An amazing poem about the human spirit

One of the best poems about the human spirit is Whittier's Barbara Frietchie. It's about a woman's refusal to surrender her belief in the Union during the Civil War as Confederate troops marched through her town. Whittier's lines flow with the steadiness of the marching Confederate troops; further, he doesn't saturate his lines with words that mask the poem's meaning. Instead, he's "upfront and personal," enabling readers to peer over his shoulder as he comments on the action.

Here are the poem's first six stanzas:

UP from the meadows rich with corn,
Clear in the cool September morn,

The clustered spires of Frederick stand
Green-walled by the hills of Maryland.

Round about them orchards sweep,
Apple and peach trees fruited deep,

Fair as the garden of the Lord
To the eyes of the famished rebel horde,

On that pleasant morn of the early fall
When Lee marched o'er the mountain-wall;

Over the mountains winding down,
Horse and foot, into Frederick town.

You can read the rest of the poem here.

Two levels of irony

In yesterday's blog post, I shared the poem Roger Heston by Edgar Lee Masters. In it, Masters integrated the literal and imaginative realms in a seamless way. It's an example of double irony. Masters used two levels of irony to subtly indicate to his readers that he wrote the poem with "tongue in cheek."

Irony results when a writer twists the meaning of his words. A poem can contain two levels of irony. For example, at Roger Heston's base level, the speaker unexpectedly gets gored to death by a cow he was observing; At its higher level, the person writing about the speaker's untimely demise is none other than the speaker himself. A bit of afterlife communication.

A poem as transparent as glass

I prefer to read poems that are transparent, that don't require me to strain my brain to decipher the poem's meaning. An example of such a poem is Roger Heston.

Roger Heston by Edgar Lee Masters

Oh many times did Ernest Hyde and I
Argue about the freedom of the will.
My favorite metaphor was Prickett's cow
Roped out to grass, and free you know as far
As the length of the rope.
One day while arguing so, watching the cow
Pull at the rope to get beyond the circle
Which she had eaten bare,
Out came the stake, and tossing up her head,
She ran for us.
"What's that, free-will or what?" said Ernest, running.
I fell just as she gored me to my death.

After reading the poem, I wondered whether a cow can have horns. I've seen many cows and can't remember any having horns, especially ones sufficiently large to gore someone to death. However, a Google search informed me that I was wrong. In several cattle breeds the females have horns, including the Texas Longhorn. On the other hand, in some cattle breeds not even the bulls have horns. One such breed is the Angus. And even if you see a hornless cow, it doesn't mean that its horns haven't been removed. Horns can be dangerous both to other cattle and to humans, as the speaker in Masters' poem discovered.

Masters concluded his poem with a twist. Its final line states that "I fell just as she gored me to my death." Yet, after his unfortunate demise, the speaker was able to share, in writing, how he met his end. A miraculous ending to an excellent poem.

Connecting sentences in a paragraph

Good writing makes connections, not just between paragraphs but also between sentences within a paragraph. In this blog entry, I reveal three different ways to connect two sentences within the same paragraph.

In the next paragraph, quoted from the New York Daily News, can you tell how its author, Adam Rubin, connected its second sentence to its first?

Pitching coach Dan Warthen said Johan Santana’s chances of starting Opening Day in Cincinnati are “almost nil.” Warthen instead is eyeing the season’s second series against the Marlins, and is adamant Santana shouldn’t miss a turn in the rotation.

The second-sentence word that builds the bridge is "Warthen." By repeating the pitching coach's name and then revealing something about him, the author created a logical relationship between the sentences.

Here's another example, exactly as it appears on the Brooklyn Cyclones website.

The Blog is the lighter side of the Cyclones. It's where we share inside jokes, make obscure pop culture references, poke fun at each other, tell stories, and find out what really happens when seven strangers behind the scenes.

In the above example, the word that connects the paragraph's second sentence connects to the first one is the pronoun "It's."

Finally, here's a third way you can connect two sentences:

Everyone seems to be more concerned about Johan Santana's health than Santana himself. The Mets' star pitcher has kept the same demeanor throughout this latest crisis, and keeps insisting that he will be there for his Opening Day start on April 6.

In the above example, which is from Ed Coleman's WFAN blog, a key element of the first sentence is Johan Santana. Coleman connects his second sentence to his first by referring to Santana as the "Mets' star pitcher."

