Carleton Choices for National Poem in Your
Pocket Day (Thursday, April 18, 2013)
The English Department slate of poems features something timely, something local, something by
an alum, and something seasonal:
To an Athlete Dying Young
By A. E. Housman
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears.
Submitted by Tim Raylor for the English
Department
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.
So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.
And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.
Homesteading
By Joyce Sutphen
Long ago, I settled on this piece of mind,
clearing a spot for memory, making a
road so that the future should come and go,
building a house of possibility.
I came across a prairie with only
my wagonload of words, fragile stories
packed in sawdust. I had to learn how
to press a thought like seed into the ground;
I had to learn to speak with a hammer,
how to hit the nail straight on. When
I took up the reins behind the plow,
I felt the land, threading through me,
stitching me into place.
Submitted by the English Department
ONIONS
by Sarah Dimick ’06
A field of onions is moving into the apartment above us. At night they come with their boxes
full of dirt—we can hear their seeds trickling up the staircase to the third floor. It reminds Henry
of the time the threads of my necklace snapped: the sound of pearls rolling under our
refrigerator. They will probably outlast us. Years from now, when someone decides to replace
the refrigerator, a repairman will discover a pair of pearls lying together in the dark.
Over breakfast, Henry suggests we invite the onions down for dinner. “It would be a neighborly
gesture,” he says, picking chips of shell off a hardboiled egg. Behind him, I can see the rain
through the window. It has rained for three days, and above us, I hear the shower and kitchen
sink running. When we leave the apartment to catch our train, we notice they’ve left their
windows wide open, the rain blowing in.
The onions do not return our phone call. The apartment manager tells us the price of real estate
where they used to live got too expensive. “Happ’nin’ everywhere now,” he says as he finishes
his cigarette. That night, as Henry helps me unhook the back of my bra, I realize we might have
scared the onions. “What would we have served them?” I ask. “Water?” Beneath the tan line
of my swimsuit, my breasts are white. Henry has moved to the other side of the room—in the
mirror’s reflection they are round and lonely.
Thin roots begin to break through our ceiling, chips of plaster on our floor. The couches and
carpets smell like damp earth—when we turn on our overhead lights, we inadvertently burn a
few roots. I cry all the time, I cry so much my limbs begin to ache. Henry brings home small
white pills that I balance in the palm of my hand and then swallow with water. By the time the
onions themselves appear above us, rows of light bulbs that won’t turn on, Henry has begun
coming home from work early every day just to hold me. I cry and he rubs my back, and this is
how we know the world is full of knives.
http://www.midwayjournal.com/Aug11_Poetry-Onions.html
Submitted by the English Department
From Blossoms Comes
by Li-Young Lee
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
Submitted by Liz Ciner for the English Department
“How Sweet The Moonlight Sleeps Upon This Bank!”
Spoken by Lorenzo, The Merchant of Venice, Act 5, Scene 1
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
Come, ho! and wake Diana with a hymn!
With sweetest touches pierce your mistress’ ear,
And draw her home with music.
The reason is, your spirits are attentive:
For do but note a wild and wanton herd,
Or race of youthful and unhandled colts,
Fetching mad bounds, bellowing and neighing loud,
Which is the hot condition of their blood;
If they but hear perchance a trumpet sound,
Or any air of music touch their ears,
You shall perceive them make a mutual stand,
Their savage eyes turn’d to a modest gaze
By the sweet power of music: therefore the poet
Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods;
Since nought so stockish, hard and full of rage,
But music for the time doth change his nature.
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils
The motions of his spirit are dull as night
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.
Submitted by Ron Rodman for Music
Fog
by Carl Sandburg
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
-----------Submitted by Carol Rutz for the Writing
Program
Умом Россию не понять,
Аршином общим не измерить:
У ней особенная стать —
В Россию можно только верить.
-Фёдор Тютчев, 1866
Russia cannot be understood with the mind,
Cannot be measured with a standard measure:
It has a particular quality -One can only believe in Russia.
This poem by Fyodor Tiutchev is known by
heart by every Russian and by many
generations of Russian 103 students at
Carleton.
