The HyperTexts

Louise Bogan: Poems, Quotes and Epigrams

Louise Bogan has long been one of my favorite poets, and it's a shame—actually, a complete and utter travesty!—that she isn't better known today. In my opinion Bogan is a major poet. Other critics seem to agree, as she has been called "the most accomplished woman poet of the twentieth century" and "one of the finest lyric poets America has produced." On this page we have published some of her best poems, including the lovely but hard-to-find "After the Persian" and the equally splendid "Song for the Last Act," followed by an essay by Jeffrey Woodward on Bogan's poem "The Mark." — Michael R. Burch, editor, The HyperTexts



After the Persian

I

I do not wish to know
The depths of your terrible jungle:
From what nest your leopard leaps
Or what sterile lianas are at once your serpents' disguise
      and home.

I am the dweller on the temperate threshold,
The strip of corn and vine,
Where all is translucence (the light!)
Liquidity, and the sound of water.
Here the days pass under shade
And the nights have the waxing and the waning moon.
Here the moths take flight at evening;
Here at morning the dove whistles and the pigeons coo.
Here, as night comes on, the fireflies wink and snap
Close to the cool ground,
Shining in a profusion
Celestial or marine.

Here it is never wholly dark but always wholly green,
And the day stains with what seems to be more than the
      sun
What may be more than my flesh.

II

I have wept with the spring storm;
Burned with the brutal summer.
Now, hearing the wind and the twanging bow-strings,
I know what winter brings.

The hunt sweeps out upon the plain
And the garden darkens.
They will bring the trophies home
To bleed and perish
Beside the trellis and the lattices,
Beside the fountain, still flinging diamond water,
Beside the pool
(Which is eight-sided, like my heart).

III

All has been translated into treasure:
Weightless as amber,
Translucent as the currant on the branch,
Dark as the rose's thorn.

Where is the shimmer of evil?
This is the shell's iridescence
And the wild bird's wing.

IV

Ignorant, I took up my burden in the wilderness.
Wise with great wisdom, I shall lay it down upon flowers.

V

Goodbye, goodbye!
There was so much to love, I could not love it all;
I could not love it enough.

Some things I overlooked, and some I could not find.
Let the crystal clasp them
When you drink your wine, in autumn.




Song for the Last Act

Now that I have your face by heart, I look
Less at its features than its darkening frame
Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame,
Lie with quilled dahlias and the shepherd's crook.
Beyond, a garden. There, in insolent ease
The lead and marble figures watch the show
Of yet another summer loath to go
Although the scythes hang in the apple trees.

Now that I have your face by heart, I look.

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read
In the black chords upon a dulling page
Music that is not meant for music's cage,
Whose emblems mix with words that shake and bleed.
The staves are shuttled over with a stark
Unprinted silence. In a double dream
I must spell out the storm, the running stream.
The beat's too swift. The notes shift in the dark.

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see
The wharves with their great ships and architraves;
The rigging and the cargo and the slaves
On a strange beach under a broken sky.
O not departure, but a voyage done!
The bales stand on the stone; the anchor weeps
Its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps
Beside the salt herb, in the lengthening sun.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.



Roman Fountain

Up from the bronze, I saw
Water without a flaw
Rush to its rest in air,
Reach to its rest, and fall.

Bronze of the blackest shade,
An element man-made,
Shaping upright the bare
Clear gouts of water in air.

O, as with arm and hammer,
Still it is good to strive
To beat out the image whole,
To echo the shout and stammer
When full-gushed waters, alive,
Strike on the fountain's bowl
After the air of summer.



Juan's Song

When beauty breaks and falls asunder
I feel no grief for it, but wonder.
When love, like a frail shell, lies broken,
I keep no chip of it for token.
I never had a man for friend
Who did not know that love must end.
I never had a girl for lover
Who could discern when love was over.
What the wise doubt, the fool believes
Who is it, then, that love deceives?



