Poetry and Directions for Thought Eileen John

Transcription

1 Poetry and Directions for Thought Eileen John I take as my starting point a recent paper by Ken Walton, Thoughtwriting in Poetry and Music. 1 Walton wants to have a way to understand expression in poetry and music that does not require positing an imagined persona as the subject or agent of expressive activity. If we found that imagining such a figure was prescribed by all expressive works (or at least by all that are not the expressive acts of real subjects), to account for their expressive properties, we would have to count such works as representational or, in Walton s view, as works of fiction at least in their expressive capacity. 2 Walton is perhaps most concerned to make sure a non-representational account is available for music, but in this paper he also takes on what might seem to be the hardest case, that of lyric poetry. It is the hardest case in that it seems most obviously to provide, in Edward Cone s words (cited by Walton), the illusion of the existence of a personal subject through whose consciousness a certain kind of experience is made known to the rest of us. 3 I will not take up the case of music but will focus here on issues that arise in relation to poetry. Walton s alternative involves letting an expressive work abstain, as it were, from being the expression of any particular subject, real or imagined. He casts this as the possibility of poets being thoughtwriters, their activity paralleling in certain ways the work of speechwriters. By thoughtwriters I shall mean writers who compose texts for others to use in expressing their thoughts (feelings, attitudes) Walton, 455). So, on this model, the poet makes words available for readers use. This might be a matter of readers making the poem their own, using it for their own expressive purposes (Walton, 462). Walton notes that prayers, songs, bumper stickers, and greeting cards are forms of words that have established functions as things to be appropriated for use by anyone who so chooses. And the practice of memorising and repeating particular lines of poetry in one s own context allies poetry in that respect with these other appropriative practices. Readers encountering poems that do not suit their expressive needs might instead engage in a pretense in which they imagine 1 Kendall Walton, Thoughtwriting in Poetry and Music, New Literary History 42 (2011): Following the theory of representation developed in Walton s Mimesis as Make-Believe (Harvard UP, 1990). 3 Edward Cone, The Composer s Voice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), p. 3 (Walton, p. 456). 1

2 themselves uttering or thinking these words seriously. In either of these cases, readers do not need to experience the poem by positing an expressive subject other than themselves. Poets may or may not have this role in mind as their primary purpose in writing poems, but The words are there ripe for picking, no matter what the poet was doing in writing them down (Walton, 462). Neither politicians giving speeches nor readers of poems need trace the words they appropriate back to any serious use of those words, either by a real or imagined speaker or thinker. The words of a speech might as well have grown on trees or appeared in driftwood patterns on a beach, and similarly for readers of poetry, poems might as well be trees (Walton, 461, 463). One question concerns how the thoughtwriting model then accounts for expression in poetry. If positing an expressive subject has been taken to explain or make sense of expressive properties, it seems the thoughtwriting model has the burden of offering an alternative explanation. Now, Walton does not think there are likely to be many (and perhaps not even any) pure thoughtwriting cases in which a poem only invites us to make the words our own (Walton, 466). Typically, perhaps, we will take a poem to express the thought and feelings of an imagined subject, while also taking it as a stretch of language available for our own use. So Walton could say that finding a work to have expressive power typically does involve invoking an imagined expressive subject. But it seems the pure thoughtwriting case needs to be theoretically viable for Walton, even if non-actual expression should not necessitate positing a subject or this will not be a real alternative. So let s suppose we had a pure case of a poem that invites us to use its language and does not invoke a real or imagined subject who is using the language expressively. Perhaps attribution of expressive properties to the poem could wait upon whether readers of the poem take it up and use it for purposes of actual or imagined expression the claim that the poem is expressive could come retrospectively, once a reader had succeeded in putting it to that use. But it seems that the expressive power of the poem might need to be acknowledged earlier in the transaction, to explain why a reader would be drawn to use it in this way in the first place. Do we need to experience the poem as already an expressive movement as someone s thought or feeling, however vaguely specified that someone might be in order to grasp it as relevant to our own expressive needs? Compare Helen Vendler s view in her discussion of Shakespeare s sonnets, as she initially articulates what sounds like Walton s model: 2

