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10/31/2026

Today we note the birth date of John Keats (October 31, 1795 – February 23, 1821), English poet prominent in the second generation of Romantic poets with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, although his poems had been published for only four years when he died of tuberculosis at the age of 25.

Keats had a style "heavily loaded with sensualities", notably in the series of odes. As was typical of the Romantics, he accentuated extreme emotion through natural imagery.

His poems were indifferently received in his lifetime, but his fame grew rapidly after his death. By the end of the century he was placed in the canon of English literature and had become an inspiration for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, strongly influencing many writers.

Here’s a selection of poems by Keats for your consideration:

Bright Star

Bright Star, Would I Were Stedfast As Thou Art

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

--John Keats
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When I Have Fears

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love; - then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

--John Keats
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Ode on a Grecian Urn

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden w**d;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

--John Keats
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Endymion
A Poetic Romance (excerpt)

BOOK I

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.

Nor do we merely feel these essences
For one short hour; no, even as the trees
That whisper round a temple become soon
Dear as the temple's self, so does the moon,
The passion poesy, glories infinite,
Haunt us till they become a cheering light
Unto our souls, and bound to us so fast,
That, whether there be shine, or gloom o'ercast;
They always must be with us, or we die.

Therefore, 'tis with full happiness that I
Will trace the story of Endymion.
The very music of the name has gone
Into my being, and each pleasant scene
Is growing fresh before me as the green
Of our own valleys: so I will begin
Now while I cannot hear the city's din;
Now while the early budders are just new,
And run in mazes of the youngest hue
About old forests; while the willow trails
Its delicate amber; and the dairy pails
Bring home increase of milk. And, as the year
Grows lush in juicy stalks, I'll smoothly steer
My little boat, for many quiet hours,
With streams that deepen freshly into bowers.
Many and many a verse I hope to write,
Before the daisies, vermeil rimm'd and white,
Hide in deep herbage; and ere yet the bees
Hum about globes of clover and sweet peas,
I must be near the middle of my story.
O may no wintry season, bare and hoary,
See it half finish'd: but let Autumn bold,
With universal tinge of sober gold,
Be all about me when I make an end.
And now, at once adventuresome, I send
My herald thought into a wilderness:
There let its trumpet blow, and quickly dress
My uncertain path with green, that I may speed
Easily onward, thorough flowers and w**d.

--John Keats

[poems from John Keats: The Complete Poems, Penguin Classics (1977)]
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“I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days - three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.”
― John Keats, Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to F***y Brawne
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All content of this post is for educational purposes.
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Visit W.Whitman Books website to learn about our bookstore.

10/30/2026

How do you separate a poet’s work from his controversial actions?

This morning we note the birth date of Ezra Pound (October 30, 1885 – November 1, 1972) expatriate American poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement.

His works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and his 800-page epic poem The Cantos (c. 1917–1962). Pound's contribution to poetry began in the early 20th century with his role in developing Imagism, a movement stressing precision and economy of language.

Working in London as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, he helped discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as H. D., Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce.

He was responsible for the 1914 serialization of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the 1915 publication of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", and the serialization from 1918 of Joyce's Ulysses.

Pound was a collaborator in Fascist Italy and the Salò Republic during World War II. He spent months in a U.S. military detention camp near Pisa. Ruled mentally unfit to stand trial, Pound was incarcerated for over 12 years at St. Elizabeths Psychiatric Hospital in Washington, D.C., whose doctors viewed Pound as a narcissist and a psychopath, but otherwise completely sane.

While in custody in Italy, Pound began work on sections of The Cantos, which were published as The Pisan Cantos (1948), for which he was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1949 by the Library of Congress, causing enormous controversy.

On November 1, 1972, Pound died in his sleep at the age of 87.

Here are six of his poems for your consideration:

And The Days Are Not Full Enough

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass

--Ezra Pound
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An Immorality

Sing we for love and idleness,
Naught else is worth the having.

Though I have been in many a land,
There is naught else in living.

And I would rather have my sweet,
Though rose-leaves die of grieving,

Than do high deeds in Hungary
To pass all men's believing.

--Ezra Pound
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The Tree

I stood still and was a tree amid the wood,
Knowing the truth of things unseen before;
Of Daphne and the laurel bow
And that god-feasting couple old
that grew elm-oak amid the wold.
'Twas not until the gods had been
Kindly entreated, and been brought within
Unto the hearth of their heart's home
That they might do this wonder thing;
Nathless I have been a tree amid the wood
And many a new thing understood
That was rank folly to my head before.

