of faith.

Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by
each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself,
also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something
at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through
in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is
what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen
now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only
something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go.".............................................. ....Jorie Graham continually probes in her poetry a real living world, shifting, changing and sliding into the future so that her poems are a shot fired at the moving target, too fast for an exact hit. In a later poem, "Orpheus and Eurydice" atschool.eduweb.co.uk/carolrb/greek/orpheus.html, the myth of maximum frustration, she writes: ........"Because you see he could not be married to it anymore, this field with minutes in it/ called woman, its presence in him the thing called/ future--{the indefinable space} could not be married to it anymore, expanse tugging his mind out into it,/ tugging the wanting-to finish out./ What he dreamed of was this road (as he walked on it), this dustiness,/ but without their steps on it, their prints, without song--"......................One last poem of Graham's has classic lines and is her best(?) work, a poem called "Fission", which she wrote after watching a film that touched her:...................."Everyone in here wants to be taken off/ somebody else's list./ Tick. It is 1963. The idea of history is being/ outmaneuvered./ So that as the houselights come on--midscene--/ not quite killing the picture which keeps flowing beneath,/ a man comes running down the aisle/ asking for our attention--" by Jorie Graham (1991). {quasimodo1}

[nebish]

John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Jerry Lieber & Mike Stoller

[quasimodo1]

To Nebish: I will do one of your authors next. Thanks for the suggestion. quasimodo1

[quasimodo1]

.........."Returning to the drifted snow, the rink
Lively with children, to the older men,
The long companions they can never reach,
The blue light, men with ladders, by the church
The sledge and shadow in the twilit street,
Are not aware that in the sandy time
To come, the evil waste of history
Outstretched..." from "Winter Landscape" by

John Berryman (1914-1972) A commentary

on Berryman can be endless. But one fact, one

trauma haunts his life and work; his father's

death outside his son's window when he was

seven years old. Despite this, he goes on to

create a body of work at once desparate,

humourus, egoistic and scholarly. A famous

line quoted often from "Dream Song 14":

................................"Life, friends, is boring. We

must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) "Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no/Inner Resources."

In Berryman's series of poems called "Dream

Song" his alter-ego Henry never rules a day.

After his mother moves them to NYcity,

Berryman acquires a scholar's education and

writing in cold-war America, he goes on to

create neurotic yet calm, confident and

despairing poetry until his last day. In "Dream

Song One: Huffy Henry hid the day"..............."All

the world like a woolen lover
once did seem on Henry's side.
Then came a departure.
Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.
I don't see how Henry, pried
open for all the world to see,

survived.".................Influenced by British poets

W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, Gerard Manley

Hopkins, and the Americans Hart Crane and

Ezra Pound, he wrote "77 Dream Songs" within

which he smashes normal syntax and diction

yet creates a unique meter with both the

scholars language, street slang, high and low

lyricism and comedy. Eventually he wrote

almost four hundred poems collected as "The

Dream Songs."

Allowing Berryman to speak for himself as

Henry, another poem is forshadowing his own

life:
'Dream Song 114: Henry in trouble whirped out

lonely whines'


"Henry in trouble whirped out lonely whines.
When ich when was ever not in trouble?
But did he whip out whines
afore? And when check in wif ales & lifelines
anyone earlier O?—Some, now, Mr Bones,
many.—I am fleeing double:

Mr Past being no friends of mine,
all them around: Sir Future Dubious,
calamitous & grand:
I can no foothold here.............................................. .."

John Berryman, professor at the University of

Minnesota, at Harvard and Wayne State

University, never got over the early trauma; a

heavy drinker with emotional instabilities and

yet still a Fellow of the Academy of American

Poets, threw himself off a bridge in Minneapolis

in 1972. ..................................................
"The Traveller"


"They pointed me out on the highway, and

they said
'That man has a curious way of holding his

head.'

They pointed me out on the beach; they said

'That man
Will never become as we are, try as he can.'"

[quasimodo1]

Anne Sexton, (1928-1974), born Anne Gray Harvey in Newton, Massachusetts, had a

psychotic breakdown at the age of twenty-eight. "One night I saw I.A. Richards on

educational tv reading a sonnet and explaining its form. I thought to myself, 'I could do that,

maybe; I could try'. So I sat down and wrote a sonnet. The next day I wrote another one,

and so forth. My doctor encouraged me to write more. 'Don't kill yourself,' he said. 'Your

Poems might mean something to someone else someday.'" At this time both Sexton and

Plath studied with Robert Lowell and took up the "confessional" impulse favored by Lowell

and S.D. Snodgrass. Robert Lowell compared Sexton as "Edna Millay after Snodgrass."