Two light limericks for dark times

Limericks can lighten the load we all must bear, especially in these dark economic times. Here's an uplifting limerick contained in the book, Meter and Meaning: An Introduction to Rhythm in Poetry.

There once was a diner at Crewe
   Who discovered a mouse in his stew.
   Said the waiter, "Don't shout
And wave it about,
Or the rest will be wanting one too!"

The traditional limerick contains one five-line stanza. Lines 1, 2, and 5 each contain about nine syllables and rhyme. In contrast, lines 3 and 4 contain either five or six syllables. They, too, rhyme, but differently from the other lines' rhyme.

The lines are usually anapaestic. An anapest contains three syllables: two unstressed (or short) syllables followed by a stressed (or long syllable), as in the word Halloween.

Here's another limerick. This one's by Edward Lear, an Englishman who was born in 1812.

There was an Old Person of Dover,
   Who rushed through a field of blue Clover;
   But some very large bees,
Stung his nose and his knees,
So he very soon went back to Dover.

Notice that in both limericks the first line introduces a person or place (Diner, Old Person) and its locale (Crewe, Dover).

Pen mightier than pellet

An adage written in 1839 is still true today. The adage is "The pen is mightier than the sword," authored by Edward Bulwer-Lytton.

The writer's age doesn't appear to weaken a pen's power; nor does it matter if, in actuality, the "sword" is a BB gun.

In Oregon, Wisconsin, a father has been charged "with one felony count of child abuse" for shooting his 9-year-old son in the buttocks with a BB gun, a charge the father admits to. The boy was blocking the father's view of a television show and didn't respond quickly enough to the father's demand that he move.

County investigators learned of the shooting from the boy's elementary-school teacher. The boy wrote about the shooting incident in an essay the teacher assigned. The teacher turned the essay over to the investigators.

In the essay, the boy wrote that being struck by the BB pellet was "the most painful thing I ever felt in my life." The pellet effected a dime-sized welt.

The father has been charged with child abuse once before in 2005.

If convicted, the father can be sentenced to up to six years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Identifying a sentence's subject

Identifying a sentence's subject can sometimes be challenging. For example, in the sentence "During winter, snow falls," someone could believe that the subject is winter. However, while "winter" creates a context for interpreting the rest of the sentence, it is not the sentence's subject. The subject is "snow."

One way to identify a sentence's subject is by seeking it verbs. One definition of a verb defines verbs as "words that tell us what a subject does or is. The Macmillan Dictionary for Children defines a verb as "a word that describes an action, condition, or experience."

Fortunately, the sample sentence "During winter, snow falls" contains only one verb, "falls." The next task is to find what is falling: snow. That's the subject.

Sometimes, it's necessary to refer to some additional words besides the verb to locate the subject. In the sentence, "Sue is short," the task is to find who "is short," while in the sentence "Sally has the hiccups," the task is to identify who has the hiccups.

James Dickey, narrative poet

James Dickey was a highly skilled storyteller. He was a novelist (He wrote Deliverance) and the winner of a National Book Award in Poetry. His skill as a storyteller is revealed in his narrative poem, The Shark's Parlor. Below are its first five lines. (Note: To fit in the blog, the quoted lines' extra, internal spacing had to be eliminated.)

The Shark's Parlor

Memory: I can take my head and strike it on a wall on Cumberland Island
Where the night tide came crawling under the stairs came up the first
Two or three steps and the cottage stood on poles all night
With the sea sprawled under it as we dreamed of the great fin circling
Under the bedroom floor. In daylight there was my first brassy taste of beer


Its second line creates a striking image. The tide isn't just flowing under the stairs of a cottage, it's crawling under it. And as the water climbed the cottage stairs, a huge shark filled Dickey' sleep-mind, circling within it.

He doesn't use any fancy words, any words that require a reader to reference a dictionary, nor does he tie his words into knots that readers struggle to unravel. Instead, he relies on plain English to reveal life's complexity.

Contrary to Oscar Wilde's statement that "The truth is rarely pure and never simple," Dickey exposes life in its purest form while making its complexity transparent.

One part of the poem I found puzzling is his opening statement: "Memory: I can take my head and strike it on a wall." Is he talking to his memory? What bearing does that have on the poem? Most every home has walls against which someone can bang their head. What's the point of telling readers that?

A concise biography of Dickey's writing life is available here.

A poem with intriguing content

Philip Larkin was a twentieth-century English poet who favored writing in traditional forms. One poem that exemplifies his style is First Sight.

