Names for Hunger
By Mrigaa Sethi

On the walk back from
the therapist to the office
you rub your chest and say

It’ll be all right, my gurgush
There’s a clusterfuck waiting at work,
things that really aren’t personal

but slice you up anyway
You’ll be all right, my malai ka doona
It’ll all get done, my chhunmunita

You think of your mother
whose love birthed all these names
How often she hurt you

and it dawns on you, like a flash
of lightning on an airplane:
love is a bagad billa

At the pantry, you feed yourself
a boxed lunch of baingan and channa
and remember how she once

stood at the door, hours
after she locked you up in a room
a plate of aloo parathas in her hand

and a look that said you were ok now,
the anger under your relief
You swallow the last morsel, feeling
it graze your heart.
Back at work, hungry again.

About the Poet

Mrigaa Sethi is an Indian poet and writer who was born in New Delhi. They were raised in Bangkok and currently living in Singapore. Their poems have appeared in The Seneca Review, ep;phany and other literary magazines, and been anthologized in Call and Response 2 and EXHALE: an Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices. She is also a storyteller and has performed at Other Tongues: A Festival of Minority Voices, What’s Your Story Slam, the Singapore Night Festival and StoryFest.

They are also a journalist and writer/editor who covers lifestyle, business, and social issues across the Asia-Pacific region. Their freelance journalism has appeared in Quartz, the Wall Street Journal and CNN Travel, and she has produced jargon-free business content for clients such as Prudential, TM ONE, NinjaVan, and other start-ups.  Outside of work, Their creative projects engage digital audiences across different mediums. Over the pandemic, she hosted a podcast series for the Singapore Writers Festival, ran a poetry-themed video series, and helped lead an online theatre festival for queer women in Singapore. Their newest passion project is growing Their LinkedIn network of thought leaders and followers, around topics such as creativity, diversity and inclusion, and content marketing.

Mrigaa’s mother is Bonny Sethi, a fashion designer whose one-woman studio in Bangkok – June Fifth by Bonny – specializes in bespoke Indian bridal wear. Mrigaa is quite the opposite of their mother. In an article for the Singapore women’s magazine Her World, she explains:

As a toddler, I would lie on the floor and shriek with displeasure when she put me in dresses and stockings. During my tween years, I would mope around at parties in the high-waisted skirts and floral blouses she picked out for me. I loathed the culottes the girls had to wear at my Catholic middle school – my mother refused to buy me the trouser option – and hid inside a sweaty oversized jacket.

As a teenager, I became more willful, insisting on wearing my father’s roomy flannel shirts and leather belts. Every dressy occasion – office parties, Diwali dos, wedding receptions – became a fashion battleground for my mother and me. 

The tension wasn’t just about clothes. And as I grew older, my gender and sexuality became harder to deny. Fashion anguish aside, I had unrequited crushes on female classmates and teachers that my mother knew about but was unprepared to handle. 

There was no word in Hindi for what I was. There wasn’t anyone like me in Bangkok’s conservative Indian community, where their child’s eventual heterosexual wedding was the dream twinkling in every parent’s eye.

After high school, she moved to the US. In both fashion and romance, she found the freedom she wanted but wasn’t able to find the right fit. Mrigaa found it hard to reconcile their sexuality with their Indian identity. She felt she could be queer or Indian, but never at the same time. Things seemed to come to a head when she moved back to Bangkok from the US seven years later and faced the choice of going back in the closet or being openly gay in the city where their parents’ Indian community resided. Their mother’s bridal business had taken off and become very well-known and was concerned that living with my partner would lead to gossip.

The integration of being queer and Indian took many years, but things changed for the better when their mother stopped negotiating on toned-down Indian women’s outfits for them and started designing clothes that made me feel good: more masculine sherwanis, Aligarh trousers, fitted Nehru collar jackets in rich prints with silk pocket squares. Eventually, it seemed like the cosmos sent their mother a gift. Mrigaa met their current partner whom they say is “beautiful, both inside and out.” On every visit to Bangkok, their mother showered their partner with all the dresses, jewelry, and handbags a fashionista mother could give a daughter. 

