Why I Love Thee?
By Sadakichi Hartmann

      Why I love thee?
  Ask why the seawind wanders,
Why the shore is aflush with the tide,
Why the moon through heaven meanders;
Like seafaring ships that ride
On a sullen, motionless deep;
  Why the seabirds are fluttering the strand
    Where the waves sing themselves to sleep
      And starshine lives in the curves of the sand!

Carl Sadakichi Hartmann was born on November 8, 1867, in Nagasaki Japan. His poetry collections include Naked Ghosts: Four Poems (Fantasia, 1925), Tanka and Haiku: 14 Japanese Rhythms (G. Bruno, 1915), and My Rubaiyat (Mangan, 1913). A dramatist, fiction writer, and art critic, he died in St. Petersburg, Florida, on November 21, 1944.

About the Poem: A “pictorial suggestion” of love.

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The More Loving One
By W. H. Auden

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.

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 literatures, art forms, social and political theories, and scientific and technical information.

About the Poem: At once a celebration of unrequited love and a metaphysical poem about the difficulty of finding ‘love’ and meaning in a secular age.

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Love Song for Love Songs
By Rafael Campo

A golden age of love songs and we still
can’t get it right. Does your kiss really taste
like butter cream? To me, the moon’s bright face
was neither like a pizza pie nor full;
the Beguine began, but my eyelid twitched.
“No more I love you’s,” someone else assured
us, pouring out her heart, in love (of course)—
what bothers me the most is that high-pitched,
undone whine of “Why am I so alone?”
Such rueful misery is closer to
the truth, but once you turn the lamp down low,
you must admit that he is still the one,
and baby, baby he makes you so dumb
you sing in the shower at the top of your lungs.

Rafael Campo was born in Dover, New Jersey, on November 24, 1964. He attended both Amherst College and Harvard Medical School before publishing his first collection of poems, The Other Man Was Me: A Voyage to the New World, which won the National Poetry Series Open Competition in 1993. Campo is a practicing physician at Harvard Medical School and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

About the Poem: Love is within the two who feel the love, and no one else can change that.

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I Needed Your Body Near Me
By Timothy Liu

An ocean is nothing, there is no separation
between two lovers. And I knew just what
it took: six hours, two meals with a movie
in between, blinders over eyes, plugs in ears
as I tried to get some sleep. When I awoke,
I knew I’d crossed more than a time zone
for my body was always nearer to yours
than anyone else’s still sleeping in your bed—

Timothy Liu’s most recent books of poems are Polytheogamy and Bending the Mind Around the Dream’s Blown Fuse. He lives in Manhattan.

About the Poem: A long distance relationship.

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♥️HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY♥️

Thank you, Susan, for the beautiful Valentine’s Day Card pictured above.

To America
By James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938)

How would you have us, as we are?
Or sinking ‘neath the load we bear?
Our eyes fixed forward on a star?
Or gazing empty at despair?

Rising or falling? Men or things?
With dragging pace or footsteps fleet?
Strong, willing sinews in your wings?
Or tightening chains about your feet?

Calling Dreams
By Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880-1966)

The right to make my dreams come true,
I ask, nay, I demand of life,
Nor shall fate’s deadly contraband
Impede my steps, nor countermand;
Too long my heart against the ground
Has beat the dusty years around,
And now at length I rise! I wake!
And stride into the morning break!

Each February, National Black History Month serves as both a celebration and a powerful reminder that Black history is American history, Black culture is American culture, and Black stories are essential to the ongoing story of America — our faults, our struggles, our progress, and our aspirations.  Shining a light on Black history today is as important to understanding ourselves and growing stronger as a Nation as it has ever been.  That is why it is essential that we take time to celebrate the immeasurable contributions of Black Americans, honor the legacies and achievements of generations past, reckon with centuries of injustice, and confront those injustices that still fester today.

—From “A Proclamation on National Black History Month, 2022,” Joseph R. Biden Jr.

As I read these poems, it invokes images of the hardships and discrimination faced by the African American community, but I also can’t help to also read them as a gay man. In “To America,” James Weldon Johnson writes, “How would you have us, as we are?” The world has treated the LGBTQ+ community, especially gay men (and even more so, black gay men), as wrong. They want us to be something that we are not. We have faced discrimination and hardships, not in the same way as African Americans, mainly because we can often hide our queerness, but minorities of color are not able to do so. While there were certainly gay African American slaves in antebellum America, gay men, no matter their race, have faced the fear of imprisonment or “tightening chains about” their feet for “lewd behavior and crimes against nature.”  One famous example is Oscar Wilde who was imprisoned for two years of hard labor for “sodomy and gross indecency” in 1895. Georgia Douglas Johnson begins “Calling Dreams” with the lines: “The right to make my dreams come true, / I ask, nay, I demand of life.” Isn’t this what all LGBTQ+ individuals, no matter their race, want?

