Poetry – Page 4 – Shenandoah

Lincoln in Marble by Henry Hart

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The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

No one shoos pigeons from his marble hair
or sandblasts tears of soot from craters
in his cheeks. No sculptor climbs a ladder
to carve or hoist his stovepipe hat.

Having stared so long at the moldy onion
of the Capitol, his eyes solidify to chalk.
His shadow slips toward fluted columns
and skies doublecrossed by jets.

Stars fall into the black reflecting pool
like snow on the grave of his beloved Ann.
Again he fingers a jack-knife in his pocket
while a nighthawk cheeps on a branch.

A man in torn army coat and camouflage fatigues
pushes a shopping cart full of amputated limbs
from Bull Run through Washington’s mud.
Cars filibuster up Rock Creek.

Where Whitman wrote letters home for the dying,
offering them sweetcrackers and raspberries
on hospital cots of pine boughs,
grass fades like dollar bills.

Shadows touch the bronze boot
of a bandoliered solider rubbed to gold
by NRA lobbyists, slip toward a monument
splitting green turf like a beached destroyer.

How many ghosts have read the Braille
carved in its black hull? How many
have seen the dead light candles
and float them across the Potomac?

Soon tourists dressed like John Wilkes Booth
scuffle beneath Lincoln’s stone boots,
trigger fingers poised on loaded cameras.
Planes reopen the wound in his head.

He stares at monumental clouds,
like the time he threw away his flintlock
and stood on a stump in a cleared field
waiting like marble for the words to come.

The Lincoln Memorial at night. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Henry Hart has written three books of poetry (The Ghost Ship, The Rooster Mask, and Background Radiation). His poems have been published in The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review, and other journals, and served as a founding editor of the international poetry journal Verse. Henry Hart is currently a Professor of English and Humanities at the College of William and Mary. “Lincoln in Marble” was previously published in Shenandoah Volume 47, Number 3.

On the week of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday and with the upcoming 150^th anniversary of his assassination, Henry Hart’s poem explores the ways we commemorate one of the nation’s greatest presidents. However, the poem’s tone reflects the grim reality of Lincoln’s legacy; though we build monuments to the man and know his face, we fail to shoo the pigeons from the monument’s hair or prevent his eyes from becoming chalky after gazing upon the Capitol and the modern government. It’s somewhat easy to trivialize the man whose face is so commonplace that it greets you every time you see a penny on the sidewalk or pull a five dollar bill out of your pocket. The line “grass fades like dollar bills” reminds us of this fact and brings attention to Lincoln’s modern reputation. Tourists who visit the Lincoln Memorial (“dressed like John Wilkes booth”) and are interested in the spectacle of the monument itself rather than displaying deference to the actual man minimalize the enormous impact Lincoln had in shaping the country we know today. Hart’s final stanza recalls the reason why Abraham Lincoln is worth remembering even today by conjuring images of the Gettysburg Address, reminding us of the incredible challenges he faced as president in guiding the country through a Civil War and successfully rebuilding it as a united nation in its aftermath.

Those interested in recent publications about the life and death of Abraham Lincoln should check out the newly released books Mourning Lincoln by Martha Hodes, Lincoln’s Body by Richard Wightman Fox, and Founder’s Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln by Richard Brookhiser.

“Yorick’s Reply” by Tom Disch

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A prop of Yorick’s skull currently on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Shakespeare exhibit. © 2014 Ryan Scott.

The rub. Milord? Then, if you please, a bit
To the back. Yes, there, just where the mud
Has scabbed to it. But still I want to know:
The rub? Who ever forfeited his sleep
For fear of dreams? Dreams vary here on Earth,
And so they may hereafter. Why be perplexed?
Life is a dream, as I have heard, and if
Our death’s another, may we well not hope
For dreams that correspond to what we wish?
I did—and I have dreamt of you, with all
Your sweet advantages. A mother mild
And coddling. True, she is a whore, but so’s
Ophelia, that’s nothing new. She loves
And, what is more, she needs you. If I were you,
I would simply poison Claudius.
Then all is square, and you can your coitus
Take with a bare whatever. I jest, Milord,
And do exceed my limit—or yours, at least.
You grimace. Think: if life’s a dream, our wishes
Matter. Conform yourself to what may be
And leave the rest to molder here with me.

A statue of Hamlet in Stratford-upon-Avon. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. — A statue of Hamlet in Stratford-upon-Avon. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Though best known today as a science fiction writer, Thomas Disch’s work spans a plethora of genres and mediums. In addition to being a pioneer in the field of “New Wave” science fiction, which sought to elevate the genre from its pulp roots, Disch also tried his hand at video games, collaborating with Electronic Arts in 1987 to create the text-based adventure game Amnesia, and theatre, as the author of a metafictional retelling of Ben-Hur and the critically acclaimed poem/monologue The Cardinal Detoxes. Born in 1940 in Iowa and raised in Minnesota, Disch moved to New York City in the 1950s, a city to which he would always return despite his constant travel and even short periods of time living in England, Spain, Rome, and Mexico. Disch published his first short story in 1962 and his first novel, The Genocides, in 1965, kicking off a long and prolific career that lasted until his death in 2008.

