Whereas: Poems by Stephen Dunn

"What's a poet anyway but someone who gives/ the unnamed a name?"

Many years ago I came across Stephen Dunn's poetry. I thought I knew where but it turned out to be a false memory. It happens to me more and more often now, misremembering something vividly recalled, learning it didn't happen that way at all. I requested Dunn's new book of poems Whereas through Edelweiss because I recalled his name and wanted to read his latest poems.

Dunn begins with a poem on his seventy-fifth birthday considering "the movement from ignorance to astonishment" and the "strangeness, the immensity" of life. He ends with A Short History of Long Ago, recalling the simple things of childhood that brought contentment followed by adulthood's choices and desires, concluding, "A bad memory is the key to happiness./I apologize for everything I haven't done."

These poems written from the wisdom of maturity are thoughtful without being abstruse, universal by being personal. Duplicity and truth, the role of the storyteller, nature vs artifice, faith, and superstition, marriage and parenthood, the mystery of life--his themes are universal.

I read the poems several times, with certain lines resonating with me.

The Melancholy of the Nude considers an artist's model who lives in "a world where she was both woman and thing."

 In Be Careful you are warned not to look into the eyes of an animal, no matter how beautiful, for staring means aggression, and "Doesn't blood usually follow when language fails?"

In Even the Awful he writes, "I would prefer an occasional bout of joy, which I could recover from in a day or so, and maybe even speak about, whereas ecstasy (that one time) made me silent." A deceased friend "just lay there, immobile, like a Calder without a breath of air to move it. In fact, he had become an 'it', and those of us who knew him noted how poorly itness suited him."

In Creatures we see him at the seashore watching a pelican following a dolphin, feeding on a school of fish and concludes that "to step out/of our houses any morning is to risk/being variously selected, and that nothing/like kindness of beauty of justice/will ever change the truth of some lives."

I keep returning to these poems. Each reading I discover something I had missed.

Dunn won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
http://www.pulitzer.org/article/stephen-dunn-influences

I received a free ebook from the publisher through Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Incisively capturing the oddities of our logic and the whimsies of our reason, the poems in Whereas show there is always another side to a story. With graceful rhythm and equal parts humor and seriousness, Stephen Dunn considers the superstition and sophistry embedded in everyday life: household objects that seem to turn against us, the search for meaning in the barrage of daily news, the surprising confessions between neighbors across a row of hedges. Finding beauty in the ordinary, this collection affirms the absurdity of making affirmations, allowing room for more rethinking, reflection, revision, prayer, and magic in the world.

Whereas
Stephen Dunn
W. W. Norton & Company
Publication February 21, 2017
ISBN-13: 978-0393254679
ISBN-10: 0393254674

The Poet, The World, and Everything: Songs of Myself by Walt Whitman

In 1969 I picked up a paperback copy of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. I still have the book, underlined and worn. For me, Song of Myself has always been one of Whitman's trickier poems to tackle and I have only read it in bits and pieces. I was excited to see this new volume of Song of Myself with commentary. It gave me an opportunity to read the poem in its entirety, with aids to help me sort it out.

In 2014 the University of Iowa offered an open, international online course, Every Atom: Walk Whitman's "Song of Myself." This book arose from that project. This is the first section-by-section reading of the poem.

The introduction, Reading Song of Myself, notes that the poem appeared in six editions from 1855 to 1881, and its meaning changed as did America, viewed as nostalgia, or as arising from the Civil War and later class and racial stress, or even as mystical. It's appearance as the main poem of Leaves of Grass never changed.

Folsom reminds us of the huge changes during Whitman's writing of the poem: The Civil War and Reconstruction; scientific advances that toppled humanity's concept of itself in relation to time and the universe; the breakdown of religious beliefs constraining scientific beliefs; the struggle for freedom for African Americans.

