Poetics and Ruminations

Edward Taylor's Sampler

 

 

In my book of criticism titled Visions and Revisions of American Poetry (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1986) I wrote this in the introductory chapter which was titled, “The Pro-Am Tournament”:

         Given the United States’ national bias against the profession of letters, one felt more at ease with our first amateur poet, Edward Taylor. Here, America was no longer in artistic competition with England and her great makers. One might lower one’s sights and see that American poetry is all about something other than world-view, craft, and words — it is about vision, soul, and salvation. It is not concerned with communication on any mundane, humane level.  There must be no misunderastanding on this point. Taylor was not any kind of great poet. Rather, his importance lay in his foreshadowing Emerson.

         Taylor used words “roughly.” He used them for pragmatic Puritan purposes: poems were “preparatory meditations,” aids in achieving the frame of mind in which he composed his real work, his sermons. Sometimes, of course, his poems also took the place of the Catholic confessional. God would hear if no one else did.

 

Ah, but one can point to at least a single instance in which Taylor’s mind was on something other than the Hereafter, when he composed a love poem to his bride-to-be. Moreover, he composed one of the most complicated poems one could hope to see, and he did it not in fine Puritan style, but in the style of the reigning British school of the moment, the “Metaphysical,” whose foremost proponent was Taylor’s fellow churchman and predecessor by about a decade, John Donne,  who wrought highly metaphorical poems, though none more highly wrought than Taylor’s literary sampler, the “Acrostic Love Poem to Elizabeth Fitch.”

The sampler was an exercise primarily for schoolgirls who would design a piece of embroidery that illustrated their ability to sew various stitches. It would be comprised of the alphabet, a motto (from the Spanish, but mote in English: a one sentence poem written in a couplet) and, often, illustrations of various kinds. The motto of Taylor’s poem is,

 

This Dove and Olive Branch to you

is both a Post and Emblem too.

 

These words originally appeared written within a crude drawing of a dove holding an olive branch with which the American Colonial poet decorated or “illuminated” this page of his manuscript.

Besides being a sampler and an acrostic (the alphabet is spelled out down the left-hand margin), this extremely complicated poem is also a picture poem, a calligramme, and an epistle (a “post”) addressed to Taylor’s first wife, Elizabeth Fitch, whom he married on November 5, 1674:

 

These for my Dove

Tender and only Love

Mrs. Elizabeth Fitch

At her father’s house in Norwich.

 

The design of this sampler is of a circle within a triangle that reads,

 

The ring of love my pleasant heart must be

Truly confined within the Trinity.

 

The second line doubles as the base of the triangle and as the line illustrating the letter “T”; it is therefore a refrain

The circle reads,

 

Love’s ring I send

That hath no end.

 

At the center of the circle is a drawn heart.

Here is a modern rendering of the acrostic portion of

 

ACROSTIC LOVE POEM TO ELIZABETH FITCH

 

Aspiring Love, that scorns to hatch a wish

Beneath itself, the fullest, chiefest Bliss

Contained within Heaven’s crystal pale and shine,

Doth wish its object always; so doth mine.

Elect no more presented in desire:

For Heaven’s roof, aye, lets not a wish soar higher.

Got though too dim, none can get to sign

Hear you, (my friend), is strengthened wish of mine.

In drossy silver should, I should by this,

[J is included in the representation of I, above]

Keep dull my post, and stain my serious wish,

Lest which polluted be, or the fearful Dove

My post-out foiled, I run a ring of Love

New polished, where my centered heart doth reek

Out highest streams of Love, which here do meet.

Presented thus your heart, Love’s Ring you’ll find

Quest I unless, always best befits the mind.

Reserve mine that. Yet let our secret breast

Set Love the tune which tunes this Ring the best.

The Ring of Love my pleasant heart must be

[Truly confined within the Trinity. — refrain]

Upon your heart (I pray you) put Love’s Ring

V[=U]nerringly; Love’s Swelt(ering) heart herein

Wearing a True-love’s-knot at center’s set.

Wherewith I send to you an alphabet

Xenodict¹ whence all syllables complete

[e]Xtracted are to spell what love can speak.

Yea, see, then, what I send. Yet I design

Zion my Ring shall license with her Trine.²

 

Edward Taylor

 
       Edward Taylor

    
 

A reproduction of Taylor's acrostic may be found in my Poetry: An Introduction Through Writing, Reston, VA: Reston Publishing Company, 1973, out-of-print, but used copies available here and there on the Internet; and here is an epitaph for Edward Taylor whose dates of birth and death are unknown:

 

R.I.P. EDWARD TAYLOR

1642-1729

 

He believed God’s predetermination,

Wrote each poem as a meditation,

Used the Word as the sharp impaler

Of the sackcloth clothing Edward Taylor.

