Selected Poems
from
MODERN POEMS
An Introduction to Poetry
edited by
Richard Ellmann & Robert O'Clair
-----
The Pardon
My dog lay dead five days without a grave
In the thick of summer, hid in a clump of pine
And a jungle of grass and honeysuckle-vine.
I who had loved him while he kept alive
Went only close enough to where he
was
5
To sniff the heavy honeysuckle-smell
Twined with another odor heavier still
And hear the flies' intolerable buss.
Well, I was ten and very much afraid.
In my kind world the dead were out of
range
10
And I could not forgive the sad or strange
In beast or man. My father took the spade
And buried him. Last night I saw the grass
Slowly divide (it was the same scene
But now it glowed a fierce and mortal
green)
15
And saw the dog emerging. I confess
I felt afraid, but still he came
In the carnal sun, clothed in a hymn of flies,
And death was breeding in his lively eyes.
I started in to cry and call his
name,
20
Asking forgiveness of his tongueless head.
. . . I dreamt the past was never past redeeming:
But whether this was false or honest dreaming
I beg death's pardon now. And mourn the dead.
1950
__________
Still, Citizen
Sparrow
Still, citizen sparrow, this vulture which you call
Unnatural, let him but lumber again to air
Over the rotten office, let him bear
The carrion ballast up, and at the tall
Tip of the sky lie cruising. Then you'll
see
5
That no more beautiful bird is in heaven's height,
No wider more placid wings, no watchfuller flight;
He shoulders nature there, the frightfully free,
The naked-headed one. Pardon him, you
Who dart in the orchard aisles, for it is
he
10
Devours death, mocks mutability,
Has heart to make an end, keeps nature new.
Thinking of Noah, childheart, try to forget
How for so many bedlam1 hours his saw
Soured the song of birds with its wheezy
gnaw,
15
And the slam of his hammer all the day beset
The people's ear. Forget that he could bear
To see the towns like coral under the keel,
And the fields so dismal deep. Try rather to feel
How high and weary it was, on the waters
where
20
He rocked his only world, and everyone's.
Forgive the hero, you who would have died
Gladly with all you knew; he rode that tide
To Ararat,2 all men are Noah's sons.
1959
1. Noisy,
as in a madhouse.
2. A mountain in the
Caucasus where Noah's ark came to rest.
__________
The Death of a
Toad3
A toad the power
mower caught,
Chewed and clipped of a leg, with a hobbling hop has got
To the garden verge, and sanctuaried him
Under the cineraria leaves, in the shade
Of the ashen heartshaped
leaves, in a
dim,
5
Low,
and a final glade.
The rare original hartsblood goes,
Spends on the earthen hide, in the folds and wizenings, flows
In the gutters of the banked and staring eyes. He lies
As still as if he would return to
stone,
10
And soundlessly attending, dies
Toward
some deep monotone,
Toward misted and ebullient seas
And cooling shores, toward lost Amphibia's emperies.4
Day dwindles, drowning, and at length is
gone
15
In the wide and antique eyes, which still appear
To watch, across the castrate
lawn,
The
haggard daylight steer.
1950
3. This
poem, according to Wilbur, is "the only instance I went straight
from something that happened to me to writing a poem about it, with very
little violation of the actual circumstances, though I put more into it
before I was through than I'd felt at the time."
4. Wilbur, asked
about the word, replied: "I may have found it in John Donne in the
first place, but I think I wanted to use it here as a kind of confession
that I'm doing rather a lot with that toad. I'm turning him into the
primal energies of the world in the course of this poem. And so I get a
little bombastic as a way of acknowledging that I'm going rather
far." Amphibia is imagined as the presiding spirit of the toad's
(and of all amphibians') universe. Emperies: dominions (archaic
usage).
__________
Ceremony
A striped blouse in a clearing by Bazille5
Is, you may say, a patroness of boughs
Too queenly kind toward nature to be kin.
But ceremony never did conceal,
Save to the silly eye, which all
allows,
5
How much we are the woods we wander in.
Let her be some Sabrina6 fresh
from stream,
Lucent as shallows slowed by wading sun,
Bedded on fern, the flowers' cynosure:6a
Then nymph and wood must nod and strive to
dream
10
That she is airy earth, the trees, undone,
Must ape her languor natural and pure.
Ho-hum. I am for wit and wakefulness,
And love this feigning lady by Bazille.
What's lightly hid is deepest
understood,
15
And when with social smile and formal dress
She teaches leaves to curtsey and quadrille,7
I think there are most tigers in the wood.
1950
5. Frédéric
Bazille (1841-1871), French painter associated with the Impressionists.
Most of his paintings show figures in close association with a
landscape.
6. The nymph of the
river Severn, in Milton's Comus. But here identified with
thoughtless, unceremonious nature, and contrasted with Bazille's lady.
6a. Center of
attention.
7. To dance a
quadrille, a kind of square dance.
