If living tissue is involved, the metaphor is a little more complicated.

I like exploring corner cases, and “organoids” are an interesting one. They sit where silicon AI meets the living tissue behind natural intelligence. An organoid is a small, three-dimensional model of an organ grown from stem cells. A brain organoid develops some brain cell types and network activity, but is not a miniature brain.

A study using brain organoids to classify Braille signals left me with another question: when the organoid has to be replaced, what exactly have we backed up?

Humans are expensive identities

Years of feeding, teaching and cleaning up pass before we trust a human with heavy machinery or a vote. People are slow to create, impossible to copy and expensive to replace.

Software is not bound by that scarcity.

In a Sybil attack, one actor creates many identities that the system counts separately. They can outvote honest users or defeat systems that mistake accounts for independent judgement. John Douceur showed that, except under extreme assumptions, a distributed system cannot reliably distinguish identities without a trusted authority.

Before AI became commonplace, many of my friends in security tried to put the scarcity of human identity back into software. You see this in reputation and trust systems. Their premise is: Humans have spent millennia developing intuitions about whom to trust; perhaps software could import the characteristics behind those judgements.

A program’s ability to be cloned instantly, and therefore to have no necessarily stable identity, breaks that analogy. It is qualitatively different from merely human identity sped up.

SybilGuard treated social links as evidence of human-established trust. Later analysis found limits: community structure created vulnerabilities, and attackers could target the links. Bruce Schneier distinguishes security from the feeling of security. A web of friends can create that feeling. Software can manufacture that web and as a result that feeling, without being any more secure.

Backups change the moral arithmetic

Analogies are great at helping us reason but when something fundamental to the analogy breaks, we have to reconsider the intuition that analogy is guiding us towards.

For example, the ability to back up and restore a system changes the ethics of that system. Deleting the only copy is different from stopping one instance when an identical one can be restarted.

Kenton Varda applies this argument to AI ethics. Our ideas about rights, he argues, come from fragility and self-preservation as well as intelligence. If people could be restored after death or copied whenever they were busy, much of our existing moral system would make less sense.

Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon turns that premise into a murder mystery: a restored victim hires a detective because his backup cannot remember his murder.

Douglas Hofstadter’s “Ant Fugue” offers a stranger (heh!) test. Aunt Hillary is an ant colony that thinks even though none of her ants can. Her ants die and are replaced; the same ants had previously formed another colony with another personality. Copying every ant would not back her up. You would have to preserve the roles, routes, signals and relationships that make the colony her.

This does not settle AI’s moral status. In this essay, I am less interested in whether a system “understands” than in what persists when its parts are replaced. Humans cannot be copied. Programs can return from backup. Aunt Hillary can survive new ants, but perhaps not a new organisation.

An organoid computer is a hybrid. Its digital parts can be copied and networked, while useful state may reside in mortal tissue. Is its identity in the cells, their organisation or the machinery around them?

What the organoids did

The researchers encoded tactile data as electrical pulses sent to human forebrain organoids on eight-electrode arrays. The tissue produced patterns of neural spikes. A conventional support-vector machine then classified those responses as one of 26 letters. One organoid averaged 61% accuracy; combining three reached 83%.

The organoids did not learn Braille. This was an open-loop experiment: the conventional classifier learned the labels and no feedback trained the tissue. Classification is not biological learning, and neither amounts to reading or understanding Braille. (Though, I admit as I write that sentence - a part of me wonders, “what then is?”).

In clean conditions, classifying the encoded stimulation without the organoids reached 82%. What I found more interesting happened when the researchers corrupted the signals: the three-organoid system was more robust.

The Neuroplatform reports organoid lifetimes exceeding 100 days in its best cases. That may be impressive for tissue culture but is rather an awkwardly short time for a computer.

What survives replacement?

Here is the experiment I would like somebody to run. Measure performance on unseen examples. Leave the digital encoder and classifier alone, replace one organoid and try again. The drop tells us how much useful computation survived the swap.

Next, allow recalibration: recompute firing baselines, remap electrodes, tune the encoder and retrain the classifier. Record the recovery time, labelled examples and human fiddling involved. Then repeat with organoids from different batches. The variation may be as interesting as the average.

The harder version comes when the tissue has genuinely learned something. Can saved digital information bring fresh tissue close to the old behaviour, or must it repeat the training? Stimulus histories and spike recordings observe biological state; they do not necessarily preserve the connections and synaptic changes behind it. “We kept the data” is meaningful only if that data can restore the function.

Computers fail. That is the point

There is an obvious objection: ordinary computers fail too. Quite right. We trust them because a lot of engineering has gone into replication, checkpoints and replaceable machines.

Biological computing may develop its own equivalents: redundant organoids, adaptive decoders, hot spares or gradual turnover. The Braille study’s three-organoid ensemble already hints that biological variation can help rather than merely inconvenience us.

This is not a gotcha for biological computing. If new tissue slots in after a little calibration, excellent. The important state lives elsewhere, or can be reconstructed. If learned function lives in the tissue, recovery may look more like rehabilitation than restoring a file.

I would like to know which sort of machine it is. If an organoid is a computer, I want to know what survives when its living part “dies”.

AI and automation are producing more findings across science, mathematics, and vulnerability research. Some are verified results. Others are predictions, conjectures, tentative proofs, or suspected bugs. Generating a claim and establishing it are different achievements.

Security researchers have long dealt with static-analysis false positives and their review burden. AI has amplified that burden in some programs. Science and mathematics have always needed scrutiny, too; cheaper generation makes the capacity to provide it a more pressing question.

The benefits of a compute donation can sometimes accrue to different people from those who bear the costs of checking its outputs. A useful gift should account for both.

From compute to knowledge

The October 8 DeepMind Institute essay gives us a reason to examine this imbalance. Its underlying study surveyed 637 US and UK scientists, reporting average self-reported net time savings of 6.9 hours a week and growing hypothesis backlogs for about 41%. These are non-representative survey findings, rather than measurements of faster discovery. They do not establish that compute donations cause unfunded validation work.

The donations themselves are substantial. Google committed $40 million in AI tokens and cloud credits to the US Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission. Anthropic announced A$3 million in Claude API credits for four Australian research institutions. Their scientific value depends on what researchers establish with them.

Testing can establish concrete results. Laboratory tests of AI-designed nanobodies identified improved binding to particular SARS-CoV-2 variant spike proteins. That establishes a specific assay result, without demonstrating clinical benefit or a general acceleration of science. The testing is what carries the claim beyond a promising design.

Security’s familiar problem

Open-source security shows what happens when the work after discovery becomes scarce. Ben Livshits’s “Mutiny on the Bounty” examines this asymmetry: automated discovery gets cheaper while verification and remediation still consume attention. His proposed response includes checkable evidence, funded triage, and rewards for usable fixes.

An unverified AI bug report is a candidate finding. It may describe a genuine vulnerability, a false positive, or behavior that falls outside the project’s security assumptions. A convincing explanation can take hours to investigate. curl’s bounty had helped identify 87 confirmed vulnerabilities. In 2025, however, fewer than 5% of submissions became confirmed vulnerabilities. In January 2026, the project ended the paid scheme after a flood of AI-generated and other low-quality reports. Private security reporting continued.

Improving report quality does not eliminate the workload. By April, curl’s maintainer reported much better submissions, while warning that their volume still threatened overload. Anthropic’s October scanner announcement reported over 29,000 candidate vulnerabilities, with approximately 6,000 manually reviewed and triaged. It identified human validation capacity as a bottleneck. These accounts document processing costs, without showing that a particular token donation caused curl’s closure.

Proofs need people

Mathematics needs expert attention after generation. OpenAI’s October 6 release contains 372 result families, with varying verification status and Lean formalizations for some. This is released research output rather than donated compute. Proposed proofs deserve the scrutiny expected of human proofs.

Lean supplies powerful verification of the encoded statement. Someone must still check that its definitions and assumptions capture the advertised claim. An October preprint reported mismatches between intermediate statements in OpenAI’s Navier–Stokes prose proof and its formalization. One prose estimate was stronger than its formal counterpart. The authors did not claim to disprove the theorem. Checking a formal proof and its correspondence to a paper are separate tasks.

Verification also has an incentive problem. Terence Tao describes refereeing as largely uncredited and less prestigious than producing proofs. Confirming somebody else’s breakthrough may also feel less satisfying than discovering your own. That is a plausible obstacle to investigation, and a reason to make verification a funded scholarly contribution.

A fund for validation

Existing efforts offer a starting point. OpenAI promised programs supporting understanding of AI mathematics. Anthropic’s Project Glasswing committed up to $100 million in usage credits alongside $4 million in donations to open-source security organizations.

I would pair scientific compute donation programs with an independently administered validation fund. Providers contribute cash; foundations, public funders, and commercial beneficiaries help match it. An established science funder allocates grants through field specialists and methodologists, including experimentalists and researchers from under-resourced institutions. Donors disclose conflicts and receive no award vote or publication veto.

Applications should identify consequential claims, their provenance, credible tests, controls, interpretation criteria, and budgets. Record model versions and predictions before testing. Fund original investigators and independent replication teams, with the latter controlling their budgets and publication.

Match funding to the work required. Biology may need technicians and reagents; materials research, synthesis and characterization; mathematics, proof scrutiny and explanatory working groups. Computational disciplines may need independent implementations, held-out data, and tests of alternative assumptions. Retail token prices cannot determine these budgets, and repeating the same simulation may preserve the same mistake. Shared methods expertise and testing facilities could help smaller laboratories participate.

An open-source equivalent would fund triage, patch review, regression tests, and maintainer time through project-approved processes. Scientific grants would support experiments, interpretation, reporting, and archiving. Both should pay for informative investigation.

Making verification count

For science, Registered Reports offer a useful model: review questions and methods before results, with publication commitments subject to agreed standards. Register funded tests, issue citable reports, and give confirmations, negative findings, and explanatory work credit in future grants. An underpowered null result is not a refutation.

On a personal note, we could all do more to celebrate work that confirms a result or disproves it. We have the Journal of Irreproducible Results, albeit humorous. We could do with a Journal of Reproduced Results, but serious.

Keeping access open

The strongest objection is that additional conditions could discourage gifts already helping underfunded researchers. Compute can also eliminate weak candidates before expensive experiments. Keep access separate: researchers should supply no matching cash and lose no credits when a validation bid fails. Start with a voluntary pool and short applications. Assess informative completed work, access delays, and administrative burden.

Measure the gift by knowledge established: effects confirmed, claims rejected, uncertainty narrowed, and results made usable. The most convincing donation would fund a result the donor would rather not put on its homepage.