--Ezra Pound
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The Encounter

All the while they were talking the new morality
Her eyes explored me.
And when I rose to go
Her fingers were like the tissue
Of a Japanese paper napkin.

--Ezra Pound
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Fish And Shadow

The salmon-trout drifts in the stream,
The soul of the salmon-trout floats over the stream
Like a little wafer of light.

The salmon moves in the sun-shot, bright shallow sea. . . .

As light as the shadow of the fish
that falls through the water,
She came into the large room by the stair,
Yawning a little she came with the sleep still upon her.

"I am just from bed. The sleep is still in my eyes.
"Come. I have had a long dream.'
And I: That wood?
'And two springs have passed us.'
'Not so far, no, not so far now,
There is a place but no one else knows it
A field in a valley . . .
Qu'ieu sui avinen,
Ieu lo sai,'

She must speak of the time
Of Arnaut de Mareuil, I thought, 'qu'ieu sui avinen.’

Light as the shadow of the fish
That falls through the pale green water.

--Ezra Pound
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X

The glamour of the soul hath come upon me,
And as the twilight comes upon the roses,
Walking silently among them,
So have the thoughts of my heart
Gone out slowly in the twilight
Toward my beloved,
Toward the crimson rose, the fairest.

--Ezra Pound
[from Exultations of Ezra Pound, London, Elkin Matthews, Vigo Street, (MCMIX)]

[Unless otherwise noted, poems are from Selected Poems of Ezra Pound, New Directions (1957)]

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All content of this post is for educational purposes.
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Visit the website of W.Whitman Books to learn about our bookstore.

10/29/2026

A Public Service Announcement:

I voted yesterday and got my “I Voted” sticker!

I haven’t missed an opportunity to vote since I was 18. As a child, I remember my father taking me with him into the voting booth and explaining the importance of voting. A migrant from Puerto Rico during the hard depression days of the 1930’s, he was a dyed-in-the wool Roosevelt Democrat and his voting followed suit.

Whether during early voting or on election day, take the time to vote and exercise the extraordinary power you have to change the course of history. The future is in our hands.

Here’s a poem for your consideration by Jane Hirshfield (born February 24, 1953), American poet, essayist, and translator.

Her books include award-winning collections of poems, essay collections, and edited and co-translated volumes of historical writers.

Let Them Not Say

Let them not say: we did not see it.
We saw.

Let them not say: we did not hear it.
We heard.

Let them not say: they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.

Let them not say: it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke,
we witnessed with voices and hands.

Let them not say: they did nothing.
We did not-enough.

Let them say, as they must say something:

A kerosene beauty.
It burned.

Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,
read by its light, praised,
and it burned.

-- Jane Hirshfield

[Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 20, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.]
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All content of this post is for educational purposes.
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Visit the W.Whitman Books website to learn about our bookstore.

10/28/2026

Lots happening this weekend at W.Whitman Books, located at 304 Main Street, Middleburgh, NY!

Celebrate Halloween with our 20% Off Children's Books Sale (Friday through Sunday). Drop in, have a candy treat and say BOO!

PLUS! Join us this Sunday, November 1 at 2:00 PM, for a Meet & Greet with author Libby Cudmore as she reads from her Neo-noir novel Negative Girl. Books will be available for purchase and signing. Free and Open to the Public!

I hope to see you this weekend! Doug

10/28/2026

How far the so-called high and mighty have fallen!

Here’s a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley August 4, 1792 – July 8, 1822), English writer who is considered one of the major English Romantic poets.

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley

[from The Poetical Works: In Four Volumes, London: Reeves & Turner (1876)]
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All content of this post is for educational purposes.
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Visit the W.Whitman Books website to learn about our bookstore.

10/27/2026

Today we note the birth dates of two major poets: Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath.
So, I do the impossible: three poems by each poet. Feel free to list your favorite poem by Thomas and Plath.

Dylan Thomas (October 27, 1914 – November 9, 1953) Welsh poet and writer whose work is known for its comic exuberance, rhapsodic lilt, and pathos. His personal life, punctuated by reckless bouts of drinking, was notorious.

We Lying By Seasand

We lying by seasand, watching yellow
And the grave sea, mock who deride
Who follow the red rivers, hollow
Alcove of words out of cicada shade,
For in this yellow grave of sand and sea
A calling for colour calls with the wind
That's grave and gay as grave and sea
Sleeping on either hand.
The lunar silences, the silent tide
Lapping the still canals, the dry tide-master
Ribbed between desert and water storm,
Should cure our ills of the water
With a one-coloured calm;
The heavenly music over the sand
Sounds with the grains as they hurry
Hiding the golden mountains and mansions
Of the grave, gay, seaside land.
Bound by a sovereign strip, we lie,
Watch yellow, wish for wind to blow away
The strata of the shore and drown red rock;
But wishes breed not, neither
Can we fend off rock arrival,
Lie watching yellow until the golden weather
Breaks, O my heart's blood, like a heart and hill.

