Image: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning – 1852. Portraits painted by Thomas Buchanan Read
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 10 “Yet, love, mere love, is beautiful indeed”
The speaker of sonnet 10 is beginning to reason that despite her flaws, the transformative power of love can change her negative, dismissive attitude.
Introduction and Text of Sonnet 10 “Yet, love, mere love, is beautiful indeed”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet 10 from Sonnets from the Portuguese finds the speaker’s attitude slowly but surely evolving. She is now allowing herself to reason that if God can love his lowliest creatures, surely a man can love a flawed woman. Thus, through that magic power, those flaws may be overcome.
Sonnet 10 “Yet, love, mere love, is beautiful indeed”
Yet, love, mere love, is beautiful indeed And worthy of acceptation. Fire is bright, Let temple burn, or flax; an equal light Leaps in the flame from cedar-plank or weed: And love is fire. And when I say at need I love thee … mark! … I love thee—in thy sight I stand transfigured, glorified aright, With conscience of the new rays that proceed Out of my face toward thine. There’s nothing low In love, when love the lowest: meanest creatures Who love God, God accepts while loving so. And what I feel, across the inferior features Of what I am, doth flash itself, and show How that great work of Love enhances Nature’s.
Reading
Commentary on Sonnet 10 “Yet, love, mere love, is beautiful indeed”
The speaker of sonnet 10 is beginning to reason that despite her flaws, the transformative power of love can change her negative, dismissive attitude. As she begins to turn her negativity around, she puts on a brighter glow of enthusiasm.
First Quatrain: The Value of Love
Yet, love, mere love, is beautiful indeed And worthy of acceptation. Fire is bright, Let temple burn, or flax; an equal light Leaps in the flame from cedar-plank or weed:
The speaker begins to focus on the value of love, finding that emotion to be “beautiful” and even “worthy of acceptation.” She likens love to fire and finds love to be “bright” as love is also a flame in the heart and mind. She contends that the power of fire and the light it emits remains the same force regardless of the fuel that feeds it—whether it is “from cedar-plank” or even if it is from “weed.”
Thus, the melancholy speaker is beginning to believe that her suitor’s love can burn as bright even if she is the motivation, although she metaphorically considers herself to be the weed rather than the cedar-plank.
Second Quatrain: Fire and Love
And love is fire. And when I say at need I love thee … mark! … I love thee—in thy sight I stand transfigured, glorified aright, With conscience of the new rays that proceed
The speaker continues the metaphorical comparison of love to fire and boldly states that love is, indeed, fire. She audaciously proclaims her love for her suitor and contends that by saying she loves him, she transforms her lowly self, and thereby she can arise transformed and even reflect an honest kind of glory. The awareness of the vibrations of love that exude from her being causes her to be magnified and made better than she normally believes herself to be.
First Tercet: God’s Love
Out of my face toward thine. There’s nothing low In love, when love the lowest: meanest creatures Who love God, God accepts while loving so.
The speaker avers that there is nothing about love that is “low.” God loves all of his creatures, even the lowliest. The speaker is evolving toward true acceptance of her suitor’s attention and affection, but she has to convince her doubting mind that there exist sufficiently good reasons for her to change her negative outlook.
Obviously, the speaker has no intention of changing her beliefs in her own low station in life. She carries her past in the heart and mind, and all of her tears and sorrows have permanently tainted her own view of herself. But she can turn toward acceptance and allow herself to be loved, and through that love, she can, at least, bask in its joy as a chilled person would bask in sunshine.
Second Tercet: The Transformative Powers of Love
And what I feel, across the inferior features Of what I am, doth flash itself, and show How that great work of Love enhances Nature’s.
The speaker will continue to think of herself as inferior, but because she can now believe that one as illustrious as her suitor can love her, she is opening her heart and mind to the possibility of the transformative powers of love. She still insists on her inferiority, asserting that she possesses “inferior features.”
And she must “feel” her way across such ingrained realities. But she also can now affirm that the power of love is so great that it can enhance the qualities and feature of Nature itself. Such a power demands respect, and the speaker is awakening to that reality.
Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” is an American (Innovative) sonnet, and it is one of the best poems written in the English language, particularly in the American vernacular.
Introduction and Text of “Those Winter Sundays”
Robert Hayden’s speaker in this nearly perfect innovative sonnet “Those Winter Sundays” is a man reflecting on his attitude and behavior during his childhood. Specifically, the speaker is remembering and dramatizing an event that involved his father. He comes to the conclusion that he should have behaved more kindly and respectfully toward his father who did so much for him.
Looking back at childish ways often reveals immature attitudes and behaviors. Such reminiscing can lead to feelings of guilt and recrimination for the immature behavior and selfish attitudes that are so common to youth. But those feelings prompted by contrasting an adult’s understanding to a child’s understanding need to be assuaged by forgiveness and knowledge of the human condition.
The speaker in this poem shows a mature, well-balanced attitude regarding his younger self that corrects the human tendency to castigate that younger self. He realizes that if he had known better he would have behaved better.
Those Winter Sundays
Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?
Robert Hayden reading “Those Winter Sundays”
Commentary on “Those Winter Sundays”
This excellent sonnet “Those Winter Sundays” is one of the best poems written in the English language, and Robert Hayden is one the finest poets writing in the American vernacular.
First Stanza: The Plain Truth
Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
The speaker begins by reporting the unvarnished fact that even on Sundays, the day that most people are apt to sleep in, his father as usual “got up early.” The father got up early and put on his clothes in a very cold house. The father then built the fire in the stove that would warm the rooms to make it comfortable for the rest of the family to rise without suffering the cold that the father had done.
The speaker refers to the kind of cold that the house experienced as “blueblack.” That descriptor provides an intense image that renders that cold as biting and bitter. That the cold was so intense further strengthens the love and affection that the father felt for his family, and the misery he was willing to suffer in order to make life more comfortable for his loved ones.
Even though the father had worked hard during the week to the point of having to suffer “cracked hands” from all his hard labor, the father still without pause got up even on Sundays to assure that his family’s comfort was provided. The image “made / banked fires blaze” arises from the custom of piling up wood inside the stove or fireplace to keep a low-level fire smoldering for long periods of time, such as over night.
This procedure then makes it easier for the wood to blaze into full flames faster than its would have done without the banking. Thus, the fire is made faster and more easily in the morning when it is most necessary. The poet has created a speaker whose freshness of language infuses his message with all of the characteristics of a dramatic masterpiece. The images build, dramatizing as well as relaying information, implying attitudes as well as stating them.
The poet’s skill has created a well-placed infusion of feeling, as he has his speaker plainly claim, referring to the father, “No one ever thanked him.” The speaker’s remorse is revealed; he makes it clear that he wishes he had thanked his father for his sacrifices, but alas, he did not. Furthermore, no one did, and that omission now grieves the adult as he looks back on the situation.
Second Stanza: The Duties of a Father
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Because of the father’s loving attention, the speaker could stay in bed warm and snug until the house was no longer suffering that “blueblack” cold but instead was all toasty warm. After the speaker wakes up but while still in bed, he can hear the cold being driven out of the house. He describes what he hears as “splintering, breaking.”
Again, the poet has infused a marvelous set of images that intensifies the meaning and skillfully dramatizes the events of this nearly perfect sonnet. What the speaker hears literally is his father chopping up wood, but to the child-speaker’s ears, it seemed as though the cold were literally being cracked and broken.
After the father had heated the house, he would call for his son to get up and get dressed. The speaker would do so, although “slowly.” Even though he was only a child, he always seemed to remain aware of the “chronic angers of that house.” The line “fearing the chronic angers of that house” seems to leave open some frightening possibilities for interpretation, and as might be expected, some critics have assumed that those angers signal an abusive father.
But such an interpretation makes no sense, however, unless one has overlooked the main message of the poem. The speaker would not likely be focusing on thanking the father, if he were testifying that the father had been an abuser. The “angers of the house” more likely refer to the house itself.
