The More Loving One
By W. H. Auden – 1907-1973

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

About the Poem

“The More Loving One” is one of W. H. Auden’s most popular post-1930s poems. At once a celebration of unrequited love and a metaphysical poem about the difficulty of finding “love” and meaning in a secular age, it is a straightforward poem that, like much of Auden’s poetry, conceals more complex interpretations beneath the surface. 

In the first stanza, the poet begins by remarking upon the indifference of the stars: when he looks up at them, he knows they don’t care about what happens to him. However, the poem is not a self-pitying verse. Auden stoically reflects that of all the things man is primed to be wary of in “man or beast,” indifference is the least one to be feared. 

Auden thinks about the stars’ indifference towards him in the second stanza. He wonders if things were different, and the stars were “burning” not purely out of an act of nuclear fission but because they harbored a passion for us, a love we could not reciprocate. At the end of this second stanza, Auden declares that when it comes to the stars, he is glad to be “the more loving one” out of the two.

In the third stanza, Auden tells us that, although he likes to think of himself as the stars’ “admirer,” he doesn’t miss them during the day when they’re not visible in the sky. Auden is saying that technically he is “the more loving one” because he admires the beauty of the stars in the night sky, but that’s as far as it goes.

In the final stanza, Auden says that if all the stars in the sky disappeared and died, he would get used to looking up at an empty night sky and eventually embrace the total darkness without stars to brighten it up. While it might take him some time, he’d adapt.

Auden constantly reins in this poem. The first half of the first stanza sets us up for a poem lamenting the indifference of nature towards us, only to conclude that indifference is actually fine; the first half of the poem leads us to believe that Auden loves the stars and that we are in for a celebratory poem admiring their beauty, before the second half checks this impulse and the poet heartily reassures us that he could cope without them. When summarized in this way, it seems that the poem is almost too simple: he’s an admirer of the stars, which don’t care whether he lives or dies, but actually, he doesn’t even care that much about the stars. However, there’s more to the poem than you might think at first reading.

“The More Loving One” should be analyzed in light of the decline of faith in the western world and the growing secularism of the twentieth century. The “stars” in Auden’s poem should be read with astrology as well as astronomy in mind: the stars may be mere balls of gas light-years away in the universe, but for centuries man made them the center of a whole belief system, believing that human fate could be read or divined within the patterns of the stars. As the famous quotation from Julius Caesar says, “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars / But in ourselves.” 

In other words, it’s significant that of all natural phenomena, Auden looks up at the heavens and decides that there is no “heaven” as man conceived of it. The stars are just balls of gas, and there is no godly guiding hand. What should we make of this knowledge? As it consistently is throughout his work, Auden’s answer is love: we should admire the stars all the same, even though they don’t care about us. But at the same time, we should resist the romantic. “The More Loving One” is not a song of praise for the beauty of the stars but instead a level-headed response to the crisis of disenchantment in a post-religious age. Once, man collectively believed the stars or the heavens cared about what happened to him. Auden is saying that the world has lost its belief in the stars.

As individuals, we can respond by believing that the universe has a purpose for us; or we can respond by saying it doesn’t and ask what the point of anything is. Or we can meet the universe’s indifference to us head-on and take pride in the fact that we, as products of nature, have been instilled with the ability to care, to feel awe in the face of nature’s beauty, and to love.

About W. H. Auden

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was born in York, England, and was educated at the University of Oxford. He described how the poetic outlook when he was born was “Tennysonian,” but by the time he went to Oxford as a student in 1925, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land had altered the English poetic landscape away from Tennyson and towards what we now call “modernism.”

W. H. Auden was admired for his unsurpassed technical virtuosity and ability to write poems in nearly every imaginable verse form; his incorporation of popular culture, current events, and vernacular speech in his work; and also for the vast range of his intellect, which drew easily from an extraordinary variety of literary art forms, social and political theories, and scientific and technical information.

