Poem by Patrick Kavanagh

Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh

I think someone out there who knows might say that Patrick Kavanagh was 20th Century Irish poetry's bridge, if not thematically then in terms of greatness, between Yeats and Heaney. Apparently, he admired later Yeats. In style and sometimes theme he anticipated Heaney. In his lifetime he never got the respect those two enjoyed. Here I love the tone. Personally, I very much identify with "the mirage/ that was my future." I love the idea -- Give me back the fog! -- and the double-take syntax of the third stanza. It's worth lingering over. I like the occasional absence of expected punctuation. And how "without knowing" becomes a noun. (As I read it anyway.) These things attach you to a poem, they make it tangle with your brain and vice versa; you become intimate, first like wrestlers, then lovers.


I Had a Future

O I had a future
A future

Gods of the imagination bring back to life
The personality of those streets,
Not any streets
But the streets of nineteen forty.

Give the quarter-seeing eyes I looked out of
The animal-remembering mind
The fog through which I walked towards
      The mirage
That was my future.

The women I was to meet
They were nowhere within sight.

And then the pathos of the blind soul,
How without knowing stands in its own kingdom.
Bring me a small detail
How I felt about money,
Not frantic as later,
There was the future.

Show me the stretcher-bed I slept on
In a room on Drumcondra Road,
Let John Betjeman call for me in a car.

It is summer and the eerie beat
of madness in Europe trembles the
Wings of the butterflies along the canal.

O I had a future.
                                 - Patrick Kavanagh

Poem by Ralph Hodgson

'The thickets of the Heart" is such a lovely phrase, of course. I remember once being in New Mexico with an ornithologist netting tiny birds to weigh and tag them, how fragile they were in his hand. But I like the idea of lurking in the heart in search of joy. Hodgson also mentions goldfinches in a poem called "Ghoul Care" (unfortunate title) as one of the three charms that protect him from the master of "the Pit," that "prodigious Bat" that I suspect refers to sadness and perhaps depression. Me, I am weak at catching the twittering beauties, though sometimes goldfinches flit in abundance around my backyard. Maybe I need a new clap-net, whatever that is...

The Birdcatcher
When flighting time is on I go
With clap-net and decoy,
A-fowling after goldfinches
And other birds of joy;

I lurk among the thickets of
The Heart where they are bred,
And catch the twittering beauties as
They fly into my Head.
                           -Ralph Hodgson 
                             1917

Nativity poem by George Mackay Brown

George Mackay Brown was a 20th Century Scottish poet who lived in the Orkney Islands. He could make the myth and lore of the Orkneys suddenly gritty and real with one line or image. Here he does that with the birth of Christ. I love the filling-in of the Nativity story, the attentiveness to this unremarkable moment in the lives of the Roman soldier and the innkeeper, and the immense irony of the last line. A 'byre" is a cow shed. The shepherds the innkeeper grumbles at are not drunk, but have gotten word from angels that a savior is born. So they are just excited.

The Lodging

The stones of the desert town
Flush; and, a star-filled wave,
Night steeples down.

From a pub door here and there
A random ribald song
Leaks on the air.

The Roman in a strange land
Broods, wearily leaning
His lance in the sand.

The innkeeper over the fire
Counting his haul, hears not
The cry from the byre;

But rummaging in the till
Grumbles at the drunken shepherds
Dancing on the hill;

And wonders, pale and grudging,
If the strange pair below
Will pay their lodging.
                       -George Mackay Brown

Stanza from Roethke's "The Pure Fury"

This is stanza # 3 of 4 numbered stanzas, I was struck, real struck, by the line, A man's a beast prowling in his own house...


How terrible the need for solitude:
That appetite for life so ravenous
A man's a beast prowling in his own house,
A beast with fangs, and out for his own blood
Until he finds the thing he almost was
When the pure fury first raged in his head
And trees came closer with a denser shade.
                                    - From "The Pure Fury" by Theodore Roethke
                                                           

Insight from Joseph Brodsky

From an interview at the end of my copy of Nativity Poems:

But at some point I realized that I am the sum of my actions, my acts, and not the sum of my intentions.