When Anne Sexton was interviewed by the Paris Review, Sexton told the interviewer that

"Sylvia [Plath] and I would would talk at length about our first suicide, in detail and depth."

Plath, Sexton, Lowell and George Starbuck would meet after Lowell's class at Boston

University at the Ritz hotel where they would meet for martinis. From "All My Pretty Ones"

she writes: .................................................. .....................

"All my pretty ones?/ Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?/ What! all my pretty chickens and

thier dam/ At one fell swoop?.../I cannot but remember such things were,/ That were most

precious to me." -Macbeth (intro to poem). In the last stanza of this piece she writes,

............"I hold a five -year diary that my mother kept/ for three years, telling all she does not

say/ of your [her father] alchoholic tendency. You overslept,/ she writes, My God, father,

each Christmas Day/ with your blood, will I drink down your glass/ of wine? The diary of

your hurly-burly years/ goes to my shelf to wait for my age to pass/ Only on this hoarded

span will love persevere./ Whether you are pretty or not, I outlive you,/ bend down my

strange face to yours and forgive you." 1962 And in heavier piece called "Wanting to Die"

she writes this stanza exerpted here: ...................."But suicides have a special language./ Like

carpenters they want to know which tools./ They never ask why build./ Twice I have so

simply declared myself,/ have possessed the enemy, eat the enemy,/ have taken on his

craft, his magic./ In this way, heavy and thoughtfull,/ warmer than oil or water,/ I have

rested, drooling at the mouth-hole./ I did not think of my body at needle point./ Even the

cornea and the leftover urine were gone./ Suicides have already betrayed the

body."............................................ .................................................. ............And the first two stanzas of "The Truth

the Dead Know" these two stanzas stand out:.............................................. .................................................. .... The Truth the Dead Know
by Anne Sexton


"For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959


Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die."


by Anne Sexton. .................................................. .................................................. Here is a partial list of her

poetry collections: (not a complete list):45 Mercy Street (1976)
All My Pretty Ones (1962)
Live or Die (1966)
Love Poems (1969)
Selected Poems (1964)
The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975)
The Book of Folly (1973)
The Complete Poems (1981)
The Death Notebooks (1974)
To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960)
Transformations (1971)
Words for Dr. Y.: Uncollected Poems 1978)............................................. .................................................. ...........
Another excerpt from the poem: "Snow White and the Seven

Dwarfs"........................................... ...."Looking glass upon the wall. . .
Once more the mirror told
and once more the queen dressed in rags
and once more Snow White opened the door.
This time she bought a poison comb,
a curved eight-inch scorpion,
and put it in her hair and swooned again.
The dwarfs returned and took out the comb
and she revived miraculously.
She opened her eyes as wide as Orphan Annie.
Beware, beware, they said,
but the mirror told,
the queen came,
Snow White, the dumb bunny,
opened the door
and she bit into a poison apple
and fell down for the final time.
When the dwarfs returned
they undid her bodice,
they looked for a comb,
but it did no good.
Though they washed her with wine
and rubbed her with butter
it was to no avail.
She lay as still as a gold piece." [6 stanzas from the 11 total] Sadly Anne Sexton was

discovered dead inside an idling car in a garage, October 4, 1974 {quasimodo1}

(the next posting will be a poet not of the suicidal school)

[stlukesguild]

...the next posting will be a poet not of the suicidal school

Awwww shoot! I was hoping for Hart Crane

[stlukesguild]

Robert Herrick (baptized August 24, 1591- October 1674)

Herrick was born in London, the son of Nicholas Herrick, a well-to-do goldsmith, who committed suicide when Robert was a year old. It is thought that he attended Westminster School although there are no absolute records of this. In 1607 he apprenticed to his uncle, Sir William Herrick, who was also a goldsmith and jeweler to the king. Herrick ended his apprenticeship after only six years, at age twenty-two, at which time he entered St. John's College, Cambridge.He graduated in 1617.

