Category Archives: semi-formal

Excerpt, semi-formal: Matthew Arnold, ‘A Summer Night’ (2)

1 Reply

And the rest, a few,
Escape their prison and depart
On the wide ocean of life anew.
There the freed prisoner, where’er his heart
Listeth, will sail;
Nor doth he know how there prevail,
Despotic on that sea,
Trade-winds which cross it from eternity.
Awhile he holds some false way, undebarred
By thwarting signs, and braves
The freshening wind and blackening waves.
And then the tempest strikes him; and between
The lightning-bursts is seen
Only a driving wreck,
And the pale master on his spar-strewn deck
With anguished face and flying hair
Grasping the rudder hard,
Still bent to make some port he knows not where,
Still standing for some false, impossible shore.
And sterner comes the roar
Of sea and wind, and through the deepening gloom
Fainter and fainter wreck and helmsman loom,
And he too disappears, and comes no more.

*****

This fragment is the response to the previous excerpt from Matthew Arnold’s ‘A Summer Night’ that I blogged two days ago. As a teen in a well-regimented boarding school I found that previous fragment terrifying with its prospect of living as a bored wage-slave forever, and this second fragment exhilarating in its freedom despite the expectation of catastrophe. Altogether a very subversive poem, and I thank my schooling for including such works. For the next couple of decades I followed the wild path, failing to earn a degree at universities in three countries, never holding a job for more than 18 months, frequently moving. Eventually I found an occupation that was constantly changing, where Eliza and I were our own bosses, and that took us to dozens of countries to teach business seminars. So that successfully combined the wage-slave and the freed prisoner, and it all worked out.

Arnold originally ended his poem:

Is there no life, but these alone?
Madman or slave must man be one?

But ten years later he added a much more wishy-washy piece about learning from the pure heavens and seeing what a nice life you could make for yourself. I always thought he should have stopped with the original “madman or slave” view of life: much more dramatic! But his later addition was probably justified…

“Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth” by hyperion327 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. (Note: the painting is by J.M.W. Turner, of course.)

Excerpt, semi-formal: Matthew Arnold, ‘A Summer Night’ (1)

2 Replies

For most men in a brazen prison live,
Where, in the sun’s hot eye,
With heads bent o’er their toil, they languidly
Their lives to some unmeaning taskwork give,
Dreaming of naught beyond their prison wall.
And as, year after year,
Fresh products of their barren labor fall
From their tired hands, and rest
Never yet comes more near,
Gloom settles slowly down over their breast.
And while they try to stem
The waves of mournful thought by which they are prest,
Death in their prison reaches them,
Unfreed, having seen nothing, still unblest.

*****

I’m very grateful to my schooling for putting Matthew Arnold on the curriculum – this subversive little passage seems designed to undermine the office and factory culture which has flourished since his time, to undermine even the student writing endless essays. Arnold was an inspector of schools as well as a poet and social critic, so we can assume he knew what he was doing. But isn’t it suggesting that a dissatisfied person should just drop out? More on that in the next post.

The other thing I like about the piece is its easy, flowing style. Every line rhymes, but without pattern. The lines are iambic, mostly pentameter, but a scattering of them are shorter. It feels very conversational, and it is certainly very easy to learn by heart (which is one of the reasons that poetry evolved in the first place). The only hiccup to natural speech are the displacement of ‘live’ and ‘give’ to the ends of their lines for the sake of the rhyme and even that, though artificial, is done conventionally enough to read smoothly. The rest of it is in normal speech. When T.S. Eliot came out with ‘Prufrock‘ some decades later, though it had a different, Imagist sensibility, the only real difference in style was in dropping the thou’s and thee’s that Arnold still clung to.

Photo: “Office workers in Executive Building Room No. 123 prior to alterations, Brisbane” by Queensland State Archives is marked with CC PDM 1.0

RHL, ‘Cold Immortality’

2 Replies

The candle, blown out, still retains a spark;
Nor is it burnt up, though the room is dark.
No one cares. Its job is done.

But sparks could still rekindle into flame
Or stubs, restrung, redipped, refill its frame.
But not both things together.

Yet if the candle could keep sparks in wick,
We’d keep it live, remake it long and thick…
Continuous, unsevered.

Like Lincoln’s axe, whose haft’s been replaced thrice,
And the steel axe head changed out once or twice…
Same axe? Or stupid-clever?

