1. Adlestrop
By Edward Thomas
Yes. I remember Adlestrop—
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
2. Sense And Sensuality
By Hugh Fitzgerald
In the first stirrings of the sense
Of sense and sensuality
Am I to find my recompense
Beloved, for your banality?
Queer
By Frank Bidart
Lie to yourself about this and you will
forever lie about everything.
Everybody already knows everything
so you can
lie to them. That’s what they want.
But lie to yourself, what you will
lose is yourself. Then you
turn into them.
For each gay kid whose adolescence
was America in the forties or fifties
the primary, the crucial
scenario
forever is coming out—
or not. Or not. Or not. Or not. Or not.
Involuted velleities of self-erasure.
Quickly after my parents
died, I came out. Foundational narrative
designed to confer existence.
If I had managed to come out to my
mother, she would have blamed not
me, but herself.
The door through which you were shoved out
into the light
was self-loathing and terror.
Thank you, terror!
You learned early that adults’ genteel
fantasies about human life
were not, for you, life. You think sex
is a knife
driven into you to teach you that.
The Room
By Vladimir Nabokov
The room a dying poet took
at nightfall in a dead hotel
had both directories — the Book
of Heaven and the Book of Bell.
It had a mirror and a chair,
it had a window and a bed,
its ribs let in the darkness where
rain glistened and a shop sign bled.
Not tears, not terror, but a blend
of anonymity and doom,
it seemed, that room, to condescend
to imitate a normal room.
Whenever some automobile
subliminally slit the night,
the walls and ceiling would reveal
a wheeling skeleton of light.
Soon afterwards the room was mine.
A similar striped cageling, I
groped for the lamp and found the line
“Alone, unknown, unloved, I die”
in pencil, just above the bed.
It had a false quotation air.
Was it a she, wild-eyed, well-read,
or a fat man with thinning hair?
I asked a gentle Negro maid,
I asked a captain and his crew,
I asked the night clerk. Undismayed,
I asked a drunk. Nobody knew.
Perhaps when he had found the switch
he saw the picture on the wall
and cursed the red eruption which
tried to be maples in the fall?
Artistically in the style
of Mr. Churchill at his best,
those maples marched in double file
from Glen Lake to Restricted Rest.
Perhaps my text is incomplete.
A poet’s death is, after all,
a question of technique, a neat
enjambment, a melodic fall.
And here a life had come apart
in darkness, and the room had grown
a ghostly thorax, with a heart
unknown, unloved — but not alone
Extra Credit:
In “The Room,” identify the chess pieces. Find the allusion to antisemitism. Compare the poem to Vladislav Khodasevich’s “Ballada” in Nabokov’s English translation.
Buraq says
Clearly, the 2nd ‘poem’ by Mr. Fitzgerald is not a poem. However, I think Mr. Fitzgerald would be the first to agree!
Adelstrop is the real deal. This Zen moment in the heart of the English countryside at a deserted railway station precedes the obscene carnage of WW1. Edward Thomas began making notes for Adlestrop in January 1915, several months after the railway journey on June 24th, 1914. Tragically, Edward Thomas was cut down in a hail of bullets in the Battle of Arras on April 9th, 1917.
Hugh Fitzgerald says
I disagree. I think my single four-line stanza is a poem. I like it, and I hope others do too. Once you read it, it is hard to forget.
But I agree with you that “Adlestrop” takes the cake..Like you, I can see the tiny station andl the train taking on water, and the steam hissed, and otherwise all was quiet as no one got on and no one got off. And what a beautiful use of place names in the last line: “Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.” His train journey took place in 1914, but that fatidic date, I submit, should be written as Philip Larkin did when he titled one of his poems: MCMIV.,
Edward Thomas was a close friend of Robert Frost. He was also one of two potentially great English poets who died in the Great War. The other was Isaac Rosenberg who, like Thomas, died in the Battle of Arras. Rosenberg had not been drafted, but.enlisted in order to earn money to support his widowed and impoverished mother. I don’t count Rupert Brooke because he did not die on the battlefield but of blood poisoning from an insect bite..
Nabokov, too, is — as always –peerless. This poem is one of his earliest written in English. For those of you who don’t know what the “Book of Bell” is, it’s a telephone book, that only we superannuated old folks remember from Before the Flood. Eheu fugaces postume postume labuntur anni…,
Which leaves Frank Bidart’s effort, the one that “is not a poem,” about which I have nothing to say.
Dan Schnittker says
I do not like your poem, H.F. It is unkind, without recompense. I do not like Mr. Bidart’s either. It is sad and brutal. As we tear our pleasures with rough strife.
Hugh Fitzgerald says
Are you quite sure that I am the speaker of that four-line stanza? I never meant to be.
Daniel Moore says
Hugh–Another interesting group. I think by intent they are all poems–including yours. I like the formality of Nabokov, though each one shows some poetic virtue. I’ve been at it for 60 years and studied under several well-known poets. My poetic “Bible” is “The Prosody Handbook” by Shapiro and Beume..
Hugh Fitzgerald says
Dear Mr. Moore,
I forgot to recommend as well Nabokov’s “Notes On Prosody” which was included as an appendix to his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. It has also been published separately by the samaritan organization, the Bollingen Foundation.
Nabokov rendered into English Pushkin’s version of Horace’s “Exegi Monumentum.” It’s another dazzling display, with Pushkin’s iambic tetrameter becoming Nabokov’s iambic pentameter:
Exegi Monumentum
No hands have wrought my monument; no weeds
will hide the nation’s footpath to its site.
Tsar Alexander’s column it exceeds
in splendid insubmissive height.
“Not all of me is dust. Within my song,
safe from the worm, my spirit will survive,
and my sublunar fame will dwell as long
as there is one last bard alive.
“Throughout great Rus’ my echoes will extend,
and all will name me, all tongues in her use:
the Slavs’ proud heir, the Finn, the Kalmuk, friend
of steppes, the yet untamed Tunguz.
“And to the people long shall I be dear
because kind feelings did my lyre extoll,
invoking freedom in an age of fear,
and mercy for the broken soul.”
Obey thy God, and never mind, O Muse,
the laurels or the stings: make it thy rule
to be unstirred by praise as by abuse,
and do not contradict the fool.
Daniel Moore says
I will check these two sources out. I’m pretty familiar with Nabokov–especially the inimitable
“Pale Fire”. Pushkin and some of the other Russian writers I don’t know as well. I read the first translation of “One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” when I was still in high school, and it blew my socks off!. My major influences have been Hopkins, Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and W. S. Merwin. I wrote a poem for Merwin, sent it to him, and he said he really liked it.
On a more mundane level, I really like your work with Robert Spenser and others oh jihadwatch. I’ve read some of Spencer’s books: he’s tireless and talented. The best book on Islam and Arabic origins, I think, is Hal Lindsey’s “The Everlasting Hatred”–from Ishmael forward.
Hugh Fitzgerald says
Dear Mr. Moore,
Another book on prosody you might like is John Hollander’s “Rhyme’s Reason.” He also did a book (I think it was a book) of clerihews with Anthony Hecht.