Month: May 2020

The First Dandelion was published in the long-gone New York Herald on March 12, 1888.  By a stroke of ill luck, the very next day, March 13, 1888 was the day the famous “Blizzard of ’88,” which is still considered the NYC blizzard to end all blizzards…although, of course, 132 years later there is no one alive who actually saw it.   But most of New York’s worst blizzards seem to come in March or even later, so it shouldn’t have been a great surprise.

However, according to the notes on this poem in the Walt Whitman Archive (http://www.whitmanarchive.org), “The snow-bound took their ire out on Whitman in poems of their own: ‘The First Blizzard,’ Signed ‘After Walt Whitman,’ appeared in the Herald on 14 March…[and] a note from the Buffalo Express on 18 March, which explained how New Yorkers passed their time during the blizzard: ‘by printing poems of Walt Whitman’s on such seasonable themes as “The First Dandelion.” We join Walt in admiration for dandelion salad.”

Whitman, Walt. “The First Dandelion.” 12 March 1888. Ed. Susan Belasco, assisted by Elizabeth Lorang. The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 14 May 2020. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.

I love Walt Whitman and wanted to put something by him on the Poetry Stand, but as a rule, Whitman did not write short poems. And his long ones are hard to excerpt in any way that makes sense. This short poem was eventually later added to the collection, Leaves of Grass.

The First Dandelion

Simple and fresh and fair from winter’s close

emerging,

As if no artifice of fashion, business, politics,

had ever been,

Forth from its sunny nook of shelter’d grass—

innocent, golden, calm as the dawn,

The spring’s first dandelion shows its trustful

face.

Whitman’s long poems are rich and magnificent torrents of words and images.  I’ve never been sure whether my favorite is When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed, a long meditation on the death of Lincoln and the death of a loved one in general, or Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, another meditation on the disappearance of a beloved and the universal presence of death.

Yet for all that, Whitman was anything but gloomy, and instead is famous for the ecstatic, over-the-top tone of his poetic reflections. Even in themes such as New York City, a place he lived in and loved and thus a frequent theme, he found a note of stunned wonder at the richness of it all.

A good YouTube of Marvin Miller, probably the world’s best reader of Whitman, can be found here:

The video was made by a creator who animates photos of long-gone poets and makes it appear that they themselves are reading their poems. Personally, I found this a little unnerving and I couldn’t watch much of it, although it was well done. But it’s worth it for the reading, which is taken, hissing and all, from an old vinyl recording of Marvin Miller reading Whitman’s poems.

OK, here are the poets and their first lines – or just lines I like – that we’ve had so far:

Wallace Stevens: Nomad Exquisite

As the immense dew of Florida/ brings forth/ the big-finned  palm/ and green vine angering for life

Edna St. Vincent Millay: Recuerdo

We were very tired, we were very merry/ we had gone back and forth all night on the ferry

Dylan Thomas: And Death Shall Have No Dominion

Though lovers be lost love shall not; and death shall have no dominion.

Emily Dickinson: The Brain Is Wider Than The Sky

The Brain - is wider than the Sky - For - put them side by side -

Robert Louis Stevenson: Where Go the Boats?

Dark brown is the river/golden is the sand.

Elizabeth Bishop: Florida

The state with the prettiest name/ the state that floats in brackish water

William Butler Yeats: The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree […] and live alone in the bee-loud glade.

I’ll put up the full versions of these poems if it’s legal because they’re no longer under copyright, but even if not, I’ll tell a little bit about the poet. Still, the poet really doesn’t matter. It’s not about him or her, but about the image, that is, the poem. And that’s what any poet, any creator of our language, would have wanted.

RECUERDO

We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold, 
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, “Good morrow, mother!” to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

Edna St Vincent Millay
b. 1892, Maine - d. 1950, New York State
Poem written 1923

The real name of the poem is not Staten Island Ferry, but Recuerdo, which means “Memory”, because the poem is a memory of a very happy trip on the Staten Island Ferry, which goes back and forth across New York City Harbor between the tip of Manhattan and the mostly residential area of Staten Island. Many people live on Staten Island, but many other people just go there and come back on the next ferry. Or go back and forth again and again.

This poem…about a trip on the Staten Island Ferry with a Very Good Friend…is one of my favorite poems about New York City. I grew up there and made that trip to Staten Island many times, not because I had any business there, but because you were on  the ferry with a friend, of one kind or another, and at night it was a wonderful trip that made you feel you were floating. Which, of course, you were.

The “shawl covered head” refers to one of the many elderly Italian women, draped in black, who used to sit and sell fruit near the subway or transit exits in Lower Manhattan to commuters coming into Manhattan. They were there even when I was a growing up in the 1950s-60s.

Edna St Vincent Millay (1892 –1950) was born in Maine but died in Columbia County, NY (about 2 /12 hours north of NYC). Her middle name, St. Vincent, comes from St Vincent’s Hospital in NYC, where her uncle’s life had been saved years before her birth, with her mother commemorating this in Edna’s middle name. Like every other literary figure or artist in the 1920s, she went to Paris but eventually returned to the United States and lived in NY for many years. She moved Upstate and appears to have been a devotee of horse racing, becoming part owner of a racing stable. She was a prolific poet and is particularly remembered for her sonnets. After a very diverse career, which got her the Pulitzer Prize in 1923, she then went on to be considered a New York City literary figure.

One of my other favorites by Edna St Vincent Millay is Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare, about the Greek ur-geometer Euclid…yes, your horrible HS geometry class and all its exhausting theorems and proofs were based on his work. It may be hard to believe, but our poet has a different view, and sees Euclid as having understood the beauty of basic forms.

Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare

Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.
Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace,
And lay them prone upon the earth and cease
To ponder on themselves, the while they stare
At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere
In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese
Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release
From dusty bondage into luminous air.
O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,
When first the shaft into his vision shone
Of light anatomized! Euclid alone
Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they
Who, though once only and then but far away,
Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.

Edna St Vincent Millay, 1922