Dear March – Come in

Emily Dickinson

Dear March – Come in –
How glad I am –
I hoped for you before –
Put down your Hat –
You must have walked –
How out of Breath you are –
Dear March, how are you, and the Rest –
Did you leave Nature well –
Oh March, Come right upstairs with me –
I have so much to tell –
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I got your Letter, and the Birds –
The Maples never knew that you were coming –
I declare – how Red their Faces grew –        
But March, forgive me –
And all those Hills you left for me to Hue –
There was no Purple suitable –
You took it all with you –
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Who knocks? That April –
Lock the Door –
I will not be pursued –
He stayed away a Year to call
When I am occupied –        
But trifles look so trivial
As soon as you have come
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That blame is just as dear as Praise
And Praise as mere as Blame –

READING ALOUD WITH OTHERS IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN YOU THINK

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SOCIAL READING

By Abigail Williams

On 15 April 1802, Dorothy and William Wordsworth took one of the most significant walks in literary history. They set out in blustery weather, across the fells near Ullswater in the Lake District. It was misty and mild, with a strong wind, and the first signs of spring were emerging in the hedgerows. Passing Gowbarrow Park, they saw a few wild daffodils, and then as they walked along, they discovered a whole belt of them, almost as broad as a road. Dorothy’s journal entry reads:
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I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about & about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness & the rest tossed & reeled & danced & seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the Lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing.
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Brother and sister continued their walk and later found refuge in a tavern, where they enjoyed a robust meal of ham and potatoes. After supper, Dorothy recounts: “William was sitting by a bright fire when I came downstairs. He soon made his way to the Library piled up in a corner of the window. He brought out a volume of Enfield’s Speaker, another miscellany, & an odd volume of Congreve’s plays. We had a glass of warm rum & water—we enjoyed ourselves & wished for Mary.”
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Excerpted from THE SOCIAL LIFE OF BOOKS: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home by Abigail Williams.

The Moon And The Yew Tree

Sylvia Plath

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary

The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.

The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God

Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility

Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place.

Separated from my house by a row of headstones.

I simply cannot see where there is to get to.
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The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,

White as a knuckle and terribly upset.

It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet

With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.

Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky —-

Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection

At the end, they soberly **** out their names.
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The yew tree points up, it has a Gothic shape.

The eyes lift after it and find the moon.

The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.

Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.

How I would like to believe in tenderness —-

The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,

Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.
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I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering

Blue and mystical over the face of the stars

Inside the church, the saints will all be blue,

Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,

Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.

The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.

And the message of the yew tree is blackness — blackness and silence
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Read A Short Analysis of Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’

Letters from a Young Poet

The final correspondence of Sylvia Plath

EMILY COOKE

STEADILY ACCUMULATING over the fifty-six years since Sylvia Plath’s death, the abundance of books, scholarship, reportage, gossip, and errata about the poet (not to mention material to do with her husband, Ted Hughes, or the adjacent subfield that has grown up around Assia Wevill, the woman for whom Hughes left Plath) can seem excessive. The uninitiated may be excused for not comprehending the reason for it all. Everyone else may be forgiven for their fatigue.
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The diehards, of course, make no apology. The devotee, the obsessive, is perpetually and unapologetically hungry for anything that will provide a more complete understanding of the life as much as the art, a chance of more comprehensive identification. With Plath, the feeling is unaffected by the quantity of material, which, though vast, was for many years limited: The diaries were abridged, the letters selected. The poems are only so many poems. Hughes admitted in an early introduction to Plath’s journals to misplacing or destroying their final volumes (he was fuzzy on the details)—the pages, in other words, that Plath wrote during the last months of her life, and the account that promised, to the appetitive student of her biography, some answer for how and why we lost her. For all that has been written by and about Plath, the whole picture was not available, and you were forced to piece it together.
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Sunday Morning

Louis Macneice

Down the road someone is practising scales,

The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails,

Man’s heart expands to tinker with his car

For this is Sunday morning, Fate’s great bazaar;

Regard these means as ends, concentrate on this Now,
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And you may grow to music or drive beyond Hindhead anyhow,

Take corners on two wheels until you go so fast

That you can clutch a fringe or two of the windy past,

That you can abstract this day and make it to the week of time

A small eternity, a sonnet self-contained in rhyme.
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But listen, up the road, something gulps, the church spire

Open its eight bells out, skulls’ mouths which will not tire

To tell how there is no music or movement which secures

Escape from the weekday time. Which deadens and endures.