Gay African Americans have made “immeasurable contributions” to the history of the United States. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s was as much about the burden of representation and sexual dissidence. There were several queer men who made up the core of the Harlem Renaissance: Countée Cullen, whose ” virtues are many; his vices unheard of”; Langston Hughes, who was a “true people’s poet”; Claude McKay was the “enfant terrible of the Negro Renaissance”; and Richard Bruce Nugent, who is called “Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance.” However, the Harlem Renaissance did not have monopoly on black queer trailblazers. Bayard Rustin organized the 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I Have A Dream Speech.” The writer and social critic, Baldwin is perhaps best known for his 1955 collection of essays, “Notes of a Native Son,” and his groundbreaking 1956 novel, Giovanni’s Room,which depicts themes of homosexuality and bisexuality. (Giovanni’s Room was the first gay work of fiction I ever read.) 

Queer black representation had not been limited to men either. Audre Lorde, a self-described “Black, lesbian, feminist, mother, poet, warrior,” made lasting contributions in the fields of feminist theory, critical race studies and queer theory through her pedagogy and writing. Barbara Jordan, a civil rights leader and attorney, became the first African American elected to the Texas Senate in 1966, and the first woman and first African American elected to Congress from Texas in 1972. Marsha P. Johnson, who would cheekily tell people the “P” stood for “pay it no mind,” was an outspoken transgender rights activist and is reported to be one of the central figures of the historic Stonewall uprising of 1969.

About the Poets

James Weldon Johnson, born in Florida in 1871, was a national organizer for the NAACP and an author of poetry and nonfiction. Perhaps best known for the song “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” he also wrote several poetry collections and novels, often exploring racial identity and the African American folk tradition.

Georgia Douglas Johnson was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in the late nineteenth century. A member of the Harlem Renaissance, her poetry collections include Bronze: A Book of Verses (B.J. Brimmer Company, 1922) and The Heart of a Woman and Other Poems (The Cornhill Company, 1918). She died in 1966.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
By Robert Frost – 1874-1963

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

---

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” s one of Robert Frost’s most known poems. It was written in 1922, and published in 1923 in his New Hampshire volume. In a letter to the poet Louis Untermeyer, Frost called it “my best bid for remembrance.”

The poem is simple and straightforward and reflects the thoughts of a lone wagon driver (the narrator), pausing at night in his travel to watch snow falling in the woods. It ends with some of the most memorable lines of any Frost poem, that of the narrator reminding himself that, despite the loveliness of the view, “I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep.”

Frost wrote the poem in June 1922 at his house in Shaftsbury, Vermont. He had been up the entire night writing the long poem “New Hampshire” and had finally finished when he realized morning had come. He went out to view the sunrise and suddenly got the idea for “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” He wrote the new poem “about the snowy evening and the little horse as if I’d had a hallucination” in just “a few minutes without strain.”

In the early morning of November 23, 1963, Sid Davis of Westinghouse Broadcasting reported the arrival of President John F. Kennedy’s casket at the White House. Since Frost was one of the President’s favorite poets, Davis concluded his report with a passage from this poem but was overcome with emotion as he signed off.

At the funeral of former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, on October 3, 2000, his eldest son Justin, who is the current Prime Minister of Canada, rephrased the last stanza of this poem in his eulogy: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep. He has kept his promises and earned his sleep.”

Why I Can’t Leave Vermont
By Anonymous

It’s winter in Vermont
And the gentle breezes blow
72 miles per hour at 52 below.

Oh how I love Vermont
When the snow’s up to your butt
You take a breath of winter air
And your nose, it freezes shut.

Yes, the weather here is wonderful
So I guess I’ll hang around.
I could never leave Vermont
Cause I’m frozen to the ground.

I don’t know who wrote this poem, though it’s been posted in several places on the internet, including the Vermont Country Store’s Facebook page. I initially saw it elsewhere on Facebook, and it made me laugh when I read it.

