I've been reading a lot of poetry lately...by Robert Pinsky, Donald Hall, Wallace Stevens, W.H. Auden, C.K. Williams, W.B. Yeats, Galway Kinnell, Robert Hass...and I have been just enjoying the quality of certain poems, the use of language, and the way some poems make me feel...I guess just enjoying the aesthetic quality and not so much concerning myself with interpretation. The poem I'm posted today is one that I enjoy for the reasons I posted above. The feeling of loss that it communicates and the use of language, such as the street being described as "glamorous and lost" and the "delicate ankles" of the woman...the sense of hopelessness and futility at the end when the sun is just "ordinary and final" and the sentences are "too flat for any poem"...maybe it's the stab of recognition when seeing someone you haven't seen in a long time and then the pain of the passing feeling as you realize the distance is too great between you and you are no longer friends, not even close enough to say hello on the street....

The Sentences by Robert Pinsky

Reading the sentences, November sun
Touching the avenues, offices, the station,
I saw you pass me on a street, your face
Was pink with cold, cold windows flashed, the stores
And cars were like--mythology--, the street
Itself was glamorous and lost, it was
As though I never knew you yet somehow knew
That this was you, a sentence interdicted
The present, it said, you never knew, you passed,
Leaves coppery and quick as lizards moved
Around your delicate ankles; November sun
Lay on the sidewalk, ordinary and final
As the sentences too flat for any poem.

A Rough Draft

This Morning

Bare branches
outside the window
make a picture
more tragic
than imagined.
The fog highlights
dark lines, erasing
the rest.
The wavering heat
sits in the window
and I wonder
about my life,
my children.

A pedestrian
was hit by a car
at 4:45
this morning—
forty-four years old.
Did he see himself,
sixty-five, grandkids
at his knees,
reading stories,
sagacious and revered,
reciting poetry,
stirring curiosity?

Religion is needed
this morning
just to help
fit pieces together
and pray

that maybe
there are reasons
behind circumstance,
behind coincidence,
and not just science,
primitive desires
and rude chance
running the show.

W.B. Yeats

I recently found a hardback edition of Yeats's collected poems at Half Price Books. Inside the front cover in pink handwriting (maybe it once was red?) it says:

Miriam Borenstein
University of Wisconsin
Madison
Sept 1969
Mr. Barton Freidman

Stratford House
H33 W Gilman
Madison 53703
255-0367

The book must have been brand new when Miriam purchased it, because the copyright is 1969 for the 16th printing (the first edition having been published in 1933). In 1969, the book cost a whopping $6.95. Miriam obviously had to purchase this for a class, maybe taught by Mr. Barton Friedman? The book does have a few poems that are annotated in pencil and I assume those are classroom notes she has taken. It's interesting to think about how a book can travel (in great condition actually) through almost forty years of time. I wonder how Miriam is holding up? This leads me to a section of a powerful poem of Yeats's, "The Tower":

Now shall I make my soul,
Compelling it to study
In a learned school
Till the wreck of the body,
Slow decay of blood,
Testy delirium
Or dull decrepitude,
Or what worse evil come--
The death of friends, or death
Of every brilliant eye
That made a catch in the breath--
Seem but clouds of the sky
When the horizon fades,
Or a bird's sleepy cry
Among the deepening shades.

It is interesting that the speaker is compelling his soul to study, as if he is resigning himself to his fate at the end of this poem--all things must die...well, except the soul, which the speaker is going to work on educating "in a learned school." So, while death creeps up, it might be best to stop obsessing over your body's health and start worrying about your soul. I like that. I also like how Yeats ties death and the death of friends and those brilliant eyes "That made a catch in the breath" to nature. The "worse evil" will be that death will eventually become so commonplace it is like "clouds of the sky" or "a bird's sleepy cry" so natural and uneventful. The mood at the end of this poem is foreboding: "Among the deepening shades"...the "deepening" means the darkness is descending and death is approaching like a shadow moving towards the speaker.

Well, Miriam, I hope you are still out there somewhere and the deepening shade has not fully descended on you yet. I have the book you once had for a class in college and I know I'm better for it. Hopefully you got something out of your reading of Yeats as well.