by John Lithgow
I appreciate the three very different attacks of this poem. At first the poet suggests that it is great to love, and if there was all the time in the world to watch love grow and ripen, he would be patient enough to do that. The second part states the fact that, unfortunately, time is always chasing us swiftly to our end, and what a waste of his lady’s beauty and “quaint honour” when they’ll both soon be “dust.” Finally, the conquest—the celebration of his longing and his closing argument, if you will, that instead of letting time chase them, they should chase time right back by living their lives with urgency and vigor. How to argue with that reasoning?
“To His Coy Mistress” is filled with quotable turns of phrase, not the least, “Had we but world enough, and time,” which is a poignant notion that most people use to express regret, even though Marvell means for it to help us avoid regret. Marvell is also known as a gardening poet, whose love of nature, ripening to the bursting point, weaves itself like a subtle green thread through his work. “My vegetable love should grow / Vaster than empires”—what a glorious image.
To me, this poem is like the dish you have to have every time you go to your favorite restaurant. You know you should try something else, but each time you can’t resist your favorite. Call it a guilty pleasure.
The Mower’s Song
My Mind was once the true survey
Of all these Meadows fresh and gay;
And in the greenness of the Grass
Did see its Hopes as in a Glass;
When Juliana came, and She
What I do to the Grass, does to my Thoughts and Me.
But these, while I with Sorrow pine,
Grew more luxuriant still and fine;
That not one Blade of Grass you spy’d,
But had a Flower on either side;
When Juliana came, and She
What I do to the Grass, does to my Thoughts and Me.
Unthankful Meadows, could you so
A fellowship so true forego,
And in your gawdy May-games meet,
While I lay trodden under feet?
When Juliana came, and She
What I do to the Grass, does to my Thoughts and Me.
But what you in Compassion ought,
Shall now by my Revenge be wrought:
And Flow’rs, and Grass, and I and all,
Will in one common Ruine fall.
For Juliana comes, and She
What I do to the Grass, does to my Thoughts and Me.
And thus, ye Meadows, which have been
Companions of my thoughts more green,
Shall now the Heraldry become
With which I shall adorn my Tomb;
For Juliana comes, and She
What I do to the Grass, does to my Thoughts and Me.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
The Bohemian
(1892–1950)
Edna St. Vincent Millay did it her way. Known for her artistic independence, her pointed political positions, her eclectic relationships, and her unconventional lifestyle, she could easily have alienated a conservative public. Her poetry spoke louder than her wild-child ways, though, and she became one of the most beloved poets of her time.
Raised with her two sisters by a single mother, Millay lived in a variety of homes shared by friends and relatives in Maine. Although they had little money, her mother introduced her daughters to classic literature and fine music and encouraged them to be independent-minded and self- sufficient. Vincent, as she was known to her friends, took this encouragement to heart. She was a precocious student who began writing poetry as a teenager. In 1912, her poem “Renascence” won her a literary prize and a scholarship to Vassar College, where she wrote poetry and plays and cultivated a variety of relationships with women there. Her first book of poetry, Renascence and Other Poems, was published in 1917, the year she graduated and moved to Greenwich Village in New York.
Here began the legend of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s bohemian life. A freer spirit never lived, and Greenwich Village was the perfect place for her to express her freedom. She lived in an attic apartment, wrote anything someone would pay her for, and feverishly cavorted with fellow writers and artists who lived in the Village. She described herself and her friends as “very, very poor and very, very merry.” She had many love affairs, she smoked cigarettes with shameless abandon, acted in a downtown theater group, and traveled to Europe. She also worked hard on her writing, publishing short stories and poems in magazines, and eventually her next books of poems, A Few Figs from Thistles and Second April. By this time, she’d become a literary celebrity and the symbol of the New Woman in America.
A great performer of her own poetry, Millay was enormously popular at lecture halls across the country, where tickets to her readings regularly sold out to audiences of thousands. She was tiny and fair-skinned, with a glorious head of red hair that matched the fire she breathed into her spoken poetry. Like an American Byron, she was adored for her gorgeous poetry and idolized for the myth of her extraordinary life. Women wanted to be her; men wanted to marry her.
