UNDER CONSTRUCTION - more commentary are in progress
FIRST DRAFTS BELOW
best poems of
the English Language : An Annotated, non-hierarchical List
© 2008 Clay Moldenhauer
INTRODUCTION
To take on the challenge of listing the best poems in the english
language is somewhat like being asked to list the10 best mothers on
the planet. In the search to then list who most affected the
planet, with heavy dependence on history books, we might very well
come up with a list that excludes our own mothers, who, as we all
know, affected each of us in the most profound ways possible. So
much for the reliability of history books. So with that analogy,
let me say I cannot measure a poem’s significance to the
world any more than I can measure your mother’s significance
to the world except to say, as common wisdom would dictate, you owe
something very important to her. In like manner, we owe something
very important to poetry, each of us, as the mother of our
perceptual abilities and liabilities, of our visions of being
demonic and human and divine simultaneously, of our linguistic
network in ritual and community, of our bond to the senses’
lust for differences, and the minds’ hunger for patterns. And
then there is the matter of our relation to the Great Mother, the
mother of us all, beyond the mother of our birth ; the mother we
call nature, evolution, creation, the kosmos, chaos, God, Goddess,
intelligent design, and the list goes on. But by whatever name that
connection is referenced, one fact persists : by the words of our
mouth, our poetry, we recognize and honor that connection so as to
invite her presence into our endeavors. In a word, the best english
poetry is vital poetry, poetry that enlivens both ourselves and our
listeners us as we speak it, that engenders an awe and respect for
life.
Therefore, my list of the best poems would include not just the
heralded masterpieces of poetic technique that public education has
forced me to study, but also the poetry of children and their
sidewalked chalked mispellings, of street-bums churning out smelly
non-sense of alienation and drink, of pasty-faced flack-catchers
sweating out Freudian slips, of caffeinated ad-writers force
feeding deadlined lines into small spaces, the poetry of all those
strangers remembered and half-forgotten who forced me out of my
strange land into theirs for a moment of intimate intersection,
whose being, whose words forced my world to enlarge, to rebirth, to
resensitize, to appreciate the dirty fingernails of someone
else’s experience. In short, the best poems of any
description are those that have grounded us with the earth that
supports us, that have given us breath as we have given them breath
in the day to day life of the living, that have watered our eyes
with sadness and elation, and that have filled our souls with the
fire of life and the light of the stars; these are the poems that
reference the vital elements of nature’s alchemical mystery :
earth, air, water, and fire. These are the poems that are listed
here.
Such a poem is
“America the Beautiful.”
POEM : America The Beautiful *
PUBLISHED : circa 1895, (Harris -1988)
POET : Katherine Lee Bates (1859-1929), Pamela Haines (?)
TEXT :
Refrain
Oh, Beautiful for spacious skys for amber waves of grain.
For purple mountains majesty above the fruited plain.
America, America, God shed his grace on thee.
And crown thy good with Brotherhood from sea to shining sea.
Stanza 1
O beautiful for pilgrim feet whose stern impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat across the wilderness
America! America! God mend thy every flaw
Confirm thy soul in self control, thy liberty in law
Stanza 2
O beautiful for heroes proved in liberating strife
Who more than self their country loved & mercy more than
life
America! America! May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness & every gain divine.
Stanza 3
O beautiful for patriot dream that sees beyond the years
Thy alabaster cities gleam undimmed by human tears
America! America! God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with Brotherhood from sea to shining sea.
Pamela Haines Stanza
O beautiful for working folk who forged the wealth we see
In farm & mill, in home and school unsung in history
America! America! may race nor sex nor creed
No more divide, but side by side, all rise united, freed!
NOTES
According to the Academic American Encyclopedia (1980), this song,
now the unofficial national anthem of the United States, appeared
as a four stanza’d poem by Katherine Lee Bates in the
Congregationalist Magazine, July 4, 1895, and was later set to
music by Samuel Ward. The above refrain which is only the refrain
of the song, is, in my opinion, a poem, and the only poem Americans
know by heart. I have yet to meet anyone who can sing the three
verses of the full poem without a book in front of them. Despite
that, there is no other poem that I know of that brings up such
intense emotion in a public American setting. That this poem
continues to generate strong feeling and poetical expression is
evidenced by the rousing gospel rendition of this song done by
Whitney Houston as a part of Super Bowl XXV, and additional stanzas
being added by current poets.
