Parnassus-poetry in Review最新文献

{"title":"The State with the Prettiest Name","authors":"W. Logan","doi":"10.7312/loga14732-009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7312/loga14732-009","url":null,"abstract":"Those pioneer hopes, homage stained with arrogance or contempt, the names of our states have long since lost the furtive tang of accident. They have become what they never could be at first, inevitable. Think how many pay dubious respect to the tribes slaughtered, driven off, forced onto agencies (as reservations once were called), or who, having no immunity against smallpox or measles, did not survive the encounter with trapper or trader: Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Massachusetts, Missouri, North and South Dakota, Oklahoma, Utah, with perhaps fifteen more taken from Indian words. Think of the names that courted the favor of kings or queens (Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana), or acknowledged a founder's father (Pennsylvania) or a founding father (Washington). As soon as a thing is named, it begins to acquire associations that divide it from what it was named for. Who thinks now of Hampshire, Jersey, or York? Of all these, can \"Florida\" really be the prettiest? If so, it will always be so, no matter how overrun with shopping malls and pasteboard houses it becomes. Elizabeth Bishop's was the Florida of the late thirties, though-undeveloped, larval, not yet emerging from the 1925 crash of the land boom (which ruined John Berryman's father). This was the South beyond the South, a land with an atmosphere no less seductive than the gauzy, hand-colored views of Egypt, Samarkand, or Japan, all places once of Western reverie and bemusement. Depression Florida was still in touch with the days when Henry Plagier, one of the founders of Standard oil, reorganized and extended the state's east-coast rail lines, having already started to build his giant mirage-like hotels, the Disney Worlds of their day. During his America tour in 1904-1905, Henry James felt he had to see that peninsula of the \"velvet air, the extravagant plants, the palms, the oranges, the cacti, the architectural fountain, the florid local monument, the cheap and easy exoticism.\" He stayed, almost as a matter of course, at Flagler's Ponce de Leon in St. Augustine. This grandiose example of \"Moorish\" architecture, filled with Tiffany glass, was otherwise as up-to-date as the poured concrete it was made from. Rockefellers and Vanderbilts trained south in private railway cars, when Florida was the winter destination of those who summered in Newport or beside Long Island Sound ( The Age of Innocence has its St. Augustine scenes). Henry Plant, another railroad baron, built a verandah onto his Tampa Bay hotel more majestic than the Grand Union's more famous one in Saratoga. Plant's Moorish extravaganza saw, in its heyday, performances by Sarah Bernhardt, Nellie Melba, and Anna Pavlova. Surrounding everything was that air of strangeness, of otherness, of things newly seen and yet always known, a place slightly hostile to human presence. Normally the most buttoned-up of writers, James comically grasped after adequate images: \"I found myself loving, quite frate","PeriodicalId":429219,"journal":{"name":"Parnassus-poetry in Review","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124151281","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The World Out-Herods Herod","authors":"W. Logan","doi":"10.7312/loga13638-020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7312/loga13638-020","url":null,"abstract":"The World Out-Herods Herod Robert Lowell. Collected Poems. Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2003. 1186 pp. $45.00 \"Sometimes, however, to be a 'ruined man' is itself a vocation.\" -T.S. Eliot Robert Lowell's death might have been the last scene of a mordant opera bouffe. After the collapse of his third marriage, he had flown to New York to reconcile with his previous wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. On the way from the airport, he suffered a heart attack, dying so phlegmatically the cabbie didn't notice. When the taxi drew up before Hardwick's apartment building, the dead poet was slouched in the back seat, his arms cradling a mysterious package. Unwrapping it hours or days later, Hardwick found herself staring at a portrait of Caroline Blackwood, the woman for whom Lowell had left her. A poet often falls into neglect as he is lowered into the grave, particularly if he has been identified with his time. When a reputation is pulled down, razed like a rotten