EPITHALAMIUM AND ELEGY

My single constancy is love of life:
Because we have entered no such formal pact
As dulls devotion between man and wife,
No bland acknowledgement, no binding fact,
No mingling of betrothal with divorce,
No dated bliss, no midnight certitude,
No sad necessity, no matter of course,
No pallid answer saying why we wooed;
Because she lets me love her as I can
Moment by moment, moments that always come
Beyond the calculation of a man
For joy or pain, for epithalamium
Or for elegy, and because, when I am spent,
Life shall have had her way, shall be content
Still to confer the sweet bewilderment
On someone else, shall loosen her lovely hair
To the wind, shall turn with bountiful intent
Toward anyone at all, and I not there,
Shall offer cool papayas, pale bamboo
And amorous guava to a later comer,
And none of her gifts, not even a drop of dew,
to me who had received them many a summer.
These are not harlotries but only joy,
These are the very tip-toes of delight.
This is the happiness she gives a boy,
With nothing of wickedness, nothing of spite,
In that immense, delicious, naked bed
Where anyone may lie, except the dead . . .
But I shall leave her. All that there is of rest
Shall be little enough, after so much of love;-
Wherever I move, she is there. Her open breast
Offers the tenderness I am dying of.
Her arm along my body like a snake
Has softly wound me into rings of sleep
And, every time again, stings me awake
And drowns me in her rhythms deep and deep . . .
Can I be tragical, in having had
My love of life by life herself subdued?
Since I am satiate with joy, can I be sad
In leaving? All that there is of solitude
Shall be little enough, after this vast embrace.
Give her some younger lover in my place.

LORENZO

I had not known that there could be
Men like Lorenzo and like me,
Both in the world and both so right
That the world is dark and the world is light.
I had not thought that anyone
Would choose the dark for dwelling on,
Would dig and delve for the bitterest roots
Of sweetest and sauvest fruits.
I never had presumed to doubt
That now and then the light went out;
But I had not known that there could be
Men like Lorenzo and like me
Both in the world and both so right
That the world is dark and the world is light.
I had not guessed that joy could be
Selected for an enemy.

DEFEAT

On a train in Texas German prisoners eat
With white American soldiers, seat by seat,
While black American soldiers sit apart,
The white men eating meat, the black men heart.
Now, with that other war a century done,
Not the live North but the dead South has won,
Not yet a riven nation comes awake.
Whom are we fighting this time, for God's sake?
Mark well the token of the separate seat
It is again ourselves whom we defeat.

Witter Bynner 1881 - 1968

Bynner's mother's family extended to an early president of Harvard, Charles Chauncy. When Bynner was born in Brooklyn, his father was a civil engineer; his father died in 1891. Then living in Brookline, Massachusetts, he graduated from Harvard in 1902. Called "Hal" by his friends, he was invited by editor Wallace Stevens to become a member of the Harvard Advocate. Among his teachers were Royce (philosophy), Kittredge (Shakespeare), and Baker (drama), as well as his friend and professor poet George Santayana.

Upon graduating Bynner was for four years an editor of McClure's in New York, where he paraded for women's rights on Fifth Avenue with John Dewey. His poems, An Ode to Harvard, came out in 1907, and he was invited to be a Harvard Phi Beta Kappa poet. Edna St. Vincent Millay accepted his proposal for marriage, but after they reflected, they declined. Witter's lover was a Swiss painter, Paul Theanaz.

In 1916 Hal coauthored Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments, parodies spoofing Imagism written under an assumed name. This act led embarrassed critics who had been fooled to ignore his later work. It helped that Alfred A. Knopf published his many books, starting with Beloved Stranger (1918). In 1917 came his first trip to Japan and China. He was president of the Poetry Society of America from 1921 to 1923.

Upon moving to the tiny town of Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1922, he developed a friendship with D. H. and Frieda Lawrence. A later result was Journey with Genius: Reflections and Reminiscences Concerning the D. H. Lawrences.

In 1929 Witter collaborated with Kiang Kang-hu in translating Chinese poems: Jade Mountain: A Chinese Anthology. His most popular book was his translation of the 2,500 year-old The Way of Life According to Laotse (1944), an abstruse interpretation which somehow sold more than fifty thousand copies.

