by John Lithgow
And they bought an Owl, and a useful Cart,
And a pound of Rice, and a Cranberry Tart,
And a hive of silvery Bees.
And they bought a Pig, and some green Jack-daws,
And a lovely Monkey with lollipop paws,
And forty bottles of Ring-Bo-Ree,
And no end of Stilton Cheese.
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.
VI
And in twenty years they all came back,
In twenty years or more,
And every one said, “How tall they’ve grown!
For they’ve been to the Lakes, and the Torrible Zone,
And the hills of the Chankly Bore!”
And they drank their health, and gave them a feast
Of dumplings made of beautiful yeast;
And every one said, “If we only live,
We too will go to sea in a Sieve,—
To the hills of the Chankly Bore!”
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Fireside Poet
(1807–1882)
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the most popular American poet of the nineteenth century. Born in Portland, Maine, he was the grandson of a Revolutionary War hero and a descendant of John Alden from the Mayflower. A bookworm from a very early age, he was entranced with epic tales from other lands, like Robinson Crusoe and The Arabian Nights. He had an ear for languages, and after graduating from Bowdoin College he went to Europe for three years to study. He returned to become a professor at Bowdoin and eventually at Harvard, where he spent the rest of his teaching career.
What could turn this straight-arrow academic into the heartfelt voice of an entire country? Heartache, in part. His first wife died traveling with him in Europe, and his second wife (the mother of his six children) died from injuries suffered in a fire. He was a family man through and through, and these losses were deeply felt. He published poetry over the course of a forty-year writing career that put the myth of America—its drive, its fortitude, its independence—into words. Poems like “The Village Blacksmith,” “The Song of Hiawatha,” “Paul Revere’s Ride,” and “The Children’s Hour” plumbed themes that were simple but resonated profoundly with Americans worn down by dissent and civil war who needed very much to hear their own ennobling story.
Longfellow, who is considered rather formal and sentimental by today’s measure, was an all-out idol in his time. Bona fide best sellers, his books were embraced around the world, where the legend of America was growing by the minute. He became known as the first among the Fireside Poets, so named for their huge popularity in homes across the country, as popular as any English poet of the time. Five years after his death, a marble bust of Longfellow was placed in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey in London—he was the first American to be honored there.
In a speech he gave at his and his dear friend Nathaniel Hawthorne’s graduation from Bowdoin in 1825, Longfellow said, “Already has a voice been lifted up in this land,—already a spirit and a love of literature are springing up in the shadows of our free political institutions.” Longfellow’s poetry caused this spirit to come alive in America, which is a truly remarkable legacy.
Favorite Poems
“Paul Revere’s Ride” “Snowflakes” “Hymn to the Night”
“Christmas Bells” “The Village Blacksmith”
A Psalm of Life
What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
“Life is but an empty dream!”
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
“Dust thou art, to dust returnest,”
Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act to each to-morrow
Finds us farther than to-day.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!
Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,—act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
This is such an American poem, so reflective of our unique kind of activism, positivism, faith, and belief in the result of our labors. It has a rigid meter that reminds me of a call to action before a march into battle. He’s encouraging us to live beyond the plodding march from the cradle to the grave, to live well, to live now. Full of the hardy ego—as well as the innocence and naiveté—of a still-young America, the poem says that we can lift ourselves up “with a heart for any fate.”
Longfellow’s images are so descriptive that you can’t help but be swept up in the message. “The soul is dead that slumbers”—that’s a wake-up call! He urges us to be inspired by our forefathers to “make our lives sublime” and leave “footprints on the sands of time.” The poem is truly a sacred song to come back to for inspiration again and again.
Look, then, into thine heart, and write!
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Children’s Hour
Between the dark and the daylight,
When the night is beginning to lower,
Comes a pause in the day’s occupations,
That is known as the Children’s Hour.
I hear in the chamber above me
The patter of little feet,
The sound of a door that is opened,
And voices soft and sweet.
From my study I see in the lamplight,
Descending the broad hall stair,
Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,
And Edith with golden hair.
A whisper, and then a silence:
Yet I know by their merry eyes
They are plotting and planning together
To take me by surprise.
A sudden rush from the stairway,
A sudden raid from the hall!
By three doors left unguarded
They enter my castle wall!
They climb up into my turret
O’er the arms and back of my chair;
If I try to escape, they surround me;
They seem to be everywhere.
They almost devour me with kisses,
Their arms about me entwine,
Till I think of the Bishop of Bingen
In his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!
Do you think, O blue-eyed banditti,
Because you have scaled the wall,
Such an old mustache as I am
Is not a match for you all!
I have you fast in my fortress,
And will not let you depart,
But put you down into the dungeon
In t
he round-tower of my heart.
And there will I keep you forever,
Yes, forever and a day,
Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,
And moulder in dust away!
Robert Lowell
The Confessional Poet
(1917–1977)
Robert Lowell was born into a prominent old Boston family that arrived in America in 1639 and forged long associations in the fields of education, law, banking, shipping, and literature. More than 300 years’ worth of Lowells attended Harvard, though this staid family tradition—along with many others—would end with Robert. Lowell dropped out of Harvard after two years to attend Kenyon College, where he studied with the poet Allen Tate and the critic John Crowe Ransom, and later at Lousiana State University with Robert Penn Warren.
His early work was crafted in a formal style, many poems touching on subjects associated with his New England heritage and God, but moving over time toward an outright rejection of the Puritan values at the heart of American identity. He had brilliant mechanics as a poet, a command of the form and the language that was simply outstanding. An early volume, Lord Weary’s Castle, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1947. Randall Jarrell praised him as “a talent whose ceiling is invisible.”
