Nothing Gold Can Stay

Robert Frost, 1874 – 1963

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why (Sonnet XLIII)

Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1892 – 1950

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

Forever

Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1872 – 1906

I had not known before
Forever was so long a word.
The slow stroke of the clock of time
I had not heard.

‘Tis hard to learn so late;
It seems no sad heart really learns,
But hopes and trusts and doubts and fears,
And bleeds and burns.

The night is not all dark,
Nor is the day all it seems,
But each may bring me this relief—
My dreams and dreams.

I had not known before
That Never was so sad a word,
So wrap me in forgetfulness—
I have not heard

All the Names We Will Not Know

Naomi Shihab Nye, 1952

(for Adriana Corral)

Before dawn, trembling in air down to the old river,

circulating gently as a new season

delicate still in its softness, rustling raiment

of hopes never stitched tightly enough to any hour.

I was almost, maybe, just about, going to do that.

A girl’s thick dark hair, brushed over one shoulder

so regularly no one could imagine it not being there.

Hair as a monument. Hovering – pitched.

Beloved sister, maker of plans, main branch,

we needed you desperately, where have you gone?

Here is the sentence called No no no no no.

Come back, everything grants you your freedom,

here in the mire of too much thinking,

we drown, we drown, split by your echo.

Mourning and Loss in Poems
Joe, 1977

I had a poem that I really liked,
But I was in a somber mood last night.
I searched for poems of mourning and loss;
Some I kept; some I tossed.
I decided I’d go with Robert Frost.

I’ve always loved the poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay,”
Then I read Sonnet XLIII by Edna St Vincent Millay.
She talks of kisses and boys who are gone.
Then Dunbar says, “That Never was so sad a word,”
And all my moods could clearly be heard.

I chose one last poem by N.S. Nye,
Because I wish I could have said goodbye.
He was a friend I cannot forget.
My mind races and runs and I am aghast,
For “I love you” we’re the words he said last.

To Hope
By Charlotte Smith

Oh, Hope! thou soother sweet of human woes!
How shall I lure thee to my haunts forlorn!
For me wilt thou renew the wither’d rose,
And clear my painful path of pointed thorn?
Ah come, sweet nymph! in smiles and softness drest,
Like the young hours that lead the tender year,
Enchantress! come, and charm my cares to rest:—
Alas! the flatterer flies, and will not hear!
A prey to fear, anxiety, and pain,
Must I a sad existence still deplore?
Lo!—the flowers fade, but all the thorns remain,
“For me the vernal garland blooms no more.”
Come then, “pale Misery’s love!” be thou my cure,
And I will bless thee, who, tho’ slow, art sure.

Charlotte Smith published “To Hope” as a part of her collection of poems she called “Elegiac Sonnets.” She basically blends together two types of poetic form: the elegy, or a sad, mournful poem, and the sonnet, which is traditionally a love poem. By combining the sonnet form with the elegy, Smith made a revolutionary move in poetry for 1786, when the only sonnets most readers were familiar with had been written a couple of centuries before, by William Shakespeare and by the Italian poet Petrarch. Charlotte Smith pretty much single-handedly re-popularized the sonnet form, even if she’s a largely forgotten poet today.

A sonnet is a 14-line poem that is usually, but not always, in iambic pentameter. Also, a sonnet is usually, but not always, about love. (“To Hope” is an exception to this.) Now, there are two types of traditional sonnets. The original is the Petrarchan sonnet, which was invented by the Italian Renaissance poet Petrarch. William Shakespeare imported the sonnet form to England, and he changed it up a bit.

So, Charlotte Smith had a choice: she could use the imported English (a.k.a. Shakespearean) sonnet form, or she could go to the roots of the form and use the Petrarchan sonnet. She chose Petrarch—maybe because she wanted to re-popularize the form in England, but didn’t want to do it in the same way that Shakespeare did.

My Doubt
By Jane Hirshfield

I wake, doubt, beside you,
like a curtain half-open.

I dress doubting,
like a cup
undecided if it has been dropped.