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,And what I assume you shall assume,For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

In Song of Myself, Whitman was offering a paradigm for understanding the interconnectedness of all things, imagining an ideal Democratic society and setting forth its tenets. What he proposes is radical. We are called to rise above all conventional and group thinking to perceive the material reality. All perceived divisions are false. Atoms flow from one thing into another which makes all interrelated and one. The grass arises from the dead in a perfect circle of life.

A child said What is the grass?...And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves....What do you think has become of the young and old men?And what do you think has become of the women and children?They are alive and well somewhere,The smallest sprout shows there is really no death...

The poet embraces all humanity, identifying himself with every sort of person and every sort of human experience. Work, war, sex; slave and master, male and female; the innocent and the guilty, the quick and the dead; there is nothing alien. Boundaries, hierarchies, divisions are artificial. He shares all with everyone, and speaks for everyone.

I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.

I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also. 

Whitman ends the poem with the lines "I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable/I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world." Words can scare communicate what the poet wants us to understand. We may need to look for his body "under your boot-soles" but his "barbaric yawp" has endured, to "make of it what you will." Thankfully, this commentary has aided me and opened up a new understanding of America's greatest poem.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Song of Myself: With a Complete Commentary
Iowa Whitman Series
Walt Whitman with Commentary by Ed Folsom and Christopher Merrill
University of Iowa Press
Publication October 15, 2016
$24.95
paper back ISBN 978-1-60938-465-4
ebook 978-1-60938-466-1

The Friendship of Auguste Rodin and Rainer Maria Rilke

I was excited to receive an ARC of You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin by Rachel Corbett in the mail. I was clamouring to read it, entering give-a-ways and requesting it on Edelweiss, then it arrived unanounced in the mail. Thank you, W. W. Norton!

I was in my twenties and living in Philadelphia when browsing in a Center City bookstore I happened upon Letters to a Young Poet. Later I bought the Duino Elegies-which I read on vacation camping at Acadia National Park-and collected poems in several translations.

The Burghers of Calais by Rodin

I first encountered Rodin in a high school art history class, learning about The Burghers of Calais. Later we visited the marvelous Rodin Museum in Philadelphia.

Corbett's book follows the lives of both poet and artist, concentrating on their friendship and how Rodin influenced Rilke's view of the artistic life and appreciation of art, in context of their contemporary society and artist communities.

As a young man Rilke traveled to visit his idols but it was Rodin who took him into his home and confidence.

The poet served as Rodin's personal secretary, living with him at Meudon. In a writing slump, Rodin directed Rilke to the zoo to observe the animals, altering the trajectory of his work culminating in his famous poem The Panther.

Rilke took to heart Rodin's admonition that the artist must dedicate their life to their art; seeking solitude Rilke abandoned his wife and child to fend for themselves.

Rilke wrote a monograph on Rodin in which he wrote, "and he labors incessantly. His life is like a single workday" in which "therein lay a kind of renunciation of life." Rilke stressed Rodin as "solitary": "Rodin was solitary before his fame"; he lived "in the country solitude of his dwelling"; he learned his craft "alone within itself" until "Finally, after years of solitary labor, he attempted to come out with one of his works."  That work was rejected and he "locked himself away again for thirteen years."

Rilke's perception of the artist influenced his own artistic philosophy, evident in the letters he wrote to a young student, Franz Xaver Kappus, who published them in 1929 as Letters To A Young Poet. In the letters Rilke advises the aspiring poet that no outsider can affirm one's own artistic worth, that it must come from within. He tells Kappus to "look to Nature," the "little things that hardly anyone sees." Rilke praises solitude, "it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it."

Neither man was a paragon. Rodin lived with a commonlaw wife who had to tolerate his series of mistresses, including his art student Camille Claudel. He was sensitive and irascible and after nine months he threw Rilke out over a perceived breech of trust: in Rodin's absence Rilke had written a letter to a friend he'd introduced to Rodin, and Rodin had not approved his writing the letter.