For me, this poem has been an integral part of my morning
meditations, and it usually comes to mind as I am driving to work
in the early morning hours. While I usually object to the God
reference in public, secular documents, I am continually attracted
to this poem for its power to elicit my strong feelings of
community.
Three stanzas and a refrain totaling some 16 lines of iambic
heptameter, echoing the biblical cadence of iambic pentameter,
America the Beautiful is a hymn to America with an invocation to
God : first, for God to “mend its flaws,” then
“refine its Gold,” and lastly, to twice “shed his
grace,” --the last two lines of both stanza 3 and the
refrain. Each invocation is at the third line of the stanza-- so
what we have here is progression of blessings-- with the first two
lines of each stanza devoted to an honoring and remembrance of past
contributions by “pilgrims” (stanza 1),
“heroes” (stanza 2), and “patriot’s
[dream]” (stanza 3), this last remembrance in adjectival form
on “dream,” dream suggesting future time, which
completes a historical progression of the stanzas from past (stanza
1), to present (stanza 2), to future (stanza 3) ; a tight
consistent structure of design. And wouldn't you know it,
there’s more.
Within this framework, Bates has also established a sequential
social commentary on America’s challenges, using a pattern of
4 metrical feet to "X", then 3 metrical feet to "Y", in each of the
first two lines and the last line of each stanza ; X and Y being in
most cases labels of particular social forces that are in dynamic
tension, i.e. antithetical elements. If we list those antithetical
elements, it is surprising how current, or perhaps how timeless are
the parameters of the American experience.
Stanza 1
line 1 null
BATES
thoroughfare vs
wilderness MODERN
sprawl vs open
space
line three null
BATES
soul
vs self control MODERN
right to life vs
choice
BATES
liberty vs
law MODERN
individual vs
collective
Stanza 2
BATES
self
vs country MODERN
career vs
country
BATES
mercy vs
life MODERN
altruism vs
ego
BATES
Materiality vs
nobleness MODERN
me-ism vs
respect
BATES
gain
vs the divine MODERN
greed vs
ethics
Stanza 3
BATES
dream vs years
(status quo) MODERN
possibilities vs
same old
BATES
cities vs
tears MODERN
rewards vs
sacrifaces
(material) good and Brotherhood
(West) sea and (East) sea
Refrain
sky and grain (land)
mountain and plain
(material) good and Brotherhood
(West) sea and (East) sea
The refrain
stands outside of this 4-3 pattern and the anti-thetical pairings,
its content being less historical and less political, and more
theological. The refrain is also the fundamental basis of the
content of the stanzas, the refrain's content being the five
natural elements which we all share :
earth
(grain, mountain , plain),
air (spacious sky),
water (shining sea),
fire (shining
sea).
That the last half of the refrain is repeated as the last two lines
of the last (third) stanza bridges the stanza's "vs" pairings to
"and" pairings, and ties the fundamental content (of the natural
elements) to the historical content of all the stanzas, another
reminder that America may be its people and their actions, but
“the beautiful” (natural elements) are the resources we
are stewards of.
Refrain
Oh, Beautiful for spacious skys for amber waves of grain.
For purple mountains majesty above the fruited plain.
America, America, God shed his grace on thee.
And crown thy good with Brotherhood from sea to shining sea.
* From Rise Up
Singing, ed. by Peter
Blood-Patterson, Sing Out Publications, 1988, p.1.
___________________________________________________________________
POEM : "Fire and Ice" *
PUBLISHED : circa 1923
POET : Robert Frost (1874- 1963)
TEXT :
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 I had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
NOTES
"FIre and Ice" is but nine lines of 51 words (one word less than
Lincoln's Address) with only five denotative common nouns : fire,
ice, desire, hate, and destruction. These five nouns are the five
elements of the poem, and they carry the message of the poem like a
carrier pigeon : one wing of fire/desire, another of ice/hate. Of
pronouns, there are only four : one personal pronoun :" I"; one
demonstrative pronoun : "those" ; and two indefinite pronouns :
"some" , and "it". The poem reminds me of poems chiseled into
granite New England tombstones in the Shaker villages of
Massachusetts, artistic footnotes to lives long lived and piously
suffered.