Surprisingly given his later, better-known work, Auden’s early poetry flirted with the obscurity of modernism: in 1932, his long work The Orators (a mixture of verse and prose poetry with an incomprehensible plot) was published by Faber and Faber, then under the watchful eye of none other than T. S. Eliot. Auden later distanced himself from this experimental false start, describing The Orators as the kind of work produced by someone who would later either become a fascist or go mad.

Auden thankfully did neither, embracing instead a more traditional set of poetic forms (he wrote a whole sequence of sonnets about the Sino-Japanese War of the late 1930s) and a more direct way of writing that rejected modernism’s love of obscure allusion. This does not mean that Auden’s work is always straightforward in its meaning, and arguably his most famous poem, “Funeral Blues,” is often “misread” as a sincere elegy when it was intended to be a send-up or parody of public obituaries.

In early 1939, not long before the outbreak of the Second World War, Auden left Britain for the United States, much to the annoyance of his fellow left-wing writers. They saw such a move as a desertion of Auden’s political duty as the most prominent English poet of the decade. In America, where he lived for much of the rest of his life with his long-time partner Chester Kallman, Auden collaborated with composers on a range of musicals and continued to write poetry, but 90 percent of his best work belongs to the 1930s, the decade with which is most associated. He died in 1973 in Austria, where he had a holiday home.

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.

I usually post this poem every summer. It’s my favorite of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Sonnets are one of my favorite forms of poetry. I used to love teaching sonnets back when I taught British literature. I’ve always loved the intricacy of various forms of poetry. Sonnets may be my a favorite, but I also love villanelles. A sonnet is a fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameter, employing one of several rhyme schemes (Italian/Petrarchan, English/Shakespearean, Spenserian, Miltonic, and a few others), and adhering to a tightly structured thematic organization. In contrast, a villanelle, also known as villanesque, is a nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain, but I’m not going to bore you with the intricacies of a villanelle. For me, the two masters of the sonnet form were Shakespeare and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose Sonnets from the Portuguese includes “How do I love thee?” (Sonnet 43).

Back to the poem above, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 is arguably his most famous, and it is absolutely beautiful. I love the final lines:

  So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
  So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

But did you know that Shakespeare also wrote a sonnet in contrast to Sonnet 18? It is known as “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” (Sonnet 130). Instead of celebrating his mistress’s beauty, Shakespeare Sonnet 130 mocks the conventions of the showy and flowery courtly sonnets in its realistic portrayal of his mistress. In the three quatrains, he describes how homely and ordinary his mistress is, but in the final couplet, the speaker proclaims his love for his mistress by declaring that he makes no false comparisons, the implication being that other poets do precisely that (and what Shakespeare did in Sonnet 18).. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 aims to do the opposite, by indicating that his mistress is the ideal object of his affections because of her genuine qualities, and that she is more worthy of his love than the paramours of other poets who are more fanciful. As much as I like Sonnet 18, I also love Sonnet 130. It seems to say, “She might not be pretty or perfect, but he loves her more deeply because his love for her transcends everything else.”

It’s not what’s on the outside, but what’s on the inside. We all know those beautiful people who are perfection on the outside, but ugly on the inside. They may be nice to look at, but they certainly aren’t nice to be around. Then, there are the truly beautiful people. There are the rare ones who are both beautiful on the outside and the inside, but it’s the beauty on the inside that really matters.

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.

A Summer Night
By Elizabeth Drew Stoddard

I feel the breath of the summer night,
    Aromatic fire:
The trees, the vines, the flowers are astir
    With tender desire.

The white moths flutter about the lamp,
    Enamoured with light;
And a thousand creates softly sing
    A song to the night!

But I am alone, and how can I sing
    Praises to thee?
Come, Night! unveil the beautiful soul
    That waiteth for me.

About the Poet
Elizabeth Drew Stoddard was born in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, in 1823. She published both prose and poetry during her lifetime, including Poems (Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1895). She died in 1902.

Inscription for the Ceiling of a Bedroom
By Dorothy Parker – 1893-1967

DAILY dawns another day;
I must up, to make my way.
Though I dress and drink and eat,
Move my fingers and my feet,
Learn a little, here and there,
Weep and laugh and sweat and swear,
Hear a song, or watch a stage,
Leave some words upon a page,
Claim a foe, or hail a friend––
Bed awaits me at the end.

