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.”

It is now 1981-82, my second and last year as Temporary Lecturer in English at the University of Georgia, teaching a full load of Freshman Composition while writing my dissertation.  The dissertation was on Edmund Spenser.  Can you tell?  Dr. Ewbank was my faculty adviser for my undergraduate degree in English.

On Spenserian Stanza

For Two Teachers: Edmund Spenser and Frances Ewbank.

When Spenser wrote The Faerie Queene, he made

A brand new stanza up in which to frame

The glorious knights and ladies he portrayed

Triumphant over villains full of shame.

Ever different, yet still the same,

It had to hold up through the spacious land

Of Faerie from end to end, and flame

More bright with virtue there than e’er the hand

Of author had achieved, in verses quaint or grand.

Ottava Rima had the flow he needed,

But seemed in live a lady far too light

To shadow forth the gallant knights who heeded

The Code of Maidenheed and served the bright

And gracious Gloriana truly.  Might

A pensive sonnet cycle then avail?

But that would never serve to show the flight

Of narrative events in time.  The tale,

It seemed, must then be dight in wholly different mail.

Yet if the two could somehow be combined—

Could move with supple dignity, but yet

Be not in short, concise quatrains confined

Nor have its forward movement always let,

Caught in the closing couplet’s double net;

And yet still pause for needed contemplation—

With light impediment, enough to whet

The reader’s appetite for exploration—

Now that would truly be a gallant innovation!

Suppose we take Ottava Rima, add,

To slow its headlong plunge, a single line,

Rhyming with the last, but subtly clad

With just one extra foot to be a sign

Of need to sip with care such heady wine—

So came The Fairie Queene.  And there has been

No poem in which the Glory seemed to shine

More brightly since the storied epoch when

The Sweet Singer of Israel wielded the sword and the pen.

And thou, doctor mihi carissima,

Who showed me how to look with eyes undim

Upon the bright, the ars dulcissima

Of sacred Poesy, and thence to skim

Cream, not of just aesthesis, nor of whim,

But of the Truth well imaged forth, displayed,

Filling the cup of wisdom to the brim;

If worthily I now wield Spenser’s blade,

The praise is thine, who long hast labored, taught, and prayed.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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.”

This poem was once rejected by a major literary journal (which shall remain nameless) on the grounds that the editor did not see any reason why the subject demanded a sonnet.  Let us just say that fourteen lines do not a sonnet make.  So much for the supposed expertise of our cultural gatekeepers.  But why shouldn’t the poem have been a sonnet if it had wanted to?  So much for the alleged wisdom of those gatekeepers.  Wordsworth or Keats would have known better!  While this fourteen line poem is not a sonnet of any kind, I do think it has an intriguingly intricate rhyme scheme.

On One of the Functions of Morning

When the first fingers of light steal through the grass,

Angling down through spaces between the limbs

Of trees, greeting the ground-fog as they pass,

The separate the darkness into shadows

That stretch out lengthwise clear across the meadows.

I have been up a time or two, on whims,

Early enough to see it come to pass.

For it is shy, this light that flits and skims

And touches everything so very lightly.

As imperceptibly as starlight dims

It fades to greater brightness, slips away

Before the bolder light that’s merely day,

And leaves the lucky ones it touches slightly

More inclined to follow after whims.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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.”

One of Luther’s most serious disciples was Johan Sebastian Bach, the greatest contrapuntist (some would say the greatest composer) who ever lived.  This is the first of a number of attempts to get something of the quality of Bach’s music down in words—a task not ever to be completely achieved!  How do you express the idea of, not just one note interacting with other notes to form the harmony, but whole melodies interacting with each other?  The acrostic, among other things, tries to capture something of the multilayered nature of Bach’s work.

Bach

Joining word to pitch and pitch to time,

Sounds line up to flow into the air.

Bach could make whole lines with lines to rhyme

And flow in streams of thought beyond compare.

Christ gave him this grace, to let us hear

His angels’ songs with (now!) the fleshly ear.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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.”

Even people who do not agree with him admire Protestant Reformer Martin Luther for standing up for his convictions.  What many people do not understand is that his famous “Here I stand!” was not simply a bold assertion of modern individualism but sprang from much serious agonizing over what Scripture was telling him.  It was faithfulness to God’s truth as he understood it, not rebellion against church authority, that drove him.

Martin Luther

Sonnet XXXV

Can one lone monk be right, and all the rest

Of Christendom for near a thousand years

Be wrong?  The question brought him close to tears

And troubled Luther sorely, he confessed.

