In Honor of Wallace Stevens, A Poem - "At the Battle of Yorktown"

Cornwallis surrenders at Yorktown. Painting by John Trumbull (1820)

My wife Kathleen is planning a trip to Yorktown, Virginia, to research a travel article for the San Antonio Express-News. I used to live in that area and enjoyed jogging around the Yorktown battlefield. About 30 years ago, the monument celebrated the 200th anniversary of the battle. The newspaper hosted a competition for poets to write about the battle. I submitted the poem below, and they selected it as the first place entry.

The poem was inspired by Wallace Stevens' "Domination of Black," a great poem that uses language to create hypnotic rhythms, a demonstration of poetic art you don't see very often these days. So with a respectful nod to Stevens, here is "At the Battle of Yorktown" (1981)...

By day, by the York,
The colors of spent trees
And of the falling leaves
Repeating themselves,
Dying across the field,
Waving in the wind.
Yes. And the color of old ranks
Came striding.
And I remembered the crack of the flintlocks.

The colors of the ranks
Blended with the leaves themselves,
Turning in the wind,
In the sunlit wind.
They swept over the the field,
Moving as rows and ranks
Toward walls of earth.
I thought I heard them crack - the flintlocks.
Was it a crack for the sunlight
Or for the leaves themselves,
Turning in the wind,
Turning as flames
Turn in fire,
Turning as the rows of flintlocks
Turned toward the burning earth,
Echoing the steps of the ranks,
Beating with the cracking of the flintlocks?
Or was it for the heartbeat of our ranks?

Across the field
I saw humanity gathered
Like the leaves themselves,
Moving in the wind.
Then I saw how the sun moved,
Burned over the colors of the ranks,
Far above the flashing of the flintlocks.

Post by Dennis E. Coates, Ph.D., Copyright 2011. Building Personal Strength .

12 Quotes from Great Poets - They Had Something to Say

Once upon a time, people went to bookstores, bought books of poetry, and read them. A book of poetry could become a best-seller. People would sit and talk about new works from the major poets. Those days are over.

Emily Dickinson, circa 1848

Poetry was killed by the liberal, anything-goes revolution of the 1960s. After a while, it became politically incorrect to declare what was good poetry and what was bad. This allowed anyone to write whatever they wanted and declare themselves poets. How nice. But this left the true, accomplished poets high and dry. Most stopped writing because there wasn't much appreciation or a market for good poetry anymore. Oh well, nothing lasts forever.

Besides, people who love good poetry have centuries of wonderful classics to enjoy.

Which I do. I also collect the wisdom of poets in the form of quotes. Most poets are ultra-sensitive, ultra-thoughtful people. So they had important things to say, and not always in verse.

A few of my favorites...

PASSION - "My candle burns at both ends, it will not last the night But ah, my foes and oh, my friends, It gives a lovely light"! - Edna St. Vincent Millay, American poet (1892-1950)

COOPERATION - “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main....any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” - John Donne, British poet (1572-1631)

PERSEVERANCE - “Perseverance is a great element of success. If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody.” - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, American poet (1807-1882)

SELF-AWARENESS - "Oh, what a great gift we would have if we could only see ourselves as others see us." - Robert Burns, Scottish poet (1759-1796)

OPTIMISM - “If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.” - Anne Bradstreet, British poet (1612-1672)

SELF-DEVELOPMENT - “You can stay young as long as you learn.” - Emily Dickinson, American poet (1830-1886)

INITIATIVE - "All the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action." - James Russell Lowell, American poet (1819-1891)

FRIENDSHIP - "Music I heard with you was more than music, and bread I broke with you was more than bread." - Conrad Aiken, American poet (1889-1973)

RESPONSIBILITY - "Enlightenment means taking full responsibility for your life." - William Blake, British poet (1757-1827)

SELF-ESTEEM - "It takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are." - E. E. Cummings, American poet (1894-1962)

COURAGE - "Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest." - Maya Angelou, American author (1928- )

SPIRITUALITY - “The natural world is a spiritual house. . . . Man walks there through forests of physical things that are also spiritual things.” - Charles Baudelaire, French poet (1821-1867)

Post by Dennis E. Coates, Ph.D., Copyright 2011. Building Personal Strength .

Kahlil Gibran - My First Contact with Wisdom

I was 18 years old, and my plane from Germany had just landed in Washington, DC. It was a hot, humid June day in 1963 and I was on my way to visit my aunt for a couple weeks before reporting to West Point to begin "Beast Barracks" summer training. My plan was to use this interlude to explore the capitol.

One day before heading into the city I was browsing my aunt's bookshelf. I noticed a strange little book entitled, The Prophet, by poet-artist Kahlil Gibran. It was a curious mixture of inspirational prose and poetry. I was intrigued because what the author said resonated within me, even though I was too young to understand why.

Aside from The Holy Bible, it was my first high-octane encounter with wisdom - at a time when I really needed it! When my aunt noticed that I was absorbed in the book, she gave it to me. I have been on a journey in search of more wisdom ever since.

Kahlil Gibran was born in Lebanon in 1883. He immigrated with his family and studied art. The Prophet was first published in 1923, and was a best-seller in the 1960s. It remains in print to this day - one of the best-selling books of poetry of all time, exceeded only by Shakespeare and Lao-Tsu. Gibran died in 1931.

I didn't know then, of course, that most of what he was writing about was personal strength - how to live the kind of life that enables you to meet the challenges of life and work.

