For A Poet -- Countee Cullen

Guest poem submitted by Sunil Iyengar:

(Poem #598) For A Poet I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth, And laid them away in a box of gold; Where long will cling the lips of the moth, I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth; I hide no hate, I am not even wroth Who found earth's breath so keen and cold; I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth, And laid them away in a box of gold. -- Countee Cullen

I nominate this poem as a companion to Yeats' "He Wishes for the Clothes of
Heaven" [1]. Cullen seems to have been a spirited elegist, generous enough
to acknowledge his debts (see "To John Keats, Poet at Springtime", "For Paul
Laurence Dunbar") and slightly incredulous of his vocation ("Yet I Do
Marvel"). His life was brief (1903-1946), but within it he triumphed:
earning honors at New York University and Harvard, publishing his first book
before graduation, then becoming a Harlem Renaissance figure. He spent his
last years teaching in the New York City public schools.

"For a Poet" basks in the Celtic twilight. Besides adhering to Yeats' lyric
in key respects -- eight lines long, both poems are in a loose tetrameter,
pondering the fragility of dreams, and stating "cloth" or "cloths" three
times each, normally at the end of a line -- besides all this, Cullen's poem
suggests "The Song of Wandering Aengus" [2], with its conclusive "gold"
imagery, not to speak of the moth's flutter.

Sunil Iyengar.

[1] poem #597
[2] poem #1 - yup, the very
first poem ever run on the Minstrels. Indeed, I got the idea for this
mailing list after coming across this gem of a poem and wanting to share it
with some friends - t.

[Biography]

        b. May 30, 1903, Louisville, Ky.?, U.S.
        d. Jan. 9, 1946, New York, N.Y.
in full COUNTEE PORTER CULLEN American poet, one of the finest of the Harlem
Renaissance.

Reared by a woman who was probably his paternal grandmother, Countee at age
15 was unofficially adopted by the Reverend F.A. Cullen, minister of Salem
M.E. Church, one of Harlem's largest congregations. He won a citywide poetry
contest as a schoolboy and saw his winning stanzas widely reprinted. At New
York University (B.A., 1925) he won the Witter Bynner Poetry Prize and was
elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Major American literary magazines accepted his
poems regularly, and his first collection of poems, Color (1925), was
published to critical acclaim before he had finished college.

Cullen received an M.A. degree from Harvard University in 1926 and worked as
an assistant editor for Opportunity magazine. In 1928, just before leaving
the United States for France (where he would study on a Guggenheim
Fellowship), Cullen married Yolande Du Bois, daughter of W.E.B. Du Bois
(divorced 1930). After publication of The Black Christ and Other Poems
(1929), Cullen's reputation as a poet waned. From 1934 until the end of his
life he taught in New York City public schools. Most notable among his other
works are Copper Sun (1927), The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1928), and The
Medea and Some Poems (1935). His novel One Way to Heaven (1932) depicts life
in Harlem.

Cullen's use of racial themes in his verse was striking at the time, and his
material is always fresh and sensitively treated. He drew some criticism,
however, because he was heavily influenced by the Romanticism of John Keats
and preferred to use classical verse forms rather than rely on the rhythms
and idioms of his black American heritage.

        -- EB

He wishes for the cloths of heaven -- William Butler Yeats

Guest poem submitted by Tina George:

(Poem #597) He wishes for the cloths of heaven Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams. -- William Butler Yeats

I simply love this verse...I cannot think of any other lines that better
express my deepest thoughts about the question one so often searches for the
answers to: 'what is love?'

I first came across these lines in a book called "The Charmed Circle", when
I was all of 14 years old... To my young and (as yet) unimpressioned mind,
it spoke of a love so deep, so earnest and so 'giving' that it stayed with
me through the years in the quiet recesses of my mind, echoing gentle
reminders in soft undertones... "Tread softly because you tread on my
dreams"...

The years may have flown by since then and my impressions of love washed in
the many colours of experience... but the spirit of this verse remains.

Tina.

