10 Poems I Like

Poems discussed on this episode include:

1. "Are They Shadows" by Samuel Daniel
2. "To Heaven" by Ben Jonson
3. "The Kraken" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
4. "Aspecta Medusa" by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
5. Sonnet VII by George Santayana
6. "Rock and Hawk" by Robinson Jeffers
7. "What Are Years" by Marianne Moore
8. "My Son, My Executioner" by Donald Hall
9. "Drought" by Catherine Chandler (see show transcript for text)
10. "Elegy" by John Dunn Smith

Transcript

Versecraft 6-5: “10 Poems I Like” 

Welcome back or to Versecraft ladies and gentlemen, I hope you’ve been having a lovely week. I have a bit of news which I know is going to disappoint some of you, and perhaps relieve others of you: I’ve decided, at least for now, to start releasing episodes every two weeks. I love putting the show together for you every week, but it really eats away at my time to do other things which I feel like I’ve been neglecting. I don’t read books, write poetry, or even submit work nearly as much as I’d like to, and while making this show has enriched me as a poet in innumerable ways, I also don’t want it to overwhelm other aspects of my literary life which are just as important to me. Having a little bit more free time will also allow me to do a couple of other crucial things: firstly, to grow the show a bit by increasing my social media presence, merch options, and uploading my existing episodes to Youtube; and secondly, to look for a new job in the next few months. Don’t worry, I wasn’t fired. In fact, the story is an exciting one: my fiancée Laura got into the PhD program for Art History at Northwestern, so the two of us will be moving to Chicago in late July. If any of you have tips regarding people that I should reach out to in the literary scene or academic world, please don’t hesitate to email me at versecraftpodcast@gmail.com. Thanks! 

In order to atone for my cutback on the episodes, and to prove to you that I’m very far from running out of ideas— indeed I’m verily brimming with them— I decided to make today’s episode extra fun by including not one, not two, but ten different poems and poets, none of whom have been featured on the show before. As such, this will be more of an appreciation episode than an analysis episode, but I hope it gives you a little bit extra of what I know many people come to the show for, the thrill of discovery. An episode like this also allows me to feature poems that I really enjoy and admire, but that are either too short, too straightforward, or just too plainspoken to devote a full episode to. I hope you enjoy. We’ll begin in chronological order by birthdate of the poet. 

Our first poet is Samuel Daniel, who lived from 1562 to 1619. Daniel is one of those highly talented Renaissance poets, like Michael Drayton, Phineas Fletcher, George Gascoigne, Fulke Greville, or George Chapman, whom we would probably remember better if they were not competing with such a ridiculously strong and flashy crop of poetic talent which included Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and John Donne. Daniel was prolific and versatile, and was known in his day as a composer of Senecan tragedy, pastoral idylls, court masques, and Petrarchan sonnets. Our poem for today is a song from one of Daniel’s masques entitled Tethys’ Festival. It is often printed in isolation and is known by its first line: “Are They Shadows.” It goes like this:

Are they shadows that we see?

And can shadows pleasure give?

Pleasures only shadows be

Cast by bodies we conceive

And are made the things we deem

In those figures which they seem.

But these pleasures vanish fast

Which by shadows are expressed;

Pleasures are not, if they last;

In their passing is their best.

Glory is most bright and gay

In a flash, and so away.

Feed apace then, greedy eyes,

On the wonder you behold;

Take it sudden as it flies,

Though you take it not to hold.

When your eyes have done their part,

Thought must length it in the heart.

In this trochaic tetrameter song, we have the typical carpe diem theme, but we also have quite a bit more than that. We have the Platonic imagery of the world as shadows which is extended to a radical form of philosophical idealism: even our bodies are mind-dependent. The claim that earthly pleasures are “only shadows” not only suggests their insubstantiality and fleetingness, but that they are pale reflections of the greater, more substantial pleasure of the divine. We have the psychological truth that “pleasures are not, if they last,” and that their fleetingness is part of what makes them pleasurable. Finally, we have the poignant observation that pleasures may only last through the power of memory and imagination, the pleasure itself but a jumping off point for delicious cogitation. Elegant, sonorous, and searingly intelligent, this poem makes many of Shakespeare’s songs look downright ditzy by comparison. 

