The Poets' Corner

by John Lithgow

  copyright © 2007 by The Watershed Company.

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  The Warner Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  First eBook Edition: November 2007

  ISBN: 978-0-446-50199-6

  Contents

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Matthew Arnold

  W. H. Auden

  John Berryman

  Elizabeth Bishop

  William Blake

  Gwendolyn Brooks

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Robert Burns

  George Gordon, Lord Byron

  Lewis Carroll

  Geoffrey Chaucer

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Hart Crane

  E. E. Cummings

  Emily Dickinson

  John Donne

  T. S. Eliot

  Robert Frost

  William S. Gilbert

  Allen Ginsberg

  Robert Herrick

  Gerard Manley Hopkins

  A. E. Housman

  Langston Hughes

  Randall Jarrell

  Ben Jonson

  John Keats

  Philip Larkin

  Edward Lear

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Robert Lowell

  Andrew Marvell

  Edna St. Vincent Millay

  Marianne Moore

  Ogden Nash

  Dorothy Parker

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Ezra Pound

  Christina Rossetti

  Carl Sandburg

  William Shakespeare

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Edmund Spenser

  Gertrude Stein

  Wallace Stevens

  Dylan Thomas

  Walt Whitman

  William Carlos Williams

  William Wordsworth

  William Butler Yeats

  To Mary

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks, first of all, to Robin Dellabough, Lisa DiMona, and Flynn Berry at Lark Productions and especially Karen Watts for their tireless efforts on The Poets’ Corner. Thanks to Nancy Cushing-Jones, Barbara Weller, and Cynthia Cleveland—the women of Broadthink—for the original instinct to create the book. Additional thanks to Les Pockell for his editorial insights.

  Introduction:

  To Readers, Young and Old

  I grew up with poems.

  All of us did, whether we realize it or not. Poetry is in our bloodstream: nursery rhymes, schoolyard chants, song lyrics, limericks, jingles, rap. But not many of us think of ourselves as poetry lovers. The very question “Do you love poetry?” makes most of us nervous. It shouldn’t. Poetry is a part of us. The purpose of this book is to remind people, young and old, of that simple fact.

  The fifty poets I’ve chosen for the book are vastly different from one another. Indeed, they have only two things in common: they wrote in English and their work survives them. They lived on different continents, in different eras, their work is old and new, romantic and savage, comic and gloomy, orderly and chaotic, long and short. The poems are presented alphabetically, by their authors’ last names. If you read them in sequence, you’ll travel a crazy, unpredictable journey, lurching back and forth through the centuries. My brief comments reflect what the poems have meant to me, but they speak far more resonantly for themselves.

  Oh, yes. The poets have one other thing in common. I love them all.

  I can trace my love of poetry back to my childhood, and to my grandmother, Ina B. Lithgow. Grammy was born late in the nineteenth century and grew up on the island of Nantucket. Hers was one of the last generations to make the memorization and recitation of poems an integral part of a child’s education. In her late eighties she could still remember all the words to countless epic poems, such as Longfellow’s “The Wreck of the Hesperus.” My brother, my sisters, and I would sit at her feet and beg her to recite. Her dark brown eyes would twinkle, she would tilt her head back, fold her hands in her lap, and begin to speak in a gentle, even voice. She would recite for as long as forty minutes. Incredibly, I never remember her missing a syllable.

  One of our favorites was “The Deacon’s Masterpiece or, the Wonderful One-hoss Shay,” by Oliver Wendell Holmes. It is a saga about a deluxe horse-drawn buggy, made of the finest leather, wood, and brass, built to last. Not a thing goes wrong with it until the exact day, hour, minute, and second that it turns one hundred years old. All at once and without warning, the wonderful one-hoss shay flies into a million pieces. I can still hear my Grammy’s voice reciting the last stanza:

  What do you think the parson found,

  When he got up and stared around?

  The poor old chaise in a heap or mound,

  As if it had been to the mill and ground!

  You see, of course, if you’re not a dunce,

  How it went to pieces all at once,—

  All at once, and nothing first,—

  Just as bubbles do when they burst.

  End of the wonderful one-hoss shay.

  Logic is logic. That’s all I say.

  Oh, how I loved the story, the rhymes, the meter, that accent, and that voice! And, although I can’t say for sure, my seven-year-old brain must have had some inkling of the metaphorical power of the moment. Here was my elderly grandmother performing mental feats that I would never be capable of. I must have been aware that I would lose her soon, but surely I did not imagine her razor-sharp mind ever failing her—not until the very end. Perhaps it was my first poetic insight: my Grammy was the wonderful one-hoss shay!

