City Upon a Hill

* City upon a hill is a phrase from the parable of Salt and Light in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew 5:14, he tells his listeners, "You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden". It is commonly used in invocations or criticisms of American exceptionalism.



* John Winthrop was born in Groton, Suffolk, England in 1588. Educated at Cambridge University he practised law in London.

Stephen Crane, 1871 - 1900

A man said to the universe:
"Sir I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."

-- Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane was a war correspondent, fiction writer and poet. He is considered as pioneer of realism and a rebel against Romanticism. Crane was born in Newark (1871). He was the youngest of 14 children, and was very frail. His first published novel, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), a novel about a soldier in the Civil War, was very well received, although those critics who read it refused to believe that Crane was not a veteran soldier, since the story was so vivid, real and detailed. After The Red Badge of Courage was published, Crane released a book titled Maggie: Girl of the Streets, which he had written when he was 16 years old. Crane was also a war correspondent for The Westminster Gazette and The New York Journal for the Greco-Turkish War, and eventually went to Cuba as the Journal's correspondent, witnessing the operations at Santiago and Havana and Puerto Rico. He made his home in England, and died on June 6, 1900. Stephen Crane, who said: "The nearer a writer gets to life, the greater he becomes as an artist."

William Carlos Williams, 1883 - 1963

Men Die Miserably Every Day
from "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"

My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something
that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
Hear me out
for I too am concerned
and every man
who wants to die at peace in his bed
besides.

********

"so much depends"

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Walt Whitman, 1819 - 1892

Are You the New Person Drawn Toward Me?

Are you the new person drawn toward me?
To begin with take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose;
Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal?
Do you think it so easy to have me become your lover?
Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloy'd satisfaction?
Do you think I am trusty and faithful?
Do you see no further than this facade, this smooth and tolerant
manner of me?
Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man?
Have you no thought O dreamer that it may be all maya, illusion?

Tewa (Pueblo) poem

Oh our Mother the Earth, oh our Father the Sky,
Your children are we, and with tired backs
We bring you the gifts that you love.
Then weave for us a garment of brightness;
May the warp be the white light of morning,
May the weft be the red light of evening,
May the fringes be the falling rain,
May the border be the standing rainbow.
Thus weave for us a garment of brightness
That we may walk fittingly where birds sing,
That we may walk fittingly where grass is green,
Oh our Mother the Earth, oh our Father the Sky!

Tewa: a member of a cluster of pueblo-dwelling North American Indian peoples of New mexico and Arizona.

Warp:the set of yarns placed lengthwise in the loom, crossed by and interlaced with the weft, and forming the lengthwise threads in a woven fabric.

Weft: Textiles . yarn carried by the shuttle and interlacing at right angles with the warp in woven cloth

Fringe: a decorative border of thread, cord, or the like, usually hanging loosely from a raveled edge or separate strip.

Native American Prayer

Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining Pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every meadow, every humming insect.
All are holy in the memory and experience of my people. We know the sap which courses through our veins. We are part of the earth and its part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers.
The rocky crests, the juices in the meadow, the body heat of the pony, and man, all belong to the same family. The shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water, but the blood of our ancestors.
Each ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of my people. The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father. The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst. They carry our canoes and feed our children. So you must give to the rivers the kindness you would give any children.
So you must give to the rivers the kindness you would give any brother … Remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also receives his last sigh. The wind also gives our children the spirit of life.
Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the earth is our mother? What befalls the earth, befalls all the sons of the earth. This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth.
All things are connected like the blood which unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
- Chief Seattle Prayer

Welcome to American Literature at FACO

Approach: The emphasis of the course will not be on information, but on finding our critical individual voice for evaluating and understanding the American literary experience that spans over five centuries. Genuine American literature has been to a large extent a pioneer experience. It has been the expression of a hope to arrive at a unique personal account vis à vis the surrounding universe. Emerson in his famous essay Self Reliance exhorts his readers to “judge for yourself” and Emily Dickinson promotes the individual “house” of human consciousness that is able “to support itself”. This attitude is at the core of American experience. To thoroughly come to terms with this viewpoint one needs at the end to stand on one’s own intellectual feet and judge for oneself.

Practical Criticism:
Practical criticism is, like the formal study of English literature itself, a relatively young discipline. It began in the 1920s with a series of experiments by the Cambridge critic I.A. Richards. He gave poems to students without any information about who wrote them or when they were written. In Practical Criticism of 1929 he reported on and analysed the results of his experiments. The objective of his work was to encourage students to concentrate on 'the words on the page', rather than relying on preconceived or received beliefs about a text. For Richards this form of close analysis of anonymous poems was ultimately intended to have psychological benefits for the students: by responding to all the currents of emotion and meaning in the poems and passages of prose which they read the students were to achieve what Richards called an 'organised response'. This meant that they would clarify the various currents of thought in the poem and achieve a corresponding clarification of their own emotions.



