The Courageous Stride, the Ridiculous Slippers

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Hi, All:

Okay, it's been more than a day. But here's your second poem on the subject:

Courage
by Anne Sexton

It is in the small things we see it.
The child’s first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.

[Rest of poem removed because it’s probably still in copyright]


You all noticed, of course, that the poem contains a lifetime. That it begins with a child's first steps and proceeds chronologically to end with old age and death. And Sexton tells you up front that it's about courage.

Courage is an everyday thing, Sexton says. Imagine the courage it took for you to stand up and walk for the first time, an event "as awesome as an earthquake." And I'm sure you can still remember the courage it took to endure schoolyard taunts. Nobody ever forgets them.

The next stanza moves courage into the arena of war, and refers specifically to the Korean War. "Waitaminute," you say. "Women weren't allowed in the war arena back then." Absolutely right. But your teachers misled you when they said that poetry was about self-expression. Sexton is speaking about the world and she's speaking for everyone.

Herein is the most subversive aspect of the poem: She converts the act of a buddy dying to save you from the martial rhetoric of Homer and the USMC to a quotidian (that means "everyday") reality. It's as simple as "shaving soap." Simultaneously here, she has undone the glory of the act while elevating it to the status of love.

So it goes, for two more stanzas. At the end of life, Sexton says, we are the most courageous of all. And when at last you can't stave off death for even an instant longer, "you'll put on your carpet slippers and stride out." Picture that in your mind: The courageous stride, the ridiculous carpet slippers. Fools on the outside, but heroes within. This is the human condition glorified.

Life is tough business, Sexton says. It's not for sissies. We're not sissies, you and I. We're human beings.

All best,
Michael

P.S. So why shaving soap and not hand soap? To defend herself from the charge that she's trying to "feminize" men. She's just trying to reflect on the way things really are.

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Should We Kill Kipling?

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Dear Everyone:

Today I offer one of the most popular and sneered-at poems every written. There's much to be said on both sides. But to begin with, read the poem with an open and sympathetic mind. Try your best to hear and appreciate it exactly as Kipling meant you to:

If
by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream–and not make dreams your master,
If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings–nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And–which is more–you'll be a Man, my son!

So... what do you think? Moving? Ripe? Both? These are all valid reactions. The two most common reasons for disliking this poem are 1) overexposure, and 2) a dislike for people who offer advice at length. For the first, there is no cure – people do pass this around too much, and once you've heard "In A Gadda Da Vida" five hundred times, you'll never want to hear it again. But for the second, it helps to remember that Kipling is trying to be helpful. He's offering the distilled wisdom that a lifetime of being knocked down and getting right back up again has taught him.

The big criticism of Kipling, though, is that he was the mouthpiece of the British Empire, the jingoistic sloganeer, the man who perceived and embodied the Victorian spirit in all its brave, foolish, world-conquering bulletheadedness. When applied to his best (and usually early) work, this is cruelly unfair. But there's no getting around the fact that success turned him into the guy who wrote "The White Man's Burden" and such lines as, "Oh, it's Tommy this and Tommy that, And shove ‘im out, the brute. But it's savior of ‘is nation, When the guns begin to shoot."

And certainly, in this poem, you can see the distilled essence of the shared values and attitudes that allowed the British to conquer half the world in, as one historian put it, "a fit of absent-mindedness." There's a story of a seven-year-old Victorian English girl in India who fell out of a tree while playing and broke her arm, but went on playing for another half-hour because she knew she was expected to not show weakness before the natives. If you read George MacDonald Fraser's wonderfully comic Flashman novels, you'll see that exact same attitude examined by somebody who finds it kind of weird and creepy.

On the positive side, the poem is clear and lucid – and isn't that a relief after some of the stuff we've plowed through? We know exactly what Kipling was trying to tell us. And his formal command of the language is astounding. The rhyme scheme (ABAB, repeated endlessly) ought to make the poem sound singsong and yet it doesn't. How did he do that?

