Jonathan Swift -- November 30, 1667

                                    Jonathan Swift  November 30, 1667 --October 19, 1745

Dublin born Jonathan Swift, remembered as a masterful satirist, wrote prose, poetry, essays, and political statements. An ordained Anglican minister, in 1713 he became Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, a post he held until 1742.

  

On Snow

From Heaven I fall, though from earth I begin,

No lady alive can show such a skin.

I'm bright as an angel, and light as a feather,

But heavy and dark, when you squeeze me together.

Though candour and truth in my aspect I bear,

Yet many poor creatures I help to ensnare.

Though so much of Heaven appears in my make,

The foulest impressions I easily take.

My parent and I produce one another,

The mother the daughter, the daughter the mother.

An Echo

Never sleeping, still awake,

Pleasing most when most I speak;

The delight of old and young,

Though I speak without a tongue.

Nought but one thing can confound me,

Many voices joining round me;

Then I fret, and rave, and gabble,

Like the labourers of Babel.

Now I am a dog, or cow,

I can bark, or I can low;

I can bleat, or I can sing,

Like the warblers of the spring.

Let the lovesick bard complain,

And I mourn the cruel pain;

Let the happy swain rejoice,

And I join my helping voice:

Both are welcome, grief or joy,

I with either sport and toy.

Though a lady, I am stout,

Drums and trumpets bring me out:

Then I clash, and roar, and rattle,

Join in all the din of battle.

Jove, with all his loudest thunder,

When I'm vext, can't keep me under;

Yet so tender is my ear,

That the lowest voice I fear;

Much I dread the courtier's fate,

When his merit's out of date,

For I hate a silent breath,

And a whisper is my death.

Elegy Upon Tiger

Her dead lady's joy and comfort,

Who departed this life

The last day of March, 1727:

To the great joy of Bryan

That his antagonist is gone.

And is poor Tiger laid at last so low?

O day of sorrow! -Day of dismal woe!

Bloodhounds, or spaniels, lap-dogs, 'tis all one,

When Death once whistles -snap! -away they're gone.

See how she lies, and hangs her lifeless ears,

Bathed in her mournful lady's tears!

Dumb is her throat, and wagless is her tail,

Doomed to the grave, to Death's eternal jail!

In a few days this lovely creature must

First turn to clay, and then be changed to dust.

That mouth which used its lady's mouth to lick

Must yield its jaw-bones to the worms to pick.

That mouth which used the partridge-wing to eat

Must give its palate to the worms to eat.

Methinks I see her now in Charon's boat

Bark at the Stygian fish which round it float;

While Cerberus, alarmed to hear the sound,

Makes Hell's wide concave bellow all around.

She sees him not, but hears him through the dark,

And valiantly returns him bark for bark.

But now she trembles -though a ghost, she dreads

To see a dog with three large yawning heads.

Spare her, you hell-hounds, case your frightful paws,

And let poor Tiger 'scape your furious jaws.

Let her go safe to the Elysian plains,

Where Hylax barks among the Mantuan swains;

There let her frisk about her new-found love:

She loved a dog when she was here above.

The Epitaph

Here lies beneath this marble

An animal could bark, or warble:

Sometimes a bitch, sometimes a bird,

Could eat a tart, or eat a t -.

On Gold

All-ruling tyrant of the earth,

To vilest slaves I owe my birth,

How is the greatest monarch blest,

When in my gaudy livery drest!

No haughty nymph has power to run

From me; or my embraces shun.

Stabb'd to the heart, condemn'd to flame,

My constancy is still the same.

The favourite messenger of Jove,

And Lemnian god, consulting strove

To make me glorious to the sight

Of mortals, and the gods' delight.

Soon would their altar's flame expire

If I refused to lend them fire.

              

By fate exalted high in place,

Lo, here I stand with double face:

Superior none on earth I find;

But see below me all mankind

Yet, as it oft attends the great,

I almost sink with my own weight.

At every motion undertook,

The vulgar all consult my look.

I sometimes give advice in writing,

But never of my own inditing.

I am a courtier in my way;

For those who raised me, I betray;

And some give out that I entice

To lust, to luxury, and dice.

