"Daybreak" by Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo

Daybreak

Have you seen the dawn go poaching

in night’s orchard?

See, she is coming back

down eastern pathways

overgrown with lily-blooms.

From head to foot she is splashed with milk

like those children the heifers suckled long ago.

She holds a torch in hands

stained black and blue like the lips of a girl

munching mulberries.

Escaping one by one there fly before her

the birds she has taken in her traps.

Translated from the French by John Reed and Clive Wake.

 

Source of the text - Voices from Twentieth Century Africa: Griots and Towncriers, selected with an introduction by Chinweizu.  London: Faber and Faber, 1988, page 349.

TJB: Like the first morning, dawn is elegantly, extravagantly personified here as a poacher, creeping into the garden of night; but hunting what?

  

  

 

 

"Concord Hymn" by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Concord Hymn 

       Sung at the Completion of the Battle Monument, 

       July 4, 1837

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,

    Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,

Here once the embattled farmers stood

    And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;

    Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;

And Time the ruined bridge has swept

    Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,

    We set to-day a votive stone;

That memory may their deed redeem,

    When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare

    To die, and leave their children free,

Bid Time and Nature gently spare

    The shaft we raise to them and thee.

Source of the text - Poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by J. Donald Adams.  New York: Thomas J. Crowell Company, 1965, page 69.

TJB: This ribbon-cutting poem, superego-driven & with iambics of stone, coins a now-famous phrase & spends its energy hoping the monument will age well.

 

 

 

 

 

"Sad Steps" by Philip Larkin

Sad Steps

Groping back to bed after a piss

I part thick curtains, and am startled by   

The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.

Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie   

Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.   

There’s something laughable about this,

The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow   

Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart   

(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)

High and preposterous and separate—   

Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!

O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,

One shivers slightly, looking up there.

The hardness and the brightness and the plain   

Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare

Is a reminder of the strength and pain   

Of being young; that it can’t come again,   

But is for others undiminished somewhere.

Source of the text - Philip Larkin, High Windows.  New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974, page 32.

TJB: There’s a bathroom on the right. Roughly terza rima, Miltonic: one Philip riffs on another, here seeing a cold distant moon & reminded of youth.

 

 

 

 

 

"On Being Brought from Africa to America" by Phillis Wheatley

ON BEING BROUGHT FROM AFRICA TO

AMERICA.

   ’T was mercy brought me from my Pagan land,

Taught my benighted soul to understand

That there’s a God—that there’s a Saviour too:

Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

Some view our sable race with scornful eye—

‘Their color is a diabolic dye.’

Remember, Christians, Negros black as Cain

May be refined, and join the angelic train.

Source of the text - Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley, a Native African and a Slave.  Boston: Geo. W. Light, 1834, page 42.

TJB: Over understated. In 4 simple iambic couplets, with Latinate poise, the poet equally expresses her Salvation & enslavement, by the same hands.

 

 

 

 

"Luke Havergal" by E. A. Robinson

Luke Havergal

Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal,

There where the vines cling crimson on the wall,

And in the twilight wait for what will come.

The leaves will whisper there of her, and some,

Like flying words, will strike you as they fall;

But go, and if you listen she will call.

Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal—

Luke Havergal.

No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies

To rift the fiery night that’s in your eyes;

But there, where western glooms are gathering,

The dark will end the dark, if anything:

God slays Himself with every leaf that flies,

And hell is more than half of paradise.

No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies—

In eastern skies.

Out of a grave I come to tell you this,

Out of a grave I come to quench the kiss

That flames upon your forehead with a glow

That blinds you to the way that you must go.

Yes, there is yet one way to where she is,

Bitter, but one that faith may never miss.

Out of a grave I come to tell you this—

To tell you this.

There is the western gate, Luke Havergal,

There are the crimson leaves upon the wall.

Go, for the winds are tearing them away,—

Nor think to riddle the dead words they say,

Nor any more to feel them as they fall;

But go, and if you trust her she will call.

There is the western gate, Luke Havergal—

Luke Havergal.

Source of the text - The Poetry of E. A. Robinson, Edited by Robert Mezey.  New York: The Modern Library, 1999, pages 3-4.

TJB: Canon for self-slaughter? Tight-knit, concatenated, hypotactic, & iambic, a voice encourages Luke to choose death perhaps to find his beloved.