While the “ 72 miles per hour at 52 below” is an exaggeration, we did have real temperatures of -21 degrees with a windchill of -30 or lower. During our last snow storm, we got 11” of snow, while that’s not up to my butt, the snow drifts did make up to my knees. The most accurate lines in this poem are:

You take a breath of winter air
And your nose, it freezes shut.

I have had the wind blowing so hard and the temperature so low that my nose did feel like it froze shut.

A Riddle

From Heaven I fall, though from earth I begin.
No lady alive can show such a skin.
I’m bright as an angel, and light as a feather,
But heavy and dark, when you squeeze me together.
Though candor and truth in my aspect I bear,
Yet many poor creatures I help to insnare.
Though so much of Heaven appears in my make,
The foulest impressions I easily take.
My parent and I produce one another,
The mother the daughter, the daughter the mother.

This is a poem/riddle by the satirist Jonathan Swift. I’m going to take a page from BosGuy’s Friday Brain Teaser, and so, I’m not going to post the title of this poem until later this afternoon. I’d like to see if you can figure out the title. BosGuy waits to approve the guesses in the comments until later, I’ve changed my comments, only for today, so that you can comment your answer. After the Pic of the Day posts, I will approve all of the comments for the riddle answers. Any other comments to other posts will be approved as soon as I see them. Don’t cheat and look up the poem. Instead, give it a real shot to see if you can guess the answer to the riddle.

Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, Ireland, on November 20, 1667, and spent his adult life alternately living in Ireland and England. A satirist known for his sharp wit and unforgiving criticism of politics, religion, and society, Swift is best known for his satirical novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Though best known for his prose, Swift also wrote a number of poems in his lifetime, most of which were also humorous in tone and written under pseudonyms. Swift died in Dublin on October 19, 1745.

By the way, I think Swift would have had a field day with our previous defeated, loser, and twice-impeached president. Can you imagine? I’m sure it would have been good, at least for those who did not like the former president.

The Fluffer Talks of Eternity
By D. A. Powell

I can only give you back what you imagine.
I am a soulless man. When I take you
into my mouth, it is not my mouth. It is
an unlit pit, an aperture opened just enough
in the pinhole camera to capture the shade.

I have caused you to rise up to me, and I
have watched as you rose and waned.
Our times together have been innumerable. Still,
like a Capistrano swallow, you come back.
You understand: I understand you. Understand
each jiggle and tug. Your pudgy, mercurial wad.

I am simply a hand inexhaustible as yours
could never be. You’re nevertheless prepared to shoot.
If I could I’d finish you. Be more than just your rag.

About the Poem and the Poet

I featured W. H. Auden’s “The Platonic Blow” a few weeks ago about a blowjob. Though much longer, D. A. Powell’s “The Fluffer Talks to Eternity” deals with the same sexual act, though I am not sure that in this poem it is not metaphorical. I once saw an independent film called The Fluffer about a film buff with a crush on a porn star who is straight, for whom he would end up working as a fluffer in gay porn. Just in case you don’t know, a fluffer is a person employed to keep a porn performer’s penis erect on the set. “The Fluffer Talks to Eternity” was published in Poetry in February 2010 along with his poem “Pupil.”

Born in Albany, Georgia, D. A. Powell earned an MA at Sonoma State University and an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His first three collections of poetry, Tea, (1998), Lunch (2000), and Cocktails (2004), are considered by some to be a trilogy on the AIDS epidemic. Lunch was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and Cocktails was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. His next two books were Chronic (2009), which won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award;and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (2012) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry.

Powell is known for his syntactically inventive, longer eight- or ten-beat lines in poems that are often untitled. As a teacher at Sonoma State, he noticed that most of his students’ poems were written to fit the demands of the page. His experiments with his students in writing on unexpected surfaces (such as candlesticks or rolls of toilet paper) led to his own breakthrough in “subverting the page”: he turned a legal pad sideways and wrote the first poem for Tea. Powell explains that “by pulling the line longer, stretching it into a longer breath, I was giving a little bit more life to some people who had very short lives.”

Powell has also taught at Harvard University, Columbia University, and the University of San Francisco. He has been awarded the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Paul Engle Fellowship from the James Michener Foundation. His poems have been featured in the Norton anthology American Hybrid (2009) and Best American Poetry (2008). 

D.A. Powell is openly gay, and often explores his sexuality and the body through his poetry. This exploration of the body is noted with some sadness if anyone knows anything about Powell himself. Powell is HIV positive, which is part of the reason why his first three books have been called “The AIDS Trilogy” because of their exploration of the cultural and individual impact of the disease. Too many critics and writers focus just on Powell’s identity as a gay man with AIDS. They spend so much time on that aspect of his life, and they miss the man’s soul seen through his poetry. Powell’s humor is one of the greatest appeals of his work. Despite the moments where Powell is lifting the small details of existence up for reflection, he takes the reader to another place, such as he does in “The Fluffer Talks of Eternity.”

