Category Archives: Poetry

March 11, 2014

Libido

By Joe

20140310-232209.jpg

Libido
Rupert Brooke

How should I know? The enormous wheels of will
Drove me cold-eyed on tired and sleepless feet.
Night was void arms and you a phantom still,
And day your far light swaying down the street.
As never fool for love, I starved for you;
My throat was dry and my eyes hot to see.
Your mouth so lying was most heaven in view,
And your remembered smell most agony.

Love wakens love! I felt your hot wrist shiver
And suddenly the mad victory I planned
Flashed real, in your burning bending head…
My conqueror’s blood was cool as a deep river
In shadow; and my heart beneath your hand
Quieter than a dead man on a bed.

Rupert Brooke was a poet who died far too young. His most famous work, the sonnet sequence 1914 and Other Poems, appeared in 1915. Later that year, after taking part in the Antwerp Expedition, he died of blood poisoning from a mosquito bite while en route to Gallipoli with the Navy. He was buried on the island of Skyros in the Aegean Sea.

Following his death at age 28, Brooke, who was already famous, became a symbol in England of the tragic loss of talented youth during the war. He was born in England in 1887, combined literary talent with legendary good looks, entered Cambridge in 1913, wrote a few dozen exquisite poems, joined the Royal Navy to go off to the Great War in 1914 and died in the Aegean seven months later. The artist/soldier is a kind of hero that has not been present in cultures on either side of the Atlantic in decades, but World War I vaunted and cut down many. Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Alan Seeger: all dead, all in their prime.

While an undergraduate he attracted the amorous attentions of both men and women, but it was not until 1909, at the age of twenty-two, that he had his first sexual encounter. It was with a man. He described his seduction of Denham Russell-Smith (a former fellow student at Rugby) in some detail. (“My right hand got hold of the left half of his bottom, clutched it, and pressed his body into me. The smell of sweat began to be noticeable. At length we took to rolling to and fro over each other, in the excitement.”)

James Strachey, brother of Lytton Strachey of the Bloomsbury Group, fell deeply in love with Brooke, and while the poet did not return the intensity of feeling, he did hold Strachey in high regard. Strachey is probably Brooke’s most famous admirer. The two men exchanged correspondence for the last decade of Brooke’s life.

And though Brooke remains famous primarily for his war poems, he wrote a number of love poems as well. The sonnet above, “Libido,” is his most elegant; its theme is a burning bed–inspired midnight visit to a sleeping paramour. There is little more beautiful than the image of a milky Adonis leaving his tangled sheets to slip into his lover’s bedroom and wake him with a kiss, until we recall Brooke’s fate, and know that only the embracing arms of war awaited him on his final night. The passion of the poem does, however, show how passionate Brooke was as does his above description of his passionate evening with Russell-Smith.

1 Comment | posted in Poetry

March 4, 2014

Mardi Gras Madness

By Joe
Mardi Gras Madness
By Mary Beth Magee

“T’row me som’pin, mistah!” yells the crowd along the curb,
And the riders throw them something as if they could be heard.
The roar of human masses drowns out single voice or thought.
Only beads, doubloons and trinkets can appease the crowd’s onslaught.
As purple, green and golden hues shade everything in sight,
The distant roar of motorcycles nearing sounds so right.
Horses step in rhythm, cadence clopping as they pass.
At a float’s approach the crowds surge toward the street, en masse.
Last fling before the austere days of Lent, we celebrate
With parties, food and bright parades to make the grayness wait.
A pretty string of beads to keep, a blazoned cup to hold,
A treasured doubloon to collect become Mardi Gras gold.
At midnight, Carnival will end, like Cinderella’s ball
And costumes put away in attics, closets in the hall
Remind us of the fun and laughs we shared with loved ones dear.
And we start counting down the days to Mardi Gras, next year.

