Three Kings Came Riding

 

 

Edward Burne-Jones

 

 

Three Kings Came Riding

Three Kings came riding from far away,
  Melchior and Gaspar and Baltasar;
Three Wise Men out of the East were they,
And they travelled by night and they slept by day,
  For their guide was a beautiful, wonderful star.

The star was so beautiful, large, and clear,
  That all the other stars of the sky
Became a white mist in the atmosphere,
And by this they knew that the coming was near
  Of the Prince foretold in the prophecy.

Three caskets they bore on their saddle-bows,
  Three caskets of gold with golden keys;
Their robes were of crimson silk with rows
Of bells and pomegranates and furbelows,
  Their turbans like blossoming almond-trees.

And so the Three Kings rode into the West,
  Through the dusk of night, over hill and dell,
And sometimes they nodded with beard on breast
And sometimes talked, as they paused to rest,
  With the people they met at some wayside well.

"Of the child that is born," said Baltasar,
  "Good people, I pray you, tell us the news;
For we in the East have seen his star,
And have ridden fast, and have ridden far,
  To find and worship the King of the Jews."

And the people answered, "You ask in vain;
  We know of no king but Herod the Great!"
They thought the Wise Men were men insane,
As they spurred their horses across the plain,
  Like riders in haste, and who cannot wait.

And when they came to Jerusalem,
  Herod the Great, who had heard this thing,
Sent for the Wise Men and questioned them;
And said, "Go down unto Bethlehem,
  And bring me tidings of this new king."

So they rode away; and the star stood still,
  The only one in the gray of morn
Yes, it stopped, it stood still of its own free will,
Right over Bethlehem on the hill,
  The city of David, where Christ was born.

And the Three Kings rode through the gate and the guard,
  Through the silent street, till their horses turned
And neighed as they entered the great inn-yard;
But the windows were closed, and the doors were barred,
  And only a light in the stable burned.

And cradled there in the scented hay,
  In the air made sweet by the breath of kine,
The little child in the manger lay,
The child, that would be king one day
  Of a kingdom not human but divine.

His mother Mary of Nazareth
  Sat watching beside his place of rest,
Watching the even flow of his breath,
For the joy of life and the terror of death
  Were mingled together in her breast.

They laid their offerings at his feet:
  The gold was their tribute to a King,
The frankincense, with its odor sweet,
Was for the Priest, the Paraclete,
  The myrrh for the body's burying.

And the mother wondered and bowed her head,
  And sat as still as a statue of stone;
Her heart was troubled yet comforted,
Remembering what the Angel had said
  Of an endless reign and of David's throne.

Then the Kings rode out of the city gate,
  With a clatter of hoofs in proud array;
But they went not back to Herod the Great,
For they knew his malice and feared his hate,
  And returned to their homes by another way.

Henry Wordsworth Longfellow 

 

 

Emmonsail's Heath in Winter

          

                                                                        Denise Coble

Emmonsail's Heath in Winter

I love to see the old heath's withered brake
Mingle its crimpled leaves with furze and ling,
While the old heron from the lonely lake
Starts slow and flaps its melancholy wing,
An oddling crow in idle motion swing
On the half-rotten ash-tree's topmost twig,
Beside whose trunk the gypsy makes his bed.
Up flies the bouncing woodcock from the brig
Where a black quagmire quakes beneath the tread;
The fieldfares chatter in the whistling thorn
And for the haw round fields and closen rove,
And coy bumbarrels, twenty in a drove,
Flit down the hedgerows in the frozen plain
And hang on little twigs and start again.

John Clare 

 Clare is such a treat for word-lovers. He works beyond mere description and sense to give us something I can only think to call texture. Every word in this poem jumps and jostles against the others, is alive with meaning and sound - very like birds on a branch. He makes it look easy, but my gosh, it is not. He is nothing short of a master. Very few people can write an excellent poem, even fewer can write a poem that flies off the page. 

 

Heath: a broad area of level or rolling treeless country

Brake: rough or marshy land overgrown usually with one kind of plant

Furze: gorse, a bushy plant

Ling: heather

Brig: bridge

Quagmire: marsh

Haw = hawthorn or fruit of the hawthorn

Closen rove: an enclosed field?

