#sonnetobsession – Fourteen Lines

What Brothers Us In Each

What, should we get rid of our ignorance, the very substance of our lives, merely in order to understand one another?
R. P. Blackmur

Struggle-Bread

by R. P. Blackmur (1904 – 1965)

My friend, what brothers us in each? – I take,
most mine out of the wordling worlds we bled,
not life, but what is takeable, the dead.
I say the dead. Things cannot sleep nor wake,
nor grow nor lessen, upleap nor ever slack,
which have been changed between two selves. I said
the dead – what’s not but was. This struggle-bread,
the pressed wafer of knowledge, this I break.

I eat the past, the matter we have been,
and so eat god, a fast; devour my part
in you. Yet you’re untouched. You say that’s so
of me? – my dead selves only you draw in
your often eye and seldom smile? Live heart,
we lag – we are ahead of all we know.

There are days this long winter, when it is difficult to be surprised. Then comes along a March sunny day, the sparkle of snow-diamonds bedazzle contrasted by the denim blue of long shadows, that blue that only exists in spring-snow right before it melts, and I am awestruck by the simplicity of white. I had the same feeling reading R. P. Blackmur’s poem Struggle-Bread. How could I have missed this poem, these long years? Where had it been hiding? Blackmur published sparingly his own poetry, but commented elegantly as a critic on others work. I wonder what held Blackmur back from sharing more; modesty?

My Dog My Wife and Most Myself

by R. P. Blackmur

Because the elm-tree buds are red
in sunlight, yellow-brown in shade,
I think not of a living thing —
my dog my wife and most myself —
but that I think of it as dead.

Because the harrowed land is black
and the wet wales ashine like flesh
in sunlight, dull blue steel in shade.
this much I do expect, and hate,
I shall be fertile so when dead–
fertile and indiscriminate.

The Willow Tree Is Woolly

The old faiths light their candles all about,
But burly Truth comes by and puts them out.
Lizette Woodworth Reese

Mid-March

By Lizette Woodworth Reese (1856 – 1935)

It is too early for white boughs, too late
For snows. From out the hedge the wind lets fall
A few last flakes, ragged and delicate.
Down the stripped roads the maples start their small,
Soft, ’wildering fires. Stained are the meadow stalks
A rich and deepening red. The willow tree
Is woolly. In deserted garden-walks
The lean bush crouching hints old royalty,
Feels some June stir in the sharp air and knows
Soon ’twill leap up and show the world a rose.

The days go out with shouting; nights are loud;
Wild, warring shapes the wood lifts in the cold;
The moon’s a sword of keen, barbaric gold,
Plunged to the hilt into a pitch black cloud.

A Song

By Lizette Woodworth Reese

Oh, Love, he went a-straying,

A long time ago!

I missed him in the Maying,

When blossoms were of snow;

So back I came by the old sweet way;

And for I loved him so, wept that he came not with me,

A long time ago!

Wide open stood my chamber door,

And one stepped forth to greet;

Gray Grief, strange Grief, who turned me sore

With words he spake so sweet.

I gave him meat; I gave him drink;

(And listened for Love’s feet.)

How many years? I cannot think;

In truth, I do not know—

Ah, long time ago!

Oh, love, he came not back again,

Although I kept me fair;

And each white May, in field and lane,

I waited for him there!

Yea, he forgot; but Grief stayed on,

And in Love’s empty chair

Doth sit and tell of days long gone—

’Tis more than I can bear!

A Better Time Than Ours

The painful warrior famous for fight, After a thousand victories, once foil’d, Is from the books of honor razed quite, And all the rest forgot for which he toil’d.
William Shakespeare

West London

by Matthew Arnold

Crouch’d on the pavement close by Belgrave Square
A tramp I saw, ill, moody, and tongue-tied;
A babe was in her arms, and at her side
A girl; their clothes were rags, their feet were bare.
Some labouring men, whose work lay somewhere there,
Pass’d opposite; she touch’d her girl, who hied
Across, and begg’d and came back satisfied.
The rich she had let pass with frozen stare.

Thought I: Above her state this spirit towers;
She will not ask of aliens, but of friends,
Of sharers in a common human fate.
She turns from that cold succour, which attends
The unknown little from the unknowing great,
And points us to a better time than ours.

Romeo and Juliet

Excerpt from the prologue

by William Shakespeare

Two households, both alike in dignity
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Doth with their death bury their parents` strife.

