I started out an Eliot scorner, but he and I made our peace many years ago. I didn’t understand his poems; I still don’t, but now I can enjoy without understanding completely. Here are a couple of excerpts from Eliot”s play, Murder in the Cathedral.

You think me reckless, desperate and mad.
You argue by results, as this world does,
To settle if an act be good or bad.
You defer to the fact. For every life and every act
Consequence of good and evil can be shown.
And as in time results of many deeds are blended
So good and evil in the end become confounded.
It is not in time that my death shall be known;
It is out of time that my decision is taken
If you call that decision
To which my whole being gives entire consent.
I give my life
To the Law of God above the Law of Man.
Those who do not the same
How should they know what I do?

You shall forget these things, toiling in the household,
You shall remember them, droning by the fire,
When age and forgetfulness sweeten memory
Only like a dream that has often been told
And often been changed in the telling. They will seem unreal.
Human kind cannot bear very much reality.

More Eliot:

Eliot’s Hysteria.

Actor Michael Gough reads The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

Macavity, the Mystery Cat.

“Poetry stands at the center of Christian living. We glorify God by noticing, comparing, and naming in sometimes startling ways. Unlike the eye of science, poetry sees the meanings that bind seemingly bare facts together. The poet sees the world in a grain of sand—the roar on the other side of the silence.”
~Suzanne Clark

Most people are familiar with Thompson’s The Hound of Heaven in which he compares God’s pursuit of a human soul to the hound’s pursuit of its quarry. In the following poem, Thompson writes of the immanence of God in Christ.

In No Strange Land

The kingdom of God is within you

O world invisible, we view thee,
O world intangible, we touch thee,
O world unknowable, we know thee,
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!

Does the fish soar to find the ocean,
The eagle plunge to find the air–
That we ask of the stars in motion
If they have rumor of thee there?

Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars!–
The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.

The angels keep their ancient places–
Turn but a stone and start a wing!
‘Tis ye, ’tis your estrangèd faces,
That miss the many-splendored thing.

But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)
Cry–and upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder
Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.

Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,
Cry–clinging to Heaven by the hems;
And lo, Christ walking on the water,
Not of Genesareth, but Thames!

Jesus is Immanuel, God with us. May you see Him, hear Him at your own “clay-shuttered door” and never “miss the many-splendored thing” nor the sound of angel’s wing.

“The death of a beautiful woman is the most poetical subject there is.”
~Edgar Allan Poe

Since I’ve already posted about my favorite, Annabel Lee, and about The Raven, here’s another poem by Poe on the death of a beautiful woman.

To One in Paradise

Thou wast all that to me, love,
For which my soul did pine-
A green isle in the sea, love,
A fountain and a shrine,
All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers,
And all the flowers were mine.

Ah, dream too bright to last!
Ah, starry Hope! that didst arise
But to be overcast!
A voice from out the Future cries,
“On! on!”- but o’er the Past
(Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies
Mute, motionless, aghast!

For, alas! alas! me
The light of Life is o’er!
“No more- no more- no more-”
(Such language holds the solemn sea
To the sands upon the shore)
Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree
Or the stricken eagle soar!

And all my days are trances,
And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy grey eye glances,
And where thy footstep gleams-
In what ethereal dances,
By what eternal streams.

Poe Links:
Tricia reviews Nevermore: A Photobiography of Edgar Allan Poe by Karen Lange.

The Bells and tintinnabulation.

My favorite Poe poem: Annabel Lee.

In which I am stripped of my romantic illusions about the poem Annabel Lee by Someone Who Knows (at Wittingshire).

The Edgar Allan Poe Calendar, a blog celebrating the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe.

And I can’t resist including this video of John Astin performing The Raven:

I love Ogden Nash. He had a common-sense sort of view of the world, and then he wrote about it —in verse. He doesn’t seem to have worried about being profound or a pundit or winning prizes for his timeless and immortal poetry. He often ignored form and rhythm and meter and even made up his own rhyming words when necessary, and yet he wrote poems that pierced to the heart of the matter, as common sense often does.

