1269 Arts and sciences poems

Here lies Jonson with the rest Of the poets; but the best. Reader, would’st thou more have known? Ask his story, not this stone. That will speak what this can’t tell Of his glory. So farewell.

A battle lost in the cornfields and in the sky a victory. Birds, the sun and birds again. By night, what will be left of me? By night, only a row of lamps, a wall of yellow clay that shines, and down the garden, through the trees, like candles in a row, the panes; there I dwelt once and dwell no longer— I can't live where I once lived, though the roof there used to cover me. Lord, you covered me long ago.

After Hieronymus Bosch, “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” triptych right panel But all dark notes are dismantled there from the middle ear downward. Voyaged mind, cauldron skin. Can you claim anything is yours? The burning salt hour throws its black broken-glass frame skyward. Left behind the mum orchestra, body parts in peril and animals dizzy for lust past all lost astronomy and wipeout, this naked edible overjoy, a kind of suicide in syllables, fifth panic, fourth stall’s birds-fermata, this half ocean’s susurrus is coming over us in the picture. Can you akin? Can you hear it, pinned to the unseasonable underearth, an option for music and water constantly changing shape, an answer in dissonance? To hear desire is to wake yourself inside, upturned, long enough to know tomorrow is exile. Chaos, body harp, and painted butt music, crowd-crawl, rose crowned to the chest, rabbit call and playing cards    ...    listen, I’m hell-humming in your direction, giddy, I am too taken to leave it alone, the will locked in as if it is already inside of me now: to fall. Let’s be clear, my darling, in the reeling crave, spilled gut-platter of enclosed bones, in the final flesh-clean drop, it sounds like fire rising with the cliff’s updraft.

let me get the vocabulary of this song right—the curious happiness of poetry— the word materialism dropped by the way side—its mereness of the other face of spiritualism—just two notes to sing— repetitious dualism— do — do —once in a while one squawks louder than the other, baby crows being weaned before the next batch— thus, singing, move from how it does matter— Oh!—a murder of crows 1998

That poets are far rarer births than kings Your noblest father proved; like whom before, Or then, or since, about our Muses’ springs, Came not that soul exhausted so their store. Hence was it that the destinies decreed (Save that most masculine issue of his brain) No male unto him; who could so exceed Nature, they thought, in all that he would fain. At which she, happily displeased, made you, On whom, if he were living now to look, He should those rare and absolute numbers view, As he would burn or better far his book.

Dear Emily, my tears would burn your page, But for the fire-dry line that makes them burn— Burning my eyes, my fingers, while I turn Singly the words that crease my heart with age. If I could make some tortured pilgrimage Through words or Time or the blank pain of Doom And kneel before you as you found your tomb, Then I might rise to face my heritage. Yours was an empty upland solitude Bleached to the powder of a dying name; The mind, lost in a word’s lost certitude That faded as the fading footsteps came To trace an epilogue to words grown odd In that hard argument which led to God.

