POETRY

A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island
by Frank O’Hara

The Sun woke me this morning loud
and clear, saying “Hey! I’ve been
trying to wake you up for fifteen
minutes. Don’t be so rude, you are
only the second poet I’ve ever chosen
to speak to personally
so why
aren’t you more attentive? If I could
burn you through the window I would
to wake you up. I can’t hang around
here all day.”
“Sorry, Sun, I stayed
up late last night talking to Hal.”

“When I woke up Mayakovsky he was
a lot more prompt” the Sun said
petulantly. “Most people are up
already waiting to see if I’m going
to put in an appearance.”
I tried
to apologize “I missed you yesterday.”
“That’s better” he said. “I didn’t
know you’d come out.” “You may be wondering why I’ve
come so close?”
“Yes” I said beginning to feel hot
and wondering if maybe he wasn’t burning me
anyway.
“Frankly I wanted to tell you
I like your poetry. I see a lot
on my rounds and you’re okay. You may
not be the greatest thing on earth, but
you’re different. Now, I’ve heard some
say you’re crazy, they being excessively
calm themselves to my mind, and other
crazy poets think that you’re a boring
reactionary. Not me.
Just keep on
like I do and pay no attention. You’ll
find that some people always will
complain about the atmosphere,
either too hot
or too cold too bright or too dark, days
too short or too long.
If you don’t appear
at all one day they think you’re lazy
or dead. Just keep right on, I like it.

And don’t worry about your lineage
poetic or natural. The Sun shines on
the jungle, you know, on the tundra
the sea, the ghetto. Wherever you were
I knew it and saw you moving. I was waiting
for you to get to work.

And now that you
are making your own days, so to speak,
even if no one reads you but me
you won’t be depressed. Not
everyone can look up, even at me. It
hurts their eyes.”
“Oh Sun, I’m so grateful to you!”

“Thanks and remember I’m watching. It’s
easier for me to speak to you out
here. I don’t have to slide down
between buildings to get your ear.
I know you love Manhattan, but
you ought to look up more often.
And
always embrace things, people earth
sky stars, as I do, freely and with
the appropriate sense of space. That
is your inclination, known in the heavens
and you should follow it to hell, if
necessary, which I doubt.
Maybe we’ll
speak again in Africa, of which I too
am specially fond. Go back to sleep now
Frank, and I may leave a tiny poem
in that brain of yours as my farewell.”

“Sun, don’t go!” I was awake
at last. “No, go I must, they’re calling
me.”
“Who are they?”
Rising he said “Some
day you’ll know. They’re calling to you
too.” Darkly he rose, and then I slept.

Wow, this poem is crazy. I’ll tell you that the first thing the sun reminded me of was God, since he/she/it appears omnipotent, all-seeing, and friendly. However, I thought maybe the meaning was a little more complex than the sun just representing God. The sun is certainly very human-like. He talks to O’Hara the way a famous professor would to a student, with a little bit of an air of superiority but also a friendly demeanor. The strangest part was that line at the end, where he says “No I must go, they’re calling me,” and Frank says “Who,” and the sun just goes “You’ll know, they’re calling you too” and then departs.

Who could “they” be? Who calls the sun? Who calls Frank O’Hara? People perhaps? Society? After all, the sun is a pretty big “guy,” and is responsible for lighting and heating the whole earth. Everyone calls to the sun to herald in a new day, and to bring light and warmth and life (that opening scene from The Lion King comes to mind.) Perhaps the sun is telling O’Hara that society is calling to him as well, calling him as a poet and a thinker and an artist.

Maybe O’Hara is comparing himself to the sun then, as if he’s bringing in new light and life and warmth to poetry after another dark, cold night. However, it is somewhat strange that O’Hara would say he had been called forth in this way. For one thing, the poem would almost seem prophetic, since the sun tells him “Someday you’ll know.” The implication in this statement and in the entire poem is that O’Hara is just beginning to find success, that the Sun is one of the first to really enjoy his poetry. Did O’Hara guess in advance that he would be so successful as a poet? Was it just a good guess? The poem raises more questions than it answers.