But other problems had to be addressed,

Like, shall the Gospel reach the waiting ears

Of people whose good works were in arrears

And had no chance but Grace to pass the test?

He meant by that just simply every man,

And thought of men who’d lived by faith before—

And doubted then his Gospel’s truth no more:

With Athanasius contra mundum, and

With John the lone disciple at the Cross,

He clung to Christ and viewed all else as loss.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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.”

This poem marks a couple of momentous moments.  One was the loss of our dog, who had gotten out of her yard and disappeared only to be found later dead on the road.  The other is the composition of my first villanelle.  The villanelle is one of the most challenging verse forms in the language: six triplets in iambic pentameter rhyming ABA, etc., until the last stanza adds an extra A line to end in a couplet.  The catch is that lines one and three have to be substantially repeated as the final lines of the following triplets, alternating until they come together in the last stanza as the final couplet.  In one way it’s easy.  When you finished three lines, you already have a third of the rest written!  But the trick is to make the repeated lines sound like they would completely naturally have been there anyway.  Now that is hard!

The advantage is that if you do it well, there is an intensity bound by rigid limits that lends itself to containing otherwise uncontrollable emotion.  The best example of this use is Dylan Thomas’s famous villanelle on the death of his father, “Do not go gentle into that good night.”  This one is not lacking in a certain similarity to that one.

Farewell to Snoopie: A Villanelle

(No. 1)

The once lithe body lay too large, too long:

The proportions were off, the head’s angle strange;

Something about it certainly was wrong.

Something about the way the limp legs hung

Boded less wandering, a shrunken range.

The once lithe body lay too large, too long.

Never before had I seen her without a song

Of bugle-haunted greeting in glad refrains;

Something about it certainly was wrong.

The silk ears once in gay abandon flung

Were still, and their position did not change:

The once lithe body lay too large, too long.

A fly crawled slowly undisturbed along

The nose; fur rose in wind foreboding rains.

Something about it certainly was wrong.

And standing there, I felt no longer young

And thought age no great bargain in exchange.

The once lithe body lay too large, too long;

Something about it certainly was wrong.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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.”

I was really on a blank-verse jag that year for some reason.  More rhyme is coming soon; I promise.  I don’t even remember where this landscape was, but it reminds me of some parts of Wyoming, or of the Salisbury Plain near Stonehenge (though I had never seen it at that time, nor was I in Wyoming that year).  It also brings to mind Tolkien’s barrow downs.  Clearly it was somewhere not in the Appalachians seen by someone whose way of relating to landscapes is defined by places that are.   The specific location is forgotten, but not the feel of it.  That is where poetry is valuable.

Apocalypse

It was a bare place, despite the vegetation.

There was grass on the rounded hills, the long slopes,

A few trees standing, just enough

To make you notice that there were not more.

They were dark evergreens, stooped with age.

They did not stand in bunches, but alone,

Spread out like silent sentinels to watch

The years and keep a record of their doings.

There was wind in the grass and the twisted limbs.  There was

Too little between a man and the horizon.

You ought to have to climb awhile before

The sky can open up and leave you standing

Emptied out of everything but wonder.

You ought to have to go past dripping ferns,

Cool with water seeping from the rocks.

The graceful arms of trees should pull back slowly

To open in an unexpected meadow,

Then fold together again to receive you back.

It ought to be a thing you have to seek,

Perhaps unconsciously, and then return from,

Weakened and yet stronger for the journey.

It is not always so, for there was grass

On rounded hills, and wind was in the grass,

And the sky was all around you, all around you,

And lonely trees told tales that had no words.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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 is an old recording of Flannery O’Connor giving an interview on Wise Blood for an early television program.  If you haven’t had the privilege of seeing it, you can read the poem it inspired.  If you have, you can judge how well I captured it in another medium.  The poem was published in New Oxford Review, March, 1982, p. 24.

For Flannery

The body was alive.  The evidence

Is that her fingers for pure nervousness

Caressed the chair’s arm, and that was enough;

The rest was calm, the eyes demure.  The voice

Was slow and hesitant, but when it had

A chance to build momentum it could carry

The burden of a thought or two and drive them

Directly, if gently, toward the heart of things.

(The eyes would look up then as if to follow

The words and make sure they were going straight.)

The body was alive; there is no doubt.

A fifteen-minute strip of celluloid

Is proof, and there are other witnesses

Whose bodies are still living, and will be,

I reckon, for another couple decades.