Upon graduation he began composing poetry and became active within the "Sons of Ben", a group of Cavalier poets centered around an admiration for the works of Ben Jonson. During this time he made numerous connections at court with influential figures such as the Earl of Pembroke, Endymion Porter, Newark, Buckingham, Edward Norgate, etc... His poetry circulated at court and it (and perhaps he himself) was known by the King and Queen. He was known to be charming and witty and and would have been a welcome guest wherever music and poetry were welcome. In or before 1627, he took religious orders. At this point one would have surmised either a minor position at court... or perhaps at the Chapel in Whitehall.

Unfortunately Herrick became attached as the chaplain to the ill-fated expedition to the Isle of Rhé and two years later he was appointed by the king to the position of vicar of the parish of Dean Prior, Devon in 1629. This small position far removed from the court in London and offering no great pay... yet demanding much of the vicar led Herrick to compose Mr. Robert Hericke: his farwell unto Poetrie . However, his responsibilities did not result in the end of his career as a poet. Indeed, it was in the secluded rural environs of Devon (located in South-West England) that he wrote some of his best work.

In spite of the demands of his post, he reportedly took his responsibilities as a parish priest to heart, and he was essentially a man at peace with his place and much beloved by his parishioners. Nevertheless, it has been recorded that he once was known to have thrown the manuscript of his sermon at an unfortunate parishioner who had fallen asleep during the sermon. His poem A Thanksgiving to God for his House describes an idyllic rural life, spent in his little house surrounded by animals (including his beloved spaniel and reportedly a trained pig) and the poor but not unwelcome parishioners... but not without his pleasures of "guiltlesse mirth" and "Wassaile Bowles... Spic'd to the brink". He was cared for by his devoted maid, Prudence Baldwin, the "Prew" of so many of his verses.

Following the English Civil War, his position was revoked on account of his refusal to make pledge to the "Solemn League and Covenant" which involved an alliance between the Protestants and the Scottish against their common enemy, the Royalists and Catholics... in return for England adopting the Scottish Presbyterian method of church government. Herrick was forced to return to London where he lived in Westminster, and depended upon the charity of friends and family. He spent this time preparing his poetry for publication. They were initially printed in 1648 under the title Hesperides; or the Works both Human and Divine of Robert Herrick. The volume contained hundreds of alternately exquisite lyrical love poems, short satires and epigrams, and religious poems. A second subsection included in the Hesperides was entitled Noble Numbers and was comprised solely of poems of sacred subjects

Following the Restoration in 1660, with Charles II assuming the throne, Herrick petitioned for his own restoration to his previous post. Herrick was returned to his position as vicar of Dean Prior again in the summer of 1662 where he would remain until his death in 1674, at the age of 83. Herrick was a bachelor all his life, and many of the women he names in his poems are thought to be fictional... although one cannot be entirely certain as to whether some are indeed based upon real women. Herrick wrote numerous poems in which his beloved "Prew" figures, but also poems for his brothers and their wives and their children... as well as one poem in which he imagines how he himself might part from his wife... if he were to have one:

THE APPARITION OF HIS MISTRESS
CALLING HIM TO ELYSIUM.
Desunt nonnulla—

COME then, and like two doves with silv'ry wings,
Let our souls fly to th' shades where ever springs
Sit smiling in the meads ; where balm and oil,
Roses and cassia crown the untill'd soil.
Where no disease reigns, or infection comes
To blast the air, but ambergris and gums.
This, that, and ev'ry thicket doth transpire
More sweet than storax from the hallowed fire,
Where ev'ry tree a wealthy issue bears
Of fragrant apples, blushing plums, or pears ;
And all the shrubs, with sparkling spangles, shew
Like morning sunshine tinselling the dew.
Here in green meadows sits eternal May,
Purfling the margents, while perpetual day
So double gilds the air, as that no night
Can ever rust th' enamel of the light.
Here, naked younglings, handsome striplings, run
Their goals for virgins' kisses ; which when done,
Then unto dancing forth the learned round
Commixed they meet, with endless roses crown'd.
And here we'll sit on primrose-banks, and see
Love's chorus led by Cupid ; and we'll be
Two loving followers, too, unto the grove
Where poets sing the stories of our love.
There thou shalt hear divine Musæus sing
Of Hero and Leander ; then I'll bring
Thee to the stand, where honour'd Homer reads
His Odysseys and his high Iliads ;
About whose throne the crowd of poets throng
To hear the incantation of his tongue :
To Linus, then to Pindar ; and that done,
I'll bring thee, Herrick, to Anacreon,
Quaffing his full-crown'd bowls of burning wine,
And in his raptures speaking lines of thine,
Like to his subject ; and as his frantic
Looks shew him truly Bacchanalian-like
Besmear'd with grapes, welcome he shall thee thither,
Where both may rage, both drink and dance together.
Then stately Virgil, witty Ovid, by
Whom fair Corinna sits, and doth comply
With ivory wrists his laureat head, and steeps
His eye in dew of kisses while he sleeps ;
Then soft Catullus, sharp-fang'd Martial,
And towering Lucan, Horace, Juvenal,
And snaky Persius, these, and those, whom rage
(Dropt for the jars of heaven) fill'd t' engage
All times unto their frenzies ; thou shalt there
Behold them in a spacious theatre.
Among which glories, crowned with sacred bays
And flatt'ring ivy, two recite their plays—
Beaumont and Fletcher, swans to whom all ears
Listen, while they, like syrens in their spheres,
Sing their Evadne ; and still more for thee
There yet remains to know than thou can'st see
By glim'ring of a fancy. Do but come,
And there I'll shew thee that capacious room
In which thy father Jonson now is plac'd,
As in a globe of radiant fire, and grac'd
To be in that orb crown'd, that doth include
Those prophets of the former magnitude,
And he one chief ; but hark, I hear the ****
(The bellman of the night) proclaim the clock
Of late struck one, and now I see the prime
Of day break from the pregnant east : 'tis time
I vanish ; more I had to say,
But night determines here, away.

Transpire, breathe.
Purfling, trimming, embroidering.
Margents, bowers.
Round, rustic dance.
Rage, the poetic "furor".
Comply, encircle.
Their Evadne, the sister of Melantius in their play
"The Maid's Tragedy".

Herrick's apprenticeship as a jeweler and goldsmith are especially intriguing when one considers just how jewel-like his poems are. He is a master of the miniature... rather like those Elizabethan cameos. (Its only fitting that my own personal collection of his poems is itself a miniature volume.) He's all flowers, perfume and other sweet scents, gems, and beautiful women. His touch is exquisitely light... "precious" in the finest sense of the world:

TO THE VIRGINS, TO MAKE MUCH OF TIME.

GATHER ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying :
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he's to setting.

That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer ;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may go marry :
For having lost but once your prime
You may for ever tarry.


DELIGHT IN DISORDER.

A SWEET disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness :
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction :
An erring lace which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher :
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribbons to flow confusedly :
A winning wave (deserving note)
In the tempestuous petticoat :
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility :
Do more bewitch me than when art
Is too precise in every part.

UPON JULIA'S CLOTHES.

WHENAS in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.

Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free ;
O how that glittering taketh me !

Poems such as these are just marvelous sensual delights! They remind me of the shimmer of satin and lace and a little glimpse of leg as might be found in the paintings of the French Baroque painter, Watteau...:



or some of the more delicate poetry of Verlaine or the chanson of Faure or Debussy. The descriptive sensuality of Herrick's language employing allusions to sound, sight, scent, touch and even motion is absolutely exquisite. Who can ever forget "...how sweetly flows/ That liquefaction of her clothes..."? What a marvelous word.

Of course... if it is not already obvious... I have long been an admirer of Herrick's poetry. One poem in particular, The Vine, has always made me smile... if not break into laughter:

THE VINE.

I DREAM'D this mortal part of mine
Was Metamorphoz'd to a Vine;
Which crawling one and every way,
Enthrall'd my dainty Lucia.
Me thought, her long small legs & thighs
I with my Tendrils did surprize;
Her Belly, Buttocks, and her Waste
By my soft Nerv'lits were embrac'd:
About her head I writhing hung,
And with rich clusters (hid among
The leaves) her temples I behung:
So that my Lucia seem'd to me
Young Bacchus ravished by his tree.
My curles about her neck did craule,
And armes and hands they did enthrall:
So that she could not freely stir,
(All parts there made one prisoner.)
But when I crept with leaves to hide
Those parts, which maids keep unespy'd,
Such fleeting pleasures there I took,
That with the fancie I awook;
And found (Ah me!) this flesh of mine
More like a Stock then like a Vine.