There are lots of cunning bits of craft hidden in the poem so openly that you probably missed them entirely. To mention just one: The fact that the poem is addressed to the narrator's son isn't revealed until the very final word. Which, since the reader has been receiving the poem as a direct admonition directed at him, turns him into the poet's son, and Kipling into his father. A very powerful relationship has thus been imposed, and absolutely without resistance on the reader's part!

But the key question is, does the poem work? That is, is it of actual help in the messy business of living? And the answer is, I think, on balance, yes. Not as a self-improvement program -- it contains a near-infinite number of goals and no advice on how to reach them -- but as a way of making the reader brave. I'm sure there have been any number of times when somebody faced adversity and defeat and drew strength from these lines in the form of a determination to be THAT kind of man, one who can force his "heart and nerve and sinew" to act hopeful, courageous, and strong, long after hope, courage, and strength have left him.

Yes, it's a hokey poem. Yeah, if you successfully internalize it, you'll be a massively repressed Type-A personality. But anything that helps you when times are hard is to be cherished. And, even at its worst, it's like the parson's egg – parts of it are excellent.

So, on balance, I think we'll let Kipling live.

Tomorrow, a rather different poem on the subject of courage

All best,

Michael

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Cat! Poem (What Could Be More Commercial?)

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Dear Everybody:

I having been away so long, at various times in Australia, in my own thoughts, and in fluenza, I'm getting you back into the swing of poetic things easily with:

To a Cat
by Jorge Luis Borges

Mirrors are not more silent
nor the creeping dawn more secretive;
in the moonlight, you are that panther
we catch sight of from afar.

[Rest of poem removed because it’s probably still in copyright]

Borges is respected as a poet, but revered as a writer of prose. (He's the guy who wrote about an infinite library containing not only every book written but every book possible; a man who forgets nothing and another who sets out to write Cervantes' Don Quixote four hundred years after Cervantes; the Alef, which contains within it all things; the Lottery of Babel, which is indistinguishable from life itself; and many, many other intellectual mind-benders.) So his poetry is more cleverly-constructed than profoundly-felt.

Note here how the cat is a thing of absences, defined by negatives ("not more silent nor... more secretive), never seen or described, identified with mirrors, the dawn, a long-forgotten time, the Ganges, a setting sun, a dream. All of which are absolutely unlike the physical thing that is a cat. In fact, what Borges has evoked here is a day, from sunup to sundown and sleep, and a world, through at least two continents. No furs, no claws, no eyes. Only, in fact, a "haunch" pushing up against "the love of a distrustful hand."

"You know my methods," as Sherlock Holmes said to Dr. Watson. What am I getting at here?
Two things: The poem is in the second person, so the poet is addressing a cat. The haunch and the hand place the cat in the poet's lap. Borges is feeling contemplative, dreamish. That's one. The other is that "distrustful" hand. The word leaps out at the reader. You'd expect "distrusted." But no, that word reveals that the poem is not about the cat at all. It's about the poet himself, the member of the race that distrusted the cat's wild ancestors, and somehow, so long ago the facts are forgotten, tamed it anyway.

So the poem's not really about a cat at all. It's about how the poet feels about cats. It's about the idea of a cat.


That's all for today. But we'll have more soon.

Best,
Michael

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Fat, Gay, Jewish -- and Way Cool

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Dear Everyone:

Today a not at all bad poem by a guy who was fat, gay, Jewish, and one of the coolest people on the face of the earth. Neat trick, eh?

Allen Ginsberg got his start in the 1950s, hanging around with Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and William S. Burroughs, became world famous with the publication of “Howl,” was ubiquitous in the Sixties and Seventies (a couple of times a year I’d see him in my college’s public cafeteria, hanging out with anybody who wanted to sit at his table; a couple of hours after the solar eclipse of – I’m guessing – 1973, a couple of my friends went into a diner and there he was; “Did you see the eclipse?” he asked. “Oh, it was mad – mad!”) Then, long before it was cool to do so, he traded in the hippie drag for a suit and tie, trimmed his beard, and went back to looking like an ordinarily respectable Jewish guy, someone who might be in rugs or small appliances. Apparently he’d lost patience with the guru role, and all the luggage that went with it. But he kept on traveling, writing poetry, keeping things churned. He died a few years ago, leaving behind such an enormous body of work that nobody’s yet sorted through it to determine what’s great, what’s not quite, and what’s hardly worth the trouble.