The fearful passage of their death-marked love
And the continuance of their parents` rage,
Which, but their children’s` end, naught could remove,
Is now the two hours traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

We Deceive Time

The American soul has been stored under the stairs
In a box with the mittens and scarves
For the longest time. We couldn’t think where we had put it.
Reed Whittemore

Three Sonnets to Time

III

by Reed Whittemore

Again and again, we deceive time. We sleep, we meander
As if it were nothing to us when we’d come, or be, through
Or where, in the limitless world, our ship would founder,
Or do what whatever ships in metaphor do.

We wear all the bright fashions, read soft books
And lie in the sun in Nassau with our hides.
We build our castles and line our secretest nooks
With the addresses where passion or drink resides.

And though time is never deceived – it is we, with our slippers on,
Who are caught by surprise when our light verse yawns its last
yawn –
To the last hour we must strive to keep not looking drawn
From lamenting in secret, mumbling dirges at dawn.

It is a game, but a very solemn one, this that we play
With art, drama and rhetoric as we decay.

Thoughts of a California Desert

by Reed Whittemore

Under palm trees, oranges, olives and pears
The indolent desert slouches, half an eye closed
And half an eye out for men of affairs whose cares
Keep them from keeping their gaudy gaudy gardens hosed.

Slouches and yawns, that clown. Leaves in disdain
Gaseous dragon their nauseous knights to nettle.
Flips his tail coyly, rolls over, says he would fain
Die a dry death. Haw! browning a petal.

Has it too good, too good. It vastly diverted
Watching his merchants and bankers stumble out doors.
Parries their blows, says he loves, loves to be squirted
As at him they fiercely empty their reservoirs.

Sleeps a great deal, drinks deep, drinks deep and makes hay,
Thinking he’ll swallow the bankers and all one day.

I Forgot To Change The Hour

I would write poems even if no else read them.
Margaret Hasse

Day After Daylight Savings

By Margaret Hasse

Blue numbers on my bedside clock

tell I forgot to change the hour.

This sets routines on haywire.

Like a domestic goat staked

to its circle of earth,

I don’t do well untethered.

I have no hunger for early dinner,

become confused by the sound

of children who seem out

too late for a school night.

They’ve found an extra helping

of daylight to romp on new grass

and can’t contain themselves,

strip off jackets, scatter

like a rag of ponies.

Whatever time says,

their joy insists

on springing forward.

Most years when we spring forward, it feels like spring is on the other side of that time jump. I awake with a shorter day but with a spring mindset and a spring anticipation. Not this year. I am mired in an atmospheric river of winter, it just keeps snowing. Minneapolis streets are so compressed by ever encroaching piles of snow that we are down to single lanes of traffic on side streets. If there is a spring waiting as we set our clocks forward, I sure hope it sticks its head out of its burrow soon, our hearts are spring sick and looking for the great white north to turn green. We maybe carnivores in feeding our bellies but our souls are vegetarian, we need green and living things to fulfill us. Nearly March 15 and not a muddy dog in sight. But give it two weeks. The polish of spring grainy snow on paws will turn into the grime of snow melt. Plenty of time for brown to become the theme on the way to green.

Maybe we should start a movement and just always set our clocks back? Decide to never spring forward, instead always relive an hour of our lives twice a year, collectively grab time and pull it back. I think that’s the grief of daylight savings time. We lose time constantly, Delta steals it with endless flight delays, colleagues put you through repetitive meetings, our world is constantly taking us away from what’s important. We suffer those loses because we must. But to have an hour stolen that just doesn’t exist one day a year, seems like a self inflicted psychological wound that we can do without. Let’s either protest by always moving back, or just doing away with this silliness forever. Copernicus would be proud. Let’s leave the heavens to heaven and live on earth beset by days of 24 hours in length, give or take a wobble of the axis.

Sonnet 12

By William Shakespeare

When I do count the clock that tells the time,

And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;

When I behold the violet past prime,

And sable curls all silver’d o’er with white;

When lofty trees I see barren of leaves

Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,

And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves

Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,

Then of thy beauty do I question make,

That thou among the wastes of time must go,

Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake

And die as fast as they see others grow;

And nothing ‘gainst Time’s scythe can make defence

Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.

