 Poetry: November 02, 2022 Issue [#11644] |
This week: Conrad Aiken Edited by: Stormy Lady  
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All Lovely Things
By Conrad Aiken
All lovely things will have an ending,
All lovely things will fade and die,
And youth, that's now so bravely spending,
Will beg a penny by and by.
Fine ladies soon are all forgotten,
And goldenrod is dust when dead,
The sweetest flesh and flowers are rotten
And cobwebs tent the brightest head.
Come back, true love! Sweet youth, return!—
But time goes on, and will, unheeding,
Though hands will reach, and eyes will yearn,
And the wild days set true hearts bleeding.
Come back, true love! Sweet youth, remain!—
But goldenrod and daisies wither,
And over them blows autumn rain,
They pass, they pass, and know not whither.
Haunted Chambers
By Conrad Aiken
The lamp-lit page is turned, the dream forgotten;
The music changes tone, you wake, remember
Deep worlds you lived before, deep worlds hereafter
Of leaf on falling leaf, music on music,
Rain and sorrow and wind and dust and laughter.
Helen was late, and Miriam came too soon;
Joseph was dead, his wife and children starving;
Elaine was married and soon to have a child.
You dreamed last night of fiddler crabs with fiddles.
They played a buzzing melody, and you smiled.
Tomorrow—what ? And what of yesterday ?
Through soundless labyrinths of dream you pass,
Through many doors to the one door of all.
Soon as it's opened we shall hear a music:
Or see a skeleton fall.
We walk with you. Where is it that you lead us ?
We climbed the muffled stairs beneath high lanterns.
We descend again. We grope through darkened cells.
You say: "This darkness, here, "will slowly kill me—
It creeps and weighs upon me .... is full of bells.
"This is the thing remembered I would forget:
No matter where I go, how soft I tread,
This windy gesture menaces me with death.
'Fatigue!' it says—and points its finger at me;
Touches my throat and stops my breath.
"My fans, my jewels, the portrait of my husband,
The torn certificate for my daughter's grave—
These are but mortal seconds in immortal time.
They brush me, fade away—like drops of water.
They signify no crime.
"Let us retrace our steps: I have deceived you!
Nothing is here I could not frankly tell you—
No hint of guilt, or faithlessness, or threat.
Dreams—they are madness; staring eyes—illusion.
Let us return, hear music, and forget."
On august 5, 1889, Dr. William Ford Aiken and his wife Anna Potter, welcomed their first son Conrad Potter Aiken into the world. The couple lived in Savannah, Georgia. Dr Aiken was a respected physician and his wife was the daughter of a prominent Massachusetts Unitarian Minister. When Aiken was just eleven years old, his father murdered his mother and than took his own life. Aiken was the first person to find his parents, after hearing gunshots. After his parents' services he and his three younger siblings went to live with his aunt and uncle in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He went to school at the Middlesex School, then went on to study at Harvard University. While attending Harvard he was a contributing editor to the Dail magazine. He graduated in 1912.
Aiken’s first collection of poetry was Earth Triumphant, published in 1914. Aiken avoided military service during World War I. He claimed he was part of an “essential industry.” Aiken's second published work of poetry was Turns of Movies and other Tales in Verse in 1916. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Aiken traveled back and further between England and North America. He married three times. Once to Jessie McDonald in 1912. The couple had a son, John in 1913 and two daughters Jane, in 1917 and Joan in 1924. Aiken was traveling between Boston and England when he fell in love with Clarissa M. Lorenz and Jessie divorced Aiken. Clarissa and Aiken were married in 1930. Seven years later he met the artist Mary Hoover. He divorced Clarissa and married Mary Hoover in 1937, the marriage lasted the rest of Aiken’s life.
The House of Dust was published in 1920 followed by Priapus and the Pool in 1922. The Pilgrimage of Festus was published in 1923 and one of his best known publications, Selected Poems, was published in 1929. That following year it received Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Conrad Aiken was named Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress for a time. Aiken's Collected Poems was selected in 1954 as the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry.
During his years of marriage to Mary Hoover, the couple would split their time between the north and the south. They would spend the summers in Massachusetts and winters in Savannah. Aiken remained an active writer throughout the 1960s. On August 17, 1973 at the age of eighty-four Conrad Potter Aiken died. He was buried in Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah Georgia. Writer John Berendt would feature Aiken’s burial site in his book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
Nocturne Of Remembered Spring
By Conrad Aiken
I.
Moonlight silvers the tops of trees,
Moonlight whitens the lilac shadowed wall
And through the evening fall,
Clearly, as if through enchanted seas,
Footsteps passing, an infinite distance away,
In another world and another day.
Moonlight turns the purple lilacs blue,
Moonlight leaves the fountain hoar and old,
And the boughs of elms grow green and cold,
Our footsteps echo on gleaming stones,
The leaves are stirred to a jargon of muted tones.
