Reading Set 3

LIT 14. POETRY AND DRAMA

SECTIONS R28, R43, & R69

Reading Outline
Page

“Penniless Lovers,” Eugénio de Andrade (Portugal) 2

“Commemoration,” Wislawa Szymborska (Poland) 3

“Contrapuntal,” Ophelia Dimalanta (Philippines) 4

“Scheherazade,” Richard Siken (United States) 5

“Gretel in Darkness,” Louise Glück (United States) 6

“Prayer,” Myrna Peña-Reyes (Philippines) 7

“A Man,” Nicanor Parra (Chile) 8

“A Man in His Life,” Yehuda Amichai (Israel) 9

“The House Surrounded,” Jules Supervielle (France) 10

“I Feel Sorry for the Stars,” Fernando Pessoa (Portugal) 11

“On My Birthday,” Rabindranath Tagore (Bengal) 12

“Distribution of Poetry,” Jorge de Lima (Brazil) 13

“Temptation,” Nina Cassian (Romania) 14

“Wild Geese,” Mary Oliver (United States) 15

Instructions for Short Paper 1 16

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PENNILESS LOVERS
Eugénio de Andrade (Portugal)

They had faces open to whoever passed.

They had legends and myths
and a chill in the heart.
They had gardens where the moon strolled
hand in hand with the water.
They had an angel of stone for a brother.

They had like everyone

the miracle of every day
dripping from the roofs;
and golden eyes
glowing with a wilderness of dreams.

They were hungry and thirsty like animals,

and there was silence
around their steps.
But at every gesture they made,
a bird was born from their fingers
and, dazzled, vanished into space.

Trans. from the Portuguese by Alexis Levitin

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COMMEMORATION
Wislawa Szymborska (Poland)

They made love among hazel shrubs

beneath suns of dew,
gathering in their hair
the forest’s residue.

Heart of the swallow

have mercy on them.

They knelt down by the lake,

combed out the earth and leaves,
and fish swam to the water’s edge,
a shimmering galaxy.

Heart of the swallow

have mercy on them.

Steam rose from trees reflected

in the rippling waves.
O swallow let this memory
forever be engraved.

O swallow, thorn of clouds,

author of the air,
Icarus improved, Translator’s notes to “Commemoration”:
Assumption in formal wear,
“Assumption in formal wear:” given
the religious overtones of this poem,
O swallow, the calligrapher, which is structured like a part of the
timeless second hand, Catholic liturgy called the Kyrie,
early ornithogothic, here I chose to render the adjective
a crossed eye in the sky, wniebowziety as the proper noun
“Assumption.” The Polish word has
two meanings, the archaic literal
O swallow, pointed silence, meaning, “taken to heaven,” and the
Mourning full of joy, modern figurative meaning,
halo over lovers, “rapturous, entranced.”
have mercy on them.
The word “ornithogothic” in the
penultimate stanza reflects
Szymborska’s coinage “early-bird
gothic,” which has an air of linguistic
Trans. from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak innovation in Polish, but bargain-
basement connotations in English,
hence the Latinate rendering was
chosen here.

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CONTRAPUNTAL
Ophelia Dimalanta (Philippines)

You say:
Love is voiceless
Lying still deep down
Steaming undertows
Best untroubled
Without a name

I say:
Extract it excise it
Hymn it holy
Or drivel it loose
Hurl it strong
Or spread it lightly
Sprinkle it frosted
Splurge it on thick
Or slather over body
For licking up for taste
Sweeten with honey
Or tang with mint
Scent with cyclamen
Hiss it insidious
Between your teeth
Or drool in trickles

But darn it say it

Diminished perhaps
And a trifle false
Duplicity in flummery
Foreplayed for
Latching on to
A star’s streaking
Frozen in midstream
Syllables pelting
The earth of this body
Into a fierce quickening

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SCHEHERAZADE
Richard Siken (United States)

Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
and dress them in warm clothes again.
How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
until they forget that they are horses.
It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio,
how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days
were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple
to slice into pieces.
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means
we’re inconsolable.
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we’ll never get used to it.

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GRETEL IN DARKNESS
Louise Glück (United States)

This is the world we wanted.

All who would have seen us dead
are dead. I hear the witch’s cry
break in the moonlight through a sheet
of sugar: God rewards.
Her tongue shrivels into gas…

Now, far from women’s arms

and memory of women, in our father’s hut
we sleep, are never hungry.
Why do I not forget?
My father bars the door, bars harm
from this house, and it is years.

