National Poetry Month 2025: 30 Days, 30 Poems

April 22
Aphasia by Chris Abani

My language is dying the same way


my father did:


Alone. 

Chris Abani is an author I learned about in college. In fact it was in a class called "The African Novel," taught by a white guy whose name (or supervillain sobriquet) was "Professor Slaughter." He was a good teacher. And Chris Abani became a lifelong love. Song For Night is perhaps my favorite short novel, which is saying something because Gogol and Melville are over here providing some stiff competition. 

But what do you do with a poem like this? A poem that arrives on the scene and already it's breaking your heart. Making you think. Making you want to study Igbo... or your own mother tongue (Yiddish, in my case) or even just making you want to try one last desperate time to have a conversation with your own flesh-and-blood father without it devolving into an argument about politics. 

It pains me to talk technique about a poem that just works. But maybe it's a good thing that even when a poem is beautiful and simple you can find the meaning; find where it comes from. Consider how you might use the same tools to make meaning of your own. For instance: "Aphasia" is a beautiful title. Languages really do have their own words. So when a language is lost that means that words are lost. The technology (no joke--technology comes from the Greek 'teknai-logon' meaning the linguistic art) for feeling and saying certain shades of meaning within the sphere of the human experience... we like to say that art is eternal; that words represent the communion of the human wit the divine. But what happens when a whole language dies and its words prove as mortal as the people who spoke them?

Another stroke of genius is that last word of the poem. Left in Igbo and no translation offered. If this poem moves you, you cannot resist going to the internet and trying to find the meaning of the word. "Aphasia" is from 2006 but Abani wrote his first works for publication some 20 years earlir. So this is a poem written by someone who knows how to use words; knows how to lead the eye of his reader just so. 

It can be hard to say exactly what is in your heart. And that paradox is at the heart of a poem like this--simultaneously a virtuoso performance and a simple cry of pain.

-Adam

April 21
Autumn by T. E. Hulme

A touch of cold in the Autumn night—
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded,
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.

I first read Hulme in the Penguin Book of English Verse. I love that book so much even though it’s been supplanted by more antiracist collections like Broadview. It was the late Saskia Hamilton’s favorite book to teach from. I was taking a class in poetry writing with her and one of the assignments was to write a one-page reflection on a poem. As a joke, I chose the shortest one I could find–a 2-line piece by Hulme. I ended up writing a page-and-a-half before I just said “screw it” and called the assignment done. Look at this poem and you see how I never ran out of things to say. See how grounded, yet beautifully executed the similes are?

Such a simple poem and yet we’d all be hard-pressed to find that level of simplicity.

-Adam

April 20
Black Marigolds by Bilhana, trans., E. Powys Mathers

Even now
My thought is all of this gold-tinted king’s daughter
With garlands tissue and golden buds,
Smoke tangles of her hair, and sleeping or waking
Feet trembling in love, full of pale languor;
My thought is clinging as to a lost learning
Slipped down out of the minds of men,
Labouring to bring her back into my soul.

Even now
If I see in my soul the citron-breasted fair one
Still gold-tinted, her face like our night stars,
Drawing unto her; her body beaten about with flame,
Wounded by the flaring spear of love,
My first of all by reason of her fresh years,
Then is my heart buried alive in snow.

I want to talk for a moment about how our relationship to a piece of writing can change over the years. I first read an excerpt of this poem in the Steinbeck novel Cannery Row. I remember rereading that novel some six times just in my freshman year of college. “Oh!” I might have thought at the time. “So that’s what a novel is supposed to do.” Steinbeck gets justly lambasted for his attitude towards women (probably his two ex-wives would have something to say in the matter). But something about the novel caught me. No plot. No little to no forward momentum. Just character moments and the melancholy joy of a window into the psyches of others.

And that party. One of the major scenes in the book shows Doc hosting a party because everyone in the town wanted to do something nice for him. And toward the end of the night, Doc takes a volume down from the shelf and begins reading poetry out loud. Doc is based on a real guy–the person Steinbeck went out on the water with, as memorialized in Log from the Sea of Cortez. So was the party real? Did Doc really take down a volume in the middle of a party and read a 900-year-old Sanskrit poem to a room full of sex-workers and mendicants? And if so, do y’all wanna come over to my place for a party later?

