100 Poems to Break Your Heart Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  WILLIAM WORDSWORTH: “Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind” (1815, 1820)

  JOHN KEATS: “This living hand” (1819)

  JOHN CLARE: “I am” (c. 1847)

  ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON: In Memoriam, VII (c. 1848)

  GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS: “Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend” (1889)

  CONSTANTINE CAVAFY: “The God Abandons Antony” (1910)

  THOMAS HARDY: “The Voice” (1912)

  EDWARD THOMAS: “The Owl” (1915)

  GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE: “The Pretty Redhead” (1918)

  EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY: “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why” (1920)

  LANGSTON HUGHES: “Song for a Dark Girl” (1927)

  CHARLOTTE MEW: “Rooms” (c. 1929)

  CÉSAR VALLEJO: “Black Stone Lying on a White Stone” (1930)

  ALFONSINA STORNI: “I’m Going to Sleep” (1938)

  JULIA DE BURGOS: “To Julia de Burgos” (1938)

  ANNA AKHMATOVA: “In Memory of M. B.” (1940)

  MIKLÓS RADNÓTI: “The Fifth Eclogue” (1943)

  CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ: “Café” (1944)

  KADYA MOLODOWSKY: “Merciful God” (1945)

  PRIMO LEVI: “Shemà” (1946)

  NZIM HIKMET: “On Living” (1948)

  WELDON KEES: “Aspects of Robinson” (1948)

  GWENDOLYN BROOKS: “The rites for Cousin Vit” (1949)

  STEVIE SMITH: “Not Waving but Drowning” (1953, 1957)

  TADEUSZ RÓŻEWICZ: “In the Midst of Life” (1955)

  DAHLIA RAVIKOVITCH: “On the road at night there stands the man” (1959)

  JORGE LUIS BORGES: “Poem of the Gifts” (1960)

  GWEN HARWOOD: “In the Park” (1961)

  ROBERT HAYDEN: “The Whipping” (1962)

  ROBERT LOWELL: “Night Sweat” (1963)

  ANNE SEXTON: “Wanting to Die” (1964)

  ROSE AUSLÄNDER: “My Nightingale” (1965)

  RANDALL JARRELL: “Next Day” (1965)

  J. V. CUNNINGHAM: “Montana Fifty Years Ago” (1967)

  W. S. MERWIN: “For the Anniversary of My Death” (1967)

  MURIEL RUKEYSER: “Poem” (1968)

  ETHERIDGE KNIGHT: “The Idea of Ancestry” (1968)

  JOHN BERRYMAN: “Henry’s Understanding” (1969)

  L. E. SISSMAN: “A Deathplace” (1969)

  PHILIP LEVINE: “They Feed They Lion” (1969)

  SOPHIA DE MELLO BREYNER ANDRESEN: “The Small Square” (1972)

  WISŁAWA SZYMBORSKA: “Under One Small Star” (1972)

  RICHARD HUGO: “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg” (1973)

  STEPHEN BERG: “On This Side of the River” (1975)

  PHILIP LARKIN: “Aubade” (1977)

  WILLIAM MEREDITH: “Parents” (1978)

  HAYDEN CARRUTH: “Essay” (1978)

  JAMES SCHUYLER: “Arches” (1978)

  NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: “Kindness” (1978, 1994)

  ALLEN GROSSMAN: “The Woman on the Bridge over the Chicago River” (1979)

  ANTHONY HECHT: “The Book of Yolek” (1981)

  ZBIGNIEW HERBERT: “Mr Cogito and the Imagination” (1983)

  C. K. WILLIAMS: “From My Window” (1983)

  LOUISE GLÜCK: “Night Song” (1983)

  SHARON OLDS: “The Race” (1983)

  DONALD JUSTICE: “In Memory of the Unknown Poet, Robert Boardman Vaughn” (1984)

  GERALD STERN: “The Dancing” (1984)

  JOY HARJO: “For Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, Whose Spirit Is Present Here and in the Dappled Stars (for we remember the story and must tell it again so we may all live)” (1985)