The problem with Allen Ginsberg is that his best poems are enormously long, immersive experiences. But wonderful. Consider “Howl”:

It begins, I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

And continues, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

and goes on, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night

Oh, man. That’s on beyond cool. Try reading those lines out loud. You guys should go to the library and check out a copy. It’s an astonishing poem. It maintains that level of energy all the way to the end.

Today, however, we have something simpler, with a self-explanatory title:



New Stanzas for Amazing Grace
by Allen Ginsberg

I dreamed I dwelled in a homeless place
Where I was lost alone
Folk looked right through me into space
And passed with eyes of stone

[Rest of poem removed because it’s probably still in copyright]


Yes, it’s meant to be sung. What I want you guys to admire in it is its simplicity. It takes a lot of hard work and experience to write something that simple without looking silly.

Not that simplicity is everything. Consider “Howl.” Not at all simple. Immeasurably better.

All best,
Michael

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The Arrow, the Song, Will Not Stay Us Long

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Hi, everybody!

Today’s poem is another ripe one from Longfellow. So why do I think you should read it? Well, for one thing, you know its first lines already.

Behold:

The Arrow and the Song
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For, so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.

I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For who has sight so keen and strong,
That it can follow the flight of song?

Long, long afterward, in an oak
I found the arrow, still unbroke;
And the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend.

So there it is, the poem that launched a thousand parodies. (“...it hit my teacher’s derriere” to note but one.) Now you know the point of those lines.

In a footnote to the poem (useful things, footnotes) I discovered an entry from Longfellow’s diary: "October 16, 1845. Before church, wrote The Arrow and the Song, which came into my mind as I stood with my back to the fire, and glanced on to the paper with arrow's speed. Literally an improvisation." So now we know a second thing, which is that the poem did not take up a great deal of Longfellow’s time.

Nor need it ours.

Best,
Michael

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Sing "Wreck of the Hesperus" Today!

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Dear Everyone:

We’ve got a ripe one today! For your sins, I’ve been reading a volume of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. But as Nietzsche said, “That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.”

In which spirit, I urge you to read the following before my commentary:

Wreck Of The Hesperus
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It was the schooner Hesperus,
That sailed the wintery sea;
And the skipper had taken his little daughter,
To bear him company.

Blue were her eyes as the fairy flax,
Her cheeks like the dawn of day,
And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds,
That ope in the month of May.

The Skipper he stood beside the helm,
His pipe was in his mouth,
And he watched how the veering flaw did blow
The smoke now West, now South.

Then up and spake an old Sailor,
Had sailed the Spanish Main,
"I pray thee, put into yonder port,
for I fear a hurricane.

"Last night the moon had a golden ring,
And to-night no moon we see!"
The skipper, he blew whiff from his pipe,
And a scornful laugh laughed he.

Colder and louder blew the wind,
A gale from the Northeast,
The snow fell hissing in the brine,
And the billows frothed like yeast.

Down came the storm, and smote amain
The vessel in its strength;
She shuddered and paused, like a frighted steed,
Then leaped her cable's length.

"Come hither! come hither! my little daughter,
And do not tremble so;
For I can weather the roughest gale
That ever wind did blow."

He wrapped her warm in his seaman's coat
Against the stinging blast;
He cut a rope from a broken spar,
And bound her to the mast.

"O father! I hear the church bells ring,
Oh, say, what may it be?"
"Tis a fog-bell on a rock bound coast!" –
And he steered for the open sea.

"O father! I hear the sound of guns;
Oh, say, what may it be?"
Some ship in distress, that cannot live
In such an angry sea!"

