Love Poetry Out Loud (8 page)

She never dreams.

Those sunrise-colored clouds

Around man's head — that inconceivable enchantment

From which, at sunset, we come back to life

To find our graves dug, families dead, selves dying:

Of all this, Tanya, she is innocent.

For nineteen years she's faced reality:

They look alike already.

They say, man wouldn't be

The best thing in this world — and isn't he?—

If he were not too good for it. But she

— She's good enough for it.

And yet sometimes

Her sturdy form, in its pink strapless formal,

Is as if bathed in moonlight — modulated

Into a form of joy, a Lydian mode;

This Wooden Mean's a kind, furred animal

That speaks, in the Wild of things, delighting riddles

To the soul that listens, trusting …

Poor senseless Life:

When, in the last light sleep of dawn, the messenger

Comes with his message, you will not awake.

He'll give his feathery whistle, shake you hard,

You'll look with wide eyes at the dewy yard

And dream, with calm slow factuality:

“Today's Commencement. My bachelor's degree

In Home Ec., my doctorate of philosophy

In Phys. Ed.

[Tanya, they won't even
scan]

Are waiting for me.…”

Oh, Tatyana,

The Angel comes: better to squawk like a chicken

Than to say with truth, “But I'm a
good
girl,”

And Meet his Challenge with a last firm strange

Uncomprehending smile; and—then, then!—see

The blind date that has stood you up: your life.

(For all this, if it isn't, perhaps, life,

Has yet, at least, a language of its own

Different from the books'; worse than the books'.)

And yet, the ways we miss our lives are life.

Yet … yet …

to have one's life add up to
yet!

You sigh a shuddering sigh. Tatyana murmurs,

“Don't cry, little peasant”; leaves us with a swift

“Good-bye, good-bye … Ah, don't think ill of me …”

Your eyes open: you sit here thoughtlessly.

I love you — and yet — and yet — I love you.

Don't cry, little peasant. Sit and dream.

One comes, a finger's width beneath your skin,

To the braided maidens singing as they spin;

There sound the shepherd's pipe, the watchman's rattle

Across the short dark distance of the years.

I am a thought of yours: and yet, you do not think …

The firelight of a long, blind, dreaming story

Lingers upon your lips; and I have seen

Firm, fixed forever in your closing eyes,

The Corn King beckoning to his Spring Queen.

 

Half-soul =
A misquotation of Kipling's poem in which a dog prays to his god (his master) and complains about his “distressed half-soul.”

Worn hexahedrons =
Books (their geometrical shape)
.

Tatyana Larina =
Jarrell imagines talking about the girl to this character in Alexander Pushkin's novel
Eugene Onegin,
herself a country girl who becomes a sophisticated lady after Lensky, the lover of a friend, dies in a duel
.

Sunset =
In old age, youth's rosy clouds drift away, and we begin to see who we are
.

Lydian mode =
A musical scale resembling a major chord
.

Wooden Mean =
The “golden mean” of classical geometry is considered a perfect proportion; she's not perfect
.

Angel =
Jarrell likens graduation, and being thrust into the “real world,” to the touch of the angel of death
.

Blind date =
Life's disappointments
.

Corn King =
Naomi Mitchison's 1931 novel
The Corn King and the Spring Queen,
set in ancient Greece and Egypt, features a young heroine and takes its title from the pagan ritual in which temporary rulers were eventually torn to pieces and scattered on the fields as a fertility rite
.

 

IMMORTAL VERSE

A traditional theme of love poets that shows up often in Shakespeare's sonnets is the immortalizing of the beloved's temporal beauty through the poet's eyes. Archibald MacLeish can't help agreeing, while seeming to argue with Shakespeare and scoff at such sentiments
.

William Shakespeare

N
ot marble nor the gilded monuments

Of princes shall outlive this pow'rful rhyme,

But you shall shine more bright in these contents

Than unswept stone, besmear'd with sluttish time.

When wasteful war shall statues overturn,

And broils root out the work of masonry,

Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn

The living record of your memory.

'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity

Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room,

Even in the eyes of all posterity

That wear this world out to the ending doom.

So till the judgment that yourself arise,

You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.

 

Museum of Antiquities

The Venus de Milo, a famous Greek statue of Aphrodite that now shelters in the Louvre, is a byword for classical beauty. But she's missing the arms her sculptor gave her. She had not yet been discovered when Shakespeare wrote this sonnet, but he might say she proves his point
.

Sluttish =
Slovenly and grimy
.

Broils =
Disturbances (from freezing and thawing)
.

Archibald MacLeish

(for Adele)

T
he praisers of women in their proud and beautiful poems,

Naming the grave mouth and the hair and the eyes,

Boasted those they loved should be forever remembered:

These were lies.

The words sound but the face in the Istrian sun is forgotten.

The poet speaks but to her dead ears no more.

The sleek throat is gone — and the breast that was troubled to listen:

Shadow from door.