Mary Beth Magee

Mary Beth draws on her curiosity and love of research to explore the world around her and write about it. New Orleans native, she now lives in northern CA, by way of Chicagoland. She first saw her name in print as a juvenile book reviewer her hometown paper and hasn’t stopped writing since. Her checkered past includes stints as a telephone operator, substitute school teacher, cosmetic sales, home health aide, government contractor, kitchen help in a deli, real estate sales, office manager and corporate trainer. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology, focusing on adult learning. Over the years, her writings covered news and feature articles, book and movie reviews, training materials, greeting cards, short fiction, poetry, and church bulletins.
Laissez les bons temps rouler!


Leave a comment | posted in Poetry

February 25, 2014

Once I Pass’d Through A Populous City

By Joe

20140223-213511.jpg

Once I Pass’d Through a Populous City
by Walt Whitman
(1819-1892)

Once I pass’d through a populous city imprinting my brain for future
use with its shows, architecture, customs, traditions,
Yet now of all that city I remember only a man I casually met
there who detain’d me for love of me,
Day by day and night by night we were together–all else has long
been forgotten by me,
I remember I say only that man who passionately clung to me,
Again we wander, we love, we separate again,
Again he holds me by the hand, I must not go,
I see him close beside me with silent lips sad and tremulous.

There are many different ways in which I find poems that I want to post, but this one came to me in a rather shocking way: porn. I’ve discussed on this blog before that I enjoy watching porn, so it should not be too shocking that I was doing just that the other day on my day off. However, I didn’t really expect to be inspired to find a poem for a post in a porn video. The video in questions, in case you are wondering, is the CockyBoys video “A Thing of Beauty.” It’s a pretty hot video about a threesome, but I digress. At the beginning of the video, we see three guys enjoying a vacation, when they narrator begins to read “Once I Pass’d Through a Populous City” by Walt Whitman. So after watching the video, and well, I will be modest and not discuss the particulars of watching the video, I looked up the poem, and what I found was fairly shocking, but I will get to that in a moment.

If one were to expect a poem in a gay pornographic video, you probably would be surprised to hear one by Walt Whitman, whose sexuality is generally assumed to be homosexual or bisexual based on his poetry, though that has been at times disputed. His poetry depicts love and sexuality in a more earthy, individualistic way common in American culture before the medicalization of sexuality in the late 19th century. Though Leaves of Grass was often labeled pornographic or obscene, only one critic remarked on its author’s presumed sexual activity: in a November 1855 review, Rufus Wilmot Griswold suggested Whitman was guilty of “that horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians”. Whitman had intense friendships with many men and boys throughout his life. Some biographers have claimed that he may not have actually engaged in sexual relationships with males, while others cite letters, journal entries and other sources which they claim as proof of the sexual nature of some of his relationships. Late in his life, when Whitman was asked outright if his “Calamus” poems were homosexual, he chose not to respond.

If you are at all familiar with Whitman’s poetry, then you are familiar with the homoeroticism that exists within.

Emory Holloway, in his Whitman: An Interpretation in Narrative (1926), provided the first scholarly biography of the poet, and his experience may stand as an example of the continuing controversy over Whitman. In his research, Holloway happened to run across the manuscript of a “Children of Adam” poem, “Once I Pass’d through a Populous City,” and discovered that it had originally been addressed to a man—and therefore “belonged” in the “Calamus” cluster. He was the first biographer to agonize over how to write about Whitman’s sexuality. A revealing footnote to Holloway’s biography is that he later became obsessed with demonstrating that Whitman was telling the truth in his claims to fatherhood in his letter to Symonds; his obsession led to his publication, after long years of research, of Free and Lonesome Heart: The Secret of Walt Whitman (1960), claiming discovery of “Whitman’s son.”

20140223-225719.jpg

Holloway’s discovery here lies the interesting part of “Once I Pass’d.” Originally, this poem was addressed not to a woman but to a man, as I have done above. Nearly every place that I looked for the text of the poem used the published version which used feminine forms.