Graepel helped build AlphaGo. He contrasts its explicit search through possible moves with an LLM’s generation of tokens. He wants reasoning systems to maintain a persistent, inspectable record of beliefs, separate knowledge from the machinery operating on it, and explain how they actually reached their conclusions. I’d like those features in a system I had to rely on. I’m less sure they describe what humans ordinarily do.

Humans do reason—though perhaps not according to Graepel’s definition. That’s why the title deserves a second look. If a definition excludes much of what we ordinarily call human reasoning, we need to decide whether we’re describing a more demanding ideal or have simply misplaced the humans. Similarly, if a definition includes things that don’t fit our instinctive grasp of the concept, that mismatch is worth exploring too.

I ran into something similar in my essay on understanding as compression. Take that definition seriously and you have to ask whether gzip understands a file. My instinct objects. But why, exactly? Following that objection is where the definition starts to get interesting.

Does a regex reason?

Yann LeCun is a deep-learning pioneer and NYU professor who shared the 2018 Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. Endorsing Graepel’s article, he writes, “True reasoning must involve a search,” adding that LLMs lack that capability.

When I read “search and backtracking,” I’m immediately drawn to regexes. Does a regular expression reason? It certainly does the search and backtracking part—or rather, a backtracking regex engine does—but in my gut, that’s not what I mean by reasoning.

That doesn’t refute LeCun. He says search is necessary; he doesn’t say it is sufficient. Graepel’s definition asks for more too. Still, granting the necessary condition leaves quite a bit to explain. What else does the search need to be doing? Would following a logical rule be enough? What about a very simple rule?

I don’t have a satisfying answer yet. Perhaps some regex matching should count as a very limited sort of reasoning. I’d want to understand what that definition buys us before dismissing it just because the example feels wrong.

What if we put the search outside the model? Tree of Thoughts combines an LLM’s proposed steps and evaluations with an external search algorithm. The whole arrangement searches. That doesn’t demonstrate the same search mechanism inside the model, so we need to be clear about which one we’re evaluating. We’ll need the same distinction when a human asks for a notebook.

Would I pass the test?

Apple’s The Illusion of Thinking gives us actual failures to examine. In its puzzle experiments, the tested models benefited from extra thinking at intermediate difficulty, then failed as complexity increased. Giving them the algorithms didn’t eliminate the failures. The revised paper addresses objections about impossible cases and output limits; failures on feasible tasks remain.

I’m not inclined to wave that away. I do want to know what failed. Did the model choose the wrong approach? Lose its place? Misapply a rule? Those are different problems, and “doesn’t reason” doesn’t tell me which one I’m looking at.

Consider the Tower of Hanoi. For a sense of scale, fifteen disks on three pegs require at least 32,767 moves. The recursive algorithm is short enough to fit on a card. Now ask me to write down all the moves, in order, without making a mistake. I’d want a notebook. Better, I’d want to write a program. At some point I’d also want to know why we’re doing this.

Apple didn’t run a matched human comparison, so I can’t tell you how people would fare. The fifteen-disk example is my illustration of the execution problem. Knowing a method and carrying out a long sequence correctly are things we can test separately. It matters whether an error occurred while finding the method or while keeping track of move 8,193.

We do have evidence that the way a puzzle is presented matters to humans. In Experiment 2 of Zhang and Norman’s Tower of Hanoi study, changing which constraints were represented externally changed performance. The same underlying problem can place different demands on the person solving it.

There’s another way a problem can trip us up: change what it’s about. Try four cards.

Four cards show D · F · 3 · 7. Each has a letter on one side and a number on the other.

The rule is: If a card has D on one side, it has 3 on the other.

Which cards must you turn over to check the rule?

D and 7. The D might have the wrong number behind it. The 7 might have a D. You don’t need to turn over the 3: the rule allows other letters to have a 3 too.

Now make the rule: If someone is drinking beer, they must be at least eighteen. You check the beer drinker and the seventeen-year-old. Same logical structure, rather different associations. That doesn’t guarantee everyone will find it easier, but it gives us a way to ask whether the content is doing some of the work.

A 2024 study comparing humans and language models found that a problem’s content affected performance in both across several reasoning tasks, although their errors differed. That doesn’t mean their machinery is identical. But if dependence on familiar content is evidence against reasoning, we have some explaining to do about people as well.

I like Douglas Hofstadter’s admission in “Is there an ‘I’ in AI?” that he judged a human relative’s flawed mathematical poem more generously than a smaller flaw from GPT-4. It’s easy to supply a sympathetic explanation for a person’s mistake. We assume they understand, so something must have gone wrong. With a model, the mistake can become evidence that it never understood anything. I can see why we make that distinction. I’d still like us to justify it.

Where did that explanation come from?

Graepel also wants explanations that faithfully describe how a conclusion was reached. I’d like that too. I’m just not sure being human entitles us to assume we can provide them.

In a choice-blindness experiment, people chose which of two faces they found more attractive. The researchers sometimes secretly handed them the photograph they hadn’t chosen, then asked them to explain their preference. Participants could give reasons for the substituted choice. They weren’t necessarily reporting the process that produced their original decision, even if they sincerely believed they were.

Models have a reporting problem too. In experiments that supplied hints, those hints could influence answers without being acknowledged in the reasoning text. These are different experiments, not evidence of a common mechanism. But in either case, asking for an explanation hasn’t settled whether the explanation is faithful.

If you give me a proof, I can check whether it works. That doesn’t tell me how you found it. Conversely, an honest account of how you found it wouldn’t make an invalid proof valid. We should be clear which of those things we’re asking a person—or a model—to give us.

If we want to know how a model reached its answer, we have to investigate the computation. Calling it “just next-token prediction” describes how it produces output, but leaves open what happens along the way. Formal work on transformers with chain of thought shows that intermediate generation can change computational power under specified assumptions. That is a capacity result, not proof that a trained model learned a particular algorithm.

One way to investigate that is to change something inside the model and see whether the answer changes. In a circuit-tracing study, answering a question about Dallas and its state’s capital involved an intermediate representation of Texas. Substituting California for Texas changed the answer to Sacramento. The method is imperfect and this is a selected example, but the intervention gives us evidence that the representation contributed to the answer. We can ask where that computation works, where it fails, and whether it survives changes to the problem.

Let me keep the notebook

There’s a part of Graepel’s proposal I find easier to agree with once I think about code review.

I’ve argued for programming languages that make code locally reviewable. Given a small change, how much else does the reviewer have to understand to judge its effect? If the answer is “most of the codebase,” asking for more conscientious reviewers won’t get us very far. The language and the tools should help make the change understandable.

The same question applies when I read an argument. A person can retain a belief, act on it, and revise it after learning something new. That doesn’t mean they can hand me an inspectable record of every belief and how it got there. But if they’ve written down the relevant evidence and steps, I can check the argument without that access.

Steven Pinker’s “Reason To Believe” makes the broader case for our dependence on expertise and institutions that expose claims to criticism. An awful lot of what we count as human knowledge depends on work spread across people, records, and tools. We ought to remember that when deciding where the human stops and the reasoning system begins.

So yes, give the machine explicit state and checked updates. Make it possible to inspect the evidence. These are useful engineering requirements even if we haven’t agreed that they define reasoning. Then evaluate the whole system, including whatever is supposed to catch its mistakes. A model approving its own explanation is a rather thin form of review.

“Humans make mistakes too” would be a terrible reason to trust a model with something consequential. Its competence still needs evidence. What I object to is treating a human’s mistakes as problems to investigate while treating a model’s mistakes as the end of the investigation.

I haven’t arrived at a definition of reasoning that I’m happy with. I’d like one that helps explain why some inferences work, what has to be learned, and what happens when the familiar cues disappear. If it excludes humans, or includes regex engines, let’s follow that through and see whether we still want it.

And if we’re testing my ability to reason, please let me use a pencil. We can argue about whether it’s part of the system afterwards.

The poem

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Listening

Listen to Robert Frost read “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”

PennSound has two early recordings of Frost reading the poem. The 1933 version is the first recording on the page.

Dare I say it: Robert Frost is a far better poet and writer than he is at reciting his poems! It is nevertheless great to hear it in his own voice. :)

What I learned

For a poem that sounds so effortless, it is very tightly constructed. Frost wrote it in 1922 at his farm in South Shaftsbury, Vermont, after staying up all night working on the much longer poem “New Hampshire.” He later described “Stopping by Woods” as a kind of second growth from that night’s work. It appeared in New Hampshire in 1923, the collection that won him his first Pulitzer Prize.

The form is doing more work than I noticed at first. There are four stanzas of four lines, each written in iambic tetrameter. The rhyme scheme is AABA BBCB CCDC DDDD. In each of the first three stanzas, the rhyme that seems to stray becomes the main rhyme of the next, quietly pulling the poem onwards. The last stanza finally stops passing a rhyme forward. Every line closes on the same sound: deep, keep, sleep, sleep.

There is also a darker reading. “Sleep” can mean no more than sleep, but it can also suggest death, making the woods a tempting place of escape or oblivion. The poem does not make us choose. It still works as a traveller stopping for a few quiet minutes before remembering his obligations. The woods let him pause. His promises make him move again.

What stayed with me

It will not come as a surprise that the lines that stayed with me are:

But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,

Sources and versions

• “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” at the Academy of American Poets

• Robert Frost’s 1933 and 1934 readings at PennSound

• “Waiting for Form,” on Frost and the poem, at the Poetry Foundation

• The Library of Congress on New Hampshire

These ten lines are poem XXIX from Antonio Machado’s Proverbios y cantares. They first appeared in his 1917 Poesías completas and are now usually included in the expanded Campos de Castilla. I began with the Spanish, an approximate pronunciation guide and a deliberately plain translation.

The poem

Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino, y nada más;
caminante, no hay camino:
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino,
sino estelas en la mar.

Approximate pronunciation

This is only a starting point for an English speaker sounding out the Spanish.

Kah-mee-NAHN-teh, sohn toos WEH-yahs
ehl kah-MEE-no, ee NAH-dah mahs;
kah-mee-NAHN-teh, no eye kah-MEE-no:
seh AH-seh kah-MEE-no ahl ahn-DAHR.
Ahl ahn-DAHR seh AH-seh kah-MEE-no,
ee ahl bohl-BEHR lah BEES-tah ah-TRAHS
seh BEH lah SEHN-dah keh NOON-kah
seh ah deh bohl-BEHR ah pee-SAHR.
Kah-mee-NAHN-teh, no eye kah-MEE-no,
SEE-no ehs-TEH-lahs ehn lah mahr.

A simple, naive translation

Traveller, your footprints are
the road, and nothing more;
traveller, there is no road:
the road is made by walking.
By walking the road is made,
and when you turn your gaze back
you see the path that never
is to be stepped on again.
Traveller, there is no road,
only wakes upon the sea.

