Category: Poetry

Philip Hoare’s William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love: A Review

Dante Running from the Three Beasts

Writer and filmmaker Philip Hoare has of this date written ten well-received books of non-fiction, including multiple award-winning Leviathan, or the Whale (2008). His expertise ranges widely as a connoisseur of poetry, painting, and environmental concern. He once rescued a butterfly from a crowded tube platform. Every winter, for twenty-four years, he has traveled from his native Britain to Cape Cod to film and research the few Right Whales that remain.

These eclectic interests repeat themselves in his latest book, William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love (2025), extraordinary in its telling as a mix of tribute and memoir embedded in seascapes and the long cast of those Blake influenced—among them Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, T. E. Lawrence, Paul Nash, Nancy Cunard, Iris Murdoch, and Patti Smith. Hoare elaborates at length on each of them.

Readers may find this annoying in a book supposedly focused on Blake, but Hoare sees them as linked to Blake in their radical politics. I found these vignettes intriguing, especially regarding Hopkins, Lawrence, and Murdoch, who I was unaware were bisexual. I had not known that Lawrence translated The Odyssey directly from Greek, or that Blake learned Italian to read Dante’s Divine Comedy in the original.

I did not, however, find most of the vignettes convincing emissaries of Blake’s influence. To have read Blake does not invoke influence; Hopkins, Lawrence, and Cunard loom especially tentative. While Hoare is concerned with seascapes in Blake’s work, that Hopkins’s The Wreck of the Deutschland is situated in an aquatic domain does not evidence Blakean influence by itself. T. E. Lawrence read Blake, but no specific instances of linkage occur in his work. And while Blake abhorred painting landscapes, Nancy Cunard was obsessed with them.

What all these figures share with Blake is not artistic continuity, but their remaining authentic, defiant selves, eccentric in their otherness, endowed with vision, often revolutionary.

Nonetheless, I’m fond of this book, having been drawn to Blake years ago—the genesis of much of my subsequent musings on myth, Carl Jung, and Northrop Frye, whose Fearful Symmetry laid bare Blake’s mythology, handing me a roman à clef to unlock literature’s portals.

I’m biased, I suppose, in sharing Hoare’s radical politics, his fierce accusatory polemic of capitalist transgression, his compassion for the marginalized, and his anxiety for the environment—especially whales, those denizens of the deep that profusely populate Blake’s artistry, emblematic of divine paradox, or contraries: “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things” (Isaiah 45:7, KJV).

Blake’s renegade politics as a devotee of the French Revolution align with Hoare’s own mindset, reflected in the bestselling 1972 environmental broadside The Blueprint for Survival (known as The Manifesto). Hoare traces its primogeniture back to Blake, who unsparingly critiqued burgeoning capitalism, state religion, and the military. “The prophet against Empire,” as historian David Erdman called him, Blake thundered his radicalism in works like Visions of the Daughters of Albion. He viewed Admiral Nelson not as a hero, but as an emissary of colonialism rife with exploitation.

In 1803, Blake was arrested for sedition after pushing a drunken soldier, John Schofield, out of his Felpham garden. Schofield retaliated by falsely claiming Blake had cursed the king—a charge that could have led to Blake’s execution. Fortunately, local jurors refused to testify against him and the court dismissed the case. This traumatic incident resonated through literary history, ultimately finding its way into James Joyce’s Ulysses when Stephen Dedalus encounters British soldiers in the Circe episode.

The book may be difficult for readers, emerging as much personal memoir as biography. Moving in a semi-stream-of-consciousness style—without chapters or quotation marks—time shifts fluidly from Blake’s Lambeth cottage to the present day. Along the way, tidbits fall like raindrops, yielding passages of sheer poetry: “Always different, always the same. The sea had no limits and neither did he. It promised everything. So did he.”

At times, Hoare comes close to hagiography in his reverence, yet his exuberance proves contagious: “People tell me I get over-excited, as if excitement were rationed. Well, bollocks to that.”

While he gives due credit to patron Thomas Butts and collector W. Graham Robertson for preserving Blake’s paintings, it was W. B. Yeats and John Ellis’s 1893 three-volume study, The Works of William Blake: Poetic. Symbolic and Critical (1893), that restored Blake to modern poetic awareness, probing deep into his multidimensional mythology. Joyce read this work and would later lecture on Blake in Trieste.