But things change. You learn about the problematic portrayal of women. You find other books that can do some things as well or better. And perhaps more importantly you learn about how the racist educations of even the most important translators–your Burtons and Fitzgeralds and so on–left their mark on these authors’ attempts to communicate the beauties of the various Asian poetic traditions to their own audiences at home in The United Kingdom. So what are we left with? An imperfect translation is better than nothing, no? What was it we liked about the poem in the first place? Was the poem always so erotic? (Feet trembling in love… wounded by the flaring spear of love…) And the focus on the beloved’s white skin… is that Mathers being racist or a medieval Indian poet being colorist? Couple the whiteness-fetish with the fixation on the beloved’s small stature and youth and disproportionately large breasts… Is Bilhana thirsting for an anime princess? Is Bilhana an incel lusting after a petite Asian tradwife?

You know the funny thing? Mathers’ thranslation is 50 stanzas long and even the erotic stuff is kind of one-note. Slender this and white that… So why do I like the poem? Most times when I pick it up to read I only get halfway through. I like the repetition of “even now.” I like that the poem drips with adjectives though I don’t always like which ones. I like the idea that one stanza was not enough; that fifty stanzas were not enough. I like the idea of writing a long poem as tribute to the beloved. And maybe I like it because I was 18 when I read it and my lower back still worked properly. I just like it. Get off my back. So to speak.

Anyway go read it.

-Adam

April 19
Evgeny Onegin by Aleksander Pushkin

“He filled a shelf with a small army of books and read and read; but none of it made sense. .. They were all subject to various cramping limitations: those of the past were outdated, and those of the present were obsessed with the past.”

I read this book my first year of grad school in a class about the evolution of the novel, mostly in Europe. I really liked the way my professor talked about the setting (you have to imagine this in the voice of an elderly gay Peruvian man… good luck with that). He said: the Russian and Ukrainian countryside were full of bored noblemen. They just visited each other’s houses and drank beer and ate fish and that was all. In the city you could find interesting things to do but it was expensive. You might have a liaison with the wrong person. You might fight a duel. So the question you had to ask yourself was: do I want to be bored or in danger?

I think good old Prof Pizarro was overstating the case. Not least because we see Russian nobles in War and Peace acting like they’re cultivating the appearance of boredom. Like it’s a race to the bottom to see who can be the boredest.

Anyway, Onegin is a weird book. It’s a novel but it’s written in 14-line stanzas that are not sonnet stanzas–the rhyme scheme is different. You can argue whether it’s a poem or a novel or a bit of both. What it is is wonderful. What I love most is this one thing: When our female lead meets Onegin for the first time, she thinks he is dashing and magnificent, like a hero out of the storybooks. Later in the novel, she is reading a book off of Onegin’s shelf and the main character reminds her of him. We see her realizing that the man she thought she knew was a constructed personality cobbled together, just as her first instinct had told her, from pieces he had picked up in books.

It’s such a sad moment. Everyone wants to believe in, to strive for something; to be more beautiful, more mysterious… but in playing the part he plays, Onegin is just finding a different way to be generic.

Anyway go read it.

-Adam

April 18
The Epic of Sonjara/Sunjata

I have not read this book since college but I loved it and we need to talk about it. It’s a case where the transmission is as interesting as the story.

You may remember that Milman Parry traveled around looking for aural poetic traditions. There were some in former Yugoslavia, some in Africa, and more. Studying modern aural traditions started as a way to figure out who and what Homer was–a teller of tales? A writer? A transitional figure? A committee?

But it turns out when you study deeply into the foundational poems of various cultures you might find… that those cultures could also write good poetry! What are the odds? Other cultures are… cultured? Anyway, one result was a bunch of American/European anthropologists and Comparative Literature types packing their quinine tablets and bug netting and going off in search of the Next Big Epic Poem.

One such poem is the Epic of Sonjara. I read the version as told by Fa Digi Sisoko and recorded/translated by John William Johnson. It’s awesome. At one point, Fa Digi mentions that he was on the radio the day before, and he does it without changing the poetic meter.

Sunjata is born lame. He can’t walk. There’s a scene where he is given the magical strength to go and perform his task, and he has to rise up and go to work. But he can’t. Yet. So he takes a piece of cane and tries to use it to stand up. The cane breaks. Another cane breaks. Finally the cane bends but doesn’t break and Sunjata is able to walk. Its a beautiful scene. I can imagine criticism or frustration from people who don’t have the use of their legs; this scene minimizes their daily struggles. I ask their leave not to see it that way. Disability is permeable in both directions. There are of course well people who become sick, but there are also sick people who become well.