 

¹Xeno” means strange or foreign, and “dict” (spelled “dick” in the original) means spoken; perhaps what this neologism means is “strangely spoken,” which would be an accurate description of this poem.

²The last line of this metaphysical (extended metaphor) poem may mean something like, the license of marriage, or even of poetic license, is allowed within the strictures laid down by the Trinity as perceived, no doubt, by a Puritan like Taylor if not by the High Anglican churchperson John Donne.

 

Winter Bouquet

Season’s Greetings from Lew and Jean

 

                  It storms in April five days —

         it snows, and then it rains, and then

soft fogs like veils hang on all the houses,

                  and then the days turn topaz

 

                  like a lady's pin.  The hills

         take off their purple frocks and dress

in long white nightgowns.  The men were

                  mowing the second hay not

 

                  long since — the cocks were smaller

         than the first, and spicier.  I

would distill a cup, bear it to my friends,

                  drinking to summer no more

 

                  astir, make a balloon of

         a dandelion, but the fields

are gone where children walked the tangled road,

                  some of them to the end, some

 

                  but a little way, even

         as far as the fork.  Remembrance

is more sweet than robins in May orchards.

                  Today is very cold, yet

 

                  I have much bouquet upon

         the window pane — of moss and fern.

I call them saints' flowers, because they do

                  not romp as other flowers

 

                  do, but stand so still and white.

         I enjoy much with a precious

fly, not one of your blue monsters, but a

                  timid creature that hops from

 

                  pane to pane of her white house

         so very cheerfully, and hums

and thrums — a sort of speck piano.  I

                  have one new bird and several

 

                  trees of old ones.  A snow slide

         from the roof dispelled the sweetbrier.

There are as yet no streets, though the sun is

                  riper.  This is a landscape

 

                  of frost and zeros.  I wish

         “the faith of the fathers” didn't

wear brogans and carry blue umbrellas.

                  The doubt, like the mosquito,

 

                  buzzes round my faith.  My heart

         has flown before, my breaking voice

follows — that bareheaded life under grass

                  worries me like a wasp — life

 

                  of flowers lain in flowers —

         what a home of dew to come to!

We reckon by the fruit.  When the grape gets

                  by, and the pippin and the

 

                  chestnut — when the days are a

         little short by the clock, and a

little long by the lack — when the sky has

                  new red gowns and a purple

 

                  bonnet, I am glad that kind

         of time goes by.  Twilight is but

the short bridge, and the moon stands at the end.

                  With Nature in my ruche, I

 

shall not miss the spring, the seasons falling

and the leaves — the molting goldfinch singing.        

 

Copyright 1986, 2007 by Lewis Turco. All rights reserved. From

 

Thanksgiving Sonnet

The turkey's found its silence. So have we,

The youngsters and the elders of this hall

Who welcomed back both staid and prodigal

With equal eyes.  Each knows his own degree

 

Of happiness on any other day

But this when neural tides must flood or fall

To reach the level common to us all

And flagrant colors fade to neutral gray.

 

This room's a simple basin of the sea

We yearly swim.  Here lies the quiet bay

Where no one claims the single right of way,

Where each is bound to set the other free.

 

The beaches of this cordial shore forestall

The breakers dimly heard beyond our wall.

 

Wesli Court

Hidden Lake, Connecticut. Photo credit:Walter Hekster.

Trilogy for J. F. K.

I. The Moment Before

II. November 22, 1963

 

Weeping, I write this:  You are dead.  The dark

animal of the heart, the beast that bides

stilly in its web of flesh, has stolen

flight again out of the air.  What is there

to say?  That I wish we were gods?  That the

mind of man were equal to his lusts?  It

is not -- not yet.  You were a man, but more:

you were an idea dreamt in a sweet

hour while the spider slept.  We make our

web; its habitant makes greatness of its

prey.  We are ourselves victim and victor.

You were and are ourselves.  In killing you

we murder an emblem of what we strive

to be: not men, but Man.  In mourning you,

good Man, we grieve for what we are, not what

we may become.

                                  Sleep, John.  We will try

once more.  Sleep, sleep now.  We will try again.

