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Starting a new school year is always exciting and scary. And that’s doubly true for students venturing off to kindergarten for the first time.

Author Catherine Urdahl takes on this topic in Polka-Dot Fixes Kindergarten (Charlesbridge, 2011). Dorothy, who’s better known as Polka-Dot, skips off to kindergarten ready to learn. But she brings a fix-it kit full of her grandfather’s favorite repair tools just in case.

At first, kindergarten doesn’t look like it will be very fun. Her name tag says, “Dorothy,” there are lots of rules to remember and there’s a girl named Liz who doesn’t appreciate Polka-Dot’s name or fashion sense. And, grandpa’s fix-it tools don’t seem to work as well at school as they do at home — at least initially.

Today’s guest reviewer has successfully navigated the waters of kindergarten and, therefore, is thoroughly qualified to comment on this book. So take it away, Brooke!

Our reviewer: Brooke

Age: 8

Things I like to do: Play with my friends and my sister.

This book was about: A girl named Polka-Dot going to kindergarten.

The best part was when: Liz and Polka-Dot made up.

I smiled when: Polka-Dot fixed Liz’s dress.

I was worried when: The boys saw Liz’s underpants.

I was surprised when: Liz’s dress split.

This book taught me: To always be nice.

Three words that best describe this book are: “Fix.” “Help.” “Friendship.”

My favorite line or phrase in this book is: When she said, “Let’s be friends.”

Other kids reading this book should watch for: Stripes and polka-dots.

You should read this book because: It is a good book.

Thanks, Brooke!

If you’d like to learn more about author Catherine Urdahl, you can visit her website. Or, you can read this blog post where Catherine describes how Polka-Dot’s story came to be.

If you’d like to learn more about illustrator Mai S. Kemble, you can visit her website. Or, you can stop by her blog.

Finally, if you’d like to see what other reviewers had to say about this book, you can visit:

Books That Heal Kids

Jen Robinson’s Book Page

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Among other things (Jane-related books and articles, friends' manuscripts for critiques, and the occasional new book), I've been reading Bill Bryson's book, Shakespeare: The World as Stage. And the other day I watched the movie Twelfth Night, featuring Gandhi Ben Kingsley as Feste, Imogen Stubbs as Viola and Toby Stephens as Duke Orsino. (S came in part-way through and said "Oh, is this based on She's the Man?" Um, yeah. Or maybe the other way around?) Ever since then, I've been singing "When that I was and a little tiny boy" (or, The Rain, it Raineth Every Day) off and on. But I digress.

And yet it's not a true digression, for all of the bits I just related contribute to explain why I've selected one of Shakespeare's sonnets for today. Master poet, master playwright, creator of words, inventor of myriad characters of delight, Shakespeare really knew his way around a sentence. The particular form of sonnet he used followed this rhyme scheme: ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. As in most sonnets, the first eight lines set up the poem. Line nine of any sonnet typically contains the volta, or the "turn", where the sonnet moves to a different vantage point (could move inward or outward, or on to a related topic, or flip the poem on its head). And Shakespeare generally employs a turn in his ninth lines as well, and then does one better, because that rhymed couplet left by itself at the end is usually an extra serving of cream that gives the poem still further resonance. In this poem, however, I find there is no real turn until the closing couplet, although I can also see a bit of a shift once you hit lines 11 and 12. See where you think the poem "turns" as you read Sonnet LXXIII.

Sonnet 73
by William Shakespeare

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Broken down in the crassest of ways, the speaker here spends four lines comparing himself to a tree in winter, another four comparing himself to twilight (with night encroaching), and yet another four in comparing himself to a dying fire, with an overt reference to a death-bed in line 11. The final couplet is, to me, the real volta here, where Shakespeare ceases to speak of "me" and shifts to "thou", and the topic shifts from metaphors for death and aging to a direct address about love and parting. Despite a fairly bleak opening, I find hope in this poem because of its last lines, which speak of love strengthening and which can, I believe, be read in a carpe diem* kind of way.

Many folks read the poem literally as one intended to be "spoken" by an older person to someone much younger, and I have to say I think that's an entirely fair reading. The poem can also be read as being about the speaker's creative life: his work was once compared to the singing of sweet birds, but now is diminished; his star is fading; his creative powers are nearly used up. I have to say that while that second interpretation is one that's very popular with the "write a bullshit essay for school" crowd, I don't believe for moment that Shakespeare intended for the poem to be about his art, even though one can freely analyze it that way and likely get an A on the essay in doing so.

No, my take is that Shakespeare was most likely feeling neglected or a bit unappreciated by a lover and was trying to gain their sympathy (or heap coals upon them) by invoking thoughts of his death. It's all very melodramatic and over the top, and similar to what a lot of teenagers might do (even though Shakespeare was probably in his twenties or thirties when this was written), yet it rings true in a way that making these about Shakespeare's death or dying art do not. First, there's his age to consider - he was not an old man when he wrote this sonnet. Second, there's his art to take into account: he was still growing and writing and succeeding. In either case, personal experience/autobiography seem out of the question. Unless, of course, you believe, as I do, that Will was trying to manipulate someone by preying on their emotions.

