Yet Do I Marvel

    

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!


-- Countee Cullen (1903-1946), African American lyric poet, children's author, playwright, critic, editor, and public school teacher, 

Orphaned at a young age, he was raised in Louisville, Kentucky, by his grandmother. After her death when he was 15, he moved to New York City and was unofficially adopted by the Rev. Frederick Cullen of Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, the largest congregation in Harlem. A precocious talent, he was winning awards for his poetry in high school, and then published his first poems in Harper's, Poetry, and The Crisis while still an undergraduate at New York University. 

After graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1925, he published his first poetry collection, Color, and was admitted to Harvard, where he completed an MA in English in 1926. In 1928 he received a Guggenheim fellowship and studied in France. Upon his return, he became a teacher of English, French and creative writing at Frederick Douglass Junior High School in Harlem, where he was a mentor of a young James Baldwin. When he wasn't teaching, he was writing poetry and worked as an editor at Opportunity magazine, as well as in the last years of his life writing the novels One Way to Heaven and God Sends Sunday; producing a translation of the play Medea, and writing plays. His adaptation of God Sends Sunday into a play, which later became the musical St. Louis Woman, was hugely conroversial in the African American literary community, who accused Cullen of playing to racial sterotypes that harmed the cause of black equality. 

Although much of his best poems centered on topics of race and racial injustice, and some of his first poems were published in The Crisis, a banner African American publication, he insisted publicly upon being seen as a poet, not necessarily an African American poet. His ambivalence was controversial in his time, especially given his ties to institutions prominent in the fight for civil rights for African American and his position as a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance. However, he chose John Keats and A. E. Housman as his premier poetic influences, and once criticized the use of jazz influences and rhythms in poems such as Langston Hughes' "Weary Blues." He urged African American poets to work in formal verse and to study major English and American poetic figures, who were predominantly white.

Similarly, despite being raised by a Methodist minister, Cullen spent a good portion of his most productive years as a young poet with an uneasy relationship with Christian faith (see his poem Pagan Prayer), although he later reaffirmed his faith, as evinced in poems like "The Black Christ,"  "Christus natus est," and "The Cross." Questions of race and faith are central to his finest work.

His first marriage to Nina Yolande Du Bois, daughter of WEB Du Bois, while a social triumph at the time of their wedding, unhappily ended in divorce; his second marriage to Ida lasted until his untimely death related to hypertension and uremia in 1942.

Image: Judgment Day, by Aaron Douglas. This image was famously used on the cover of James Weldon Johnson's book of religious poetry, God's Trombones.

Water

    
If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.

Going to church
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes;

My litany would employ
Images of sousing,
A furious devout drench,

And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.

--Philip Larkin (1922-1985), English poet, novelist, and librarian, and confirmed agnostic if not atheist.

For someone who did not believe in God, Larkin nonetheless read the Bible and admired the architecture and function of church. One senses almost a longing to believe-- yet his preocupation with death did not allow it.

Image: Westland Tai Poutini National Park lake, New Zealand

Church Going

  

Once I am sure there’s nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,

Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new –
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don’t.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
‘Here endeth’ much more loudly than I’d meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort or other will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation – marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these – for which was built
This special shell? For, though I’ve no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

-- Philip Larkin (1922-1985) English poet, probable agnostic or atheist,  and librarian. 

Larkin reading his poem:

Aubade

    

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

-- Philip Larkin (1922-1985)- English poet, novelist, and librarian, and "Anglican agnostic." 

Larkin's dread of death comes through strongly here, with a bleak view of the meaninglessness of life amid a stark existential void.

Image: "Man Alone in a Room, by Darren Coxen

Praise in Summer

  

Obscurely yet most surely called to praise,
As sometimes summer calls us all, I said
The hills are heavens full of branching ways
Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead;
I said the trees are mines in air, I said
See how the sparrow burrows in the sky!
And then I wondered why this mad instead
Perverts our praise to uncreation, why
Such savour's in this wrenching things awry.
Does sense so stale that it must needs derange
The world to know it? To a praiseful eye
Should it not be enough of fresh and strange
That trees grow green, and moles can course in clay,
And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day?

-- Richard Wilbur (1921-2017), American poet.

