The Darkling Thrush

Thomas Hardy

The perfect poem for New Year’s Eve, 2020

I leant upon a coppice gate

      When Frost was spectre-grey,

And Winter’s dregs made desolate

      The weakening eye of day.

The tangled bine-stems scored the sky

      Like strings of broken lyres,

And all mankind that haunted nigh

      Had sought their household fires.

.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be

      The Century’s corpse outleant,

His crypt the cloudy canopy,

      The wind his death-lament.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth

      Was shrunken hard and dry,

And every spirit upon earth

      Seemed fervourless as I.

.

At once a voice arose among

      The bleak twigs overhead

In a full-hearted evensong

      Of joy illimited;

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,

      In blast-beruffled plume,

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

      Upon the growing gloom.

.

So little cause for carolings

      Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

      Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through

      His happy good-night air

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

      And I was unaware.

Click here to listen to Barte Wolffe read “The Darkling Thrush”

Click here to read an excellent essay about this poem

A Poet Who Wrote the Way Abstract Expressionists Painted

Barbara Guest stands apart as a radical traditionalist, committed to poetry’s clairvoyant, mythical potentials.

by Tim Keane

Recalling her early days in New York, poet Barbara Guest relates a painter friend’s comment on a poem-in-progress visible only from its title on the otherwise blank page: “Never give a poem a title,” the painter warned her, “let the poem find its subject.” 

This advice, related in the essay “Wounded Joy” from Guest’s Forces of Imagination: Writing on Writing (2003), reinforced the poet’s instincts, as Guest turned to a practice that involves “no preplanning,” a poetry motivated, like the canvases of Abstract Expressionists, by the “spontaneous” and geared toward “movement” rather than representation. In those New York days, she collaborated with like-minded painters, including Mary Abbott, Grace Hartigan, and Sheila Isham — and these artists created work in response to her poetry. Her involvement in that storied clique has long been a cornerstone in a career that carried her far beyond that milieu.

Read the complete article

The View

Philip Larkin

The view is fine from fifty,

        Experienced climbers say;

So, overweight and shifty,

        I turn to face the way

        That led me to this day.

.

Instead of fields and snowcaps

        And flowered lanes that twist,

The track breaks at my toe-caps

       And drops away in mist.

       The view does not exist.

.

Where has it gone, the lifetime?

        Search me. What’s left is drear.

Unchilded and unwifed, I’m

        Able to view that clear:

        So final. And so near.

Caught in time’s current

In an exclusive new poem and essay Margaret Atwood reflects on the passing of time and how to create lasting art in a rapidly changing world

I can say with a measure of certainty – having consulted my poor excuse for a journal – that my poem “Dearly” was written in the third week of August 2017, on a back street of Stratford, Ontario, Canada, with either a pencil or a rollerball (I’d have to check that) on some piece of paper that may have been anything from an old envelope to a shopping list to a notebook page; I’d have to check that as well, but I’m guessing notebook. The language is early 21st-century Canadian English, which accounts for the phrase “less of a shit”, which would never have been used in, for instance, Tennyson’s “In Memoriam AHH”; though something like it might have appeared in one of Chaucer’s more vernacular tales – “lesse of a shitte”, perhaps. This poem was then taken out of a drawer, its handwriting more or less deciphered by me, and typed as a digital document in December 2017. I know that part from the date and time identifier on the document.

Read the complete essay and poem