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Filtering by Category: Old poems
It is a posthumous poem in life. The title mimics the labels conferred on unpublished works found after an author’s death. Carver may appear self-mocking, but he is well aware that the poem is a fragment only because a body of work exists, and that a body of work can only be designated as such when the right people say so.
Read MoreThe poem’s title and dedication are, respectively, the content and receiver of the letter the poem describes; the poem is not the letter.
Read MoreEvery time I linger on Frost’s collected poems, I stop at this one and think that I shouldn’t have forgotten the impact of reading it, more than the poem itself or that extraordinary line made of names of plants. It is true that the situation at the outset of the poem shares the basic situation of other poems by Frost, and it is a standing point we recognise as the axis of this limpid juxtaposition between poetry and speculation: a stop on the way, a clear situation in “The Road not Taken” (“long I stood”) or “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening”, for example, where the interruptions in the poem mimic those of the journey, and make reflection its natural course.
Read MoreThis poem should not have been forgotten because it helps those who read it to understand that there is nothing wrong with starting all over again, quite the opposite, and also because it suggests that madness might be the sanest way of being human.
Read MoreThe poem is therefore not merely about syntactic prowess. It is indeed about the intellectual depths of Bernardim and Sá de Miranda, to the extent that (mainly) the latter display the impossible skill of examining themselves as if they were outside looking in. To me, a reader who is utterly incapable of performing such a complex philosophical operation (although I acknowledge its utility, as it would certainly save many appointments with psychologists), this is an admirable feat. And all this in a poem which appears to be so unpretentious, so short and written in such a casual manner. Thus, I like this poem because it is only apparently simple (very few can write something which is simple but only apparently); and because this simplicity conveys “an emotion”, to invoke what Rasputine told Corto Maltese after, funnily enough, he tried to kill him.
Read MoreThe butcher’s is ill-suited to poetry — this assumption is so evident we forget to question it (which immediately places us outside poetry, since the questioning of evidence is the poetic gesture par excellence), excluding from our poetic horizons not just the smell of blood and the martyrdom of steak, but all of those complex rituals of food manipulation and techniques of killing crucial to the success of televised police narratives, invariably serial.
Read MoreThis poem should not have been forgotten because it is about the mystery of choosing to do one thing instead of another.
The beginning of the poem seems to describe a privileged state: either I stay here writing poems or I can go and hunt bobcats with a friend. Below, the poet reveals his condition: he is 45 years old and has no occupation, meaning no mandatory daily job. This peculiar situation comes with the grant that names the poem, probably the Strauss Living Award, which Carver won on January 10th1983, granting him $35,000 a year for five years, with a chance of renewal.
The grant is particularly important in Carver’s case. When he finished high school, Carver worked at a sawmill with his father. After marriage, he was a delivery man, a night shift janitor in a hospital, a library assistant, and in between he took the occasional odd job. He got into debt to pay for creative writing courses, and taught classes at a couple of universities. Throughout the years, he kept writing; he did it in the car, at night, after he already had both his kids.
Now he does not have to worry about how to provide for himself or for those who depend on him. The lines “Imagine the luxuriousness of this life. / Try and imagine” are directed to the reader as much as they are directed to Carver himself, expressing a state of subjective awe for the situation he sees himself in: never in my life did I think this possible. Similarly, the words that open the poem, “It’s either this or”, do not merely describe a state of good fortune; they may also describe a state of anxiety: now there are only two things for me to do: either stay here and try to write a poem, or go and hunt bobcats with Morris.
Both practices seem to induce the same emotion: the line “Heart jumping in its cage” is in immediate connection both to the act of hunting a bobcat and to the act of staying home trying to write a poem. Nevertheless, and once again, the line might be describing something else. The pleasure and the satisfaction of chasing a bobcat and the luxury of staying put and write a poem instead of going to work are not the sole propellers of the heart. There is an anxiety underlying both actions: will I be able to hunt a bobcat? Will I be able to write a poem? The tension becomes physically threatening when a gun is referred — “running / behind the hounds with / a rifle in my hands” —, and it can be compared to Wordsworth’s desperate utterance in “My Heart Leaps Up”: if when I grow old my heart does not leap up at the sight of a rainbow in the sky, then let me die.