Poetry and the Revolution of Being: Jane Hirshfield on How Great Art Transforms Us

“Why ask art into a life at all, if not to be transformed and enlarged by its presence and mysterious means?… And by changing selves, one by one, art changes also the outer world that selves create and share.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

Few cups hold life more sturdily and splendidly than poetry. Understanding the wellspring of magic that grants the poetic form its power can only be done, must only be done, by plumbing the deepest groundwater from which all great art springs and tracing the rivulets that slake the most eternal thirsts of the human spirit.
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That is what Jane Hirshfield, who composes poems of contemplative beauty and unquiet wakefulness and who has limned the inner work of creativity with uncommon insight, accomplishes in Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (public library). She frames the guiding spirit of her inquiry:

“How do poems — how does art — work? Under that question, inevitably, is another: How do we?”

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In Another Country

Stephen Dunn

 

Poetry and Action: Octavio Paz at 100

Joel Whitney

When protest movements spread through cities around the world in 1968, Octavio Paz looked upon the “great youth rebellions . . . from afar,” he wrote, “with astonishment and with hope.” The poet was then Mexico’s ambassador to India. He escaped the summer heat of New Delhi into the foothills of the Himalayas, following developments on the radio. Soon, he learned that Mexico had joined the rebellions. Mexico would host the Olympics in October. As protests grew entrenched, and students threatened to disrupt the games, government repression intensified. On October 2, hundreds of student protesters were killed at Mexico’s City’s Tlatelolco Plaza. Hearing the grim news, Ambassador Paz’s response was a swift vote of no confidence, a letter of unambiguous dissent. It was, as he described the rebellions themselves, the merging of poetry and action, a merger he constantly craved.
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Paz was poetry’s great universalist. Winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature, he absorbed many of the great movements of the twentieth century: Marxism, surrealism, the European avant garde. Early in the Spanish Civil War, he tried his hand at social realism, and he admired North American poetry, especially Whitman, Pound, Eliot, and Williams. His ambassadorship to India in the 1960s introduced him to the pillars of Hindu and Buddhist thought.

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Old Paintings On Italian Walls

By Kathleen Raine

Who could have thought that men and women could feel,

With consciousness so delicate, such tender secret joy?

With finger-tips of touch as fine as music,

They greet one another on viols of painted gold

Attuned to harmonies of world with world.

They sense, with inward look and breath withheld,

The stir of intangible presences

Upon the threshold of the human heart alighting––

Angels winged with air, with transparent light,

Archangels with wings of fire and faces veiled.

Their eyes gleam with wisdom radiant from an invisible sun.
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Others contemplate the mysteries of sorrow:

Some have carried the stigmata, themselves icons

Depicting a passion no man as man can know,

We being ignorant of what we do;

And painted wounded hands are by the same knowledge formed

Beyond the ragged ache that flesh can bear

And we with blunted mind and senses dulled endure.

Giotto’s compassionate eyes, rapt in sympathy of grief,

See the soul’s wounds that hate has given to love,

And those that love must bear

With the spirit that suffers always and everywhere.
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Those painted shapes stilled in perpetual adoration

Behold in visible form invisible essences

That hold their gaze entranced through centuries; and we

In true miraculous icons may see still what they see,

Though the sacred lineaments grow faint, the outlines crumble,

And the golden heavens grow dim

Where the Pantocrator shows in vain wounds once held precious.

Paint and stone will not hold them to our world

When those who once cast their bright shadows on those walls

Have faded from our ken, we from their knowledge fallen.

PLATO’S POETRY

A review of Exiling the Poets: The Production of Censorship in Plato’s Republic, by Ramona A. Naddaff

Ramona Naddaff’s reading of Plato’s Republic explicitly challenges two simple but nevertheless common, and therefore powerful, objections to the treatment of poetry in this dialogue. First, there is the liberal objection virtually every teacher of the Republic encounters from one or more students: Socrates advocates censorship of poetry, and censorship is bad. Socrates and his proposals for the reform of the “feverish” unjust city are therefore also bad. Naddaff, a professor in the Department of Rhetoric at University of California, Berkeley, agrees with these critics that censorship should be decried. Nevertheless, she points out, Socrates’ treatment of poetry in Books 2-3 of the Republic recognizes the power of poetic discourse to shape the characters (or souls) of those who listen to it, as liberal toleration of every form of speech does not. In “disciplining” that power by expunging all the elements that work against the inculcation of the virtues of courage and moderation in the guardians, Socrates’ “censorship” actually results in a purification of Homer that makes epic poetry, better and less ambiguously, serve its traditional aim of fostering the heroic virtues.
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Naddaff crosses swords more directly and unqualifiedly with philosophical commentators like Francis Cornford, Benjamin Jowett, Paul Shorey, and Julia Annas, who suggest that the discussion of poetry in Book 10 adds nothing essential to the argument. Rather than an irrelevant addition, she argues, the reincorporation of poetry in the “myth of Er” at the end constitutes a new definition of philosophy. Because it takes a “myth” to arouse the desire that animates and sustains philosophy as a search for wisdom, poetry and philosophy are necessarily intertwined. After attempting first to restrict and then to negate the power of poetry, Naddaff argues, Socrates finally produces a new form of philosophical-poetic discourse.
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