COURSE :Introduction To Literature

DEPARTMENT : ENGLISH

PROFESSOR : WATERS

Lecture5 : Poetry2

View the Power Point Presentation of the Lecture

This never before released recording of Langston Hughes was made at the Library of Congress in 1959. In it Hughes talks about having his work discovered by the then famous poet Vachael Lindsay while he was working as a busboy. By the time of the recording Hughes was a well-known author himself and talks about the themes of his poetry including music, black life in America, and the struggle for racial equality. Here Hughes reads some of his most famous poems including his first “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “Mother to Son,” and “The Weary Blues.” He also reads “Harlem Too” from which Lorraine Hansberry got the title of her Pulitzer prize winning play A Raisin in the Sun. This is “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” one of my earliest poems written in 1920 just after I came out of high school. The way this poem came to be written while I was going to Mexico to visit my father who lived in Mexico City and on the train going across the Mississippi River just outside St. Louis I looked out the window and I saw this great muddy river flowing down toward the heart of the South and I began to think about what this river had meant to the Negro people how in the sense our history was linked to this river. How in slavery time my grandmother told me that to be sold down the Mississippi is one of the worst things that could happen to a Negro slave and then I remembered that I had read about Abraham Lincoln going down the Mississippi as a young man and he went on the raft to New Orleans and he saw human beings bought and sold in the same market there. He was so horrified by this that he hadn’t forgot it and many years later of course you know it was Lincoln who signed the Emancipation Proclamation and so as the train went on into the gathering dusk because it had been about sunset when we crossed the river. I took my father’s letter out of my pocket and began to write on the back of his letter this poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” I've known rivers:I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. Poem “Mother to Son” Well, son, I'll tell you: Life for me ain't been no crystal stair. It's had tacks in it, And splinters, And boards torn up, And places with no carpet on the floor—Bare. But all the time I'se been a-climbin' on, And reachin' landin's, And turnin' corners, And sometimes goin' in the dark Where there ain't been no light. So, boy, don't you turn back. Don't you set down on the steps. 'Cause you finds it's kinder hard. Don't you fall now—For I'se still goin', honey, I'se still climbin', And life for me ain't been no crystal stair. One of the poems that I wrote in Harlem in the 1920s is a poem called “The Weary Blues.” Droning a drowsy syncopated tune, Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, I heard a Negro play. Down on Lenox Avenue the other night By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light He did a lazy sway . . .He did a lazy sway . . .To the tune o' those Weary Blues. With his ebony hands on each ivory key He made that poor piano moan with melody. O Blues! Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool. Sweet Blues! Coming from a black man's soul. O Blues! In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan--"Ain't got nobody in all this world, Ain't got nobody but ma self. I's gwine to quit ma frownin' And put ma troubles on the shelf." Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor. He played a few chords then he sang some more-- "I got the Weary Blues And I can't be satisfied. Got the Weary Blues And can't be satisfied--I ain't happy no mo'And I wish that I had died." And far into the night he crooned that tune. The stars went out and so did the moon. The singer stopped playing and went to bed While the Weary Blues echoed through his head. He slept like a rock or a man that's dead. The secrets of writing light verse according to the master of the discipline Ogden Nash is to show the other side of poetry in reverse. In this 1959 recording Nash goes on to declare the light versifier can be just as unhappy as the serious versifiers. Nash even had a sense of humor about the importance of his writing. To use his own words again, all that’s said has been said before and better but I have been able to support a family by saying it again and saying it worse. Nash drew his material largely from the headlines of his time. All the same his hilarious insights into marriage, family life, and even his frustrations with the changing language still seem fresh today. Nash is the poems “I Do, I Will, I Have” and “I Must Tell You About My Novel” even his voice is funny. “I Do, I Will, I Have”How wise I am to have instructed the doorman to order my carriage; I am about to volunteer a definition of marriage. Just as I know that there are two Hagens, Walter and Copen, I know that marriage is a legal and religious alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut and a woman who can't sleep with the window open. Moreover just as I am unsure of the difference between flora and fauna and flotsam and jetsam I am quite sure that marriage is the alliance of two people one of whom never remembers birthdays and the other never forgetsam, And he refuses to believe there is a leak in the water pipe or the gas pipe and she is convinced she is about to asphyxiateor drown, And she says Quick get up and get my hairbrushes off the window sill, it's raining in, and he replies Oh they're all right, it's only raining straight down. That is why marriage is