This is the night we have kept, you say:
This is the moonlit night that will never die.
Through the grey streets our memories retain
Let us go back again.
II.
Mist goes up from the river to dim the stars,
The river is black and cold; so let us dance
To flare of horns, and clang of cymbals and drums;
And strew the glimmering floor with roses,
And remember, while the rich music yawns and closes,
With a luxury of pain, how silence comes.
Yes, we loved each other, long ago;
We moved like wind to a music's ebb and flow.
At a phrase from violins you closed your eyes,
And smiled, and let me lead you how young we were!
Your hair, upon that music, seemed to stir.
Let us return there, let us return, you and I;
Through changeless streets our memories retain
Let us go back again.
III.
Mist goes up from the rain steeped earth, and clings
Ghostly with lamplight among drenched maple trees.
We walk in silence and see how the lamplight flings
Fans of shadow upon it the music's mournful pleas
Die out behind us, the door is closed at last,
A net of silver silence is softly cast
Over our thought slowly we walk,
Quietly with delicious pause, we talk,
Of foolish trivial things; of life and death,
Time, and forgetfulness, and dust and truth;
Lilacs and youth.
You laugh, I hear the after taken breath,
You darken your eyes and turn away your head
At something I have said
Some intuition that flew too deep,
And struck a plageant chord.
Tonight, tonight you will remember it as you fall asleep,
Your dream will suddenly blossom with sharp delight,
Goodnight! You say.
The leaves of the lilac dip and sway;
The purple spikes of bloom
Nod their sweetness upon us, lift again,
Your white face turns, I am caught with pain
And silence descends, and dripping of dew from eaves,
And jeweled points of leaves.
IV.
I walk in a pleasure of sorrow along the street
And try to remember you; slow drops patter;
Water upon the lilacs has made them sweet;
I brush them with my sleeve, the cool drops scatter;
And suddenly I laugh and stand and listen
As if another had laughed a gust
Rustles the leaves, the wet spikes glisten;
And it seems as though it were you who had shaken the bough,
And spilled the fragrance I pursue your face again,
It grows more vague and lovely, it eludes me now.
I remember that you are gone, and drown in pain.
Something there was I said to you I recall,
Something just as the music seemed to fall
That made you laugh, and burns me still with pleasure.
What were those words the words like dripping fire?
I remember them now, and in sweet leisure
Rehearse the scene, more exquisite than before,
And you more beautiful, and I more wise.
Lilacs and spring, and night, and your clear eyes,
And you, in white, by the darkness of a door:
These things, like voices weaving to richest music,
Flow and fall in the cool night of my mind,
I pursue your ghost among green leaves that are ghostly,
I pursue you, but cannot find.
And suddenly, with a pang that is sweetest of all,
I become aware that I cannot remember you;
The ghost I knew
Has silently plunged in shadows, shadows that stream and fall.
V.
Let us go in and dance once more
On the dream's glimmering floor,
Beneath the balcony festooned with roses.
Let us go in and dance once more.
The door behind us closes
Against an evening purple with stars and mist.
Let us go in and keep our tryst
With music and white roses, and spin around
In swirls of sound.
Do you foresee me, married and grown old?
And you, who smile about you at this room,
Is it foretold
That you must step from tumult into gloom,
Forget me, love another?
No, you are Cleopatra, fiercely young,
Laughing upon the topmost stair of night;
Roses upon the desert must be flung;
Above us, light by light,
Weaves the delirious darkness, petal fall,
And music breaks in waves on the pillared wall;
And you are Cleopatra, and do not care.
And so, in memory, you will always be
Young and foolish, a thing of dream and mist;
And so, perhaps when all is disillusioned,
And eternal spring returns once more,
Bringing a ghost of lovelier springs remembered,
You will remember me.
VI.
Yet when we meet we seem in silence to say,
Pretending serene forgetfulness of our youth,
"Do you remember but then why should you remember!
Do you remember a certain day,
Or evening rather, spring evening long ago,
We talked of death, and love, and time, and truth,
And said such wise things, things that amused us so
How foolish we were, who thought ourselves so wise!"
And then we laugh, with shadows in our eyes.
Thank you all!
Stormy Lady
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The winner of "Stormy's poetry newsletter & contest" [ASR] is:
"Hallowe'en"
Hallowe'en,
a night for waking dead folks,
crammed full of creepy cuisine.
"Trick or treat!"
kiddies shout in unison
in pursuit of something sweet.
Children scream
when skeletons suddenly
jump up in frightening scheme.
Party starts
with Frankensteins frolicking
and ends with some tasty tarts.
Ghastly scene,
which we all love and cherish,
becomes happy Hallowe'en.
Honorable mention:
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