100 Poems to Break Your Heart Read online

  Speaking for all who lay under the stars,

  Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.

  Thomas first published this poem under the title “Those Others.” Later he decided the title was too editorial and changed it to “The Owl.” This bird is the trigger to the lyric, which begins outdoors, like almost all of Thomas’s poems. Thomas was a peripatetic poet, a walker in the country who loved the mysteries of nature. Here, the speaker comes to a place of rest after a winter tramp in the countryside. The poem begins emphatically and immediately captures the rhythm and feeling of hurrying to the end of a long walk—“Downhill I came . . .” The wanderer is careful to explain his state with some exactitude: how he is hungry but not starved, cold but not frozen, tired but not so exhausted that rest was impossible.

  The second stanza moves from the cold, windy outdoors to the refuge of an inn, where the speaker feels lucky to find lodging. Now that he is inside, he can enjoy the sweetness of “food, fire, and rest”; they are the antidote to his condition: “hungry, cold, and tired.” The speaker feels relieved that the walls and roof of the inn keep the dangers of night outside—“All of the night was quite barred out except”—though the word “except” at the end of this enjambed line indicates that something of the night will penetrate this shelter. What the inn cannot keep out is “An owl’s cry,” which completes the stanza and the first half of this sixteen-line poem. Thomas decided to rhyme the second and fourth lines of each stanza (abcb), as in many ballads, and here he gets special effect from pairing the words “I” and “cry.” It is this cry that unsettles the speaker.

  Notice how that cry is “Shaken out long and clear” not only “upon the hill” but also across a line and stanza break, which prolongs and emphasizes its poignancy. Thomas is specifically distinguishing this owl’s “most melancholy cry” from the owl in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour Lost (act 5, scene 2): “Then nightly sings the staring owl ‘Tu-whit, to-who!’— / A merry note.” Thomas’s owl is “No merry note, nor cause of merriment.” Rather, it is a note that, in another dramatic enjambment, reminds the speaker of “what I escaped / And others could not, that night, as in I went.”

  This final line of the third stanza serves as an important hinge in the poem. Not only is it the only eleven-syllable line in a poem composed entirely of ten-syllable lines; it is also the first reference to “those others” of Thomas’s original title, and the poem’s true, underlying subject. Though Thomas does not yet reveal who the “others” are or what, exactly, he “escaped / And others could not,” the line continues with “that night, as in I went.” In this context, “that night” can be read not only as an element of the setting but also as the very thing the others could not escape. Recall that what was not “quite barred out” by the inn was “the night,” which in the poem embodies the perils of being outdoors, exposed, unprotected. This distinction between inside and outside, which occurs from the poem’s outset, opposes “that night” to “in I went,” punning on the words “in” and “inn.”

  The first line of the poem’s final, powerful stanza, like the preceding line, begins with the word “And,” which creates a correspondence between the two lines, the two stanzas. Because the speaker has escaped what others couldn’t, not only is his food “salted,” but so is his sleep. The word salted means “flavored” or “seasoned” but also carries connotations of tears, of salt poured on open wounds, so that we understand that his rest is disturbed. We hear the emphatic repetition of s and z sounds, which solemnly whisper through the last stanza, binding many of the key words to one another.

  And salted was my food, and my repose,

  Salted and sobered, too, by the bird’s voice

  Speaking for all who lay under the stars,

  Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.

  Now “the owl’s cry” has been transformed into “the bird’s voice,” which speaks for those who “lay under the stars” rather than “under a roof.”

  The final line blows open and clinches the poem by revealing those for whom the bird’s voice speaks: “Soldiers and poor.” Thomas doesn’t condescend to a class of people by referring to “the poor”; thus, “poor” can be read both as an adjective modifying the word “soldiers” (poor soldiers) and as a noun (poor people). The final rhyme emphasizes that the bird’s voice does not sing but speaks for all those unable to rejoice. The word “unable” also underscores the stark truth that anyone living outdoors deprived of shelter is not necessarily able, as the speaker is, to procure “food, fire, and rest” when “hungry, cold, and tired.”

  It is not until this sobering last line that we finally recognize “The Owl” as a war poem, a lyric that connects, and opposes, military and civilian life. What Thomas had thus far “escaped” was enlistment in World War I, the historical reality that others could not evade, which the poem represents as the uncomfortable world outside, the night. Like the voice of Hardy’s late wife in “The Voice,” the voice of the owl speaks as the poet’s restless conscience.

  Edward Thomas enlisted three months after he wrote “The Owl,” an early war poem that refuses to sound a triumphant or patriotic note. His decision to serve reflected what Walter de la Mare called his “compassionate and suffering heart,” but it would also lead to his undoing. On April 9, 1917, he died by shell blast in the Battle of Arras on the western front, at the age of thirty-five.

