Poem of the Day: ‘Knowledge’
Sometimes the poems of Louise Bogan seem downright cold, but they are nevertheless fraught with complicated emotion beneath a plainspoken surface.
In 1945, the first woman was appointed to serve as Consultant to the Library of Congress (the position now known as Poet Laureate). Louise Bogan (1897–1970) was a poet of formal restraint and subtlety. In a century that increasingly came to prize the experimental line and the sprawling, unguarded confessional voice, “economical” is an apt descriptor for her verse. Her poems, often brief, evince tight formal control. Sometimes they seem downright cold, but they are nevertheless fraught with complicated emotion beneath a plainspoken surface.
Today’s Poem of the Day, for example, from Bogan’s 1923 debut collection, “The Body of This Death,” beguiles the ear first in its brevity and simplicity. Its two dimeter abab quatrains are no sooner read than memorized. Its words themselves are as simple — each one and two syllables, no more — as a child’s rhyme. A child might learn this poem, in fact, for the love of its sounds, intuiting but not understanding its strangeness. The poem’s speaker declares, from her place in the grave, that life is brief and goes up in smoke. All its wisdom amounts to nothing beside the lesson she means to learn in the great leisure of eternity: “how over their ground, / Trees make a long shadow / And a light sound.”
Knowledge
by Louise Bogan
Now that I know
How passion warms little
Of flesh in the mould,
And treasure is brittle, —
I’ll lie here and learn
How, over their ground,
Trees make a long shadow
And a light sound.
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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.