Bartlett's Poems for Occasions

by Geoffrey O'Brien

  Near as I reach thereto!

  What a good haunter I am, O tell him!

  Quickly make him know

  If he but sigh since my loss befell him

  Straight to his side I go.

  Tell him a faithful one is doing

  All that love can do

  Still that his path may be worth pursuing,

  And to bring peace thereto.

  THOMAS HARDY

  ENGLISH (1840-1928)

  The Voice

  Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,

  Saying that now you are not as you were

  When you had changed from the one who was all to me,

  But as at first, when our day was fair.

  Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,

  Standing as when I drew near to the town

  Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,

  Even to the original air-blue gown!

  Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness

  Travelling across the wet mead to me here,

  You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,

  Heard no more again far or near?

  Thus I; faltering forward,

  Leaves around me falling,

  Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,

  And the woman calling.

  THOMAS HARDY

  ENGLISH (1840-1928)

  His Immortality

  I

  I saw a dead man’s finer part

  Shining within each faithful heart

  Of those bereft. Then said I: “This must be

  His immortality.”

  II

  I looked there as the seasons wore,

  And still his soul continuously bore

  A life in theirs. But less its shine excelled

  Than when I first beheld.

  III

  His fellow-yearsmen passed, and then

  In later hearts I looked for him again;

  And found him—shrunk, alas! into a thin

  And spectral mannikin.

  IV

  Lastly I ask—now old and chill —

  If aught of him remain unperished still;

  And find, in me alone, a feeble spark,

  Dying amid the dark.

  THOMAS HARDY

  ENGLISH (1840-1928)

  Little Boy Blue

  The little toy dog is covered with dust,

  But sturdy and stanch he stands;

  And the little toy soldier is red with rust,

  And his musket moulds in his hands.

  Time was when the little toy dog was new,

  And the soldier was passing fair;

  And that was the time when our Little Boy Blue

  Kissed them and put them there.

  “Now, don’t you go till I come,” he said,

  “And don’t you make any noise!”

  So, toddling off to his trundle-bed,

  He dreamt of the pretty toys;

  And, as he was dreaming, an angel song

  Awakened our Little Boy Blue —

  Oh! the years are many, the years are long,

  But the little toy friends are true!

  Ay, faithful to Little Boy Blue they stand,

  Each in the same old place,

  Awaiting the touch of a little hand,

  The smile of a little face;

  And they wonder, as waiting the long years through

  In the dust of that little chair,

  What has become of our Little Boy Blue,

  Since he kissed them and put them there.

  EUGENE FIELD

  AMERICAN (1850-1895)

  To an Athlete Dying Young

  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.

  To-day, 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:

  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.

  A. E. HOUSMAN

  ENGLISH (1859-1936)

  For a Dead Lady

  No more with overflowing light

  Shall fill the eyes that now are faded,

  Nor shall another’s fringe with night

  Their woman-hidden world as they did.

  No more shall quiver down the days

  The flowing wonder of her ways,

  Whereof no language may requite

  The shifting and the many-shaded.

  The grace, divine, definitive,

  Clings only as a faint forestalling;

  The laugh that love could not forgive

  Is hushed, and answers to no calling;

  The forehead and the little ears

  Have gone where Saturn keeps the years;

  The breast where roses could not live

  Has done with rising and with falling.

  The beauty, shattered by the laws

  That have creation in their keeping,

  No longer trembles at applause,

  Or over children that are sleeping;

  And we who delve in beauty’s lore

  Know all that we have known before

  Of what inexorable cause

  Makes Time so vicious in his reaping.

  EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON

  AMERICAN (1869-1935)

  The House on the Hill

  They are all gone away,

  The House is shut and still,

  There is nothing more to say.

  Through broken walls and gray

  The winds blow bleak and shrill:

  They are all gone away.

  Nor is there one to-day

  To speak them good or ill:

  There is nothing more to say.

  Why is it then we stray

  Around the sunken sill?

  They are all gone away,

  And our poor fancy-play

  For them is wasted skill:

  There is nothing more to say.

  There is ruin and decay

  In the House on the Hill:

  They are all gone away,

  There is nothing more to say.

  EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON

  AMERICAN (1869-1935)

  The Widow’s Lament in Springtime

  Sorrow is my own yard

  where the new grass

  flames as it has flamed

  often before but not

  with the cold fire

  that closes round me this year.

