Bartlett's Poems for Occasions Read online

  Copyright © 2004 by Little, Brown and Company

  Introductions copyright © 2004 by Geoffrey O’Brien

  Foreword copyright © 2004 by Billy Collins

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group, USA

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com

  First eBook Edition: September 2007

  ISBN: 978-0-316-02902-5

  Contents

  FOREWORD BY BILLY COLLINS

  INTRODUCTION

  THE CYCLES OF NATURE

  SPRING

  SUMMER

  AUTUMN

  WINTER

  THE ROUND OF THE YEAR

  NEW YEAR’S

  VALENTINE’S DAY

  CELEBRATING FAMILY

  THE FOURTH OF JULY

  HALLOWEEN: PHANTASMS AND HAUNTINGS

  THANKSGIVING

  THE CHRISTMAS SEASON

  THE CYCLES OF LIFE

  BIRTH AND INFANCY

  CHILDHOOD

  YOUTH AND ITS PLEASURES

  INTO ADULTHOOD

  MARRIAGE

  THE PERSPECTIVES OF MIDLIFE

  RETIREMENT FROM WORK AND FROM THE WORLD

  AGING

  DEATH AND MORTALITY

  GRIEF AND MOURNING

  THE HUMAN CONDITION

  FRIENDSHIP

  CONTENTMENT

  THE WORKING LIFE

  LOVE AND PASSION

  DISAPPOINTMENT

  SEPARATIONS AND FAREWELLS

  SOLITUDE

  SORROW AND COMFORT

  ENDURANCE, RESISTANCE, AND SURVIVAL

  SPIRITUAL AWAKENING

  PUBLIC MOMENTS AND ULTIMATE MATTERS

  THE FATES OF NATIONS AND EMPIRES

  IN TIME OF WAR

  FROM THE AMERICAN STORY

  GOD

  THE UNKNOWN AND THE UNKNOWABLE

  COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  Foreword

  ONE EVENING IN LONDON LAST YEAR, SOMEONE HAD THE IDEA OF BRINGING TOGETHER THE VISITING UNITED STATES POET LAUREATE—ME—AND THE CURRENT BRITISH POET laureate, Andrew Motion. Over dinner at a small restaurant, we speculated ignorantly as to whether this was the first ever face-to-face meeting of the two nation’s laureates. Did Rita Dove ever have a drink with Ted Hughes? we wondered. And then we decided to agree that our meeting was unprecedented, if only to bring a bit of historical weight to the table. Though separated by a common language, we managed to talk easily about this and that, and when the subject of our positions came up, we began to compare laureate notes. Motion, it seemed, was a functionary of the royal household; I was an employee of the Library of Congress. He was presented by the Queen with a cask of dry wine; I was paid an annual stipend out of a private fund. But the difference that truly defined our roles and most clearly revealed national character was that only the British laureate was obliged to write poems commemorating public events, ranging from the death of the Queen Mother, which came on the heels of Motion’s appointment, to perhaps the marriage of a disreputable viscount. The American laureate was under no such obligation. In short, the British laureate was required to write occasional poems, whereas the American laureate only had to write poems occasionally.

  The occasional poem, that is, a poem commemorating some event of widely recognized importance, has a deep history. From the odes of Pindar celebrating athletic victories to Tennyson’s ultimate laureate poem, “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington,” to Miller Williams’s poem on Bill Clinton’s second presidential inauguration, poems have served as literary tributes meant to add a bit of gravitas and possibly confer the touch of immortality to certain public occasions. Before such modern means of recording as cameras and audio devices, occasional poems also served the real function of preserving events in the national memory by producing a lasting historical record in rhyme and meter. Poems were the videotape and the still cameras of the past. They extended the original mnemonic purpose of poetry to act as a stay against the gradual amnesiac effects of time. Today, when all manner of earthly life is being digitally captured, these poems are generally thought to have become as ceremonial as the ceremonies to which they attempt to add verbal luster.

  Bartlett’s Poems for Occasions is an extremely generous collection that extends the meaning of occasion beyond the publicly significant to include personal occasions, the vast spectrum of large and small circumstances that make up human life. The immensity of the range of occasions is apparent from just a glimpse at the table of contents, which shows that poetry has a way of getting into every corner of experience. The book uses as its organizational principles the habitual ways we tend to organize life. Poems connected to the natural cycle of the seasons are followed by ones marking the social calendar we fit over the seasonal one featuring such mythic and historic dates as Halloween, Independence Day, and the birth of Christ. Then we are carried, poem by poem, through the cycle of human life, from cradle to coffin, from Blake’s “Infant Joy” to Chidiock Tichborne’s “Elegy for Himself,” with stops along the way to hear the songs of exuberant youth, emergent adulthood, sober midlife, retirement, and often complaining old age. We then are given a tour of the mansion of human experience including the rooms of friendship, love, work, disappointment, contentment (a shortish section), sorrow (noticeably longer), valediction, separation, bravery, and epiphany. Poems touching on the ultimate topics of God and immortality exist side by side with occasional poems in the traditional sense, those provoked by national events, particularly war. Here, a dissonant chorus of voices both idealizes and condemns such conflicts.

  The notion of occasional poetry can be extended further insofar as every moment of perception is in itself an occasion. Since the English Romantics, poetry has been seen as a means of preserving discrete glimpses into the world around us, refined ways of seeing. Some poems simply want to rescue a single moment from the burning building of time. Here is A. R. Ammons’s “Winter Scene”:

  There is now not a single

  leaf on the cherry tree:

  except when the jay

  plummets in, lights, and,

  in pure clarity, squalls:

  then every branch

  quivers and

  breaks out in blue leaves.

  This impressionist vision of sound turning into sight, noise into color, is a true occasion, a private one which suddenly radiates outward to include all readers. Or take the chill conveyed by this untitled little poem by Buson:

  What piercing cold I feel:

  my dead wife’s comb, in our bedroom,

  under my heel . . .

  How could any formal elegy on, say, the Duke of Bedford, do more to convey the shock of grief than these three modest lines? Besides recording private epiphanies, every poem can be said to commemorate the occasion of its being written, the singular event of its composition. Every poem is finally its own birth announcement.

  It is typical for people—especially people who are not habitual readers of poetry—to turn to verse in times of stress and uncertainty. The aftermath of 9/11 witnessed a sudden surge of interest in poetry, a search for words that could provide stability and consolation. Oddly, the poem that emerged as the popular favorite was Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” a poem written in a New York bar by a man who had just fled the impending war in Europe. In their haste to make the poem relevant, readers ita
licized certain lines (“. . . the lie of Authority / Whose buildings grope the sky”) and largely ignored the poem’s final salute to irony: “Ironic points of light / Flash out wherever the Just / Exchange their messages.” But the general call for poems revealed an ancient dependence on formalized language as a way of bracing ourselves in wobbly times.

  Engagements, anniversaries, birthdays, commencements, inaugurations, and especially weddings and funerals are often in need of a poem that will add stability to the occasion and connect it to a tradition of similar events. After all, poetry is the deepest history of human emotion that we have, and its formal arrangements—particularly its patterns of rhyme and meter—have the power to embody and ritualize feeling. The right poem can bring the balm of structure to the grief-stricken and provide the joyous with a pattern of choric dance. I might add that a truly fitting wedding poem is not an easy thing to find, even in a recently published anthology devoted to wedding poems. It is no accident that in Bartlett’s, as in life, marriage poems are greatly outnumbered by love poems—here by a margin of nearly 5 to 1.

  This capacious anthology has an obvious social usefulness. Just as one might thumb through the more familiar Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations in search of relevant bon mots to spice up an address or add wit to a speech, so, too, one may look here for a poem whose recitation might enhance and possibly dignify any number of public gatherings. But because the range of poems gathered here is so broad, extending well beyond the conventional definition of occasional poetry, readers can also browse within for poems to suit any mood, time of year, or predicament—poems to augment personal moments, to pluck them from the rush of time. Plus, poems are always offering the reader the opportunity to memorize them and, therefore, take advantage of poetry’s ultimate portability. “I never heard anyone humming a building,” Sammy Cahn once snapped in defense of his decision to be a lyricist and not an architect. Nor can you memorize a statue or recite a painting. But a poem you can easily carry with you in one of the inside pockets of memory, and you can pull it out anytime at all, even if the occasion is nothing more than a rainy day, and a sunny one will do just as well.

  Introduction

  THIS IS A BOOK OF POEMS ARRANGED IN RELATION TO THE CIRCUMSTANCES AND SEASONS OF HUMAN LIFE. I HAVE DIVIDED THE POEMS INTO FIVE PARTS. THE FIRST PART, “The Cycles of Nature,” has a selection of poems arranged by season. The poems in the second part, “The Round of the Year,” are ones that celebrate the rituals of seasonal holidays, including New Year’s, Mother’s and Father’s Days, the Fourth of July, and Thanksgiving. The third part, “The Cycles of Life,” includes poems tracing our earliest explorations of infancy, the pleasures and anxieties of youth, the challenge of entering adulthood, the peaks of marriage and midlife, the approach of retirement, aging, and death. The fourth part, “The Human Condition,” maps our social and emotional lives: the torments and fulfillments of love; friendship and contentment; the working life; farewells; sufferings shared or undergone in solitude; and endurance. Finally, the last part, “Public Moments and Ultimate Matters,” includes poems that address our public lives in the wider arena of history, the cataclysms of war, and the death of kings and confront life’s ultimate questions. In all five sections I cast a wide net, considering poems from over a dozen different languages and historical epochs dating from ancient Egypt to the present day to find those that might serve as companion, guide, or source of knowledge about human ways of coping with the unforeseeable, inescapable, and immeasurable vicissitudes of existence. Much of this work can be considered as part of a deep and ancient wisdom literature, to be shared with others to commemorate a special occasion, or to mark that same occasion privately, in quiet self-reflection. But I have made room as well for poems that have been so often recited or memorized that they have in effect become part of the language. The surprise of meeting up with a phrase such as “into each life some rain must fall” in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Rainy Day” or “all that Heav’n allows” in the earl of Rochester’s “All my past life is mine no more” is not so minor a pleasure as it might seem. The most overfamiliar of poems can spring unexpectedly into new life, not only for their own merits but for the freight of feeling that so many earlier readers have in a sense imparted to them. On the other hand, I have allowed ample space to the less familiar—to poets both recent and ancient whose names are not so frequently mentioned, to translations that can only begin to represent the scope of such treasuries as the Sanskrit or the Japanese traditions, to lesser-known poems by well-known poets (such as Rudyard Kipling’s indelible protest “To a Dead Statesman”) that turned out to be perfectly apt for one or another of the book’s occasions.

  Does a book of poems for occasions require a user’s manual? To apply a poem to your own life is in itself a creative act. The categories into which this book is divided are intended to suggest directions, coordinates, possible routes. They can only hint at the occasions when a reader might turn to them, occasions that seem to call for words beyond what we can ourselves easily articulate: a family gathering at Thanksgiving (the Iroquois prayer “The Thanksgivings”), the birth of a baby (Walter De La Mare’s “The Birthnight”), a graduation (Langston Hughes’s “Dreams”), a funeral (Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar”), a wedding ceremony (William Shakespeare’s sonnet “Let me not to the marriage of true minds”). A poem of winter might, recited under different circumstances, evoke a festive mood, or a grief-struck one. The poems grouped here under the rubric “Retirement from Work and from the World” are hardly limited to readers of retirement age (any hard-pressed student might find equal solace in Andrew Marvell’s garden). The poems gathered under the heading “Separations and Farewells” encompass a range of moods as varied as there are kinds of separations; Michael Drayton’s famous “Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part”—almost the archetype of breakup poems—does end, after all, on a note of lingering hope for reconciliation.