One of the book’s bonuses is its photo inclusions of many of Blake’s principal prints, paintings and engravings, a number of them accompanied by delineations of their technique and purpose.

In his lifetime, Blake was largely dismissed as mad for claiming inspiration from the dead. Following the death of his brother Robert at just nineteen, Blake took over Robert’s notebook (often called the Rossetti Manuscript), which is now held in the British Library. Over a lifetime, Blake filled its pages with his own notes and sketches alongside his brother’s.

Hoare does not query Blake’s claims. Whatever the source of his genius, Blake’s imagination is to be celebrated—promiscuous in its daring, defiant of the restraints of reason. What Blake critics so often miss, however, is that his wife, Catherine, whom Blake taught to read, claimed that very same source of inspiration for her own art. Hoare reminiscences holding the notebook in his hands.

He tries on Blake’s steel-rimmed glasses at Cambridge University’s Fitzwilliam Museum, an hour before closing time “to see through Blake’s eyes.”

Across the way, he visits the University Museum of Zoology, housing its massive fin whale skeleton hanging above the entrance and the vast collection of bones, baleen, and marine specimens. Moved, his thoughts shift to Isaac Newton, whose rationalist reductionism Blake angrily dismissed.

Where is the wonder that Blake proclaimed: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour”?

Hoare’s book emerges a moving tribute to Blake, to those who courageously followed in his daring to be himself, to the Earth, infinite, but exploited. If it reads like poetry, it is poetry—direct, passionate, creative, resonant:

You get more for your money with Blake. He’s the Willy Wonka of art, your golden ticket to other worlds. He takes you there by the hand. His generosity is magical and without limits. Blake in fire, in iron, in paint; in ink, in the flesh, in the stars. Like the sea, you can’t be for or against him; he doesn’t give you that choice and he never, ever gives way. In his certainty is his ambiguity. He’s a cloud floating over the ocean, a layer of unknowingness through which new worlds arise. The stars rearrange themselves before your eyes.

—rj

And This Is Why I Read

Last night, I read my 30th book this year, not that I’m prioritizing numbers, but simply because I’m spending more time at it, reading a minimal fifty pages daily, and not just any book, but some of the best ever written, conglomeration of genres that have shaped my world, defined who I am, not the quixotic schoolboy of sixteen, rebellious, often angry, in pursuit of discovering who I was and, better, who I wanted to be, that best self, enlarged through awareness and sensitivity.

Today, a new book: Philip Hoare’s William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love: Art, Poetry and the Imaging of a New World (2025), his moving tribute to the great poet and his myriad influence. I first read Blake as a university English major and he’s stayed with me as one of my favorite poets.

Blake taught me to see life as polarity, the mix of opposites, of their necessity to wholeness, like summer and winter, the sun by day, the moon by night, beginning and ending, “the marriage of heaven and hell” as he called their fusion, innuendos of Isaiah 45:7: “I form the light, and create darkness: make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things” (KJV).

Thus began my odyssey with myth, paradox its hub, my later love for Keats and his “negative capability,” of opposites unresolved, my passage into Blake”s protégés, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, William Butler Yeats, Paul Nash, Iris Murdoch, counter culture artists Allen Ginsberg, Dave Bowie, and Bob Dylan.

Ahead of his time, Blake opposed slavery, championed social reform in poems like the “Little Black Boy”:

“…we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love,
And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face
Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.

For when our souls have learn’d the heat to bear
The cloud will vanish we shall hear his voice.
Saying: come out from the grove my love & care,
And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice.

Thus did my mother say and kissed me,
And thus I say to little English boy.
When I from black and he from white cloud free,
And round the tent of God like lambs we joy:

Ill shade him from the heat till he can bear,
To lean in joy upon our fathers knee.
And then I’ll stand and stroke his silver hair,
And be like him and he will then love me.”

I have cherished his profundity veiled in simplicity, his magnificent “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour” (”Auguries of Innocence”):

I continue to rejoice in “Jerusalem,” England’s unofficial anthem, with its call to battle injustice:

“I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.”

Arrested for sedition, Blake was not a nationalist, but a champion of the ideals of the French Revolution. Not only opposing slavery, he was anti-monarchy and anti-Church of England, elitists out-of-touch with the laboring class.

