And NOT Dover Beach!
********************
UD (to Mr. UD, who just this moment returned from sitting on the beach for two hours): Why are there no good beach poems?
Mr. UD: There are many good mountain poems.
UD: No there aren’t.
Mr. UD: Name a bad mountain poem.
UD: “The Mountain in Your Butt.”
Mr. UD: Our daughter is absolutely wonderful, but the day she taught you to end your sentences with in your butt was not a good day.
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Rhode Island, by William Meredith, is the best I can do at the moment.
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Here at the seashore they use the clouds over & over
again, like the rented animals in Aïda.
In the late morning the land breeze
turns and now the extras are driving
all the white elephants the other way.
What language are the children shouting in?
He is lying on the beach listening.
The sand knocks like glass, struck by bare heels.
He tries to remember snow noise.
Would powder snow ping like that?
But you don’t lie with your ear to powder snow.
Why doesn’t the girl who takes care
of the children, a Yale girl without flaw,
know the difference between lay and lie?
He tries to remember snow, his season.
The mind is in charge of things then.
Summer is for animals, the ocean is erotic,
all that openness and swaying.
No matter how often you make love
in August you’re always aware of genitalia,
your own and the half-naked others’.
Even with the gracefulest bathers
you’re aware of their kinship with porpoises,
mammals disporting themselves in a blue element,
smelling slightly of fish. Porpoise Hazard
watches himself awhile, like a blue movie.
In the other hemisphere now people
are standing up, at work at their easels.
There they think about love at night
when they take off their serious clothes
and go to bed sandlessly, under blankets.
Today the children, his own among them,
are apparently shouting fluently in Portuguese,
using the colonial dialect of Brazil.
It is just as well, they have all been changed
into small shrill marginal animals,
he would not want to understand them again
until after Labor Day. He just lays there.
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Eh. I don’t say it’s great. Drifty thoughts of a middle-aged daddy lying, laying, lieing, alie, on the beach, his kids nearby. The bit about eroticism is sort of okay, all that openness and swaying. Gives you a sense of the guy’s orientation, summer for him being perturbingly messy and bestial, an out of joint season during which Yalies misspeak and his own kids sound Portuguese.
The speaker, Hazard, looks at his own, what, tenting little erection or something, “like a blue movie.”
He doesn’t like summer, in short. Can’t wait for Labor Day, when we go back to work. Summer creatures have morphed from sandless serious citizens to shrill marginal animals, and he doesn’t like it.
He ends with a joke which links him — drily, ironically — to the gibberish world around him: He just lays there.
August 9th, 2009 at 6:24PM
Not "The Idea of Order at Key West"? Or is that only a sea poem, and not a beach poem?
August 9th, 2009 at 6:32PM
Why are there no good beach poems?
OUT of the cradle endlessly rocking,
Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle,
Out of the Ninth-month midnight,
Over the sterile sands, and the fields beyond, where the child, leaving his bed, wander’d alone, bare-headed, barefoot,
Down from the shower’d halo,
Up from the mystic play of shadows, twining and twisting as if they were alive,
Out from the patches of briers and blackberries,
From the memories of the bird that chanted to me,
From your memories, sad brother—from the fitful risings and fallings I heard,
From under that yellow half-moon, late-risen, and swollen as if with tears,
From those beginning notes of sickness and love, there in the transparent mist,
From the thousand responses of my heart, never to cease,
From the myriad thence-arous’d words,
From the word stronger and more delicious than any,
From such, as now they start, the scene revisiting,
As a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing,
Borne hither—ere all eludes me, hurriedly,
A man—yet by these tears a little boy again,
Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves,
I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter,
Taking all hints to use them—but swiftly leaping beyond them,
A reminiscence sing.
August 9th, 2009 at 7:54PM
Moria: Absolutely. But I’ve already done a long post on that poem:
http://www.margaretsoltan.com/?p=8627
August 9th, 2009 at 7:54PM
Sure, the intended audience skews a little young, but I like it:
"The Picnic"
We brought a rug for sitting on,
Our lunch was in a box.
The sand was warm. We didn’t wear
Hats or shoes or socks.
Waves came curling up the beach.
We waded. It was fun.
Our sandwiches were different kinds.
I dropped my jelly one.
Dorothy Aldis
August 9th, 2009 at 10:50PM
By the shores of Gitchee Gumee/By the shining Big-Sea-Water/Stood the wig-wam of No-ko-mis/Daughter of the moon, No-ko-mis
(Who probably had the good sense not to wade or swim in the Big-Sea-Water!)
August 9th, 2009 at 11:58PM
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of ANNABEL LEE;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love-
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsman came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.
The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me-
Yes!- that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we-
Of many far wiser than we-
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.
For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
August 10th, 2009 at 12:00AM
maggie and millie and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)
and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and
millie befriended a stranded star
who’s rays five languid fingers were;
and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and
may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.
For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea.
August 10th, 2009 at 10:04AM
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
(oh, okay, maybe not.)
August 10th, 2009 at 10:54AM
Oh no, absolutely, Mr. Punch. Well-chosen, and I don’t know why I didn’t think of it. I’ve always loved this poem — many of its lines are permanently embedded in my head.
August 10th, 2009 at 4:48PM
There is also, of course, "The Walrus and the Carpenter." Too long to reproduce here, but I love these verses:
The sea was wet as wet could be,
The sands were dry as dry.
You could not see a cloud, because
No cloud was in the sky:
No birds were flying overhead —
There were no birds to fly.
The Walrus and the Carpenter
Were walking close at hand:
They wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand:
‘If this were only cleared away,’
They said, ‘it would be grand.’
‘If seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year,
Do you suppose,’ the Walrus said,
‘That they could get it clear?’
‘l doubt it,’ said the Carpenter,
And shed a bitter tear.