The original story behind the poem states that in 1848, at age 29, Whitman visited New Orleans, the populous city in the poem. There he met a man, who became the inspiration for the poem. Most scholars now reject the idea that Whitman was involved with a Creole woman of higher social rank than his own and that his sudden exit from New Orleans was due to complications deriving from this relationship. The theory of a New Orleans romance, started by Henry Bryan Binns in his A Life of Walt Whitman (1905), proposes to explain the mystery of Whitman’s letter to John Addington Symonds in which he discussed his life down South and mentioned six illegitimate children (for which there is no documented evidence). It is also used to explain the dramatic change in Whitman after the New Orleans trip, his sexual awakening, and the inspiration for the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855). Some biographers think the lines “O Magnet-South! O glistening, perfumed South! My South! / O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse and love! good and evil! O all dear to me!” in “Longings for Home” (later “O Magnet-South”) suggest a New Orleans romance. Some quote the first five lines of “I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing” as support for the idea. Basil De Selincourt asserts in his 1914 critical study of Whitman that “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” bemoans the death of one who was all but wife to him—the genteel New Orleans lady. Still others see further evidence in “Once I Pass’d through a Populous City,” in which Whitman penned, “Yet now of all that city I remember only a woman I casually met there who detain’d me for love of me . . . who passionately clung to me.” However, Whitman’s earlier manuscript, which read “the man” instead of “a woman,” is telling.

When Walt looked back on his New Orleans passion, he penned a poem, “Once I Pass’d Through a Populous City” that was branded “obscene” when it was published. But when it was published, it hid the truth. In 1925 Emory Holloway discovered the original hand-written manuscript of “Once I Pass’d Through A Populous City,” showing the poet had changed the gender before the poem was published. Only eight letters make the difference between the original and the published version. In my opinion, those eight letters tell a completely different story. It seems that there was a romance during the three months (from 25 February to 25 May in 1848) that Whitman spent in New Orleans, but not with a creole woman, but a man.

New Orleans has always had a long history of homosexuals, or at least fluid sexuality, so why would it be surprising that the young Whitman came into his sexual being in New Orleans, “A Populous City.”

Source of the Whitman’s original manuscript: Walt Whitman Poetry Manuscripts in the Papers of Walt Whitman, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia

3 Comments | posted in History, Poetry

February 18, 2014

There may be chaos still around the world

By Joe

20140218-002156.jpg

There may be chaos still around the world
by George Santayana

There may be chaos still around the world,
This little world that in my thinking lies;
For mine own bosom is the paradise
Where all my life’s fair visions are unfurled.
Within my nature’s shell I slumber curled,
Unmindful of the changing outer skies,
Where now, perchance, some new-born Eros flies,
Or some old Cronos from his throne is hurled.
I heed them not; or if the subtle night
Haunt me with deities I never saw,
I soon mine eyelid’s drowsy curtain draw
To hide their myriad faces from my sight.
They threat in vain; the whirlwind cannot awe
A happy snow-flake dancing in the flaw.

About This Poem
George Santayana is regarded as one of the most prominent champions of critical realism, and is a central figure in the era now called Classical American Philosophy. His first published work was a book of poetry titled Sonnets and Other Verses.

George Santayana was a Spanish-born American philosopher, critic, essayist, novelist, and poet. He received his PhD from Harvard and became a faculty member in 1889. During his tenure at Harvard, Santayana’s students included Conrad Aiken, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens. In 1912, Santayana moved to Europe and never returned to the United States. He died in 1952, a few months before his 89th birthday.

2 Comments | posted in Poetry

February 14, 2014

How Do I Love Thee?

By Joe

20140213-221515.jpg

How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Though I usually only post poems on Tuesday, but what is more appropriate for Valentine’s Day than this beautiful love sonnet. It’s one of my favorite poems and was first published by Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her book Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850). Most critics agree that Barrett Browning wrote the sonnets, not as an abstract literary exercise, but as a personal declaration of love to her husband, Robert Browning (who was also an important Victorian poet). Perhaps the intimate origin of the sonnets is what led Barrett Browning to create an imaginary foreign origin for them. But whatever the original motives behind their composition and presentation, many of the sonnets immediately became famous, establishing Barrett Browning as an important poet through the 19th and 20th centuries. Phrases from Barrett Browning’s sonnets, especially “How do I love thee?,” have entered everyday conversation, becoming standard figures of speech even for people who have never read her poetry.