First Sight
by Philip Larkin

Lambs that learn to walk in snow
When their bleating clouds the air,
Meet a vast unwelcome, know
Nothing but a sunless glare
Newly stumbling to and fro
All they find, outside the fold,
Is a wretched width of cold.

As they wait beside the ewe,
Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hidden round them, waiting too,
Earth's immeasurable surprise.
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow.

This poem packs a lot of meaning into its 14 lines. Some of the ways its meaning is worded is quite creative, as in "wretched width of cold," but in others the intent isn't as clear. For example, he wrote "They could not grasp it if they knew." If you know something, it's illogical that you would not be able to grasp it.

It's interesting how, in the poem, Larkin sometimes seems to force his rhyme scheme. For example, in line 3, he inserted "know" at that end of the line after its final comma so that it rhymes with line 1. By doing that, he added a jerkiness to the line most evident when it's read aloud. I found it to be disruptive.

His rhyme scheme in both stanzas is one I hadn't encountered before: lines 1, 3, and 5 rhyme, as do 2 and 4, and 6 and 7.

Who's vetting whom in D.C.?

Here's a two-cinquain sequence dedicated to the current shenanigans in Washington.

Questionable Conduct

Daschle
joins Geithner in
pleading ignorance of
his huge fed income tax mistake.
Excuses.

If they
can't get their tax
returns right, maybe the
tax laws are what need amending. Or
Congress.

A powerful antiwar poem

One of the more powerful antiwar poems is Carl Sandburg's Ready to Kill. Written in first person, the poem's about the bronze statue of an unnamed Army general who's carrying a flag, sword, and gun. However, instead of being impressed by it, Sandburg wrote:

"I want to smash the whole thing into a pile of junk to be
hauled away to the scrap yard."

To Sandburg, the general doesn't belong in the company of others who've been memorialized in bronze:

"the farmer, the miner, the shop man, the factory
hand, the fireman and the teamster,"

They deserve the honor, Sandburg said, because they do the world's real work; they help people rather than harm them. He labels them the world's "real huskies." Unlike the general, each of them is not:

"Ready to kill anybody that gets in his way,
Ready to run the red blood and slush the bowels of men
all over the sweet new grass of the prairie."

I wonder what caused Sandburg to view the general's statue so negatively.

Sandburg fought in the Spanish-American War as a member of the 6th Illinois Infantry.

Sandburg's Fog

A poem does not have to be long nor laden with abstraction to create a powerful image. For example, though Carl Sandburg's poem, Fog, contains only six lines, and most of its words are one syllable, it creates a vivid image of fog.

The one thing about the poem that puzzles me is why, in line 5, Sandburg uses the word "silent" rather than words that imply silence, as he did in the first two lines.

Fog
by Carl Sandburg

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

Sandburg: A word magician

Carl Sandburg had a magical way with words. Though he often used simple words, he combined them in a way that empowered them.

In his poem, PASSERS-BY, Sandburg seeks to create an experience. He reflects upon the looks on their faces, now reduced to "flash memories." He remembers the way their movements and voices awakened the city. He especially remembers the lean people. Why his eyes gravitated to them and his mind chose to etch them within its memory is unclear, but that's what they did.

PASSERS-BY

PASSERS-BY,
Out of your many faces
Flash memories to me
Now at the day end
Away from the sidewalks
Where your shoe soles traveled
And your voices rose and blend
To form the city's afternoon roar
Hindering an old silence.

Passers-by,
I remember lean ones among you,
Throats in the clutch of a hope,
Lips written over with strivings,
Mouths that kiss only for love.
Records of great wishes slept with,
Held long
And prayed and toiled for. .

Yes,
Written on
Your mouths
And your throats
I read them
When you passed by.

Li Po Still Lives

In China, they wrote poetry more than a thosand years before the United States became a nation. One of China's greatest poets was Li Po. He lived from 701–762.

Here is one of his poems:

Taking Leave of a Friend by Li Po

Blue mountains lie beyond the north wall;
Round the city's eastern side flows the white water.
Here we part, friend, once forever.
You go ten thousand miles, drifting away
Like an unrooted water-grass.
Oh, the floating clouds and the thoughts of a wanderer!
Oh, the sunset and the longing of an old friend!
We ride away from each other, waving our hands,
While our horses neigh softly, softly . . . .

Simon Elegant wrote a novel about Li Po's life, A Floating Life, that was well-reviewed by the New York Times.

