TIMES

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

[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 alchymy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack (4) 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. 1609

JOHN DONNE

The Good-Morrow

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? were we not weaned till then?
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers' den? (5)
'Twas so; but (6) this, all pleasures fancies be.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got,(7) twas but a dream of thee.

And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love, all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to other,' worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,(9)
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres,
Without sharp north, without declining west?
Whatever dies was not mixed equally, (1)
If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die. 1633

4. Moss. 5. According to tradition, seven Christian youths escaped Roman persecution by sleeping in a cave for 187 years. Snorted: snored.
6. Except for.7. Sexually possessed. Beauty: beautiful woman. 8. Other people. 9. That is, each is reflected in the other's eyes. 1. Perfectly mixed elements, according to scholastic philosophy, were stable and immortal.
 

SYLVIA PLATH

Morning Song

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons. 1961

T. S. ELIOT

Morning at the Window

They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens,
And along the trampled edges of the street
I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
Sprouting despondently at area gates.

The brown waves of fog toss up to me
Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,
And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts
An aimless smile that hovers in the air
And vanishes along the level of the roofs.  1917

JONATHAN SWIFT

A Description of the Morning

Now hardly here and there a hackney-coach (2)
Appearing, showed the ruddy morn's approach.
Now Betty(3) from her master's bed had flown,
And softly stole to discompose her own.
The slip shod 'prentice from his master's door
Had pared the dirt, and sprinkled round the floor.
Now Moll had whirled her mop with dext'rous airs,
Prepared to scrub the entry and the stairs.
The youth with broomy stumps began to trace
The kennel-edge  (4) where wheels had worn the place.
The small-coal man(5) was heard with cadence deep,
Till drowned in shriller notes of chimney-sweep:
Duns (6) at his lordship's gate began to meet;
And brick-dust Moll had screamed through half the street.(7)
The turnkey now his flock returning sees,
Duly let out a-nights to steal for fees. (8)
The watchful bailiffs take their silent stands, (9)
And schoolboys tag with satchels in their hands.     p. 1709

2. Hired coach. Hardly: scarcely; that is, they are just beginning to appear. 3. A stock name for servant girl. Moll (lines 7, 14) is a frequent lower-class nickname. 4. Edge of the gutter that ran dow the middle of the street. Trace: "To find old Nails." US) S. A seller of coal and charcoal. 6. Bit collectors. 7. Selling powdered brick that was used to clean knives. 8. jailers collected fees from prisoners for their keep and often let them out at night so they could steal to pay expenses. 9. Looking for those on their "wanted" lists.
 

AMY CLAMPITT

Meridian

First daylight on the bittersweet-hung
sleeping porch at high summer : dew
all over the lawn, sowing diamond-
point-highlighted shadows :
the hired man's shadow revolving
along the walk, a flash of milkpails
passing : no threat in sight, no hint
anywhere in the universe, of that

apathy at the meridian, the noon
of absolute boredom : flies
crooning black lullabies in the kitchen,
milk-soured crocks, cream separator
still unwashed : what is there to life
but chores and more chores, dishwater,
fatigue, unwanted children : nothing
to stir the longueur of afternoon

except possibly thunderheads :
climbing, livid, turreted alabaster
lit up from within by splendor and terror
--forked lightning's
                                  split- second disaster.

KAREN VOLKMAN

Evening

The child calling and calling
his lost dog home on the long
suburban block, doesn't know he is part
of a peculiar orchestration, along with traffic, and the predictable
humming of my fridge, and the tick
of the clock still not set back
from daylight savings--a music
specific to a private
kitchen view, in the unfolding
dimensions of a sepia twilight
from which comes, again
and again, the high far note
of the child in his chanting,
so natural and knowing that it
might happen every dusk,
as if loss were an inevitable
condition of nightfall,
spread from streets and houses
to an open, barren hill, and to
the hulking, enigmatic water-
tower, bulbous, beneath which
a frail white dog must be asleep.           1996

W. H. AUDEN

As I Walked Out One Evening

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
'Love has no ending.

'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,

'I'll love you till the ocean
is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

'The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.'

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'0 let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

'In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

'Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.

'0 plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.

'0 look, look in the mirror,
0 look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing
Althoughyou cannot bless.

'0 stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.'