About the Poem

Sometimes you read a poem and you immediately identify with it in some way. You may not understand the whole poem, but there is just something about it that speaks to you. “Names for Hunger” by Mrigaa Sethi did that for me. Mrigaa is lesbian and Indian, while I am white, s gay man from the southern United States. Being members of the LGBTQ+ though is not they only thing we have in common. Our relationships with our mothers are complex, and we are constantly trying to work through that complexity.

Speaking about this poem, Mrigaa Sethi said, “I lived in Singapore during the pandemic, and for a time my temporary office happened to be across the street from my therapist’s. After one particularly impactful session, I came back to my office and reheated my lunch of homemade Indian leftovers. They used to cause me great shame when I was a little immigrant kid, but in adulthood bring me great joy. This poem resulted from the collision of my ‘work self’ with some other selves that had lingered after therapy.”

Before I give my thoughts on the poem, I thought I’d try to give definitions for some of the words in this poem that were unfamiliar to me and will possibly be unfamiliar to you. I could not find a direct reference to the first three, but the last three were easy enough to find. If you are familiar with any of these words (some mean something very different in language other than Hindi), please let me know.

• Gargush was the most difficult for me to understand. The word gargush is Hebrew for a traditional Yemenite Jewish headdress. I do not believe this is what the poet was referencing. I think it is more likely a Hinglish (a mixture of the English and Hindi) word for gorgeous, though I could not find this in my searches for the word’s meaning.
• malai ka doona: Malaika is a Hindu girl’s name meaning “angel.” Doona is a type of quilt or duvet, but it also seems to mean “doubly.” By best guess is malai ka doona means a double angel, or maybe a very sweet and caring person. I could not find any actual equivalent in Hindi, so this is my best guess.
• I assume that chhunmunita is the diminutive of Chhunmun, a girl’s name meaning “Cute.” Thus, chhunmunita would mean “little cutie” or something to that affect. Again, I could not actually find a meaning for chhunmunita. Chunmun is also a clothing store in India, which might mean there is a connection to Mrigaa Sethi’s mother.
• Bagad billa an imaginary animal invoked to frighten children. Also, the name Bagadbilla is of Hindi origin and means “A cat which pretends to be a tiger.”
• Baingan and channa is a flavorful vegan eggplant (baingan) and chickpea (channa) curry.
• Aloo paratha is a paratha (flat bread dish) stuffed with potato filling that is traditionally eaten for breakfast.

The poet hears their mother’s voice in their head as they cross the street from their therapist to their temporary office. They know that “there’s a clusterfuck waiting at work.” As a queer Indian, the poet speaks of how often their mother hurt them and that love can be a terrifying monster (bagad billa) that pretends to be something that it is not but disguises itself as something that should be beautiful. As the poet eats their lunch, they realize that their mother did love them but found it hard to express that love through understanding. Eventually, the mother does accept the poet, and they go back to work still feeling hungry for the love that they had felt they lacked growing up.

I can understand the frustration of wanting to be accepted by your mother who believes that what she does, even though it hurts you, is done in love. My own mother lived in denial about my sexuality for years, and she still often hurts me with how she deals with it and the little nasty comments she sometimes makes. Yet, she wraps all of that in what she believes is love, when it is more hurtful than love ever should be. For some, like Mrigaa Sethi, acceptance eventually comes, but for others like me, I doubt it ever will. So, we press on, get back to work, and live our lives the best we can.

We hurry on, nor passing note
By Digby Mackworth Dolben

We hurry on, nor passing note
The rounded hedges white with May;
For golden clouds before us float
To lead our dazzled sight astray.
We say, ‘they shall indeed be sweet
‘The summer days that are to be’—
The ages murmur at our feet
The everlasting mystery.

We seek for Love to make our own,
But clasp him not for all our care
Of outspread arms; we gain alone
The flicker of his yellow hair
Caught now and then through glancing vine,
How rare, how fair, we dare not tell;
We know those sunny locks entwine
With ruddy-fruited asphodel.

