52 Books in 52 Weeks, it's called. The challenge is simple: read a book every week for a year.
49. Poems about God.
Ransom served as the editor of the Kenyon Review and mentor to a number of the poets I’ve been reading—Lowell, Jarrell, etc.—and I wanted to see what he did with his own hand: what he practiced of what he preached. I figured these poems, loosely “about God,” might be a good start, thematically. These aren’t all the greatest. There’s a strict, very strict, meter in many that makes me a little seasick, although I appreciate the technical skill required to get there. Perhaps this was just a fashion of the time, and I’m from a generation fully immersed in non-metric poetry? And having to collect only those poems touching even tangentially on the subject of God probably made for the inclusion of lesser poems (which Ransom all but apologizes for in the preface). But there’s a surprising bitterness that rises through the formalism, and it can be bracing at times:
MORNING
The skies were jaded, while the famous sun
Slack of his office to confute the fogs
Lay sick abed; but I, inured to duty,
Sat for my food. Three hours each day we souls,
Who might be angels but are fastened down
With bodies, most infuriating freight,
Sit fattening these frames and skeletons
With filthy food, which they must cast away
Before they feed again.
This is probably the most extreme example, but you get the sense of what can be really good about his poetry— there’s something about the alliteration on the letter ‘f’ that makes this one particularly nasty. I have Selected Poems checked out, and may continue on to that.