building, it may not be rebuilt for decades or centuries, if ever. We are unlikely now to see the resurrection of Bryant or Whittier, or even Longfellow. Lowell was the most brilliant American poet after the moderns, richer and more complex in instinct than any poet we have had since. His long-delayed, spatchcocked, and jury-rigged Collected Poems, a thousand and more pages long, prepares his belated revival. At the close of World War II, a young American poet could look around nervous about his prospects. The major poets were older, even much older, though still vital and uncomfortable figures-who knew what yawps might issue from the caged Pound (and The Pisan Cantos came), what morose keenings from Eliot might follow Four Quartets? Stevens, the most unusual insurance man who ever lived, had only recently published Esthetique du mal and Notes toward a Supreme Fiction. Dr. Williams had yet to publish Paterson, or the better meditative poems that surrounded it. Something might still be expected from Frost and Marianne Moore. When young, these aging gods had given English poetry a shock as galvanic as the Romantics. In scarcely a decade, roughly from Pound's Ripostes in 1912 to Moore's Observations in 1924, the force and tactics of modern verse had been imagined, investigated, and installed. A century later, there has been little formal innovation the moderns did not think of first, or execute with more intensity and spirit. Poets born too late might be forgiven for thinking they were born too late. One did not have to be daunted by the governing reputations (including newer ones like Auden's) to feel that the times were not propitious, that there was little to do except write in the shadows of greater poets. Looking back we can see how little resistance other young poets offered to Lowell's moody, feral intelligence, or to lines manufactured like hawsers in the glowing mills once used by Webster and Shakespeare. War poets like Karl Shapiro and Randall Jarrell, wild men ","PeriodicalId":429219,"journal":{"name":"Parnassus-poetry in Review","volume":"02 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129998516","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Emily Dickinson Thinking","authors":"H. Vendler","doi":"10.2307/j.ctvk12q8k.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvk12q8k.6","url":null,"abstract":"It is natural that Emily Dickinson should come to mind when one reflects on the evidence for thinking in poetry. Her work has been called metaphysical, philosophical, theological. Vocabularies have been invented to describe her style of thinking-its cryptic ellipses, its compression, its enigmatic subjects, its absent centers, and its abstractions. These qualities indeed are her \"carbonates\"-the residue of the fire that preceded them: \"Ashes denote that Fire was\" [1097; 1865].' But equally intrinsic to her verse is Dickinson's invention of structures that mimic the structure of life as she at any moment conceives it. By those structures she channels our reactions, adjusts our pace to hers, and molds our thinking after her own. Any detailed assertions about her work must be partial ones in view of the almost 1800 poems she composed. Nonetheless, I believe there is something to be said about her thinking as she invents ways to plot temporality.' The larger ideas in Dickinson are not recondite ones: She satirizes received religious thought, while retaining its metaphysical dimension and much of its compensatory solace; she continues the European lyric tradition of an erotic adoration coming to grief-, and she dwells much on nature's appearances, death's certainty, and an uncertain immortality. If it is not Dickinson's themes that determine her style of thinking, what does? Her well-described grammatical, syntactical, and metaphorical idiosyncrasies certainly play an important role in conveying her style of thought to us, but to understand her imaginative thinking we also need to perceive how, in her poems, over time, she altered \"normal\" temporal organization. I take for granted the usual critical account, derived from the poetry, of Dickinson's emotional crises, in which a soul of intense sensitivity, hoping to find stability in religion or love, is brought to grief by some unidentifiable calamity, sometimes represented as an inner death, which leads almost to madness. After each such crisis, she experiences a long aftermath' marked by new traumas, punctuated by forms of denial, stoicism, and regressive idealization. I will be paying particular attention to how Dickinson orders the inner structure of her poems