Here

Here I am in the garden laughing
an old woman with heavy breasts
and a nicely mapped face

how did this happen
well that’s who I wanted to be

at last a woman
in the old style sitting
stout thighs apart under
a big skirt grandchild sliding
on off my lap a pleasant
summer perspiration

that’s my old man across the yard
he’s talking to the meter reader
he’s telling him the world’s sad story
how electricity is oil or uranium
and so forth I tell my grandson
run over to your grandpa ask him
to sit beside me for a minute I
am suddenly exhausted by my desire
to kiss his sweet explaining lips

I think this poem is meant to be sarcastic, not only because of the context of the other poems but because of one of the lines. “How did this happen? Well that’s who I wanted to be.” It’s something I can’t quite put my finger on, but it just seems like the implication is that perhaps in reality she didn’t want to simply grow old to be a “traditional” woman, maybe “that” wasn’t who she wanted to be. The part that confuses me is the last little section, where the man is talking about oil and uranium and she’s reflecting on kissing him. This part is difficult to reconcile with the poem whether it suggests a feminist or more traditional attitude. Perhaps it is sarcasm that reveals disatisfaction? The implication of the grandfather’s “sweet explaining lips” could be that women could have “sweet explaining lips” as well.

Aunt Jennifer’s tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.

Aunt Jennifer’s fingers fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer’s hand.

When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

This poem struck me because it reminded me of some of the stuff we talked about throughout the year. For instance, at the end of the poem, the line “The tigers in the panal that she made will go on prancing, proud and unafraid” reminds me of the themes in The Iliad, where we talked about how by acumulating time and kleos you could become immortal. Now Aunt Jennifer isn’t going out killing Greeks to get her honor and glory, but nonetheless her embroidery will certainly end up immortalizing her in some sense, as the poet suggests. Another important theme in this poem seems to be the wedding ring, alluded to in the line “the massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer’s hand” and also “her terriffied hands will lie, still ringed by the ordeals she was mastered by.” The implication here seems to be that marriage is oppressive or a burden to women, but the root of the concern seems to be revealed in the last line, “the tigers in the panel that she made, will go on prancing unafraid.” Rather than marriage being oppressive, perhaps the criticism is that society is oppressive. Her criticism could be that while the tigers (men) will be immortalized and remembered, the women are often forgotten.

The Imaginary Iceberg

We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship,
although it meant the end of travel.
Although it stood stock-still like cloudy rock
and all the sea were moving marble.
We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship;
we’d rather own this breathing plain of snow
though the ship’s sails were laid upon the sea
as the snow lies undissolved upon the water.
O solemn, floating field,
are you aware an iceberg takes repose
with you, and when it wakes may pasture on your snows?

This is a scene a sailor’d give his eyes for.
The ship’s ignored. The iceberg rises
and sinks again; its glassy pinnacles
correct elliptics in the sky.
This is a scene where he who treads the boards
is artlessly rhetorical. The curtain
is light enough to rise on finest ropes
that airy twists of snow provide.
The wits of these white peaks
spar with the sun. Its weight the iceberg dares
upon a shifting stage and stands and stares.

The iceberg cuts its facets from within.
Like jewelry from a grave
it saves itself perpetually and adorns
only itself, perhaps the snows
which so surprise us lying on the sea.
Good-bye, we say, good-bye, the ship steers off
where waves give in to one another’s waves
and clouds run in a warmer sky.
Icebergs behoove the soul
(both being self-made from elements least visible)
to see them so: fleshed, fair, erected indivisible.

As soon as I read the first part of this poem, I tried to decide what the “Iceberg” represents, and I first thought that it represented our judgments and thoughts. What Bishop seems to tell us in the first part of her poem is that we would rather have these judgments and “standardized” ideas than continued growth and learning. We would prefer to stay on the Iceberg of knowledge than sail off into the Ocean of learning.
Then I thought maybe Bishop was referring to words too, because we often find definitions for words and simply accept them. Since Bishop is a Structuralist writer, she might be referring the nature of words, which we often take for granted as having certain definitions, and never reflect upon how these definitions affect us. Words often display the effects of Bishop’s iceberg, they “dare upon a shifting sands and stares.” They can also “behoove the soul,’ and she calls the Iceberg “the Imaginary Iceberg.” This makes sense, because what are words except things that we have dreamed up to make communication possible?
It seems that the iceberg could represent any number of things, but that fact itself is the point of the poem. It is a great observation of our process of “naming” objects; we assign names and properties and descriptions to objects to allow understanding of them without actually seeing or comprehending them. The poem also reveals the way in which we take in meaning. What is meaning? Does it exist, or is it just something attached to objects in our heads? Bishop seems to say that meaning, like the iceberg, is purely “imaginary.”