Submitted by Laura Goering for Russian
I dreamed of a peony flower (shaoyao hua 芍藥花)
By Huang Chunyao (1605-45)
Coir palm flowers fill the courtyard;
black lichen enters my quiet-room.
The lamp’s reflection lights my sleeplessness.
Mind clear, I breathe in the wondrous scent.
(Huang Chunyao’s (1605-45) calligraphy (unpaginated), trans. Lynn A. Struve)
Sailing to Byzantium (1926)
W.B. Yeats
THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
Submitted by Seungjoo Yoon and Susannah Ottaway for the History Department
Musee des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Submitted by Fred Hagstrom for Studio Art
Selection of Poems by Ogden Nash
REFLECTION ON A WICKED WORLD
Purity
Is obscurity.
THE FLY
God in His wisdom made the fly.
And then forgot to tell us why.
THE MIDDLE
When I remember bygone days
I think how evening follows morn;
So many I loved were not yet dead,
So many I love were not yet born.
THE CATERPILLAR
I find among the poems of Schiller
No mention of the caterpillar.
No can I find one anywhere
In Petrarch or in Baudelaire,
So here I sit in extra session
To give my personal impression.
The caterpillar, as it's called,
Is often hairy, seldom bald;
It looks as if it never shaves;
When as it walks, it walks in waves;
And from the cradle to the chrysalis
It's utterly speechless, songless, whistleless.
Submitted by Anna Moltchanova for Philosophy
‫יהודה עמיחי‬
‫מי שעוזב את שהוא אוהב‬
‫יפרוש את חפציו ואת דבריו ליד החלון‬
‫ זה כל מה שיש לי‬,‫ויאמר‬
‫מי שעוזב את שהוא אוהב‬
‫הניסים יקרו לו במהופך‬
‫כל יין יהפוך לדם‬
‫וכל לחם לאבן‬
‫וים סוף לא יבקע לחיים חדשים‬
‫אלא ישאר שלם כזכרון‬
. ‫ שבו יטבע‬,‫שאין לעבור אותו‬
He who leaves what he loves
By Yehudah Amichai
He who leaves what he loves
Will spread out his belongings and his things by the window
And will say, that is all I have
Miracles will happen to him inversely
All wine will turn into blood
And all bread into stone
And the Red Sea will not burst open into new life
But will stay whole as a memory
That cannot be crossed, in which he’ll drown.
Submitted and translated by Mira Reinberg, Hebrew
(For a very small pocket):
Catullus 85
Odi et amo. Quare id faciam fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
I hate and I love. Perhaps you’ll ask why I do this.
I don’t know, but I feel that it’s done and I am tortured.
Catullus 13
Cenabis bene, mi Fabulle, apud me
Paucis, si tibi di favent, diebus
Si tecum attuleris bonam atque magnam
Cenam, non sine candida puella
Et vino et sale et omnibus cachinnis.
Haec si, inquam attuleris, venuste noster
Cenabis bene; nam tui Catulli
Plenus sacculus est aranearum.
Sed contra accipies meros amores
Seu quid suavius elegantiusve est:
Nam unguentum dabo, quod meae puellae
Donarunt Veneres Cupidinesque,
Quod tu cum olfacies, deos rogabis
Totum ut te faciant, Fabulle, nasum.
You will dine well, my Fabullus, at my house
In a few days, if the gods are kind to you,
If you bring along a good and abundant
Dinner, not without a gorgeous girlfriend
And wine and wit and lots of laughter.
If, as I said, you bring these along, my charming friend,
You will dine well; for your Catullus’s
Change-purse is full of spiderwebs.
But in exchange, you will receive pure love,
or something still more lovely and elegant:
For I will give you a perfume which all the
Love-gods gave to my girlfriend
Which, when you get a whiff of it, you will ask the gods
to make you, Fabullus, entirely nose.