Bumbarrel: a longtailed tit

Drove: a flock

 

 

Brr, Footrest

 

Matthew Brady

 

Brr, Footrest

(Robert Frost)

This ottoman is in my way.

I tripped on it again today;

It chills me with a nameless fear

To think it sees me as its prey.

My loving wife must think it queer

That I am always falling here

As I am walking past the chair.

How comical I must appear.

When I remember to beware

The wicked footrest lurking there,

I do not stumble in a sprawl,

And yet such instances are rare.

My house is cozy, warm , and small,

With just one thing that wrecks it all:

The ottoman that makes me fall,

The ottoman that makes me fall.

Francis Heany

 

 (Sometimes I just can't find the image I want to match the poem. This one will have to do for now.) My last post made me think of "Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening" by Frost, which in turn made me think of this poem - a wonderful imitation/parody of that poem. It cracks me up. There are some excellent parodies out there, I should include more.

 

November

Ernest W. Watson

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-grey, 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 wintery white, and bleak winds moan
About the naked uplands. I alone
Am neither sad, nor shelterless, nor grey,
Wrapped round with thought, content to watch and dream.

Archibald Lampman

 

Word by word, line by line, Lampman builds the scene. Layer on layer, his description of the  sights and sounds accumulate to create a moment so real it feels like I could step right in. 

"Far off the village lamps begin to gleam,

Fast drives the snow, and no man comes this way..."

 

Each poet has their strong points, and Lampman is wonderful with drawing the reader right into the scene. If I were going to choose desert island poetry, I would take Lampman - round about noon a poem like this would cool me right down. This particular poem has a lovely slow rhythm I find mesmerizing, a little like Robert Frost's "Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening". The mood is similar. Maybe it's a snowfall effect, lulling and drowsy.

"I alone

Am neither sad, nor shelterless, nor grey,

Wrapped round with thought, content to watch and dream."

Shadows

Linda Bennett

Shadows

And if tonight my soul may find her peace
in sleep, and sink in good oblivion,
and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower
then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.

And if, as weeks go round, in the dark of the moon
my spirit darkens and goes out, and soft strange gloom
pervades my movements and my thoughts and words
then I shall know that I am walking still
with God, we are close together now the moon’s in shadow.

And if, as autumn deepens and darkens
I feel the pain of falling leaves, and stems that break in storms
and trouble and dissolution and distress
and then the softness of deep shadows folding,
folding around my soul and spirit, around my lips
so sweet, like a swoon, or more like the drowse of a low, sad song
singing darker than the nightingale, on, on to the solstice
and the silence of short days, the silence of the year, the shadow,
then I shall know that my life is moving still
with the dark earth, and drenched
with the deep oblivion of earth’s lapse and renewal.

And if, in the changing phases of man’s life
I fall in sickness and in misery
my wrists seem broken and my heart seems dead
and strength is gone, and my life
is only the leavings of a life:

and still, among it all, snatches of lovely oblivion, and snatches of renewal
odd, wintry flowers upon the withered stem, yet new, strange flowers
such as my life has not brought forth before, new blossoms of me

then I must know that still
I am in the hands of the unknown God,
he is breaking me down to his own oblivion
to send me forth on a new morning, a new man.

 

D.H. Lawrence

 

 "...then I shall know that I am walking still/ with God we are close together now.."

There are so many distractions and stresses, there always have been - coming in from in so many directions. These days I look for the constants, the things that don't change. I find so much comfort there. Like the speaker in this poem, I go to sleep at night committing my existence into the hands of the God I trust with everything. The God who remains Himself no matter what dark cloud I find myself under, no matter what I don't know and can't control. The God who knows me fully and loves me entirely and who is able (and willing) to re-create me, transform me, lift me up beyond cloud or circumstance. The God with whom all good things are possible. "

"New blossoms of me." for instance, 

"strange flowers such as my life has not brought forth before."

 

 

Good Question

 

James Ruby

 

If a sheepdog ate a cantaloupe,

Would it make him frisk like an antelope?

Would he feel all pleased and jolly?

Or would he be a Melon Collie?

 

 Richard Wilbur 

 

Brilliant. 