The Whole World Dreamed Of This

The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.
Mark Van Doren

After Long Drought

by Mark Van Doren

After long drought, commotion in the sky;
After dead silence, thunder. Then it comes,
The rain. It slashes leaves, and doubly drums
On tin and shingle; beats and bends awry
The flower heads; puddles dust, and with a sigh
Like love sinks into grasses, where it hums
As bees did once, among chrysanthemums
And asters when the summer thought to die.

The whole world dreamed of this, and has it now.
Nor was the waking easy. The dull root
Is jealous of its death; the sleepy brow
Smiles in its slumber; and a heart can fear
The very flood it longed for, roaring near.
The spirit best remembers being mute.

Dream Song 123

by John Berryman

Dapples my floor the eastern sun, my house faces north,
I have nothing to say except that it dapples my floor
and it would dapple me
if I lay on that floor, as-well-forthwith
I have done, trying well to mount a thought
not carelessly

in times forgotten, except by the New York Times
which can’t forget. There is always the morgue.
There are men in the morgue.
These men have access. Sleepless, in position,
they dream the past forever
Colossal in the dawn comes the second light

we do all die, in the floor, in the morgue
and we must die forever, c’est la mort
a heady brilliance
the ultimate gloire
post-mach, probably in underwear
as we met each other once.

Vampire of Rest

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.
Henry Ford

Despotisms

by Louise Imogen Guiney

I: THE MOTOR: 1905

From hedgerows where aromas fain would be

New volleyed odours execrably arise;

The flocks, with hell-smoke in their patient eyes,

Into the ditch from bawling ruin flee:

Spindrift of one abominated sea

Along all roads in wrecking fury flies

Till on young strangled leaf, on bloom that dies,

In this far plot it writes a rune for me.

Vast intimate tyranny! Nature dispossessed

Helplessly hates thee, whose symbolic flare

Lights up (with what reiterance unblest!)

Entrails of horror in a world thought fair.

False God of pastime thou, vampire of rest,

Augur of what pollution, what despair?

Guiney’s old English verse is as thick as the carbon black from exhaust of early automobiles on London’s cobble stone streets, yet it is remarkably clairvoyant of what will unfold with the consequences of fossil fuel consumption. The internal combustion engine was invented in a series of breakthroughs beginning around 1870. Ford’s Model T wasn’t rolled out until 1908. But Guiney’s poem of 1905 already is dreading the despotic hold that automobiles will have on the 20th century. No single thing has caused more ecological destruction than the endless applications that internal combustion engines have caused, enabling humanity’s zeal to make money from natural resources. Internal combustion engines made it possible for people to travel to places they could never have otherwise managed to travel and live in places they could never have managed to live. The internal combustion engine has made resource extraction and exploitation possible at levels never imagined 100 years ago.

I particularly love her expression – vampire of rest. It sums up the feeling I get driving to work with endless pressure from middle aged and older men in mostly pickups, aggressively riding my bumper, wanting to drive 20 miles over the speed limit, and acting like they, and only they have a right to the road. I have coined a new phrase for them – Frustrated Older Republican Drivers – (though I am sure there are Democrats doing the same) driving mostly Ford F150s in which they are angrily ensconced. What is driving this anger? I suspect it is a frustration stemming from a nagging realization that a lifestyle they have worked so hard to create is not sustainable in the future. We have built cities and infrastructure designed for our past, not our future. Ford is aggressively marketing an all electric replacement for the Ford F150 that is impractical, range limited, excessively expensive, dangerously heavy and bound to fail. It is a marketing statement, not a transformational vehicle for the future. If America is going to get serious about climate change we are going to have to adapt and give up our obsession with large vehicles. And we all are going to have to get comfortable with that change voluntarily or get carbon taxed into it. Change makes most old men, even me, grumpy.

Reserve

By Louise Imogen Guiney

You that are dear, O you above the rest!
Forgive him his evasive moods and cold;
The absence that belied him oft of old,
The war upon sad speech, the desperate jest,
And pity’s wildest gush but half-confessed,
Forgive him! Let your gentle memories hold
Some written word once tender and once bold,
Or service done shamefacedly at best,
Whereby to judge him. All his days he spent,
Like one who with an angel wrestled well,
O’ermastering Love with show of light disdain;
And whatso’er your spirits underwent,
He, wounded for you, worked no miracle
To make his heart’s allegiance wholly plain.