Carver came into possession of this grant in the last years of his life (he died at 50), when he was living with writer Tess Gallagher at Port Angeles. At the time, he committed himself to write a poem each day. He had, he said, wasted too much time, and felt guilty when watching TV or even when reading (Carol Sklenicka, Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, p. 401). The sense of responsibility certainly weighed all those years Carver kept writing when he barely had the time for it, and we can see the power of that weight in the closing “But may not”. This utterance, structured by three negative terms, conjoins the tension that pervades the whole poem: alongside the weight of responsibility comes also the jumping of the heart at having been able to write one more poem. Although the next day brings no assurance that the same will happen, Carver suspects, and us with him, that the dawn that follows will find Morris hunting alone.
Helena Carneiro
Helena Carneiro completed her Master at the Program in Literary Theory (University of Lisbon). She works as a redactor and as an editorial assistant at Imprensa da Universidade de Lisboa. People in her life have explained poetry to her. And she does enjoy Phillip Larkin, who, in his tombstone, has described himself as a “writer”.
This poem should not have been forgotten because it evokes the power of memory and its lingering presence in our identity and life.
This is again a cantiga by Bernardim Ribeiro, the cerebral poet of the pains of love and existential philosophy, who this time states that the greatest pain one can experience is the remembrance of past happiness at times of adversity. The antonymic pair “grace”/”disgrace” seems a very apt choice to describe the pain of evoking happy times which are now over.
I like this poem very much because I view it as a crucial predecessor of many other works which have taught me the absolute importance of the memory of the past in the present – By the rivers that flow (Sôbolos rios que vão)[1], by Camões; Amália’s voice singing “triste quero viver pois se mudou/em tristeza a alegria do passado” (“sad I wish to live for the happiness/of the past has turned into sadness), a poem some say was also written by Camões; Sophie Call’s book Doleur Exquise in which the artist produces a countdown in journal form to the painful breakup with her then partner. It is a constant process of remembrance of past happiness – on that day, there were 92 days left before the pain. 91 days. 90 days. Etc. Happy times are the silly happiness of ignorance which lasts until something or someone decides to ruin everything.
The poem is also a linguistic gem. It was written at a critical time in the history of Portuguese, in which the language was looking for stable forms but would also exhibit great variation (Cardeira 2012). This cantiga chooses the unsurpassable word “tristura” (“sadness”) instead of “tristeza”, which other compositions included in the Cancioneiro prefer. The period of elaboration of Middle Portuguese was actually quite handy to poets. Had Bernardim tried to write his cantiga at a later stage and the rhyme with “má ventura” (“misfortune”) would have given him a headache.
The use of “amador” (“lover”) in its etymological sense, as derived from “amar” (“to love”) and “amor” (“love”) is also unforgettable. “Fui e sou grande amador” (“I was and I am a great lover”) is almost an intentional pleonasm with lots of personality.
To sum up, I like this poem because, in the words of another unsurpassable poet who came later, “I saw that joy, once ended/ isn’t pleasure, it’s grief”. One of life’s greatest truths, whether we like it or not.
Rita Faria
[1]Camões, L. (2009). Sonetos e outros poemas. Organização e tradução de Richard Zenith: Planeta Manuscrito.
Rita Faria is a professor at the Catholic University of Portugal. She doesn’t know how to do anything else apart from reading and writing and wants to do nothing else apart from reading and writing. Besides this, she enjoys horror films, vampires, ghosts and zombies in general and thinks the Portuguese language is the most fun in the whole world.
Love is therefore an intellectual mistake. It makes us viler than the intelligent serpent, and wounded by the Mermaids’ cry. The advantage is that it also allows for great poetry, which somehow pays off.