Odyssey 23.231ff (Odysseus’ reunion with Penelope; translation by Alexander Pope)
ὣς φάτο, τῷ δ᾽ ἔτι μᾶλλον ὑφ᾽ ἵμερον ὦρσε γόοιο:
κλαῖε δ᾽ ἔχων ἄλοχον θυμαρέα, κεδνὰ ἰδυῖαν.
ὡς δ᾽ ὅτ᾽ ἂν ἀσπάσιος γῆ νηχομένοισι φανήῃ,
ὧν τε Ποσειδάων εὐεργέα νῆ᾽ ἐνὶ πόντῳ
ῥαίσῃ, ἐπειγομένην ἀνέμῳ καὶ κύματι πηγῷ:
παῦροι δ᾽ ἐξέφυγον πολιῆς ἁλὸς ἤπειρόνδε
νηχόμενοι, πολλὴ δὲ περὶ χροῒ τέτροφεν ἅλμη,
ἀσπάσιοι δ᾽ ἐπέβαν γαίης, κακότητα φυγόντες:
ὣς ἄρα τῇ ἀσπαστὸς ἔην πόσις εἰσοροώσῃ,
δειρῆς δ᾽ οὔ πω πάμπαν ἀφίετο πήχεε λευκώ.
Touch'd to the soul, the king with rapture hears,
Hangs round her neck, and speaks his joy in tears.
As to the shipwreck'd mariner, the shores
Delightful rise, when angry Neptune roars:
Then, when the surge in thunder mounts the sky,
And gulf'd in crowds at once the sailors die;
If one, more happy, while the tempest raves,
Outlives the tumult of conflicting waves,
All pale, with ooze deform'd, he views the strand,
And plunging forth with transport grasps the land:
The ravish'd queen with equal rapture glows,
Clasps her loved lord, and to his bosom grows.
Submitted by Clara Hardy for Classics
Luis Cernuda
from _Los Placeres Prohibidos_ (1931)
No decía palabras
No decía palabras,
acercaba tan sólo un cuerpo interrogante
porque ignoraba que el deseo es una
pregunta
cuya respuesta no existe,
una hoja cuya rama no existe,
un mundo cuyo cielo no existe.
La angustia se abre paso entre los huesos,
remonta por las venas
hasta abrirse en la piel,
surtidores de sueño
hechos carne en interrogación vuelta a las
nubes.
Un roce al paso,
una mirada fugaz entre las sombras,
bastan para que el cuerpo se abra en dos,
ávido de recibir en sí mismo
otro cuerpo que sueñe;
mitad y mitad, sueño y sueño, carne y carne,
iguales en figura, iguales en amor, iguales
en deseo.
Aunque sólo sea una esperanza,
porque el deseo es una pregunta cuya
respuesta nadie sabe.
It Didn’t Speak in Words
Submitted by Silvia Lopez, Spanish
Translation by Dave Bonta
It didn’t speak in words,
It could only draw near: an inquisitive body,
Unaware that desire is a question
Without an answer,
A leaf without a branch,
A world without a sky.
Anguish opens a path among the bones,
Travels upstream through the veins
Until it comes out on the skin,
Upwellings of dream made flesh
To question the clouds.
A brush in passing,
A stolen glance among the shadows
Are enough to make the body divide in two,
Eager to take another dreaming body
Into itself,
Half with half,
Dream with dream,
Flesh with flesh:
Equivalent in shape, in love, in craving.
But it never gets farther than a hope,
Because desire is a question whose answer
nobody knows.
Charles Baudelaire's "Enivrez-Vous" or "Be Drunk"
"Enivrez-vous"
From Petits poèmes en prose (1869)
ENIVREZ-VOUS
Il faut être toujours ivre, tout est là ; c'est l'unique question. Pour ne pas sentir l'horrible fardeau
du temps qui brise vos épaules et vous penche vers la terre, il faut vous enivrer sans trêve.
Mais de quoi? De vin, de poésie, ou de vertu à votre guise, mais enivrez-vous!
