Temporary Boxes
A selection of poems from the works of
ten poets
For the shared study of poetry in SACE
Stage 2 English Studies.
Chosen by J. A. Scobie.
Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.
The box is only temporary.
Sylvia Plath, from ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’
CONTENTS
Page
Jeri Kroll
1.
Quickening
……………………………………………………
1
2.
On Watching a Sleeping Child
……………………………………………………
1
From The Songs of Innocence
……………………………………………………
4
William Blake
3.
The Ecchoing Green
4.
Infant Joy
……………………………………………………
5
5.
The Chimney Sweeper
……………………………………………………
5
6.
The Lamb
……………………………………………………
6
7.
Holy Thursday
……………………………………………………
7
8.
On Anothers Sorrow
……………………………………………………
8
9.
THE Chimney Sweeper
From The Songs of Experience
……………………………………………………
9
10. The Tyger
……………………………………………………
9
11. HOLY THURSDAY
……………………………………………………
10
12. LONDON
……………………………………………………
10
13. A POISON TREE
……………………………………………………
11
14. INFANT SORROW
……………………………………………………
11
15. Metaphors
……………………………………………………
13
16. You’re
……………………………………………………
13
17. Morning Song
……………………………………………………
14
18. Mirror
……………………………………………………
14
19. Blackberrying
……………………………………………………
15
20. The Moon and the Yew Tree
……………………………………………………
16
21. The Applicant
……………………………………………………
17
22. Daddy
……………………………………………………
18
23. The Arrival of the Bee Box
……………………………………………………
20
24. Stings
……………………………………………………
21
25. Lady Lazarus
……………………………………………………
22
26. Ariel
……………………………………………………
23
27. Digging
……………………………………………………
24
28. Blackberry Picking
……………………………………………………
25
29. Death of a Naturalist
……………………………………………………
26
30. Waking in the Blue
……………………………………………………
27
31. Memories of West Street and Lepke
……………………………………………………
29
32. Skunk Hour
……………………………………………………
30
Sylvia Plath
Seamus Heaney
Robert Lowell
Robert Frost
33. The Road not Taken
……………………………………………………
32
34. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
……………………………………………………
33
35. The Silken Tent
……………………………………………………
33
36. Grandchild
……………………………………………………
34
37. Housework
……………………………………………………
35
38. The Sunne Rising
……………………………………………………
37
39. Holy Sonnet X (Death be not proud)
……………………………………………………
38
40. Ode on Melancholy
……………………………………………………
39
41. To Autumn
……………………………………………………
40
42. Much Madness is Divinest Sense
……………………………………………………
41
43. They put Us far apart
……………………………………………………
41
Margaret Scott
John Donne
John Keats
Emily Dickinson
Extracts from pp 52-3 of the SACE Board’s English Subject Outline Stage 2 (from 2011):
Study of Poetry
The study of poetry is designed to address the ideas, experiences, and emotions that poets explore
and express, and the particular language techniques and stylistic features they use. Students should
therefore be made familiar with aspects of style, imagery, word choice, and technique so that they
develop an awareness of the poet’s role in constructing the text to shape the response of the reader,
and of the interaction of poet and reader. The study allows students to consider a range of
interpretations and readings.
The study of poetry is a shared class activity in which teachers, in negotiation with students, choose
a range of poems that total at least 1000 lines and focus on the works of at least three poets. At least
two of the poets must be chosen from the list of prescribed texts; the remaining poet or poets may be
chosen from other sources. The selection must allow students to consider and compare the works of
the chosen poets but could also include a wider range of poems to cover students’ individual
interests and choices, particularly if the teacher organises the study of poetry around a theme.
POETS
Auden, W.H.
Blake, William
Dawe, Bruce
Dickinson, Emily
Donne, John
Frost, Robert
Harwood, Gwen
Heaney, Seamus
Hopkins, G.M.
Keats, John
Kroll, Jeri
Malouf, David
Marvell, Andrew
Mtshali, Oswald Mbuyiseni
Murray, Les
Nichols, Grace
Noonuccal, Oodgeroo
Owen, Wilfred
Plath, Sylvia
Shakespeare, William
Slessor, Kenneth
Soyinka, Wole
Strauss, Jennifer
Sykes, Bobbi
Thomas, Dylan
Wright, Judith
Yeats, W.B.
Jeri Kroll
Quickening
You shudder like the sleeping cat
light as her whiskers
tingling my wrist
my body just knows you are there:
a pulse, a twitch, a pinch,
an eyelid closing
floating as scraps of dream
I can’t quite recall
each night I lie down
hoping to dream you whole
5
10
On watching a sleeping child
5
10
15
Once again, sleep has saved you.
Your mouth, round like the O of pleasure,
not ovaled to caterwaul like a cranky cat
walking the fence between bully and badger,
allows me to bear your breath.
But today you came close.
I could easily have done you in.
The ambulance would have been too late
to save what’s left of my martyred patience.
For days it’s been spread-eagled on the fridge,
nailed by your wild sea-blue eyes.
Yes, not much blood left.
This morning you leeched a few more drops –
splat, splat – on the bathroom floor with the toothpaste.
(‘Stop stalling, do the bottom as well as the top.’)
Then hosing you off, you superb little bastard,
1
you greedy vampire, you struck again.
‘Into the bathtub.
Don’t clamp your eyes shut.
You’re getting me soaked.
Come out of the closet.
No lollies for breakfast.’
20
The litany of the lunatic mother,
the Bacchante1 who’d love to feast on children’s flesh.
I hate the slippery dip of your back
as my hand smoothes powder over your bum:
two tight moons that invite exploration.
25
Some woman will lose her mind there in twenty years time.