You give me a little courage, Mary, in your skittish dedication to her highness; I too can dare as humbleness may dare; if there’s anywhere to speak with you, it’s here at the wordy Anglo-Saxon periphery of the universe’s one great surge of praise though I’m lost here. Where’s the joyful noise? the syllables I managed to memorize before they were weighted down by meaning? and what’s all this complicated rhyme? Don’t mistake me—I’m not complaining; it’s just not my notion of a psalm for all my love of wrought, elaborate things— especially when they’re the sort that sings and yours do sing a stunning song— but they’re off-kilter without the awe inherent in my ancient holy tongue. I miss my amen sela, hallelujah though I do applaud you and your brother— going for the full linguistic bait-and-switch in the move from one language to another: David’s disarmingly direct speech a tour-de-force of formal contrivance (no form repeated more than once in each of a hundred fifty psalms!) in your show-off/virtuoso hands. Talk about such a song in such a land— but what else is there in dreary England? Its sole extravagance a trove of synonyms that endlessly perplexes and expands its mongrel, unbeautiful tongue— a language, frankly, crying out for poetry given its absence, even, of integrity not to mention intrinsic song. . . . (Its sound: water going down the drain according to my friend, an Italian, after riding in a compartment of Americans gurgling all the way from Florence to Rome.) Why not a convoluted scheme of intricately wrought meter and rhyme? So what if the Hebrew has no strict patterns? Aim for a parallel sublime; aren’t poems for the impossible? Though perhaps yours wouldn’t have been written had you known how daunting their task was; you had no Hebrew, used the Coverdale, Wyatt, Geneva Bible, as cribs for Latin, even psaumes de David, mis en rime Françoise . . . Clearly, your secret weapon was ignorance, also useful (look at me!) in writing a poem, your psalms fourth- and fifth-hand half the time. Unless (of course!) your stroke of brilliance was to focus on the one thing you could do: Sing and let your song be new which they are, profoundly, even to me, who know so many bits of the originals of what you claim you’re “translating” by heart. Still, I’ll be reading along, alternately put off and spellbound by your art- ifice, when my wary eye suddenly falls on something both completely known and new, my own—our own—ungainly language for a brief instant alien with grace, a black-on-white typescript mirage in which English letters turn into Hebrew or at least intercept its holiness. . . . How did you manage it, Mary? Your contemporaries called it piety— but I don’t believe that for a second. What motivated you was love of poetry, or rather of your legendary brother—lost so young—whom you would spend your whole life working to immortalize. . . . I’m not sure he needed you. No lighter touch exists in English poetry than his . . . a touch you often managed to approach in your grief-induced lyric resolve to force a bit of him to stay alive. Poetry as solace, as wizardry— and there he is, with you, all the time, clearly palpable in all your artistry. It was your eagerness to be with him that kept you going back to intervene with yet one more indomitable line, got you through all hundred-fifty psalms. Or maybe it was just your poet’s ruse (poetry often thrives on self-delusion) to trick yourself to rise to his occasion. . . . Unless he just provided the excuse to stake your own (quite vast) poetic claims, impossible to say from this vantage point: to distinguish collaborator from muse, self-doubt from false humility but, then again, there’s a poetry in mystery. Who will contradict me if I confuse my own passions with yours—so convenient, inevitable?—in a poem like this— though you and I—despite the labyrinth of misapprehension, class, religion reinforcing our dissociation (Jew from Christian, commoner from countess, twenty-first-century from seventeenth) come together in passion upon passion (forgive me, Mary, if dare too far): psalms, poetic forms, your genius brother (I mean both the poet and the man; no poem could manufacture that much charm). We’ve even suffered from a kindred harm: my version, albeit, fairly mild, though I too was admonished as a child about what a woman dared not do. Still, I have a vast cohort, while you were almost entirely alone. Better yet, I had the complete Dickinson (published just a year before I was born); I didn’t know it yet, but I had you . . . while you had to ransack antiquity for even fragments of poems by a woman. But of course you weren’t troubled by inequity— it was, frankly, all you knew— you might even have relished your position as sole woman poet, thinker, patron— lonely as it was—though you did encourage your precocious niece, Mary (later Wroth). And who can really estimate the damage of your appalling bargain: a brother’s death required to turn you into poet? Of course, in your time, death was everywhere. Perhaps you were pious—a last resort to shore up an attenuated heart against even further disrepair, immersion in the psalms a sort of antidote to life’s massive overdose of pain: from living with a sad, disfigured mother (small-pox scars from nursing a sick queen) mourning her husband’s lost affection to deaths of favorites—your sister, your brother, your only daughters, Katherine, then Anne. God made this day; he did us send it In joy and mirth then let us spend it Excellent advice, if it would hold— And maybe it does, when you can summon all that air or life enfold to distract you with a binge of exaltation . . . or if that fails, then an assiduous extravaganza of sublime detail calibrated to provide the wherewithal to face a universe we cannot alter if not with joy and mirth, at least with grace: a perfect, hand-illuminated psalter, the loops of all its letters filled with gold— a treasure, even, for an exacting Queen— offering a deity who’ll listen to a voice alternately humble, bold, beseeching, thankful, ecstatic, bleak, through which (hallelujah, Mary!) you still speak.

Midway the hill of science, after steep And rugged paths that tire the unpractised feet, A grove extends; in tangled mazes wrought, And filled with strange enchantment: dubious shapes Flit through dim glades, and lure the eager foot Of youthful ardour to eternal chase. Dreams hang on every leaf: unearthly forms Glide through the gloom; and mystic visions swim Before the cheated sense. Athwart the mists, Far into vacant space, huge shadows stretch And seem realities; while things of life, Obvious to sight and touch, all glowing round, Fade to the hue of shadows. Scruples here, With filmy net, most like the autumnal webs Of floating gossamer, arrest the foot Of generous enterprise; and palsy hope And fair ambition with the chilling touch Of sickly hesitation and blank fear. Nor seldom Indolence these lawns among Fixes her turf-built seat; and wears the garb Of deep philosophy, and museful sits In dreamy twilight of the vacant mind, Soothed by the whispering shade; for soothing soft The shades; and vistas lengthening into air, With moonbeam rainbows tinted. Here each mind Of finer mould, acute and delicate, In its high progress to eternal truth Rests for a space, in fairy bowers entranced; And loves the softened light and tender gloom; And, pampered with most unsubstantial food, Looks down indignant on the grosser world, And matter’s cumbrous shapings. Youth beloved Of science — of the Muse beloved, — not here, Not in the maze of metaphysic lore, Build thou thy place of resting! Lightly tread The dangerous ground, on noble aims intent; And be this Circe of the studious cell Enjoyed, but still subservient. Active scenes Shall soon with healthful spirit brace thy mind; And fair exertion, for bright fame sustained, For friends, for country, chase each spleen-fed fog That blots the wide creation — Now heaven conduct thee with a parent’s love!

Poetry chooses choice things, carefully selecting select words, arranging, fabulously, things arranged. To put it differently is hard, if not out of the question. Poetry's like a clay plate. It's broken easily under the weight of all those poems. In the hands of the poet, it sings. In those of others, not only doesn't it sing, it's out of the question.

Whether on Ida's shady brow, Or in the chambers of the East, The chambers of the sun, that now From ancient melody have ceas'd; Whether in Heav'n ye wander fair, Or the green corners of the earth, Or the blue regions of the air, Where the melodious winds have birth; Whether on crystal rocks ye rove, Beneath the bosom of the sea Wand'ring in many a coral grove, Fair Nine, forsaking Poetry! How have you left the ancient love That bards of old enjoy'd in you! The languid strings do scarcely move! The sound is forc'd, the notes are few!