--Dylan Thomas
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Fern Hill

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the di**le starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the c**k on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace,

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

--Dylan Thomas
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Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on that sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

--Dylan Thomas

[from The Poems of Dylan Thomas, New Directions (1971)]

“Somebody's boring me. I think it's me.”
― Dylan Thomas

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Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932--February 11, 1963), American poet whose best-known works, such as the poems “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” and the novel The Bell Jar, starkly express a sense of alienation and self-destruction closely tied to her personal experiences and, by extension, the situation of women in mid-20th-century America.

Point Shirley

From Water-Tower Hill to the brick prison
The shingle booms, bickering under
The sea's collapse.
Snowcakes break and welter. This year
The gritted wave leaps
The seawall and drops onto a bier
Of quahog chips,
Leaving a salty mash of ice to whiten

In my grandmother's sand yard. She is dead,
Whose laundry snapped and froze here, who
Kept house against
What the sluttish, rutted sea could do.
Squall waves once danced
Ship timbers in through the cellar window;
A thresh-tailed, lanced
Shark littered in the geranium bed —-

Such collusion of mulish elements
She wore her broom straws to the nub.
Twenty years out
Of her hand, the house still hugs in each drab
Stucco socket
The purple egg-stones: from Great Head's k**b
To the filled-in Gut
The sea in its cold gizzard ground those rounds.

Nobody wintering now behind
The planked-up windows where she set
Her wheat loaves
And apple cakes to cool. What is it
Survives, grieves
So, battered, obstinate spit
Of gravel? The waves'
Spewed relics clicker masses in the wind,

Grey waves the stub-necked eiders ride.
A labor of love, and that labor lost.
Steadily the sea
Eats at Point Shirley. She died blessed,
And I come by
Bones, only bones, pawed and tossed,
A dog-faced sea.
The sun sinks under Boston, bloody red.

I would get from these dry-papped stones
The milk your love instilled in them.
The black ducks dive.
And though your graciousness might stream,
And I contrive,
Grandmother, stones are nothing of home
To that spumiest dove.
Against both bar and tower the black sea runs.

--Sylvia Plath
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Lady Lazarus

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it——

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a N**i lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?——

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot——
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
It’s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

‘A miracle!’
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart——
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

--Sylvia Plath
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Ariel

Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.

God’s lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow

Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks—

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.
Something else

Hauls me through air—
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.

White
Godiva, I unpeel—
Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child’s cry

Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,

The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

--Sylvia Plath

[from Sylvia Plath: The Collected Poems, Harper Perennial Modern Classics (2018)]

“That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

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All content of this post is for educational purposes.
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Visit W.Whitman Books' website to learn about our bookstore.

10/26/2026

This morning, we note the birth date of Sir Andrew Motion FRSL (born October 26, 1952), English poet, novelist, and biographer, who was England’s Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009.

His poetry collections include: 2017: Coming in to Land: Selected Poems, 1975–2015, Ecco Press; 2018: Essex Clay, Faber and Faber; 2020: Randomly Moving Particles, Faber and Faber; and 2026: Gravity Archives, Faber and Faber.

Motion founded the Poetry Archive, an online resource of poems and audio recordings of poets reading their own work. In 2012, he became President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, taking over from Bill Bryson.

His 1993 biography of Larkin, which won the Whitbread Prize for Biography, was responsible for bringing about a substantial revision of Larkin's reputation.

Here are three poems by Andrew Motion for your consideration:

Passing On

By noon your breathing had changed from normal
to shallow and panicky. That’s when the nurse said
Nearly there now, in the gentle voice of a parent
comforting a child used to failure, slipping her arms
beneath your shoulders to hoist you up the pillows,
then pressing a startling gauze pad under your jaw.

Nearly there now. The whole world seemed to agree—
as the late April sky deepened through the afternoon
into high August blue, the vapour trails of two planes
converged to sketch a cross on the brow of heaven.
My brother Kit and I kept our backs turned to that
except now and again. It was the room I wanted to see,

because it contained your last example of everything:
the broken metal window-catch that meant no fresh air;
your toothbrush standing to attention in its plastic mug;
the neutral pink walls flushed into definite pale red
by sunlight rejoicing in the flowering cherry outside;
your dressing-gown like a stranger within the wardrobe

eavesdropping. That should have been a sign to warn us,
but unhappiness made us brave, or do I mean cowardly,
and Kit and I talked as if we were already quite certain
you could no longer hear us, saying how easy you were
to love, but how difficult always to satisfy and relax—
how impossible to talk to, in fact, how expert with silence.