Learn more about Li Po.

The link below will lead you to a well-rated book of Li Po's poems.

A cinquain

Here's a cinquain I wrote after a recent medical visit:

Its sharp
point ouched into
my skin, my blood flowing
through its body into vials — three?
Hurting.

I partially followed Adelaide Crapsey's approach to writing cinquains. Here's how many syllables each line has:

L1: 2
L2: 4
L3: 6
L4: 8
L5: 2

Learn more about Adelaide Crapsey's approach to writing cinquains.

A space is more than an empty place

A poet can increases a poem's impact by adding whitespace within lines. In her poem, The Poet's Occasional Alternative, Grace Paley used this technique within lines 2, 5, and 6. Notice the difference it makes.

The Poet's Occasional Alternative
by Grace Paley

I was going to write a poem
I made a pie instead      it took
about the same amount of time
of course the pie was a final
draft      a poem would have had some
distance to go      days and weeks and
much crumpled paper

You can read the rest of the five-stanza poem here.

More than a snail

The poem, Considering the Snail, is an example of syllabic verse at its best. Every line has seven syllables. When I read a poem written in what I call "pure" syllabic verse (every line has the same number of syllables), I wonder what the insertion of the same number of syllables into every line adds to the poem's effect.

Reading the poem, I couldn't detect a discernible rhythm. In fact, it reads like prose.

The poem gains its power from its imagery. I can see the snail moving along the wet earth, seeking whatever snail's seek. However, the poem lost some of its grip on me in its third stanza. There, Gunn changed the "person," inserting himself into the snail's path, disrupting my journey.

Considering the Snail
by
Thom Gunn

The snail pushes through a green
night, for the grass is heavy
with water and meets over
the bright path he makes, where rain
has darkened the earth's dark. He
moves in a wood of desire,

pale antlers barely stirring
as he hunts. I cannot tell
what power is at work, drenched there
with purpose, knowing nothing.
What is a snail's fury? All
I think is that if later

I parted the blades above
the tunnel and saw the thin
trail of broken white across
litter, I would never have
imagined the slow passion
to that deliberate progress.

A poem that warms winter's cold

Though this poem by Robert Frost describes a winter scene, it has a warming affect on me whenever I read it. Frost injects humor into the poem when he describes his horse's reaction to his stopping to watch the snow fall. I particularly liked these two lines: "He gives his harness bells a shake | To ask if there is some mistake." In doing that, he humanizes the horse. Animals have more intelligence than many people realize. Their intelligence is often discounted because it is different from ours.

I'm unsure why Frost repeats the same line twice in the last stanza. Is it Frost's attempt to indicate that he has many more miles miles to travel before he reaches his destination? Sometimes, however, I find the repetition in the final couplet distracting.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

By Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Scansion definitions

Need a scansion definition? You can find them here.

Do you know what scansion is?

Susan Tichy wrote that

Poems are more fun and more meaningful when you know how they work.

The way to find out how they work is to get your hands on them: take poems apart and put poems together.

The tool used to take poems apart is scansion. Scansion involves analyzing verse to determine its metrical patterns. (An example is iambic tetrameter.) Scansion is one of the more difficult aspects of poetry to grasp; Fortunately, there's a Web page titled The Basics of Scansion that delves into its mysteries. Effort's required to understand the page's contents, but it's worth it if you'd like to like more about a critical underlying mechanism of poetry.

For those preferring a less comprehensive introduction to scansion, take a look at Rhythm, Meter, and Scansion Made Easy. It's easier to intellectally digest.

Steve Kowit on learning to write poetry

In his book, In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet's Portable Workshop,Steve Kowit made some interesting comments about how to learn to write poetry.

"There are few better ways to become a more effective poet than by reading a great deal of poetry — from all cultures — and by reading books of criticism about poetry" (p. 262).

"If you want to study poetry with the best teachers, study the works of the great poets" (p. 263).

"The best resource is your own desire to keep writing, keep learning, keep perfecting your skills" (p. 263).

An especially valuable chapter not found in most poetry writing books is titled The Art of Revision. Kowit shows step-by-step how to improve a poem. This kind of instruction by example is often of more benefit than information just telling you how to revise a poem. Just as the pen is mightier than the sword, show is usually mightier than tell.