so much more interesting than divorce, Because it's the only known example of the happy meeting of the immovable object and the irresistible force. So I hope husbands and wives will continue to debate and combat over everything debatable and combatable, Because I believe a little incompatibility is the spice of life, particularly if he has income and she is pattable. Two of the three poems read here by W. H. Auden were written in tribute to other writers. When Auden wrote his eulogy “In Memory of William Butler Yeats” in 1939 the young writer was already considered by many to be the heir apparent to the great Irish poet. In “Musee de Beaux Arts” Auden remarks on the ability of painters to find ordinary moments in extraordinary events. Finally Auden reads one of his many songs “If I Could Tell You” instructs us in the gentlest of lyrics that human wisdom, his folly. This is W. H. Auden reading from his poem March 14, 1914 “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”He disappeared in the dead of winter: The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, And snow disfigured the public statues; The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. What instruments we have agree The day of his death was a dark cold day. Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays; By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems. But for him it was his last afternoon as himself, An afternoon of nurses and rumours; The provinces of his body revolted, The squares of his mind were empty, Silence invaded the suburbs, The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers. Now he is scattered among a hundred cities And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections, To find his happiness in another kind of wood And be punished under a foreign code of conscience. The words of a dead man Are modified in the guts of the living. But in the importance and noise of to-morrow When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse, And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed, And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom, A few thousand will think of this day As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual. What instruments we have agreeThe day of his death was a dark cold day. You were silly like us; your gift survived it all: The parish of rich women, physical decay,Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth. Earth, receive an honoured guest: William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry. In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark, And the living nations wait, Each sequestered in its hate; Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye. Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night,With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice; With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse,Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress; In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise. “Musee de Beaux Arts” About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters; how well, they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. In these next three poems recorded by Theodore Roethke in 1962 the poet moves from memories of a difficult childhood to adulthood. In “My Papa’s Waltz” Roethke views the world from the eyes of a child dancing with his drunken father. The second poem “The Waking” is one that cannot be understood in literal terms instead simply listen and let the words transport you to a place where you find your own meaning by entering the mood or spirit of the poem. Finally and perhaps the most sensual poem in this collection Roethke recounts a love affair in “I Knew a Woman.” “My Papa’s Waltz” The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy. We romped until the pans Slid from the kitchen shelf; My mother's countenance Could not unfrown itself. The hand that held my wrist Was battered on one knuckle; At every step you missed My right ear scraped a buckle. You beat time on my head With a palm caked hard by dirt, Then waltzed me off to bed Still clinging to your shirt. Each of the next two poems by Elizabeth Bishop was recorded at about the time it was written. The nearly 30 years separating the poems show the poet at very different stages in her life. The recording of “The Fish” was made in 1947 when Bishop was 36 years. She sounds very young and a bit tentative in recalling the details of catching a very old fish. In the second recording made in 1974 her voice is much deeper and surer. When Bishop recorded “Crusoe in England” told in the voice of an aging Robinson Crusoe the poem had not yet been published. “The Fish” I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of his mouth. He didn't fight. He hadn't fought at all. He hung a grunting weight, battered and venerable and homely. Here and there his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper, and its pattern of darker brown was like wallpaper: shapes like full-blown roses stained and lost through age. He was speckled with barnacles, fine rosettes of lime, and infested with tiny white sea-lice, and underneath two or three rags of green weed hung down. While his gills were breathing in the terrible oxygen--the frightening gills, fresh and crisp with blood, that can cut so badly--I thought of the coarse white flesh packed in like feathers, the big bones and the little bones, the dramatic reds and blacks of his shiny entrails, and the pink swim-bladder like a big peony. I looked into his eyes which were far larger than mine but shallower, and yellowed, the irises backed and packed with tarnished tinfoil seen through the lenses of old scratched isinglass. They shifted a little, but not to return my stare.