The Alchemist

I burned my life, that I may find
A passion wholly of the mind,
Thought divorced from eye and bone
Ecstasy come to breath alone.
I broke my life, to seek relief
From the flawed light of love and grief.

With mounting beat the utter fire
Charred existence and desire.
It died low, ceased its sudden thresh.
I had found unmysterious flesh—
Not the mind's avid substance—still
Passionate beyond the will.



Knowledge

Now that I know
How passion warms little
Of flesh in the mould,
And treasure is brittle,—

I'll lie here and learn
How, over their ground
Trees make a long shadow
And a light sound.



Cassandra

To me, one silly task is like another.
I bare the shambling tricks of lust and pride.
This flesh will never give a child its mother,—
Song, like a wing, tears through my breast, my side,
And madness chooses out my voice again,
Again. I am the chosen no hand saves:
The shrieking heaven lifted over men,
Not the dumb earth, wherein they set their graves.



Statue and Birds

Here, in the withered arbor, like the arrested wind,
Straight sides, carven knees,
Stands the statue, with hands flung out in alarm
Or remonstrances.

Over the lintel sway the woven bracts of the vine
In a pattern of angles.
The quill of the fountain falters, woods rake on the sky
Their brusque tangles.

The birds walk by slowly, circling the marble girl,
The golden quails,
The pheasants, closed up in their arrowy wings,
Dragging their sharp tails.

The inquietudes of the sap and of the blood are spent.
What is forsaken will rest.
But her heel is lifted,—she would flee,—the whistle of the birds
Fails on her breast.



Chanson un Peu Naïve

What body can be ploughed,
Sown, and broken yearly?
But she would not die, she vowed,
But she has, nearly.
        Sing, heart sing;
        Call and carol clearly.

And, since she could not die,
Care would be a feather,
A film over the eye
Of two that lie together.
        Fly, song, fly,
        Break your little tether.

So from strength concealed
She makes her pretty boast:
Plain is a furrow healed
And she may love you most.
        Cry, song, cry,
        And hear your crying lost.



Sonnet

Since you would claim the sources of my thought
Recall the meshes whence it sprang unlimed,
The reedy traps which other hands have times
To close upon it. Conjure up the hot
Blaze that it cleared so cleanly, or the snow
Devised to strike it down. It will be free.
Whatever nets draw in to prison me
At length your eyes must turn to watch it go.
My mouth, perhaps, may learn one thing too well,
My body hear no echo save its own,
Yet will the desperate mind, maddened and proud,
Seek out the storm, escape the bitter spell
That we obey, strain to the wind, be thrown
Straight to its freedom in the thunderous cloud



Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom

Men loved wholly beyond wisdom
Have the staff without the banner.
Like a fire in a dry thicket
Rising within women’s eyes
Is the love men must return.
Heart, so subtle now, and trembling,
What a marvel to be wise,
To love never in this manner!
To be quiet in the fern
Like a thing gone dead and still,
Listening to the prisoned cricket
Shake its terrible, dissembling
Music in the granite hill.



Old Countryside

Beyond the hour we counted rain that fell
On the slant shutter, all has come to proof.
The summer thunder, like a wooden bell,
Rang in the storm above the mansard roof,

And mirrors cast the cloudy day along
The attic floor; wind made the clapboards creak.
You braced against the wall to make it strong,
A shell against your cheek.

Long since, we pulled brown oak-leaves to the ground
In a winter of dry trees; we heard the cock
Shout its unplaceable cry, the axe's sound
Delay a moment after the axe's stroke.

Far back, we saw, in the stillest of the year,
The scrawled vine shudder, and the rose-branch show
Red to the thorns, and, sharp as sight can bear,
The thin hound's body arched against the snow.



Exhortation

Give over seeking bastard joy
Nor cast for fortune’s side-long look.
Indifference can be your toy;
The bitter heart can be your book.
(Its lesson torment never shook.)