A little life, a little love,
Young men rejoicing in their youth,
A doubtful twilight from above,
A glimpse of Beauty and of Truth,—
And then, no doubt, spring-loveliness
Expressed in hawthorns white and red,
The sprouting of the meadow grass,
But churchyard weeds about our head.

About the Poet

During the 19th century the gay British poet Digby Mackworth Dolben was little known. He owes his poetic reputation to his cousin, Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1913 to 1930, who edited a partial edition of his verse, Poems, in 1911. Bridges guaranteed Dolben’s reputation with Three Friends: Memoirs of Digby Mackworth Dolben, Richard Watson Dixon, Henry Bradley (1932), as well as the careful editing of his poetry. Bridges said that the poems Dolben left behind were equal to “anything that was ever written by any English poet at his age.” Hopkins’ infatuation for Dolben and Dolben’s tragic death feature in Simon Edge’s 2017 novel The Hopkins Conundrum.

Dolben was born February 8, 1848, in Guernsey and brought up at Finedon Hall in Northamptonshire. He was educated at Cheam School and Eton College. At Eton, his distant cousin Bridges was his senior and took him under his wing. Dolben caused considerable scandal at school by his exhibitionist behavior. He chronicled his romantic attachment to another pupil a year older than he was, Martin Le Marchant Gosselin, by writing love poetry. He also defied his strict Protestant upbringing by joining group of studetns of the Oxford Movement, a movement of high church members of the Church of England which began in the 1830s and eventually developed into Anglo-Catholicism. He then claimed allegiance to the Order of St Benedict, affecting a monk’s habit. He was considering a conversion to Roman Catholicism. On June 28, 1867, Dolben drowned in the River Welland when bathing with the ten-year-old son of his tutor, Rev. C. E. Prichard, Rector of South Luffenham in Rutland. Dolben was then aged 19 and preparing to go up to Oxford.

According to Simon Edge, the English poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins was “so captivated by a brief meeting [with Dolben] that he spent the rest of his life mourning him.” In a letter to Bridges after Dolben’s death, Hopkins said “there can very seldom have happened the loss of so much beauty (in body and mind and life) and of the promise of still more as there has been in his case.” Hopkins also asked Bridges whether Dolben’s family had considered publishing his poems. Fortunately, the independently wealthy Bridges later published books of poems by both Dolben and Hopkins, or their poetry might have been lost to the world forever. Dolben’s poems were published in a single volume by Bridges in 1911; the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says that his work stands “among the best of the poetry of the Oxford Movement.” Dolben’s death, it adds, “was the end of a life of exceptional poetic promise.” 

In his biography of Dolben, Bridges identifies Dolben’s ardent affection for another of his Eton classmates, a particularly attractive (if in Bridges’s estimation somewhat vacuous) member of their high church circle. Bridges calls this an “idolization”, but infatuation is a better term; the poems are plainly homoerotic. While editing the book Bridges refused the suggestion put forth by mutual friends that he rewrite Dolben’s poems to read as though they had been written for a girl: but he did agree to suppress the identity of Gosselin, the seemingly oblivious young man who had so enamored Dolben.  Gosselin, the British Minister to Lisbon and a knight, had himself died a few years before Bridges began his memoir. (His widow requested the suppression after denying access to his diary.) Bridges does not ignore Dolben’s sexuality. However, he is never direct, and his discussion of his sexuality is hesitant, extremely guarded without any direct or conclusive statement. 