Though I go in pride and strength,
I’ll come back to bed at length.
Though I walk in blinded woe,
Back to bed I’m bound to go.
High my heart, or bowed my head,
All my days but lead to bed.
Up, and out, and on; and then
Ever back to bed again,
Summer, Winter, Spring, and Fall––
I’m a fool to rise at all!

For twelve years now, I have left “some words upon a page” in the form of The Closet Professor. Nearly every day for the past twelve years I have published a post on this site. Mostly, they have been my ramblings about history, poetry, politics, and religion. Sometimes, I, “weep and laugh and sweat and swear,” but I have always tried to be as candid about my life and career as I could be. I’ve written about growing up gay, religious, and closeted in the South. I have written about my health, especially my journey with chronic migraines. Several years ago, I started to add a second post each day, my “Pic of the Day.” I come across so many great pictures on the internet, and some of them I think would make a great addition to a post. Others, I have no idea how I’d ever use it with a post, but I know I like the picture and want to be able to share it. So, it becomes my “Pic of the Day.”

The Closet Professor blog has been a fantastic journey that isn’t over yet. Occasionally, I “claim a foe” which what I write about, but more often than not, I “hail a friend.” I have met some wonderful friends along the way, some merely virtually and others in person. Some, old and new, are still friends, others I’ve lost touch with, and a few have passed away. My readers mean the world to me, and I love when one of you reaches out to me. I read each comment you make, and though I don’t always respond, I read them all. This blog has allowed me to “go in pride and strength” through this life, and I think it has made me a better person.

While each night “bed awaits me at the end,” it is usually just before I go to bed that I write my post for tomorrow. I wanted to celebrate my twelfth anniversary. Since I almost always post a poem on Tuesdays and my anniversary fell on a Tuesday this year, I looked for what I thought might be an appropriate poem. I love Dorothy Parker’s wit, and when I read this poem, I really didn’t think any other poem would be as perfect as this poem is for the anniversary of a blog. 

Blogs didn’t exist in Parker’s lifetime, but I imagine if she’d lived during this time, she would have had a very popular blog with fantastic and scathing commentary on the world. I will never be the wordsmith that Dorothy Parker was, but I do hope you will continue to enjoy my ramblings for maybe another twelve years (or maybe longer). We shall see. When I started this blog, I never imagined that I’d still be writing it twelve years later. 

Thanks for being on this journey with me.

About the Poet

On August 22, 1893, Dorothy Parker was born to J. Henry and Elizabeth Rothschild, at their summer home in West End, New Jersey. She grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. In 1914, Dorothy sold her first poem to Vanity Fair. At age twenty-two, she took an editorial job at Vogue. She continued to write poems for newspapers and magazines, and in 1917 she joined Vanity Fair, taking over for P.G. Wodehouse as drama critic.

In 1919, Parker became a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, an informal gathering of writers who lunched at the Algonquin Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. The “Vicious Circle” included Robert Benchley, Harpo Marx, George S. Kaufman, and Edna Ferber, and was known for its scathing wit and intellectual commentary. In 1922, Parker published her first short story, “Such a Pretty Little Picture,” for Smart Set. When the New Yorker debuted in 1925, Parker was listed on the editorial board. Over the years, she contributed poetry, fiction, and book reviews as the “Constant Reader.” 

Parker’s first collection of poetry, Enough Rope (Boni & Liveright), was published in 1926 and was a bestseller. Her two subsequent collections were Sunset Gun (Boni & Liveright, 1928) and Death and Taxes (The Stratford Press, 1931). She published a work of collected fiction, Laments for the Living (The Viking Press), in 1930. 

During the 1920s, Parker traveled to Europe several times. She befriended Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, socialites Gerald and Sara Murphy, and contributed articles to the New Yorker and Life. While her work was successful, and she was well-regarded for her wit and conversational abilities, she suffered from depression and alcoholism. 

