A Song of a Young Lady to Her Ancient Lover -- John Wilmot

Guest poem submitted by Nick Blackburn:

(Poem #1058) A Song of a Young Lady to Her Ancient Lover Ancient Person, for whom I All the flattering youth defy, Long be it e'er thou grow old, Aching, shaking, crazy cold; But still continue as thou art, Ancient Person of my heart. On thy withered lips and dry, Which like barren furrows lie, Brooding kisses I will pour, Shall thy youthful heart restore, Such kind show'rs in autumn fall, And a second spring recall; Nor from thee will ever part, Ancient Person of my heart. Thy nobler parts, which but to name In our sex would be counted shame, By ages frozen grasp possest, From their ice shall be released, And, soothed by my reviving hand, In former warmth and vigour stand. All a lover's wish can reach, For thy joy my love shall teach; And for thy pleasure shall improve All that art can add to love. Yet still I love thee without art, Ancient Person of my heart. -- John Wilmot

A fine poem from from my second best source (it's not the Minstrels, so it
must be the BBC's Something Understood). A fine compliment to Shakespeare's
sonnet CXXX ("My Mistress' Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun") and extremely
rude.

Nick.

[Minstrels Links]

Just the one Wilmot poem so far:
Poem #669, Epigram on Charles II -- John Wilmot

Here's old Bill Shakespeare:
Poem #16, Full Fathom Five
Poem #44, My Mistress' Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun (Sonnets CXXX)
Poem #48, Pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth
Poem #71, Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day? (Sonnets XVIII)
Poem #126, Our revels now are ended
Poem #200, Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks
Poem #219, Full many a glorious morning have I seen (Sonnets XXXIII)
Poem #229, To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow
Poem #243, When that I was and a little tiny boy
Poem #312, Where the bee sucks
Poem #363, Let me not to the marriage of true minds (Sonnet CXVI)
Poem #413, Admired Miranda!
Poem #477, Fear no more the heat o' the sun
Poem #570, Come, Night; Come, Romeo
Poem #611, Winter
Poem #808, Not From The Stars Do I My Judgment Pluck (Sonnets XIV)
Poem #943, So is it not with me as with that Muse (Sonnets XXI)

Atavism -- William Stafford

Guest poem submitted by Joyce Heon:

(Poem #1057) Atavism 1 Sometimes in the open you look up where birds go by, or just nothing, and wait. A dim feeling comes you were like this once, there was air, and quiet; it was by a lake, or maybe a river you were alert as an otter and were suddenly born like the evening star into wide still worlds like this one you have found again, for a moment, in the open. 2 Something is being told in the woods: aisles of shadow lead away; a branch waves; a pencil of sunlight slowly travels its path. A withheld presence almost speaks, but then retreats, rustles a patch of brush. You can feel the centuries ripple generations of wandering, discovering, being lost and found, eating, dying, being born. A walk through the forest strokes your fur, the fur you no longer have. And your gaze down a forest aisle is a strange, long plunge, dark eyes looking for home. For delicious minutes you can feel your whiskers wider than your mind, away out over everything. -- William Stafford

No matter how often I read this poem, I feel the fur I no longer have lift,
something creeps my skin, more primeval than thought.  The space of it
recreates my youthful forays onto forest paths, where light becomes defined
by the upright tree and angle of the sun, where it comes like jaguar spots
to the skin.  Every trip into the forest makes you more than yourself and so
much less.

Archibald MacLeish advises that a poem lies less in what is said than what
is not, what is communally recognized, but is just shy of being put in
words, possibly cannot be put in words.  It is more feeling than thought,
something that fits in between lines and images, and that is eternally true.
Atavism takes you from the common experience into the uncommon, the
recognition that we have a long history of forest and field, clearing and
thicket, that beneath our skin lies the caution of hunter and hunted.  It
speaks to where we live and die.  If you pause, you sense that you are just
about to come upon the most revealing truth of your life, some secret,
perhaps there in that shadow.