3 The act of the lyric is to offer its reader a script to say. the private literary genres such as the Psalms, or prayers printed in prayer books, or secular lyrics are scripted for repeated personal recitation. One is to utter them as one s own words, not as the words of another. It is indispensable, then, if we are to be made to want to enter the lyric script, that the voice offered for our use be believable to us, resembling a real voice coming from a real mind like our own. 4 On this view, it seems that a poem has to earn its ability to function as a script for others by evoking a subject who is speaking or thinking in this way. Walton remarks, in considering the case of music, that One can hear a musical work as a kind of psychological drama without hearing it as expressing a succession of another person s psychological states (Walton, 470-1). Taking the emphasis here to be on a kind of psychological drama, it seems we could say the same thing about a poem: a poem can express a kind of thought or feeling, the sort of thing that could be thought or felt, but without presuming or imagining anyone to have thought or felt it. In comprehending the words of the poem, the reader recognizes a thought-kind that can then be instantiated in particular episodes of thinking. Does recognizing something as a thought-kind simply mean, or incorporate, recognizing a thinker or subject as sustainer of thought? It seems that if we refer to something as a thought, we thereby conceive of it as the outcome of thinking, as something thought. When we move to the level of kinds, if we do not incorporate such a recognition, even very minimally and vaguely, perhaps we are just saying that poems offer brute content stuff that can show up in thought, but is not itself thought or the specification of a thought-kind. Maybe Walton could say that in recognizing a thought-kind, we also recognize a thinker-kind, the sort of being who would sustain thoughts of that kind (and where this recognition is not a matter of positing an actual or imagined subject of thought). Walton also refers to thoughtwritings as expressive-behavior indicators, and it may be that this phrase aims to capture what it is like to function as an expressive kind (Walton, 470, 473). We take up a poem as an indicator of how one could behave (speak or think) expressively, though not as indicating that someone is behaving in that way, and we can then proceed to appropriate it for ourselves or not. I do not have a clear sense of 4 Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare s Sonnets (Harvard UP, 1997), p

4 whether appealing to status as an indicator helps, and I also am not sure if Walton would mind if it turned out that there is always at least a very attenuated positing of an expressive subject, in the recognition of a poem s expressive potential. Maybe such attenuation (e.g., in the notion of a thinker-kind ) can progressively minimise the objectionable fictionality that would persist in identifying music or poetry as expressive. The contrary intuitions would, I think, still hold that taking a poem found to be expressive to offer a kind of expression that awaits expressive use is an unsatisfying and inaccurate account of the poem s force. However, I will now retreat from this (in my mind, fuzzy) point, even though it might seem to be a crucial theoretical issue to square away. Maybe we do have to posit an expressive subject in some way, but if so, it can be in such a minimal spirit that it does not induce an implausibly fictional or representational status in the work. Instead, I want to step back from that theoretical demand and think speculatively about two other broad issues raised by the notion of poetry as thoughtwriting. One concerns the relation between the words of a poem and the thinking it prompts, and the other concerns what it takes to identify thought as one s own. Putting these two concerns together will lead me to split some hairs by suggesting that speechwriting is a more apt term than thoughtwriting for the kind of poetic labour that Walton is considering. Speechwriting focuses on the words to be said, it envisions an occasion of speech, and it accommodates or possibly expects distance between what is said and what is thought by the speaker. In these respects it seems to better reflect certain kinds of constraint and openness that matter to poetry. Two rather different intuitions and experiences with poetry motivate concern about the words-thought relation with respect to poetry. First, on the one hand, I find poems to be partly indigestible as thoughts, not able to be taken up and transmuted into thought. Helen Vendler refers to the verbal deliberateness of lyric poetry (in the course of distinguishing the intimacy of the lyric from the intimacy of analyst/analysand conversation), and that quality seems important: the words are just so, and they cannot quite turn into the fluid, improvising, eroding, unevenly precise stuff of thought. 5 The structure and precision of a poem, even in more casual and freely flowing verse, is a tremendously attractive achievement, but it is an achievement that seems possible for verbal artefacts, not for thoughts. 5 Helen Vendler, Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery (Princeton UP, 2005), p. 7. 4