Who punishments on me inflict,

Because they find their pockets pickt.

By riding post, I lose my health,

And only to get others wealth.

 

 -- Cat

Remembrance Day

In Flanders Fields

BY JOHN MCCRAE

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

    That mark our place; and in the sky

    The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

    Loved and were loved, and now we lie,

        In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

    The torch; be yours to hold it high.

    If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

        In Flanders fields.

·         

·         

·         

·         

·     ---Cat         

Sylvia Plath -- October 27, 1932

Sylvia Plath  October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963

Prolific American poet and writer, Plath struggled with depression throughout her short life. She committed suicide at the age of 31. In 1982 she was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for The Collected Poems. 





Balloons
Sylvia Plath

Since Christmas they have lived with us,
Guileless and clear,
Oval soul-animals,
Taking up half the space,
Moving and rubbing on the silk

Invisible air drifts,
Giving a shriek and pop
When attacked, then scooting to rest, barely trembling.
Yellow cathead, blue fish ----
Such queer moons we live with

Instead of dead furniture!
Straw mats, white walls
And these traveling
Globes of thin air, red, green,
Delighting

The heart like wishes or free
Peacocks blessing
Old ground with a feather
Beaten in starry metals.
Your small

Brother is making
His balloon squeak like a cat.
Seeming to see
A funny pink world he might eat on the other side of it,
He bites,

Then sits
Back, fat jug
Contemplating a world clear as water.
A red
Shred in his little fist.





Conversation Among The Ruins
Sylvia Plath

Through portico of my elegant house you stalk
With your wild furies, disturbing garlands of fruit
And the fabulous lutes and peacocks, rending the net
Of all decorum which holds the whirlwind back.
Now, rich order of walls is fallen; rooks croak
Above the appalling ruin; in bleak light
Of your stormy eye, magic takes flight
Like a daunted witch, quitting castle when real days break.

Fractured pillars frame prospects of rock;
While you stand heroic in coat and tie, I have sit
Composed in Grecian tunic and psyche-knot,
Rooted to your black look, the play turned tragic:
Which such blight wrought on our bankrupt estate,
What ceremony of words can patch the havoc?






Elm
Sylvia Plath
    for Ruth Fainlight

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root;
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was you madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it.
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallup thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, the big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin white, like arsenic.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand,a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches? ----

Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.





Gigolo
Sylvia Plath

Pocket watch, I tick well.
The streets are lizardly crevices
Sheer-sided, with holes where to hide.
It is best to meet in a cul-de-sac,

A palace of velvet
With windows of mirrors.
There one is safe,
There are no family photographs,

No rings through the nose, no cries.
Bright fish hooks, the smiles of women
Gulp at my bulk
And I, in my snazzy blacks,

Mill a litter of breasts like jellyfish.
To nourish
The cellos of moans I eat eggs --
Eggs and fish, the essentials,

The aphrodisiac squid.
My mouth sags,
The mouth of Christ
When my engine reaches the end of it.

The tattle of my
Gold joints, my way of turning
Bitches to ripples of silver
Rolls out a carpet, a hush.

And there is no end, no end of it.
I shall never grow old. New oysters
Shriek in the sea and I
Glitter like Fontainebleu

Gratified,
All the fall of water an eye
Over whose pool I tenderly
Lean and see me.





Last Words
Sylvia Plath

I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus
With tigery stripes, and a face on it
Round as the moon, to stare up.
I want to be looking at them when they come
Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots.
I see them already -- the pale, star-distance faces.
Now they are nothing, they are not even babies.
I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first gods.
They will wonder if I was important.
I should sugar and preserve my days like fruit!
My mirror is clouding over --
A few more breaths, and it will reflect nothing at all.
The flowers and the faces whiten to a sheet.

I do not trust the spirit. It escapes like steam
In dreams, through mouth-hole or eye-hole. I can't stop it.
One day it won't come back. Things aren't like that.
They stay, their little particular lusters
Warmed by much handling. They almost purr.
When the soles of my feet grow cold,
The blue eye of my tortoise will comfort me.
Let me have my copper cooking pots, let my rouge pots
Bloom about me like night flowers, with a good smell.
They will roll me up in bandages, they will store my heart
Under my feet in a neat parcel.
I shall hardly know myself. It will be dark,
And the shine of these small things sweeter than the face of Ishtar.





