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Arrival of Spring

Each wing delivers news of a young earth:
The nightingale, the end of moonless woes,
The dove, the peace of melting mountain snows,
The hummingbird, a lightness dense with mirth.
The goldfinch tells the sun what joy is worth,
The starling stirs the nimbus clouds that doze,
The cardinal draws passion from the rose,
The crane distills the waters of rebirth.

Then feathers flutter in the headlights’ glare:
No messengers are heard, no chirp or trill.
Spring carrion are silent to the blare
Of horns along the country lanes they fill.
The day you took up in that buzzard lair
My happiness was flattened to roadkill.

.

.

The Right Balance

Lopsided in the scales of life, a pull
Might stabilize our fortunes and admit
That proverb’s wrongness: that a branching apple
Can’t ripen in an orange’s passing basket.

A bit more money, and I’d buy a ring
With jewels of eggs to nest around, my bird.
A bit less hardship, and your surer footing
Could fit in the glass slipper I’d discovered.

We’d hibernate if I had browner fur
Or a silver lining streaked your mane, my fox.
With more naïveté, I’d plan our future.
With more experience, you would seldom flummox.

My far-flung net would pull a rotten catch
Were not your peerless charm my perfect match.

.

.

Andrew Benson Brown has had poems and reviews published in a few journals. His epic-in-progress, Legends of Liberty, will chronicle the major events of the American Revolution if he lives to complete it. Though he writes history articles for American Essence magazine, he lists his primary occupation on official forms as ‘poet.’ He is, in other words, a vagabond.


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26 Responses

  1. James Sale

    Very, very skilful poems – the final rhyme, for example, of ‘roadkill’ is quite brilliant, because whilst it is a ‘perfect’ rhyme, it is also an unexpected spondee which, whilst a generally accepted substitution for an iamb, here pulls us up short. This certainly is writing at its best.

    Reply
  2. Michael Pietrack

    I appreciated the set up in “Arrival of Spring”. I was floating off is peaceful ease and then disrupted by the blaring horns. And then, splat I went against your point. Masterful!

    You have a fan out here in Colorado. When I see your name as the submitted author, I stop and read that instant. Keep up the great work.

    Reply
    • ABB

      Glad I have Colorado covered. Need to work on the other 49 states. My fans here in Missouri are mostly limited to family relations!

      Reply
  3. jd

    Enjoyed both poems very much as well as the graphic. The first struck me as sad rather than
    humorous. A thanks to James Sale also for the
    explanation of the use of “roadkill” in “The Arrival
    of Spring”.

    Reply
    • ABB

      I was feeling down when I wrote both of these, so appreciate that you perceived that side of it, jd.

      Reply
  4. Stephen Dickey

    Both of these are spot on for me. The set-up in “Arrival of Spring” took me in too. As a casual birdwatcher, I’ve noticed I only end up hitting birds when going 90+ MPH. Thankfully I don’t make that speed too often, certainly not on country roads.
    I also think the couplet of “The Right Balance” is the most striking I’ve seen in some time, a perfect ending.

    Reply
    • ABB

      Thanks, Stephen. Living in the country as I do, have had the occasional experience of a bird flying into my windshield. Once I almost hit a bald eagle that flew right in front of me and had to slam on my breaks! That would have been traumatic.

      Reply
  5. Joseph S. Salemi

    The high-flown octet of the sonnet “Arrival of Spring” sets you up perfectly for the sucker-punch of the deflating sestet. It’s a great way to puncture the balloon of gaseous pomposity. We need more of such stuff.

    Reply
    • ABB

      Thanks Dr Salemi. These poems were initially rejected by a certain other journal, as they were ill-matched to the editor’s lofty aesthetic purposes. Oh well—Evan’s gain!

      Reply
  6. Jeremiah Johnson

    Andrew,

    I love the rundown of fowls in “Arrival of Spring” – reminds me in a way of Lewis’s comments in “The Discarded Image” about the medieval joy in tabulating known knowledge, not because their audience didn’t know what they were talking about, but for the sheer joy of the act – and, of course, most often with refreshing little commentaries like the ones you provide for each bird.

    Regarding line 13 of the poem, I’ll admit I’m not sure what it means – could you elaborate a little for me?

    Finally, my favorite way of responding to poetry is with poetry itself, so I thought I’d share a brief piece of my own which your poem brought to mind:

    Insulated

    Driving home this April evening,
    Weaving over, under and around
    On foliage shrouded backroads
    To the sensuous insects’ sound
    And to “Songs My Mother Taught Me”,
    And, dipping in to shaded groves,
    I muse on what the early settlers
    Must have felt at plodding through
    Such glens, with dark descending
    Round them, laid bare to nature
    On horseback or in horse-drawn
    Carriage, mulling slowly over each
    Slanting sun-ray, each dark shade –
    Like Ichabod astride his noble steed,
    His reedy whistling in the gloom –
    Uninsulated by the steel and speed
    Which safeguard me from mystery.