NOTHING
By Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

i lie around wondering
what, if anything
i should post on the internet
about the government trying
to legislate me out
of existence
i decided to say nothing
too tired today
birds make noise outside
while my back aches
from stress and bad sleep and
worse dreams
it’s autumn and the light comes in different
this house inside looks different
i haven’t breathed okay in a while
maybe a few years
can’t remember
wish i could fall back asleep
while staying aware of things
that way i can guide the dream
can make the light do its normal thing
can inhale fully without walls
compressing the air away
can fly up above this city
its modest downtown
shrinking down to model size
the people dotting around
saying isn’t it just awful
and what can we say
to make it feel less awful
and i’m there in the air
singing
                nothing
nothing
                nothing

About the Poem

I had found a different poem by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza called “It Is Important To Be Something” and while I was looking up information about her, I came across this poem on her Tumblr site. While a lot of “NOTHING” is about being trans, but when I read:

i lie around wondering
what, if anything
i should post on the internet
about the government trying

I decided to use this poem instead. I had spent about an hour or so trying to come up with a poem to use today, and I was “wondering / what, if anything / i should post.” This happens to me more than I’d like to admit. My life is not exactly exciting, and sometimes, I am just not up to babbling on about things other people probably have no interest in. I like talking about politics, but a lot of people don’t like political discussions. I like talking about Star Trek, but again, not all people like to listen to things about Star Trek that I find interesting. There are numerous other topics as well: a recipe I found, books I’ve read, a restaurant I went to or want to go to, important news items, etc. And while I do sometimes write about these things, sometimes I don’t write about them because I am lazy.

I found “NOTHING” to be an interesting poem from beginning to end, especially the final lines:

and what can we say
to make it feel less awful
and i’m there in the air
singing
                nothing
nothing
                nothing

About the Poet

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza is a trans woman poet and the author of I Don’t Want to Be Understood (Alice James Books, 2024), There Should Be Flowers (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016), and i’m alive / it hurts / i love it (Boost House, 2014). Espinoza’s work covers topics like mental illness, coming out as a transgender woman, as well as universal themes like love, grief, anger, and beauty. She is a Visiting Professor of English at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California.

Summer Morn in New Hampshire
By Claude McKay

All yesterday it poured, and all night long
  I could not sleep; the rain unceasing beat
Upon the shingled roof like a weird song,
  Upon the grass like running children’s feet.
And down the mountains by the dark cloud kissed,
  Like a strange shape in filmy veiling dressed,
Slid slowly, silently, the wraith-like mist,
  And nestled soft against the earth’s wet breast.
But lo, there was a miracle at dawn!
  The still air stirred at touch of the faint breeze,
The sun a sheet of gold bequeathed the lawn,
  The songsters twittered in the rustling trees.
And all things were transfigured in the day,
  But me whom radiant beauty could not move;
For you, more wonderful, were far away,
  And I was blind with hunger for your love.

If you have seen the news, you probably know that there has been a lot of flooding in Northern New York and Vermont. In most of the towns around me, there has been some flooding as the local rivers have overrun their banks. Thankfully, I live on high ground, so I am not in any danger, though what the roads will look like on my way to work this morning is anyone’s guess. I will watch the morning news hoping I will hear more about road conditions.

I picked the above poem because the rain began Sunday afternoon and is supposed to continue through the early hours of this morning. Hopefully, it will have stopped by the time I leave for work. It poured all day yesterday.

About the Poet

Claude McKay, who was born in Jamaica in 1889, wrote about social and political concerns from his perspective as a Black man in the United States, as well as a variety of subjects ranging from his Jamaican homeland to romantic love.

The Star Dial
By Willa Cather

Δέδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα
καὶ Πληΐαδες
          —Sappho*

When the moon was high I waited,
  Pale with evening’s tints it shone;
When its gold came slow, belated,
  Still I kept my watch alone

When it sank, a golden wonder,
  From my window still I bent,
Though the clouds hung thick with thunder
  Where our hilltop roadway went.

By the cypress tops I’ve counted
  Every golden star that passed;
Weary hours they’ve shone and mounted,
  Each more tender than the last.

All my pillows hot with turning,
  All my weary maids asleep;
Every star in heaven was burning
  For the tryst you did not keep.

Now the clouds have hushed their warning,
  Paleness creeps upon the sea;
One star more, and then the morning—
  Share, oh, share that star with me!

Never fear that I shall chide thee
  For the wasted stars of night,
So thine arms will come and hide me
  From the dawn’s unwelcome light.

