Happy Birthday, Edgar Allen Poe and Good-Bye Mary Oliver

photo from wikipedia

His life was haunted and uneasy, his stories even more so. I read his tales with fear and delight when I was in my early teens, and came to appreciate his genius, and his darkness, later in life.

A friend posted this on Facebook, and it is one of Poe's poems  I had not read before. What mastery of language. Happy birthday, Mr. Poe. I hope eternity has provided you more rest than life on this troubled earth provided.



A Dream Within A Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

~E. A. Poe

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photo from poetryfoundation.org 

This week we lost another great poet, the wonderful Mary Oliver. In some ways, I want to dedicate Poe's poem above to her, and yet her writing tells us that she would not have viewed either life or death as a "surf-tormented shore." She embraced the joy of life, and accepted the awe and inevitably of nature.

Morning Poem

Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches ---
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead ---
if it's all you can do
to keep on trudging ---

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted ---

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.

--Mary Oliver



Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.