It likely had other issues beside the morning cold, for example, it might have had broken windows, leaky or noisy pipes, rodents, shabby furniture, or perhaps the floor-boards creaked when walked upon, or the roof leaked when it rained. After all, the speaker does designate that those angers belonged to the “house,” not to his father or to any other family member or resident of the house.
If meaning in a poem is derived from the poet’s biography, the poet’s actual meaning in the poem can become skewed. Readers must always look first and foremost to the poem for its meaning, not at the biography of the poet.
Third Stanza: The Indifference of Youth
Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?
In the final stanza, the speaker demonstrates that he now understands the sacrifices his father made for him and the rest of the family. Undeniably, the speaker feels shame that he often spoke so “indifferently” to this father. The speaker thus suggests that if he could go back and correct that mistake, he would speak to his father with the love and devotion that he now realizes the father deserved.
Not only had the father “driven out the cold” for him and the rest of the family, but he had also polished the speaker’s shoes. These tokens of love become symbols for all of the other duties that the father must have performed for the family. It is quite likely that the father also cooked breakfast of this son, drove him to church or school, or to wherever the son needed to go.
The speaker then asserts his all important remark, framing it as a question: “What did I know, what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices?” Far from excusing his childhood behavior, the speaker is, instead, very eloquently explaining it: he was just a child. And as a child, he did not have the maturity to perceive that his father was performing selfless acts. Few, if any, children are ever blessed with such foresight.
Because the speaker repeats the question “what did I know?,” he is emphasizing his childhood lack of awareness. The speaker simply did not know what it was like to be a father, with the responsibilities of caring for children and running a household, of going to work each week-day to keep the family fed, clothed, and warm with a roof over their heads.
If the speaker had been capable of processing all of this complex, adult activity, he would have behaved differently—not “indifferently” toward his father. With his adult awareness though maturity, the speaker is now able to offer a corrective to all those who have experienced those same feelings of guilt for past childhood immaturity.
Why should any adult continue to suffer from the guilt and recrimination over childhood immaturity when it is so simple?: Children simply do not know any better. Children cannot behave in ways that remain out of their range of knowledge.
Once they do know better as mature adults, and though they may continue to wish they had done better, they should be able to leave off the abject guilt and get on with their lives. This poem’s spiritual level of thought and feeling renders it the marvelous, nearly perfect poem that it is.
The poet’s skill in crafting his dramatic sonnet filled with poignant memories that offer universal succor to readers elevates its stature to the nearly sublime. Such a poetic achievement remains rare in 20th century secular poetry, so thoroughly infused with the postmodern muck of unprompted anger and the inability to recognize and accept truth.
Langston Hughes’ “Theme for English B” dramatizes the brainstorming session of a speaker who is a non-traditional college student. He has been given the assignment to write a paper about himself that is true. He muses on how to go about producing a page that the instructor will understand.
Note on Usage: “Negro,” “Colored,” and “Black”: Before the late 1980s in the United States, the terms “Negro,” “colored,” and “black” were accepted widely in American English parlance. While the term “Negro” had started to lose its popularity in the 1960s, it wasn’t until 1988 that the Reverend Jesse Jackson began insisting that Americans adopt the phrase “African American.” The earlier, more accurate terms were the custom at the time that Langston Hughes was writing.
Introduction with Text of “Theme for English B”
The speaker is a non-traditional, older student in a college English class who has been given the assignment to write a paper that “come[s] out of you.” The instructor has insisted that the paper will be “true” if the student simply writes from his own heart, mind, and experience, but the speaker remains a bit skeptical of that claim, thinking that maybe he is unsure that it is “that simple.
Theme for English B
The instructor said,
Go home and write a page tonight. And let that page come out of you— Then, it will be true.
I wonder if it’s that simple? I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem. I went to school there, then Durham, then here to this college on the hill above Harlem. I am the only colored student in my class. The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem, through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas, Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y, the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator up to my room, sit down, and write this page:
It’s not easy to know what is true for you or me at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I’m what I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you: hear you, hear me—we two—you, me, talk on this page. (I hear New York, too.) Me—who? Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love. I like to work, read, learn, and understand life. I like a pipe for a Christmas present, or records—Bessie, bop, or Bach. I guess being colored doesn’t make me not like the same things other folks like who are other races. So will my page be colored that I write?
Being me, it will not be white. But it will be a part of you, instructor. You are white— yet a part of me, as I am a part of you. That’s American. Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me. Nor do I often want to be a part of you. But we are, that’s true! As I learn from you, I guess you learn from me— although you’re older—and white— and somewhat more free.
This is my page for English B.
Reading of “Theme for English B”
Commentary on “Theme for English B”
In Langston Hughes’ “Theme for English B,” the speaker is musing on how to write a college essay about himself, after receiving the instructor’s assignment in his English class. The issue of race intrudes on the speaker’s thoughts, and he offers his experienced observation about the supposed differences between the races.
First Movement: Not a Simple Assignment
The instructor said,
Go home and write a page tonight. And let that page come out of you— Then, it will be true.
I wonder if it’s that simple? I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem. I went to school there, then Durham, then here to this college on the hill above Harlem. I am the only colored student in my class.
The speaker begins his musing by brainstorming, listing the reasons that the assignment may not be so simple as the instructor has made it sound. The student/speaker is only “twenty-two,” but he is older than most of the other students in his class.
He was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he attended school until he moved to New York. The speaker is now attending college in Harlem. He is the only “colored” student in the class. Despite the fact that the majority of the population of Harlem was African American, it was still a time when few of them attended college.
Second Movement: A Brainstorming Tactic
The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem, through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas, Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y, the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator up to my room, sit down, and write this page:
As the speaker begins to write, he traces the route that he takes from the college to his apartment. This step in his composition process seems to be a delaying tactic—a brainstorming activity just to get started thinking on the issue. He no doubt intuits that during the process of writing one thing leads to another, and he is thereby likely hoping that the trivial will lead to the profound.
Third Movement: Musing on What Is True
It’s not easy to know what is true for you or me at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I’m what I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you: hear you, hear me—we two—you, me, talk on this page. (I hear New York, too.) Me—who?
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love. I like to work, read, learn, and understand life. I like a pipe for a Christmas present, or records—Bessie, bop, or Bach.
The speaker then turns his attention to what might be “true” for himself and what might be “true” for a white instructor. It crosses his mind that the differences between them might be too great for the instructor to understand and appreciate a “colored” student’s experience.
Nevertheless, the speaker begins to examine what he feels is genuine for himself. He then guesses that what he sees helps make him what he is—a brilliant recovery from what might have sounded only like stalling in the brainstorming session that began his composition.
By tracing the route he takes to school, he has opened up the possibilities for what he sees and hears. What he sees and hears is Harlem as he somewhat awkwardly spills out his thinking. He hears himself, he hears his instructor, and now he has to “talk on this page” to this instructor. He hears “New York,” but then he circles back to himself with a question, implying a query into who he actually is.
The answer to his question is important because the assignment, after all, is to produce a piece of writing that tells the instructor who the student is, what he hopes for, and what is in his heart and mind. The instructor has intimated that if the student writer will search his own heart and mind, he will then write what is “true,” that is, what is genuine and accurate without obfuscation and guile. The speaker then moves on to catalogue what he likes: sleeping, eating, drinking, and being in love.
Furthermore, the speaker enjoys such activities as working, reading, learning, and he likes to “understand life”—all fine qualities that would likely impress a university instructor. He also likes to receive “a pipe for a Christmas present.”
Finally, the speaker lists other items that he enjoys getting such as records for Christmas because he enjoys listening to music. His taste in music turns out to be rather eclectic from “Bessie, bop, or Bach.” He must be simply gleeful that his music preferences create an interesting sounding alliterative series of names.
Fourth Movement: Communication between Black and White
I guess being colored doesn’t make me not like the same things other folks like who are other races. So will my page be colored that I write?
The opening two lines of this movement present the observation that this young man has tentatively made in his life, so he frames that observation as a “guess”—he surmises that race does not dictate what an individual “likes.”