Of course it should be mentioned that in contrast to these poems Herrick sprinkled the Hesperides with some poems of a darker nature... often taking the form of epigrams that satirize certain characteristics or weaknesses that Herrick found "ugly". Many of these may have been inspired by his parrishoners... while he is no less sparing of himself.

WRINKLES.

WRINKLES no more are or no less
Than beauty turned to sourness.

UPON HIS EYESIGHT FAILING HIM.

I BEGIN to wane in sight ;
Shortly I shall bid good-night :
Then no gazing more about,
When the tapers once are out

For more of Herrick (actually all of Herrick):
http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/herrick/herribib.htm

[quasimodo1]

First, let me thank stlukesguild for an outstanding post on a great, prolific poet. Before another is put up, does anyone have a poet in mind that they would like to see have a similar treatment? quasimodo1

[stlukesguild]

Yehuda Halevi or Yehuda ben Shemuel Ha-Levi c. 1075-1141

Medieval Moorish Spain was one of the most fabulous cultures of all history. The Moorish culture in what is today Morocco dates back to the time of the Roman Empire (and perhaps earlier) when they acted as trading partners with Carthage, the independent city-state founded by the Phoenicians and competitor/enemy of Rome. Following the destruction of Carthage the surrounding provinces were integrated into the Roman Empire and later Christianized. With the fall of the Roman Empire the Byzantine Empire, the Vandals and the Arabs all struggled to gain control of the Moors. Around 600 A.D. the region was brought under Arab-Islamic control. In 711, the now Moslem Moors conquered the Visigoths taking possession of the Iberian Peninsula and pushed well into France until eventually defeated by Charles Martel at the decisive Battle of Tours (or Battle of Poitiers). The Moslem forces continued to hold control of most of what is today Spain and Portugal and many of the native population converted to Islam. Nevertheless, a number of Christian-European city-states continued to initiate conflict with the Moors and to slowly push into Spanish-Muslim territories. In 1212 a coalition under Alfonso VIII of Castille pushed the Muslims out of central Spain. Nevertheless, they would hold out in the south until 1492 when the last Moslem stronghold in Granada fell to the Christian forces. With the "reconquista" of Spain by Christian forces there began a period of forced conversion to Catholicism shortly after Isabella and Ferdinand instituted the Inquisition in 1480. Not only was the Inquisition directed at Jews and Muslims who had overtly converted to Christianity but were thought to be practicing their faiths secretly... but also it was geared toward Protestants or other "heretics" who rejected Roman Catholic orthodoxy. The persecution lead to a mass exodus leading to a population loss of about 1/3rd by 1600.

From the tenth century A.D. until the final fall of Granada Moorish Spain or Arab Andalusia would represent one of the great cultures and great cultural experiments in history. In spite of the Moslem control, there was a religious tolerance so that Islam, Christianity, and Judaism all flourished. Intellectual concepts and beliefs of these three religions and the artistic ideas of the east and west were interwoven in the hot house environment of Arab Andalusia. Among the great artistic achievements of the era one might point first to the marvelous art and architecture of Seville and Granada... especially as found in Alhambra, the fantastic palace complex of the Moorish rulers and once proclaimed the beautiful city in the world:











Beyond the visual arts, Arab Andalusia would inspire fabulous innovations in literature (Poem of the Cid, Solomon ibn Gabriol, Moses ibn Ezra, etc...) and music. The music of the Sephardic Jews would merge ancient Hebrew traditions with Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Greek, North African, etc. Attempts by the Jewish composer, Isaac Nathan in the early nineteenth century to revive some of this ancient music would serve as an impetus for Lord Byron's Hebrew Melodies. The German poet, Heinrich Heine's Hebrew Melodies were also rooted in the music of Arab Andalusia... but also the poetry of the great Spanish Hebrew poets, especially Jehuda Halevi.

Born c. 1075 in Navarre, Spain, Jehuda Halevi, Yehuda ben Shemuel Ha-Levi in full, was a Jewish poet, philosopher and doctor. Halevi's youth is said to have been spent in seeking both pleasure and in study. He chose medicine as a career, but exhibited a great aptitude for poetry. His poetry aroused the praise and admiration of his great predecessor, Moses ibn Ezra. Halevi made a masterful use of both lyrical Arabic poetic forms and the traditions of Hebrew poetry. His early themes were common to Arabic lyric poetry: wine, women, and song.

from: That Night a Gazelle

That night a gazelle
of a girl showed me the sun
of her cheek and veil
of auburn hair

like ruby over
a moistened crystal brow
she looked like dawn's
fire rising...

from: The Doe Washes

The doe washes her clothes
in the stream of my tears
and sets them out to dry
in the glow of her glory...

from: To Ibn Al-Mu'allim

Gently, my hard-hearted, slender one,
be gentle with me and I'll bow before you.
I've ravished you only in looking-
my heart is pure, but not my eyes:
They'd gather from your features
the roses and lillies mingled there.
I'd lift the fire from your cheeks
to put out fire with fire...

