And then a poem which perhaps has been more
anthologized than any other poem of mine--
"Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter."
I want to make a little comment before reading it.
That's better than waiting till afterwards [LAUGHTER]
and trying to explain what I've been reading.
"John Whiteside's Daughter" is not giving her a name.
And the fact is that it's a neighbor talking
who lives in an upstairs apartment,
and looks down over the playground of the little girl.
And the phrase that may not be familiar.
Well, I always ask about that, and half the people know it
and half don't know it.
Her brown study.
Now my father used to scold me if I
seem to be thinking about something else when
he had to give me a command.
And he would say "Come out of that brown study,
and listen to what I have to tell you."
And I was told by my New England friends
it was a common phrase there, and it may be common generally.
But it simply an absent minded state.
There was such speed in her little body,
and such lightness in her footfall,
it is no wonder her brown study astonishes us all.
Her wars were bruited in our high window.
We looked among orchard trees and beyond,
where she took arms against her shadow or harried unto
the pond.
The lazy geese, like a snow cloud dripping their snow
on the green grass.
Tricking and stopping, sleepy and proud.
Who cried in goose, alas, for the tireless heart
within the little lady with rod, that
made them rise from their noon apple-dreams
and scuttle goose fashion under the skies.
But now go the bells, and we are ready.
In one house, we are sternly stopped
to say we are vexed at her brown steady,
lying so primly propped.
About the geese, they seem very stupid.
They haven't much voices.
They quack, hiss.
They haven't a very graceful manner of locomotion--
they waddle.
And it bothered me, the greatest difficulty ahead here
was to say to put the geese on her side.
To say this is a dangerous thing.
This little girl has too much energy.
She's bound to come to grief, and so I finally
had it-- "who cried in goose, alas, for the tireless heart
within the little lady with rod" and so on.
So they're quite sensitive, like the old couple
looking from the upper window, about the danger.
And finally, it has come.
And now she lies propped up in her lasting brown study, which
she will not come out again.
And he says "We are sternly stopped here"
with the feelings of her great chagrin and regret.
And I published--
I mean, I wrote in the early days of my publication
a number of poems about death.
And I had the feeling that that's the classical thing
to do.
Among the Greeks and the Romans, it
was necessary to have intimations of mortality
and to know that our day would come.
And some of the gravest and bravest of human sentiments
are involved there.