Still as a young man, the speaker continues to wonder if how he feels and what he says will register with his white instructor. He, therefore, wonders if what he writes will be “colored.”
The speaker is contemplating what he believes is genuine for himself as the instructor has suggested, but he remains unsure that he can be understood by a white instructor if his words reveal him as “colored.”
Fifth Movement: Racial Boundaries
Being me, it will not be white. But it will be a part of you, instructor. You are white— yet a part of me, as I am a part of you. That’s American. Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me. Nor do I often want to be a part of you. But we are, that’s true! As I learn from you, I guess you learn from me— although you’re older—and white— and somewhat more free.
This is my page for English B.
The speaker then insists that what he writes will “not be white.” Yet it must still be part of the instructor. Although he is black and the instructor is white, they are surely still part of each other because “That’s American.”
Yet the speaker does remain aware that often whites do not want to be part of blacks, and he is also aware that the reverse is equally true. Despite those racial boundaries of separation, the speaker believes that they are still part of each other, whether they accept it or not.
Finally, the speaker concludes with a very significant discernment: the black student learns from the white instructor, and the white instructor can also learn from the black student, even if the instructor is older, white, and “somewhat more free” than the black student.
The speaker concludes by offering the explicit statement, “This is my page for English B.” He seems to feel that he has likely exhausted his exploration for the true, genuine, and accurate for this English assignment.
The Speaker of the Poem
Lest readers are tempted to take this poem as autobiography, a perusal of Hughes’ autobiographical work, The Big Sea, should disabuse them of that error. In that first autobiography (his second was I Wonder as I Wander), the poet describes his college days at Lincoln University, located in “the rolling hills of Pennsylvania,” not “on the hill above Harlem.”
Hughes does not broach any subject as mundane as an English class assignment as he describes his rough and tumble days at Lincoln. Also, Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, not “Winston-Salem.”
It is useful to remember that poets seldom write autobiographical details; they often create characters, as playwrights do. Hughes does take the opportunity in this piece to make a statement about race relations, a topic that he explored his whole life. But the speaker of a poem and the poet are often not the same, and to understand and appreciate the poem that fact must be kept in mind.
Controversy over the Phrase “African American”
The controversy surrounding the appellation, “African American,” reached an important pinnacle after Teresa Heinz Kerry, Caucasian wife of the 2004 presidential candidate and former senator John Kerry, identified herself as “African American.”
Teresa Heinz was born and raised in Mozambique, which is a country in Africa. Having been a resident of the USA since 1963, she qualifies most assuredly as an “African American.” The fact that she is white demonstrates the inaccuracy that Rev. Jackson foisted upon the black population of the United States of America, as he attempted to euphemize terms that need no euphemism.
Amanda Gorman’s “For Renee Nicole Good” tries to be an elegy, but it falters in displaying contrived diction, strained prosody, clichéd imagery, and manipulative historical framing—all compromising its position as an elegiac form.
Introduction and Text of “For Renee Nicole Good”
Spurred on by the January 7, 2026, incident in which Renee Nicole Good was fatally shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, inaugural poetry reader Amanda Gorman has focused on the unfortunate event for moral and political effect, prioritizing rhetoric over grief and glossing over a complex historical reality.
Gorman’s piece commemorates Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis woman, who was killed during a federal immigration enforcement operation. The incident, widely reported in major media, involved Good ramming her 4,000-pound Honda Pilot into an ICE officer, causing him to suffer internal injuries. Allegedly, the officer reacted by shooting Good in self-defense.
Political and media pundits have continued to debate federal characterizations of her actions, including claims that labeled her a “domestic terrorist.” Talking heads on various media outlets have continued to exploit the dismal affair by interpreting the videos of the event to fit their own narratives.
Gorman’s piece attempts to position Good’s death as the result of systemic failure couched in moral urgency; however, the literary execution of the piece weakens Gorman aim at elegy. The rime is forced and uneven, diction is inflated and often awkward, and imagery slips into abstraction or cliché.
The use of figurative language remains symbolic and moralistic, rather than being grounded in Good’s specific circumstances. While the piece attempts elegiac elevation, its rhetorical ornamentation and moral abstraction produce nothing more than mere posturing.
The piece remains merely decorative verse lacking emotional precision or nuanced engagement with historical fact. The piece remains an excellent example of “miselegy”—not elegy.
For Renee Nicole Good
Killed by I.C.E. on January 7, 2026
They say she is no more, That there her absence roars, Blood-blown like a rose. Iced wheels flinched & froze. Now, bare riot of candles, Dark fury of flowers, Pure howling of hymns.
If for us she arose, Somewhere, in the pitched deep of our grief, Crouches our power, The howl where we begin, Straining upon the edge of the crooked crater Of the worst of what we’ve been.
Change is only possible, & all the greater, When the labour & bitter anger of our neighbors Is moved by the love & better angels of our nature.
What they call death & void, We know is breath & voice; In the end, gorgeously, Endures our enormity.
You could believe departed to be the dawn When the blank night has so long stood. But our bright-fled angels will never be fully gone, When they forever are so fiercely Good.
Commentary on “For Renee Nicole Good”
Amanda Gorman’s piece is rhetorically inflated and abstract, inflating symbolic moral critique over concrete grief. It glosses over key facts and turns personal tragedy into generalized indictment. The result is both stylistic weakness and historical distortion.
First Movement: “They say she is no more”
They say she is no more, That there her absence roars, Blood-blown like a rose. Iced wheels flinched & froze. Now, bare riot of candles, Dark fury of flowers, Pure howling of hymns.
If for us she arose, Somewhere, in the pitched deep of our grief, Crouches our power, The howl where we begin, Straining upon the edge of the crooked crater Of the worst of what we’ve been.
The piece fails as elegy from its opening lines, with vagueness masquerading as intensity. The vague claim—“They say she is no more”—screams out as a slack, secondhand construction. The nondescript, distancing phrase “they say” bypasses the elegist’s most important obligation—to bear direct witness to loss.
Compare this avoidance to the stark authority of Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” or even a simple declarative statement such as “She is dead”: the circumlocution here drains the death of immediacy before the piece has properly begun.
The use of figurative language compounds the failure. “Blood-blown like a rose” aspires to vivid compression but achieves only decorative incongruity: ”blood-blown” suggests violence, yet the rose is so overworked a poetic symbol that it softens rather than sharpens what ought to be a disturbing image. Thus, the two terms are pitted against each other.
Similarly, “Iced wheels flinched & froze” is so obscure that it remains meaninglessness: wheels, obviously belong to the 4000 pound vehicle, but wheels do not flinch. The verb “flinch” describes a human reaction of nervousness, and to assign wheels this involuntary recoil is to sentimentalize machinery rather than illuminate human grief.
The lines “bare riot of candles, / Dark fury of flowers, / Pure howling of hymns” reveal another besetting weakness: the piece’s reliance on oxymoronic abstract nouns to manufacture feeling it has not earned. A riot is not bare; fury is not dark in any illuminating sense; howling is not pure; see Malcolm M. Sedam’s appraisal of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.”
These contradictions do not exert a useful tension; instead, they simply hint at emotional extremes without grounding them in any specific detail of the occasion, the mourners, or the deceased. Readers learn nothing about who this woman was or who weeps for her.
The closing lines’ prosody also undermines its ambitions. The lines “Crouches our power, / The howl where we begin” strain for prophetic weight but the inversion “crouches our power” is merely awkward, and “the howl where we begin” is so abstract as to be empty—begin what?
The final image of “the crooked crater / Of the worst of what we’ve been” gestures at collective historical shame but without any specific referent. Although this piece concerns a real death in a specific circumstance—one involving an officer’s injury and reaction of likely self-defense, the needed context is entirely absent.
Elegy, at its best, as in Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” earns any generalization by first anchoring itself in specificity. This piece attempts the reverse, and the result is rhetoric without a foundation that is, nevertheless, loud, shapeless, unmoved and unmoving.