Sonnet 73 is part of a quartet of sonnets that deal with aspects of death, and are usually read together. The quarter is composed of sonnets 71-74, and most folks read them as an older man (most believe Shakespeare himself) considering his own mortality, and writing poems for a young male friend he leaves behind him. Why male? Beats me. There's nothing in the poems overtly indicative that such is the case, although references to the other person facing public scrutiny might be taken that way (and many scholars believe that it was Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton and Shakespeare's patron, to whom these poems were addressed). It seems to me far more likely that these lines were written by Shakespeare in order to manipulate a woman he knew, or else written for Southampton so that he could share them with a mistress in order to try to make her feel sorry for him. Or perhaps to try to get Elizabeth I to pardon him for schtupping one of her ladies-in-waiting without her permission or for backing Essex's rebellion against the Queen.

Sonnet 71 takes a pious martyr-like tone and urges the surviving loved one not to mourn overly much, because it's not the dying person's desire to see him/her unhappy, nor does the speaker want the survivor to be "mocked" for their sentimental mourning: "I'm just thinking of you, dear; I would never want you to be unhappy. When I'm dead." Sonnet 72 reads like a dejected, almost petulant, lover, speaking of how unworthy he is of love and undeserving of praise, and exhorting the survivor (after his death), not to heap praise on the speaker because it would be a lie: "I'm a mutt, a mongrel, unworthy even of being kicked". Sonnet 73 you've just read, and Sonnet 74 talks about how the dead speaker's body may decay, but his spirit will live on with the loved one he addresses, as memorialized in the lines of his poem: "Don't be sad. Even when I'm dead and my body is being devoured by worms, probably because I've been knifed, and I'm unworthy of being remembered by you, you'll have this sonnet about me being dead to remember me by." (Sorry for the overly long description of Sonnet 74, but really, the lines about worms and being knifed and how base the writer is were too good not to mention.)

* seize the day

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First off, I should note that I set out to write a Poetry Friday post related to it being National Wear Red Day here in the U.S. (an initiative designed to raise awareness of heart health issues that causes everyone to wander about looking like a Target employee). And I'll get there, I promise. Just stick with me for a few minutes.

The post title came to mind because I've been watching the movie Music and Lyrics repeatedly since it's in heavy rotation on HBO and I love-love-love the movie, which holds up extremely well to repeat viewings. Some of you (I'm looking at you, Christy, Liz and Colleen!) may recall that I said I was going to purchase Sting's latest book, Lyrics, back in October. And I bought it. And I read it. And I enjoyed it. And I totally forgot to blog about it, which is odd because due to some lucky happenstance involving a coupon plus a percentage off, I got the book for dirt cheap, which would've been worth mentioning on its own. But I digress.

First, the technical stuff. This book is really well-made. The white hardcover is covered with a gold-hued replica of Sting's handwritten lyrics. On the front, "Message in a Bottle" and "King of Pain"; on the back, bits from "Roxanne", complete with doodles. And covering the hardcover is a tan vellum that allows those bits to peek through a bit. The book contains a foreword and the lyrics from the first Police album, Outlandos D'Amour through Sting's solo, Sacred Love. It has two indices - one by first line, one by song title; the song title stuff includes copyright info, which is cool, but should have added the album titles, I'm thinking. Also in the book? Photographs, as one might expect. And here and there, some clarification from Sting.

You can read the complete foreword over at the Barnes & Nbble site (and probably elsewhere as well). What Sting notes first is that separating lyrics from their music can be a dicey thing, as they are mutually dependent beings.

The two, lyrics and music, have always been mutually dependent, in much the same way as a mannequin and a set of clothes are dependent on each other; separate them, and what remains is a naked dummy and a pile of cloth. . . . I have set out my compositions in the sequence they were wrritten and provided a little background when I thought it might be illuminating. My wares have neither been sorted nor dressed in clothes that do not belong to them; indeed, they have been shorn of the very garments that gave them their shape in the first place. No doubt some of them will perish in the cold cruelty of this new environment, and yet others may prove more resilient and become perhaps more beautiful in their naked state.

As one might expect, a song like "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da" does not hold up well. Others, such as "You Still Touch Me" and "The Wild Wild Sea" seem richer to me having read them without the music playing. And some of my favorites are, as I expected them to be, fantastic when read as text. One that I played in near-continuous loop when The Soul Cages came out was "Why Should I Cry for You?", which is a spectacular song, and the lyrics, read alone, are heart-breaking. I recommend this book highly for Sting fans.

But they lyrics I'm putting up as today's poem are from the following album, Ten Summoner's Tales, which came out in 1992.

