1/15/2024 0 Comments Scansion mending wall![]() He will not go behind his father’s saying,Īnd he likes having thought of it so well Not of woods only and the shade of trees. In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,īut it’s not elves exactly, and I’d ratherīringing a stone grasped firmly by the top ‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors’. There where it is we do not need the wall:Īnd eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. We wear our fingers rough with handling them. ‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’ We have to use a spell to make them balance: ![]() To each the boulders that have fallen to each.Īnd some are loaves and some so nearly balls No one has seen them made or heard them made,īut at spring mending-time we find them there. Where they have left not one stone on a stone,īut they would have the rabbit out of hiding, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,Īnd spills the upper boulders in the sun,Īnd makes gaps even two can pass abreast. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, Both poets are seeking the Sweet Sixteen with poems of alterity, and both poems might have something to do with the 400 year love/hate relationship between England and the United States. Which brings us to our March Madness 2013 clash between Frost and Blake. ![]() Frost took a trip to England in 1913 and got lucky. If you wanted to be a famous poet in the 20th century, you had to meet one person: Pound. ![]() If you haven’t heard of the Dymock Poets, it’s probably because Pound didn’t like them. But Pound got Frost into Poetry, and a star was born. The Dymock Poets-their 100th anniversary, as well, a group decimated by the First World War (England was now finally our friend and hating on Germany) helped Frost, too. It is the 50th anniversary of Frost’s death and the 100th anniversary of the publication of Frost’s first book, his trip to England as an unknown poet, and the discovery of Frost by another crank, Ezra Pound, who happened to be another States’ rights loon. In other words, Robert Frost was the heir to the States’ rights politics which almost doomed the United States in the “Third War of American Independence.” Frost turned New England crankiness into American Poetry gold. If Blake was a typically English radical: too crazy/clever to be a danger to anyone, Robert Frost was the son of a San Francisco politician-(Democrat all the way) who tried to enlist to fight for the South in the Civil War (but was too young). The complexities of U.S./British geopolitics was far beyond the Blake of “Thou art the image of God who dwells in darkness of Africa” and yet Blake was no doubt writing in code to avoid being tossed into a British prison. This is not to knock Blake’s genius, but he was a loon, and the American experiment to him probably meant “free love” more than anything else. But with William “howling pains” Blake, no one really knows. Civil War, fifty-two years later, or it might have something to do with the War of 1812, as well. “A Serpent in Canada” recalls the network that produced the actions of John Wilkes-Booth in the “Third War of American Independence,” the U.S. This is eternal death, and this the torment long foretold.’ Mingle in howling pains, in furrows by thy lightnings rent. O what limb-rending pains I feel! thy fire and my frost I see a Whale in the south-sea, drinking my soul away. I see a Serpent in Canada who courts me to his love, On my American plains I feel the struggling afflictionsĮndur’d by roots that writhe their arms into the nether deep. Thou art the image of God who dwells in darkness of Africa,Īnd thou art fall’n to give me life in regions of dark death. ‘I know thee, I have found thee, and I will not let thee go: Who the hell knows what the following means? Blake’s first illuminated book of poems was called “America, A Prophecy.”īlake was a radical freak, hated by the British establishment, but the Americans struggling against the oppressive British Empire were never able to figure out what Willie Blake was saying when he wrote about America. William Blake, like many English Romantic poets, such as Coleridge, Southey, and Keats, took a great interest in what was happening in America. Vast designs always trump the politically correct. In this “Second War of American Independence,” the British Empire failed to take back her American colony, even as she tried to do so, cynically using its native peoples. ![]() This year marks the 200th anniversary of America’s 1813 defeat of Great Britain and their American Indian allies for the control of the Great Lakes region in the War of 1812. This illustration of William Blake was published 200 years ago ![]()
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