Though the moon a heav’n had given us,
  Every star a crown and throne,
Till the morn apart had driven us—
  Let the last star be our own.

Ah! the cypress tops are sighing
  With the wind that brings the day;
There my last pale treasure dying
  Ebbs in jeweled light away;

Ebbs like water bright, untasted;
  Black the cypress, bright the sea;
Heav’n’s whole treasury lies wasted
  And the dawn burns over me.

* He showed up with a seal and Pleiades

About this Poem

“The Star Dial” appeared in McClure’s, vol. 30, no. 2 (December 1907). In “‘The Thing Not Named’: Willa Cather as a Lesbian Writer,” published in Signs, vol. 9, no. 4, (Summer 1984), Sharon O’Brien, adjunct faculty in creative writing at Dickinson College, argues that “[i]n Sappho, [Willa Cather] found a poet who celebrated the delights and agonies of love between women. Cather read Sappho during her college years and in 1907 wrote ‘The Star Dial,’ a poem revealing her identification with this literary and sexual foremother as she assumes Sappho’s voice [. . .]. Evidently Sappho’s poetry formed a bond between Cather and Louise [Pound], for Cather refers to her verse in one of [their] letters; understandably the two young women were drawn to this poet of ‘love and maidens’ where they found their own experience of romantic love mirrored.” Expanding on O’Brien’s argument in his book Sappho: ]fragments (Punctum Books, 2018), Jonathan Goldberg, former Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Emory University, writes, “Fragment 168B [in Eva-Maria Voigt’s edition of Sappho’s poetry] lies behind the poem: ‘Moon has set / and Pleiades: middle / night, the hour goes by, / alone I lie.’ In Cather’s poem, her speaker waits for a lover who never appears as a dawn arises that would, in any case, have necessitated their separation. Theirs is a secret love; although no gender is explicit, the fourth stanza of Cather’s light-drenched nocturne is particularly sapphic [. . .]. She burns to the end of the poem.”

About this Poet

Willa Cather was born in Virginia on December 7, 1873. Her family moved to Nebraska in 1883, ultimately settling in the town of Red Cloud, where the National Willa Cather Center is located today. She attended the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Cather moved to Pittsburgh in 1896 to pursue a career in journalism and work for the women’s magazine Home Monthly. After a few years, she took a break to teach high school English and focus on her creative writing. In 1903, she published her first book, April Twilights (The Gorham Press), a collection of poems, and began writing and publishing short stories. In 1906, she moved to New York City to take an editorial position at McClure’s Magazine, where she worked until 1911, then left to focus again on her creative writing. 

Cather is the author of twenty books and best known for her works of fiction, including Death Comes for the Archbishop (Alfred A. Knopf, 1927); One of Ours (Alfred A. Knopf, 1922), which won the Pulitzer Prize; My Antonia (Houghton Mifflin, 1918); and O, Pioneers! (Houghton Mifflin, 1913).Cather was awarded a gold medal in fiction by the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1944. She died in New York City on April 24, 1947, and is memorialized at the American Poets’ Corner at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. 

Trees
By Joyce Kilmer

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

About the Poem

Joyce Kilmer’s reputation as a poet is staked largely on the widespread popularity of one poem—”Trees” (1913). It was first published in the August 1913 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse which had begun publishing the year before in Chicago, Illinois and was included as the title poem in a collection of poems Trees and Other Poems (1914). According to Kilmer’s oldest son, Kenton, the poem was written on February 2, 1913, when the family resided in Mahwah, New Jersey.

It was written in the afternoon in the intervals of some other writing. The desk was in an upstairs room, by a window looking down a wooded hill. It was written in a little notebook in which his father and mother wrote out copies of several of their poems, and, in most cases, added the date of composition. On one page the first two lines of ‘Trees’ appear, with the date, February 2, 1913, and on another page, further on in the book, is the full text of the poem. It was dedicated to his wife’s mother, Mrs. Henry Mills Alden, who was endeared to all her family.

