Poem 72, by Lady Kii, from the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu

Poem 72, by Lady Kii, from the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu (One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each)

Poem 72, in calligraphy in the hand of Abbot Genchin circa 1660 CE

Poem 72, in modern Japanese characters

Poem 72 transliteration into Roman alphabet

Oto ni kiku

takashi no hama no

ada-nami wa

kakeji ya sode no

nure mo koso sure



Poem 72, translated by Peter McMillan

I keep well away

from the well-known fickle waves

that pound on Takashi shore,

for I know I’d be sorry

if my sleeves got wet.

Source of the text (all versions listed above) - One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each: A Translation of the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, translated and edited by Peter McMillan.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2008, pages 74, 125, 144, 169.

TJB: Staying dry. Like the nymph to the shepherd, like an anti-Dover Beach, the poet here warily smacks down an overeager poet’s wave metaphor.

 

 

 

"Remembrance" by Emily Brontë

REMEMBRANCE

COLD in the earth—and the deep snow piled above thee,

    Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave!

Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee,

    Severed at last by Time’s all-severing wave?

Now, when alone, do my thoughts no longer hover

    Over the mountains, on that northern shore,

Resting their wings where heath and fern-leaves cover

    Thy noble heart forever, ever more?

Cold in the earth—and fifteen wild Decembers

    From those brown hills, have melted into spring:

Faithful, indeed, is the spirit that remembers

    After such years of change and suffering!

Sweet Love of youth, forgive, if I forget thee,

    While the world’s tide is bearing me along;

Other desires and other hopes beset me,

    Hopes which obscure, but cannot do thee wrong!

No later light has lightened up my heaven,

    No second morn has ever shone for me;

All my life’s bliss from thy dear life was given,

    All my life’s bliss is in the grave with thee.

But, when the days of golden dreams had perished,

    And even Despair was powerless to destroy,

Then did I learn how existence could be cherished,

    Strengthened, and fed, without the aid of joy.

Then did I check the tears of useless passion—

    Weaned my young soul from yearning after thine;

Sternly denied its burning wish to hasten

    Down to that tomb already more than mine.

And, even yet, I dare not let it languish,

    Dare not indulge in memory’s rapturous pain;

Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,

    How could I seek the empty world again?

Source of the text – The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë, Edited by Clement Shorter.  New York: George H. Doran Company, 1924, pages 7-8.

TJB: This growl-lyric written to an irreplaceable long-dead beloved in rough Yorky trochaics & Gothic-obvious rhyme sings: Live joylessly & forget.

  

  

  

  

"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.