Fata Morgana -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Guest poem sent in by Shalini Umachandran

(Poem #1646) Fata Morgana O sweet illusions of song That tempt me everywhere, In the lonely fields, and the throng Of the crowded thoroughfare! I approach and ye vanish away, I grasp you, and ye are gone; But ever by night and by day, The melody soundeth on. As the weary traveller sees In desert or prairie vast, Blue lakes, overhung with trees That a pleasant shadow cast; Fair towns with turrets high, And shining roofs of gold, That vanish as he draws nigh, Like mists together rolled -- So I wander and wander along, And forever before me gleams The shining city of song, In the beautiful land of dreams. But when I would enter the gate Of that golden atmosphere, It is gone, and I wonder and wait For the vision to reappear. -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A friend introduced me to the Wondering Minstrels about three years ago but
all this time I've just been content to read the poetry that landed in my
inbox and feel glad that someone made the effort to brighten up my day.

Today, I actually decided to find out who the Thomas, Martin and Sitaram
were. I know, I've really left it a long time, but then... at least I looked
at the site now.

And I thought I'd send in this poem because somehow it seemed to go with the
idea of wondering minstrels wandering along, seeking songs of the wood that
make you feel better.

shalini

[Links]

Explaining the allusion in the title:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fata_Morgana

Haiku -- Michael P Garofalo

Guest poem submitted by Hemant R. Mohapatra

(Poem #1645) Haiku A frog floats belly up -- dead silence. -- Michael P Garofalo

One of the Haikus that perfectly describes the weather that is up and about
today the place where I stay. It brings out images of a marshy, silent,
secret land all shrouded up in a mystical fog. Outside, it's cloudy and
ominous today; much like a drop of water poised achefully at the edge of a
leaf, pondering whether to take the plunge or not. Whenever it's like this,
more often than not a carefree happy-go-lucky droplet would roll mindlessly
down the leaf and drag the thoughtful drop along with it and away they'd go
all the way down to meet the earth rising up to meet its prize.

I am sure it'll rain by evening.

Hemant.

On Passing the New Menin Gate -- Siegfried Sassoon

Guest poem sent in by GB (Ireland)

(Poem #1644) On Passing the New Menin Gate Who will remember, passing through this Gate, The unheroic Dead who fed the guns? Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate, - Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones? Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own. Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp; Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone, The armies who endured that sullen swamp. Here was the world's worst wound. And here with pride 'Their name liveth for evermore' the Gateway claims. Was ever an immolation so belied As these intolerably nameless names? Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime. -- Siegfried Sassoon

For poetry that brings home the vicious inhumanity of modern mass warfare,
it is hard to surpass Siegfried Sassson, and for me the best of his poetry
is On Passing New Menin Gate. Ironically, Sassoon himself volunteered
himself for service in the British Army in World War One, where his almost
suicidal courage (to some extent a reaction to the death of his younger
brother earlier in the War in the Gallipoli campaign) earned him a Military
Cross (the ribbon of which he later threw in the River Mersey) and would
have earned him another, but for the fact that the battle in which he had
fought had been lost and the award of a medal was deemed impolitic. At some
point, the slaughter became too much for Sassoon. He then showed that his
courage was not confined to the battlefield. Whilst on convalescent leave,
he wrote a Declaration of "wilful defiance" against the continuation of the
war, for which, but for the intervention of his friend Robert Graves, he
would have been court-martialled. Instead he was hospitalised for ‘shell
shock’ (with the poet Wilfred Owen, who became a great friend).  Eventually,
he resumed his military career, fought as bravely as ever, and was
recuperating from injuries sustained when the war ended. He lived quietly
through World War II and died in 1967.