My early reverence for Blake led me to seek out his grave in the Bunhill Fields Burial Ground of the London Borough of Islington, an unmarked grave he shared with others—meanwhile, the din of urban traffic that could not muffle an inner quietude of somber reverence.

Blake has been with me in all of life’s flux, an inspiration, a friend.

Reading has granted me converse with the best that’s been thought and said, new landscapes, new friendships, companions I have with me always, in the days and in the nights.

rj

Reaching Back: The Child Within

It’s a funny thing how I sometimes reach back into my childhood for memories that yield comfort in older years, simple truths endowed with a wisdom that sustains.

I loved Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit stories, smartly drawn from her keen observation of England’s rural landscape, reinforcing my deep affection for my fellow creatures. Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail, and Peter have been my buddies all the days of my life.

Along with them came the wild, staccato rhythms of Dr. Seuss and every volume of the Doctor Dolittle series.

Maybe I’m just waxing sentimental—I’ve always been a deeply feeling person—but in surfacing these forgotten memories, I feel reborn.

Here are several gems I indulged in just this morning, each granting its own quiet contentment. First, the anonymous lines of the children’s poem traditionally titled “The Polite Rabbit”:

I met a grey rabbit, at the top of the hill.
We both stopped to look, and stood very still.
But I didn’t scare him, and he didn’t scare me,
Because I was polite, and so was he.

Christina Rossetti captured a similar quiet kinship in “The Caterpillar,” tracking its transformation from humble crawler to exquisite butterfly, a reminder of how what seems simple can, given allowance, mature into unexpected beauty:

Brown and furry
Caterpillar in a hurry,
Take your walk
To the shady leaf, or stalk,
Or what not,
Which may be the chosen spot.
No toad spy you,
Hovering bird of prey pass by you;
Spin and die,
To live again a butterfly.

The capstone for me since my youth has always been William Wordsworth’s celebratory poem of nature’s beauty, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”—that supreme exemplar of poetry rendered in simple language, of “emotion recollected in tranquility”:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

I have since read every one of his several hundred poems—some better than others, but always granting solace.

Fortunately, great verse is still being written to guide our children and grandchildren on their life journeys. Take, for example, this marvelous stanza by Jeanne Willis, from her illustrated picture book, Wild Child    (2012):

They caught all the wild children, and put them in zoos,
They made them do sums and wear sensible shoes.
They put them to bed at the wrong time of day,
And made them sit still when they wanted to play.
They scrubbed them with soap and they made them eat peas.
They made them behave and say pardon and please.
They took all their wisdom and wildness away.
That’s why there are none in the forests today.

Talk about rearing conformist children, alienated from nature, taught never to draw outside the lines, never to rebel and find their true selves—wow!

Call it nostalgia if you like, but William Wordsworth got it right when he wrote in “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” that “The Child is father of the Man.”

By that, he meant that childhood’s gift of innocence and wonder amid nature’s plentiful grace helps define the adults we ultimately become.

I believe, like Wordsworth, that the child lingers within us. Recovering that child within, its capacity for wonder, to notice a rabbit on a hill, a caterpillar on a leaf, a field of daffodils dancing in the wind—these are not childish things to be outgrown.

Milton for Contemporaries

Many years ago, I took a graduate seminar on John Milton centered on Paradise Lost (1667), one of the crowning achievements of the English Renaissance. But it was another work—Areopagitica (1644), his impassioned defense of freedom of speech—that has resonated with me ever since.

Written in opposition to Parliament’s Licensing Order, Milton argued that truth is strengthened, not endangered, by being tested against error, a bold stance in an age when dissent could invite imprisonment or execution.

 Milton’s intellectual hero was Galileo. In Paradise Lost, he evokes the great astronomer when describing Satan’s massive shield:

“…the moon, whose orb
Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views…”

The “Tuscan artist” is Galileo, whose telescope transformed humanity’s understanding of the heavens.

In Areopagitica, Milton recalls visiting Galileo at his villa in Arcetri, where the aging scientist lived under house arrest after being condemned by the Roman Inquisition for advocating the Copernican model of the solar system.

Forced under threat of torture to recant what he knew to be true, Galileo spent his final years blind and confined. I like to imagine that Milton’s visit offered some measure of consolation to a man whose only offense had been to follow the evidence where it led.

