Great Poems – Easy to Memorize – “Fire and Ice,” by Robert Frost

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Robert Frost at his pithiest. Both finely balanced and yet asymmetrical, this wry, little poem plays with numerous contrasted polarities, including the concrete elementals, the “fire” and “ice” of the title, which are contrasted with Frost’s overall abstract speculations. The fact that it is a “little” poem of a mere nine lines, contrasts with the rather huge topic, huge for humans, although the succinctness of the poem might also imply that in the larger scheme of things the “end of the world” is possibly of not such a great significance. “Fire and Ice” was first published in 1920, and was included in a book of poems by Frost, New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes, published in 1923, which won the first of four Pulitzer Prizes for Frost in 1924. The pessimism of the poem may not seem inappropriate, given world events of the day. It was written in the aftermath of the devastations of both WWI and the horrific influenza pandemic of 1918-1920–which killed up to 100 million people, close to 5% of the world’s population, the war having killed “only” seventeen million, but, of course, having done so in unprecedentedly inhuman and vicious ways. The calm surface tone of the poem, and especially the understatement of the final line, work in a tense contrast with its actual passions, which we sense as deep.

In terms of images, much is left to the imagination of the reader/auditor. Fire is coupled with desire, while ice is linked with hatred. The ending of fire could be the Biblical Apocalypse of the Book of Revelations, which at one point includes both hail and fire descending simultaneously from heaven to lay waste to the Earth (Chapter 8), or it could be the explosion of our Sun into a Red Giant, a predictable stage in the main-sequence of stars of the Sun’s variety, slated to take place in about four or five billion years. It is predicted that this explosion of the Sun will entirely engulf the space that extends out to and beyond the Earth’s orbit, and, of course, the Earth itself. The ending of ice recalls images of the vast glaciations of the Ice Ages. Frost is also using these scenarios of the end of the world metaphorically and personally, and so manages to generate a sense both of literal destruction on a world-wide scale and also a sense of destruction on the intimate scale of human relationships.

The rhyme scheme, abaabcbcb, is beautifully intertwined. Rhythmically the poem is “tight” iambic; the longer lines have four strong beats (tetrameter), while the shorter ones have two strong beats (dimeter.) The short line 2 abruptly throws the rhythm out of what would be expected from the four beat “metrical contract” set in line 1. Lines 3 through 7 resume the “metrical contract” with lines of four steady beats, and lull us back into the expectation of a predictable rhythm, which lines 8 and 9 disrupt again, quite appropriately to the content. The repetition of “some say” in the first two lines sets up a general tone at first, which begins to shift in line 3, where Frost starts to move the scale of the poem closer to us, into a more intimate, personal register. The phrase “to say…” at the beginning of line 7 is a nice echo to the opening phrases “some say” of lines 1 and 2.

What strikes me as salient, and especially delicious, is the line break of line 7. The placement of “ice” way out on the end of the line creates a tension, a suspense, which is satisfied by the tight ending that follows, concludes, balances, and ironically comments upon the poem. The simplicity, shortness, repetition, and rhyming of “Fire and Ice” make it a cinch… definitely a great poem – easy to memorize!

Great Poems – Easy to Memorize:

William Shakespeare: “Ariel’s Song” from The Tempest:

Full fathom five thy father lies,

Of his bones are coral made:

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.

Hark! Now I hear them: ding, dong bell.

ii. 397-405, The Riverside Shakespeare

In form, the song consists of eight lines in one stanza or in two four line stanzas. I prefer it as one stanza because its momentum is not impeded. The content is surreal; I believe only Shakespeare would think of the fanciful resemblances of bones to coral and eyes to pearls. And, of course, this is the origin of the concept of “sea-change,” which denotes a very large change of some kind, and suggests an irreversible, irrevocable quality to the transformation.

Then, the imagery: the drowned father, yours and mine, whose fate was ship-wreck, the one of the most severe, if not the quintessential, disaster of the Elizabethan age, perhaps the equivalent of the crashing of a large commercial jet, a 747 for instance, today. In an age of seafaring exploration, shipwreck was a hazard many people had to chance. And death by water leads to the subsequent “rich and strange” transformations Shakespeare imagines: bones to coral, pearls to eyes.