Parker was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1959 and was a visiting professor at California State College in Los Angeles in 1963. That same year, her husband, actor-writer Alan Campbell, died of an overdose. On June 6, 1967, Parker was found dead of a heart attack in a New York City hotel at age seventy-three. A firm believer in civil rights, she bequeathed her literary estate to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Upon his assassination the following year, the estate was turned over to the NAACP. 

Summer Rain
By Amy Lowell – 1874-1925

All night our room was outer-walled with rain.
Drops fell and flattened on the tin roof,
And rang like little disks of metal.
Ping!—Ping!—and there was not a pin-point of silence between
    them.
The rain rattled and clashed,
And the slats of the shutters danced and glittered.
But to me the darkness was red-gold and crocus-colored
With your brightness,
And the words you whispered to me
Sprang up and flamed—orange torches against the rain.
Torches against the wall of cool, silver rain!

Summer Morn in New Hampshire
By Claude McKay – 1889-1948

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.

The Poets:

Born in 1874, Amy Lowell was deeply interested in and influenced by the Imagist movement and she received the Pulitzer Prize for her collection What’s O’Clock.

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.

A Poem for Pulse
By Jameson Fitzpatrick

Last night, I went to a gay bar
with a man I love a little.
After dinner, we had a drink.
We sat in the far-back of the big backyard
and he asked, What will we do when this place closes?
I don’t think it’s going anywhere any time soon, I said,
though the crowd was slow for a Saturday,
and he said—Yes, but one day. Where will we go?
He walked me the half-block home
and kissed me goodnight on my stoop—
properly: not too quick, close enough
our stomachs pressed together
in a second sort of kiss.
I live next to a bar that’s not a gay bar
—we just call those bars, I guess—
and because it is popular
and because I live on a busy street,
there are always people who aren’t queer people
on the sidewalk on weekend nights.
Just people, I guess.
They were there last night.
As I kissed this man I was aware of them watching
and of myself wondering whether or not they were just.
But I didn’t let myself feel scared, I kissed him
exactly as I wanted to, as I would have without an audience,
because I decided many years ago to refuse this fear—
an act of resistance. I left
the idea of hate out on the stoop and went inside,
to sleep, early and drunk and happy.
While I slept, a man went to a gay club
with two guns and killed forty-nine people.
Today in an interview, his father said he had been disturbed
recently by the sight of two men kissing.
What a strange power to be cursed with:
for the proof of men’s desire to move men to violence.
What’s a single kiss? I’ve had kisses
no one has ever known about, so many
kisses without consequence—
but there is a place you can’t outrun,
whoever you are.
There will be a time when.
It might be a bullet, suddenly.
The sound of it. Many.
One man, two guns, fifty dead—
Two men kissing. Last night
I can’t get away from, imagining it, them,
the people there to dance and laugh and drink,
who didn’t believe they’d die, who couldn’t have.
How else can you have a good time?
How else can you live?
There must have been two men kissing
for the first time last night, and for the last,
and two women, too, and two people who were neither.
Brown people, which cannot be a coincidence in this country
which is a racist country, which is gun country.
Today I’m thinking of the Bernie Boston photograph
Flower Power, of the Vietnam protestor placing carnations
in the rifles of the National Guard,
and wishing for a gesture as queer and simple.
The protester in the photo was gay, you know,
he went by Hibiscus and died of AIDS,
which I am also thinking about today because
(the government’s response to) AIDS was a hate crime.
Now we have a president who names us,
the big and imperfectly lettered us, and here we are
getting kissed on stoops, getting married some of us,
some of us getting killed.
We must love one another whether or not we die.
Love can’t block a bullet
but neither can it be shot down,
and love is, for the most part, what makes us—
in Orlando and in Brooklyn and in Kabul.
We will be everywhere, always;
there’s nowhere else for us, or you, to go.
Anywhere you run in this world, love will be there to greet you.
Around any corner, there might be two men. Kissing.