Evaluation:
1) Diary: An ongoing record based on a short summary of authors and concepts discussed in the class plus one or two paragraphs of personal comments and criticism at the end of each entry. Neatness and legibility is important.


2) Seminar: Every student will be responsible for presenting at least one seminar per semester. Students should choose a topic ahead of time (a list will be provided) and offer an oral presentation to the class lasting between ten to fifteen minutes. A team of two to three students can work together on a topic and offer a joint presentation.


3) Regular attendance and active participation in the discussions.


4) Use of secondary material without providing the source will be considered plagiarism.


Recommended Texts:

1) An Outline of American Literature by Peter B. High, Longman, 1986
2) An Introduction to American Literature: time present and time past by Françoise Grellet, Hachette
3) La Littérature américaine par Dominique Lescanne, Langues Pour Tous, 2004



Objective: This course aims at a critical survey of texts that are representative of American thought and literature. It will include extracts from novels, short stories, plays, essays and poetry. The works of major American authors will be examined in the following order: 
Native American outlook
Puritan Legacy: John Winthrop, William Bradford (1590-1657)
Benjamin Franklin ( 1706-1790)
Thomas Jefferson ( 1743-1826)
Washington Irving ( 1783-1859)
Ralph Waldo Emerson ( 1803-82)
Mark Twain ( 1835-1910)



Words to ponder: "There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong. "

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

America
by Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair'd in the adamant of Time.

The life of Pi

Yann Martel was born on June 25, 1963, in Salamanca, Spain, to Canadian parents.

There, while sipping coffee in a café in the town of Pondicherry, he met an elderly man named Francis Adirubasamy who offered to tell him a story.


Piscine Molitor Patel

Pi’s companion throughout his ordeal at sea is Richard Parker, a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger.

Tips for the Oral Exam

1) Be prepared to discuss "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" by J.D. Salinger

2) Choose one poem from the poems we studied in class and be prepared to talk about it at length

3) Make sure your diary is complete and in good order

4) Those who memorize the following poem by Robert Frost and are prepared to discuss it earn themselves extra marks:

Robert Frost, 1874 - 1963

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.


________

Emily Dickinson, 1830 - 1886

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant


Tell all the Truth but tell it slant---
Success in Cirrcuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind---

________


by Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803–1882

What makes a nation's pillars high
And it's foundations strong?
What makes it mighty to defy
The foes that round it throng?

It is not gold. Its kingdoms grand
Go down in battle shock;
Its shafts are laid on sinking sand,
Not on abiding rock.

Is it the sword? Ask the red dust
Of empires passed away;
The blood has turned their stones to rust,
Their glory to decay.

And is it pride? Ah, that bright crown
Has seemed to nations sweet;
But God has struck its luster down
In ashes at his feet.

Not gold but only men can make
A people great and strong;
Men who for truth and honor's sake
Stand fast and suffer long.

Brave men who work while others sleep,
Who dare while others fly...
They build a nation's pillars deep
And lift them to the sky.
__________

Walt Whitman, 1819 - 1892

Song of the Open Road

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.

The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
I am fill'd with them, and I will fill them in return.)

American Revolutionary War

When it came to the war and the losses of life, about 7,200 Americans were killed in battle during the Revolutionary War. Approximately 8,200 were wounded. Around 10,000 others died in military camps from disease or exposure. Some 8,500 would die in prison after being captured by the British. American military deaths from all causes during the war adds up to 25,700 people.
In addition, approximately 1,400 soldiers were missing.
British military deaths total about 10,000.

Robert Frost, 1874 - 1963

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

*************

A Prayer in Spring

Robert Frost (1915)


Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.

And make us happy in the darting bird
That suddenly above the bees is heard,
The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,
And off a blossom in mid air stands still.

For this is love and nothing else is love,
The which it is reserved for God above
To sanctify to what far ends He will,
But which it only needs that we fulfil.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803 - 1882

Compensation

Why should I keep holiday,
When other men have none?
Why but because when these are gay,
I sit and mourn alone.

And why when mirth unseals all tongues
Should mine alone be dumb?
Ah! late I spoke to silent throngs,
And now their hour is come.

_____________________

What makes a nation's pillars high
And it's foundations strong?
What makes it mighty to defy
The foes that round it throng?