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.                                                             November 1937

ARCHIBALD LAMPMAN

In November

The hills and leafless forests slowly yield
To the thick-driving snow. A little while
And night shall darken down. In shouting file
The woodmen's carts go by me homeward-wheeled,
Past the thin fading stubbles, half concealed,
Now golden-gray, sowed softly through with snow,
Where the last ploughman follows still his row,
Turning black furrows through the whitening field.
Far off the village lamps begin to gleam,
Fast drives the snow, and no man comes this way;
The hills grow wintry white, and bleak winds moan
About the naked uplands. I alone
Am neither sad, nor shelterless, nor gray,
Wrapped round with thought, content to watch and dream.
 

JOHN ASHBERY

City Afternoon

A veil of haze protects this
Long-ago afternoon forgotten by everybody
In this photograph, most of them now
Sucked screaming through old age and death.

If one could seize America
Or at least a fine forgetfulness
That seeps into our outline
Defining our volumes with a stain
That is fleeting too

But commemorates
Because it does define, after all:
Gray garlands, that threesome
Waiting for the light to change,
Air lifting the hair of one
Upside down in the reflecting pool.

APRIL BERNARD

Praise Psalm of the City-Dweller

for C. B.

Lift your heads, all you peoples, to the wet heat rising in the airshaft
to the pigeon feathers scattered on the sills, to the grey
triangle of sky that drifts like a soft, wet shawl

For this is the day of the heat, when yellow sedans herd like goats,
when the smell of the body contains its own joyful death

See how the young men of the city weep and fall upon one another's
shoulders, see how they turn their shining faces away from us who stand
encumbered by the changing sky

There was a place made, a clearing in the wilderness of bricks,
where they gathered to sing--the microphone warbled,
the hot smell of tar and hope fanned in wings of smoke

Shout singing in your praises, all you peoples, for there will be more
days like this, when the mouths of all the dogs fall open, pink
and quivering, and the cats lie down like lambs and close their eyes

While the hot grey heat rises like tissue from the skin, accumulating
in clouds of tears, there will be more days

Break the stick across your knee, 0 my brother, begin again
in the heat of further days  1993

ANTHONY HECHT

A Hill

In Italy, where this sort of thing can occur,
I had a vision once--though you understand
It was nothing at all like Dante's, or the visions of saints,
And perhaps not a vision at all. I was with some friends,
Picking my way through a warm sunlit piazza
In the early morning. A clear fretwork of shadows
From huge umbrellas littered the pavement and made
A sort of lucent shallows in which was moored
A small navy of carts. Books, coins, old maps,
Cheap landscapes and ugly religious prints
Were all on sale. The colors and noise
Like the flying hands were gestures of exultation,
So that even the bargaining
Rose to the ear like a voluble godliness.
And then, when it happened, the noises suddenly stopped,
And it got darker; pushcarts and people dissolved
And even the great Farnese Palace itself
Was gone, for all its marble; in its place
Was a hill, mole-colored and bare. It was very cold,
Close to freezing, with a promise of snow.
The trees were like old ironwork gathered for scrap
Outside a factory wall. There was no wind,
And the only sound for a while was the little click
Of ice as it broke in the mud under my feet.
I saw a piece of ribbon snagged on a hedge,
But no other sign of life. And then I heard
What seemed the crack of a rifle. A hunter, I guessed;
At least I was not alone. But just after that
Came the soft and papery crash
Of a great branch somewhere unseen falling to earth.

And that was all, except for the cold and silence
That promised to last forever, like the hill.

Then prices came through, and fingers, and I was restored
To the sunlight and my friends. But for more than a week
I was scared by the plain bitterness of what I had seen.
All this happened about ten years ago,
And it hasn't troubled me since, but at last, today,
I remembered that hill; it lies just to the left
Of the road north of Poughkeepsie; and as a boy
I stood before it for hours in wintertime.                               1967

METAPHOR AND SIMILE

The language of poetry is almost always visual and pictorial. Rather than depending primarily on abstract ideas and elaborate reasoning, poems depend mainly upon concrete and specific words that create images in our minds. Poems thus help us to see things fresh and new, or to feel them suggestively through our other physical senses, such as hearing or touch. But, most often, poetry uses the sense of sight in that it helps us form, in our minds, visual impressions, images that communicate more directly than concepts. We "see" yellow leaves on a branch, a father and son waltzing precariously, or two lovers sitting together on the bank of a stream, so that our response begins from a vivid impression of exactly what is happening. Some people think that those media and arts that challenge the imagination of a hearer or reader--radio drama, for example, or poetry--allow us to respond more fully than those (such as television or theater) that actually show things more fully to our physical senses. Certainly they leave more to our imagination, to our mind's eye.