Fire and Ice, I think, is in this tradition : brevity of
expression, surface simplicity, philosophic depth, wry
understatement, all of which are taught as the Frostian signature
as well as the New England mode of communication. Like the
stonecutters and craftman of the mid-19th century New England,
Frost left New England for the gold of somewhere else, in his case,
the American communal clusters of literati in Europe at the turn of
the 20th century. He returned to New England 2 years later, an
expatriate re-patriated to the fire and ice of New England weather
and the hot and cold of American politics, to try his hand at
farming. That too was short-lived. He turned his hand to writing
poetry.
Have you ever have tried to write poetry in breath-cold,
un-insulated cabins of New England? The very air demands long
concentrations and brief exposition. It sharpens the mind as it
numbs your fingers. Maybe that's why I like this poem, aside from
its craftsmanship. What I think this poem is about is the
experience of extremes, the extreme's of "warmth : extreme excess,
extreme lack." That polarity dominates the poem. And while excesses
may be typical of New England weather, the narrator, however, is
not Frost himself living in New England, but someone, the "I",
living in the "world" where (s)he has experienced those polarities.
The I, of course, is you and me, the voice of humanity speaking in
simple words of deep wisdom, like the narrator in Blake, or
Dickinson. We have all tasted desire, we have all known hate, we
have all participated in the destruction of the world. We burn
people with our desire and we chill them with our hate. The
narrator is expressing a formula here re-enforced by the structure
of the poem on the page.
Fire and ice end line 1 and line 2, respectively : the thesis
lines, the proposition. Desire and fire are linked as rhyming end
words at lines 3 and 4 respectively ; hate and ice are linked as
unrhymed end words at line 6 and 7 respectively. I am rushing at
"the meaning" here, obviously, but I want to get to the enigma of
line 5 : "But if I had to perish twice//," the kernel line, the
line from which for me the message or significance of the poem
radiates. To get at this lines import, cut and paste : take out "if
I had to perish twice//," leaving line 6 to absorb the "but" into
itself so line 6 would read "But I think I know enough of hate//."
Omitting the enigma omits the vital suggestion that hatred leads to
two deaths. And the ponderousness of two deaths is re-enforced by
semantic contrast : sensation/softness of the fire choice
(taste,desire,favor- pun on flavor?- fire) with hardness of the
mental/ice choice(I think I know), where "ice" and great" get heavy
end line emphasis because of the awkwardly divided three word lines
of both line 8 and 9 ("Is also great//And would surfice"//).
So what do we now know from the narrator. We know now that the
world dies once from desire, twice from hatred. Can we now
interpolate what the second death might be? Even if we haven't
explicated what the first one is? I think not. We have this same
problem in St. Francis of Assisi's "Canticle", don't we? And we've
had this same problem in the New Testament with writers talking
about being born again.
Birth and death: fire and ice; still an enigma.
*From : Modern American and British Poetry, ed. by Louis
Untermeyer,
Harcourt,Brace and World, N.Y., 1955, page 59.
_________________________________________________________
POEM : "LOVE’S GROWTH"
PUBLISHED : circa 1633
POET : JOHN DONNE (1572- 1631)
[Love's growth poem goes here]
John Donne’s poem “Love’s Growth,” one of
22 poems and 7 Holy Sonnets selected for the Fourth Norton
Anthology of Poetry, Fourth Edition, exhibits many
of the signative qualities of Donne’s work, especially the
distinctness of the literary persona, that is, the voice in the
poem or sonnet which illicits our response. It also exhibits a
complex matrix of metaphors which were the Renaissance poet’s
image stock : tropes or conceits on the subjects of alchemy, the
five elements, the muses, the heavenly spheres and angels,
like-cures-like, lovers frozen by neglect, etc. (See footnote 1
)
My response to this poem, what I hear, is a poem that begins as
many of his do, with a clear conversational-toned “I”
statement about an issue, given directly to me, the reader, almost
as if the persona speaking were sitting next to me on a park bench
reflecting on life’s lessons. The lesson here , as I hear the
persona or perhaps the personas , is that because love is
“..as all else,..elemented too,” i.e. composed of the
finite elements of earth, air, fire, and water-- “all stuff
paining soul and sense”--and is not a perfect balance of
them, i.e. a “quintessence”, as he had been
taught--compare “The Fifth Element” recently screened--
love can paradoxically increase.