________________

I Woke Up
By Jameson Fitzpatrick

and it was political.
I made coffee and the coffee was political.
I took a shower and the water was.
I walked down the street in short shorts and a Bob Mizer tank top
and they were political, the walking and the shorts and the beefcake
silkscreen of the man posing in a G-string. I forgot my sunglasses
and later, on the train, that was political,
when I studied every handsome man in the car.
Who I thought was handsome was political.
I went to work at the university and everything was
very obviously political, the department and the institution.
All the cigarettes I smoked between classes were political,
where I threw them when I was through.
I was blond and it was political.
So was the difference between “blond” and “blonde.”
I had long hair and it was political. I shaved my head and it was.
That I didn’t know how to grieve when another person was killed in America
was political, and it was political when America killed another person,
who they were and what color and gender and who I am in relation.
I couldn’t think about it for too long without feeling a helplessness
like childhood. I was a child and it was political, being a boy
who was bad at it. I couldn’t catch and so the ball became political.
My mother read to me almost every night
and the conditions that enabled her to do so were political.
That my father’s money was new was political, that it was proving something.
Someone called me faggot and it was political.
I called myself a faggot and it was political.
How difficult my life felt relative to how difficult it was
was political. I thought I could become a writer
and it was political that I could imagine it.
I thought I was not a political poet and still
my imagination was political.
It had been, this whole time I was asleep.

About the Poet

Jameson Fitzpatrick is the author of Pricks in the Tapestry (Birds, LLC, 2020), and the chapbooks Mr. & (Indolent Books, 2018) and Morrisroe: Erasures (89plus/LUMA Publications, 2014). Fitzpatrick teaches at New York University.

I, Lover
By Elsa Gidlow – 1898-1986

I shall never have any fear of love,
Not of its depth nor its uttermost height,
Its exquisite pain and its terrible delight.
I shall never have any fear of love.

I shall never hesitate to go down
Into the fastness of its abyss
Nor shrink from the cruelty of its awful kiss.
I shall never have any fear of love.

Never shall I dread love’s strength
Nor any pain it might give.
Through all the years I may live
I shall never have any fear of love.

I shall never draw back from love
Through fear of its vast pain
But build joy of it and count it again.
I shall never have any fear of love.

I shall never tremble nor flinch
From love’s moulding touch:
I have loved too terribly and too much
Ever to have any fear of love.

About the Poem

Today’s poem is by the early 20th century poet Elsa Gidlow, who famously came out as a lesbian in her autobiography. “I, Lover” originally appeared in On a Grey Thread (Will Ransom, 1923). In this poem, we see the speaker acknowledge the risk of love. But we also see her courage to commit to risking her heart again and again, no matter what the consequences. While it is a lesbian poem, I think it is universal for all LGBTQ+ love. It is an inspirational poem about not fearing who we love and shows Gidlow’s openness with her sexuality. I think it is a goal of all of us to “never have any fear of love.”

If you read “I, Lover” aloud, as poems are meant to be read, it would not work unless you started with the words, I, lover. It converts a shout into the void into a personal promise. A beloved is swearing fealty to love, to enter into a relationship unafraid of stinging reprisals of heartbreak. It is a weighty vow we are witnessing, and as we recite it, we become part of it.

About the Poet

Elsa Gidlow, known to many as the “poet-warrior,” was unabashedly visible as an independent woman, a lesbian, a writer, and a bohemian-anarchist at a time when such visibility was both unusual and potentially dangerous. Gidlow was born on December 29, 1898, in Yorkshire, England. She was the eldest of seven children and immigrated with her family to a town near Montreal when she was six. Gidlow grew up in poverty and was largely self-educated. Throughout her career, despite often surviving on a meager income, she would struggle to support her family, including three siblings who suffered with mental illness, while maintaining her commitment to writing. 

In 1920, after spending some time in Montreal’s art circles, Gidlow moved to Manhattan. Gidlow began her career as a freelance journalist and co-published the first North American newspaper that openly celebrated and discussed LGBTQ+ lives and issues within the community. After moving to Manhattan in the 1920s, she became poetry editor at Pearson’s Magazine. Six years later, she moved to San Francisco, where she befriended several poets, as well as the journalists and activists Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin—the first gay couple to be legally wed in California. 