to represent the way such life-events reshape a person's conception of serial existence itself Dickinson's original and \"natural\" style of thinking about serial plot-by which I mean a plot of events in chronological succession-- aimed at a temporal exhaustiveness: Her poems unscrolled, like her sun, 'a ribbon at a time,\" and wished to project, by displaying one \"ribbon\" after another, a complete coverage of temporal experience from beginning to end. Her early poems tend to believe not only that all roads have an end, but also that \"all roads\" have \"A `Clearings at the end,\" as she says in the 1859 poem \"My Wheel is in the dark\" [61]. En route to the denouement at the clearing, the poem strings out experience phase by phase, aspiring to leave ","PeriodicalId":429219,"journal":{"name":"Parnassus-poetry in Review","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129157434","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance","authors":"S. Mallarmé","doi":"10.1515/9789048542024-011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9789048542024-011","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":429219,"journal":{"name":"Parnassus-poetry in Review","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121912951","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Book of Kings","authors":"S. Guppy","doi":"10.2307/j.ctt22nm69v.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt22nm69v.15","url":null,"abstract":"The Book of Kings Abolqasem Ferdowsi. Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings. Translated by Dick Davis. Viking 2006. 885 pp. $45.00 $25.00 (paperback) THE Book of Kings, Shahnameh, is the national epic of Iran, and one of the loftiest summits of world literature. Completed in the early eleventh century, it is to Iranians and the Persianate world what the Iliad the Odyssey are to Greeks and the West. Until recently, Persian classical poetry was largely unknown to the general public in the West, the purview of a few specialists and academics. Edward FitzGerald's Rubaiyat ofOmar Khayyam (1859), a free rendition of the poet's quatrains, was an exception. So, to a lesser extent, was Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum (1853), based on one of the most tragic episodes of the Shahnameh. But in the last couple of decades, thanks to the efforts of gifted translators and dedicated scholars, the treasury of classical Persian poetry has been more fully discovered, and a few poets have become genuinely popular, notably Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-73), whose mystical poetry has struck a chord with readers on both sides of the Atlantic; when Madonna declared Rumi her favorite poet, one could say that after seven centuries of obscurity in the West, Mowlana (\"Our Master,\" as Rumi is called by Sufis) had finally arrived. Ferdowsi's epic has not yet reached that degree of popularity, although its presence in the West goes back to the nineteenth century, when the scholar Jules Mohl published his French translation in seven volumes, between 1834 and 1878. Thereafter extracts appeared in various European languages, but the poem remained confined to the cognoscenti. One hopes that Dick Davis's lively, delightful translation will reach a wider readership. It is hard to imagine better timing for its publication-Iran is in the news. Most Westerners' image of the country and its people is limited to women in black chadors, turbaned politicians, and fist-shaking, slogan-shouting crowds-not very flattering, I'm afraid. By contrast, Ferdowsi's poem provides glimpses of an ancient civilization and insights into the collective psyche of the Iranian people, helping us to understand both their survival as a nation through centuries of tormented history and the reasons for their pride. To Iranians, the Shahnameh is the mirror of their history and the foundation of their language. It has been a major source of inspiration to artists throughout the ages-some of the most prized Persian miniatures are illustrations from old Shahnameh manuscripts. Every Iranian child is raised on it, his or her imagination nourished by its magical stories, historical tales, spiritual precepts, and moral injunctions. \"Power grows out of knowledge,\" written in ornate calligraphy on blue tiles above the gate of my first school, greeted us every morning on arrival. Its corollary was the motto of the Ministry of Education, engraved on its stationery: \"From the cradle to the grave, seek knowledge.