Then keep some spark alive when I have ‘died’;
Freeze, then unfreeze, rebuild. No homicide
Of brain cells lost forever.

Come on, cryonics, sign me up, for one.
That’s immortality’s first step begun.
I would outlive the sun.

*****

I love this life, and am always interested to see how things are going to play out. Not interested in dying, but I’ve been fascinated by issues of death and extended lifespans since at least my teens; have been signed up with the Cryonics Institute for the last 30 years. Now with the rapidly increasing developments through AI, I hope we all soon reach the point where every additional year you live increases your life expectancy by more than one year, i.e. Longevity Escape Velocity. It’s coming, folks – hang on!

‘Cold Immortality’ was first published in a recent Bewildering Stories. Don Webb changed the title from just ‘Immortality’ – I’m not sure how much the addition of the word “cold” shifts the thrust of the poem… Certainly, cryonics is just an ambulance to the future, second-best to getting there unscathed.

“the beginning is nigh” by Adam Rummer is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Len Krisak, ‘A Life’

Leave a reply

The streets, albeit not with gold, were paved,
The path both broad and even; wide the way
And easy, with no uniform to don.
By almost nothing was he put upon.
Old age had been foreseen, and so he saved,
The modicum matched with its rainy day.
The sheets were clean, as were the neat clothes worn
From bawling babe, to teen, to man, and on.
Few were the oaths required to be sworn,
And almost nothing had been sacrificed,
Or found worthwhile, or worth the dying for.
As to the depredations brought by war,
None had been undergone. All things sufficed,
Since almost nothing crucial had been needed.
Yes, easy, broad, and even, he conceded,
Though through it all, what all of it had meant
He couldn’t say. No, not in any event.

*****

Len Krisak writes: “the speaker, slightly morose (?), confesses both to a life of no particular hardship and to an inability to decide on the meaning or quality of such an existence.”

‘A Life’ was first published in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal.

Len Krisak’s translation of the Aeneid appeared in 2016. His translation of the Inferno will be out from Routledge in September, as will his own poems, Magpie. The past winner of the Richard Wilbur and Robert Frost prizes, he is a four-time champion on Jeopardy!

“empty suits” by paul goyette is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Joe Crocker, ‘Bedtime stories’

Leave a reply

Pyjama’d, nightied, they are read to,
snuggled close, or independently alert.
The Baudelaires’ unfortunate events unravel.
Hogwarts weaves a family for Harry.
Boyhood and a Bear are said goodbye to.

The boy enjoys but doesn’t like to show.
His sister smiles because she knows, she knows.
The youngest bites her toes.

The youngest settles back
and blithely bites her toes.

*****

“Bedtime Stories” was a happy memory of that short time when our three children could each enjoy listening to the same story.( When it wasn’t my turn to read to them I would sit in on my wife’s episode, just to keep up.) I tried to stick to the bare facts and avoid any too obvious doting. But it is a very fond memory.

“Bedtime Stories” was first published in Snakeskin

Brief biography of Joe Crocker (masculine/feminine/neutered)

He writes his stuff and slides it under doors.
His age and sex, his fantasies, are no concern of yours.

The rhymes reflect his humour — down to earth.
A pamphlet is forthcoming but refuses to come fearth.

Winner of the Awkward Prize, ham-fisted.
Never short- or long- but  sometimes black- or shopping-listed.

Nominated (pusher) for the pushcart.
Squawking from the slush pile, self-regarding little upstart.

Google says he’s one of Sheffield’s legends
— a rock star who gets by with little help from friends, well… ex-friends.

*****

Photo: “grandpa jeff reading a bedtime story to his grandsons – MG 6276.JPG” by sean dreilinger is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Steven Clayman: ‘Enmeshed In Pure Feeling’

Leave a reply

I spied her entwine an out-spiraling net,
each jittery stride trailing radial spans
before coming to rest
astride her last strands.
 
Still-standing and idling
then inching and sidling
till centered she sits, wind-wafted and wheeling,
unhearing, unseeing, enmeshed in pure feeling.
 
From above, a tableau of flutter and flop;
from within, she awaits the faintest pin drop.
A gnat mid-air, full stop, enstranded;
arachnid sensed where it had landed.
 
She swivels right
to eight o’clock.
One silken vibe
betrayed the spot.  

