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Dec. 8th, 2008 03:29 pmIn my many musings on literary folks' argument over Shelley I totally forgot this response to him:
The Lost Follower, Robert Frost
As I have known them passionate and fine
The gold for which they leave the golden line
Of lyric is a golden light divine,
Never the gold of darkness from a mine.
The spirit plays us strange religious pranks
To whatsoever god we owe the thanks.
No one has ever failed the poet ranks
To link a chain of money-metal banks.
The loss to song, the danger of defection
Is always in the opposite direction.
Some turn in sheer, in Shelleyan dejection
To try if one more popular election
Will give us by short cut the final stage
That poetry with all its golden rage
For beauty on the illuminated page
Has failed to bring I mean the Golden Age.
And if this may not be (and nothing's sure),
At least to live ungolden with the poor,
Enduring what the ungolden must endure.
This has been poetry's great anti-lure.
The muse mourns one who went to his retreat
Long since in some abysmal city street,
The bride who shared the crust he broke to eat
As grave as he about the world's defeat.
With such it has proved dangerous as friend
Even in a playful moment to contend
That the millennium to which you bend
In longing is not at a progress-end
By grace of state-manipulated pelf,
Or politics of Ghibelline or Guelph,
But right beside you book-like on a shelf,
Or even better god-like in yourself.
He trusts my love too well to deign reply.
But there is in the sadness of his eye,
Something about a kingdom in the sky
(As yet unbrought to earth) he means to try.
Rather, a response to Browning's "The Lost Leader"--itself an anxious moderation of Shelley's "To Wordsworth"--but clearly starring Shelley, at least as example. Interesting how Stevens, who writes against utopianism even more unfortunately, because less sympathetically, than the amused Frost, defends Shelley from this kind of charge in the long poem (and frequently anti-Marxist rant) "Owl's Clover"--and this passage from a letter explaining it:
The astral and Shelleyan lights are not going to alter the structure of nature. Apples will always be apples, and whoever is a ploughman hereafter will be what the ploughman has always been. For all that, the astral and Shelleyan will have transformed the world.
The Lost Follower, Robert Frost
As I have known them passionate and fine
The gold for which they leave the golden line
Of lyric is a golden light divine,
Never the gold of darkness from a mine.
The spirit plays us strange religious pranks
To whatsoever god we owe the thanks.
No one has ever failed the poet ranks
To link a chain of money-metal banks.
The loss to song, the danger of defection
Is always in the opposite direction.
Some turn in sheer, in Shelleyan dejection
To try if one more popular election
Will give us by short cut the final stage
That poetry with all its golden rage
For beauty on the illuminated page
Has failed to bring I mean the Golden Age.
And if this may not be (and nothing's sure),
At least to live ungolden with the poor,
Enduring what the ungolden must endure.
This has been poetry's great anti-lure.
The muse mourns one who went to his retreat
Long since in some abysmal city street,
The bride who shared the crust he broke to eat
As grave as he about the world's defeat.
With such it has proved dangerous as friend
Even in a playful moment to contend
That the millennium to which you bend
In longing is not at a progress-end
By grace of state-manipulated pelf,
Or politics of Ghibelline or Guelph,
But right beside you book-like on a shelf,
Or even better god-like in yourself.
He trusts my love too well to deign reply.
But there is in the sadness of his eye,
Something about a kingdom in the sky
(As yet unbrought to earth) he means to try.
Rather, a response to Browning's "The Lost Leader"--itself an anxious moderation of Shelley's "To Wordsworth"--but clearly starring Shelley, at least as example. Interesting how Stevens, who writes against utopianism even more unfortunately, because less sympathetically, than the amused Frost, defends Shelley from this kind of charge in the long poem (and frequently anti-Marxist rant) "Owl's Clover"--and this passage from a letter explaining it:
The astral and Shelleyan lights are not going to alter the structure of nature. Apples will always be apples, and whoever is a ploughman hereafter will be what the ploughman has always been. For all that, the astral and Shelleyan will have transformed the world.