Read MoreI like this poem because it ponders on the complexities and ideological engagement of teaching language to the Other. I like this poem because it starts with suffering in the collective “we,” but wehave trouble identifying with that particular discourse of suffering. I like this poem because it uses physical images, such as the suggestive vignette for a teacher’s labor of grading, and I am a teacher and I like the traffic of languages: “the checks I make for right answers,/ the rosy golf-clubs on the page.”
Read MoreIn Hecht’s short, tightly rhymed lines, such rhythmic effects occur strikingly at the level of the sentence. The first line in the second octave completes a sentence that began five lines earlier. Such periodicity dramatically postpones finality until it runs into the next octave. What a contrast to lines of a single sentence that end the third stanza and begin the fourth! Despite paying all its dues of stanza, rhyme, and meter, Hecht’s tightly controlled syntax soon breaks its bonds. A thirteen-line sentence linking two octaves together precedes the final octave, which is a single sentence. There are rules and forms, and there is the dance. Or is it the dancer, who strays from strict observance? Then the prodigal returns to a welcome homecoming of sound and sense.
Read MoreThe truth is, reading this poem is no trouble at all, because the tone is colloquial and invocatory from the very start, implying the reader with that cross between a rhetorical question and a cry for help which is, if not common, at least perfectly understandable ("Who will open the door for my cat / when I am dead?"). The language is simple, direct, oral like, reminiscent of conversations among pet owners about their animals’ idiosyncrasies ("Whenever he can/ he runs for the street,/ sniffs at the sidewalk/ and backtracks"), although one begins to realise, at a certain point, that this poem may not be about an owner’s concern for his cat’s happiness.
Read MoreThe theme is again love and the pain of separation, but the magnitude of the hurt is conveyed by the linguistic resources of the poem, to which we have called “impressionist” because of the importance attached to physical referents, mainly tears and eyes, who fall “sick”, and to repetition which allows for the parallel created at the beginning and at the end of the poem. Without this craftsman’s work on language, the poem would be nothing more than a banal complaint about the pains of love.
Read MoreThis poem should not have been forgotten because it is about growing old, and that happens to the best of us.
Read MoreThis poem should not have been forgotten because it is not only about the love between two people, or about unrequited love, or about physical or neo-Platonic love – it is also, or even mainly, about the love and the yearning one can feel about “land”, about “a shore”.
Read MoreThis poem should not have been forgotten (and it probably wasn’t) because it cruelly describes the confrontation between what we are and what we would like to be. What we would like to be is the “castles in the wind”; what we are is the “poor understanding”, and the castles dissolved. This is therefore a cruel poem.
Read More
I think this poem should not have been forgotten as it is a good pocket poem, only apparently silly, and perfect to be used in a variety of circumstances. In the poem, the image of the huge bear is opposed to that of the smallness of the child, while the wildness of the animal contrasts with the child’s innocence. If a feature of wild animals is that they tend to eat whatever is available, with certain lack of concern for whether or not is it ethical to consume small babies, a characteristic of babies seems to be the fact that they understand very little, which is why they seem to be unable to realize that they are about to be or have been eaten by a bear. This means that both bears and babies seem to be alike in their lack of awareness of what is happening to them and that eating and being eaten are similar forms of innocence.
The bear ignores the fact that it is committing murder; whereas the child is unaware that being eaten usually implies dying, as that would involve understanding death as concept, something a small baby would be unable to do. Despite the parallelism between lines, the title could point to the fact that only infant children are innocent, but, in fact, the term infant innocence could represent the bear’s behavior, which devours others without knowing why.
The silliness of the form, and its simplicity, could thus cover two seemingly incompatible moral standings. On the one hand, it refers to how those who are wild and huge tend to eat those who are small (and they really shouldn’t), and to those who are too powerless to avoid being eaten. So a good occasion to make use of the poem and to quote it appropriately would be in those occasions of life in which we see powerful people manoeuvring those who are not. On the other, “grizzly” names a large race of brown bears native to North America, but also a child who cries fretfully, which is a very annoying thing for a child to do, as we all know. In this sense, there is some justice in the ghoulish action of the bear, which means that the poem could be read to those who complain noisily about something, but also as a warning to a misbehaved child.