The English novelist Thomas Hardy once said that there were only two great things in the United States—skyscrapers and the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Her work spoke of youth, love, change, death, and liberation, especially for women. She had a sensitivity and delicacy that gave her poems a distinctly seductive quality. In 1923 she became the first woman ever to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Love is not all
Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.
This poem reminds me of what M. F. K. Fisher answered when she was asked why she kept writing about food. She said that it was because there were only two things that humans couldn’t live without—food and love. It’s true that humans have a natural hunger for both that drives us. You can refuse food and die. You can deny love and starve your soul.
Favorite Poems
“Renascence”
“What lips my lips have kissed, and where and why” (Sonnet XLIII)
“Second Fig” “Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare”
“The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver”
Millay makes a clever case for this truth. She notes from the start that love isn’t everything. It won’t sustain us as food and water does. It won’t protect us from the elements, or save us when we’re drowning, or fix what’s wrong with us when we’re ill. “Yet many a man is making friends with death / Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.” Love isn’t everything, but we cannot survive without it.
The first part of the poem is a list of all the things love is not, all the things love cannot do. Then it shifts into what love is, described not in a list, but in a sort of worst-case scenario, where the poet admits she could never be so desperate as to deny herself the love she cannot do without. This poem has everything a great Millay poem should—wit and truth and deeply personal resonance.
Marianne Moore
The Genuine Poet
(1887–1972)
Marianne Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, spent most of her childhood in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and eventually attended Bryn Mawr College. After college she took secretarial courses, then taught secretarial skills and English at the Indian school in Carlisle. She traveled to Europe in
1911 and in 1915 began publishing her poetry in journals and periodicals, to almost immediate acclaim by fellow poets and critics. In 1918, she moved to Greenwich Village in New York with her mother, with whom she lived for most of her adult life. In New York, she quickly began mixing with other poets such as Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, as well as all the up-and-coming artists and intellectuals. She also was an enthusiastic baseball fan, especially of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Marianne Moore saw beauty in all things well made, from the stitching on a baseball to the scales on an anteater, and she strived to create poetry that featured that same intricate precision. She worked with incredible discipline and attention to detail and structure, observing the world around her with a scientist’s eye and a poet’s heart. She was endlessly curious about the natural world; she took laboratory courses in biology while she was a college student, and her fascination with animals lasted all her life. She sought “enchantment” in her work and would settle for nothing less—she compares the pangolin (the aforementioned anteater) with Leonardo da Vinci and likens its scaly body to a spruce cone, an artichoke, and the ironwork at Westminster Abbey. Moore claimed to have wanted to be a painter, which might explain why she used such painterly precision in her work.
She played with language like a cubist, taking familiar structures and putting them back together in a slightly unexpected way, occasionally dropping quotes from other sources into her work, much the way Picasso and Juan Gris pasted scraps of newspaper onto some of their still lifes. Her original and detailed visual observations were like a breeze blowing through the poetry of the time.
Her first collection, Poems, was published in 1921 in England. Moore had a long, celebrated career, publishing poem after poem in periodicals like the Kenyon Review, the Nation, the New Republic, and the Partisan Review, as well as in celebrated volumes such as her 1951 Collected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Award. She was esteemed and celebrated by her peers; William Carlos Williams admired “the edge-to-edge contact” between objects in her poems, while in the introduction to her Selected Poems in 1935, T. S. Eliot called her poetry “durable” and allowed she was one of the few writers of the time who had made a contribution to the language. Eliot was a notorious snob, so these were no small compliments.
Famous for her signature three-cornered hat and a dark cape, Moore was a celebrity even outside of poetry circles. When she accepted the National Book Award in 1951, she quipped that her work was called poetry because there was nothing else to call it, and described herself as “a happy hack.”
Poetry
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels
a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician—
nor is it valid
to discriminate against “business documents and
school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination”—above
insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” shall we
have it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.
In a poem the excitement has to sustain itself. I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of fabric is governed by gravity.
