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Letter from the Editors

Dear Readers,

Each weekday in April, Poetry Daily brings its email newsletter readers a special poem, selected by a contemporary poet whose work has appeared on Poetry Daily, as part of its annual fund-raising campaign and in celebration of National Poetry Month. This year, Poetry Daily is presenting these poems and comments to its website readers.

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Thank you so much for your support! Enjoy today's special poem!

Warmest regards,

Don Selby & Diane Boller
Editors

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Mark Doty's Poetry Month Pick, April 28, 2009

“To His Books”
by Henry Vaughan (1621-1695)

Bright books! the perspectives to our weak sights,
The clear projections of discerning lights,
Burning and shining thoughts, man's posthume day,
The track of fled souls, and their milkie way,
The dead alive and busie, the still voice
Of enlarged spirits, kind Heaven's white decoys!
Who lives with you lives like those knowing flowers,
Which in commerce with light spend all their hours;
Which shut to clouds, and shadows nicely shun,
But with glad haste unveil to kiss the sun.
Beneath you all is dark, and a dead night,
Which whoso lives in wants both health and sight.
    By sucking you, the wise, like bees, do grow
Healing and rich, though this they do most slow,
Because most choicely; for as great a store
Have we of books as bees of herbs, or more:
And the great task to try, then know, the good,
To discern weeds, and judge of wholesome food,
Is a rare scant performance. For man dyes
Oft ere 'tis done, while the bee feeds and flyes.
But you were all choice flowers; all set and dressed
By old sage florists, who well knew the best;
And I amidst you all am turned a weed,
Not wanting knowledge, but for want of heed.
Then thank thyself, wild fool, that wouldst not be
Content to know — what was too much for thee!

Mark Doty Comments:
Here is the Metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan, opening a poem called “To His Books:”

                        Bright books! the perspectives to our weak sights,
                        The clear projections of discerning lights,
                        Burning and shining thoughts, man’s posthume day,
                        The track of fled souls, and their milkie way,
                        The dead alive and busy…

It's an energetic gesture, for that exclamation, Bright books!, to be the opening phrase of a poem; it promises that the following lines will go on to do exactly what happens next, unpacking that phrase, teaching us to read its implications.  Bright is certainly not the first adjective that comes to mind when we think of printed volumes. Though of course the poet’s process is irrecoverable, I’m willing to bet that it was this phrase that came first, in a sort of (forgive the pun) flash, the arrival of insight; it will be a familiar experience to readers who write poems, that arrival of a phrase laden with more sense than we can immediately discern, a cluster of words that seems to know, as it were, more than we do.

In the lines that follow you can feel the muscular progression of Vaughan’s thinking: books are bright because they provide lights to our dim vision, and because they clearly project a lantern-light that might help us to discern our way in the world, or to make difficult choices when it’s hard for us to see the right one. But they’re bright too because of the incandescent energy of thinking and creating, the blaze of consciousness that has been inscribed upon those pages. And suddenly it’s as if Vaughan recognizes that since, in these volumes, thinking is no longer contained within the time-bound human body, it outlasts us, to become our “posthume day.” How lovely the notion that the light of books is the day of the afterlife, that a made sunlight shines past the grave. The following, breathtaking line suddenly enlarges the poem’s scale; “the track of fled souls, and their milkie way” makes these books a shining streak across the firmament, and invites us to consider the stars themselves as evidence of human passing, the still-burning traces of consciousness gone.   We’ve gone from library to cosmos in a flash, and in the process what has been lost to us is suddenly restored to life, in an unexpected resurrection.

About Mark Doty:
Mark Doty's Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008.  His eight books of poems include School of the Arts, Source, and My Alexandria. He has also published four volumes of nonfiction prose. Doty's work has been honored by the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, two Lambda Literary Awards  and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. He is the only American poet to have received the T.S. Eliot Prize in the U.K., and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill and Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Doty lives in New York City and in Houston, Texas, where he is John and Rebecca Moores Professor in the graduate program at the University of Houston. In the fall of 2009, he will join the faculty at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

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