Many locations including Rutgers University (where Kilmer attended for two years), University of Notre Dame, as well as historians in Mahwah, New Jersey and in other places, have boasted that a specific tree was the inspiration for Kilmer’s poem. However, Kenton Kilmer refutes these claims, remarking that,

Mother and I agreed, when we talked about it, that Dad never meant his poem to apply to one particular tree, or to the trees of any special region. Just any trees or all trees that might be rained on or snowed on, and that would be suitable nesting places for robins. I guess they’d have to have upward-reaching branches, too, for the line about ‘lifting leafy arms to pray.’ Rule out weeping willows.” 

The popular appeal of this simple poem is likely the source of its endurance despite the continuing negative opinion of the poem’s merits from scholars and critics. According to Robert Holliday, Kilmer’s friend and editor, “Trees” speaks “with authentic song to the simplest of hearts” and that “(t)he exquisite title poem now so universally known, made his reputation more than all the rest he had written put together. That impeccable lyric which made for immediate widespread popularity.” Its popularity has also led to parodies of the poem—some by noted poets and writers. The pattern of its first lines (I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree.) is of seemingly simple rhyme and meter and easy to mimic along with the poem’s choice of metaphors. One of the best-known parodies is “Song of the Open Road” by American humorist and poet Ogden Nash (1902–1971):

I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Indeed, unless the billboards fall,
I’ll never see a tree at all.

About the Poet

Joyce Kilmer was born on December 6, 1886, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Kilmer attended Rutgers Preparatory School and graduated in 1904. He attended Rutgers College from 1904 to 1906, then transferred to Columbia University, where he completed his bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1908. That same year, he married poet Aline Murray.

After Kilmer graduated college, he took a job teaching Latin at a high school in Morristown, New Jersey, and wrote features for The Literary Digest, The Nation, Town & Country, and The New York Times. From 1909 to 1912, he worked for Funk and Wagnalls, writing definitions for The Standard Dictionary, and continued to write magazine articles for publication.

In 1911, Kilmer published his first poetry collection, A Summer of Love (The Baker & Taylor Company). Two years later, he published what would become his most famous poem, “Trees,” in Poetry magazine. The poem was included in his second collection, Trees and Other Poems (Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1914). 

Kilmer published his last poetry collection, Main Street and Other Poems (George H. Doran Company, 1917), the same year he enlisted in the U.S. Army to serve in World War I, during which time he continued to write poems while fighting in the Sixty-Ninth Regiment. He died of a gunshot from a German sniper on July 30, 1918.

Undressing You
By Witter Bynner

Fiercely I remove from you
All the little vestiges—
Garments that confine you,
Things that touch the flesh,
The wool and the silk
And the linen that entwine you,
Tear them all away from you,
Bare you from the mesh.
And now I have you as you are,
Nothing to encumber you—
But now I see, caressing you,
Colder hands than mine.
They take away your flesh and bone,
And, utterly undressing you,
They tear you from your beauty
And they leave no sign.

About the Poet

Witter Bynner was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1881. He graduated from Harvard University in 1902. After college, he worked as a newspaper reporter and, later, as the assistant editor of McClure’s magazine.

Bynner published his first poetry collection, An Ode to Harvard (Small, Maynard, & Co.), in 1907. He was also the author of New Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1960); Take Away the Darkness (Alfred A. Knopf, 1947); The Beloved Stranger (Alfred A. Knopf, 1919); Tiger (M. Kennerley, 1913); and several other poetry collections.

In 1922, Bynner settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico with his partner, Robert Hunt. He died there on June 1, 1968.