-translated by Peter Cole, 2007

from Parted Lovers

...If parting be decreed for the two of us,
stand yet a little, while I gaze upon thy face...

By the life of Love, remember the days of thy longing as I-
I remember the nights of thy delight.

As thine image passeth into my dream,
So let me pass, I entreat thee, into thy delight.
Between me and thee roar the waves of a sea of tears
And I cannot pass over unto thee...

Would that after my death, unto mine ears should come
The sound of the golden bells upon thy skirts.

-translated by Nina Salaman, 1923

Of course Hafiz was more than aware of the Greco-Latin traditions of love poetry as well:

from: Epithalamium

The stars of the earth are joined today-
a pair unrivalled in the hosts of heaven.
Even the Pleiades envy this union,
for breath itself can't come between them...

-translated by Peter Cole, 2007

His style, which was both personal and fluid... but also containing the mythic-visionary manner of the Hebrew Bible is all the more astonishing when one considers that Hebrew was NOT his native language. In spite of this, Halevi has the reputation as the greatest post-Biblical Hebrew poet.

Halevi described himself as the "immigrant from Christendom" due to his continual wandering. He had initially lived in southern Islamic Spain (some say Toledo). With time, he became disillusioned with the pleasure-seeking/ beauty-worshiping lifestyle of the Andalusian cultural ideal, declaring: "Don't be taken by Greek wisdom/ which bears no fruit, but only blossoms." This change of heart may have been in part due to a growing spiritual maturity, but it was also a response to the increasing intolerance toward Judaism which he was to witness following the assumption of control of Andalusia by the North African Almoravids. He moved initially to Seville or Cordoba and then eventually followed many other Jewish-Andalusian refugees to Castille, ruled by the tolerant King Alfonso VI. When King Alfonso died, however, anti-Jewish rioting broke out. Halevi seems to have continued to wander for some time, often witnessing the devastation of Jewish communities wrought by Christian and Muslim forces alike. At this time Halevi's poetry began to turn to serious spiritual/religious content and build even more so upon the Hebrew Biblical traditions:

from Heal Me Lord

Heal me Lord and I will be healed.
Don't let me perish in your anger.
All my balms and potions are yours
to guide to weakness or to vigor...

from True Life

I run to the source of the one true life,
turning my back on all that is empty or vain.
My only hope is to see the Lord, my king-
apart from Him I fear and worship nothing...

from Where Will I Find You

Where, Lord, will I find you:
your place is high and obscured
And where
won't I find you:
your glory fills the world...

-translated by Peter Cole, 2007

In spite of Halevi's rejection of easy pleasures of wine, women, and song and his rejection of the Arab-Andalusian culture he once embraced, his poetry still made masterful use of the forms of the Arabic lyrical poem traditions... often in combination with Hebrew traditions... in this case conjoining it with the tradition of the Biblical Psalms:

from Sabbath Hymn

On Friday doth my cup o'erflow,
What blissful rest the night shall know,
When, in thine arms, my toil and woe
Are all forgot, Sabbath my love!

'Tis dusk, with sudden light, distilled
From one sweet face, the world is filled;
The tumult of my heart is stilled-
For thou art come, Sabbath my love!...

translated by Hartwig Hirschfeld, 1905

At this time Helevi also became noted as a philosopher, composer various treatises upon Judaism. Perhaps the most well-known of these is The Kuzari, In Defense of the Despised Faith which presented Hebrew beliefs in clear-cut manner and argued against Greek philosophy, Islam, and Christianity. Eventually believing that he could only find peace of mind in the Holy Land Halevi bid farewell to friends and family shortly after the death of his wife and sailed for Alexandria, Egypt. He was greatly welcomed there. There were many admirers there and Egypt provided a large and safe Jewish community, free from intolerance or oppression. Nevertheless, Halevi was set upon returning to the Holy Land. He was advised against due to ill health, but continued to push on. It is thought that he passed through Cairo, Tyre, Damascus, and eventually arrived at Jerusalem. Tradition has it that he was slain by an Arab horseman while he was singing his great Song to Zion before the remaining western wall of the great Temple of Solomon (now known as the "Wailing Wall").



from Song to Zion

Won't you ask, Zion,
how your captives are faring-
this last remnant of your flock who seek
your peace with all their being?
From west and east, from north and south-
from those near and far,
from all corners- accept these greetings,
and from desire's captive, this blessing...