And I abhor your adorable smile
as you insist on buttoning the buttons,
all four, and then doing two over,
watching you watching me watch the clock
as it ticks to 8.30.
30
I hate you, I love you, I hate you, I love you.
That’s clear unambiguous truth.
Each night I sneak in to stave off the verdict.
Death isn’t your foe, it’s the thought of silence,
the peach you possess as you breathe in your sleep
in out
in out
the pulse of the universe
snuffle
snort
35
40
Moonlight dusting your brow in the dark
floats into my heart like friendly gas
I’ll laugh and pass out with love and relief.
You are still my child,
I can bear you another day.
45
1
Bacchante: a priestess or follower of the god Bacchus, whose rites involved violent orgies
2
William Blake
“Read patiently; take not up this Book in an idle hour: the consideration of
these things is the whole duty of man & the affairs of life & death trifles,
sports of time; these considerations business of Eternity.”
Blake’s annotations to a volume he studied in 1798 (An Apology for the
Bible by Bishop Watson) can serve today to characterize the attention
deserved and significance offered by the most familiar work of England’s
“last great religious poet” (Ackroyd 18) and “greatest revolutionary artist”
(Eagleton, in Larrissy ix).
What we know as his Songs of Innocence and of Experience begins in
the publication, over the space of thirty-five years, of fifty copies of Songs
of Innocence and twenty-eight of Songs of Experience, from which
were constituted the two dozen actual sets of the combined Songs,
variously ordered and with a joint title page. The work in its full form
consists of fifty-four designs and poems which only in the last few copies
follow the sequence adopted by almost every modern edition. These Blake
etched in relief on relatively small (7 x 11 cm) copper plates, printed, often
coloured, and bound: his title page gives equal weight to his labours as
“Author & Printer,” and expects no less of his readers.1
Composition also was protracted — while the poems and designs of Innocence are dated 1789, three early drafts
surface in a 1785 manuscript which also reveals the 28-year-old artist’s predilection for “making a fool” of the reader2;
Songs of Experience and the joint title page are dated 1794, and one poem (“To Tirzah”) appears a few years after
that. The five epochal years between the title page dates of Innocence and Experience bracket the bulk of Blake’s socalled “Bible of Hell,” including remarkable works such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (MHH), VISIONS of
the Daughters of Albion, and, also dated 1794, The Book of Urizen.
As part of the “discovery” or “invention” of childhood in the eighteenth century associated with the interest in early
education shown by Locke, Rousseau, and the Sunday School movement, the decades before the Songs saw the genre
of short collections of devotional and moral poems for children emerge as a “most prolific and controversial literary
form” (Shrimpton 22). The genre’s mainstay was Isaac Watts’s Divine and Moral Songs Attempted in easy
Language, for the Use of Children, 1715, influential enough to be parodied not only by Blake (in “A Cradle Song”),
but still later in Alice in Wonderland; other titles could be cited, however, including Charles Wesley’s Hymns for
Children, 1763; Christopher Smart’s Hymns for the Amusement of Children, 1770; and Anna Barbauld’s Hymns in
Prose for Children, 1781. These works make a small sub-set of eighteenth-century hymnody, itself arguably the most
pervasively influential innovation of cultural discourse in Blake’s time. While it has long been recognized that in terms
of metrical and stanzaic variety, Blake’s songs “make as clear a parallel with eighteenth-century hymns, as they make a
contrast with eighteenth-century lyric” (Holloway 37), their contrast with the ideological burden of hymns has yet to be
explored fully. If John Wesley could preface his brother’s hymns with the hope that once children “understand them
they will be children no longer, only in years and stature,” then Blake might counter that if adults could understand his
songs, their “doors of perception” might be cleansed (MHH 14). Following his own interpretation of the Gospel, Blake
thinks “every Thing to be Evident to the Child” (E 664), and writes that “the innocence of a child” can reproach the
reader “with the errors of acquired folly” (E 600). His songs “about” or “from the perspective of” a guiltless point of
view offer parables to test what such pure perception might be, and how our sense might be folly.
The girl and boy learning to read at the lap of their nurse or mother who appear on the Innocence title page announce
recurrent concern with education in Songs. This group announces the “scene of instruction” to be found in or behind
almost every song. The quintessential object of instruction is, in one form or another, language and the related ability to
play with the symbolic order, and Songs might be taken as evoking stations along a gradient beginning with total
ignorance of that realm of symbol and culture and ending with original artistic contribution. These various stations can
be shuffled in the various sequences of different copies of Songs — there is no one developmental path, no single
authorized reading. From a social perspective, the poems represent minute particulars from the spectrum of discourses
across the social field. These different, often “contrary” stations or moments are rooted in the individual poems and
designs themselves, making lack of single meaning a crucial point about each of the Songs. Given inescapable
divisions in self and society, a Wordsworthian “common language of men” is impossible for Blake (Glen 106). There
are no lyric effusions of emotion recollected, but rather dramatic stagings of language in action (see Gillham) — as the
few readings which follow hope to suggest.
This is an extract from —”William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience” by Nelson Hilton in The Blackwell Companion to
Romanticism, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998) http://virtual.park.uga.edu/~wblake/SONGS/begin/essayframe.html
1
The best generally available facsimile is that edited by Lincoln. A hypertext version, which facilitates experience of the various sequences and
includes annotated bibliographies, can be accessed at this site; color reproductions will be found at the web site for The Blake Archive.
2
From Blake’s AN ISLAND IN THE MOON, a satire on the artists and thinkers of his day that he mixed with
3
Plates 13 & 14 of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy Ci
The Ecchoing Green
The Sun does arise,
And make happy the skies.
The merry bells ring
To welcome the spring.