The world in the early 20th c. was rapidly changing. Rodin's art became repetitive and was considered too representational. Rilke's work was in keeping with the new movements of Existentialism, Abstract Art, and Depth Psychology. Rilke's poetry continued to show growth during his brief 51 years, but Rodin, over twenty years older, in old age realized how serialized his work had become and felt the irony that only as he neared the end of his life did he realize the pupose of his work.

Toward the end of Rodin's life Rilke realized Rodin had failed to live up to his own advice, which Rilke had taken to heart: work, only work.

"You must change your life" is the last line in Rilke's poem Archaic Torso of Apollo which I first read translated by Stephen Mitchell. Rilke responds to a sculpture of the god Apollo, sans head, arms, and legs, but which still holds a transformative power so that "you must change your life" upon encountering it.

Read about a newly published translation of Rilke by Ruth Spiers here
Read about Rilke's influence on me here

I received an ARC from W. W. Norton in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

You Must Change Your Life
Rachel Corbett
W. W. Norton & Company
Publication Sept. 2016
$26.95 hard cover
ISBN: 978-0-393-24505-9

Poetry Month & A Poem

April is National Poetry Month. I have been receiving a poem a day with Garrison Keillor's A Writer's Almanac for years, plus this year I am receiving the Knopf Poem a Day. I have written about poetry over the years:

101 Famous Poems
http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2013/09/one-hundred-and-one-famous-poems.html
Emily Dickinson
http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2015/02/love-poems-by-emily-dickinson.html
Stephen Crane
http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2014/03/roots-of-understanding-stephen-cranes.html
Robert Hillyer
http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2015/04/roots-of-understanding-poetry-of-robert.html
Edgar Allen Poe
http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2014/09/my-grandfathers-edgar-allen-poe.html
Rainer Maria Rilke
http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-rilke-of-ruth-speirs-new-poems.html
http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2014/04/roots-of-understanding-letters-to-young.html
Thomas Hardy
http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2016/01/selected-poems-by-thomas-hardy.html
Anne Sexton
http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2016/04/the-poetry-of-anne-sexton.html
Ezra Pound
http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-early-poems-of-ezra-pound.html

And in 2015 the entirety of A Year With the Fairies by Anna O. Scott!

Today I want to share a poem I wrote, well, many years ago. It is based on one of my first memories.

*****

"In the beginning was the word"

Nancy A. Bekofske

Recalled:

two figures seated at a kitchen table

lost in the glare of unfiltered sunlight.

Shadow players, male and female,

each with lighted cigarettes streaming blue smoke.

White light, white walls, and shadows moving

and talk about grown-up things while

                                                        I played, pushing

                                     some wheeled toy across the floor

                                             into my parent's dark bedroom,

                  into the nursery with its barred bed now forgotten,

                                          down the narrow uncarpeted hallway,

           into the slatted venetian-blind light of the living room 

                                 the radio standing on the floor playing

                            "Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White"

          or was it "The Poor People of Paris," I've forgotten,

                                                   back into the kitchen

where they sat, talking still, pushing papers about,

some business, I suppose, when I heard a name,

a word never before spoken for all I knew,

and I longed to make its magnetic beauty mine:

                                        I stopped my play and mouthed that word

                                                    like a sacred prayer recited in private,

                                                             savoring it on the tongue, my ears

                                                                          ringing with pure response,

                              that one word opening my mind to majestic possibilities.

"What did you say, hon?" Bending down, indulgent,

the man asked, and my mother, embarrassed

urged me to repeat myself, so they could understand.

                                                       I knew they would never understand

                                       the magic of that moment, even at, say, three;

                               I could not utter that word, it would have been

                        a misuse, like swearing with the Deity's name.

They returned to their conversation, dismissing me,

a child, as having done a child-like thing

of great amusement to the wisdom of age.

