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"When Have We Not Preferred Some Going Round To Going Straight To Where We Are?"
Here are the final two lines of a sonnet:When have we not preferred some going roundTo going straight to where we are?Reading the lines in isolation, one might think that they were written by Robert...
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"The Bells Ring Out, The Year Is Born"
Yesterday afternoon, in a United States Post Office, I heard Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis being played over the lobby loudspeakers. I don't know what to make of this.For New Year's Day, I had...
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"Synonyms For Joy"
Near the end of his life, W. H. Auden wrote the following poem:He has never seen God,but, once or twice, he believeshe has heard him.W. H. Auden, Collected Poems (edited by Edward Mendelson) (1991).We...
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"Everything Turns Away Quite Leisurely From The Disaster"
It's odd how certain poems prove to be the ones that inspire a youthful interest in poetry. The following poem is one of the poems that did it for me. My memory fails me, but I believe that I first...
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Snow
First, a poem written around 1,200 or so years ago: River SnowFrom a thousand hills, bird flights have vanished;on ten thousand paths, human traces wiped out:lone boat, an old...
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"A Gull Between Earth And Sky"
Nearly all of the best-known T'ang Dynasty (618-907) poets were civil servants. But T'ang Dynasty civil servants differed a bit from our modern civil servants. For instance, the rigorous civil...
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"He Too, A Restless Sea-Bird, Roams The Wave"
My previous post contained a poem by Li Po in which he likened himself to a gull suspended between earth and sky: "Drifting, what am I like?/A gull between earth and sky" or "Floating on the...
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"The Hidden Law"
W. H. Auden wrote his fair share of obscure poems (at any rate, they are obscure to me). But they sound good, so I'm willing to give him some leeway. The following poem falls into this category. I...
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"Still Are Thy Pleasant Voices, Thy Nightingales, Awake"
Considering that the odds of writing a good poem are long (even for an accomplished poet), being remembered for a single poem is not a bad thing. Such is the case of William Johnson Cory (1823-1892)....
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Millennia
Two of my recent posts have featured poems by Callimachus, who wrote in Greek in the third century B. C. (to the best of our knowledge). For all of their antiquity, Callimachus's poems are not...
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"And Went With Half My Life About My Ways"
A. E. Housman had one great love in his life, and that love was unrequited. The object of his affection was Moses Jackson, one of his roommates at Oxford. It has been suggested that two crucial...
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Stepping Stones
As I have remarked before (stating the obvious, I realize), one of the pleasures of reading poetry is the way in which one poem leads to another. One can take a long journey through the ages and across...
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Antiquity
Over the past month or so, I've been beguiled by the poems of The Greek Anthology. Although the epigrammatic poems were written two thousand or so years ago, they do not have an out-of-date feel. The...
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At Sea
I've been put in a maritime mood by the seaside grave poems from The Greek Anthology that have appeared in my recent posts. But the two poems I have in mind are neither funereal nor littoral: they...
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Winter Into Spring, Part Seven: "Mystery, Unresting, Taciturn"
Lo and behold: yesterday I saw the first crocuses of the year. Purple and yellow they were, on a sunny patch of ground facing westward. They seem a trifle premature in this week's freezing weather....
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"As Under The Sea"
John Drinkwater's poem "The Wood," which appeared in my previous post, wonderfully evokes the feeling of late winter within a grove of trees. At this time of year, all is silent and still and half-lit...
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In Memory Of Crethis
The angled light of early spring and early autumn is, I think, the loveliest light of the year. It calls things to your attention, things that detain you, delightfully.After a rain-filled night, today...
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Oak
From an early age, I have thought of the oak as the exemplar of trees. I'm not sure why. I suspect it has something to do with childhood impressions of the shape of its leaf, smoldering piles of its...
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Mediterranean
My recent meanderings in The Greek Anthology have me daydreaming of golden classical landscapes and seascapes. Idealized landscapes and seascapes, I readily concede. Without barathrums, for instance....
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Ionic
Given that I am residing in a Mediterranean, classical Greek daydream world at the moment (courtesy of The Greek Anthology), a visit to C. P. Cavafy is appropriate. Cavafy's entire body of work is a...
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