ENGL 6637 Dr. Robinson

Experiment in Practical Criticism

Read carefully each of the four poems that follow, and more than once; then, in a paragraph or so, evaluate them. That is, state how good or bad the poems are, and why.

This is not a test.

Please e-mail me your responses by noon this Friday, at dwrob@gasou.edu. You can either do a straight text e-mail message, or send an WordPerfect of Word attachment.

1.

At the round earth's imagined corners blow

Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise

From death, you numberless infinities

Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go;

All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,

All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,

Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyes

Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe.

But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space;

For, if above all these my sins abound,

'Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace,

When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,

Teach me how to repent, for that's as good

As if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood.

2.

since feeling is first

who pays any attention

to the syntax of things

will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool

while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,

and kisses are a better fate

than wisdom

lady I swear by all flowers. Don't cry

-the best gesture of my brain is less than

your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then

laugh, leaning back in my arms

for life's not a paragraph

And death I think is no parenthesis

3.

What's this of death, from you who will never die?

Think you the wrist that fashioned you in clay,

The thumb that set the hollow just that way

In your full throat and lidded the long eye

So roundly from the forehead, will let lie

Broken, forgotten, under foot some day

Your unimpeachable body, and so slay

The work he most had been remembered by?

I tell you this: whatever of dust to dust

Goes down, whatever of ashes may return

To its essential s elf in its own season,

Loveliness such as yours will not be lost,

But, cast in bronze upon his very urn,

Make known him Master, and for what good reason.

4.

And did young Stephen sicken,

And did young Stephen die?

And did the sad hearts thicken,

And did the mourners cry?

No; such was not the fate of

Young Stephen Dowling Bots;

Though sad hearts round him thickened,

'Twas not from sickness' shots.

No whooping-cough did wrack his frame,

Nor measles drear with spots;

Not these impaired the sacred name

Of Stephen Dowling Bots.

Despised love struck not with woe

That head of curly knots,

Nor stomach troubles laid him low,

Young Stephen Dowling Bots.

O no. Then list with tearful eye,

Whilst I his fate do tell.

His soul did from this cold world fly

By falling down a well.

They got him out and emptied him;

Alas it was too late;

His spirit was gone for to sport aloft

In the realms of the good and great.