But being visual does not just mean describing, telling us facts, indicating shapes, colors, and specific details and giving us precise discriminations through exacting verbs, nouns, adverbs, and adjectives. Often the vividness of the picture in our minds depends upon comparisons. What we are trying to imagine is pictured in terms of something else familiar to us, and we are asked to think of one thing as if it were something else. Many such comparisons, or figures of speech, in which something is pictured or figured forth in terms of something already familiar to us, are taken for granted in daily life. Things we can't see or that aren't familiar to us are imaged as things we already know; for example, God is said to be like a father, Italy is said to be shaped like a boot, life is compared to a forest, a journey, or a sea. When the comparison is explicit--that is, when one thing is directly compared to something else--the figure is called a simile. When the comparison is implicit, with something described as if it were something else, it is called a metaphor.
 

Poems use figurative language much of the time. A poem may insist that death is like a sunset or sex like an earthquake or that the way to imagine how it feels to be spiritually secure is to think of the way a shepherd takes care of his sheep. The pictorialness of our imagination may clarify things for us-scenes, states of mind, ideas-but at the s me time it stimulates us to think of how those pictures make us feel. Pictures, even when they are mental pictures or imagined visions, may be both denotative and connotative, just as individual words are: they may clarify and make precise, and they may channel our feelings.
 

In the poem that follows, the poet helps us to visualize the old age and approaching death of the speaker by making comparisons with familiar things--the coming of winter, the approach of sunset, and the dying embers of a fire.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

[That time of year thou mayst in me behold]

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by(6) black night doth take away,
Death's second self,(7) that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.                             1609

6. Shortly.7. Sleep.

The first four lines of "That time of year" evoke images of the late autumn; but notice that the poet does not have the speaker say directly that his physical condition and age make him resemble autumn. He draws the comparison without stating that it is a comparison: you can see, he says, my own state in the coming of winter, when the leaves are almost all off the trees. The speaker portrays himself indirectly by talking about the passing of the year. The poem uses metaphor; that is, one thing is pictured as if it were something else. "That time of year" goes on to another metaphor in lines 5-8 and still another in lines 9-12, and each of the metaphors contributes to our understanding of the speaker's sense of his old age and approaching death. More important, however, is the way the metaphors give us feelings, an emotional sense of the speaker's age and of his own attitude toward aging. Through the metaphors we come to understand, appreciate, and to some extent share the increasing sense of anxiety and urgency that the poem expresses. Our emotional sense of the poem is largely influenced by the way each metaphor is developed and by the way each metaphor leads, with its own kind o internal logic, to another.

The images of late autumn in the first four lines all suggest loneliness, loss, and nostalgia for earlier times. As in the rest of the poem, our eyes are imagined to be the main vehicle for noticing the speaker's age and condition; the phrase "thou mayst in me behold" (line 1) introduces what we are asked to see, and in both lines 5 and 9 we are similarly told "in me thou see'st. . . ." The picture of the trees shedding their leave suggests that autumn is nearly over, and we can imagine trees either with yellow leaves or without leaves, or with just a trace of foliage remaining--the latter perhaps most feelingly suggesting the bleakness and loneliness that characterize the change of seasons, the ending of the life cycle. But other senses are invoked, too. The boughs shaking against the cold represent an appeal to our tactile sense, and the next line appeals to our sense of hearing, although only as a reminder that the birds no longer sing. (Notice how exact the visual representation is of the bare, or nearly bare, limbs, even as the cold and the lack of birds are noted; birds lined up like a choir on risers would have made striking visual image on the barren limbs one above the other, but now there is only th reminder of what used to be. The present is quiet, bleak, trembly, and lonely; it is the absence of color, song, and life that creates the strong visual impression, a reminder of what formerly was.)

