"Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom" by Louise Bogan

MEN LOVED WHOLLY BEYOND WISDOM


Men loved wholly beyond wisdom
Have the staff without the banner.
Like a fire in a dry thicket
Rising within women's eyes
Is the love men must return.
Heart, so subtle now, and trembling,
What a marvel to be wise,
To love never in this manner!
To be quiet in the fern
Like a thing gone dead and still,
Listening to the prisoned cricket
Shake its terrible, dissembling
Music in the granite hill.


Source of the text - Louise Bogan, The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968.  New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968, p. 16.

TJB: Amid 3 gorgeous-precise similes, this gnomos-lyric surprises with the equivocal force of “must,” “now,” “never,” “dissembling,” & “granite.”