Like The Ooze of Oil

“What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”
Gerard Manley Hopkins

God’s Grandeur

by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 – 1899)

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Hopkins, for all his precise literary religious fervor, is complicated in his contradictions. He uses exquisite rhyme and structure to construct his poetic hymns. His goal was to promote Christianity through his art. In his own words;

“What are works of art for? to educate, to be standards. To produce is of little use unless what we produce is known, is widely known, the wider known the better, for it is by being known that it works, it influences, it does its duty, it does good. We must try, then, to be known, aim at it, take means to it. And this without puffing in the process or pride in the success.”

Well, let’s not go too far Mr. Hopkins in your humbleness. You also said, “What I do is me, for that I came,” which is a clever way to say, I am what I write or I write because I am, either way there is a certain amount of credit being taken. I have never met a writer who put their work out into the public eye that didn’t take a little pride in its success. If Hopkins’ was writing today he would have thousands of likes on his blog. My point is genius can rarely get out of the way of its own recognition.

It’s okay to not seek recognition, it is another to ignore it. I am in the camp both approaches are acceptable to an artist, but the latter can get one in bind if they pick and choose what awards they acknowledge during their career. Writers willing to be adored only by fans worthy of their adoration rarely age well, the vintage goes off as dust settles, something just not quite right as the flavor goes off.

The interesting question is why do some why do poets like Hopkins continue to inspire for hundred’s of years after their deaths, while thousands of other writers, some with equal gifts, are discarded by and large to obscurity relatively quickly? I think it may have something to do with luck and inspiration, but in reality I have no idea….

Justus quidem tu es, Domine

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?
Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes
Now, leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build – but not I build; no, but strain,
Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

Heroic Happy Dead

War is what happens when language fails.
Margaret Atwood

pity this busy monster, manunkind

by e. e. cummings

pity this busy monster, manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
—electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend

unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
A world of made
is not a world of born—pity poor flesh

and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if—listen: there’s a hell
of a good universe next door; let’s go.

Do wars ever come to an end? One side runs out of ammunition or conscripts or volunteers, or civilians are pummeled into subjugation, to the point they can no longer support the war effort, but is there really ever a victor? The current war sow’s the seeds for the next war and so on and so on. Veteran’s day is to honor those that served, but it’s also a reminder on how war is handed down generation after generation. One’s family’s liberation is another’s subjugation. One’s person’s defeat is another’s lifelong PTSD for the incalculable cruelty of victory. We survive them, outlast them and unfortunately repeat them.

The narrative of war is driven by the propaganda used to justify the expense in human lives and human capitol. Why do we fail to invest in diplomacy, honor carefully crafted accords, when it is more effective and less costly than conflict? Cummings catch-22 clunky use of language fits the inherent contradictions of war. War rarely make ssense but we all understand its consequence. Cummings lack of clarity in his word-hash feels like clarity, in the context of the longing left behind by the heroic happy dead….

next to of course god america

by e. e. cummings

“next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn’s early my
country ’tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?”

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water.

Now Here, Now There

The songs I had are withered Or vanished clean. Yet there are bright tracks Where I have been.
Ivor Gurney

Servitude

By Ivor Gurney (1890 – 1937)

If it were not for England, who would bear

This heavy servitude one moment more?

To keep a brothel, sweep and wash the floor

Of filthiest hovels were noble to compare

With this brass-cleaning life. Now here, now there

Harried in foolishness, scanned curiously o’er

By fools made brazen by conceit, and store

Of antique witticisms thin and bare.

Only the love of comrades sweetens all,

Whose laughing spirit will not be outdone.

As night-watching men wait for the sun

To hearten them, so wait I on such boys

As neither brass nor Hell-fire may appal,

Nor guns, nor sergeant-major’s bluster and noise.

After-Glow

By Ivor Gurney

(To F. W. Harvey)

Out of the smoke and dust of the little room

With tea-talk loud and laughter of happy boys,

I passed into the dusk. Suddenly the noise

Ceased with a shock, left me alone in the gloom,

To wonder at the miracle hanging high

Tangled in twigs, the silver crescent clear.

Time passed from mind. Time died; and then we were

Once more at home together, you and I.

The elms with arms of love wrapped us in shade

Who watched the ecstatic west with one desire,

One soul uprapt; and still another fire

Consumed us, and our joy yet greater made:

That Bach should sing for us, mix us in one

The joy of firelight and the sunken sun.