                                                           Only I knew the worth of the word,

                                              a sound so potent it could stop adult speech

                                                                        and demand their attention

                                                                                      to listen to a child

                                                                                 who had just learned

                                                                   the power of a beautiful word.

The Poetry of Anne Sexton

The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton is now available in ebook from Open Road Integrated Media. The book includes the complete poems and posthumously published work. It is a substantial volume of work. Sexton plumbed her own life as a woman, mother, daughter, wife and lover, addressed her struggle with depression, institutionalization, and suicide attempts.

The Publisher's Note explains how the poems were adapted to the ebook form. And How It Was: Maxine Kumin on Anne Sexton,  a revealing essay about Kumin's professional and personal relationship with Sexton.  Kumin writes that an elderly priest told Sexton that "God is your typewriter"; those words kept Sexton going for another year as she wrote her last book of poetry, The Awful Rowing Toward God.

I found The Awful Rowing Toward God by Anne Sexton shortly after it's publication in paperback. I did not have much money in those days, and buying a book was a thoughtful decision. I did not know Sexton. I did not know about 'confessional' poetry or about Sexton's demons and suicide. The title caught my attention and I brought it home.

Sexton was a revelation. Her imagery was so novel and individualistic, unlike anything I had ever read before. Her voice was clear and honest. I fell in love with these poems. She impacted my own poetry more than I care to admit, but I was young and trying new things.

The volume begins with Rowing with its imagery of God as an island the poet endeavors to reach, an imperfect island but where

"there will be a door
and I will open it
and I will get rid of the rat inside of me
the gnawing pestilential rat.
God will take it with his two hands/and embrace it."

She tells us she is on a quest.

In the poem Courage she writes about what courage means in life, "it is in the small things we see it./The child's first step,/as awesome as an earthquake," to the courage of enduring despair, and the courage of old age when "at the last moment/when death opens the back door/you'll put on your carpet slippers and stride out."

At times the poems reflected me back to other poets. For instance, in The Poet of Ignorance Sexton writes,

"I try to forget it, go about my business,
cook the broccoli, open and shut books,
brush my teeth and tie my shoes."

And I recalled Emily Dickinson's poem about performing the mundane as a way of carrying on:

"I tie my hat--I crease my shawl--
Life's little duties do--precisely--
...
Therefore--we do life's labor--
Though Life's Reward--be done--
With scrupulous exactness--
To hold our senses on--"

Sexton refers to an animal, a crab clutching fast to her heart; Dickinson to a Bomb held to her bosom.

The last poems were my favorites.

Not So. Not So.,  beginning "I cannot walk an inch/without trying to walk to God" and ending "You have a thousand prayers/but God has one."

In The Rowing Endeth, the poet has arrived "at the dock of the island called God" and plays a game of poker with the deity. God wins and laughs, "the laughter rolling like a hoop out of His mouth/and into mine,/and such laughter that He doubles right over me/laughing a Rejoice-Chorus at our two triumphs." And as the whole universe laughs, she ends, "Dearest dealer/I with my royal straight flush/love you for your wild card/that untamable, eternal, gut-driven ha-ha/and lucky love."

The Christian faith is a comedy: God always wins for out of death comes the joy of resurrection. Death brought Sexton death respite from her demons. I  pray that she found peace.

I received a free ebook through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

"[Her poems] will be understood in time--not as 'women's poetry' or 'confessional poetry'--but as myths that expand the human consciousness." Erica Jong

The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton

Open Road Integrated Media

Publication Date: April 5, 2016

ISBN: 9781504034364

$9.99 ebook

Roots of Understanding: The Poetry of Robert Hillyer

"Quite simply, for a long long time now, You've made me happy, sad, and tremendously alert with your poems. For all this, I want to thank you." Letter written by Ray Bradbury to Robert Hillyer on September 10, 1959

As I wondered how to address Poetry Month I perused the poetry books on my bookshelf. When I saw the first book of poetry I ever purchased for myself I knew what to write about.