The last line

Sometimes I read a poem that doesn't make sense. Usually, it's written by a long-dead poet whose use of the English language doesn't mimic mine. If I were able to time-travel back to the dead poet's era and immerse myself in his culture, I'd slowly be able to unravel his poem's intricacies; however, before I'd even attempt that, I'd prefer to try to obtain a copy of his most popular book, present it to some commonfolk (i.e., people who don't make their living by trying to decipher poetry), ask them to read a few of the book's poems, and see if any of them can explain them to me. If they can't, I wouldn't bother to expend any effort on those poems.

What inspired me to write the previous paragraph was the last line of a poem I just read titled Jet by Tony Hoagland. The poem begins with this stanza:

Sometimes I wish I were still out
on the back porch, drinking jet fuel
with the boys, getting louder and louder
as the empty cans drop out of our paws
like booster rockets falling back to Earth

My read went fairly smoothly until I reached the last line, which made as much sense as does eating ice cream topped with Miracle Whip. Here's its last line: "We would give anything for what we have." What the heck is Hoagland trying to say in that line?

You can read the entire poem here.

Trees by Joyce Kilmer

Born in New Jersey, his full name was Alfred Joyce Kilmer. While serving as a sergeant in an American infantry regiment in World War I, Kilmer was killed at the Second Battle of Marne in 1918. He was 31.

Trees contains 12 lines divided into six stanzas. Lines 2 and 11 contain seven syllables; the others have eight syllables, structured as iambic tetrameter, whose meter is ta TUM | ta TUM | ta TUM | ta TUM. Trees' rhyme scheme consists of rhyming couplets rendered as "aa bb cc dd ee aa."

In Trees, Kilmer seeks to show how man-made objects cannot compare in beauty to those made by G-d.

Trees
(For Mrs. Henry Mills Alden)

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

A beautiful Longfellow poem

Today's poem, The Meeting, written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, illustrates the power of the poetic form as well as any poem I've read.

After so long an absence
  At last we meet again:
Does the meeting give us pleasure,
  Or does it give us pain?

The tree of life has been shaken,
  And but few of us linger now,
Like the Prophet's two or three berries
  In the top of the uppermost bough.

We cordially greet each other
  In the old, familiar tone;
And we think, though we do not say it,
  How old and gray he is grown!

We speak of a Merry Christmas
  And many a Happy New Year
But each in his heart is thinking
  Of those that are not here.

We speak of friends and their fortunes,
  And of what they did and said,
Till the dead alone seem living,
  And the living alone seem dead.

And at last we hardly distinguish
  Between the ghosts and the guests;
And a mist and shadow of sadness
  Steals over our merriest jests.

Learning to write poetry

In her book, A Poetry Handbook,Mary Oliver shares her opinions about how to learn to write poetry.

"Good poems are the best teachers. Perhaps they are the only teachers."

"I think if imitation were encouraged much would be learned well that is now learned partially and haphazardly. Before we can be poets, we must practice; imitation is a very good way of investigating the real thing."

Do you agree?

What is a poem?

Today, while pondering what it means to be a poem, this poem popped into my head:

It is?

A poem is but a group of words,
some red or blue or green,
that might mean this
or might mean that
or something in-between.

Be Glad Your Nose Is on Your Face

Have you read any of Jack Prelutsky's poems? If you haven't, you should treat yourself to one. You might want to start with "Be Glad Your Nose Is on Your Face." This is an extremely well thought out poem that epitomizes the power of poetry.

Be glad your nose is on your face,
not pasted on some other place,
for if it were where it is not,
you might dislike your nose a lot.

Imagine if your precious nose
were sandwiched in between your toes,
that clearly would not be a treat,
for you’d be forced to smell your feet.

Your nose would be a source of dread
were it attached atop your head,
it soon would drive you to despair,
forever tickled by your hair.

Within your ear, your nose would be
an absolute catastrophe,
for when you were obliged to sneeze,
your brain would rattle from the breeze.

Your nose, instead, through thick and thin,
remains between your eyes and chin,
not pasted on some other place—
be glad your nose is on your face!

The first thing I noticed when I read the poem, besides its obvious humor, was its rhythm. Its meter is da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM. Each line has four iambic feet and contains eight syllables.

The poem also has a rhyme that's pleasant to listen to. In each stanza, the first two lines rhyme, as do the last two.

Finally, the poem ends up where it began, its last line the same as its first. Prelutsky skillfully guides the poem's readers to an ending that is also a new beginning.

It's not easy to write this type of poem. It reminds me of a sculpted work of art.