An Exquisite Off-Broadway Reinvention Retains Stoppard’s Spirit
By ELYSA GARDNER
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What’s notable about this poem is how the speaker’s vision turns continually outward, training itself on the reality of the world outside himself, even though it’s a world he largely can’t see.
In today’s Poem of the Day, Mark van Doren (1894–1972) evokes a blizzard scene in flexible blank verse: iambic pentameter that admits the occasional anapest or trochee, even as the blinding whiteness of the visible world still admits some variation. The poem’s speaker, looking out, can discern “a circle of grey shore” with water beyond it. Out of “the further white,” a gull appears, white on whiteness, a flash of movement that disappears, though the speaker can still hear it crying beyond the curtain of snow.
By ELYSA GARDNER
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By MARIO NAVES
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By THE NEW YORK SUN
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By LAWRENCE KUDLOW
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By BRADLEY CORTRIGHT
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By THE NEW YORK SUN
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By JOSEPH CURL
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By CARL ROLLYSON
|In today’s Poem of the Day, Mark van Doren (1894–1972) evokes a blizzard scene in flexible blank verse: iambic pentameter that admits the occasional anapest or trochee, even as the blinding whiteness of the visible world still admits some variation. The poem’s speaker, looking out, can discern “a circle of grey shore” with water beyond it. Out of “the further white,” a gull appears, white on whiteness, a flash of movement that disappears, though the speaker can still hear it crying beyond the curtain of snow.
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