The next four lines are slightly different in tone, and the color changes. From a black-and-white landscape with a few yellow leaves, we come upon a rich and almost warm reminder of a faded sunset. But a somber note does enter the poem in these lines through another figure of speech, personification, which involves treating an abstraction, such as death or justice or beauty, as if it were a person. The poem is talking about the coming of night and of sleep, and Sleep is personified and identified as the "second self" of Death (that is, as a kind of "double" for death). The main emphasis is on how night and sleep close in on our sense of twilight, and only secondarily does a reminder of death enter the poem. But it does enter.

The third metaphor--that of the dying embers of a fire--begins in line 9 and continues to color and warm the bleak cold that the poem began with, but it also sharpens the reminder of death. The three main metaphors in the poem work in a way to make our sense of old age and approaching death more familiar, but also more immediate: moving from barren trees, to fading twilight, to dying embers suggests a sensuous increase of color and warmth, but also an increasing urgency. The first metaphor involves a whole season, or at least a segment of one, a matter of days or possibly weeks; the second involves the passing of a single day, reducing the time scale to a matter of minutes, and the third draws our attention to that split second when a glowing ember fades into a gray ash. The final part of the fire metaphor introduces the most explicit sense of death so far, as the metaphor of embers shifts into a direct reminder of death. Embers, which had been a metaphor of the speaker's aging body, now themselves become, metaphorically, a deathbed; the vitality that nourishes youth is used up just as a log in a fire is. The urgency of the reminder of coming death has now peaked. It is friendlier but now seems immediate and inevitable, a natural part of the life process, and the final two lines then make an explicit plea to make good and intense use of the remaining moments of human relationship.

'That time of year" represents an unusually intricate use of images to organize a poem and focus its emotional impact. Not all poems are so skillfully made, and not all depend on such a full and varied use of metaphor. But most poems use metaphors for at least part of their effect, and often a poem is based on a single metaphor that is fully developed as the major way of making the poem's statement and impact, as in the following poem about the role of a mother and wife.

LINDA PASTAN

Marks

My husband gives me an A
for last night's supper,
an incomplete for my ironing,
a B plus inbed.
My son says I am average,
an average mother, but if
I put my mind to it I could improve.
My daughter believes
in Pass/ Fail and tells me
I pass. Wait 'til they learn
I'm dropping out.
 

The speaker in "Marks" is obviously not thrilled with the idea of continually being judged, and the metaphor of marks (or grades) as a way of talking about her performanc of roles in the family suggests her irritation. The list of the roles implies the many things expected of her, and the three different systems of marking (letter grades, categories to be checked off on a chart, and pass/fail) detail the difficulties of multiple standards. Th poem retains the language of schooldays all the way to the end ("learn," line 11 ; "dro ping out," line 12), and the major effect of the poem depends on the irony of th speaker's surrendering to the metaphor the family has thrust upon her; if she is to b judged as if she were a student, she retains the right to leave the system. Ironically, sh joins the system (adopts the metaphor for herself) in order to defeat it.
 

The following poem depends from the beginning-even from its title-on a sing taphor and the values associated with it.

DAVID WAGONER

My Father's Garden

On his way to the open hearth where white-hot steel
Boiled against furnace walls in wait for his lance
To pierce the fireclay and set loose demons
And dragons in molten tons, blazing
Down to the huge satanic caldrons,
Each day he would pass the scrapyard, his kind of garden.

In rusty rockeries of stoves and brake drums,
In grottoes of sewing machines and refrigerators,
He would pick flowers for us: small gears and cogwheels
With teeth like petals, with holes for anthers,
Long stalks of lead to be poured into toy soldiers,
Ball bearings as big as grapes to knock them down.

He was called a melter. He tried to keep his brain
From melting in those tyger-mouthed mills
Where the same steel reappeared over and over
To be reborn in the fire as something better
Or worse: cannons or cars, needles or girders,
Flagpoles, swords, or plowshares.