  GARRETT HONGO: “Mendocino Rose” (1987)

  ADRIENNE RICH: “(Dedications)” (1990–91)

  THOM GUNN: “The Gas-poker” (1991)

  HEATHER MCHUGH: “What He Thought” (1991)

  LES MURRAY: “It Allows a Portrait in Line-Scan at Fifteen”

  THOMAS LUX: “The People of the Other Village” (1993)

  LINDA GREGERSON: “For the Taking” (1993)

  NICHOLAS CHRISTOPHER: “Terminus” (1993)

  MARIE HOWE: “What the Living Do” (1994)

  DUNYA MIKHAIL: “The War Works Hard” (1994)

  STANLEY KUNITZ: “Halley’s Comet” (1995)

  BRIGIT PEGEEN KELLY: “Song” (1995)

  ROSANNA WARREN: “Simile” (1996)

  FRANK BIDART: “In Memory of Joe Brainard” (1997)

  LUCILLE CLIFTON: “jasper texas 1998” (1998)

  CYNTHIA HUNTINGTON: “The Rapture” (2000)

  RICHARD HOWARD: “Elementary Principles at Seventy-Two” (2001)

  EAVAN BOLAND: “Quarantine” (2001)

  AGI MISHOL: “Woman Martyr” (2002)

  HARRYETTE MULLEN: “We Are Not Responsible” (2002)

  GALWAY KINNELL: “Shelley” (2004)

  VIJAY SESHADRI: “Aphasia” (2004)

  MARY SZYBIST: “On Wanting to Tell [ ] About a Girl Eating Fish Eyes” (2004)

  MARY OLIVER: “Lead” (2005)

  ANYA KRUGOVOY SILVER: “Persimmon” (2005)

  PATRICIA SMITH: “Ethel’s Sestina” (2006)

  CAROLYN CREEDON: “Woman, Mined” (2006)

  NATASHA TRETHEWEY: “Graveyard Blues” (2006)

  CAMILLE DUNGY: “Requiem” (2006)

  PETER EVERWINE: “Aubade in Autumn” (2007)

  TONY HOAGLAND: “Barton Springs” (2007)

  PHILIP SCHULTZ: “Failure” (2007)

  MICHAEL COLLIER: “An Individual History” (2007)

  LUCIA PERILLO: “The Second Slaughter” (2008)

  MICHAEL WATERS: “Old School” (2010)

  LUCIE BROCK-BROIDO: “Infinite Riches in the Smallest Room” (2013)

  YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA: “The African Burial Ground” (2014)

  KATE DANIELS: “The Addict’s Mother: Birth Story” (2014–15)

  AFAA MICHAEL WEAVER: “Spirit Boxing” (2015)

  VICTORIA CHANG: “Obit [The Blue Dress]” (2016)

  TOI DERRICOTTE: “Pantoum for the Broken” (2017)

  MEENA ALEXANDER: “Krishna, 3:29 A.M.” (2018)

  Acknowledgments

  Credits

  About the Author

  Connect With HMH

  Copyright © 2021 by Edward Hirsch

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hirsch, Edward, editor.

  Title: 100 poems to break your heart / Edward Hirsch.

  Other titles: One hundred poems to break your heart

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020033839 (print) | LCCN 2020033840 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544931886 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780544931800 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Poetry—Collections. | Poetry—Translations into English. | Poetry—History and criticism.

  Classification: LCC PN6101 .A1638 2021 (print) | LCC PN6101 (ebook) | DDC808.81—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020033839

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020033840

  Cover design by Mark Robinson

  Author photograph © Julie Dermansky

  v2.0321r />
  Excerpt from The Witness of Poetry by Czesław Miłosz. Copyright © 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Used by permission of Harvard University Press. Excerpt from the essay “The Real and the Paradigms” by Czesław Miłosz published in Poetry Australia. Copyright © 1979 by Czesław Miłosz. Used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.

  Credits for poems are listed on pages 483 to 492.

  In memory of

  Irma Hirsch (1928–2019)

  In a murderous time

  the heart breaks and breaks

  and lives by breaking.