I eat doubting,
work doubting,
go out to a dubious cafe with skeptical friends.

I go to sleep doubting myself,
as a herd of goats
sleep in a suddenly gone-quiet truck.

I dream you, doubt,
nightly—
for what is the meaning of dreaming
if not that all we are while inside it
is transient, amorphous, in question?

Left hand and right hand,
doubt, you are in me,
throwing a basketball, guiding my knife and my fork.
Left knee and right knee,
we run for a bus,
for a meeting that surely will end before we arrive.

I would like
to grow content in you, doubt,
as a double-hung window
settles obedient into its hidden pulleys and ropes.

I doubt I can do so:
your own counterweight governs my nights and my days.

As the knob of hung lead holds steady
the open mouth of a window,
you hold me,
my kneeling before you resistant, stubborn,
offering these furious praises
I can’t help but doubt you will ever be able to hear.
About This Poem

Jane Hirshfield is the author of The Beauty (Knopf, 2015), which was longlisted for the 2015 National Book Award. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the 2016 Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford University. When I read this poem, it immediately struck me as describing the way I have been feeling for the last month. When I read what Jane Hirshfield said about the poem, it hit even closer to home. Hirshfield described the poem by saying, “There are times almost impossible to navigate and silencing, when everything has come into question. The doubt behind this poem was, in the living of it, something close to despair—at my own life; at the life of the world held in any day’s news. Yet to find within the times of ash anything that might be made word-malleable, anything susceptible to imaginative leap and some sense, even, of the comic—that in itself is antidote and through-passage. By the time the poem was half-written, the window had been cracked open an inch; once that happens, some breathable air can’t help but rush in.” I’m hoping for some of that breathable air to reach me.

Sonnet: I Thank You
BY Henry Timrod

I thank you, kind and best beloved friend,
With the same thanks one murmurs to a sister,
When, for some gentle favor, he hath kissed her,
Less for the gifts than for the love you send,
Less for the flowers, than what the flowers convey;
If I, indeed, divine their meaning truly,
And not unto myself ascribe, unduly,
Things which you neither meant nor wished to say,
Oh! tell me, is the hope then all misplaced?
And am I flattered by my own affection?
But in your beauteous gift, methought I traced
Something above a short-lived predilection,
And which, for that I know no dearer name,
I designate as love, without love’s flame.

These last two weeks have been some of the most heart wrenching of my life. I finally stopped crying constantly, but I’ve now moved on the random panic attacks. Someone will mention something that reminds me of my friends and my emotions come crashing down on me. While I can often hide my panics, I feel completely on the verge of tears. I don’t know what will trigger them, but someone will mention something that is innocuous, but it brings back strong memories of my friend. I know that this too will get better. I’ve never experienced such grief when I have been so alone.

However, with your comments and emails showing your love, support and friendship, I don’t feel as lonely. All of you have been a lifesaver these past two weeks. You’ve shown what beloved friends you really are. Your gestures have meant so much to me, because I know it’s the love you send and the meaning that it conveys. This poem conveys much of my thank for all you’ve done, but it can’t come close to how thankful I really am. While I’m not out of the deep dark hole of despair, you have helped me to begin pulling myself up again.

Thank you all for also being patient with me and offering your kind words. I answered some of your emails yesterday but I haven’t answered any of the comments many of you left on my posts these past two weeks. Some of them are written so beautifully that I don’t want to mare them with responses that would never fully be able to convey the gratitude that I feel. I hope that the above poem will at least begin to let you know how thankful I am.

Holy Sonnet V
By John Donne

I am a little world made cunningly
Of elements, and an angelic spright,
But black sin hath betrayed to endless night
My worlds both parts, and oh! both parts must die.
You, which beyond that heaven which was most high
Have found new spheres and of new lands can write,
Pour new seas in mine eyes, that so I might
Drown my world with my weeping earnestly,
Or wash it, if it must be drowned no more:
But oh! it must be burnt; alas the fire
Of lust and envy burnt it heretofore,
And made it fouler; Let their flames retire,
And burn me, O Lord, with a fiery zeal
Of thee and thy house, which doth in eating heal.