Today, speaking one’s conscience seldom risks imprisonment in liberal democracies, but it can still carry severe consequences: reputational ruin, professional ostracism, organized harassment, and targeted campaigns intended to silence rather than engage.

Public discourse, accelerated by social media, spreads these consequences with astonishing speed, rewarding denunciation far more readily than disagreement.

Our universities bear part of this responsibility. Among the intellectual influences that have shaped portions of academic life is Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, mentor of the New Left. In his 1965 essay Repressive Tolerance, Marcuse proposed a striking inversion of classical free expression:

“Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.”

He made the practical implications explicit, advocating for the “withdrawal of tolerance before the deed, at the stage of communication in word, print, and picture.”

In Marcuse’s view, there are issues where “certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed.”

Whether one agrees with Marcuse or not, his framework represents a profound departure from Milton’s conviction that truth emerges through open contest rather than enforced orthodoxy.

I have no dog in today’s culture wars. Censorship has become an equal-opportunity temptation for both the Left and the Right. Battles over gender, sexuality, race, religion, history, and politics have produced book bans, withdrawn publications, disinvited speakers, removed art, renamed institutions, and ousted educators. The particulars vary; the impulse to silence does not.

Milton himself understood the cost of dissent. Like Galileo, he eventually lost his sight. Following his death in 1674, he was denied burial in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner due to his support for the Parliamentary cause during the English Civil War. Buried instead at St. Giles Cripplegate, his grave was desecrated more than a century later by souvenir hunters who carried away portions of his bones as grisly relics.

Some may dismiss Milton’s model as anachronistic, but I remain convinced that falsehood is exposed by argument, not by prohibition. The remedy for bad ideas remains better ideas, fearlessly expressed.

History offers sobering reminders of what happens when enforced orthodoxy replaces open debate. Authoritarian regimes throughout history have always understood that controlling speech is the prerequisite to controlling thought.

America has never perfectly reconciled its ideals with its practice, which is precisely why freedom of speech remains indispensable.

We improve our republic not by silencing one another, but by arguing honestly, listening seriously, and trusting that truth has nothing to fear from debate.

As Milton wrote in Areopagitica nearly four centuries ago:

“And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”

—rj

Britain’s New Prime Minister Is An English Major

I hadn’t known that Andy Burnham, Britain’s new prime minister, is a fan of Philip Larkin—England’s premier poet since Auden. It aligns with Burnham having read English at Cambridge, making him rare among a long line of prime ministers.

I find that refreshing—not because English majors possess superior virtue, but because the finest literature is fundamentally moral in its urgings, even in unsettling works like A Clockwork Orange or Joyce’s Ulysses. As for poetry, moral resonance often defines its very existence.

Of course, Larkin has come under fierce attack, his published letters revealing objectionable racist and sexist views. It’s the familiar, troubling dilemma of separating an artist from the work.

I’ve just finished reading Sue Prideaux’s revelatory Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, with its unsettling account of his relationships with young native girls. Picasso physically abused several of his partners. Richard Wagner was a vehement anti-Semite, yet his music endures in our concert halls. Even foundational thinkers—Hume, Kant, and Hegel—harbored implicit racism, while Aristotle viewed women as flawed versions of men.

But back to Burnham. What does he see in Larkin? Will his affinity for the poet make him a more responsive leader, attuned to his nation’s pressing domestic needs?

This much is clear: Larkin possessed an extraordinary gift for bringing poetry into quotidian life, capturing present urgencies, human longing, despair, and the precise mood of the British landscape. I can still hear the train wheels rhythmically clicking along the rails, carrying newly married couples, in “The Whitsun Weddings.”

Larkin rendered poetry conversational and, in doing so, deeply palpable.

What better guiding text for a new prime minister than these lines from “The Mower”?

…we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

Or from “Going, Going”:

Their kids are screaming for more
More houses, more parking allowed
More caravan sites, more pay.

Reading Larkin might just keep Andy Burnham anchored to the everyday lives of working people in an era of corporate autocracy, widening economic disparity, and self-interested oligarchy.

Larkin reminds us that ordinary lives matter, not a bad script for a new prime minister to follow.

–RJ

A Mary Oliver Poem I Hadn’t Resd Before

Mary Oliver was perhaps the most beloved American poet since Robert Frost, whose nature-centered poems continue to reverberate.

