MODERN POEMS

1.Darkness.

Darkness.
I stop to watch a star shine in the boghole –
A star no longer, but a silver ribbon of light.
I look at it, and pass on.

2. On the Top-Stone.

On the top-stone.
A nipping wind blowing.
Winter dusk closing in from the south Ards.
The moon rising, white and fantastic, over the loch and the town below.
I take off my hat, salute her, and descend into the darkness.

3. Night, and I Travelling.

Night, and I travelling.
An open door by the wayside,
Throwing out a shaft of warm yellow light.
A whiff of peat-smoke;
A gleam of delf on the dresser within;
A woman’s voice crooning, as if to a child.
I pass on into the darkness.

4. The Dawn Whiteness.

The dawn whiteness.
A bank of slate-grey cloud lying heavily over it.
The moon, like a hunted thing, dropping into the cloud.

                              Joseph Campbell (1879-1944) was an Irish poet who wrote in both English and Gaelic (publishing his latter work under the name Seosamh Mac Cathmhaoil or Seosamh MacCathmhaoil). Like pioneering modernist poet T.E.Hulme, who was four years younger than him, Campbell wrote a small number of short poems in free verse and utilising a pared back and understated style. There is no rhetoric here, no outpouring of emotion (perhaps too little for some readers); but what these poems show is the emergence of a distinctly modern style of poetry that rejects the gushing excesses of the worst Victorian verse. Written towards the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, they are among the first poems written in English which can be confidently labelled ‘modern’.

                      We’ve made these four poems by Campbell available here because they are not online anywhere else, so far as we could tell. All four are taken from Seosamh MacCathmhaoil (Joseph Campbell), The Mountainy Singer (Dublin: Maunsel and Company, 1909). Campbell died in 1944, so according to UK copyright law The Mountainy Singer is now in the public domain.

                       The Embankment

(The fantasia of a fallen gentleman on a cold, bitter night)

Once, in finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy,
In a flash of gold heels on the hard pavement.
Now see I
That warmth’s the very stuff of poesy.
Oh, God, make small
The old star-eaten blanket of the sky,
That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.

                            First, a short paraphrase of the poem: on London’s Embankment (an area well-known for homeless people sleeping rough), a ‘fallen gentleman’ reflects on his past and how he found pleasure in worldly social activities (the ‘finesse of fiddles’ suggesting musical gatherings, such as dances) and beautiful women – probably (given the ‘flash of gold heels on the hard pavement‘) courtesans or prostitutes. But now, down on his luck 

and most probably sleeping rough on the streets, he realises that warmth is what really matters and is what poets should be singing about. The poem then ends with a heartfelt entreaty to the heavens, with the poem’s speaker beseeching God to make a blanket of the starry sky so that the speaker’s wish for warmth might be granted.

                            This is a very different kind of poem from the sort of thing being written in England a few years before. Although many poets of the 1890s had written about ‘fallen gentlemen’ (not just men down on their luck, but often, by implication, those who had succumbed to sexual temptations and been subsequently ruined emotionally or financially), and had treated the stars in the night sky as an appropriate topic for their poetry, none of them had taken the bold step of reimagining that starry canopy as a moth-eaten blanket. 

                            To invert Oscar Wilde’s famous line, we can all look at the stars, but some of us are in the gutter. Talk of the beauty of a starry night is of little use to someone in the gutter: a blanket, though – now you’re talking sense, Mr Poet.

                 Edward Storer, ‘Image’ 

 Storer was writing at around the same time as several other early modernist poets on this list, notably T. E. Hulme (whom he knew) and Joseph Campbell, though he started off writing independently of them. He was clearly influenced by Japanese forms such as the haiku, as the following poem demonstrates :

Forsaken lovers,
Burning to a chaste white moon,
Upon strange pyres of loneliness and drought.

                         The dictionary meaning of “forsaken” is “to give up” so here “forsaken lovers” represents the fall. Here is a phrase “forsaken lovers burning” so here we can say that they are burning in lost as T.S Eliot discussed this in the third part “the fire sermon” in this part he discussed about the people who are burning and lost in spiritual degradation.

     Ezra Pound, ‘In a Station of the Metro‘ 

THE apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Along with T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound is probably the most famous modernist poet working in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century. Pound arrived at this two-line poem after writing a much longer draft which he then cut down, line by line. The poem describes the sight of the crowd of commuters at the Paris Metro station, using a vivid and original image.

