Off the Shelf Archive ~May

Before the month is completely over, it's time to switch out the Off the Shelf selection once again. Browsing through the past entries, I discovered I'd yet to post anything by Theodore Roethke. Born in Saginaw, Michigan, Roethke (1908-1963) belongs to that period of American poetry between Whitman and Ginsberg, and was influenced by T.S. Elliot, W.H. Auden, and Whitman himself. The son of a German immigrant market farmer whose death when the poet was fifteen profoundly influenced his life and work, Roethke spent his young years working in his father's greenhouse. He later taught English at Michigan State University and the University of Washington, and published several volumes of poetry and was, as poets go, well-known and successful. His life was marked by episodes of severe manic depression and heavy drinking, and he died at 55 of a heart attack.  I've selected two of his shorter works, different in style and theme: Dolor, and Journey into the Interior. 

You can find them here in the  Off the Shelf Archive   for June 2011.

In order to make room for this new selection, Robert Frost's The Hill Wife makes a final appearance before entering the archives. As always, feel free to comment on either poem here, as comments are disabled off the main page, and suggestions for next time are always welcome.

The Hill Wife

by Robert Frost

I. LONELINESS

Her Word

One ought not to have to care
So much as you and I
Care when the birds come round the house
To seem to say good-bye;

Or care so much when they come back
With whatever it is they sing;
The truth being we are as much
Too glad for the one thing

As we are too sad for the other here --
With birds that fill their breasts
But with each other and themselves
And their built or driven nests.

II. HOUSE FEAR

Always -- I tell you this they learned --
Always at night when they returned
To the lonely house from far away
To lamps unlighted and fire gone gray,
They learned to rattle the lock and key
To give whatever might chance to be
Warning and time to be off in flight:
And preferring the out- to the in-door night,
They learned to leave the house-door wide
Until they had lit the lamp inside.

III. THE SMILE

Her Word

I didn't like the way he went away.
That smile! It never came of being gay.
Still he smiled- did you see him?- I was sure!
Perhaps because we gave him only bread
And the wretch knew from that that we were poor.
Perhaps because he let us give instead
Of seizing from us as he might have seized.
Perhaps he mocked at us for being wed,
Or being very young (and he was pleased
To have a vision of us old and dead).
I wonder how far down the road he's got.
He's watching from the woods as like as not.

IV. THE OFT-REPEATED DREAM

She had no saying dark enough
For the dark pine that kept
Forever trying the window-latch
Of the room where they slept.

The tireless but ineffectual hands
That with every futile pass
Made the great tree seem as a little bird
Before the mystery of glass!

It never had been inside the room,
And only one of the two
Was afraid in an oft-repeated dream
Of what the tree might do.

V. THE IMPULSE

It was too lonely for her there,
And too wild,
And since there were but two of them,
And no child,

And work was little in the house,
She was free,
And followed where he furrowed field,
Or felled tree.

She rested on a log and tossed
The fresh chips,
With a song only to herself
On her lips.

And once she went to break a bough
Of black alder.
She strayed so far she scarcely heard.
When he called her --

And didn't answer -- didn't speak --
Or return.
She stood, and then she ran and hid
In the fern.

He never found her, though he looked
Everywhere,
And he asked at her mother's house
Was she there.

Sudden and swift and light as that
The ties gave,
And he learned of finalities
Besides the grave.



Image: Boreas, by John William Waterhouse, 1903
courtesy wikimedia commons

Off the Shelf Archive ~April

Sadly, the Archivist was much taken up during the month of April with writing a poem a day for National Poetry Month (in company with the talented poets Ami Mattison, Brian Miller, Patricia Caspers, and the inimitable Fireblossom, who all gave tons of support.) Therefore, the page known as Off the Shelf, where  the intriguing works of the mostly Dead Poets I fancy are showcased, was allowed to get quite dusty and neglected. 

But a new month is here, and a new selection makes it's appearance at last. This is a poem I first read in my late teens that made quite an impression on me, a classic of its kind from a writer who's celebrated perhaps more than he's read these days, the great American poet Robert Frost. It's a fey piece called The Hill Wife, and has always been my favorite work of Frost's.

You'll find it here, in the Off the Shelf Archives.

As always, feel free to comment on either the current or prior selection here, as comments are disabled off the main page.