  Thirtyfive years

  I lived with my husband.

  The plumtree is white today

  with masses of flowers.

  Masses of flowers

  load the cherry branches

  and color some bushes

  yellow and some red

  but the grief in my heart

  is stronger than they

  for though they were my joy

  formerly, today I notice them

  and turn away for
getting.

  Today my son told me

  that in the meadows,

  at the edge of the heavy woods

  in the distance, he saw

  trees of white flowers.

  I feel that I would like

  to go there

  and fall into those flowers

  and sink into the marsh near them.

  WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

  AMERICAN (1883-1963)

  Shout No More

  Stop killing the dead,

  Shout no more, don’t shout

  If you still want to hear them,

  If you’re hoping not to perish.

  Their murmur is imperceptible,

  The sound they make no louder

  Than growing grass,

  Happy where men don’t pass.

  GIUSEPPE UNGARETTI

  ITALIAN (1888-1970)

  TRANSLATED BY ANDREW FRISARDI

  While I Slept

  While I slept, while I slept and the night grew colder

  She would come to my room, stepping softly

  And draw a blanket about my shoulder

  While I slept.

  While I slept, while I slept in the dark, still heat

  She would come to my bedside, stepping coolly

  And smooth the twisted, troubled sheet

  While I slept.

  Now she sleeps, sleeps under quiet rain

  While nights grow warm or nights grow colder.

  And I wake, and sleep, and wake again

  While she sleeps.

  ROBERT FRANCIS

  AMERICAN (1901-1987)

  The Human Condition

  IF POETRY IS (AMONG OTHER THINGS, BUT PERHAPS PRIMARILY) AN EXERCISE IN THE CLEAR DEFINITION OF FEELING, THEN THIS PART OF THE BOOK CAN BE TAKEN AS A partial lexicon of such definitions. Approaching analogous situations at different times and from different angles, individual poets open up altogether distinct perspectives. Immense nouns—passion, love, separation, solitude, sorrow, survival —stand like symbolic arches as emblems for our lives. By long overexposure—precisely like monuments that one passes every day on the street—the words that ought to carry the weightiest import come to be drained of any effect at all. The work of poets is to demonstrate that those nouns can, after all, possess specific and unavoidable meaning. That meaning is not to be confused with some kind of didactic message: what the poem nails, often by the simplest of means, is not essentially paraphrasable. It’s in the sounds and textures, in the proportions and the shape of the poem that meaning is embedded, and it’s by totally grasping what is going on at all the poet’s levels that the reader may discover an experience of unexampled richness in what might otherwise seem a bald statement. Indeed, the extravagant intimacy of poetry is perhaps best measured by those occasions when the poem seems to engage merely the most ordinary recurrences of existence. Indeed, it is precisely at those moments when the poet appears to be fine-tuning a perception of sheer humdrum blankness—like the speaker in Robert Frost’s “The Most of It,” who “thought he kept the universe alone”—that the inexplicable comes crashing through like the great buck in that poem who “stumbled through the rocks with horny tread, / And forced the underbrush—and that was all.” The poems of spiritual awakening with which this section concludes address the infinitely large through the immediate and transient, as when George Herbert, in his great poem “The Flower,” describes an inner restoration in the simplest terms: “I once more smell the dew and rain”; or when Walt Whitman finds the deepest possible image of his own soul’s quest in a spider spinning its web: “It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself / Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.”

  FRIENDSHIP

  To an Old Comrade in the Army of Brutus

  Dear friend who fought so often, together with me,

  In the ranks of Brutus in hardship and in danger,

  Under whose sponsorship have you come back,

  A citizen again, beneath our sky?

  Pompey, we drank together so many times,

  And we were together in the Philippi fight,

  The day I ran away, leaving my shield,

  And Mercury got me out of it, carrying me

  In a cloud, in a panic, right through the enemy rage;

  But the undertow of a wave carried you back

  Into the boiling waters of the war.

  Come, stretch your weary legs out under this tree;

  Let’s dedicate a feast to Jupiter

  Just as we told each other we’d do someday.

  I’ve got good food to eat, good wine to drink;

  Come celebrate old friendship under the laurel.

  HORACE

  LATIN (65-8 B.C.)

