MY POEMS 1
Relax, it’s not what you think. (If you want to see some JH stuff, you can find it at johnhart.com/poetry). What I’m talking about now is poetry by others, verses that I know; that I love; that I possess: poems that have become a part of my mental furniture; lines that just might spill out of me at parties. Quite a few of these, I’m sure, are on anyone’s list—among people who have such lists. Some poems, especially of more recent vintage, maybe not.
It’s a parlor game: impose a limit of one poem per poet. I might start way back, with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, “That time of year thou may’st in me behold,” with its memorable series: “when yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang”—a little lesson in effective word placement. Or Thomas Nashe’s “Litany in Time of Plague”: “Brightness falls from the air.” Or certain stanzas—but only stanzas—of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen, such as the portrait of decadence in Book I, Canto IV, stanzas 4-5.
John Donne is tough: love poem, or Holy Sonnet? But has anyone since managed an extended metaphor as well as he does in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning?” John Milton’s “On His Blindness” haunts, though the consolation is less convincing than the despair. Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” in everyone’s anthology, is in mine too. “Our vegetable love should grow/Vaster than empires, and more slow.”
I find less that sticks with me in the Neoclassical and Romantic periods, but Blake’s “Tyger” is unavoidable, along with the weird central scenes of Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Some Germans chime in here: Goethe for the second “Wanderer’s Nightsong” and Clemens Brentano for his desperately Catholic “Cry from the Depths in Spring,” still awaiting a readable English translation. (That’s another subject.)
For the Victorians, there’s Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” But the era is really redeemed by its three outsiders. Walt Whitman, for the small percentage of hits among his copious misses: I love, for instance, “Song of the Rolling Earth.” Emily Dickinson, that heroine of self-invention: I’ll settle on #303, “The soul selects her own society.” Gerard Manley Hopkins? It has to be one of the “Terrible Sonnets,” say, the one beginning: “Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee.”
While the Anglos were ignoring their best, the French were celebrating theirs. The parade begins, for me, with the less familiar Alfred de Vigny, if only for the cynical close of his “The Mount of Olives”: “The just man will oppose disdain to absence.” Gerard de Nerval, for his treatment of the same subject—and of the emerging concept of entropy—in “Christ on the Mount of Olives.” Do I really have to settle on one Baudelaire? Then it’s “Parisian Dream,” his vision of an ideal city devoid of vegetation. (So much for the poet as environmentalist.) Of Stéphane Mallarmé, there is hardly a poem I could let go, but I’ll recite you one of the longer ones, the tribute titled “Toast Funèbre,” in which the departed poet Théophile Gautier is instructed to “to keep his sacred eyes shut, and be still.”
This is already lengthy and I haven’t reached 1900 and an explosion of choices. To be continued.
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