\" When the midwife an","PeriodicalId":429219,"journal":{"name":"Parnassus-poetry in Review","volume":"54 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116100966","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Triumph of Geoffrey Hill","authors":"W. Logan","doi":"10.7312/loga13638-012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7312/loga13638-012","url":null,"abstract":"Geoffrey Hill. The Triumph of Love. Houghton Mifflin 1998. 82 pp. $22.00 For every poem encrusted in learning like The Waste Land or The Cantos (whether Eliot's mandarin allusions or Pound's half learned learning), needing a road map for the shortest distance from here to there, thousands of verses are plainer than pudding, poems men wrote but only children can read. The fewer its readers the easier most poetry gets, trying to tempt back the lost souls seduced by narrative or the frisson of memoir, to say nothing of entertainments or disciplines that require no reading at all. Like Hansel trailing bread crumbs through a black forest, many poets hope to leave clues. The birds just dine on their verses. Geoffrey Hill's hectoring, philosophical, bitter new poem ends where it begins, in the stagnant landscape of childhood recalled, resurrection delayed, that has haunted the mean and humid nature of his verse. The Triumph of Love meets his demons on his own terms, terms favorable to demons but unfavorable to the reader. Hill is a difficult poet and requires a difficult reader, one not defeated by his salient of allusion and arcane reference, his Maginot Line of haggard pun and thickened phrase. A fractured howl of anger and self contempt, the 150 sections of The Triumph of Love start with a single static fragment: Sun-blazed, over Romsley, a livid rain-scarp. (1) Hill does not allow his poems to admit themselves too demurely to the reader's attention. The Triumph of Love must begin somewhere; and at the outset Hill lets section stutter to brief section, illuminating like flashes of lightning (or signal flares) the themes and tutelary spirits that control the phrases afterward. The reader who wants to stand at equality with such a line must know, or at pains discover, that Romsley is the site of a church sacred to St. Kenelm, a church by legend erected over the spot where his body was found. The reader must know that Romsley (the name means \"wild garlic wood\"), now swallowed by the city of Birmingham, is half a dozen miles north of Bromsgrove, where Hill was born. Often enough, Hill provides hints if not implications. Half a-dozen sections later we get: Romsley, of all places!-Spraddled ridgevillage sacred to the boy-martyr, Kenelm, his mouth full of blood and toffee. A stocky water tower built like the stump of a super-dreadnought's foremast. It could have set Coventry ablaze with pretend broadsides, some years before that armoured city suddenly went down, guns firing, beneath the horizon; huge silent whumphs of flame-shadow bronzing the nocturnal cloud-base of her now legendary dust. (VII) Kenelm (Cynehelm) was one of those errors of church history where fiction overwhelmed fact. Supposedly king of Mercia at the age of seven, he was murdered by his jealous sister and his tutor. This was retrospective, eleventh-century fantasy for William of Malmesbury and others. The real ninth-century Cynehelm died in manhood, probably fighting the Welsh, and never ","PeriodicalId":429219,"journal":{"name":"Parnassus-poetry in Review","volume":"2004 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127312690","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Comedian as the Letter I, or the Perils of Vaudeville in a Post-Modern Age","authors":"W. Spiegelman","doi":"10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195368130.003.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195368130.003.0010","url":null,"abstract":"The Comedian as the Letter I, or The Perils of Vaudeville in a Post-Modern Age Irving Feldman. The Life and Letters. The University of Chicago Press 1994. 103 pp. $29.00 $13.00 (paper) Irving Feldman. Beautiful False Things. Grove Press 2000. 95 pp. $13.00 (paper) If Jackie Mason could write poetry he would probably sound like Irving Feldman. Or maybe if Irving Feldman could do stand-up he'd sound like Jackie Mason. With the exception of Albert Goldbarth, no other American poet, certainly none who has retired from a distinguished academic career lauded and (as he puts it in one poem) Maclaureled, shoots past us so many riffs-energetic torrents mixing the sublime, the pathetic, and the almost-tasteless-as Feldman does. His vaudeville routines seem to belong to another century, as though Browning's dramatic monologues had been renovated for the fin of the siecle just past, and yet their author came to poetic maturity in the summer of High Modernism, right after World War II. (He was born in 1928, of the same generation as Ammons, Ashbery, Bly, Creeley, Ginsberg, Justice, Merrill, O'Hara, Rich, and Snyder, though he sounds like none of them.) He is the poet as comedian, a multi-faceted performer extraordinaire. But he wasn't always this way, and the development in Feldman's poetry over more than four decades roughly parallels the changes of fashion in American poetry. Here's Feldman in 2000: \"Call!