I wonder if his circus animals are his poems? I'd like to hear this one read aloud. Wonder if I can find it on Ye Olde internet.

DW: For me, the last stanza makes the poem and the last two lines are brilliant.

DWill wrote: W.B. Yeats

The Circus Animals' Desertion

III

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

I love a coincidence. About an hour a go I read the Yates poem DWill posted on 10/25. Just now I was settled down for the night with Kay Ryan's collection of poetry The Niagara River, when I came upon her poem entitled, Carrying A Ladder. Two poem ladders in the space of an hour. I had to post these two poems near each other. If for no other reason than for my own amusement and delight (and yours too, I hope). The ladder in Ryan's poem is a bit different than the one in Yates' or maybe not....

Carrying A Ladder

We are always
really carrying
a ladder, but it's
invisible. We
only know
something's
the matter:
something precious
crashes; easy doors
prove impassable.
Or, in the body,
there's too much
swing or off-
center gravity.
And, in the mind,
a drunken capacity,
access to out-of-range
apples. As though
one had a way to climb
out of the damage
and apology.


My favorite image/idea is the out-of-range apples.

Oh, and here is a link to Kay Ryan reading this poem.
Carrying A Ladder

We can play a kind of poem-association game now, if you want, which can be fun. I'll give you another one with apples and ladders, which also happens to be one of my favorites and is appropriate as well because apple-picking season just ended around here. Someone can bounce another poem off this one in whatever way pleases.

AFTER APPLE PICKING

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.

And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

--Robert Frost

I think W.S. Merwin has a whole collection of poems in a book entitled The Carriers of Ladders, but I don't have the book and don't have any poems memorized from it. The only words of his I do recall right now are:

"Stars too near
ever to arrive."

But I probably even have the line divisions wrong on that. I'll have to go look for it at the library later or something (eschewing an internet search out of sheer perverse conservatism).

There was also this other poem of his that seemed to resonate for me on the topics of the environment and colonialism, but I was probably just misreading it. It started with something like, "Well they went everywhere because why not./ Everywhere was theirs because they thought so." and ended with some of them just barely escaping with their shadows. How vague. I wonder if anyone knows what poem I'm thinking about.

Ladder up to heaven
down to hell
left against the wall where the paint is still peeling
and the trim is just as ugly
following Jacob's angel above
or Dante's Virgil below
wont get the wall painted
or the trim any prettier

DH

I guess it should be against the rules for me to daisychain my own post, but I'll do it anyway. From "After Apple Picking":

The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

(This next poem is in the voice of the woodchuck.)



A DRUMLIN WOODCHUCK

One thing has a shelving bank,

Another a rotting plank,

To give it cozier skies

And make up for its lack of size.

My own strategic retreat

Is where two rocks almost meet,

And still more secure and snug,

A two-door burrow I dug.

With those in mind at my back

I can sit forth exposed to attack

As one who shrewdly pretends

That he and the world are friends.

All we who prefer to live

Have a little whistle we give,

And flash, at the least alarm

We dive down under the farm

We allow some time for guile

And don't come out for a while

Either to eat or drink.
We take occasion to think.

And if after the hunt goes past

And the double-barreled blast

(Like war and pestilence

And the loss of common sense),

If I can with confidence say

That still for another day,

Or even another year,

I will be there for you, my dear,

It will be because, though small

As measured against the All,

I have been so instinctively thorough

About my crevice and burrow.

---Robert Frost

DWill, I think this little DRUMLIN WOODCHUCK is going to be a difficult little fellow to follow.

The Milestone by the Rabbit-Burrow

(On Yell'Ham Hill)

In my loamy nook
As I dig my hole
I observe men look
At a stone, and sigh
As they pass it by
To some far goal.

Something it says
To their glancing eyes
That must distress
The frail and lame,
And the strong of frame
Gladden or surprise.

Do signs on its face
Declare how far
Feet have to trace
Before they gain
Some blest champaign
Where no gins are?

Great thread!

I like what you did with this, Will.

Thanks, Carly. And great follow, Saffron. How did you find this? Thomas Hardy as I recall gave up his novels to concentrate on poetry. I like the typical mood of his poems, wistful, maybe a little gloomy, not surprised by anything. But, as you say, the task is for somebody to spin another from your rabbit-burrow poem. Good luck!