Poem of the Day: ‘Nothing is Enough!’

Laurence Binyon gives us something stripped down, potent, and — despite its title — enough, in the satisfying way that a small poem can sometimes be.

British Museum via Wikimedia Commons
Detail of portrait of Robert Laurence Binyon in 1898. British Museum via Wikimedia Commons

Laurence Binyon (1869–1943), the English poet, famously wrote the 1914 World War I anthem “For the Fallen,” which the Sun featured as the Poem of the Day this past August 11. Also famously, in the last decade of his life, while teaching first at Harvard, then at the University of Athens, Binyon completed his translation of Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” the sort of large, ambitious project which we speak of as “the crowning of a life’s work.

In today’s Poem of the Day, Binyon gives us something different: stripped down, potent, and — despite its title — enough, in the satisfying way that a small poem can sometimes be. Trimeter lines like these can quickly become metronomic. But in the rapid turn from line to line, they can also generate the effect of an idea boring like a corkscrew into the mind. A tight rhyme scheme, returning again and again to the same sound, as Binyon does here, underscores this intensity of concentration. At the same time, his rhymes resist the satisfaction of utter completion. We don’t arrive at the rhyme for love, in line two, until the poem’s end, a formal move which keeps us, like the poem’s speaker, in suspension. Ours, as readers, is an aural desire. What the speaker experiences is desire for that “Divine Desire” that will at last, burning away all dross, gather the human spirit to itself in a truer crowning.  

Nothing is enough!
by Laurence Binyon

No, though our all be spent — 
Heart’s extremest love, 
Spirit’s whole intent, 
All that nerve can feel, 
All that brain invent, — 
Still beyond appeal 
Will Divine Desire 
Yet more excellent 
Precious cost require 
Of this mortal stuff, — 
Never be content 
Till ourselves be fire. 
Nothing is enough!

___________________________________________ 

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 will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul. 


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