The poem is a monologue of a man who “fluffs” men before a porn shoot. Powell is working in a voice spoken from a sensitivity of life, of its absurdity, or its all tiniest beauties. He is able to conjure sensations and imaginations that real poetry should do. Poetry sometimes should just shock us out of our comfort so that we can then reassess our reality and determine what it actually is. That is often the beauty of poetry.

The Guest House
by Rumi

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Taken from SELECTED POEMS by Rumi, Translated by Coleman Barks (Penguin Classics, 2004).

Cory Muscara is a former monk and bestselling author of Stop Missing Your Life. He has taught Mindful Leadership at Columbia University, is an instructor of Positive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and for the last ten years has offered mindfulness workshops and retreats around the world. Muscara is the host of the top ranked podcast, Practicing Human, host of the mindfulness app and platform, Mindfulness.com, and author of the bestselling book, Stop Missing Your Life: How to Be Deeply Present in an Un-Present World.

I saw him read this poem on Instagram and his soothing voice seemed to make this poem mean so much more. I think it’s a wonderful poem to start off the new year. His comments after the video are also a great analysis of the poem.

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About the Poet

Mowlānā Jalāloddin Balkhi, known in Persia as Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī and in the West as Rumi, was born on September 30, 1207 C. E. in Balkh Province, Afghanistan, on the eastern edge of the Persian Empire. Rumi descended from a long line of Islamic jurists, theologians, and mystics, including his father, who was known by followers of Rumi as “Sultan of the Scholars.” When Rumi was still a young man, his father led their family more than 2,000 miles west to avoid the invasion of Genghis Khan’s armies. They settled in present-day Turkey, where Rumi lived and wrote most of his life.

As a teenager, Rumi was recognized as a great spirit by the poet and teacher Fariduddin Attar, who gave him a copy of his own Ilahinama (The Book of God). When his father died in 1231, Rumi became head of the madrasah, or spiritual learning community. 

Rumi’s oldest son, Sultan Velad, managed to save 147 of Rumi’s intimate letters, which provide insights about the poet and how he lived. Rumi often involved himself in the lives of his community members, solving disputes and facilitating loans between nobles and students. The letters are described as having lines of poetry scattered throughout.

In 1244, Rumi met Shams Tabriz, who had taken a vow of poverty. Their meeting is considered a central event in Rumi’s life, and Rumi believed his real poetry began when he met Shams. They were close friends for about four years. Over the course of that time, Shams was repeatedly driven away by Rumi’s jealous disciples, including one of Rumi’s sons, Ala al-Din. In December of 1248, Shams again disappeared; it is believed that he was either driven away or killed. Rumi left the madrasah in search of his friend, traveling to Damascus and elsewhere. Eventually, Rumi made peace with his loss, returning to his home.

Rumi’s mourning for the loss of his friend led to the outpouring of more than 40,000 lyric verses, including odes, eulogies, quatrains, and other styles of Eastern-Islamic poetry. The resulting collection, Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi or The Works of Shams Tabriz, is considered one of Rumi’s masterpieces and one of the greatest works of Persian literature.

In his introduction to his translation of Rumi’s The Shams, Coleman Barks has written: “Rumi is one of the great souls, and one of the great spiritual teachers. He shows us our glory. He wants us to be more alive, to wake up… He wants us to see our beauty, in the mirror and in each other.”

For the last twelve years of his life, beginning in 1262, Rumi dictated a single, six-volume poem to his scribe, Husam Chelebi. The resulting masterwork, the Masnavi-ye Ma’navi (Spiritual Verses), consists of sixty-four thousand lines, and is considered Rumi’s most personal work of spiritual teaching. Rumi described the Masnavias “the roots of the roots of the roots of the (Islamic) Religion,” and the text has come to be regarded by some Sufis as the Persian-language Koran.

In his introduction to an English edition of Spiritual Verses, translator Alan Williams wrote: “Rumi is both a poet and a mystic, but he is a teacher first, trying to communicate what he knows to his audience. Like all good teachers, he trusts that ultimately, when the means to go any further fail him and his voice falls silent, his students will have learnt to understand on their own.”

