Favorite rhymed metric verse written after 1950 (e.g. Wilbur and Gunn)

[marcus]

Check these out. Add your favorites if you have some. Richard Wilbur was born in 1922 and in 2004 published his Collected Poems 1943-2004. The NYT published these exerpts
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/29/books/chapters/0529-1st-wilbur.html
and at the bottom of that page there's one I like called Blackberries for Amelia
so I will put a sample here that starts about halfway thru the poem

he is talking about a blackberry thicket the way it looks at the beginning of summer, and the white fivepoint blossoms scatter thru it somewhat like stars and he says:
***
...As the far stars, of which we now are told
That ever faster do they bolt away,
And that a night may come in which, some say,
We shall have only blackness to behold.

I have no time for any change so great,
But I shall see the August weather spur
Berries to ripen where the flowers were--
Dark berries, savage-sweet and worth the wait--

And there will come the moment to be quick
And save some from the birds, and I shall need
Two pails, old clothes in which to stain and bleed,
And a grandchild to talk with while we pick.
***

the poem has a complicated message which maybe you need to read the whole thing to get----the darkness at the end of the universe and life is connected and balanced with the dark ripeness of a blackberry. He wrote it in 2003, when he was 81 years old, I guess. If you want to see all 5 stanzas, it is on the NYT page along with some other Wilbur verse. I am using *** as a demarcation for quotes.

 

[marcus]

Rhymed metric poets of the 1950+ years are to some extent a craft guild and JV Cunningham was a master that some of them, like Thom Gunn, looked up to.
So Gunn wrote this, about JVC.

***
He concentrated as he ought
On making language fit his thought,

And getting all the rhymes correct,
Thus exercising intellect.

In such a space, in such a fashion,
He concentrated into passion.
***

I type this from memory, without consulting printout. It is witty and funny because Gunn exactly mimics Cunningham style in eulogizing him. I think every word is perfect. As John Donne lasts, so, I think, will Thom Gunn. Some of the rhymed metric verse of our period will survive.

Here is one by Richard Wilbur, which I also type from memory. Perhaps I miss some punctuation. Consult his Collected Poems to be sure :-) It is addressed to the Etruscan poets, whose work sadly did not survive because the Etruscan language was forgotten. That's something about poetry, it can last only so long as the language it's written in is understood. Carved stone could have a better chance.

***
Dream fluently, still brothers, who when young
Took with your mother's milk, the mother tongue,

In which pure matrix, joining world and mind,
You strove to leave a line of verse behind,

Like a fresh track across a field of snow,
Not reckoning that all could melt and go.
***

the language is the matrix
in which the poem is written
if the language melts and vanishes
so does the poem. I swear each word in that Wilbur poem is perfect
and cannot be changed. Can you bring something with a like perfection to expand this thread?
I want more of these. They add to my life.

 

[marcus]

Thom Gunn was born in 1929 in England and he happened to be gay and live in San Francisco. He probably saw a number of his contemporaries die, and he may have been a bit like a high-resolution camera--accurately recording detail both witnessed and imagined. Here is "Words for Some Ash"

***

Poor parched man, we had to squeeze
Dental sponge against your teeth,
So that moisture by degrees
Dribbled to the mouth beneath.

Christmas Day your pupils crossed,
Staring at your nose's tip,
Seeking there the air you lost
Yet still gaped for, dry of lip.

Now you are a bag of ash
Scattered on a coastal ridge,
Where you watched the distant crash,
Ocean on a broken edge.

Death has wiped away each sense;
Fire took muscle, bone, and brains;
Next may rain leach discontents
From your dust, wash what remains

Deeper into damper ground
Till the granules work their way
Down to unseen streams, and bound
Briskly in the water's play;

May you lastly reach the shore,
Joining tide without intent,
Only worried any more
By the current's argument.

***

 

[marcus]

One night around summer 1968 Wilbur went out in a field with his wife Charlotte and looked at the stars---a field near their summerhouse in the Berkshires, I think---and the next morning they walked thru the same field which at the moment was full of wildflowers. And "In the Field" records some of what they thought and talked about.

The poem has 20 short stanzas. I'm going to excerpt a sample and you can always get the whole thing in his Collected Poems. This won't necessarily be in order. I will start with the last three stanzas

***

We could no doubt mistake
These flowers for some answer to that fright
We felt for all creation's sake
In our dark talk last night,

Taking to heart what came
Of the heart's wish for life, which, staking here
In the least field and endless claim,
Beats on from sphere to sphere

And pounds beyond the sun,
Where nothing less peremptory can go,
And is ourselves, and is the one
Unbounded thing we know.

***

This is pretty good, but to see what it is saying you have to have some of the preceding 17 stanzas! So I'll put in a few more to give a hint of the idea.

 

[marcus]

You know that the best law of gravity we have leads to the picture that distances keep increasing by a certain percentage each year----it is just part of how gravity (which is to say geometry) works. And stars must eventually burn out. So the very longterm future is dark and comparatively empty. And no matter how beautiful the night sky, it also contains that thought. Which will occur to someone who thinks as carefully as Richard Wilbur and he will tell you what he thinks about it.

