[Michael F]

Here’s another gem from my mother’s flea market book, by James Russell Lowell. OK, the diction is dated, and it’s sentimental – I could certainly do without the angel singing, etc. -- but it’s sentimental in the nicest way, and I can’t argue with the thrust of the sentiment. I actually think the poem is quite wise. It reminds me a bit of Blake and Whitman in its capacity to find nearly endless goodness and beauty in the most ordinary, pedestrian thing (sez I, who have written poems on weeds and dung beetles). This poem also has some nice tropes, such as “the white lily’s breezy tent”, and the cloud like a lamb.


To The Dandelion

Dear common flower, that grow'st beside the way,
Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold,
First pledge of blithesome May,
Which children pluck, and, full of pride uphold,
High-hearted buccaneers, o'erjoyed that they
An Eldorado in the grass have found,
Which not the rich earth's ample round
May match in wealth, thou art more dear to me
Than all the prouder summer-blooms may be.

Gold such as thine ne'er drew the Spanish prow
Through the primeval hush of Indian seas,
Nor wrinkled the lean brow
Of age, to rob the lover's heart of ease;
'Tis the Spring's largess, which she scatters now
To rich and poor alike, with lavish hand,
Though most hearts never understand
To take it at God's value, but pass by
The offered wealth with unrewarded eye.

Thou art my tropics and mine Italy;
To look at thee unlocks a warmer clime;
The eyes thou givest me
Are in the heart, and heed not space or time:
Not in mid June the golden-cuirassed bee
Feels a more summer-like warm ravishment
In the white lily's breezy tent,
His fragrant Sybaris, than I, when first
From the dark green thy yellow circles burst.

Then think I of deep shadows on the grass,
Of meadows where in sun the cattle graze,
Where, as the breezes pass,
The gleaming rushes lean a thousand ways,
Of leaves that slumber in a cloudy mass,
Or whiten in the wind, of waters blue
That from the distance sparkle through
Some woodland gap, and of a sky above,
Where one white cloud like a stray lamb doth move.

My childhood's earliest thoughts are linked with thee;
The sight of thee calls back the robin's song,
Who, from the dark old tree
Beside the door, sang clearly all day long,
And I, secure in childish piety,
Listened as if I heard an angel sing
With news from heaven, which he could bring
Fresh every day to my untainted ears
When birds and flowers and I were happy peers.

How like a prodigal doth nature seem,
When thou, for all thy gold, so common art!
Thou teachest me to deem
More sacredly of every human heart,
Since each reflects in joy its scanty gleam
Of heaven, and could some wondrous secret show,
Did we but pay the love we owe,
And with a child's undoubting wisdom look
On all these living pages of God's book.

-- James Russell Lowell

[John Riley]

Not sure of the translator


Nothingness
by Anna Akhmatova

Calm yourself, my child, it is gone.
What you see are the remains: the woodland, the smoke, the retreating flames.
Somewhere, perhaps, in a far-away country
the sky is bluer and roses cling to a stone wall,
perhaps there are palm trees and a milder wind—
here there is nothing.
Here is nothing but snow on the branches of the spruce.
Here is nothing to kiss with warm lips:
what of it, all lips cool with passing time.
And you claim, my child, that your heart is brave
and that living without hope is worse than death.
What do you expect of death? Nausea seeps from his garb,
and self-slaughter is the most loathsome end of all.
We should love these long sick hours of life,
these narrow years of yearning,
like the brief blooming of a desert landscape.

[John Riley]

And here are a few by William Bronk. I have no idea how well known he is or what his status in the hierarchy is. I have a second-hand copy of his Life Supports I've been carrying in my backpack for a while.

***

The Woods, New York

I walk through city streets as once through woods
without the benefit of map or plan.
Failing to get to places when I should,
I learn a twisted pathway through the land.
Or lost, with nothing near to set me right,
where brick facades are similar as trees,
I walk along and suddenly come to a quite
familiar, remembered place, surprised and pleased.
This is a city the world will always remember
as one remembers Babylon or Thebes.
In the distant summer that follows our last November
the sifting screens and the shovels will fail to perceive
its being in me. I walked here once toward dark
and felt the wind come up across the park.


