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.

Cheerfulness Taught by Reason
By Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I think we are too ready with complaint
In this fair world of God’s. Had we no hope
Indeed beyond the zenith and the slope
Of yon gray blank of sky, we might be faint
To muse upon eternity’s constraint
Round our aspirant souls. But since the scope
Must widen early, is it well to droop,
For a few days consumed in loss and taint?
O pusillanimous Heart, be comforted,—
And, like a cheerful traveller, take the road—
Singing beside the hedge. What if the bread
Be bitter in thine inn, and thou unshod
To meet the flints?—At least it may be said,
“Because the way is short, I thank thee, God!”

About This Poem

“Cheerfulness Taught by Reason” was published in Browning’s book A Drama of Exile: and other poems (H. G. Langley, 1845). It is true, we are often all too ready to complain, but God is on our side. God provides us with hope and happiness, it is only without Him that we could truly complain. If there was no God, we would have right to become weak and feel like our aspirations are constrained by an empty eternity, but because there is much more in life beyond that where there is God, we shouldn’t complain when we have a few bad days. Our cowardly hearts should be comforted and we should move on happily. Even if we come across some bad times, at least this life God has given us is short and afterwards we can have paradise for eternity. To put that more succinctly, on this journey to happiness, we must be prepared to run into bumps in the road, but know in the end it will get better. Even if in the end you feel as if the journey has taught you nothing, you must be thankful that the journey was short.

This poem was, in my opinion, a perfect companion to my post yesterday. My road has been bumpy and the journey has been arduous, but I persevered and kept God by my side, and I am much happier because of it.

Beginning
by Warren Hanson

This is the Beginning…
This is where it all will start,
on the Wings of some new Spirit with the Beat of some new Heart.

Every morning brings a Promise,
Every day has Gifts to give,
But Today…right now…This Minute….
is when I begin to Live.
And the air that I am breathing is the breeze of what could be,
as I stand here looking out on all the things that could be Me.
And the road that goes before me, leading somewhere out of sight,
is a brand new Opportunity for me to get it Right.
This is the Beginning. This is
Once Upon a Time….
There are dragons to be vanquished! There are castle walls to climb!
But this story isn’t written yet.
I’m only at page One.
The Adventure that’s awaiting me has only just Begun.
There are Mysteries and Treasurers.
There are daring deeds to do!
And if I speak the secret word, then all my Wishes will come true.
That Magic Word has powers that can make the heavens spin.
But it really is not Secret that the password is……”Begin!”
Oh the possibilities is this Beginning I have made!
I am Ready!…. but reluctant.
I am Excited!…. but afraid.

Afraid that starting something New leaves something Old behind.
Afraid that what I seek is something I may Never find.
Or, if I Find it, that it won’t be what I want at all.
That what I’ve left Behind is what I needed after all.

Beginning can be bittersweet, and hard to comprehend.
It can mean that some sweet, precious part of life is at an End.
And the Heart can feel so Hollow when it has to say Good-bye
that the thought of starting Over is too Hard to even try.

But when I reach the End, when all my days are nearly through,
I will Not want to look back on all the things I Didn’t do.
Nor regret the Joys and Passions of the me that Might have been,
if only I had found the simple Courage to Begin.
So…….This is the Beginning….
My Beginning……..My Rebirth.
I Awaken to the Wonder of what I am Really worth.
It is a Springtime for the Spirit, and it’s Giving me a Choice.
So I choose to Use this season as a reason to Rejoice!

I lift my voice in Sweet thanksgiving, singing Loud….and not alone.
A host of Harmonies accompanies my song of the unknown.
Loving Friends and willing Strangers, with their voices joining in,
create a chorus of Encouragement that begs me to Begin.

And the end?…..
It’s out there, Somewhere, farther than the heart can see.
And the Power that will take me there is Here, inside of me.
Though there is no way I can know how many trials I’ll endure,
nor the Joys that I may find,
there is One thing I know for sure…..

This is the Beginning…….

Warren Hanson is a gifted writer of books for children and adults alike. It’s amazing how closely it aligns with what I am feeling today. I’m putting the final touches on packing, loading my car, and telling people goodbye. I’m heading north tomorrow morning. As the poem says, “I am Ready!…. but reluctant. I am Excited!…. but afraid.” It’s so true that “Beginning can be bittersweet, and hard to comprehend.” It can be a bit overwhelming at times. This is a new adventure and a new job far away from home. I don’t know what the future will hold, but I look forward to getting settled and getting to work. This is the Beginning…….