*****

Steve Clayman writes: “The poem’s content was inspired by a remarkable book on the sensory systems of animal species (An Immense World, by science journalist Ed Yong).   Reading the book gave me vertigo, the good kind that arises from being drawn into the “alien” perceptual worlds that other species inhabit.  In a chapter on tactile senses, Yong writes that many web-spinning spiders are nearly blind and deaf, but are extraordinarily sensitive to vibrations.  Thus the web is far more than a trap for prey:

It’s also a surveillance system, which extends the range of the spider’s senses well beyond the reach of its body….  It is as much a part of the creature’s sensory system as the [sensors] on its body. Most orb-weavers sit in the middle of their webs and rest their legs on the radial spokes that funnel vibrations toward them.  From this position, they can distinguish the vibrations generated by rustling wind or falling leaves from those created by struggling prey.  They can probably work out where those struggles are coming from by comparing the strength of the vibrations hitting each of their legs….  If the prey stops moving, they can find it by deliberately plucking the silk and “listening” to the return vibrational echoes. 

“As for the poem’s form, I came up with the first line and the rest emerged organically, in the course of dealing with the possibilities of that starting point.  So the overall form was not planned, although after the first line I was determined to avoid using the word spider or web throughout the poem.”

*****

‘Enmeshed in Pure Feeling’ was first published in Lighten Up Online, edited by Jerome Betts.

Steven Clayman is professor of sociology at UCLA. He likes to think that his light verse is at least loosely related to his research specialization in conversation analysis and the study of language use in everyday life.  His scholarly work appears in linguistics, communication, and sociology journals, and in the books (co-authored with John Heritage) Talk in Action (Wiley-Blackwell) and The News Interview (Cambridge University Press).  His poems have appeared in Lighten Up Online, Philosophy Now, Better Than Starbucks, Light: A Journal of Light Verse, and Asses of Parnassus.
 

“Spider and Web” by kendoman26 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Ekphrastic verse: Wendy Videlock, ‘Before You Put Your Armor On’

1 Reply

Each morning when you wake to put
your armor on, remember this:
all the world’s a spinning stage,

all the world’s a carnival—
and though it doesn’t have your back
or love the cover of your book

all the world’s a turning page.
Just when you thought the minstrels, fools
and dragon cats had lost their way

inside the inflammation age,
they shed the husks of self defense
and enter stage, not from the right

or from the left, but from behind.
They sneak right up and inch ahead
into the distance of your mind.

The sun will melt. The moon will find
your part has not yet been assigned.
You blink, and take your armor off.

The lights will blaze before they dim.
It’s not a sham. It’s not a con.
The curtain falls. Show must go on.

*****

The illustration is ‘Not Dancing’ by Marina Korenfeld, and was the subject of Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, February 2026. Wendy Videlock’s response, ‘Before You Put Your Armor On’, was selected as the Rattle Editor’s Choice.

Wendy Videlock lives on the Western Slope of the Colorado Rockies. Her work appears widely and her books are available wherever books are sold. Her upcoming book, Desert Kin, will appear in August, 2026.

Semi-formal verse: Rachel Hadas, ‘Ides of March, MMXX’

Leave a reply

New York, March 2020

Nothing new,
but it feels like an end.
An end that’s new.
This end is now?
No, I said new.
But who
could hear me through my mask?
Don’t ask.
Love
wears a glove.
I want to touch my friend.
.
This fear feels new.
We’ve all forgotten how
to live with it, to live it
day by day. And each
day begins anew,
begins a new
now we do not know,
oh no,
do not yet know.

*****

Rachel Hadas writes: Mid-March 2020, as I look back, did feel like both an end and a beginning.  Any moment in time is that, of course, but one’s sense of discontinuity was certainly heightened then.  A lot of familiar features of life just stopped, and an uncharted period began.  The confusion of trying to wrap one’s mind around all this at once is echoed in the overlapping  and echoing words “no, new, knew, know…”

“Ides of March MMXX” is collected in my 2022 volume “Pandemic Almanac,” a book in which, contrary to my usual practice, I append date and place of composition to each poem.  In 2020 we were in Vermont from early April until late November; “Ides” was written before people who could began to leave New York City in large numbers.

