Poetry

Barbara McClay on Eliot’s *Ash Wednesday*

“In addition to reading these online poems over and over—as if they were some sort of texts from a lost civilization about which nothing more could be known, instead of (again) poems that were in books that were probably in my very own home—I would carefully copy and paste anything that struck me as a good epigraph for a chapter of a novel into a WordPerfect document that I’m almost positive was called something like “good quotes.” I probably copied, conservatively, at least two thirds of “Ash Wednesday,” because its language thrilled me.

At the time, I’m not sure I even slightly understood what it meant to say “I do not hope to know / the infirm glory of the positive hour” or what it meant to hope to turn again or any of the rest of it.3 I certainly had already accumulated regrets at that point in my life, some of which could eat into me very deeply and even keep me awake at night. But I did not associate them at all with the poem.4 Reading it now, listening to Eliot read it, I understand it better.”

https://substack.com/home/post/p-158401105?source=queue

“The Lake Isle” by Ezra Pound

“The Lake Isle”

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop,
With the little bright boxes
piled up neatly upon the shelves
And the loose fragrant cavendish
and the shag,
And the bright Virginia
loose under the bright glass cases,
And a pair of scales not too greasy,
And the whores dropping in for a word or two in passing,
For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit.
 
O God, O Venus, O mercury, patron of thieves,
Lend me a little tobacco-shop,
or install me in any profession
Save this damn’d profession of writing,
where one needs one’s brains all the time.

“Footnote to All Prayer” by C.S. Lewis

He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow
When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou,
And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart
Symbols (I Know) which cannot be the thing Thou art.
Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme
Worshiping with frail images a folk-lore dream,
And all men in their praying, self-deceived, address
The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts, unless
Thou in magnetic mercy to Thyself divert
Our arrows, aimed unskillfully, beyond desert;
And all men are idolaters, crying unheard
To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word.
Take not, oh Lord, our literal sense. Lord, in Thy great,
Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate.

“Leap Before You Look” by W.H. Auden

Leap Before You Look

The sense of danger must not disappear:
The way is certainly both short and steep,
However gradual it looks from here;
Look if you like, but you will have to leap.

Tough-minded men get mushy in their sleep
And break the by-laws any fool can keep;
It is not the convention but the fear
That has a tendency to disappear.

The worried efforts of the busy heap,
The dirt, the imprecision, and the beer
Produce a few smart wisecracks every year;
Laugh if you can, but you will have to leap.

The clothes that are considered right to wear
Will not be either sensible or cheap,
So long as we consent to live like sheep
And never mention those who disappear.

Much can be said for social savoir-faire,
But to rejoice when no one else is there
Is even harder than it is to weep;
No one is watching, but you have to leap.

A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep
Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear:
Although I love you, you will have to leap;
Our dream of safety has to disappear.

December 1940