Shape of My Heart
by Sting

He deals the cards as a meditation
And those he plays never suspect
He doesn't play for the money he wins
He don't play for respect

He deals the cards to find the answer
The sacred geometry of chance
The hidden law of a probable outcome
The numbers lead a dance

I know that the spades are the swords of a soldier
I know that the clubs are weapons of war
I know that diamonds mean money for this art
But that's not the shape of my heart

He may play the jack of diamonds
He may lay the queen of spades
He may conceal a king in his hand
While the memory of it fades

I know that the spades are the swords of a soldier
I know that the clubs are weapons of war
I know that diamonds mean money for this art
But that's not the shape of my heart

And if I told you that I loved you
You'd maybe think there's something wrong
I'm not a man of too many faces
The mask I wear is one

Well, those who speak know nothin'
And find out to their cost
Like those who curse their luck in too many places
And those who fear are lost

I know that the spades are the swords of a soldier
I know that the clubs are weapons of war
I know that diamonds mean money for this art
But that's not the shape of my heart
That's not the shape, the shape of my heart
That's not the shape, the shape of my heart

Structurally: the verses are rhymed ABCB, the chorus is in couplets (with slant rhyme between soldier and war). Tarot afficianados will recognize the source of the chorus's lines. In Tarot, spades are swords (which correspond to "air" and represent intellect), clubs are wands (which correspond to "fire" and represent work/career), diamonds are coins/pentacles (which correspond to "earth" and represent material concerns like wealth and goods), and hears are cups (which correspond to "water" and represent emotion).

The cards of a regular deck are related to the minor archana in Tarot. They can be used to play card games, of course, but they can also be used for personal meditation, with meanings attributed to various cards. "Jack of diamonds" signifies patience; "queen of spades" signifies vulnerability. The kings of diamonds, clubs and spades have positive meanings: contentment, foresight and victory, respectively; the king of hearts is known as the "suicide king", and represents the throwing away of oneself for selfish or worthless causes. Whether Sting considered these meanings in selecting the specific cards referenced is doubtful, since the book contains a note stating that he went for a walk and came back with the whole thing written in his head; still, fun to ponder/add on there, I think.

To watch the video, which contains the haunting tune that accompanies this poem:

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First the poem, then the discussion. Or really, if you have time, first the poem. Then a a few moments to think/grieve, and then the discussion. You'll understand that better in a moment, unless this is one you already know by heart.

When We Two Parted
by George Gordon, Lord Byron

When we two parted
In silence and tears,
Half broken-hearted,
To sever for years,
Pale grew thy cheek and cold,
Colder thy kiss;
Truly that hour foretold
Sorrow to this.

The dew of the morning
Sank chill on my brow—
It felt like the warning
Of what I feel now.
Thy vows are all broken,
And light is thy fame:
I hear thy name spoken,
And share in its shame.

They name thee before me,
A knell to mine ear;
A shudder comes o’er me—
Why wert thou so dear?
They know not I knew thee,
Who knew thee too well:—
Long, long shall I rue thee
Too deeply to tell.

In secret we met—
In silence I grieve
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee?—
With silence and tears.

Go on. Pause for a moment. I'll wait.

Let's get the technical stuff out of the way: four stanzas, eight lines each, with an ABABCDCD rhyme scheme (the third stanza can also be read as ABABACAC). There's no strict syllable count per line; instead there are two strongly-accented syllables per line (E.g., "WHEN we two PARTed" or "they KNOW not i KNEW thee").

The power of this poem comes from multiple sources. Part of it is the punch-iness of the lines with their two accented syllables each. They rock you along through the poem, and yet they sometimes pack a wallop as they go. Part of the poem's power is Byron's use of the first person. It lends credibility to the words of the poem, which is highly personal not just because of the use of first person, but also because of the grief, anger, despair and resentment in the words of the poem.

And a large part of this poem's power is that ends on a sadder note than it began. Contrary to common belief, time has not healed the speaker's wound. In the first stanza, he's been rejected by a lover; the lover went on to a life of infamy, and his knowledge that he was once associated with the lover is a constant source of shame; while the lover's name is bandied about (one infers with some derision), the speaker reassesses the level of his affection ("Why wert thou so dear?"), and it seems that he harbored feelings over the years; and then the final stanza, which is killer, as he reflects on their past trysts and his continued resentment over what he now views as a betrayal, and considers the possibility of meeting her again.

I should note that this poem is often read as meaning that a prior secret lover has made a public fool of him- or herself, and is now being gossiped about in society. Friends discuss it openly in front of the speaker, not knowing of his past relationship, and it reopens all the wounds of the original separation. I should also note that I read this poem slightly differently, based on all the verbal cues that have to do with death, as meaning that the ex-lover is now dead, and is nevertheless the object of society's ridicule as a result of a misspent life, and that the far-distant future meeting is in the afterlife. It's supportable on the face of the poem, but isn't, I believe, the traditional take on it. And that's the beauty of poems— they are subject to individual interpretation.