I wanted to post this poem for all those that I love, including my wonderful readers. I think that my favorite part of this poem is “if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.” How wonderful is that line. We know that all things will be greater in heaven than on earth, so to be able to love better after death, implies to me that the love in life is as great a love as can be imagined. Only in heaven could it be greater. That’s a powerful statement of love. I have family and friends that I love with all of my heart, and I hope that one day I will find that love in a romantic way. If you have found that love, I admire you and am jealous. If you haven’t, then I hope that you too will find it someday.

For those like me who are single on Valentine’s Day, it can seem so lonely, but there is one thing I have learned over the years: you must love yourself. Before you can truly love someone else, you have to first love yourself. If there are things about yourself that you don’t love, you will never allow yourself to be loved in the way we all deserve to be loved. So love yourself, and allow yourself to be loved, too. So to ultimately answer Browning’s question, “How do I love thee?” I must love myself first so that I can love you more.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

7 Comments | posted in Poetry

February 11, 2014

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry

By Joe

20140210-214335.jpg

Jubilate Agno, Fragment B, [For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry]
Christopher Smart

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For is this done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.
For this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.
For fifthly he washes himself.
For sixthly he rolls upon wash.
For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.
For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.
For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.
For tenthly he goes in quest of food.
For having considered God and himself he will consider his neighbor.
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.
For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.
For when his day’s work is done his business more properly begins.
For he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.
For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.
For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses.
For he will not do destruction if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation.
For he purrs in thankfulness when God tells him he’s a good Cat.
For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon.
For every house is incomplete without him, and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.
For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the departure of the Children of Israel
from Egypt.
For every family had one cat at least in the bag.
For the English Cats are the best in Europe.
For he is the cleanest in the use of his forepaws of any quadruped.
For the dexterity of his defense is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly.
For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.
For he is tenacious of his point.
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
For he knows that God is his Saviour.
For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.
For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.
For he is of the Lord’s poor, and so indeed is he called by benevolence perpetually–Poor Jeoffry!
poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat.
For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better.
For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in complete cat.
For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants in music.
For he is docile and can learn certain things.
For he can sit up with gravity, which is patience upon approbation.
For he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment.
For he can jump over a stick, which is patience upon proof positive.
For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command.
For he can jump from an eminence into his master’s bosom.
For he can catch the cork and toss it again.
For he is hated by the hypocrite and miser.
For the former is afraid of detection.
For the latter refuses the charge.
For he camels his back to bear the first notion of business.
For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly.
For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services.
For he killed the Icneumon rat, very pernicious by land.
For his ears are so acute that they sting again.
For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention.
For by stroking of him I have found out electricity.
For I perceived God’s light about him both wax and fire.
For the electrical fire is the spiritual substance which God sends from heaven to sustain the
bodies both of man and beast.
For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
For, though he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped.
For he can tread to all the measures upon the music.
For he can swim for life.
For he can creep.

Lines 695-768 from Fragment B of Jubilate Agno by Christopher Smart.

HRH is back to her old self and seems to be fully recovered from her illness. She still needs to gain weight. The poor old girl is just skin and bones, having lost so much weight during her illness. However, she’s back to eating, and she’s regained her kingdom. She is bossing around human and animal alike. I don’t know what made her mad at the other cats last night, but she was really bossing them around.

I’m glad to see that she is recovering well. Last night she could tell I had a headache, and she laid behind my head and nudged my head with hers and patted my head with her paw. Cats always seem to be aware of when their human companions are under the weather. My previous cat Calico (who loved to be the ripe old age of 18), always knew when I was sick and would cuddle up to me to comfort me as a kid. People can say what they will about cats, but with all their aloofness, they are very empathetic creatures. I think one of the things I love most about cats is that they are much like me, sometimes they want to cuddle, and sometimes, they just want to be left alone.