When We Two Parted
George Gordon Byron, 1788 – 1824

When we two parted
In silence and tears,
Half broken-hearted
To sever for years,
Pale grew thy cheek and cold,
Colder thy kiss;
Truly that hour foretold
Sorrow to this.

The dew of the morning
Sunk chill on my brow–
It felt like the warning
Of what I feel now.
Thy vows are all broken,
And light is thy fame;
I hear thy name spoken,
And share in its shame.

They name thee before me,
A knell to mine ear;
A shudder comes o’er me–
Why wert thou so dear?
They know not I knew thee,
Who knew thee too well–
Long, long shall I rue thee,
Too deeply to tell.

In secret we met–
In silence I grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee?–
With silence and tears.

Self-Portrait at 36 w/ David
By Ellen Hagan

Barnegat Light, New Jersey—April 4, 2015

Because looking at myself w/ out you beside me is unnatural
& though the light is all wrong—your camera slung & up

the light feels right to me, warm & soft, your chest pressed
towards my back, both our heads angling towards the dock,

boat slips on the bay—all the scallops secure in the sea still,
their bone-less bodies soft. & our own getting softer each day.

Sometimes the mirror makes our features fun-house style
& we’re way more old age than the teen age we most times feel,

or the slight of shutter promises supple & smooth, where edge
& ravine & straight up wrinkle have arrived & settled in

like vulnerable house guests we don’t have the heart to kick out.
How comfortable they’ve become all over our fine faces

& my neck—how they’ve become familiar w/ our privacy. How
we’ve begun to cradle them. Stitch & loom. In the photograph

there we are—chins tilted towards one another, mouths closed

& turned up. A type of satisfaction dead in this middle we’re both in.

 
Self-Portrait on the Street of an Unnamed Foreign City
By Jennifer Grotz

The lettering on the shop window in which
you catch a glimpse of yourself is in Polish.

Behind you a man quickly walks by, nearly shouting
into his cell phone. Then a woman

at a dreamier pace, carrying a just-bought bouquet
upside-down. All on a street where pickpockets abound

along with the ubiquitous smell of something baking.
It is delicious to be anonymous on a foreign city street.

Who knew this could be a life, having languages
instead of relationships, struggling even then,

finding out what it means to be a woman
by watching the faces of men passing by.

I went to distant cities, it almost didn’t matter
which, so primed was I to be reverent.

All of them have the beautiful bridge
crossing a grey, near-sighted river,

one that massages the eyes, focuses
the swooping birds that skim the water’s surface.

The usual things I didn’t pine for earlier
because I didn’t know I wouldn’t have them.

I spent so much time alone, when I actually turned lonely
it was vertigo.

Myself estranged is how I understood the world.
My ignorance had saved me, my vices fueled me,

and then I turned forty. I who love to look and look
couldn’t see what others did.

Now I think about currencies, linguistic equivalents, how lopsided they
are, while
my reflection blurs in the shop windows.

Wanting to be as far away as possible exactly as much as still with you.
Shamelessly entering a Starbucks (free wifi) to write this.

 
About These Poem:

When writing about “Self-Portrait on the Street of an Unnamed Foreign City,” Jennifer Grotz said, “Ut pictura, poesis: as with painting, so with poetry, the saying goes, and perhaps this is why from time to time poets, like painters, use the exercise of the self-portrait to practice seeing. If either the poet or the painter is lucky, sight leads to insight. In this unabashedly autobiographical poem, I use a shop window on a busy street, not a mirror, to view myself, and though my poem aims for truthful precision, I think it renders what, I’m convinced more and more, poems are meant to achieve, that is: registering what it feels like to pass through time.” I agree that poems are meant to evoke feelings; it’s the main thing that draws me to poetry. A hundred people can read the same poem, and each would probably have a different meaning. We tend to focus on what the “experts,” that is those literature professors and literary critics tell us what a poem is about, but a good poem as in any art form, it speaks differently to each person.

In another self-portraits through poetry, Ellen Hagan presents a very different picture. In her comments on “Self-Portrait at 36 w/ David,” she says, “There is something both jarring and seductive about the aging process—a thrill to be gathering years and moments and history (and hopefully wisdom), but too a railing against the media’s constant perception of youth and how to hang onto it. Writing has forever been a balm against all that keeps me awake at night. I look forward to writing the poems that will surely harness all the years to come.” My grandmother used to always say that you are only as old as you feel. In a way, this poem shows how the author sees herself as a woman who is young at heart, even if she looks older than she feels.

These are two very different portraits and two very different poems in content, though they have some grammatical similarities. Yet both are self portraits and tell how the poet sees herself.