No one remembers. Even you, my brother,

summer afternoons you look at me as though
you meant to leave,
as though it never happened.
But I killed for you. I see armed firs,
the spires of that gleaming kiln—

Nights I turn to you to hold me

but you are not there.
Am I alone? Spies
hiss in the stillness, Hansel,
we are there still and it is real, real,
that black forest and the fire in earnest.

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PRAYER
Myrna Peña- Reyes (Philippines)

Father,
wind breaks a world
outside my window,
but thunder is slow
to crack the light.

I do not crouch
at your side—
I remember the cold
but do not feel
the wet wind.

In nightmare
lions bored me
at a show
where I
was lion tamer.

So show me
show me where naked children sing
and race their leaf boats
in a muddy stream.

And burn me,

burn me, Father, so
I’ll play with lions
and still know
the terror in a claw.

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A MAN
Nicanor Parra (Chile)

A man’s mother is very sick

He goes out to find a doctor
He’s crying
In the street he sees his wife in the company of another man
They’re holding hands
He follows a few steps behind them
From tree to tree
He’s crying
Now he meets a friend from his youth
It’s years since we’ve seen each other!
They go on to a bar
They talk, laugh
The man goes out on the patio for a piss
He sees a young girl
It’s night
She’s washing dishes
The man goes over to her
He takes her by the waist
They waltz
They go out into the street together
They laugh
There’s an accident
The girl’s lost consciousness
The man goes to telephone
He’s crying
He comes to a house with lights on
He asks for a telephone
Somebody knows him
Hey stay and have something to eat
No
Where’s the telephone
Have something to eat, hey eat something
Then go
He sits down to eat
He drinks like a condemned man
He laughs
They get him to recite something
He recites it
He ends up sleeping under a desk

Trans. from the Spanish by W.S. Merwin

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A MAN IN HIS LIFE
Yehuda Amichai (Palestine)

A man doesn’t have time in his life

to have time for everything.
He doesn’t have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
was wrong about that.

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,

to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.

A man doesn’t have time.

When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves,
when he loves he begins to forget.

And his soul is seasoned, his soul

is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn’t learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.

He will die as figs in autumn,

Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there’s time for everything.

Trans. from the Hebrew by Chana Bloch

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THE HOUSE SURROUNDED
Jules Supervielle (France/Uruguay)

The mountain hesitates outside my window:

“How can I come in, if I am a mountain,
Extending as I do upwards, with rocks and pebbles,
A piece of the Earth, and changing under the Sky?”
The foliage of the woods surrounds my house:
“What have the woods to say about all this?
Our world spread out in branches, leafy world,
What can it do in that room with its white bed,
Where a candlestick is burning at its peak,
Close to that flower sipping from a glass?
What can it do for that man who leans on his arm,
For a hand which writes in the shelter of four walls?
Let us take counsel from our fragile roots,
He hasn’t seen us, he searches within himself
For trees which understand what he has to say.”
And the river: “This is no concern of mine;
For myself alone I flow and know nothing of men.
Always ahead of myself, I fear to linger.
Who cares for people who walk away on their legs—
They leave and they will return the way they came.”
But the star says, “Trembling I hang by a thread;
I cease to exist if no one thinks of me.”

Trans. from the French by Patricia Terry

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I FEEL SORRY FOR THE STARS
Fernando Pessoa (Portugal)

I feel sorry for the stars

Which have shined for so long,
So long, so long . . .
I feel sorry for the stars.

Is there not a weariness

Felt by things,
By all things,
Such as we feel in our limbs?

A weariness of existing,
Of being,
Just of being,
Whether sad or happy . . .

Is there not, finally,

For all things that are,
Not just death
But some other finality?
Or a higher purpose,
Some kind of pardon?