Thanatopsis

   To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And healing sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts
Of the last bitter hour come like a blight
Over thy spirit, and sad images
Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,
And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,
Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;—
Go forth, under the open sky, and list
To Nature’s teachings, while from all around—
Earth and her waters, and the depths of air—
Comes a still voice— Yet a few days, and thee
The all-beholding sun shall see no more
In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground,
Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears,
Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist
Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim
Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,
And, lost each human trace, surrendering up
Thine individual being, shalt thou go
To mix for ever with the elements,
To be a brother to the insensible rock
And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain
Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak
Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould.

   Yet not to thine eternal resting-place
Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish
Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down
With patriarchs of the infant world—with kings,
The powerful of the earth—the wise, the good,
Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past,
All in one mighty sepulchre. The hills
Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun,—the vales
Stretching in pensive quietness between;
The venerable woods—rivers that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks
That make the meadows green; and, poured round all,
Old Ocean’s gray and melancholy waste,—
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man. The golden sun,
The planets, all the infinite host of heaven,
Are shining on the sad abodes of death,
Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread
The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom.—Take the wings
Of morning, pierce the Barcan wilderness,
Or lose thyself in the continuous woods
Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound,
Save his own dashings—yet the dead are there:
And millions in those solitudes, since first
The flight of years began, have laid them down
In their last sleep—the dead reign there alone.
So shalt thou rest, and what if thou withdraw
In silence from the living, and no friend
Take note of thy departure? All that breathe
Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh
When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care
Plod on, and each one as before will chase
His favorite phantom; yet all these shall leave
Their mirth and their employments, and shall come
And make their bed with thee. As the long train
Of ages glide away, the sons of men,
The youth in life’s green spring, and he who goes
In the full strength of years, matron and maid,
The speechless babe, and the gray-headed man—
Shall one by one be gathered to thy side,
By those, who in their turn shall follow them.
So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

-- William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), poet, lawyer, and editor, premier American poet of his age. this was one of the most popular poems of the mid-19th century. 

The poem's title literally means, "a consideration of death," which is amazing considering this was one of Bryant's first poems, possibly begun when he was 17. A natural argument against the closing lines, which urges one to live so that one faces death in trust of rest and knowledge that we are not alone in death, might be found in Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night." The song "I Will Follow You Into the Dark," by Deathcab for Cutie, also turns upon this idea.

Lovely commentary by Jerry Harp in the Kenyon Review here.

Image: A gravestone in a cemetery in Elsberry, MO.

The Castaway

Obscurest night involv'd the sky,
          Th' Atlantic billows roar'd,
When such a destin'd wretch as I,
          Wash'd headlong from on board,
Of friends, of hope, of all bereft,
          His floating home for ever left.

No braver chief could Albion boast
          Than he with whom he went,
Nor ever ship left Albion's coast,
          With warmer wishes sent.
He lov'd them both, but both in vain,
          Nor him beheld, nor her again.

Not long beneath the whelming brine,
          Expert to swim, he lay;
Nor soon he felt his strength decline,
          Or courage die away;
But wag'd with death a lasting strife,
          Supported by despair of life.

He shouted: nor his friends had fail'd
          To check the vessel's course,
But so the furious blast prevail'd,
          That, pitiless perforce,
They left their outcast mate behind,
          And scudded still before the wind.

Some succour yet they could afford;
          And, such as storms allow,
The cask, the coop, the floated cord,
          Delay'd not to bestow.
But he (they knew) nor ship, nor shore,
          Whate'er they gave, should visit more.

Nor, cruel as it seem'd, could he
          Their haste himself condemn,
Aware that flight, in such a sea,
          Alone could rescue them;
Yet bitter felt it still to die
          Deserted, and his friends so nigh.

He long survives, who lives an hour
          In ocean, self-upheld;
And so long he, with unspent pow'r,
          His destiny repell'd;
And ever, as the minutes flew,
          Entreated help, or cried—Adieu!

At length, his transient respite past,
          His comrades, who before
Had heard his voice in ev'ry blast,
          Could catch the sound no more.
For then, by toil subdued, he drank
          The stifling wave, and then he sank.

No poet wept him: but the page
          Of narrative sincere;
That tells his name, his worth, his age,
          Is wet with Anson's tear.
And tears by bards or heroes shed
          Alike immortalize the dead.