  Guillaume Apollinaire

  * * *

  “The Pretty Redhead”

  (1918)

  Guillaume Apollinaire was a bohemian poet and critic at the artistic center of Paris, which was the artistic center of Europe, but he was also an outsider, a Roman-born foreigner who desperately wanted to become a French citizen. He volunteered for World War I in 1914 and fought on the front lines—first as part of the artillery, then as an infantry officer. He was badly hurt in 1916, sustaining a shrapnel wound to the temple, and was invalided out of active service. He returned to Paris, where he continued his charmed battles in art, drama, and poetry, but he never fully recovered his health. Apollinaire died of influenza two days before the Armistice of 1918.

  He was thirty-eight years old.

  The pretty redhead of the poem’s title refers to Jacqueline Kolb, whom Apollinaire married in 1918. She also appears in his novel The Seated Woman as “pretty Coral, a redhead with nut-brown eyes, who altogether resembled a drop of blood on the tip of a sword.” However, “La Jolie Rousse” is not a love poem addressed to his beloved but a condensed memoir about World War I, a meditation on tradition and innovation in art, and a poet’s last testimony. It is the final poem in Apollinaire’s second and final book of poems, Calligrammes (1918), which was subtitled Poems of Peace and War.

  The Pretty Redhead

  I stand here in the sight of everyone a man full of sense

  Knowing life and knowing of death what a living man can know

  Having gone through the griefs and happinesses of love

  Having known sometimes how to impose his ideas

  Knowing several languages

  Having travelled more than a little

  Having seen war in the artillery and the infantry

  Wounded in the head trepanned under chloroform

  Having lost his best friends in the horror of battle

  * * *

  I know as much as one man alone can know

  Of the ancient and the new

  And without troubling myself about this war today

  Between us and for us my friends

  I judge this long quarrel between tradition and imagination

  Between order and adventure

  * * *

  You whose mouth is made in the image of God’s mouth

  Mouth which is order itself

  Judge kindly when you compare us

  With those who were the very perfection of order

  We who are seeking everywhere for adventure

  * * *

  We are not your enemies

  Who want to
give ourselves vast domains

  Where mystery flowers into any hands that long for it

  Where there are new fires colors never seen

  A thousand fantasies difficult to make sense out of

  They must be made real

  All we want is to explore kindness the enormous country where everything is silent

  And there is time which somebody can banish or welcome home

  Pity for us who fight always on the frontiers

  Of the illimitable and the future

  Pity our mistakes pity our sins

  * * *

  Here summer is coming the violent season

  And so my youth is as dead as spring

  Oh Sun it is the time of reason grown passionate

  And I am still waiting

  To follow the forms she takes noble and gentle

  So I may love her alone

  She comes and draws me as a magnet draws filaments of iron

  She has the lovely appearance

  Of an adorable redhead

  Her hair turns golden you would say

  A beautiful lightning flash that goes on and on

  Or the flames that spread out their feathers

  In wilting tea roses

  * * *

  But laugh laugh at me

  Men everywhere especially people from here

  For there are so many things that I don’t dare to tell you

  So many things that you would not let me say

  Have pity on me

  (Translated by James Wright)

  “The Pretty Redhead” is an unpunctuated lyric in vers libre, free verse. It follows no preexistent pattern, and the absence of punctuation gives it a liberated and spacious feeling. The night before he published his first book, Alcools (1913), Apollinaire impulsively decided to drop all punctuation from his poems. The effect was electrifying. As Tony Hoagland points out, “The relationship between beginnings, endings and middles, between poetic fragments and poetic wholes, might be said to have changed that night.” Apollinaire’s last-minute impulse to undertake this radical formal experiment helped position his work at the forefront of the new modern poetry.

  The speaker of “The Pretty Redhead” begins grandly: “I stand here in the sight of everyone a man full of sense,” as if he is standing up on the witness stand, giving a deposition to the entire world. He summarizes his experiences in love, intellectual pursuits, travel and languages, battle, and pain and grief, using the third person (“Having lost his best friends”) to describe himself. It’s as if he’s reciting the qualifications of a “man full of sense” in order to prove that he has lived and suffered enough to be trustworthy. After a line stating that the speaker lost his best friends in the horror of war, the translator, the poet James Wright, adds a stanza break for emphasis; however, in the French, the poem continues without a break. The speaker returns to the first person (“I know as much as one man alone can know / Of the ancient and the new”). This additional qualification links the literal “war in the artillery and the infantry” to a figurative war via a clever enjambment: “this war today / Between us and for us my friends.” The metaphorical war waged between different artistic camps is the poem’s principle subject.

  Given his knowledge of the old and the new, Apollinaire feels confident to judge “this long quarrel between tradition and imagination / Between order and adventure.” In the French text he indents and capitalizes the nouns for emphasis: “De l’Ordre et de l’Aventure.” The speaker advocates for a new spirit of innovation against the French classical tradition—The Oxford English Dictionary lists the late date of 1877 as the first recorded use of the term neoclassicism. Apollinaire took a more polemical, embattled tone in his 1917 lecture “L’esprit nouveau et les poètes” (“The New Spirit and the Poets”), where he argues that poetry needs constant experimentation and innovation to remain relevant in an ever-changing modern world. It is no accident that the aesthetic category known as the avant-garde derives from a French military term, which literally means “the advance-guard,” the scouts who forge ahead of the rest of the troops.