—Marianne Moore
This is a wonderful, conversational poem about what she does and why she thinks it’s important. I identify with this poem because as an actor, I ask myself all the time, “Why do I act? Why do they watch me? Why do I need to act? Why do they need to watch?” What I see in this poem is the answer that poetry (or art or acting) is not indispensable, but it is important. It reminds us of the inherent usefulness of art, and that like love in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “Love is not all,” art may not be everything, but it is necessary.
Moore takes digs at poetry that is dishonest or “so derivative as to be unintelligible,” so we can believe that not all poetry is useful. She sees poetry as a “place for the genuine,” to be valued above all else. She insists on poetry containing “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”—I thrill to that phrase, for that is the essence of acting as well.
There’s a wonderful, purposeful incongruity to this poem that is typical of Moore. She throws in little tidbits like quotes and unlikely references to the baseball fan or the statistician, and manages to bring the ordinary, grubby stuff of real life into an important conversation about poetry. She gives readers an intellectual and emotional exercise that puts them in touch with what’s genuine in poetry and life.
In his 1925 essay, “Marianne Moore,” William Carlos Williams describes how Moore could magnify a small object until it seemed to contain an entire world: “so that in looking at some apparently small object, one feels the swirl of great events.” What a tremendous inspiration to a poet—or an actor!
Favorite Poems
“A Graveyard” “An Octopus” “ Baseball and Writing”
“ The Pangolin ” “ No Swan So Fine ”
Ogden Nash
The Worsifier
(1902–1971)
Ogden Nash is another great hero of mine—he’s the undisputed master of contemporary light verse. His is a great American story of an ordinary man accessing the extraordinary poet inside him.
Born in Rye, New York, Nash came from a prominent family after whom the city of Nashville, Tennessee, is named. He attended Harvard briefly, but dropped out for financial reasons and ventured into the working world. He taught school, gave Wall Street a try, and wrote advertising copy for a short time. In 1925, he landed a job at Doubleday as an editor and publicist. There he collaborated with the writer Christopher Morley on several books of humor, giving him a taste of being published.
In 1930, his first published poem appeared in the New Yorker, followed by a collection of poetry, Hard Lines, in 1931. The book was an instant success, going through seven printings in its first year of publication. Nash left Doubleday to work at the New Yorker for a short while, but soon quit to devote all his time to his own writing.
Nash was incredibly prolific, partly because he had a lot to say, and partly because he was just a hard worker. Over his lifetime, his poems were published in dozens of periodicals, including the Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s, Life, and, of course, the New Yorker. He published dozens of books of verse, humor, and essays and more than 1,500 individual poems; he cowrote a hit Broadway musical, One Touch of Venus; he wrote movie scripts and even song lyrics. He appeared on radio comedy and game shows in the 1940s, similar television shows in the 1950s, and was a popular lecturer across the United States and England.
Ogden Nash had a wit so sharp and quick, you feel if you met him you might have trouble keeping up. Yet that was his gift, to use every word as an opportunity to tur
n a notion upside down, to tickle, to tease, all in the most accessible way. Each line of each poem had something real to say, and he would invigorate and deliver his message with the tools of his wit. Like Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear before him, Nash was known to make up a word or two, or at least to manipulate the spelling of a word for his own cunning purposes. He even made up a word to describe himself and his way with words—he said he was a “worsifier.” And like Marianne Moore, he loved to consider animals in his work, though often it was to extol the virtues of dogs and lament the existence of cats; one poem is called “Cat Naps Are Too Good for Cats”!
Favorite Poems
“So Does Everybody Else, Only Not So Much”
“Just Keep Quiet and Nobody Will Notice”
“The Boy Who Laughed at Santa Claus” “More About People”
“Children’s Party”
No Doctors Today, Thank You
They tell me that euphoria is the feeling of feeling wonderful, well,
today I feel euphorian,
Today I have the agility of a Greek god and the appetite of a Victorian.
Yes, today I may even go forth without my galoshes,
Today I am a swashbuckler, would anybody like me to buckle any
swashes?
This is my euphorian day,
I will ring welkins and before anybody answers I will run away.
I will tame me a caribou
And bedeck it with marabou.
I will pen me my memoirs.
Ah youth, youth! What euphorian days them was!
I wasn’t much of a hand for the boudoirs,
I was generally to be found where the food was.
Does anybody want any flotsam?