This is deliberately plain. It is just there to show me roughly what the Spanish words are doing before I listen to the poem, read a polished translation or learn anything about its history.

Before I listen or read more

We are still by the sea, but seemingly only incidentally. The poem leaves me with a vivid image of an open field where the “road” is simply the direction we strike out in.

There are lots of sayings about never being able to step into the same river twice, or about forging one’s own path. This poem feels like it ties those two ideas together.

Listening to the Spanish

Listen to a spoken Spanish recitation

There is hope in that repetition for me, although I can see how someone else might hear despair in it, or hear it as imploring.

A polished translation

Betty Jean Craige’s translation was published in 1979:

Wanderer, your footsteps are
the road, and nothing more;
wanderer, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
By walking one makes the road,
and upon glancing behind
one sees the path
that never will be trod again.
Wanderer, there is no road—
Only wakes upon the sea.

I like Craige’s use of “wanderer.” It makes me picture an explorer, unfettered and making the road simply by moving through the world.

What I learned

The publication history is a little more complicated than ten lines ought to require. Campos de Castilla first appeared in 1912, but this poem was not in it. It appeared as XXIX in the expanded Proverbios y cantares in Machado’s Poesías completas in 1917. Later editions folded it into an enlarged Campos de Castilla, which is why it is now usually described as belonging to that book.

The name Proverbios y cantares, or “Proverbs and Songs,” gives the game away a little. Machado uses eight-syllable lines and repetition to make an abstract thought about time sound like something passed down from person to person.

It turns out my link to never stepping into the same river twice was not so far-fetched. Critics have read the poem alongside Heraclitus and the philosopher Henri Bergson, especially Bergson’s idea of time as something lived and irreversible. Still, reducing it to philosophy in verse, or to an instruction to forge your own path, misses the most interesting part.

On land, the traveller’s footprints make a road. At sea, a ship leaves only a wake, and the wake disappears. That is how hope and despair can sit in the same ten lines. We make the road by moving, but we cannot keep it or walk it again.

If you know these lines already, it may be because of Joan Manuel Serrat’s 1969 song “Cantares.” Serrat mixed several passages from Machado with new verses of his own. It is not a straight reading of this ten-line poem, but it put Machado’s words into the heads of far more people than the book ever could.

What stayed with me

Your footsteps are the road.

What an inspirational sentiment to craft a life around.

Sources and versions

• Spanish text from the Centro Virtual Cervantes

• Campos de Castilla at the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes

• Machado’s 1917 Poesías completas at Project Gutenberg

• Emilio J. García-Wiedemann on the publication history of Proverbios y cantares

• García-Wiedemann on the philosophical themes in Campos de Castilla

• Joan Manuel Serrat’s 1969 album Dedicado a Antonio Machado, poeta

• The Biblioteca Digital de Andalucía catalogue note on Serrat’s adaptation

• Betty Jean Craige’s translation, quoted in About Campus

First, listen

The core refrain

There are several versions of the words. This is the short one I started with:

Igqirha lendlela nguqongqothwane,
Igqirha lendlela nguqongqothwane.
Ebeqabel’ egqith’ apha,
uqongqothwane.
Ebeqabel’ egqith’ apha,
uqongqothwane.

A simple, naive translation

The diviner of the road is the knocking beetle,
The diviner of the road is the knocking beetle.
It climbed and passed this way,
the knocking beetle.
It climbed and passed this way,
the knocking beetle.

I haven’t included an English pronunciation guide. The clicks are consonants in isiXhosa, not decorative sounds that English spelling can represent properly. For this poem, Makeba is the pronunciation guide.

My first response

It is a simple set of lines and, if it references something deeper, I need a lot more context to make sense of it.

What I learned

The context does matter here. “Qongqothwane” is a traditional isiXhosa wedding song. An igqirha is a traditional healer or diviner. The uqongqothwane is the knocking beetle.

The bare translation leaves out the associations that give those lines their weight. A diviner may guide the rites around a marriage. In Xhosa oral tradition, the knocking beetle is said to show lost children the way home. Its knocking is also how it attracts a mate. That makes the comparison much easier for me to follow. The beetle shows the road home, while the diviner guides a couple towards a new life together.

Makeba took the song to audiences around the world and included it on her first American studio album in 1960. She explained that English speakers called it “The Click Song” because they could not pronounce “Qongqothwane.” In later performances she became more pointed about that name. The clicks were part of her language, not noises or vocal effects.

That is not a minor distinction. Makeba was not demonstrating an unusual sound for an international audience. She was singing in isiXhosa and insisting that people hear it as a language during apartheid, when language itself was used as a form of control.

Listening again

It is easy for me to be mesmerized by the clicks in the song, and too easy for that to distract me from the rest of the performance. Makeba spoke up against exactly that way of hearing it. Knowing this hasn’t made the clicks less mesmerizing, but it has made me more conscious of what I may be missing.

Sources and versions

• Miriam Makeba performing “Qongqothwane” live in 1963

• PRAESA’s isiXhosa text

• Carter-Ényì and Carter-Ényì, “Decolonizing the Mind Through Song: From Makeba to the Afropolitan Present”

• Miriam Makeba’s introduction to The World of African Song

I began with the Russian, an approximate pronunciation guide and a deliberately plain translation, before reading a polished version or anything about the poem.

The poem

Russian text at iLibrary

Белеет парус одинокой
В тумане моря голубом!..
Что ищет он в стране далекой?
Что кинул он в краю родном?..

Играют волны — ветер свищет,
И мачта гнется и скрыпит...
Увы! он счастия не ищет
И не от счастия бежит!

Под ним струя светлей лазури,
Над ним луч солнца золотой...
А он, мятежный, просит бури,
Как будто в бурях есть покой!

Approximate pronunciation

This is only a guide for an English speaker sounding out the Russian.

Beléyet párus odinókoy
V tumáne mórya golubóm!..
Chto íshchet on v strané dalyókoy?
Chto kínul on v krayú rodnóm?..

Igráyut vólny — véter svíshchet,
I máchta gnyótsya i skripít...
Uvý! on schástiya ne íshchet
I ne ot schástiya bezhít!

Pod nim struyá svetléy lazúri,
Nad nim luch sólntsa zolotóy...
A on, myatézhny, prósit búri,
Kak búdto v búryakh yest pokóy!

A simple, naive translation

A lone sail gleams white
In the blue mist of the sea!..
What does it seek in a distant land?
What did it leave in its native land?..

The waves play — the wind whistles,
And the mast bends and creaks...
Alas! It does not seek happiness,
Nor is it fleeing from happiness!

Beneath it, a current brighter than azure;
Above it, a golden ray of sun...
But it, rebellious, asks for a storm,
As though there were peace in storms!

This is deliberately plain. It is there to show me roughly what the Russian words are doing before I read a translator’s poem.

Before I read a polished translation

I happened to be spending the day on the beach, with fog rolling in and swallowing the sails. It felt like the perfect backdrop for reading this poem aloud.

Those last two lines make the ship feel tempestuous to me, too bored by the calm and prettiness around it. I can identify with that ship.

Listening to the Russian

I listened to Mikhail Tsaryov read the poem. I thought I would hear his tone change when he reached the last two lines, but I couldn’t.

Two translations

Alice Stone Blackwell’s translation was published in The Russian Review in 1916:

A lone white sail on the horizon
Upon the azure sea doth stand.
What seeks he in this foreign region?
What left he in his native land?

The whistling breeze the mast is bending,
The playful waves around him rise.
Ah! not for happiness he searches,
And not from happiness he flies.

The sun is bright as gold above him,
Light spray below, a snowy fleece;
But he, rebellious, seeks the tempest,
As though the storms could bring him peace!

Max Eastman’s translation appeared in The Nation in 1925:

White is the sail and lonely
On the misty, infinite blue;
Flying from what in the homeland?
Seeking for what in the new?

The waves romp, and the winds whistle,
And the mast leans and creaks;
Alas! He flies not from fortune,
And no good fortune he seeks.

Beneath him the stream luminous, azure,
Above him the sun’s golden breast;
But he, a rebel, invites the storms,
As though in the storms were rest.

By far and away, Blackwell’s is the rendition I love. The spark of solidarity I felt with the ship grows into a blaze in her translation. I love its rhythm too.

What I learned

Lermontov wrote “The Sail” in 1832, when he was only seventeen. One of the surviving copies is in a letter he sent to Maria Lopukhina from St. Petersburg on September 2. The poem had no title in the letter. He introduced it simply as more verses he had written “on the seashore.” It was not published until 1841, the year he died.

The Russian looks simple, but it is very tightly made. There are three quatrains of iambic tetrameter with alternating rhymes. Each stanza follows the same movement. Two lines show us something that can be seen or heard, then two lines try to read a motive into it. The first stanza ends with questions, the second with a statement and the third with an exclamation. The emotional pressure increases even as the form remains steady. Perhaps that is why I expected the reciter’s voice to turn more sharply at the end.

Blackwell’s decision to call the sail “he” isn’t just old-fashioned language. Parus, the Russian word for sail, is grammatically masculine, and Lermontov repeatedly refers to it with the masculine pronoun on. English makes the translator choose. Calling the sail “it” leaves us looking at an object. Calling him “he” makes it easier to see a creature with motives and to feel solidarity with him.

The word translated as “rebellious” is myatezhny. It is related to myatezh, a rebellion or uprising, and can carry shades of rebellious, mutinous, turbulent and restless. The sail isn’t merely bored. He is in revolt.

The verb in that line is also stronger and stranger than either polished translation quite suggests. Prosit buri means that he asks for, or requests, a storm. Blackwell has him seek the tempest; Eastman has him invite the storms. In the Russian, he asks for one. The final line then says, literally, “as if in storms there is peace.” He is not seeking peace after the storm. He imagines finding it inside one.

The poem never actually tells us that the sail represents Lermontov, or anyone else. There is no explicit comparison. The descriptions simply become human a little at a time, until a patch of white in the mist can seek, abandon, flee, rebel and ask for trouble. By the end, it is hard not to treat the sail as a person.

Even the famous opening line has a history. It echoes a line from Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky’s 1828 narrative poem Andrei, Prince of Pereyaslavl. Lermontov took the borrowed image somewhere else entirely.

Reading it again

The more I have read about this poem and Blackwell’s translation, the more I love it. Its control, its principled structure and, most of all, its appeal to find peace not after a storm but in it, all resonate with me.

What stayed with me

The appeal in the last two lines of Blackwell’s translation is one I love, in part because she uses tempest, a word I adore:

But he, rebellious, seeks the tempest,
As though the storms could bring him peace!