  It may take an imaginative leap to recognize a treasured friend in a poem about a veteran of the Roman imperial army (by Horace) or a courtier of ancient China (by Ezra Pound). The pleasures of a midwinter dinner party might be marked by the late medieval trappings of Thomas Campion’s “Now winter nights enlarge.” A great passion might be shared with John Donne in a world where, only recently, “sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone.” The faith of poetry is that inner truths, the hard-won structures of thought and feeling, prevail over the accidentals of time and circumstance.

  Readers of poetry perform a similar operation. No two people will find the same things in the same poems, or for the same reasons. The categories here are rough signposts, but it is for the reader to decide when it is an appropriate moment to go to a particular place. The spring poem contemplated in the depths of winter, the poem of war read in time of provisional peace, the evocation of departed grandparents juxtaposed with the immediacy of childbirth, the meditation on loss read amid seeming plenitude—these are the readings that can provoke and disarm, pitting the reality of the poem against the reality of the reader’s state of being. Similarly, this book’s categories are not separate enclosures but interconnected rooms, with their fair share of secret passageways and unexpected panoramic views of the surrounding hills.

  This approach to anthologizing poetry might seem quaintly old-fashioned, a throwback to those thematically arranged multivolume treasuries assembled by American fireside poets of the nineteenth century such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and William Cullen Bryant. Alongside the Bible and Shakespeare, these were copious collections designed to form part of the standard household library. For Longfellow and Bryant it went without saying that poems could appropriately be grouped according to the moods and occasions for which they were best suited.

  This was not a sentimental fancy but a thoroughly pragmatic recognition of the proven utility of poetry as instructor, entertainer, healing agent, aid to meditation, and liberator of the imagination. Even Francis Palgrave’s The Golden Trea
sury—the most widely disseminated of Victorian poetry anthologies, and still one of the best of any era—avoided a strictly chronological arrangement. An arrangement purely by chronology would have, in Palgrave’s words, “rather fit a collection aiming at instruction than at pleasure, and the wisdom which comes through pleasure”; he preferred to group its poems according to “gradations of feeling or subject.”

  As Palgrave noted, a chronological arrangement is more obviously suited to the serious student. But only in more recent times—in America, since the mid-twentieth century—has the assumption taken hold that poetry is something to be relegated to the classroom. In any case, historically minded anthologies exist, in profusion, enabling anyone who likes to examine in close detail the precise moment, for instance, when early English Drab of Edward Dyer or George Gascoigne gives way to the Italianate flourishes of the Tudor Renaissance in the work of Sir Philip Sidney or Edmund Spenser. For earlier readers, poetry had a private, domestic aspect; poems were sung or recited in intimate circumstances and carried with them a reminder of emotions and associations that might otherwise be lost to memory. The power of such associations became all the greater when the poem was committed to memory, thereby becoming in some sense part of the body of the reader, to be evoked at will whenever needed.

  In classrooms poems become objects to be dissected according to whatever rules of analysis prevail at a given moment. In our own day, when the emphasis of academic study tends to be historical and ideological, the danger is that a given poem can end up figuring as a mere illustration of larger tendencies, a “for instance” to be slotted into a grid of social circumstance.

  This is not to deny the potential value of such analysis. It is naive or simplistic to take refuge in the notion of aesthetic timelessness. No poem can be read eternally in precisely the way the poet intended. Poetry is one kind of map and history another; to bring them together (as we do, however inadequately, anytime we read) is to be continually startled out of complacency by unanticipated disconnects and equally unanticipated connections. When we read a Shakespeare sonnet or a Robert Burns ballad we measure simultaneously our closeness to and our distance from the moment in which they wrote, not unlike the experience of looking at an old photograph of a long-dead relative.