--Cat

Jorge Luis Borges -- August 24

                                            Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo
                                                       August 24,1899 -- June 14, 1986
                                Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, died in Geneva, Switzerland.

                     Writer, poet, essayist, critic, translator, librarian, known as Jorge Luis Borges.






The Art Of Poetry

To gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.

To feel that waking is another dream
that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death
that every night we call a dream.

To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into a music, a sound, and a symbol.

To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadness--such is poetry,
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.

Sometimes at evening there's a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
a green eternity, not wonders.

Art is endless like a river flowing,
passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and yet another, like the river flowing.




Adam Cast Forth

Was there a Garden or was the Garden a dream?
Amid the fleeting light, I have slowed myself and queried,
Almost for consolation, if the bygone period
Over which this Adam, wretched now, once reigned supreme,

Might not have been just a magical illusion
Of that God I dreamed.  Already it's imprecise
In my memory, the clear Paradise,
But I know it exists, in flower and profusion,

Although not for me.  My punishment for life
Is the stubborn earth with the incestuous strife
Of Cains and Abels and their brood; I await no pardon.

Yet, it's much to have loved, to have known true joy,
To have had -- if only for just one day --
The experience of touching the living Garden.


Translated by Genia Gurarie





History Of The Night

Throughout the course of the generations
men constructed the night.
At first she was blindness;
thorns raking bare feet,
fear of wolves.
We shall never know who forged the word
for the interval of shadow
dividing the two twilights;
we shall never know in what age it came to mean
the starry hours.
Others created the myth.
They made her the mother of the unruffled Fates
that spin our destiny,
they sacrificed black ewes to her, and the cock
who crows his own death.
The Chaldeans assigned to her twelve houses;
to Zeno, infinite words.
She took shape from Latin hexameters
and the terror of Pascal.
Luis de Leon saw in her the homeland
of his stricken soul.
Now we feel her to be inexhaustible
like an ancient wine
and no one can gaze on her without vertigo
and time has charged her with eternity.

And to think that she wouldn't exist
except for those fragile instruments, the eyes.





Remorse For Any Death

Free of memory and of hope,
limitless, abstract, almost future,
the dead man is not a dead man: he is death.
Like the God of the mystics,
of Whom anything that could be said must be denied,
the dead one, alien everywhere,
is but the ruin and absence of the world.
We rob him of everything,
we leave him not so much as a color or syllable:
here, the courtyard which his eyes no longer see,
there, the sidewalk where his hope lay in wait.
Even what we are thinking,
he could be thinking;

we have divvied up like thieves
the booty of nights and days.





To A Cat

Mirrors are not more silent
nor the creeping dawn more secretive;
in the moonlight, you are that panther
we catch sight of from afar.
By the inexplicable workings of a divine law,
we look for you in vain;
More remote, even, than the Ganges or the setting sun,
yours is the solitude, yours the secret.
Your haunch allows the lingering
caress of my hand. You have accepted,
since that long forgotten past,
the love of the distrustful hand.
You belong to another time. You are lord
of a place bounded like a dream.

May 7 -- Archibald MacLeish

Archibald MacLeish (May 7, 1892 – April 20, 1982) 

Prolific American poet, essayist, playwright, political activist, and for several years at the request of FDR, the Librarian of Congress. He won numerous awards for his poems and plays, among them Pulitzer Prizes and an Academy Award.




An Eternity by Archibald MacLeish


There is no dusk to be, 
There is no dawn that was, 
Only there's now, and now, 
And the wind in the grass.

Days I remember of 
Now in my heart, are now; 
Days that I dream will bloom 
White the peach bough.

Dying shall never be 
Now in the windy grass; 
Now under shooken leaves 
Death never was. 