  Then there was my dad. Grammy must have passed on her poetry- loving genes to my father, for he devoted half of his professional life to producing Shakespeare’s plays in a succession of theater festivals in Ohio. As a result, my own childhood was awash in Elizabethan verse. And although my dad poured most of his energy into rehearsals and performances, we usually had him to ourselves at bedtime. He would read aloud to us from either the funny papers, from a fat collection of stories called Tellers of Tales, from Kipling’s Jungle Book, or, best of all, from a series of bright orange volumes for kids called Childcraft.

  One of the Childcraft books was a collection of poems. It mostly featured loopy verse by doggerel poets such as Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. None of the poems was especially complex or challenging, but we would request them over and over again. I can still rattle off several lines from memory:

  Once there was an elephant

  Who tried to use the telephant;

  No no, I mean an elephone

  Who tried to use the telephone. . . .

  Or my favorite:

  I never saw a purple cow,

  I never hope to see one;

  But I can tell you anyhow:

  I’d rather see than be one.

  I remember my father’s exact inflections, his husky smell, the scratchy wool of our burnt orange couch. My father was a genial man, but slightly abstracted. He lived his life with his head halfway in the clouds. But when my sibs and I cuddled up to him and listened to those poems, we were never closer.

  Those bedtime hours primed me for all the poetry I encountered later on, in high school and college English classes. Nonsense verses gave way to the metaphysical poets, the cavalier poets, the Romantic poets. Instead of telephants and purple cows, I discovered Donne, Herrick, Col
eridge, Poe. I embraced these poets with a swoony, youthful exuberance. I felt as if they were speaking directly to me from centuries past. I remember declaiming Walt Whitman to my first girlfriend, pronouncing Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” the perfect poem, memorizing Keats’s ode “To Autumn” on a golden fall day in New England. As a student actor, I appeared in plays by T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and William Butler Yeats, drunk with the power of their words.

  None of this made me an authority on poetry, nor even much of a scholar. But it made me a poetry lover, a lifelong seeker of poetic experience, whether reading, reciting, or listening to great poems.

  I once witnessed firsthand just how intense the experience of poetry can be. The story bears repeating, because it partly inspired this book.

  Ten years ago, a married couple asked me to host a benefit for a nonprofit organization they had founded in a town eighty miles from my home. The request came at a time when I was busy and overextended, so I hesitated. But when my wife told me that these people were good friends of hers, I accepted their invitation. A few days later, the couple called again, asking me to recite some poems during the benefit. They said they would choose them for me. Once again I dutifully agreed. When the evening arrived, I quickly skimmed the poems they had chosen before setting off with my wife.

  The fund-raiser was for an organization that fostered creative approaches to educating autistic children. Every single person at the event was the parent of at least one autistic child. The couple themselves had had three, one of whom had died young. Considering these poignant facts, the atmosphere at the banquet was amazingly lighthearted and festive. Everyone was cheerful and energized, none more so than my two new friends.

  After dinner, I launched into my recitation. The couple had selected a dozen poems. As I read them, I began to realize why each poem had been chosen. Each had something to say about the plight of the parents in the audience and the struggles of their children. The first few were familiar poems by the likes of Emily Dickinson, W. H. Auden, and Robert Frost. Gradually the poems began to cut closer to the bone. Late in the sequence there were two written by the mother of an autistic boy. The final one was by a twenty-two-year-old woman, writing with heartbreaking clarity about her own autism. By the time I finished, everyone in the hall was in tears, myself included.

  I had never performed for an audience like that. These people came from all walks of life. The only thing they had in common was the sad fact of their children’s condition. Until this occasion, very few of them had had any experience of poetry. And yet, as I read aloud to them, I could sense a kind of electricity in the air. Every word of these poems was intensely meaningful to them, speaking to their deepest feelings. That night they felt connected to twelve poets whom they had never met nor perhaps even heard of. And as they never had before, they felt connected to one another. That connection was startling, exhilarating, and comforting to them.

  Poetry can do that.

  All the poets in this volume (including every name mentioned in this introduction) have made that kind of connection with their readers over time. Turn these pages, read these words, and see if you make the connection too. For those of you who already know the following poems, my hope is that they strike you as familiar strains of music, experienced in a fresh, vivid way. If the poems are new to you, grab on to them, wrestle with them, fall in love with them, make them a part of you, and grow up with them.