    Reply
    • ABB

      Thanks, Jeremiah. The anachronistic pedant within me loves comparisons to medievalism.
      Line 13 was a personal reference. The addressee knows who she is. I am given to understand that sonnet-writing was practiced in courtly circles where the identity of the subject was intended to be somewhat opaque—guessable but not certain. Wyatt’s poems to Anne Boleyn are a case in point. Henry VIII would have had him killed (as he almost was anyway) if this versifier guy had written more explicit love poems to his queen. In any case he must have guessed anyway, because he sent Wyatt on diplomatic missions to get rid of him.
      Thanks for sharing your reflective poem. I appreciate the historical and literary parallels. You mimic the mystery surrounding settlers’ experiences by hinting at, without explicitly stating, the content of their thoughts, remaining fixed in descriptions of shade and slanting light.

      Reply
  7. Evan Mantyk

    Thank you for the poems, Andrew! “The Right Balance” belongs in the next edition of How to Write Classical Poetry. Here’s why:

    The problem that many new poets have is that they rhyme a hard beat with a soft beat, which actually means you haven’t achieved a full rhyme at all (even though the poem at hand seems to call for a full rhyme). Andrew has taken this fact and consciously used it to craft a very clever poem. So you will notice that in lines 1 and 3, the rhyming beats are off: “a PULL” and “APple”; lines 2 and 4: “adMIT” and “BASket.” This continues on until the final couplet when the strong full rhymes of “CATCH” and “MATCH” are achieved, and what perfect choices of words to illustrate this as well. Andrew deftly uses the dissonant almost rhymes and the perfect rhyme at the end to reflect the pursuit of finding the right partner in life. Brilliant!

    Reply
    • James Sale

      Great analysis Evan: essentially what ABB does is use the language mimetically; the ‘flawed’ rhyming mirrors the quest to find the right partner, and on finding that person the rhyme ‘perfects’ itself, as it were. It takes real ability to do that (which of course ABB has), but from my POV it also leads away from too simplistic a view that rhyming should always ‘rhyme’ – meaning here, of course, should perfectly rhyme. Here we see precisely why perfect rhyming would be a big mistake in this particular poem.

      Reply
      • ABB

        James, yes lots of ways to handle rhyme, as I am gradually discovering. One might call the rhyme of metrical mismatch a variation on the forms of ‘perfect imperfect’ rhyme, of which Wilfred Owen was a pioneer.

      • Evan Mantyk

        James, good point. One way to look at it is that there is a balance between the formal techniques (rhyming, alliteration etc.) and the delivery of narrative meaning. Loose rhymes, slant rhymes, and no rhymes are all fine if it matches the overall style and situation. For example, if a writer is delivering a tightly packed narrative, as you do in your epic and Milton does in his, then we are not expecting full rhymes.

      • James Sale

        Thanks Evan: I like being squeezed into the same sentence with Milton! And of course, for some poems – given context – perfect rhyme is perfect! In my own final instalment of The English Cantos, called DoorWay (which is my version of Paradiso), which I have now commenced writing, I am having to think even more carefully about the nature of the rhyming, since heaven we consider a perfect place. I hope I can whet appetites by saying in the first canto of DoorWay I have weaved together a treble triple rhyme across the stanzas to try to capture that sense of supernal radiance. And as for ABB’s allusion to Wilfred Owen, then that is an allusion after my own heart: I consider Strange Meeting a masterpiece of rhyming and of poetry. ABB is certainly on the right path with his poetic development using such models and writing so well here as an exhibition of it; and it is exciting that he is so young too!!! Like yourself – there is a future!

    • ABB

      Thank you, Evan. Of course it would be an honor to be included in your handbook. Ironic in a way, because I actually used that book to help me get better at writing formal verse when I first connected with SCP three years ago!

      Reply
  8. Paul Freeman

    I particularly enjoyed the first poem, with its mesmeric listing of birds and their part in the coming of spring, then the humorous turn. It’s another of those poems I believe could instill a love of poetry in the younger, high school reader. The sonnet is easy to understand and spurs the reader on to delve further into the attributes of these avian miracles rather than clump them together generically as ‘birds’ without differentiation.

    Taking nothing away from The Right Balance, I particularly enjoyed the imagery surrounding hibernating bears and foxes.

    Thanks for the reads, Andrew.

    Reply
    • ABB

      Thanks for your appreciation, Paul. It would certainly be nice if we could get more young people off of Tik-Tok and into literature.

      Reply
  9. Margaret Coats

    Sorry to disagree with James Sale on “ROADkill,” but in my pronunciation (and in that of all Americans I have heard say it), it is a typical English word with accent on the first syllable. It does not rhyme perfectly with “fill” and “trill” (see Evan Mantyk’s note that perfect rhyme demands both sound and rhythm). “ROADkill” does something more suitable to Andrew’s poem, mimicking the splat that creates roadkill by flattening the rhyme to imperfection. Great way to end a poem on the chosen topic, and sorry I have had no time to notice it until now. Let me express admiration for “The Right Balance” as well. From my point of view, careful and even rigid attention to meter/rhythm is the way to keep imperfect rhymes (which we poets writing in English must frequently use) in good poetic order.