Heaney's journey to Aarhus

August 30, 2013 - Heaney died today. This is an excerpt, with some lines from the poet, from an unpublished essay I wrote about, among other things, my encounter with Ötzi the Iceman:

I’ve always loved old bones. I love their mystery, the tactile connection they represent to personal histories, so close yet so obscure. For me there has been no bigger thrill than peering into a gaping, ruined grave in Enniskillen to spy in the shadows an old browned skull and to imagine, just for a moment, just a sound the brain it held might have produced, just one emotion, one sensation. And if old bones were thrilling, then old faces, old noses, old fingernails and old whiskers were even better. Although I’d found they could disappoint, too. Once I had walked the long, grim, subterranean corridors of a monastery in Palermo where hundreds of dried mummies of all ages, dressed in their burial clothes, gazed back at me. Their poses bordered on clownishness and their display amounted to a violation, like a deprivation of promised sleep. They should have delivered me to a morbid nirvana. Instead they left me unmoved.

The Bog People by P.V. Glob

Then I read P.V. Glob’s classic, The Bog People (from the miraculous New York Review of Books imprint), about the fully-preserved Iron Age corpses found in bogs in Denmark and Ireland, men who were criminals, young women who were adulterers or in some cases sacrifices to the gods. I could spend an entire afternoon staring at photographs of the tormented, peat-stained, human face of the Tollund Man, his impressively aquiline nose, the vertical crease of mortal anguish in his forehead, the hangman’s noose around his neck still. I had read and re-read the poems the bog mummies had inspired in Seamus Heaney. For the poet, the Tollund Man, the Grauballe Man, the Bog Queen, and the brutality and cruel, ignorant sacrifice to which they bore witness, became useful symbols for the violent, religion-fueled predicament of the Irish of the 1970s. Here he would leave behind snipes and drowned farm cats as symbols and turn to something more ambiguous and better. “Opening The Bog People,” he told Dennis O’Driscoll, “was like opening a gate."

Through them Heaney could exercise his gift for ruthless identification and self-reflection. It’s all there in a bog poem called “Punishment,” with passages like these:

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.

This desire I feel and draw I find in Ötzi Heaney describes precisely in these stanzas from “Tollund Man:"

Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eyelids,
His pointed skin cap,

In the flat country nearby
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds,
Caked in his stomach...

Heaney dreamed of a journey to Denmark to see the Tollund Man, like mine to Italy to see the Iceman; I happen to know he made it. I could think of few better fates for a corpse than to become the inspiration for a poem, or a journey to Aarhus, by Seamus Heaney. And all Ötzi gets is me.
                                                                                     
                                                                                              -from "The Find"

Farewell, my friend, farewell: poem by Esenin

Farewell, my friend, farewell.
Dear friend, you're in my heart.
The predetermined parting
Promises reunion ahead.

Farewell, my friend, without handshake or word,
Don't grieve and knit your brow -- 
In life death's nothing new,
But life's, of course, no greater novelty.
                                                  Sergei Esenin
                                                   1925

Esenin, sometimes spelled Yesenin, dead and mourned.

A vessel on the sea, at midnight, in a storm - Poe's "Alone"

Combine the names "Booth" & "Poe" - and you get..."Both"

It started with the idle late night plucking from my bookshelves Paul Metcalf's Both, one of his many strange, imaginative, hybrid works. In this one, he documents the unexpected, ostensible parallels between Edgar Allan Poe and John Wilkes Booth, and not just in their appearances, signatures, and melodramatic personalities. Metcalf's list of sources for Both was so interesting that I began tracking them down, at least the one's I could afford. Some were so obscure that, even if I could find them on abebooks, I could never have afforded them. I really wanted to pull the trigger on The Mad Booths of Maryland, but at over $400, it'll just have to wait.

However, I could afford The Raven and the Whale, Perry Miller's dissection of the mid-19th Century American literary scene, especially in New York, its cattiness, its brawling, its factionalism, the births and deaths of its many journals, their great achievements and great failures, all their explicit scheming for an American Literature independent of English influence. How in service to this elusive American ideal -- the country was only 60 years old, technically -- the editors, writers and intellectuals, especially in New York, searched and begged and hedged and compromised, how they boosted any old tripe if it seemed American and new. And how, when what Duyckink and Matthews and their colleagues were looking for came, in the works of Melville, Whitman and Poe, they just didn't see. To be sure, they published and honored particularly Poe and Melville, and welcomed all three of them into their factions when they could be useful. 

