Poet's Choice

By Robert Pinsky
Sunday, February 12, 2006

The Penguin Classics Series has issued in a new paperback edition The Complete Poems of Andrew Marvell, the 17th-century English poet. Marvell is a master of serious play, poetry that appealingly displays the energy of his mind -- urbane but capable of wonder, learned but the opposite of stuffy. For instance:

The Mower to the Glowworms

Ye living lamps, by whose dear light

The nightingale does sit so late,

And studying all the summer night,

Her matchless songs does meditate;

Ye country comets, that portend

No war, nor prince's funeral,

Shining unto no higher end

Than to presage the grass's fall;

Ye glowworms, whose officious flame

To wandering mowers shows the way,

That in the night have lost their aim,

And after foolish fires do stray;

Your courteous lights in vain you waste,

Since Juliana here is come,

For she my mind hath so displaced

That I shall never find my home.

The predominant emotion of this poem is wonder, not love. The compliment to Juliana at the end is just that: a compliment, a flattering gift card accompanying the sweet-box or floral arrangement of his graceful marveling at the glowworms. Sweets to the sweet, or, in this case, wonders to the wonderful.

A poem more candidly of wonder -- also in response to an unusual natural light, also urbane and learned, and also with a personal component -- is in Imago Mundi , a recent book by the American poet Michelle Mitchell-Foust:

Us in the Dark Wandering Home

Falcarragh, Ireland

For Kevin and Pam

I found the Aristotle paraphrases

of Albertus Magnus, and the milky way

was certainly full of stars. I couldn't stop

reading the revision of Magnus saying the lunar

rainbow appeared to him twice in one year,

not the once-in-fifty-years of Aristotle.

I have only seen the lunar rainbow once in a lifetime,

over the high bog of an ancient gravesite

lit by a ringed moon. The whole thing

with a small rain.

It was midnight and the arch was black

and every color, and the new burros and sheep

made such a racket instead of sleeping

that we knew we were seeing something profound

among the sock puppet headstones

in the deep August light, us wondering whether

the souls of the layers of the dead beneath us warmed

to the rain under the phenomenon,

us in the dark wandering home.

(Andrew Marvell's poem "The Mower to the Glowworms" can be found in "The Complete Poems" of Andrew Marvell. Penguin Classics. Michelle Mitchell-Foust's poem "Us in the Dark Wandering Home" is from her book "Imago Mundi." Elixir. Copyright © 2005 by Michelle Mitchell-Foust.)