    Reply
    • James Sale

      Dear Margaret
      Always the aluminium question! First I have to confess a severe lack in my life: I am not sure I have ever heard an American say the word ‘roadkill’. In the UK, especially since Covid, we say it all the time as we are becoming a poor banana republic. Indeed, I myself, like millions of my compatriots now, can only survive via roadkill: FoxFlat, JayDead, and BeeSquash provide marvellous food, so long as you get the salt and pepper right (though, getting enough BeeSquash is very time consuming, especially in winter).
      On the more substantive issue: My Oxford U Reference Dictionary and my Chambers Dictionary both agree that ‘roadkill’ is not spelt like that but is ‘road kill’ – two separate words and they both indicate that they are equally stressed. My Websters is quite old and didn’t list the word. Of course, as separate words the functions shift slightly to favour my interpretation: as ‘roadkill’, the compound word, is a noun, but as road kill we have ‘road’ functioning as a qualifying adjective, which suggests more of a stress on ‘kill’. It’s certainly an unusual word, and this debate links to the one going on with Susan JB and the definition of ‘women’: are dictionaries prescriptive or descriptive? I think Joe has given us the definitive lead on that in his riposte there.
      So, I conclude and maintain that ‘roadkill’ is spondaic, but the more important point is that it works either way, for you unravel its power as a trochee essentially, and this reminds me of Frost’s famous and brilliant hence/difference rhyme in the Road Not Taken.
      The final word must surely be given to the poet, the great Benson Brown: how does he pronounce the word? Perhaps he could do an audio recording and send it to me so that I can – at long last, after 70 years of waiting – hear an American say that magic and ominous word, ‘roadkill’. Thanks for your great comments.

      Reply
      • ABB

        OK, long unnecessary explanation follows here.

        I intended it to be a spondee, but I realized that Margaret is right. According to Google pronunciation (if Google may be seen as the authority of all things), it is ROWD-kil. Google lists it as being the same for American and British English. I admit that I am occasionally guilty of forcing spondees at the end of lines, and I do this even more with double-schwa words. How nice, though, Margaret, that your interpretation happens to fit my error!

        As far as being one word or two, both are deemed to be correct. To corroborate this, we must refer to the ULTIMATE ULTIMATE authority in lexical matters: the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Yes, my friends, I am afraid if you are using merely a dictionary (or worse yet, merely a thesaurus), then your scholarship is hopelessly obsolete. You must be referring to a thesaurus OF a dictionary—and there is only one! Compiled over a period of forty years by a team of scholars, it represents the cutting edge of verbosity. Let’s see what it says:

        “Road-kill” (with a hyphen) is listed under the category ‘killing of animals’ and records the first use from 1979. Then, to complicate things further, there is “road(-)kill / road kill” – the parentheses in the first seems to indicate the option of either a single compound word, as in my usage, or a hyphenated word. This one falls under the metaphorical category of a ‘useless person/thing,’ and dates to 1992. So, apparently, first the word was hyphenated in its literal sense, then the compound / split word-phrasing followed with metaphorical usage.

        Of course, if we are using this term in its metaphorical sense, I prefer its synonym ‘cumber-world,’ in use from 1374 to 1593.

        If I had my OED on hand, I would cross-reference further for pronunciation of these variations, but it’s at my other house. If I remember to look it up when I go back there for New Years, will do so.

        My wife thought I was crazy when I spent $500 to buy the HTOED. “What a cumber-world,” she might have called it if she knew that word. As it is now out of print, its two volumes are going for about 2K. The new online version of the site is currently down (they are expanding it to add idiotic contemporary slang like ‘awesomesauce’ and ‘amazeballs’). So you’ll have to take my word for it!

      • ABB

        To add more to this and to explicitly respond to your question, James, I would pronounce the compound usage as trochaic and the two-word usage as spondaic. Although I would say that as far as trochees go, ‘roadkill’ is less trochaic in its emphasis than, say, ‘glibly’ or such other adverb that is neatly glided over. A pedant might even give this an absurd name like ‘half-trochee,’ or ‘spondaic trochee.’
        Ok no more trifling.

      • James Sale

        Ha ha ha!!! Well, then, seems like I am corrected, although I don’t think definitively because of course dictionaries and thesauruses alone cannot determine the stress, as syntax and metrical patterning may affect any given word! I am surprised that my own Oxford dictionary can disagree with your $2K Oxford version. But here’s one final point I’ll make and then quit the field. Aside from dictionaries, consider what is a typical 2-syllable trochaic word sounds like: e.g. river, waiting, outlet etc. We go up with the beat and then we go down. When we say ‘road-kill’, we do not, I think, get that same pronounced dip or falling away that is typical of the trochee; so even if it is not strictly pure spondaic, the second syllable has a stress, albeit not as intense or quite – quite – equal to the word ‘road’. So your own compromise reading, ABB, is I think probably nearer the truth. Either way, it’s a fabulous poem and thanks to Margaret for raising the issue; technically, it’s very interesting.

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