Archive for December, 2008

XXX

Don December 11th, 2008

XXX 

Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.”

            There was a guest lecturer once.  I do not remember whom nor where nor when nor on what subject, but I do remember one question he asked us.  “On you way to class, how many leaves did you actually see?”  We had all passed a profusion of them in all their autumn glory, but no one could recall a single one.

            This poem did not flow from that lecture, which I believe was from a much later date, but from a particular finely veined maple leaf whose memory would make me think the lecturer had asked a very good question.

 TO A LEAF 

I’ll press you now in this great book

And then, years later, I will look

                                                            At your color and design

Preserved in such a fragile form!

And still with power my heart to warm

                                                            And prod my weary mind

To think of Him who made you

                                                            And your kind.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

XXIX

Don December 8th, 2008

XXIX Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.” 

By now I have made good progress as an English Major in discovering something of the range of what poetry can do.  The English Romantics—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats—teach us how effectively Nature can mirror our own moods back to us and help us to explore them, and they showed how poetry could mirror that mirror.  They thought (see Wordsworth in “Expostulation and Reply” and “The Tables Turned”) that Nature could do more than that, that it had positive content, and so an impulse from a vernal wood could teach us more of moral evil and of good than all the sages can.  From this critical distance it is easy to see that they imported their own propositional content into those experiences, content they got somewhere else.  So must we all do, and find other ways of testing the validity those beliefs than how well they fit Nature’s moods.  What Nature—and nature poetry—can do is to help us find the perfect language for expressing them.

 MEDITATION XIV 

The music of the dripping leaves,

A booming frog, a cricket’s song,

The night-owl’s call to one who grieves

Remind me of that of which I’m bereaved

And that I don’t belong.

And often when the brittle stars

Flame out in Midnight’s deep, dark dome,

Their pristine light, remote, unmarred,

Reminds me of how small men are

And that I’m not at home.

But when I turn, Lord, to your Book

And read the things that you have done:

How although Man your law forsook

You pity on your creatures took

And gave your only Son

To die for an undeserving race,

My stubborn heart’s bowed down

To think of how you took my place

That my weak eyes might see your face

And I, your sheep, be found.

Then Nature has different things to say:

Your handiwork in wood and stone,

In starlit night and rainy day

Remind me of the price you paid,

And that I’m not alone. 

Donald T. Williams, PhD