White skies, tall pines, blue spruce
give way to evening darkness total.
I read Robert Frost’s “New Hampshire,”
twice, getting stuck on a line where “Nothing”
is a thing or event, like “the nothing that is”
in Stevens’s “The Snow Man.” The line:
“Nothing not built with hands of course is sacred,”
which is not only a metrical way
of praising manual labor but also an elevation
of “nothing,” before waving the subject away,
the real problem having less to do with the sacred
than with “what to face or run away from.”
That’s Frost for you, who elsewhere said Nirvana
was “the only nothing that is something.”
-- David Lehman
Imagine the money the Keats estate would have made
if they could have copyrighted “negative capability”
and charged permission fees for its use, nearly as pricey
as Kant’s “categorical imperative,” which rests on the solidity
of logic while “negatively capability” stands for
a destination you arrive at despite signs that say “dead end.”
A letter Keats sent to his brothers Tom and George
in 1817 is the ultimate authority, for it was there that he coined
“negative capability” for being in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts,
without any irritable reaching for fact.” Consider King Lear.
The poetry is sublime and we love it despite the ugly atrocities
without denying they exist. And therefore “beauty is truth,”
or “ripeness is all,” which, according to Yale’s Cleanth Brooks
in The Well-Wrought Urn, means pretty much the same thing.
-- David Lehman
* This poem is also forthcoming for the literary magazine The Common. Reprinted with permission from the author.
On this day in 1904, Leo Bloom fried a kidney,
visited a newspaper office, entered a pub,
stared at a girl on the strand and visited
a brothel in his quest to meet his unborn
or reborn son, Stephen Dedalus, the poet
as Irish Catholic schoolboy, who had previously
discovered hell, Aquinas, Shelley, and the villanelle,
and now lives in a tower facing the Irish Sea.
When the men meet, they get pissed and then they
take a piss together in good fellowship.
Meanwhile Molly, Mrs. Bloom to you, gets
her kicks and the last affirmative word
after a gush of them like a river that winds
around the city, an unceasing flow.
-- David Lehman