Another scene depicts Sunjata waiting for his foe Sumamuru to come to town so they can fight. Sumamuru arrives wearing a coat of human skin. Can this guy make an entrance or what? Sumamuru is treated as powerful and harsh while Sunjata is depicted more positively. Not to mention he was the one who went on to found the Mali empire.

Finally, reading an epic lets you know what a culture values. According to this epic poem, order comes from the village and magic/chaos comes from the bush. But that also means that power comes from the bush.

Okay I lied. This is finally: that the epic contains characters who are themselves griots and thus the poem places an emphasis on poetry.

Anyway go read it.

-Adam

April 17
Catullus 59 (one of the dirty ones)

Rufa of Bononia blows Rufulus, she the wife of Menenius. Often you have seen her among the tombs, snatching her meal from the funeral pyre. When she chases after the bread which has rolled from the fire, she is buffeted by the half-shaven cremator.

You’ll find a lot of repeat themes in museums, one of which is “Susannah and the Elders,” a barely Biblical scene (it’s from Daniel… do you ever make it that far?). I’ll skip the suspense–the popularity of the Susannah theme is an excuse for some rich fuck to commission his fave painter to sketch a woman in a compromising pose being leered at by dirty old men. Because you can’t just frame some tits and hang them in your study. It has to be the Bible or Roman antiquity or something. Which makes you wonder… what did they do in Roman antiquity when they wanted some smut?

Lots of books are devoted to that question. Books about graffiti and the low comedy of Plautus and so on. Not my department. I don’t know much. But I do know, for instance: that in the 2nd century AD the surviving fragments of the novel Satyricon make it look like having a sex slave was a common enough practice that it went largely without comment to parade them about in social settings. I know sex workers walk the streets of Plautine comedy (3rd century BC) and are on a first name basis with their john’s wife. And still. Still. Catullus 59 confuses and disturbs me. Who was the target audience? Who is Rufa of Bononia? Is Rufulus meant to be her stepson or her nephew or…? Are Rufa and Rufulus, as seems unlikely, their real names? Did we seriously just find history’s first “What are you doing stepmom”?

And–always a question with older texts–are we looking at two poems that accidentally got schmooshed together over the years? What does Rufa blowing her step-someone have to do with stealing the sacrificial bread from the half-shaven cremator? And does he then beat her as the plain text implies? Or bang her? I find myself thinking this is just a diss-track. Far from narrating a tale of import or interest or even coherence, Catullus is just freestyling about someone’s wife. But it’s just a theory. *Sigh…
The past truly is another country…
Questions, questions, questions…

Also do you notice that the 1894 translation of the poem (seen above) already translates “fellare” as “blow”? I guess I didn’t know when that construction was coined. But the fidelity of the translation even in that one word is no small thing. Look how Sir Richard Burton (yeah, the Arabian Nights guy) does it the very same year:

Rufa the Bolognese drains Rufule dry,
(Wife to Menenius) she ‘mid tombs you’ll spy,
The same a-snatching supper from the pyre
Following the bread-loaves rolling forth the fire
Till frapped by half-shaved body-burner’s ire.

Just awful. Seriously. Just. Awful. I expect better smut from a guy named Dick.

-Adam

April 16
On Perfection by Okla Elliot

The sanctified blade is perfect.

The colossal slowness of dying is perfect.

I wasn’t in a down mood tonight. I regularly flip through articles online dedicated to celebrating dead poets. And I regularly focus on poets I’ve known personally. We call this “typical Wednesday behavior.”

I met Okla in 2015, the same place I met our frequent collaborator Shi Huiwen. Okla was a published poet and novelist. He offered to look at my work and give constructive feedback. And then he died. What a jerk.

Okla was a decent fellow. He cared about his students; boasted about their achievements all the time. Wrote a book about Bernie Sanders to introduce populist politics to an American audience after far, far too long. And. Just look at this poem. Okla’s poetry does what poetry is supposed to do: it makes the very act of tasting the words in your mouth into something new and strange:

Everything will rhyme
in the afterlife
as it does in the beforedeath.