Holy Sonnet X
By John Donne

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so,
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

Holy Sonnet XIV
By John Donne

Batter my heart, three-person’d God; for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy:
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
“Wilt thou love God, as he thee? Then digest”

Holy Sonnet XIX
By John Donne

Oh, to vex me, contraries meet in one:
Inconstancy unnaturally hath begot
A constant habit; that when I would not
I change in vows, and in devotion.
As humorous is my contrition
As my profane love, and as soon forgot:
As riddlingly distempered, cold and hot,
As praying, as mute; as infinite, as none.
I durst not view heaven yesterday; and today
In prayers and flattering speeches I court God:
Tomorrow I quake with true fear of his rod.
So my devout fits come and go away
Like a fantastic ague; save that here
Those are my best days, when I shake with fear.

Sonnets are my favorite form of poetry. While Shakespeare, Spenser, and Petrarch are the most famous sonneteers, I do love the sonnets of Donne and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Today though I am featuring four of Donne’s Holy Sonnets. The Holy Sonnets—also known as the Divine Meditations or Divine Sonnets—are a series of nineteen poems by the English poet John Donne (1572–1631). The sonnets were first published in 1633—two years after Donne’s death. The poems are predominantly in the style and form set forth by Petrarch (1304–1374) in which the sonnet consisted of two quatrains (four-line stanzas) and a sestet (a six-line stanza). However, several rhythmic and structural patterns as well as the inclusion of couplets are elements influenced by the sonnet form developed by Shakespeare (1564–1616).

The primary theme of Donne’s Holy Sonnets are to mourn the passing of his wife and address religious themes of mortality, divine judgment, divine love, and humble penance while reflecting deeply personal anxieties.

I’m not sure I’m in full blogging mode again yet, but I had read Holy Sonnet V the other day, and it just sort of stuck with me. I used to teach the Holy Sonnets when I tortured taught my students about sonnets. Donne wrote some of the most difficult sonnets to understand but I think if you are in the mindset he was when he wrote them, it becomes easier to understand. He is obviously coming to terms with changes in his life (Catholicism to Anglicanism), the loss of a loved one (he lost his wife), and general anxieties that come with such struggles. Moving from Alabama to Vermont, I can see allegorically how I moved from a rural conservative place that was what you expected of Alabama, to a somewhat rural but much more liberal (and even more urban since I live in town) Vermont. Anyway, just my thoughts as I woke up this morning, and decided to add this last paragraph.

Mist
By Henry David Thoreau, 1816 – 1861

Low-anchored cloud,
Newfoundland air,
Fountain-head and source of rivers,
Dew-cloth, dream-drapery,
And napkin spread by fays;
Drifting meadow of the air,
Where bloom the daisied banks and violets,
And in whose fenny labyrinth
The bittern booms and heron wades;
Spirit of lakes and seas and rivers,—
Bear only perfumes and the scent
Of healing herbs to just men’s fields.
Some of you who have followed this blog over he years, might know that I have a particular affinity for the Transcendentalists. They aren’t an easy group to wrap your head around, but once you do, it is well worth it. Transcendentalism is a very formal word that describes a very simple idea. People, men and women equally, have knowledge about themselves and the world around them that “transcends” or goes beyond what they can see, hear, taste, touch or feel. This knowledge comes through intuition and imagination not through logic or the senses. People can trust themselves to be their own authority on what is right. A transcendentalist is a person who accepts these ideas not as religious beliefs but as a way of understanding life relationships.

One of the transcendentalists’ core beliefs was in the inherent goodness of both people and nature, in opposition to ideas of man as inherently sinful, or “fallen,” and nature as something to be conquered. They believed that society and its institutions—particularly organized religion and political parties—ultimately corrupted the purity of the individual. They had faith that people are at their best when truly “self-reliant” and independent. Their concept of self-reliance differed from the traditional usage of the word, however, in that it referred primarily to a fierce intellectual independence or self-reliance. They believed that individuals were capable of generating completely original insights with as little attention and deference to past masters as possible.