Sea-nymphs, or Nereids, are female spirits of the oceans in Greek mythology, thought to move in attendance to Poseidon, the god of the oceans. A “knell” is a bell rung in English churches when a death occurred, as in the familiar quote of John Donne, “Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” But rather than a sexton, or the clerk of a church, this knell for “your father” is rung by sea-nymphs, a little pagan twist on convention, reinforced by the use of the archaic “Hark!” The sea-nymphs are elevated to the status of priestesses, ministering condolence to the dead man they were unable to save. This little song of Shakespeare’s takes place in deeps, and only comes to the surface in the last line, when the speaker admonishes the audience to listen with him to the faint sounding of the bell. The little narrative is: the shipwreck, the slow transformation of the man’s bones to coral, and his eye’s to pearls, which savors, in a way, the irreversible momentum of death, the sea-change waiting for every human, followed by funeral rites and a new existence for the “father,” whose body has now been dispersed into the life of the ocean floor.

As far as poetic sound and musicality goes, this little song is extremely rich. Beginning with the striking alliteration of four “fs” in the first line; the “a” rhyme “lies” which will rhyme ultimately with “eyes,” is already rhymed with “five” and “thy” in the first line as well. The “b” rhymes “made” and “fade” are soft words, which are strongly contrasted with the more “mouthy” “change” and “strange.” The repetition of “that” in lines three and four, and the repetition of “doth” in lines four and five serve to subtly knit the transition from the beginning description to the conceptual middle of the song. “Sea-nymphs” is a nice echo of “sea-change;” and there is a nice internal rhyme between “ring” and “ding.” There are four strong beats per line, which makes the rhythm smooth and steady, only to be expected in a song, which was most likely accompanied with music, probably by a lute.

The salient features we’ve already covered in the imagery, but the overall mournful tone also conveys a deep wonder for the unpredictable ways and movements of the world.

(In regard to the last line, it’s interesting to note that when doorbells were invented in the early 1800s, a two note sound was created: one tone when the button is pressed and another when released, and it was called a “ding-dong” tone. So, oddly enough, the death-knell for the father announcing death, also anticipated, long before invented, the doorbell, which in the “father’s” case could be thought of as a kind of doorbell, signaling his entrance into a new realm.)

Betzi’s Poetry Blog: The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, Edward Fitzgerald Translation, 1^st edition, selected quatrains:

51:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

14:

The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon

Turns Ashes—or it prospers; and anon,

Like Snow upon the Desert’s dusty Face

Lighting a little Hour or two—is gone.

49:

‘Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days

Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:

Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,

And one by one back in the Closet lays.

52:

And that inverted bowl we call The Sky,

Whereunder crawling coop’t we live and die,

Lift not thy hands to It for help—for It

Rolls impotently on as Thou or I.

11:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough

A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread–and Thou,

Beside me singing in the Wilderness

And oh, Wilderness is Paradise enow.                                    (enough)

27:

Myself when young did eagerly frequent

Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument

About it and about: but evermore

Came out of the same Door as in I went.

28:

With them the Seed of Wisdom I did sow,

And with my own hand labour’d it to grow:

And this was all the Harvest that I reaped

“I came like Water, and like Wind I go.”

73:

Ah, Love! Could thou and I with Fate conspire

To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,

Would not we shatter it to bits—and then

Re-mould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!

Omar Khayyam, the brilliant Persian astronomer, mathematician, philosopher, poet, and, at least in the “Rubáiyát,”profound sceptic, was born in 1048 and died in 1131. He wrote many significant and influential treatises on mathematics, especially on algebra and helped with Seljuk Sultan Malik Shah I’s reform of the Iranian calendar.

Khayyam’s poetry, which was unpopular in his day, due undoubtedly to his skeptical and even heretical views on religion, reached a world-wide audience centuries after its initial composition via its translation into English by Edward FitzGerald, an English scholar from an extremely wealthy Victorian family. The first edition of FitzGerald’s translation was published in 1859; its popularity grew slowly but steadily.

His translation of Khayyam’s poems can be thought of as more of a collaboration, although carried on long after Khayyam’s death. FitzGerald used the word “transmogrification” to typify his work. “Transmogrification” has a humorous connotation and means “to transform, especially in a surprising, or magical manner.” (OED) He brings Khayyam’s poems to life in English, in what we today call a “version,” rather than a strict translation. “I have…taken great pains in Translation… though certainly not to be literal… at all Cost, a Thing must live…Better a live Sparrow than a stuffed Eagle.” FitzGerald had a great sympathy for Khayyam’s skeptical sensibility, and so was primed in a sense, to make a stunning connection across the vast distances between their times and cultures.  (A famous quote that shows a bit of Mr. FitzGerald’s wit and personality claims that he said “all my relatives are mad; further, I am insane myself, but at least am aware of the fact..”)