The body is cold dust and brittle bone

And blind as Hazel Motes.  But take the cold,

Thin strip of plastic, add electric light,

A motor, and some other gadgetry,

It will be warm and soft again, or seem so.

We most of us belong to Hazel’s church:

Our lame don’t walk, our blind don’t see, our dead

Stay put, our Jesus has no blood to spare,

Despite what we recite on Sunday mornings.

The body stalks from tree to tree behind us.

Its hands fidget in embarrassment;

Its eyes occasionally look up.  (Be sure

That’s only in the mind.  The body still

Lies quiet—even now the bones are cumbling.)

Be sure you do not look into the eyes.

If once you do, you are forever lost,

Your well-adjusted modern life in shambles.

Jesus, striding through the point of light

Behind the pupils, will lay hold of you.

“The prophet that I raise up from her words

Will burn your eyes clean!”   There will be no way

To keep out even resurrections then,

Or Jesus’ blood.  And you will see the body

Living, and it will not be on film.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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.”

Enough blank verse!  Now for something completely different.

Oh Sight beyond all Seeing

(Christmas, 1980)

Oh Sight beyond all seeing,

Light in the dark of the sun,

Fact behind the face of Being,

Second of Three in the One:

What motive could have moved you hither thus?

The Life that was ever begotten, never begun,

Began to be born, to mourn.  For us

The daring deed was done.

Burned by angel-light,

The shepherds’ eyes were blind

To everything except the sight

That they went forth to find.

It was a Baby wrapped in swaddling clothes,

Laid in a manger: such had been the sign.

The sign they saw by then still shows

The perilous paths that wind

Between the Tree and the Tree

This much the sign makes clear:

The Light invisible we see,

The silent Word we hear.

What motive could have moved Him hither thus?

We hear pegs pounded, see the thrusted spear,

We hear, “Forgive them!”  Now for us

The day of doom draws near.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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.”

Ted Georgian was the best back-packing buddy I’ve ever had.  I’m the speaker in this poem; but he was there, and will vouch for its truth, I have no doubt.

Conversation with a Back-Packer

There is a path that slowly winds its way

Into the Hills.  In sudden switchbacks up

It rises from the Tallulah River basin

In North Car’lina, and curls around along

The ridges until it crosses the bowl between

Big Scaly and Standing Indian; then, back down

It curves to join the Tallulah once again

In northern Georgia where the valley’s broader.

It was a road put in to bring logs out,

But that was many years ago.  Today

It seldom sees a truck, though I have met

The hoofprints of a burro coming down,

Plain where the ground was soft from last week’s rain

Or in white scars where the iron had struck the sparks

Out of the flinty rocks in steeper places.

The beeches have grown for thirty years back in,

Along with scattered stands of birch and hemlock,

And hulks of patriarchs the woodsmen left

As monuments to the forest’s former glory,

And the ever-present patches of rhododendron.

Except for the week-old marks of man-shod hooves

And the absence of older trees in the mist of the roadway,

There was little sign that men had come that way

Since the fathers of the beeches had been laid low.

Were it not for the shelter by the spring

With names and dates inscribed in candle-smoke

Upon the beams as a memorial,

You might have thought that place had been forgotten.

Between the peaks the land is almost flat

And opens in what you’d almost call a meadow,

And there the spring comes up beside the shelter

And almost forms a pond before it forms

The stream which forms Beech Creek, which almost gets

To be a river itself before the Tallulah

Deprives it of its name on down the valley.

There where the water is gentle the deer come

To drink and browse in the quiet of the morning

Before the sun can look in over the broad

Shoulder of Standing Indian, who stands guard

Above them there.  If you are there some morning

You might see elven maidens in the distance,

Appearing and disappearing between the tree trunks.

Look closer and they will resolve themselves

Into the deer’s white rumps as they go bounding

Across the ground.  And now has come the time

You must be very still and very quiet.

You’ll want the camera from your pack, of course,

But if you move to get it, however slowly,

The rumps will flash just once more and be gone.

Resist temptation.  Clutch your bowl of oatmeal

And feel the heat go slowly out of it

As it goes still more slowly out of the fire

And up with the smoke in a grey, spiraled column

That could be one of the trunks of the young birches

‘Round which the doe steps out into the clearing,

No more than twenty feet from where you sit.

She looks at you, and you are sure she sees you.

She stands and stares as motionless as you do.

Then, being satisfied you’re not a hunter

(It’s said they know the day the season opens,

And what guns are, and partly I believe it),

The graceful head goes down and starts to tear

Away the undergrowth.  No, “tear”  is wrong–

For later when you go there, you will find

The leaves and stems are clipped away as neatly

As you could do it with a pair of hedge-shears.

