Bartlett's Poems for Occasions

by Geoffrey O'Brien

  Like Stone —

  EMILY DICKINSON

  AMERICAN (1830-1886)

  Dank fens of cedar, hemlock branches gray

  Dank fens of cedar, hemlock branches gray

  With trees and trail of mosses, wringing-wet,

  Beds of the black pitchpine in dead leaves set

  Whose wasted red has wasted to white away,

  Remnants of rain and droppings of decay,

  Why hold ye so my heart, nor dimly let

  Through your deep leaves the light of yesterday,

  The faded glimmer of a sunshine set?

  Is it that in your darkness, shut from strife,

  The bread of tears becomes the bread of life?

  Far from the roar of day, beneath your boughs

  Fresh griefs beat tranquilly, and loves and vows

  Grow green in your gray shadows, dearer far

  Even than all lovely lights and roses are?

  FREDERICK GODDARD TUCKERMAN

  AMERICAN (1821-1873)

  Sense of Something Coming

  I am like a flag in the center of open space.

  I sense ahead the wind which is coming, and must live it through,

  While the creatures of the world beneath still do not move in their sleep:

  The doors still close softly, and the chimneys are full of silence,

  The windows do not rattle yet, and the dust still lies down.

  I already know the storm, and I am as troubled as the sea,

  And spread myself out, and fall into myself,

  And throw myself out and am absolutely alone

  In the great storm.

  RAINER MARIA RILKE

  GERMAN (1875-1926)

  TRANSLATED BY ROBERT BLY

  As Much As You Can

  And if you can’t shape your life the way you want,

  at least try as much as you can

  not to degrade it

  by too much contact with the world,

  by too much activity and talk.

  Try not to degrade it by dragging it along,

  taking it around and exposing it so often

  to the daily silliness

  of social events and parties,

  until it comes to seem a boring hanger-on.

  C. P. CAVAFY

  GREEK (1863-1933)

  TRANSLATED BY EDMUND KEELEY AND PHILIP SHERRARD

  The New House

  Now first, as I shut the door,

  I was alone

  In the new house; and the wind

  Began to moan.

  Old at once was the house,

  And I was old;

  My ears were teased with the dread

  Of what was foretold,

  Nights of storm, days of mist, without end;

  Sad days when the sun

  Shone in vain: old griefs and griefs

  Not yet begun.

  All was foretold me; naught

  Could I foresee;

  But I learned how the wind would sound

  After these things should be.

  EDWARD THOMAS

  ENGLISH (1878-1917)

  Solitaire

  When night drifts along the streets of the city,

  And sifts down between the uneven roofs,

  My mind begins to peek and peer.

  It plays at ball in old, blue Chinese gardens,

  And shakes wrought dice-cups in Pagan temples,

  Amid the broken flutings of white pillars.

  It dances with purple and yellow crocuses in its hair,

  And its feet shine as they flutter over drenched grasses.

  How light and laughing my mind is,

  When all the good folk have put out their bed-room candles,

  And the city is still!

  AMY LOWELL

  AMERICAN (1874-1925)

  Morning Song

  A diamond of a morning

  Waked me an hour too soon;

  Dawn had taken in the stars

  And left the faint white moon.

  O white moon, you are lonely,

  It is the same with me,

  But we have the world to roam over,

  Only the lonely are free.

  SARA TEASDALE

  AMERICAN (1884-1993)

  The Lake Isle of Innisfree

  I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

  And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

  Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

  And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

  And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

  Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

  There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

  And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

  I will arise and go now, for always night and day

  I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

  While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

  I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

  WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

  IRISH (1865-1939)

  Acquainted with the Night

  I have been one acquainted with the night.

  I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.

  I have outwalked the furthest city light.

  I have looked down the saddest city lane.

  I have passed by the watchman on his beat

  And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

  I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet

  When far away an interrupted cry

  Came over houses from another street,

  But not to call me back or say good-by;

  And further still at an unearthly height,

  One luminary clock against the sky

  Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.

  I have been one acquainted with the night.

  ROBERT FROST

  AMERICAN (1874-1963)

  The Most of It

  He thought he kept the universe alone;

  For all the voice in answer he could wake

  Was but the mocking echo of his own

  From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.

  Some morning from the boulder-broken beach

  He would cry out on life, that what it wants

  Is not its own love back in copy speech,

  But counter-love, original response.

  And nothing ever came of what he cried

  Unless it was the embodiment that crashed

  In the cliff’s talus on the other side,

  And then in the far distant water splashed,

  But after a time allowed for it to swim,

  Instead of proving human when it neared

  And someone else additional to him,

  As a great buck it powerfully appeared,

  Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,

  And landed pouring like a waterfall,

  And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,

  And forced the underbrush—and that was all.