Sources and versions

• Russian text at iLibrary

• Alice Stone Blackwell’s 1916 translation

• Max Eastman’s 1925 translation, reproduced in a Library of Congress edition

• A scan-backed 1874 edition at the Russian National Electronic Library

• The Russian National Library catalogue entry for Lermontov’s letter containing the poem

• Scholarly textual notes in the Russian Virtual Library

• Michael Wachtel, The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Poetry

• Vladimir Dal’s dictionary entry for myatezh and myatezhny

Blake made the poem as an illuminated page, with the words and image printed together. I started with the words alone and looked at the design after recording my first response.

The poem

Text: Representative Poetry Online

O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

Before I read anything about it

I took the poem literally on first reading, although I had a niggling feeling that it was an allusion to something. I pictured a red rose alone in a windy, rainy storm, slowly withering and dying because some insect had infected it.

Even as I thought about it, things that had seemed obvious started to raise questions. An insect being responsible for a rose withering seemed plausible, but I couldn’t think of one that would make it happen so quickly.

Looking at Blake’s illuminated page

I looked at Blake’s illuminated page at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There is definitely something sexually charged about the picture. What had been only a hint in “Has found out thy bed” becomes much more evident in Blake’s artwork.

Listening to the poem

I listened to Mimi Khalvati read “The Sick Rose” for the Poetry Archive. Her slow, even reading felt very close to how I had read it myself.

There is a lot of imagery in these eight lines. If anything, the ambiguity gives me room to picture more rather than less.

What I learned

“The Sick Rose” appeared in Songs of Experience in 1794. Blake had published Songs of Innocence a few years earlier, and later brought the two together as Songs of Innocence and of Experience. The full title described them as showing “the two contrary states of the human soul.”

The words were never meant to stand alone. Blake etched the poem and its design onto a copper plate, printed copies himself and colored them by hand. The Met copy I saw was printed around 1825 from the plate he made in 1794. Other surviving copies use different colors, so there isn’t even one definitive version of the picture.

Apparently, there is no agreed key to the rose and worm. The obvious sexual reading sees the rose as a woman and the worm as a secret lover or phallic figure. Other readers have seen sexual disease, jealousy, repressed desire, guilt, corruption or simply the destruction that can exist inside love.

The literal reading doesn’t disappear either. Blake’s designs include worm-like and caterpillar-like creatures, so the thing that “flies in the night” could be suggesting the winged stage of a larva rather than an ordinary earthworm. Still, making it invisible and giving it “dark secret love” pushes it beyond a garden pest.

One detail I especially liked makes the ambiguity even stranger. An early draft said “her dark secret love” before the published poem settled on “his.” That makes it harder to assume that the worm was always meant to be one particular male intruder.

The two full rhymes almost tell the story by themselves: worm with storm, then joy with destroy. Everything else remains unresolved.

Reading it again

It is comforting to know that the sexual ambiguity I sensed while reading the poem has been noticed by others too, and may well have been deliberately intended by Blake.

What stayed with me

The poem is too short for me to pull out one particular line. The whole thing is haunting enough that I think all of it will keep coming back to me, especially the image of a lonesome rose withering in a storm.

Sources and versions

• The text at Representative Poetry Online

• Blake’s illuminated page at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

• The poem at the Poetry Foundation

• The Poetry Archive recording and commentary

• The William Blake Archive blog on the poem’s metaphor

• Michael Srigley, “The Sickness of Blake’s Rose”

I started with the poem on its own. I wanted to see whether the argument would work on me before finding out what anyone else thought of it.

The poem

Text: Representative Poetry Online

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deny’st me is;
Me it suck’d first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;
Confess it, this cannot be said
A sin, or shame, or loss of maidenhead,
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pamper’d swells with one blood made of two;
And this, alas, is more than we would do.

Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, nay more than married are:
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is;
Though parents grudge, and you, we’re met,
And cloister’d in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?
In what could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?
Yet thou triumph’st, and say’st that thou
Find’st not thyself nor me the weaker now;
‘Tis true, then learn how false fears be;
Just so much honour, when thou yield’st to me,
Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.

Before I read anything about it

After the lofty ideas of love in the last few poems, this one feels more base and lustful. I wasn’t sure I followed the argument at first, but if I read it as playful teasing, I could see the humor in it.

Listening to the poem

I listened to Adam Foulds read “The Flea” for the Poetry Archive. His reading confirmed what I had suspected. The speaker is inviting a woman to bed. His excuse is that the flea has already mixed their blood, so she may as well give him what he wants, given “how little that which thou deny’st me is.”

I’m not usually prudish, but somehow this poem did not sit right with me. If anything, hearing it read aloud made it sound even more distasteful.

Still, not every poem is for everyone.

What I learned

Donne passed much of his poetry around privately and published very little verse during his lifetime, which makes individual poems difficult to date. “The Flea” first appeared in print in 1633, two years after his death.

Apparently, erotic flea poems were already a thing. There was a European tradition of poets envying the insect for its access to a woman’s body. Donne’s trick was to turn the flea into a complete argument for sex.

This sort of unlikely comparison, stretched out through an entire poem, is called a metaphysical conceit. The flea becomes proof of physical union, then a marriage bed, then a marriage temple containing three lives.

Once I understood the action between the stanzas, the poem became easier to follow. First, the flea has bitten them both and mixed their blood without sin or shame. The speaker argues that what he wants from her is equally insignificant. When she moves to kill it, he declares that the flea contains him, her and itself. Killing it would therefore be murder, suicide and sacrilege all at once.

She kills it anyway.

We hear the woman only through him, but she is not simply sitting there listening. She crushes his symbol and points out that neither of them is any weaker. He immediately turns that around too: if the flea’s death cost them nothing, then surrendering her honour to him will cost just as little.

It is clever, but it is also exactly what bothered me. Every refusal becomes material for his next argument. She disproves him and, instead of accepting the answer, he changes the terms and keeps going.

“The Flea” is a dramatic monologue, so the speaker is not necessarily Donne himself. Perhaps we are meant to laugh at him as much as admire his cleverness. That makes the poem more interesting, but it does not make the speaker more appealing.

Reading it again

I had entirely missed that she kills the flea. Somehow that makes me feel better about the poem. She does get to assert herself against what feels like an unwanted pursuit, even if he immediately turns her refusal into another argument.

What stayed with me

Honestly, I’m not convinced that this poem, or any of its lines, will stay with me.

Sources and versions

• The text at Representative Poetry Online

• The poem at the Poetry Foundation

• The Poetry Foundation on Donne and the metaphysical conceit

• The Poetry Archive on John Donne and “The Flea”

• Renaissance Studies on the European flea-poem tradition

I started with the poem alone, before listening to anyone read it or looking up its history.

The poem

• Text: Folger Shakespeare Library

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Before I read anything about it

Of course Shakespeare can recreate the fiery brightness of an autumn sunset. I picture trees with golden leaves in the foreground and a sun-streaked sky behind them.

I especially love the funeral imagery: the choir of birds and the bed of darkness swallowing the light.

Listening to the poem

I listened to Patrick Stewart read Sonnet 73. I could simply revel in his delivery of these lines. I can’t imagine adding anything that his rendering does not convey better.

What I learned

Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets were published together in 1609, although some had been circulating privately since at least 1598. Sonnet 73 sits among several poems in which the speaker imagines his own death and what it will mean for the person he loves. In Sonnet 71, he asks to be forgotten after he dies. Here, he imagines his approaching death making that love stronger. Sonnet 74 then says that the body will die while something of him stays alive in the poem.

The person he is speaking to is unknown. Sonnet 73 belongs to the first 126 poems, traditionally said to be addressed to a young man sometimes called the “Fair Youth.” That is a convention rather than an identification, and the ageing man in the poem should not automatically be treated as literal autobiography.

The sonnet is built from three images of something approaching its end: first late autumn, then twilight, then a fire reduced to its final embers. The time left shrinks with each one, from part of a season, to a few hours, to the last moments before a fire goes out.

“Bare ruined choirs” may be more literal than I first realised. A choir is also the part of a church in which choristers sing. The bare branches can resemble the roofless choirs of monasteries ruined after Henry VIII dissolved them, while the absent birds take the place of singers who are no longer there. My first impression of funeral imagery was closer than I knew.

The fire carries the strangest idea. It lies on the ashes of its own youth and is finally “consumed with that which it was nourished by.” The fuel that kept it alive is also what it consumes on its way to extinction. The final couplet turns all three images back toward the beloved: knowing that something will be lost makes it more precious while it is still here.

Reading it again

There was imagery here that I had missed completely. The choir of birds may also be the choir of an actual church emptied of its choristers, and the dying fire may be a life being lived all the way to its completion.

That puts more of a chill into the poem than I felt on first reading.

The line or image I kept thinking about

It is autumn in California, and I like to go for runs in the morning. I know that I will not be able to look at overhanging branches, empty of birds, without seeing a ruined choir.

Sources and versions

• The Folger Shakespeare Library text

• The poem at the Poetry Foundation

• Shakespeare Documented on the first edition of the sonnets

• The Folger on “bare ruined choirs”

I also went to a Rumi poetry reading that evening, with music and rather surreal video projected across a giant IMAX dome. This particular poem was not read, but it still felt like the right day to choose Rumi.

English Rumi can be a slippery thing. Some versions are translations and others are closer to poems inspired by translations. So I began with a traceable Persian text, a pronunciation guide and a deliberately naive translation.

The poem

Persian text: Ganjoor

من عاشق عشق و عشق هم عاشق من
تن عاشق جان آمد و جان عاشق تن
گه من آرم دو دست در گردن او
گه او کشدم چو دلربایان گردن

Working transliteration

Man asheq-e eshq-am o eshq ham asheq-e man
Tan asheq-e jan amad o jan asheq-e tan
Gah man aram do dast dar gardan-e u
Gah u keshadam cho delrobayan gardan

This was only meant to help me sound out the Persian. It is not an attempt to reconstruct thirteenth-century pronunciation.

A simple, naive translation

I am in love with Love, and Love is in love with me.
The body loves the soul, and the soul loves the body.
Sometimes I put both arms around Love’s neck;
sometimes Love pulls me by the neck, as beloveds do.

This is deliberately clumsy. It is there to show me what the words are doing before I read a better translation.

Before I read a polished translation

I barely got past the final line. Everything before it seemed as sweet as I had expected from Rumi, and then came: “Sometimes Love pulls me by the neck, as beloveds do.”

The neck feels like a very vulnerable part of the body to be pulled by. I found the image so jarring that I could not think about much else in the poem.

Two translations

I needed help with that last line. The Persian really does contain the word “neck,” but the movement continues the embrace begun in the previous line. The two lovers are taking turns drawing each other close.