The sky-lark and thrush,
The birds of the bush,
Sing louder around,
To the bells chearful sound.
While our sports shall be seen,
On the Ecchoing Green.
Old John with white hair
Does laugh away care,
Sitting under the oak,
Among the old folk,
They laugh at our play,
And soon they all say,
Such such were the joys.
When we all girls & boys,
In our youth-time were seen,
On the Ecchoing Green.
Till the little ones weary
No more can be merry
The sun does descend,
And our sports have an end:
Round the laps of their mothers.
Many sisters and brothers,
Like birds in their nest,
Are ready for rest:
And sport no more seen,
On the darkening Green.
p14.05
p14.10
p14.15
4
p13.05
p13.10
Infant Joy
I have no name
I am but two days old.—
What shall I call thee?
I happy am
Joy is my name,—
Sweet joy befall thee!
5
Pretty joy!
Sweet joy but two days old,
Sweet joy I call thee;
Thou dost smile.
I sing the while
Sweet joy befall thee.
10
Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy C , plate 5
The Chimney Sweeper.
When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue,
Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep.
So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.
5
10
15
20
Theres little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head
That curl’d like a lambs back, was shav’d, so I said.
Hush Tom never mind it, for when your head’s bare,
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.
And so he was quiet, & that very night,
As Tom was a sleeping he had such a sight,
That thousands of sweepers Dick, Joe, Ned & Jack
Were all of them lock’d up in coffins of black,
And by came an Angel who had a bright key,
And he open’d the coffins & set them all free.
Then down a green plain leaping laughing they run
And wash in a river and shine in the Sun.
Then naked & white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind.
And the Angel told Tom if he’d be a good boy,
He’d have God for his father & never want joy.
And so Tom awoke and we rose in the dark
And got with our bags & our brushes to work.
Tho’ the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm,
So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.
5
Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy C, plate 20
Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy C , plate 9
The Lamb.
5
10
15
20
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice!
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Little Lamb I’ll tell thee,
Little Lamb I’ll tell thee!
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child:
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
6
Holy Thursday
Twas on a Holy Thursday their innocent faces clean
The children walking two & two in red & blue & green
Grey headed beadles walkd before with wands as white as snow
Till into the high dome of Pauls they like Thames waters flow
5
10
O what a multitude they seemd these flowers of London town
Seated in companies they sit with radiance all their own
The hum of multitudes was there but multitudes of lambs
Thousands of little boys & girls raising their innocent hands
Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song
Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among
Beneath them sit the aged men wise guardians of the poor
Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door
Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy C , plate 12
7
On Anothers Sorrow
Can I see anothers woe,
And not be in sorrow too.
Can I see anothers grief,
And not seek for kind relief?
5
30
Can I see a falling tear,
And not feel my sorrows share,
Can a father see his child,
Weep, nor be with sorrow fill’d.
35
Think not, thou canst sigh a sigh,
And thy maker is not by.
Think not, thou canst weep a tear,
And thy maker is not near.
O! he gives to us his joy,
That our grief he may destroy
Till our grief is fled & gone
He doth sit by us and moan
Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy C, plate 15
10
15
20
Can a mother sit and hear,
An infant groan an infant fearNo no never can it be.
Never never can it be.
And can he who smiles on all
Hear the wren with sorrows small,
Hear the small birds grief & care
Hear the woes that infants bearAnd not sit beside the nest
Pouring pity in their breast,
And not sit the cradle near
Weeping tear on infants tear.
And not sit both night & day,
Wiping all our tears away.
O! no never can it be.
Never never can it be.
25
He doth give his joy to all.
He becomes an infant small.
He becomes a man of woe
He doth feel the sorrow too.
8
Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy C , plate 46
THE Chimney Sweeper
A little black thing among the snow:
Crying weep, weep, in notes of woe!
Where are thy father & mother? say?
They are both gone up to the church to pray.
5
10
Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smil’d among the winters snow:
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.
And because I am happy, & dance & sing,
They think they have done me no injury:
And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King
Who make up a heaven of our misery.
The Tyger
Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy C , plate 50
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
5
10
15
20
In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare sieze the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!
When the stars threw down their spears
And water’d heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
9
Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy C , plate 52
HOLY THURSDAY
Is this a holy thing to see,
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reducd to misery,
Fed with cold and usurous hand?
5
10
15
Is that trembling cry a song?
Can it be a song of joy?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty!
And their sun does never shine.
And their fields are bleak & bare.
And their ways are fill’d with thorns.
It is eternal winter there.
For where-e’er the sun does shine,
And where-e’er the rain does fall:
Babe can never hunger there,
Nor poverty the mind appall.
Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy C , plate 49
LONDON
I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
5
10
15
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear
How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh,
Runs in blood down Palace walls
But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse
10
Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy C , plate 48
A POISON TREE
I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
5
10
15
And I waterd it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears:
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.
And it grew both day and night.
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine.
And into my garden stole,
When the night had veild the pole;
In the morning glad I see;
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.
Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy C , plate 33
INFANT SORROW
My mother groand! my father wept.
Into the dangerous world I leapt:
Helpless, naked, piping loud;
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.
5
11
Struggling in my fathers hands:
Striving against my swadling bands:
Bound and weary I thought best
To sulk upon my mothers breast.
Sylvia Plath
5
“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing
guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity
is self-doubt.”
(The Journals of Sylvia Plath, Smith College 1950-1955, p. 83.)
Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes, wrote that the Ariel poems published after her death in
1965 are a record of a “real self” finding expression and emerging from among her
warring “false selves.”
Plath committed suicide, in February of 1963, by putting her head in a gas oven. Her two small children were
asleep at the time and she had sealed their room against the fumes. She left milk and bread near their beds for
them to eat when they woke.
