[C.G. Macdonald]

I think Robert Francis deserves to have a few poems on this thread, as well as being mentioned.

THE TWO USES

The eye is not more exquisitely designed
For seeing than it is for being loved.
The same lips curved to speak are curved to kiss.
Even the workaday and practical arm
Becomes all love for love's sake to the lover.

If this is nature's thrift, love thrives on it.
Love never asks the body different
Or ever wants it less ambiguous,
The eye being lovlier for what it sees,
The arm for all it does, the lips for speaking.

[Tim Murphy]

CGM, Here are a few of the Francis poems we discussed earlier, all of which belong here:

Indoor Lady

An indoor lady that I know
Laments the lateness of the spring—
The sun, the birds, the buds so slow,
The superannuated snow,
The wind that is possessed to blow.

Her sadly window-watching eyes,
Her uttered and unuttered sighs,
For such unseasonable skies
Give me to understand that spring
In other years was otherwise.


The Mouse Whose Name Is Time

The mouse whose name is Time
Is out of sound and sight.
He nibbles at the day
And nibbles at the night.

He nibbles at the summer
Till all of it is gone.
He nibbles at the seashore,
He nibbles at the moon.

Yet no man not a seer,
No woman not a sibyl
Can ever ever hear
Or see him nibble, nibble.

And whence or how he comes
And how or where he goes
Nobody now remembers,
Nobody living knows.


Farm Boy After Summer

A seated statue of himself he seems.
A bronze slowness becomes him. Patently
The page he contemplates he doesn’t see.

The lesson, the long lesson, has been summer.
His mind holds summer as his skin holds sun.
For once the homework, all of it, was done.

What were the crops, where were the fiery fields
Where for so many days so many hours
The sun assaulted him with glittering showers?

Expect a certain absence in his presence.
Expect all winter long a summer scholar,
For scarcely all its snows can cool that color.


Good Night Near Christmas

And now good night. Good night to this old house
Whose breathing fires are banked for their night's rest.
Good night to lighted windows in the west.
Good night to neighbors and to neighbor's cows

Whose morning milk will be beside my door.
Good night to one star shining in. Good night
To earth, poor earth with its uncertain light,
Our little wandering planet still at war.

Good night to one unstarved and gnawing mouse
Between the inner and the outer wall.
He has a paper nest in which to crawl.
Good night to men who have no bed, no house.


Now That Your Shoulders Reach My Shoulders

My shoulders once were yours for riding.
My feet were yours for walking, wading.
My morning once was yours for taking.

Still I can almost feel the pressure
Of your warm hands clasping my forehead
While my hands clasped your willing ankles.

Now that your shoulders reach my shoulders
What is there left for me to give you?
Where is a weight to lift as welcome?

Young Farmer

Once glance at him and you can tell
His fruit is clean, his corn is tall.
His sheep and cattle pastured well,
His buildings trim: house, barn, and wall.

You know the seed he sows is sound
As seed his forefathers have sown.
And when he plows and plants the ground
The crop must grow as he has grown.

While I slept

While I slept, while I slept and the night grew colder
She would come to my room, stepping softly
And draw a blanket about my shoulder
While I slept.

While I slept, while I slept in the dark, still heat
She would come to my bed, stepping cooly
And smooth the twisted, troubled sheet
While I slept.

Now she sleeps, sleeps under quiet rain
While nights grow warm or nights grow colder,
And I wake, and sleep, and wake again
While she sleeps.

[C.G. Macdonald]

A few others by Francis


WITH THE YEAR'S COOLING


With the year's cooling come the colors of fire.
The later-blooming are the warmer flowers
That blaze and smolder in the thinning hours.

Now in the falling of the unfailing year
The quiet-clicking leaves unlatch a door
To those long landscapes we have waited for.

Bitter and fragrant hangs the smoke-tinged air
From some abandoned bonfire near or far,
While sterner night burns an intenser star.


