[MacArthur]

Sestina on Six Words by Weldon Kees

I often wonder about the others
Where they are bound for on the voyage,
What is the reason for their silence,
Was there some reason to go away?
It may be they carry a dark burden,
Expect some harm, or have done some harm.

How can we show we mean no harm?
Approach them? But they shy from others.
Offer, perhaps, to share the burden?
They change the subject to the voyage,
Or turn abruptly, walk away,
To brood against the rail in silence.

What is defeated by their silence?
More than love, less than harm?
Many already are looking their way,
Pretending not to. Eyes of others
Will follow them now the whole voyage
And add a little to the burden.

Others touch hands to ease the burden,
Or stroll, companionable in silence,
Counting the stars which bless the voyage,
But let the foghorn speak of harm,
Their hearts will stammer like the others',
Their hands seem in each other's way.

It is so obvious, in a way.
Each is alone, each with his burden.
To others they are always others,
And they can never break the silence,
Say, lightly, "thou", but to their harm
Although they make many a voyage.

What do they wish for from the voyage
But to awaken far away
By miracle free from every harm,
Hearing at dawn that sweet burden
The birds cry after a long silence?
Where is that country not like others?

There is no way to ease the burden.
The voyage leads on from harm to harm,
A land of others and of silence.

Donald Justice

[Tim Murphy]

Thanks for posting this, Andrew, a rare example of a fine sestina in English. Our Master of Memory is one of Justice's closest friends and colleagues, and I'll be eager to see what he has to say.

[robert mezey]

Yes, a very good sestina. He wrote several
fine ones, back before they became fashionable
for poetlings in workshops (who thought that
that little game was all there was to form).
I believe that Justice wrote the first sestina
in free verse (and I've told him he will have
a lot to answer for in the next world). I
will have some things to say about this marvelous
poet, il miglior fabbro; but a little later.

[Robert J. Clawson]

[quote]Originally posted by robert mezey:
"Yes, a very good sestina. He wrote several
fine ones, back before they became fashionable
for poetlings in workshops...."

Whew, this is intimidating. The form itself is tough enough, Robert.

Robert

[MacArthur]

Ralph-- yes this is very well done...but not intimidating at all! When I decided to write a sestina (months ago) this was the one that showed me (one way, anyway) how it can be done.

I think it's the Iambic Tet. Not only does the shorter line take some of the edge off the repetitiousness of the sestina, but also allows for many more enjambments, so the end-words can appear in different parts of a sentence.

This should be the model in the workshops.

(...my sestina got published.)

[Robert J. Clawson]

"Ralph-- yes this is very well done...but not intimidating at all!"

Mac, I agree, very Kees. I hope you didn't think that I was cowed by the form. I found Robert's COMMENT on "poetlings" in workshops intimidating. Despite my age, I'm still a "poetling," and, yes, I go to workshops now and then. I have some empathy for kids I meet in them.

I shall post a sestina that Mezey can ravage.

Bob

[robert mezey]

I didn't mean that a good sestina is easy---no good
poem is easy. But if you can't write in meter, as most
workshop kids can't, and nobody cares, it is a fairly
easy form to manipulate, and a mildly amusing game with
the end-words. For several years the little mags were
full of ghastly sestinas, and they still appear sometimes.
Here is the sestina that I told Don Justice he would have
to answer for, it being, I think, the first free verse
sestina and endless imitated (the young imitators not
realizing that a free verse sestina is even harder than
other sorts of free verse).

HERE IN KATMANDU

We have climbed the mountain.
There is nothing more to do.
It is terrible to come down
To the valley
Where, amidst many flowers,
One thinks of snow,

As, formerly, amidst snow,
Climbing the mountain,
One thought of flowers,
Tremulous, ruddy with dew,
In the valley.
One caught their scent coming down.

It is difficult to adjust, once down,
To the absence of snow.
Clear days, from the valley,
One looks up at the mountain.
What else is there to do?
Prayer wheels, flowers!

Let the flowers
Fade, the prayer wheels run down.
What have these to do
With us who have stood atop the snow
Atop the mountain,
Flags seen from the valley?

It might be possible to live in the valley,
To bury oneself among flowers,
If one could forget the mountain,
How, never once looking down,
Stiff, blinded with snow,
One knew what to do.

Meanwhile it is not easy here in Katmandu,
Especially when to the valley
That wind which means snow
Elsewhere, but here means flowers,
Comes down,
As soon it must, from the mountain.


The play with do, dew, Katmandu is particularly
delicious.

[Roger Slater]

Justice's Katmandu sestina has been posted two times in one day, it seems. I also posted it on the Gazebo. An interesting coincidence. I posted it as an atonement for posting my own sestina. People hadn't just bad-mouthed my own sestina, but the sestina form in general, and I wanted to demonstrate that I was not a victim of having chosen an impossible form but merely of having not written it well enough.

[This message has been edited by Roger Slater (edited August 17, 2001).]

[robert mezey]

I'll be leaving these fun & games for a while,
but I want to leave one last example of mastery.
Here is the sestina I love most, one of the best
in English, if not the best---by Anthony Hecht.

THE BOOK OF YOLEK

Wir haben ein Gesetz,
Und nach dem Gesetz soll er sterben

The dowsed coals fume and hiss after your meal
Of grilled brook trout, and you saunter off for a walk
Down the fern trail, it doesn't matter where to,
Just so you're weeks and worlds away from home,
And among midsummer hills have set up camp
In the deep bronze glories of declining day.

You remember, peacefully, an earlier day
In childhood, remember a quite specific meal:
A corn roast and bonfire in summer camp.
That summer you got lost on a Nature Walk;
More than you dared admit, you thought of home;
No one else knows where the mind wanders to.

The fifth of August, 1942.
It was morning and very hot. It was the day
They came at dawn with rifles to The Home
For Jewish Children, cutting short the meal
Of bread and soup, lining them up to walk
In close formation off to a special camp.

How often you have thought about that camp,
As though in some strange way you were driven to,
And about the children, and how they were made to walk,
Yolek who had bad lungs, who wasn't a day
Over five years old, commanded to leave his meal
And shamble between armed guards to his long home.

We're approaching August again. It will drive home
The regulation torments of that camp
Yolek was sent to, his small, unfinished meal,
The electric fences, the numeral tattoo,
The quite extraordinary heat of the day
They all were forced to take that terrible walk.

Whether on a silent, solitary walk
Or among crowds, far off or safe at home,
You will remember, helplessly, that day,
And the smell of smoke, and the loudspeakers of the camp.
Wherever you are, Yolek will be there, too.
His unuttered name will interrupt your meal.

Prepare to receive him in your home one day.
Though they killed him in the camp they sent him too,
He will walk in as you're sitting down to a meal.

[Nigel Holt]

I have to reply here.

I can honestly say that I have never been moved so much by a poem as by this one.

It should be in every school's English books.

I will certainly use it when given the opportunity. It is a crime that this poem is not more widely known.

Wonderful and dreadful.

Thank you Robert, so very much, for posting this.


Nigel