Number 139: John Updike "Sunflower"

Sunflower


Sunflower, of flowers

the most lonely,

yardstick of hours,

long-term stander

in empty spaces,

shunner of bowers,

indolent bender

seldom, in only

the sharpest of showers:

tell us, why

is it your face is

a snarl of jet swirls

and gold arrows, a burning

old lion face high

in a cornflower sky,

yet by turning

your head we find

you wear a girl's

bonnet behind?

--John Updike

Hap Notes: It's possible I may be the only person in the world kvetching about John Updike spending so much time writing novels and not enough writing poetry. He's dead for heaven's sake and I'm still miffed at him. His natural ear and pacing is perfect for poetry. He's a potentially a great poet. He knew there was no money in it and chose fiction writing. We all have to make choices, eh?

Maybe that's what I'm mad about– not that he wanted money– that there is not much money to be had in writing poetry. First, somebody has to take your verses seriously. You have to give readings. Many folks will peer at you suspiciously for choosing poetry as a calling; why not architecture or basket weaving? You know, something functional. Then of course, you'll need grants – your books won't exactly fly off the shelves. People will expect poetry to fall out of you all the time. It's a scrappy life, even when you're famous. (Feel free to use these excuses about your own poetic output- I certainly have.)

This spiny poem about the sunflower tells us something about people, too, because we mirror the natural world in which we live. Their leaves and buds do measure the hours, by the way, and follow the sun in its travels across the sky, hence their name. This following of the sun is called heliotropism and mature sunflowers don't do it- they usually face east. Here's an interesting factoid: the sunflower has a slightly more complicated and longer genome (an organism's genetic heredity info found in DNA/RNA) than human beings.

Sunflowers, by the way, are so useful. They are great producers of seeds favored by people and animals and birds. The seeds produce sunflower oil. The sunflower head, after the seeds have dropped off are used for cattle feed. Sunflowers produce a kind of latex that can be used to make a "greener" rubber. When planted, they can suck toxic ingredients out of the soil. Sunflowers were planted at a pond near Chernobyl to extract nuclear waste chemicals (which ones? cesium-137 and strontium-90 – impressive, huh?)

Oh, and they are quite beautiful in all their gold and yellow splendor. If you have a few in your yard, you know that they always look as if they are nodding at you pleasantly in a light wind.

Back to the poem– a lion face in a girl's bonnet is a pretty good description, don't you think? The more I read the poem the sadder I am about Updike's lack of poetic output. So there. Still holding a grudge against something– let's say it's money.

Here's where we've talked about Updike before: happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2010/12/number-4-john-updike-thoughts-while.html

and here: happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/03/number-96-john-updike-ex-basketball.html

Number 138: Linda Pastan "What We Want"

What We Want

What we want

is never simple.

We move among the things

we thought we wanted:

a face, a room, an open book

and these things bear our names–

now they want us.

But what we want appears

in dreams, wearing disguises.

We fall past,

holding out our arms

and in the morning

our arms ache.

We don’t remember the dream,

but the dream remembers us.

It is there all day

as an animal is there

under the table,

as the stars are there

even in full sun.

-- Linda Pastan

Hap Notes: Linda Pastan (born 1932) has written a good dozen books of poetry and has won tons of awards (over a half dozen, I believe is considered a ton) and was Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1991-1995. She lives in Maryland, still.

When she attended Radcliffe she won the Mademoiselle magazine poetry prize. The runner-up in that contest was Sylvia Plath. Pastan got her masters at Brandeis. She concentrated on raising a family and her husband, Ira, encouraged her to go back to poetry.

Pastan's subject matter borders on the practical and the everyday – the stirring of pots, the eating of pears, the scrubbings and dustings of life. But Pastan's ear is her gift, when she turns the phrase just right, bastes it with the spaces, gives it time to settle, her poetry is a marvel of verbal beauty and economy. She writes of the natural world and grief and children and the other thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.