\" \"Call!\" \"Call!\" \"Call!\"\"CAP\" 'CAW) Thought I was bluffing. Wanted to see me. I'm loaded, guys, I am fuller than full. So, see 'em, read 'em, feed 'em, eat 'em-and weep! Then, our heart-and-soul-satisfying smart sharp snap-and-slap-the-cards-on-the-table shtick; up on two feet, I cracked the buggy whip my wrist; and the five-of-a-kind of the hand I held high, one by one, Take that, whump! and Take that, whamp! and Take this, whomp! I smacked down-notice served to all the stiffs and to the Big Stiffer by the woodcutter and master of the deck, owner of the ax, last man alive and standing! (\"Joker,\" Beautiful False Things) Talk about energy, gamesmanship, testosterone-the whole shebang of masculine self-assertiveness. The wildness makes him sound like some cranky old codger on speed. But here is Feldman almost forty years ago: Like weary goddesses sick of other worlds-- Those little islands, their drugged white beaches Where the surf's unending colonies arrive, And, helpless, the sacrifice lies on altars Of their indifference, gasping in the sun, Offering millenniums of his wound They, as from the prows of ships stepping, Come to where the patient worries The sheet's spreading day, his body Stilled in drowsy rituals of disaster. And the marble paradigms, their patient, Uncaring hands, drop from the salt-parched Light, gathering your infinite gift, Its burden. (\"The Nurses,\" The Pripet Marshes) Whatever else this may be, it is an exercise in stiltedness, from the stiff, slightly-off iambic metric to the tortuous simile that interrupts between the first line a","PeriodicalId":429219,"journal":{"name":"Parnassus-poetry in Review","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127600696","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Sins of the Sonnets","authors":"W. Logan","doi":"10.7312/loga13638-026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7312/loga13638-026","url":null,"abstract":"Shakespeare's Sonnets. Edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones. The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series. Thomas Nelson 1997. 485 pp. $45.00 $16.00 (paper) Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Harvard University Press 1997. 672 pp. $35.00 If Shakespeare's private correspondence fell out of an ancient cupboard tomorrow, with letters from \"fair youth\" and \"dark lady\" and reference to the \"rival poet,\" their identities secure beyond doubt, it would not make much difference to reading the sonnets. Perhaps a few would seem more intimately biographical, fragments of the tangled private life of the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts laid bare; but interpretations depend little on whom the poems address and which boy or woman the poet wasted his emotions over. Speculation about the missing identities has not lapsed for centuries; and centuries from now scholars will still be raking old ground, raising Southampton at Pembroke's expense, touting some Elizabethan nobody with the initials W. H., savaging scholars who hold deviant views. The scholars will get no more temperate (at least one critic has argued the dark lady was the fair youth, master-mistress Mrs. Shakespeare). Shakespeare's Sonnets was printed in 1609 for Thomas Thorpe, who had published Jonson's Sejanus and Volpone and plays by Chapman and Marston (sometime rivals to Shakespeare and each other, though Shakespeare acted in Sejanus). The print run, which may have been a thousand copies or so, was divided between two bookshops near St. Paul's (one at the sign of the Parrot-today we would call it the Parrot Bookshop). Thirteen copies now survive.