“The Rubáiyát” gives us a good example of the distance we have to assume between the speaker of a poem and the person who writes it. By all accounts, Khayyam lived an extremely industrious and intellectually vigorous life; it’s hard to imagine the same man who wrote detailed critiques of Euclid’s Elements, turning around and writing to advise a reader of his poems toward a dissolute, or at least a highly sensual, life, featuring the imbibing of wine, and the spending of time reading poetry (oh, my) with beautiful young women, etc. And yet this is the overall message of “The Rubáiyát”: live for today, for all life is fleeting in a world barren of spiritual truth. Khayyam is very tuned into what the Buddhists call Impermanence, the ever-changingness of all phenomena, without the Buddha’s consoling vision and teaching of an ethical path and a practice of meditation designed to greatly reduce the human suffering Khayyam observes and bemoans in his poems. But even though I do not share Khayyam’s disillusionment, I find that the beauty of his images and the power of his pointed skeptical observations generate enormous ongoing pleasure for me.

The depth of Khayyam’s dismay, and perhaps even despair, can be explained with an understanding of the turbulent, violent, and chaotic nature of his era. Just before he was born, his home, Nishapur, was devastated by invasion from the West by the Saljug Turks, and he grew up in a world ruled under their alien thumb. After his death, the Mongols invaded from the East. (In this regard, Persia seems to resemble the Poland of our modern era, invaded by the Germans, then the Russians, then the Germans again, etc. Interestingly, in both cultures, poetry flourished during these times of foreign oppression.) For more background, let me recommend another notable translation of “The Rubáiyát” by Peter Avery and John Heath-Stubbs, available from Penguin Classics. Their introduction elucidates Khayyam’s life and circumstances, and their translation strives to be more literal than FitzGeralds, providing a nice complementarity between the two.

And to the point of the ease of memorization, all the quatrains stand on their own, in spite of having been loosely placed in a kind of sequence by FitzGerald, and therefore can be memorized one at a time. Pick your favorite and then maybe go on to another. (Rubai is the singular in Persian for a quatrain; rubáiyát is the plural. The rhyme scheme is usually: aaba, but sometimes takes the form of a mono-rhyme: aaaa.) Enjoy!

(Also, I recommend finding an edition that is illustrated with drawings by Edmund J. Sullivan, for a full rendering of the Victorian sensibility of the time of publication. The perfect complement to the Fitzgerald translation.)

Betzi’s Poetry Blog:         How to memorize poems?

For me the memorization process parallels how I begin to experience poems. It takes time and patience to memorize a poem and requires lots of repeating of the lines of the poem, out loud.

There are 5 main aspects of the poem I focus on when I am memorizing:

1. The content of the poem (including its tone—sarcastic, romantic, lyric, ironic, etc.)
2. Imagery
3. Sounds, especially rhyme
4. Rhythm—whether it is metrical (has a beat) or is free verse
5. Salience – whatever else leaps out at you about that particular poem

The content and tone are usually grasped quickly; it could be assumed that if you are going to the effort to memorize the poem it is because you like it a lot; therefore you are going to have a clear idea of what you think and feel the poem is saying and doing. (This idea will often change, or evolve, as I explore the poem.)

Once I’ve decided on an overall interpretation or sense of the poem, I focus on the imagery. Sometimes imagery will be like a portrait, a landscape, or a mini-narrative. If I can visualize the scene or the sequence of events of the poem, even in a vague way, it can give me a kind of map. And as I memorize or study a poem details and the overall import can become sharper.

If a poem is rhymed, slant or full, it is much easier for me to memorize. For example, the delicious slant rhyme between “crowd” and “bough” in Ezra Pound’s imagist masterpiece, In a Station of the Metro, ties the two lines of the couplet together and makes them resonate. Rhyme gives a poem reverb, and tuning in, literally, to the sound waves as they create a kind of echo can greatly aid memory. Other sound echoes, such as alliteration (as in Pound, the sound linkage between “black” and “bough”) and assonance, also aid the memorization process. (I like to memorize free verse poems as well, but with them, I find I have to rely much more on content and imagery.)

