One learns by thinking about writing, and by talking about writing — but primarily through writing.
Mary Oliver
It’s in the doing, where the learning happens.
Oliver, Mary. A Poetry Handbook. Taiwan, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994. pp17
Category: Poems
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An excerpt from Warble for Lilac-Time, by Walt Whitman
The maple woods, the crisp February days and the,
sugar making,
The robin where he hops, bright-eyed, brown-breasted,
With musical clear call at sunrise, and again at sunset,
Or flitting among the trees of the apple-orchard, building
the nest of his mate,
The melted snow of March, the willow sending forth its
yellow-green sprouts,
For spring-time is here! the summer is here! and what is
this in it and from it?It is Lilac Time. It’s flitting time. Flitting is such a Spring word, isn’t it?
Whitman walks us from February into March. Describes what the Maple and willow trees make, and shares that small image you might miss – the robin building his mate’s nest.
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Frost. I don’t know why I even bothered submitting anything, given how he writes. I mean he’s still using rhyme.
Yeah, so?
Rhyme is bullshit. Rhyme says that everything works out in the end. All harmony and order. When I see rhyme in a poem, I know I’m being lied to. Go ahead, laugh! It’s true–rhyme’s a completely bankrupt device. It’s just wishful thinking. Nostalgia.
Jeff PurcellMy suspicions were correct. Rhyme is considered “un-literary”. Still, reading Frost for his rhymes is a joy.
Wolff, Tobias. Old School. United States, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2004. pp44
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The west was getting out of gold,
The breath of air had died of cold,
When shoeing home across the white,
I thought I saw a bird alight.
In summer when I passed the place
I had to stop and lift my face;
A bird with an angelic gift
Was singing in it sweet and swift.
No bird was singing in it now.
A single leaf was on a bough,
And that was all there was to see
In going twice around the tree.
From my advantage on a hill
I judged that such a crystal chill
Was only adding frost to snow
As gilt to gold that wouldn't show.
A brush had left a crooked stroke
Of what was either cloud or smoke
From north to south across the blue;
A piercing little star was through.It may be “un-literary” to admit, but part of the joy of reading Robert Frost’s poems are that they rhyme. Copying them out gives you the feeling of transcribing song lyrics into your 6th grade Mead Composition notebook.
My favorite bit from this poem is when Frost briefly takes us back to summer in the second stanza, before for dropping us off in winter again three lines later. Brilliant how he fits that glimpse of summer in to give us the context of the present emptiness of that place.
Merry Christmas dear readers!
Frost, Robert. New Hampshire. United States, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2019. pg100
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The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.Not the Christmas Eve Robert Frost poem you were expecting… 🙂
Merry Christmas Eve!
Frost, Robert. New Hampshire. United States, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2019. pg82
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Glory be to God for dappled things - For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings; Landscape plotted and pieced -- fold, fallow, and plough; And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.
Keeping with the thankfulness theme. This time from Gerard Manley Hopkins.
The two lines that hang in my mind are:
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings
and
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
The first is a picture of fall changing into winter. Chestnuts and finches wings, the colors of both depict fall. While the firecoal indicates that the temperature is dropping.
The second is, and I don’t think it’s what Hopkins intended, but I picture a tackle box and fishing gear sitting on the floor of a boat.
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. Poems and Prose (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets). United Kingdom, Everyman, 1995. pp15
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Thanks in old age - thanks ere I go, For health, the midday sun, the impalpable air - for life, mere life, For precious ever-lingering memories, (of you my mother dear - you, father - you, brothers, sisters, friends,) For all my days - not those of peace alone - the days of war the same, For gentle words, caresses, gifts from foreign lands, For shelter, wine and meat - for sweet appreciation, (You distant, dim unknown - or young or old - countless, unspecified, readers belov'd, We never met, and ne'er shall meet - and yet our souls embrace, long, close and long;) For beings, groups, love, deeds, words, books - for colors, forms, For all the brave strong men - devoted, hardy men - who've forward sprung in freedom's help, all years, all lands, For braver, stronger, more devoted men - (a special laurel ere I go, to life's war's chosen ones, The cannoneers of song and thought - the great artillerists - the foremost leaders, captains of the soul 🙂 As soldier from an ended war return'd - As traveler out of myriads, to the long procession retrospective, Thanks - joyful thanks! - a soldier's, traveler's thanks.
Mr. Whitman covers it all. He’s even thankful for his unknown readers – love that.
The title of the poem is Thanks in Old Age, but these are things we could all be thankful for at any age.
Happy Thanksgiving gentle readers. I’m thankful for you.
Whitman, Walt. The Complete Poems. United Kingdom, Penguin Books Limited, 2004.
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From the second stanza of To Autumn
Steady thy laden head across a brook; Or by a cider-press, with patient look, Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. Keats, John. The Poetry of John Keats. London: Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2018.
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the endlessly varying hues of America’s Autumn…
We rhapsodize about “New England Autumns,” and for good reason; but, really, Autumn anywhere in the deciduous forests of North America, especially in the East—from upper Canada to the deep South—is magnificent, and far outshines anything the Old World has to offer. In those years in which I have found myself in some corner of Europe during the Fall, I have never been able to suppress a certain feeling of disappointment at the limited palette nature employs there for what is surely my favorite of the seasons. This isn’t to say European Autumn is not lovely enough, with its muted light and drifting mists and pale flavescence. But the chromatic spectrum is narrow. For the most part, the trees pass from a darker to a more limpid green, and then to light gold, and then to ochre and brown, before their branches are stripped bare. There are occasional bright flashes of red and maroon amid the tawny pallor, though mostly from imported species of flora. But, to an eye accustomed to the endlessly varying hues of America’s Autumn, it can all seem a little insipid.
– David Bentley HartAlways on the hunt for enlightened passages on Autumn. Of course David Bentley Hart delivers.
I’ve never considered the differences between a European Autumn and an American one. One would think Autumn is the same everywhere.
Obviously it isn’t. The biodiversity in different regions of the world make it so. But like a therapist telling you you’re not sleeping enough, it takes an attentive, neutral observer, to make you aware.
Hart, David Bentley. “The Poetry of Autumn.” David Bentley Hart on Substack, October 20, 2023, https://davidbentleyhart.substack.com/p/the-poetry-of-autumn.
Floodlights and Goalposts 