  ROBERT FROST

  AMERICAN (1874-1963)

  Then up the ladder of the earth I climbed

  From The Heights of Machu Picchu

  Then up the ladder of the earth I climbed

  through the barbed jungle’s thickets

  until I reached you Machu Picchu.

  Tall city of stepped stone,

  home at long last of whatever earth

  had never hidden in her sleeping clothes.

  In you two lineages that had run parallel

  met where the cradle both of man and light

  rocked in a wind of thorns.

  Mother of stone and sperm of condors.

  High reef of the human dawn.

  Spade buried in primordial sand.

  This was the habitation, this is the site:

  here the fat grains of maize grew high

  to fall again like red hail.


  The fleece of the vicuña was carded here

  to clothe men’s loves in gold, their tombs and mothers,

  the king, the prayers, the warriors.

  Up here men’s feet found rest at night

  near eagles’ talons in the high

  meat-stuffed eyries. And in the dawn

  with thunder steps they trod the thinning mists,

  touching the earth and stones that they might recognize

  that touch come night, come death.

  I gaze at clothes and hands,

  traces of water in the booming cistern,

  a wall burnished by the touch of a face

  that witnessed with my eyes the earth’s carpet of tapers,

  oiled with my hands the vanished wood:

  for everything, apparel, skin, pots, words,

  wine, loaves, has disappeared,

  fallen to earth.

  And the air came in with lemon blossom fingers

  to touch those sleeping faces:

  a thousand years of air, months, weeks of air,

  blue wind and iron cordilleras—

  these came with gentle footstep hurricanes

  cleansing the lonely precinct of the stone.

  PABLO NERUDA

  CHILEAN (1904-1973)

  TRANSLATED BY NATHANIEL TARN

  You

  In all the world, one man has been born, one man has died.

  To insist otherwise is nothing more than statistics, an impossible extension.

  No less impossible than bracketing the smell of rain with your dream of two nights ago.

  That man is Ulysses, Abel, Cain, the first to make constellations of the stars, to build the first pyramid, the man who contrived the hexagrams of the Book of Changes, the smith who engraved runes on the sword of Hengist, Einar Tamberskelver the archer, Luis de León, the bookseller who fathered Samuel Johnson, Voltaire’s gardener, Darwin aboard the Beagle, a Jew in the death chamber, and, in time, you and I.

  One man alone has died at Troy, at Metaurus, at Hastings, at Austerlitz, at Trafalgar, at Gettysburg.

  One man alone has died in hospitals, in boats, in painful solitude, in the rooms of habit and of love.

  One man alone has looked on the enormity of dawn.

  One man alone has felt on his tongue the fresh quenching of water, the flavor of fruit and of flesh.

  I speak of the unique, the single man, he who is always alone.

  JORGE LUIS BORGES

  ARGENTINEAN (1899-1986)

  TRANSLATED BY ALASTAIR REID

  Soledad

  (And I, I am no longer of that world)

  Naked, he lies in the blinded room

  chainsmoking, cradled by drugs, by jazz

  as never by any lover’s cradling flesh.

  Miles Davis coolly blows for him:

  O pena negra, sensual Flamenco blues;

  the red clay foxfire voice of Lady Day

  (lady of the pure black magnolias)

  sobsings her sorrow and loss and fare you well,

  dryweeps the pain his treacherous jailers

  have released him from for awhile.

  His fears and his unfinished self

  await him down in the anywhere streets.

  He hides on the dark side of the moon,

  takes refuge in a stained-glass cell,

  flies to a clockless country of crystal.

  Only the ghost of Lady Day knows where

  he is. Only the music. And he swings

  oh swings: beyond complete immortal now.

  ROBERT HAYDEN

  AMERICAN (1913-1980)

  Anxiety

  I’m having a real day of it.

  There was

  something I had to do. But what?

  There are no alternatives, just

  the one something.

  I have a drink,

  it doesn’t help—far from it!

  I

  feel worse. I can’t remember how

  I felt, so perhaps I feel better.

  No. Just a little darker.

  If I could

  get really dark, richly dark, like

  being drunk, that’s the best that’s

  open as a field. Not the best,

  but the best except for the impossible

  pure light, to be as if above a vast

  prairie, rushing and pausing over

  the tiny golden heads in deep grass.