In today's poem, she embraces a difficult subject– what the hell is that mysterious something that we all want? That thing we yearn for, that whatchamacallit that will fill us up with enough whatever the hell it is? It's almost there – we can almost get to it. And whatever we do get, starts to own us, have you ever noticed that? And whatever we do get – it's not enough, not right, not exactly right, not quite. This spiny little poem packs a powerful punch.

Here's a good Pastan quote: " No, there is no ease in writing. The job is to make it by the end feel as if it flows easily. But each poem of mine goes through something like 100 revisions. "

You can find more Pastan here: www.poemhunter.com/linda-pastan/

Number 137: Carl Sandburg "An Electric Sign Goes Dark"

An Electric Sign Goes Dark

Poland, France, Judea ran in her veins,
Singing to Paris for bread, singing to Gotham in a fizz at the pop of a bottle’s cork.

“Won’t you come and play wiz me” she sang … and “I just can’t make my eyes behave.”
“Higgeldy-Piggeldy,” “Papa’s Wife,” “Follow Me” were plays.

Did she wash her feet in a tub of milk? Was a strand of pearls sneaked from her trunk? The newspapers asked.
Cigarettes, tulips, pacing horses, took her name.

Twenty years old … thirty … forty …
Forty-five and the doctors fathom nothing, the doctors quarrel, the doctors use silver tubes feeding twenty-four quarts of blood into the veins, the respects of a prize-fighter, a cab driver.
And a little mouth moans: It is easy to die when they are dying so many grand deaths in France.

A voice, a shape, gone.
A baby bundle from Warsaw … legs, torso, head … on a hotel bed at The Savoy.
The white chiselings of flesh that flung themselves in somersaults, straddles, for packed houses:
A memory, a stage and footlights out, an electric sign on Broadway dark.

She belonged to somebody, nobody.
No one man owned her, no ten nor a thousand.
She belonged to many thousand men, lovers of the white chiseling of arms and shoulders, the ivory of a laugh, the bells of song.

Railroad brakemen taking trains across Nebraska prairies, lumbermen jaunting in pine and tamarack of the Northwest, stock ranchers in the middle west, mayors of southern cities
Say to their pals and wives now: I see by the papers Anna Held is dead.

--Carl Sandburg

Hap Notes: Here's somewhat a contrast to O'Hara's "Lana Turner Has Collapsed" in that Sandburg is not playing it for laughs. Anna Held was a hugely famous star on Broadway whose life was the subject of much publicity. She was known all over America as a vital and charming actress/singer/performer even though she spent little time in the country outside of New York save for a vaudeville tour or two. Her picture made good copy.

Held was born to a Jewish couple in Poland in the mid-to-late 1800s (her birth date is somewhat up for grabs- somewhere between 1865-1873-actresses, you know.) Her mother was French, hence the first line of the poem. She was pert and lively on stage and she sang suggestive flirtatious songs- she showed her legs on stage- oh my! Anyway Florenz Ziegfeld meets her when he's in Europe, is smitten and feeds the press a bunch of sensational stories about his new theatrical "find." (Ziegfeld was a very famous Broadway show maker and producer- you knew that, right?)

Ziegfeld told the press she bathed in milk and/or champagne. She was a tiny five foot fireball of a performer who wore super-tight corsets to emphasize her 18 inch waist. She was a sensation before she'd even hit the stage. There were Anna Held corsettes, face powder, pomades (for the hair) and cigars. And of course there were postcards showing her in elaborate and feathered French gowns and pearls.

She became Ziegfeld's common-law wife. She helped him create the famous "Ziegfeld Follies." She was enormously famous, somewhat naughty (she reputedly wore a nightgown when meeting reporters seeking interviews) and thoroughly charming. Ziegfeld made her a millionaire. She once told the press she was visiting a movie set and shot a runaway tiger. There was always some titillating story around about Held. She sang "I joost cahn't make my eyes be'ave" and fellas swooned.

Now the story gets a bit sad. She had been previously married and had a child from that marriage. The child is given to the birth father so Held can continue her career. The child (who is in her early teens) comes to America to seek her mother and is used as sort of fuel for the Held image as a mysterious French coquette- the "hidden child"- ooh la la!