 

 

III. Ode on St. Cecilia's Day 1964

 

1.  Of the Past

 

Some music, then, for this day.  Let it be

Suitable to the mood of fallen snow,

The veil of a virgin saint.  Quietly

Let it come now, out of the silence; now

While the birds inexplicably forsake

The elm, the oak, the seed in the lilac....

Instead, drumrolls muffled in an old year,

An echo of trumpets in the streets.  Clear

But muted, there is a ragged tattoo

Of hooves, image of a sable horse, wild-

Eyed, resisting the rein, skittish among

The twin rows of witness citizens who,

Their voices frozen, give up to the cold

Air of the marble city an old son.

 

2.  Of the Present

 

But it’s another year, Cecilia’s day

Again, another part of the land.  So,

Let the phantoms of those dead days lie

Under these new burdens of snow.  Allow

That chorus of stricken men to dim like

Shadows into blackening film, the dark

Merging with the riderless horse.  Feature

By feature, let the scene fade into near

Distance, into perspective, then shadow.

This is music for St. Cecilia.  Yield

To her the lyric due her.  Let us sing

For her patronage -- her martyrdom grew

Out of a summer heart: she is our shield

Against the winter.  She is always young.

 

 

3.  Of the Moment

 

Here beyond the window the campus lies.

The students pass in mufflers and coats, eyes

Almost hidden against the wind.  The sound

Of radio music settles around

The furniture, into the carpeting.

Choral voices: a requiem.  Distant

And urgent, the November church bells ring.

Outdoors a dog rags something.  An instant

Pause in his play -- he has caught a squirrel

Which tosses and tosses in the gray air.

The mongrel, in the midst of his quarrel

With life, is assaulted by three girls.  There,

At the base of a tree, the limp ruff falls

From insensate jaws, starts to inch up walls

Of oak bark toward some invisible

Sanctuary.  The dog begins to howl.

The girls watch the squirrel into the limbs.

Cecilia’s radio is done with hymns.

 

From Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems 1059-2007 by Lewis Turco, www.starcloudpress.com. All rights reserved.

Late Elegy for an Old Suicide

On May 27^th, 1992, my wife Jean and I were touring England with two friends, Tom and Mary Loe [who was photographing our trip with a camcorder]. Jean was keeping a journal, and she wrote, “Very close to Bath is Bristol, so we drove there after dinner at a small place in Bath with some strange 1950s [American] motifs for decoration.  Lew wanted to see the church St. Mary Redcliffe at which the father of the poet Thomas Chatterton had been sexton.  The church was easy to find, and as big as a cathedral.  We weren't able to see the inside [because there was choir practice going on, and when we opened the door the director turned toward us and told us loudly to get out], but the outside was beautiful.”  [And I shed a tear or two for young Thomas who wrote this]:

 

SONG FROM AELLA

 

O sing unto my roundelay,

O drop the briny tear with me;

Dance no more at holyday,

Like a running river be:

         My love is dead,

         Gone to his death-bed

All under the willow tree.

 

Black his crown as the winter night,

White his brow as the summer snow,

Red his lips as the morning light,

Cold he lies in the grave below:

         My love is dead,

         Gone to his death-bed

All under the willow tree.

 

Sweet his tongue as the throstle’s note,

Quick in dance as thought can be,

Deft his tabor, cudgel stout;

O he lies by the willow-tree!

         My love is dead,

         Gone to his death-bed

All under the willow tree.

 

Hark! The raven flaps his wing

In the briery dell below;

Hark! The death-owl loud doth sing

To the nightmares, as they go:

         My love is dead,

         Gone to his death-bed

All under the willow tree.

 

See! The white moon shines on high;

Whiter is my true-love’s shroud;

Whiter than the morning sky,

Whiter than the evening cloud:

         My love is dead,

         Gone to his death-bed

All under the willow tree.

 

Here upon my true-love’s grave

Shall the barren flowers be laid;

Not one holy saint to save

All the coldness of a maid:

         My love is dead,

         Gone to his death-bed

All under the willow tree.

 

With my hands I’ll dent the briers

Round his holy corpse to grieve:

Ouph and fairy, light your fires,

Here my body I shall leave:

         My love is dead,

         Gone to his death-bed

All under the willow tree.

 

Come, with acorn-cup and thorn,

Drain my red heart’s blood away;

Life and all its good I scorn,

Dance by night, or feast by day:

         My love is dead,

         Gone to his death-bed

All under the willow tree.

 

Thomas Chatterton

 

[And I wrote this ballade, “Late Elegy for an Old Suicide”]:

 

In memory of Thomas Chatterton 1752-1770

"There's nothing that agrees worse

Than a proud mind and a beggar's purse."