But it melted. His classical learning ran
Down and away from him, not burning bright.
His fingers culled a few cold scraps of Latin
And Greek, magna sine laude,(8) for crosswords
And brought home lumps of tin and sewer grills
As if they were his ripe prize vegetables.                                              1987

8. Without great distinction, a reversal of the usual magna cum laude
 

The poem is a tribute to the speaker's father and the things he understands and values in his ordinary, workingman's life. The father is a "melter" (line 13) in the steel mills (lines 14-15), and what he values are the things made from what he helps to produce. His avocation has developed from his vocation: he collects metal objects from the scrapyard and brings them home just as some other men would pick flowers for their families. The scrapyard is, says the speaker, "his kind of garden" (line 6). The life led by the father has been a hard one, but he shows love for his children in the only way he knows howby bringing home things that mean something to him and that can be made into toys his children will come to value. Describing these scraps as the products of his garden--"As if they were his ripe prize vegetables" (line 24)--has the effect of making them seem home-grown, carefully tended, nurtured by the father into a useful beauty. Instead of crude and ugly pieces of scrap, they become-through the metaphor of the poemexamples of value and beauty corresponding to the warm feelings the speaker has for a father who did what he could with what he knew and what he had.
 

Poets often are self-conscious and explicit about the ways they use language metaphorically, and sometimes (as in the following poem) they celebrate the richness of language that makes their art possible:

ROBERT FRANCIS

Hogwash

The tongue that mothered such a metaphor
Only the purest purist could despair of.

Nobody ever called swill sweet but isn't
Hogwash a daisy in a field of daisies?

What beside sports and flowers could you find
To praise better than the American language?

Bruised by American foreign policy
What shall I soothe me, what defend me with

But a handful of clean unmistakable words--
Daisies, daisies, in a field of daisies?                         1965

The poet here claims little for his own invention and not  much for the art of poetry, insisting that the American language itself is responsible for miraculous conceptions.  The poet plays cheerfully here with what words offer--the pun on "purest" and "purist" (line 2), for example, and the taunting (but misleading) similarity of the beginnings of "swill" and "sweet" (line 3)--but insists that poems and poets only articulate things already realized in common speech, where metaphors are "mothered" (line 1). "Hogwash," although never explicitly glossed or discussed in the poem, is the primary example: What does "hogwash" mean? How do hogs wash themselves and in what? to what purpose and effect? How did the term get invented as a metaphor, and what are its visual implications? And what is it doing as an example of beauty in a poem about "clean unmistakable words" (line 9)? But then the poem plays even more fully with "daisy" (lines 4 and 10) as metaphor and idiomatic expression. A "daisy" is a great success, a breakthrough, a beaut, a perfect example, and the word "hogwash" is such a daisy, an instance of such a success: a "daisy in a field of daisies," a success of successes, a wonder in a language full of wonders.

Not everything American, according to this poem, is as praiseworthy as its language, and the word "hogwash" ultimately has its context established in the poem's fourth stanza when the speaker finally tells us why the word is so soothing and so pertinent. Poets, the poem says, need words and metaphors that are not always images of beauty because the world is full of things that are not altogether beautiful, and metaphors of ugliness can be "daisies," too.

Not all poets feel as positive as Francis claims to be here about the raw materials they have to work with in language. Ultimately, of course, the modesty of the poet's claims here about his own inventiveness becomes as comic as the metaphor of "hogwash" itself and the poem's characterization of foreign policy, for it is the poem that makes this particular use of the metaphor, no matter where or when it was invented: the wit belongs to the poem, not the language. Poets make use of whatever idioms, expressions, inherited metaphors, and traditions of language come their way, and they turn them to their own uses, sometimes quite surprisingly.

The difficulty of conveying what some experiences are like and how we feel about them sometimes leads poets to startling comparisons and figures of speech that may at first seem far-fetched but that, in one way or another, do in fact suggest the quality of the experience or the feelings associated with it. Sometimes they use a series of metaphors as if no single act of visualization will serve but several together may suggest the full complexity of the experience or cumulatively define the feeling precisely. Metaphor open up virtually endless possibilities of comparison, giving words a chance to be more than words, offering our mind's eye a challenge to keep up with the fertile and articulate imagination of writers who make it their business to see things that ordinary people miss noticing the most surprising likenesses and conveying feelings more powerfully than politicians usually do.
 

Sometimes, in poetry as in prose, comparisons are made explicitly, as in the following poem.

ROBERT BURNS

A Red, Red Rose

0, my luve's like a red, red rose
That's newly sprung in June.
O, my luve's like the melodie
That's sweetly played in tune.

As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in love am I;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a' the seas gang (9) dry.

Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi' the sun;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
While the sands of life shall run.

And fare thee weel, my only luve,
And fare thee weel a while!
And I will come again, my luve,
 Though it were ten thousand mile.

9. go