 

 

We Wear the Mask

Jean Cocteau

We Wear the Mask

We wear the mask that grins and lies, 

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— 

This debt we pay to human guile; 

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, 

And mouth with myriad subtleties. 

Why should the world be over-wise, 

In counting all our tears and sighs? 

Nay, let them only see us, while 

       We wear the mask. 

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries 

To thee from tortured souls arise. 

We sing, but oh the clay is vile 

Beneath our feet, and long the mile; 

But let the world dream otherwise, 

       We wear the mask!

 

Paul Lawrence Dunbar  

A little irony considering the circumstances.

Moth Song

Virgil Elliott



  

Moth Song

I tasted it, the gold

In the gold, I saw the sweetness

At the end of my uncoiling

Tongue, by the beautiful ends

Of what curved from my forehead,

And I swam, gliding, I dove

Through the air toward gold

And sweetness meant to be

Chosen, begging to hold me

And be drawn inside me.

But I stop now, I hang

Still, suddenly suspended

Without having chosen to be

Still in a breeze still full

Of calling and beckoning

Red and blue around gold,

And what comes to meet me

Holds me and turns

My body, spinning a lightness

Around me to fold my wings

Close into a darkness,

And it turns me slowly

Into a flower and drinks me,

And I open, I become

Completely known, I blossom.

David Wagoner

Smoke and moths - we're seeing a lot of both of those these days. Forests burning, moths swarming - it's as if a surfeit, a splurge, a super-abundance has, yes, "blossomed" around us, swirled us within its rhythms, moved us with its influence. Every 10 or so years, when the conditions are just right, the moths come out in great numbers, any window with a light behind it is covered with fluttery moth-bodies, any outside light obliterated with feathered furies. Add to that this misty-musty thickness of smoking forests - it's a strange atmosphere. 

But the poem intrigues me for other reasons as well. This bewildering lure of destruction - what is this? What draws us toward our demise? Why do we dance with death? What is the fascination of fire? I have no answers to this, only questions.

On Parting

Andrew Wyeth

On Parting



It's over you know, the summer's over.
Clouds of dust as the last vehicle went out.


A jeep hauling a small boat on a trailer
Through the dust of the grey country road.


Patterns of tires, patterns of cast leaves
Printed in ashen dust


The next day clouds of snow, the crumbled sky
Falling and settling on the trees
Of the bare abandoned forest.


They have all returned to the city, while I remain
Sorting my summer notebooks:


Drawings of tender plants begun in the spring
Pressings of leaves


Which are prints of tough early autumn, before
The rot comes that thickens
The floor of the woods.


And what lies beneath the snow, the needle duff?
Cities of pebbles and crushed shells,


Kingdoms of beetles, republics of worms,
Forest of hyphae, tangled mycelium,


Roots of trees coming upon each other
In the dark.



Anne Zumigalski




"It's over, you know." Zumigalski is talking about summer - but these days I can't help but feel this poem's broader sense. Life has changed in such a way these last months that seems to mark a definitive "before" and "after", a change of season. What new weather will come, I don't know. I sit here, like the speaker in the poem, "sorting my summer notebooks", thinking over what I have heard and seen and experienced, wondering what it means, and how it will carry me through what is to come.


 

Summer Farm

Henry Mosler

Summer Farm 


Straws like tame lightnings lie about the grass
And hang zigzag on hedges. Green as glass
The water in the horse-trough shines.
Nine ducks go wobbling by in two straight lines.
A hen stares at nothing with one eye,
Then picks it up. Out of an empty sky
A swallow falls and, flickering through
The barn, dives up again into the dizzy blue.
I lie, not thinking, in the cool, soft grass,
Afraid of where a thought might take me – as
This grasshopper with plated face
Unfolds his legs and finds himself in space.
Self under self, a pile of selves I stand
Threaded on time, and with metaphysic hand
Lift the farm like a lid and see
Farm within farm, and in the centre, me.

Norman McCaig 


“Threaded on time…” A pile of selves. Ha! Interesting. Also the idea of lifting a lid and looking down into the scene. Maybe we should be afraid of where our thoughts might take us! Or maybe we just need more practice at it.