Okla makes me want to believe in an afterlife. I don’t. I think it’s probably slim consolation to his nothingness that people still read his works. But they’re good; so we press on. No reason to stop.

-Adam

April 15
To a Young Poet by Mahmoud Darwish

Be strong as a bull when you’re angry
weak as an almond blossom
when you love, and nothing, nothing
when you serenade yourself in a closed room.

April is Arab-American Heritage Month. I don’t usually mark such occasions–I get time-blind so they make me more anxious than not–but Erika likes them. Anyway I first encountered Mahmoud Darwish when I tried to take an Arabic class at that bastion of civil rights Columbia University. I’m bringing him up now not because I want to discuss dead poets in preference to living ones (I really, really do; I know I shouldn’t). But because Darwish has an energy we need for our times. Consider the fact that Darwish had decades of staying power in one of the most difficult places and times in the 20th century. And then he goes and writes something like this. Read the poem I’ve linked and you’ll see it’s paternal without being patriarchal. It’s full of fatherly affection for a generation of poets whose work Darwish will never see.

Which is not to say Darwish is a pushover. His anger bleeds off the page in poem after poem.

But whatever it was that allowed Darwish to write “You won’t disappoint me, / if you distance yourself from others, and from me. / What doesn’t resemble me is more beautiful,” we need more of it in this world.

-Adam

April 14
In Kyoto by Matsuo Basho

Even in Kyoto
Hearing the Cuckoo's cry
I long for Kyoto. 

A poem like this makes you want to be spare in writing about it. But I will go so far as to say, for those whose knowledge of haiku comes from its misrepresentation in American pop culture, that what makes this a traditional haiku is the reference to a season. Where? Well, the Japanese branch of the cuckoo family appears to be migratory; so its cry is the herald of the season. Japan is home to many of the snowiest regions in the word (the novel Snow Country by Kawabata is about one such). It makes sense that a bird would not want to winter there. So the cuckoo’s cry isn’t just a random occurrence. But rather, like the cock’s crow or the loon’s cry or the sight of a “flying V” of Canada geese, the cuckoo’s cry marks the month on the world’s calendar.

Now. I know it’s a nerdy affectation for me to persist in distinguishing between “haiku,” which is the more serious version of this poetic form that deals with nature and references the seasons, and “senryu,” which is the more playful version of this poetic form that deals with human foibles. I know it’s silly of me to clench my teeth each time I hear someone say “haiku” when they mean “senryu.” And, after all, what is the point of reading the poems of Basho if that beauty can’t touch your soul and make you a little kinder and more patient. So let me take a deep breath and straighten my shoulders and half-lid my eyes and let the slow smile of inner peace o’erspread my features as I say: “Learn the goddamn difference. It’s not that goddamn hard.”

-Adam

April 12
Minstrel Man by Langston Hughes

Because my mouth 
Is wide with laughter
And my throat
Is deep with song,
You do not think 
I suffer after 
I have held my pain 
So long. 

Because my mouth 
Is wide with laughter, 
You do not hear
My inner cry, 
Because my feet 
Are gay with dancing, 
You do not know 
I die. 

Not everything has to be complicated. What is more satisfying than the simple dish, well made? Or in this case: what better way to learn than by partaking of the plain home fare in someone else’s home?

In some ways, this is the goal. Being let in. It takes trust for a person to drop the mask in your presence. And once they do, the real work can begin.

What we are witnessing in this poem is a miracle. No room for error in such a poem; no room for hypocrisy or equivocation or anything but the pure cry from within. Hughes is truly a master.

-Adam

April 11
The New Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish Duchess of Newcastle

Definitions change. Gogol called his novel “Dead Souls” a poem even though it was in prose. Gogol’s contemporary, Pushkin, called his Onegin a novel even though it was written in verse. Rhyming as a convention is largely only a couple thousand years old. What’s up with that? Part of the explanation is that the word “poet” comes from the Greek “poiesis” meaning “to make.” So a “poem” referred in practice to any work of literature especially fictional. Like an opus/opera. Which brings us to Cavendish. Sometimes called the first woman to publish a science fiction novel. Or is she the first modern fantasy novelist? Science-fantasy? She also wrote lots of nonfiction; basically the first woman to be a full-time natural philosopher.

