pō’ĭ-trē

Robert Frost

Listen (to Hoon read)

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

For this is love and nothing else is love,
The which it is reserved for God above
To sanctify to what far ends He will,
But which it only needs that we fulfill.

Hoon has set this poem to a fugue on guitar by Handel.

Hoon writes,

The poem progresses from considering an orchard,
whose blossoms metamorphize from nothing else, to ghosts, to a swarm of bees,
until suddenly a humming bird appears;
and then pronounces that all these small wonders are an expression of God’s love,
as though we still lived in Eden.

In his poetic essay, The Figure a Poem Makes, Frost writes that:

The artist must value himself as he snatches a thing
from some previous order in time and space into a new order
with not so much as a ligature clinging to it of the old place where it
was organic.

So it should not seem too farfetched to suggest that the poem,
with its emphasis on taking pleasure in the moment,
and the small things of the moment,
appears to be inspired by the Sermon on the Mount:

Therefore … do not worry about your life
Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns;
…
Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin;
and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

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Robert Frost

Listen (to Hoon read)

Come with rain, O loud Southwester!
Bring the singer, bring the nester;
Give the buried flower a dream;
Make the settled snow-bank steam;
Find the brown beneath the white;
But whate’er you do to-night,
Bathe my window, make it flow,
Melt it as the ices go;
Melt the glass and leave the sticks
Like a hermit’s crucifix;
Burst into my narrow stall;
Swing the picture on the wall;
Run the rattling pages o’er;
Scatter poems on the floor;
Turn the poet out of door.

Hoon writes,

‘One of the many short sweet lyrics in Frost’s first book, A Boy’s Will (1913).
(Frost was 39 at the time.)
Short lines, tetrameter, couplets,
till the end where a triplet of identical rhymes completes the piece,
as a whole it might be taken as the hallmark of a mere rhymer, but note,
as the poem progresses from stream-bank, to window, to room,
the movement from stream to window is graced by a quick metaphor
that compares the window’s glass to a sheet of ice,
which the speaker hopes will melt,
leaving the frame, like a hermit’s crucifix;
which slyly brings in the theme of the artist’s isolation,
which is not simply seasonal.’

Updated : The Kubla Khan post has been updated with Hoon’s reading and commentary.

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Wallace Stevens

Listen (to Hoon read)

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Hoon says,

I know it is turning spring-like in much of the country, but yesterday
Redford had snow.

But the real reason for posting Wallace Stevens’ The Snow Man is that
it illustrates the use of music to accompany the recitation of poetry;
something I employ occasionally in my recordings. Adding existing music
to recitation often yields bad results when the two modes move against
each other, and cadences don’t line up. But when appropriate musical
works, or fragments thereof, are discovered, or new music composed for
the occasion, and the modes are in synch, uncanny effects can result.
The music here is from Claude Debussy’s Des Pas sur la Neige,
Footprints in the Snow, from his first book of preludes for piano.
I hope you enjoy it.

Wallace Stevens’ The Snow Man is sometimes viewed as a depressing,
despairing work, but ought not be so.
Stevens believed that the mind was always interpreting reality,
projecting its own values into the world-at-large, as in religion,
romantic poetry, etc. Over time these interpretation fail to be
convincing to the mind and a new set of projections must be created.
This new way of looking at the world can only come about when the mind
tries to comprehend the world without illusions, which this poem tries
to do. A brisk, brusque, brittle, yet tranquil, sense of the world is
what then results.

Crossposted on Hoon’s website, http://innerlea.com.

More commentary here.

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Robert Lowell

Listen (to Hoon read)

A single man stands like a bird-watcher,
and scuffles the pepper and salt snow
from a discarded, gray
Westinghouse Electric cable drum.
He cannot discover America by counting
the chains of condemned freight-trains
from thirty states. They jolt and jar
and junk in the siding below him.
He has trouble with his balance.
His eyes drop,
and he drifts with the wild ice
ticking seaward down the Hudson,
like the blank sides of a jig-saw puzzle.

Across the river,
ledges of suburban factories tan
in the sulphur-yellow sun
of the unforgivable landscape.

For the Union Dead, 1964.

Hoon writes,

“It is a simple description of a landscape,
neutral until the judgmental unforgivable at the end.
A landscape that is both natural and manmade,
where both components seem indifferent to A single man,
And the river seems to inexorably sweep the man, the rail yard, the
entire landscape, out to the Atlantic.”

This would be our first Lowell poem. So here is a bio and a commentary on ‘The Mouth of the Hudson’.

And do checkout Hoon’s website Innerlea (http://innerlea.com) that aims to turn literature into entertainment. The site includes works by Keats, Frost, Stevens and Shakespeare, and other pieces on aesthetics of poetry, poetics etc.

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Listen (from the BBC)

Listen (to Hoon read)

(or, a Vision in a Dream, a Fragment)

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ‘twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Look here for commentary.

[UPDATED: 04/20/2007]

Hoon writes,

‘A favorite, and perhaps what the musicians call a warhorse.
It says something about the state of recorded poetry
that no famous rendition of this poem by some famous actor or other
springs instantly to mind. In fact no version springs to mind.
Oh well! Be that as it may…

Surely the non sequiturs inspired Prufrock, and constitute an early
form of stream-of-consciousness.
…
The poem regards the deepening world of self-enchantment that artistic
creation brings, and its consequential isolation; and compares it to
the fantastic pleasure-dome of the conqueror Khan. Both the artist and
the warrior crave the exercise of will, of having one’s desires and
imaginings realized. Somewhat difficult to understand is why this
evokes an ancestral call-to-arms-
because only through ruthless exploitation can such narcissistic
fantasies ever be realized?

It is worth reading, in this regard, the definition that The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia gives of narcissism:

Freudian term, drawn from the Greek myth of Narcissus, indicating an exclusive self-absorption. In psychoanalysis, narcissism is considered a normal stage in the development of children. It is known as secondary narcissism when it occurs after puberty, and is said to indicate a libidinal energy directed exclusively toward oneself. A degree of narcissism is considered normal, where an individual has a healthy self-regard and realistic aspirations. The condition becomes pathological, and diagnosable as a personality disorder, when it significantly impairs social functioning. An individual with narcissistic personality disorder tends to harbor an exaggerated sense of his own self-importance and uniqueness. He is often excessively occupied with fantasies about his own attributes and potential for success, and usually depends upon others for reinforcement of his self-image. A narcissist tends to have difficulties maintaining healthy interpersonal relationships, stemming largely from a lack of empathy and a propensity for taking advantage of others in the interest of self-aggrandizement. It is often found in combination with antisocial personality disorder.

Undoubtedly Freud read Coleridge.

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