5 This sense of the poem as a deliberately formed verbal artefact shows up in critics attention to the specific words used, and the specific formations of words in a poem. Here is Geoffrey Hartman singling out some words in the final stanza of Keats s To Autumn : There is hardly a romance language phrase: sound-shapes like sallows, swallows, borne, bourn, crickets, croft, predominate. 6 The presence of these northern words, as he calls them, contributes to his larger argument about the poem, so they have a role in the thinking he offers as appropriate to the poem. But it seems the words themselves are not present only to be the vehicles or the substance of thought; they are there partly to be words that have reached the poem from a different historical path and with particular kinds of sound-shapes. They need to remain precisely what they are as tokens of linguistic heritage, and as they look and sound, rather than just feeding into an occurrence of thought. 7 Or consider Robert Alter on Frost s Once by the Pacific, which includes the following two passages: Great waves looked over others coming in, And thought of doing something to the shore That water never did to land before.... It looked as if a night of dark intent Was coming, and not only a night, an age. Someone had better be prepared for rage. Alter discusses the poem s conspicuously colloquial diction as the matrix for a peculiar quality of Frost s poetry here and elsewhere that might be called expressive vagueness, and that is felt in his general fondness for words like something and someone. The source in spoken English for this usage would be an idiom employed in a situation like the following: an angry child says to another child, Somebody better watch 6 Geoffrey Hartman, Poem and Ideology: A Study of Keats s To Autumn, in The Fate of Reading (University of Chicago Press, 1975), p Hartman also refers to Keats s poem as a whole in the terms of a physically palpable object The very shape of the poem firm and regular without fading edges but also no overdefined contours suggests a slowly expanding constellation that moves as a whole, if it moves at all (Hartman, 127). That description may merge qualities of the poem as an object an object being something that will not be fully accommodated in thought with qualities of the thought appropriate to the poem. But there is still the suggestion, I would say, that the poem has ways of having shape and firmness not only in qualities of thought but in such things as its look and sound and the historical roots of its language. 5

6 out meaning, of course, you or, I m going to do something to you meaning, whatever I will do will be so terrible that I would rather not say exactly what. 8 Alter ties these bits of the poem s vocabulary directly to expression, in referring to their expressive vagueness, but as with Hartman, it seems Alter is also pointing to the words real life as functioning things. Someone and something not only get us to think of unspecified people and things, but they are words that people rely on in certain ordinary contexts because of their vagueness in thought. Their colloquial tone and function are part of what they are as things and they have to retain that identity in order to be expressive in the poem. Second, and on the other hand still concerning the word-thought relations there is the sense of how very closely allied to thinking and consciousness these verbal artefacts are. John Koethe spells out powerfully poetry s capacity to convey the full range and movement of subjective life, to enact the experience of experience. 9 In the case of a substantial poem, I think one can have the further sense that it conjures up the possibility of thinking that is not obviously accessible to us. One reason for the sense of inaccessibility is that a poem asks for more thought, more agility in consciousness, more simultaneously interacting lines of thought, than anyone can actually sustain. That is to say the poem indeed points me toward thinking it is partly digestible or apt for appropriation into thinking, but it goes overboard in relation to what episodes of thinking can be in beings like us. 10 With respect to an Elizabeth Bishop poem, At the Fishhouses, that I will return to below, the critical discussion of it convinces me that I could be bringing together, in my engagement with the poem, perceptually vivid imaginings, the poem s changes of meter, singing in general and the music of a Martin Luther hymn, Wynken, Blynken, and Nod, Bishop s roots in Nova Scotia, Wordsworth and Marianne Moore poems, Latin and Portuguese words, death, beauty, the four elements, seal-human relations, 8 Robert Alter, The Pleasures of Reading (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), p John Koethe, Poetry and the Experience of Experience, in Poetry at One Remove (University of Michigan Press, 2000). Poetry has the imagistic and metaphoric potential to evoke perception and sensation; the discursive capacity of language to express states of propositional awareness and reflexive consciousness; the rhythmic ability to simulate the movement of thought across time; and a lyric density that can tolerate abrupt shifts in perspective and tone without losing coherence (Koethe, 82). 10 See Susan Stewart s comment that poetic form relies on effects of meaning that, in their metaphorical and imaginative reach, cannot be taken up completely in any single moment of reception (Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 12). 6