Witter Bynner was a monogamous homosexual who was openly gay. His partner for thirty-four years in Santa Fe was Robert Hunt, twenty-five years younger.

His personal acquaintances were many: Mark Twain, Henry James, Georgia O'Keefe, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Igor Stravinsky, Isadora Duncan, Diego Rivera.

The poet died in Santa Fe after suffering a stroke following previous ills, near blindness (glaucoma), and prolonged painful shingles on the shoulders. James Kraft wrote a biography: Who is Witter Bynner? His remodeled home and gardens are now a bed and breakfast-the Inn of the Turquoise Bear.

A NEW ENGLAND SAMPLER

Miss Dickinson is gone;
Mr. Thoreau has lain
In deeper Concord for
Some three-score years and more.
I had thought these were bones
would rise like tawny pines.

Cabot came down this way,
Took five redskins away
To show for sixpence in
Alleys Shakespearian.
I had thought these were bones
would rise like tawny pines.

Newport, when Henry James
Was there, smelled of the Thames;
His polished jaw and eye
Furthered the heresy.
I had thought these were bones
would rise like tawny pines.

When Jonathan Edwards went
To live in a Berkshire tent,
The Indians knew the result:
His tongue was difficult.
I had thought these were bones
would rise like tawny pines.

Scholarship and time
Have brought them bookish fame,
Whose biographies on stone
Are paged by the careless rain.
I had thought these were bones
would rise like tawny pines.

John Malcolm Brinnin 1916 - 1998

Brinnin is remembered not only as a poet but as an extensive correspondent with poets and an able anthologist of modern American-British poetry. Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, his family moved to Detroit. His higher education at the University of Michigan and Harvard led to his teaching at Vassar College from 1942 to 1947 and as Princeton Professor of English at Boston University from 1961 to 1978. Among his other experience was his editing for Dodd-Mead in New York and his memorable directing of the YM-YWHA Association Poetry Center in New York City.

Brinnin not only wrote Dylan Thomas: An Intimate Journey in America, but brought Thomas himself to America and accompanied him in traveling across the country. He also authored The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and Her World, William Carlos Williams, and an autobiography, Here. Now. Always. Among his publications of verse are: The Garden is Political, The Lincoln Lyrics, and The Selected Poems of John Malcolm Brinnin. John Malcolm Brinnin was awarded the Gold Medal for Distinguished Service to Poetry. When in the Greater Boston Area, he lived in Cambridge and Duxbury.

FOR DELIVERANCE FROM A FEVER

When sorrows had begirt me round,
And pains within and out,
When in my flesh no part was found,
Then didst Thou rid me out.
My burning flesh in sweat did boil,
My aching head did break,
From side to side for ease I toil,
So faint I could not speak.
Beclouded was my soul with fear
Of Thy displeasure sore,
Nor could I read my evidence
Which oft I read before.
"Hide not Thy face from me!" I cried,
"From burnings keep my soul.
Thou know'st my heart, and hast me tried;
I on Thy mercies roll."
"O heal my soul," Thou know'st I said,
"Though flesh consume to nought,
What though in dust it shall be laid,
To glory I shall be brought."
Thou heard's", Thy rod Thou didst remove
And spared my body frail
Thou show'st to me Thy tender love,
My heart no more might quail.
O, praises to my mighty God,
Praise to my Lord, I say,
Who hath redeemed my soul from pit,
Praises to Him for aye.

Though children Thou has given me,
And friends I have also,
Yet if I see Thee not through them,
They are no joy, but woe.

O shine upon me, blessed Lord,
Ev'n for my Saviour's sake
In Thee alone is more than all,
And there content I'll take.

O hear me, Lord, in this request
As Thou before hast done,
Bring back my husband, I beseech,
As Thou didst once my son.

Ev'n while my days shall last
And talk to my beloved one
Of all Thy goodness past.

So both of us Thy kindness, Lord,
With praises shall recount
And serve Thee better than before
Whose blessings thus surmount.

But give me, Lord, a better heart,
Then better shall I be,
To pay the vows which I do owe
Forever unto Thee.

Unless Thou help, what can I do
But still my frailty show?
If Thou assist me, Lord, I shall
Return Thee what I owe..