Dr. Sigmund Freud Discovers the Sea Shell by Archibald MacLeish
                  

Science, that simple saint, cannot be bothered
Figuring what anything is for:
Enough for her devotions that things are
And can be contemplated soon as gathered.

She knows how every living thing was fathered,
She calculates the climate of each star,
She counts the fish at sea, but cannot care
Why any one of them exists, fish, fire or feathered.

Why should she? Her religion is to tell
By rote her rosary of perfect answers.
Metaphysics she can leave to man:
She never wakes at night in heaven or hell

Staring at darkness. In her holy cell
There is no darkness ever: the pure candle
Burns, the beads drop briskly from her hand.

Who dares to offer Her the curled sea shell!
She will not touch it!--knows the world she sees
Is all the world there is! Her faith is perfect!

And still he offers the sea shell . . .

What surf
Of what far sea upon what unknown ground
Troubles forever with that asking sound?
What surge is this whose question never ceases? 

                           

       
Nocturne by Archibald MacLeish


The earth, still heavy and warm with afternoon,
Dazed by the moon:

The earth, tormented with the moon’s light,
Wandering in the night:

La, La, The moon is a lovely thing to see—
The moon is an agony.

Full moon, moon rise, the old old pain
Of brightness in dilated eyes,

The ache of still
Elbows leaning on the narrow sill,

Of motionless cold hands upon the wet
Marble of the parapet,

Of open eyelids of a child behind
The crooked glimmer of the windown blind,

Of sliding faint remindful squares
Across the lamplight on the rocking-chairs:

Why do we stand so late
Stiff fingers on the moonlit gat

Why do we stand
To watch so long the fall of moonlight on the sand?

What is it we cannot recall?
Tormented by the moon’s light
The earth turns maundering through the night. 




The Rock In The Sea by Archibald MacLeish
          
Think of our blindness where the water burned! 
Are we so certain that those wings, returned 
And turning, we had half discerned 
Before our dazzled eyes had surely seen 
The bird aloft there, did not mean?— 
Our hearts so seized upon the sign! 


Think how we sailed up-wind, the brine 
Tasting of daphne, the enormous wave 
Thundering in the water cave— 
Thunder in stone. And how we beached the skiff 
And climbed the coral of that iron cliff 
And found what only in our hearts we’d heard— 
The silver screaming of that one, white bird: 
The fabulous wings, the crimson beak 
That opened, red as blood, to shriek 
And clamor in that world of stone, 
No voice to answer but its own. 


What certainty, hidden in our hearts before, 
Found in the bird its metaphor? 


           
    
The End of the World by Archibald MacLeish

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing -- nothing at all. 


-- Cat

February 29 -- Howard Nemerov

Howard Nemerov (February 29, 1920 – July 5, 1991) was United States Poet Laureate on two separate occasions: from 1963 to 1964, and from 1988 to 1990. The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. He was brother to photographer Diane Nemerov Arbus.



"I got the idea that you were supposed to be plenty morbid and predict the end of civilization many times, but civilization has ended so many times during my brief term on earth that I got a little bored with the theme."  -- Howard Nemerov 



"Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time." -- Howard Nemerov 
   


A Spell before Winter
   
After the red leaf and the gold have gone,
Brought down by the wind, then by hammering rain
Bruised and discolored, when October's flame
Goes blue to guttering in the cusp, this land
Sinks deeper into silence, darker into shade.
There is a knowledge in the look of things,
The old hills hunch before the north wind blows.

Now I can see certain simplicities
In the darkening rust and tarnish of the time,
And say over the certain simplicities,
The running water and the standing stone,
The yellow haze of the willow and the black
Smoke of the elm, the silver, silent light
Where suddenly, readying toward nightfall,
The sumac's candelabrum darkly flames.
And I speak to you now with the land's voice,
It is the cold, wild land that says to you
A knowledge glimmers in the sleep of things:
The old hills hunch before the north wind blows. 




The Blue Swallows
   
Across the millstream below the bridge 
Seven blue swallows divide the air 
In shapes invisible and evanescent, 
Kaleidoscopic beyond the mind’s 
Or memory’s power to keep them there. 