7 knowledge, self-knowledge, and imagination. 11 All of these have their own proliferating possibilities. So the poem can occupy and guide thought in these directions, and, I would say, it is an expressive poem, but there is also something about these directions for thought that I cannot carry out. What would it be to put all of that together, properly prioritized and interrelated? Maybe I can go slowly and think or imaginatively experience one thing at a time, or perhaps two or three things in relation to each other at a time, in a way that is called for by the poem, and eventually do a pretty thorough job. But that would still not be adequate to what the poem was doing in bringing these elements together, in getting them to connect and reverberate. (And I do not take Bishop s poem to be unusual in this respect; it s intended as a representative example.) Of course, we do think in response to poems in ways that they call for we do not throw up our hands at the impossibility of thinking adequately in experiencing a poem. So I do not mean to say that poems stymie thought, but that the thinking we do is likely to involve approximation, shifting of tactics, reframing and revisiting, and hopeful attempts at connection. 12 The practice of critics reflects this, in part, in their own uses of figurative and expansive language. Hartman says that To Autumn has a westerly drift like the sun (Hartman, 129). David Kalstone writes of Bishop s At the Fishhouses that the poem accumulates the sense of an artistry beyond the human, one that stretches over time, chiselling and decorating with its strange erosions. 13 This kind of figurative criticism really helps the reader, I think, but perhaps more because it acknowledges the expansive project of thought than because it helps you know what is to be thought. So, along with registering the verbal deliberateness of poetry, and the way poems thus resist being only vehicles for thought, I think we need to register that there is often a call for thinking that we cannot meet, because of an unassimilable complexity and connectedness in what a poem offers. In relation to Walton s model, this is to say that if I appropriate a poem for my own expressive needs, this may not be because I can know, precisely, what it is that can be thought and felt by using this form of words. 11 See, for instance, Stewart s discussion of the poem (Stewart 2002, pp ), Anne Stevenson in Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop (London: Bellew, 1998), esp. pp , and various essays in Harold Bloom, ed., Elizabeth Bishop (NY: Chelsea House, 1985). 12 Vendler makes reference to a Walt Whitman line, Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul, in speaking of lyric poems as flinging filaments that catch at that somewhere (or someone) implicit in all poetic address (Invisible Listeners, pp. 7, 81n4). That hopeful flinging seems apt for what the reader has to do as well. 13 David Kalstone, Questions of Memory, Questions of Travel, in Bloom, p

8 Another reason for saying that a poem can set a problematic task for thought is that the reader might in some sense get a good grip on what to think (at least with respect to discrete components of a poem), but not on how to think it or why it should be thought. This phenomenon leads into my second speculative concern, which is about what it takes to identify thought as one s own. The notion that I can comprehend what is to be thought, but lack something of the how and why of the thought, points to aspects of thinking that matter to identifying thought as one s own. I will circle back to illustrate this possibility in relation to poetry, by making a few comments about Bishop s poem. Let me approach this concern slightly indirectly, however, by considering how the issue of ownership of one s thoughts shows up in phenomena considered to be disorders of thinking, such as the experience of thought insertion described by schizophrenics. Thought insertion involves, roughly, thoughts occurring without the thinker experiencing them as his or her own. Here are a few of the things that have been said in trying to capture what is crucial to, or missing in, this disordered experience: it is thinking that is not of our own making ; there is a derailment of thought a slipping of the train of thought into another direction or an irregular progression of the train of thought ; the sense of effort and deliberate choice as we move from one thought to the next is lacking; or what is imposed on them is something that does provide the answer to a question, only that it was not a question that they had formulated or that it was not them who arrived at the answer. 14 The broader experience of the schizophrenic has also been described as one in which everything is felt to be merely mental or representational, the thinking showing a withdrawal from practical engagement with what to believe (Hoerl, 197). When we put these descriptions in the context of thinking about poetry, I hope they sound evocative. Of course the person experiencing a poem is doing so deliberately and exercises volition and control in ways that the person experiencing thought insertion does not, so I am not trying to collapse the phenomena. But we do have a long history of thinking that poetry involves experiences of thought being taken over, from Plato in the Ion to Georges Poulet saying that, Reading, then, is the act in which the subjective principle which I call I, is modified in such a way that I no longer have the 14 I am taking all of this from Christoph Hoerl s On Though Insertion, Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 8(2/3), 2001: (I m not here giving the detailed citations of whose views are being referred to will do this eventually when I have this section better in hand.) 8

9 right, strictly speaking, to consider it as my I. 15 The claim I want to make, briefly, is that one of the things we seem to seek out in poetry is the experience of thinking that can lack some of the markers of one s own thought. Irregular progression of a train of thought, thinking the answer to a question I did not formulate, moving to a new thought without deliberate choice, thinking in an intensely representational mode these all seem familiar to me as a reader of poetry. In such experiences it may be that my thinking is, in its content, well directed by the poem, and yet if I lack a sense of how I have gotten to these thoughts or why they should be thought, perhaps they are not yet fully my thoughts. Let me conclude with a sketch of an example. I have chosen Bishop s At the Fishhouses because it has a particular quality of clarity. The words and syntax are almost entirely familiar and straightforward, and the items in the depicted scene come into sensory-imaginative consciousness very firmly. Anne Stevenson says of this and a number of other Bishop poems that they begin in a low-keyed deictic mood, pointing at this and that. They go on so long, pointing and looking so intently that, by the end, some more abstract impression has to be felt. 16 The reader follows along, is right there with the clear, firm sensations and remarks, but that transition Stevenson points to, when some more abstract impression has to be felt, is disorienting. Does the reader know how and why the pointing and looking turn into something more abstract? In the case of At the Fishhouses, the pointing and looking changes somewhat gradually, but also radically, in the following lines from the end of the poem: If you should dip your hand in, your wrist would ache immediately, your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn as if the water were a transmutation of fire that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame. If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter, then briny, then surely burn your tongue. It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, 15 Georges Poulet, Criticism and the Experience of Interiority, in Reader-Response Criticism, ed. Jane Tompkins, essay trans. Catherine Macksey and Richard Macksey (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), p Anne Stevenson, Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop (London: Bellew, 1998), p

10 drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown. The line, It is like what we imagine knowledge to be, is the one where I most immediately feel that I can think it, but I am not sure how or why I got there. J. D. McClatchy says that this line is at three removes from itself, 17 and that is suggestive of how it trips me up. The steady pointing and looking has now switched into assuming I understand something about knowledge that I have never really thought about (how we imagine it to be). And I need to appreciate the similarity between that aspect of my conceptual territory and some hypothetical but finely articulated and painful exposures to icy sea water. To spell out all the things I am uncertain of here, including why there is a colon at the end of that line, would be difficult (and boring, I expect!). And yet in reading the poem I acquire some of its momentum, and feel taken up into some thinking I did not choose. There is a kind of lucky boost that can occur, where having gone through the tubs lined with fishscales and the burning icy water, I am more ready than I otherwise would have been, at any rate, to think about what I cling to as a knowledge-seeker and what sort of flowing coldness I should brace myself for instead. With that sketch in mind, how does it help us reflect on the notion of poets as thoughtwriters? Experiences such as this one with Bishop s poem suggest to me that thought that can be fully my own is perhaps quite rarely on offer in a poem. And it isn t perhaps what I want out of a poem I may indeed want some derailment that means I end up separating out aspects of my thought (say, separating what I think from the choice and explanatory control of that thought). In such cases, one might say the poem is and is not functioning as a thoughtwriter for me. I said earlier that the various concerns canvassed here have led me to find speechwriting more apt for the phenomena. The general reason for this is that, despite the close alliance between poetry and thought, it seems that the poem most importantly offers a form of words that we can speak and perhaps take up into thought. In that way a poem can function for us in the detached way that a speech written by another can. The poetic form of 17 J. D. McClatchy, One Art : Some Notes, in Bloom, p