If you're interested in more about Byron's biography, you can get some of the dirt in a prior post of mine. He was actually quite a scandalous figure in his day, and in honesty, this poem could as easily have been written about him as by him.

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First, a word about trope. I first heard the word in a music history class in college. I took two full years of music history, since I was a music major, and the word "trope" cropped up in the very first one, the study of Medieval and Renaissance music. I learned then that a trope is a theme, and Gregorian chants are typically tropes. Other religious music uses tropes as well, for Torah and Haftorah in Judaism, and for Psalms in the Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Episcopalian churches as well as in the Church of England.

The word "trope" is used in literature to describe a common theme, motif or a pattern. In linguistics, a "trope" is a play on words. In poetry, it is all of the things I've described already, depending on the particular poet and the person analyzing the poems. Suffice it to say that a recurring image, setting or turn of phrase can be a trope. It's most frequently a theme, symbol or idea that recurs within the work of a particular poet, possibly being returned to at various points throughout a career.

As Jama Rattigan pointed out a few weeks ago, apple orchards were a frequent image or motif in the poems of Robert Frost, who wrote "After Apple Picking", "The Cow in Apple Time" and "Goodbye, and Keep Cold". Even "Mending Wall" contains references to Frost's apple orchard.

I've been reading The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice over the past several weeks, and I'm finally ready to write my first MacNeice post. Reading a collection of poetry spanning the lifetime of a particular poet is an excellent way to discover particular tropes, even if they are not something that the poet may have been aware of. As I mentioned in a "Quoteskimming"* post a few weeks back, his poem, "Bagpipe Music", is one of my favorites. (In all fairness, my list of favorite poems is extraordinarily lengthy.) First, the poem, and then a discussion of trope in MacNeice.


Bagpipe Music
by Louis MacNeice

It's no go the merrygoround, it's no go the rickshaw,
All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow.
Their knickers are made of crêpe-de-chine, their shoes are made of python,
Their halls are lined with tiger rugs and their walls with head of bison.

John MacDonald found a corpse, put it under the sofa,
Waited till it came to life and hit it with a poker,
Sold its eyes for souvenirs, sold its blood for whisky,
Kept its bones for dumb-bells to use when he was fifty.

It's no go the Yogi-Man, it's no go Blavatsky,
All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi.

Annie MacDougall went to milk, caught her foot in the heather,
Woke to hear a dance record playing of Old Vienna.
It's no go your maidenheads, it's no go your culture,
All we want is a Dunlop tyre and the devil mend the puncture.

The Laird o' Phelps spent Hogmanay declaring he was sober,
Counted his feet to prove the fact and found he had one foot over.
Mrs. Carmichael had her fifth, looked at the job with repulsion,
Said to the midwife, 'Take it away; I'm through with overproduction.'

It's no go the gossip column, it's no go the ceilidh,**
All we want is a mother's help and a sugar-stick for the baby.

Willie Murray cut his thumb, couldn't count the damage,
Took the hide of an Ayrshire cow and used it for a bandage.
His brother caught three hundred cran*** when the seas were lavish,
Threw the bleeders back in the sea and went upon the parish.

It's no go the Herring Board, it's no go the Bible,
All we want is a packet of fags when our hands are idle.

It's no go the picture palace, it's no go the stadium,
It's no go the country cot**** with a pot of pink geraniums,
It's no go the Government grants, it's no go the elections,
Sit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat on a pension.

It's no go my honey love, it's no go my poppet;
Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit.
The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall forever,
But if you break the bloody glass you won't hold up the weather.

In the penultimate stanza of the poem, and, indeed, throughout the poem, MacNeice discusses then-contemporary life and politics. British and Irish politics, to be precise. MacNeice was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1907. He was educated in England, at Oxford, and his everyday jobs included jobs in academia and as a feature writer and producer for the BBC from 1941-49, which included much of the time that Britain was involved in World War II (they officially declared war on Germany in 1939 following the invasion of Poland). Before the war, MacNeice's poems addressed the depression (economic and emotional) then existing. Poems like "The individualist speaks" and "Turf-stacks", for instance. MacNeice wrote a number of war poems during the Blitz, and wrote more still years after the war was over. "Brother Fire", written in 1943, talks about England's early policy of appeasement toward Germany and the air-raids to come; "The Trolls (Written after an air-raid, April 1941)" tells of the experience of being in (and being witness to) the destruction of an air-raid. Later poems, like "The Atlantic tunnel (a memory of 1940)", "Homage to Wren (a memory of 1941)", and "Rites of War".