Here is a close translation that keeps the repeated words and the physical image:

I am in love with Love, and Love is in love with me.
Body has fallen in love with soul, and soul with body.
Sometimes I place both arms around Love’s neck;
sometimes Love, as beloveds do, draws my neck close.

And here is a smoother rendering:

I love Love, and Love loves me.
Body and soul are lovers of one another.
Sometimes I throw my arms around Love;
sometimes Love pulls me into an embrace.

Shahram Shiva also keeps the neck but makes it clear that Love is pulling the speaker close. Nader Khalili drops the physical detail and has them take turns loving and being loved. Neither feels remotely as alarming as my naive translation.

After reading the translations

This is yet another example of how much can disappear in translation. Being pulled by the neck feels threatening. Being pulled into an embrace is much gentler and far more consistent with the rest of the poem.

Once I understood the gesture as reciprocal, I could appreciate the tenderness in these lines much more than I could in the naive word-for-word version.

What I learned

A rubai is a Persian quatrain made from two couplets, usually with an AABA rhyme. This one ends its lines with man, tan, u and gardan. The third line steps away from the rhyme and the fourth brings it back with gardan, “neck.”

So the word that bothered me is also the word that holds the form together. The first two lines talk about reciprocal love. The third turns that idea into a physical gesture. The fourth completes both the gesture and the rhyme.

The poem comes from the Divan-e Shams, Rumi’s collection of lyric poetry associated with Shams of Tabriz, rather than the Masnavi. Rumi met Shams in Konya around 1244. Their friendship transformed his life and, after Shams disappeared, separation and the desire for union ran through Rumi’s poetry. The collection is named for Shams and sometimes even speaks in his voice.

It is difficult to separate romantic love from divine love in these poems. Persian mystical poetry often uses the language of one to talk about the other. Here the roles keep swapping. The speaker loves Love. Love loves the speaker. The body loves the soul and the soul loves the body. Finally, each takes a turn drawing the other close.

That body and soul line is more interesting to me now. Rumi often uses the body as outward form and the soul as inward meaning, but he does not discard either one here. Their love is mutual, and the physical embrace belongs in the poem.

The last line also explains why English versions of Rumi can differ so wildly. Persian can pack the pronouns, action and body into a line that English has to unpack. A translator must choose whether to keep the neck, explain the movement, or simply give us the embrace. That one choice changed almost everything about how I read the poem.

The line or image I kept thinking about

Unfortunately, the mistranslated line “Love pulls me by the neck, as beloveds do” remains indelibly ingrained in me. Even though it is not a good translation, I keep wondering what that love would look like.

The mistranslation has become part of my strange and unsettling encounter with the poem. I suppose that is how it is with poetry. What a reader finds in the words is not always what the poet intended.

Sources and versions

• The Persian text at Ganjoor

• Dar al-Masnavi’s concordance of Rumi’s quatrains

• Encyclopaedia Iranica on classical Persian literature

• Encyclopaedia Iranica on Rumi’s philosophy

• The Poetry Foundation biography of Rumi

• The Poetry Foundation on English-language versions of Rumi

I know its reputation and its ending. This time I want to read the whole poem and see whether that famous final line still works when I know it is coming.

The poem

• Text: Poetry Foundation

• Original subtitle: A Ballad of the Republic, Sung in the Year 1888

The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day;
The score stood four to two with but one inning more to play.
And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same,
A sickly silence fell upon the patrons of the game.

A straggling few got up to go in deep despair. The rest
Clung to that hope which springs eternal in the human breast;
They thought if only Casey could but get a whack at that—
We’d put up even money now with Casey at the bat.

But Flynn preceded Casey, as did also Jimmy Blake,
And the former was a lulu and the latter was a cake;
So upon that stricken multitude grim melancholy sat,
For there seemed but little chance of Casey’s getting to the bat.

But Flynn let drive a single, to the wonderment of all,
And Blake, the much despised, tore the cover off the ball;
And when the dust had lifted, and men saw what had occurred,
There was Jimmy safe at second and Flynn a-hugging third.

Then from 5,000 throats and more there rose a lusty yell;
It rumbled through the valley, it rattled in the dell;
It knocked upon the mountain and recoiled upon the flat,
For Casey, mighty Casey, was advancing to the bat.

There was ease in Casey’s manner as he stepped into his place;
There was pride in Casey’s bearing and a smile on Casey’s face.
And when, responding to the cheers, he lightly doffed his hat,
No stranger in the crowd could doubt ‘twas Casey at the bat.

Ten thousand eyes were on him as he rubbed his hands with dirt;
Five thousand tongues applauded when he wiped them on his shirt.
Then while the writhing pitcher ground the ball into his hip,
Defiance gleamed in Casey’s eye, a sneer curled Casey’s lip.

And now the leather-covered sphere came hurtling through the air,
And Casey stood a-watching it in haughty grandeur there.
Close by the sturdy batsman the ball unheeded sped—
“That ain’t my style,” said Casey. “Strike one,” the umpire said.

From the benches, black with people, there went up a muffled roar,
Like the beating of the storm-waves on a stern and distant shore.
“Kill him! Kill the umpire!” shouted some one on the stand;
And it’s likely they’d have killed him had not Casey raised his hand.

With a smile of Christian charity great Casey’s visage shone;
He stilled the rising tumult; he bade the game go on;
He signaled to the pitcher, and once more the spheroid flew;
But Casey still ignored it, and the umpire said, “Strike two.”

“Fraud!” cried the maddened thousands, and echo answered fraud;
But one scornful look from Casey and the audience was awed.
They saw his face grow stern and cold, they saw his muscles strain,
And they knew that Casey wouldn’t let that ball go by again.

The sneer is gone from Casey’s lip, his teeth are clinched in hate;
He pounds with cruel violence his bat upon the plate.
And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go,
And now the air is shattered by the force of Casey’s blow.

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;
But there is no joy in Mudville—mighty Casey has struck out.

Before I read anything about it

There is almost nothing I can add that the poem does not already do for itself. It is so vividly written that I can almost smell the hot dogs and feel the tension of the crowd in a town ballpark small enough that everyone knows who Casey is. I can see every change in his expression as the pitches go by.

Thayer does such a good job of building the tension that, even though I know how it ends, the final line still catches me out.

Listening to the poem

I listened to Dave Jageler’s recitation for the Library of Congress. I especially loved the announcer-style delivery. It feels like exactly how the poem should be read.

In my heart, though, I will always hear it the way I first did: Penn reading it on stage while Teller dangled upside down, trying to escape from a straitjacket.

The pace builds with each pitch Casey lets pass. By the final swing, the pause before the last words feels that much more pregnant.

What I learned

“Casey at the Bat” first appeared on page four of San Francisco’s Daily Examiner on June 3, 1888. Ernest Lawrence Thayer signed it “Phin,” a version of his Harvard nickname. He had worked on the Harvard Lampoon alongside William Randolph Hearst, who later hired him to write comic ballads for the newspaper. It was published with no special fanfare.

A shortened, unattributed version then reached New York, where the writer Archibald Gunter passed it to the actor DeWolf Hopper. Hopper was a six-foot-five comic-opera and vaudeville performer with a booming voice, as well as a devoted baseball fan. He first recited it on stage in August 1888 at a performance attended by players from the New York Giants and Chicago White Stockings. It was an immediate success. He went on to perform it at least ten thousand times.

The poem was therefore a performance almost from the beginning. Hopper started a tradition that runs through recordings, cartoons, ballparks and, for me, Penn and Teller. The announcer-style reading does not add something that is not there. It brings out the performance already built into the lines.

The original subtitle, A Ballad of the Republic, Sung in the Year 1888, is part of the joke. Thayer tells the story of a failed at-bat in the language of a national epic. The crowd becomes a multitude, the ball becomes a “leather-covered sphere,” and Casey calms a threatened riot with “a smile of Christian charity.” He is treated like a hero entering battle right up to the moment his confidence defeats him.

The long rhyming lines are made for performance. “And now” repeats as the pitcher holds the ball, lets it go and Casey swings. A reader can keep speeding up and then suddenly stop. The final stanza pulls away from Mudville to imagine sunlight, music and laughter everywhere else before returning for the last line.

What stayed with me

There isn’t one particular line that stands out for me. It is the entire picture painted by the poem: a town at a baseball game placing all its hope in one swaggering local hero. That earns it the right to be called one of the most American poems ever written.

Sources and versions

• The poem at the Poetry Foundation

• The Library of Congress on its first publication

• The Library of Congress on DeWolf Hopper’s performances and recording

• The Poetry Foundation biography of Ernest Lawrence Thayer

The poem

• Italian text: Treccani

• From: Vita nuova, chapter XXVI

Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare
la donna mia quand’ella altrui saluta,
ch’ogne lingua deven tremando muta,
e gli occhi no l’ardiscon di guardare.

Ella si va, sentendosi laudare,
benignamente d’umiltà vestuta;
e par che sia una cosa venuta
dal cielo in terra a miracol mostrare.

Mostrasi sì piacente a chi la mira,
che dà per li occhi una dolcezza al core,
che ‘ntender no la pò chi no la prova:

e par che de la sua labbia si mova
un spirito soave pien d’amore,
che va dicendo all’anima: Sospira.

Approximate pronunciation

This is a guide for an English speaker, not a reconstruction of exactly how Dante’s Florentine Italian sounded.

TAHN-toh jen-TEE-leh eh TAHN-toh oh-NES-tah PAH-reh
lah DON-nah MEE-ah kwahn-DELL-ah AHL-troo-ee sah-LOO-tah
KOH-nyeh LEEN-gwah DEH-ven treh-MAHN-doh MOO-tah
eh lyee OK-kee noh lahr-DEE-skohn dee gwahr-DAH-reh

EH-lah see vah, sen-TEN-doh-see lau-DAH-reh
beh-neen-nyah-MEN-teh doo-meel-TAH veh-STOO-tah
eh pahr keh SEE-ah OO-nah KOH-zah veh-NOO-tah
dahl CHEH-loh een TEHR-rah ah mee-RAH-kohl moh-STRAH-reh

MOH-strah-see see pyah-CHEN-teh ah kee lah MEE-rah
keh dah pehr lee OK-kee OO-nah dohl-CHET-tsah ahl KOH-reh
keh NTEN-dehr noh lah paw kee noh lah PROH-vah

eh pahr keh deh lah SOO-ah LAHB-byah see MOH-vah
oon SPEE-ree-toh soh-AH-veh pyen dah-MOH-reh
keh vah dee-CHEN-doh ahl-LAH-nee-mah: soh-SPEE-rah

A simple, naive translation

So noble and so dignified appears
my lady when she greets another,
that every tongue, trembling, becomes mute,
and eyes do not dare to look at her.