Stafford leaves you in that moment of expectation, unlike Mary Oliver, whose
fox leaps from hiding like flame across your mind.  She paints the image,
the experience, and resolves it with photo-realism.  For all the fire, the
mystery is smothered.  You are left having seen a fox.  But Stafford only
suggests what you might have seen, and thereby reveals some places within
you that you didn't know.

William Stafford is one of my favorite accessible poets.  How can you not
admire a man who on the day he died in fragile hand wrote a poem so
incredibly affecting as "Are you Mr. William Stafford?" without the least
trace of soppy self-pity?  You read it with the certainty that he faced
dying with his whiskers way out over everything.

Joyce.

[Links]

http://www.graywolfpress.org/mainpages/poem.html has the text of "Are You
Mr. William Stafford?", along with a facsimile of the (dying) poet's
handwritten draft of the poem.

[broken link] http://www.linkstoliterature.com/stafford.htm is a comprehensive Stafford
linkery.

Minstrels poems/poets mentioned in the commentary:
Poem #188, Ars Poetica  -- Archibald MacLeish
Poem #457, The End of the World  -- Archibald MacLeish
Poem #426, Wild Geese  -- Mary Oliver

Waiting for the Barbarians -- Constantine Cavafy

Guest poem submitted by Zubaer Mahboob:

(Poem #1056) Waiting for the Barbarians What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum? The barbarians are due here today. Why isn't anything happening in the senate? Why do the senators sit there without legislating? Because the barbarians are coming today. What laws can the senators make now? Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating. Why did our emperor get up so early, and why is he sitting at the city's main gate on his throne, in state, wearing the crown? Because the barbarians are coming today and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader. He has even prepared a scroll to give him, replete with titles, with imposing names. Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas? Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts, and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds? Why are they carrying elegant canes beautifully worked in silver and gold? Because the barbarians are coming today and things like that dazzle the barbarians. Why don't our distinguished orators come forward as usual to make their speeches, say what they have to say? Because the barbarians are coming today and they're bored by rhetoric and public speaking. Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion? (How serious people's faces have become.) Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly, everyone going home so lost in thought? Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come. And some who have just returned from the border say there are no barbarians any longer. And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians? They were, those people, a kind of solution. -- Constantine Cavafy

Translated by Edmund Keeley.

An empire awaits its end, its ruling class awash in all the trappings of
opulence but rudderless without a guiding moral compass, and dissipating
under the weight of boredom and finery. Cavafy's poem tells hauntingly of
the ultimate hollowness of tyranny - an apt theme for our times. The
novelist JM Coetzee adopted the title of this poem for his 1982 novel
"Waiting for the Barbarians", a scantily-veiled denunciation of the
apartheid regime. If you enjoy the mythical landscape of this poem, you
might also enjoy the vivid imaginary empire created in that book.

Zubaer.

[Minstrels Links]

Constantine Cavafy:
Poem #217, Ithaka
Poem #296, Footsteps
Poem #522, In Harbor

Bleezer's Ice Cream -- Jack Prelutsky

Once again, posting on Martin's behalf:

(Poem #1055) Bleezer's Ice Cream I am Ebenezer Bleezer, I run BLEEZER'S ICE CREAM STORE, there are flavors in my freezer you have never seen before, twenty-eight divine creations too delicious to resist, why not do yourself a favor, try the flavors on my list: COCOA MOCHA MACARONI TAPIOCA SMOKED BALONEY CHECKERBERRY CHEDDAR CHEW CHICKEN CHERRY HONEYDEW TUTTI-FRUTTI STEWED TOMATO TUNA TACO BAKED POTATO LOBSTER LITCHI LIMA BEAN MOZZARELLA MANGOSTEEN ALMOND HAM MERINGUE SALAMI YAM ANCHOVY PRUNE PASTRAMI SASSAFRAS SOUVLAKI HASH SUKIYAKI SUCCOTASH BUTTER BRICKLE PEPPER PICKLE POMEGRANATE PUMPERNICKEL PEACH PIMENTO PIZZA PLUM PEANUT PUMPKIN BUBBLEGUM BROCCOLI BANANA BLUSTER CHOCOLATE CHOP SUEY CLUSTER AVOCADO BRUSSELS SPROUT PERIWINKLE SAUERKRAUT COTTON CANDY CARROT CUSTARD CAULIFLOWER COLA MUSTARD ONION DUMPLING DOUBLE DIP TURNIP TRUFFLE TRIPLE FLIP GARLIC GUMBO GRAVY GUAVA LENTIL LEMON LIVER LAVA ORANGE OLIVE BAGEL BEET WATERMELON WAFFLE WHEAT I am Ebenezer Bleezer, I run BLEEZER'S ICE CREAM STORE, taste a flavor from my freezer, you will surely ask for more. -- Jack Prelutsky

