Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry

692 Pages·1992·30.361 MB·English

by  John Frederick Nims

THIRD
AN INTRODUCTION TO POETRY
EDITION
John Frederick Nims

WESTERN WIND
An Introduction to Poetry
Western wind, when will thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ! if my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again!
WESTERN
WIND
An Introduction to Poetry
THIRD EDITION
John Frederick Nims
McGRAW-HILL, INC.
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WESTERN WIND
An Introduction to Poetry
Copyright © 1992, 1983, 1974 by McGraw-Hill, Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in the United
States of America. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part
of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in
a data base or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Acknowledgments appear on pages 619-633, and on this page by reference.
34567890 DOC DOC 909876543
ISBN 0-07-04L.574-L.
This book was set in Plantin Light by Ruttle, Shaw Gf Wetherill, Inc.
The editors were Steve Pensinger and Tom Holton;
the designer was Joan Greenfield;
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The photo researcher was Elsa Peterson.
R . R. Donnelley & Sons Company was printer and binder.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nims, John Frederick, (date).
Western wind: an introduction to poetry / John Frederick Nims.—
3rd ed.
p. cm.
Includes indexes.
ISBN 0-07-046574-6
1. Poetics. 2. Poetry—Collections. I. Title.
PN1042.N6 1992
809.1—dc20 91-23756
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in Muskegon, Michigan, John Frederick Nims received his M.A.
from the University of Notre Dame and his Ph.D. in comparative litera¬
ture from the University of Chicago. He has taught poetry and given
workshops in poetry at Notre Dame, the University of Toronto, the
University of Illinois at Urbana, Harvard University, Williams College,
the University of Florida, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. He
has also been a Visiting Professor at the universities of Florence and
Madrid and has been on the staff of many writers’ conferences, including
the one at Bread Loaf, Vermont, where he taught for more than ten years.
He is the author of eight books of poetry, among them The Iron Pastoral,
Knowledge of the Evening (a National Book Award nominee), The Kiss: A
Jambalaya, Zany in Denim, and The Six-Cornered Snowflake—books that
have brought him awards from The National Foundation of Arts and
Humanities, The American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Brandeis
University, which awarded him its Creative Arts Citation in Poetry. He
has been the Phi Beta Kappa poet at the College of William and Mary
and at Harvard University. He has also published several books of trans¬
lations, including Sappho to Valery: Poems in Translation and The Poems
of St. John of the Cross, and edited The Harper Anthology of Poetry. Several
times on the staff of Poetry (Chicago), he was its editor from 1978 to 1984.
In 1982, he was awarded the Fellowship of the Academy of American
Poets; in 1991, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry.
v
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CONTENTS
PREFACE xxix
BEFORE WE BEGIN xxxi
ONE
The Senses
\
WHERE EXPERIENCE STARTS: The Image 3
THE ROLE OF THE SENSES 3
Anonymous, Western Wind 6
Archibald MacLeish, Eleven i
Robert Morgan, Stretching 8
Sappho, There’s a Man 9
T. S. Eliot, Preludes 9
Anonymous , Brief Autumnal n
THE SPECIFIC IMAGE 11
Ezra Pound, In a Station of the Metro 12
Alba (“As cool as the pale wet leaves . . .”) 12
Anthony Hecht, The End of the Weekend 13
Anonymous, Sir Patrick Spens 15
EXERCISES & DIVERSIONS 16
Brewster Ghiselin, Rattler, Alert 17
Sappho, Leaving Crete, Come Visit Again 18
vii
viii • CONTENTS
2 WHAT'S IT LIKE? Simile, Metaphor, and
Other Figures 20
SIMILE AND METAPHOR 20
Robinson Jeffers, The Purse-Seine 21
Robert Frost, The Silken Tent 24
Emily Dickinson, My Life Had Stood—A Loaded Gun 25
Linda Pastan, Returning 28
Margaret \twood, Habitation 28
William Butler Yeats, No Second Troy 29
Robert Frost, A Patch of Old Snow 31
Helen Chasin, City Pigeons 32
ANALOGY 34
Walter de la Mare, All But Blind 35
SYNESTHESIA 37
ALLUSION 39
Alexander Pope, Intended for Sir Isaac Newton 39
PERSONIFICATION, MYTHOLOGY 41
Karl Shapiro, A Cut Flower 41
William Butler Yeats, Leda and the Swan 44
Walter Savage Landor, Dirce 44
EXERCISES & DIVERSIONS 45
^ THE BROKEN COIN: The Use of Symbol 49
SYNECDOCHE, METONYMY 49
THE SYMBOL 52
Howard Nemerov, Money 54
Plato, The Apple 55
George Herbert, Hope 57
William Blake, The Sick Rose 57
Robert Frost, Acquainted with the Night 58
Saint John of the Cross, The Dark Night 59
THING-POEMS 60
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Merry-Go-Round 60
William Carlos Williams, Nantucket 6i
Karl Shapiro, Girls Working in Banks 62