Published April 23, 2009 | 
Sonnet 65
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o’ersways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O! how shall summer’s honey breath hold out,
Against the wrackful siege of battering days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong but Time decays?
O fearful meditation! where, alack,
Shall Time’s best jewel from Time’s chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
O! none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.–William Shakespeare
You still shine bright, 445 years after your birth.
Published April 22, 2009 | So, we’ll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have a rest.Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon.–George Gordon, Lord Byron
Published April 21, 2009 | You are like me, you will die too, but not today:
you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine:…
This poem was written byReginald Shepherd, wrote the article on Adorno and Celan that I mentioned yesterday. His blog is still up, the site maintained by his partner (for whom this poem was written), although Shepherd himself died last year from cancer.
Published April 20, 2009 | This poem by a Holocaust survivor is posted as my response to Hitler’s birthday. Celan’s Death Fugue may be the single best poem to come out of World War II. Do go read it.
Theodor Adorno raised the question of whether it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.
To me, poetry is, has always been, one of the few possible answers to the death camps, since long before I read Adorno or Celan. When I was a small child, I saw those pictures. (You know the ones.) They were in books on my father’s shelves. Books — poetry, stories, nonfiction, any kind of book — were the only defense I had against those images, against the searing things he did to me and animals, against the things he made me do, and which even then I sensed were a private expression of the same impulse that built the smokestacks.
Books are defiance even in defeat. They are victory even in death. Long after their authors are dead, they go on tapping out the message of freedom to prisoners caged in tyrannies of iron or clapboard. They can speak the truth when all utterance is forbidden and only lies are acknowledged.
Adorno’s oft-quoted dictum that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz is a quotation from a larger, far more complex and shifting attitude. (Good article on it by the late poet Reginald Shepherd.)
Adorno also wrote:
Literature must resist this verdict, in other words, be such that its mere existence after Auschwitz is not a surrender to cynicism…. It is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice, consolation, without immediately being betrayed by it.
Published April 19, 2009 | For April 18, anniversary of the great San Francisco Quake, we have one of the great poems of geology:
Lay of the Trilobite
A mountain’s giddy height I sought,
Because I could not find
Sufficient vague and mighty thought
To fill my mighty mind;
And as I wandered ill at ease,
There chanced upon my sight
A native of Silurian seas,
An ancient Trilobite.So calm, so peacefully he lay,
I watched him even with tears:
I thought of Monads far away
In the forgotten years.
How wonderful it seemed and right,
The providential plan,
That he should be a Trilobite,
And I should be a Man!And then, quite natural and free
Out of his rocky bed,
That Trilobite he spoke to me
And this is what he said:
‘I don’t know how the thing was done,
Although I cannot doubt it;
But Huxley – he if anyone
Can tell you all about it;‘How all your faiths are ghosts and dreams,
How in the silent sea
Your ancestors were Monotremes -
Whatever these may be;
How you evolved your shining lights
Of wisdom and perfection
From Jelly-Fish and Trilobites
By Natural Selection.‘You’ve Kant to make your brains go round,
Hegel you have to clear them,
You’ve Mr Browning to confound,
And Mr Punch to cheer them!
The native of an alien land
You call a man and brother,
And greet with hymn-book in one hand
And pistol in the other!‘You’ve Politics to make you fight
As if you were possessed:
You’ve cannon and you’ve dynamite
To give the nations rest:
The side that makes the loudest din
Is surest to be right,
And oh, a pretty fix you’re in!’
Remarked the Trilobite.‘But gentle, stupid, free from woe
I lived among my nation,
I didn’t care – I didn’t know
That I was a Crustacean.*
I didn’t grumble, didn’t steal,
I never took to rhyme:
Salt water was my frugal meal,
And carbonate of lime.’Reluctantly I turned away,
No other word he said;
An ancient Trilobite, he lay
Within his rocky bed.
I did not answer him, for that
Would have annoyed my pride:
I merely bowed, and raised my hat,
But in my heart I cried: -‘I wish our brains were not so good,
I wish our skulls were thicker,
I wish that Evolution could
Have stopped a little quicker;
For oh, it was a happy plight,
Of liberty and ease,
To be a simple Trilobite
In the Silurian seas!’–May Kendall
* He was not a crustacean. He has since discovered that he was an Arachnid, or something similar. But he says it does not matter. He says they told him wrong once, and they may again.
I have no idea if May Kendall is a relative; she was an English poet and reformer, and my ancestors of that ilk came to this side of the Atlantic four hundred years ago.
Also, go buy a copy of Earthquake Weather, a stunning collection of poems by Janice Gould.
For April 19, one of the great poems of American history
Concord Hymn
Sung at the Completion of the Concord Monument,
April 19th, 1836By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream that seaward creeps.On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set today a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.–Ralph Waldo Emerson
Posted in Arts, geology, history, Literature, Natural History | 
Emerson, May Kendall, poem | 
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