I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed -- Emily Dickinson

Guest poem sent in by Aseem

(Poem #1743) I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed I taste a liquor never brewed, From tankards scooped in pearl; Not all the vats upon the Rhine Yield such an alcohol! Inebriate of air am I, And debauchee of dew, Reeling, through endless summer days, From inns of molten blue. When landlords turn the drunken bee Out of the foxglove's door, When butterflies renounce their drams, I shall but drink the more! Till seraphs swing their snowy hats, And saints to windows run, To see the little tippler Leaning against the sun! -- Emily Dickinson

Just a quick response to Zen's tea poem [Poem #1743] (which, incidentally, I
have absolutely no memory of ever sending her). Figured if we were doing
poems about drinking and beverages more generally (I sense a theme coming on
- Martin / Thomas?) we can't do without including this little marvel of a
poem.

Today's poem is not, emphatically, one of Dickinson's best. Some of the
lines border on trite and the overall effect is of something light and
harmless, the intense power that I love Dickinson for is missing. But it's
precisely this frothiness that makes this poem such a delightful read.
Poetry really doesn't get sweeter and happier than this - to read these 16
lines is to experience the very giddiness that Dickinson is trying to
describe. There are some exquisite phrases here "Inebriate of air am I / and
debauchee of dew" and "inns of molten blue" and Dickinson's quicksilver
lines create a sense of footsteps dancing lightly through across the page
which is simply exquisite.

This is a poem one could truly get drunk on.

Aseem

Other suggested reading on minstrels:

John Agard's Coffee in Heaven [Poem #1071]
(another poem we owe to Zen - you're really obsessed, aren't you?)
Vikram Seth's Sit [Poem #966]
Harold Monro's Milk for the Cat [Poem #727]
Rumi's The Tavern [Poem #514]
Harivansh Rai Bacchan's Madhusala [Poem #72]
Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat (extract) [Poem #162]

A Pot Of Tea -- Robert Service

Guest poem submitted by Zenobia Driver:

(Poem #1742) A Pot Of Tea You make it in your mess-tin by the brazier's rosy gleam; You watch it cloud, then settle amber clear; You lift it with your bay'nit, and you sniff the fragrant steam; The very breath of it is ripe with cheer. You're awful cold and dirty, and a-cursin' of your lot; You scoff the blushin' 'alf of it, so rich and rippin' 'ot; It bucks you up like anythink, just seems to touch the spot: God bless the man that first discovered Tea! Since I came out to fight in France, which ain't the other day, I think I've drunk enough to float a barge; All kinds of fancy foreign dope, from caffy and doo lay, To rum they serves you out before a charge. In back rooms of estaminays I've gurgled pints of cham; I've swilled down mugs of cider till I've felt a bloomin' dam; But 'struth! they all ain't in it with the vintage of Assam: God bless the man that first invented Tea! I think them lazy lumps o' gods wot kips on asphodel Swigs nectar that's a flavour of Oolong; I only wish them sons o' guns a-grillin' down in 'ell Could 'ave their daily ration of Suchong. Hurrah! I'm off to battle, which is 'ell and 'eaven too; And if I don't give some poor bloke a sexton's job to do, To-night, by Fritz's campfire, won't I 'ave a gorgeous brew (For fightin' mustn't interfere with Tea). To-night we'll all be tellin' of the Boches that we slew, As we drink the giddy victory in Tea. -- Robert Service

Here's a nice poem on tea. Actually I got it from Aseem who seems to be
contributing a lot to the Minstrels these days, dunno why he has not
submitted this one yet. I love tea, hence the very title of this poem grabs
my attention. Love the simple and matter-of-fact way in which the poem
announces its existence - "a pot of tea". These are my favourite lines:

 You're awful cold and dirty, and a-cursin' of your lot;
 You scoff the blushin' 'alf of it, so rich and rippin' 'ot;
 It bucks you up like anythink, just seems to touch the spot:
 God bless the man that first discovered Tea!

I just love having a warm, fragrant cup of tea when I am tired - just the
smell of the brew makes me feel better.

Zenobia.

To the Moon -- Percy Bysshe Shelley

Guest poem sent in by Aseem

(Poem #1741) To the Moon Art thou pale for weariness Of climbing heaven, and gazing on the earth, Wandering companionless Among the stars that have a different birth,— And ever-changing, like a joyless eye That finds no object worth its constancy? -- Percy Bysshe Shelley

Every time I look through the Minstrels archive, I'm always saddened to see
how poorly represented Shelley is on the site (yes, Martin, I know you don't
much care for him, but still). All right, so he tends to get a little
carried away; yes, he doesn't have quite the ear that Keats does, or Byron;
fine, his images tend to pile one upon the other until they become
suffocating, almost annoying (What was it Shakespeare said: "give me excess
of it, that surfeiting / The appetite may sicken and so die."); true, he
could have used a good editor. All of that does not detract from the fact
that Shelley is, IMHO, one of the most visionary and passionate of poets to
grace the English language, one of its most strident and lyrical voices; a
young man capable, at his best, of such burning purity of image that few
poets before or since could match him.  Certainly a poet who deserves to be
better represented on the site than he currently is.