  Rather than attack those who don’t share his experimental aesthetic, Apollinaire employs a range of rhetorical strategies in “The Pretty Redhead” to disarm his skeptics and persuade them to listen to his line of reasoning. He addresses them as “my friends” and later assures them that “We are not your enemies.” He good-naturedly cedes “God,” “order,” and “perfection” to the other side, the old order, and asks them to “judge kindly” when they compare the new ways to the old. For his side he claims the earthly disorder and imperfection of “adventure.” He repeatedly asks for understanding, urging them to “Pity our mistakes pity our sins.”

  The poem passionately makes the case for a new spirit in art. Notice how the “I” switches to “we,” the first-person plural speaking not just for the poet but for an entire new generation (“We who are seeking everywhere for adventure”):

  We are not your enemies

  Who want to give ourselves vast domains

  Where mystery flowers into any hands that long for it

  Where there are new fires colors never seen

  A thousand fantasies difficult to make sense out of

  They must be made real

  In 1917, Apollinaire coined the term surréaliste to suggest a dramatic attempt to go beyond the limits of an agreed-upon reality. He hungered for the marvelous and put his faith in the unconscious, in dreams, fantasies, and hallucinations. This revolutionary set of values anticipates the ideas of André Breton, who used the term Surrealism (meaning “superrealism” or “above reality”) in 1924 in the first of three manifestos: “I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality.”

  In a movingly simple example of Apollinaire’s efforts to bring the dream world into a new experience of reality, the poem continues with this key line: “All we want is to explore kindness the enormous country where everything is silent.” “Explore kindness” seamlessly joins an action with an abstraction, which is then characterized in evocative concrete terms, “the enormous country where everything is silent.” Apollinaire declared that “a work of art must be at the same time clear and mysterious,” a statement that especially applies to this compelling line, which inspired James Wright to translate the poem. The writer Charles Baxter heard Wright read “The Pretty Redhead” at SUNY Brockport in 1970 and recalls that Wright paused after he recited the line and whispered, “Christ, I’d rather have written that than to go to heaven.”

  Apollinaire then returns to one of the poem’s main subjects, the past versus the future, with an oddly personalized depiction of future time as a sort of family member or intimate: “And there is time which somebody can banish or welcome home.” When he declares, “Pity for us who always fight on the frontiers / Of the illimitable and the future,” he once more alludes to war, breaking the line and punning on the literal and metaphorical meanings of the word frontiers (frontières).

  In the penultimate stanza the speaker finds himself on the verge of summer, “the violent season,” a season of heat and burning, a ripe season, when his “youth is as dead as spring.” He invokes the sun—Frank O’Hara explicitly imitates him in “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island”—as the symbol of summer, “the time of reason grown passionate.” Rather than worship the God of order and perfection, the speaker chooses to follow and love the sun, as well as “the forms she takes,” a reference not just to aspects of the sun but to poetic forms. Here the lovely redhead of the title makes her appearance as a personification of the sun, her hair described in a dynamic series of rapturous images evoking the fire and heat of the sun, moving from “golden” to “A beautiful lightning flash that goes on and on”—note the temporal impossibility of a flash that goes on continuously—to “flames that spread out their feathers / In wilting tea roses.”

  The poem mi
ght have ended here, on an uplifted note, but instead takes a turn in the last stanza. Apollinaire’s translator Anne Hyde Greet points out that the last five lines were written in a different ink on the manuscript and thus presumably were added later. The mood of ecstasy is relinquished. Notice the language of argumentation:

  But laugh laugh at me

  Men everywhere especially people from here

  For there are so many things that I don’t dare to tell you

  So many things that you would not let me say

  Have pity on me

  Anticipating mockery from skeptics, the speaker encourages them to go ahead and laugh at him. Somewhat grandly, he addresses “Men everywhere” but particularly speaks to his local contemporaries, “people from here.” Despite his zeal for a new experimental aesthetic, Apollinaire’s image of the future is permeated by bleak forebodings. As the poet Adam Zagajewski suggests, it is as if Apollinaire “knew something about the future, about the terror this century was about to produce, something that his comrades (poets and painters flourishing at the beginning of the century) didn’t have a hint of.” He ends the poem by asking again for pity. In the end, Apollinaire silently bears the burden of the visionary who perceives things that he doesn’t dare to tell, the impending horrors that others, who are stuck in the past, simply refuse to see.

  Edna St. Vincent Millay

  * * *

  “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why”

  (1920)

  Edna St. Vincent Millay radicalized the love poem. Writing as an openly bisexual woman, she reversed a long tradition of entrenched gender roles in poetry, which posed the male lover as the speaker, the desiring subject, and the artistic creator, while positioning the woman as the object of male desire, a voiceless muse for male artistic inspiration. In Millay’s skillful and embattled romantic sonnets, the woman becomes the lover, the desiring subject, the artist. The speaker in her poems is a self-assertive and self-revealing woman who expresses and explores the conflicts between her own physical passions, her sensuality, and the emotional connections and disconnections that arise from erotic entanglements.