Shakespeare's "That Time of Year" and Kooser's "A Letter in October"

Blogspot is fighting me; please ignore the odd spacing. Besides, it's easier on the eyes, I guess.

Here are two poems in which the authors see autumn as a way of, and a cause for, looking inward. Please don’t be overly swayed in by the fact that Shakespeare wrote the older poem, a sonnet. The other writer, Ted Kooser, was the U.S. poet laureate in 2004-2006, so some important people think he can sling some verbal hash in his own right. Here’s the new twist. I want people to vote for the poem they prefer. Wait!  There’s more. You need to vote twice. 

 1.  Which poem do you like better?

 2.  Which poem do you respect more? That is, which is the better poem, whether or not you prefer it?

 Your answers to 1 and 2  may be the same, or not. If you’re a good person in the best of all worlds, including cyberspace, you’ll also talk a bit about why you answered as you did. And if you don’t, you flunk.

 

Sonnet LXXIII: That Time of Year thou mayst in me Behold by William Shakespeare : The Poetry Foundation

 A Letter in October by Ted Kooser : The Poetry Foundation

Shakespeare's "That Time of Year"

We might get six inches of snow late Saturday and into Sunday. So, although I'm a little tardy, I want to post this paean to late November before I forget for another year. I'm not quite at the point described in the sonnet, but that's a quibble. I've been an old soul since I was fourteen; and for an entire teaching career, I've identified with the concluding couplet's "to love that well/ which thou must leave ere long." It's a poem for all teachers and all students as well as those at a certain stage of life.

As I write that, dusk turns to dark, on cue, at 5:30 in Michigan.


Sonnet LXXIII: That Time of Year thou mayst in me Behold by William Shakespeare : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

And at the risk of beating dead horses, what would Picasso say about this poem?

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Robert Penn Warren's Sonnet, "Mortal Limit"

Robert Penn Warren, Mortal Limit


I shouldn't be pleased to have my species, with me in it, labeled "item" and "rot," but I think "Mortal Limit" ends up with a much more positive perspective on mortality and humanity than the Anne Sexton poems did. Maybe because we are only capable of seeing things from an anthropomorphic point of view, don't we identify with the hawk, occasionally soaring upward into a thinness of atmosphere for a glimpse of what is beyond the mountain range and beyond mortality? Barring that, are we not at least cheering the hawk because he has achieved that vision, however temporary it must be?

Notice too that the poem is a sonnet, most obviously Shakespearean because of the rhyming couplet at the end, but also Petrarchan with the shift of thought at line nine, so that there's also the octave and sestet that define the Italian form.

I find that I sound here at the blog as if I favor fixed forms more than free verse, yet I don't think that's the case. I simply ask poetry to be rich and precise in language as well as compelling in thought. The universal themes have been done; that was more or less always true. So the task of each poet and each era is to see those ideas anew--in language or shades of thought or both. As I scout poems for the blog, it just so happens that I've hit on traditional forms more than I expected to. Maybe I do have an unconscious bias in favor of them, but I think there's a lot of coincidence in this too: I like yapping about precision and complexity, and perhaps the traditional forms lend themselves to that more obviously than free verse does.

Maybe this sets the table for our discussion-to-come about confessional poetry, which is easy to see as self-indulgent and sloppy. I think Plath and Sexton put the lie to that, especially since both began their commitment to writing with sonnet after sonnet and other fixed forms. How does one develop from that kind of carefulness to the theatrics and perhaps narcissism of their later work?

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