This book will make you read Herman and Edgar anew

But they were blind to the fact that in their own time and city, the pillars of American literature had finally appeared. (Similarly, a couple of decades later, Col. Wigginson was incredibly supportive of that fourth pillar, Emily Dickinson, was a friend to Emily, but couldn't see the monumental achievement right before his eyes.)

Another Metcalf source I could find and afford was Frances Winwar's life of Poe, The Haunted Palace. And so I spent a few days in stunned contemplation of the abject sadness of Poe's existence. For years I have been known to mutter, seemingly out of nowhere, "Poor Herman," when suddenly comes to mind how poorly things ended up for Melville. But Poe's life, the constant death and early loss, the bitter avarice of his guardian, then the late death and loss, the addiction and the final, deep mental illness, trump Herman's own unsatisfying fate. Amazing how much Poe produced. How many magazines he catapulted to success. But always in the end something would break. I guess it is ironic, that his towering ambition was warranted, but often it was what caused him to crash, to have so start again from literary, financial and emotional scratch.

Metcalf, Winwar, Zagajewski, Poe (ed., Wilbur), Miller

And so I opened again the poems of Poe, including a volume edited, and with a helpful introduction by the great American poet Richard Wilbur. One particular poem, "Alone," stayed with me for awhile.

And then, just as I was moving on to other things, while reading Adam Zagajewski's poem, "The Generation," I came across these lines, which reminded me again of Poe's "Alone":

Two kinds of death circle about us.

One puts our whole group to sleep,

takes all of us, the whole herd...

...the other one is wild, illiterate,

it catches us alone, strayed,

we animals, we bodies, we the pain,

we careless and uneducated...

We worship both of them in two religions

broken by schism...

                -Adam Zagajewski

                  "The Generation"

Here is the Poe poem, also about two kinds of death. In its final image, it seems like Poe is characterizing his entire life, his haunted mind, the warp of his works. It's interesting about the warp of his stories and characters; it lurked always in their depths, only slowly to be revealed by the storyteller, often slowly to destroy him, as it did Poe.

Winwar ends her biography with a dream Walt Whitman described to a group of friends after a memorial for Poe at his re-burial in 1875. Whitman had met Poe a couple of times. Poe had been one the earliest publishers of Whitman's poetry, pre-Leaves of Grass. In Whitman's vision, he sees a "vessel on the sea, at midnight, in a storm... On the deck was a slender, slight, beautiful figure, a dim man, apparently enjoying all the terror, the murk and the dislocation of which he was the center and the victim. The figure of my lurid dream might stand for Edgar Poe, his spirit, his fortunes, and his poems..."

To Winwar, writing in 1959, the figure was Poe, but also Poe as Modern Man, "conscious of a new dimension: the world within, whose storms, terrible in their revealing flashes, throw light, now more than ever, on the black, hidden regions of the soul."

Makes sense to me. Okay, here's Poe's poem, finally (note the italicized second "I" in line 8):

Alone

From childhood's hour I have not been

As others were -- I have not seen

As others saw -- I could not bring

My passions from a common spring --

From thw same source I have not taken

My sorrow -- I could not awaken

My heart to joy at the same tone --

And all I lov'd -- I loved alone --

Then -- in my childhood -- in the dawn

Of a most stormy life -- was drawn

From ev'ry depth of good and ill

The mystery which binds me still--

From the torrent, or the fountain --

From the red cliff of the mountain --

From the sun that 'round me roll'd

In its autumn tint of gold --

From the lightning in the sky

As it pass'd me flying by --

From the thunder and the storm--

And the cloud that took the form

(When the rest of Heaven was blue)

Of a demon in my view--

Another poem by R.S. Thomas

Tell me, what did Shelly dream? And how did love deceive him?

1963 edition, dedicated to the great James Hanley

Song at the Year's Turning
Shelley dreamed it. Now the dream decays.
The props crumble. The familiar ways
Are stale with tears trodden underfoot.
The heart's flower withers at the root.
Bury it, then, in history's sterile dust.
The slow years shall tame your tawny lust.

Love deceived him; what is there to say
The mind brought you by a better way 
To this despair? Lost in the world's wood
You cannot stanch the bright menstrual blood.
The earth sickens; under naked boughs
The frost comes to barb your broken vows.

Is there blessing? Light's peculiar grace
In cold splendour robes this tortured place
For strange marriage. Voices in the wind
Weave a garland where a mortal sinned.
                                                                                  Winter rots you; who is there to blame?
                                                                                  The new grass shall purge you in its flame.