Rhythm is the pattern of stressed and unstressed or lesser stressed syllables in each line of the poem. For the most part, just noticing the alternation of beats and off-beats, or weak and stronger stresses in the flow of syllables suffices. (Ultimately, four levels of stress can be discerned, but more of that another time.) The best system for understanding the alternation of beats (or stresses) is elaborated by Derek Attridge, and the simplest manual explaining this most important aspect of poetry in English, is Meter and Meaning, by Thomas Carper and Derek Attridge.

Lastly, when memorizing, I make note of any salience, or anything from the poem seems outstanding to me. Going back to the Pound example, the metaphorical leap from faces to petals, is striking, and the follow-up leap between the darkness of the metro and the “wet, black bough” is striking as well. The concreteness of the adjectives, “wet” and “black” make the image vivid and easy to visualize. Much more could be said on this subject, but for starters, I hope these thoughts will prove to be helpful.

Ezra Pound:        In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

1913

Great Poems—Easy to Memorize:           O Western Wind—

O Western Wind, when wilt thou blow
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again.

O Western Wind is a Middle English lyric, whose author is unknown; the date of its origin is impossible to fix. It comes to us from the oral tradition, and could have been composed at any point between the 12^th and 16^th centuries, but was first published in 1792. It falls within and combines the subgenres of the love-song and complaint.

To those of us waiting for the full arrival of this year’s (2015-16) El Nino, an address to the West Wind concerning its willingness and ability to bring rain can seem remarkably contemporary. The speaker is separated from his (or her) loved one, and wishes fervently for the comforts of home and a loving embrace.

Our method for memorization begins with the images: a lonely speaker addressing the Western Wind, which creates images of the same Western Wind and the rain which has not yet arrived. The exclamation “Christ,” reveals the intensity of the lover’s longing, while bringing the Deity to mind, as well as the unheeded admonishment to not “take the Lord’s name in vain.” At the same time, it functions to elevate this lyric to the level of prayer. We see the embrace and the pleasures of security and safety, which are implied to be lacking in the speakers current, but unreferenced, condition.

The images are: a speaker, the Western Wind, rain and the absence thereof, Christ, the speaker’s loved one and their embrace, and both the presumably warm and safe, longed for bed, and the absence thereof. This gives us a mini-narrative, which can be the thread that helps us see the poem both as a whole and as a linear sequence of events…

The sounds are simple: the repetition of “rain,” rhyming with the emphatic “again,” and the pronounced alliteration in the first line: “western,” “wind,” “when,” “wilt.” The rhythm is what is called “Ballad Measure,” i.e. quatrains (stanzas of four lines) with lines that alternate 4 beats and 3 beats. The rhyme scheme is abcb.

This poem is so straight forward, we can take the opportunity to consider the larger issue of the lyric as a genre, and how O Western Wind exemplifies the qualities we associate with other lyric poems. First, historically, the lyric was designated as a major type of poetry by Aristotle, along with the dramatic and the narrative, or epic genres. The name “lyric” comes from the Greek word for a stringed musical instrument, the lyre, and hence carries with it a strong association with music, song and dance. Early on, the lyric was more often sung than spoken, and certainly more often sung than written. In addition, according to The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (whose article on the lyric informs all these comments), the primary characteristics of a lyric poem in addition to musicality are: brevity, coherence or a clear focus, the expression of powerful feelings, sensuality, and the subjectivity of a speaker. In fact, a lyric often seems like we, the listeners, are eavesdropping on someone’s very private and innermost thoughts and emotions. There are examples of lyric poems from so many cultures and time periods, it can be considered a universal human expression. As we want to expand our repertoire of memorized poems, we will have occasion to discover many more poignant, lyric poems.

Note: Some anthologies eliminate the “O” in the 1^st line and the “that” in the second, but I prefer this version.

Wednesday, February 25, 2015:                “Writing poetry is all about discovery.”

This evening, I just happily attended “An Evening with David St. John,” a part of the ongoing USC Visions and Voices Series: The Arts and Humanities Initiative and USC’s The Provost’s Writers Series, which was held in the Doheny Memorial Library, at USC, from 6:30 to 8:30pm. I am lifting from the program a brief synopsis of David’s career: “Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and the current Head of the English Department at USC, St. John is the acclaimed author of eleven collections of poetry, including Study for the World’s Body, which was nominated for the National Book Award. He has also written a volume of essays, interviews and reviews, Where the Angels Come Toward Us, and two librettos. The co-editor of American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry, St. John has been honored by the National Endowment of the Arts and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The multimedia evening [included] live music, poetry and a conversation with Frank Tichell, a composer and professor in the Composition Program in the USC Thornton School of Music.”

