Daily Dose

From Selected Poems, by Geoffrey Hill

ON READING CROWDS AND POWER

1 

Cloven, we are incorporate, our wounds 
simple but mysterious. We have 
some wherewithal to bide our time on earth. 
Endurance is fantastic; ambulances 
battling at intersections, the city 
intolerably en fête. My reflexes 
are words themselves rather than standard 
flexures of civil power. In all of this 
Cassiopeia’s a blessing 
as is steady Orion beloved of poets. 
Quotidian natures ours for the time being 
I do not know 
how we should be absolved or what is fate. 

2 

Fame is not fastidious about the lips 
which spread it. So long as there are mouths 
to reiterate the one name it does not 
matter whose they are. 
The fact that to the seeker after fame 
they are indistinguishable from each other 
and are all counted as equal shows that this 
passion has its origin in the experience 
of crowd manipulation. Names collect 
their own crowds. They are greedy, live their own 
separate lives, hardly at all connected 
with the real natures of the men who bear them. 

3 

But hear this: that which is difficult 
preserves democracy; you pay respect 
to the intelligence of the citizen. 
Basics are not condescension. Some 
tyrants make great patrons. Let us observe 
this and pass on. Certain directives 
parody at your own risk. Tread lightly 
with personal dignity and public image. 
Safeguard the image of the common man. 

Daily Dose

From The Oxford Authors:Alexander Pope, edited by Pat Rogers

EPITAPH

Foe One who would not be buried in Westminster Abbey

Heroes, and kings! your distance keep:
In peace let one poor poet sleep,
Who Never flattered folks like you:
Let Horace blush, and Virgil too.

Celebrating National Poetry Month

Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day

Calmly we walk through this April’s day,   

Metropolitan poetry here and there,   

In the park sit pauper and rentier,   

The screaming children, the motor-car   

Fugitive about us, running away,   

Between the worker and the millionaire   

Number provides all distances,   

It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,   

Many great dears are taken away,   

What will become of you and me

(This is the school in which we learn ...)   

Besides the photo and the memory?

(... that time is the fire in which we burn.)

(This is the school in which we learn ...)   

What is the self amid this blaze?

What am I now that I was then

Which I shall suffer and act again,

The theodicy I wrote in my high school days   

Restored all life from infancy,

The children shouting are bright as they run   

(This is the school in which they learn ...)   

Ravished entirely in their passing play!

(... that time is the fire in which they burn.)

Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!

Where is my father and Eleanor?

Not where are they now, dead seven years,   

But what they were then?

                                     No more? No more?

From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,   

Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume

Not where they are now (where are they now?)   

But what they were then, both beautiful;

Each minute bursts in the burning room,   

The great globe reels in the solar fire,   

Spinning the trivial and unique away.

(How all things flash! How all things flare!)   

What am I now that I was then?   

May memory restore again and again   

The smallest color of the smallest day:   

Time is the school in which we learn,   

Time is the fire in which we burn.

 -- Delmore Schwartz