Selected Poems

from

MODERN POEMS
An Introduction to Poetry

edited by

Richard Ellmann & Robert O'Clair

 

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The Fly

O hideous little bat, the size of snot,
With polyhedral eye and shabby clothes,
To populate the stinking cat you walk
The promontory of the dead man's nose,
Climb with the fine leg of a Duncan-Phyfe¹                            5
    The smoking mountains of my food
        And in a comic mood
    In mid-air take a bed a wife.

Riding and riding with your filth of hair
On gluey foot or wing, forever coy,                                    10
Hot from the compost and green sweet decay,
Sounding your buzzer like an urchin toy---
You dot all whiteness with diminutive stool,
    In the tight belly of the dead
        Burrow with hungry head                                          15
    And inlay maggots like a jewel.

At your approach the great

My peace is your disaster. For your death                           25
Children like spiders cup their pretty hands
And wives resort to chemistry of war.
In Fens of sticky paper and quicksands
You glue yourself to death. Where you are stuck
    You struggle hideously and beg                                     30
        You amputate you leg
    Imbedded in the amber muck.

But I, a man, must swat you with my hate,
Slap you across the air and crush you flight,
Must mangle with my shoe and smear you blood,                  35
Expose your little guts pasty and white,
Knock your head sidewise like a drunkard's hat,
    Pin your wings under like a crow's,
        Tear off you flimsy clothes
    And beat you as one beats a rat.                                  40

Then like Gargantua² I stride among
The corpses strewn like raisins in the dust,
The broken bodies of the narrow dead
That catch the throat with fingers of disgust.
I sweep. One gyrates like a top and falls                             45
    And stunned, stone blind, and deaf
        Buzzes its frightful F
    And dies between three cannibals.

                                                                              1942

    ^1. Duncan Phyfe (c. 1766-1854), U.S. cabinetmaker, whose early style was delicate.
    ^2. Giant of medieval legend adopted by Rabelais in Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532). One of his exploits was to swallow five pilgrims, with their staves, in a salad.

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Lower the Standard: That's My Motto

Lower the standard: that's my motto. Somebody is always putting the food
    out of reach. We're tired of falling off ladders. Who says a child can't
    paint? A pro is somebody who does it for money. Lower the standards.
    Let's all play poetry. Down with ideals, flags, convention buttons, morals,
    the scrambled eggs on the admiral's hat. I'm talking sense. Lower the
    standards. Sabotage the stylistic approach. Let weeds grow in the
    subdivision. Putty up the incisions in the library facade, those names that
    frighten grade-school teachers, those names whose U's are cut like V's.
    Burn the Suntopicon and The Harvard Classics.³ Lower the standard on
    classics, battleships, Russian ballet, national anthems (but they're low
    enough). Break through to the bottom. Be natural as an American abroad
    who knows no language, not even American. Keelhaul the poets in the
    vestry⁴ chairs. Renovate the Abbey of cold-storage dreamers.5 Get off
    the Culture Wagon. Learn how to walk the way you want. Slump your
    shoulders, stick your belly out, arms all over the table. How many
    generations will this take? Don't think about it, just make a start. (you
    have made a start.) Don't break anything you can step around, but don't
    pick it up. The law of gravity is the law of art. You first, poetry second,
    the good, the beautiful, the true come last. As the lad said: We must
    love one another or die.⁶

                                                                              1964

    ^3. A selection from the "great books" of literature, philosophy, and science, edited by Harvard president Charles William Eliot (1834-1926), was called the Harvard Classics, and a similar selection edited by Robert Hutchins had a topical index, prepared by Mortimer J. Adler, called the Syntopicon; these were intended as tools for self-education.
    ^4. Lay governors of a church.
    ^5. The "poets' corner" in Westminster Abbey, in London, is where many important English poets, from Chaucer to the present, are buried.
    ^6. Quoted from Auden, "September 1939" (furst version), urging mutual love as an antidote to war.

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Ellmann, Richard and Robert O'Clair. Modern Poems: An Introduction to
     Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973, pp. 316-318.

 

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