As a girl I would bring home books of poetry from the school library, reading everything from Walt Whitman to Catullus over the years. The Collected Poems by Robert Hillyer was one of my early favorites. My copy was purchased on December 31, 1968 for $4.75 with Christmas money. I read those poems over and over. I didn't know anything about Hillyer. I realized I never heard anything about him in my classes.

I Goggled and found Robert Stillman Hillyer won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1934. He was part of the Harvard Aesthetes, a group that included Malcolm Cowley, E. E. Cummings, John Dos Passos, S, Foster Damon, and John Brooks Wheelwright. He was an ambulance driver in the war, and taught in many universities.

The poems were very nostalgic, which appealed to me. I've written before about how moving when I was ten years old affected me, that I was full of longing and nostalgia for the 'old days' of my first home. I found especially poignant the poem Julia's Room, which was one of Hillyer's poems set to music.

He went up the dark stairs and knocked at Julia's door;
It opened, and a blade of light cut the dim hall,
But the girl was a stranger and when he spoke to her
She could not--or would not--understand at all.
She looked at him a moment--horrified, he thought--
Then slammed to door shut.

Bewildered, he guessed that while he was away
Julia must have invited a friend he had never known;
Sometimes when she asked an old friend to stay
She moved to the attic room and gave her own away.
So he climbed the second flight, but that floor was dark
As rain-drenched bark.

"Julia!" he called but no light flashed on.
"Julia!" he called down the stairwell gloom...
"Whoever you are, for God's sake be gone!"
Then he remembered it was fifty years ago
And he melted like snow.

Oh, I loved nostalgia! Like this poem remembering a childhood scene of skipping pebbles with a friend:

Of lives that intersect, then go their way
At last to lose themselves alone against
The shores of silence, our brief hours of play
Seem now the symbol; the bright memory fenced
With deep, oblivious forest, and condensed
Into one flash, one fragmentary scene
That skips the surface of the years between.
from A Memory

Another poem I especially liked was The Victim.

The hummingbird that darts and hovers
Made one fatal dart--alas!--
Against a counterfeit of flowers
Reflected in the window glass.
When four-o'clocks had sunk in shadow,
The window caught an extra glint
Of color, like the sudden rainbow
Arching the purple firmament.
Transcendent are the traceries
Illusion weaves to set a snare;
The quick competitor of bees,
Trusting his universe of air
Fr flight and fancy, dazzled so
In quest of sweetness, was waylaid
By something hard that had a glow
Brighter than the garden made.
Illusion shatters; the ideal
Is much more ruthless than the real.
The visionary hummingbird
Hit nothingness, and hit it hard.

This poem was a little morality tale, like The Spider and The Fly in my One Hundred and One Famous Poems, which I wrote about here.

Throughout the volume I underlined lines that caught my heart or mind.

"Is there nobody now 
Who can speak with my speech
But the wind in th ruin,
The waves on the beach? 
from Manorbrier

In Thermopylae he wrote, "Men lied to them and so they went to die. Some fell, knowing that they were deceived, And some escaped, and bitterly bereaved, Beheld the truth they loved shrink to a lie."

This was deep stuff!

"For life deals thus with Man, to die alone deceived or with the mass, Or disillusioned to complete his span. Thermopylae or Golgotha, all one, The young dead legions in the narrow pass, he stark black cross against the setting sun."

I didn't know what Thermopylae was, or hardly even Golgotha although the cross reference may have helped me on that. It gave me something to think about.

His long poem The Gates of the Compass II. The Nightmare was quite horrible and Gothic to me. It starts,

We come on leaden feet, we come with leaden
Tread along the haunted corridors
Through darkness void as in a dying brain
Where one by one the thoughts have flickered out.

We are told the unknown dead loved life, and not to dismiss his death, for "In him you weep the doom that is your own."