Second Movement: “Change is only possible”
Change is only possible, & all the greater, When the labour & bitter anger of our neighbors Is moved by the love & better angels of our nature.
What they call death & void, We know is breath & voice; In the end, gorgeously, Endures our enormity.
The second movement opens with a conditional proposition in the first stanza of the movement, and this proposal immediately reveals the piece’s central confusion of purpose: elegy is not argument. The conditional “when” converts mourning to a political syllogism: grief is admissible only insofar as it produces the correct social outcome. The dead woman has already been subordinated to a thesis.
The phrase “better angels of our nature” compounds the problem by alluding to Lincoln’s famous phrase without earning it. In Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, the phrase carried the weight of a young nation on the verge of civil war; here it is borrowed to lend gravitas to what is essentially a political slogan. The allusion does not illuminate; it appropriates.
The lines “What they call death & void, / We know is breath & voice” represent the most telling failure in the passage. The opposition of “they” and “we” divides the world into the politically benighted and the enlightened speaker’s community, and in doing so it abandons the elegiac mode entirely.
Elegy confronts death as an irreducible, universal fact, intrinsic to the human condition; it does not reframe death as a misperception held by ideological opponents. To argue that death is not merely what the unenlightened “call” it is not consolation; it is evasion dressed as affirmation.
The closing couplet reaches for the lapidary but lands in obscurity. “Enormity” in precise usage means moral outrage or wickedness, which may be the intended meaning, but then “gorgeously” becomes grotesque in the wrong way, not productively paradoxical but simply muddled.
If “enormity” is used loosely to mean vastness or magnitude, the line collapses into vague self-congratulation: we are very large, and we endure. Neither reading redeems the couplet, and neither brings the reader any closer to a specific dead woman, her specific life, or the specific circumstances of her death. The piece has fully exchanged the particular for the rhetorical, and what endures is not grief but posture.
Third Movement: “You could believe departed to be the dawn”
You could believe departed to be the dawn When the blank night has so long stood. But our bright-fled angels will never be fully gone, When they forever are so fiercely Good.
The final movement opens with a conditional that immediately points to its own uncertainty: “You could believe departed to be the dawn.” The addition of the verb “believe” does not signal the tentativeness of honest doubt; it is the tentativeness of a versifier who knows the metaphor is not working.
That time of day known as dawn as a poetic device for death’s transcendence is among the most exhausted—therefore clichéd—resources in the elegiac tradition, and to introduce it with “you could believe” rather than committing to it fully exposes an acknowledgment of its staleness. The line asks readers to entertain a consolation that the piece itself does not fully trust.
The line “The blank night has so long stood” attempts to deepen the light-and-darkness opposition but “blank” is doing no useful work here. Night is characterized only by the absence of qualities, which is itself an absence of imagination.
Compare the productive darkness in elegies that have earned their consolations through prior engagement with specific grief. For example, Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” lingers over the obscurity and stifled potential of the rural dead before arriving at its muted, hard‑won consolations. The darkness in Gorman’s piece has no particular texture because the woman mourned has never been rendered particular.
The line “Our bright-fled angels” is symptomatic of the movement’s broader failure. The compound adjective “bright-fled” strains for originality but produces only a vague luminous blur. Readers cannot see these angels, cannot locate them, cannot feel their specific absence. And “angels,” used here for the second time in the piece, has by this point become the piece’s default finger pointing toward the transcendent, deployed only wherever the sentiment runs short of concrete reality.
The closing line “When they forever are so fiercely Good” makes the piece’s central substitution explicit and, in doing so, exposes its paucity. The capitalization of “Good” collapses the woman’s surname into a moral abstraction, transforming a specific human being into an emblem of virtue—a claim which is never realized.
This kind of sleight-of-hand is the opposite of what elegy requires. The great elegies, including Milton’s “Lycidas,” Tennyson’s “In Memoriam A. H. H,” and Wilcox’s “The Queen’s Last Ride,” depend upon the irreplaceable particularity of the lost individual.
Here, the decedent’s’ name is conscripted into the piece’s rhetorical argument: she is “Good” [good]; therefore, her death indicts a system that is not. The wordplay, however well-intentioned, subordinates the woman’s personhood to her usefulness as a symbol, which is precisely the charge that the piece is leveling at the broader social forces it purports to critique.
Taken as a whole, “For Renee Nicole Good” fails as elegy because its every formal and figurative decision moves away from the particular and toward the general, away from grief and toward argument, away from the irreducibly human fact of one woman’s death and toward the consolations of political and moral statement.
Doggerel is not merely a matter of clumsy versification; it is verse that reaches beyond its own imaginative and emotional resources. This piece reaches very far and grasps nothing of substance.
Image: Thomas Gray – Portrait by John Giles Eccardt, oil on canvas, 1747-1748
Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
Thomas Gray’s elegy describes a beautiful scene in the country landscape, as the speaker muses upon the life and death of rustic, simple folk in the pastoral setting.
Introduction and Text of “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” features 32 quatrains that naturally separate into eight self-contained movements. The final movement is a lovely epitaph devoted to an unknown country youth.
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea, The plowman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight, And all the air a solemn stillness holds, Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;
Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower The moping owl does to the moon complain Of such, as wand’ring near her secret bower, Molest her ancient solitary reign.
Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade, Where heaves the turf in many a mold’ring heap, Each in his narrow cell for ever laid, The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
The breezy call of incense-breathing morn The swallow twitt’ring from the straw-built shed, The cock’s shrill clarion, or the echoing horn, No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.
For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn, Or busy housewife ply her evening care: No children run to lisp their sire’s return, Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.
Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield, Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke; How jocund did they drive their team afield! How bowed the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!
Let not ambition mock their useful toil, Their homely joys, and destiny obscure; Nor grandeur hear with a disdainful smile, The short and simple annals of the poor.
The boast of heraldry, the pomps of power, And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave, Await alike th’ inevitable hour. The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
Nor you, ye proud, impute to these the fault, If memory o’er their tomb no trophies raise, Where through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.
Can storied urn or animated bust Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath? Can honor’s voice provoke the silent dust, Or flattery soothe the dull cold ear of death?
Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire; Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed, Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.
But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page Rich with the spoils of time did ne’er unroll; Chill penury repressed their noble rage, And froze the genial current of the soul.
Full many a gem of purest ray serene, The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear: Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Some village Hampden, that, with dauntless breast The little tyrant of his fields withstood; Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.
Th’ applause of listening senates to command, The threats of pain and ruin to despise, To scatter plenty o’er a smiling land, And read their history in a nation’s eyes,
Their lot forbade: nor circumscribed alone Their growing virtues, but their crimes confined; Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne, And shut the gates of mercy on mankind.
The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide, To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame, Or heap the shrine of luxury and pride With incense kindled at the muse’s flame.
Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife, Their sober wishes never learned to stray; Along the cool requestered vale of life They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.
Yet ev’n these bones from insult to protect Some frail memorial still erected nigh, With uncouth rimes and shapeless sculpture decked, Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.
Their name, their years, spelt by th’ unlettered muse, The place of fame and elegy supply: And many a holy text around she strews, That teach the rustic moralist to die.
For who to dumb forgetfulness a prey, This pleasing anxious being e’er resigned, Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day, Nor cast one longing ling’ring look behind?
On some fond breast the parting soul relies, Some pious drops the closing eye requires; Ev’n from the tomb the voice of Nature cries, Ev’n in our ashes live their wonted fires.
For thee, who mindful of th’ unhonored dead Dost in these lines their artless tale relate; If chance, by lonely contemplation led, Some kindred Spirit shall inquire thy fate,
Haply some hoary-headed swain may say, “Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn Brushing with hasty steps the dews away To meet the sun upon the upland lawn.
“There at the foot of yonder nodding beech That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high, His listless length at noontide would he stretch, And pore upon the brook that babbles by.
“Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn, Mutt’ring his wayward fancies he would rove, Now drooping, woeful wan, like one forlorn, Or crazed with care, or crossed in hopeless love.
“One morn I missed him on the customed hill, Along the heath and near his fav’rite tree; Another came; nor yet beside the rill, Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he;
“The next with dirges due in sad array Slow through the church-way path we saw him borne. Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay Graved on the stone beneath yon aged thorn.”
The Epitaph
Here rests his head upon the lap of earth A youth, to fortune and to fame unknown; Fair science frown’d not on his humble birth, And melancholy mark’d him for her own.
Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere; Heaven did a recompense as largely send: He gave to misery all he had, a tear, He gain’d from heaven,’twas all he wish’d, a friend.
No farther seek his merits to disclose, Or draw his frailties from their dread abode, (There they alike in trembling hope repose,) The bosom of his father and his God.
Reading
Commentary on “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
Thomas Gray’s speaker is offering a tribute to the simply folk who tended the land in this beautiful scene of country landscape. The speaker is musing upon the life and death of these rustic, simple folk in the pastoral, rustic setting.
First Movement: Serene Landscape
In the opening movement, the speaker describes the serene landscape surrounding the cemetery which he will be visiting. A herd of cows is moving slowly over the meadow. A farmer is leaving his plowing to head home, “leaving the world to darkness and to” the speaker.
It is dusk and the landscape seems to glimmer in the still air. Except for a few complaining beetles and an “moping owl,” all is quiet. The speaker approaches the graves of the village “forefathers,” who rest beneath “rugged elms.”
Second Movement: No More Cultivation
Those resting forefathers will never again be roused by the noise of the twitter of swallows or the call of the roosters. They will never again be experiencing their home life with “blazing hearth,” care of the wives, and interaction with their children. No longer will the land that they cultivated be turned by their plow. No more will the fields be tended by their careful, cheerful hands.
Third Movement: Simple Folk
These men were simple folk who did not seek ambition trade and fame. They lived, loved, farmed their land and enjoyed the rustic life. The speaker wishes to forestall any negative criticism of these simple farmers, as such folk are often looked down upon by city-folk, calling them rubes and provincials.
But the speaker makes it clear that no matter how high and mighty the ambitious become, they all end up in the same place as these simple folk because “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”
The speaker speculates that among these country folk there might even be those who could have easily performed the tasks of emperors or that of talented lyre playing poets. And perhaps there were those who did harbor such ambitions.
Fourth Movement: Unspoiled by Social Ills
In the fourth movement, the speaker elaborates on his assertion from the third movement. Because these rustic men never became enamored by knowledge of seeking ambitious titles and such, they remained unspoiled by many of the ills of society.
They remained like uncultured gems and flowers that were never seen but flourished. There might have been those who could have performed as a Milton or a Cromwell, or who could have served in government, or even conquered lands, thus adding their names to the nation’s historical record.
Fifth Movement: The Life Within
The speaker now concedes that if among these gentle folk some dark tendencies prevailed, their way of life precluded their acting upon those evil tendencies. They were “Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne.” Because they lived and moved “Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,” they experienced a life wherein, “Their sober wishes never learned to stray.”
They were, in fact, protected. However, some of the grave markers profess “uncouth rimes and shapeless sculpture.” This fact, while not dismaying, does arouse a “sigh” in the passersby.
Sixth Movement: Honoring the Rustic Dead
The speaker has noted that some of the names of the interred have been displayed by the “unlettered,” meaning that they are misspelled. But the gravestone also contained many biblical passages which “teach the rustic moralist to die.”
These “unhonored dead,” however, deserve to be honored, at least, by a reverent thought or prayer. If their history must remain hidden, at least a thought or two sent their way would give them honor as “some kindred Spirit shall inquire” about their lives.
Seventh Movement: A Rustic Soliloquy
In the seventh movement, the speaker composes a likely soliloquy by “some hoary-headed swain,” who might share a brief summary of one of the rustic’s manner, where he had roamed, how he might behaved, what he might have thought as he made his way through his day.
Then the rustic was missed and replaced by another like him. The imaginary speaker reports that they bore his man “through the church-way path.” and the speaker asks his listener to read the song that is engraved on the man’s “stone beneath yon aged thorn.”
Eighth Movement: Simple Country Folk
The final three quatrains making up the final movement and titled, “The Epitaph,” is dedicated to “A youth, to fortune and to fame unknown.” The youth “rests his head upon the lap of earth.” He represents the simple country folk who are of “humble birth.”
He laughed, he cried, and he had a “soul sincere.” To honor him, one need only acknowledge his having existed and realize that he now rests upon the “bosom of his father and his God.”
Walt Whitman in Camden, N.J., c. 1891. (Colorised black and white print). Creator: Thomas Eakins. (Photo by Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images)
Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”
Walt Whitman’s admiration for President Lincoln is dramatized in the poet’s elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” mourning the death while celebrating the presidency of the sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln.
Introduction and Text of “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”
In Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” the speaker laments the death of President Lincoln, but he does much more than merely offer his own sad and melancholy state of mind. This speaker creates a sacred myth through which he not only offers a tribute to the fallen president but also creates a symbolic triad that will henceforth bring readers’ and listeners’ attention to the momentous event.
The speaker also composes a “Death Carol,” in which rests the irony of elevating death from the lamentation it usually brings for a celebrated friend whom all suffering humanity can afford the fealty of welcome.
It might be observed that poet Walt Whitman sectioned his elegy into 16 parts, symbolizing the fact that Abraham Lincoln, the heroic subject of the poem, had served as the sixteenth president of the United States.
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d
1
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night, I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring, Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west, And thought of him I love.
2
O powerful western fallen star! O shades of night—O moody, tearful night! O great star disappear’d—O the black murk that hides the star! O cruel hands that hold me powerless—O helpless soul of me! O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul.
3 In the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the white-wash’d palings, Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich green, With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I love, With every leaf a miracle—and from this bush in the dooryard, With delicate-color’d blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green, A sprig with its flower I break.
4
In the swamp in secluded recesses, A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.
Solitary the thrush, The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements, Sings by himself a song.
Song of the bleeding throat, Death’s outlet song of life, (for well dear brother I know, If thou wast not granted to sing thou would’st surely die.)
5
Over the breast of the spring, the land, amid cities, Amid lanes and through old woods, where lately the violets peep’d from the ground, spotting the gray debris, Amid the grass in the fields each side of the lanes, passing the endless grass, Passing the yellow-spear’d wheat, every grain from its shroud in the dark-brown fields uprisen, Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchards, Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave, Night and day journeys a coffin
6
Coffin that passes through lanes and streets, Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land, With the pomp of the inloop’d flags with the cities draped in black, With the show of the States themselves as of crape-veil’d women standing, With processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night, With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and the unbared heads, With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces, With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn, With all the mournful voices of the dirges pour’d around the coffin, The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs—where amid these you journey, With the tolling tolling bells’ perpetual clang, Here, coffin that slowly passes, I give you my sprig of lilac.
7
(Nor for you, for one alone, Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring, For fresh as the morning, thus would I chant a song for you O sane and sacred death.
All over bouquets of roses, O death, I cover you over with roses and early lilies, But mostly and now the lilac that blooms the first, Copious I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes, With loaded arms I come, pouring for you, For you and the coffins all of you O death.)
8
O western orb sailing the heaven, Now I know what you must have meant as a month since I walk’d, As I walk’d in silence the transparent shadowy night, As I saw you had something to tell as you bent to me night after night, As you droop’d from the sky low down as if to my side, (while the other stars all look’d on,) As we wander’d together the solemn night, (for something I know not what kept me from sleep,) As the night advanced, and I saw on the rim of the west how full you were of woe, As I stood on the rising ground in the breeze in the cool transparent night, As I watch’d where you pass’d and was lost in the netherward black of the night, As my soul in its trouble dissatisfied sank, as where you sad orb, Concluded, dropt in the night, and was gone.
9
Sing on there in the swamp, O singer bashful and tender, I hear your notes, I hear your call, I hear, I come presently, I understand you, But a moment I linger, for the lustrous star has detain’d me, The star my departing comrade holds and detains me.