Trans. from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith

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ON MY BIRTHDAY
Rabindranath Tagore (Bengal)

Today I imagine the words of countless

Languages to be suddenly fetterless—
After long incarceration
In the fortress of grammar, suddenly up in rebellion.
Maddened by the stamp-stamping
Of unmitigated regimented drilling.
They have jumped the constraints of sentence
To seek free expression in a world rid of intelligence,
Snapping the chains of sense in sarcasm
And ridicule of literary decorum.
Liberated thus, their queer
Postures and cries appeal only to the ear.
They say, “We who were born of the gusty tuning
Of the earth’s first outbreathing
Came into our own as soon as the blood’s beat
Impelled man’s mindless vitality to break into dance in his throat.
We swelled his infant voice with the babble
Of the world’s first poem, the original prattle
Of existence. We are kin to the wild torrents
That pour from the mountains to announce
The month of Śrāban: we bring to human habitations
Nature’s incantations—“
The festive sound of leaves rustling in forests,
The sound that measures the rhythm of approaching tempests,
The great night-ending sound of daybreak—
From these sound-fields man has captured words, curbed then like a breakneck
Stallion in complex webs of order
To enable him to pass on his messages to the distant lands of the future.
By riding words that are bridled and reined
Man has quickened
The pace of time’s slow clocks:
The speed of his reason has cut through material blocks,
Explored recalcitrant mysteries;
With word-armies
Drawn into battle-lines he resists the perpetual assault of imbecility.
But sometimes they slip like robbers into realms of fantasy,
Float on ebbing waters
Of sleep, free of barriers,
Lashing any sort of flotsam and jetsam into metre.
From them, the free-roving mind fashions
Artistic creations
Of a kind that do not conform to an orderly
Universe—whose threads are tenuous, loose, arbitrary,
Like a dozen puppies brawling,
Scrambling at each other’s necks to no purpose or meaning:
Each bites another—
They squeal and yelp blue murder,
But their bites and yelps carry no true import of enmity,
Their violence is bombast, empty fury.
In my mind I imagine words thus shot of their meaning,
Hordes of them running amuck all day,
As if in the sky there were nonsense nursery syllables booming—
Horselum, bridelum, ridelum, into the fray.

Trans. from the Bengali by William Radice

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DISTRIBUTION OF POETRY
Jorge de Lima (Brazil)

I took wild honey from the plants,

I took salt from the waters, I took light from the sky.
Listen, my brothers: I took poetry from everything
To offer it to the Lord.
I did not dig gold from the earth
Or leech blood from my brothers.
Inn-keepers: let me alone.
Peddlers and bankers:
I can fabricate distances
To keep you away from me.
Life is a failure,
I believe in the magic of God.
The roosters are not crowing,
The day has not dawned.
I saw the ships go and return.
I saw misery go and return.
I saw the fat man in the fire.
I saw zig-zags in the darkness.
Captain, where is the Congo?
Where is the Isle of Saint Brandon?
Captain, what a black night!
Mastiffs howl in the darkness.
O Untouchables, which is the country,
Which is the country that you desire?
I took wild honey from the plants,
I took salt from the waters, I took light from the sky.
I have only poetry to give you.
Sit down, my brothers.

Trans. from the Portuguese by John Nist

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TEMPTATION
Nina Cassian (Romania)

Call yourself alive? Look, I promise you

that for the first time you’ll feel your pores opening
like fish mouths, and you’ll actually be able to hear
your blood surging through all those lanes,
and you’ll feel light gliding across the cornea
like the train of a dress. For the first time
you’ll be aware of gravity
like a thorn in your heel,
and your shoulder blades will ache for want of wings.
Call yourself alive? I promise you
you’ll be deafened by dust falling on the furniture,
you’ll feel your eyebrows turning to two gashes,
and every memory you have—will begin
at Genesis.

Trans. from the Romanian by Brenda Walker and Andrea Deletant

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WILD GEESE
Mary Oliver (United States)

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

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INSTRUCTIONS FOR SHORT PAPER 1
DEADLINE: DEC 20, 2013 (FRI), 4:30 P.M.

1. There are 14 poems in this reading set. Choose any one of them, except Ophelia
Dimalanta’s “Contrapuntal.”

2. Write a two-page analysis on the poem you have chosen. The analysis is essentially a
thematic analysis. That is, the paper should be able to answer: what is the poem saying? Be
able to answer this question through a coherent argument.

3. In your discussion, you may focus on any element or aspect of the poem, as long as you be
able to build toward your thesis.

4. At the same time, in your discussion you should be able to:

a. Establish the speaker and the dramatic situation

b. Close read the significant/relevant images in the poem
c. Make comments on the technique or form of the poem (i.e., figures of speech, the
dual movement of the pantun, the single image of the haiku, etc.)

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