But now, this living thing that stands before you,

Its breath as white as yours in the cold air!

Up here she wanders and lives out her life

Within the ancient hills and infant forest,

Depending on no man to come and feed her.

She mates and bears her young and crops her leaves

And dances with her fellows in the forest

And warily sniffs the air for signs of hunters

(As she does now: see how the head comes up

With eyes and ears and nose all sharply pointed

Toward me at the slightest sound or movement

For a brief eternity of fierce attention

To see if I am still behaving myself.

Then, satisfied, the slender neck goes down

To feed again).  All this she does and more,

And would even if I’d never come to see her.

You’ve seen deer in the zoos, no doubt, so tame

That children feed them milk from baby bottles,

And beautiful they are, but not the same.

The camera could not have told the difference

If I had gotten to it.  Paint on canvas,

Fanciful words on paper about elf-maidens,

Suggest it merely.  You must go yourself

And catch you own glimpse of the mystery.

There is no guarantee that you’ll see anything,

But give up guarantees, and go.  Remember,

Grace comes to whom it will.  There’s no explaining

Just why it touches one and not another.

You must be very still and very quiet.

Then if the deer comes, take it as a gift

Unearned.  You are her uninvited guest;

You are a pilgrim and a stranger here:

The spring and meadow high between the mountains

Belong to her and to her kind forever.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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.”

It is now 1980-81.  I have finished my course work for the PhD at the University of Georgia and been admitted to candidacy; all that is left is the minor detail of finishing my dissertation.  Meanwhile, I have been offered a job at UGA as full time Temporary Lecturer in Freshman English, just to make sure I don’t get too much work done on that dissertation.  Meanwhile there were stories to be told, some historical like the last one, some fictional, and some personal (a sub-set of historical).  The next poem is in the latter category.

On My Grandmother’s Father, His Wife,

Minnie Ellabella Huitt,

And a Tenuous Connection With Robert E. Lee

William Forney Lee had a long, white, drooping mustache

And a black string tie in the pictures in the drawer

At my grandmother’s house.  She was all I knew of him,

The old photographs and the stories that she told:

How his father had been sick and couldn’t go to fight the Yankees,

And old Marse Robert had come down himself to see him

And give such comfort as could be for such a woe,

And left him a daguerreotype, a new-fangled picture

Of himself on Traveler, and written on the bottom

With his own hand, “To my favorite nephew.”  That was all.

That was all!  It was enough.  To have such a contact

Was more than I have even yet begun to comprehend.

But was the story true?  There wasn’t any need to doubt it.

Her very own eyes had seen the picture more than once,

And that was back when she could see as well as anyone.

Well, now she is as old, almost, as William Forney’s wife

Had been when I, a boy, barely able to remember,

Had been led up to the wheelchair where the tiny woman sat,

Her hair up in a bun, the whitest white I’d ever seen,

And someone shouted, “This is Vera Lee’s boy, your great grandson,”

And slowly her ancient hand had reached out to touch me.

There was an old country house with a long porch, and horses

At the far end of the pasture, and a calf in the barn,

And bird-dogs in a pen who jumped up to lick my fingers.

There were long tables spread in the yard beneath the oak tree.

The spiced tea was strange on my tongue–I wouldn’t drink it,

But there was chicken and dumplings and a giant birthday cake,

And water that you drank with a ladle from a bucket

That you cranked up creaking on a rope from the well.

It was all Great Grandma Lee, it was all the Birthday Dinner,

And it happened every year.  When we came back again,

The horses and the bird-dogs were still there, but she was not.

Well, William Forney Lee had mouldered twenty years already,

And now twenty more have passed.  The horses and the dogs

Have followed both their mistress and their master into dust.

The old house is gone; there is a new brick one now,

With all the modern plumbing, but it does not have a porch.

Only the old oak tree remains as a reminder,

And the pictures I the drawer, and the pictures in my mind.

“But where is the daguerrotype?” I ask, but get no answer.

“Oh surely it is somewhere in the family, but I can’t say

Exactly where.  It’s been so long, there are so many branches.”

As many as the branches of the oak that was a sapling

When William Forney’s father took an unexpected present

From the kindest hand that ever held a sword.  And I have touched

The wife of the son of the man who was that nephew of Marse Robert,

And oh, I wish that I had known, I wish that I had known!

Donald T. Williams, PhD