Christopher Smart’s Jeoffry is a wonderful look at the eccentricities of cats, and though it is a long poem, it really is worth a full reading of it. Christopher Smart was born on April 11, 1722 in Shipbourne, Kent, England. His father, a steward on the estate of Lord Vane, died when Smart was eleven. Smart attended the Durham School and was later educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge University, where he was well known for his Latin verses.

The Odes of Horace would remain influential throughout Smart’s career; he translated The Works of Horace in 1756. After college, Smart earned a living in London editing and writing copy for periodicals and composing songs for the popular theater. During this time, he became known for his reckless drinking and spending habits; he was arrested for debt in 1747. In 1752 he published his first collection, Poems on Several Occasions, and married Anna Maria Carnan. They had two daughters.

In the 1750s Smart developed a form of religious mania that compelled him to continuous prayer. Samuel Johnson remarked, “My poor friend Smart showed the disturbance of his mind by falling upon his knees, and saying his prayers in the street, or in any other unusual place.” In 1756 he published Hymn to the Supreme Being, on Recovery from a Dangerous Fit of Illness. However, from that time onward, Smart was confined, with one brief Intermission, until 1763 in St. Luke’s Hospital and then in Mr. Potter’s Madhouse in Bethnal Green.

During his confinement he wrote what many see as his most original and lasting works—A Song to David, and the lengthy manuscript of Jubilate Agno. The last five years of Smart’s life were marked by increasing debt and need; he was arrested again for debt in 1770 and died the following year.

Smart is best known for A Song to David (1763), which praises the author of the Psalms as an archetype of the Divine poet. Although in its own time the poem was greeted largely with confusion, later poets such as Browning and Yeats would single out this poem for its affirmation of spirituality in an increasingly materialistic world.

In this respect Smart has been considered as a forerunner to poets such as John Clare and William Blake. Smart is also known for his distinctive and often anthologized homage to his cat, Jeoffry. This poem comes from the surviving fragments of Jubilate Agno, which was also written during his confinement but not published in a definitive edition until 1954.

The surviving fragments of Jubilate Agno are composed in a series of antiphonal verses beginning either with the word let or for. Smart envisions himself as “the Lord’s News-Writer—the scribe-evangelist” spreading the Word. The poem is both a personal and philosophical diary and it presents an encyclopedic gathering of obscure lore, genealogy, and wordplay. Startling alterations of tone and juxtaposition of material as well as a careful attention to the quotidian energize Jubilate Agno.

Smart’s work has captured the attention of contemporary artists such as Benjamin Britten, Allen Ginsberg, and Theodore Roethke.

5 Comments | posted in Poetry

February 4, 2014

To Television

By Joe

20140203-213619.jpg

To Television
By Robert Pinksy

Not a “window on the world”
But as we call you,
A box a tube

Terrarium of dreams and wonders.
Coffer of shades, ordained
Cotillion of phosphors
Or liquid crystal

Homey miracle, tub
Of acquiescence, vein of defiance.
Your patron in the pantheon would be Hermes

Raster dance,
Quick one, little thief, escort
Of the dying and comfort of the sick,

In a blue glow my father and little sister sat
Snuggled in one chair watching you
Their wife and mother was sick in the head
I scorned you and them as I scorned so much

Now I like you best in a hotel room,
Maybe minutes
Before I have to face an audience: behind
The doors of the armoire, box
Within a box — Tom & Jerry, or also brilliant
And reassuring, Oprah Winfrey.

Thank you, for I watched, I watched
Sid Caesar speaking French and Japanese not
Through knowledge but imagination,
His quickness, and Thank You, I watched live
Jackie Robinson stealing

Home, the image — O strung shell — enduring
Fleeter than light like these words we
Remember in, they too winged
At the helmet and ankles.

