Friday, May 30, 2025

Heinrich Heine's The Lotus Flower


The Lotus Flower

The lotus flower is frightened
By the sun's majestic light;
With downcast eyes and dreaming
She longs for the quiet of night.
 
The moon, he is her lover,
He wakes her with silver rays;
To him she unveils her friendly
Devoted flower face.
 
She blooms and sparkles, gazing
Silently up to his glow;
In fragrance she weeps and trembles
From rapture of love and woe.
 
-Heinrich Heine (tr. Ernst Feise)
 
Heine was a German poet, born in 1797 in Düsseldorf, when the revolutionary French forces occupied the town. His parents were Jewish. In 1831, he moved as a political exile to Paris, where he lived the rest of his life. In 1848, he suffered a paralytic stroke and was confined to bed (his 'mattress-grave' he called it) from then until his death in 1856, but still writing all the time.
 
The German:
 
Die Lotosblume
 
Die Lotosblume ängstigt
Sich vor der Sonne Pracht,
Und mit gesenktem Haupte
Erwartet sie träumend die Nacht.
 
Der Mond, der ist ihr Buhle,
Er weckt sie mit seinem Licht,
Und ihm entschleiert sie freundlich
Ihr frommes Blumengesicht.
 
Sie blüht und glüht und leuchtet
Und starret stumm in die Höh;
Sie duftet und weinet und zittert
Vor Liebe und Liebesweh.
 
-Heinrich Heine

Thursday, May 1, 2025

Pangloss' Song by Richard Wilbur (#poem)

 

Pangloss' Song:
A comic-opera lyric
 
I
 
Dear boy, you will not hear me speak
  With sorrow or with rancor
Of what has paled my rosy cheek
  And blasted it with canker;
'Twas Love, great Love, that did the deed
  Through Nature's gentle laws,
And how should ill effects proceed
  From so divine a cause?
 
Sweet honey comes from bees that sting,
  As you are well aware
To one adept in reasoning
Whatever pains disease may bring
Are but the tangy seasoning
  To Love's delicious fare.
 
II
 
Columbus and his men, they say,
  Conveyed the virus hither
Whereby my features rot away
  And vital powers wither;
Yet had they not traversed the seas
  And come infected back,
Why, think of all the luxuries
  That modern life would lack!
 
All bitter things conduce to sweet,
  As this example shows;
Without the little spirochete
We'd have no chocolate to eat,
Nor would tobacco's fragrance greet
  The European nose.
 
III
 
Each nation guards its native land
  With cannons and with sentry,
Inspectors look for contraband
  At every port of entry,
Yet nothing can prevent the spread
  Of love's divine disease:
It rounds the world from bed to bed
  As pretty as you please.
 
Men worship Venus everywhere,
  As plainly may be seen;
The decorations which I bear
Are nobler than the Croix de Guerre,
And gained in service of our fair
  And universal Queen.
 
-Richard Wilbur
 
Somehow it seemed time for a little light verse, even if it's verse in celebration (?) of syphilis. 
 
Richard Wilbur wrote this for Leonard Bernstein's operetta Candide, the first version of which was performed in 1956. This song for Dr. Pangloss (he was the young Candide's tutor) didn't make it into the operetta--I suspect Bernstein thought it would be too hard to sing and so didn't write music for it--but did make it into subsequent volumes of Richard Wilbur's poetry. But the majority of the lyrics in the operetta were by Richard Wilbur, including its most famous song, 'Glitter and Be Gay', sung by Cunegonde.
 

Friday, April 25, 2025

Frank O'Hara's A City Winter (#1952Club, #Poem)


Poem

Let's take a walk, you 
and I in spite of the
weather if it rains hard
      on our toes
 
we'll stroll like poodles
and be washed down a
gigantic scenic gutter
     that will be
 
exciting! voyages are not
all like this you just put
your toes together then
     maybe blood
 
will get meaning and a trick
become slight in our keeping
before we sail the open sea it's
     possible--
 
And the landscape will do
us some strange favor when
we look back at each other
     anxiously
 
-Frank O'Hara
 
A City Winter: 1
 
I understand the boredom of the clerks
fatigue shifting like dunes within their eyes
a frightful nausea gumming up the works
that once was thought aggression in disguise.
Do you remember? then how lightly dead
seemed the moon when over factories
it languid slid like a barrage of lead
above the heart, the fierce inventories
of desire. Now women wander our dreams
carrying money to our sleep's shame
our hands twitch not for swift blood-sunk triremes
nor languorous white horses nor ill fame,
  but clutch the groin that clouds a pallid sky
  where tow'rs are sinking in their common eye.
 
-Frank O'Hara
 
Frank O'Hara was an American poet (1926-1966). He was born in Baltimore, grew up in Massachusetts, was in the Navy in the Philippines and elsewhere in the Pacific during World War II, used his GI Bill benefits to get a Harvard education and then moved to New York City where he was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art and an art critic. He was gay. He died when he was hit by a (presumably drunk) driver in a dune buggy on Fire Island.
 
His first published book of poems, A City Winter and Other Poems, came out in 1952. (There was an earlier privately printed volume.)  O'Hara is usually viewed as a spontaneous chronicler of his life in a sort of primitive poetry. John Ashbery says, in the introduction to the Collected Poems, "Dashing the poems off at odd moments--in his office at the Museum of Modern Art, in the street at lunchtime or even in a room full of people--he would then put them away in drawers and cartons and half forget them." Hmm. Maybe. But I would note that 'A City Winter: 1' is a perfectly fine sonnet, and is one of five sonnets in a sequence that is the title poem, and that the first poem quoted while, not in a nameable form, has form, something close to Sapphics. Maybe he did think about them a little bit...
 
He's also capable of fun: 
 
Poem
 
At night Chinamen jump
on Asia with a thump
 
while in our willful way
we, in secret, play
 
affectionate games and bruise
our knees like China's shoes.
 
The birds push apples through
grass the moon turns blue, 

those apples roll beneath
our buttocks like a heath
 
full of Chinese thrushes
flushed from China's bushes.
 
As we love at night
birds sing out of sight,
 
Chinese rhythms beat
through us in our heat,
 
the apples and the birds
move us like soft words,
 
we couple in the grace
of that mysterious race.
 
-Frank O'Hara
 
One of my favourites from O'Hara, also from A City Winter and Other Poems.
 
A great discussion of what's probably O'Hara's most famous poem (but from his later book Lunch Poems) 'Having a Coke With You' by A. O. Scott can be found here, though you'll need access to the New York Times to read it.
 
Sadly, while I put a photo of the first edition of A City Winter and Other Poems up at the top, that's not what I have. I poached that picture from AbeBooks where an autographed copy was listed for £27000. Instead what I have is 😉 this:
 
 
which is where that Ashbery quote comes from.

It's the week of Simon and Kaggsy's 1952 Club! It's also National Poetry Month in Canada and the US.