__________
"A World
Without Objects
Is a Sensible Emptiness"8
The tall camels of
the spirit
Steer for their deserts, passing the last groves loud
With the sawmill shrill of the locust, to the whole honey of the arid
Sun. They are slow, proud,
And move with a stilted
stride
5
To the land of sheer horizon, hunting Traherne's
Sensible emptiness, there where the brain's lantern-slide
Revels in vast returns.
O
connoisseurs of thirst.
Best of my soul who long to learn to
drink
10
Of pure mirage, those prosperous islands are accurst
That shimmer on the brink
Of
absence; auras, lustres,
And all shinings need to be shaped and borne.
Think of those painted saints, capped by the early
masters
15
With bright, jauntily-worn
Aureate9 plates, or even
Merry-go-round rings. Turn, O turn
From the fine sleights10 of the sand, from the long empty oven
Where flames in flamings
burn
20
Back to the trees arrayed
In bursts of glance, to the halo-dialing11 run
Of the country creeks, and the hill's bracken tiaras made
Gold in the sunken sun,
Wisely watch for the
sight
25
Of the supernova12 burgeoning over the barn,
Lampshine blurred in the steam of beasts, the spirit's right
Oasis, light incarnate.
1950
8. The
title comes from Thomas Traherne (c. 1638-1674), Second Century,
Meditation 65: "You are as prone to love as the sun is to shine; it
being the most delightful and natural employment of the soul of man,
without which you are dark and miserable. . . . For certainly he that
delights not in love makes vain the universe. . . . The whole world
ministers to you as the theatre of your love. It sustains you and all
objects that you may continue to love them. Without which it were better
for you to have no being. Life without objects is sensible emptiness, and
that is a greater misery than death or nothing."
9. Golden.
10. Mirages.
11. Like a sundial,
the light on the creeks forms a halo-dial which reflects the solar
changes.
12. Astronomers now
believe that the star of Bethlehem, a symbol of Christ's birth, was a
supernova, an exploding star.
__________
Pangloss's Song13
I
Dear boy, you will not hear me speak
With sorrow or with rancor
Of what has paled my rosy cheek
And blasted it with canker;
'Twas Love, great Love, that did the
deed 5
Through Nature's gentle laws,
And how should ill effects proceed
From so divine a cause?
Sweet honey comes from bees that sing
As you are well
aware;
10
To one adept in reasoning,
Whatever pains disease may bring
Are but the tangy seasoning
To Love's delicious fare.
II
Columbus and his men, they
say,
15
Conveyed the virus hither
Whereby my features rot away
And vital powers wither;
Yet had they not traversed the seas
And come infected
back,
20
Why, think of all the luxuries
That modern life would lack!
All bitter things conduce to sweet,
As this example shows;
Without the little
spirochete
25
We'd have no chocolate to eat,
Nor would tobacco's fragrance greet
The European nose.
III
Each nation guards its native land
With cannon and with
sentry,
30
Inspectors look for contraband
At every port of entry,
Yet nothing can prevent the spread
Of Love's divine disease:
It rounds the world from bed to
bed
35
As pretty as you please.
Men worship Venus everywhere,
As plainly may be seen;
The decorations which I bear
Are nobler than the Croix de
Guerre,
40
And gained in service of our fair
And universal Queen.
1961
13. A
lyric written for the comic operetta based on Voltaire's Candide,
produced in New York in 1958. Dr. Pangloss is the optimistic
philosopher who assures his friend, the ingenuous Candide, that all
evils, even syphilis, are for the best, and that this is the best of
all possible worlds.
__________
Playboy
High on his stockroom ladder like a dunce
The stock-boy sits, and studies like a sage
The subject matter of one glossy page,
As lost in curves as Archimedes14 once.
Sometimes, without a glance, he feeds
himself.
5
The left hand, like a mother-bird in flight,
Brings him a sandwich for a sidelong bite,
And then returns it to a dusty shelf.
What so engrosses him? The wild décor
Of this pink-papered alcove into
which
10
A naked girl has stumbled, with its rich
Welter of pelts and pillows on the floor,
Amidst which, kneeling in a supple pose,
She lifts a goblet in her farther hand,
As if about to toast a
flower-stand
15
Above which hovers an exploding rose
Fired from a long-necked crystal vase that
rests
Upon a tasseled and vermilion cloth
One taste of which would shrivel up a moth?
Or is he pondering her perfect
breasts?
20
Nothing escapes him of her body's grace
Or of her floodlit skin, so sleek and warm
And yet so strangely like a uniform,
But what now grips his fancy is her face,
And how the cunning picture holds her
still
25
At just that smiling instant when her soul,
Grown sweetly faint, and swept beyond control,
Consents to his inexorable will.
1969
14. (c.
287-212 B.C.), Greek mathematician and inventor, known for his invention
of a tubular helix, or screw, used to lift water from the hold of a
ship.
__________
llmann, Richard and Robert O'Clair. Modern Poems: An
Introduction to Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 1973, pp. 366-371.
-----
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