Here are my favorites...

COMPASSION - "Tenderness and kindness are not signs of weakness and despair, but manifestations of strength and resolution."

EFFORT - “Work is love made visible.”

FAITH - "Faith is an oasis in the heart which will never be reached by the caravan of thinking."

FRIENDSHIP - "Let your best be for your friend."

GRATITUDE - “I would not exchange the laughter of my heart for the fortunes of the multitudes.”

INTEGRITY - "One may not reach the dawn save by the path of the night."

LOVE - "If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. And if they don't, they never were."

PASSION - “If you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work.”

RATIONALITY - “Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.”

RESPONSIBILITY - "We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them."

SELF-DEVELOPMENT - "Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge."

Post by Dennis E. Coates, Ph.D., Copyright 2011. Building Personal Strength .

Poet William Blake - "Auguries of Innocence"

"To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour."

These are the famous opening lines of William Blake's classic poem, "Auguries of Innocence." But what do they mean?

Blake was a British poet and artist, a central figure of the Romantic Age of the early 19th century. As such, he believed in the spirituality that comes from direct perception of the natural world. Blake's perspective, often expressed by the romantic poets, was so unique and at odds with conventional beliefs that critics often considered him a mystic or even mad. 

Blake understood that people don't perceive reality as it is. Their perceptions are conditioned by beliefs and attitudes handed down by parents, teachers, ministers, and others. So people don't really see things as they are, they see them as they have been interpreted to mean. So one has to quiet the mind and set aside all these explanations in order to experience the real world on its own terms. According to Blake and other romantics, this state of pure perception can be a gateway to spirituality.

If you could see the tiniest substructures within a grain of sand, you'd understand that it is, indeed, a world. You could hold infinity in the palm of your hand.

If you could get your judgmental mind to be quiet long enough, you would see that the intricate beauty of a flower actually exceeds anything you can imagine would exist in any notion of heaven. This way of seeing is a way of dramatically slowing down the perception of time. If you could sustain this way of perceiving for an hour, it would seem like an eternity.

Like existentialism and the themes of novelist Carlos Castaneda in our own time, this world-view seems strange to the conventional mind. But one should remember that this strange way of looking at the world is actually how children see things - how you experienced life purely before your parents, teachers and ministers painstakingly explained it all to you.

Post by Dennis E. Coates, Ph.D., Copyright 2010. Building Personal Strength . (Photo of Thomas Phillips' 1807 portrait of William Blake, source unknown, in public domain)

Duty Officer's Log - A Poem

Today I feel like digressing from my usual posts about the many facets of personal strength. Today, a poem.

If you've followed this blog, you know that in a previous life I was a career Army officer. I may have also mentioned along the way that I wrote poetry as a young man. Some of it was published. I continued to write poetry even during my assignment to the English Department at West Point in the early 1970s.

Shortly after that, I gave it up. It was a time of change and confusion in American culture, and poetry seemed to be losing its way as an art form. Back then, you could write anything, arrange it in lines and people would uncritically accept it as poetry. In fact, it was considered politically incorrect to declare that someone's heartfelt composition was or was not poetry. And now after decades of this "anything goes" approach to art, it seems to me that poetry is now dead. No one publishes it. No one buys it. And no one reads it. Except the poets themselves, that is. And of course all those people who still write brief expressions arranged in lines and think of it as poetry.

Don't get me started or I might tell you what I really think.

One of the last poems I wrote back then was an experiment in form. I called it "Duty Officer's Log." For those of you who aren't familiar with how the military works, the duty officer is the official representative of the commander after hours. The responsibility rotates among commissioned officers on staff. The duty officer takes his post in the headquarters, where he spends the night, ready to handle whatever comes up. In my past life as a career Army officer, I pulled my share of tours.

When I wrote this poem many years ago, I wanted the subject matter to direct the form. The structure was suggested by the duty officer's log itself, an official paper form with spaces to make a record of what happens during the night.

DUTY OFFICER'S LOG

1. The Duty Officer sits alone in an empty headquarters building.

2. He waits for the phone to ring.

3. He waits in dread of urgent messages, threats against silence.

4. The Duty Officer makes entries in his log.

5. While performing his duties, he listens to the evening news.

6. The President is in Martinique holding talks.

7. The Russians have violated the Arms Agreement.

8. A family of four has been murdered.

9. A topless dancer has been arrested for dancing bottomless.

10. A multi-billionaire has agreed to testify in court.

11. No explanation is offered for any of these events.

12. The Duty Officer is responsible for security.

13. He boards the elevator, rides it down, down.

14. He has forgotten there are so many depths.

15. When the door opens, he does not recognize the dim, lifeless halls.

16. But the Duty Officer means business.

17. He looks into every corner.

18. He tests every door.

19. He extinguishes every light on his way back to the elevator.

20. The Duty Officer turns the final corner and senses that he is lost.


Post by Dennis E. Coates, Ph.D., Copyright 2010. Building Personal Strength .

37 Years Later - The Brooklyn Bridge

In 1972, I was at Duke University studying British and American literature. For me, it was an intense time of learning and personal growth. Since I didn't have the typical undergraduate preparation in English, Duke made an exception to allow me to take graduate-level courses. I was in way over my head. To catch up, I had to study my ass off. I read a novel every day for several months, wrote 200 pages of essays each semester, and struggled to ask questions in class without exposing my ignorance.