She and Ted Hughes had been married for six years; but they had separated the previous fall because of an
affair Hughes was having with another woman. Hughes left her in their cottage in Devon with two small
children, one a baby, and not much domestic help. In spite of these hardships, Plath began to rise at 5 in the
morning to write before her day began caring for the children. After a few months, she left Devon and spent
one freezing winter in London trying to put her life together. The poems she wrote — with an almost
frightening speed and energy — in these last months were the making of her reputation as a poet.
Plath’s early years were not serene. At the age of 9, her father, a German professor of biology, died, and she
and her brother were raised by their hardworking mother who made her living as a business teacher. Extremely
gifted, Plath always strove to be the best in everything she did. She was the classic overachiever, winning
every award but putting enormous pressure on herself. During her university days as a student at Smith College
she took an overdose and crawled under the house to die. Fortunately, she was found in time and sent to a
sanatorium to recover. She recorded her experiences as a mental patient in the novel, The Bell Jar.
After recovering from her breakdown, she won a scholarship, a Fulbright, to Cambridge University in England.
There she met her future husband who had already received some recognition as a poet. Ted Hughes was
wildly attractive to women and Sylvia was never very stable, a disastrous convergence.
In 1958, while teaching in America, she studied with the poet Robert Lowell whose book of poems, Life
Studies, broke new ground in poetry. Gone was the impersonal style of T. S. Eliot; Lowell’s poetry was
confessional.
She published her first book of poems in 1960; she had two children in 1960 and 1962.
Plath had as complicated relationship to her mother. Though she wrote almost daily to her mother, she resented
her mother’s visiting in England; she always reported her successes, sometimes bragging, but never confided in
her mother her true feelings. The letters she wrote her mother portray a wildly different person than do the
poems she was writing at the same time.
Upset at Sylvia’s portrayal of her, Mrs. Plath published Sylvia’s letters home to prove that Sylvia was not like
the self seen in the poems published after her death. Letters Home were published in 1975.
Mary Anne Andrade, “Biography of Sylvia Plath”
Online course notes for Collin County Community College District, Spring Creek Campus
http://iws.ccccd.edu/Andrade/britlit/hughes/SylviaPlath.html
The following biographies provide interesting insights into Plath’s life:
Rough Magic, Paul Alexander
Sylvia Plath, Revised, Caroline King; Barnard Hall
The Death & Life of Sylvia Plath, Ronald Haymen
A Closer Look at Ariel, Nancy Hunter-Steiner
Bitter Fame, Anne Stevenson
Sylvia Plath, Linda Wagner-Martin
The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Janet Malcolm;
Knopf: New York, 1993
12
Metaphors
I’m a riddle in nine syllables.
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.
Money’s new-minted in this fat purse.
I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I’ve eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there’s no getting off.
5
You’re
5
10
15
Clownlike, happiest on your hands,
Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,
Gilled like a fish. A common-sense
Thumbs-down on the dodo’s mode.
Wrapped up in yourself like a spool,
Trawling your dark as owls do.
Mute as a turnip from the Fourth
Of July to All Fool’s Day,
O high-riser, my little loaf.
Vague as fog and looked for like mail.
Farther off than Australia.
Bent-backed Atlas, our travelled prawn.
Snug as a bud and at home
Like a sprat in a pickle jug.
A creel of eels, all ripples.
Jumpy as a Mexican bean.
Right, like a well-done sum.
A clean slate, with your own face on.
13
Morning Song
Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.
5
Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.
I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.
10
15
All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the fat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.
One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square
Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.
Mirror
5
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
What ever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful –
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
14
10
15
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
Blackberrying
5
10
15
20
25
Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,
Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,
A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea
Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries
Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes
Ebon in the hedges, fat
With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers.
I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me.
They accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides.
Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks —Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.
Theirs is the only voice, protesting, protesting.
I do not think the sea will appear at all.
The high, green meadows are glowing, as if lit from within.
I come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies,
Hanging their bluegreen bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese screen.
The honey-feast of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven.
One more hook, and the berries and bushes end.
The only thing to come now is the sea.
From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me,
Slapping its phantom laundry in my face.
These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.
I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me
To the hills’ northern face, and the face is orange rock
That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space
Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths
Beating and beating at an intractable metal.
15
The Moon and the Yew Tree
5
10
15
20
25
This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God,
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.
The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky –
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection.
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.
The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness –
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.
I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars
Inside the church, the saints will all be blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness – blackness and silence.
16
The Applicant
5
First, are you our sort of a person?
Do you wear
A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,
A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,
10
Stitches to show something’s missing? No, no? Then
How can we give you a thing?
Stop crying.
Open your hand.
Empty? Empty. Here is a hand
15
To fill it and willing
To bring teacups and roll away headaches
And do whatever you tell it.
Will you marry it?
It is guaranteed
20
To thumb shut your eyes at the end
And dissolve of sorrow.
We make new stock from the salt.
I notice you are stark naked.
How about this suit –
25
Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.
Will you marry it?
It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof
Against fire and bombs through the roof.
Believe me, they’ll bury you in it.
30
Now your head, excuse me, is empty.
I have the ticket for that.
Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.
Well, what do you think of that?
Naked as paper to start
35
But in twenty-five years she’ll be silver,
In fifty, gold.
A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk.
40
It works, there is nothing wrong with it.
You have a hole, it’s a poultice.
You have an eye, it’s an image.
My boy, it’s your last resort.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.
17
Daddy
5
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
10
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time—Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
15
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off the beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.
20
In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend
25
Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
30
It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene
35
An engine, an engine,
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
18
40
I may be a bit of a Jew.
45
I have always been sacred of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——
50
Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
55
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who
60
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
65
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
70
And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I’m finally through.