Maria Sequeira Mendes
Maria Sequeira Mendes is a professor at the Faculty of Letras, University of Lisbon, and collaborates with Teatro Cão Solteiro. She wrote for the first time about poetry at primary school, but the composition had spelling mistakes. She then promised she would never write about poets who used difficult words to copy. This has proved to be a difficult oath to live by.
This poem should not have been forgotten as it is a fine example of both confessional poetry and sonnet form done right. The title’s preciseness, set in a specific time and place (‘the’) nonetheless contrasts with its opening verse: ‘On some rude fragment of the rocky shore’ [emphasis mine] - the first clue that place might not be what is most important in the sonnet. The abruptness of the scenery is echoed in the ‘r’ consonance of ‘rude’, ‘fragment’, ‘rocky’, ‘fractur’d’, and ‘break’, as well as in the unruliness of the imperfect rhyme in the first two quatrains (‘shore’/ ‘roar’; ‘howl’/ ‘soul’). The melodiousness of the stanzas, created by an intermingling of consonance and alliteration, make of the ‘deep and solemn roar’ a description ambiguously suitable for scene and sonnet.
The introduction of the verb (‘[m]using’) is deferred to the end of the third verse, as is the subject who, gazing thoughtfully, takes the spectator's ‘solitary seat’. Whereas both the possessive pronoun and ‘take’ imply someone who has a precise, usual place in the scene, - ‘a’, rather than ‘my’, would be used for a seat taken for the first time - the use of the inserted rhyme (i.e., the rhyme scheme is abba) in the four instances where the subject directly refers to itself (‘I take’, ‘charms for me’, ‘temper of my soul’, ‘methinks I stand’) contributes to a sense of encasement of this solitary being in the tempestuous landscape.
The poet defies expectation (‘But’) in the second quatrain by affirming that the ‘wild gloomy scene has charms for me,/ And suits the mournful temper of my soul’. The use of ‘suits’ is curious: most likely meaning ‘to be fitted or adapted to, be suitable for, answer the requirements of’ (OED), it implies an interchangeability between scene and subject that suggests, on the one hand, that the long description of the former is also a description of the latter’s ‘mournful temper’, thus making the first two quatrains masked depictions of the ‘I’ ; on the other hand, it implicates that the sea shore has no effect on the subject, but rather mimics what the subject was already feeling. Although the appearance of the ‘I’ is deferred, and its role is subdued to that of a spectator, the sonnet’s volta nevertheless turns the poem in such a way that it becomes about the ‘I’.
The subject proceeds to embody a sailor in the final quatrain (‘like the mariner’). The use of the past (‘Already shipwreck’d’), along with the use of ‘Fate’ point to the poem’s ominous ending. As the ‘cliff’ marks the point where land and sea meet, so is the poet placed in the limbo between life and death: the two pathways available - marked by a caesuric dash - are lack of ‘succour’, or it coming ‘too late’. The existence of an actual choice is thus as misleading as the role of the ‘I’ in the poem, as both scenarios inevitably lead ‘the exhausted sufferer’ to the same end: death (‘dies’).
Inês Rosa
Inês Rosa is a PhD student at the Program in Literary Theory (Faculty of Letras, University of Lisbon). Her interest in poetry started with Shakespeare’s sonnets (read by Helen Vendler’s), but it was in Cambridge, while eating cakes and drinking tea, she began to talk and write about poems. Focused mainly on the work by Wordsworth, sonets, Smith and Philip Larkin are also part of her topics of interest in poetry.