"O father! I see a gleaming light.
Oh say, what may it be?"
But the father answered never a word,
A frozen corpse was he.

Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark,
With his face turned to the skies,
The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow
On his fixed and glassy eyes.

Then the maiden clasped her hands and prayed
That saved she might be;
And she thought of Christ, who stilled the wave,
On the Lake of Galilee.

And fast through the midnight dark and drear,
Through the whistling sleet and snow,
Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept
Tow'rds the reef of Norman's Woe.

And ever the fitful gusts between
A sound came from the land;
It was the sound of the trampling surf,
On the rocks and hard sea-sand.

The breakers were right beneath her bows,
She drifted a dreary wreck,
And a whooping billow swept the crew
Like icicles from her deck.

She struck where the white and fleecy waves
Looked soft as carded wool,
But the cruel rocks, they gored her side
Like the horns of an angry bull.

Her rattling shrouds, all sheathed in ice,
With the masts went by the board;
Like a vessel of glass, she stove and sank,
Ho! ho! the breakers roared!

At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach,
A fisherman stood aghast,
To see the form of a maiden fair,
Lashed close to a drifting mast.

The salt sea was frozen on her breast,
The salt tears in her eyes;
And he saw her hair, like the brown sea-weed,
On the billows fall and rise.

Such was the wreck of the Hesperus,
In the midnight and the snow!
Christ save us all from a death like this,
On the reef of Norman's Woe!

I have two things to say about this poem. First, that you shouldn’t be overly scornful of the sentiment. Longfellow died in 1882, before a lot of the improvements in medicine that we take for granted. Back then, the average reader – you – would have lost at least one sister or brother in his or her infancy. So that line about the little daughter with eyes “blue ... as the fairy flax” would have been a shot right to the heart. It would have touched undying pain.

The other is that this poem can be sung to the tune of the theme from “Gilligan’s Isle.” Some of the verses (the first one most notably), you have to scrunch the second line together to make fit. But most work just fine. Try it right now:

"O father! I see a gleaming light.
Oh say, what may it be?"
But the father answered never a word,
A frozen corpse was he.

(Don’t forget the refrain: “... frozen corpse was he.”)

So now you know why modern poets abandoned rhyme!

All best,
Michael

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Cultured Literary Doodling

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Dear Everyone:

Your teachers, no doubt, emphasized emotion when they taught poetry. Yet, considering how much of it is rhyme and scansion, wouldn’t logic be a better emphasis? And doesn’t it stand to reason that mathematicians would make particularly good poets?

So the following, by Professor Charles Luttwidge Dodgson, who wrote two well-regarded children’s books under a pseudonym, is nothing more than you’d expect, right?

(Epilogue to Through the Looking Glass)
by Lewis Carroll

A boat, beneath a sunny sky
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July –

Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear
Pleased a simple tale to hear –

Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die:
Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream –
Lingering in the golden gleam –
Life what is it but a dream?

Good poem. But did you get it?

No, I don’t mean the fact that it was written about going boating with Alice Pleasance Liddell and her sisters on those golden afternoons when he made up the stories that became Alice in Wonderland. That’s pretty obvious by the fact that the poem first appeared at the very end of that exact same book. Did you get the secret he hid in the poem?

Nor do I mean anything dark and sexual either. Though many people do think that Dodgson was a natural pederast who managed to stifle his impulses. (Then again, the case is not proved; a recent biographer claimed that the man’s dark secret was that he was attracted to adult women, and hung around with little girls because being pre-sexual they were safe.)

Here’s a clue: The poem was cast in triplets of lines in order to draw the eye away from the hidden secret. Which is that it’s an acrostic poem. Look at the first letter of each line. Read straight down. The poem contains its own dedication to the girl who inspired Alice.

Acrostic poems were not at all uncommon in an age when any educated gentleman might be expected to dash off an occasional verse or two. So it wasn’t a terribly big secret – you were expected to get it sooner or later. The trick was to make the poem itself good enough that the acrostic came as a surprise.

All best,
Michael

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