The black telephone’s off at the root,
The voices just can’t worm through.
75
If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two—The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.
80
There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.
19
The Arrival of the Bee Box
5
I ordered this, clean wood box
Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift.
I would say it was the coffin of a midget
Or a square baby
Were there not such a din in it.
10
The box is locked, it is dangerous.
I have to live with it overnight
And I can’t keep away from it.
There are no windows, so I can’t see what is in there.
There is only a little grid, no exit.
15
I put my eye to the grid.
It is dark, dark,
With the swarmy feeling of African hands
Minute and shrunk for export,
Black on black, angrily clambering.
20
How can I let them out?
It is the noise that appalls me most of all,
The unintelligible syllables.
It is like a Roman mob,
Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!
25
I lay my ear to furious Latin.
I am not a Caesar.
I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.
They can be sent back.
They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.
30
I wonder how hungry they are.
I wonder if they would forget me
If I just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree.
There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades,
And the petticoats of the cherry.
35
They might ignore me immediately
In my moon suit and funeral veil.
I am no source of honey
So why should they turn on me?
Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.
The box is only temporary.
20
Stings
Bare-handed, I hand the combs.
The man in white smiles, bare-handed,
Our cheesecloth gauntlets neat and sweet,
The throats of our wrists brave lilies.
5 He and I
Have a thousand clean cells between us,
Eight combs of yellow cups,
And the hive itself a teacup,
White with pink flowers on it,
10 With excessive love I enamelled it
Thinking “Sweetness, sweetness.”
Brood cells gray as the fossils of shells
Terrify me, they seem so old.
What am I buying, wormy mahogany?
15 Is there any queen at all in it?
If there is, she is old,
Her wings torn shawls, her long body
Rubbed of its plush —
Poor and bare and unqueenly and even shameful.
20 I stand in a column
In eight great bounds, a great scapegoat.
Here is his slipper, here is another,
And here the square of white linen
He wore instead of a hat.
45 He was sweet,
The sweat of his efforts a rain
Tugging the world to fruit.
The bees found him out,
Molding onto his lips like lies,
50 Complicating his features.
They thought death was worth it, but I
Have a self to recover, a queen.
Is she dead, is she sleeping?
Where has she been,
55 With her lion-red body, her wings of glass?
Now she is flying
More terrible than she ever was, red
Scar in the sky, red comet
Over the engine that killed her —
60 The mausoleum, the wax house.
Of winged, unmiraculous women,
Honey-drudgers.
I am no drudge
Though for years I have eaten dust
25 And dried plates with my dense hair.
And seen my strangeness evaporate,
Blue dew from dangerous skin.
Will they hate me,
These women who only scurry,
30 Whose news is the open cherry, the open clover?
It is almost over.
I am in control.
Here is my honey-machine,
It will work without thinking,
35 Opening, in spring, like an industrious virgin
To scour the creaming crests
As the moon, for its ivory powders, scours the sea.
A third person is watching.
He has nothing to do with the bee-seller or with me.
40 Now he is gone
21
Lady Lazarus
I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it —
45
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.
A sort of walking miracle, my skin
5 Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot
A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.
50
55
The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
15 Will vanish in a day.
Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me
60
And I a smiling woman.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.
65
70
Them unwrap me hand and foot —
The big strip tease.
30 Gentleman , ladies
These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,
75
Or a piece of my hair on my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.
That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.
Ash, ash —
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there —
A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.
Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
35 The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.
The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut
For the eyeing my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart —
It really goes.
I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby
25 What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see
‘A miracle!’
That knocks me out.
There is a charge
And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood
20 I am only thirty.
This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.
It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
It’s the theatrical
Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:
10 Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify? —
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
80
Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
40 As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
22
Ariel
Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.
5
God’s lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow
Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,
10
15
Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks- —
Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.
Something else
Hauls me through air —
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.
20
White
Godiva, I unpeel —
Dead hands, dead stringencies.
And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child’s cry
25
30
Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,
The dew that flies,
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning.
23
Seamus Heaney
Digging
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.
5
Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravely ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
10
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
15
By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.
20
25
30
My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
24
Blackberry-Picking
For Philip Hobsbaum
5
10
15
20
25
Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up, and that hunger
Sent us out with milk-cans, pea-tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills,
We trekked and picked until the cans were full,
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush,
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn’t fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.
25
Death of a Naturalist
5
10
15
20
25
30
All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring,
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window-sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst into nimbleSwimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog,
And how he croaked, and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.
Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass, the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam, gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance, and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.
26
Robert Lowell
Waking in the Blue
The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore1,
rouses from the mare’s-nest2 of his drowsy head
A philosophy text book propped on The Meaning of Meaning.
He catwalks down our corridor.
Azure day
makes my agonized blue window bleaker.
Crows maunder on the petrified fairway.
Absence! My hearts grows tense
as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.
(This is the house for the “mentally ill.”)
5
10
What use is my sense of humour?
I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties,
once a Harvard all-American fullback,
(if such were possible!)
still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties,
as he soaks, a ramrod
with a muscle of a seal
in his long tub,
vaguely urinous from the Victorian plumbing.
A kingly granite profile in a crimson gold-cap,
worn all day, all night,
he thinks only of his figure,
of slimming on sherbert and ginger ale –
more cut off from words than a seal.
This is the way day breaks in Bowditch Hall at McLean’s;3
the hooded night lights bring out “Bobbie,”
Porcellian ‘29,4
a replica of Louis XVI
without the wig –
redolent and roly-poly as a sperm whale,
15
20
25
30
1
Boston University 2nd year student
mare’s-nest: an illusion / fantasy
3 McLean’s: a mental asylum for Boston’s elite
4 Porcellian: an exclusive Harvard University graduates’ Club
2
27
as he swashbuckles about in his birthday suit
and horses at chairs.