Then she either had a miscarriage or an abortion (it was Ziegfeld's child) in 1908. Ziegfeld's interest in her was waning. She entertained the troupes in France during WWI, going close to enemy lines and was thought to be very brave. But Ziegfeld had gone on to other women and finally settled on a red-haired beauty named Billie Burke whom he married. Billie Burke had the opposite reputation from Held- she was billed as the pure, old fashioned American girl. You probably only know Burke as "Glenda, the Good Witch" from the "Wizard of Oz" movie but she was also a great beauty and very famous in her early career as a "Ziegfeld Girl."

Held dies in her mid-forties of cancer although the newspaper jive was that her internal organs were damaged by corsets laced up too tight. She flitted through the fantasies of men the world over and even Sandburg has his moment of remembering her.

Unlike "Lana Turner Has Collapsed" though, Sandburg is pointing out the way people react to celebrity tragedy- they comment but their private thoughts and fantasies (then, anyway) drift through their memories unspoken.

Here's where we've talked about Sandburg before: happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2010/12/number-15-carl-sandburg-arithmetic.html

Number 136: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow "The Wreck of the Hesperus"

The Wreck of the Hesperus

It was the schooner Hesperus,
That sailed the wintry sea;
And the skipper had taken his little daughter,
To bear him company.

Blue were her eyes as the fairy-flax,
Her cheeks like the dawn of day,
And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds,
That ope in the month of May.

The skipper he stood beside the helm,
His pipe was in his mouth,
And he watched how the veering flaw did blow
The smoke now West, now South.

Then up spake an old Sailor,
Had sailed to the Spanish Main,
'I pray thee, put into yonder port,
For I fear a hurricane.

"Last night, the moon had a golden ring,
And to-night no moon we see!"
The skipper, he blew a whiff from his pipe,
And a scornful laugh laughed he.

Colder and louder blew the wind,
A gale from the Northeast,
The snow fell hissing in the brine,
And the billows frothed like yeast.

Down came the storm, and smote amain
The vessel in its strength;
She shuddered and paused, like a frighted steed,
Then leaped her cable's length.

"Come hither! come hither! my little daughter,
And do not tremble so;
For I can weather the roughest gale
That ever wind did blow."

He wrapped her warm in his seaman's coat
Against the stinging blast;
He cut a rope from a broken spar,
And bound her to the mast.

'O father! I hear the church-bells ring,
Oh say, what may it be?'
"'Tis a fog-bell on a rock-bound coast"-
And he steered for the open sea.

"O father! I hear the sound of guns,
Oh say, what may it be?"
"Some ship in distress, that cannot live
In such an angry sea!"

"O father! I see a gleaming light,
Oh say, what may it be?"
But the father answered never a word,
A frozen corpse was he.

Lashed to the hclm, all stiff and stark,
With his face turned to the skies,
The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow
On his fixed and glassy eyes.

Then the maiden clasped her hands and prayed
That saved she might be;
And she thought of Christ, who stilled the wave,
On the Lake of Galilee.

And fast through the midnight dark and drear,
Tbrougb the whistling sleet and snow,
Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept
T'wards the reef of Norman's Woe.

And ever the fitful gusts between
A sound came from the land;
It was the sound of the trampling surf
On the rocks and the bard sea-sand.

Tle breakers were right beneath her bows,
She drifted a dreary wreck,
And a whooping billow swept the crew
Like icicles from her deck.

She struck where the white and fleecy waves
Looked soft as carded wool,
But the cruel rocks, they gored her side
Like the horns of an angry bull.

Her rattling shrouds, all sheathed in ice,
With the masts went by the board;
Like a vessel of glass, she stove and sank,
Ho! ho! the breakers roared!

At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach,
A fisherman stood aghast,
To see the form of a maiden fair,
Lashed close to a drifting mast.

The salt sea was frozen on her breast,
The salt tears in her eyes;
And be saw her hair, like the brown seaweed,
On the billows fall and rise.

Such was the wreck of the Hesperus,
In the midnight and the snow!
Christ save us all from a death like this,
On the reef of Norman's Woe!