In his poetry, Disch sought to appeal to a different audience than that which read his fiction. Consequently, it is hardly surprising that this piece concerns not science fiction but Shakespeare, imagining the skull of the dead jester Yorick replying to Hamlet’s lamentations. Interestingly, Disch’s Yorick seems to be responding more to Hamlet’s famous “To be or not the be” monologue rather than what the Prince of Denmark actually says to the skull in the graveyard. The tone of the poem is mocking toward the young Hamlet, opening with a pun off his comment, “perchance to dream; ay, there’s the rub” (Act Three, Scene One) and later urging the infamously indecisive hero to quit philosophizing and just kill his uncle already. Befitting a disembodied skull, Yorick is especially contemptuous of Hamlet’s dread of death, describing both life and what lies beyond as being dreams to be shaped by the mind. The former jester has not entirely forgotten his love for the child he once entertained, however, and ends the poem on a note of sympathy, exhorting Hamlet to let his fears lie dead with the past.

“Yorick’s Reply” was originally published in the fourth issue of Shenandoah’s thirty-eighth volume, printed in 1988. The poem is currently available in the latest collection of Disch’s poetry, About the Size of It.

“The Tulip-Flame” by Chloe Honum

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My sister’s painting this: a hill, a lane
that winds around the hill, and a wide field
of tulips with a centered tulip-flame.

She rolls her brush through gray and adds the rain
in tiny flicks, glinting arrows of cold.
My sister’s painting this: a hill, a lane.

Last year our mother died, as was her plan.
It’s simpler to imagine something could
have intervened. The centered tulip-flame

startles the scene; the surrounding ones are plain
pastels, while this one’s lit with a crimson fold.
My sister’s painting this: a hill, a lane

of cobblestones, a watery terrain
of dripping flowers. Her strokes, elsewhere controlled,
flare out and fray around the tulip-flame

as if it were an accident, a stain,
a blaze in the mid-point of a wet field.
My sister’s painting this: a hill, a lane,
a tulip field, and one astounding flame.

Chloe Honum grew up in Auckland, New Zealand and currently lives in Lenox, Massachusetts. She has a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and an M.F.A. from the University of Arkansas. Her poems have appeared in places such as Poetry Magazine and The Paris Review, and she has been awarded a Ruth Lily Fellowship. Her first collection of poems, The Tulip-Flame, was published in 2013 and was selected as winner of the 2013 Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize. The collection is based on her personal life, and she uses rich imagery to portray subjects ranging from her mother’s suicide to the world of ballet. The poem was first published in Shenandoah, Volume 58, Number 3.

“The Tulip-Flame” paints a picture of the power that a glimpse of hope can have during the battle with depression. The poem is centered on the suicide of the narrator’s mother and its impact on the life of her family. Honum structures the poem as a villanelle, which appeals to the reader through its defining feature of repetition. In each stanza, the repetitions alternate, the first being “a hill and a lane” and the second “a centered tulip flame.” In the last stanza, the two phrases are repeated together. The repetitions create a soothing function that fits with the poems sorrow and ability to recover balance.

Honum uses the painting to symbolize the narrator’s emotional state following the tragedy. Through the painting, Honum brings depression to life as different images illustrate the stages of depression. The hill symbolizes an obstacle to her path. Her use of greyness represents death and despair, as the “glinting arrows of cold” shock the narrator with the realization of her mother’s suicide (5). The rain and water represent suffering and tears. These images provide the backdrop for a field of tulips. The tulips are colorless and plain, as depression has stripped the narrator of life and passion.

Yet, centered amongst these colorless figures is a tulip that resembles a flame. Amidst the gloomy setting lies one single object of color, astonishing, bright, and uncontained, but random, “as if were an accident, a stain” (16). The reader imagines that the narrator, fraught with depression, has found a flame of hope within herself, which cannot be explained. One can infer that perhaps to overcome the gloominess and difficulty within her life, the narrator must focus on the single point of hope. The mother resorted to suicide because of her failure to focus on hope, as the narrator suggests “the centered tulip flame” could have, but did not, intervene. However, the single tulip remains ablaze within the narrator’s heart in the midst of her mourning. As the central object of the poem, the tulip-flame represents the power of hope to bring passion back to life during hardships. After reading the poem, one is left with the sense that perhaps soon the entire field of flowers will burst into flames, unable to resist the radiance and immensity of the centered tulip-flame.

The Daffodils by William Wordsworth

Andrea Siso

By William Wordsworth

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A Poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

(Poems in Two Volumes, 1807)

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“The Daffodils” touches upon the subject of loneliness–a sentiment commonly felt at this time of year. However, Wordsworth advises his audience that it is possible to relish in this feeling, as one must only be reminded of its value. In other words, the “bliss of solitude” can be found by taking pause to appreciate what one encounters, alone. The cloud could be seen as lonely, but could also be seen as free. Free to gaze upon dancing daffodils; free to find other pleasures previously hidden by the distraction of companionship.

William Wordsworth was one of the main figures of the British Romanticism movement, and was Britain’s Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.