 

 

 

 

 

Poem 31 from "Astrophil and Stella" by Sir Philip Sidney

31

With how sad steps, ô Moone, thou climb’st the skies,
   How silently, and with how wanne a face,
   What, may it be that even in heav’nly place
That busie archer his sharpe arrowes tries?
Sure, if that long with Love acquainted eyes
   Can judge of Love, thou feel’st a Lover’s case;
   I reade it in thy lookes, thy languisht grace,
To me that feele the like, thy state descries.
   Then ev’n of fellowship, ô Moone, tell me
Is constant Love deem’d there but want of wit?
Are Beauties there as proud as here they be?
Do they above love to be lov’d, and yet
   Those Lovers scorne whom that Love doth possesse?
   Do they call Vertue there ungratefulnesse?

Source of the text - The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, Edited by William A. Ringler, Jr.  Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962, page 180.

TJB: Hanging out the passenger side, the poet moans a sonnet with 5 questions of the moon, with 8 uses of "love," a classic octave & a manic sestet.
 
 
 
 

"The Oven Bird" by Robert Frost

THE OVEN BIRD

There is a singer everyone has heard,

Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,

Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.

He says that leaves are old and that for flowers

Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.

He says the early petal-fall is past

When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers

On sunny days a moment overcast;

And comes that other fall we name the fall.

He says the highway dust is over all.

The bird would cease and be as other birds

But that he knows in singing not to sing.

The question that he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.

Source of the text - Robert Frost, Mountain Interval.  New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1916, page 35.

TJB: Tea-cher, tea-cher. This sonnet, strongly misreading the birdsong as ode & elegy, has an offbeat rhyme scheme with couplets and tercets, & a lovely volta.

 

 

 

 

"The Unquiet Grave," anonymous ballad

 

THE UNQUIET GRAVE

A

1  ‘THE wind doth blow today, my love
       And a few small drops of rain;
    I never had but one true-love,
       In cold grave she was lain.

2  ‘I’ll do as much for my true-love
       As any young man may;
    I’ll sit and mourn all at her grave
       For a twelvemonth and a day.’

3  The twelvemonth and a day being up,
       The dead began to speak:
    ‘Oh, who sits weeping on my grave,
       And will not let me sleep?’

4  ‘’Tis I, my love, sits on your grave,
       And will not let you sleep;
    For I crave one kiss of your clay-cold lips,
       And that is all I seek.’

5  ‘You crave one kiss of my clad-cold lips;
       But my breath smells earthy strong;
    If you have one kiss of my clay-cold lips,
       Your time will not be long.

6  ‘’Tis down in yonder garden green,
       Love, where we used to walk,
    The finest flower that ere was seen
       Is withered to a stalk.

7  ‘The stalk is withered dry, my love,
       So will our hearts decay;
    So make yourself content, my love,
       Till God calls you away.’

Source of the text - The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, edited by Francis James Child, Volume II, Part I.  Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1886, page 236.

TJB: Tear-animated. Just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl, we hear pure ballad tropes: pining for dead love, voices from beyond, a decaying rose.

 

 

 

 

 

"Casabianca" by Elizabeth Bishop

Casabianca

Love’s the boy stood on the burning deck

trying to recite “The boy stood on

the burning deck.”  Love’s the son

stood stammering elocution

while the poor ship in flames went down.

Love’s the obstinate boy, the ship,

even the swimming sailors, who

would like a schoolroom platform, too,

or an excuse to stay

on deck.  And love’s the burning boy.

Source of the text - Elizabeth Bishop, Poems: North & South—A Cold Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1955, page 6.

TJB: Corinthians column. Honoring and/or lampooning a shipwreck of a poem stuffed with religious metaphor, the poet here ramrods love metaphors.

 

 

 

 

"A Carafe, that is a Blind Glass." by Gertrude Stein

A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS.

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing

strange  a single  hurt  color and an arrangement in a

system  to  pointing.  All  this  and  not  ordinary, not

unordered   in   not   resembling.   The  difference  is
spreading.

Source of the text - Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons.  New York: Claire Marie, 1914, page 9.

TJB: Spectacular-mundane. Inspired by still-life, this semi-cubist sketch teases at and denies a similarity between form and content. Or so it seems.