I first came across this poem in school, where its shocking honesty gave it
an impact in the classroom that no other poem had. Not for Sassoon the
euphemisms and clichés that honour the dead of the war but simultaneously
disguise their fate. The fallen are ‘unheroic’. (Other poetry of Sassoon’s
looks at the motives which brought them to the war.) They are
‘unvictorious’. The fate inflicted on them by the society which sent them to
die in a ‘swamp’ is ‘foul’. They have been ‘fed to the guns’ by their
political masters (or by society or by all of us). Contrary to this monument
tells us, their name liveth not for evermore – they are no more than the
nameless victims of a criminal immolation, who, if they could live again,
would see what had been done to them and deride society’s payment in the
form of this monument  - a pile of stone. I can only imagine the impact that
this poem, which I believe was first published in 1936, must have produced
in the inter-war period to its readers, many or most of whom would have lost
friends or relatives in the war.

Compare this with Wilfred Owen's similarly impressive Dulce Et Decorum Est
(Poem #32 on Minstrels). Contrast it  with John McCrae’s In Flanders
Field (Poem #11 on Minstrels) which the dead ask for the living to ‘take
up our quarrel with the foe’, and which I must admit, perhaps because of my
awareness of the awful scale of the deaths in World War One, I have never
liked. For me, it seems far less impressively aware of terrible political
realities than this poem, but perhaps as a testament to individual
motivation for what (in spite of Sassoon’s valid perspective) in many cases
was heroic self-sacrifice, it is also worthy of attention. Another good poem
on Minstrels (with a good discussion attached) is Hayden Carruth’s On Being
Asked to Write a Poem Against the War in Vietnam (Poem #1214 on
Minstrels). Yeats was appropriately modest (or perhaps politically wise)
when asked to write a war poem (See Poem #1040) – but poetry like
Sassoon’s, Carruth’s , Owen’s, Kettle’s, Ledwidge’s  and perhaps even
McCrae’s show us that poets do have contributions of great value to give us
on this topic.

GB

[Links]

There are some good sites on Sassoon. The best biography is at
http://www.sassoonery.demon.co.uk/ His obituary in the Times is also
worth reading. http://www.sassoonery.demon.co.uk/sass-obituary.htm#top

Another biography is found at [broken link] http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/8103/
And a few of his poems are to be found at
http://www.sassoonery.demon.co.uk/remembrance.htm

PS: There are a number of other good Sassoon poems on Minstrels.

The Misanthrope -- Moliere

Guest poem submitted by Seema Pai, an excerpt from:

(Poem #1643) The Misanthrope ORONTE: ... In short, I am your servant. And now, dear friend, Since you have such fine judgement, I intend To please you, if I can, with a small sonnet I wrote not long ago. Please comment on it, And tell me whether I ought to publish it. ALCESTE: Sir, these are delicate matters; we all desire To be told that we've the true poetic fire. But once, to one whose name I shall not mention, I said, regarding some verse of his invention, That gentlemen should rigorously control That itch to write which often afflicts the soul; That one should curb the heady inclination To publicize one's little avocation; And that in showing off one's works of art One often plays a very clownish part. ... You're under no necessity to compose; Why you should wish to publish, heaven knows. There's no excuse for printing tedious rot Unless one writes for bread, as you do not. Resist temptation, then, I beg of you; Conceal your pastimes from the public view. -- Moliere

 from "The Misanthrope" (1666).
 translated by Richard Wilbur (1965).
 Moliere was the pen-name of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (1662-1673).

 This absolutely delightful exchange between Alceste, the misanthrope and
the aspiring poet Oronte is from Richard Wilbur's translation of Moliere's
play. I think translation is an underappreciated art that could be
especially challenging when it comes to verse. This is from a book I own
called 'Five Plays' by Moliere of which three are translated by Wilbur. I
think the translation is absolutely brilliant as are the plays. After
reading it, I wished I had the wit to respond so sharply to several
acquaintances who chose to hunt me down (years after we lost touch) only to
subject me to the fruits of their pursuits with a keyboard, MS-Word and an
empty afternoon!

Thanks,
Seema

Untitled -- Stephen King

(Poem #1642) Untitled Your hair is winter fire, January embers My heart burns there, too. -- Stephen King

       (from "IT")

   I first read this poem when I was 16, and was smitten by it. I like it
because, like Ben's english teacher explained to him in the book, "a haiku
... could be just seventeen syllables long - no more, no less. It usually
concentrated on one clear image which was linked to one specific emotion:
sadness, joy, nostalgia, happiness ...  love". I hope that you'll read IT
if you like this poem; IT is a mighty fine book.