  But still now, familiar laughter low

  from a dark face, affection human and often even —

  motivational? the warm walking night

  wandering

  amusement of darkness, lips,

  and

  the light, always in wind. Perhaps

  that’s it: to clean something. A window?

  FRANK O’HARA

  AMERICAN (1926-1966)

  Fauré’s Second Piano Quartet

  On a day like this the rain comes

  down in fat and random drops among

  the ailanthus leaves—“the tree

  of Heaven”—the leaves that on moon-

  lit nights shimmer black and blade-

  shaped at this third-floor window.

  And there are bunches of small green

  knobs, buds, crowded together. The

  rapid music fills in the spaces of

  the leaves. And the piano comes in,

  like an extra heartbeat, dangerous

  and lovely. Slower now, less like

  the leaves, more like the rain which

  almost isn’t rain, more like the thawed-

  out hail. All this beauty in the

  mess of this small apartment on

  West 20th in Chelsea, New York.

  Slowly the notes pour out, slowly,

  more slowly still, fat rain falls.

  JAMES SCHUYLER

  AMERICAN (1923-1991)

  Unknown

  I am not that one

  walking alone

  there near the garden

  hedges watching

  a bird turn back on the side of

  this hill turning

  always at this point on the hill

  as if wary

  of what is below

  I am not

  that one but someone else

  who dances

  over the sand toward

  evening and floats in the water

  peacefully as it darkens

  this time

  To the watchers along the steps she seems

  to be singing but they cannot hear

  what it is

  nor to whom

  HILDA MORLEY

  AMERICAN (1919-1998)

  SORROW AND COMFORT

  Pain penetrates

  Pain penetrates

  Me drop

  by drop

  SAPPHO

  GREEK (C. 612 B.C.)

  TRANSLATED BY MARY BARNARD

  The flowers withered

  The flowers withered,

  Their color faded away,

  While meaninglessly

  I spent my days in the world,

  And the long rains were falling.

  ONO NO KOMACHI

  JAPANESE (FL. C. 833-857)

  TRANSLATED BY DONALD KEENE

  Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable night

  Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable night,

  Brother to death, in silent darkness born,

  Relieve my languish, and restore the light;

  With dark forgetting of my care return.

  And let the day be time enough to mourn

  The shipwreck of my ill-adventured youth:

  Let waking eyes suffice to wail their scorn,

  Without the torment of the night’s untruth.

  Cease, dreams, the images of day-desires,

  To model forth the passions of the morrow;

  Never let rising sun approve you liars,

  To add more grief to aggravate my sorrow:

  Still
let me sleep, embracing clouds in vain,

  And never wake to feel the day’s disdain.

  SAMUEL DANIEL

  ENGLISH (1562-1619)

  In night when colours all to black are cast

  In night when colours all to black are cast,

  Distinction lost, or gone down with the light;

  The eye a watch to inward senses plac’d,

  Not seeing, yet still having power of sight,

  Gives vain alarums to the inward sense,

  Where fear stirr’d up with witty tyranny,

  Confounds all powers, and thorough self-offence,

  Doth forge and raise impossibility:

  Such as in thick depriving darknesses,

  Proper reflections of the error be,

  And images of self-confusednesses,

  Which hurt imaginations only see;

  And from this nothing seen, tells news of devils,

  Which but expressions be of inward evils.

  FULKE GREVILLE

  ENGLISH (1554-1628)

  My thoughts hold mortal strife

  My thoughts hold mortal strife;

  I do detest my life,

  And with lamenting cries,

  Peace to my soul to bring,

  Oft call that prince which here doth monarchise;

  But he, grim-grinning king,

  Who caitives scorns, and doth the blessed surprise,

  Late having decked with beauty’s rose his tomb,

  Disdains to crop a weed, and will not come.

  WILLIAM DRUMMOND

  SCOTTISH (1585-1649)

  The Pains of Sleep

  Ere on my bed my limbs I lay,

  It hath not been my use to pray

  With moving lips or bended knees;

  But silently, by slow degrees,

  My spirits I to Love compose,

  In humble trust mine eye-lids close,

  With reverential resignation,

  No wish conceived, no thought expressed,

  Only a sense of supplication;

  A sense o’er all my soul impressed

  That I am weak, yet not unblest,

  Since in me, round me, everywhere

  Eternal Strength and Wisdom are.

  But yesternight I prayed aloud

  In anguish and in agony,

  Up-starting from the fiendish crowd

  Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me:

  A lurid light, a trampling throng,

  Sense of intolerable wrong,

  And whom I scorned, those only strong!

  Thirst of revenge, the powerless will

  Still baffled, and yet burning still!

  Desire with loathing strangely mixed