In the final stanza of "Bagpipe Music", written in 1937, MacNeice's reference to "the glass" is not to a windowpane or a drinking glass, but to the barometer. The stanza speaks of futility — no matter how much you work, the money all goes; no matter what you do to the barometer, the rough weather (literal and figurative) will come. A poem from eleven years earlier, "Glass falling", written in 1926, presages this closing stanza:

Glass falling
by Louis MacNeice

The glass is going down. The sun
Is going down. The forecast say
It will be warm, with frequent showers,
We ramble down the showery hours
And amble up and down the day.
Mary will wear her black goloshes
And splash the puddles on the town;
And soon on fleets of macintoshes
The rain is coming down, the frown
Is coming down of heaven showing
A wet night coming, the glass is going
Down, the sun is going down.

The tone in these two poems is very different, "Bagpipe Music" being mocking and sharp, "Glass falling" being dolorous. Where "Bagpipe Music" lilts along, racing towards its end with its snappy metre and crackling consonants and short vowel sounds, "Glass falling" mopes along with long tones and humming, vocalized consonants (check out all the Ms and Ns and even the Ws, Ls and Rs) and internal repetition ("down" appears 8 times) or slower words like "ramble" and "amble". It uses assonance to keep itself slow, and onomatopoeia (the use of a word that imitates a sound) to give effect, as where the "goloshes . . . splash". There is an end-rhyme scheme of a sort as well, that lends the poem structure, although it's not a specific form (ABCCBDEDEFFE).

And yet.

With all the differences, these poems both speak of inevitability. Of the inability to prevent or avoid bad weather, actual or figurative. Of the bleakness that comes with the clouds and rain and the disappearing of the sun.

Well. I don't feel right leaving you on such a sour note, so I will include a third poem by MacNeice, from his final collection of poems which was published only days after his unexpected death from pneumonia in 1963.

Coda
by Louis MacNeice

Maybe we knew each other better
When the night was young and unrepeated
And the moon stood still over Jericho.*****

So much for the past; in the present
There are moments caughte between heart-beats
When maybe we know each other better.

But what is that clinking in the darkness?
Maybe we shall know each other better
When the tunnels meet beneath the mountain.

For those of you who care about such things (and I will assume I'm not the only soul who does), MacNeice's "Coda" is written using tercets (three-line stanzas), and is a variation of a roundel or rondeau, in that the line "Maybe we knew each other better" (or a variant thereon) appears in the first line of the first stanza, the third line of the second stanza, and the second line of the third.

The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice that I've been reading is the 1967 edition edited by E.R. Dodds. Afficianados should note that a new edition called The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice edited by Peter McDonald was published in January 2007 by Faber & Faber, and can be gotten as an import through Amazon (I couldn't find any other sites that had it).

* Quoteskimming: My term for ganking writing-related quotes from here and there
** ceilidh: pronounced kay-lee; a Gaelic term for "visit", it refers to a dance
*** cran: a measure of the quantity of herrings caught
**** cot: a cottage
***** Jericho: Not used here to mean a town in the book of Joshua, but a recurring motif or trope in MacNeice's poems, and most likely a reference to his college days. Jericho is the name of a neighborhood in Oxford, which takes its name from a pub called the Jericho Tavern. In the 1950s, it was a red-light district, just the sort of place one might find "a bit of skirt in a taxi."

In other news: This is the last week of featured snowflakes for the Robert's Snow for the Cure project. The first "batch" o'flakes opens for auction on Monday, November 19th at 9 a.m. EST and runs through Friday, the 23rd at 5 p.m. EST. You can see precisely which flakes will be on the block next week over at The Robert's Snow page. While there, you can find information on how to register to be a bidder, and can check out the bidding rules.

To check out the snowflakes featured in today's blogosphere, click on the Robert's Snow button. Jules at 7-Imp has posted a new 2007 snowflake from Brian Biggs called "Ice Skaters Waltz" done in black and white and grey. In addition, Jules and Eisha have also been keeping an ongoing list of blog posts thus far featuring snowflakes and the artists who created them.

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This morning, I had to drive S to school because she opted to stay home and finish a bit of homework she'd forgotten rather than take the bus that comes an hour before school opens. (I don't quarrel with her decision, which was sound, or with her priorities, which were to spend all last night studying for a major unit test in Spanish, and I enjoy time alone in a car with my girlies.)

On the way, I was still pondering what poem to use today for Poetry Friday. And S and I began to talk about the changing leaves on the trees. S's favorites are the "leaves that look like peaches — gold, with a hint of pink". (I like the dark eggplant-purple of the occasional ornamental tree, but only when it's contrasted with greens; they lose their magic for me when everything goes to rust.) And it hit me that the poem I most wanted to share today was Robert Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay."

"That's a sad poem," said S. "It was used in The Outsiders. Have you ever read that book?"

The answer is that I haven't. In the time and town where I grew up, once you were done with children's books, you moved on to grown-up titles. S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders, first published in 1967 (when I was three), was clearly around when I was a teen, but I never heard of it until S read it in middle school. But the poem plays a key role in the book in the relationship between the characters Ponyboy and Johnny. And because S so strongly associates the poem with the characters in the book, she finds it sad.

