do you know what month it is?

it's national poetry month :) as a result, poetry daily delivers poems to my inbox not weekly, but daily :) here's today's, followed by a brief discussion on it (and if my posting of long poems scares you, don't even bother reading the discussion) :)

"Friendship After Love"
by Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919)

After the fierce midsummer all ablaze
Has burned itself to ashes, and expires
In the intensity of its own fires,
There come the mellow, mild, St. Martin days
Crowned with the calm of peace, but sad with haze.
So after Love has led us, till he tires
Of his own throes, and torments, and desires,
Comes large-eyed friendship: with a restful gaze,
He beckons us to follow, and across
Cool verdant vales we wander free from care.
Is it a touch of frost lies in the air?
Why are we haunted with a sense of loss?
We do not wish the pain back, or the heat;
And yet, and yet, these days are incomplete.

*David Baker comments:

Issa's masterful haiku

The world of dew
is the world of dew.
And yet, and yet--

is one of my favorite poems. The delicacy of the simple first image is
one thing. But the reiteration of that image in line two becomes a
mirror in a drop of water, which in turn prepares the ultimate
reflection inside the last line. "And yet, and yet" quivers as though
the bead of dew is about to spill, or evaporate. What restraint yields
what power. The poem's last repetition seems hesitant, even as it evokes
acceptance of its own transience. It is 1819. The poet's young daughter
Sato has died, in June, of smallpox. The provisional, Issa reminds us,
is what lasts.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox's sonnet, "Friendship After Love," haunts me for its
kindred reiteration in the last line. I love the way poems echo and arc,
calling to each other across time and languages. Wilcox's poem is
resigned, rueful - Issa's provisional. Even in her first lines, I admire
Wilcox's fine craft and complex syntax. "All ablaze" points back, as a
modifier, to "midsummer," the object of the preposition; but also
resolves forward into the predicate after the line break. Likewise
"St. Martin days" closes a phrase but further modulates into the
participle in the next line.

St. Martin's Day comes from German culture, and commences on the 11th
hour of the 11th day of the 11th month to mark the end of farming, the
beginning of harvest. This reference is part of Wilcox's larger pattern
of seasonal imagery. It's a familiar association - the seasons of the
year reflect a person's life and love - notable in Wordsworth and
Barrett Browning, notable in Yeats's chilly tropes in "When You Are Old."
Less effective is the bathos of Wilcox's phrase "large-eyed friendship,"
though I remind myself that her image anticipates by a century the
cartoonish greeting-cards, Anime, and black-velvet urchins we find so
saccharine.

The real power of her poem derives from the way Wilcox leads to the
clarities of the final four lines. She proceeds from conventional
romantic tropes of language and love toward the surprising modernity of
the last lines. Notice how her earlier long clauses and heavy enjambment
resolve into her ending's more deliberate lineation, each taut line a
closed clause with no syntactical inversions. A powerful clarity. Notice
finally how she slips from one mode into another, the way the erotic
poem - with its requisite pain and anguish - becomes the more serene
love poem. The grief of her lyric arises from Wilcox's realization of
that transformation. She wants the summer back. The fire.