10
O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved? And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone? And what shall my perfume be for the grave of him I love?
Sea-winds blown from east and west, Blown from the Eastern sea and blown from the Western sea, till there on the prairies meeting, These and with these and the breath of my chant, I’ll perfume the grave of him I love.
11
O what shall I hang on the chamber walls? And what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls, To adorn the burial-house of him I love?
Pictures of growing spring and farms and homes, With the Fourth-month eve at sundown, and the gray smoke lucid and bright, With floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun, burning, expanding the air, With the fresh sweet herbage under foot, and the pale green leaves of the trees prolific, In the distance the flowing glaze, the breast of the river, with a wind-dapple here and there, With ranging hills on the banks, with many a line against the sky, and shadows, And the city at hand with dwellings so dense, and stacks of chimneys, And all the scenes of life and the workshops, and the workmen homeward returning.
12
Lo, body and soul—this land, My own Manhattan with spires, and the sparkling and hurrying tides, and the ships, The varied and ample land, the South and the North in the light, Ohio’s shores and flashing Missouri, And ever the far-spreading prairies cover’d with grass and corn.
Lo, the most excellent sun so calm and haughty, The violet and purple morn with just-felt breezes, The gentle soft-born measureless light, The miracle spreading bathing all, the fulfill’d noon, The coming eve delicious, the welcome night and the stars, Over my cities shining all, enveloping man and land.
13
Sing on, sing on you gray-brown bird, Sing from the swamps, the recesses, pour your chant from the bushes, Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines.
Sing on dearest brother, warble your reedy song, Loud human song, with voice of uttermost woe.
O liquid and free and tender! O wild and loose to my soul—O wondrous singer! You only I hear—yet the star holds me, (but will soon depart,) Yet the lilac with mastering odor holds me.
14
Now while I sat in the day and look’d forth, In the close of the day with its light and the fields of spring, and the farmers preparing their crops, In the large unconscious scenery of my land with its lakes and forests, In the heavenly aerial beauty, (after the perturb’d winds and the storms,) Under the arching heavens of the afternoon swift passing, and the voices of children and women, The many-moving sea-tides, and I saw the ships how they sail’d, And the summer approaching with richness, and the fields all busy with labor, And the infinite separate houses, how they all went on, each with its meals and minutia of daily usages, And the streets how their throbbings throbb’d, and the cities pent—lo, then and there, Falling upon them all and among them all, enveloping me with the rest, Appear’d the cloud, appear’d the long black trail, And I knew death, its thought, and the sacred knowledge of death.
Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me, And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me, And I in the middle as with companions, and as holding the hands of companions, I fled forth to the hiding receiving night that talks not, Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness, To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still.
And the singer so shy to the rest receiv’d me, The gray-brown bird I know receiv’d us comrades three, And he sang the carol of death, and a verse for him I love.
From deep secluded recesses, From the fragrant cedars and the ghostly pines so still, Came the carol of the bird.
And the charm of the carol rapt me, As I held as if by their hands my comrades in the night, And the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird.
Death Carol
Come lovely and soothing death, Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving, In the day, in the night, to all, to each, Sooner or later delicate death.
Prais’d be the fathomless universe, For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious, And for love, sweet love—but praise! praise! praise! For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.
Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet, Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome? Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all, I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.
Approach strong deliveress, When it is so, when thou hast taken them I joyously sing the dead, Lost in the loving floating ocean of thee, Laved in the flood of thy bliss O death.
From me to thee glad serenades, Dances for thee I propose saluting thee, adornments and feastings for thee, And the sights of the open landscape and the high-spread sky are fitting, And life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night.
The night in silence under many a star, The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know, And the soul turning to thee O vast and well-veil’d death, And the body gratefully nestling close to thee.
Over the tree-tops I float thee a song, Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the prairies wide, Over the dense-pack’d cities all and the teeming wharves and ways, I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee O death.
15
To the tally of my soul, Loud and strong kept up the gray-brown bird, With pure deliberate notes spreading filling the night.
Loud in the pines and cedars dim, Clear in the freshness moist and the swamp-perfume, And I with my comrades there in the night.
While my sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed, As to long panoramas of visions.
And I saw askant the armies, I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags, Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierc’d with missiles I saw them, And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody, And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs, (and all in silence,) And the staffs all splinter’d and broken.
I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them, And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them, I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war, But I saw they were not as was thought, They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer’d not, The living remain’d and suffer’d, the mother suffer’d, And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer’d, And the armies that remain’d suffer’d.
16
Passing the visions, passing the night Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades’ hands, Passing the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song of my soul, Victorious song, death’s outlet song, yet varying ever-altering song, As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding the night, Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet again bursting with joy, Covering the earth and filling the spread of the heaven, As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses, Passing, I leave thee lilac with heart-shaped leaves, I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with spring.
I cease from my song for thee, From my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, communing with thee, O comrade lustrous with silver face in the night.
Yet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night, The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird, And the tallying chant, the echo arous’d in my soul, With the lustrous and drooping star with the countenance full of woe, With the holders holding my hand nearing the call of the bird, Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep, for the dead I loved so well, For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands—and this for his dear sake, Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul, There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.
Commentary on “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”
Walt Whitman was deeply affected by the assassination of President Lincoln on April 14, 1865. The poet’s admiration is dramatized in his elegy as it emphasizes three symbols: a lilac, a star, and a bird.
First Movement 1-6: Springtime when Lilacs Bloom
The speaker begins by setting the time frame in spring when lilacs bloom. He is in mourning and suggests that Americans will continue to mourn this time of year, when three events continue to come together: the lilacs bloom, the star Venus appears, and the speaker’s thoughts of the president he venerated return.
The lilacs and the star of Venus immediately become symbolic of the speaker’s feelings and the momentous event that has engendered them. In the second section of the first movement, the speaker offers a set of keening laments prefaced by “O”:
O powerful western fallen star! O shades of night—O moody, tearful night! O great star disappear’d—O the black murk that hides the star! O cruel hands that hold me powerless—O helpless soul of me! O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul.
Each keen grows more intense as it progresses to the final, ” O hard surrounding cloud that will not free my soul.” He picks a sprig of lilac whose leaves are heart-shaped. This act indicates that the lilac will henceforth become symbolic for the speaker; the lilac will symbolize the love the speaker bears for the fallen president.
The speaker then introduces the singing hermit thrush whose song will elevate the bird to symbolic significance for the speaker, as well as the lilacs and star. In the final two sections of the first movement, the speaker describes the landscape through which President Lincoln’s casketed body moved to its final resting place in Illinois.
Second Movement 7: The Symbolic Offering
The second movement consists of a parenthetical offering of flowers to the casketed corpse of the president but also suggests that the speaker would overlay the coffins of all the war dead with roses and lilies, “But mostly and now the lilac that blooms the first.”
Again, the suggestion that the lilac will remain a symbol because it is the first flower to bloom every spring. While showering the coffins of the fallen, the speaker says he will “chant a song for you O sane and sacred death.”
Third Movement 8-9: The Star of Venus
The speaker now confronts the “western orb” that star of Venus that he had observed a month earlier. He imagines that the symbolic star had been speaking to him of the tragic events to come.
The star seemed to drop to the speaker’s side as the other stars watched. The speaker felt a sadness as the star “drops in the night, and was gone.” Now that the month has passed, the speaker feels that he was being forewarned by the symbolic star.
The speaker says that the “star of my departing comrade hold and detains me,” as he addresses the “singer bashful and tender,” that is, the hermit thrush who sings his solitary song from the covering of leaves.
Fourth Movement 10-13: A Personal Shrine to a Slain President
The speaker now muses on how he will be able to “warble . . . for the dead one there I loved.” He continues to lament but knows he must compose a “song for the large sweet soul that has gone.”