We Two, How Long We Were Fool’d
By Walt Whitman

We two, how long we were fool’d,
Now transmuted, we swiftly escape as Nature escapes,
We are Nature, long have we been absent, but now we return,
We become plants, trunks, foliage, roots, bark,
We are bedded in the ground, we are rocks,
We are oaks, we grow in the openings side by side,
We browse, we are two among the wild herds spontaneous as any,
We are two fishes swimming in the sea together,
We are what locust blossoms are, we drop scent around lanes mornings and evenings,
We are also the coarse smut of beasts, vegetables, minerals,
We are two predatory hawks, we soar above and look down,
We are two resplendent suns, we it is who balance ourselves orbic and stellar, we are as two comets,
We prowl fang’d and four-footed in the woods, we spring on prey,
We are two clouds forenoons and afternoons driving overhead,
We are seas mingling, we are two of those cheerful waves rolling over each other and interwetting each other,
We are what the atmosphere is, transparent, receptive, pervious, impervious,
We are snow, rain, cold, darkness, we are each product and influence of the globe,
We have circled and circled till we have arrived home again, we two,
We have voided all but freedom and all but our own joy.

About the Poem

M. Jimmie Killingsworth sees in this poem a significant shift in Whitman’s attitude on sexual acceptance. Whereas in 1855 Whitman wanted men and women to accept their own bodies so that they might be vehicles for contact with others, in a “Children of Adam” poem like “We Two, How Long We were Fool’d,” Whitman turns inward and stresses the need for his unwilling female readers to accept his male body and his poem as given, even though it is separate from his readers’ desires. Although E.H. Miller understands the two to be a modern Adam and Eve in search of a new spirit, he finds the poem actually celebrates male-male attraction, and Allen notes that the theme of the poem stresses that the pair were gulled by abstinence. In a sequence of poems that stresses elemental imagery with water and earth predominating over air and fire, the poem “We Two” mixes images of nature.

About the Poet

Born on May 31, 1819, Walt Whitman is the author of Leaves of Grass and, along with Emily Dickinson, is considered one of the architects of a uniquely American poetic voice. 

Though biographers continue to debate Whitman’s sexuality, he is usually described as either gay or bisexual in his feelings and attractions. Whitman’s sexual orientation is generally assumed on the basis of his poetry, though this assumption has been disputed. His poetry depicts love and sexuality in a more earthy, individualistic way common in American culture before the medicalization of sexuality in the late 19th century. Though Leaves of Grass was often labeled pornographic or obscene, only one critic remarked on its author’s presumed sexual activity: in a November 1855 review, Rufus Wilmot Griswold suggested Whitman was guilty of “that horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians.”

Whitman had intense friendships with many men and boys throughout his life. Some biographers have suggested that he did not actually engage in sexual relationships with males, while others cite letters, journal entries, and other sources that they claim as proof of the sexual nature of some of his relationships. I tend to believe he was gay and did have sexual relations with other men.

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? (Sonnet 18)
By William Shakespeare – 1564-1616

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.
    So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
    So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Since Memorial Day marks the unofficial start of summer, I thought I’d post what is arguably the most well-known use of summer in a poem. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” is one of my favorite of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

“Sonnet 18” is perhaps the best known of all of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets, primarily due to the opening line, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,” which every true romantic knows by heart. But there is much more to this line than meets the eye. “Sonnet 18” focuses on the loveliness of a friend or lover, with the speaker initially asking a rhetorical question about comparing their subject to a summer’s day. He then goes on to introduce the pros and cons of the weather, mentioning both an idyllic English summer’s day and the less-welcome dim sun and rough winds of autumn. In the end, it is insinuated this very piece of poetry will keep the lover—the poem’s subject—alive forever and allow them to defy even death.

When I would teach “Sonnet 18,” I loved to compare it with “Sonnet 130,” also known as, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.” “Sonnet 130” is an unusual poem because it turns the idea of female beauty on its head and offers the reader an alternative view of what it’s like to love a woman, warts and all, despite her shortcomings. It is basically the opposite of the more famous “Sonnet 18.”

It parodies other sonnets of the Elizabethan era, which were heavily into Petrarchan ideals, where the woman is continually praised and seen as beyond reproach. In this sense, ‘Sonnet 130’ is an anomaly, a unique poem that flouts the rules of convention and breaks new ground in the process. Shakespeare must have known what he was doing when he wrote this sonnet, because he ridicules an art form he himself had mastered.

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun (Sonnet 130)
By William Shakespeare – 1564-1616

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
    And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
    As any she belied with false compare.