Traditional verse fell out of favor. Hillyer seems to be a forgotten poet. I had not picked up this volume in years. But the poems spoke to my girl's mind and, like Ray Bradbury, I want to thank him.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/robert-hillyer
http://library.syr.edu/digital/guides/h/hillyer_r.htm

Love Poems by Emily Dickinson

Further Poems of Emily Dickinson Withheld from Publication by Her Sister Lavina, Edited by Her Niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson, was published by Little, Brown, and Company in 1929. Many years ago I came into possession of a copy of this book.

A good history of the publication of Dickinson's poems can be found at https://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/book/export/html/108 where Martha Dickinson Bianchi's role in bringing Emily's poetry to publication is mentioned:

When Mabel Loomis Todd ceased her work on Dickinson’s poems, a period of quiet ensued in the publication story. Lavinia Dickinson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Susan Dickinson all died, and Martha Dickinson Bianchi began to assume a larger role in shaping her aunt's legacy. Having inherited Dickinson’s manuscripts from both Lavinia and Susan, Martha edited at least six volumes of Dickinson’s poetry. With a lighter editorial hand than her predecessors, Bianchi did not title the poems and kept their rhyme schemes intact. Incensed by publications about her aunt that she judged inaccurate, Bianchi wrote several memoirs to assert her unique perspective as “the one person now living who saw [Emily Dickinson] face to face” (Bianchi, p. xxii).

Most of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems appear in this book. Such as,

To fill a gap--
Insert the thing that caused it.
Block it up
With other and 't will yawn
The more;
You cannot solder an abyss
With Air.

Amherst by William Nicholson suggests that Emily heard her brother Austin's lovemaking with his mistress in her family's home parlor. Some have written that Emily was in love with Austin's wife--her "Sister Sue"-- or that she loved Austin's lover Mable Loomis Todd. There is supposition that Emily loved Thomas Wentworth Higginson to whom she shared her poems, or her father's friend Judge Otis Phillips Lord, or family friend Samuel Bowles, or any number of people.

Read more at
https://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/love_life
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2008/10/emily_dickinsons_secret_lover.html
http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/master-narrative-who-did-emily-dickinson-write-her-love-letters-to
http://www.sappho.com/letters/e_dickinsn.html
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/13/emily-dickinson-lyndall-gordon

The question of Emily's love interest remains conjecture. Emily tells of her great love in these poems from the book. It is obvious why they were withheld from publication by her sister Lavinia. They are so personal, telling a story unbefitting to the Victorian image of womankind.

+++++

Why do I love thee, Sir?
Because--
Require the grass
To answer wherefore, when
He pass,
She cannot keep her place.

The lightning never asked
An eye
Wherefore she shut when
he was by--
Because he knows
She cannot speak,
And reasons not contained
Of talk
There be--preferred by daintier folk.

+++++

Renunciation is a piercing virtue,
The letting go
A presence for an expectation--
Not now.

So well that I can live without--
I love Thee; then how well
Is that?
As well as Jesus?
Prove it me
That He loved men
As I love Thee.

+++++

If he were living--dare I ask?
And how if her were dead?
And so around the words I went
Of meeting them afraid.

I hinted changes, lapse of time,
The surfaces of years
I touched with caution, lest they slit
And show me to my fears.

Reverted to adjoining lives
Adroitly turning out
Wherever I suspected graces--
'T'was prudenter, I though.

And He--I rushed with sudden force
In face of the suspense--
"Was buried"--Buried!"
"He!"
My life just holds the trench.

+++++

After great pain a formal feeling comes--
The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs;
The stiff Heart questions--was it He that bore?
And yesterday--or centuries before?

The feet mechanical go round
A wooden way
Of ground or air or Ought,
Regardless grown,
A quartz contentment like a stone.

This is the hour of lead
Remembered if outlived
As freezing persons recollect
The snow--
First chill, then stupor, then
The letting go.

