dare

When we stand on the tops of Things –
And like the Trees, look down –
The smoke all cleared away from it –
And Mirrors on the scene –

Just laying light — no soul will wink
Except it have the flaw –
The Sound ones, like the Hills — shall stand –
No Lighting, scares away –

The Perfect, nowhere be afraid –
They bear their dauntless Heads,
Where others, dare not go at Noon,
Protected by their deeds –

The Stars dare shine occasionally
Upon a spotted World –
And Suns, go surer, for their Proof,
As if an Axle, held –

Wait till the Majesty of Death
Invests so mean a brow!
Almost a powdered Footman
Might dare to touch it now!

Wait till in Everlasting Robes
That Democrat is dressed,
Then prate about “Preferment” –
And “Station,” and the rest!

Around this quiet Courtier
Obsequious Angels wait!
Full royal is his Retinue!
Full purple is his state!

A Lord, might dare to lift the Hat
To such a Modest Clay
Since that My Lord, “the Lord of Lords”
Receives unblushingly!

How dare the robins sing,
When men and women hear
Who since they went to their account
Have settled with the year! –
Paid all that life had earned
In one consummate bill,
And now, what life or death can do
Is immaterial.
Insulting is the sun
To him whose mortal light,
Beguiled of immortality,
Bequeaths him to the night.
In deference to him
Extinct be every hum,
Whose garden wrestles with the dew,
At daybreak overcome!

How the old mountains drip with sunset,
And the brake of dun!
How the hemlocks are tipped in tinsel
By the wizard sun!

How the old steeples hand the scarlet,
Till the ball is full, –
Have I the lip of the flamingo
That I dare to tell?

Then, how the fire ebbs like billows,
Touching all the grass
With a departing, sapphire feature,
As if a duchess pass!

How a small dusk crawls on the village
Till the houses blot;
And the odd flambeaux no men carry
Glimmer on the spot!

Now it is night in nest and kennel,
And where was the wood,
Just a dome of abyss is nodding
Into solitude! –

These are the visions baffled Guido;
Titian never told;
Domenichino dropped the pencil,
Powerless to unfold.

According to the Dublin Evening Herald, people waiting at the Naas Hospital Kildare and other places around the region will have the chance to read a little poetry instead of just out-of-date celebrity rags and old medical journals.

Poems in the Waiting Room is a pilot arts project funded by Kildare County Council. The idea was driven by Kildare-based writer Kate Dempsey.

It was inspired by pieces of public sculpture dotted across the country. The idea is to make poetry an art form that is available in ordinary everyday places.

The project has a web site, too, from which you can download a poster-sized version of Dickinson’s “Hope,” watch Alan Rickman recite Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”), or read Leigh Hunt’s Jenny Kissed Me, a sweet little poem about Thomas Carlyle’s wife.

Similar to the various poems-on-public-transit projects, like the recent Wilkes-Barrie Poetry in Transit or the famous Poems on the Underground in London, the Poems in the Waiting Room project seeks to slip poetry into the fallow spaces of our lives and enrich the unsuspecting with a few well-chosen words. Given the rate at which video monitors and loud music have colonized gas pumps and grocery-store lines, this incursion of verse is certainly welcome.

I should not dare to leave my friend,
Because — because if he should die
While I was gone, and I — too late –
Should reach the heart that wanted me;

If I should disappoint the eyes
That hunted, hunted so, to see,
And could not bear to shut until
They “noticed” me — they noticed me;

If I should stab the patient faith
So sure I ‘d come — so sure I ‘d come,
It listening, listening, went to sleep
Telling my tardy name, –

My heart would wish it broke before,
Since breaking then, since breaking then,
Were useless as next morning’s sun,
Where midnight frosts had lain!

Podcast music by Antonio Meneses

Wait till the majesty of Death
Invests so mean a brow!
Almost a powdered footman
Might dare to touch it now!

Wait till in everlasting robes
This democrat is dressed,
Then prate about “preferment”
And “station” and the rest!

Around this quiet courtier
Obsequious angels wait!
Full royal is his retinue,
Full purple is his state!

A lord might dare to lift the hat
To such a modest clay,
Since that my Lord, “the Lord of lords”
Receives unblushingly!

English department graduate students at the University of Texas are now loafing about in the Emily Dickinson Graduate Student Lounge, thanks to the largess of a professor (not in the English department) who was inspired by “his love for English literature and Emily Dickinson.” The amenities of the lounge include “[t]hree new, oversized couches . . . , . . . new tables, silk trees, pieces to help with organization and new appliances like an espresso machine.” Oh, and also “a fountain and . . . a piano.”

Not bad digs for a graduate student lounge. I recall that my own “lounge” (which the American Studies department shared with the history department) consisted of a couple of cast-off, uncomfortable armchairs, a battered wooden table, and a coffee pot that contained the burnt remains of too many gallons of Maxwell House to dare add more. And the room of cluttered desks that the English department had wasn’t much better.

This anonymous professor is also turning his attention to the neglected lounges of the music and drama departments.

Having been a graduate student, I question the wisdom of making a graduate lounge so well-appointed and comfortable. If my lounge had been more welcoming than the library, I would probably have spent less time in the stacks; and with a fountain and a piano to keep me company, I might be in grad school still. The glimmer of hope in this is that the slovenly ways of English department grad students will take its toll in short order, and they’ll make it grim and uncomfortable again . . .