  —Stanley Kunitz, “The Testing-Tree”

  Introduction

  We live in distracting times. Our superficial, materialistic, media-driven culture often seems uncomfortable with true depths of feeling. It’s as if the culture as a whole has become increasingly intolerant of that acute sorrow, that intense mental anguish and remorse that can be defined as grief. We want to medicate such sorrow away. We want to divide it into recognizable stages so that grief can be tamed, labeled, and put behind us. But poets have always celebrated grief as one of the strongest human emotions, one of our signature feelings.

  Implicit in poetry is the notion that we are deepened by heartbreaks, by the recognition and understanding of suffering—not just our own suffering but also the suffering of others. We are not so much diminished as enlarged by grief, by our refusal to vanish, or to let others vanish, without leaving a verbal record. The poet is one who will not be reconciled, who is determined to leave a trace in words, to transform oceanic depths of feeling into the faithful nuances of art.

  Poetry companions us. Poems are written in solitude, but they reach out to others, which makes poetry a social act. It rises out of one solitude to meet another. Poems of terrible sadness and loss trouble and challenge us, but they also make us feel less alone and more connected. Our own desolations become more recognizable to us, more articulate, something shared. We become less isolated in our sorrow, and thus are befriended by the words of another. There is something ennobling in grief that is compacted, expressed, and transfigured into poetry.

  I know that I have brought my own griefs and sympathies to bear in the reading and writing of poetry. Over the course of my life, I have been vastly enriched by heartbreaking poems from many different eras and languages. In this book, I have chosen poems from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. I have selected poems that have been especially meaningful to me, and I have tried to illuminate them—for myself as well as for others. My goal is to create a dramatic, sometimes biographical, often historical context for the poems, explaining their references, teasing out their meanings, unpacking them. I have tried to show how poems work, how their techniques operate in the service of their subjects. My desire is not to explain poems away, but to enable the reader to experience them more completely and more humanly.

  A word about nomenclature. The poems in this book are extreme human documents, but they are also poems, made things. Many of them deal with intensely personal experiences that have been transformed into art. In writing about each poem, I’ve tried to honor the life experience of the poet who wrote it while also paying close attention to the art of the maker. That’s why I tend to use the phrase “the poet” when I’m discussing an author’s craft and intention. I use the phrase “the speaker,” the constructed “I,” for the figure who narrates the poem. This is complicated by the fact that, either intentionally or unintentionally, many of these poems blur the distinction. In such cases it’s accurate to say that the speaker serves as a stand-in for the poet. I’ve tried to be responsive to the personhood of individual works while also heeding Emily Dickinson’s warning to Thomas Higginson: “When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse—it does not mean—Me—but a supposed person.”

  In discussing these poems, I’ve avoided technical language whenever possible, but sometimes, especially in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century metrical poems, I have resorted to formal terms and metrical analysis. Many of these earlier poems were written in blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter, the five-beat, ten-syllable line that has characterized so much of English-language poetry. It has been estimated that three-fourths of all English poetry up until the twentieth century is written in blank verse, which suggests that it is the modal pattern in English, the pattern closest to natural speech, and therefore it has often been used to evoke the spoken word, to create a speaker in a dramatic situation.

  This book includes sonnets and sestinas, aubades and elegies, an eclogue, a villanelle, a blues poem, a night song or nocturne, a pantoum, prose poems, lyrics that rhyme and lyrics that don’t, intentional and unintentional fragments, poems pitched at the level of speech, others that sing. There are prayers and anti-prayers. There are many nonce forms—that is, poetic forms invented for a single purpose; “for the nonce” means “for the occasion.” Each one has a discernible pattern. Throughout this book, I’ve explained the forms and tried to find a vocabulary to describe each poem on its own terms. I hope this language isn’t intimidating.