+++++

There is a pain so utter
It swallows Being up
Then covers the abyss with trance
So memory can step
Around, across, upon it,
As One within a swoon
Goes steady, when an open eye
Would drop him bone by bone.

+++++

I tie my hat, I crease my shawl,
Life's little duties do precisely
As the very least
Were infinite to me.

I put new blossoms in the glass,
And throw the old away,
I push a petal from my gown
That anchored there--I weigh

The time 't will be till six o'clock,
I have so much to do--
And get [sic; should be yet] existence some way back,
Stopped, struck, my ticking through.

We cannot put ourselves away
As a completed man
Or woman--when the errand's done
We came to flesh upon.

There may be miles on miles of nought
Of action,--sicker far,
To simulate is stinging work
To cover what we are

From Science and from surgery,
Too telescopic eyes
To bear on us unshaded,
For their sake, not for ours.

+++++

I got so I could hear his name
Without--
Tremendous gain!--
That stop-sensation in my soul,
And thunder in the room.

I got so I could walk across
That angle in the floor
Where he turned--so--and I
Turned--how--
And all our sinew tore.

I got so I could stir the box
In which
His letters grew,
Without that forcing in my breath
As staples driven through.

Could dimly recollect a Grace--
I think
They called it "God",
Renowned to ease extremity
When formula had failed--

And shape my hands
Petition's way--
Too ignorant of word
That Ordination utters--
My business with the cloud.

+++++

Staples driven through! Our sinews torn! We tie our hats and go about daily business, dead inside. After great pain Emily wrote the most exquisite verses resounds through the centuries to pierce our hearts with sympathy. She understood all we have experienced.

What did Lavinia know, what caused her to keep back these poems? It is the untold stories that most capture our imaginations.

One Hundred and One Famous Poems

"Preface: This is the age of science, of steel--of speed and the cement road, The age of hard faces and hard highways. Science and steel demand a medium of prose. Speed requires only the look--the gesture. What need then, for poetry?  

Great need!"

The summer I turned eleven my family moved from Tonawanda, NY to Michigan. For several months we lived with my grandparents while my folks looked for a new house. All my possessions, save for my Barbie dolls, were in boxes in my grandparents' garage. I was a great reader and perused my grandfather's books for something to read. I found One Hundred and One Famous Poems and read it so often that my grandfather gave it to me.

My grandfather's bookplate

The poems entertained me, taught me to love language, and extolled traditional American values of home, country, initiative, and community. I learned history. I learned about experiences very unlike my own.

My earliest favorite was Eugene Field's The Duel. Otherwise known by its protagonists, the Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat, who "side by side on the table sat." They started a fight that upset the Dutch Clock and the Chinese plate. Next morning there was no trace of dog or cat. "The truth about the cat and pup is this: they ate each other up!"

Now, if that does not warn against the horrible end of those who engage in senseless fights! (find the poem at http://www.mamalisa.com/field/)

The Spider and The Fly by Mary Howitt is a warning to beware falling victim to flattery. The spider entices a fly into "the prettiest little parlor that ever you did spy" with "fine and thin sheets." When that does not work, the spider talks about the fly's 'robes of green and purple and eyes like the diamond bright.' She finally is seduced and enters...never to be seen again. The dear children are then warned to take a lesson and "unto an evil counselor close heart, and ear, and eye." http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~aathavan/poems/The%20Spider%20and%20The%20Fly%20A%20Fable.htm

I loved the story poems. Especially Alfred Noye's The Highwayman, a romantic tale of the robber who loves Bess, the landlords' dark-eyed daughter. When the Redcoats tie Bess up and wait for the highwayman to return to her, she warns him by fingering the rifle trigger, sacrificing her own life. I adored the language of the poem: "The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees, the moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,/the road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor." http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171940

The language of Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven was also gorgeous. "It was in the bleak December, and each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor". "And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain /Thrilled me--filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before." I soon discovered a complete set of Poe on my grandfather's shelves, and ended up taking them home permanently as well. http://www.eapoe.org/works/poems/ravent.htm

Edgar Allan Poe quilt by Nancy A. Bekofske

I suffered terrible nostalgia and homesickness for over two years after our move. Out To Old Aunt Mary's by James Whitcomb Riley allowed me to indulge my own fond remembrances of a childhood home so recently lost. He spoke of willow trees, which had surrounded my own home.
http://www.jameswhitcombriley.com/youth.htm

my old home with the willow tree

Little Boy Blue by Eugene Field describes the vacant chair and waiting toys of the absent boy, who I did not realize was dead when I first read it; I thought he had grown up as I was growing up--quite against my wishes. The poem's sweet nostalgia transported me to my own future. And John Greenleaf Whittier's Barefoot Boy speaks of the lost freedom of childhood, lost to the "mills of toil." http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174752

And the volume warned about the adult responsibilities and horrors that awaited.

Like War. Did the Light Brigade also  have a 'rendezvous with death' when they charged forward? Was their death gentle, as Alan Seeger wrote? This was a world of poppies in Flanders' fields, and of grass-covered graves in Gettysburg so that people asked "what place is this" and did not remember the violence it had seen.

The suffering of the poor in Thomas Hood's Song of the Shirt, "with fingers weary and worn" a women in rags sewed "in poverty, hunger, and dirt." "It is not linen you're wearing bout,/But human creature's lives!"
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/hood/shirt.html
And immediately follows Shakespeare's "The quality of mercy is not strained, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven."
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/21707

What is our purpose on earth? Abou Ben Adhem asks the Angle if his name was in the book of those who loved the Lord and was told, "Nay, not so." He asks to "write me as one that loved his fellow men" and lo! his name led the list of those whom God had blessed. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173698

I was taught social consciousness.

The "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" may have given Hamlet pause. But every other poem condemns his indecision. "It isn't the fact you're dead that counts,/But only, how did you die?" asks Edmund Vance Cooke. "It's how did you fight and why' and "how did you take" the troubles life throws at you. "Come up with a smiling face, to lie there--that's disgrace."
http://allpoetry.com/poem/8619995-How_Did_You_Die_-by-Edmund_Vance_Cooke_

"Be strong!" admonishes Maltbie Davenport Babcock, "we are not here to play, to dream, to drift: we have hard work to do and loads to life. Shun not the struggle--face it; 'tis God's gift."
http://acacia.pair.com/Acacia.Vignettes/Be.Strong.html

"Taint no use to sit an' whine," Frank Stanton encourages in Keep a-Goin, "drain the sweetness from the cup.
"http://royceferguson.blogspot.com/2012/01/keep-goin.html

"Yours is the Earth and everything in it!" Rudyard Kipling cries. "If you can dream, and not make dreams your master."
http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_if.htm

"Act--act in the living Present!" proclaims Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in Psalm of Life. "We can makes our lives sublime/ And, departing leave behind us/Footprints on the sands of time!"http://www.potw.org/archive/potw232.html

Natural beauty was extolled in these poems.

"Poems are made by fools like me/But only God can make a tree." Joyce Kilmer will always be remembered for this simple poem.  "What does he plant who plants a tree?" ashed Henry Cuyler Bummer in The Heart of the Tree. "He plants the glory of the plain; He plants the forest's heritage, the harvest of a coming age;/ The joy that unborn eyes shall see--"
http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/bunner01.html

William Wordsworth "wandered lonely as a cloud" and comes across "a crowd a host of golden daffodils" which like Shelley's skylark taught him gladness and "unbodied joy."

The book is tattered with bent edges and the paper cover of the book has separated from the spine. Yet it is one of my most treasured possessions, for it brought me to an early love of poetry.

The 1922 edition of  One Hundred and One Famous Poems from The Cable Company is found at the Library of Congress and can be downloaded in many formats.
http://archive.org/details/onehundredonefam02cook