She goes on, hearing herself praised,
kindly clothed in humility;
and she seems to be something that has come
from heaven to earth to show a miracle.

She appears so pleasing to whoever looks at her
that through the eyes she gives a sweetness to the heart
which cannot be understood by anyone who has not felt it;

and it seems that from her face there moves
a gentle spirit filled with love
that goes saying to the soul: Sigh.

This is deliberately plain. Several familiar-looking words had different shades of meaning in Dante’s Italian, but I am leaving those for later.

Before I read a polished translation

I’m sure we have all had the chance to see a loved one, colleague or friend in their element, gliding across a room and dazzling people, almost holding court.

That is the picture this poem first brought to mind: a person who mesmerizes everyone around her while still seeming to be “clothed in humility.”

Listening to the Italian

I listened to Luigi Maria Corsanico read the poem. Unfortunately, the music distracted me from the reading. I know a little Italian, but not enough to follow this poem without help, so this time I will have to rely on a good translation.

Two translations

First, a close modern rendering:

So noble in spirit, so full of dignity
my lady appears when she greets another,
that every trembling tongue falls silent
and no one’s eyes dare look at her.

She passes on, hearing herself praised,
graciously clothed in humility,
and seems a being come
from heaven to earth to reveal a miracle.

She appears so lovely to whoever sees her
that through the eyes she sends a sweetness to the heart
which no one can understand without feeling it;

and from her countenance there seems to move
a gentle spirit, full of love,
saying to the soul: Sigh.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s translation is much more romantic:

My lady looks so gentle and so pure
When yielding salutation by the way,
That the tongue trembles and has nought to say,
And the eyes, which fain would see, may not endure.

And still, amid the praise she hears secure,
She walks with humbleness for her array;
Seeming a creature sent from Heaven to stay
On earth, and show a miracle made sure.

She is so pleasant in the eyes of men
That through the sight the inmost heart doth gain
A sweetness which needs proof to know it by:

And from between her lips there seems to move
A soothing essence that is full of love,
Saying for ever to the spirit, “Sigh!”

After reading the translations

I prefer Rossetti’s romantic version, although I miss the phrase “clothed in humility.” His “humbleness for her array” means much the same thing, but I don’t picture it as vividly. “Clothed in humility” makes me see someone wearing her humility as she glides through the room.

What I learned

Vita nuova was Dante’s first major work, written not long after 1292. It mixes poems with prose that tells the story around them. It follows Dante’s love for Beatrice from their childhood meetings through her death and its aftermath. This sonnet comes in chapter XXVI, while Beatrice is still alive, and is part of what Dante calls his poetry of praise.

The prose around the sonnet changed the scene for me. Beatrice is not gliding across a room. She is walking through Florence, and people hurry to see her pass. Their reaction is not just Dante’s private infatuation. My original picture was not so far away, but the audience is a crowd.

Some of the Italian looks more familiar than it really is. Gentile means spiritually noble, not just gentle. Onesta is closer to dignity and an outward grace than simple honesty. Pare does not mean that she only seems this way. It means that she reveals herself to be so. Even her greeting carries more weight than a social hello. Dante treats it as an act of grace that changes the person receiving it.

Most interesting to me, “clothed in humility” is not a translator’s embellishment. Dante uses vestuta, meaning clothed or dressed. Treccani traces the image to Saint Paul’s instruction to clothe oneself in compassion, kindness and humility. Her humility is not hidden inside her. It is something people can see her wearing.

The poem is part of the dolce stil novo, the “sweet new style” associated with Dante and a small group of thirteenth-century Italian poets. The woman being praised could be more than a courtly love interest. Beatrice is presented as a sign of divine love, someone come from heaven to make a miracle visible. That helps explain why Dante gives us almost no physical description of her. We know her by what happens when she appears: voices fail, eyes lower and souls sigh.

Rereading it

I was a little disappointed to learn that this is not simply Dante’s infatuation with one particular person, but Beatrice’s effect on everyone who sees her. It makes the poem feel less private.

Still, if anything, that should make Beatrice even more extraordinary. She does not dazzle only the person in love with her. Everyone sees it.

The line or image I kept thinking about

It is still very much “clothed in humility.” That image survived everything I learned about the poem. I can still see her wearing it as she moves through Florence.

Sources and versions

• Italian text and discussion at Treccani

• The sonnet in a scan-backed edition of Vita nuova at Wikisource

• Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s translation in The Early Italian Poets

• Treccani on Vita nuova

• Treccani on the poem’s language, imagery and biblical echoes

• Treccani on Beatrice and the meaning of her greeting

Fragment 31 survives in ancient Greek but breaks off after four nearly complete stanzas. I began with the Greek, a romanization and a deliberately simple translation before reading any of the polished English versions.

The poem

• Greek text: Dickinson College Commentaries

• Ancient Greek reading: Elizabeth Donnelly on YouTube

φάινεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θέοισιν
ἔμμεν ὤνερ, ὄττις ἐναντίος τοι
ἰσδάνει καὶ πλάσιον ἆδυ φωνεί-
σας ὐπακούει

καὶ γελαίσας ἰμερόεν τό μ᾽ ἦ μάν
καρδίαν ἐν στήθεσιν ἐπτόησεν·
ὠς γὰρ εἰσίδω βροχέως σε, φώνας
οὐδὲν ἔτ᾽ ἴκει·

ἀλλὰ κάμ μὲν γλῶσσα ἔαγε, λέπτον
δ᾽ αὔτικα χρῷ πῦρ ὐπαδεδρόμηκεν,
ὀππάτεσσι δ᾽ οὐδὲν ὄρημ᾽, ἐπιρρόμ-
βεισι δ᾽ ἄκουαι.

καδ δέ μ᾽ ἴδρως κακχέεται, τρόμος δὲ
παῖσαν ἄγρει, χλωροτέρα δὲ ποίας
ἔμμι, τεθνάκην δ᾽ ὀλίγω ᾽πιδεύης
φαίνομαι […].

ἀλλὰ πᾶν τόλματον …

Romanization

Phainetai moi kēnos isos theoisin
emmen ōner, ottis enantios toi
isdanei kai plasion ādu phōnei-
sas upakouei

kai gelaisas imeroen, to m’ ē man
kardian en stēthesin eptoēsen;
ōs gar eisidō brokheōs se, phōnas
ouden et’ ikei;

alla kam men glōssa eage, lepton
d’ autika khrōi pur upadedromēken,
oppatessi d’ ouden orēm’, epirrom-
beisi d’ akouai.

kad de m’ idrōs kakkheetai, tromos de
paisan agrei, khlōrotera de poias
emmi, tethnakēn d’ oligō ’pideuēs
phainomai […].

alla pan tolmaton …

The romanization maps the Greek letters into the Latin alphabet; it is not a confident reconstruction of exactly how Sappho sounded.

A simple, naive translation

He seems to me equal to the gods,
that man who sits facing you
and, close beside you, listens as you
speak sweetly

and laugh charmingly. That truly
makes my heart flutter in my chest;
for whenever I look at you even briefly,
I can no longer speak.

Instead my tongue breaks; at once
a thin fire runs beneath my skin;
my eyes see nothing,
and my ears ring.

Cold sweat pours over me; trembling
seizes all of me; I am greener than grass,
and I seem to myself only a little short
of being dead.

[But everything must be endured …]

The final bracketed line is only a provisional gloss of a broken sentence. Whatever followed it has been lost.

Before I read a polished translation

My first picture was of a girl talking to her beau, trying to impress him with stories and laughter while feeling nervous to the point of fear. I recognize the situation: meeting someone you admire and love, wanting to charm them, then finding yourself stuttering and stumbling as you speak.

There seemed to be a conflict between “speaking sweetly” and “I can no longer speak.” I read them as part of the same struggle: the performance she wants to give and the panic that interrupts it. The more she wants to impress him, the less control she seems to have over her voice.

Listening to the Greek

I found myself relying heavily on the tone of the delivery and being influenced by it. This time, listening did not add anything to the poem for me. It felt less like a way of hearing something new and more like another interpretation laid over it.

Two translations

Henry Thornton Wharton’s 1885 prose version stays fairly close to the Greek:

That man seems to me peer of gods, who sits in thy presence, and hears close to him thy sweet speech and lovely laughter; that indeed makes my heart flutter in my bosom. For when I see thee but a little, I have no utterance left, my tongue is broken down, and straightway a subtle fire has run under my skin, with my eyes I have no sight, my ears ring, sweat pours down, and a trembling seizes all my body; I am paler than grass, and seem in my madness little better than one dead.

John Addington Symonds’s 1883 version is much more obviously a poem in English:

Peer of gods he seemeth to me, the blissful
Man who sits and gazes at thee before him,
Close beside thee sits, and in silence hears thee
Silverly speaking,

Laughing love’s low laughter. Oh this, this only
Stirs the troubled heart in my breast to tremble!
For should I but see thee a little moment,
Straight is my voice hushed;

Yea, my tongue is broken, and through and through me
‘Neath the flesh impalpable fire runs tingling;
Nothing see mine eyes, and a noise of roaring
Waves in my ear sounds;

Sweat runs down in rivers, a tremor seizes
All my limbs, and paler than grass in autumn,
Caught by pains of menacing death, I falter,
Lost in the love-trance.

Symonds adds things that are not in the Greek, including “silverly,” “autumn” and the “love-trance.” Wharton’s printed version continues with a conjectural ending, which I have left out because it is not securely present in the surviving Greek.

After reading the translations

The translations changed the arrangement of the scene for me. The poem now reads almost as if Sappho is reading out the mind of the woman speaking to the man. Looking in on such an intimate moment feels intrusive, especially given the intensity of the woman’s feelings and the seeming obliviousness of the man she is speaking to.

Strictly speaking, the Greek gives those physical reactions to Sappho’s speaker rather than the woman she is watching. That is still how the scene forms in my mind. Either way, the poem captures a moment of sweet infatuation.

What I learned

Sappho lived on Lesbos around the end of the seventh and beginning of the sixth centuries BCE. Her poetry was composed as song in Aeolic Greek, not as silent words on a page. The poem is in what is now called the Sapphic stanza: three longer lines followed by a short one. Its sentences spill across those boundaries. The language itself seems to falter when the speaker says that her tongue has broken.

The poem survives largely because an ancient critic, conventionally called Longinus, quoted it in On the Sublime. He was interested in the way Sappho gathers the heart, tongue, skin, eyes and ears into one overwhelming experience. Four stanzas survive almost completely, but the next sentence breaks off. We do not know what came after it.

We also do not know the relationship among the three people. The scene has been read as a wedding, as jealousy, and as desire so overpowering that the man seems godlike simply because he can sit beside the woman without falling apart. The poem does not settle the question. Its first-person voice should not automatically be treated as a page from Sappho’s private life either. It is a lyric performance, however personal it feels.

The Roman poet Catullus later remade the poem in Latin as Poem 51. He kept the lost speech, the fire beneath the skin and the ringing ears, then added a stanza about the dangers of idleness. Many other poets have made their own versions since.

The line or image I kept thinking about

I can’t think of another pair of lines that capture infatuation as well as the opening of John Addington Symonds’s translation:

Peer of gods he seemeth to me, the blissful
Man who sits and gazes at thee before him,

He seems godlike simply because he can sit calmly beside the person whose presence overwhelms the speaker. The rest of the poem describes what infatuation does to the body, but those first two lines say it all for me.

Sources and versions

• Greek text and commentary at Dickinson College Commentaries

• Ancient Greek reading by Elizabeth Donnelly

• Henry Thornton Wharton’s 1885 edition and translations at Project Gutenberg

• John Addington Symonds’s 1883 translation at Project Gutenberg

• Gregory Nagy on the poem’s broken voice and survival through Longinus

• William D. Furley on the poem’s competing interpretations

• Catullus 51 at Dickinson College Commentaries

This time there is no translation between me and the poem. I read the thirteen short sections before looking up Stevens or anybody else’s explanation.

The poem

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the black bird.

II

I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV

A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI

Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII

O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X

At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI

He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII

The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

This is the text printed in the first edition of Harmonium in 1923. That edition writes “black bird” as two words in the third line, then uses “blackbird” everywhere else.

First reading

I had to read this a couple of times before I had any sense of what I was reading or could begin to picture these little scenes.

The blackbirds are always there, but they seem almost incidental in each section. They are “involved in what I know,” as the poem says, but they do not feel like the key player.

After both my first and second readings, I was not sure I had a strong feeling about the poem at all.

Hearing it

I listened to Wallace Stevens read the poem himself. His reading did not join the pieces together for me. It maintained the scattered, seemingly disconnected little stories, with the blackbirds still the only thread between them.

The black birds and the very deliberate choice of thirteen sections seem to hint at something dark, foreboding or unlucky. Nothing in the poem itself really supports that reading, though.

The men of Haddam gave me the one hint of lament. They imagine golden, and presumably more beautiful, birds when there are perfectly beautiful blackbirds walking around them. Perhaps Stevens is complaining that they cannot see what is already there. That supports my sense of something mournful, even if it does not explain the rest of the poem.

What I learned

The poem first appeared in 1917 in Others: An Anthology of the New Verse, six years before Stevens included it in his first collection, Harmonium.

The most useful thing I learned came from Stevens himself. In a later letter, he described the sections as different kinds of “sensations.” I had been looking for a story or an argument to tie them together, but their scatteredness is part of the form.

The poem is often compared with haiku because of its compressed images, and with Cubism because it keeps turning around one subject. Both comparisons make sense up to a point. Stevens said that his interest in Japanese art was casual and that he had not studied haiku.

I could not find anything from Stevens suggesting that he chose thirteen because it was unlucky. The number and the black bird invite that reading, but it came from me rather than anything the poem says.

Haddam is a real town in Connecticut. Stevens later said that he liked its distinctly Yankee-sounding name, but he did not provide a single explanation for the golden birds. I still read the contrast plainly enough: the men invent something rare and ideal while missing the ordinary blackbird already walking among them.

Two of the stranger phrases also became less mysterious. “Bawds of euphony” was Stevens’s jab at critics who profit from other people’s pleasure in beautiful sound. An “equipage” is a carriage and its horses, so the traveller in section XI frightens himself by mistaking his own moving shadow for a flock of birds.

None of this turns the blackbird into the key player I was looking for. Perhaps it is enough that the bird remains involved while everything around it changes.

Rereading it

If scatteredness was Stevens’s intention, as the background reading suggests, then bravo. It worked on me. I am still left with a deeply disquieting feeling, especially when I read the poem aloud.

The line or image I kept thinking about

“It was evening all afternoon.”

That line makes no sense, and yet I know exactly what such an afternoon would look and feel like. What a beautiful sentence!

Sources and versions

• The 1923 Harmonium text at Representative Poetry Online

• A scan of the first edition of Harmonium

• Wallace Stevens reading the poem

• The Wallace Stevens Society’s Harmonium archive

• The Academy of American Poets on Harmonium

Kabir’s poems have survived both in manuscripts and through people singing them, so there isn’t one definitive text. I began with this compact five-line version before listening to the longer forms people sing.

The poem

मोकों कहाँ ढूँढ़े बंदे, मैं तो तेरे पास में।
ना मैं देवल ना मैं मसजिद, ना काबे कैलास में।
ना तो कौन क्रिया-कर्म में, नहीं योग बैराग में।
खोजी होय तो तुरतै मिलिहौं, पल भर की तलास में।
कहैं कबीर सुनो भाई साधो, सब स्वाँसों की स्वाँस में॥

Roman transliteration

Moko kahan dhoondhe bande, main to tere paas mein.
Na main deval, na main masjid, na Kaabe Kailas mein.
Na to kaun kriya-karam mein, nahin yog bairag mein.
Khoji hoy to turtai milihau, pal bhar ki talaash mein.
Kahain Kabir, suno bhai sadho, sab swaanson ki swaans mein.

A deliberately plain translation

Where do you search for me, person? I am close beside you.
I am not in temple or mosque, not in Kaaba or Kailash.
Not in any rite or ritual, not in yoga or renunciation.
If you are a seeker, I will meet you at once, within a moment’s search.
Kabir says: Listen, brother seeker, I am in the breath of every breath.

This is only a reading aid. Bande can mean a person, servant or devotee, while sadho addresses a seeker or holy person. “The breath of every breath” stays deliberately close to Kabir’s final phrase rather than trying to explain it.

First reading

Kabir was another of the poets I was required to read growing up, and this poem in particular stayed with me. I am not especially religious, but I grew up surrounded by religious ritual and went to an all-boys Catholic school.

The poem suggests that much of what surrounds religion is cultural affectation and unnecessary to “knowing God.” That was an interesting contrast to the importance placed on following rites exactly, something drummed into us early.

I also have to admit that Kabir referring to himself in the third person in the final line amuses me greatly.

Hearing it

I listened to Dastaan Live performing the poem at the Mahindra Kabira Festival. It was an unexpectedly folk-rock rendering of what I had always pictured as a soft and self-reflective set of lines. This reading wasn’t for me, but it did give the poem a more upbeat interpretation.

Reading a polished translation

Here is Rabindranath Tagore’s (of course!) translation from the 1915 Songs of Kabir:

O servant, where dost thou seek Me?
Lo! I am beside thee.
I am neither in temple nor in mosque: I am neither in Kaaba nor in Kailash:
Neither am I in rites and ceremonies, nor in Yoga and renunciation.
If thou art a true seeker, thou shalt at once see Me: thou shalt meet Me in a moment of time.
Kabir says, “O Sadhu! God is the breath of all breath.”

Tagore’s version feels much more scriptural than the plain translation, but it captures the rhythm of Kabir’s repetition well.

What I learned

Most of what we know about Kabir’s life is tangled up with later legend. He is thought to have lived in fifteenth-century Varanasi and worked as a weaver in a Muslim julaha family. Tradition links him to the Hindu teacher Ramanand, but trying to file Kabir under either religion rather misses the point.

Temple is paired with mosque, and the Kaaba with Mount Kailash. Kabir is taking aim at both traditions. He then turns on ritual, yoga and renunciation for good measure. Nobody gets to claim a private route to God.

Kabir is associated with nirgun devotion, the idea of a divine reality without form or attributes. He isn’t rejecting spiritual experience here. He is rejecting the idea that we need a sacred building, a long journey or a perfectly observed ritual to reach it. The answer is already beside you, in “the breath of every breath.”

Kabir was an oral poet. His songs passed from singer to singer and were written down by other people later, which is why collections and performances don’t always use exactly the same words. The longer versions sung today aren’t simply mistakes added to a fixed original. They are part of how the poem has lived.

Tagore’s English version has its own history. It appeared in Songs of Kabir in 1915, drawing on texts collected by Kshitimohan Sen, with help from Ajit Kumar Chakravarty. Its “dost” and “thou” belong to the English devotional language of that period. That may be where some of the scriptural tone I heard comes from.

Rereading it

Until I read the history, I had missed the Hindu and Muslim comparison Kabir makes by placing temple beside mosque and the Kaaba beside Kailash.

The line or image I kept thinking about

Given how deep and meaningful this poem is, I am surprised that what stays with me most is its repetitive syntax. Kabir tells us again and again what God is not, giving more weight to the moment when he tells us what God is. I suspect I will find myself reaching for that construction in my own writing.

Sources and versions

• The five-line text at Hindwi

• Dastaan Live at the Mahindra Kabira Festival

• Tagore’s 1915 translation in Songs of Kabir

• Linda Hess, The Bijak of Kabir

• Linda Hess, Bodies of Song

I began with the poem on its own, before reading about its history or the different forms it took during Poe’s life.

The poem

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?

First reading

What a vividly sad poem. This is not one of Poe’s poems I had read before, and I had not expected it to be so intensely sad.

For whatever reason, the poems I seem to have chosen have had poignant twists of sadness. This one caught me off guard. It was striking enough to bring tears to my eyes.

Hearing it

I listened to Tom O’Bedlam read the poem. His deep, sonorous voice does the poem justice. It softens the intensity of the first stanza for me while keeping all the weight and gravitas of the second.

What I learned

What surprised me most was how long Poe lived with this idea. An early version appeared in a poem called “Imitation” in his 1827 collection. He rewrote it as “To ——” a couple of years later, then returned to it again near the end of his life.

By early 1849, the shore, sand and waves existed as a poem on their own. Poe sent that version to Annie Richmond under the title “For Annie.” He later added the opening farewell and published the complete poem as “A Dream Within a Dream” in the Boston newspaper Flag of Our Union on March 31, 1849. He died a little over six months later.

The title “For Annie” makes a biographical reading tempting. So does the YouTube video’s description, which links the poem to the death of Poe’s wife, Virginia. But the final poem does not identify the person being left, and the surviving history does not prove that Virginia is its subject. I would rather leave the farewell open than force a name onto it.

The first printing also capitalizes “Hope.” It is a tiny choice, but it makes Hope feel almost like a presence that can leave of its own accord, rather than simply a feeling the speaker has lost.

Rereading it

I still read this as a touching farewell to someone Poe cared about deeply. The fact that it does not belong neatly to one identifiable person or moment gives it even more weight for me. Poe returned to it and perhaps reshaped it around another parting.

It feels less like a eulogy fixed to one loss and more like a poem he could return to when he needed to capture grief again. I find that even more touching.

