[Tim Murphy]

After our long excursion into dimeter and trimeter over at Lariat, I found myself reading Bogan again this afternoon. Alan was certain he'd put up a Bogan thread here when he ran Mastery, but I can't find it. Born in '98 and died in '70, she was an immaculate poet, good at any line length, and particularly good in short lines. I think she's probably my favorite woman poet of the last century.

To Be Sung On The Water

Beautiful, my delight,
Pass, as we pass the wave.
Pass, as the mottled night
Leaves what it cannot save,
Scattering dark and bright.

Beautiful, pass and be
Less than the guiltless shade
To which our vows were said;
Less than the sound of the oar
To which our vows were made,--
Less than the sound of its blade
Dipping the stream once more.

To An Artist, To Take Heart

Slipping in blood, by his own hand, through pride
Hamlet, Othello, Coriolanus fall.
Upon his bed, however, Shakespeare died,
Having endured them all.

The Daemon

Must I tell again
In the words I know
For the ears of men
The flesh, the blow?

Must I show outright
The bruise in the side,
The halt in the night
And how death cried?

Must I speak to the lot
Who little bore?
It said "Why not?"
It said "Once more."

The Young Mage

The young mage said:
Make free, make free,
With the wild eagles planing in the mountains,
And the serpent in the sea.

The young mage said:
Delight, delight,
In the vine's triumph over the marble
And the wind at night.

And he said: Hold
Fast to the leaves' silver
And the flower's gold.

And he said: Beware
Of the round web swinging from the angle
Of the steep stair,
And of the comet's hair.

[Janet Kenny]

Tim
Thanks for posting these. I didn't know them. My almost favourite Schubert song is Auf dem Wasser zu singen(To Be Sung On The Water.) I think she may have been influenced by it (song) although her poem is briefer and more contained than the German poem by Friedrich Von Stolberg.

I am busy just now but I look forward to reading these.
Janet

PS
I'm cooking and cleaning (lunch guests) but here to go on with for anyone who like me doesn't know this poet well.
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poe...ogan/bogan.htm

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited July 01, 2004).]

[robert mezey]

Good for you, Tim, it's about a time we had a real master on this thread. And Bogan is also my favorite woman poet of the century (and was Henri Coulette's)---much as I admire Bishop and Mew and Meynell and Anna Wickham and E.J. Scovell and Wendy Cope and a dozen more, none, I think, had the pure
lyric brilliance of Bogan. And you chose some of her most beautiful. You might also add her elegy for her brother, which reduces me to tears without fail.

[robert mezey]

Oh, and don't forget this one, called "Solitary Observation Brought Back from a Sojourn in Hell"---

At midnight tears
Run into your ears

Worthy of Hank Williams, no? Or this one, "Cartography"--

As you lay in sleep
I saw the chart
Of artery and vein
Running from your heart,

Plain as the strenth
Marked upon the leaf
Along the length,
Mortal and brief,

Of your gaunt hand.
I saw it clear:
The wiry brand
Of the life we bear

Mapped like the great
Rivers that rise
Beyond our fate
And distant from our eyes.


And "Evening in the Sanatarium" and "Come, Sleep" and "Spirit's Song" and "Tears in Sleep" and "Second Song" and
"Question in a Field" and "The Crows" and and and and....
and I can't resist typing out one more, "Kept"---


Time for the wood, the clay,
The trumpery dolls, the toys
Now to be put away:
We are not girls and boys.

What are those rags we twist
Our hearts upon, or clutch
Hard in the sweating fist?
They are not worth so much.

But we must keep such things
Till we at length begin
To feel our nerves their strings,
Their dust, our blood within.

The dreadful painted bisque
Becomes our very cheek.
A doll's heart, faint at risk,
Within our breast grows weak.

Our hand the doll's, our tongue.

Time for the pretty clay,
Time for the straw, the wood.
The playthings of the young
Get broken in the play,
Get broken, as they should.


