I don’t really talk about poetry very much, nor do I write a lot of it. I usually leave that sort of stuff to Lindsay, because she’s got me beat when rhyme and rhythm are concerned. But nonetheless, I love it to pieces.
I rather like Petrarch and Dante, but in the late Renaissance, sonnets and odes about love and lost love and being sad about lost love start becoming excruciatingly common place, and the tedium of it bores me. I’m going to go ahead and blame England for this one, but come the late 18th and early 19th-centuries, poets like Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, and Byron start redeeming the sins of the lovelorn — or at least making it more palatable. But I love modern poetry (I’m going to define this as just poems of the 20th century, for simplicity’s sake) just a bit more. I can’t explain it. I know that, for every Ezra Pound or Anne Sexton, there are a thousand, terrible, modern poets.
So I went and scoured the internet for my favorite examples of modern poetry. Sometimes, I picked poems I have read many, many times before. Other times, I stumbled upon a work I liked by an author I had only read in passing before, and found something new to love and appreciate. My compendium includes Eliot, Neruda, Sexton, Millay, Sandburg, and Plath. As you’ve probably noticed, I keep fiddling with the poems I selected, because I keep forgetting which ones I liked, and I keep finding new ones I like even more. Many of these poems are merely excerpts (marked with an …), but I hope you like them!
T.S. Eliot
These are actually two of my favorite Eliot poems. Both Marina and Ash Wednesday are lyrical, solemn, and beautiful, and are some of Eliot’s more accessible poems. I love The Wasteland personally, but it is very abstract. So there we are:
Marina (…)
What is this face, less clear and clearer
The pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger‚
Given or lent? more distant than stars and nearer than the eye
Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet
Under sleep, where all the waters meet.
Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat.
I made this, I have forgotten
And remember.
The rigging weak and the canvas rotten
Between one June and another September.
Made this unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own.
The garboard strake leaks, the seams need caulking.
This form, this face, this life
Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me
Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,
The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.
What seas what shores what granite islands towards my timbers
And woodthrush calling through the fog
My daughter.
Ash Wednesday (…)
VI. Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn
Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings
And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth
This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.
Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the
garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated
And let my cry come unto Thee.
Sylvia Plath
I actually hadn’t read much Sylvia Plath prior to this post, but I wasn’t surprised to find a lucid, eloquent voice, even in times of bitterness, anger, and anguish.
Sonnet: To Eva (…)
This was a woman : her loves and stratagems
Betrayed in mute geometry of broken
Cogs and disks, inane mechanic whims,
And idle coils of jargon yet unspoken.
Not man nor demigod could put together
The scraps of rusted reverie, the wheels
Of notched tin platitudes concerning weather,
Perfume, politics, and fixed ideals.
The idiot bird leaps up and drunken leans
To chirp the hour in lunatic thirteens.
Candles (…)
They are the last romantics, these candles:
Upside-down hearts of light tipping wax fingers,
And the fingers, taken in by their own haloes,
Grown milky, almost clear, like the bodies of saints.
It is touching, the way they’ll ignore
A whole family of prominent objects
Simply to plumb the deeps of an eye
In its hollow of shadows, its fringe of reeds,
And the owner past thirty, no beauty at all.
Daylight would be more judicious,
Giving everybody a fair hearing.
They should have gone out with the balloon flights and the stereopticon.
This is no time for the private point of view.
When I light them, my nostrils prickle.
Their pale, tentative yellows
…
They mollify the bald moon.
Nun-souled, they burn heavenward and never marry.
The eyes of the child I nurse are scarcely open.
In twenty years I shall be retrograde
As these drafty ephemerids.
I watch their spilt tears cloud and dull to pearls.
How shall I tell anything at all
To this infant still in a birth-drowse?
Tonight, like a shawl, the mild light enfolds her,
The shadows stoop over the guests at a christening.
