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The View from My Window
Two letters from Don Yorty
 More of this Feature
• April 29, a letter with sonnets
 
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• Emily “The Virgin” Dickinson, 1830 - 1886
• “What Would Emily Say?,” an in-death interview by Robyn Su Millerz
• Raising Their Voices, poets speak out against war in Iraq, by Victor Infante
 

When Laura Bush canceled the Rose Garden poetry reading for “politicizing” poets Hughes, Whitman, and Dickinson, much was made of the political nature of Hughes’ and Whitman’s poetry -- African American, gay, pacifist.... Somehow Emily didn’t seem to fit the Political Poet rubric. Wrong! We love Don Yorty’s reading of Dickinson’s “Hope is the thing with feathers...” so much we had to ask if we could pass his letter along to you, dear Readers.

Here’s our inveterate East Village poet/reporter with the first two installments of what we hope will be a semiregular About Poetry column, “The View from My Window.”

Bob Holman & Margy Snyder

MARCH 23
“Hope is the thing with feathers”

I’ve not been enjoying seeing Baghdad bombed. Whatever debatable arguments there are for having gone in, the fact that innocent people are being bombed to death or maimed for life like that little Iraqi girl with the severed spinal column, that violence is done to the innocent, negates any argument for the war that’s taking place. The tons of money being spent could be spent on better things than death lining the pockets of the rich. This could have been done peacefully with the world watching. But the world is run by bullies who need to get their rocks off. When shall the meek inherent the earth? When hell freezes over I suppose.

Well, there’s always hope, as Emily Dickinson has so succinctly said. Do you know this poem? I make my class memorize the first stanza to exercise their brains.

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet never in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
I love how that little word abash (to make somebody bashful, quiet) has within its gentle confines the word bash: the word its own oxymoron, outside the gentleness, inside the violence, not to abash the little bird, but to bash it quiet. I also like the last stanza with its own scheme: sea, extremity and me all rhyming; but then one realizes that the chillest land, which is an extreme, connects in that sense with the other three, and land and sea are each other’s extremity as well. Everything is rhyming and connecting with extremity followed by me, the last word: I who can go no further than the end of my own fingers, but who can hope, and go beyond myself, but no, it’s hope that may fly away but never ask a crumb. Ultimately we’re stuck to ask the question, Is hope a good bird or a bad one? Here comes the sun. I’m going to put on some shorts and run. I hope this finds you well.

Don Yorty

Next page > April 29, Yellow Spring and Sonnets > page 1, 2


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