Mythology

We credit, still, some of the old gods
and their stories and warn ourselves: don’t forget.
But the overriding myth man always has
is one that we don’t feel is myth at all.
We address it reverently as Real World,
by reason, take our practical prayers to it
though real isn’t real in any sense we know
and blows whatever myth we make of it.



The Then We Are

Conceded, we can let the told of time
tell us a here when we ask it where we are.
It can show us befores of being born
and count our years as surely as its own,
teaching us public and private histories
in stories that we hear it tell, that we tell ourselves
and come to believe as gauges of what is true.
Should we hold still and bare of the tales of time?
Can any of us say what then we are?



The Smile on the Face of a Kouros

This boy, of course, was dead, whatever that
might mean. And nobly dead. I think we should feel
he was nobly dead. He fell in battle, perhaps,
and this carved stone remembers him
not as he may have looked, but as if to define
the naked virtue the stone describes as his.
One foot is forward, the eyes look out, the arms
drop downward past the narrow waist to hands
hanging in burdenless fullness by the heavy flanks.
The boy was dead, and the stone smiles in his death
lightening the lips with the pleasure of something achieved:
an end. To come to an end. To come to death
as an end. And coming, bring there intact, the full
weight of his strength and virtue, the prize with which
his empty hands are full. None of it lost,
safe home, and smile at the end achieved.
Now death, of which nothing as yet - or ever - is known,
leaves us alone to think as we want of it,
and accepts our choice, shaping the life to the death.
Do we want an end? It gives us; and takes what we give
and keeps it; and has, this way, in life itself,
a kind of treasure house of comely form
achieved and left with death to stay and be
forever beautiful and whole, as if
to want too much the perfect, unbroken form
were the same as wanting death, as choosing death
for an end. There are other ways; we know the way
to make the other choice for death: unformed
or broken, less than whole, puzzled, we live
in a formless world. Endless, we hope for no end.
I tell you death, expect no smile of pride
from me. I bring you nothing in my empty hands.

--William Bronk

[Andrew Szilvasy]

John,

I like Bronk. I read Life Supports a few years ago and found a lot of it well done. Yet, by the end of the volume I couldn't help thinking he was a bit too one note, even though that one note was often very well hit.

It was like he was Wallace Stevens, if Stevens didn't have a playful side. There's silliness in Stevens that often tempers the heavy ideas. After reading Bronk, that wasn't something I found an abundance of.

"Bantams in Pine-Woods"

Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan
Of tan with henna hackles, halt!

Damned universal cock, as if the sun
Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail.

Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal.
Your world is you. I am my world.

You ten-foot poet among inchlings. Fat!
Begone! An inchling bristles in these pines,

Bristles, and points their Appalachian tangs,
And fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

Originally Posted by John Riley

Not sure of the translator


Nothingness
by Anna Akhmatova

Calm yourself, my child, it is gone.
What you see are the remains: the woodland, the smoke, the retreating flames.
Somewhere, perhaps, in a far-away country
the sky is bluer and roses cling to a stone wall,
perhaps there are palm trees and a milder wind—
here there is nothing.
Here is nothing but snow on the branches of the spruce.
Here is nothing to kiss with warm lips:
what of it, all lips cool with passing time.
And you claim, my child, that your heart is brave
and that living without hope is worse than death.
What do you expect of death? Nausea seeps from his garb,
and self-slaughter is the most loathsome end of all.
We should love these long sick hours of life,
these narrow years of yearning,
like the brief blooming of a desert landscape.

Hey John. Are you sure this is Akhmatova? I think I have seen this poem in translation credited to Edit Södergran. I think Janice Soderling may have done the translation. But I might be high.
(Unclear typos removed)

[William A. Baurle]

What The Chairman Told Tom

Poetry? It's a hobby.
I run model trains.
Mr Shaw there breeds pigeons.

It's not work. You don't sweat.
Nobody pays for it.
You could advertise soap.

Art, that's opera; or repertory -
The Desert Song.
Nancy was in the chorus.

But to ask for twelve pounds a week -
married, aren't you? -
you've got a nerve.

How could I look a bus conductor
in the face
if I paid you twelve pounds?