Former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky has written many books of and about poetry, including most recently, “Selected Poems.” From 1997 to 2000, he served as the United States Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. During that time, he founded the Favorite Poem Project, a program dedicated to celebrating, documenting and encouraging poetry’s role in Americans’ lives. Pinsky currently teaches in the M.F.A. program at Boston University and is the poetry editor of Slate.

Leave a comment | posted in Poetry

January 28, 2014

Snow Day

By Joe

20140127-200207.jpg

Snow Day
By Billy Collins


Today we woke up to a revolution of snow,
its white flag waving over everything,
the landscape vanished,
not a single mouse to punctuate the blankness,
and beyond these windows

the government buildings smothered,
schools and libraries buried, the post office lost
under the noiseless drift,
the paths of trains softly blocked,
the world fallen under this falling.

In a while, I will put on some boots
and step out like someone walking in water,
and the dog will porpoise through the drifts,
and I will shake a laden branch
sending a cold shower down on us both.

But for now I am a willing prisoner in this house,
a sympathizer with the anarchic cause of snow.
I will make a pot of tea
and listen to the plastic radio on the counter,
as glad as anyone to hear the news

that the Kiddie Corner School is closed,
the Ding-Dong School, closed.
the All Aboard Children’s School, closed,
the Hi-Ho Nursery School, closed,
along with—some will be delighted to hear—

the Toadstool School, the Little School,
Little Sparrows Nursery School,
Little Stars Pre-School, Peas-and-Carrots Day School
the Tom Thumb Child Center, all closed,
and—clap your hands—the Peanuts Play School.

So this is where the children hide all day,
These are the nests where they letter and draw,
where they put on their bright miniature jackets,
all darting and climbing and sliding,
all but the few girls whispering by the fence.

And now I am listening hard
in the grandiose silence of the snow,
trying to hear what those three girls are plotting,
what riot is afoot,
which small queen is about to be brought down.

Billy Collins (born William James Collins; March 22, 1941) is an American poet, appointed as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He is a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York and is the Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute, Florida. Collins was recognized as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library (1992) and selected as the New York State Poet for 2004 through 2006. He is currently a teacher in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton.

Source: Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (Random House Inc., 2001)

13 Comments | posted in Poetry

January 21, 2014

What lips my lips have kissed

By Joe

20140120-214650.jpg

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why (Sonnet XLIII)
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

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.

Edna St. Vincent Millay’s What Lips My Lips Have Kissed is a conventional Italian or Petrarchan sonnet and is the speaker’s reminiscences of the numerous love affairs of her younger days and her regret that such amours were moments of days past that will not be repeated. This poem struck a particular chord with me, since the older I get and the more time I am single, I begin to wonder if my past amours are in the past, not to be repeated again, though hopefully, I am not too old to find love again. I certainly think I am still young enough to still find love again, but some days, I just have to wonder if it will ever happen and “summer will sing in me” once more.

In the opening quatrain Millay refers not to individual lovers but merely to lips that have met hers and arms that have supported her head. Millay admitted her free ranging sexuality and eventually entered into an open marriage with a man who managed her business affairs and was a dear friend. She complains not so much about her early promiscuity but about the passage of time. Her early loves are now “ghosts . . . that tap and sigh.” In line 7 and 8 she refers to them as “unremembered lads that not again/ Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.”

With the beginning of the sestet or concluding six lines, she creates a brilliant and evocative metaphor. She never says, “I am a lonely winter tree,” but the identification of herself with the tree of silent boughs is inescapable. Similarly, the lovers of her youth are birds that “have vanished one by one” leaving her now leafless boughs (read arms) “more silent than before.” Just as she had refrained earlier from identifying whose lips and arms had kissed and held her, she now “cannot say what loves have come and gone.” However, those past days of passion were a “summer [that] sang in me/ A little while, that in me sings no more.”