And though I'm trying to stay away from Anthology pieces, I heard someone read this poem last night at a memorial reading for Walter Pavlich (an excellent poet from Davis, who died suddenly last July in his mid-forties), and was surprised by how well this later poem of Francis' works as an oral/performance piece...how, while being made up entirely of nouns, it creates a narrative:


SILENT POEM


backroad leafmould stonewall chipmunk
underbrush grapevine woodchuck shadblow

woodsmoke cowbarn honeysuckle woodpile
sawhorse bucksaw outhouse wellsweep

backdoor flagstone bulkhead buttermilk
candlestick ragrug firedog brownbread

hilltop outcrop cowbell buttercup
whetstone thunderstorm pitchfork steeplebush

gristmill millstone cornmeal waterwheel
watercress buckwheat firefly jewelweed

gravestone groundpine windbreak bedrock
weathercock snowfall starlight cockcrow

[robert mezey]

A couple of bawdy ones by Frost:

The symbol of the number ten--
The naught for girls, the one for men--
Defines how many times does one
In mathematics or in fun
Go as you might say into zero.
You ask the heroine and hero.


God fell in love but once,
Though with the best excuse.
He wasn't fond of cunts--
Not half as much as Zeus.

[Carl Sundell]

Another from Yeats:

VACILLATION

My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was bless`ed and could bless.

[C.G. Macdonald]

Professor Mezey, I enjoyed the last two ones by Frost, but can't find either one in my (so-called) Complete Poetry of RF. Could the poem about one and zero have been the origin of "fuzzy math?"

And quite a selection of Francis's short poems, Mr. Murphy...FARM BOY AFTER SUMMER applies to even suburban September scholars.

But to leave New England for a bit, two shorties I like by Janet Lewis.


GIRL HELP


Mild and slow and young,
She moves about the room
And stirs the summer dust
With her wide broom.

In the warm, lofted air
Soft lips together pressed,
Soft wispy hair,
She stops to rest.

And stops to breathe,
Amid the summer hum,
The great white lilac bloom
Scented with days to come.

MUSIC AT A CONCERT


This is the many-mansioned, built in air,
The timelessly returning, built in time;
The only halls to which she may repair
Who long since passed beyond the reach of time.

Since she so loved this, ever I find her here
When men have laid their personal strife aside
That this impersonal grace may hold the air,
Whereby my loss is, for a time, denied.

[Roger Slater]

Tim, that "Indoor Lady" poem by Francis is quite reminiscent of Frost's "My November Guest," which is perhaps a bit too long for this topic at 20 lines, but which I'll post since it's so wonderful:

My November Guest


MY Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane. 5

Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.

**

And the Frost poem has always reminded me of this gem by Larkin:

Mother, Summer, I

My mother, who hates thunder storms,
Holds up each summer day and shakes
It out suspiciously, lest swarms
Of grape-dark clouds are lurking there;
But when the August weather breaks
And rains begin, and brittle frost
Sharpens the bird-abandoned air,
Her worried summer look is lost,

And I her son, though summer-born
And summer-loving, none the less
Am easier when the leaves are gone.
Too often summer days appear
Emblems of perfect happiness
I can't confront: I must await
A time less bold, less rich, less clear:
An autumn more appropriate.

[robert mezey]

C.G.---
The first Frost poem is in the Library of
America edition (the one to have), in the
section Uncollected Poems and under the (not
very good) title, "Sym-ball-ism"
The second one, about God and Zeus and their
sexual tastes, is not to be found anywhere.
It was given to my late colleague Darcy O'Brien
by Lawrance Thompson (RF's awful biographer
and O'Brien's teacher at Princeton) and Darcy
gave it to me. (It is almost certainly the
work of Frost; who else could have written it?)

[hector]

Are there yet more poems by Frost uncollected except in the memories of Professor Mezey and others? If he finds time, perhaps Professor Mezey could supply us with those he knows.

[robert mezey]

I don't know any other uncollected Frost, just
that little one about God and Zeus. I'd bet
there are some others like it, but God knows
where. But the section of Uncollected Poems
in the Library of America edition is almost a
hundred pages and has lots of fine things early
and late, like "The Middletown Murder" or "On
the Sale of My Farm" which ends,

It shall be no trespassing
If I come again some spring
In the grey disguise of years,
Seeking ache of memory here.