Next up, we have a man who was a rival to Daniel in masques, a rival to Shakespeare in comedy, and the pen behind one of the clearest, purest, most influential poetic styles in English: Ben Jonson. Jonson, who lived from 1572 to 1637, was the most popular and respected poet of his day, surpassing even his buddy Shakespeare. A rigorous Classicist, he was capable of evoking Horatian charm in his lyrics, Juvenalian viciousness in his satirical comedies, and the social critique of Tacitus in his tragedies. More than this, he was, in his most serious moments, capable of a clear-eyed, plainspoken, dignified sincerity of utterance nearly unmatched in English poetry, as seen most famously in his short elegies for his deceased children. Here, I’d like to offer his finest and most vulnerable devotional poem, “To Heaven.” It goes like this:

Good and great God, can I not think of thee

But it must straight my melancholy be?

Is it interpreted in me disease

That, laden with my sins, I seek for ease?

Oh be thou witness, that the reins dost know

And hearts of all, if I be sad for show,

And judge me after; if I dare pretend

To ought but grace or aim at other end.

As thou art all, so be thou all to me,

First, midst, and last, converted one, and three;

My faith, my hope, my love; and in this state

My judge, my witness, and my advocate.

Where have I been this while exil'd from thee?

And whither rap'd, now thou but stoop'st to me?

Dwell, dwell here still. O, being everywhere,

How can I doubt to find thee ever here?

I know my state, both full of shame and scorn,

Conceiv'd in sin, and unto labour borne,

Standing with fear, and must with horror fall,

And destin'd unto judgment, after all.

I feel my griefs too, and there scarce is ground

Upon my flesh t' inflict another wound.

Yet dare I not complain, or wish for death

With holy Paul, lest it be thought the breath

Of discontent; or that these prayers be

For weariness of life, not love of thee.

Jonson expresses his struggle with what we may tend to view as very modern problems: depression, and distance from God. There is pathos in Jonson’s prayer for God to cleave close to him—he does not doubt God’s existence, but he still suffers from what he feels to be God’s absence. Nevertheless, he does not lash out in anger, petulance, or self-pity, but rises to the occasion to declare the purity of his intentions and his willingness to bear his lot despite his sadness. Here, the purity of spirit matches the purity of style, and the effect is not only touching, but beautiful and inspiring. 

Let us now take an enormous, over two hundred year leap, passing over Milton, Dryden, the Augustans, and the original Romantics, to land at the most Victorian of Victorian poets: Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Tennyson, who lived from 1809 to 1892, was to English poetry what Queen Victoria herself was to the English nation: the icon, the standard. He embodied the position of poet laureate as no one had before or has since, and like his American equivalent, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, his popularity and cultural magnitude was so potent and ubiquitous within his sphere that it makes someone like Taylor Swift pale by comparison. 

Often, absurdly popular figures like this are tossed onto the trash heap of history after their deaths, but it was not so with Tennyson, who happened to actually be a very fine poet. At his worst, he could be bland, vague, sentimental, jingoistic, and airheaded, but he was also capable of profound sensitivity, poignancy, and imagination. More than anything though, he had an absolute hell of an ear. Indeed, Tennyson’s ability to put the sounds of words together in a satisfying way is rivaled only by the likes of Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, and Wallace Stevens, and Tennyson may be the most melodious of all. I mentioned in a previous episode that Tennyson was occasionally inspired by the purely descriptive poetics of the Parnassians, and gave “The Eagle” as an example. Here, I’d like to represent him by another Parnassian piece, his awesome and very metal poem, “The Kraken.” It goes like this:

Below the thunders of the upper deep,
 Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
 His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
 The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
 About his shadowy sides; above him swell
 Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
 And far away into the sickly light,
 From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
 Unnumbered and enormous polypi
 Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
 There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
 Battening upon huge sea worms in his sleep,
 Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
 Then once by man and angels to be seen,
 In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

In an age when poetry was often recited aloud, and television didn’t exist, you can see why Tennyson was so popular. That poem is just an experience, and is without a doubt square one for Lovecraft’s concept of Cthulhu. 

If Tennyson was the institution, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the archetypal bad boy bohemian of the Victorian age. Like William Blake, he was both a poet and a painter, and he founded what was perhaps the very first avant-garde movement in the visual arts, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The Pre-Raphaelites sought to move painting away from the neoclassical academic style based on Raphael and toward an art of vivid color, lush natural detail, and pseudo-medieval fantasy and mysticism. In the process, they not only created a good deal of dreamily gorgeous art but laid the foundations for the Symbolist and Art Nouveau movements, which would in turn usher in what we know as Modernism. 