It is not gold. Its kingdoms grand
Go down in battle shock;
Its shafts are laid on sinking sand,
Not on abiding rock.

Is it the sword? Ask the red dust
Of empires passed away;
The blood has turned their stones to rust,
Their glory to decay.

And is it pride? Ah, that bright crown
Has seemed to nations sweet;
But God has struck its luster down
In ashes at his feet.

Not gold but only men can make
A people great and strong;
Men who for truth and honor's sake
Stand fast and suffer long.

Brave men who work while others sleep,
Who dare while others fly...
They build a nation's pillars deep
And lift them to the sky.

Yann Martel born June 25, 1963

Yann Martel wrote a big best seller about a boy and a tiger in a lifeboat: Yann Martel was born in Salamanca, Spain (1963). His father was a Canadian diplomat, and he grew up in Alaska, British Columbia, Costa Rica, France, Ontario, and Mexico. He studied philosophy, and then worked odd jobs — as a tree planter, a dishwasher, and a security guard — and he started to write. He wrote some stories, and then a novel, Self (1996), about a man who turns into a woman on his 18th birthday. It won plenty of awards, but it didn't sell very well.
He was feeling burnt out and had no idea what to do with his life, so he went to India, where he felt even worse. He was lonely, and he tried to write a novel but it failed. He left Bombay for Matheran, a quiet hill station where all motor vehicles were outlawed. And it was there, sitting on a boulder, that he suddenly thought of a book review he had read many years ago. The book was by a Brazilian writer, and its premise was that a German Jewish family who owned a zoo tried to escape to Brazil, but the ship ended up sinking and one family member was left alone in a lifeboat with a black panther. Martel loved the premise, and so he made it his own.
He spent the next six months researching Indian zoos, churches and mosques, and cities. He went back to Canada and wrote a story about an Indian teenager named Pi Patel, who calls himself a Hindu, Muslim, and Christian. Pi is the son of a zookeeper, and his family leaves India for Canada to begin life there. They are shipwrecked, and Pi ends up in a lifeboat with a few animals, and eventually, only a tiger named Richard Parker. Yann Martel said, "The idea of a religious boy in a lifeboat with a wild animal struck me as a perfect metaphor for the human condition. Humans aspire to really high things, right, like religion, justice, democracy. At the same time, we're rooted in our human, animal condition. And so, all of those brought together in a lifeboat struck me as being … as a perfect metaphor." The novel ends with a surprise twist that asks the reader to rethink the entire plot. In 2001, Martel published the book, Life of Pi, which became a best seller and won the Booker Prize.

Henry James (1843-1916)

A few famous quotations from Henry James (1843-1916)

*The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million... but they are, singly or together, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher. The Portrait of a Lady (1908 ed.) preface

*It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance . . . and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

*To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

*Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

*Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had?

*Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.

Benjamin Franklin, 1706 - 1790

Emily Dickinson, 1830 - 1886

These are the days when Birds come back—
A very few—a Bird or two—
To take a backward look.

These are the days when skies resume
The old—old sophistries of June—
A blue and gold mistake

Oh fraud that cannot cheat the Bee—
Almost thy plausibility
Induces my belief.

Till ranks of seeds their witness bear—
And softly thro' the altered air
Hurries a timid leaf.

Oh Sacrament of summer days,
Oh Last Communion in the Haze—
Permit a child to join

Thy sacred emblems to partake—
Thy consecrated bread to take
And thine immortal wine!

Wallace Stevens, 1879 - 1955

The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.


-- from Harmonium , 1923

Poet Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania (1879). He was one of the few great writers to work in corporate America. He was an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. He worked his way up to vice president. Almost nobody at the office knew that he was a poet, even after he became famous in the literary world. Stevens said, "I'm sure that most people here in Hartford know nothing about the poetry, and I'm equally sure that I don't want them to know because once they know, they don't seem to get over it. I mean that once they know, they never think of you as anything but a poet and, after all, one is inevitably much more complicated than that."
He woke up early, read for a few hours, and then composed his poems in his head while he walked to work. His wife didn't want him to publish anything, but he finally came out with a collection in 1923, Harmonium, which got almost no critical attention, though eventually it came to be seen as one of the most accomplished poetry debuts in literary history, including his famous poems, "Sunday Morning," and "Peter Quince at the Clavier," and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Stevens was so disappointed in the reception of his first book that he stopped writing poetry for almost a decade. But he eventually started up again and published many more books, including Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), The Auroras of Autumn (1947), and An Ordinary Evening in New Haven (1950).
Wallace Stevens said, "It is not every day that the world arranges itself in a poem."


