The Top 500 Poems: 400-301

[DWill]

Oh, Shakespeare, how I love thee.

I'm glad, because our man Will has two more in row. Not sure how it comes about that a poet could happen to have poems that are so ordered in popularity. I suspect hanky-panky.

341. "Full many a glorious morning have I seen."

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:
Even so my sun one early morn did shine
With all triumphant splendor on my brow;
But out, alack! he was but one hour mine;
The region cloud hath mask'd him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
Suns of the world may stain when heaven's sun staineth.

"When that I was and a little tiny boy"

When that I was and a little tiny boy,
[With]1 hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came to man's estate,
[With]1 hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
'Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,
For the rain it raineth every day.

[ But when I came, alas! to wive,
[With]1 hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
By swaggering could I never thrive,
For the rain it raineth every day.]2

[ But when I came unto my beds,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
With toss-pots still had drunken heads,
For the rain it raineth every day.]3

A great while ago the world [begun]4,
[With]1 hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
But that's all one, our play is done,
And we'll strive to please you every day.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 Amram: "With a"
2 Omitted by Amram.
3 set only by Baxter.
4 Amram: "began"

Input by Ted Perry

[bleachededen]

"When that I was and a little tiny boy"

When that I was and a little tiny boy,
[With] hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came to man's estate,
[With] hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
'Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,
For the rain it raineth every day.

[ But when I came, alas! to wive,
[With]1 hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
By swaggering could I never thrive,
For the rain it raineth every day.]

[ But when I came unto my beds,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
With toss-pots still had drunken heads,
For the rain it raineth every day.]

A great while ago the world [begun],
[With]1 hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
But that's all one, our play is done,
And we'll strive to please you every day.

This is my favorite of his songs within a play, and the character who sings it, Feste, the jester, is one of my favorite of his comedic characters. And, it is also from my favorite comedy (Twelfth Night), so it's a triple threat!

I'm really glad they included this in the top 500. It gives me a bit more faith in the selection process.

[DWill]

339. "Loving in Truth and Fain in Verse My Love to Show," by Sir Philip Sidney. Sidney was about half a generation older than Shakespeare and aptly shows that writers of great skill and range prepared the way for Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Sidney was poet, scholar, diplomat, soldier--in other words, Renaissance man. The following sonnet, from his sequence "Astrophel and Stella," is unusual in its rhyme scheme and in its hexameter line length. I like it a lot. (Bleachededen, try to tell yourself that S. wrote this and tell me what you think )

Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain,
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,—
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe ;
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain,
Oft turning others' leaves to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sun-burned brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting invention's stay ;
Invention, nature's child, fled step-dame Study's blows,
And others' feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
Fool, said my muse to me, look in thy heart and write.

[bleachededen]

I was definitely thrown by the hexameter at first, especially because I find pentameter rolls very well off the tongue and in the mind (but that could just be from my long exposure to Shakespeare, as many other people find pentameter hard to grasp), but toward the end the flow began to make sense, and the imagery and rhyme could easily have come from our dear friend William, and so I'm impressed with this poem, and may even dare to say I like it. I usually don't like poems about the act of writing poems (self-referencing), because I find them to be too pretentious, but this one does a good job of presenting the idea of a poet speaking to his muse without alienating me. So, job well done, old boy! I do not hate Sir Philip Sidney.

[DWill]

I'm glad you liked the Sidney. It's a skillful performance, but different from Shakespeare in the simplicity of the emotion and the lack of a veil, which I believe S. always wore. Would you agree?

338. "I Sing of a Maiden," Anonymous

I sing of a maiden
That is matchless,
King of all kings
For her son she chose.
He came as still
Where his mother was
As dew in April
That falls on the flower.
He came as still
Where his mother lay
As dew in April
That falls on the spray.
Mother and maiden
There was never one but she;
Well may such a lady
God's mother be.

[DWill]

338. "Church Going," by Philip Larkin. Here is a title so well suited for the average booktalk member.

Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,

Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new-
Cleaned or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate, and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort or other will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognizable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation - marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these - for whom was built
This special shell? For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

[Saffron]

338. "Church Going," by Philip Larkin. Here is a title so well suited for the average booktalk member.

Ha,ha.

[bleachededen]

I'm not seeing the funny.

[DWill]

I wonder if Philip Larkin spoke too soon. His feelings about what he sees as the inevitable end of religion are mixed, but maybe rumors of religion's death were greatly exaggerated. I believe that even in England there has been a resurgence of evangelical religion, as there has been in a bigger way in the U.S. Of course, nobody woluld be tempted to get off his bike to sit in lonely contemplation inside a megachurch. The word sanctuary is a good one for the worship space of traditional churches. There's a difference in the character of such places that alters frame of mind and offers an escape.

336. "Love Calls Us to the Things of this World," by Richard Wilbur.

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
``Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.''

Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world's hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

``Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.''

[bleachededen]

336. "Love Calls Us to the Things of this World," by Richard Wilbur.

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
``Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.''

Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world's hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

``Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.''

This is my favorite Richard Wilbur poem. The 500 keeps getting better.

I always loved the way Wilbur turned laundry into an ethereal experience. So amazing.