 

Descendant of Redcliffe's deacons, a Bristol boy,

         St. Mary's ghosts were native to his blood.

He haunted Canyng's tomb.  His only joy

         Was in his own invention: "Rowley" stood

         More clearly in his sight than real life could,

                  Of greater substance than apprentice wages.

         He made the priest his mask, put on his hood....

                  Tom's suicide aches still across the ages.

 

He built a myth, turned Bristol into Troy

         And Camelot combined.  The Sacred Wood

Grew at the gate, and time became his toy.

         He brought the rill of local lore to flood

         And made St. Mary's cross the Holy Rood —

                  All for Rowley's sake.  Upon those pages

         He worked till Rowley's lyrics stood enthewed.

                  Tom's suicide aches still across the ages.

 

At last he went to London to employ

         Himself and Rowley in the common good;

He managed but to starve himself, annoy

         Great Walpole, tender Johnson.  When his food

         And pence ran out at seventeen, he rued

                  The day that he'd been born.  London's sages

         Looked the other way, cried "Hoax!" and "Fraud!"

                  Tom's suicide aches still across the ages.

 

Envoy:

         Yet what he wrote was true, the lines imbued

                  With haunting skill.  Death was his early wages.

         God rest his bones, however misconstrued.

                  Tom's suicide aches still across the ages.

 

Originally published in The Sewanee Review, xcviii:4, Fall 1990, and gathered in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, www.StarCloudPress.com. All rights reserved.

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Friday, November 20th, 2009

R.I.P. THOMAS CHATTERTON

November 20, 1752-August 24, 1770

 

Chatterton, the genius boy of Bristol,

Peered through his father’s occult ball of crystal,

Invented the ancient poet-priest called Rowley,

Then swallowed poison rather than starve slowly.

 

R.I.P. JOHN FREDERICK NIMS

November 20, 1913-January 13, 1999

 

Were he alive, he'd pick these lines

To nits, turn wrinkles into wrines.

God now submits his choir's hymns

To Poetry's John Frederick Nims.

The Brotherhood of Man

When I was in high school in the early 1950s one of my heroes, as unlikely as it may seem, was the early American poet William Cullen Bryant who, at the age of seventeen, had written America’s first truly great poem — and, sadly for Bryant, the greatest poem he himself would ever write —  “Thanatopsis.”

When he was so young Bryant could look at the fields and woods of his native New England and say, after a brave start, that one would have much company in death, for earth is “one mighty sepulcher.”

 

                                             The golden sun,

The planets, all the infinite host of heaven,

Are shining on the sad abodes of death,

Through the still lapse of ages.

 

In no sense are these the immortal heavenly hosts that Christians looked forward to with “a sure and certain hope” (even when I was myself young I thought that this phrase was one of the most ironically ridiculous I had ever heard). No, they are the cold, flaming stars lost in dwindling space.

 

                                    All that tread

The globe are but a handful to the tribes

That slumber in its bosom.

 

Mother Nature seems distinctly unmatronly among such lines as these: “…the dead are there: / And millions in those solitudes, since first / The flight of years began, have laid them down / In their last sleep — the dead reign there alone, / So shalt thou rest, and what if thou withdraw / In silence from the living, and no friend / Take note of thy departure? All that breathe / Will share thy destiny.”

The dead are alone, but not lonely; if there is loneliness in being alive, and in dying alone, take comfort, Bryant says, in the knowledge that everyone is in the same boat. “Plod on, and each one as before will chase / His favorite phantom.” His favorite phantom — we live alone with our illusions, with our romantic solace which, finally, does not cover the bleaching bone.

Though each of us is “a brother to the insensible rock,” Bryant could say in the same poem — say with a straight face and not be thought a fool by his contemporaries — “sustained and soothed / By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave, / Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch / About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.” An unfaltering trust in what? Bryant doesn’t say, he merely suggests that we be Sybarites of darkness. Walk on your lonely grave by day, and by night pull your Turkish winding sheet about you. Lie down, dust, with your brother stone, beneath the stars like sand in the glass of ages.

Thoroughly un-American, if you think about it. If you don’t, if your conscious mind hears only the uplift while your unconscious mind goes its own irrational way, how thoroughly American. If Bryant had lived in the twentieth century, his name would have been Wallace Stevens.