R.S. elsewhere on the blog: "Somewhere"

Poem by Desmond O'Grady

This is one of those poems, like R.S. Thomas' "Song at the Year's Turning," that I can't really figure out but love very much anyway. I love "fisted flex of heart." Also how "staring staring silence" is revisited later with the "Unwinking eyes of saints" and "I felt the Churcheyed, fidget fear." I love the structure of the three long sentences that make up the three stanzas, and the tone of frustration, perhaps tinged with surrender. Perhaps not tinged with surrender. I'm not really sure. I like the outraged shock in the question of the title. Is it outraged shock? Is it a sort of mocking of teenage petulance? There's some kind of returning going on, but is it to an emotion? Or a place? And if it's to a place, is it a physical place or a spiritual one? Maybe it's all of these things. Or none of them. I can't really figure it out. But still I love this poem by the Irishman, Desmond O'Grady, which I found in his 1967 collection called The Dark Edge of Europe.

Was I Supposed to Know?

When,

In a blue-sharp, fallow sky,

With wind in hair

And grey of rock, angled by ages, sharpening the eye,

I

Stamped down that cut stone stair

Towards sand and sea

And clawed, nails scratching, down from the deaf-mute cliffs to where

Were track and trees below --

Was I supposed to know?

When,

With senses quick as compass

And tightened skin,

In breaking clearing, fell on Church and Churchyard moss

I,

Helpless, toeheeled in

To Christ and Cross

And staring staring silence, felt small as a pin,

Felt schoolboy years ago --

Was I supposed to know?

Was I supposed to know

That each fisted flex of heart

And wide of eye,

Each pitch of thought in bone-sprung skull; each stutter start

Of unravelled blood in my

Knit flesh and bone;

And every studied part I cast me as a boy;

That all my rebel scorn

And mock at prayer,

My every bedded bitch and spilled out kids unborn,

Were

All marked mine with care --

By some high Law

Or some high guiding Plan -- to lead me back to where,

Again,

With coffin smell of pew

And chris of Cross,

Unwinking eyes of saints and hushed confession queue --

For one loud nervous boot

Of frightened heart,

I felt the Churcheyed, fidget fear of schooltied youth?

Line from the poet Desmond O'Grady

There's a time in the wound of childhood when something clots.
                                                                    -Desmond O'Grady
                                                                      from the poem "The Nail"

Also see: Poem by Desmond O'Grady - Was I Supposed to Know?

Prose passage from Osip Mandelstam

The Russian Osip Mandelstam, vindictively exiled by Stalin for the second and final time in 1938, died in a Siberian transit camp, reportedly out of his mind. He is known for his poetry, but wrote great, rich, dense, evocative essays and stories about Russian life in St. Petersburg and elsewhere. These two paragraphs (translated by Clarence Brown) are a perfect example. ("Scellé" means sealed. I don't know the "Song of Malbourk," although I have been to the amazing Malbork Castle, in Poland, and it is sometimes spelled "Malbourk.")

From "Riots and Governesses:"

It is my opinion that the little songs, models of penmanship, anthologies, and conjugations had ended by driving all these French and Swiss women themselves into an infantile state. At the center of their worldview, distorted by anthologies, stood the figure of the great emperor Napoleon and the War of 1812; after that came Joan of Arc (one Swiss girl, however, turned out to be a Calvinist), and no matter how often I tried, curious as I was, to learn something from them about France, I learned nothing at all, save that it was beautiful. The French governesses placed great value upon the art of speaking fast and abundantly and the Swiss upon the learning of little songs, among which the chief favorite was the "Song of Malbourk." These poor girls were completely imbued with the cult of great men -- Hugo, Lamartine, Napoleon, and Molière. On Sundays they had permission to go to mass. They were not allowed to have acquaintances.
                Somewhere in the Ile de France: grape barrels, white roads, poplars -- and a winegrower has set out with his daughters to go to their grandmother in Rouen. On his return he is to find everything "scellé," the presses and vats under an official seal. The manager had tried to conceal from the excise tax collectors a few pails of new wine. They had caught him in the act. The family is ruined. Enormous fine. And, as a result, the stern laws of France make me the present of a governess.