The persona of the first stanza is pondering on the mutability of
all things, and, in this case, both that of his attitude, and of
[his?] “Gentle love deeds.” That is, the persona
thought his love absolute, unsullied by material level elements,
but now his love has changed and grown. So has his opinion. The
concluding line of the poem, “No winter [of absence?] shall
abate the spring’s increase [of love]", perhaps says it all.
But, of course, while a poem may have something to say,
that’s not all there is to a poem. Because the poem functions
as a matrix of tensions within itself and within me the reader.
That is what I want to talk about, these creative tensions : both
this feeling of tension between a persona of spontaneous feeling
and thought, and another persona, one of strict conscience and deep
reflection, (both of whom seem to speak as one in stanza one but
separate in later stanzas), as well as the tension (and cohesion)
between and among the interweaving metaphors within the poem (See
footnote 2 ). But first, some groundwork about the poem’s
rhetorical substance.
As a sonnet, the poem’s line count is greater than the
traditional sonnet of 14 lines. “Love’s Growth”
is 28 lines, divided into a pair of two stanzas of 14 lines each,
with the sestets at stanzas one and three and the octets at two and
four, thus doubling and inverting the standard Italian sonnet
(eight first and six second) as the Norton footnote points out.
Thus it is a double sonnet; two sonnets in one, appropriate for a
sonnet about increase. Perhaps it is, as the Norton footnotes
suggest, a poem about pregnancy.
It has a formal rhyme scheme, i.e. ABABCC DEEDFFGG HIHIJJ KLKLMMNN,
expresses different aspects of a single thought, which is resolved
or summed up, as I noted by the last line of the poem, inside a
concluding couplet. And, interestingly, the concluding couplet
(climactic structure) of all but the last couplet which concludes
in one line-- speak with a certainty and resolve ; this, I think,
is the persona of strict conscience and judgment. And in each
couplet, love as the topic (the tenor of the metaphors) is imaged
intimately with natural things or natural processes or is
personified by such (the vehicles).
stanza one couplet -- infinite, spring
stanza two couplet -- elemented, contemplation,doing
stanza three couplet -- blossoms, bough, root
stanza four last line -- winter, spring
The effect of this “positioning” of love is somewhat
similar to the effect of a product advertisement : the product
(love) is consistently associated with healthy, clean, natural,
uplifting images. Here the consistency results in love’s
linkage with nature’s seasons and growth cycles.
The other persona, therefore, if there is another, contributes all
the other lines before the concluding couplets: this is the voice
of spontaneity and poetic fancy, doubts, scientific babbling,
confessions, and self recriminations, the voice which brings up
“all else.” If we start with the diction of the rest of
these lines and list all the nouns, we get a sense of the world of
the other persona as well as the things that support the
poem’s matrix of metaphors, a matrix usually termed
“metaphysical conceits” by the literary critics.
vicissitude,
season, grass, medicine, sorrow, quintessence, stuffs, soul, sense,
sun, vigor, mistress, muse, firmament, stars, sun, water, circles,
additions, spheres, heaven, spring, heat, princes, action (war),
taxes, peace.
Is this really two persona, or am I just evidence gathering for a
forced conclusion? That there are two persona in this one poem may
be debatable. But what is obvious is a kind of dialectic : a going
out, and then a coming back in ; first a sensitivity to the outer
world and its complexities, and then a drawing back to a smaller
quieter space to point to the parallel between the outer and the
inner, with resolving end couplets at lines 5&6,13&14,
19&20, and 27&28 to finalize the dialectic, and reify (and
perhaps deify via multiple metaphors ) nature’s processes of
growth.