Certainly there is regret and “a quiet pain,” but the sadness is not shame at her youthful promiscuity but a quiet melancholy that the onset of winter or age that has caused the leaves to fall and the birds to vanish. Were another summer season to come, she would welcome another succession of nameless lips and arms. But in human life we are not accorded renewed youth, renewed leafy boughs and more than one singing summer. This graceful sonnet renews and heightens one’s appreciation of the poet about whom Richard Wilbur said of Millay, ”She wrote some of the best sonnets of the century.” That is a strong compliment from the second Poet Laureate of the United States.

4 Comments | posted in Poetry

January 14, 2014

The Cat’s Song

By Joe

20140113-212621.jpg

The Cat’s Song
by Marge Piercy

Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness.
My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, says
the cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing
milk from his mother’s forgotten breasts.

Let us walk in the woods, says the cat.
I’ll teach you to read the tabloid of scents,
to fade into shadow, wait like a trap, to hunt.
Now I lay this plump warm mouse on your mat.

You feed me, I try to feed you, we are friends,
says the cat, although I am more equal than you.
Can you leap twenty times the height of your body?
Can you run up and down trees? Jump between roofs?

Let us rub our bodies together and talk of touch.
My emotions are pure as salt crystals and as hard.
My lusts glow like my eyes. I sing to you in the mornings
walking round and round your bed and into your face.

Come I will teach you to dance as naturally
as falling asleep and waking and stretching long, long.
I speak greed with my paws and fear with my whiskers.
Envy lashes my tail. Love speaks me entire, a word

of fur. I will teach you to be still as an egg
and to slip like the ghost of wind through the grass.

HRH is finally home and seems much healthier (though she still has another round of antibiotics). See was royally pissed that I had left her down there for a week, and she let her displeasure be known to the whole veterinarian clinic. She hissed, growled, and attacked anything near her, until I got her in the car. Once in the car, she was considerably calmer, and has been quite calm since she’s been home. I’m just so happy she’s home, and I’m pretty sure, so is she.

Marge Piercy was born in Detroit, Michigan, into a working-class family that had been hard-hit by the Depression. Piercy was the first member of her family to attend college, winning a scholarship to attend the University of Michigan. She received an MA from Northwestern University. During the 1960s, Piercy was an organizer in political movements like the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the movement against the war in Vietnam, an engagement which has shaped her work in myriad ways. Perhaps most importantly, though, has been Piercy’s sustained involvement with feminism, Marxism and environmental thought. An extremely prolific writer, Piercy has published 17 volumes of poetry and 17 novels. Her novels generally address larger social concerns through sharply observed characters and brisk plot lines. Though generally focused on issues such as class or culture, and usually written from a feminist position, Piercy’s novels have taken on a variety of guises, including historical fiction and science or speculative fiction. Her novel He, She, and It (1991)—published as Body of Glass in the UK—won that country’s prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award; an earlier novel of speculative fiction, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) has been credited as the first work of cyber-punk.

Piercy’s poetry is known for its highly personal, often angry and very emotional timbre. She writes a swift free verse that shows the same commitment to the social and environmental issues that fill her novels. The Moon is Always Female (1980) is considered a classic text of the feminist movement. Early Grrl (1999) collects Piercy’s earliest work and includes some unpublished poems. Of the autobiographical elements in her poetry, Piercy has said that “although my major impulse to autobiography has played itself out in poems rather than novels, I have never made a distinction in working up my own experience and other people’s. I imagine I speak for a constituency, living and dead, and that I give utterance to energy, experience, insight, words flowing from many lives. I have always desired that my poems work for others. ‘To Be of Use’ is the title of one of my favorite poems and one of my best-known books.” Piercy has also written plays, several volumes of nonfiction, a memoir, and has edited the anthology Early Ripening: American Women’s Poetry Now (1988). Increasingly interested in Jewish issues, Piercy has also been poetry editor of Tikkun Magazine.

In 1971 Piercy moved to Cape Cod where she continues to live and work. She and her husband, the novelist Ira Wood, run Leapfrog Press.

8 Comments | posted in Poetry