09/03/2015: 'To a Poppy' by Anna Seward

While summer roses all their glory yield
To crown the votary of Love and Joy,
Misfortune's victim hails, with many a sigh,
Thee, scarlet poppy of the pathless field,
Gaudy, yet wild and lone; no leaf to shield
Thy flaccid vest, that, as the gale blows high,
Flaps, and alternates folds around thy head. - 
So stands in the long grass a love-crazed maid
Smiling aghast; while stream to every wind
Her garish ribbons, smeared with dust and rain;
But brain-sick visions cheat her tortured mind,
And bring false peace. Thus, lulling grief and pain,
Kind dreams oblivious from thy juice proceed,
Thou flimsy, showy, melancholy weed.

This one came from the 'Oxford Book of English Sonnets'. I thought I knew the poet but I'd confused her with one of her contemporaries. It's subversive in all the right ways, ascending the redundant imagery of the rose and giving a unique metaphysical existence to the poppy instead. Her 'scarlet poppy of the pathless field' is the unmarried maiden, the non-conformist figure in contemporary poetry or even in contemporary society. She becomes more resistant to the poppy through the poem; the turn in the stanza seems to increase tension rather than resolve it. It is not an acceptance of a social position but a lament of such a position, it is the experience felt rather than liberated from.

Or at least that's what I read earlier. I don't know if I just want it to capture the oppression of women and be subversively comic. First line is nice and lofty (great assonance, will steal) but then I like the descent into the slightly more mundane and domesticated language.

08/03/2015: Dust Bowl by Langston Hughes

The land wants me to come back

To a handful of dust in autumn,

To a raindrop

In the palm of my hand

In spring.

The land wants me to come back

To a broken song in October,

To a snowbird on the wing.

The land wants me to come back.

This is my first time reading Hughes, I went through four poems. This one stood out because it used a familiar phrase: the 'a handful of dust' from the Waste Land. It was immediately surprising to see a black poet from the other side of the Atlantic appropriating a line from that poem, a poem that I love but simultaneously can't help but read as a work of cultural imperialism. Whilst Eliot’s ‘handful of dust’ is a inevitable ruin, the fall of cultured civilisation, Hughes attaches it to a season (‘autumn’). It becomes instead a symbol of hardship imposed on the narrator by the ‘land’ itself and part of a natural, recurring cycle. The poem raises up manual labour to the level of Eliot’s canonical art by assimilating his phrases (accommodating them, much like Eliot’s own collage-style poetry), opening up the canon but simultaneously showing us that poetry is not on some kind of decline because of this process.

Not sure what I make of the ‘snowbird on the wing’. That might be the puzzle for next time I read the poem. I'll come back to it, that's the point of this scrapbook.