  Matthew Arnold

  The Serious Poet

  (1822–1888)

  Among the Victorian poets of England, Matthew Arnold was not as famous as Tennyson and Robert Browning. Unlike them, he did not have the luxury of being able to devote himself full-time to writing. Arnold, the son of a clergyman and private-school head- master, worked for a living his entire life. A ten-year appointment at Oxford University as a poetry professor, combined with his job as a government school inspector, meant he had to squeeze in his poetry on his own time. He wrote most of his poems before he was forty years old, when family life and work were less demanding. After that, he concentrated on writing essays about culture, religion, and literature, and his prose was better received than his poetry, at least during his lifetime. Some say it was his literary criticism that elevated criticism to an art form in its own right. Here is Arnold on poetry: “I think it will be found that grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.”

  To Arnold, no matter how beautiful its language or imagery, if a poem lacked an important subject, he found it unworthy of his attention. Serious and austere himself, he chose lofty subjects for his own poems—faith or the absence of faith, how to live in a meaningful way, politics, the individual in relation to society. He believed his work would endure because it reflected the period’s big themes. “For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur,” wrote Arnold, “the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.” Arnold’s moment in history happened to be one of great change and flux. You could say all his poetry was about coming to terms with the Victorian age of industrialism and the weakening of religion.

  Favorite Poems

  “Shakespeare” “The Scholar-Gipsy” “To Marguerite”

  “Thyrsis” “The Forsaken Merman”

  Dover Beach

  The sea is calm to-night.

  The tide is full, the moon lies fair

  Upon the straits;—on the French coast, the light

  Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

  Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

  Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

  Only, from the long line of spray

  Where the sea meets the moon-blanch’d land,

  Listen! you hear the grating roar

  Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

  At their return, up the high strand,

  Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

  With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

  The eternal note of sadness in.

  Sophocles long ago

  Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought

  Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

  Of human misery; we

  Find also in the sound a thought,

  Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

  The Sea of Faith

  Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

  Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

  But now I only hear

  Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

  Retreating, to the breath

  Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

  And naked shingles of the world.

  Ah, love, let us be true

  To one another! for the world, which seems

  To lie before us like a land of dreams,

  So various, so beautiful, so new,

  Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  There’s just no way around it, this is a downbeat poem. I hear in it a desperate, yearning gloom, a sense of despair about the Victorian world and a personal crisis of faith. But despite the poet’s melancholy, the poem is quite beautiful in its specificity. Arnold reveals his feelings very directly and openly. As the American novelist Henry James said, Arnold’s poetry appeals to those who “like their pleasures rare” and who like to hear the poet “taking breath.” The “breath” of the sea, its ebb and flow, in and out, reverberates throughout the lines, creating a kind of wavelike music. There is some hope in beauty—“a land of dreams / So various, so beautiful, so new”—and the potential to regain happiness and faith if his beloved can hang in there with him. For Arnold, this was the answer to emotional and spirit
ual isolation. For me, reading an exquisite, powerful poem such as “Dover Beach” is an antidote to a moody moment.

  Read contemporary poet Anthony Hecht’s

  “The Dover Bitch” for a wonderful modern take on the

  emotional landscape of “Dover Beach.”

  W. H. Auden

  The High / Low Poet

  (1907–1973)

  W. H. Auden was the furthest thing from the sensitive poet holed up in a garret. He was a writer who lived enthusiastically in the midst of his time, and wove pop culture, current events, and everyday speech into his poems. He was also decidedly not a snob. Auden loved to mix the highbrow and the lowbrow: he worshiped opera as much as he enjoyed cheap cabarets. He also had a prankish sense of humor; sometimes he included private symbols that only a few close friends could discover and decipher, and he intended some of his poems to be sung to the tune of popular songs. It certainly changes the meaning to learn that the poem “James Honeyman” (about the scientist inventor of poison gas) was meant to be sung to the tune of “Stagolee,” or that “Victor” (about a religious murderer) was set to the tune of “Frankie and Johnny.” Auden was playful, but he was also very aware of what he was doing: shocking the stodgy and jauntily blasphemizing somber subjects.

  Auden was offensive and devout, intellectual and silly, disillusioned and hopeful. He was a cranky, egotistical, precocious young man who churned out hundreds of poems, and he was also a playful old fellow who was crazy about Broadway shows and Gershwin tunes. Auden could write dense essays using a term like “consupponible” without bothering to define it, but he also wrote about manners for Mademoiselle and famous last words for Harper’s Bazaar. He loved nursery rhymes, folk verse, and doggerel. He believed that “Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye” was pretty nearly “pure poetry.”

  “Why do you want to write poetry?” If the young man answers, “I have important things I want to say,” then he is not a poet. If he answers, “I like hanging around words listening to what they say,” then maybe he is going to be a poet.

  —W. H. Auden