Category Archives: poetry

Maine Interlude

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Maine has a gorgeous, rugged coastline. I just spent a week around Blue Hill, Maine with family, not doing much besides visiting, eating, and playing with color settings on my camera that I didn’t know I had.

The seaweed there is a bright yellow-orange that reminded me of one of my favorite poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay, who came from Maine.

I shall go back again to the bleak shore
And build a little shanty on the sand
In such a way that the extremest band
Of brittle seaweed will escape my door
But by a yard or two, and nevermore
Shall I return to take you by the hand;
I shall be gone to what I understand
And happier than I ever was before.

The love that stood a moment in your eyes,
The words that lay a moment on your tongue,
Are one with all that in a moment dies,
A little under-said and over-sung;
But I shall find the sullen rocks and skies
Unchanged from what they were when I was young.
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
I imagine the coast of Maine in winter would be a bleak thing indeed. In summer, however, it’s quite glorious.

It is Margaret you mourn for.

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William Blake, from For Children: The Gates of Paradise

Spring and Fall
to a young child

MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh


Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:    
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

–Gerard Manley Hopkins

That time of year

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Wind from the Sea, Andrew Wyeth
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 ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth from the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
–That time of year thou mayst in me behold, William Shakespeare

Turkey Pond, Andrew Wyeth
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.
 

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick…

 
-Sailing to Byzantium, William Butler Yeats