This is an old comic, but it's Auden's birthday today, so I thought I'd revisit it. And David Lehman's wonderful YOUTUBE on Auden.
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I love reading poems literally, or rather-- hyper-literally. I was thinking of Zeus when I drew this but of course, Athena burst from his forehead in a full suit of armor.
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
I've spent the week trying to polish off some poems and a manuscript for a chapbook. I finally sent them along. Now I want to unsend them. It's always like that for me. The worst is when a book comes out, and I want to rewrite it. I dream of the day I don't feel like this!
It's funny how certain lines of a poem stick in the mind--like "ancient glittering eyes" from "Lapis Lazuli." Or rather, "Their ancient, glittering eyes are gay."
I was reading "Kubla Khan" and actually began to wonder if there were cows in heaven. Or if the milk would be dairy-free. I love being overly-literal.
I was playing with the first line of this poem by Gwendolyn Brooks: THE POOL PLAYERS. SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL. We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.
I love Elizabeth Bishop's poem, "One Art." It's hard not to keep going in this vein with something like:
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to be. None of these will bring disaster
I lost a man with such good looks! My last, or
next-to-last, of three lovers who just left.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two skinny fellas, lovely ones. And, fat,
some men I owned, some as wide as a continent.
I miss them, yes, but it wasn’t a disaster.
The last stanza, so lovely, so true and painful--I would never want to mess with: "Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture/I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident/ the art of losing's not too hard to master/though it may look like (write it!) like disaster."