Oliver’s gifts were different from Frost’s. She rarely pursued the subtle symbolism beneath his seemingly familiar surfaces or the double meanings hidden within his plain diction. Yet we continue to read her for a similar invitation: to find rest, not among our busy fellows, absorbed in the pursuit of the volatile, but in nature’s quietude—the bubbling stream, the scurrying chipmunk, the scent of pine, the intricate tapestry of a snowflake.

As always when I read her, a quiet solace takes hold. I grow tranquil, reminded that contentment is found not in possessions but in nature’s moods, even its thunder—in the sense that I, too, belong to something larger than myself, a continuity that neither time nor circumstance can annul.

My childhood returns: memories of a pine-scented grove, a whispering wind, a fox moving silently through the brush.

A few moments ago, I read an Oliver poem I had somehow missed, despite having read much of her work. It’s “What Can I Say,” one of her final poems, included in “Swan: Poems and Prose Poems.”

Once again, she beckons us to immerse ourselves in nature’s quiet wonders, to gather its gifts, and to discover grace by accepting its rhythms.

Her poems never insist; they invite. They ask us to linger long enough for the ordinary to become luminous.

Nature still speaks, if we’ll but listen. As Oliver reminds us, “the leaf is singing still.”:

“What Can I Say”

What can I say that I have not said before?
So I’ll say it again.
The leaf has a song in it.
Stone is the face of patience.
Inside the river there is an unfinishable story
and you are somewhere in it
and it will never end until all ends.
Take your busy heart to the art museum and the
chamber of commerce
but take it also to the forest.
The song you heard singing in the leaf when you
were a child
is singing still.
I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four,
and the leaf is singing still.

—rj

Keeping Up With The Greeks

When Christopher Nolan decided to film The Odyssey, he had no shortage of distinguished English translations from which to choose. From among them, he chose Emily Wilson’s, remarkable for its freshness, clarity, and contemporary English while remaining faithful to Homer’s poetry.

Wilson, a classics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has also translated The Iliad. Unlike some modern “translators,” whose work consists largely of revising earlier English versions, Wilson translates directly from the ancient Greek text. She is equally at home in Latin, a reminder of the extraordinary linguistic preparation classical scholarship once demanded.

That accomplishment is no small feat. Were Homeric Greek taught as a modern foreign language, its highly inflected grammar would make it among the most demanding languages to master, up there with Chinese, Arabic, and Russian.

Wilson also reads classical Greek fluently, the evolved language of Plato, Sophocles, Thucydides, and Aristotle with its unique vocabulary and grammar.

My own acquaintance with the classical languages began in high school, where I studied Latin for two years. The curriculum offered four years, but I opted instead for French and German. Today, my old high school no longer teaches those languages, having replaced them with Spanish.

A few years later, I enrolled in an intensive eight-week Harvard summer course in Koine Greek, the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean during the Roman Empire and language of the New Testament. Easier than Homeric or classical Greek, it nevertheless presents formidable challenges.

Our Australian instructor insisted that we learn Greek actively rather than merely decipher it. Instead of translating Greek into English, we were expected to orally translate English into Greek. With only ten students in the room, we couldn’t evade being called upon repeatedly to think, speak, and stumble in the language in real-time. That meant knowing where the accents fell for each word, often very arbitrary, unlike Spanish and Italian.

It was a demanding approach, but by the end of the course I could work through New Testament passages with little more than the aid of a dictionary. Most of that Greek has long since vanished, although I can still read the alphabet, which proved unexpectedly useful years later when I studied Russian, whose Cyrillic alphabet derives in part from Greek.

Impressed with my teacher, I asked him how long he had studied the classical languages. His answer has remained with me ever since: “Thirteen years of Latin; eleven years of Greek.” I was in good hands.

I’ve often regretted not keeping up with Greek, a language renowned for precision in contrast to English, whose richness often lies in words layered with multiple shades of meaning, wonderful for poetry, but often less exact. Reading Greek reveals layers of irony, structural symmetry, and philosophical nuance that disappear in translation.

Growing up in Massachusetts, one could spend a Saturday “junking” through secondhand bookstores and antique shops, coming away with Latin and Greek grammars for a dime apiece, evidence of the former preeminence of classical languages in the curriculum of schools such as Boston Latin School.