                    The poem was first published in 1913 and is considered one of the leading poems of the Imagist tradition. Pound's process of deletion from thirty lines to only fourteen words typifies Imagism's focus on economy of language, precision of imagery and experimenting with non-traditional verse forms. The poem is Pound’s written equivalent for the moment of revelation and intense emotion he felt at the Paris Metro's Concorde station.

                          The poem is essentially a set of images that have unexpected likeness and convey the rare emotion that Pound was experiencing at that time. Arguably the heart of the poem is not the first line, nor the second, but the mental process that links the two together. "In a poem of this sort," as Pound explained, "one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective."

Like other modernist artists of the period, Pound found inspiration in Japanese art, but the tendency was to re-make and to meld cultural styles rather than to copy directly or slavishly. He may have been inspired by a Suzuki Harunobu print he almost certainly saw in the British Library (Richard Aldington mentions the specific prints he matched to verse), and probably attempted to write haiku-like verse during this period.

            The Pool

Are you alive?

I touch you.

You quiver like a sea-fish.

I cover you with my net.

What are you—banded one?

                  'The Pool’ is, along with ‘Oread’, Hilda Doolittle’s finest achievement as an Imagist poet. The poem was first published in the 1915 anthology Some Imagist Poets.

                          'The Pool’ is one of the most famous and widely discussed Imagist poems, and in many ways it conforms to the central ‘tenets’ of that movement as set out by Ezra Pound in his unofficial manifesto, 'A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste'.It’s unrhymed, it has no regular metre, it uses no superfluous word or phrase, and it has at its centre a strong, clear image, an ‘image’ being defined by Pound as ‘that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.’

                              ‘The Pool’, like much modernist poetry, poses more questions than it provides – indeed, literally, given the first and last lines of this five-line Imagist masterpiece. How should we analyse Doolittle’s poem? What is the thing she finds in the pool? It’s clearly not a fish, since it quivers like a sea-fish, suggesting it is something else.

                              One possible way to interpret or analyse ‘The Pool’ is suggested by the setting. If the speaker is in a rock-pool, or standing over one, she can probably see her reflection in the surface of the water. Is ‘The Pool’ a poem about self-discovery – or, rather, failure to self-discover? (She remains unsure of ‘what’ she is at the end of the poem.) Why is she ‘banded’? Is this simply because she has it (her own face) covered with the ‘bands’ of her net?

'Insouciance‘  IN and out of the dreary trenches,
Trudging cheerily under the stars,
I make for myself little poems
Delicate as a flock of doves.
They fly away like white-winged doves.

                                 Richard Aldington was prominent in several literary capacities; most notably as a founding poet of the Imagist movement and as a novelist who conveyed the horror of World War I through his written works. He was also a prolific critic, translator, and essayist. Though he considered his novels to be his most important works, he received much critical attention for his biographies of such contemporaries as Lawrence of Arabia and D.H. Lawrence. Aldington began his literary career in as a part-time sports journalist after leaving college and quickly became part of an influential circle of British writers that included William Butler Yeats and Walter de la Mare. However, he became disillusioned with the literary scene after returning from battle in World War I, and he moved to France and lived the life of an expatriate writer abroad.

                       Richard Aldington was married to Hilda Doolittle and, although they divorced after numerous affairs ending with Doolittle pregnant with another man’s child, they remained lifelong friends. In his short poem “Insouciance,” written a year after World War I ended, Aldington composed this odd little poem. In it, Aldington describes life in the trenches and how poetry kept him alive and happy. It is oddly light-hearted when compared with modern ideals of war poetry. The personification of poems as “white winged doves” that fly away is liberating and helps understand his perspective on the arts and why they kept him alive and happy during trying times.

         Morning at the Window

T.S.Eliot

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. 

                     'Morning at the Window' is an imagist poem that presents an image of poverty. The picture is that of a slum where people lead miserable lives. The speaker is at the window. He may be a visitor of a certain house in the area where poor people live. The images that come to his eyes are 'object correlatives' or objects corresponding certain ideas and emotions in the poet's and the reader's mind.

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

                             The images in the poem correlate with the idea of poverty and feelings of sympathy. But the poem only presents them just the objective image, rather than romantically expressing his feelings and emotions. There is also a balance between feelings and ideas in the sense that the image arouses not only feelings in the reader but also provokes thoughts and ideas.

