Category: Poetry

John Donne, “The Flea”:

MARK but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is;
It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
Thou know’st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead;
    Yet this enjoys before it woo,
    And pamper’d swells with one blood made of two;
    And this, alas! is more than we would do.

O stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, yea, more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is.
Though parents grudge, and you, we’re met,
And cloister’d in these living walls of jet.
    Though use make you apt to kill me,
    Let not to that self-murder added be,
    And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it suck’d from thee?
Yet thou triumph’st, and say’st that thou
Find’st not thyself nor me the weaker now.
‘Tis true ; then learn how false fears be;
Just so much honour, when thou yield’st to me,
Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.

Yeah, calling a woman flea-bitten has always worked for me.

(More John Donne here.)

A compatriot and I at work often stand at the window and look down at Washington Avenue, five stories below, to take a break from our work. Once, when I was a young man, I wrote the following sonnet about a similar situation, watching the kids (women to me then, but we were all kids) walking along the college malls:

Fifth Floor Eyes

With bouncy strides of legs just lightly tanned,
you walk below my watching third floor eyes.
A gentle wind moves silently and dies;
you brush some wayward hair with careless hand.
Your lips, marooned with hasty morning care,
are framing hinted teeth in sudden joy
and move in greeting of some passing boy,
the words sweet notes unheard in summer air.
Your dark sunglasses never flash my way,
and you continue on toward a class,
or maybe to your dorm–I’ll never know.
For sixty stairs is much too far away,
so silently I let you swiftly pass,
invisibly about my way I go.

Whoa, we’ve got subtle allusions to Shelley and Blake in there, don’t we? I am a far distance away from reading those authors in my Romantic Poets classes and whatnot. I published that poem in my 1995 chapbook Deep Blue Shadows. My second chapbook came a year after the first (Unrequited, 1994), and altough I started mocking one up in the late 1990s (Flipside Id), I have yet to finish it.

Flipping through the chapbook, I note that it’s a hastily-composed bit designed when I was restless and worried that I wasn’t going anywhere as a poet. With its contents, I can see why, although in the period of 1996-1997 I would write some of my best work, yet unpublished.

Also, regardless of my merit in structured poetry, much of my free verse is crap. Which is par for that form.

Robert Frost:

SOME say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

As Robert Frost was from New England, of course he wouldn’t initially think that ice and snow were threatening enough to end the world. But he never lived in Missouri.

Google search of the day: tiger tiger burning bring in the middle of the night robert blake

You can take that to the bank
Where Love lay sleeping;
I heard among the rushes dank
Weeping, weeping.

Perhaps it’s the end of the year and time to just dump old DOC files that I converted from WPS files which I converted from the original LotusWorks files I created in my prolific college period, but since I saw Edmund Spenser’s “One day I wrote her name upon the strand” over at Pejmanesque, I thought it only fitting to present my responses:

---

A Carved Tree (I)
Copyright 1991 Brian J. Noggle, you illegal poem-sharing rabble

One day I carved her name into a tree
with mine inside a Cupid-arrowed heart.
When I had closed my knife, she checked my art,
and shook her head, and then she looked at me.
“Now why’d you come and maim this oak?” asked she.
“Here in the woods, it lived its life apart,
but now the awful manly meddlings start.
This tree will never have its privacy.”
“I maimed this oak so everyone could see
our names as linked for all Eternity,
and I must admit to you, my deified,
I like our love like this, objectified,
so that it’s not another petty ‘love’,
but like a natural law passed from above.”

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A Carved Tree (II)
Also Copyright 1991 Brian J. Noggle,
so don’t repost without permission, Harvey

This quiet spot, beneath this ancient oak,
is where I come to think on brooding days.
The open sky is blue and mocks the strays
that cower underneath the leafy cloak.
I sit and sip my slowly warming Coke,
and stumble through my memory, a maze
of many cul-de-sacs of yesterdays.
I remember how, beneath this tree, we spoke….
Above my head, carved by my careful hand,
the heart and letters of a “Brian and ….”
I remember once, the reckless words I said,
in love’s embrace of sweetly muddled head.
With human eyes, a truth is now revealed:
That higher laws can also be repealed.

UPDATE: This poem, and many others, are available in my 2018 collection Coffee House Memories.