"Bleezer's Ice Cream" is one of those rare, perfect children's poems that it
is my occasional pleasure to stumble across. It's not too hard to see why it
works so well. The name "Ebenezer Bleezer" is both nicely comical and nicely
euphonious, so "I am Ebenezer Bleezer" gets the poem off to a good start
right away. The whole first verse, though, is nothing more than a prologue,
an introduction to the real meat of the poem. I refer, of course, to the
wonderfully zany list of twenty-eight "flavours", a catalogue of food
combinations whose appeal lies in their grossness as much as in their
playful metre and rhymes. I'll leave you to look up some of the weirder
foods on your own :)

-martin

Links:

  Here's a biography of Prelutsky:
    [broken link] http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=69

  I am reminded of the Centipede's song from Dahl's 'James and the Giant
  Peach':
    http://www.qu-i-x.com/eaten.html

  And from the credit-where-due department, I discovered the poem in the
  following, well-chosen collection:
    http://gobinpoetry.homestead.com/Home.html

Barmaid -- William Ernest Henley

Once again, posting on Martin's behalf:

(Poem #1054) Barmaid Though, if you ask her name, she says Elise, Being plain Elizabeth, e'en let it pass, And own that, if her aspirates take their ease, She ever makes a point, in washing glass, Handling the engine, turning taps for tots, And countering change, and scorning what men say, Of posing as a dove among the pots, Nor often gives her dignity away. Her head's a work of art, and, if her eyes Be tired and ignorant, she has a waist; Cheaply the Mode she shadows; and she tries From penny novels to amend her taste; And, having mopped the zinc for certain years, And faced the gas, she fades and disappears. -- William Ernest Henley

Today's poem belongs to a fairly small, but interesting, genre of poems that
combine aspects of biography, character sketch and synecdoche and explore an
entire class of people by suitable focus on one of its members. Perhaps the
best-known writer of such poems is Edward Arlington Robinson, though there
have been several others (John Betjeman comes to mind).

'Barmaid' is an excellent example of the genre. Note that the barmaid is
wonderfully developed as an individual, Henley achieving an enviable density
of description in fourteen short lines. The opening lines set the tone right
away - "she says 'Elise', being plain Elizabeth", writes Henley, and the
sense of recognition is almost automatic - we know exactly the kind of
person he's talking about.

The progression of the poem is interesting. Having established the barmaid's
working-class background, Henley goes on to build her up as a dignified,
self-contained person, until he undercuts the description with "her eyes be
tired and ignorant". From then on, the portrait is irretrievably pathetic,
and, indeed, the next few lines merely underscore that. And then the final
couplet steps back a pace to suggest that Elise made very little impression
on the world - she "mopped the zinc for certain years" (certainly not a
phrase to suggest any great accomplishment), and then faded and disappeared.
And in doing so, she suddenly becomes as much a symbol as a person - every
barmaid, shop girl or what-have-you who has lived in grey and tired
anonymity and disappeared as silently as she appeared.

-martin

Links:

  Henley on Minstrels:
    Poem #117, 'The Rain and the Wind' (biography attached)
    Poem #221, 'Invictus'

  Some other character sketches:
    Poem #234, Edwin Arlington Robinson, 'Miniver Cheevy'
    Poem #516, Nissim Ezekiel, 'The Patriot'
    Poem #543, John Betjeman, 'Executive'
    Poem #636, Edwin Arlington Robinson, 'Aaron Stark'
    Poem #798, John Updike, 'V.B. Nimble, V.B. Quick'