* The sonnets had first been mentioned in print a decade before. In 1598, Francis Meres wrote in his field guide to current writers, Palladis Tamia, \"the sweete wittie soule of Ouid liues in mellifluous & honytongued Shakespeare, witnes his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his priuate friends, c it is littered with errors no careful author could have ignored. Since no copy of any further printing exists, Q was probably no rousing success, certainly not the success of Venus and Adonis (1593), the pillow book for young Elizabethans that had reached its tenth printing by 1609. The Sonnets was not reprinted until 1640, and then in corrupt and incomplete fashion. Shakespeare's sonnets are divided into two groups, the first (1-126) addressed to a \"fair youth,\" the much smaller second (127-152) to a \"dark lady.\" These are not the poet's terms, but having grown up in the criticism they are now almost inseparable from it. These enigmatic figures might more accurately be named the \"sweet boy\" (or \"lovely boy\") and the \"mistress.\" The sequence closes with two Anacreontic sonnets (153-154), often felt to be un-Shakespearean, followed by the poem \"A Lover's Complaint,\" which may have had nothing to do with the sonnets, though recent critics have strongly argued the contrary. Thorpe dedicated the Sonnets to a Mr. W. H., \"THE.ONLIE.BEGETTER.OF.THESE.","PeriodicalId":429219,"journal":{"name":"Parnassus-poetry in Review","volume":"144 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115786393","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"And in the Afternoons I Botanized","authors":"E. Glaser","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv14z1bcn.45","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv14z1bcn.45","url":null,"abstract":"Where we sat, on the flagstone terrace behind the house, Gin cooling in the spill of civilian twilight, ice cubes Doing the dead man's float, with air rough to the touch, The birch leaves blown yellow, in the lacerating shape of spades, And thin boughs heaving a little with the season's sickness, You said: We've come to calamity and the end of things. Even the bees are weary, and the honey heavy, the petals depressed. The wars you lose last longer than the wars you win. And it was true. I could feel the same breeze, pallbearer of the birch, October heading the dark cortege. Where others might trace Lifelines in the palm, I read, on the back of my hand, Liver spots like annotations on a last draft. No goldfinch Flew to the feeder of wild seed; in the worked earth, No chipmunk burrowed at the sweet root of the bulb. And yet, in the mornings, fruit still hung fresh and firm, Dew-dappled apples, frost smoke thick on the ground. You said: If that crusty north-of-Boston poet had put us In a poem, would we stand stiff as figures from a snow globe, The trees bowed down around us, each branch bent With the weight of meditation, the cling of imagery? Or would we Lean on a worm fence, blood stropped in the heart, Between us those moments where anger rubs on injury The tone medium wry, the pace pieced out in syllables That stick in the throat, the ache of everything unsaid? Well, better that than chintz and chimes, some teapot dame Who'd make us talk on stilts, or in the weak repeats of Rondeaus and rondels, French inventions that sound like Girl groups from the Sixties. Would you rather lose yourself In the cold echoes of Eliot, his vaulted voice dry as Stone commencements at the graveside? Or find yourself Edged out by the muscle of music in late Yeats? We'll take our own line, broken, with a grain of sense and salt. But no words slow down the dirt. And these drinks, Essence of emptiness from the juniper berry, can't bring back A duckweb spray of maple paddling in the slipstreams of spring, Or the flowering crab, or panicles of japonica. You said: At 47, I'm in my prime numbers, indivisible, entered Only by myself and one other-odd and middling and absolute The mind still testing out every hedge against death, The short con and the long shot, the bet called on the come. It's no wonder we nail our days to the wall, and hang Distractions of the calendar, slick colors over the Xed-out box: Gaunt barge of Venice in the green canals; the loveknot puzzles of Women in the pink; and from Monet, the blue and purple pulp of waterblooms. So all our albums fail the past: pictures of picnics and the rose ribbons of Girls dozy under the summer oak; your unparalleled apparel, That dress the shade of bittersweet; and my brand-new panama, Black band around the crown, hat like an elegy for the head. You said: If we were characters cast in a play, could we choose Some comedy written in the wit of Restoration, and call ourselves Lord and Lady Vainhope, or the Fallshorts of a ","PeriodicalId":429219,"journal":{"name":"Parnassus-poetry in Review","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129786780","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}