*A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

*After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.

*Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Wallace Stevens

*In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

*In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

****************

"The Man with the Blue Guitar" (excerpts)

I

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."

And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."

II

I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.

I sing a hero's head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,

Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.

If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,

Say it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

III

Ah, but to play man number one,
To drive the dagger in his heart,

To lay his brain upon the board
And pick the acrid colors out,

To nail his thought across the door,
Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,

To strike his living hi and ho,
To tick it, tock it, turn it true,

To bang from it a savage blue,
Jangling the metal of the strings�

IV

Richard Ford, February 16 1944 -

Novelist Richard Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi (1944). He's best known as the author of the novels The Sportswriter (1985) and Independence Day (1995). He has said that one of the reasons he became a writer is that he was mildly dyslexic as a child and had to concentrate on words more intensely than most people. He also lived across the street from novelist and short story writer Eudora Welty, and his mother used to point her out to him as someone to look up to.

After his father had a heart attack, Ford went to live with his grandparents, who managed a hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas. He went to college to study hotel management, but when he got there he realized what he really wanted to do was read literature, and he switched his major to English. After college, he taught for a year, tried to join the Arkansas State Police, and spent a semester at law school. In 1968, he moved to New York City, got married, and decided on a whim to try to become a writer. He said he wanted to do something different, and "being a writer just seemed like a good idea. It was just casting off into the dark."

Ford's first novel, A Piece of My Heart, came out in 1976. He followed that up with The Ultimate Good Luck (1981). The two books together sold fewer than 12,000 copies, and Ford started thinking that maybe he wasn't cut out for writing novels. He quit writing fiction and got a job as a sportswriter for Inside Sports magazine, covering baseball and college football. He liked his new job and would have kept at it if the magazine hadn't have folded the following year. He didn't have anything else to do, so he started writing a novel about a fiction writer who becomes a sportswriter after the death of his son. The Sportswriter was published as in 1986, and it was huge critical and popular success. He wrote in The Sportswriter, "I had written all I was going to write, if the truth had been known, and there is nothing wrong with that. If more writers knew that, the world would be saved a lot of bad books, and more people—men and women alike—could go on to happier, more productive lives."

Ford's 1995 novel Independence Day picks up where The Sportswriter left off, with the sportswriter now a realtor trying to connect with his wife and his teenage son. After Ford finished writing it, he read aloud the whole 700-page manuscript, twice. Just before it was going to be published, his editor mentioned offhand that there were quite a few verbs that ended in "-ly". Ford agreed, and spent two weeks going back through the novel to change all the "-ly" verbs he could. All of his work paid off: Independence Day won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995.

Ford said, "If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure."


It's the birthday of critic and biographer Van Wyck Brooks, born in Plainfield, New Jersey (1886). His early twentieth century biographies of American writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Washington Irving, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman helped to create a sense of history in American literature.

Brooks said, "The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but by newspapers and the Bible."

*Fear and hope are alike underneath.

*It's interesting to leave a place, interesting even to think about it. Leaving reminds us of what we can part with and what we can't, then offers us something new to look forward to, to dream about.

*Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known.

*There's a lot to be said for doing what you're not supposed to do, and the rewards of doing what you're supposed to do are more subtle and take longer to become apparent, which maybe makes it less attractive. But your life is the blueprint you make after the building is built.

*Writing is the only thing I've ever done with persistence, except for being married.

J.D. Salinger, 1919 - 2010

Jerome David Salinger, the novelist J.D. Salinger was born in New York City in 1919. He wanted to be a writer, and his dream was to publish his fiction in The New Yorker, which rejected his work over and over. In November of 1941, he finally got an acceptance letter from The New Yorker for a short story called "Slight Rebellion Off Madison," about a teenager named Holden Caulfield. It was set to come out in the Christmas issue, but then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and the story was put on hold. Salinger was drafted into the Army, deployed in the ground force invasion of Normandy, and he was part of the Battle of the Bulge and some of the worst fighting of WWII. When the war ended, Salinger checked into an Army general hospital in Nuremberg, suffering from shell shock. In 1946, The New Yorker finally published "Slight Rebellion Off Madison." Salinger took the character of Holden Caulfield, and he wrote an entire novel about him. And even though it got mixed reviews and Salinger refused to help with publicity at all, it was a best seller: The Catcher in the Rye (1951). And Salinger became a celebrity, which he hated, so he became a recluse.

William Carlos Williams, 1883 - 1963

Spring and All

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken

[1923]

Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1892 - 1950

SPRING

O what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.