I Say I Say I Say -- Simon Armitage

Guest poem submitted by Victoria Paterson:

(Poem #596) I Say I Say I Say Anyone here had a go at themselves for a laugh? Anyone opened their wrists with a blade in the bath? Those in the dark at the back, listen hard. Those at the front in the know, those of us who have, hands up, let's show that inch of lacerated skin between the forearm and the fist. Let's tell it like it is: strong drink, a crimson tidemark round the tub, a yard of lint, white towels washed a dozen times, still pink. Tough luck. A passion then for watches, bangles, cuffs. A likely story: you were lashed by brambles picking berries from the woods. Come clean, come good, repeat with me the punch line 'Just like blood' when those at the back rush forward to say how a little love goes a long long long way. -- Simon Armitage

Simon Armitage is a British poet, aged in (I think) either late twenties or
very early thirties. He has published several collections of poetry, and two
novels (one with another poet called Glyn Maxwell). I suppose, critically
speaking, this isn't his best poem , but it's one of my favorite poems. I
don't know if Armitage has ever attempted suicide, but to me, someone who
has, this poem speaks volumes. I don't know if there's a lot to say about it
- it speaks for itself, I think.

Victoria.

[thomas adds]

A poem that's more than a little reminiscent of Sylvia Plath - witness these
lines in Lady Lazarus: "Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it
exceptionally well. ".

[Britannica on confessional literature]

Confession: in literature, an autobiography, either real or fictitious, in
which intimate and hidden details of the subject's life are revealed. The
first outstanding example of the genre was the Confessions of St. Augustine
(c. AD 400), a painstaking examination of Augustine's progress from juvenile
sinfulness and youthful debauchery to conversion to Christianity and the
triumph of the spirit over the flesh. Others include the Confessions of an
English Opium-Eater (1822), by Thomas De Quincey, focusing on the writer's
early life and his gradual addiction to drug taking, and Confessions
(1782-89), the intimate autobiography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. André Gide
used the form to great effect in such works as Si le grain ne meurt (1920
and 1924; If It Die...), an account of his life from birth to marriage.

Such 20th-century poets as John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and
Anne Sexton wrote poetry in the confessional vein, revealing intensely
personal, often painful perceptions and feelings.

        -- EB

The Last Man -- Thomas Lovell Beddoes

We seem to have stumbled our way into a new theme: the supernatural and the
macabre. Herewith, a guest poem submitted by Ira Cooper- an excerpt from:

(Poem #595) The Last Man By heaven and hell, and all the fools between them, I will not die, nor sleep, nor wink my eyes, But think myself into a god; old Death Shall dream he has slain me, and I'll creep behind him, Thrust off the bony tyrant from his throne And beat him into dust. Or I will burst Damnation's iron egg, my tomb, and come Half damned, ere they make lightning of my soul, And creep into thy carcase as thou sleepest Between two crimson fevers. I'll dethrone The empty skeleton, and be thy death, A death of grinding madness. -- Fear me now; I am a devil, not a human soul -- -- Thomas Lovell Beddoes

Thomas Lovell Beddoes, who wrote the above, wrote in the style of the
Elizabethan Revival of the Late Romantic Period.  I would call his style
macabre.  Born in 1803, he was the son of a famous physician.  He would have
been familiar with the anatomy table.  He was an acquaintence of Mary
Shelley.  Part of his final words:  "Food for what I am good for - worms."
If people are familiar with him at all, it might be because of one of his
more famous pieces, "Old Adam the Carrion Crow."

Ira Cooper.

[Bio]

        b. June 30, 1803, Clifton, Somerset, Eng.
        d. Jan. 26, 1849, Basel, Switz.

The son of a distinguished scientist, Beddoes seems early to have acquired,
from his father's dissections and speculations on anatomy and the soul, an
obsession with death that was to dominate his life and work. He was educated
at Charterhouse, where his passion for the drama became evident and where he
nourished his imagination on 18th-century Gothic romances. In 1820 he went
to Oxford University, where he wrote his first considerable work, The
Bride's Tragedy (1822), based on the story of a murder committed by an
undergraduate. In 1825 he went to Göttingen, Ger., to study anatomy and
medicine. There he continued work on Death's Jest-Book. Friends who read the
first version advised revision, and Beddoes' acceptance of their advice
hindered his poetic development: for the rest of his life he was unable to
escape from the work or to complete it, and it was eventually published
posthumously in 1850.

In Death's Jest-Book itself, which Beddoes described as an example of "the
florid Gothic," he aimed to use Gothic material to discuss the problems of
mortality and immortality.

After trouble with the university authorities, Beddoes left Göttingen, moved
to Würzburg (where he received his M.D.), and there involved himself in
radical politics. More trouble caused him to leave Germany for Zürich, where
his interest in writing English verse waned. In 1840 he had to flee from
Switzerland, probably for political reasons, and he never afterward settled
in one place for very long. He visited England for the last time in 1846-47.
Two years later he committed suicide.