Who says it's poetry, anyhow?
My ten year old
can do it and rhyme.

I get three thousand and expenses,
a car, vouchers,
but I'm an accountant.

They do what I tell them,
my company.
What do you do?

Nasty little words, nasty long words,
it's unhealthy.
I want to wash when I meet a poet.

They're Reds, addicts,
all delinquents.
What you write is rot.

Mr Hines says so, and he's a schoolteacher,
he ought to know.
Go and find work.

— Basil Bunting

***

Some Bunting Quotes

Bunting on Poets and Universities

There were mountebanks at the famous Albert Hall meeting, as well as a poet or two, but the worst, most insidious charlatans fill chairs and fellowships at universities ... or some other asylum for obsequious idlers.

"Lately a professor in this university"
said Khayyam of a recalcitrant ass,
"therefore would not enter, dare not face me."

Bunting on Islam

Sooner or later we must absorb Islam if our own culture is not to die of anaemia.

Bunting on Briggflatts

All old wives' chatter, cottage wisdom. No poem is profound.

Bunting's advice to young poets

I SUGGEST

1. Compose aloud; poetry is a sound.
2. Vary rhythm enough to stir the emotion you want but not so as to lose impetus.
3. Use spoken words and syntax.
4. Fear adjectives; they bleed nouns. Hate the passive.
5. Jettison ornament gaily but keep shape

Put your poem away till you forget it, then:
6. Cut out every word you dare.
7. Do it again a week later, and again.

Never explain - your reader is as smart as you.

[John Isbell]

Hi Bill,

Yes, that's a lovely Bunting poem, thank you for posting. Seeing it again, I think it may have inspired me without me remembering, in a thing called "What Cindy Said". There is nothing new under the sun.
It was Stephen Spender I think who wrote "I think continually of those who were truly great"? A great first line.

Cheers,
John

[John Riley]

I have it as Akhmatova in my files, Andrew. Maybe I'll check my collected to make certain. I do like the poem.

Bronk is always compared to Stevens and of course he comes up short. I do agree he has one tone and it wears thin in long stretches. I do have a place in me though for his poems and the type of poems he wrote. They don't have the dimensions of Steven or Frost, have fewer aspects or levels, but several of them are interesting and worth going back to periodically.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

Originally Posted by John Riley

I have it as Akhmatova in my files, Andrew. Maybe I'll check my collected to make certain. I do like the poem.

Bronk is always compared to Stevens and of course he comes up short. I do agree he has one tone and it wears thin in long stretches. I do have a place in me though for his poems and the type of poems he wrote. They don't have the dimensions of Steven or Frost, have fewer aspects or levels, but several of them are interesting and worth going back to periodically.

Yeah, I liked it too. I looked for it and found the attribution to the other poet. And I think a credit for Janice Soderling as translator but it is an unnamed document that has come up so it could be misleading. Lemme know. Interested.

[Andrew Szilvasy]

Originally Posted by John Riley

Bronk is always compared to Stevens and of course he comes up short. I do agree he has one tone and it wears thin in long stretches. I do have a place in me though for his poems and the type of poems he wrote. They don't have the dimensions of Steven or Frost, have fewer aspects or levels, but several of them are interesting and worth going back to periodically.

I agree, John. It's not really a fair comparison. I really did like what I read of Bronk. In fact, I do revisit his work, and it has inspired my work indirectly, and a few times directly (I have a poem that takes a line from the following poem). He is what he is: a compelling poet who--once you've gotten a sense of his poetry--does mostly variations on a theme by Bronk.

"Midsummer"

A green world, a scene of green, deep
with light blues, the greens made deep
by those blues. One thinks how
in certain pictures, envied landscapes are seen
(through a window, maybe) far behind the serene
sitter’s face, the serene pose, as though
in some impossible mirror, face to back,
human serenity gazed at a green world
which gazed at this face.
which gazed at this face.And see now,
here is that place, those greens
are here, deep with those blues. The air
we breathe is freshly sweet, and warm, as though
with berries. We are here. We are here.
Set this down too, as much
as if an atrocity had happened and been seen.
The earth is beautiful beyond all change.