***

This field-grass brushed our legs
Last night, when out we stumbled looking up,
Wading as through the cloudy dregs
Of a wide sparkling cup,

Our thrown-back heads aswim
In the grand, kept appointments of the air,
...
...

...

It was the nip of fear
That told us when imagination caught
The feel of what we said, came near
The schoolbook thoughts we thought,

And faked a scan of space
Blown black and hollow by our spent grenade,
All worlds dashed out without a trace,
The very light unmade.

Then, in the late-night chill,
We turned and picked our way through outcrop stone
By the faint starlight, up the hill
To where our bed-lamp shone.

Today, in the same field,
The sun takes all, and what could lie beyond?
Those holes in heaven have been sealed
Like rain-drills in a pond,

And we, beheld in gold,
See nothing starry but these galaxies
Of flowers, dense and manifold,
Which lift about our knees--

...
...
...

We could no doubt mistake
These flowers for some answer to that fright...
...
...

***

And so on. I gave the last three stanzas already. I think it is really good and worth remembering. He describes the stars they saw and the changes in the starmap that he and Charlotte knew had occurred (e.g. since Egyptian and Greek times).
I skipped it but it's a nice description. Then he evokes the dread they felt at the longterm prospect of a cold dark empty universe. Then he describes the field of wildflowers they saw in the morning. And then he says this curious thing: not even the universe is infinite or forever, only the heart's wish for life is infinite.
or at least it's the only infinite thing we know.

Wilbur is careful with the truth. As far as I know, there is not an ounce of baloney in his whole lifetime work.
except a little bit for fun now and then, and in his translations where there may have been some theatricality in the original and he renders it accurately.
but basically no baloney. read him and see. :-)

 

[marcus]

rhymed metric verse written post-1950 that has a touch of bitters, or satire

social satire is an important vitamin for keeping society healthy and not every firstrate poem needs to be serious obviously
so here is a sample satire verse from XJ Kennedy (b. 1929) called "Family Reunion"
It is from memory so you need to look it up to be sure about the punctuation etc.
It is a cartoon of an uncongenial family gathering at Thanksgiving (the day in November when Americans eat turkey).

***

Drawn round the roasting of a bird
By duty once each year,
With first a drink and soon a third
They baste glazed looks of cheer.

Each spine erected in its seat
Each head bowed low for grace,
All wait the word to fork white meat
In through the family face.

***

And Suzanne Doyle, born 1953, has this poem called "Modern Love" about a less-than-perfect marriage:

***

In middle-age they woke to find
Their marriage flabby, both behind
And there before them. No sweet tension
Informed their speech. No sex worth mention.
At breakfast each chose to discover
The other had secured a lover.

The intimacy of confession,
The details of the transgression,
Aroused an affirmation of
The passion latent in old love.
So had each going out confirmed
The choice they made when they returned.

Some say they paid a price, of course,
But saved the cost of a divorce.
And cast off lovers? Well, observe,
The wicked get what they deserve.

***

There's a Thom Gunn quattrain called "Lines for My 55th Birthday" which I'm not sure whether to classify as satire or simple observation:

***

The love of old men is not worth a lot:
Desperate and dry even when it is hot.
You cannot tell what is enthusiasm
And what involuntary, clawing spasm.

***

Philip Larkin (b. 1922), who served awhile as Poet Laureate of England, has this famous rant called "This Be The Verse"

***

They fk you up, your Mum and Dad.
They do not mean to but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some new ones, just for you.

But they were fked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats
Who half the time were soppy stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man:
It deepens, like the coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

***

Like the Gunn quattrain, this is typed from memory---I don't vouch for punctuation or spelling. I think verse is meant very much to be recited (rather than read silently) so one test is whether it sticks in my mind enough for me to type it from memory.

 

[marcus]

back to serious (and non-bitter) rhymed metric post-1950 verse

You know at a wedding one or more people are supposed to give a toast to the bride and groom. Richard Wilbur wrote this, "A Wedding Toast", for the occasion of his son's wedding on Bastille Day (14 July) 1971. I'd say the thought is routine--love can make the everyday stuff of life (like ordinary water) into something special (like wine)--but appropriate to a wedding, and the execution is flawless.

***

St. John tells how, at Cana's wedding feast
The water-pots poured wine in such amount
That, by his sober count,
There were a hundred gallons at the least.

It made no earthly sense, unless to show
That whatsoever love elects to bless
Brims to a sweet excess
That can, without depletion, overflow.

Which is to say, that what love sees is true.
That this world's fullness is not made but found.
Life hungers to abound
And pour its plenty out for such as you.

Now, if your loves will lend an ear to mine,
I toast you both, good son and dear new daughter.
May you not lack for water,
And may that water smack of Cana's wine.

***

We tend to think of the poetry of the 20th Century as nearly all belonging to the MODERNIST school. Mostly not patterned. Not rhymed. Not following a regular metrical rhythm. What I'm thinking is that after 50 or 100 years have passed people might look back and not see it quite so clear-cut modernist. Rhymed metric verse may not have lapsed as an art-form after all. It depends on what is remembered after the passage of time---what is collected, and anthologized. It's a wait-and-see thing.