Long before my own time, that same New England landscape was shaped by minds saturated in the classics. Ralph Waldo Emerson read Plato in the original Greek, finding in those ancient dialogues the architecture for his own transcendental philosophy. His friend Henry David Thoreau famously carried his Greek text of The Iliad with him to Walden Pond, writing in Walden that true literature must be read in the language in which it was written—the ancient letters “carved out of the breath of life itself.”

Much of that world has faded. Outside a handful of elite institutions like Deerfield Academy, Groton, Phillips Exeter, or in schools like England’s Eton, the sustained study of Latin and Greek has become increasingly rare. Wilson herself began studying both languages at Oxford High School, an independent all-girls school in Oxford before reading Classics (“Greats”) at Balliol College, Oxford, and earning her doctorate at Yale.

I sometimes imagine what it would have been like had I continued with Greek throughout my life: to read Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, and Homer in their own words, perhaps allowing my synapses to mount a quiet resistance to incipient forgetfulness.

I think, too, of modern writers like J.K. Rowling and Toni Morrison, whose formal classical training echoes structurally throughout their work. And yet, the figure who haunts me most is one who had to build her own door to the ancient world: Virginia Woolf.

Denied the university education her brothers received, simply because she was a woman, she taught herself Greek and continued reading it throughout her life. For Woolf, Greek was not an academic ornament, but a living intellectual companion shaping her prose, her essays, and her understanding of literature.

Each year I return to her magnificent essay, “On Not Knowing Greek” (1925), invariably lingering on her summarizing sentence:

“It is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, the confusion, the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age.”

—rj

A Dickinson Poem

I recently came upon this Emily Dickinson poem—one I hadn’t read before, yet find incredibly rich in resonance, crafted with immense subtlety. Understood most fully within its New England cultural context, it brilliantly nuances contemporary reflection as well in its strident humanism.

She remains my favorite poet:

That it will never come again
Is what makes life so sweet.
Believing what we dont believe
Does not exhilirate.

That if it be, it be at best
An ablative estate –
This instigates an appetite
Precisely opposite.

Briefly, the poem opens with the speaker’s affirmation that life is to be cherished precisely because of its transience. She refuses to feign belief in something she cannot embrace: the recompense of an afterlife.

The second stanza explains why, drawing on “ablative”—the Latin grammatical case denoting removal or “taking away.” To Dickinson, a conventional heaven is an “ablative estate” because it strips away our physical, sensory selves. (Intriguingly, “ablation” also carries a modern surgical definition of tissue removal, reinforcing this sense of loss).

Ultimately, the proffer of this sterile, diminished eternity only instigates an appetite “precisely opposite”: a heightened hunger for the sensory, mortal now.

–RJ

Not So Simple: A Reading of a Dickinson Poem

If you ask me to name my favorite American poet, and there are many extraordinary ones to choose from, I will unabashedly reply: Emily Dickinson.

Her recurring themes of deity, nature, and mortality have always held me captive. I grew up in an intensely Christian household, only to rebel later in life as the problem of evil weighed heavily on my mind. Dickinson was herself a rebel. In a time of vestigial Puritanism, she chose to stay home from church and frequently questioned God’s way of doing things.

Like her, I am intimately aware of death’s proximity and its universal scythe. As for her ardent love for nature—count me in.

Above all, I admire her poetry for its enigmatic essence, her finest poems lending themselves to myriad readings and leaving behind a lingering residue.

Like the Bible studies of my youth, her work invites group commentary. Like her elusive life, we probe the lines and never exhaust them.

Perhaps her most universally beloved poem is “Hope is the thing with feathers.” Unlike the vast majority of her 1,776 poems, this one resides in an apparent simplicity, which likely explains its enduring popularity:

Hope is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –

And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –

I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.

Yet, the poem has its detractors. Some critics contend that its smooth surface, aside from the initial personification of hope as a bird, lacks the integrity of a truly well-crafted poem.

They argue that it contains no irony, no paradox, and no resonant dictional elements. In its hymnal quatrains, they hear a sing-song quality that invites parody. They claim it lacks metrical subtlety.

They ask: if the bird sings a song without words, shouldn’t a poem proffering hope actually articulate its basis?