Therefore I will not praise your knees nor your fine walking

Telling you men shall remember your name as long

As lips move or breath is spent or the iron of English

Rings from a tongue.

I shall say you were young, and your arms straight, and your mouth scarlet:

I shall say you will die and none will remember you:

Your arms change, and none remember the swish of your garments,

Nor the click of your shoe.

Not with my hand's strength, not with difficult labor

Springing the obstinate words to the bones of your breast

And the stubborn line to your young stride and the breath to your breathing

And the beat to your haste

Shall I prevail on the hearts of unborn men to remember.

(What is a dead girl but a shadowy ghost

Or a dead man's voice but a distant and vain affirmation

Like dream words most)

Therefore I will not speak of the undying glory of women.

I will say you were young and straight and your skin fair

And you stood in the door and the sun was a shadow of leaves on your shoulders

And a leaf on your hair —

 

I will not speak of the famous beauty of dead women:

I will say the shape of a leaf lay once on your hair.

Till the world ends and the eyes are out and the mouths broken

Look! It is there!

 

Shakespeare Was a Liar

Shakespeare's sonnet, if you read carefully, says nothing about what his beloved actually looks like. And so, MacLeish suggests, we have indeed forgotten her. Instead, he shows us concrete images of his beloved — the particular way she walks, the color of her lips, a leaf in her hair, so that we too may catch a glimpse of the “now” he knew when writing this
.

Istrian =
Region near Trieste on the Adriatic Sea
.

Look! It is there! =
Perhaps an echo of the final words of King Lear in Shakespeare's play, when Lear holds his dead daughter Cordelia and says, “Look there, Look there!”

“To fall in love is by no means the most stupid thing man does — gravitation cannot be held responsible, however.”

—Albert Einstein

YOU LOVE ME, YOU REALLY LOVE ME!

Who doesn't want to be loved? It's among our most basic requirements, right up there with food, water, and safety, according to the psychologist Abraham Maslow's famous “hierarchy of needs.” So, perhaps Christina Georgina Rossetti and Paul Laurence Dunbar can be forgiven if they sound a little giddy
.

 

Victorian Finery

Rossetti lived during the first flowering of Victorian England's taste for the ornate and medieval. Much of her best poetry is about love — often unrequited love, unhappy love, and lost love
.

Halcyon =
Glowing and lustrous, like the feathers of a kingfisher
.

Vair =
Squirrel fur, often used in medieval garments
.

Christina Georgina Rossetti

M
y heart is like a singing bird

Whose nest is in a watered shoot;

My heart is like an apple tree

Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;

My heart is like a rainbow shell

That paddles in a halcyon sea;

My heart is gladder than all these

Because my love is come to me.

Raise me a dais of silk and down;

Hang it with vair and purple dyes;

Carve it in doves and pomegranates,

And peacocks with a hundred eyes;

Work it in gold and silver grapes,

In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;

Because the birthday of my life

Is come, my love is come to me.

Paul Laurence Dunbar

T
hou art my lute, by thee I sing,—

My being is attuned to thee.

Thou settest all my words a-wing,

And meltest me to melody.

Thou art my life, by thee I live,

From thee proceed the joys I know;

Sweetheart, thy hand has power to give

The meed of love — the cup of woe.

Thou art my love, by thee I lead

My soul the paths of light along,

From vale to vale, from mead to mead,

And home it in the hills of song.

My song, my soul, my life, my all,

Why need I pray or make my plea,

Since my petition cannot fall;

For I'm already one with thee!

 

Minstrel Show

Many of Paul Dunbar's most popular poems and stories are dialect pieces, written in the style of the blackface minstrel shows popular in America in the late nineteenth century. That paid the bills: Dunbar was among the first African-American writers to make a living from his work. He had another side, though
.

Meed =
Wages
.

Mead =
Meadow
.

 

ROSE AND GERANIUM

An expensive cultured rose and a ninety-nine-cent Kmart geranium — both beautiful in bloom, but also reflective of changing attitudes toward love. e. e. cummings used a lot of modern devices in his poetry (odd capitalization and punctuation, for instance), but the imagery and cadences and sentiments hark back to nineteenth-century poetry. Connie Voisine's poem, on the other hand, belongs squarely in the twenty-first century
.

Myself as =
Pause in between, as if there were punctuation
.

e. e. cummings

S
omewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

any experience, your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me

though i have closed myself as fingers,

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and

my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,

as when the heart of this flower imagines

the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals

the power of your intense fragility: whose texture

compels me with the colour of its countries,

rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens; only something in me understands

the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

 

Small Beauties

Cummings is suspicious of big ideas, grand abstractions, and sweeping pronouncements. On the page, his lowercase poems convey smallness. Read aloud, the precise images and minute detail of his little loves unfold with vivid particularity. Here, in a twist on classical love poems, it is the poet who is the delicate flower, not the beloved
.