Uncle’s First Rabbit
He was a good boy
making his way through
the Santa Barbara pines,
sighting the blast of fluff
as he leveled the rifle,
and the terrible singing began.
He was ten years old,
hunting my grandpa’s supper.
He had dreamed of running,
shouldering the rifle to town,
selling it, and taking the next
train out.
Fifty years
have passed and he still hears
that rabbit “just like a baby.”
He remembers how the rabbit
stopped keening under the butt
of his rifle, how he brought
it home with tears streaming
down his blood soaked jacket.
“That bastard. That bastard.”
He cried all night and the week
after, remembering that voice
like his dead baby sister’s,
remembering his father’s drunken
kicking that had pushed her
into birth. She had a voice
like that, growing faint
at its end; his mother rocking,
softly, keening. He dreamed
of running, running
the bastard out of his life.
He would forget them, run down
the hill, leave his mother’s
silent waters, and the sounds
of beating night after night.
When war came,
he took the man’s vow. He was
finally leaving and taking
the bastard’s last bloodline
with him. At war’s end, he could
still hear her, her soft
body stiffening under water
like a shark’s. The color
of the water, darkening, soaking,
as he clung to what was left
of a ship’s gun. Ten long hours
off the coast of Okinawa, he sang
so he wouldn’t hear them.
He pounded their voices out
of his head, and awakened
to find himself slugging the bloodied
face of his wife.
Fifty years
have passed and he has not run
the way he dreamed. The Paradise
pines shadow the bleak hills
to his home. His hunting hounds,
dead now. His father, long dead.
His wife, dying, hacking in the bed
she has not let him enter for the last
thirty years. He stands looking,
he mouths the words, “Die you bitch.
I’ll live to watch you die.” He turns,
entering their moss-soft livingroom.
He watches out the picture window
and remembers running: how he’ll
take the new pickup to town, sell it,
and get the next train out.

This poem is great at drawing the reader down the same path that the character it describes follows. It starts off with an innocent young boy and paints a likeable picture of him, describing him as a “good boy.” Then the boy kills for the first time, a rabbit, but clearly still significant since he cries for a week afterwards. Then we find out that his family is horribly dysfunctional, but that the boy still has that dream of escaping his family, escaping his problems, and getting away. Then he finally does escape, by going to war, and seeing the horror of death and chaos that comes with the reality of war, and the years go by and he finds himself unable to escape. Finally it’s the end of his life, when all of his dreams, his “escapes” from the nightmare of knowing his own, animal nature, have all fallen apart. He watches his wife dying, but he still has that forlorn dream of escaping, of getting away. That dream is the one thing he’s been able to hold on to over the years, but he never realized that the escape he dreamed of was not as simple as hopping on a train and leaving.
The boy tries to escape the knowledge of his true nature though. This poem gives us a poignant message about our true nature, that we are, at heart, animals who are desperate to survive. We often forget this about ourselves; I think we’ve gotten good at covering it up with our planes and our clothes and our televisions and all the distractions we have to forget that we’re animals at heart (although it’s amazing how quick you see a group of people become animals again when there’s no more food or they’re desperate to survive.) Maybe we, as a culture, do what the boy does then. We’re always running after “change,” always trying to escape, and we equate that “change” or “escape” with more science and more inventions and more products. But do our new products and inventions really make us different from what we really are? Can we simply invent a new truth for ourselves by making some discoveries? This poem says no, the same way a boy cannot just leave his past life behind by jumping on a train and going somewhere new and exciting is the way we can’t just invent a new identity for what we are.

Facing It

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn’t,
dammit: No tears.
I’m stone. I’m flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way–the stone lets me go.
I turn that way–I’m inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap’s white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman’s blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird’s
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet’s image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I’m a window.
He’s lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair.