The second stanza, however, belies the poem’s seeming simplicity, introducing an undermining threat to its optimism: “And sore must be the storm / That could abash the little bird.” In short, the stanza introduces the possibility of a duress so severe that even hope cannot transcend it. “Abash” connotes embarrassment, or even shame for having entertained hope in the first place, while “little bird” underscores an acute vulnerability.

I actually admire this stanza precisely for its ambiguity. Are there life interventions that—no matter what we oppose against them, like sandbags piled against a rising river, cannot avail?

Dickinson does not answer, nor should she. The stanza deserves praise for its integrity. Writing in a cultural context that demanded a definitive conversion experience, Dickinson may suggest that hope—or better yet, faith, does not always prevail.

The eminent late critic Helen Vendler, about whom I recently posted (Vendler ), contends that the poem’s seeming simplicity conceals an underlying riddle. The text never once specifies the word “bird”; we are left to discover it ourselves.

While hope carries a massive theological history, the poet bypasses complication with a quotidian analogy drawn from nature. St. Paul famously wrote of the three virtues that abide—or rather, transcend: faith, hope, and love. Dickinson’s analogy is demonstrative of this. Replete in New Testament overtones, this hope “endures all things,” despite life’s vicissitudes of “storm” and “gale.”

It continues, asking for nothing—not a single “crumb.” It does not need to be fed; it requires no logical rationale.

Returning to that challenging second stanza, perhaps the speaker is not acquiescing to the idea that hope will fail under trial. Instead, she may be conjecturing about what unthinkable life tribunal would be required to extinguish it.

The ambiguity remains beautifully unresolved. Is Dickinson admiring the unshakeable faith of her fellow townsfolk—a faith to which she herself could not subscribe? I have a cousin whose faith has remained utterly unaltered, no matter the circumstance, from the earliest days I have known her.

If we exclude Dickinson herself from the poem’s persona, as the most valuable exegesis does, a deeper problematic emerges: is this a poem of distant admiration or personal testimony? The closing words, “of me,” pull us back and forth between a deeply personal confession and the observations of a detached admirer.

Vendler is entirely right about the riddle here that conceals a depth wrought of subtle artistry. Even Dickinson’s dashes perform a vital cinematic role—acting like a panning camera that takes in each angle separately, before finally folding the scene into a consummate plenitude.

–RJ

Star Gazing

Today is “Poem in Your Pocket Day,” a chance to carry a poem with you and share it. Poetry speaks to the feeling dimension at the heart of who we are, most often through metaphor.

I’ve chosen Sara Teasdale’s “Stars,” first published in 1917. Teasdale is also known for “There Will Come Soft Rains,” whose title Ray Bradbury later borrowed for one of his most memorable stories. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

“Stars” is a short poem whose apparent simplicity conceals careful craft:

“Stars”

Alone in the night
On a dark hill
With pines around me
Spicy and still,

And a heaven full of stars
Over my head,
White and topaz
And misty red;

Myriads with beating
Hearts of fire
That aeons
Cannot vex or tire;

Up the dome of heaven
Like a great hill,
I watch them marching
Stately and still,

And I know that I
Am honored to be
Witness of so much majesty.

The opening stanza—“Alone in the night / On a dark hill”—does not suggest loneliness so much as attentiveness. The speaker is set apart in order to perceive more fully. The “spicy and still” pines engage not only sight but scent, grounding the experience in the physical world.

In the second stanza, the sky’s “white and topaz / And misty red” stars introduce a quiet richness of color. Rather than dramatizing emotion, the imagery gently intensifies perception, drawing us into a heightened awareness.

The third stanza personifies the stars as having “beating / Hearts of fire.” This is a form of pathetic fallacy, but it feels less like projection than kinship. The stars are not indifferent; they seem alive with a steady, enduring energy, untouched by time’s vexations.

By the fourth stanza, the speaker’s response becomes more clearly shaped: the stars “marching / Stately and still” evoke a ceremonial procession, ordered and serene.

The final tercet—departing from the earlier quatrains—serves as a quiet coda:“I am honored to be witness of so much majesty.”

The shift in form underscores the inward turn toward gratitude.

A small poem, yet it opens onto something vast: a moment in which solitude becomes not isolation but privilege—the chance to witness a universe both immense and strangely intimate.

—rj