The speaker then considers what he will “hang on the chamber walls,” indicating he will erect a personal shrine to the slain president. He offers a number of items that he feels must decorate that shrine, as he catalogues them; for example, “Pictures of growing spring and farms and homes.”
The famous Whitman catalogue finds its way into several movements of this elegy. As it is the president of the country who has died, the speaker places scenes from the country in his elegy:
Lo, body and soul—this land, My own Manhattan with spires, and the sparkling and hurrying tides, and the ships,The varied and ample land, the South and the North in the light, Ohio’s shores and flashing Missouri, And ever the far-spreading prairies cover’d with grass and corn.
The speaker then commands the bird to sing as he prepares to offer a “Death Carol” in the next movement.
Fifth Movement 14: A Hymn to Death
The speaker creates a moving tribute to the president by replacing the sorrow of death with the dignity and necessity of death. Death becomes a friend who gives respite to the weary body—a fact often referenced by the “Father of Yoga in the West” Paramahansa Yogananda.
The speaker prefaces his “Death Carol” with a scene of himself walking between two friends: “knowledge of death” walked on one side of the speaker, and the “thought of death” occupied the other.
The “Death Carol” virtually lovingly addresses death, inviting it to “come lovely and soothing death.” He welcomes death to “undulate round the world.” He has almost fully accepted that death comes “in the day, in the night, to all, to each, / Sooner or later.” The speaker’s lament has transformed death from a dreaded event to a sacred, sweet one to which he will float a song full of joy.
Sixth Movement 15-16: Entwining the Images and Symbols
The speaker credits the bird with the composition of the “Death Carol.” This crediting indicates that the speaker had become so closely in tune with the warbling bird that he cognizes a hymn from the singing.
The speaker then catalogues scenes that he had actually witnessed as he traveled the battlefields of the war during which time he had nursed the wounded and dying. He saw “battle-corpses, myriads of them.”
But he finally realizes something vital to the awareness of the reality of death: “. . . I saw they were not as was thought, / They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer’d not.” The speaker realized that it is the living who suffer the death of the deceased and not the deceased, who remained, “fully at rest.”
The speaker’s parting words offer his summation of the entwined images that now have become and will retain their symbolic significance for the speaker: “For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands—and this for his dear sake, / Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul.”
The speaker in Malcolm M. Sedam’s “Desafinado” holds the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg accountable for what the speaker deems to be the attempted degradation of the soul of humanity.
Introduction with Text of “Desafinado”
The speaker in Malcolm M. Sedam’s “Desafinado” belongs to that group of readers who finds little to no literary value in Ginsberg’s rant. He is thus holding the Beat poet accountable for what the speaker deems to be the attempted degradation of the soul of humanity.
Written in 1955 and published in late 1956, the long poem “Howl” from Allen Ginsberg’s collection, Howl and Other Poems, caused a stir that ultimately brought the book’s publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, founder of City Lights Bookstore, to trial for obscenity [1]. The poem dramatizes certain sex acts; for example, “those who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy.”
The Ginsberg poem also spewed its glowing approval of illegal drug use. Ultimately, Ferlinghetti was not convicted of his alleged crime of obscenity. Nine expert witnesses, including literature professors, editors and book reviewers from the San Francisco Examiner and The New York Times testified that the work had literary value, that is, it offered “a significant and enduring contribution to society and literature.” They also testified that it was a “prophetic work” and “thoroughly honest.”
However, since that time, traditionally many readers [2], including teachers, parents, critics [3], and other literary scholars [4] have resisted the notion that Ginsberg’s hysterics had literary merit.
(One might note that the quotation above from the poem is not welcome on a number of websites even in the 21st century; the now defunct site to which I used to post articles required the block of full spelling of the offending words.)
The poem’s main claim to fame has always been its confrontational struggle with dignity and morality, not its literary value.
Desafinado
(For Allen Ginsberg, et al)
Through this state and on to Kansas more black than May’s tornadoes showering a debris of art — I saw you coming long before you came in paths of twisted fear and hate and dread, uprooted, despising all judgment which is not to say that the bourgeois should not be judged but by whom and by what, junkies, queers, and rot who sit on their haunches and howl that the race should be free for pot and horny honesty which I would buy if a crisis were ever solved in grossness and minor resolve but for whom and for what?
I protest your protest it’s hairy irrelevancy, I, who am more anxious than you more plaintive than you more confused than you having more at stake an investment in humanity.
Reading
Commentary on “Desafinado”
Out of touch with humanity, but certainly spouting the postmodern ethos, Ginsberg’s work finds its ultimate critic in Sedam’s “Desafinado.”
Flat or Off Key
The musical term “desafinado” denotes an out-of-tune sound; a note that is flat or off key may be labeled “desafinado.” Thus, Sedam’s speaker in his poem “Desafinado” from The Man in Motion insists that the Beat poets, Ginsberg and his ilk, are definitely out of tune with human dignity and morality. Featuring Sedam’s signature indented lines, the poem is displayed in free-verse and in twenty-four lines.
It seems likely that the speaker of the poem is reacting to having attended a poetry reading wherein one or more of the scandalous Beats—perhaps even Ginsberg himself—have performed their wares. The speaker claims that Ginsberg in his travels through the mid-west is “showering a debris of art.” That debris is blacker than the tornadoes that assault the landscape in May.
Literarily Littering the Minds
The speaker suggests that the Ginsberg “art” litters the mind in a way that even the devastating tornadoes fail to equal across middle America. The speaker understands that influence on the mind of an individual and thereby society can have far reaching consequences.
Cleaning up the damages from damaged minds far exceeds that of cleaning up the damage hurled by strong winds in spring. The speaker berates the Beat poet and his ilk for degrading the art of poetry by dragging it down paths of hatred which is twisted with fear and unhinged from reality. Also these protestors hate being judged, criticized, corrected, or held to any traditional standards.
The speaker asserts that he does not believe that the “bourgeoisie” is perfect, nor is it thereby above judgment. However, he forces out the question regarding who is really able and qualified to make those judgments about the middle class. The speaker affirms that such judgment will never be made effectively by societal degeneracy.
If one finds the speaker’s name-calling off-putting, one must ask, is it name-calling or simply naming? Is he not accurate in describing the characters who are appearing in the works of Ginsberg and the Beats?
What Redeeming Value?
According to this speaker, the Ginsbergian ilk does not offer anything useful to the society from which they benefit greatly. Those of that ilk continue to “sit on their haunches and howl / that the race should be free for pot / and horny honesty.”
The speaker is, of course, alluding to Ginsberg’s infamous “Howl,” which was coming into prominence in the early 1960s in the United States, as the Sixties decadence was setting in. The speaker asserts that he might be able to agree with some of the radicals’ protesting moral standards if such protest ever solved any of society’s problems.
The speaker, however, deems that the Beats’ low-energy “resolve” and the grossness of the bellyachers as they just “sit on their haunches and howl” cannot, in fact, alter society and cannot benefit humanity.
The speaker then declaims that he protests against their protests. The irrelevance of those long-haired hippies, those who merely howl while sitting on their butts cannot convince this speaker of any righteousness of their stance. This speaker revolts against the moral corruption of these dopers.
The speaker then further supports his claims by emphasizing his own invested interest in a just and moral society. He insists that he remains even more agitated, melancholy, and befuddled than those hairy protestors.
One Man’s Investment in Humanity
The speaker finally punches his last punch attempting to knock out the feeble but brazen howling cries of the hairy, dirty doping protesters, whose selfish self-aggrandizing leads only to a society of decay. Instead of only a selfish concern, this speaker’s stake is much higher: he professes that he struggles mightily because for him what is at stake is his “investment in humanity.”
Even though this speaker is aware that he cannot vanquish the debauchery that is on its way, leaking into the culture like a punctured sewer pipe, he knows he can register his own protest against the moral equivalency that is leading to the degeneracy of the next generation. Of course, the period known as the hippy sixties would continue down its fatalist path, yet where it would lead would remain open for discussion at the time of this poet’s writing.