Perfect little poem by Henry Taylor

Henry Taylor was a professor in the Lit Department at American University in D.C. when I was a student there in the late Eighties. He was my independent study adviser my senior year. I don't think he was much impressed with me, but was always very kind about it. I love this poem and think of it all the time, partly because it is brief enough for me to remember it, but more because he gets everything right in it (even down to the colon at the end of line 2). I think I recognized this even when I was young, but now, no longer young, I experience the poem in a way I wouldn't have then. It's from his 1985 Pulitzer Prize winning volume, The Flying Change. Here's how he inscribed my copy after an appearance before a great class I took my sophomore year with Robert Bausch called The Living Writers: 

For Jim,
With thanks for good questions and kind words --
All best,
Henry Taylor
25 March 88

The poem: 

Airing Linen

Wash and dry,

sort and fold:

you and I

are growing old.

Poem by John Berryman

The first time I read John Berryman I was impressed with his sense of humor and with the self-deprecation in his confessional poetry. I thought, "What a great outlook he has on life." Then I learned he had killed himself. He jumped off the Washington Street Bridge in Minneapolis. Into the Mississippi River. (I always imagine people who jump from bridges regret it mightily on the way down.) It was jarring news, jarring in a way such news rarely is for me. Usually, news of the death of a famous stranger doesn't move me much. And in this case I'd come to Berryman late, so the death was decades old. But it was the nature of it, I guess, the contrast between the despair in the act and what I'd interpreted as his healthy confrontation with his demons in the poetry. Berryman was an alcoholic. Eventually I read his novel, Recovery, about being in rehab, and I got a sense of the hopelessness, loss and pain he must have felt, and perhaps the powerlessness over his condition. I also read his joyful and singular books on Shakespeare and Stephen Crane, and more and more of his poetry, all the time thinking about how prolific he was, in act and mind, despite the pain he must have been in. What can I say about this poem but that I love its tone.

A Prayer After All

Father, Father, I am overwhelmed.

I cannot speak tonight.

Do you receive me back into Your sight?

It seems it must be so, for

strangely the Virgin came into my mind

as I stood beside my bed --

whom I not only have not worshipped

since childhood, but also

harsh words have said of, that she pushed her Son

before his time as come

which he rebuked her for, and leaving home

repudiated hers & her --

and for no reason, standing in the dark

before I had knelt down

(as is my custom) to speak with You, I found

my tongue feeling its way

thro' the Hail Mary, trying phrase by phrase

its strangeness, for the unwelcome

to my far mind estranged, awaiting some

unacceptable sense, and

Father I was amazed I could find none

and I have walked downstairs

to sit and wonder. You must have been Theirs

all these years, & They Yours,

and now I suppose I have prayed to You after all

and Her and I suppose she is the Queen of Heaven

under your greater glory, even

more incomprehensible but forgiving glory.

Poems by Stephen Crane

Along with Isaac Babel, Stephen Crane is my favorite short story writer. (I could throw Trevor, McGahern and Salter in the mix, but then I start to sound wishy-washy.) In the story, "The Open Boat," Crane wrote my favorite opening line; he wrote my favorite ending in "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky." Crane also wrote poems, strange little poems that remind me, no so much in their language or themes as in the way they get where they are going, of Emily Dickinson. Here are three. They have no titles, so I'll just number them. In #1, I like "gardens/ lying at impossible distances." Feels very precisely like life. In #2, I hear the first voice as some lying, hyperbolic evangelist in Ocean Grove, NJ, the revival town near where Crane grew up. The second voice, ironically, sounds like a truth-teller. In poem #3, I like the craving for hope and, of course, "...hence with your red sword of virtue."

1

There was set before me a mighty hill,

And long days I climbed

Through regions of snow.

When I had before me the summit-view,

It seemed that my labor

Had been to see gardens

Lying at impossible distances.

2

"Truth," said a traveller,

"Is a rock, a mighty fortress;

Often have I been to it,

Even to its highest tower,

From whence the world looks back."

"Truth," said a traveller,

"Is a breath, a wind,

A shadow, a phantom;

Long have I pursued it,

But never have I touched

The hem of its garment."

And I believed the second traveller;

For truth was to me

A breath, a wind,

A shadow, a phantom;

And never had I touched

The hem of its garment.

3

Supposing that I should have the courage

To let a red sword of virtue

Plunge into my heart,

Letting to the weeds of the ground

My sinful blood,

What can you offer me?

A gardened castle?

A flowery kingdom?

What? A hope?