You have to read this book. An unnamed main character travels on a boat to another world. She can do this because the worlds are connected at the poles. She becomes empress (naturally setting the main character up to seem like an author-self-insert) of that world and immediately fulfills her dream of… cross examining the scientists. Other notable things happen: she gets a visit from the Duchess of Newcastle. Wait–isn’t that the author who wrote the Blazing World in the first place? Yup. Wait–I thought the empress was the self-insert character. I mean. Kind of. Maybe both? So then the two characters sit down and start writing Utopia-style fantasies. Huh? Isn’t this book a Utopia-style fantasy? Now you’re getting it. Anyway. Go read. It’s amazing.

-Adam

April 10
Mantle by Kevin Young

The dead do
     what they want
which is nothing—

Kevin Young was the director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. He was fired from that role last week by Musk. His plight–and the beauty of his poetry–was brought to our attention by Eve Brackenbury. This poem is lively, given its subject matter. And it has that liminal quality where you don’t know if he is using “the dead” as a metaphor or if the poem actually takes us into that other world. Young’s notes tell us that the work is inspired by Dante, so perhaps the answer is: “a bit of both.”

-Adam

April 9
I was in a Hurry by Dunya Mikhail

Yesterday I lost a country.
I was in a hurry,
and didn't notice when it fell from me
like a broken branch from a forgetful tree.

As an American and an (in may ways) fairly privileged one at that, I feel i am always playing catch up. I didn’t start properly salting my food until I was in my thirties and then only at the insistence of my South Asian partner. I’d learned about inequality; even done political activism. But never in a way that cost me anything; again, not until I was in my thirties. I imagine the last few weeks have felt similar to a lot of Americans. We are used to ruling the world; have done so since the 1920s more or less. Now we’re facing something new; the fragility of the American experiment, such as it is. It’s past time. We are used to being able to turn our powers on other countries; we may not be able to do what we want with them but we can do what they don’t want with ease and impunity. With such powerful tools just lying around it was inevitable that a child got his hands on them. I hope this episode in American history makes us more circumspect. We shall see.

Poems like this–by Iraqi-American poet Dunya Mikhail–might be able to teach us what it feels like from day to day–the powerlessness that comes of being a really small piece on a really big chess board. We’ll see if the lesson sticks. And for how long.

-Adam

April 8
Animula Vagula Blandula by Emperor Hadrian

Animula vagula blandula
Hospes comesque corporis
Quae nunc abibis in loca?
Pallidula rigida nudula
Nec ut soles dabis iocos

Poor little, wandering, charming soul
Guest and companion of my body,
What place will you go to now?
Pale, stiff, naked little thing,
Nor will you be making jokes as you always do. (Trans., Isaac Casaubon)

I don’t know why I have such a fixation for the early classics this week but I’m going to go with it. The poem we talked about yesterday (albeit indirectly) was Catullus 101, which the great translator Anne Carson (look at her work on Sappho) considered untranslatable. Well if that one was then this one definitely is because it relies on a grammatical convention that doesn’t even exist in English: the ending -ula as a diminutive. The closest we have are the suffixes “-let” as in “streamlet,” “-ling” as in “youngling” and “-ish” as in “hungryish.”

“Animula” means “little soul” or “little spirit.” You could translate that just fine as “Soullet” and people would get your point more or less. But the next two words–“vagula” and “blandula.” “Vagus a um” means wandering. So what does “vagula” mean? A little wandering? Wandering-ish? Wanderish? And “blandus a um” means “lovely” or “alluring.” Even were all well, we’d have the lovely music of the soul, near death, being both wandering and alluring. Wandering off but inviting me to follow. Who is doing the inviting and who is being invited? That’s a normal problem for a normal poem. Now add in the suffix. “Allurish”? “Entice-ish”? Part of me wants to just go that way:

Wanderish allurish spiritish
Guest and friend of this body
Where will you go now?
Pale-ish, nakedish, spine-straight
Not making any more jokes?

It’s horrible. Or maybe it just takes some getting used to.

Little soul, little lovely, little wandery
Guest and friend of this body
Where will you go now?
Little pale, little naked, spine straight
Not making any more jokes?