        -- EB

Overheard on a Salmarsh -- Harold Monro

An irresistible follow up to yesterday's poem...

(Poem #594) Overheard on a Salmarsh Nymph, nymph, what are your beads? Green glass, goblin. Why do you stare at them? Give them me. No. Give them me. Give them me. No. Then I will howl all night in the reeds, Lie in the mud and howl for them. Goblin, why do you love them so? They are better than stars or water, Better than voices of winds that sing, Better than any man's fair daughter, Your green glass beads on a silver ring. Hush, I stole them out of the moon. Give me your beads, I want them. No. I will howl in the deep lagoon For your green glass beads, I love them so. Give them me. Give them. No. -- Harold Monro

Today's delightfully whimsical poem calls for little explanation - I just
like the image of a goblin and a nymph squabbling over a handful of green
glass beads. This is a genre of poetry that I loved as a child, both for its
playfulness and for the unexpected directions it would take my imagination,
and age has done little to diminish its appeal. And 'Overheard on a
Salmarsh' is an excellent example of the genre - simple, but startlingly
evocative; indeed I was surprised at how few words it took to conjure up a
detailed mental picture (doubtless straight out of an illustration to a book
of fairy tales, but then, that was probably precisely the intended effect).

The language too is that perfect mixture of the fairy-tale and the poetic
that reaches out to children without in any way condescending to them. And
this is truly a poem to be read aloud - try it and see how the rhymes, the
metre, the interspersed voices all come together in an utterly captivating
narrative.

Note:

I believe Salmarsh to be a corruption of saltmarsh (a sea-flooded marsh),
but can't confirm this. Can anyone shed some light on the issue?

Biography:

Harold Monro

  The publisher of the various anthologies of Georgian Poetry, Harold Monro,
  was born in Brussels in 1879. He describes himself as "author, publisher,
  editor and book-seller." Monro founded The Poetry Bookshop in London in
  1912, a unique establishment having as its object a practical relation
  between poetry and the public, and keeping in stock nothing but poetry,
  the drama, and books connected with these subjects. His quarterly Poetry
  and Drama (discontinued during the war and revived in 1919 as The Monthly
  Chapbook), was in a sense the organ of the younger men; and his shop, in
  which he has lived for the last seven years except while he was in the
  army, became a genuine literary center.

  Of Monro's books, the two most important are Strange Meetings (1917) and
  Children of Love (1919). "The Nightingale Near the House," one of the
  loveliest of his poems, is also one of his latest and has not yet appeared
  in any of his volumes.

        -- http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/poetry/poems/harold_monro.html

On Georgian Poetry:

  a variety of lyrical poetry produced in the early 20th century by an
  assortment of British poets, including Lascelles Abercrombie, Hilaire
  Belloc, Edmund Charles Blunden, Rupert Brooke, William Henry Davies, Ralph
  Hodgson, John Drinkwater, James Elroy Flecker, Wilfred Wilson Gibson,
  Robert Graves, Walter de la Mare, Harold Monro (editor of The Poetry
  Review), Siegfried Sassoon, Sir J.C. Squire, and Edward Thomas.

  Brooke and Sir Edward Marsh, wishing to make new poetry accessible to a
  wider public, with Monro, Drinkwater, and Gibson, planned a series of
  anthologies. To this series they applied the name "Georgian" to suggest
  the opening of a new poetic age with the accession in 1910 of George V.
  Five volumes of Georgian Poetry, edited by Marsh, were published between
  1912 and 1922. (See Marsh, Sir Edward Howard.)

  The real gifts of Brooke, Davies, de la Mare, Blunden, and Hodgson should
  not be overlooked, but, taken as a whole, much of the Georgians' work was
  lifeless. It took inspiration from the countryside and nature, and in the
  hands of less gifted poets, the resulting poetry was diluted and
  middlebrow conventional verse of late Romantic character. "Georgian" came
  to be a pejorative term, used in a sense not intended by its progenitors:
  rooted in its period and looking backward rather than forward.

        -- EB

[Which is sad - at their best, poets like Flecker, Brooke and indeed Monro
were anything but lifeless. I have personally found considerable enjoyment
in leafing through collections of Georgian poetry. -m.]

Links:

Some poems similar in theme or mood: poem #252, poem #312.
and, of course, yesterday's poem #593.

We've run several other poems by Georgian poets - see the index at
[broken link] http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/index_poet.html

-martin