This poem is the first step towards achieving that representation. It's a
brilliant little gem of a poem, a glorious example of just how stunning
Shelley could be when he didn't overdo it. The double image of the moon
roaming disconsolate through the night sky and Youth searching restlessly
for spiritual beauty is both crystal clear and oddly compelling. To read
this poem aloud is to experience the sadness and the despair of the speaker
- no mean feat for a poem that is all of six lines long. This is a
quintessentially romantic poem: it combines a sense of haunting lyricism
with one of the most spectacularly visual closing lines in all of poetry:
'Ever changing like a joyless eye / That finds no object worth its
constancy'. (The failure of the last line to rhyme only heightens the
overall impact of the stanza in my view - it sharpens the ending, makes it,
somehow, more fragile).

It's always seemed to me that Shelley, with his restless, tormented, uneven
poems, with his visions of political and lyrical grandeur combined with
periods of dark depression, is truly a poet of a 'different birth'. The
least we can do is make sure he has all his best poems with him, to keep him
company.

Aseem

[Martin adds]

While it is true that I dislike the majority of Shelley's work, I have never
denied his essential genius, and I have ever urged readers who *are* fans of
his poetry to fill up the lacuna. I heartily agree that he deserves to be
better represented in the archives, but my primary criterion for selecting a
poem has always been my enjoyment of said poem; therefore, I leave the
Shelley poems to people like Aseem, who has done a far better job of writing
about him than I could have. (I believe that I speak for Thomas too in this
regard.)

martin

Covering Two Years -- Weldon Kees

Guest poem submitted by Aseem Kaul:

(Poem #1740) Covering Two Years This nothingness that feeds upon itself: Pencils that turn to water in the hand, Parts of a sentence, hanging in the air, Thoughts breaking in the mind like glass, Blank sheets of paper that reflect the world Whitened the world that I was silenced by. There were two years of that. Slowly, Whatever splits, dissevers, cuts, cracks, ravels, or divides To bring me to that diet of corrossion, burned And flickered to its terminal. - Now in an older hand I write my name. Now with a voice grown unfamiliar, I speak to silences of altered rooms, Shaken by knowledge of recurrence and return. -- Weldon Kees

A month ago, I'd never heard of Weldon Kees. Then Anthony Lane wrote an
article about him in the New Yorker [1] and I went out and got Kees'
collected poems from the library and before I knew it another poet had been
added to my ever-growing list of American Greats (and to my order list at
Amazon, sigh!).

The truth is, Kees is not really one poet - he's two. The younger Kees is a
clever enough poet, a product of his time, writing poems filled with wit and
intelligence that impress you with their craft but don't necessarily move
you. There are some beautiful images here, some truly skilled writing
("Distance upon distance, cloud on cloud, / Crayons of smoke that sketch
blue sky / With gray appeals." - Two Cities; or check out, if you can a poem
called Early Winter), his poems have an air of meticulous observation about
them, of quiet detail which make them a rewarding read. But there's
something disconnected about these poems, as if they do not really touch
Kees' heart. Plus there's the Eliot influence which shows through clearly,
and is certainly not compatible with Kees' own style - in trying to emulate
his masters, Kees does himself a grave disservice. If you're a form buff
though you might really enjoy these poems - Kees writes some of the most
skilled sestinas I've ever read, and there are a couple of villanelles in
there as well.

But it's the later Kees that I truly fell in love with. There are glimpses
of this side of Kees in The Fall of the Magicians, but it's only in the
poems he wrote in the early 1950's (Poems 1947 - 1954) and in particular in
his uncollected poems that this side of him comes alive. The poems from this
period are premonitions of Lowell, even of Plath. Kees writes like a man
trying to fight off his demons with the aid of poetry; there is a note of
authentic despair in his voice (even though he struggles to maintain a
distant, almost academic tone) that gives these poems a sense of deep
autumnal urgency.

Today's poem is a good example of this - there are some beautiful lines here
("Blank sheets of paper that reflect the world / Whitened the world I was
silenced by") but what really makes this poem work is the sense of defeat
and dread: the first stanza paralysed and helpless, the second at once a
revival and a surrender, a portrait of a man granted a small reprieve, but
faced (as the last line tells us) with the inevitable return of his
depression. Any man who can dismiss two years of his life in half a line
("There were two years of that.") is a poet: brave, precise and true.

Aseem

[1] You can read Lane's article at:
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/050704crat_atlarge

There's also a biography of Kees at:
http://mockingbird.creighton.edu/NCW/kees.htm

And a selection of his poems at:
[broken link] http://www.poemhunter.com/weldon-kees/poet-9071/

Three Songs of Shattering - I -- Edna St Vincent Millay

(Poem #1739) Three Songs of Shattering - I The first rose on my rose-tree Budded, bloomed, and shattered, During sad days when to me Nothing mattered. Grief of grief has drained me clean; Still it seems a pity No one saw, -- it must have been Very pretty. -- Edna St Vincent Millay

I was reading through a Dorothy Parker collection, and pondering Millay's
influence on her poems, when it occurred to me that we hadn't had a Millay
poem in a while. This one came to mind naturally enough, as being very
reminscent of Parker's work, and it highlights many of the things I enjoy
about both poets - the precision of form and language (and a precision that
manages to be flowingly organic rather than sterile), the ability to find
startlingly moving metaphors in the most seemingly everyday situations, the
mastery of bathos, and above all, the perfectly controlled outpouring of
pain and grief beneath the surface of a superficially light poem.

Tangentially, the first episode of the US TV show "Desperate Housewives"
aired here recently, and I felt that the general tone and content was very
reminiscent of Millay's poetry. Did anyone else make that particular
connection?

martin