The possibilities are endless because there is explicitly no right answer. Mark Strand used to say: if you are looking for poetic inspiration, try reading an old, not-especially popular poem in a different language; maybe you’ll find that its time has come again. Some part of it–the music, the imagery, the form–will find new expression in your next poem. That’s kind of what we’re doing here but this challenge is more specific. This poem and others like it are sitting here like Fermat’s last theorem waiting for the next generation to try their hand at them. How will you square the circle? By translating it into a Pidgin that does have such grammatical features? By taking inspiration and letting it lead you in another direction entirely? By seeking out an aspect of English grammar that doesn’t have its peer in other tongues and crafting, not a translation, but a parallel example?

There is no possibility for success. Doesn’t that just make you want to try anyway?

-Adam

April 7
Nox by Anne Carson

Multās per gentēs et multa per aequora vectus
adveniō hās miserās, frāter, ad īnferiās,
ut tē postrēmō dōnārem mūnere mortis
et mūtam nēquīquam alloquerer cinerem
quandoquidem fortūna mihī tētē abstulit ipsum
heu miser indignē frāter adēmpte mihī
nunc tamen intereā haec, prīscō quae mōre parentum
trādita sunt trīstī mūnere ad īnferiās,
accipe frāternō multum mānantia flētū.
Atque in perpetuum, frāter, avē atque valē.

The story goes that poet and translator Anne Carson lost her brother at a young age and didn’t know how to memorialize him. She had worked on melancholy poems by the Greeks and Latins for years; probably knew a few good elegies by heart. But what happens when it’s your own heart that has the hole in it? If any one poem called to her it was Catullus 101, which he wrote a thousand years ago for his own brother.

But Carson had long considered that poem untranslatable.

She arrived at a compromise: on a long, long piece of paper (like one used to find in old fax machines) she put the poem, using collage, one word at a time with facing translation; no, not translation exactly. She put the word as it appeared on the poem on one side and the word with its definition as it appeared in the dictionary on the other. And around where those two words faced each other across the page like estranged family members she further employed collage: family photos, snippets of letters and diary entries, and other relics from his manic travels. I was studying Latin by then and was already familiar with the poem so it’s hard for me to discern whether you can suss out the meaning of the poem just from those one-word translations. But Carson’s point is that you can’t do it even if you know the poem. There is something about Catullus 101 that you have to read yourself. And even then there are no certainties. But the sense of loss comes across; and more than that: the sense that loss cannot be put into words.

Matters would have ended there but the memorial–that long sheet of paper–found its way to New Directions Books and was published as Nox by Anne Carson. The “book” you get when you buy a copy (I got mine used for like ten dollars; otherwise it costs upwards of forty) is actually a box containing a facsimile of Carson’s original collage. And yes they put it on a single piece of paper that you pull out of the box in accordion-like folds. The back is completely blank.

Carson’s challenge–that Catullus 101 is untranslatable–actually led me to try to translate the piece myself. I’d show you what I mean but I’m trying to get it published in a different literary magazine and they’re notoriously finicky about previously published work. Email us or find us on social media and I’ll send you a copy to beta-read.

Is Nox a poem? A translation? A collage? I don’t know. It’s just in my thoughts lately and now for a little while it’s in yours, too.

-Adam

April 6
Something Childish but Very Natural by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

But in my sleep to you I fly:
I'm always with you in my sleep!
The world is all one's own.

This is one of the first poems I ever memorized. Looking back now, I can see it was a poem that spoke to me as a daydreamer. I don’t especially love to wake ere break of day, but I do appreciate the verses about having one’s own schedule and one’s own comfort zones. If yesterday’s tribute to Abu Nuwas was about addressing the elephant in the room–racism, current events, etc.–today’s is about making space for yourself. You need both. Poems that remind you to act and poems that remind you to be still; and you need to find the balance yourself.

A thought I had just today about this poem points to a darker side of Coleridge’s career and personality: that a lot of Coleridge’s dreams, whether about Xanadu or about his family and friends, came to him courtesy of opium. I could say more about balance; about the sad contrast between Coleridge Wordsworth. Wordsworth was more of a worker; more of an even keel. He wrote a lot of garbage and rarely if ever attained the heights of a poem like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Yet there is an unpretentious beauty to dozens upon dozens of Wordsworth’s pieces that I find myself returning to again and again.

Coleridge and Wordsworth do represent the two schools of artistic praxis–the rockstar and the artisan. But maybe I’m prattling on too long. This is a simple poem; and I have to believe that a simple poem can be enjoyed simply.

-Adam