-translated by Peter Cole, 2007

More by Halevi: http://www.angelfire.com/ct/halevi/

[stlukesguild]

William Blake (November 28, 1757 – August 12, 1827) may just be my single favorite British poet so I will need to offer fair warning as to the possibility of some bias. Blake has long been accepted as one of the "great six" of British Romanticism (Blake, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge) and one of the greatest poets ever to have written in the English language. His achievements in the visual arts have gained him near equal acclaim. Nevertheless, Blake has also been one of the most misunderstood and maligned of any major poet. He is often portrayed as a half-mad genius, a wacked-out visionary who spoke to spirits, a political naif, a curmudgeon and "outsider", a self-taught artist and poet who had little knowledge or experience of the art of his predecessors or of his own time. Most of these stereotypes have little reality to them.

Blake may not have had the advantage of a formal education in literature at the university level... nevertheless, he was most certainly not unlearned. The reality is that Blake was very well-read and often of literature which was not part of the accepted canon of his time. Of course Blake was well-versed in the works of Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Chaucer, Ben Jonson, Spencer, and the Bible... but other sources of inspiration include Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, with whom he was friends and a political ally, Emanuel Swedenborg, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Plato, Plotinus, the Hermetica and the Bhagavad Gita, mythologies of the world from Egypt to Iceland to India to ancient Britain and even the Kabbalah. Not only was Blake well-read, but he was also an insightful reader who developed interpretations that freely challenged the accepted ones.

Blake developed an early love of drawing by copying engravings of masters such as Raphael, Michelangelo, and Albrecht Dürer. In this he was was fully supported by his father. Unable to afford apprenticeship to a painting master, Blake was initially apprenticed to the fashionable William Ryland, engraver to King George. Blake however would request that his father find a more suitable match for his talents, declaring that Ryland had "the hanging look about him". (In fact Ryland would end on the scaffold some years later, convicted for forging currency.) Blake spent his apprentice years under James Basire. Basire's manner of working was rather out-dated stressing the linear contours and avoiding the more painterly affects that would allow for replication of paintings or the creation of more atmospheric elements. His manner, however, was perfectly suited to Blake's own personal preferences for the linear sculptural form. Basire's chief source of income was the result of commissioned engravings to be made of architectural and sculptural details of English churches and cathedrals. Through his apprenticeship to Basire Blake was exposed to the stylistic abstractions of Romanesque and Gothic art which would have been largely dismissed by most artists of the time.

In 1778 Blake enrolled in the Royal Academy. He quickly rebelled against the preference of the academy for such painterly masters as Rubens, Rembrandt, and Titian... as well as against the president of the academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds. He detested Reynold's pursuit of "abstractions" and "generalizations" and he would write in the margins of his personal copy of Reynold's Discourses, "To Generalize is to be an Idiot; To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit".

In 1782 Blake met John Flaxman (sculptor) and George Cumberland (one of the founders of the National Gallery) who would both become patrons of his work. He also met Catherine Boucher, who would become his wife. Illiterate at the time of his marriage, Blake would not only teach her to read and write, but also educate her in the art of watercolors and engraving. She would become an invaluable aid to him in the creation of his printed books and a great moral support.

In 1784 Blake and his brother, Robert opened a print shop, and began working with the radical publisher, Joseph Johnson. Through Johnson, Blake met with some of the leading intellectual dissidents of the time, including Joseph Priestly, John Henry Fuseli (whose art work clearly influenced Blake's own), Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, William Wordsworth, and William Godwin. Inspired by Wollstonecraft's views on marriage and sexuality Blake composed his Visions of the Daughters of Albion in 1793. It is quite possible that Percy Shelley may have come across Blake's writings in the possession of Mary Godwin (Shelley), Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter.