In the early 1950s, Gidlow was investigated as a suspected Communist, though she identified as an anarchist, and was forced to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). At the time, Gidlow lived openly in a relationship with Isabel Grenfell Quallo, a biracial woman. Her cohabiting in an interracial, lesbian relationship may have provoked the investigation as much as her politics. Indeed, when she was questioned by the HUAC, she had nothing good to say about Communism, since her own political sympathies lay with the anarchists, who considered Marxism just another oppressive ideology.

Gidlow published around a dozen books of poetry and prose, some of which were self-published and released with a limited number of copies. Many of her works are currently out of print. Her poetry book, On a Grey Thread is, historians believe, the first collection of openly lesbian love poetry published in North America. Her autobiography, Elsa: I Come With My Songs (Booklegger Press, 1986), was the first lesbian autobiography not published under a pseudonym.

In 1954, Gidlow purchased a ranch at Muir Woods, north of San Francisco, called Druid Heights, which she used both as her personal residence and as a retreat for artists, bohemians, and feminists. Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder were among the ranch’s various famous guests and residents. In 1962, Gidlow co-founded, with British philosopher and writer Alan Watts, the Society of Comparative Philosophy. In 1977, she appeared in Peter Adair’s 1977 documentary Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives, which featured LGBTQ+ individuals from a range of classes, ethnicities, and professional backgrounds. 

Gidlow died at home on June 8, 1986. Her ashes are interred near the Moon Temple at Druid Heights.

At the Touch of You
By Witter Bynner – 1881-1968

At the touch of you,
As if you were an archer with your swift hand at the bow,
The arrows of delight shot through my body.

You were spring,
And I the edge of a cliff,
And a shining waterfall rushed over me.

About the Poem
“At the Touch of You” is a short and simple poem, that’s very sweet. What drew me to this poem was the first line: “At the touch of you.” Most poems begin with mentioning the sight of their lover and go on to describe their outer appearance, but this poet instead felt his rush of emotions not when he saw his love, but when he touched him. The imagery in the first stanza is evocative of Greek mythology. The final stanza is a beautiful comparison of how the lover’s fit together in their romance by invoking the image of a waterfall to create a beautiful metaphor.

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.

Bynner was also known for his works in translation, including The Way of Life According to Laotzu: An American Version (John Day Co., 1944), and a literary biography, Journey with Genius: Recollections and Reflections Concerning the D. H. Lawrences (J. Day Co, 1951).

In 1916, Bynner and Arthur David Ficke published Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments, under the pseudonyms Emanuel Morgan and Anne Krish. The book included poems and a manifesto on “spectrism,” a parody of Imagism. In 1918, Bynner admitted that the book was a hoax.

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

And Now Upon My Head the Crown
By Phillip B. Williams

1.
    In the first place—I wanted him and said so
when I had only meant to say. His eyes
opened beyond open as if such force would unlock me
to the other side where daylight gave reason
for him to redress.

            When he put on his shirt,
after I asked him to keep it off, to keep putting off
the night’s usual end, his face changed beneath
the shirt: surprise to grin, to how even the body
of another’s desire can be a cloak behind which
to change one’s power, to find it.

2.
                    In the first place
he slept, he opened the tight heat of me that had been
the only haven he thought to give a name:

Is-it-mine? Why-you-running? Don’t-run-from-it—as though
through questions doubt would find its way away from me,
as though telling me what to do told me who I was.

About This Poem
“This poem is part of a few ‘failed sonnets’ I’d written and revised out of their intended form. In this revision, I wanted the phrase ‘in the first place’ to move through two possibilities: the first instance and the first location. That there may be other readings is great. As for the title, I guess I was thinking less about success and more about regretting when one gets exactly what one has asked for.”
—Phillip B. Williams

About The Poet
Phillip B. Williams is the author of Mutiny (Penguin, 2021), a 2022 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry finalist, and Thief in the Interior (Alice James Books, 2016), winner of the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a Lambda Literary Award. He has received a Whiting Award and Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He currently lives in Philadelphia.

Daffodils
By William Wordsworth – 1770-1850

I wandered lonely as a Cloud
That floats on high o’er Vales and Hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden Daffodils;
Beside the Lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:—
A Poet could not but be gay
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the shew to me had brought:

For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude,
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the Daffodils.