And really, it is sad, or at least fatalistic. But first the poem, then the discussion:

Nothing Gold Can Stay
by Robert Frost

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

On the surface, this is not truly a poem about autumn. The first four lines are about spring, and early growth of plants and leaves, when the first yellow greens appear on the trees. In the fifth line, the leaves are just leaves, but use of the word "subsides" shows a settling or falling sort of motion. And then the sixth line is the "turn," where Frost gets to his real topic. The subsidance of leaves reminds him of the fall of man in the Garden of Eden. Dawn is lost, but day remains. And then that last, killer line with a fatalistic ring to it, decrees that "Nothing gold can stay." It can be taken to mean that nothing can stay gold, and S.E. Hinton's character, Johnny, says that it's about the importance of appreciating the things you loved in youth, and about staying "golden", or young. But I think it means that nothing can stay young.

For me, the poem is about the transient nature of youth, with a hint of loss. And in my mind today, remembering this poem (I don't yet have it committed to memory, but I sure remembered the leaf references), I thought that "Nothing gold can stay" suited the brilliant-gold of the autumn leaves quite well. And so, evidently, did Robert Frost. Here are the last three lines of this poem from an earlier draft, at a time when the poem was called "Nothing Golden Stays":

In autumn she achieves
A still more golden blaze
But nothing golden stays.


Today's poem, "Nothing Gold Can Stay," was first published in 1923, in The Yale Review. But Frost played around with it for several years, and several earlier versions of it exist. The earliest of these other versions was sent to a friend in 1920, and ended as you see above. Frost's initial focus was on the evanescent quality of new growth. Buds are golden before green. Leaves appear to be flowers before they unfold and "subside" to be leaves. Trees burst forth in color again in the fall, then the leaves subside once and for all to earth. In later revisions, he decided to universalize the poem more. By introducing the idea of Eden, Frost injects a human element into the poem without spelling it out. The sinking of Eden is a reference to the "fall of man," but it echoes the idea of transience: Eden was short-lived, but the rest of man's time on earth has been much longer. Dawn, usually the time when the sun rises, is describes in falling terms as well, but dawn "goes down" to the bright light of day. Is that really a decline, or an improvement? Again, dawn is transient and over quickly, but day lasts far longer. Perhaps, then, Eden was transient, and the longer time spent after the fall is to be preferred? Is our preference for "gold" really such a good thing? Is not the long day better than the short dawn? Is not the summer longer and more durable than the budding spring? Is it not worth our while to recognize that youth's a stuff will not endure* and to appreciate our adulthood?

The poem concludes strongly, for a number of reasons:

"Nothing gold can stay."

Why does that line pack such a wallop?

Well, first, looking at metre, it is different than all the rest. The first seven lines are essentially iambic (a two-syllable poetic foot in which an unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed syllable, ta-TUM), although the first line has an oddball because "nature" is usually read NAture, not naTURE. The first seven lines each have six syllables to them. That last line has only five. And it's trochaic, with a truncated ending. (Don't panic - it means that it has two-syllable feet that are trochees, in which a stressed syllable is followed by an unstressed syllable, TUM-ta, but that the last foot only has one syllable, which is accented, so the line reads TUM-ta TUM ta TUM.)

It's written in rhymed couplets. Not just any rhymed couplets, either: but end-stopped rhymed couplets (which is to say that each line logically pauses at the end, where the commas and periods and semicolon can be found). This could easily become sing-songy in the wrong hands, yet Frost manages his images well enough that I find myself not truly noticing the rhyminess of it on a conscious level. Particularly if I read it aloud (as one should), where the pause after a comma is not as long as that created by a semicolon or a period. Especially since the lines "So Eden sank to grief,/So dawn goes down to day" form a single sentence, and don't rhyme with one another. Instead, they create a break before that last line, which stands alone.

Second, looking at word choice, the line begins with a negative: "Nothing." While there have been hints at loss and falling and evanescence throughout the poem, creating a vaguely melancholy tone, this word is aggressively negative. Also, as written that last line can be read as a command, rather than as a commentary on loss. It is a far broader statement than any that comes before it, generalized as it is to all things (in the negative). Gold cannot stay.

A possible stretch: While folks don't usually interpret the poem this way, one could stretch so far as to say that gold in that last line might not refer to the "just-Spring" qualities in the poem (with a nod to e.e. cummings), but could refer as well to money, which one cannot, after all, take with them.

For some other commentaries on the poem, check out these essays over at Modern American Poetry. The second one, analyzing it from a linguistic point of view, is fascinating to me, although I'm sure most people don't have the patience for it.


What think you?



* The quote "Youth's a stuff will not endure" is the closing line of "O Mistress Mine" by William Shakespeare. It was a song sung by the character Feste in Twelfth Night.