I like this anthropomorphic poem because it represents in a very plain language the sensibility of childhood and juvenility as something positive and profound. In contemporary Japanese society, anthropomorphic mascots and characters inundates not only the commercial spheres but also political ones, as local governments, police and even courts create their own characters to promote their administrations. In this sense, the whole Japanese society may seem to be affected by juvenilization. As much as posing criticism on this phenomenon, we could also ask ourselves if juvenilization is simply a sign of detestable immaturity, or something valuable is underlying it. This poem seems to me to offer an excellent path to understanding this issue.
So how should we look at the poem which, despite its popularity in Japan, seems to be overlooked outside of the country? One thing we need to remember is that Kudo Naoko has been writing poetry extensively for children. In fact, “Lion of Philosophy” has been adopted many times into the secondary school Japanese textbooks since its publication in 1982. In the face value, the poem depicts bizarre and childish conversations about the “would-be” philosopher Lion and his friend Snail, perhaps in the savanna of Africa which is very much exotic to Japan. Does this mean that her literature should be understood as “juvenile”? We should not overlook, however, the poet’s careful uses of Japanese language in representing something that could look plain comical and fantastic. In the Japanese original, we notice that the word “philosophy” is carefully differentiated. In Lion’s discourse, philosophy (“tetsugaku”) is written in Hiragana characters (てつがく). To readers with Japanese language skills, this implies a trace of juvenility in Lion, as grown-ups would write philosophy in more complex Kanji characters (哲学). The juvenility of Lion is juxtaposed to the Snail’s lines: Snail always talks about philosophy in Kanji character. The concept of philosophy is alien to Lion, while for Snail, it is an established and lived knowledge. Thus, Kudo represents Lion in his heart-warmingly childish struggle to assimilate himself to the new knowledge he heard from Snail, who is, to him, a wise master whose words revealed himself in the way he could have never seen before. The Lion’s awkwardness for the alien concept of philosophy is reinforced by the uses of quotation marks in lines 1, 3 and 12. Consequently Lion tries to be “philosophy” itself (“tetusgaku” as in noun — which is ungrammatical), rather than becoming “philosophical” (“tetsugakuteki” as in grammatically correct adjective), which is what Snail initially tells him to be in line 2.
At the end of the poem, Lion has indeed “become philosophy.” At a glance, Lion seems to have mastered the way he is supposed to look like. This is not to say, however, that the lion becomes “philosophical” — note that in the poem’s last lines he still uses the word “tetsugaku” in Hiragana character. One could dismiss Lion for being preoccupied with superficial appearance of philosophy/philosophical, and for wishfully thinking that he will be able to show off his new identity through mere affectation and posing. But that is not the point of this poem. On the contrary, the beauty of this poem lies, I think, in the fact that it appreciates Lion who indeed becomes philosophy itself in his unique way. The quaint beauty of the Lion “of philosophy” — who inadvertently became even more “beautiful and magnificent” than the pre-established “philosophical Lion” — makes us think about the potential in an unknowledgeable child who opens themself up to the new world and puts themself there in solitude for the first time in their life. We then realize that, after all, that is what philosophy is about.
Thus, minutely differentiating the writing of the word “philosophy,” Kudo Naoko’s anthropomorphic poem brings charm to Lion’s trial-and-error in self-fashioning himself as unknown other. Finding one’s new self through the voice of another signifies the process of discovering one’s unexpected potential. This is not an easy process for anybody: we need to be prepared to suffer from stiff shoulders, and to feel hungry and lonely. Yet, like Lion, we may be able to find the quaint beauty and magnificence in the end. The poem’s sensibility in representing this sort of potential in a very plain language may suggest that being juvenile is perhaps not always such a bad thing.
Akihiko Shimizu
Akihiko Shimizu teaches Japanese at the University of Edinburgh. He also does research on Ben Jonson and early modern English literature. Years ago when Aki bumped into a three-line epigram by Jonson, he found it so baffling that he decided to find out what on earth the poem is on about. He ended up writing a PhD thesis, Ben Jonson and Character.
This poem should not have been forgotten because it can avoid many appointments with a psychiatrist. It is the perfect example of a certain poetic “breathing” which eases our own breathing, as any asthma patient, myself included, knows perfectly well.
It is a very self-contained poem, closed in itself, “solipsist” (inverted commas because this is an ugly word which becomes eloquent with time), and at the same time universal, troubling and illustrative of what Oscar Wilde, to whom flamboyance was no stranger, claimed – the worse crimes of Humanity are committed in the brain.
Bernardim makes us face alienation (“to myself I made a stranger”), which we could perhaps define as the feeling of looking at ourselves in the mirror and seeing a complete stranger bearing entirely different values, morals and truth to our own – to the point we could call them lies. This villancico explains all the moments in life in which we struggle against what we should do and not against what we can and want to do.
We usually choose the ease and the cowardice of doing what we can and want to do, instead of what is right – and this “makes us our enemy”. In Linguistics, modality is defined as the speaker’s attitude and his or her engagement towards the utterance; it is conveyed by certain verbs which with some pomposity are called “modal” – “should” and “can” prominently. Bernardim calls it something “that has risen”; “delusion”; “great harm”; and he also describes the moment of cruel lucidity (“Sorely costly is disillusionment”) when we imperatively know that our brain has committed a crime; or the coward moment in which we choose what is easy, not what is right.
The world is full of bad people who think they are good people simply because they have never killed or insulted anyone to their face. We are all like that except for Bernardim (in itself a very musical name). He knows that when the moment of “disillusionment” comes, the kind masks which cover our ugly, not at all ideal self, will fall and uncover a dire portrait of Dorian Grey (who would tell that Oscar Wilde could have so much to do with all this). At least, we have Bernardim to tell us that life is what it is, that the human condition struggles against its own turpitude and, alas, “thus I am had, thus I am so”.
Originally published in Cancioneiro Geral, this villancico follows the “new metrics”, the fashion of the time, and it postulates the equally fashionable theme of the “fragmentation of the self”, which is furthermore reflected in Sá de Miranda’s “troubled” cantiga. The latter complains about not being able to live with himself nor without himself (here, prepositions and pronouns convey to perfection the intricate philosophy exuding from the minds of these poets). However, I would say that the truthful and disarming simplicity of Bernardim’s poem scores many points. “Between I, myself and me/ What has risen I do not know”. “Between consideration and concern”. In his frequent alliterations, the poet says everything he means in a couple of lines. No need for endless verbal drivel.
* Very little is known about Bernardim Ribeiro but at the same time a great deal is known. His poetry was included in Garcia de Resende’s 1516 Cancioneiro Geral and fellow poet and friend Sá de Miranda writes about him (“amigo Ribeiro”) to both praise his literary gifts and lament his mysterious fall from grace. Almeida Garrett attributes the latter to a heartbreaking love story between Bernardim and Beatriz, who happened to be the King’s daughter. Sadly there is no historical evidence for such a cinematic love story. What we do know is that Bernardim, in all likelihood born in the late 1400s and deceased in the mid-1500s, was a poet who enjoyed success and royal favours for a time; left the court for reasons unknown but probably in disgrace; transformed the cadence of music and alliteration into cerebral poetry and wrote the most wonderful beginning to a novel – “Menina e moça me levaram de casa de minha mãe para muito longe. Que causa fosse então daquela minha levada, era ainda pequena, não a soube”. It is also Menina e Moça who provides grounds to believe Bernardim might have been Jewish – converted, reconverted, in exile, we don’t know (as explained by Helder Macedo in his preface to Menina e Moça, D. Quixote, 1999). His mind seems to have been a mind in exile – and there are many forms of exile, with which Bernardim was certainly acquainted. This, we know.
Translation and reading Rita Faria
Rita Faria is a professor at the Catholic University of Portugal. She doesn’t know how to do anything else apart from reading and writing and wants to do nothing else apart from reading and writing. Besides this, she enjoys horror films, vampires, ghosts and zombies in general and thinks the Portuguese language is the most fun in the whole world.