John Adams, our second President, once wrote: “You are never alone with a poet in your pocket.” I’d like to think that some of us have quite deep pockets, and today, on the First Anniversary of this column, I’d like to dig into mine and share some of my favorites with you. No epic poems for the moment . . . just the size that would fit in a pocket!
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Here’s a little personal background. Excluding nursery rhymes and rude boyhood street verse, I discovered the joy of poetry by way of Shakespeare . . . not a bad idea I might say. Reading the plays as a teen-ager, I would come upon the song lyrics he sprinkled through his works: “It Was a Lover and His Lass.” “Sigh No More, Ladies,” “Full Fathom Five,” and one I especially liked:
O Mistress mine where are you roaming?
O stay and hear, your true love’s coming,
That can sing both high and low.
Trip no further pretty sweeting.
Journeys end in lovers’ meeting,
Every wise man’s son doth know.
What is love, ’tis not hereafter,
Present mirth, hath present laughter:
What’s to come, is still unsure.
In delay there lies no plenty,
Then come kiss me sweet and twenty:
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.
Looking back, my youth has not exactly endured, but a love of poetry definitely has. There’s such a glory to the way poets use words to express feelings that all of us can respond to. My thanks to the Bard for the introduction!
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Because much of my professional life has been spent in the musical world, I have a fondness for lyrical works that have been set to music.
Here is a lovely lyric by W. H. Auden (1907-1973), a fine poet (“The Age of Anxiety”) who spent some fascinating years in Berlin with Christopher Isherwood, experiencing the events that would ultimately become “Cabaret.” A regular guest in their apartment was a cabaret singer named Jean Ross, later to be known as Sally Bowles.
Carry her over the water,
And set her down under the tree,
Where the culvers white all days and all night,
And the winds from every quarter,
Sing agreeably, agreeably, agreeably of love.
Put a gold ring on her finger,
And press her close to your heart,
While the fish in the lake snapshots take,
And the frog, that sanguine singer,
Sing agreeably, agreeably, agreeably of love.
The streets shall flock to your marriage,
The houses turn round to look,
The tables and chairs say suitable prayers,
And the horses drawing your carriage
Sing agreeably, agreeably, agreeably of love.
My column on William Butler Yeats included a poem he wrote for Maud Gonne, his muse and would-be lover. I repeat it here because it is one of my all-time favorites and has had such beautiful musical settings.
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
The distinguished composer, Randall Thompson, wrote a splendid song based on stanzas by Elinor Wylie (1885-1928). Wylie, from a prominent Washington, D.C. family, trained for the life of a debutante, progressed through a series of high-profile marriages and affairs, and emerged as an elegant poet and novelist.
Let us walk in the white snow
In a soundless space;
With footsteps quiet and slow,
At a tranquil pace,
Under veils of white lace.
I shall go shod in silk,
And you in wool,
White as white cow’s milk,
More beautiful
Than the breast of a gull.
We shall walk through the still town
In a windless peace;
We shall step upon white down,
Upon silver fleece,
Upon softer than these.
We shall walk in velvet shoes:
Wherever we go
Silence will fall like dews
On white silence below.
We shall walk in the snow.
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How could I not include my favorite Robert Frost poem, one that has influenced the direction of so many lives?
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
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Perhaps surprising, one of my pocket poems is an epitaph, written by Robert Louis Stevenson and inscribed on his grave in Samoa where he had settled and taken the name Tusitala (“Teller of Tales”) It reads:
Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
Finally, for a bit of off-the-wall fun, here are two quatrains that always make me smile. This is Ogden Nash offering “A Word to Husbands:”
To keep your marriage brimming
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you’re wrong, admit it;
Whenever you’re right, shut up.
Yip Harburg calls this bit of wildness “Courtship in Greenwich Village:”
Our days will be oh, so ecstatic,
Our nights will be oh, so exotic,
For I’m a neurotic erratic,
And you’re an erratic erotic.
I think I’ll just stick to my poetic aesthetic.
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VIDEO. This week we welcome two new members to our video repertory theater. Claire Bloom as Emily Dickinson performs “I’ll Tell You How the Sun Rose” and James Whitmore offers “To Helen” by Edgar Allan Poe. Then Jill Tanner brings us Matthew Arnold’s splendid “Dover Beach,” and as a finale, Alan Howard of the Royal Shakespeare Company presents my favorite piece of Shakespeare, “All the World’s a Stage” from Act II of “As You Like It.”
CLICK ON THIS LINK FOR VIDEO: A Poet in Your Pocket