--It was more like the tipping of an object toward the light. I admired his sullen face, the mechanism of his jaw, and then I saw that from his lower lip--if you could call it a lip grim, wet, and weaponlike, hung five old pieces of fish-line ,or four and a wire leader with the swivel still attached, with all their five big hooks grown firmly in his mouth. A green line, frayed at the end where he broke it, two heavier lines, and a fine black thread still crimped from the strain and snap when it broke and he got away. Like medals with their ribbons frayed and wavering, a five-haired beard of wisdom trailing from his aching jaw. I stared and stared and victory filled up the little rented boat, from the pool of bilge where oil had spread a rainbow around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange, the sun-cracked thwarts, the oarlocks on their strings, the gunnels--until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go. “Crusoe In England” The island smelled of goat and guano.The goats were white, so were the gulls, and both too tame, or else they thought I was a goat, too, or a gull. Baa, baa, baa and shriek, shriek, shriek, baa...shriek...baa... I still can't shake them from my ears; they're hurting now. The questioning shrieks, the equivocal replies over a ground of hissing rain and hissing, ambulating turtles got on my nerves. When all the gulls flew up at once, they sounded like a big tree in a strong wind, its leaves. I'd shut my eyes and think about a tree, an oak, say, with real shade, somewhere. I'd heard of cattle getting island-sick. I thought the goats were. One billy-goat would stand on the volcano I'd christened Mont d'Espoir or Mount Despair (I'd time enough to play with names), and bleat and bleat, and sniff the air. I'd grab his beard and look at him. His pupils, perpendicular, narrowed up and expressed nothing, or a little malice. I got so tired of the very colors! One day I dyed a baby goat bright red with my red berries, just to see something a little different. And then his mother wouldn't recognize him. Dreams were the worst. Of course I dreamed of food and love, but they were pleasant rather than otherwise. But then I'd dream of things like slitting a baby's throat, mistaking it for a baby goat. I'd have nightmares of other islands stretching away from mine, infinities of islands, islands spawning islands, like frogs' eggs turning into polliwogs of islands, knowing that I had to live on each and every one, eventually, for ages, registering their flora, their fauna, their geography. Just when I thought I couldn't stand it another minute longer, Friday came. (Accounts of that have everything all wrong.) Friday was nice. Friday was nice, and we were friends. If only he had been a woman! I wanted to propagate my kind, and so did he, I think, poor boy. He'd pet the baby goats sometimes, and race with them, or carry one around.--Pretty to watch; he had a pretty body. And then one day they came and took us off. Now I live here, another island, that doesn't seem like one, but who decides? My blood was full of them; my brain bred islands. But that archipelago has petered out. I'm old. I'm bored too, drinking my real tea, surrounded by uninteresting lumber. The knife there on the shelf--it reeked of meaning, like a crucifix. It lived. How many years did I beg it, implore it, not to break? I knew each nick and scratch by heart, the bluish blade, the broken tip, the lines of wood-grain on the handle...Now it won't look at me at all. The living soul has dribbled away. My eyes rest on it and pass on. The local museum's asked me to leave everything to them: the flute, the knife, the shriveled shoes, my shedding goatskin trousers(moths have got in the fur), the parasol that took me such a time remembering the way the ribs should go. It still will work but, folded up looks like a plucked and skinny fowl. How can anyone want such things?--And Friday, my dear Friday, died of measles seventeen years ago come March. Muriel Rukeyser was a poet who celebrated much that others found distasteful. Her open use of her art to make political statements made her a controversial figure in the poetry world and as these poems recorded in the 1960s and 70s show Rukeyser is still a controversial poet. When Rukeyser wrote the first poem “Night Feeding” in 1935 poems about breastfeeding were outside the norm but Rukeyser didn’t stop there. Much of her work openly embraced feminism called for an end to racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and war. In both “The Poem as Mask” and “Waiting for Icarus” Rukeyser combines classical imagery with contemporary. He said he would be back and we'd drink wine together He said that everything would be better than before He said we were on the edge of a new relation He said he would never again cringe before his father He said that he was going to invent full-time He said he loved me that going into me He said was going into the world and the sky He said all the buckles were very firm He said the wax was the best wax He said Wait for me here on the beach He said Just don't cry I remember the gulls and the waves
I remember the islands going dark on the sea I remember the girls laughing I remember they said he only wanted to get away from me I remember mother saying: Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot I remember she told me those who try out inventions are worse I remember she added: Women who love such are the worst of all I have been waiting all day, or perhaps longer. I would have liked to try those wings myself. It would have been better than this.