Well, but still, even if when I was myself seventeen years of age, I could have articulated all these thoughts and been able to say, “How ridiculous!” — I admired Bryant for having seen what I did know even then: that this life is all there is, and I would have liked to be able to say that I, too, had written a great poem even though it was full of anomalies, paradoxes and contradictions and published it before I turned eighteen. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen, but I did take a good hard look at “Thanatopsis” in a poem of my own:

 

THE BROTHERHOOD OF MAN

...to be a brother to the insensible rock....

from "Thanatopsis" by William Cullen Bryant

 

To be a brother to the insensible rock

Is what we wear for.  Like the hairy man

Knocking flint from canyons, living his span

By granite, never noticing life's wreck,

 

We come at last to bludgeon dust and find

A home of gravel.  Hills beyond this fog

Would indicate the bluff of years.  Agog,

We hear Zephyrus say we're of the mind,

 

Never of clay.  Therefore our dunes sift through

The hourglass, their insidious abrasions

Undermining all our stately mansions,

Till brotherhood is heaped on us anew.

 

"The Brotherhood of Man" was originally published in The University of Kansas City Review, xxv:2, 1958; first collected in First Poems, Francestown: Golden Quill Press, 1960, and re-collected in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court, 1953-2004, Scottsdale: Star Cloud Press, 2004. ISBN 1932842004, cloth; ISBN 1932842012, paper.

 

Pumpkinode

For Pierre Bennerup of Sunny Border Nurseries in Kensington, Connecticut, who didn't know what a "stook" was; remembering our young days in his father's fields, and for Frances Sinderwahl, whose e-mail message yesterday made me think of this.

 

         I have always wanted to write

                           a poem about a

                  pumpkin.  It is one of those

         impossible subjects.  You know

the feeling, left over from childhood's

 

         fantasies of what childhood is

                           like.  Come the Indian

                  summer of any year, 'mums

         and trees burning their clean colors

into the air, one thinks of

 

         all seasons, past and future, but

                           particularly of

                  the pumpkin, Ceres' good Jack,

         grinning his candlepower in-

to the scarecrow's menace.  Northern spies

 

         engage in autumnal intrigue;

                           winesaps hit the local

                  cider mills, and there's a witch

         in every stook.

                                        Cozy, but the

real spice lies with that vandal made of

 

         air, the empty ghost our scarecrows

                           cannot frighten.  August:

                  the field is a tangle of

         sunlight wound in vines, covered with

pillows of foliage.  Blossoms flare

 

         briefly, then fall.  Green nodes take their

                           place, begin to swell.  Then,

                  the infant pumpkins seem to

         disappear.  The patch is a great

green whirligig of tendril and vine.

 

         One night, only the moon watching,

                           magic occurs.  The dawn

                  finds the bright globes lying in

         windrows, clinging to tangles of

brown twine.  Next, even the vines crumble

 

         into film.  We take October's

                           flesh and make it grin.  We

                  set it in our window to

         frighten shadows with a hollow shell,

but wind seeps in, and the flame wavers. 

Originally published in The Quest, iiL2, Summer 1967 and collected in Awaken, Bells Falling, Poems 1959-1968, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1968, and in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems 1959-2007, Scottsdale: Star Cloud Press, 2007, copyright Lewis Turco, all rights reserved.

 

Originally published in The Quest, ii:2, Summer 1967

A Well As Deep As the World

For Conrad Aiken and Ezra Pound

 

"It is not now as it was then,"

it is broken and far off,

"but it is like a sea on ebb,"

like the sound of someone being tortured

"and only pools here and there"

at the end of a long corridor

"left among the rocks."

 

From The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, 2004; originally published in Innerspring Quarterly, I:2, Fall 1971. 

R. I. P. Morton Marcus

         I heard today from my friend and former student Dennis Morton in Santa Cruz that his fellow townsman, and my former Iowa Workshop classmate, the poet Morton Marcus, died today. Dennis and I had been corresponding over the past few days about Mort, so this was in the air between us.

         We’d last seen each other in April 2006 when Dennis put together a reunion of Mort, Vern Rutsala, and me in Santa Cruz: the three of us older people had not been together since we’d been schoolmates in Iowa City in 1959-60, the best of friends, as we remained ever after, until now. This picture, below, is of Joan Rutsala, Mort Marcus, and the docent of Robinson Jeffers’ home, Tor House, in Monterey, California, during that reunion (click on the picture to see it entire):

R.I.P. MORTON MARCUS

1936 – October 28, 2009

 

Here lies the offbeat Dreamer

Whose beard wound round his nose.

His rage, created by the world,

Was vented on a rose.

 

Our deepest sympathies to Donna, and to Mort himself, goodbye, old friend.