Whereas Blake created artworks to accompany his poems, Rossetti usually wrote poems to accompany his art. Such is the raison d’etre of the epigram I am about to read, which was written to accompany a sketch of Perseus and Andromeda looking at a reflection of Medusa’s head in a pool of water, a subject which fellow Pre-Raph Edward Burne-Jones would later treat more thoroughly and effectively in his own painting, “The Baleful Head.” Rossetti’s poem and painting are entitled “Aspecta Medusa,” and the poem goes like this: 

Andromeda, by Perseus sav’d and wed,
 Hanker’d each day to see the Gorgon’s head:
 Till o’er a fount he held it, bade her lean,
 And mirror’d in the wave was safely seen
 That death she liv’d by.

Let not thine eyes know
 Any forbidden thing itself, although
 It once should save as well as kill: but be
 Its shadow upon life enough for thee.

            The thought structure here is almost brutally simplistic: here’s a situation, and here’s the moral we can draw from it. What makes it memorable however is that the moral is strange and not entirely clear, but nevertheless intimates profundity. That is the Symbolist method at work. Can we think of anything in our own lives which is forbidden, and which saves as well as kills? The poem is a kind of riddle for the reader—what is our equivalent of Medusa’s Head? The most obvious answer of course is the Divine Presence, and if so, we can think of Rossetti as responding to Daniel’s poem: let its shadow upon life be enough for thee. The poem, however, is open-ended. Sin, for instance, may be another solution. It is up to you to answer for yourself. 

            “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” “Only the dead have seen the end of war.” “Fanaticism is redoubling your efforts after you’ve forgotten your aim.” Sound familiar? Those well-known idioms were first spoken by our next poet, George Santayana. Like Rossetti, Santayana, who lived from 1863 to 1952, was a bit of a Renaissance man—he is much more famous as a philosopher and, in his day, as a bestselling novelist, than a poet. He was an illustrious professor at Harvard, and his students included such luminaries as T.S. Eliot, Conrad Aiken, W.E.B. Dubois, and Gertrude Stein. He was also a friend and mentor to Wallace Stevens, who was deeply inspired by Santayana’s aesthetic philosophy, and whose late poem, “To An Old Philosopher In Rome,” is dedicated to him. 

Influenced by his friend William James, Santayana’s philosophy is of the pragmatist school, but his favorite philosopher was always Spinoza, and while he often argued for a materialist position, his interest in spirituality could never be extinguished. His mystical yearnings are reflected in the following sonnet, the seventh in a series, but usually identified by its first line: “I Would I Might Forget That I Am I.” The poem goes like this: 

I would I might forget that I am I,

And break the heavy chain that binds me fast,

Whose links about myself my deeds have cast.

What in the body’s tomb doth buried lie

Is boundless; ’tis the spirit of the sky,

Lord of the future, guardian of the past,

And soon must forth, to know his own at last.

In his large life to live, I fain would die.

Happy the dumb beast, hungering for food,

But calling not his suffering his own;

Blessèd the angel, gazing on all good,

But knowing not he sits upon a throne;

Wretched the mortal, pondering his mood,

And doomed to know his aching heart alone.

Far from modernist atheism, the beliefs expressed here are downright Hindu: not only do bodies contain souls, but these souls are themselves fragments of the godhead which will eventually be reunited with their source. The sestet takes a self-pitying and frankly unoriginal turn: a human is one caught in the uniquely unpleasant position between angel and beast, whose knowledge is a curse because of his limitations. For a counter-argument, see C.S. Lewis’s poem, “On Being Human.” 

Nevertheless, I have a soft spot for this poem, as it eloquently expresses the thoughts and angsts of many a young philosopher, as I was when I first discovered it. When I first started dipping my toe into verse, Santayana showed me that there was a place for overt philosophizing in poetry. He even wrote a book on this subject, entitled “Three Philosophical Poets,” which is a study of Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe. Years after first reading this poem, lines from it continue to ring in my brain from time to time. 

Our next writer was not a professional philosopher, but his work is nothing if not dominated by an idiosyncratic, in his case infamous, worldview. I am speaking of Robinson Jeffers, who lived from 1867 to 1962, and whose legacy is profoundly ambiguous. On the one hand, his fierce devotion to environmentalism was many decades ahead of his time, and his warnings of the dangers human technologies posed to our natural environment was both groundbreaking and inspirational to many subsequent activists. On the other hand, he was so scornful of humanity as a species that he gleefully looked forward to the day when we would all destroy each other and leave nature once again to its own devices. Very popular in the twenties and thirties, Jeffers fell into disgrace when his reaction to World War II was to essentially proclaim that Hitler and Stalin were on the same moral footing as Roosevelt and Churchill, and that the only sane thing to do was to sit back and derive aesthetic appreciation from watching them kill each other. Needless to say, this point of view is morally untenable and repugnant, and it makes much of Jeffers’ work, which can already be preachy and repetitive, suffer all the more. I say “work” and not “poetry” because Jeffers, despite a deep classical education and a taste for biblical cadences, never wrote in any consistent meter. 