Rumi fell ill and died on December 17, 1273 C. E., in Konya, Turkey. His remains were interred adjacent to his father’s, and the Yeşil Türbe (Green Tomb) was erected above their final resting place. Now the Mevlâna museum, the site includes a mosque, dance hall, and dervish living quarters. Thousands of visitors, of all faiths, visit his tomb each month, honoring the poet of legendary spiritual understanding.

The Passing of the Year
By Robert W. Service

My glass is filled, my pipe is lit,
  My den is all a cosy glow;
And snug before the fire I sit,
  And wait to feel the old year go.
I dedicate to solemn thought
  Amid my too-unthinking days,
This sober moment, sadly fraught
  With much of blame, with little praise.

Old Year! upon the Stage of Time
  You stand to bow your last adieu;
A moment, and the prompter’s chime
  Will ring the curtain down on you.
Your mien is sad, your step is slow;
  You falter as a Sage in pain;
Yet turn, Old Year, before you go,
  And face your audience again.

That sphinx-like face, remote, austere,
  Let us all read, whate’er the cost:
O Maiden! why that bitter tear?
  Is it for dear one you have lost?
Is it for fond illusion gone?
  For trusted lover proved untrue?
O sweet girl-face, so sad, so wan
  What hath the Old Year meant to you?

And you, O neighbour on my right
  So sleek, so prosperously clad!
What see you in that aged wight
  That makes your smile so gay and glad?
What opportunity unmissed?
  What golden gain, what pride of place?
What splendid hope? O Optimist!
  What read you in that withered face?

And You, deep shrinking in the gloom,
  What find you in that filmy gaze?
What menace of a tragic doom?
  What dark, condemning yesterdays?
What urge to crime, what evil done?
  What cold, confronting shape of fear?
O haggard, haunted, hidden One
  What see you in the dying year?

And so from face to face I flit,
The countless eyes that stare and stare;
Some are with approbation lit,
And some are shadowed with despair.
Some show a smile and some a frown;
Some joy and hope, some pain and woe:
Enough! Oh, ring the curtain down!
Old weary year! it’s time to go.

My pipe is out, my glass is dry;
My fire is almost ashes too;
But once again, before you go,
And I prepare to meet the New:
Old Year! a parting word that’s true,
For we’ve been comrades, you and I —
I thank God for each day of you;
There! bless you now! Old Year, good-bye!

About the Poem

“The Passing of the Year” by Robert Service is a beautiful and thoughtful poem about the passing of the year and the beginning of the new. At this critical juncture, the poet, sitting comfortably, talks with the old year. There isn’t much from the poet’s side as it’s much about others with whom the poet converses. They don’t talk with the poet but show how they are, either happy with the passing of the year or sad. However, without remarking much about the poet’s personal affairs the poet bids thanks to the old year at last. Such a poem like this is always rewarding to that person who sits alone and visualizes the year in a recap.

About the Poet

Robert William Service, the renowned poet of the Yukon, was born in Lancashire, England, on January 16, 1874. In 1883 he moved with his family north to Glasgow, Scotland. He attended several of Scotland’s finest schools, where he developed a deep interest in books and poetry, along with a sharp wit and a way with words.

Service’s innate curiosity and fondness for adventure stories inspired an urge to travel—to go off to sea and to see the world. Although his parents discouraged this adolescent ambition, his desire wasn’t extinguished (and would one day be fulfilled). Service bided his time with assorted jobs—one at a shipping office that soon closed down, then another following his father’s footsteps in a position at a suburban branch of the Commercial Bank of Scotland. Working under light supervision, Service managed to pass the day with reading material he’d snuck in: Robert Browning, Lord Alfred Tennyson, and John Keats. Service developed into an excellent student of poetry, and attended the University of Glasgow to study English Literature. He was quickly identified as one of the brightest in his class, though he also proved to be a bit audacious. After a year, the young poet left the university.

Soon his interests realigned with his aims for adventure. His reading turned to Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson, and their stories of world explorers in search of fortune and, more important, their own identity. In 1895, at the age of twenty-one, with a significant amount of savings, Robert announced his dream of going to Western Canada to become a cowboy. He soon set sail for Montreal with only his suitcase and a letter of reference from the bank in tow. Upon arrival, Service took a train across Canada to Vancouver Island, where he lived for many years and gathered much of the material for what became his most celebrated poems. Many of his experiences working on cowboy ranches, and the colorful personalities he met during his travels around the West, eventually found their place in his work.