  TRANSLATED BY DAVID FERRY

  Inviting a Friend to Supper

  Tonight, grave sir, both my poor house and I

  Do equally desire your company:

  Not that we think us worthy such a guest,

  But that your worth will dignify our feast

  With those that come; whose grace may make that seem

  Something, which else could hope for no esteem.

  It is the fair acceptance, sir, creates

  The entertainment perfect: not the cates.

  Yet shall you have, to rectify your palate,

  An olive, capers, or some better salad

  Ushering the mutton; with a short-legged hen,

  If we can get her, full of eggs, and then

  Lemons, and wine for sauce; to these, a cony

  Is not to be despaired of for our money;

  And though fowl now be scarce, yet there are clerks,

  The sky not falling, think we may have larks.

  I’ll tell you of more, and lie, so you will come:

  Of partridge, pheasant, woodcock, of which some

  May yet be there; and godwit, if we can;

  Knat, rail and ruff too. Howsoe’er, my man

  Shall read a piece of Virgil, Tacitus,

  Livy, or of some better book to us,

  Of which we’ll speak our minds, amidst our meat;

  And I’ll profess no verses to repeat:

  To this, if aught appear which I not know of,

  That will the pastry, not my paper show of.

  Digestive cheese and fruit there sure will be;

  But that which most doth take my Muse and me

  Is a pure cup of rich canary wine,

  Which is the Mermaid’s now, but shall be mine;

  Of which had Horace or Anacreon tasted,

  Their lives, as do their lines, till now had lasted.

  Tobacco, nectar, or the Thespian spring

  Are all but Luther’s beer, to this I sing.

  Of this we will sup free, but moderately,

  And we will have no Pooly or Parrot by;

  Nor shall our cups make any guilty men,

  But at our parting we will be as when

  We innocently met. No simple word

  That shall be uttered at our mirthful board

  Shall make us sad next morning, or affright

  The liberty that we’ll enjoy tonight.

  BEN JONSON

  ENGLISH (1572-1637)

  Travelling

  This is the spot:—how mildly does the sun

  Shine in between the fading leaves! the air

  In the habitual silence of this wood

  Is more than silent; and this bed of heath —

  Where shall we find so sweet a resting-place?

  Come, let me see thee sink into a dream

  Of quiet thoughts, protracted till thine eye

  Be calm as water when the winds are gone

  And no one can tell whither. My sweet Friend,

  We two have had such happy hours together

  That my heart melts in me to think of it.

  WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

  ENGLISH (1770-1850)

  This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison

  addressed to charles lamb, of the india
house, london

  In the June of 1797 some long-expected friends paid a visit to the author’s cottage; and on the morning of their arrival, he met with an accident, which disabled him from walking during the whole time of their stay. One evening, when they had left him for a few hours, he composed the following lines in the garden-bower.

  Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,

  This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost

  Beauties and feelings, such as would have been

  Most sweet to my remembrance even when age

  Had dimmed mine eyes to blindness! They, meanwhile,

  Friends, whom I never more may meet again,

  On springy heath, along the hill-top edge,

  Wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance,

  To that still roaring dell, of which I told;

  The roaring dell, o’erwooded, narrow, deep,

  And only speckled by the mid-day sun;

  Where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rock

  Flings arching like a bridge;—that branchless ash,

  Unsunned and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves

  Ne’er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still,

  Fanned by the water-fall! and there my friends

  Behind the dark green file of long lank weeds,

  That all at once (a most fantastic sight!)

  Still nod and drip beneath the dripping edge

  Of the blue clay-stone.

  Now, my friends emerge

  Beneath the wide wide Heaven—and view again

  The many-steepled tract magnificent

  Of hilly fields and meadows, and the sea,

  With some fair bark, perhaps, whose sails light up

  The slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two Isles

  Of purple shadow! Yes! they wander on

  In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad,

  My gentle-hearted Charles! for thou hast pined

  And hungered after Nature, many a year,

  In the great City pent, winning thy way

  With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain

  And strange calamity! Ah! slowly sink

  Behind the western ridge, thou glorious Sun!

  Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb,

  Ye purple heath-flowers! richlier burn, ye clouds!

  Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves!

  And kindle, thou blue Ocean! So my friend

  Struck with deep joy, may stand, as I have stood,

  Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round

  On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem