Wednesday Poem: Luke Havergal

“Luke Havergal” caught the attention of Teddy Roosevelt, who, impressed by its evocative imagery and mournful rhythm, promptly gave its author a government job as a small sinecure.

Luke Havergal
Edwin Arlington Robinson

Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal,
There where the vines cling crimson on the wall,
And in the twilight wait for what will come.
The leaves will whisper there of her, and some,
Luke flying words, will strike you as they fall;
But go, and if you listen, she will call.
Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal—
Luke Havergal.

No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies
To rift the fiery night that's in your eyes;
But there, where western glooms are gathering,
The dark will end the dark, if anything:
God slays himself with every leaf that flies,
And hell is more than half of paradise.
No; there is not a dawn in eastern skies—
In eastern skies.

Out of a grave I come to tell you this,
Out of a grave I come to quench the kiss
That flames upon your forehead with a glow
That blinds you to the way that you must go.
Yes, there is yet one way to where she is,
Butter, but one that faith may never miss.
Out of a grave I come to tell you this—
To tell you this.

There is the western gate, Luke Havergal,
There are the crimson leaves upon the wall.
Go, for the winds are tearing them away,—
Nor think to riddle the dead words they say,
Nor any more to feel them as they fall;
But go, and if you trust her she will call.
There is the western gate, Luke Havergal—
Luke Havergal.

Wednesday Poem: Work Without Hope

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is a fascinating man to read about; he always seems drawn to darkness yet struggles towards the light. Much of his life was a struggle to complete ambitious literary projects even while suffering from depression and opium addiction. And as you would expect, Coleridge can plumb depths of darkness and fevered imagery that I've never come across in, say, Wordsworth or Keats. But here's a somewhat calmer one, though it does touch on futility and struggle.

Work Without Hope
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

All nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair--
The bees are stirring--birds are on the wing--
And winter slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.

Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow,
Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow.
Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may,
For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away!
With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll:
And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?
Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And hope without an object cannot live.

Wednesday Poem: Every Riven Thing

Last week I definitely forgot to post a poem. This week, I'm hardly going to do better: I'm just posting a link. I found this on The Fire and The Rose the other week, and I liked it very much. It's by a poet who is not dead, so I'm breaking tradition already. His name is Christian Wiman, and I know almost nothing about him except that some of his work is beautiful. Read “Every Riven Thing” and “This Mind of Dying” on a page at the Harvard Divinity School website, and then pretend that you read them here.

“God goes belonging to every riven thing he's made.”

Wednesday Poem: The Realists

I'm re-reading the Lord of the Rings again—a thousand apologies to those to whom I said that Tolkien was a poor stylist! It's his dialogue that occasionally gets clunky, not his description. This Yeats poem seems to get it right, the wonderful treasure of fairie-stories, and it's from 1916, so it falls in the public domain just outside of copyright land.

The Realists
W.B. Yeats

Hope that you may understand!
What can books of men that wive
In a dragon-guarded land,
Paintings of the dolphin-drawn
Sea-nymphs in their pearly waggons
Do, but awake a hope to live
That had gone
With the dragons?

Wednesday Poem: Alone

The strange thing about melancholy: amid all its torments, unexpected blessings.

Alone
Edgar Allen Poe

From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As others saw—I could not bring
My passions from a common spring—
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow—I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone—
And all I loved—I loved alone.
Then—in my childhood—in the dawn
Of a most stormy life—was drawn
From ev'ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still—
From the torrnet, or the fountain—
From the red cliff of the mountain—
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold—
From the lightening in the sky
As it passed me flying by—
From the thunder, and the storm—
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.

Wednesday Poem: Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister

For my money, one of the funnier poems in the English language, with its rhymed insults from the mouth of a monk. Who knew such things could happen back in the cloister? The best bit might be how the speaker triple-sips his beverages to “frustrate” the “Arian” (trinity-denying) heresy.

Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister
Robert Browning

Gr-r-r — there go, my heart’s abhorrence!
Water your damned flower-pots, do!
If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,
God’s blood, would not mine kill you!
What? your myrtle-bush wants trimming?
Oh, that rose has prior claims —
Needs its leaden vase filled brimming?
Hell dry you up with its flames!

At the meal we sit together;
Salve tibi! I must hear
Wise talk of the kind of weather,
Sort of season, time of year:
Not a plenteous cork-crop: scarcely 
   Dare we hope oak-galls, I doubt; 
What's the Latin name for “parsley”? 
What's the Greek name for “swine's snout”?

Whew! We’ll have our platter burnished,
Laid with care on our own shelf!
With a fire-new spoon we’re furnished,
And a goblet for ourself,
Rinsed like something sacrificial
Ere ’tis fit to touch our chaps —
Marked with L. for our initial!
(He-he! There his lily snaps!)

Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores
Squats outside the Convent bank
With Sanchicha, telling stories,
Steeping tresses in the tank,
Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horsehairs,
— Can’t I see his dead eye glow,
Bright as ’twere a Barbary corsair's?
(That is, if he'd let it show!)

When he finishes refection,
Knife and fork he never lays
Cross-wise, to my recollection,
As do I, in Jesu’s praise.
I the Trinity illustrate,
Drinking watered orange-pulp —
In three sips the Arian frustrate;
While he drains his at one gulp.

Oh, those melons? If he’s able
We're to have a feast! so nice!
One goes to the Abbot’s table,
All of us get each a slice.
How go on your flowers? None double?
Not one fruit-sort can you spy?
Strange! — And I, too, at such trouble,
Keep them close-nipped on the sly!

There's a great text in Galatians,
Once you trip on it, entails
Twenty-nine distinct damnations,
One sure, if another fails:
If I trip him just a-dying,
Sure of heaven as sure as can be,
Spin him round and send him flying
Off to hell, a Manichee?

Or, my scrofulous French novel
On grey paper with blunt type!
Simply glance at it, you grovel
Hand and foot in Belial’s gripe:
If I double down its pages
At the woeful sixteenth print,
When he gathers his greengages,
Ope a sieve and slip it in’t?

Or, there's Satan! — one might venture
Pledge one's soul to him, yet leave
Such a flaw in the indenture
As he’d miss till, past retrieve,
Blasted lay that rose-acacia
We're so proud of! Hy, Zy, Hine ...
’St, there's Vespers! Plena gratiâ 
   Ave, Virgo! Gr-r-r — you swine!

Wednesday Poem: Dover Beach

I'm feeling great, so: a sad poem.

Dover Beach
Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;—on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was one, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Wednesday Poem: A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing

Here's some good didactic poetry for you. Study up, lest you wind up drunk on shallow draughts.

A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing
Alexander Pope

A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:
There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Fir'd at first Sight with what the Muse imparts,
In fearless Youth we tempt the Heights of Arts,
While from the bounded Level of our Mind,
Short Views we take, nor see the Lengths behind,
But more advanc'd, behold with strange Suprize
New, distant Scenes of endless Science rise!
So pleas'd at first, the towring Alps we try,
Mount o'er the Vales, and seem to tread the Sky;
Th' Eternal Snows appear already past,
And the first Clouds and Mountains seem the last:
But those attain'd, we tremble to survey
The growing Labours of the lengthen'd Way,
Th' increasing Prospect tires our wandring Eyes,
Hills peep o'er Hills, and Alps on Alps arise!

Wednesday Poem: Possibilities

Possibilities
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Where are the poets, unto whom belong
The Olympian heights; whose singing shafts were sent
Straight to the mark, and not from bows half bent,
But with utmost tension of the thong?
Where are the stately argosies of song,
Whose rushing keels made music as they went
Sailing in search of some new continent,
With all sail set, and steady winds and strong?
Perhaps there lives some dreamy boy, untaught
In schools, some graduate of the field of street,
Who shall become a master of the art,
An admiral sailing the high seas of thought,
Fearless and first, and steering with his fleet
For lands not yet laid down in any chart.

“Wednesday” Poem (late): Aaron Stark, Erasmus

I've been sick and busy, but you will hear no more about that from me, because this is not a personal blog.

I was browsing the old Oscar Williams American Poetry anthology and enjoyed some of the Edwin Arlington Robinson poems. Robinson got his big break when Theodore Roosevelt publicly lauded Robinson's fascinating “Luke Havergal.” I checked around for some other public domain stuff and found two that I think I like, both about outsiders, one in Maine and one in late Medieval Europe. Here they are.

Aaron Stark
Edwin Arlington Robinson

Withal a meager man was Aaron Stark—
Cursed and unkempt, shrewd, shriveled, and morose.
A miser was he, with a miser's nose,
And eyes like little dollars in the dark.
His thin, pinched mouth was nothing but a mark;
And when he spoke there came like sullen blows
Through scattered fangs a few snarled words and close,
As if a cur were chary of its bark.

Glad for the murmur of his hard renown,
Year after year he shambled through the town—
A loveless exile moving with a staff;
And oftentimes there crept into his ears
A sound of alien pity, touched with tears—
And then (and only then) did Aaron laugh.

Erasmus
Edwin Arlington Robinson

When he protested, not too solemnly,
That for a world's achieving maintenance
The crust of overdone divinity
Lacked aliment, they called it recreance;
And when he chose through his own glass to scan
Sick Europe, and reduced, unyieldingly,
The monk within the cassock to the man
Within the monk, they called it heresy.

And when he made so perilously bold
As to be scattered forth in black and white,
Good fathers looked askance at him and rolled
Their inward eyes in anguish and affright;
There were some of them did shake at what was told,
And they shook best who knew that he was right.

Wednesday Poem: The Human Seasons

Keats could arrange words to such glorious and subtle effect. He died at twenty-five, and you have to wonder what Keats would have written had he not passed directly from Spring to Winter. Of course, all of his writing had a tinge of Autumn…

The Human Seasons
John Keats

Four Seasons fill the measure of the year;
There are four seasons in the mind of man:—
He has his lusty Spring, when fancy clear
Takes in all beauty with an easy span:

He has his Summer, when luxuriously
Spring's honey'd cud of youthful thought he loves
To ruminate, and by such dreaming high
Is nearest unto heaven: quiet coves

His soul has in its Autumn, when his wings
He furleth close; contented so to look
On mists in idleness—to let fair things
Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook:

He has his Winter too of pale misfeature,
Or else he would forego his mortal nature.

Wednesday Poem: That Holy Thing

Because it is Holy Week, I sought out a religious poem for today. I found one by George MacDonald. If only I could find my old copy of The Golden Key! I'd read the whole thing tonight. But anyway, here it is: short, simple, and probably deeper than you think. (Again via Bartleby!)

That Holy Thing
George MacDonald

They all were looking for a king
To slay their foes and lift them high:
Thou cam'st, a little baby thing
That made a woman cry.

O Son of Man, to right my lot
Naught but Thy presence can avail;
Yet on the road Thy wheels are not,
Nor on the sea Thy sail!

My how or when Thou wilt not heed,
But come down Thine own secret stair,
That Thou mayst answer all my need—
Yea, every bygone prayer.

Wednesday Poem: Meeting at Night; Parting at Morning

I went to a friend's literary event tonight, and it got me to thinking about Keats and negative capability. And I was thinking about writing something on that tonight, but I want to put a little bit more thought into it before I type it up. Everyone needs a little bit of poetry, right? So I'm going to try to post some short, public domain works once a week or so.

Why not start with Browning? He's one of the very best, after all. There isn't much that I want to say about these two brief poems, except that they are beautiful, and that the “him” in “Parting at Morning” seems to be the sun. (Both poems can be found at Bartleby.com.)

Meeting at Night
Robert Browning

The gray sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon long and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i' the slushy sand.

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, a quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, thro' its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!

Parting at Morning
Robert Browning

Round the cape of a sudden came the sea
And the sun looked over the mountain's rim:
And straight was a path of gold for him,
And the need of a world of men for me.