To check out the snowflakes featured in today's blogosphere, click on the Robert's Snow button to the left. The girls at 7-Imp have a lovely image of Alissa Imre Geis's snowflake, “Hope in Winter,” which features the first stanza of Emily Dickinson's Hope is the Thing With Feathers. In addition, Jules and Eisha have also been keeping an ongoing list of blog posts thus far featuring snowflakes and the artists who created them.

While there, check out their Poetry Friday post today, all about Alice. Yes, the one from Wonderland. No, not the one from the Restaurant.

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It's almost Halloween, All Hallows Eve when the spirits of the dead are said to walk among the living. What will you wear to frighten the spirits and keep them at bay? Or will you greet them with offerings of flowers and foods and skulls made of sugar, como el dìa de los muertos, honoring the ones who've died? Do you celebrate Samhain (November), the harvest festival that is known as the Celtic New Year, the start of the dark half of the year? Or recognize Toussaint, the French festival that melds Samhain and All Souls' Day, when families visit the graves and bring chrysanthemums - flowers so firmly associated with death that they are not given as gifts to the living? Beginning with Toussaint (the Black Month) and continuing until Christmas Eve, the next portal between the worlds of the living and the dead, the people of Bretagne (Brittany, France) begin their storytelling. At night, families and friends gathered to tell stories of fantasy and horror, of fairies, forsaken creatures and lost worlds.

Today, I'll be sharing part of a story that's perfect for Toussaint. It's from Macbeth, and it's a departure from his usual iambic pentameter (five poetic feet per line, each foot consisting of two syllables, the first unstressed, the second stressed: taDUM taDUM taDUM taDUM taDUM). I'm pulling from Act 4, Scene 1, a scene featuring "the weird sisters," or at least that's what Macbeth calls them. That phrase, "the Weird Sisters" was also sometimes written as "the Wyrd Sisters," and they were norns (Norse versions of the fates, of which there were many, not just the three referred to in Greek and Roman mythology - those interested in learning about the norns are advised to check out the two surviving Eddas written about them).

Shakespeare set the weird sisters/witches apart from others by writing their lines in rhymed couplets (two lines that rhyme back to back) using trochaic tetrameter: Tetrameter means four poetic feet per line (shorter lines), Trochaic refers to trochee (TROkey), a two-syllable foot in which a stressed syllable is followed by an unstressed (DUMta DUMta DUMta DUMta). Only most of the time, Shakespeare lops off that last "ta", so each line begins and ends with a stressed syllable. It makes their speech sound very different from that of anyone else, a completely separate cadence. Their ability to complete one another's thoughts is creepy; their chanting in unison creepier still. And then there's the content of their speech, which many believed to be "actual witch's spells."


    Thunder. Enter the three WITCHES.

  First Witch
1   Thrice the brinded cat hath mew'd.

  Second Witch
2   Thrice and once the hedge-pig whined.

  Third Witch
3   Harpier cries "'Tis time, 'tis time."

  First Witch
4   Round about the cauldron go;
5   In the poison'd entrails throw.
6   Toad, that under cold stone
7   Days and nights has thirty-one
8   Swelter'd venom sleeping got,
9   Boil thou first i' the charmed pot.

    ALL
10   Double, double toil and trouble;
11   Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

    Second Witch
12   Fillet of a fenny snake,
13   In the cauldron boil and bake;
14   Eye of newt and toe of frog,
15   Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
16   Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting,
17   Lizard's leg and howlet's wing,
18   For a charm of powerful trouble,
19   Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

    ALL
20   Double, double toil and trouble;
21   Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

    Third Witch
22   Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,
23   Witches' mummy, maw and gulf
24   Of the ravin'd salt-sea shark,
25   Root of hemlock digg'd i' the dark,
26   Liver of blaspheming Jew,
27   Gall of goat, and slips of yew
28   Sliver'd in the moon's eclipse,
29   Nose of Turk and Tartar's lips,
30   Finger of birth-strangled babe
31   Ditch-deliver'd by a drab,
32   Make the gruel thick and slab.
33   Add thereto a tiger's chaudron,
34   For the ingredients of our cauldron.

    ALL
35   Double, double toil and trouble;
36   Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

    Second Witch
37   Cool it with a baboon's blood,
38   Then the charm is firm and good.

**     Enter HECAT and the other three WITCHES.

    HECATE
39   O well done! I commend your pains;
40   And every one shall share i' the gains;
41   And now about the cauldron sing,
42   Live elves and fairies in a ring
43   Enchanting all that you put in.

    Music and a song: "Black spirits, etc."

    [Exit HECATE.]

    Second Witch
44   By the pricking of my thumbs,
45   Something wicked this way comes.

You may have noticed that Hecate arrived near the end, there. Hecate was a goddess who came from Thrace, not Greece. The Greeks sometimes thought of her as a Titaness. She was originally a goddess of the wilderness and of childbirth; over the years, she gained a triple face. She's a prime example of the idea of a wise woman/midwife being perceived as a witch, as her reputation altered over time from that of a powerful non-Greek goddess with influence over childbirth and knowledge of wild plants to that of a night-walking, crone-like sorceress.