And what the hell, here's that one about her brother, "To My Brother Killed: Haumont Wood: October, 1918"--


O you so long dead,
You masked and obscure,
I can tell you, all things endure:
The wine and the bread;

The marble quarried for the arch;
The iron become steel;
The spoke broken from the wheel;
The sweat of the long march;

The hay-stacks cut through like loaves
And the hundred flowers from the seed;
All things indeed
Though struck by the hooves

Of disaster, of time due,
Of fell loss and gain,
All things remain,
I can tell you, this is true.

Though burned down to stone
Though lost from the eye,
I can tell you, and not lie,--
Save of peace alone.




[This message has been edited by robert mezey (edited July 02, 2004).]

[Richard Wakefield]

Tim:
I am not good at rankings -- I have a tendency to love the one I'm with -- but Bogan is mighty good. "Cartography," posted by Robert Mezey, is an old favorite of mine. The flow of the simile from vein to leaf to map to river is like the flow of blood, the flow of water, the flow of the speaker's powers of association, and more. Splendid.
RPW

[Tim Murphy]

Thanks, Robert, for typing in these wonderful poems. The problem with any discussion of Bogan is "Where do we start?"
She left us only about 100 poems, composed between 1923 and 1968. She is an intensely cerebral poet, in that there is no real sense of place, little imagery. What there is, is a purity of line and syntax which is dazzling and an over-riding grief that often borders on despair. The best of her poems are simply stripped to the bone. Though I'll confess that when it comes to the "deep image," the young mage poem and the poem to her brother leave all the American imitators of Neruda gasping in her dust.

I had never read Bogan or Francis until Dick Wilbur urged me to seek them out "in the middle of my journey." So although critics have cited both of them among my influences, that's not really true. I just marveled to see these wonderful voices manipulating the short line much as I try to do today--but fifty years before me.

Robert, I know little about Bogan's life. Perhaps you could share your thoughts on the person who gave birth to these wonderful verses.

[Steven Schroeder]

Medusa

I had come to the house, in a cave of trees,
Facing a sheer sky.
Everything moved, -- a bell hung ready to strike,
Sun and reflection wheeled by.

When the bare eyes were before me
And the hissing hair,
Held up at a window, seen through a door.
The stiff bald eyes, the serpents on the forehead
Formed in the air.

This is a dead scene forever now.
Nothing will ever stir.
The end will never brighten it more than this,
Nor the rain blur.

The water will always fall, and will not fall,
And the tipped bell make no sound.
The grass will always be growing for hay
Deep on the ground.

And I shall stand here like a shadow
Under the great balanced day,
My eyes on the yellow dust, that was lifting in the wind,
And does not drift away.


------------------
Steve Schroeder

[robert mezey]

"Medusa" is a good one. And there must be twenty or thirty more. But I wonder why her verse hasn't drawn any more attention on this thread. Everybody seems to want to talk about Thomas or Brooks, neither of whom are in Bogan's class.
Ah well, to each his own goo.

[Janet Kenny]

Robert
I am stunned by Bogan. I have not read enough of her and am still finding out about her. I agree she is beyond first rate.

Why is she excluded from some major anthologies of 20th century poetry?

I have had guests these last two days but I certainly intend to read as much of her as I can find.

I am always comforted to discover first rate women poets.
Janet

[Clay Stockton]

I must thank Tim for posting this thread. For this youngster, and I suspect for many others, Bogan's name is recognizable but her poems mostly unknown (thanks in part to the lack of anthologization that Janet mentions).

Fortunately, a quick trip to the used bookstore today produced an $8 copy of The Blue Estuaries, and even just a lunchtime's worth of reading demonstrates the gross injustice that she's not at least as well known as, say, Millay.

Yes, what about her life? Why isn't she a "celebrity" poet? The back flap says she was the poetry editor of the NYer for over forty years . . . so it's hard to understand why she's a bit obscure.

Anyway, thanks for the thread.

--CS


P.S. Same shelf at same bookstore provided copies of Mason & Jarman . . . pretty good shelf!