Sometime in his forties, Lowell’s style began to change to a more personal approach, largely due to the affairs of his own complicated day-to-day existence. He had followed a path far from his Brahmin roots—he lived a regular rumpus of a life, fraught with antiwar protests, messy marriages, religious crises, bouts of mental illness, and the draw of literary celebrity that put him in the company of Jackie Kennedy and other famous luminaries of the 1960s and ’70s. He forged a distinct confessional style that was looser in form than his earlier work and sometimes shockingly laid bare the details of his private life. This new style, marked by the publication of his Life Studies in 1959, changed modern poetry permanently. Poets such as John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, and Anne Sexton adopted the confessional form, fearlessly exposing themselves through their writing. You don’t need to read a biography of Robert Lowell for a portrait of his life; you just need to read his poetry from beginning to end. It forms a kind of autobiography, revealing more truth about the poet than any biography could.
You can obtain an audio recording of Robert Lowell and John Berryman reading selections from their works Life Studies and 77 Dream Songs respectively at www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/17047. It’s amazing.
The Public Garden
Burnished, burned-out, still burning as the year
you lead me to our stamping ground.
The city and its cruising cars surround
the Public Garden. All’s alive—
the children crowding home from school at five,
punting a football in the bricky air,
the sailors and their pick-ups under trees
with Latin labels. And the jaded flock
of swanboats paddles to its dock.
The park is drying.
Dead leaves thicken to a ball
inside the basin of a fountain, where
the heads of four stone lions stare
and suck on empty fawcets. Night
deepens. From the arched bridge, we see
the shedding park-bound mallards, how they keep
circling and diving in the lanternlight,
searching for something hidden in the muck.
And now the moon, earth’s friend, that cared so much
for us, and cared so little, comes again—
always a stranger! As we walk,
it lies like chalk
over the waters. Everything’s aground.
Remember summer? Bubbles filled
the fountain, and we splashed. We drowned
in Eden, while Jehovah’s grass-green lyre
was rustling all about us in the leaves
that gurgled by us, turning upside down . . .
The fountain’s failing waters flash around
the garden. Nothing catches fire.
This is an immensely evocative poem for me, especially as I remember spending many childhood Thanksgivings with relatives in Boston, walking in the Public Garden after dinner, soaking up the last bits of autumn. I know the Garden well in every season, from my years at college in Cambridge, and there isn’t a detail Lowell touches that isn’t absolutely, precisely so. This is a “place” poem that does its job, like William Blake’s “London” or even Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” The poets want you to close your eyes and see it and smell it, relying on the particular details they suggest.
Favorite Poems
“The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” “Skunk Hour”
“The Lesson” “For the Union Dead” “Dolphin”
In the course of the poem day ends, night comes, the moon rises, and most every image of the life of the Garden—schoolchildren, sailors, mallards, the stone lions, the fountain—is exquisitely invoked. If you’d never laid eyes on the Public Garden you could still paint a picture in your mind that is instantly familiar. “Punting a football in the bricky air” and sailors under “trees with Latin labels”—this is a communal gathering place of extraordinary beauty, as it was the first botanical garden in the country, which explains the Latin labels on the trees.
“Burnished, burned-out, still burning”—what a description of a particular moment of the spent season, with its shining, autumnal glow. The drying up of leaves and fountains, the closing down of activities. Then “Remember summer?” when water flowed and gurgled and splashed. And that stunning final line, harkening back to the burning in the first line: “Nothing catches fire.”
I feel for the tortured soul of Lowell, the New England Puritan. He’s full of joys to express, joys to be denied, and a sense of predestined finality, even within the confines of this short poem. But I can’t help enjoying my own experience of “The Public Garden,” far more in the vein of Keats’s “To Autumn”—I relish the fact that summer passes and autumn comes, bringing its own culminating beauty.
Andrew Marvell
The Posthumous Poet
(1621–1678)
Aell came to be known as one of the greatest poets of the seventeenth century, but not until long after his death. His collected poetry, Miscellaneous Poems, was not published until three years after he died. In his lifetime, he mainly published political pamphlets and satires and was deeply involved in English politics during the Cromwell years and beyond.
Marvell grew up the son of a minister in Yorkshire, England. He attended Trinity College at Cambridge, where he studied for seven years. After leaving Cambridge, he traveled in Europe, worked as a tutor, and eventually became involved in government service and politics after befriending the influential writer John Milton. Due to his political skill, he managed to keep his head—literally!—when the monarchy was restored after the Oliver Cromwell republican period. He served as a member of Parliament from 1659 until his death, and was a model of conscientious leadership and public service.
It was Marvell’s nephew who put together the collection of poems he found after his uncle’s death, many of which are believed to have been written decades earlier. On publication of his poetry, Marvell became known as one of the Metaphysical poets, along with contemporaries John Donne and George Herbert, though the term was only applied many decades after their time. As he is one of my favorite poets, I think it’s wonderful that the appreciation of Andrew Marvell’s poetry grew over the centuries—many modern poets attest to the influence of his work, and no less than T. S. Eliot references Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” in his own “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and The Waste Land. What a terrific testament to 400-year-old, just plain good poetry.
Favorite Poems
“The Nymph Complaining of the Death of Her Fawn”
“A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body”
“The Definition of Love” “The Garden” “Upon Appleton House”
To His Coy Mistress
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart;
For, Lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song: then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapt power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
This is one of the poems I love the most in the whole wide world of poetry. It’s a ravishing poem of love and desire. It’s also a classic carpe diem poem, urging us to seize the day and make the most of life while we can. Although that is usually good advice, in this case the poet is using the argument to convince his reluctant lover to abandon her chasteness and join him in a frolic before time runs out. Sly of him? Yes, but also irresistibly seductive.