These victorious figures of bravado ossified5 young.
In between the limits of day,
hours and hours go by under the crew haircuts
and slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle
of the Roman Catholic attendants.
(There are no Mayflower6
screwballs in the Catholic Church.)
After a hearty New England breakfast,
I weigh two hundred pounds
this morning. Cock of the walk,
I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor’s jersey
before the metal shaving mirrors,
and see the shaky future grow familiar
in the pinched, indigenous faces
of these thoroughbred mental cases,
twice my age and half my weight.
We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor.
35
40
45
50
5
6
ossified: changed into bone
Mayflower: ship that brought the Pilgrim Fathers (a metonymy for all Protestant Americans)
28
Memories of West St and Lepke 1
Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming
in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning,
I hog a whole house on Boston’s
“hardly passionate Marlborough Street,”
where even the man
scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans,
has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate,
and is “a young Republican.”
I have a nine months’ daughter,
young enough to be my granddaughter.
Like the sun she rises in her flame-flamingo infants’ wear.
5
10
These are the tranquilized Fifties,
and I am forty. Ought I to regret my seedtime?2
I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O.,3
and made my manic statement,
telling off the state and president, and then
sat waiting sentence in the bull pen
beside a negro boy with curlicues
of marijuana in his hair.
15
Given a year,
I walked on the roof of the West Street Jail, a short
enclosure like my school soccer court,
and saw the Hudson River once a day
through sooty clothesline entanglements
and bleaching khaki tenements.
Strolling, I yammered metaphysics with Abramowitz,
a jaundice-yellow (“it’s really tan”)
and fly-weight pacifist,
so vegetarian,
he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit.
He tried to convert Bioff and Brown,
the Hollywood pimps, to his diet.
Hairy, muscular, suburban,
wearing chocolate double-breasted suits,
they blew their tops and beat him black and blue.
20
25
30
35
Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, head of an American national crime syndicate, known as Murder Inc., founded in
the 1930’s to threaten, maim, or murder designated victims for a price.
2
“Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up / Fostered alike by beauty and by fear”, The Prelude, Book 1.by
William Wordsworth. Lowell is implying a similarity between himself as a Conscientious Objector to the
war in his disordered and idealistic youth and his attitudes now in his forties, and Wordsworth at the time of
the Napoleonic war with France and his later drift into middle-aged conservatism.
3
Conscientious Objector: against the war
1
29
I was so out of things, I’d never heard
of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
“Are you a C.O.?” I asked a fellow jailbird.
“No,” he answered, “I’m a J.W.”
He taught me the “hospital tuck,”
and pointed out the T-shirted back
of Murder Incorporated’s Czar Lepke,
there piling towels on a rack,
or dawdling off to his little segregated cell full
of things forbidden to the common man:
a portable radio, a dresser, two toy American
flags tied together with a ribbon of Easter palm.
Flabby, bald, lobotomized,
he drifted in a sheepish calm,
where no agonizing reappraisal
jarred his concentration on the electric chair
hanging like an oasis in his air
of lost connections…
40
45
50
Skunk Hour
For Elizabeth Bishop1
Nautilus Island’s2 hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer
is first selectman3 in our village;
she’s in her dotage.
5
Thirsting for
the hierarchal privacy
of Queen Victoria’s century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.
10
The season’s ill –
we’ve lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue.4 His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.
15
the poem is Lowell’s response to Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The Armadillo’
In Castine, Maine, on the Atlantic coast where Lowell had a summer house
3 selectman: elected councillor in New England towns (USA)
1
2
4
L.L. Bean a mail-order house in Maine, selling sporting and camping goods
30
And now our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for fall;
his fishnet’s filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler’s bench and awl;
there is no money in his work,
he’d rather marry.
20
One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .
My mind’s not right.
25
30
A car radio bleats,
“Love, O careless Love. . . .” I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat. . . .
I myself am hell;5
nobody’s here – 6
35
only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.
40
I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air—
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail.
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.
45
“Which way I fly is Hell, myself am Hell”, from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Book IV, line 75 – Satan’s
reaction to first viewing Adam and Eve’s bliss in the Garden of Eden, sometime after he has been thrown out
of Heaven as a fallen angel.
6
French existentialist, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a play in the 1940’s called Huis Clos (‘No Exit’) where three
people who died – a homosexual, an insecure man and a nymphomaniac woman,– found themselves in Hell
as a room where they had to share eternity with each other.
5
31
Robert Frost
The Road not Taken
5
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
10
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.
15
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
20
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.
32
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Whose woods these are I think I know,
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
5
10
15
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
The Silken Tent
5
10
She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when the sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To every thing on earth the compass round,
And only by one’s going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.
33
Margaret Scott
Grandchild
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
Early this morning, when workmen were switching on lights
in chilly kitchens, packing their lunch-boxes
into their Gladstone bags, starting their utes in the cold
and driving down quiet streets under misty lamps,
my daughter bore a son. Nurses sponged him clean
as the glittering shingle of suburbs beside the river
waned to a scattered glimmer of pale cubes.
We met at half-past twelve in a ward crowded
with people busy with parcels and extra chairs.
A bunch of flowers fell on the floor. We passed
the baby round. His dark head lay in my hand
like a fruit. He seemed to be dwelling on something
half-remembered, puckering his brow, occasionally
flexing fingers thin and soft as snippets of mauve string.
Far below in the street lunch-time crowds flowed out
among the traffic. Girls went arm in arm on high
heels. An ambulance nosed into a ground-floor bay.