So why do I bring him up? Because despite everything, I find him fascinating. He is practically obsessed with the sublimity of nature, the transcendent beauty of the world despite its horror, the grand, tragic sense of life, and stoic dignity in the face of death, all of which are precisely up my alley. I am intrigued and disturbed to find him such a kindred spirit in some ways and so intolerable in other ways. Regardless of his ultimate intellectual and artistic merit, he is a figure of undeniable power and personality who challenges us to consider the world from a perspective that is inhumanely beyond good and evil. 

The lyric I’ve chosen by him is one which avoids both obnoxious pontification and Whitmanian diffuseness. It’s catchily titled “Rock and Hawk,” and it goes like this: 

Here is a symbol in which

Many high tragic thoughts

Watch their own eyes.

This gray rock, standing tall

On the headland, where the seawind

Lets no tree grow,

Earthquake-proved, and signatured

By ages of storms: on its peak

A falcon has perched.

I think, here is your emblem

To hang in the future sky;

Not the cross, not the hive,

But this; bright power, dark peace;

Fierce consciousness joined with final

Disinterestedness;

Life with calm death; the falcon's 

Realist eyes and act

Married to the massive

Mysticism of stone,

Which failure cannot cast down

Nor success make proud.

This fusion of the falcon and the stone, of fierce consciousness with final disinterestedness, is indeed a powerful image, and an attractive spiritual ideal—but it is barbaric and incomplete without a human heart to negotiate the heights and depths. 

Another writer who wasn’t afraid to sermonize from time to time was Marianne Moore. Moore, who lived from 1887 to 1972, is, excluding the borderline cases of Frost and Yeats, the last major Modernist poet whom I haven’t yet discussed on the show. While she clearly adapted techniques from Imagism and Poundian High Modernism, she was more or less a school of one: her quirky poems, which are full of precise natural description, collage-like fragmentation, and puckish commentary, and which are often organized according to intricate syllabic schemes, derive from a decidedly unique style and sensibility. Judged by her overall body of work, the following poem is disarmingly straightforward and rhetorical. It is one of her most famous, so you may already know it. It is called “What Are Years,” and it goes like this:

What is our innocence,

what is our guilt? All are

        naked, none is safe. And whence

is courage: the unanswered question,

the resolute doubt—

dumbly calling, deafly listening—that

in misfortune, even death,

        encourages others

        and in its defeat, stirs

        the soul to be strong? He

sees deep and is glad, who 

        accedes to mortality

and in his imprisonment, rises

upon himself as

the sea in a chasm, struggling to be

free and unable to be,

        in its surrendering

        finds its continuing. 

        So he who strongly feels,

behaves. The very bird,

        grown taller as he sings, steels

his form straight up. Though he is captive,

his mighty singing

says, satisfaction is a lowly

thing, how pure a thing is joy.

        This is mortality,

        this is eternity.

This may sound like free verse, but each nine line stanza is in fact organized according to a symmetrical syllable count of 6-6-7-9-5-9-7-6-6. This is what neurodivergence looks like, folks. This intricately organized mixed meter is reminiscent of Greek choruses, and the poem itself, which has no argument but is merely a grand declaration of a preferred attitude, has the naïve, plainspoken quality of archaic poetry. The phrase “he sees deep and is glad who” is a variation on a rhetorical construction known as makarismos in Ancient Greek poetry: “Happy is the man who does X.” Though I have my doubts about whether the triumph at the end of the poem is earned or convincing, I applaud the stoic spirit and Moore’s attempt to imbue her work with an ancient choral sensibility, something I often attempt to do in my own work.

Donald Hall, who lived from 1928 to 2018, continued to write well-received lyrics and essays well into his eighties, and so current generations know him best as a kind of sagely elder statesman of poetry, as well as the husband of Jane Kenyon. What many may not know, unless they’ve listened to last week’s episode or read Hall’s intriguing memoir, Their Ancient Glittering Eyes, is that when he was a young man he studied for a single year with Yvor Winters. Winters and Hall often butted heads in class, usually over whether a Yeats poem was great or not, but they achieved a mutual respect, and for a short while Hall wrote poems which passed the muster of Wintersian rigor. It is little wonder, to me at least, that he produced at least one of his best poems during this time, entitled “My Son, My Executioner.” It goes like this: 

My son, my executioner
 I take you in my arms
 Quiet and small and just astir
 and whom my body warms
 
 Sweet death, small son, 
 our instrument of immortality,
 your cries and hunger document
 our bodily decay.
 
