Friendship

Oh, the comfort—
the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person—
having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words,
but pouring them all right out,
just as they are,
chaff and grain together;
certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them,
keep what is worth keeping,
and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.

God's Grandeur
By Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

To learn more about Percy Bysshe Shelley, click here.

Here is the text of the poem:

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Photo: Ramses II, British Museum

This poem illustrates the cover of Abram Van Engen's new book, Word Made Fresh. The book explores connections between poetry and faith, and it serves as an invitation to reading poetry of all kinds--with tools and tips for how to get started and explore broadly.

Special thanks to John Hendrix for the cover illustration of Word Made Fresh, which is an illustration of "As Kingfishers Catch Fire."

Here is the poem by Hopkins:

As Kingfishers Catch Fire

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

See the poem at the Poetry Foundation.

For more on Hopkins, see here.

The last chapter of Word Made Fresh dwells at length on this poem by Hopkins as an expression of what poetry does and can do in the world.

Links:

• Word Made Fresh: An Invitation to Poetry for the Church — Have you ever read a book that turned your world upside down? What about a poem? Poetry has the power to enliven, challenge, change, and enrich our lives. But it can also feel intimidating, confusing, or simply “not for us.” In these joyful and wise reflections, Abram Van Engen shows readers how poetry is for everyone—and how it can reinvigorate our Christian faith. Intertwining close readings with personal storytelling, Van Engen explains how and why to read poems as a spiritual practice. Far from dry, academic instruction, his approach encourages readers to delight in poetry, even as they come to understand its form. He also opens up the meaning of poetry and parables in Scripture, revealing the deep connection between literature and theology. Word Made Fresh is more than a guide to poetry—it’s an invitation to wonder, to speak up, to lament, to praise. Including dozens of poems from diverse authors, this book will inspire curious and thoughtful readers to see God and God’s creation in surprising new ways.

To read the text of this poem, click here or see below:

To learn more about Walt Whitman and his work, visit the Walt Whitman Archive, a magnificent compendium of information about Whitman's life, cultural context, and editions of Leaves of Grass.

To learn more about scholar Christopher Hanlon, click here.

Text from Leaves of Grass:

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, soon out of their mothers' laps,
And here you are the mothers' laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

For the full text of the poem, see here: "Learning to Read"

Janaka Bowman Lewis is an Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina--Charlotte, and she includes a chapter on Frances Ellen Watkins Harper in Freedom Narratives of African American Women: A Study of 19th Century Writings.

For a good recent article about this poem by Madeline Zehnder, see Commonplace.

For more on Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, see the Poetry Foundation.

For good resources on F.E.W. Harper, especially materials related to the recovery and teaching of her first book of poems, Forest Leaves, see the Just Teach One archive at Commonplace.

For the best collection of Harper's work, see Frances Smith Foster, A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader

For further reading, see Harper's most famous novel, Iola Leroy.

Links:

• Learning to Read by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper | Poetry Foundation
• Frances Ellen Watkins Harper | Poetry Foundation
• Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Media Theorist - Commonplace - The Journal of early American Life
• Just Teach One: Early African American Print » Frances Ellen Watkins (Harper)’s Forest Leaves (ca. 1846)
• A Brighter Coming Day — Feminist Press
• Iola Leroy by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: 9780143106043 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

We Wear the Mask
BY PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!

For more on Paul Laurence Dunbar, visit The Poetry Foundation.

For more on Rafia Zafar, see her personal website at Washington University in St. Louis.

Youtube has a brief clip from the Library of America hosting Kevin Young's discussion of "We Wear the Mask."

Elizabeth Alexander also discusses this poem for the Library of America.

For more on the poetic form of the rondeau, see the Academy of American Poets.

Links:

• Paul Laurence Dunbar | Poetry Foundation
• Rafia Zafar | Arts & Sciences
• Home | Rafia Zafar | Washington University in St. Louis
• Kevin Young Discusses "We Wear the Mask" by Paul Laurence Dunbar - YouTube
• Elizabeth Alexander Comments on "We Wear the Mask" by Paul Laurence Dunbar - YouTube
• Rondeau | Academy of American Poets

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.

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.

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.

For more on John Keats, see the Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-keats

Further Resources:

Keats's Negative Capability: New Origins and Afterlives, ed. Brian Rejack and Michael Theune:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/keatss-negative-capability-9781786941817?cc=us&lang=en&

Keats Letters Project:
https://keatslettersproject.com/

Anahid Nersessian, Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/K/bo77573957.html

Links:

• To Autumn by John Keats | Poetry Foundation
• John Keats | Poetry Foundation
• Keats's Negative Capability - Hardcover - Brian Rejack; Michael Theune - Oxford University Press
• The Keats Letters Project – Corresponding with Keats
• Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse, Nersessian

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

In this extraordinary curtal sonnet (a shortened sonnet, curtailed), Hopkins packs immense power. He uses the shortened form to heighten the emotion, drawing himself up short in the end with nothing else that can be said other than "Praise him." This week, we walk through these short lines and unfold some of the ways that Hopkins works.

Hopkins was an immensely influential poet of the Victorian era (late 1800s) whose work was not published or encountered until 1918 in the modernist era. He was a reclusive, Jesuit priest who struggled with depression, but who could also be given over to incredible acts of wonder and praise (as in this poem). He stands outside his time, and has been read and loved by poets of all different persuasions throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

For more informaiton on Hopkins, please see The Poetry Foundation.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant — (1263)
by Emily Dickinson

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

For more on Emily Dickinson, see https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/emily-dickinson

Links:

• Emily Dickons, Tell all the truth but tell it slant --
• Emily Dickinson | Poetry Foundation