Borges, the Argentina literary giant, happened to write rhymed metric verse--he liked to write sonnets. And Richard Wilbur achieved a very fine English translation of one of Borges sonnets. For me, it is about spacetime---the 4D version of reality. Borges had a fairly sophisticated familiarity with physics. Again this is from memory, so check a print version if you want correct official punctuation etc.

***

One thing does not exist: Oblivion.
God saves the metal and he saves the dross
And his prophetic memory guards from loss
The moons to come and those of evenings gone.

Everything is: the shadows in the glass
Which, in between the day's two twilights, you
Have scattered by the thousands, or shall strew
Henceforward in the mirror as you pass.

And everything is part of that diverse
Crystalline memory, the universe.
Whoever in its endless mazes wanders
Hears door on door click shut behind his stride,
And only on the sunset's farther side
Will see at last the Archetypes and Splendors.

***

That is very true to a General Relativity vision of spacetime. It is the classic 4D picture.
Curiously enough there is a different picture emerging, the Feynman path integral, or sum-over-histories, version of spacetime. Quantum 4D geometry instead of classical. July Scientific American has a great article about this by Renate Loll. It is beautiful too, indeed I think far more so than the simple classical picture. Glance at the SciAm illustrations and see if you do not agree. But now it is too late for Borges to write us a sonnet about this new picture---another sonnet for Wilbur to translate.

 

[marcus]

Part of the process of presenting some excerpts of books of verse is always to give links to amazon in case you like it and want to read more. this is traditional. the New York Times does it, the New Yorker does it, or the equivalent. It would be disrespectful of me not to follow the established custom. A poet quoted always gets his plug.

Here's Richard Wilbur
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0156030799/?tag=pfamazon01-20
This is amazing. the guy is arguably America's greatest living poet and his collected poems, the book of all his poems, is being sold for $12 new and $3 used. That's a two pound paperback book with 608 pages. It's a lot of wise honest and technically perfect verse for three dollars.

And here's Thom Gunn
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0374524335/?tag=pfamazon01-20
the price new is $20 and it sells used under $6, plus postage of course.
496 pages. A 1.5 pound paperback

For what my judgment is worth, these are two I think will be remembered. Philip Larkin is a bit plaintive for my taste, but if you liked "This Be The Verse", quoted above, and want more here is his collected work
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0374529205/?tag=pfamazon01-20
240 pages, about the same number of poems, a surprising number of them rhymed and metrical. $10 new, under $7 used.

Look. Here is a great poem by Gunn called "Still Life". When his friend Larry Hoyt was still alive (not quite dead) then, as often happens, they gave him oxygen via tube to the mouth.

I shall not soon forget
The greyish-yellow skin
To which the face had set:
Lids tight: nothing of his,
No tremor from within,
Played on the surfaces.
He still found breath, and yet
It was an obscure knack.
I shall not soon forget
The angle of his head,
Arrested and reared back
On the crisp field of bed,
Back from what he could neither
Accept, as one opposed,
Nor, as a life-long breather,
Consentingly let go,
The tube his mouth enclosed
In an astonished O.

 

[marcus]

Here is one by Richard Wilbur called "Matthew VIII,28 ff."

Rabbi, we Gadarenes
Are not ascetics; we are fond of wealth and possessions.
Love, as You call it, we obviate by means
Of the planned release of aggressions.

We have deep faith in prosperity.
Soon, it is hoped, we will reach our full potential.
In the light of our gross product, the practice of charity
Is palpably non-essential.

It is true that we go insane;
That for no good reason we are possessed by devils;
That we suffer, despite the amenities which obtain
At all but the lowest levels.

We shall not, however, resign
Our trust in the high-heaped table and the full trough.
If You cannot cure us without destroying our swine,
We had rather You shoved off. In the New Testament story a Gadarene man suffering from mental illness was cured by transferring his demons over into a herd of swine that happened by. But then the crazy swine self-destructed by stampeding off a cliff. Wilbur lays the voice of consumption-now Americans right on the imagined voice of the Gadarenes like two congruent triangles. They coincide so perfectly it tingles.

 

[marcus]

Updating Updike---neutrinos do have a little mass and do interact some

Probably many people who love physics also like this rhymed metrical poem by John Updike about neutrinos. But the the first three lines are troubling because they contain blatant error.
So how would you suggest fixing them but keeping the rhyme and metrical rhythm?

The idea is that in this thread you can try putting thoughts into rhyme and metric pattern yourself, not just read other people's efforts. trying it is a good way to increase your appreciation of it and enjoyment.

So this what Updike wrote is wrong:

"Neutrinos, they are very small.
They have no charge and have no mass
And do not interact at all.
The Earth is just a silly ball
To them, through which they simply pass,
..."

they have some slight mass and they interact with other matter, though rarely, because we can build detectors

so how would you fix this?

Here is a sample solution, only the first three lines have been revised:

Cosmic Gall
(almost completely) by John Updike

Neutrinos have a size quite small,
No charge, and hardly any mass.
They scarcely interact at all:
The Earth is just a silly ball
To them, through which they simply pass,
Like dustmaids through a drafty hall
Or photons through a sheet of glass.
They snub the most exquisite gas,
Ignore the most substantial wall,
Cold-shoulder steel and sounding brass,
Insult the stallion in his stall,
And scorning barriers of class,
Infiltrate you and me! Like tall
And painless guillotines, they fall
Down through our heads into the grass.
At night, they enter at Nepal
And pierce the lover and his lass
From underneath the bed-you call
It wonderful; I call it crass.

 

[marcus]

like dustmaids DOWN a drafty hall, dammit. only caught that the next day when it was too late to edit

 

[hypatia]

I really enjoyed reading this, thanks for posting it.

 

[marcus]

So glad you enjoyed this pick of goodies, Hypatia!
If any particularly grab you, please let me know. Other people's reactions help.

Before I only posted the last half of Richard Wilbur's Blackberries for Amelia. But now I think it should be read complete for greatest pleasure:

***
Fringing the woods, the stone walls, and the lanes,
Old thickets everywhere have come alive,
Their new leaves reaching out in fans of five
From tangles overarched by this year's canes.

They have their flowers, too, it being June,
And here or there in brambled dark-and-light
Are small, five-petalled blooms of chalky white,
As random-clustered and as loosely strewn

As the far stars, of which we are now told
That ever faster do they bolt away,
And that a night may come in which, some say,
We shall have only blackness to behold.

I have no time for any change so great,
But I shall see the August weather spur
Berries to ripen where the flowers were --
Dark berries, savage-sweet and worth the wait --

And there will come the moment to be quick
And save some from the birds, and I shall need
Two pails, old clothes in which to stain and bleed,
And a grandchild to talk with while we pick.

***

 

[Evo]

So glad you enjoyed this pick of goodies, Hypatia!
If any particularly grab you, please let me know. Other people's reactions help.

Before I only posted the last half of Richard Wilbur's Blackberries for Amelia. But now I think it should be read complete for greatest pleasure:

***
Fringing the woods, the stone walls, and the lanes,
Old thickets everywhere have come alive,
Their new leaves reaching out in fans of five
From tangles overarched by this year's canes.

They have their flowers, too, it being June,
And here or there in brambled dark-and-light
Are small, five-petalled blooms of chalky white,
As random-clustered and as loosely strewn

As the far stars, of which we are now told
That ever faster do they bolt away,
And that a night may come in which, some say,
We shall have only blackness to behold.

I have no time for any change so great,
But I shall see the August weather spur
Berries to ripen where the flowers were --
Dark berries, savage-sweet and worth the wait --

And there will come the moment to be quick
And save some from the birds, and I shall need
Two pails, old clothes in which to stain and bleed,
And a grandchild to talk with while we pick.

***

I absolutely loved that Marcus. I meant to thank you sooner, it brightened my day.

 

[hypatia]

***

One thing does not exist: Oblivion.
God saves the metal and he saves the dross
And his prophetic memory guards from loss
The moons to come and those of evenings gone.

Everything is: the shadows in the glass
Which, in between the day's two twilights, you
Have scattered by the thousands, or shall strew
Henceforward in the mirror as you pass.

And everything is part of that diverse
Crystalline memory, the universe.
Whoever in its endless mazes wanders
Hears door on door click shut behind his stride,
And only on the sunset's farther side
Will see at last the Archetypes and Splendors.

I really enjoyed this, and I will ponder it during the rest of our rain showers today, and hope that it will clear up, so that I may think about it as I go star watching tonight.

 

[marcus]

Hypatia and Evo, thanks for your reactions! Both those poems are special favorites of mine too. Evo, I hope so much that you are feeling better.

 

[marcus]

a comic plaint by Larkin

I'm not especially fond of Larkin's verse because the voice is so often plaintive but he was extremely skillful and could be funny in the way he complained. This one is dated 8 January 1954, so it just barely got in through our time-window :-)

there is something subtle about the rhyme-pattern of this poem that took me a while to figure out. The poem is called "I Remember, I Remember".

***

Coming up England by a different line
For once, early in the cold new year,
We stopped, and, watching men with numbered plates
Sprint down the platform to familiar gates,
'Why Coventry!' I exclaimed, 'I was born here.'

I leant far out, and squinnied for a sign
That this was still the town that had been 'mine'
So long, but found I wasn't even clear
Which side was which. From where those cycle-crates
Were standing, had we annually departed

For all those family hols?...A whistle went:
Things moved. I sat back, staring at my boots,
'Was that,' my friend smiled, 'where you "have your roots"?'
No, only where my childhood was unspent,
I wanted to retort, just where I started:

By now I've got the whole place clearly charted.
Our garden, first: where I did not invent
Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits,
And wasn't spoken to by an old hat.
And here we have that splendid family

I never ran to when I got depressed,
The boys all biceps and the girls all chest,
Their comic Ford, their farm where I could be
'Really myself'. I'll show you, come to that,
The bracken where I never trembling sat,

Determined to go through with it: where she
Lay back, and 'all became a burning mist'.
And, in those offices, my doggerel
Was not set up in blunt ten-point, nor read
By a distinguished cousin of the mayor,

Who didn't call and tell my father There
Before us, had we the gift to see ahead--
'You look as if you wished the place in Hell'
My friend said, 'judging from your face.' 'Oh well,
I suppose it's not the place's fault,' I said.

'Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.'

***

You can hear the rhymes, but there may seem to be no regular pattern to them. There is a concealed pattern which emerges if you divide the 36 lines into four groups of nine.Coming up England by a different line
For once, early in the cold new year,
We stopped, and, watching men with numbered plates
Sprint down the platform to familiar gates,
'Why Coventry!' I exclaimed, 'I was born here.'
I leant far out, and squinnied for a sign
That this was still the town that had been 'mine'
So long, but found I wasn't even clear
Which side was which. From where those cycle-crates

Were standing, had we annually departed
For all those family hols?...A whistle went:
Things moved. I sat back, staring at my boots,
'Was that,' my friend smiled, 'where you "have your roots"?'
No, only where my childhood was unspent,
I wanted to retort, just where I started:
By now I've got the whole place clearly charted.
Our garden, first: where I did not invent
Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits,

And wasn't spoken to by an old hat.
And here we have that splendid family
I never ran to when I got depressed,
The boys all biceps and the girls all chest,
Their comic Ford, their farm where I could be
'Really myself'. I'll show you, come to that,
The bracken where I never trembling sat,
Determined to go through with it: where she
Lay back, and 'all became a burning mist'.

And, in those offices, my doggerel
Was not set up in blunt ten-point, nor read
By a distinguished cousin of the mayor,
Who didn't call and tell my father There
Before us, had we the gift to see ahead--
'You look as if you wished the place in Hell'
My friend said, 'judging from your face.' 'Oh well,
I suppose it's not the place's fault,' I said.
Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.'

aBccBaaBc
The first couplet tells you the last line. The second couplet echos the first line. But Larkin didn't break it up that way. He didn't want you to see the rhymes schematically as a reader sees them on the page. At least that time he only wanted you to hear them.

 

[marcus]

a sad poem by Elizabeth Bishop about loss

She used a centuries-old form, the villanelle. The form requires echoing the first and third lines of the first stanza---working them into the flow in a prescribed way. Dylan Thomas used this form in "Do not go gentle into that good night" written in grief at his father's death. Bishop's villanelle, called "One Art", is likewise about loss.

***
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

***

This is more stoical and less cathartic than Thomas'. Perhaps you could say that Bishop's is tougher and at the same time more touching. I want to show Thomas' villanelle for comparison although it is pre-1950 and does not belong to the thread time-frame:

***

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

***
Comparing these two examples will show just how the villanelle form works and also show what liberties Bishop took with it (to good effect I think)---she sometimes avoided exact repetition, and kept just enough that you could hear the line resurface.
I am finding myself overwhelmed with how much good rhymed metric verse there is even from times when it was supposed to be out of fashion. (When modernist-school poetry, normally unrhymed and rhythmically irregular, supposedly predominated.)

 

[marcus]

"Going, Going" --a great one by Larkin

Putting this thread together, samples to show how much good R-M verse grew in the post-1950 years, has given me a new appreciation for Philip Larkin. He seems to have had a pretty good time in his 63 years (1922-1985) and to have actually had the impertinence to turn down the Poet Laureate job when it was offered him. Reading the wikipedia article told me stuff I hadn't known. He liked jazz and used to play the drums when he was a kid. I'm tickled by his use of vernacular, among other things---as when referring to death as "snuffing it" and the UK's leading citizens as "crooks and tarts". Here's "Going, Going", written January 1972:

***

I thought it would last my time -
The sense that, beyond the town,
There would always be fields and farms,
Where the village louts could climb
Such trees as were not cut down;
I knew there'd be false alarms

In the papers about old streets
And split level shopping, but some
Have always been left so far;
And when the old part retreats
As the bleak high-risers come
We can always escape in the car.

Things are tougher than we are, just
As Earth will always respond
However we mess it about;
Chuck filth in the sea, if you must:
The tides will be clean beyond.
- But what do I feel now? Doubt?

Or age, simply? The crowd
Is young in the M1 cafe;
Their kids are screaming for more -
More houses, more parking allowed,
More caravan sites, more pay.
On the Business Page, a score

Of spectacled grins approve
Some takeover bid that entails
Five per cent profit (and ten
Per cent more in the estuaries): move
Your works to the unspoilt dales
(Grey area grants)! And when

You try to get near the sea
In summer . . . It seems, just now,
To be happening so very fast;
Despite all the land left free
For the first time I feel somehow
That it isn't going to last,

That before I snuff it, the whole
Boiling will be bricked in
Except for the tourist parts -
First slum of Europe: a role
It won't be hard to win,
With a cast of crooks and tarts.

And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There'll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.

