Friday Poem

Environmental & Science Education
Poetry
Art and Environment
Edward Hessler

It is the 73rd day of the year. The sun rises at 7:27 am and sets at 7:16 pm. Those 3 minutes of new light are adding up. Today we have 11 hours, 49 minutes and 03 seconds of sunlight. One of the very few pussy willows in my life is full and I stood under it, looking up for a few minutes this morning. Paradise!

Hank Gutman, is an emeritus professor of English (poetry especially) at the University of Vermont. Several years ago I signed up for occasional notes from him--mostly extraordinary dissections of poems in which he teases out their anatomy and physiology.  

March 7, 2020, I received the first one in memory without commentary. Here are a few things Gutman had to say about a short, presient poem by William Butler Yeats.

Poets often get things right.  They “see into the life of things” as Wordsworth wrote, when many others don’t see as clearly as they do, even when the poet is, like Yeats, someone often befuddled by the politics of his times. 

I was walking to have coffee with a friend when the lines by Yeats below, bolded, came to me.  They seemed enormously appropriate to our times.  So I share them with you, without commentary.

[T]he poem was addressed to his friend Lady Augusta Gregory, and was about the failure of her effort to get Dublin to build a gallery of modern art. The poem, of course, is about the loneliness of being on the ‘right’ path. I was walking to have coffee with a friend when the lines by Yeats below, bolded, came to me.  They seemed enormously appropriate to our times.  So I share them with you, without commentary.

To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing

Now all the truth is out,

Be secret and take defeat

From any brazen throat,

For how can you compete,

Being honor bred, with one

Who were it proved he lies

Were neither shamed in his own

Nor in his neighbors' eyes;

Bred to a harder thing

Than Triumph, turn away

And like a laughing string

Whereon mad fingers play

Amid a place of stone,

Be secret and exult,

Because of all things known

That is most difficult.