In the cold heart, as on a page,
Spell out the gentle syllable
That puts short limit to your rage
And curdles the straight fire of hell,
Compassing all, so all is well.

Read how, though passion sets in storm
And grief’s a comfort, and the young
Touch at the flint when it is warm,
It is the dead we live among,
The dead given motion and a tongue.

The dead, long trained to cruel sport
And the crude gossip of the grave;
The dead who pass in motley sort,
Whom sun nor sufferance can save.
Face them. They sneer. Do not be brave.

Know once for all: their snare is set
Even now; be sure their trap is laid;
And you will see your lifetime yet
Come to their terms, your plans unmade,—
and be belied, and be betrayed.



Epitaph for a Romantic Woman

She has attained the permanence
She dreamed of, where old stones lie sunning.
Untended stalks blow over her
Even and swift, like young men running.

Always in the heart she loved
Others had lived,—she heard their laughter.
She lies where none has lain before,
Where certainly none will follow after.



Women

Women have no wilderness in them,
They are provident instead,
Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts
To eat dusty bread.

They do not see cattle cropping red winter grass,
They do not hear
Snow water going down under culverts
Shallow and clear.

They wait, when they should turn to journeys,
They stiffen, when they should bend.
They use against themselves that benevolence
To which no man is friend.

They cannot think of so many crops to a field
Or of clean wood cleft by an axe.
Their love is an eager meaninglessness
Too tense, or too lax.

They hear in every whisper that speaks to them
A shout and a cry.
As like as not, when they take life over their door-sills
They should let it go by.



Louise Bogan Quotes and Epigrams

Innocence of heart and violence of feeling are necessary in any kind of superior achievement: The arts cannot exist without them.
But childhood prolonged, cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell.
Your work is carved out of agony as a statue is carved out of marble.
Perhaps this very instant is your time.
I hope that one or two immortal lyrics will come out of all this tumbling around.
Stupidity always accompanies evil. Or evil, stupidity.
Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.
Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier. 
No more pronouncements on lousy verse. No more hidden competition. No more struggling not to be a square. 
The intellectual is a middle-class product; if he is not born into the class he must soon insert himself into it, in order to exist. He is the fine nervous flower of the bourgeoisie.
In a time lacking in truth and certainty and filled with anguish and despair, no woman should be shamefaced in attempting to give back to the world, through her work, a portion of its lost heart.
The women rest their tired half-healed hearts; they are almost  well.
It is not possible, for a poet, writing in any language, to protect himself from the tragic elements in human life ... Illness, old age, and death—subjects as ancient as humanity—these are the subjects that the poet must speak of very nearly from the first moment that he begins to speak.

Pasture, stone wall, and steeple,
What most perturbs the mind:
The heart-rending homely people,
Or the horrible beautiful kind?

Parochial punks, trimmers, nice people, joiners true-blue,
Get the hell out of the way of the laurel.
It is deathless And it isn't for you.



The Mark

Where should he seek, to go away
That shadow will not point him down?
The spear of dark in the strong day
Beyond the upright body thrown,
Marking no epoch but its own.

Loosed only when, at noon and night,
The body is the shadow's prison.
The pivot swings into the light;
The center left, the shadow risen
To range out into time's long treason.

Stand pinned to sight, while now, unbidden,
The apple loosens, not at call,
Falls to the field, and lies there hidden,
Another and another fall
And lie there hidden, in spite of all

The diagram of whirling shade,
The visible, that thinks to spin
Forever webs that time has made
Though momently time wears them thin
And all at length are gathered in.



On Louise Bogan’s The Mark
by Jeffrey Woodward

Certain chief ornaments of the history of our poetry are figures whose very great achievements in the art were neither appreciated in their lifetimes nor popularly received posthumously. One remembers, for example, Henry Vaughn or Frederick Goddard Tuckerman whose excellences have escaped the broader audience their work deserves but whose respective geniuses find persistent champions among many of the most distinguished poets and critics of our century.