Then hence with your red sword of virtue.

Poem by Gevorg Emin

Seemingly simple, but does it describe the Armenian poet himself? Or what has become of someone he knew? Or a country? A people? All humanity? I feel like I was an exclamation point until about the age of 18. Question mark ever since.

The Question Mark

Poor thing. Poor crippled measure

of punctuation. Who would know,

who could imagine you used to be

an exclamation point?

What force bent you over?

Age, time and the vices

of this century?

Did you not once evoke,

call out and stress?

But you got weary of it all,

got wise, and turned like this.

                                 -Gevorg Emin

                                 Translated byDiana Der Hovanessian

Poem by R.S. Thomas

Thomas was a great poet of the second half of the 20th Century. I mean one of the great poets. Welsh (thus the Anglo-spellings), an Anglican priest, often he wrote as if to reconcile his despair at the silence of God with his faith. He wrote about, and universalized, marriage, Welsh nationalism and what he referred to as "the machine," by which I think he meant a coldly engineered future that is slowly crowding out the influence of the human soul. Some of his greatest work was done in and about old age. This one, ostensibly about traveling, I came upon while traveling myself.

Somewhere

Something to bring back to show

you have been there: a lock of God's

hair, stolen from him while he was

asleep; a photograph of the garden

of the spirit. As has been said,

the point of travelling is not

to arrive, but to return home

laden with pollen you shall work up

into the honey the mind feeds on.

What are our lives but harbours

we are continually setting out

from, airports at which we touch

down and remain in too briefly

to recognise what it is they remind

us of? And always in one

another we seek the proof

of experiences it would be worthy dying for.

Surely there is a shirt of fire

this one wore, that is hung up now

like some rare fleece in the hall of heroes?

Surely these husbands and wives

have dipped their marriages in a fast

spring? Surely there exists somewhere,

as the justification for our looking for it,

the one light that can cast such shadows.

R.S. elsewhere on the blog: "Song at the Year's Turning"

2 Short, Ancient Irish Poems

These two poems from 9th Century Ireland (or around the 9th Century) reflect two sides of the complex Irish soul. And weather. One is from springtime and shows the happy side, the optimistic side, the tone of life I associate with my Grandfather, the side that loves God and nature. The other is the bleaker side and while a little obscure, is clearly full of foreboding. I associate it with me.

My understanding is that the first was found scribbled in the margin of a book an unknown 9th Century monk was transcribing by hand. At some point, he was distracted by the birdsongs and the peacefulness of his situation, wrote about it in verse, and was pretty damn happy with how it came out. On the rare occasions when I think I have written something good, a good phrase or sentence or paragraph, I admit to thinking to myself, "good the stuff I write in my cushy seat."

 

Notes of a Monastic Scribe

A hedge before me, one behind,

a blackbird sings from that,

above my small book many-lined

I apprehend his chat.

Up trees, in costumes buff,

mild accurate cuckoos bleat,

Lord love me, good the stuff

I write in a shady seat.

The other poem, I have run across several versions of it, is about winter and it makes me shiver. "Ice-frost time" and all that. Here are three translations, in order of how I like them. The middle one is the most recent version, and is a translation from the Irish by the great 20th Century Irish writer Flann O'Brien, author of, among many things, the novels At Swim Two Birds and The Pour Mouth; both are very funny. The third version below is probably the most poetically accomplished of these translations, but I like but I like #1 best, probably because it's the first I read.

#1

From the Fenian Cycle

A tale I have for you. Ox murmurs,

Winter roars, summer is gone.

Wind high cold, sun low.

Cry is attacking, sea resounding.

Very red raying has concealed form.

Voice of geese has become usual,

Cold has caught the wings of birds,

Ice-frost time; wretched, very wretched.

                                  A tale I have for you.

#2

Flan O'Brien's Version

Here's a song --

stags give tongue

winter snows

summer goes.

High cold blow

sun is low

brief is day

seas give spray.

Fern clumps redden

shapes are hidden

wild geese raise

wonted cries.

Cold now girds

wings of birds

icy time --

that's my rime.

#3

Winter's Approach

List my lay; oxen roar,

Winter chides, Summer's o'er,

Sinks the sun, cold winds rise

Moans assail, ocean cries.

Ferns flush red, change hides all,

Clanging now, gray geese call,

Wild wings cringe, cold with rime,

Drear, most drear, ice-frost time.