I therefore purpose not, or dream,
          Descanting on his fate,
To give the melancholy theme
          A more enduring date:
But misery still delights to trace
          Its semblance in another's case.

No voice divine the storm allay'd,
          No light propitious shone;
When, snatch'd from all effectual aid,
          We perish'd, each alone:
But I beneath a rougher sea,
          And whelm'd in deeper gulfs than he.

--William Cowper (1731-1800), prominent English poet and inspiration to the early Romantics. This was believed to be his last poem written before his death. It is featured in the film version of the novel Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, chosen by screenwriter and actress Emma Thompson. Cowper was listed as Marianne's favorite poet in the novel, but the poem read by Edward was left unnamed. Technically this choice is an anachronism, as the novel is set between 1795 and 1800, and this poem was published posthumously in 1803.

Image: Man Overboard, Rescue Launch from HMS 'St Jean d'Acre' by Oswald Walters Bryerly (1817-1894)

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

    

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
                      Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
                                                 The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,
And cries,
             “Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,
“Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
                       keeping their difficult balance.”

-- Richard Wilbur (1921- 2017), American poet, editor, and translator

Image: Angel sculpture, Christ Church Cathedral, St. Louis

Pyrosymphonie

   

You and I, when our days are done, must say
Without exactly saying it, goodbye.
If we could choose at such a time one free
Embodiment which might, by being the last,
Stand in the account somehow as one
Generous entry putting the whole in credit,
What and where would it be, that final choice?

There are times such as when we have had them
Must serve in their completeness for the fancy,
For they are all we get. As yesterday,
Breathing in the wood, crouching for ceps.
And just a week ago, the eyes narrowing
For twenty porpoises sewing the waves
Beyond West End, not seen for fifteen years.

And then last month, the heart syncopating,
We slipped from a canoe into the shallows
With golden Beynac above us, tall, half-robed.
That wood, that sea, that river, rooted or moving,
Survive in all their changes, year by year
In which we drift through them, seizing on hope,
Searching for our permanent lost shapes.

Perhaps for that moment we could be ourselves
For once, and somehow find ourselves in time
For the Assumption at Calvi, surprised by night,
The whole sky split by fire and dripping stars.
And we should live this passionate postscript till
Those shapes no longer named themselves as all
That they suggest, these mimes of the cascade:

Lamps of the hill town’s single street, guiding
Its evening Clios after each other down
To the pleasures of the coast, the pulse of light,
Celestial pinball, instantaneous blooms,
Paper in chimneys, headaches, calculations,
Ribbons, Spanish exclamation marks,
Cringing anemones, the sky shocked red,

A burst of dizzy bubbles in the kicklight
Of the downthrust of an ankle, following
Your swimming shape for ever for this moment
Onwards through weed-flagged crevices, as quick
As your shutter on these artificial fires
That live just longer than we might expect,
Though never giving time to say goodbye.

—John Fuller (1937- ), English poet, novelist, teacher, editor, Fellow Emeritus at Magdalen College, and critic

I Will Follow You Into the Dark

    

Love of mine, someday you will die,
But I'll be close behind--
I'll follow you into the dark;
No blinding light, or tunnels to gates of white,
Just our hands clasped so tight
Waiting for the hint of a spark.

If Heaven and Hell decide
That they both are satisfied
Illuminate the "No's" on their vacancy signs;
If there's no one beside you
When your soul embarks,
Then I'll follow you into the dark.

In Catholic school, as vicious as Roman rule,
I got my knuckles bruised by a lady in black.
I held my tongue as she told me, "Son, 

Fear is the heart of love,"
So I never went back.

If Heaven and Hell decide
That they both are satisfied
Illuminate the "No's" on their vacancy signs;
If there's no one beside you
When your soul embarks,
Then I'll follow you into the dark.

You and me have seen everything to see,
From Bangkok to Calgary
And the soles of your shoes 

are all worn down. The time for sleep is now
But it's nothing to cry about,
'Cause we'll hold each other soon
In the blackest of rooms....

If Heaven and Hell decide
That they both are satisfied
Illuminate the "No's" on their vacancy signs;
If there's no one beside you
When your soul embarks,
Then I'll follow you into the dark--
Then I'll follow you into the dark.

--Benjamin Gibbard (1976- ), American songwriter and musician who performs as the lead singer for the band Death Cab for Cutie.

Video here: