You, Andrew Marvell

Like Nick Hornby’s characters in High Fidelity, I sit around making lists of my favorite things. Unlike Nick Hornby’s characters, my lists do not inspire passionate argument. However, you’re free to argue passionately if you don’t mind signing up for Blogster. But I have to warn you that this is a list of my favorite poems. And if I hear nothing, I will assume that Qui tacit consentire vult: silence gives consent, and you love ‘em as much as I do.

1. You, Andrew Marvell

I remember reading Archibald MacLeish’s obituary in the The Guardian. It said something like, “Despite years of effort, MacLeish never produced a truly great poem” — and I thought, “No! No! That’s wrong!” — and it continued “except ‘You, Andrew Marvell.’”

Of course it is inspired by Marvell's To His Coy Mistress.

For a while I cherished an idea of writing a science fiction novel about a space explorer who was a direct descendent of Andrew Marvell. It could be that this was a very,very bad idea for a novel. But I digress.

Every line of this poem is perfect. “And strange at Ecbatan the trees / Take leaf by leaf the evening strange”!

2. Mark Strand’s Where Are the Waters of Childhood?

Mark Strand and I have the same imagination. I once had a dream in which the moon set to the level of the ocean and then floated on the water and washed up on the shore at my feet. I was later dumbfounded to see that Mark Strand had written a poem on just that subject. Put about thirty of his poems in my top-50 list. Also he is a hunk. Did I just say that?

http://usa.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=592&x=1

Oddly enough Strand wrote a reply to You, Andrew Marvell, called A.M., but it's not up to his usual standards.

3. Sir Walter Raleigh’s The Lie

It was not until I assigned this to unwitting students in my intro lit classes that I found out that the expression “to give something the lie” (i.e. to declare it is false) is completely unknown in modern pop culture.

...Tell zeal it wants devotion;
Tell love it is but lust;
Tell time it meets but motion;
Tell flesh it is but dust:
And wish them not reply,
For thou must give the lie.

http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/thelie.htm

4. Naneo Sakaki’s A Love Letter

This isn’t so much a poem as a conceptual exercise, and an interesting counterpoint to You, Andrew Marvell. They both involve gaining new perspective by looking at the Earth (or indeed the universe) from a great height. This was also the motif of Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, where Scipio is taken above the Earth and sees how futile all the people running around trying to gain fame and win wars are. It was borrowed for the Vision of Paul, an apocryphal vision attributed to St. Paul, and so on down through history, culminating in the Peter Pan ride at Disneyland (which provides the experience of looking down through the stars very effectively), and, as it happens, in a tattoo of stars on my right ankle, just to remind me of poetry, Latin, Peter Pan, and perspective.

http://www.levity.com/digaland/nanao.html

5. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

It says it all. The sense that everything passes away is part of what drives a medievalist, and incidentally is the thing that most animates Tolkien, and that Peter Jackson and the video games leave out — but I digress again.

For some we loved, the loveliest and the best
That from his Vintage rolling Time hath prest,
Have drunk their Cup a Round or two before,
And one by one crept silently to rest.

http://classics.mit.edu/Khayyam/rubaiyat.html


And here is the winner in all its glory. Read this slowly if you don’t know it, because it truly is a great poem. The earth turning, the night coming, the sense of emptiness, rest, evening, and...

You, Andrew Marvell
by Archibald MacLeish

And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth’s noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night

To feel creep up the curving east
The earthy chill of dusk and slow
Upon those under lands the vast
And ever climbing shadow grow

And strange at Ecbatan the trees
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange
The flooding dark about their knees
The mountains over Persia change

And now at Kermanshah the gate
Dark empty and the withered grass
And through the twilight now the late
Few travelers in the westward pass

And Baghdad darken and the bridge
Across the silent river gone
And through Arabia the edge
Of evening widen and steal on

And deepen on Palmyra’s street
The wheel rut in the ruined stone
And Lebanon fade out and Crete
High through the clouds and overblown

And over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls
And loom and slowly disappear
The sails above the shadowy hulls

And Spain go under and the shore
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more
The low pale light across that land

Nor now the long light on the sea

And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on…