Louise Bogan (1897-1970), critic for The New Yorker, winner of the Bollingen Prize and member of the American Academy for Arts and Letters, is just such a figure. For fifty years or so, Bogan patiently and quietly perfected her craft, writing little, but writing well. Her final collection, The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968, presents just in excess of one hundred poems. Few of the collected titles fail, a high percentage lay claim to the status of exceptional minor poems and a handful, perhaps a dozen, are arguably among the most profound and moving short poems of our time. Furthermore, her very best efforts, such as Medusa, Exhortation, Henceforth from the Mind, Simple Autumnal and The Alchemist, beg comparison with the greatest poems of any period and do not suffer thereby. Bogan guarded her private life jealously, lacked the drive for self-promotion of a Whitman, and scorned the bardic posturing necessary to the creation of a Romantic myth, preferring to place her trust in fine, hard composition. Poets as diverse in talent and outlook as W. H. Auden, Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke and Yvor Winters rewarded her labor with large claims for the great import of her art. That success aside, however, one discovers, especially among younger students of poetry, discouragingly little or no acquaintance with her work. Such neglect alone, perhaps, would justify the modest effort of this paper to bring Bogan to the attention of a wider public. Another motive, however, is available in the poem chosen for discussion, for The Mark, despite the passing praise it has received from sympathetic critics, has inspired only cursory comment. Little effort has been expended in an attempt to acquire a greater understanding of the poem and of its place in the Bogan canon. Consequently, this poem is rarely anthologized and not well-known, even to the poet’s following.

The Mark, first published in The New Republic of January 9, 1929, appeared during the period of the Anglo-American revival of the Metaphysical poets; its few commentators have associated the poem with that style. It lacks the outlandish Metaphysical conceit, a hallmark of that style, however, and while the tone is contemplative and restrained, the elliptical syntax, the stark and thrifty phrasing that rejects every ornament, and the emblematic landscape join to promote a lively tension whose general effect shows greater affinity with the Renaissance plain style of Wyatt, Gascoigne and Greville. The question of probable influence is secondary, nevertheless. The Mark achieves a certain quality that is decidedly modern and nowhere evident in a Greville or a Donne. It is this quality which situates the poem wholly in the modern period that I will attempt to define below.

While a paraphrase and a poem are not one, and while the emotive, rhythmic and symbolic dimensions of a poem may resist precise paraphrase (assuming, that is, a poem that contains a minimum amount of paraphraseable content), such rough “translation” into prose, where possible, is an instrument of great utility to understanding. In the interest of such economy, I beg the reader’s indulgence and offer the explication that follows.

The rhetorical question that opens The Mark poses an anonymous seeker — anonymous, perhaps, as that abstraction, the universal man writ large — who is confronted by his shadow, that phenomenal replica of his proportions and motions. The shadow’s definition as a “spear of dark” accents the impending, if subdued, violence of the poem, a quality implicit in the statement that the shadow directs the man “down.” That the spear measures “no epoch but its own” may seem, at first, strange, if one recalls the apparent indivisibility of body and shadow. But Bogan’s assertion is clarified by what follows.

The second quintet informs the reader that the man is liberated from his shadow at noon and night — noon, that sharp division in the day’s progress (or in man’s mortal journey) when the sun’s ascent (or man’s maturation) attains its highest and ideal mark and when, of course, the decline toward night (or oblivion) commences. Thus, the shadow’s lengthening, from noon to night, signals the “treason” of time and of the seeker’s mortality, whether he stand firm or “go away.”

Bogan’s gentleman, having stepped into the light, is discovered “pinned to sight” in the third quintet, a captive of the spectacle of an apple tree and its slant and dark duplicate, of fleshy apples and their shadowy doubles falling in concert to the earth where both body and shadow are obscured, and falling, it should be noted, without sanction of the human will (“unbidden,” “not at call”). The scene is acted out “in spite of” understanding — with spite, one surmises, for the intellect that organizes a “diagram of whirling shade” of what it perceives. Though the “web that time has made” must be taken to refer to the shadowy image of the branches, though Bogan is describing, literally, the progress of the shadows from noon to dusk, the bitter and unflinching observation of the poet is that “momently” (i.e., slowly and inexorably), not only the shadows, but the very bodies that cast them as well, are worn “thin” until both body and shadow are “gathered” into night and oblivion. This precise and factual description of a common natural phenomenon, abetted by Bogan’s quiet understatement, establishes the emblematic character of her landscape and lends the poem, in its gradual wedding of body and shadow, the very lucid terror of its vision. This much may be offered as tentative paraphrase.

I would like to return, briefly, to the apple tree, for it possesses a significance in-and-of-itself. Any tree, it would seem, might have served Bogan’s purpose, but she chose the apple. The apple, in Occidental poetry and art, is an ancient and venerable symbol of death, due to its popular association with the temptation of Eve and the Edenic Tree of Knowledge. Beyond the broader theme of human frailty in temporal terms, Bogan introduces a secondary theme or sub-plot, if you will, on the limits of human perception and knowledge, for wherever our gentleman “seeks,” not only the apple of knowledge but even its rather Platonic shadow must fall to obscurity.

I alluded earlier to a certain elusive quality in The Mark that distinguished Bogan’s poem from her possible Renaissance models, a distinctively modern quality. For while Bogan employs language with a concern for exactitude and a scorn of ornament worthy of a Jonson or Greville, she also achieves something more. Her controlled association of images, where the progression of sensory perceptions bears a relationship to the conceptual content that is roughly analogous to the relations of vehicle and tenor in metaphor, is a relatively new technique. This method of composition has been christened post-symbolist by Yvor Winters who first identified and defined its origins and development (see the fifth chapter of his critical volume, Forms of Discovery, Chicago: Swallow Press, 1967). The treatment of sensory data in this style differs from its treatment by the Imagists who held sway in Bogan’s youth, for the phanopoeia of the Imagists (to echo Pound) is commonly impressionistic vignette offered for its own sake or is a discrete series of enigmatic epiphanies for the illumination of the initiate. Bogan’s practice is infinitely richer in promise and achievement, for she employs images as crisp and sharp as any found in H. D., Pound or Williams, while possessing an orderly intellectual content and the terms of a public speech that are absent, in large part, from the writings of her more esteemed contemporaries.

Certain metrical features of The Mark reward study. Bogan’s quintets, rhymed ABABB, adopt an iambic tetrameter norm, a measure with an annoying tendency in English to admit pauses in a medial position with deadening frequency. Bogan avoids the risk of monotony by varying the position of the pause or, in verses where a medial pause is present, by varying her rhythm from the iambic norm by foot-substitution

            /           /                       /         /
The spear of dark  │   in the strong day

or by a judicious placement of long and heavy syllables in unaccented positions

               /         /                     /            /
Loosed only when,   │    at noon and night ….

                 /        /                       /                /
Though momently    │    time wears them thin

Also, the relation of sentence structure to verse and stanza is varied subtly, as a close reading will show. Throughout the final two quintets, the repetition of plosive stops (the  /t/, /d/, /p/, and /b/ consonants of “hidden,” “unbidden,” “pinned,” “time,” “diagram,” “stand,” etc.), of nasals (the /n/ and /m/ consonants of many words in the same passage), and of the high front vowel /i/ (the “i” of “pinned” and  “hidden”) serves to underscore the dull thud of the apples against the earth.

In closing, it may be deemed worthy of comment to observe that Bogan’s quintets retain their integrity as stanzas by strict closure on a period in every case, save one, where the third and fourth quintets are enjambed to hasten the rhythm and where, quite typical of Bogan’s exceptional ear, the one extrametrical syllable of the entire poem

And lie there hidden,   │    in spite of all

is admitted just before mid-verse, as though to allow poet and reader to gather the breath and pause, prior to the final articulation of Bogan’s unique vision.

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