At its heart, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other Transcendentalists, believed that nature guided the universe. We should not try to tame nature just as we should not try to tame the mind of the individual. So what if you’re different from what the masses consider the norm. It doesn’t matter because we can transcend those mass marketed ideas. Sadly, Americans did not learn from the Transcendentalists. Instead of thinking for themselves, they tune into news broadcasts and talk radio to find out what they are supposed to think. They blindly follow religious teachers without trying to really understand God. If the Transcendentalists could see America today, they would believe that most Americans are mere lemmings who follow the crowds without paying attention to where they are going.

In the poem above, Thoreau uses a mist, or a fog, to give an example of nature. I think what draws me most to this poem is its lyrical quality. It doesn’t rhyme and it doesn’t follow a particular beat or poetic meter, but yet, the description is beautiful and melodic in its own self-reliant way. In its most basic form, “Mist” is a short poem that describes the different types of mist, but Thoreau also uses this poem to describe how nature is the only thing that can heal men’s spirits.

Ode to an Encyclopedia
By James Arthur

O hefty hardcover on the built-in shelf in my parents’ living
room,
O authority stamped on linen paper, molted from your dust
jacket ,
Questing Beast of blue and gold, you were my companion

on beige afternoons that came slanting through the curtains
behind the rough upholstered chair. You knew how to trim a
sail
and how the hornet builds a hive. You had a topographical map

of the mountain ranges on the far side of the moon
and could name the man who shot down the man
who murdered Jesse James. At forty, I tell myself

that boyhood was all enchantment: hanging around the railway,
getting plastered on cartoons; I see my best friend’s father
marinating in a lawn chair, smiling benignly at his son and me

from above a gin and tonic, or sitting astride his roof
with carpentry nails and hammer, going at some problem
that kept resisting all his mending. O my tome, my paper
brother,

my narrative without an ending, you had a diagram of a cow
broken down into the major cuts of beef, and an image
of the Trevi Fountain. The boarding house,

the church on the corner: all that stuff is gone.
In winter in Toronto, people say, a man goes outside
and shovels snow mostly so that his neighbors know

just how much snow he is displacing. I’m writing this
in Baltimore. For such a long time, the boy wants
to grow up and be at large, but posture becomes bearing;

bearing becomes shape. A man can make a choice
between two countries, believing all the while
that he will never have to choose.

About This Poem

When discussing this poem, poet James Arthur said, “It’s now almost unimaginable to me that for the first half of my life, I had no access to the Internet. What I did have is my parents’ hardbound, single-volume encyclopedia: a book that seemed to contain a scrap of information on almost every subject. For me ‘Ode to an Encyclopedia’ is about the openness of the open field; when we’re children, we can still believe that we’ll have time to go everywhere, see everything, and do it all.” I can remember the set of blue World Book Encyclopedias my parents had. We used them for many school projects, but what I temper most is that they spawned my love of knowledge. I’ll be turning 38 at the end of this month, so just like Arthur, the first half of my life I had no access to the Internet and it seemed like all the knowledge in the world were contained in those blue volumes. Now if something interests me and I want to know more, I Google it, but back then, I’d pulled down the appropriate encyclopedia and begin flipping through. The problem was, there were always things I’d see on the way to finding my main article that had drawn me to the books. With those other articles, I’d hold its place with a finger and continue on. By the time I had turned to the article I wanted, I usually had four or five fingers holding different things I wanted to read about next. One or more of them would lead me to putti that volume back up and getting down another and the process began again. Now with the Internet it is so much easier because you just right clicks, and open up a new tab. There’s an almost infinite number of tabs you can open though, but I only had so many fingers. I will get immersed in article after article, each one taking me to a new piece of knowledge.
James Arthur is the author of Charms Against Lightning (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). He teaches at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Baltimore, Maryland.