Most things are never meant.
This won't be, most likely; but greeds
And garbage are too thick-strewn
To be swept up now, or invent
Excuses that make them all needs.
I just think it will happen, soon.

***

I've bolded the part that comes to mind, when I think of this poem.

 

[marcus]

a little one of Auden's (1957)

This one, by WH Auden, gets in through our 1950-plus time window. It is called "The More Loving One"

***

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on Earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

***

One of Auden's best known poems "The Shield of Achilles" was first published in 1953 and so it also comes in the time period we are looking at
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15547
It's pretty long. Maybe I will just give a couple of links to this one.
http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/99/jrieffel/poetry/auden/achilles.html

 

[hypatia]

"Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,"

Ahahah I love it

 

[marcus]

What a nice comment to get!

BTW a friend just informed me that the Dylan Thomas poem "Do not go gentle into that good night" actually belongs in our post-1950 sample. David John Thomas, the poet's father, died in December 1952.

 

[BWV]

Don't like much rhymed poetry, let alone rhymed poetry written after 1950 - but this one is good:

Love and Tensor Algebra
from "The Cyberiad" by Stanislaw Lem


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

Come, every frustrum longs to be a cone
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.


In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.


I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.


For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Bools or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?


Cancel me not - for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.


Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
the product o four scalars is defines!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.


I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!

 

[marcus]

thanks for contributing a favorite BWV
in the fifth stanza, should Bools actually be Boole?

I suspect the translator was Michael Kandel (the main translator of Lem).
Considerable credit should go to the translator. It isn't easy
to render a rhymed metrical poem in another language and
have it sound natural.

In the next to last stanza, probably

the product of four scalars is defined

instead of

the product o four scalars is define

==============
I don't have the original Lem/Kandel poem to check so I am just guessing.
thanks for taking the time to copy this in!
It is grand satire. BTW do you have an explanation for a-squared cos (two phi)?
anything special about that mathematical expression making it the right note to end on?
my very tentative guess would be that there was a pun in the original Polish, in the
way they would read out a² cos (2 phi), or whatever formula Lem had there.
but I could easily be missing something.

 

[marcus]

I had some comment earlier about Wilbur's "The Field" and gave some excerpts.

One night around summer 1968 Wilbur went out in a field with his wife Charlotte and looked at the stars---a field near their summerhouse in the Berkshires, I think---and the next morning they walked thru the same field which at the moment was full of wildflowers...

The poem has 20 short stanzas.

I will put the pieces together so we can get a look at the whole thing:

***

This field-grass brushed our legs
Last night, when out we stumbled looking up,
Wading as through the cloudy dregs
Of a wide sparkling cup,

Our thrown-back heads aswim
In the grand, kept appointments of the air,
Save where a pine at the sky's rim
Took something from the Bear.

Black in her glinting chains,
Andromeda feared nothing from the seas,
Preserved as by no hero's pains,
Or hushed Euripedes',

And there the dolphin glowed,
Still flailing through a diamond froth of stars,
Flawless as when Arion rode
One of its avatars.

But none of this was true.
What shapes that Greece or Babylon discerned
Had time not slowly drawn askew
Or like cat's cradles turned?

And did we not recall
That Egypt's north was in the Dragon's tail?
As if a form of type should fall
And dash itself like hail,

The heavens jumped away,
Bursting the cincture of the zodiac,
Shot flares, with nothing left to say
To us, not coming back

Unless they should at last,
Like hard-flung dice that ramble out the throw,
Be gathered for another cast.
Whether that might be so

We could not say, but trued
Our talk awhile to words of the real sky,
Chatting of class or magnitude,
Star-clusters, nebulae,

And how Antares huge
As Mars' big roundhouse swing, and more, was fled
As in in some rimless centrifuge
Into a blink of red.

It was the nip of fear
That told us when imagination caught
The feel of what we said, came near
The schoolbook thoughts we thought,

And faked a scan of space
Blown black and hollow by our spent grenade,
All worlds dashed out without a trace,
The very light unmade.

Then, in the late-night chill,
We turned and picked our way through outcrop stone
By the faint starlight, up the hill
To where our bed-lamp shone.

Today, in the same field,
The sun takes all, and what could lie beyond?
Those holes in heaven have been sealed
Like rain-drills in a pond,

And we, beheld in gold,
See nothing starry but these galaxies
Of flowers, dense and manifold,
Which lift about our knees--

White daisy-drifts where you
Sink down to pick an armload as we pass,
Sighting the heal-all's minor blue
In chasms of the grass,

And strews of hawkweed where,
Amongst the reds or yellows as they burn,
A few dead plls commit to air
The seeds of their return.

We could no doubt mistake
These flowers for some answer to that fright
We felt for all creation's sake
In our dark talk last night,

Taking to heart what came
Of the heart's wish for life, which, staking here
In the least field an endless claim,
Beats on from sphere to sphere

And pounds beyond the sun,
Where nothing less peremptory can go,
And is ourselves, and is the one
Unbounded thing we know.


***

 

[marcus]

In earlier times, poets did not always confine themselves to their own private experience. Milton wrote sonnets about public events and political issues. I believe he wrote at least one poem addressed to someone in power, namely Oliver Cromwell.