11 words cannot, however, simply become thought and leave its verbal deliberateness behind, and it cannot necessarily direct us either to an accessible complex of thinking or to thinking that is fully our own thought. Robert Alter, The Pleasures of Reading (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989). Harold Bloom, Elizabeth Bishop (NY: Chelsea House, 1985). Edward Cone, The Composer s Voice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974). Geoffrey Hartman, Poem and Ideology: A Study of Keats s To Autumn, in The Fate of Reading (University of Chicago Press, 1975). Christoph Hoerl, On Thought Insertion, Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 8(2/3), 2001: John Koethe, Poetry and the Experience of Experience, in Poetry at One Remove (University of Michigan Press, 2000). George Poulet, Criticism and the Experience of Interiority, in Reader-Response Criticism, ed. Jane Tompkins, essay trans. Catherine Macksey and Richard Macksey (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp Anne Stevenson, Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop (London: Bellew, 1998). Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (University of Chicago Press, 2002). Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare s Sonnets (Harvard UP, 1997)., Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery (Princeton UP, 2005). Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe (Harvard UP, 1990)., Thoughtwriting in Poetry and Music, New Literary History 42 (2011):

12 At the Fishhouses Elizabeth Bishop Although it is a cold evening, down by one of the fishhouses an old man sits netting, his net, in the gloaming almost invisible, a dark purple-brown, and his shuttle worn and polished. The air smells so strong of codfish it makes one's nose run and one's eyes water. The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up to storerooms in the gables for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on. All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea, swelling slowly as if considering spilling over, is opaque, but the silver of the benches, the lobster pots, and masts, scattered among the wild jagged rocks, is of an apparent translucence like the small old buildings with an emerald moss growing on their shoreward walls. The big fish tubs are completely lined with layers of beautiful herring scales and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered with creamy iridescent coats of mail, with small iridescent flies crawling on them. Up on the little slope behind the houses, set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass, is an ancient wooden capstan, cracked, with two long bleached handles and some melancholy stains, like dried blood, where the ironwork has rusted. The old man accepts a Lucky Strike. He was a friend of my grandfather. We talk of the decline in the population and of codfish and herring while he waits for a herring boat to come in. There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb. He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty, from unnumbered fish with that black old knife, the blade of which is almost worn away. Down at the water's edge, at the place where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp descending into the water, thin silver tree trunks are laid horizontally across the gray stones, down and down at intervals of four or five feet. Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, element bearable to no mortal, to fish and to seals... One seal particularly I have seen here evening after evening. He was curious about me. He was interested in music; like me a believer in total immersion, so I used to sing him Baptist hymns. I also sang "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God." He stood up in the water and regarded me steadily, moving his head a little. Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug as if it were against his better judgment. Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, the clear gray icy water... Back, behind us, the dignified tall firs begin. Bluish, associating with their shadows, a million Christmas trees stand waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones. I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same, slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones, icily free above the stones, above the stones and then the world. If you should dip your hand in, your wrist would ache immediately, your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn as if the water were a transmutation of fire that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame. If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter, then briny, then surely burn your tongue. It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown. 12

13 To Autumn John Keats 1. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; To bend with apples the moss d cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For Summer has o er-brimm d their clammy cells. 2. Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; Or on a half-reap d furrow sound asleep, Drows d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep Steady thy laden head across a brook; Or by a cyder-press, with patient look, Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. 3. Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue; Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies. 13

14 Once by the Pacific Robert Frost The shattered water made a misty din. Great waves looked over others coming in, And thought of doing something to the shore That water never did to land before. The clouds were low and hairy in the skies, Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes. You could not tell, and yet it looked as if The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff, The cliff in being backed by continent; It looked as if a night of dark intent Was coming, and not only a night, an age. Someone had better be prepared for rage. There would be more than ocean-water broken Before God s last Put out the Light was spoken. 14