Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Poets-Free-For-All comes through for me yet again! Kind souls there point me to many poems on reading other poems. I will be posting them on my blog a few at a time. Here are two on Shakespeare, one by Milton, the other by Arnold. On Shakespear What needs my Shakespear for his honour'd Bones, The labour of an age in piled Stones, Or that his hallow'd reliques should be hid Under a Star-ypointing Pyramid? Dear son of memory, great heir of Fame, What need'st thou such weak witnes of thy name? Thou in our wonder and astonishment Hast built thy self a live-long Monument. For whilst toth' shame of slow-endeavouring art, Thy easie numbers flow, and that each heart Hath from the leaves of thy unvalu'd Book, Those Delphick lines with deep impression took Then thou our fancy of it self bereaving, Dost make us Marble with too much conceaving; And so Sepulcher'd in such pomp dost lie, That Kings for such a Tomb would wish to die. -- John Milton * ...

Giving my two cents in this PFFA thread on Shelley, I was reminded of Matthew Arnold, and how much I enjoyed "Sohrab and Rustum," "Empedocles at Atena," "The Buried Life," "The Scholar-Gipsy" and that anthology piece "Dover Beach," when I read them as an undergraduate. This evening, while traveling back home on the train, I started reading "Rugby Chapel" from his Poetical Works , and finished it in the Thai restaurant near my train station. The poem, a paean to his dead father, who was a Rugby headmaster, has the moral seriousness and dramatic vividness of Arnold's best poems. From the middle of the poem: Friends, who set forth at our side, Falter, are lost in the storm. We, we only are left! With frowning foreheads, with lips Sternly compress'd, we strain on, On--and at nightfall at last Come to the end of our way, To the lonely inn 'mid the rocks; Where the gaunt and taciturn host Stands on the thresh...

I read Carson's long poem "The Glass Essay" again yesterday, and enjoyed it immensely for its narrative maneuvers and literary musings, although Guy Davenport, in his introduction, exaggerates when he says that it is a poem "richer than most novels nowadays." His comment either means something, in which case it is patently false since Carson's poem does not aim at novelistic detail, or it means nothing, playing it safe with that qualifier "most." "The Glass Essay" tells two intertwined stories: the abandonment by a lover, and the suffering of a father from Alzheimer's. Presiding over the stories is the tutelary spirit of Emily Bronte, loveless, unloved. The language of the poem is deliberately unlyrical; some may even call it prosy. Here's the opening of the section titled "Three": Three silent women at the kitchen table. My mother's kitchen is dark and small but out the window there is the moor, paralyzed wi...