Two perhaps under-appreciated themes in David’s career came out in the course of the evening in addition to an appreciation of his poetry, first, the range of David’s teaching, within the university, from freshmen through the graduate level. (And I need to add, that to my great benefit and to that of many others, David also teaches ongoing workshops with a large community of working poets outside the university, in addition to his work at USC.)

Another theme in David’s career that emerged in the course of the evening is the range and very high quality of David’s collaborations with musicians, a number of whom performed this evening. David read a very small selection of poems: “The Bridge,” “The Hungry Ghost,” “Zones,” the always riveting (you’ll understand the pun if you read the poem) section 27 from David’s book length collection, The Face, and “GUITAR. I have always loved the word guitar.” This latter poem was beautifully accompanied by Christopher Sampson, Vice Dean of the Division of Contemporary Music; and Founding Director of the Popular Music Program.

Next, the composer, Donald Crockett, composer of the opera of David’s book-length poem, The Face, sang the male part of the duet called “Zones,” in part:

“It was in the night’s minute disturbances                                                                                                                            (You said) that you’d discovered the exquisite

Composition of desire….

…tonight,

Sitting alone in this distant hotel, I lift another

Shattered glass of stars to you….”

from: “Nocturnes and Aubades, I. Zones,”                                                                                                                                                           in The Red Leaves of Night.

Mr. Crockett is Chair of the Composition Program, director of the New Music Ensemble, Assistant Dean of Faculty Affairs, Thornton School of Music. The female singer was Katherine Beck, MM student in voice in the Thornton School of Music, and they were accompanied by Brian Head (Chair of the Classical Guitar Department and faculty in the Composition Program, Assistant Dean for Faculty Affairs, Thornton School of Music. Also performing was one of David’s students, the LA Times Book Festival award-winning Catherine Rose Smith, of the band, Ghost in the Canyon, who sang her songs “Learn from You”, and “Mice in the Heather.” All of these musical performances were exceptional.

Next came a conversation between David and his friend and collaborator, the composer, Frank Tichell. Here are some of David’s comments: (forgive me for paraphrasing) about the relationship between song and poetry: although they may seem separate, poetry still retains its intimate connection with song and dance. Dance, song and lyrics having once formed more of a seamless whole, were apparently severed from each other with the development of the printing press, as poetry came to seem to be able to stand alone on the page. However, David and Frank agreed that the apparent separation of poetry from song is an illusion, that a poem still contains dance in its rhythm and song in the musical aspects of language; and that the rhythms of the early English Ballads that have come down to us through the oral tradition form the basis of all English poetry.

David believes strongly that poetry emerges from the body, while it reveals to us the movements of the mind at work. A poem is a “little piece of consciousness, set to language.” The main subjects of poetry are perennial: love, loss of love, life, and “that other thing…” (I wish I could convey David’s wit, humor and well-honed sense of self-deprecation, but you’ll have to take my word for it, if you haven’t heard him read.) But what is almost miraculous about poetry is the way an individual personality and tone, tone of voice, an individual’s intelligence and unique reflections can be conveyed by poetry and can impress us so deeply. That “writing is all about discovery…”

David advocates “reading everything, even work you don’t like. Some work you don’t like at first can open up to you, and what you continue to not like can serve to clarify your own poetic values.” In answering questions about how he became interested in poetry, David talked about his development toward poetry: being raised by his father and uncle to be a professional tennis player, but not liking the kind of person professional tennis was turning him into; on his way to poetry, via music, to playing in “very bad bands in the 60s.” When pressed to reveal the name of the worst of these bad bands, David consented to a rueful true confession: when the British Invasion was at its height, he played in a band called, “The Blokes.” This naturally produced a big laugh from the audience.

Concerning the state of poetry overall, David feels that the idea of separate, competing schools is no longer a strong tendency in American poetry, and when asked about his many collaborations, especially with musicians, David said he relishes the generosity of the collaboration process – “collaboration makes me happy.” I plan to discuss David’s work in greater detail in later pages of this blog.