Poetry For All

In this third installment of our series on the aubade, we feature a contrapuntal poem that explores various states of grief and loss.

Tarfia Faizullah is the author of two poetry collections: Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf, 2018) and Seam (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014). She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships. To learn more about her work, visit her website. Thanks to SIU Press for granting us permission to read this poem on the podcast.

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To read this poem, click on this link.

This episode continues our series on the aubade (a morning love song) with a dramatic turn. Larkin reinvents the tradition as waking to the fact that every new day brings a person one day closer to death.

To see the tradition that Larkin reimagines, see our previous episode on John Donne, "The Sun Rising."

For the text of Larkin's "Aubade" see the Poetry Foundation.

For more on Larkin, see the Poetry Foundation.

Thanks to Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, as well as Faber and Faber, for permission to read Larkin's "Aubade" for this episode.

Photo by Barry Wilkinson/Radio Times via Getty Images

In a special episode, we celebrate the release of Joanne Diaz's latest book, Electric Dress, by reading "The Face," a poem of double ekphrasis that reflects on the hope of tomorrow in the losses of today.

To order the book Electric Dress, see Barrow Street Press here:

https://barrowstreet.org/press/product/electric-dress-joanne-diaz/

For more on Joanne Diaz, see her faculty homepage:

https://www.iwu.edu/english/faculty/diaz.html

For more on the work of William Utermohlen, see this article and exhibition:

https://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=utermohlen

For the work of Catherine Drabkin, see her website:

https://catherinedrabkin.com/

This episode begins a three-part series on the "aubade," a poem to greet the morning (often by wishing the morning away). We discuss Donne's many wonderful techniques and even recite a little Romeo and Juliet.

Here is the poem:

The Sun Rising

By John Donne

Busy old fool, unruly sun,
Why dost thou thus,

Through windows, and through curtains call on us?

Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?

Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide

Late school boys and sour prentices,

Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,

Call country ants to harvest offices,

Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,

Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

Thy beams, so reverend and strong
Why shouldst thou think?

I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,

But that I would not lose her sight so long;

If her eyes have not blinded thine,

Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,

Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine

Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me.

Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,

And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.

She's all states, and all princes, I,
Nothing else is.

Princes do but play us; compared to this,

All honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy.

Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,

In that the world's contracted thus.

Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be

To warm the world, that's done in warming us.

Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;

This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44129/the-sun-rising

For more on Donne:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-donne

This poem offers a humble love of the world and a leave-taking of it. It was found in the papers of Jane Mead (1958-2019), which were left to her great friend Kathleen Finneran (1957-2026), and it was published in the New Yorker in 2021 through Kathleen's efforts. The poem was read at the memorial for Mead in 2021 and then again at the funeral for Finneran in 2026.

Here is the poem:

I Wonder If I Will Miss the Moss

—Jane Mead (1958-2019)

I wonder if I will miss the moss

after I fly off as much as I miss it now

just thinking about leaving.

There were stones of many colors.

There were sticks holding both

lichen and moss.

There were red gates with old

hand-forged hardware.

There were fields of dry grass

smelling of first rain

then of new mud. There was mud,

and there was the walking,

all the beautiful walking,

and it alone filled me—

the smells, the scratchy grass heads.

All the sleeping under bushes,

once waking to vultures above, peering down

with their bent heads the way they do,

caricatures of interest and curiosity.

Once too a lizard.

Once too a kangaroo rat.

Once too a rat.

They did not say I belonged to them,

but I did.

Whenever the experiment on and of

my life begins to draw to a close

I’ll go back to the place that held me

and be held. It’s O.K. I think

I did what I could. I think

I sang some, I think I held my hand out.

For The New Yorker, see here.

For a reflection on the poem by the poet Devin Kelly, see Kelly's Substack Ordinary Plots.

For more on Jane Mead, see The Poetry Foundation.

For the memorial service and the tribute by Kathleen Finneran, see Mead's personal webpage.