 We twenty two and twenty five,
 who seemed to live forever,
 observe enduring life in you
 and start to die together.

This is one of those rare poems that hits upon a compelling thought that is both original yet instantly understandable, and perhaps even more rather than less moving given the tender age of the one who speaks it. It is not only about the recognition of mortality, but about the shock of the end of youth, which is something related but with its own kind of pain. The ambivalence of childbearing—the joy and the anxiety, the longing for immortality and the recognition of obsolescence, are elegantly handled in this brief poem. It reminds me of some of the best work of Matthew Buckley Smith. One curiosity is that while the second stanza adheres to the common meter established, the lines are not broken to reflect it. Perhaps Hall cared more about maintaining a consistent typographic shape than a consistent pattern of metrical lineation. 

We now move to poets who still live and breathe. This next one is by Catherine Chandler, a Canadian poet born in 1950, a winner of the Richard Wilbur Award and the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, and a well-known figure in the formal poetry scene. When reading the Able Muse Anthology, I was struck by her poem entitled “Drought,” and it has lingered in my mind ever since. The poem was written while Cathy was visiting the town of Saladillo in Argentina. For context, a chimango is a kind of falcon, a leveret is a baby hare, and a carancho is a kind of scavenger bird. Once again, the poem is called “Drought,” and it goes like this: 

Above our field of stunted corn and thistle,

A lone chimango circles, scouts, homes in

As sure and swift and savage as a missile,

Pins down a leveret, rips away its skin,

Ignores the terror-stricken eyes, the squeal,

Devours the pulsing heart. His thirst now slaked,

He leaves the rest for a carancho’s meal. 

The land is quivering, crumbling, cracked and caked,

The stream a silent checkerboard of mud,

The well near dry. I pray this lack of water

Won’t leave me stony at the sight of blood,

Of rational, inexorable slaughter. 

What begins as a vivid, objective description of nature’s savagery ala the Parnassians is transformed into a moral insight, and a prayer. Almost in defiance of Robinson Jeffers, Chandler begs not to become stony and pitiless, not to have her heart devoured, like the leveret’s, by cruelty. Of course, there is no risk that a thirsty Catherine will go out and rip apart a baby rabbit with her bare hands, but as we know from the history of human warfare and survival situations, exposure to cruelty and the deprivation of essential resources can dehumanize us quickly. Even when we know that slaughter is rational and inexorable, to accept this truth completely, as Jeffers or Yeats or some mystics would have us do, is to lose a crucial part of what it means to be human—it deadens rather than enriches our experience of life. Human beings must always exist in a state of tension with the ways of the world, employing our intelligence and our will to reshape nature according to the moral vision we have been given. This is the ideal project of civilization. 

I’d like to close with a beautiful, devastating poem by John Dunn Smith. Smith, whom I estimate was born in 1963, has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and has released six books of poetry as well as one novel. While known for his mastery of light verse, he is also more than capable of hard-hitting gravity, as this sonnet will indicate. It is simply titled “Elegy,” and it goes like this:

We weren’t allowed the time to contemplate
 What talents he in time might come to show,
 What fame or wealth he might accumulate,
 What love and other passions he might know.
 
 We had, instead, the chance to see him crawl
 And graduate to solid food, to take
 Some wobbling steps that ended in a fall,
 To hand an uncle’s dog a piece of cake.
 
 To say more is to claim a flare’s bright arc
 Could have reached high, though it had scarcely flown
 Before dissolving in the larger dark.
 We fall back on the facts, which stand alone.
 
 He seldom cried. He used to point at birds.
 And now he will be missed beyond all words.

This is breathtaking. It sounds simple, but it would be so so easy to write this poem wrongly. So easy to slip into grotesque sentimentality. But Smith treats horrific grief and loss with the dignity and compassion they deserve, and expresses them in the quietly overwhelmed, rationalizing way that we do when processing such unthinkable emotions in public. The poem is not only heartbreaking, but is heartbreaking because it is a masterclass in the proper calibration of tone and emotion to a subject. 

That’s a somber note to end on, but I hope you’ve enjoyed this idiosyncratic odyssey through poems and poets, and that you’ve discovered at least one that you like—if you have, then I have succeeded. I’ll talk to you guys soon, and keep that verse in your universe, baby. As I hope I’ve shown, it helps you live more.