Pablo Neruda
I read Neruda for the first time in English, senior year of high school. I took a poem in the original Spanish and set about translating it into English via Latin. For the life of me, I can’t remember what that poem was, but I found one about a penguin, so that will have to suffice:
Magellanic Penguin (…)
I was without doubt the child bird
there in the cold archipelagoes
when it looked at me with its eyes,
with its ancient ocean eyes:
it had neither arms nor wings
but hard little oars
on its sides:
it was as old as the salt;
the age of moving water,
and it looked at me from its age:
since then I know I do not exist;
I am a worm in the sand.
The reasons for my respect
remained in the sand:
the religious bird
did not need to fly,
did not need to sing,
and through its form was visible
its wild soul bled salt:
as if a vein from the bitter sea
had been broken.
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Carl Sandburg
Everyone knows Sandburg’s Fog, but I decided to rummage further and came up with these. I’m a sucker for classical references, so A Sphinx was a given (I had to fight myself not to put down Plath’s The Colossus); At A Window was just too sweet to not include though.
A Sphinx
Close-mouthed you sat five thousand years and never
let out a whisper.
Processions came by, marchers, asking questions you
answered with grey eyes never blinking, shut lips
never talking.
Not one croak of anything you know has come from your
cat crouch of ages.
I am one of those who know all you know and I keep my
questions: I know the answers you hold.
At A Window
Give me hunger,
O you gods that sit and give
The world its orders.
Give me hunger, pain and want,
Shut me out with shame and failure
From your doors of gold and fame,
Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!
But leave me a little love,
A voice to speak to me in the day end,
A hand to touch me in the dark room
Breaking the long loneliness.
In the dusk of day-shapes
Blurring the sunset,
One little wandering, western star
Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.
Let me go to the window,
Watch there the day-shapes of dusk
And wait and know the coming
Of a little love.
Anne Sexton
I read through Sexton’s complete works last year in English, and was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked her. Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward is touching, and at the same time, touched with fear, or worry on Sexton’s part; Letter Written on a Ferry is a beautiful poem — I only included the last part because I love the last line — but I wish the circumstances in which I read it for the first time weren’t as unpleasant. Hopefully, I’ll get over that little memory soon.
Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward (…)
Down the hall the baskets start back. My arms
fit you like a sleeve, they hold
catkins of your willows, the wild bee farms
of your nerves, each muscle and fold
of your first days. Your old man’s face disarms
the nurses. But the doctors return to scold
me. I speak. It is you my silence harms.
I should have known; I should have told
them something to write down. My voice alarms
my throat. “Name of father—none.” I hold
you and name you bastard in my arms.
And now that’s that. There is nothing more
that I can say or lose.
Others have traded life before
and could not speak. I tighten to refuse
your owling eyes, my fragile visitor.
I touch your cheeks, like flowers. You bruise
against me. We unlearn. I am a shore
rocking off you. You break from me. I choose
your only way, my small inheritor
and hand you off, trembling the selves we lose.
Go child, who is my sin and nothing more.
Letter Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound (…)
There go my dark girls,
their dresses puff
in the leeward air.
Oh, they are lighter than flying dogs
or the breath of dolphins;
each mouth opens gratefully,
wider than a milk cup.
My dark girls sing for this.
They are going up.
See them rise
on black wings, drinking
the sky, without smiles
or hands
or shoes.
They call back to us
from the gauzy edge of paradise,
good news, good news.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Millay is one of the more old-fashioned modernists. She wrote a lot of sonnets, a magnum opus — Renascence — and then, poems like this. Again, classical references. I’m sold.
Ode to Silence (…)
This is her province whom you lack and seek;
And seek her not elsewhere.
Hell is a thoroughfare
For pilgrims,—Herakles,
And he that loved Euridice too well,
Have walked therein; and many more than these;
And witnessed the desire and the despair
Of souls that passed reluctantly and sicken for the air;
You, too, have entered Hell,
And issued thence; but thence whereof I speak
None has returned;—for thither fury brings
Only the driven ghosts of them that flee before all things.
Oblivion is the name of this abode: and she is there.
And just for funsies, having made it this far, I’d like to show off Ozymandius, one of my favorite poems. Shelley is by no means a modernist, but, at this point, who cares?:
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Ozymandius
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
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