In 1788 Blake developed his method of "relief etching" (reportedly revealed to him by his deceased brother Robert in a dream) by which he produced most of his printed and illustrated books. Blake often referred to his illustrated books as "illuminated books"... a term used to describe the medieval books such as the Book of Kells, the Lindesfarne Gospels...



...or the Tres Riches Heures of the Limbourg Brothers, in which the text and imagery were woven into a single unified artistic entity. These books were engraved or etched in a single color and then each volume was handpainted in watercolors by himself or Catherine.



Blake also produced a large number of watercolor paintings illustrating scenes from the Bible, Milton, Dante, Shakespeare, and Chaucer. Some of these were bound with folios, while others were imagined as the basis for more ambitious printed books that he would never realize.


Pieta


Cain and Abel


The Lustful Caught in the Whirlwind- from the Inferno

Blake's two thin volumes The Songs of Innocence and The Songs of Experience are perhaps his most famous poetic and artistic productions... and also the first instances in which he fully integrated his visual and poetic talents.



The Songs of Innocence consist mostly of poems describing the innocence and joy of the natural world... or the world seen from an innocent viewpoint, advocating free love and a personal relationship with God unmediated by religion. The poems and the accompanying imagery are deceptively child-like. They strike one initially as simple... even naive... but reveal a deeper meaning with with repeated reading:

The Lamb

Little Lamb who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life and bid thee feed
By the stream and o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing whooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice.
Little Lamb who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

Little Lamb I'll tell thee,
Little Lamb I'll tell thee;
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a lamb.
He is meek and he is mild;
He became a little child.
I a child and thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
Little Lamb God bless thee.

Infant Joy

"I have no name;
I am but two days old."
What shall I call thee?
"I happy am,
Joy is my name."
Sweet joy befall thee!
Pretty joy!
Sweet joy, but two days old.
Sweet Joy I call thee:
Thou dost smile,
I sing the while;
Sweet joy befall thee!

In contrast, The Songs of Experience suggest a loss of innocence after exposure to the materialistic world, "unnatural" concepts such as good and evil, sin, and religion. Most of the poems of the latter volume offer a direct counterpart to the Songs of Innocence. Perhaps the best example is The Tyger, counterpart to The Lamb, and probably Blake's most famous (deservedly) poem:

The Tyger

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?



I have long held this lyric in my memory, like many nursery rhymes and poems learned in my youth. Like a nursery rhyme, it's hypnotic and chant-like... seeming oh so simple at first... but soon revealing far greater depths of thought... questions about the very nature of good and evil and creation. I'm always struck with chills as the poet finally confronts us with the ultimate question, "Did he who made the Lamb, make thee?", before returning once again to the beginning, "Tyger Tyger..." and leaving that question unanswered... but perhaps provoking a little spark in our minds.

Another favorite of the The Songs of Experience is The Garden of Love:

The Garden of Love

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.

This poem... again deceptively simple and childlike... confronts us with what were certainly rather revolutionary ideas at the time. The poem clearly suggests the naturalness of sexuality and rages against the manner in which organized religion attempts to repress our natural desires and label them as "sinful".

Blake was largely unknown outside of a small circle of admirers during his lifetime. His reputation began to be revived toward the end of the 19th century thanks to the admiration of poets such as W.B. Yeats and D.G Rossetti. Rossetti, an artist and poet, was greatly enamored of Blake's attempt to merge both the visual and literary arts. In 1847, Dante Gabriel Rossetti purchased a journal of Blake's from the brother of the artist Samuel Palmer in which one could see early compositional studies for many of Blake's more famous art works. The text of the manuscript included copies of many of Blake's poems from the Songs of Innocence and Experience. These exhibit numerous revisions. Perhaps more importantly, the so-called "Rossetti Manuscript" along with another original document known as the "Pickering Manuscript" contain several unpublished poems... including a number that contain some of Blake's most well-known passages:

Auguries of Innocence

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour

A Robin Red breast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage

A Dove house fill'd with Doves and Pigeons
Shudders Hell thro' all its regions

A Dog starved at his Master's Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State...

Man was made for Joy & Woe
And when this we rightly know
Thro' the world we safely go.

Joy & Woe are woven fine,
A Clothing for the Soul divine;
Under every grief and pine
Runs a Joy with silken twine...

Every Night & every Morn
Some to Misery are Born
Every Morn and every Night,
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are Born to Endless Night.

continued...