Conrad Aiken - 3 Short Poems (1916-19)

Forgotten Poems #62: The Book of Lost Rhymes

 
              —: Variations :—

       Wind in the sunlit trees, and the red leaves fall:
       Shadows of leaves on the sunlit wall.
       Wind in the turning tops of the trees . . .
       I am reminded, seeing these,
       Of an afternoon, and you
       Making the trees more scarlet, the sky more blue.
 

  
              —: Illusions :—

       Green fingers lifting a pebble, 
       green fingers uncurling,
       the slant and splash of a waterdrop
       between eternities;
       earth slipping from old roots,
       and the stealth of white petals in the sun
       all day long;

       brown chimney pots
       descending against a cloud
       in silence;
       between walls
       the dry whir of a sparrow's wings . . .
       am I these, or more?
  

 
              —: Improvisations :—

       On the day when my uncle and I drove
                     to the cemetery,
              Rain rattled on the roof of the carriage;
              And talking constrainedly of this and that
              We refrained from looking
                  at the child’s coffin
                      on the seat before us.

              When we reached the cemetery,
       We found that the thin snow on the grass
       Was already half transparent with rain,
       And boards had been laid upon it
       So that we might walk
                     without wetting our feet.
  

“Although a Georgian by birth, Conrad Aiken is a neo-Imagist by training and a Freudian by inclination.” Began writing poetry at age 9; graduated from Harvard in 1912, after being elected class poet, and co-editing the Harvard Advocate, with T.S. Eliot. Later, was a “contributing editor of The Dial and on the staff of the Chicago Daily News.” (The Poetry Journal, 1917) In the 1920s was an editor of Coterie, the anthologies Modern American Poets (1922) and American Poetry: 1671-1928 (1929), and the Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson (1924). Mentor and close friend of English novelist and poet, Malcolm Lowry.

“Roughly speaking we can divide [poets] into two classes: those who contribute a definitely new note to the world's poetry... and those who are eclectic, who recombine and refine the known moods of poetry... The two contributions, both necessary, are essentially different: the originative type of poet chiefly contributes moods or attitudes, something unconscious, like the timbre of a voice, the expression of a face; whereas the contribution of the eclectic poet is chiefly an intellectual one—something conscious and schematic. The former is usually more subjective, more lyric,—the latter more objective, more analytic. For the purpose of explanation the cleavage has of course been made sharper than it really is. Every successful poet is both originative and eclectic.” (Aiken, in ‘The Impersonal Poet’, The Poetry Journal, 1917)

    
              For Conrad Aiken
                 By Dick Whyte

       letting go
       the leaf
       & wind

       befriend
       a commotion
       of birds,

       un
       consciously
       connective
       
 

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