A clerk strode in the wind with a streaming tie.
Beyond the office blocks and the estuary, in Santa Fe,
Northampton or the other side of town, a young man
may be gripping a girl's hand as they climb upstairs.
She is wearing a cotton dress. Her sandals slip
on metal treads. She laughs, embarrassed, excited
at being desired so urgently in the
minutes before this grandchild's wife is conceived.
And his best friend, whose parents quarrel all day
about leaving Greece, is lying perhaps in his cot
on a balcony, watching his fat pink hands and woolly sleeves
swatting at puffs of cloud in the airy blue.
News he may break to our boy in some passage-way
in a house we've never seen is breeding now
in the minds of pensive children queuing by Red Cross
trucks, or curled like foetuses deep under warm quilts
as the long ship-wrecking roar of the distant sea
slides to the coming of night and fades away.
34
Housework
1. Making Redcurrant Jelly
For Beverley Farmer
Today I made redcurrant jelly,
lugging a pan of juice as thick and dark as
water dyed by my grandmother’s heavy curtains.
And the face I found in my white enamel well,
looking up from a crimson mirror, was hers to the life
when she bent to knead a trough of steaming rep1.
There were her plump cheeks split by shadows,
a glint of spectacles, her horns and wisps of hair.
When I was young she used to tell us stories
of mirrors that spoke in riddles, miraculous wells,
innocent victims of magic, great survivors,
but her eyes that are also mine discouraged questions.
What made the daughter run with her jar to the spring
or the mother carry soap for a stranger god?
As I stirred in sugar the sealed face dissolved
in a swirl of baffling mothers, importunate girls,
laboring since the time that pots were fired
to draw reflecting water from the earth,
to scour, steep, launder, rinse, refine,
to mix soup, remedies, ale, lye2, preserves,
recreating always the same image:
vessels of dark fluid, women tied by blood,
brewing, pouring knowledge that goes beyond them.
5
10
15
20
1
2
rep: an old form of woven ribbed material, from French reps for ribs
lye: a highly caustic alkali used in the manufacture of soap
3. Doing the Washing
Wash days came to my mother surely as the seasons.
Everything she used – copper, boiler-stick, mangle,
the chipped enamel bath that caught the drips,
the prop, the wicker basket – was heavy, awkward,
durable as the clumsy ploughs, the mattocks1, scythes
and flails of labour in the old round fields.
5
1
mattock: a digging tool with a head like a pick and blade like an axe
35
10
15
20
Sometimes wind and rain got the better of her.
Sodden sheets were draped around the fire.
The day went down in steam and spoiled harvest.
But often, after the ironing had all been done
and the iron stowed in its place, the house
at evening smelled of well-aired linen,
gathered, folded, smoothed ready for use.
Up in the garden, pegging out drip-dry shirts
on a Sunday night, I feel rebuked by all
that dedication, that patient rhythmic toil.
I’m obsessed by omens, gambling by moonlight
on filling the outer lines of the Hill’s hoist,
on finding the clothes add up to an even number.
A win can seem like something saved for the future,
chaos defeated again, a clean sheet.
5. Mending a Dress
5
10
15
20
I am sitting mending the sleeve of an old dress.
Light from a big yellow lamp falls on a fold
of blue cotton like evening sun, stroking the downy nap
until it smiles. A car hums in the street.
A log stirs in the fire. The dress lies warm in my lap
like a friendly cat. I am not thinking much
about the past when kingfisher blue flashed
at the tail of my eye, dipping through shadow and gleam
in a forest of windows. I am not thinking much
about the future when one day, old and bent,
I’ll find the dress pushed to the bottom of a rag-bag,
its blue brittle and thin as the wings of moths.
I am just poking the needle in and out
bringing together two segments of frayed cloth
under the arm. As I turn the cotton this way
and that I see I’m making a seam,
a dark line like a straight creek lying between
blue fields where, traffic lulled to a hum,
a comfortable cat smiles and stirs, warm
as a dozing log, where kingfisher flies in the trees
and moths come down to dance in the golden light
of the present moment.
36
John Donne
The Sunne Rising
Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows and through curtains, call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school boys and sour ’prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen, that the King will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices;
Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
5
10
Thy beams so reverend and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long:
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,
Whether both th’ India’s of spice and mine1
Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those Kings whom thou saw’st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, “All here in one bed lay”.
15
20
She is all states, and all princes, I,
Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honour’s mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou sun art half as happy as we,
In that the world’s contracted thus;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art every where;
This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere.
25
30
1
both th’ India’s of spice and mine: the East Indies were known for spices and the West Indies for gold
37
Holy Sonnet X
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so:
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death; nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
5
Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow;
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and souls’ delivery.
Thou’rt slave to fate, chance, kings, and desp’rate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;
10
And poppy1 or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better, than thy stroke; – why swell’st22 thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die.
1
2
poppy: opiate drugs
swell’st: puff with pride
38
John Keats
Ode on Melancholy
1
No, no, go not to Lethe1, neither twist
Wolf’s-bane2, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche3, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.
5
10
2
But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.
3
She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu ; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips :
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine ;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
15
20
25
30
1
Lethe: the River of Oblivion in Hades. In the Greek mystical religious movement Orphism, it was believed that the newly dead who
drank from it would lose all memory of their past existence. (Line 4’s Proserpine is also a reference to the Queen of Hades).
2
Wolf’s-bane: this and all the other plants mentioned in verse 1 are medicinal plants associated with sleep, drugs and poison.
3
Psychē: the goddess of the soul, which in Greek folklore was also pictured as a butterfly, itself another meaning of the word psychē.
39
To Autumn
5
10
15
20
25
30
1.
SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
2.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
3.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
40
Emily Dickinson
Much Madness is Divinest Sense
5
Much Madness is divinest Sense —
To a discerning Eye —
Much Sense — the starkest Madness —
‘Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail —
Assent — and you are sane —
Demur — you’re straightaway dangerous —
And handled with a Chain —.
They put Us far apart
They put Us far apart —
As separate as Sea
And Her unsown Peninsula —
We signified “These see” —
5
They took away our Eyes —
They thwarted Us with Guns —
“I see Thee” each responded straight
Through Telegraphic Signs —
10
With Dungeons — They devised —
But through their thickest skill —
And their opaquest Adamant —
Our Souls saw — just as well —
15
They summoned Us to die —
With sweet alacrity
We stood upon our stapled feet —
Condemned — but just — to see —
20
Permission to recant —
Permission to forget —
We turned our backs upon the Sun
For perjury of that —
25
Not Either — noticed Death —
Of Paradise — aware —
Each other’s Face — was all the Disc
Each other’s setting — saw —
41
Source references for copies of William Blake’s illuminated pages
i
Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy C: electronic edition Copy Information
Title: Songs of Innocence and of Experience
Origination: William Blake: author, inventor, delineator, etcher, printer, colourist
Origination: Catherine Blake: printer
Publisher: William Blake
Note: Blake’s name is given as the “printer” on the title pages to Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, but he is also the
“publisher.”
Place of Publication: London
Note: The place of publication is not printed in the book, but Blake lived in London and its suburb, Lambeth, during the composition,
etching, and printing of this volume.
Imprint Date: 1789, 1794
Note: The 1789 imprint appears on the title page to Songs of Innocence, the 1794 imprint on the title page to Songs of Experience. There
is no date on the general, combined title page.
Composition Date: 1789 (plates 1, 3-28, 41-44, 54 as arranged in this copy); 1794 (plates 2, 29-40, 45-53 as arranged in this copy)
Note: Plate 54 (Bentley plate a) as arranged in this copy may have been etched in 1789 independent of the Songs of Innocence and of
Experience.
Print Date: 1789 (plates 1, 3-28 as arranged in this copy); 1794 (plates 2, 29-54 as arranged in this copy)
Note: Although printed at different times as separate copies of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, they were probably joined
into this single copy of the combined Songs of Innocence and of Experience by Blake.
Number of Plates:54
Plate Order:2, 1, 3, 4, 25, 5, 16, 17, 8, 11, 24, 19, 6, 7, 27, 22, 23, 53, 18, 12, 15, 9, 10, 54, 20, 21, 13, 14, 28-31, 48, 51, 38, 41, 39, 44,
45, 47, 26, 34-36, 50, 37, 40, 49, 46, 42, 43, 33, 32, a
Note: Bentley plate numbers are used unless otherwise stated. This copy does not contain Bentley’s plate 52, “To Tirzah.” The
frontispiece to Innocence (plate 1 as arranged in this copy) is bound facing the general title page (plate 2 as arranged in this copy); the
frontispiece to Experience (plate 29 as arranged in this copy) is bound facing the title page to Experience (plate 30 as arranged in this
copy).
Plate Size: Ranging between 12.4 x 7.9 cm. and 6.3 x 5.2 cm. (plate a)
Number of Leaves: 30
Note: Plates 5/6 through 27/28 and 31/32 through 53/54, as arranged in this copy, are printed recto/verso; plates 1-4 and 29-30 as
arranged in this copy are printed on rectos only.
Leaf Size: 18.0 x 12.3 cm.
Medium: Relief and white-line etching with hand colouring, plates 1, 3-28, 54 as arranged in this copy; relief etching with colour printing
and hand colouring, plates 2, 29-53 as arranged in this copy.
Printing Style: Relief, with colour printing on plates 2, 29-53 as arranged in this copy.
Ink Colour: Plate 40 (as arranged in this copy) in green; plates 1, 3-28, 41-44 (as arranged in this copy) in raw sienna; plates 2, 29-40,
45-54 (as arranged in this copy) in yellow ochre.
Support: wove paper
Watermark: E & P; I Taylor; J Whatman
Note: The E & P watermark appears on plates 17/18 as arranged in this copy; the I Taylor watermark appears on plates 49/50 as arranged
in this copy; the J Whatman watermark appears on plates 53/54 as arranged in this copy.
Etched Numbers: none
Penned Numbers: none
Frame Lines: none
Binding: citron morocco
Note: Plate 1 as arranged in this copy, the frontispiece to Songs of Innocence, is bound facing plate 2, the title page to the combined
Songs of Innocence and of Experience; plate 29 as arranged in this copy, the frontispiece to Songs of Experience, is bound facing plate 30,
the title page to Songs of Experience.
Stab Holes: none
Provenance
Name: Rosenwald Collection, The Library of Congress
Date: 1945
Dealer: none
Price: gift
Note: Sold the property of a clergyman, Sotheby’s, 16 March 1909, lot 172 (£166 to the dealer Dobell); the dealer James Tregaskis by
1909 (in partnership with Dobell?); William E. Moss by no later than 1914; sold from the Moss collection, Sotheby’s, 2 March 1937, lot
144 (£1,400 to the dealer A. S. W. Rosenbach acting for Lessing J. Rosenwald); given by Rosenwald to the Library of Congress in 1945.
Present Location
The Library of Congress, 101 Constitution Avenue SE, Washington, DC 20540
Telephone: 202-707-5434
Department: Rare Book and Special Collections Division
Facsimile: 202-707-4142
Collection: Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection
Email: lcweb@loc.gov
Call number: PR4144.S6 1794
URL: http://lcweb.loc.gov/rr/rarebook/
Catalogue number: 1801
42