Wandering into the dark kitchen, I saw that a neighbor had left its back porch light on, and it reminded me of a poem I had written when I was younger:

Okauchee Light

Across the dark Okauchee lake, a light,
the marker for the end of someone’s dock,
is strangely lit at nearly twelve o’clock
and breaks the solid black that is the night.
From here, across the chilling April lake,
through busy bar room glass I see that glow,
but life or rooms beyond I’ll never know.
One light does not a utopia make.
Quite like your smile, that single man-made star:
Up there, on stage, you flash a smile at me,
and crinkle eyes to give the gesture weight,
but like the dock-end light, you are too far;
your glow is there for someone else to see,
and now, for me at least, it is too late.

I wrote about the keyboardist in the band my friends and I followed around Milwaukee as they played the fairs and bars. Acourse, as an English major, I felt damn proud to mirror The Great Gatsby with the whole bit. Man, I was the little sonnet slut then, casting off fourteen liners at the slightest provocation.

Remember, friends, this piece is copyright 1991(?) Brian J. Noggle, and you’ve got to click that little Contact link below and beg offer me scads of money ask for permission to repost.

While you await the much anticipated lottery drawings this evening, stop by American Digest to read a couple of poems by new poet laureate Ted Kooser.

It beats 1700 of Emily Dickinson’s collected poems.

Emily Dickinson, Poem 551:

There is a Shame of Nobleness —
Confronting Sudden Pelf —
A finer Shame of Ecstasy —
Convicted of Itself —

A best Disgrace — a Brave Man feels —
Acknowledged — of the Brave —
One More — “Ye Blessed” — to be told —
But that’s — Behind the Grave —

Crikey on a cracker, if ever there’s a time for footnotes, explaining to this forelorn and slightly half-baked poetical sojourner what the devil Pelf means is it.

I have but one vow: if I’m ever confronted by a sudden Pelf, the damn Pelf will get the worst of it.

The world-famous DC from Brainstorming, who also appeared on the Hugh Hewitt show this evening (even if Instapundit overlooks it, we know), asks why I didn’t want to be associated with Walt Whitman.

The backstory: I took a Quizilla quiz that asked what poet I was. I wasn’t Walt Whitman, and I said I was glad I wasn’t. DC took the same quiz and was. And she wondered why I said I didn’t like Walt Whitman.

I don’t find his poetry very vivid. Certainly, most of it seems to have a point, which Whitman doesn’t hide. As a matter of fact, he pretty much delivers a non-rhyming lecture with line breaks. Let’s take DC’s favorite Whitman piece, and let’s color code it. Blue is show, which means an image or other sensory material; green is tell, which is discussing abstractions:

O Me! O Life!

O ME! O life!… of the questions of these recurring;
Of the endless trains of the faithless–of cities fill’d with the foolish;
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light?of the objects mean?of the struggle ever renew?d;
Of the poor results of all–of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me;
Of the empty and useless years of the rest–with the rest me intertwined;
The question, O me! so sad, recurring–What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.
That you are here?that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.

You see, I am reduced to coloring the blooming concrete nouns to find images and turns of phrase. The rest, chatter.

Personally, when it comes to poetry, I prefer structured poetry to free verse. So let’s take a quick gander at something from my personal favorite poet (aside from my beautiful wife and, well, me, of course), Edna St. Vincent Millay:

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

The concrete images resonate at a lower level than abstractions, and the reader makes the connections and draws the higher meaning for himself, which resonates more deeply than a series of things we know, but cannot see or feel.

(Thanks to Lex Libertas, another conservative poetry lover, who led posted a pile of Millay’s poetry.)

As I said, I like structured poetry better than free verse (although not exclusively). I prefer to see a poet struggle against the bonds of tradition, and make the poem worthwhile. So it’s no surprise that I work in the sonnet form like my patron saint:

It’s always more than sex to sleep with you.
Don’t get me wrong; I like to tangle sheets
and hungry scents and taste the salty dew
of glistening sweat where heavy brow meets
soft eyelids closed, relaxed. I’ll kiss them, too,
and sample other slow seduction sweets.
But I run out of juice, won’t thump my chest
and say I don’t, and so I like the rest:
I like to lie, arms wrapped around you, deep
in comfortable darkness where the moon projects
odd patterns on the walls. I want to keep
you safe and warm as winter licks our necks.
You mumble love and slowly fall asleep;
these moments worth much more than simple sex.

You can mentally add your own blue or green highlighting to it. But keep in mind, it’s not public domain, and I better not Google it and find other hits, or I will kick your ass (don’t worry; if you don’t own a donkey, one will be provided for you).

To make a short story long, I don’t like Whitman because his poems don’t contain the things I value in poetry. Imagery, concrete sensational phrases, and/or structure.