You breathed more easily by the time we were done,
although the thought you might have heard us after all,
and our words be settling into your soft brain like stones
onto the bed of a stream—that made our own breathing
tighter. Then the nurse looked in: Nothing will change
here for a while boys, and we ducked out like criminals.

I was ordering two large gins in the pub half a mile off
when my mobile rang. It was the hospital. You had died.
I put my drink down, then thought again and finished it.
Five minutes later we were back at the door of your room
wondering whether to knock. Would everything we said
be written on your face, like the white cross on the heavens?

Of course not. It was written in us, where no one could find it
except ourselves. Your own face was wiped entirely clean—
and so, with your particular worries solved, and your sadness,
I could see more clearly than ever how like mine it was,
and therefore how my head will eventually look on the pillow
when the wall opens behind me, and I depart with my failings.

--Andrew Motion
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Anne Frank Huis

Even now, after twice her lifetime of grief
and anger in the very place, whoever comes
to climb these narrow stairs, discovers how
the bookcase slides aside, then walks through
shadow into sunlit room, can never help

but break her secrecy again. Just listening
is a kind of guilt: the Westerkirk* repeats
itself outside, as if all time worked round
towards her fear, and made each stroke
die down on guarded streets. Imagine it—

four years of whispering, and loneliness,
and plotting, day by day, the Allied line
in Europe with a yellow chalk. What hope
she had for ordinary love and interest
survives her here, displayed above the bed

as pictures of her family; some actors;
fashions chosen by Princess Elizabeth.
And those who stoop to see them find
not only patience missing its reward,
but one enduring wish for chances

like my own: to leave as simply
as I do, and walk at ease
up dusty tree-lined avenues, or watch
a silent barge come clear of bridges
settling their reflections in the blue canal.

--Andrew Motion
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*Westerkirk is a protestant church situated near the Anne Frank House.
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Rainfall

[With acknowledgments to “Rain” by Cynthia Barnett]

Whether the rain on Mars was delicate or brutal

whether it was blue or gray

whether it fell on bare rocks
that remained bare
or on fertile ground
that raised large forests of leafing trees

it could not last.

Mars froze eventually
in the same duration
that Venus by contrast
bowed her burning head
in noxious v***rs and gas clouds.

•

On planet Earth meanwhile

after half a billion years
of continuous volcano-havoc
meteor storms
earthquakes and lightning strikes

v***r stored in the atmosphere
eventually began falling.

It soothed the fires.

When the fires died
it fell silently on the first outcrops of moss.

On the tender grass with a sizzle.

With more strenuous drumming
on the resilient fronds of ferns.

It became an orchestra of millions
across the luxurious expanse of the tree canopy.

•

Then the sun wiped its forehead
with long filmy fingers
and beamed afresh.

It worked through to creatures
flourishing beneath the canopy
and persuaded them to
interrupt their work
of scouring on all fours
for delectable roots and berries.

In the clarified light
they stared at their hands.

They saw the wrinkled fingertips
that gave them a firm grip
on slippery branches and vines
gradually smooth and soften.

They rose in amazement
onto their hind legs
and crept from shelter
across the dazzling savannah.

•

After a summer of twelve thousand years

after the interruptions of ice

after one particular inundation
and the shadow of an ark
darkening fish-shoals
as they scooted over hills and valleys

after the blaze of one civilization
then another

after the destruction of several experiments
with law and order

after the extinction
of many beautiful languages

rain by and large
found its place in the scheme of things.

It began to defeat its purpose
on the private sky of umbrellas.

It babbled through long green fields
and melted into the seams of poetry.

It larked in the puddle of its many names.

Cobblers and chair legs and pipe stems.

Frogs and jugs and beards.

Cats and dogs.

Men.

•

Although they are shaped like a parachute
thanks to the air pressure beneath them
raindrops explode on landing.

Then the sun bears down again
fitting his monocle into his eye.

The glass flashes and burns.

The rain sweats
and ev***rates into the ocean of its air.

The ocean continues on its way
continually overflowing here and there
in quick little splashes
or reckless floods and drenching.

It is delicate or brutal.

It is blue sometimes and sometimes gray.

Sometimes it falls on bare rocks
at others it raises
large forests of leafing trees.

--Andrew Motion
[from Poetry (January 2017)]

[Unless otherwise noted, poems are from New and Selected Poems 1977–2022, Faber & Faber (2023)]
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