There was an end to hearts and rhymes,
The old occasion rushed on past.
Now? Unruled pages, and the vast
Spaces of our unsinging times
Within which these still measured lines
Shall wander yet, slowly to mark
A journey through a kind of dark
In which a distance faintly shines.
john hollander, "valentine's day has come and gone" in in time & place, 1986
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A poem by John Hollander
By the Sound
Dawn rolled up slowly what the night unwound
And gulls shrieked violently just out of sight.
In those days I was living by the sound.
The silent water heard the light resound
From all its wriggling mirrors, as the bright
Dawn rolled up slowly what the night unwound.
Each morning had a riddle to expound;
The wrong winds would blow leftward to the right,
In those days I was living by the sound:
The dinghies sank, the large craft ran aground,
Desire leapt overboard, perhaps in fright.
Dawn rolled up slowly what the night unwound.
But seldom, in the morning’s lost-and-found
Would something turn up that was free of blight.
In those days I was living by the sound
The sky contrived, whose water lay around
The place where I was dreaming by the light
(Dawn rolled up slowly) what the night unwound
In those days. I was living by the sound.
John Hollander
(1929-2013)
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One evening in early spring Father gave us dimes:
George planted his in the hard and sour ground of the yard,
Hannah pasted hers to a card and drew crayoned wings
About it, little Willie lent his to a playground
Friend who never paid him back, and I––I took the dime
And let it lie among other coins in my pocket,
Hearing it jingle, safely hidden away among
The ringing gathering of its own kind, like itself
All unspent and all quite blind to just what being saved
Had meant––loss of glitter in the places of exchange,
Of all the energies of getting and expense. Yet
It could sing out: my dime could rhyme with its own echoes,
Down inside a buried sound it was no death to hide.
“9. hidden rhymes” from powers of thirteen, john hollander
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The Observatory
John Hollander, 1957
How vainly open eyes amaze
Themselves with the synoptic gaze!
And cloud the mediant air between
The image and the object seen,
Whose public face may never ask
The one behind it to unmask.
Better to see, I made my home
This dark eye, a transparent dome.
To pierce with pools of mental light
The pudency that shades the night,
I turn my stare on hidden suns,
Forbidden constellations;
Each planet spinning in her niche;
And bright elliptic visions which
No intervening prospect mars:
The winking habits of the stars.
Thus I, crazy astronomer,
Whose heavens are this earth confer
Among my lenses with the few
Who sought for the forbidden view:
Sweet Insight's Martyrs! each displays
The Keyhole, emblem of his praise,
Unlocked by only those who try
The fitting key, the peering eye.
Where Privacy was put to rout
Actaeon peeped true beauty out;
Lot's wife risked all that she might know
What salt had lost its savor so;
Tom's blind eyes clasped, without remorse,
Chaste whiteness straddled on a horse,
And Orpheus turned about to see
His noumenal Eurydice.
Ah, what a life with them I led!
Bright data danced inside my head;
By brambles, where I used to lie,
Endangering the naked eye,
I sped my floating sight to drift
Round Sandra standing in her shift,
To seize a patch of pink and white
Undifferentiated light:
My mother's opera-glass laid bare
The sensibilia lurking there,
Sharp images that should have kept
Secret the Things in which they slept;
Like crystal thoughts that hidden dwell
Within the gem's deceptive shell,
Or mild affections, unbetrayed
By the dark face of a dark shade.
Such innocency as was mine
When, clinging to my neighbor's vine,
I learned that all but blinding lies
Are interdicted from the eyes,
Infused our former State, where turned
Two heavenly bodies; as each burned
The other took his light therefrom:
A perfect Planetarium!
The Beautiful, the virtuous Mean
Were then permitted to be seen
Before false opened eyes effaced
Those bright inscriptions with distaste;
And letters which enclosed the True
By clothes were folded out of view,
Whose blind impress upon the seal
Made the apparent the unreal.
I, in my glassy Paradise,
With fading sight anatomize
The figures of the world, and trope
As rod and staff, my telescope,
Awaiting the descent of night
When I shall read the darkened light
Behind day's unperceiving pall;
While seeing nothing, knowing all.
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Once again, the three classic production photos of Enjolras comforting a crying Marius after Éponine's death.
Because every now and then, they need to be shared.
*John Herrera and Hugh Panaro (US 1st National Tour, 1987)
*Greg Blanchard and Reece Holland (US 2nd National Tour, 1988)
*Jason McCann and Niklas Andersson (London, 2000)
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Higgledy-piggledy - The Art of the Double Dactyl
Jiggery-Pokery: A Compendium of Double Dactyls, an anthology devoted to a novel form of poetry, edited by Anthony Hecht and John Hollander, with illustrations by Milton Glaser, was first published by Atheneum in 1967. The originator of this new brief genre was Anthony Hecht as the introduction explains, even offering a precise date – November 3, 1951 – and a precise place – the American Academy…
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