This dialectic within the persona, or by the personas, of the poem
places the poet in a certain posture to his subject. While I cannot
identify that posture or give it a term from literary criticism, I
sense that the posture here in “Love’s Growth” is
common to both Donne and to the sonnets of the Renaissance, and was
of great appeal to his Renaissance audience. While literary
discussions today, for instance the symposium “Poetry--Who
needs it?” at Lynchburg College (March 14, 2000), focus on
the question of “where have all the audiences gone,” a
more productive focus, I think, would be on where has all the
knowledge gone”. For I think that Donne’s personas had
great appeal precisely because they were not “idiots”--
see footnote 8, Elegy VII, line1-- and could display their
knowledge of the best available ideas about the workings of nature
while skillfully templating that knowledge into the sonnet
obsession and sexual interest of their audience (See footnote
3).
Where or how the meter of this poem under girds these thematic and
semantic events is not entirely clear to me, but several matters
are worth mentioning. Of the poems 28 lines, 22 are pentameter, 4
are trimeter, and one is hexameter. Of the poems 133 feet, 75 are
iambic, 33 are trochaic, 25 are spondaic and pyrrhic, and 1 is
dactylic. One pattern of these scansion elements is as follows
:
stanza 1
iambic
69%
trochaic
12%
iambic excess
over trochaic +47%
stanza 2 iambic
43%
trochaic
29%
iambic excess
over trochaic +14%
stanza 3 iambic
46%
trochaic
34%
iambic excess
over trochaic +12%
stanza 4 iambic
67%
trochaic
22%
iambic excess
over trochaic +45%
I would argue that this distribution of the accentual patterns
speeds up stanza two and three giving them, as the Norton Anthology
editors put it, a “ lighter, quicker, more buoyant
movement,” while in comparison, stanza one and four are
slower and closer to the “biblical cadence” of iambic
pentameter. Could I suggest that this is a mime of the rhythm of
love making?
In any case, “Love’s Growth”, also titled
“Spring” in some printings (See footnote 4 ), is a
delight of double-entendres (puns) which serve to fuse the primary
thematic units of the poem : the persona's consciousness fusing
with love in the first two stanzas, and then love fusing with the
seasons and heat in the last two, the “turn” occurring
in each case at the beginning of the last quatrain of the 14 line
sonnet units. Repeated readings only re-enforce my impression that
this poem is an intricate semantic machine of the highest order :
persona, theme, rhyme, meter, diction, and sonnet structure all
lean in and away from each other in a rhythm that creates a dynamic
tension no different than a windmill and its blades. And there is
constant delight in feeling the wind of its turning.
FOOTNOTES
footnote 1
“signitive qualities”: Donne’s particular genius
of poesy and insight, his signature, so to speak : reflections on
life’s and love’s apparent paradoxes in a rich tapestry
of conceits that reflect the general five element science and
heaven-earth polarity politics of his day, using an evocative elder
narrator who seems to be talking directly to male relational
dilemmas with the female sex, employing the element of
“syntactical surprise.” For example, Holy Sonnet #5 ,
lines 1&2: “I am a little world made cunningly// Of
elements and an angelike sprite..”
footnote 2
Handbook to Literature, ed. by Thrall,Hibbard, and Holman, The
Odessy Press, p.218. I am indebted to the editors for the
distinction “spontaniety of consciousness vs strictness of
conscience” used in defining hebraism and hellenism as forces
in tension in western literature.
footnote 3
Here in our narrative we could comment on the steady
compartmentalization of knowledge since the 16th century, and how
Donne’s readers could flatter themselves that they knew all
about nature because they could read and understood sonnets of the
times.
footnote 4
See Norton Anthology of Poetry, Fourth Edition, page 269, footnote
4.
_________________________________________________________
[UNDER CONSTRUCTION]
POEM : “Song of Myself” *
PUBLISHED : circa (1891-92)
POET : Walt Whitman (18XX - XXXX )
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer
grass...
*See The Norton
Anthology of Poetry, 4th Edition,
page 961.