This is hard to comment on, because it says so much so much better than words can express. I’ve talked to my dad about Vietnam sometimes, and I always come away thinking it must have been so surreal, so unbelievable. He’ll talk about being “out in the field” just walking along, and something will happen; for example, a swarm of rice beatles will suddenly fly through (they’re each about five inches long) and there’d be so many they could knock you down, and he’ll smile and remember it the way you might remember taking a walk with some friends, and you can almost see him and his buddies laughing and talking like a bunch of kids, except that they’re carrying grenades and M-16s and rocket launchers. Then suddenly the smile dissappears and he stops talking about it; it’s suddenly not funny anymore, and he never talks about what it was like when it wasn’t funny, when it was bullets, not rice beatles, that knocked men down. My father never talks about the other men there though, other than saying that he was no hero and he doesn’t want a parade when so many other men gave so much more. I wonder about his friends though, and I hope for his sake that in the four years he was there he decided not to make too many friends, because the alternative would be too horriffic to imagine.

This poem speaks to me the way my father does though, and after visiting the Vietnam Memorial and seeing the 60,000 names on it, it’s hard for me to see the glory of war, and it’s hard for me to see the romance of fighting, because I think any family with a member on that wall would rather have a relative than a pretty etching in a big black rock. I guess that’s what this poem really makes me think about with that last line, the way sixty thousand men could pass into history and into death, and a woman could stand before all of that and still worry about a child’s unkempt hair, as if those men never even existed in the first place.

May Magnificat
MAY is Mary’s month, and I

Mary= The Blessed Virgin Mary

Muse at that and wonder why:
Her feasts follow reason,
Dated due to season-

Mary is often seen as an “equal and opposite” to Eve. In the Creation story, Eve ended up refusing God’s gift (of a pretty good life I think, I mean, come on, chilling out in a beautiful garden forever?) by eating the forbidden fruit. In the Gospel of Luke, when Mary accepts God’s request to be the mother of Jesus (interestingly she was actually asked, it was not a purely “you-will-do-this-because-I-said-you-will” situation) she reverses that role and accepts God by being the mother of Christ. This is an interesting parallel to seasons (Eve falls=winter, Mary prepares to give birth for Jesus=spring) which is pointed out here.

Candlemas, Lady Day;
But the Lady Month, May,
Why fasten that upon her,
With a feasting in her honour?

Is it only its being brighter
Than the most are must delight her?
Is it opportunest
And flowers finds soonest?

Ask of her, the mighty mother:
Her reply puts this other
Question: What is Spring?-
Growth in every thing-

Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and greenworld all together;
Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
Throstle above her nested

Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within;
And bird and blossom swell
In sod or sheath or shell.

All things rising, all things sizing
Mary sees, sympathising
With that world of good,
Nature’s motherhood.

In Catholicism, because Mary was the mother of Jesus, she is also seen as the mother of all Catholics, but Protestantism does not share this view. Here Mary is compared to “mother nature,” which is an interesting comparison. Mary is often seen as beautiful, virtuous, and kind the same way we often imagine nature. Of course, in reality, we know that nature can be at times peaceful and beautiful, and other times violent and horriffic (earthquakes/volcanoes/floods etc.) Perhaps Hopkins is saying the way we can romantiscize nature too much we can romantiscize Mary too much?

Their magnifying of each its kind
With delight calls to mind
How she did in her stored
Magnify the Lord.

Well but there was more than this:
Spring’s universal bliss
Much, had much to say
To offering Mary May.

“Mary is so awesome that she gets May, the last month of spring when everything is just finishing growing in and nature is alive and vibrant with life.” I think that’s what Hopkins intends us to think when he says this, but it could be read into a different way…

When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple
Bloom lights the orchard-apple
And thicket and thorp are merry
With silver-surfed cherry

This ecstasy all through mothering earth
Tells Mary her mirth till Christ’s birth
To remember and exultation
In God who was her salvation.

Again, it’s rather unclear. I did research and found out Hopkins was actually a Roman Catholic convert and Priest. I would say that fact makes it likely he seeks to simply venerate Mary in this poem, but parts of it do seem strange to me. I am uncomfortable reading into it too much, because I do not want to offend any potential readers. To present the issue at a glance, I’d say that this poem highlights what some conservative Protestants would accuse Catholics of- of venerating Mary too much and basically “making too big a deal” out of all the Mary stuff. However, I could also say that the poem could be interpreted as simply talking about how cool Mary was, and comparing her to the beautiful month of may and the spring season. It really depends on how you read into it, and I find this poem particularly confusing.