                         The poem is a set of striking images of poverty; the poet says nothing but shows them. The poor people are rattling (making a sound) breakfast plates early in the morning. It is an obligation for poor people to go to work early and work till late. Sun or shower, frost or fog, they have to set out early. The image brings to mind similar images of poverty. The speaker says that he is aware of the condition of the households' minds and souls, or their psychology. He doesn't describe that. Such housemaids are appearing one after another at the city gate. Maybe they come from villages. They have no identity, dignity and meaningful life. They are 'despondent', or extremely sad.

         The Red                          Wheelbarrow

William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens
 

                        'The Red Wheelbarrow' is one such poem, that has only 8 lines and at the first read, the reader get confused as to what the poem is being linked to. This was one among his last works of his imagist movements. His poems never told any specific stories or describe emotions, as the way usually poets do.

                      The Red Wheelbarrow is like a life painting poem in 1923.He based this poem on a scene he observed in a farmyard from a window.

The basic summary of the poem is the outlook of a farmyard and how simple things used in a farm could be important. Here, poet talks about three things mainly, the wheelbarrow, the chickens and the rain and emphasis the word “so much depends”. Actually, so much depends on which of these in a farmyard is what is being thought about.

                         In this poem, the reader could interpret in many angles. It could be thought as the rain has just been over and left the shiny droplets on the wheelbarrow with the white chicks beside it, or as was it after a major drought that the showers of rain being emphasized. Or is it that the wheelbarrow is the most important thing in the yard as it a transporter of products, or are the chickens the important ones, as they provide food? .in such manner, the poem could be read from different angles.

                      This poem is like a puzzle and the answers to this puzzle lie all within these eight lines. Why has the poet used the color ‘red’ for the wheelbarrow and ‘white’ for the chickens? Is it a symbolic representation of a mass killing of the chicks? Is the rain to symbolize the washing away? Or is it that the barrow has been given red, to show the importance it has in the yard and how it could reflect if not present and the chicks as white to show the peace?

Anecdote of the Jar

BY WALLACE STEVENS

I placed a jar in Tennessee,   

And round it was, upon a hill.   

It made the slovenly wilderness   

Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.   

The jar was round upon the ground   

And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.   

The jar was gray and bare.

It did not give of bird or bush,   

Like nothing else in Tennessee.

                In the poem "Anecdote of the Jar, " the narrator elucidates an account of a jar which stands as a metaphor for art.

                            The narrator places a round jar upon a hill in Tennessee. The jar attracts the attention of the unruly wilderness (which is a metaphor for common people) from its vantage point. Thus, the wilderness surrounds the hill.

                    The wilderness rises up to it and loses its barbarity. The narrator restates that "The jar was round" stressing that art is complete by itself. The polished piece of art is consistent and has the ability to affect people with its grandeur.

                         The jar that seemed passive took dominion everywhere with its inertness and transparency. Art is not useful to a bird or a bush "Like nothing else in Tennessee" (The poet could have meant the epidemic flu and the racial riot during the period 1918 - 1919 when the poem was written) but it can influence and alter the human mind for the betterment of the society. Thus, Stevens expounds the exaltation of of art and its power over the society.

l(a...(a leaf falls on loneliness)

l(a

le
af
fa

ll

s)
one
l

iness

                        This poem appeared in 1958 in Cummings’ collection 95 Poems, so it’s really a late modernist work. Although it’s nine lines long, it only contains four words – cleverly arranged so that ‘a leaf falls’ appears parenthetically within the word ‘loneliness’. Richard S. Kennedy, Cummings’ biographer, called it ‘the most delicately beautiful literary construct that Cummings ever created’. We agree.

                   "l(a" is a poem by E. E. Cummings. It is the first poem in his 1958 collection 95 Poems.

                        "l(a" is arranged vertically in groups of one to five letters. When the text is laid out horizontally, it either reads as l(a leaf falls)oneliness —in other words, a leaf falls inserted between the first two letters of loneliness- or l(a le af fa ll s) one l iness, with a le af fa ll s between a l and one.

Cummings biographer Richard S. Kennedy calls the poem "the most delicately beautiful literary construct that Cummings ever created". 

                        In analyzing the poem, Robert DiYanni notes that the image of a single falling leaf is a common symbol for loneliness, and that this sense of loneliness is enhanced by the structure of the poem. He writes that the fragmentation of the words "illustrates visually the separation that is the primary cause of loneliness". The fragmentation of the word loneliness is especially significant, since it highlights the fact that that word contains the word one. In addition, the isolated letter l can initially appear to be the numeral one. It creates the effect that the leaf is still one, or "oneliness" whole within itself, even after it is isolated from the tree. Robert Scott Root-Bernstein observes that the overall shape of the poem resembles a 1.