Et si quelquefois, sur les marches d'un palais, sur l'herbe verte d'un fossé, vous vous réveillez,
l'ivresse déjà diminuée ou disparue, demandez au vent, à la vague, à l'étoile, à l'oiseau, à
l'horloge; à tout ce qui fuit, à tout ce qui gémit, à tout ce qui roule, à tout ce qui chante, à tout ce
qui parle, demandez quelle heure il est. Et le vent, la vague, l'étoile, l'oiseau, l'horloge, vous
répondront, il est l'heure de s'enivrer ; pour ne pas être les esclaves martyrisés du temps, enivrezvous, enivrez-vous sans cesse de vin, de poésie, de vertu, à votre guise.
BE DRUNK
You must be drunk always. That is everything: the only question. Not to feel the horrible
burden of Time that crushes your shoulders and bends you earthward, you must be drunk without
respite.
But drunk on what? On wine, on poetry, on virtue—take your pick. But be drunk.
And if it should chance, on the steps of a palace, in the green weeds of a ditch, in the dreary
solitude of your bedroom, you awake, your drunkenness grown less or gone, ask of the wind, of
the wave, a star, bird, clock, anything fleeing, any that moan, that roll along, that sing, that speak,
ask what hour it is; and the wind, wave, star, bird, clock, will reply, “The hour to be drunk! Not
to be Time’s racked slaves, be drunk; be drunk without respite. On wine, on poetry, on virtue—
take your pick.”
Translation by Keith Waldrop
Submitted by Dana Strand for French and Francophone Studies
Guillaume Apollinaire
From Calligrammes (1918)
View the Wonderful Image at :
http://www.eratiopostmodernpoetry.com/editor_Il_Pleut.html
IL PLEUT
Il pleut des voix de femmes comme si elles étaient mortes même dans le souvenir
c’est vous aussi qu’il pleut, merveilleuses rencontres de ma vie Ô gouttelettes !
et ces nuages cabrés se prennent à hennir tout un univers de villes auriculaires
écoute s’il pleut tandis que le regret et le dédain pleurent une ancienne musique
écoute tomber les liens qui te retiennent en haut et en bas
IT’S RAINING
It’s raining women’s voices as if they had died even in memory
And it’s raining you as well marvelous encounters of my life O little drops
Those rearing clouds begin to neigh a whole universe of auricular cities
Listen if it rains while regret and disdain weep to an ancient music
Listen to the bonds fall off which hold you above and below
Translation by Roger Shattuck
Submitted by Éva Pósfay for French and Francophone Studies
On Prayer
~ Czeslaw Milosz ~
You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.
All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge
And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,
Above landscapes the color of ripe gold
Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.
That bridge leads to the shore of Reversal
Where everything is just the opposite and the word 'is'
Unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned.
Notice: I say we; there, every one, separately,
Feels compassion for others entangled in the flesh
And knows that if there is no other shore
We will walk that aerial bridge all the same.
Submitted by Roger Jackson for the Religion Department
Tin Wedding Whistle
by Ogden Nash
Though you know it anyhow
Listen to me, darling, now,
Proving what I need not prove
How I know I love you, love.
Near and far, near and far,
I am happy where you are;
Likewise I have never larnt
How to be it where you aren't.
Far and wide, far and wide,
I can walk with you beside;
Furthermore, I tell you what,
I sit and sulk where you are not.
Visitors remark my frown
Where you're upstairs and I am down,
Yes, and I'm afraid I pout
When I'm indoors and you are out;
But how contentedly I view
Any room containing you.
In fact I care not where you be,
Just as long as it's with me.
In all your absences I glimpse
Fire and flood and trolls and imps.
Is your train a minute slothful?
I goad the stationmaster wrothful.
When with friends to bridge you drive
I never know if you're alive,
And when you linger late in shops
I long to telephone the cops.
Yet how worth the waiting for,
To see you coming through the door.
Somehow, I can be complacent
Never but with you adjacent.
Near and far, near and far,
I am happy where you are;
Likewise I have never larnt
How to be it where you aren't.
Then grudge me not my fond endeavor,
To hold you in my sight forever;
Let none, not even you, disparage
Such a valid reason for a marriage.
Submitted by Steve Poskanzer (poem read at his wedding to Jane)