May’s selection of poems for the theme of Poetry and Clouds
Abigail discovered “Morley Hall” by Branwell Brontë which begins: “When life’s youth, overcast by gathering clouds/Of cares, that come like funeral-following crowds/Weary of that which is, and cannot see/A sunbeam burst upon futurity,/It tries to cast away the woes that are/And borrow brighter joys from times afar.” “This unfinished poem contrasts the narrator’s present, which is under a cloud, with the happier days of his youth, and suggests that what is true for the individual may also be true for a generation that can look further back to another generation’s joy.”
Roger thought of the most famous cloud poem of all, William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”: “I wandered lonely as a cloud/That floats on high o’er vales and hills,/When all at once I saw a crowd,/A host, of golden daffodils.” “Loneliness changes to gaiety which comes back to the poet whenever he thinks of the dancing scene.”
Carol chose “A Night Piece,” also by William Wordsworth: “The sky is overcast/With a continuous cloud of texture close,/Heavy and wan, all whitened by the Moon.” Carol writes, “This piece resonated with me as I recalled staging a theatre production in college called ‘Dark of the Moon’—the night shadows, cast by clouds, hide the brilliant light of the moon, a metaphor for casting doubts on true love.”
Richard chose “The Darkling Thrush” by Thomas Hardy from the Poetry Foundation’s website. “I have read this poem many times, but coming across it this morning, the air of hope that wafted from these words moved me to tears. It blew ‘In Memoriam’ (‘Ring out, wild bells’), which had been one of my original choices, out of first place.” Hardy’s poem begins:
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
Hazel found many poems with references to clouds that seemed “pretty, fluffy, and upbeat. I somehow always thought of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as cheerful, but ‘Snow-Flakes’ surprised me”: “This is the poem of the air,/Slowly in silent syllables recorded;/This is the secret of despair,/Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,/Now whispered and revealed/To wood and field.”
Gail sent “Mutability” by Percy Bysshe Shelley, written in 1816 and cited in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Gail wrote, “Our lives are as evanescent as clouds streaking across the midnight sky and the only constant is change. Shelley refers to the turbulence and strain of his emotional and financial life in these two lines”: “We rest—a dream has power to poison sleep;/We rise—one wandering thought pollutes the day.”
Scott randomly picked “Student of Clouds” by Billy Collins from the Poetry Foundation’s cloud selections: “The emotion is to be found in the clouds,/not in the green solids of the sloping hills/or even in the gray signatures of rivers,/according to Constable, who was a student of clouds.” Scott wrote, “It is both accessible and insightful, which I like in poetry. I enjoyed the reference to Constable. In A Clutch on Constables by Ngaio Marsh a group of people are on a boat going down a river in rural England. Coming upon a cloud-strew landscape one of them says, ‘Look—there’s a clutch of Constables!’ At which point the villain on the boat becomes alarmed, thinking the police have been alerted to his presence.”
Christiana sent “Winter Syntax,” also a Billy Collins poem, this one from his collection Sailing Alone Around the Room. “Clouds transform the boldface fact of a full moon into pure poetry,” writes Christiana. “Their appearance in the bleak landscape of composition helps inspire the writer to slog on through the blizzard of blank paper before him until he has traced his thoughts and left a trail of words, freezing the unspoken into a complete sentence.”
The full moon makes sense. When a cloud crosses it
it becomes as eloquent as a bicycle leaning
outside a drugstore or a dog who sleeps all afternoon
in a corner of the couch.
Cate selected “Landing” by Elinor Wilner from Before Our Eyes, which shows us a cloud of another nature, one with a man attached. “It is remarkable how Wilner keeps us looking skyward, continuing to be wishful until she makes us deal with the reality of the landing. She brackets the experience with the moon and the cloud and cloud-like”: “It was a pure white cloud that hung there/in the blue, or a jellyfish on a waveless/sea, suspended high above us./It seemed so effortless in its suspense,/perfectly out of time and out of place/like the ghost of moon in the sky/of a brilliant afternoon.”
Victoria chose “Sea Surface Full of Clouds” by Wallace Stevens: “The sea-clouds whitened far below the calm/And moved, as blooms move, in the swimming green/And in its watery radiance, while the hue/Of heaven in an antique reflection rolled/Round those flotillas.” “In this poem the poet uses repetition combined with subtle differences in word choice, mood, and tone within five stanzas to create an atmosphere of perpetually shifting words and images, while at the same time remaining similar and familiar. This mirrors the continuous movement and play of light on water at sea, clouds reflected on the surface of waves in perpetual motion: always different, yet always the same.”
AnnaLee completes the circle, and the spring 2022 OPPC program, by first noting this spring’s proliferation of fiery clouds at sunset. “I chose Theodore Roethke’s ‘Child on Top of a Greenhouse’ inspired by the huge greenhouse his family owned in Saginaw Valley, Michigan. Each time I read the poem I feel the rush of youthful freedom as the young daredevil on top of the glass roof stares down into the contained and protected world of the greenhouse, and then up to clouds dashing across the sky.”
The wind billowing out the seat of my britches,
My feet crackling splinters of glass and dried putty,
The half-grown chrysanthemums staring up like accusers,
Up through the streaked glass, flashing with sunlight,
A few white clouds all rushing eastward,
A line of elms plunging and tossing like horses,
And everyone, everyone pointing up and shouting!
Have a wonderful summer and we hope to see you in the fall! In the meantime, please blog with us here at onepagepoetrycircle.wordpress.com.
Abigail Burnham Bloom, abigailburnhambloom@gmail.com
AnnaLee Wilson, annalee@kaeserwilson.com