Hap Notes: Well, it's not a cheery poem but I was reminded of it today when I looked in the bathroom mirror and said to myself, ""You look like the wreck of the Hesperus." It dawned on me that this somewhat common phrase (in my youth) was common no more and, of course, it reminded me of the poem which the phrase references.

There is a Massachusetts reef called Norman's Woe but Longfellow's poem is a pastiche of shipwrecks of which he knew. The little girl bound to the mast (so that she would not fall off the careening ship) is possibly a reference to a woman found bound to the mast after the wreck of the Favorite (a ship)on Norman's Woe in the mid 1800s.

The poem used to be quite famous but I'm not so sure now. It's sort of a lesson in paying attention to your old-salt hand at sea when he tells you there's gonna be trouble. It was pride that wenteth before the fall here, eh?

When I was a kid, the poem seemed full of drama and fascinating details like the captain's frozen eyes and the "glassy" ship. It still holds a certain drama for me as corny as that may be. Rhyming story poems are harder to write than one would imagine. You should give it a try sometime just to try your hand at it.

Longfellow, by the by, is the first American poet to have a carved bust representing him placed in "Poet's Corner" in Westminster Abbey.

Here's where we've talked about Longfellow before: happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/02/number-71-henry-wadsworth-longfellow.html

Number 135: Gerard Manley Hopkins "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection"

That Nature is a Heraclitan Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection

Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows ' flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs ' they throng; they glitter in marches.

Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, ' wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle in long ' lashes lace, lance, and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous ' ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest's creases; in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed ' dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks ' treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, ' nature's bonfire burns on.

But quench her bonniest, dearest ' to her, her clearest-selvèd spark
Man, how fast his firedint, ' his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned. O pity and indig ' nation! Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, ' death blots black out; nor mark
Is any of him at all so stark
But vastness blurs and time ' beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping, ' joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. ' Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; ' world's wildfire, leave but ash:

In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, ' since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ' patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins

Hap Notes: First of all, the division of the stanza is my own. I am not presuming to change Hopkins, I just wanted to make each extraordinary passage readable. It's a lot to take in and I thought it would help to space out the poem. Then, when you see it in its more compressed form, you'll not be overwhelmed with the cascades of words pouring out of these verses. I have left his accent marks but not his "dividings"- I thought if you've never read the poem that would be enough to take in.

Happy Easter, by the by. Actually, I suppose you could boil this poem down to that greeting if you so chose. There's a lot more in it, though. Let's get to it.

First off, the title. Heraclitus was a Greek philosopher (often called the "weeping" or melancholy philosopher.) In typical presocratic (before Socrates) form, he was concerned with the nature of things: where does stuff come from and how is it made? Heraclitus said that the world is always in flux, always changing. He's one of the guys who said "You can't step into the same river twice," i.e. it's always different, ever changing, or as he said "All things move and nothing remains still." Heraclitus said that the basic ruling principle of life was fire and that everything was in a sort of opposite harmony; "The death of fire is the birth of air, and the death of air is the birth of water." He thought that fire was the most fundamental element in this always changing universe, earth and life.

Now, Hopkins probably agrees with Heraclitus that all things have a unique and changing character and the title of the poem tells us exactly what he is trying to say. That is, in this constant flux and change, this life of quick sparked life and then darkness, the coming of Christ changes all this. The resurrection of Jesus is the element that changes this cycle to one of redemption from the constant grind.

Let's get a little vocabulary out of the way and then I'm bound to gush a bit about the poem (spoiler alert- ha!)

"chevy" means to run quickly (more or less)

"gay" of course, means festively happy (I'm sure you know this was written in the late 1800s- the word had nothing to do with sex- probably quite literally- Victorians, you know.)

A "shive" is a slice and the shadow "tackle" he's probably referring to is the tackle on a boat- the weighs and pulleys. So what he's saying is that the clouds are obscuring and then moving aside to let the sun shine through. This is happening pretty rapidly and it's breathtaking to look at as well as sort of illustrating Heraclitus' principle of flux.

Then he's saying that the wind (a pretty rowdy one) is drying up the puddles from a rain that happened the day before, drying out the thick ooze of mud (marked by man with wheel marks and footprints) into a dusty, dry crust.

So, he says, the ever-changing fire burns on....

He says man is one of the sparks of this fire and nature dotes on him but yet, how quickly his fire burns out ( his "firedint"- his spark of effort) and all is cast into dull and empty darkness. (They didn't call Heraclitus the "weeping philosopher for nothin'.)

Disseveral means to separate into parts. He's saying everything goes back into the fire, everything becomes level again. There is no individual, only the parts that make up the "fire," everything becomes a blur of nothingness again.

BUT

Christ's resurrection changes all this. The residuary (who get the remainder of) worm gets leftovers and the fire is but ash now because through Jesus is redemption from this "cycle" of Heraclitus.

Then Hopkins writes one of the best descriptions of a human (and Jesus who "became" human) ever written- this "Jack" (so many "Jacks" to pick from "everyman Jack, Jack-a-napes, Jackass, Jack-a-Lent (a small handpuppet used at lent) and there's more, I'm sure), a potsherd is a piece of broken pottery.

So Hopkins is saying, Christ, becoming man (with all his characteristics), saves us from the "fire" of life through the resurrection and we become, as he did- immortal diamond. Diamond that has been formed from coal through the heat of fire and the pressures of life.

I suppose I don't have to mention how breathtaking this is to read aloud, do I? Or how moving?

The picture today at the masthead is from one of Hopkin's journals where he is drawing the clouds and a photo to illustrate somewhat the fast moving clouds he of which he speaks.


Here's another nice quote of Hopkins:"No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness. I hope in time to have a more balanced and Miltonic style. But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music and design in painting, so design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of calling inscape is what I above all aim at in poetry. Now it is the virtue of design, pattern, or inscape to be distinctive and it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice I have not escaped."

(Once again, 1880-"queer" means strange or odd...knew that, right?)

Here's where we've talked of Hopkins before: happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/04/number-121-gerard-manley-hopkins-spring.html

and: happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/02/number-67-gerard-manley-hopkins.html

and: happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/01/number-30-gerard-manly-hopkins-thou.html

Number 134: A bit of Shakespeare for the Bard's birthday

from Othello...(Othello is speaking)

............................My story being done,

She gave me for my pains a world of sighs.

She swore, i' faith, 'twas strange, 'twas passing strange;

'Twas pitiful, 'twas wondrous pitiful.

She wished she had not heard it; yet she wished

That heaven had made her such a man. She thanked me;

And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her,

I should but teach him how to tell my story,

And that would woo her. Upon this hint I spake.

She loved me for the dangers I had passed,

And I loved her that she did pity them.

This only is the witchcraft I have used.

from Richard III (Richard is speaking)

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.



A Midsummer Night's Dream (Titania is speaking)

The fairy land buys not the child of me.
His mother was a votaress of my order:
And, in the spiced Indian air, by night,
Full often hath she gossip'd by my side,
And sat with me on Neptune's yellow sands,
Marking the embarked traders on the flood,
When we have laugh'd to see the sails conceive
And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind;
Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait
Following,.her womb then rich with my young squire,--
Would imitate, and sail upon the land,
To fetch me trifles, and return again,
As from a voyage, rich with merchandise.
But she, being mortal, of that boy did die;
And for her sake do I rear up her boy,
And for her sake I will not part with him.

---William Shakespeare

Hap Notes: Just a little taste of Shakespeare on his birthday (or, at least, the date we choose to celebrate it). I thought of using a sonnet or two but I really just wanted to show how Shakespeare's various characters inform his words and how his characters contribute to what Harold Bloom calls "the invention of the human." All these speeches reveal something complex about human behavior.

Othello is explaining how after he told Desdemona his life story, filled as it was with adventure, floods, being sold into slavery, hard labors, his escapes and many exploits, the story fills her with love and sympathy and admiration. (Shakespeare is telling us that a woman can love someone whose life story is well-told. Desdemona is moved by the events of his life. He does not woo her with flowery speeches, he speaks of military campaigns, cannibals and his own suffering. Why would she fall in love with him for this?)

Richard the III is explaining why his deformities prevent him from being a part of regular happy life and how, even if he wanted to join in he is spurned. Even his shadow reminds him of his physical limitations and while he cannot be a "normal" person, he is quite capable and determined to be a villain. (It's truly the first case I can think of where a brute villain's childhood has been his psychological underpinnings. His rejection by life causes his anger and his evil deeds.)

Third is the goddess Titania talking about a servant boy that her "mate" Oberon wants from her. It's her charming chat about her serving woman and herself bonded as sisters through talk and laughter together that charms me here. That and the "spiced Indian air" which sounds so romantic and beautiful on the beach. (Women bonding in friendship through joking and talk- cool stuff in the 1600s. Titania loves the child because she was good friends with the mother...another complex idea.)

Here are some funnier Shakespearean things for a Saturday:

First the enormously funny Reduced Shakespeare Company doing some of Hamlet: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLCbsuXwb6o

Here's Second City's "Sassy Gay Friend" with Ophelia: www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnvgq8STMGM&feature=relmfu

Last, the Slings and Arrows theme song for their Hamlet episodes: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mqioi08EIHQ

And a cartoon: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KGF3Tap94k

Number 133: Earth Day Throw-down (sorta) with Keats and Hunt

On the Grasshopper and the Cricket

The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper's -- he takes the lead
In summer luxury -- he has never done
With his delights; for when tired out with fun
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills.

--John Keats

On the Grasshopper and the Cricket

Green little vaulter in the sunny grass,
Catching your heart up at the feel of June,
Sole voice that's heard amidst the lazy noon,
When even the bees lag at the summoning brass,
And you, warm little housekeeper, who class
With those who think the candles come too soon,
Loving the fire, and with your tricksome tune
Nick the glad silent moments as they pass;
Oh sweet and tiny cousins, that belong,
One to the fields, the other to the hearth,
Both have your sunshine; both, though small, are strong
At your clear hearts; and both seem given to earth
To ring in thoughtful ears this natural song --
In doors and out, summer and winter, mirth.

--Leigh Hunt

Hap Notes: Yes, it's another little contest posed by Keats and Hunt to come up with a poem expressing the characteristics of grasshoppers and crickets. Let's pause for a moment to think how delightful it is to have poets "dueling" on a subject for good-natured sport.

Keats, by the way, favored Hunt's poem, which is a very humble thing under the circumstances since, once again, Keats sees just a little bit farther than Hunt does. Hunt's poem has its charms as well.

The poems are put up in honor of Earth Day and the reason I thought of the poems at all is because when I think of the word "earth" Keats' poem first occurs to me. (Take a word and then think of the poem it corresponds to that first pops up in the mind- it's a game I play with myself. Sometimes it's a lively game, sometimes, not so much.)

In the poems we see Keats likening the "songs" of the grasshopper and the cricket to poetry and in his last two lines we aren't entirely sure if it is the listener or the cricket who remembers the grasshopper's summer song. Keats tells us that the earth is full of poetry to those who listen. Keats' creatures sing because they must sing, as maybe a poet does, eh?

Hunt's approach is that the grasshopper is an athletic "vaulter" and the cricket a "housekeeper" but both have songs of mirth to gladden the ear. Hunt's creatures are our "tiny cousins" given to earth to sing for us. Hunt is no slouch and it's a lovely poem.

I'll not charge you to write a sonnet about crickets and grasshoppers but it might be fun to try it.

Here's where we have talked about Keats and Hunt in contest before: happopoemouse.blogspot.com/2011/02/numbers-59-and-60-keat-shelley-hunt.html

As far as crickets and grasshoppers go, they are somewhat related, both from the order Orthoptera. The grasshopper is diurnal the cricket is nocturnal. The grasshopper "sings" by rubbing his legs together, the cricket does the trick with his wings. All grasshoppers can fly, only some crickets can. There are about 900 cricket species and around 8,000 grasshopper species.