Numerous publications followed, including Songs of a Sourdough, published in 1907, which won wide acclaim. His forty-five verse collections accumulated over one thousand poems, the most famous of which include “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” and “The Men That Don’t Fit In.” To add to his poetic output, Service wrote two autobiographies, Ploughman of the Moon (1945) and Harper of Heaven (1948), as well as six novels. His poem about Dan McGrew and several of his novels were adapted to film. The poet himself managed even to garner an acting credit, appearing briefly opposite Marlene Dietrich in the 1942 movie The Spoilers.

Service served as an ambulance driver during World War I, after which he published Rhymes of a Red Cross Man (Barse & Hopkins, 1916), a collection of mostly war poems. He later married a French woman, Germaine Bougeoin, and the two lived in Europe, mainly in the south of France, until the poet’s death in 1958. By then, his prolific and prosperous career in poetry had earned him the distinction—as stated in an obituary in the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph—as “the people’s poet.”

He died in Lancieux, France, on September 11, 1958.

A Visit from St. Nicholas
By Clement Clarke Moore – 1779-1863

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there;
The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads;
And mamma in her ’kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap,
When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.
The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below,
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer,
With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick.
More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name;
“Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Donder and Blitzen!
To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!”
As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;
So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,
With the sleigh full of Toys, and St. Nicholas too.
And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
The prancing and pawing of each little hoof.
As I drew in my head, and was turning around,
Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound.
He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
A bundle of Toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a pedler just opening his pack.
His eyes—how they twinkled! his dimples how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow
And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow;
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath;
He had a broad face and a little round belly,
That shook when he laughed, like a bowlful of jelly.
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself;
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head,
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread;
He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And filled all the stockings; then turned with a jerk,
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose;
He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle,
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,
“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night.”

About This Poem

I know very few poems by heart, but I can say this one all the way through from memory. It was always a favorite of mine during my childhood. My mother used to read it to us when I was young, so it always brings back fond memories of a happy childhood, back when life was innocent and simple.

On December 23, 1823, a poem called “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” was published anonymously in the Sentinel, the local newspaper of Troy, New York. This piece offered a different take on Santa Claus, a figure who was, until that time, traditionally depicted as a thinner, less jolly, horse-riding disciplinarian, a combination of mythologies about the British Father Christmas, the Dutch Sinterklaas, and the fourth-century bishop Saint Nicholas of Myra. 

The poem in the newspaper painted a different picture: it gave Santa eight reindeer, and even named them; it described a Santa who could magically sneak in and out of homes via chimneys; and it created the venerated, cheerful, chubby icon that is everpresent in holiday cards, movies, television shows, and malls everywhere. The poem, of course, is now known as “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas,” after its famous first line. Thirteen years after it was published, Clement Clark Moore took credit for its authorship, though his claim to the poem is now in question. Many believe the poem was actually penned by New York writer Henry Livingston.

 

About the Poet

Clement Clarke Moore was born on July 15, 1779, in New York City. He received a BA from Columbia College in 1798 and an MA in 1801. Moore was the author of Poems (Barlett & Welford, 1844), which included the poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” Moore also published several academic works, including A Compendious Lexicon of the Hebrew Language(Collins & Perkins, 1809). He taught at the General Theological Seminary in New York City from 1821 to 1850. He died on July 10, 1863, in Newport, Rhode Island.

The Christmas Wreath
By Anna de Brémont

Oh! Christmas wreath upon the wall,
  Within thine ivied space
I see the years beyond recall,
  Amid thy leaves I trace
The shadows of a happy past,
  When all the world was bright,
And love its magic splendour cast
  O’er morn and noon and night.

Oh! Christmas wreath upon the wall,
  ’Neath memory’s tender spell
A wondrous charm doth o’er thee fall,
  And round thy beauty dwell.
Thine ivy hath the satiny sheen
  Of tresses I’ve caressed,
Thy holly’s crimson gleam I’ve seen
  On lips I oft have pressed.

Oh! Christmas wreath upon the wall,
A mist steals o’er my sight.
Dear hallow’d wreath, these tears are all
The pledge I now can plight
To those loved ones whose spirit eyes
Shine down the flight of time;
Around God’s throne their voices rise
To swell the Christmas Chime!

The Comptess Anna de Brémont was born Anna Dunphy in 1864. A journalist, memoirist, fiction writer, and poet, she authored two poetry collections: Sonnets and Love Poems (J. J. Little, 1892) and Love Poems (Argus Printing Co., 1889). She died in 1922.