My Personal Reflection on Ginsberg’s “Howl”
Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” can arguably be considered to have ushered in the onslaught of postmodernism in America. However, this work as a piece of literature has stood the test of time as a game changer in literature, whether one agrees that the game needed to be changed or not.
The style of this slack-jawed piece is loosely reminiscent of that of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, even though Ginsberg’s obscene posture is anathema to Whitman’s measured, disciplined stance, as well as to that of the poet of “Desafinado.”
In my personal opinion, what saves “Howl” from becoming just a piece of trash to assign to the dustbin of literary history—as the Sedamian speaker’s ethos would suggest—is that it offers a view of a segment of American life.
The poem reveals the mindset dedicated to the aberrant life styles that a significant portion of American society would never be able to experience otherwise. Most of America—and likely even the entire globe—would never consider taking the kinds of trips taken by the Beats.
Information can be useful, whether one agrees with it or not, nay, even if the work is nonsensical or brushed through with immorality, nihilism, and naïveté. And while poetry’s first function is not to impart empirical information, it does rely on empirical information to empower its focus on the human experience in feeling and emotion.
A piece of literature based on information that is abominable and morally repugnant in its content offers the opportunity explain to children and students that the behavior in the work should be disdained, discouraged, and avoided.
Censorship vs Editorial Choice
The first commandment regarding the written word should be “Thou shalt NOT censor!” Unless a discourse is calling for active violence against a person or property, censorship should always remain off the table. Despite the possible, ultimate degradation and depravity of any text, nothing should be censored.
Editorial choice regarding the fitness of any text for any publication does not become censorship, unless the editor is denying the work based on prejudice, political bias, or personal preference. The discussion of ideas with which an editor does not agree does not give the editor the moral right to censor.
Essentially, censorship usually bans ideas not necessarily the form in which those ideas are delivered. If the form, including the use of grammar and mechanics, is faulty, the editor has the duty to reject for publication the submitted piece, as faulty grammar and lax mechanics often suggest that the ideas may be weak as well.
The experienced, knowledgable editor should possess and sustain the resources to determine the difference between a few insignificant mechanical errors and those that suggest a sloppy writer with sloppy thoughts.
But if the editor rejects or devalues a piece simply because s/he despises the politics, societal attitudes, or spiritual tradition of the writer, then that rejection would equal censorship, which is an abomination and a danger to a free people.
inspired by Paramahansa Yogananda’s “Consecration”
A sonnet’s full throat hast Thou, my Guru, Placed in Thy opening lay of “Consecration”— In Thy masterful Songs of the Soul— Where shower meets flower as grown follows born Where the loneliness of seeking Finds the seeker found.
A second sestet bursts into a humble offering— Thou spreadest before the All-Seeing Divine Thy sheaves of leaves—the best flowers From Thy garden of verse. Thy flowers’ scent exudes, soul-inspired. Thy riming power leaves the petals in tact.
Would that I may follow Thy lead, To that Cosmic Home in verse and in deed.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 9: “Can it be right to give what I can give?”
Continuing her lamentations over the gap in societal station between her suitor and herself, the speaker wonders if she has anything to offer the suitor. But after exaggerating that distance, she attempts to close it up by emphasizing just how much she does love him.
Introduction and Text of Sonnet 9: “Can it be right to give what I can give?”
Sonnet 9, from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, seems to offer the speaker’s strongest rebuttal against the pairing of herself and her beloved. She seems most adamant that he leave her; yet in her inflexible demeanor screams the opposite of what she seems to be urging upon her lover.
Her dramatic reversal offers the strongest expression of the intensity of the love she actually feels for her beloved suitor. Despite having nearly dismissed him, she, in fact, lets him know how utterly and desperately she wants him to stay.
Sonnet 9: “Can it be right to give what I can give?”
Can it be right to give what I can give? To let thee sit beneath the fall of tears As salt as mine, and hear the sighing years Re-sighing on my lips renunciative Through those infrequent smiles which fail to live For all thy adjurations? O my fears, That this can scarce be right! We are not peers, So to be lovers; and I own, and grieve, That givers of such gifts as mine are, must Be counted with the ungenerous. Out, alas! I will not soil thy purple with my dust, Nor breathe my poison on thy Venice-glass, Nor give thee any love—which were unjust. Beloved, I only love thee! let it pass.
Reading
Commentary on Sonnet 9: “Can it be right to give what I can give?”
As she continues to bemoan the gap between the social stations of her suitor and herself, the speaker wonders if she has anything to offer her belovèd.
First Quatrain: Only Sorrow to Offer
Can it be right to give what I can give? To let thee sit beneath the fall of tears As salt as mine, and hear the sighing years Re-sighing on my lips renunciative
In Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ninth sonnet of the sequence, the speaker begins with a question, asking if it even appropriate for her consider giving her beloved the paltry gifts that she possesses.
She then explains what she has to offer; through a bit of exaggeration, she contends that all she has to offer is her sorrow. If her suitor continues with her, he will have to suffer watching her continue to cry and moan.
And he will have to listen to her sighs again and again. Her “lips” are like a renunciant, who has given up all desire for worldly gain and material achievement; thus, she deems herself unworthy of one so accomplished in worldly matters as her suitor is.
Second Quatrain: Seldom Smiling Lips
Through those infrequent smiles which fail to live For all thy adjurations? O my fears, That this can scarce be right! We are not peers, So to be lovers; and I own, and grieve,
The speaker’s lips have seldom smiled, and they even now seem incapable of acquiring the smiling habit, despite the attentions she is now receiving from her suitor. She is afraid that such an unbalanced situation is unfair to her lover; thus she laments the likelihood that pairing with him could be appropriate. Continuing she exclaims that they are no “peers.”
She allows her disdain of her lowly station compared to his to dominate her concerns and her rhetoric. Because they are “not peers,” she cannot fathom how they can be lovers, yet it seems that such is the nature of their maturing relationship. She feels that she must confess that the gap between them continues to taunt her and to cause her to “grieve.”
First Tercet: Copious Tears
That givers of such gifts as mine are, must Be counted with the ungenerous. Out, alas! I will not soil thy purple with my dust,
The speaker spells out her concern that by giving him such gifts as copious tears and unsmiling lips she has to be reckoned as an individual lacking in generosity. She wishes it were otherwise; she would like to give gifts as rich as the ones she receives.
But because she is incapable of returning equal treasure, she again insists that her lover leave her; she cries out demanding he turn away from her. Again, elevating her lover to the status of royalty, she insists that she does not wish to tarnish his royalty with her lowly, common status.
Second Tercet: Self-Argument
Nor breathe my poison on thy Venice-glass, Nor give thee any love—which were unjust. Beloved, I only love thee! let it pass.
She likens her station in life to a poisonous atmosphere, with which she does not want to mar his higher class status She will not allow her lowly station to sully his higher class. But then she goes much too far, saying, “[n]or give thee any love.” She immediately reverses herself, averring that she was wrong in making such a statement. Thus, she asserts, “Belovèd, I only love thee! let it pass.”
She finally admits without reservation that she loves him and asks him to forget the protestations she has made. She asks him to “let it pass,” or forget that she has made such suggestions that he should leave her; she wants nothing more than that he stay.
By earlier protesting so vehemently that they are not a suitable pair and then reversing herself so completely so quickly, she has created a fascinating little drama that expresses her love while laying special emphasis on the that love’s intensity.
Image: Created by ChatGPT inspired by “Would that my sonnet shine”
Would that my sonnet shine
Would that my sonnet shine like burnished gold So thou canst marvel long at its pure gleam: A sonnet so warm that banishes cold And serves to guide and guard through a dark dream. Its lines would keep the heat of noonday sun. Their beauty would catch fire—a burning crest. The fruits of its labor would let it run To hearts and minds so sore in need of rest. Would that my sonnet be velvet to touch To show that truth is always here to serve. Would that each word become a star or such As any lantern lighted works with verve. I hope that riming truth thy soul will feed, And that my sonnets work to meet thy need.
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