For instance, there’s this poem in which Mr. Nash volunteers his definition of marriage: humorous, insightful, and eminently debatable.

For pure fun, Custard has always been one of my favorites.

Even the titles of many of Mr. Nash’s poems are a delight and a wonder and a word to the wise:

I Always Say a Good Saint Is No Worse Than a Bad Cold
To A Small Boy Standing On My Shoes While I Am Wearing Them
Cat Naps Are Too Good for Cats
Do Sphinxes Think?
A Plea for a League of Sleep (I plan to send this one to Engineer Husband, who averages five hours of sleep per night and often falls asleep during the day.)

I ask you: aren’t those enticing titles?

And for today’s dose of Nashian Sense and Fun, I give you:

Very Like a Whale

One thing that literature would be greatly the better for
Would be a more restricted employment by the authors of simile and metaphor.
Authors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutons or Celts,
Can’t seem just to say that anything is the thing it is but have to go out of their way to say that it is like something else.
What does it mean when we are told
That that Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold?
In the first place, George Gordon Byron had enough experience
To know that it probably wasn’t just one Assyrian, it was a lot of Assyrians.
However, as too many arguments are apt to induce apoplexy and thus hinder longevity.
We’ll let it pass as one Assyrian for the sake of brevity.
Now then, this particular Assyrian, the one whose cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold,
Just what does the poet mean when he says he came down like a wolf on the fold?
In heaven and earth more than is dreamed of in our philosophy there are great many things.
But I don’t imagine that among them there is a wolf with purple and gold cohorts or purple and gold anythings.
No, no, Lord Byron, before I’ll believe that this Assyrian was actually like a wolf I must have some kind of proof;
Did he run on all fours and did he have a hairy tail and a big red mouth and big white teeth and did he say Woof Woof?
Frankly I think it is very unlikely, and all you were entitled to say, at the very most,
Was that the Assyrian cohorts came down like a lot of Assyrian cohorts about to destroy the Hebrew host.
But that wasn’t fancy enough for Lord Byron, oh dear me no, he had to invent a lot of figures of speech and then interpolate them,
With the result that whenever you mention Old Testament soldiers to people they say Oh yes, they’re the ones that a lot of wolves dressed up in gold and purple ate them.
That’s the kind of thing that’s being done all the time by poets, from Homer to Tennyson;
They’re always comparing ladies to lilies and veal to venison,
And they always say things like that the snow is a white blanket after a winter storm.
Oh it is, is it, all right then, you sleep under a six-inch blanket of snow and I’ll sleep under a half-inch blanket of unpoetical blanket material and we’ll see which one keeps warm,
And after that maybe you’ll begin to comprehend dimly
What I mean by too much metaphor and simile.

Oh, yes, Mr. Nash sees straight through that pretentious but admittedly handsome Lord Byron, doesn’t he?

So, let’s not get all pompous and highfalutin about this Poetry Month gig, but rather let’s just celebrate and enjoy it all, even the metaphors and the similes.

“Poetry is a rhythmical piece of writing that leaves the reader feeling that life is a little richer than before, a little more full of wonder, beauty, or just plain delight.”
~Aileen Fisher

Read a profile of poet Aileen Fisher by Lee Bennet Hopkins.

Time for Rabbits

“Look!” says the catkin
in its gray hatkin.
“Look!” say the larks and sparrows.
“The pasture is stirring,
the willows are purring,
and sunlight is shooting its arrows.”

“Look!” wind is humming.
“Easter is coming.
Hear how the brooklet rushes.
It’s time for the rabbits
with Easter-egg habits
to get out their paints and brushes.”

from Cricket in a Thicket by Aileen Fisher.

The book Cricket in a Thicket is copyrighted 1963, and I assume my copy was printed prior to 1985, therefore banned by the CPSIA police. The illustrations in the book are pen and ink or pencil drawing by Feodor Rojankovsky, the delightfully talented illustrator whose book Frog Went A-Courtin’ won the Caldecott Medal in 1956.

Z-baby, inspired by Rojan, as he was sometimes called, and by Ms. Fisher’s poem, drew this picture with charcoals: