Poetry Monday: The Frog After Dark

The Frogs After Dark

I am so much in love with mournful music

 That I don't bother to look for violinists. 

The aging peepers satisfy me for hours. 

 The ant moves on his tiny Sephardic feet. 

The flute is always glad to repeat the same note.

 The ocean rejoices in its dusky mansion. 

 Bears are often piled up close to each other.

 In caves of bears, it's just one hump

 After another, and there is no one to sort it out.

 You and I have spent so many hours working. 

We have paid dearly for the life we have. 

It's all right if we do nothing tonight.

 We've heard the fiddlers tuning their old fiddles,

 And the singer urging the low notes to come. 

We've heard her trying to keep the dawn from breaking. 

 There is some slowness in life that is right for us.

 But we love to remember the way the soul leaps 

Over and over into the lonely heavens.

 --Robert Bly 

 Bly apparently started this poem with the last three stanzas, which he read to interviewer Chard DeNiord for the September/October 2011 issue of The American Poetry Review. Those are the verses that attracted me, when I found this issue in a basket of old newsprint.

  He must have added the first three stanzas later, when the poem was published in his 2011 collection Talking Into The Ear Of A Donkey and then in the 2013 Stealing Sugar From The Castle, Selected and New Poems 1950-2013. Like this one, almost all of Bly’s late poems have six stanzas of three lines each. These represent—or are at least influenced by—a version of the Persian form called the Ghazal, which Bly knew through his reading of the Sufi poets such as Rumi and Hafiz. Other American poets like Jim Harrison and W.S. Merwin adopted and adapted it as well.

 In that 2011 interview, Bly talked about the ghazal form as handling several thoughts, and balancing different subject matter. He said it preserves some wildness, and the playfulness that energized American poetry in the 1950s and 1960s, through the infusion of European poets (including Surrealists but also Lorca and Rilke) and South American poets like Neruda.

 Sound is very important in Bly’s writing and reading. He loved the playfulness with sound in Wallace Stevens’ Harmonium for example. In this poem, one way the imagery is linked is by music and musical instruments (though I'm still puzzled by the bears, and the absent frogs.) To some extent Bly organizes his poems by sound (he liked those last three stanzas because of the “o” sounds, especially in the last line), and sometimes seems surprised at the meaning that emerges, especially when other people find it first.