  So too certain formal elements recur throughout, such as the difference between end-stopped and enjambed lines; understanding this distinction is crucial to the reading of lyric poems. In an end-stopped line, a natural grammatical pause, such as the end of a phrase, clause, or sentence, coincides with the end of a line. It slows or halts the movement of the verse and creates the sense of the line as a whole syntactical unit, which gives it rhetorical weight and authority, a meaning unto itself. The alternative is an enjambed, or run-over, line. Enjambment is the carryover of one line of poetry to the next without a grammatical break. It creates a dialectical motion of hesitation and flow. The lineation bids the reader to pause at the end of each line, yet the syntax pulls the reader forward. This creates a sensation of hovering expectation. In 1668 John Milton called enjambment “the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another.” It breaks the sense of the line as a terminus.

  I have included a wide range of poems that have been translated into English from many different languages. It is ideal, of course, to read such a poem in the original. But it’s also unlikely that any one reader would know all these languages, since this book includes poems from Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Hungarian, Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, Turkish, German, Portuguese, and Arabic. I have spoken to poets and translators working in these languages whenever possible. I’ve read the criticism available in English, but I’m aware that my formal analysis is necessarily limited by my own linguistic constraints. There is always something untranslatable about a poem. Yet these poems also bring us a sensibility, a range of tones and feelings, that aren’t otherwise available in English. They add to the sum of our human experience.

  These one hundred poems include a wide range of poets. There are varieties of grief, and I recognize that I have identified only some of them. This book isn’t meant to be definitive—there are hundreds of other poets writing in many disparate languages whose work has moved me over the years. I wish I had the space to include them all. I encourage you to put together your own personal anthology. In the meantime, I hope you’ll find the poems I’ve chosen as moving as I have found them. No one escapes unscathed—we all have our hearts broken. And yet, as Czesław Miłosz puts it in his “Elegy for N. N.,” “the heart does not die when one thinks it should.” Despite everything, we go on. We might even say that we live to have our hearts broken—and restored.

  Here are one hundred poems to break your heart.

  William Wordsworth

  * * *

  “Surprised by joy

  —impatient as the Wind”

  (1815, 1820)

  On the night of June 4, 1812, William Wordsworth’s daughter Catherine died suddenly after a series of convulsions. She was not quite four years old. To make matters worse, both her parents were away, and Wordsworth did not even learn about his daughter’s death until a week later, when she was already buried in Grasmere. In Decembe
r the parents were struck again when their son Thomas died of measles and was buried next to his sister. He was six years old.

  “Surprised by joy” was, as Wordsworth recollected, “Suggested by my daughter Catherine, long after her death.” It was the only piece he wrote for her. The poet is clearly the speaker of this poem, which commemorates the two worst “pangs” of his life.

  Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind

  I turned to share the transport—Oh! With whom

  But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb,

  That spot which no vicissitude can find?

  Love, faithful love recalled thee to my mind—

  But how could I forget thee?—Through what power,

  Even for the least division of an hour,

  Have I been so beguiled as to be blind

  To my most grievous loss?—That thought’s return

  Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,

  Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,

  Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more;

  That neither present time, nor years unborn

  Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.

  Wordsworth’s sonnet unfolds in fourteen regular iambic pentameter lines. Inspired by the Petrarchan sonnet form, the rhyme scheme is tight: abbaaccadedede. Many of Wordsworth’s sonnets are grandly rhetorical, fit for public declamation, but this poem is different, tender and filled with self-reproach. It begins emphatically with an indelible phrase, “Surprised by joy,” which carries a sense of radical unexpectedness. Wordsworth’s poems are filled with serendipitous moments, and here the poet is startled into delight over something he has just seen, which leads him to turn toward his companion in order to share that delight.

  “Joy” was one of Wordsworth’s favorite words. For example, he used it nearly fifty times in The Prelude, where joy almost always expresses a feeling of infinity revealed through nature, a spot of time. Wordsworth’s pantheistic spirit, which usually came to him in solitude, is all the more poignant here because he so naturally wants to share it with his daughter and cannot. Thus, the shock of loss replaces the feeling of joy. In The Story of Joy the scholar Adam Potkay recognizes that “Wordsworth’s sonnet of joy is his great poem of sorrow.”