About the Poet

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) wrote beautiful poetry filled with sweet imagery, usually based around the natural world. Often Wordsworth’s poems contained slight somber undertones, as is the case in this poem, as we will explore shortly. This is possible due to the conflict In Wordsworth’s life and his battle with depression. Some scholars suggest that Wordsworth’s relationship with his sister, Dorothy was far from platonic. But Wordsworth did marry and lived with both his wife and sister.

Wordsworth lived through the French Revolution, which he initially supported and later rebuked. William Wordsworth, who rallied for “common speech” within poems and argued against the poetic biases of the period, wrote some of the most influential poetry in Western literature, including his most famous work, The Prelude, which is often considered to be the crowning achievement of English romanticism. He and his close friend and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge were the pioneers of the romantic era of poetry, and Wordsworth’s earlier romantic poems were widely derided because of this. He was also the poet laureate for queen Victoria for seven years. Today, Wordsworth’s reputation rests heavily on the collection Lyrical Ballads that he published along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1798. 

About the Poem

“Daffodils” or “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is one of the best-loved poems of the romantic poetry of William Wordsworth. The poem features how the spontaneous emotions of the poet’s heart sparked by the energetic dance of daffodils help him pen down this sweet little piece. On April 15, 1802, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy came across a host of daffodils around Glencoyne Bay in the Lake District of Northern England. (The falls and surrounding area of Gowbarrow Park is the area of Glencoyne Bay known as Wordsworth Point.) This event was the inspiration behind the composition of Wordsworth’s lyric poem. “Daffodils” has been dissected methodically for illustrating the poet’s mood, the surrounding location, the allegorical meanings, and the beauty of nature in full motion. The poet’s love and proximity with nature have inspired and moved generations after generations of poetry lovers and young minds.

The speaker, likely Wordsworth himself, is wandering down the hills and valley when he stumbled upon a beautiful field of daffodils. Though the poem’s title hints at a cloud, it is not about it. Instead, it is about a group of golden daffodils dancing beside the lake and beneath the trees. The speaker is transfixed by the daffodils seemingly waving, fluttering, and dancing along the waterside. The poet feels immensely gleeful at this mesmerizing natural sight. Amongst the company of flowers, he remains transfixed at those daffodils wavering with full vigor. Oblivious to the poet is the fact that this wondrous scenery of daffodils brings the poet immense joy when he’s in a tense mood or perplexed for that matter. His heart breaths a new life and gives him exponential happiness at sight worth a thousand words.

The poem begins with a symbolic reference to the cloud. It is wandering and lonely. The poetic persona is the embodiment of such a cloud. Hence, it symbolizes being lonely and thoughtless. This state is achieved when one is free from mundane thoughts. The most important symbol of this piece is the daffodils. The narcissistic description of the flower seems to be alluding to the Greek myth. Apart from that, the daffodil acts as a symbol of rejuvenation and pure joy. Wordsworth becomes the means through which the flowers express their vibrance. In his pensive mood, they become a means for the poet’s self-reflection.

Hailed as the champion of the Romantic Movement in the early 19th century, Wordsworth dwelled in scenic Lake District of Northern England, far from the madding crowd. Its roots can be traced back to Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal, in which she reminisces a casual stroll with his brother in 1802, where they came across beautiful daffodils. Dorothy wrote in her journal:
 

When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow Park, we saw a few daffodils close to the water side. We fancied that the lake had floated the seed ashore and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and more and at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road.
 
I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever dancing ever changing.
 
This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here and there a little knot and a few stragglers a few yards higher up, but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity and unity and life of that one busy highway. We rested again and again. The Bays were stormy, and we heard the waves at different distances and in the middle of the water like the sea.

The poem was composed within the period of 1804-1807 and subsequently published in 1807, with a revised version published in 1815. The poem is considered a masterpiece of Romantic Era poetry steeped in natural imagery. As the sister’s journal recalls, the daffodils seemed immensely beautiful from a far-off view.