Maybe we should remember this occasionally. It's possible for the voices of poets to play a role in politics, at times. If you include popular singer-songwriters such as Bob Dylan then it might not even be uncommon. The singer's voice can help to change social mood, in some eras. But I'm not sampling popular song lyrics in this thread, just conventional verse poetry.

Well Wilbur wrote a snarky sonnet to President Lyndon Johnson which I like quite a bit. He let people know it was written in just one day---impromptu unpolished---triggered by the news that Johnson, having commissioned a presidential portrait, had rejected the artist's work because it was too big (made Johnson look larger than life-size as I recall) and the Capitol building in the background too brightly illuminated. I like it for the combnation of deep seriousness with the humorous adoption of a kind of 18th century Dr. Johnson How Now Sir! manner. As a disdainful rebuke it seems to work excellently, while being delivered with a bit of old mannerisms serves to lightens it up. Maybe your take on it is different, feel free to comment.

Wilbur called the poem "A Miltonic Sonnet for Mr. Johnson on His Refusal of Peter Hurd's Official Portrait"

***

Heir to the office of a man not dead
Who drew our Declaration up, who planned
Range and Rotunda with his drawing-hand
And harbored Palestrina in his head,
Who would have wept to see small nations dread
The imposition of our cattle-brand,
With public truth at home mistold or banned,
And in whose term no army's blood was shed,

Rightly you say the picture is too large
Which Peter Hurd by your appointment drew,
And justly call that Capitol too bright
Which signifies our people in your charge;
Wait, Sir, and see how time will render you,
Who talk of vision but are weak of sight.

***

 

[marcus]

TRISMEGISTUS
by Richard Wilbur

O Egypt, Egypt—so the great lament
Of thrice-great Hermes went—
Nothing of thy religion shall remain
Save fables, which thy children shall disdain.
His grieving eye foresaw
The world’s bright fabric overthrown
Which married star to stone
And charged all things with awe.

And what, in that dismantled world, could be
More fabulous than he?
Had he existed? Was he but a name
Tacked on to forgeries which pressed the claim
Of every ancient quack—
That one could from a smoky cell
By talisman or spell
Coerce the Zodiac?

Still, still we summon him at midnight hour
To Milton’s pensive tower,
And hear him tell again how, then and now,
Creation is a house of mirrors, how
Each herb that sips the dew
Dazzles the eye with many small
Reflections of the All—
Which, after all, is true.

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2009/01/05/090105po_poem_wilbur2

The way I picture it, the leafy plant (the herb) is covered with dazzling dewdrops each of which mirrors an image of the world around it---so the mystical (Hermetic?) idea is made to be true in a simple mundane way. And also every atom in the leaf is a reflection of the physical laws and constants of nature, and so a kind of reflection of the whole world, again in a straightforward matter-of-fact way.

So this line that says "Which, after all, is true." has a fair amount of punch or weight. I like it.

Some of the references are to the famous poem Il Penseroso by John Milton.

 

[marcus]

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2008/12/08/081208po_poem_wilbur

this is so deft, so skillful that it makes me want to laugh triumphant or cheer and yet
at the same time sick at the pit of my stomach from the image.

Remember how Dante finishes each canto of successive three-zers with a one-zer. That is how you end a terza rima chain----3,3,...3,3,1
And he is always going somewhere.

TERZA RIMA
by Richard Wilbur

In this great form, as Dante proved in Hell,
There is no dreadful thing that can’t be said
In passing. Here, for instance, one could tell

How our jeep skidded sideways toward the dead
Enemy soldier with the staring eyes,
Bumping a little as it struck his head,

And then flew on, as if toward Paradise.

 

[marcus]

Lyn Coffin is a crackerjack verse translator of the great 20-cent Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Here is a sample. This is part of a longer poem in verse sections called REQUIEM, which is about the Stalin purge years. Akhmatova's husband was executed and her son went to Gulag. Requiem was written during this time and not published but preserved and then came out in 1957. This section is called Introduction:This happened when only the dead wore smiles--
they rejoiced at being safe from harm.
And Leningrad dangled from its jails
like some unnecessary arm.

And when the hosts of those convicted
marched in mad, tormented throngs,
and railroad whistles were restricted
to singing separation songs.

The stars of death stood overhead,
and guiltless Russia, that pariah,
writhed under boots, all blood-bespattered,
and the wheels of many a black maria.

It is dated 1935.
The height of the great purge was 1937-1938
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge
For years some of Akmatova's poems were not written but kept only in memory because it was not safe to have written copies of anything critical. Police could search the private papers. Her friends helped her by sharing the job of memorizing. Most of her work is in classic (rhyme metric) verse form which does make it more easy to memorize. Lyn Coffin has preserved this feature.
I have typed LC translation from memory and so may have some mistakes of punctuation or a few words but it is roughly correct.
Lyn Coffin's book is here:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393300145/?tag=pfamazon01-20

Lyn Coffin did these translations around 1983 (when her Akhm. book was published.) Later appeared what are generally considered the best unrhymed translations, those by Judith Hemschemeyer from around 1990. You can compare. Here is the Hemschemeyer unrhyme version of the same thing:

That was when the ones who smiled
were the dead, glad to be at rest.
And like a useless appendage, Leningrad
swung from its prisons.