I'd like to type in a few sentences that precede this poems in the book:

       "During the last week of school before exams, they had been reading and
  writing haiku in English class. Haiku was a Japanese form of poetry, brief,
  disciplined. A haiku, Mrs Douglas said, could be just seventeen syllables
  long - no more, no less. It usually concentrated on one clear image which
  was linked to one specific emotion: sadness, joy, nostalgia, happiness ...
  love.

       Ben had been utterly charmed by the concept. He enjoyed his
  English classes, although mild enjoyment was generally as far as it went. He
  could do the work, but as a rule there was nothing in it which gripped him.
  Yet there was something in the concept of haiku that fired his imagination.
  The idea made him feel happy, the way Mrs Starrett's explanation of the
  greenhouse effect had made him happy. Haiku was good poetry, Ben felt,
  because it was structured poetry. There were no secret rules.  Seventeen
  syllables, one image linked to one emotion, and you were out. Bingo. It was
  clean, it was utilitarian, it was entirely contained within and dependent
  upon its own rules. He even liked the word itself, a slide of air broken as
  if along a dotted line by the 'k'-sound at the very back of your mouth:
  haiku.

        Her hair, he thought, and saw her going down the school steps again
  with it bouncing on her shoulders. The sun did not so much glint on it as
  seem to burn within it."

Subramanyam Chitti

[Martin adds]

Actually, haiku are subject to a long and complex set of rules. Here's a
pointer to some places where you can learn more about them:

Jane Reichhold notes that "Haiku, which seem so light, free and spontaneous,
are built on discipline."
   http://www.ahapoetry.com/haiku.htm

Keiko Imaoka on the distinct set of traditions that have grown up around
English haiku...

Note in particular the bit about syllable counting:
        Today, many bilingual poets and translators in the mainstream North
  American haiku scene agree that something in the vicinity of 11 English
  syllables is a suitable approximation of 17 Japanese syllables, in order to
  convey about the same amount of information as well as the brevity and the
  fragmented quality found in Japanese haiku. As to the form, some American
  poets advocate writing in 3-5-3 syllables or 2-3-2 accented beats. While
  rigid structuring can be accomplished in 5-7-5 haiku with relative ease due
  to a greater degree of freedom provided by the extra syllables, such
  structuring in shorter haiku will have the effect of imposing much more
  stringent rules on English haiku than on Japanese haiku, thereby severely
  limiting its potential.

  [broken link] http://www.ahapoetry.com/keirule.htm

George Swede has another excellent essay on the form, including the
startling fact about "Criterion 2: The Haiku Should Be Arranged in Three
Lines":

  This rules has one corollary:

  a. The three lines should be arranged according to a 5-7-5 syllable count.

  Neither this rule nor its corollary are essential. In fact, Japanese haiku
  almost always have been and continue to be written in one line or rather,
  column, as the language is usually written vertically. Because Japanese onji
  are so short, seventeen onji always fit easily into one line or column. On
  the other hand, a seventeen-syllable haiku in English usually has to be more
  than one line otherwise it would run off the page, at least in the normal
  horizontal way the language is written.

The site appears to be down, but you can read it thanks to the wayback machine:

http://web.archive.org/web//http://www.haikai.info/articles/swede.definition.html

Swede also distingushes between haiku and senryu, the latter being "a
haiku-like poem involving human nature only". By extension, in English the
word 'senryu' seems to be coming to be used to mean "a poem adhering to the
form of a haiku, but not any of the other rules".

Yet another proposal for the English haiku:
  http://www.worldhaikureview.org/pages/whcessay1.shtml

And as a parting note, here's an appropriate strip from one of my favourite
webcomics:
  [broken link] http://www.ozyandmillie.org/2005/om20050124.html

martin

[Stephen King Links]

Biography:
 http://www.stephenkingshop.com/biography.htm

And Amazon's page on "It":

[broken link] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-//qid=/sr=1-15/ref=sr_1_15/