The last two lines of the scene announce the coming of Macbeth. After all of the "evil" depicted in the scene, Shakespeare makes clear that the truly wicked thing has not yet arrived. The last line quoted has been used in many places, but most famously as a Ray Bradbury title. I can't see the words any longer without triggering the choral performance from the movie version of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

In researching Macbeth, I learned that for centuries, it's been considered unlucky by many theatre folk to say the name Macbeth unless it's during rehearsal or performance, perhaps because Shakespeare presumed to use real magic, but more likely because theatre folks are a superstitious lot, the same as athletes and other folk. Others think it's only unlucky to say the name of the play whilst in or near a theatre, but saying it elsewhere (like in a classroom) is okay. It's usually called "the Scottish play" or "the Scottish king" or "MacBee" in order to avoid the curse. The remedy, should one utter the name aloud, is to leave the room, close the door, turn around three times, say a dirty word (or spit, some say), then knock on the door and ask to be let back in. Or you can undo the ill by quoting from Hamlet, act 1, scene 4, beginning with line 39:

Angels and ministers of grace defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn'd,
Being with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou comest in such a questionable shape that I will speak to thee.

A second superstition is that the play is unlucky to performers, and can be deadly, with actors suffering illnesses and injuries. Fans of The Simpsons no doubt remember the episode called The Regina Monologues, featuring Ian McKellen:





(That particular episode also featured cameos by Tony Blair and J.K. Rowling.)

To check out Amiko Hirao's snowflake and to get the links for the other snowflakes featured in the blogosphere today, click on the Robert's Snow button to the left, which will direct you to the listing over at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast. Jules and Eisha have also posted an ongoing list of blog posts thus far featuring snowflakes and the artists who created them.

While you're at 7-Imp, don't miss their monster post for Poetry Friday.

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It is autumn now. October. It's been raining since before I woke up yesterday morning, with only an occasional break now and again for the clouds to catch their breath.

Seasonally, of course, the poem that came to mind is all wrong. The one that popped into my head, the one I quoted the final line of as the subject line to this post, is "April Rain Song" by Langston Hughes. But in truth, it's only the title of Hughes's poem that has to do with the springtime.

I first wrote about this poem earlier this year during National Poetry Month, as part of a review of The Oxford Illustrated Book of American Children's Poems, edited by Donald Hall. And today, as I looked outside at the wet and half-lit day, my first thought was "ugh, more rain." But then I thought of all those folks in California who have had to flee their homes before the fires being spread by the Santa Ana winds; fires that are made particular awful this year by the paucity of rain. And I was grateful for the rain.



April Rain Song
by Langston Hughes

Let the rain kiss you.
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops.
Let the rain sing you a lullaby.

The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk.
The rain makes running pools in the gutter.
The rain plays a little sleep-song on our roof at night --

And I love the rain.

In the prior post, I noted a bit about the structure of this poem, and today, I'd like to go a bit further with that. When I did school visits earlier this year, kids really loved this poem. If I asked them what they thought the most important part of the poem was, they all agreed it was that last line, "And I love the rain." And many of them could tell me why they thought so. I'm going to share my thoughts on it now

1. Like the cheese, that last line stands alone. Setting something apart like that gives it emphasis and weight.

2. It is one of the shortest lines in the poem (tied with the very first line at 5 words). Something that is so much shorter than what is around it stands out, and gains extra importance.

3. It is the only line spoken in first person. The first three are in second person, directing the listener. "Let the rain . . ." The second three are in third person, describing what the rain does. That last line is all about the speaker.

4. It is the only line that isn't about the rain at all: it's about how the speaker feels about the rain. It gets extra weight (again) for being singular in its perspective and emotion.

That last reason was the one that the kids grabbed onto immediately, even if they sometimes phrased it a little differently. They heard that line, "And I love the rain," and they knew that all the rest of the poem was there as a justification for that last line; that the last line was the key to the whole poem. The rest of the poem explains why the speaker loves the rain with its gentle imagery of kisses and lullabyes and the playing of sleep-songs. It talks of what the rain does. But that final, singular, first-person line that tells how the speaker feels about the rain is the reason for the poem.

To check out Anna Dewdney's snowflake and to get the links for the other snowflakes featured in the blogosphere today, click on the Robert's Snow button to the left, which will direct you to the listing over at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast. Jules and Eisha have also posted an ongoing list of blog posts thus far featuring snowflakes and the artists who created them.

While you're at 7-Imp, don't miss today's post in which they interview the members of fictional farm animal band Punk Farm. The band is composed of Cow, Sheep, Pig, Goat, and Chicken, all of whom get a chance to discuss life on the road with Jules and Eisha. Their "manager," author-illustrator Jarrett J. Krosoczka, is nowhere to be seen in this interview. This is truly one of my favorite interviews they've ever done, and that is saying something.

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