Now, before it goes into the vault of time, here's a last look at the selection that's been sitting on the shelf all April, an excerpt from  The Genie of the Beach, by the Lebanese poet Khalil Hawi, and my review of the book in which it appears translated:

Review:  

Naked in Exile, Khalil Hawi’s The Threshing Floors of Hunger 

 Interpretation and Translation by Adnan Haydar and Michael Beard,  

© Adnan Haydar & Michael Beard, 1984, Three Continents Press. 

All rights reserved.

First, a portion of one of the poems included, Hawi's The Genie of the Beach:

The Genie of the Beach

I.                  Gypsy Tents

That’s All I’ve ever been—a dark-skinned girl

In gypsy tents that have no land, no pegs,

No chattels that impede, that carried by the wind

Sail on beyond the season’s feasting days,

And land on wayward roads from feast to feast.

The wind wipes out the traces that are left

From flames and revels round the gypsy tents.

II.              Mountain Stags and Horses of the Sea

And what has there been incarnate in my flesh

Except the nature of the mellow sand,

The thirsty sand yearning with lusty want

For the outrageous fury of the waves

Which furrow and assault the beaches and the straits?

Will echoes haunt me from their mountain range?

There on the coasts of the primeval snow

The shades of poplar burned my flesh;

Their verdant branches left unveiled

Fermented embers in my depths.

And feverish visions I beheld all day;

Things in the ponds of boiling blood,

Dim shapes in rising steam are veiled,

A raging stag looms into sight,

Rubbing its eyes blood red, routing the herd.

Will I be trampled by the raging stags?

My body moans, it cringes, pants, becomes

Mere fodder, meadows, verdant fields.

The wild mint wallows in the crannied mountain foot,

And in my valleys, groves of pansies throng,

Both frenzied stags in wild abandonment

And horses of the sea surge through the pansied fields,

And galloping they race into the bay

Urged by their frothing mates, thrusting their way along,

Yet there remains within the tender flesh

The mirror's clearness and the glowing tan

Of tranquil rip'ning clusters of the vine,

Trodden by gales, yet unaffected still.

III.           In the City

And in the city’s night, what have I been

Except the harvest feast on threshing floors,

Except the apple of the fertile wild?

I offered of my flesh: blood, wine and bread.

And I beheld with great perplexity

A body plied and squeezed by fetters ten.

What could it feed on but its fever's sweat

To make it shoot and bud and carry fruit?

~Khalil Hawi

Translation © Adnan Haydar and Michael Beard

~from Naked in Exile, Khalil Hawi’s The Threshing Floors of Hunger Interpretation and Translation by Adnan Haydar and Michael Beard,  
© Adnan Haydar & Michael Beard, 1984, Three Continents Press. All rights reserved.

You'll find this poem in its entirety along with several others and a great deal of insightful explanation and critique in Naked in Exile. The book contains three major poems by Hawi, The Cave, The Genie of the Beach, and Lazarus 1962. All are given in both the original Arabic and in English translation, section by section on facing pages.

As far as someone with no knowledge of Arabic can tell,the poems are meticulously and sonorously translated by the authors, rendered in a meter also reconfigured and 'translated' so as to be readily understood  by the Western ear, and then put in an intelligent and complex historical perspective, with additional in-depth but clear and readable analysis and discussion of each, as well as their place in the timeline of Hawi’s life and work unfolding in the period of the Lebanese Civil War. Hawi's own interpretations and introductions are included, and the authors also scrupulously go over and examine existing interpretations of the poems from an assortment of critics, as well as present their own.

Of his suicide, the authors of Naked in Exile  write: " His death was one of very many civilian casualties which accompanied that military occupation. If we single him out, it is because his life work supplies a voice for the many thousand silent victims... Hawi's death is...that of a thinker who wanted nothing better than an opportunity to escape his own pessimism (and who sometimes...succeeded)...[and] who was so totally unequipped with the defenses most of us put into play at the sight of suffering in others that he simply found himself unable to witness such suffering again."

I greatly enjoyed this scholarly and professional work which still manages to so skillfully convey the dark,layered, intensely mystical and lyrical quality of the poetry of Khalil Hawi. It 's available at both Barnes and Noble and Amazon.

Disclosure—I bought and read this book on my own dime and initiative, and received no compensation for this review. 

 

Bayadir al-ju is the original Arabic title of this collection as used by Hawi for the 1965 Beirut publication.

I wrote more about this selection back in March in this post.