And when, senseless from torment,
regiments of convicts marched,
and the short songs of farewell
were sung by locomotive whistles.

The stars of death stood above us
and innocent Russia writhed
under bloody boots
and under the tires of the Black Marias.
Judith Hemschemeyer's book is here:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0939010275/?tag=pfamazon01-20

Although the LC trans speaks more to my heart---is more rhythmical, rocks and rolls more---even so I appreciate the precision of the JH, where she indicates that the convicts being marched to the train station, to be shipped to the Gulag, were senseless because they had been tortured to the point of senselessness. This is more precise in the details than what LC says. Although one can get the same idea from the LC version.

Both LC and JH render the great image of a world-culture city (former Petersburg) which has then become essentially just its police and prison system, and the rest of the society is just a dangling appendage to the essential, which is the jails. Akhmatova, who could see that way, I think has lasting greatness. Out of respect I will try to transcribe her original so we get an idea of the sound.

Eto bilo kogda oolibalsya
tolko mertvui, spokoistviyoo rad.
I nenoozhnim privyescom boltalsya
vozlye tyoorem cvoickh Lyeningrad.

I kogda, obyezoomev ot mooki,
schli oozhe osoozhdyennikh polki,
i korotkooyoo pesnyoo razlooki
parovozni peli goodki.

Zvyezdi cmerti ctoyali nad nami,
i byezvinnaya korchilas Roos
pod krovavimi sapogami
i pod schinami chernikh maroos.

 

[atyy]

Blackberries for Amelia

Words for Some Ash

They are very beautiful.

 

[marcus]

They are very beautiful.

Thanks for the comment. It's encouraging to get some response! I agree. The two you mentioned (Blackberries for Amelia, and Words for Some Dust) are among the loveliest verse in this thread. The complete Blackberries for Amelia is here:
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=1799593#post1799593

 

[marcus]

Favorite rhymed metric verse

My general impression of Auden's poems is they are urbane, often humorous, ironical, and don't get carried away. But then there's this wonderful outburst:

Follow poet, follow right
to the bottom of the night:
with your unconstraining voice
still persuade us to rejoice.

With the farming of a verse
make a vineyard of the curse.
Sing of human unsuccess
in a rapture of distress.

In the desert of the heart
let the healing fountain start:
in the prison of his days
teach the free man how to praise.


This is from memory and may have mistakes.

Why don't we change the definition of the thread and allow other rhymed verse besides stuff from 1950 and after. That excerpt was from 1939, against a gruesome political background.

Let's make the title from here on be just "Favorite rhymed metric verse" (without the "written after 1950")

 

[marcus]

Here's a minor Wilbur poem I like from around 2004. The ABBA rhyme pattern is made subtle so that you may not hear it right away.

Though the season's begun to speak
its long sentence of darkness,
the upswept boughs of the larch
bristle with gold for a week,

and then there is only the willow,
to make bright interjection,
its drooping branches decked
with thin leaves, curved and yellow,

till winter, loosening these,
with a first flurry and bluster,
shall scatter across the snow-crust
their dropped parentheses.

 

[marcus]

Earlier I quoted a short excerpt of a 1939 poem by Auden. On the occasion of the death of the great Irish poet William Yeats. It didn't seem typical Auden to me, if there is a typical Auden voice.

... often humorous, ironical, and don't get carried away. But then there's this wonderful outburst:

Follow poet, follow right
to the bottom of the night:
with your unconstraining voice
still persuade us to rejoice.

...

Yeats had just died, and there were bad things going on in Europe (including the Hitler-Stalin pact, purges, holocaust, it gets worse and worse.) This is from memory and may have mistakes.


Earth receive an honored guest,
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel like
emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark,
all the dogs of Europe bark.
And the living nations wait,
each sequestered in its hate.

Intellectual disgrace
stares from every human face.
And the seas of pity lie,
locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow poet follow right
to the bottom of the night.
With your unconstraining voice,
still persuade us to rejoice,

with the farming of a verse,
make a vineyard of the curse,
sing of human unsuccess,
in a rapture of distress.

In the deserts of the heart,
let a healing fountain start,
in the prison of his days.
teach the free man how to praise.

=============
Verse doesn't get much better than that IMHO.

 

[marcus]

Here's a sort of conjugal love poem. A husband and wife happily occupied under a tree.
(The Wilburs live in rural Mass, the Berkshires.)

UNDER A TREE

We know those tales of gods in hot pursuit,
who frightened wood-nymphs into taking root

and changing then into a branchy shape,
fair, but perplexing to the thought of rape:

but this, we say, is more how love is made--
ply and reply of limbs in fireshot shade,

where overhead we hear tossed leaves consent
to take the wind in free dishevelment

and, answering with supple blade and stem,
caress the gusts that are caressing them.