My 2025 collection “Pastorals” groups together texts written in and about Vermont over a period of years, certainly including the years of Covid but also extending both before and after the pandemic (if indeed there is an after).  I mention “Pastorals” because in one of its pieces (they’re all prose poems), “Blue Book,” which was  written sometime later during the pandemic, I do something similar to the play  in “Ides” on “no, know,” etc:   “We were elsewhere; we travelled back and forth, here and there.  Now mostly here.  Now only here.  Now here: nowhere.”

Rachel Hadas (born November 8, 1948) is an American poet, teacher, essayist, and translator. Her most recent essay collection is Piece by Piece: Selected Prose (Paul Dry Books, 2021), and her most recent poetry collection is Ghost Guest (Ragged Sky Press, 2023). Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Ingram Merrill Foundation Grants, the O.B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

https://www.rachelhadas.net/

Photo: “Not Available Hand Sanitizer Gloves Rubbing Alcohol Face Masks” by Duncan Rawlinson – Duncan.co is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Children’s poem: Isabel Chenot, ‘What to Take for a Walk in the Woods’

1 Reply

A very sensible story full of very, very, very, very, very good advice

Always carry crumbs 
when you are wandering in the woods 
beside the waters – 
just in case 

you need to mark a trail, 
like in a fairy tale. 

And always have a piece of tape 
in case a butterfly breaks 
off its wing while fluttering, 
and always 
take a pitchfork 
just in case 
a cow 
is also 
wandering. 

And always carry
extra food
like
roasted beef
or chicken legs
for escaped
crocodiles,

because they like to gnaw on legs,

and always take a mongoose
to defeat the snakes,
and always take a violin
for when
the birds are stuttering.
And always carry
party hats
and birthday cake
for any sons and daughters
of destitute woodcutters
who might be having
lonely
birthdays,
and always carry
an umbrella
because –

you know why.
An elephant might fall out of the sky.

And always take a shovel
just in case
it rains –

so you can dig a little hovel
and stay dry,

and always take a potted plant
to brighten up that cozy space,

and always take a duck
in case
of lakes,

and always
carry otters.

*****

Isabel Chenot writes: “This was originally written and illustrated as a letter to the most magical six year old girl.”

‘What To Take For A Walk In The Woods’ was first published in Story Warren.

Isabel Chenot‘s first poem as a little girl was about marrying her cat Tig when she grew up: she married a good man instead, but kept scribbling poems and stories. The Joseph Tree, a collection of poems, is available from Wiseblood. For a preview of West of Moonlight, East of Dawn, her retelling of an old fairy tale, visit westofmoonlight.art.

Semi-formal Sonnet: Rachel Hadas, ‘Out of Reach’

Leave a reply

Our lost ones drift down a dark stream,
surfacing at the brink of dream.
The crack of dawn: they’re gone again.
What have they left for us to keep?
Night’s dialect, a coded speech
beyond our reach.

Birds on the bank of a calm pond:
each one is still and poised, then dives.
Mornings we wake into our lives,
blind to what lies beyond, below,
the chasms where black rivers flow,
and flickering deeper, darkly clear,
that coded speech beyond our reach,
words we can’t hear.

*****

Rachel Hadas has a group of sonnets appearing, one a week, in The Sonneteer. For the first she wrote: “The sonnets that will be appearing in the coming weeks weren’t conceived as a sequence. Encouraged by Ken Gordon’s enthusiasm to take a look at some of my unpublished shorter poems, I speedily found one fourteen-liner, “Tectonic Plates.” Three other poems were so close to sonnet length that they almost begged to be tweaked or tightened or gently expanded; this group includes “Out of Reach,” “Winter,” and “My Best Friend’s Mother.” In every case, the sonnetification (Ken’s helpful coinage) improved the poem. (…) I now realize that, while not conceived as a sequence, all five of these sonnets (now that they are all sonnets) do share themes. They’re about time and memory, aging and loss, what we lose and what we retain. So are many other sonnets, infinitely greater than mine. It’s a privilege to be able to join in the conversation, to swell the chorus.“

Rachel Hadas (born November 8, 1948) is an American poet, teacher, essayist, and translator. Her most recent essay collection is Piece by Piece: Selected Prose (Paul Dry Books, 2021), and her most recent poetry collection is Ghost Guest (Ragged Sky Press, 2023). Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Ingram Merrill Foundation Grants, the O.B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

https://www.rachelhadas.net/

Photo: “Kingfisher fishing” by Bob Hall Photos is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.