“History is where tensions were,” 
“Form is the diagram of forces.” 
Thus, helplessly, there on the bridge, 
While gazing down upon those birds— 
How strange, to be above the birds!— 
Thus helplessly the mind in its brain 
Weaves up relation’s spindrift web, 
Seeing the swallows’ tails as nibs 
Dipped in invisible ink, writing… 

Poor mind, what would you have them write? 
Some cabalistic history 
Whose authorship you might ascribe 
listening do To God? to Nature? Ah, poor ghost, 
You’ve capitalized your Self enough. 
That villainous William of Occam 
Cut out the feet from under that dream 
Some seven centuries ago. 
It’s taken that long for the mind 
To waken, yawn and stretch, to see 
With opened eyes emptied of speech 
The real world where the spelling mind 
Imposes with its grammar book 
Unreal relations on the blue 
Swallows. Perhaps when you will have 
Fully awakened, I shall show you 
A new thing: even the water 
Flowing away beneath those birds 
Will fail to reflect their flying forms, 
And the eyes that see become as stones 
Whence never tears shall fall again. 

O swallows, swallows, poems are not 
The point. Finding again the world, 
That is the point, where loveliness 
Adorns intelligible things 
Because the mind’s eye lit the sun. 



Fugue by Howard Nemerov
                               
You see them vanish in their speeding cars, 
The many people hastening through the world,
And wonder what they would have done before
This time of time speed distance, random streams
Of molecules hastened by what rising heat?
Was there never a world where people just sat still?

Yet they might be all of them contemplatives
Of a timeless now, drivers and passengers
In the moving cars all facing to the front
Which is the future, which is destiny,
Which is desire and desire's end - 
What are they doing but just sitting still?

And still at speed they fly away, as still 
As the road paid out beneath them as it flows
Moment by moment into the mirrored past;
They spread in their wake the parading fields of food,
The windowless works where who is making what,
The grey towns where the wishes and the fears are done. 




The View From An Attic Window 
                                              
Among the high-branching, leafless boughs 
Above the roof-peaks of the town, 
Snowflakes unnumberably come down. 

I watched out of the attic window 
The laced sway of family trees, 
Intricate genealogies 

Whose strict, reserved gentility, 
Trembling, impossible to bow, 
Received the appalling fall of snow. 

All during Sunday afternoon, 
Not storming, but befittingly, 
Out of a still, grey, devout sky, 

The snowflakes fell, until all shapes 
Went under, and thickening, drunken lines 
Cobwebbed the sleep of solemn pines. 

Up in the attic, among many things 
Inherited and out of style, 
I cried, then fell asleep awhile, 

Waking at night now, as the snow- 
flakes from darkness to darkness go 
Past yellow lights in the street below. 

2 
I cried because life is hopeless and beautiful. 
And like a child I cried myself to sleep 
High in the head of the house, feeling the hull 
Beneath me pitch and roll among the steep 
Mountains and valleys of the many years 
That brought me to tears. 

Down in the cellar, furnace and washing machine, 
Pump, fuse-box, water heater, work their hearts 
Out at my life, which narrowly runs between 
Them and this cemetery of spare parts 
For discontinued men, whose hats and canes 
Are my rich remains. 

And women, their portraits and wedding gowns 
Stacked in the corners, brooding in wooden trunks; 

And children’s rattles, books about lions and clowns; 
And headless, hanging dresses swayed like drunks 
Whenever a living footstep shakes the floor; 
I mention no more; 

But what I thought today, that made me cry, 
Is this, that we live in two kinds of thing: 
The powerful trees, thrusting into the sky 
Their black patience, are one, and that branching 
Relation teaches how we endure and grow; 
The other is the snow, 

Falling in a white chaos from the sky, 
As many as the sands of all the seas, 
As all the men who died or who will die, 
As stars in heaven, as leaves of all the trees; 
As Abraham was promised of his seed; 
Generations bleed, 

Till I, high in the tower of my time 
Among familiar ruins, began to cry 
For accident, sickness, justice, war and crime, 
Because all died, because I had to die. 
The snow fell, the trees stood, the promise kept, 
And a child I slept. 




-- Cat