The line or image I kept thinking about

It is the helplessness of trying to hold on to the grains of sand as they slip from his grasp. He holds tighter and weeps, but still cannot save even one from the waves. I cannot imagine reading those lines without feeling my eyes sting too.

Sources and versions

• The first authorized printing in Flag of Our Union, March 31, 1849

• The early 1849 “For Annie” manuscript

• Publication history and surviving versions at the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore

• A chronology of Poe’s life and death

The poem began in Bengali. The English version was published in The Crescent Moon, whose title page credits Tagore himself as the translator. I began with that English version before looking closely at the Bengali poem.

The poem

Day by day I float my paper boats one by one down the running stream.

In big black letters I write my name on them and the name of the village where I live.

I hope that someone in some strange land will find them and know who I am.

I load my little boats with shiuli flowers from our garden, and hope that these blooms of the dawn will be carried safely to land in the night.

I launch my paper boats and look up into the sky and see the little clouds setting their white bulging sails.

I know not what playmate of mine in the sky sends them down the air to race with my boats!

When night comes I bury my face in my arms and dream that my paper boats float on and on under the midnight stars.

The fairies of sleep are sailing in them, and the lading is their baskets full of dreams.

First reading

There are little “slice of life” poems that perfectly capture a feeling, a moment, a culture or a way of being. This feels like one of those poems.

I can picture a young boy by a stream, shirtless in my imagination for some reason, setting his little boats afloat in the hope that they might find someone else. That he sees the clouds in the sky as sails suggests a loneliness to me, one that a wandering and inventive child’s mind is able to fill.

Comparing the Bengali and English versions

Calling the English a translation is perhaps too simple. The Bengali poem has five twelve-line stanzas. The published English version recasts it as eight short prose paragraphs. The journey survives, but much of the day surrounding it disappears.

In Bengali, the child carefully draws large, thick letters on each boat and imagines a stranger reading them and guessing where the boat came from. He fills the boats with both shiuli and bakul flowers gathered from beneath the garden trees, still shining with morning dew. The English keeps the name, the village and the shiuli, but compresses the rest into a few sentences.

The Bengali child then sits on the bank and watches. Small waves rise and fall, sunlight glitters on the water, birds call overhead and the breeze moves slowly. He sees that the clouds look like his boats and wonders who launched them, where they are going and whether the clouds or his boats will arrive first. The English replaces this with the lovely invention of the clouds setting their “white bulging sails” and an unknown playmate sending them to race his boats.

The largest omission comes when the day ends. In a close, deliberately plain rendering, the Bengali says:

At the end of the day someone comes from home
and pulls me away.
I return home and stay tucked away in a corner,
where day passes and night passes.
Where, towards what village,
does my little boat keep floating?
No one knows which way it will go.
No one ever forbids it,
no one holds it or calls it back.
It runs towards ever-new countries.
My mind climbs aboard the paper boat
and floats away with it.

The Bengali ending is darker and more particular too. The child imagines a river whose banks have been poured from ink. Stars flicker and jackals call through the watches of the night. The boat seems to search from shore to shore for a home. A familiar Bengali figure, the sleep-bringing auntie, climbs aboard carrying sleep with her.

The published English version turns her into “the fairies of sleep” and gives them baskets full of dreams. It is a beautiful ending, but it is not merely the same ending in another language.

What I learned

The Bengali poem, “Kagojer Nouka,” appeared in Shishu, Tagore’s 1903 collection about childhood. Ten years later, “Paper Boats” appeared in The Crescent Moon, soon after the success of the English Gitanjali.

There is a wrinkle. The Crescent Moon is dedicated to the British poet and artist T. Sturge Moore, an early champion of Tagore who nominated him for the 1913 Nobel Prize. A surviving English manuscript of “Paper Boats” shows that its wording changed before publication. I cannot tell from it who made each change, so I cannot claim that Tagore personally chose every cut. All I can say for certain is that these lines disappear from the published English poem.

That only makes my question more interesting. This is the English poem Tagore authorized and published under his own name, but it is a recreation rather than a literal copy of the Bengali. Perhaps it can be the same poem without being quite the same experience.

Rereading it

The full Bengali version adds to my sense of the boy’s loneliness, but it also makes him feel trapped and stuck at home. It makes his living vicariously through the boats, set free to explore the world, make all the more sense.

Those verses disappear from the English version. Could a poem with so much lost in translation still be said to be the same poem?

In spite of those lines being cut, the meaning and feeling still seem to get through, at least for me.

The line or image I kept thinking about

For me, it is the image of a series of small paper boats, each carrying this boy’s name, being buffeted and blown along by a current beyond their control as they explore the world. It feels both lonesome and full of promise.

Sources and versions

• The complete Bengali “Kagojer Nouka” at TagoreWeb

• Tagore’s English version in the 1913 edition of The Crescent Moon

• A scan of the 1913 edition

• Tagore’s English manuscript in the Bichitra Tagore Online Variorum

• The Nobel Prize nomination archive entry for Sturge Moore’s 1913 nomination of Tagore

It appears in Through the Looking-Glass, but I read it first on its own, before finding out where it sits in the book or what people have tried to make it mean.

The poem

The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright,
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.

The moon was shining sulkily,
Because she thought the sun
Had got no business to be there
After the day was done.
“It’s very rude of him,” she said,
“To come and spoil the fun.”

The sea was wet as wet could be,
The sands were dry as dry.
You could not see a cloud, because
No cloud was in the sky:
No birds were flying overhead,
There were no birds to fly.

The Walrus and the Carpenter
Were walking close at hand;
They wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand:
“If this were only cleared away,”
They said, “it would be grand!”

“If seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year,
Do you suppose,” the Walrus said,
“That they could get it clear?”
“I doubt it,” said the Carpenter,
And shed a bitter tear.

“O Oysters, come and walk with us!”
The Walrus did beseech.
“A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,
Along the briny beach:
We cannot do with more than four,
To give a hand to each.”

The eldest Oyster looked at him,
But never a word he said:
The eldest Oyster winked his eye,
And shook his heavy head,
Meaning to say he did not choose
To leave the oyster-bed.

But four young Oysters hurried up,
All eager for the treat:
Their coats were brushed, their faces washed,
Their shoes were clean and neat,
And this was odd, because, you know,
They hadn’t any feet.

Four other Oysters followed them,
And yet another four;
And thick and fast they came at last,
And more, and more, and more,
All hopping through the frothy waves,
And scrambling to the shore.

The Walrus and the Carpenter
Walked on a mile or so,
And then they rested on a rock
Conveniently low:
And all the little Oysters stood
And waited in a row.

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax,
Of cabbages and kings,
And why the sea is boiling hot,
And whether pigs have wings.”

“But wait a bit,” the Oysters cried,
“Before we have our chat;
For some of us are out of breath,
And all of us are fat!”
“No hurry!” said the Carpenter.
They thanked him much for that.

“A loaf of bread,” the Walrus said,
“Is what we chiefly need:
Pepper and vinegar besides
Are very good indeed.
Now if you’re ready, Oysters dear,
We can begin to feed.”

“But not on us!” the Oysters cried,
Turning a little blue.
“After such kindness, that would be
A dismal thing to do!”
“The night is fine,” the Walrus said.
“Do you admire the view?”

“It was so kind of you to come!
And you are very nice!”
The Carpenter said nothing but
“Cut us another slice:
I wish you were not quite so deaf.
I’ve had to ask you twice!”

“It seems a shame,” the Walrus said,
“To play them such a trick,
After we’ve brought them out so far,
And made them trot so quick!”
The Carpenter said nothing but
“The butter’s spread too thick!”

“I weep for you,” the Walrus said:
“I deeply sympathize.”
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket-handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.

“O Oysters,” said the Carpenter,
“You’ve had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?”
But answer came there none,
And this was scarcely odd, because
They’d eaten every one.

First reading

What a very Alice in Wonderland nonsense poem! The entire story makes sense, and yet the pictures it conjures are deliberately fantastical. You’re left asking, “Sure, oysters, but why a walrus and a carpenter?” and “What happened to the sun in the middle of the night?”

Lewis Carroll could make you picture dreamlike sequences that still felt plausible. This walk along the beach, ending in a feast of oysters, feels exactly like that.

Hearing it

I listened to Sir John Gielgud read the poem. His reading is exactly how I heard it in my head. Even with the sad twist, the poem remains whimsical and somehow funny.

What I learned

The poem appeared in Chapter 4 of Through the Looking-Glass in 1871. Tweedledee recites it after Alice rather doubtfully admits that she likes “some poetry” and asks for directions out of the wood. Her request is ignored. Instead, Tweedledum chooses this poem simply because it is the longest one they know.

The answer to my question, “Why a walrus and a carpenter?” is wonderfully arbitrary. When the poem was being illustrated, Carroll offered John Tenniel a choice between a carpenter, a butterfly and a baronet. All three fitted the metre. Tenniel chose the Carpenter. With a different decision, we might now be talking about the Walrus and the Butterfly, which feels entirely appropriate.

The poem has eighteen six-line stanzas, alternating between longer and shorter lines. The familiar nursery-rhyme bounce lets it become increasingly horrible without ever quite ceasing to be funny. Carroll later said that he had no particular earlier poem in mind when he wrote it. The metre, he said, was a common one.

The argument immediately afterwards is almost as good as the poem. Alice first prefers the Walrus because at least he seems sorry for the oysters. Tweedledee points out that the Walrus hid behind his handkerchief so the Carpenter could not see him eating more. Alice switches to the Carpenter, only to learn that he ate as many as he could get. She finally decides that they were both very unpleasant characters.

There is no useful answer about the sun shining in the middle of the night. Carroll tells us it is odd and moves on.

Rereading it

It is funny to reread the poem with “Butterfly” instead of “Carpenter”. Partly it is the mental image. More than that, it is absurd to imagine a butterfly not merely tricking the oysters but then devouring them.

I had wondered why Carroll chose a walrus and a carpenter. Finding out that the pairing was wonderfully arbitrary is delightful.

The line or image I kept thinking about

The Walrus and the Carpenter strolling along the beach is certainly vivid and memorable. But my mind keeps returning to the sun shining in the middle of the night and making the moon jealous. What would it look like for the sun to be out and yet for it still to be night?

Sources and versions

• The 1872 text at Representative Poetry Online, University of Toronto

• Chapter 4 of Through the Looking-Glass at Project Gutenberg

• The poem in a public-domain collection of songs from the Alice books

• The Lewis Carroll Society of North America’s online-text guide

• Edward Guiliano, ed., Through the Looking-Glass, Oxford World’s Classics, introduction and notes

• Martin Gardner, ed., The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition