No.52 - November 2021
I love poetry for its portability, over both time and distance. Like songs, brief lyric poems can easily be lodged in both mind and body. We say of a memorized poem that we “have it by heart,” and that phrase seems telling. Every time we recite one aloud it lives anew in our bodies, in breath and pulse, so we can carry poems with us that way for years. Even our whole lives. Thus it is a continual wonder but no surprise that some lyrics composed a world away and centuries ago can still send a shiver up my spine. That anonymous 14th or 15th century song lyric we call “Western Wind,” for example, gives me a little jolt every time:
The fact that “Western Wind” is still alive to us hundreds of years after its composer became dust in that wind is, when you stop to think about it, an amazement. Such poetry needs no apologies, justifications, or analysis. Moreover, I find many poems changing over time as I change. Sometimes lyrics reveal their flaws; occasionally I have found myself embarrassed by my youthful taste, or a passing infatuation will go stale. But even more often, in my experience, poems improve with seasoning. And yes, with analysis. Like Mark Twain’s father in his famous quip, a dull-witted poem can gain in intelligence just by the process of my growing older, and presumably a bit wiser.
But how to write about poems that we love? Especially when they are as simple and straightforward as “Western Wind”? I know how to teach them. As a former teacher I’m comfortable with all the usual tools of analysis and appreciation. I enjoy interpreting poetry and swapping my responses with others (obviously—otherwise, why write a column such as this?) I most assuredly appreciate the value of evaluation and criticism, academic and otherwise.
Still, some poems that I adore do resist me. I’m not always sure why. One such piece is Robert Francis’s “Summons,” first published in his 1944 collection The Sound I Listened For and fairly often anthologized later. If you’re not familiar with his work, Francis (1901-1987) is well worth exploring in depth. His mentor and friend Robert Frost once said of him that he was, “of all the great neglected poets, the greatest.”
I first encountered “Summons” in seventh or eighth grade, when I would have been thirteen years old. I don’t know if the program still exists, but back then the public schools gave pupils the opportunity to purchase paperbacks at steep discounts. I seem to recall prices of 25 cents or so for paperbacks that even then had list prices of double or quadruple that. Every few months I could take a couple dollars from my saved-up allowance and soon own my own personal copies of half a dozen books. Thus it was that the poetry anthology Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle fell into my hands. Published by Scholastic Books in 1966, it was, I believe, the first poetry book I selected and bought with my own money. The Cat in the Hat and A. A. Milne’s poems came earlier, and I dearly love them to this day; but my parents gave those classics to me. I chose this one. I still have no idea why. I wasn’t a poetry lover back then, by any means. Though already an avid reader, I mostly devoured comic books, adventure stories, science fiction, and young adult novels about sports and animals. Likely it was the anthology’s weird and whimsical title. Poetry did not become a dominant feature of my life for at least five more years, but I do remember several poems vividly from that collection, in addition to Francis’s. It was my first introduction, for instance, to William Carlos Williams, among other excellent poets.
“Summons” was thus just about the first poem that truly got under my skin. For over a half century I’ve loved this poem. So it does seem odd that, in thirty-seven years of teaching, I never once taught it. That was true with a number of deep favorites. I would half-jokingly say that I couldn’t bear to hear prematurely jaded undergraduates announce that the poem was dumb, or worse, that they didn’t get what the poet was “trying to say.” But I think the truth was more shaded than that. For one thing, I was fearful, probably, that I could not do justice to it, couldn’t teach it well enough to persuade students to love it as I do.
Students never unanimously love anything, of course. Nor should they: de gustibus non est disputandum and all that. Still, every literature teacher gets used to hearing that Macbeth is “really depressing.” Or being informed each fall by students who have read three poems that Dickinson is “too weird.” Over time it can get wearisome. Even so, my students were, by and large, quite good-spirited, bright, and angling to please their professor. I’m sure most of them would have given “Summons” a good try, and no doubt some would have come to love it. But not all, naturally. I think I was not ready to receive or demand any halfhearted appreciation of this poem that to my mind is near perfect.
I also suspect I may have simply needed to claim certain works as my own. To maintain some area of my life in poetry that was untouched by criticism, analysis, debate, all the usual rough-and-tumble of literary dispute and evaluation.
By the way, from time to time I did teach other poems by Francis, and in prose I’ve written a fair amount about his work, including a lengthy overview and analysis published back in 1985, when the poet was still alive (he died in 1987 just shy of his 86th birthday.)
For me “Summons” was and remains a touchstone, a poem to be celebrated and applied to important life events. In fact I have recited it at several wedding ceremonies as well as one funeral (in celebration not of death, naturally, but of the spirit of the deceased). The poem is simple enough to be understood by a thirteen-year-old on a first reading, but powerful enough to resonate.
In any case, this is not a memoir but an appreciation of a poem I’ve been nourished by—how strange to say this!— for most of my life. And perhaps these are also notes for the class session on “Summons” that I never did teach. I might start, as I often would in the classroom, by zeroing in on a single detail, in this case the plain one-word title. What do we think of when we see the word “summons”? Perhaps an unpleasant memory of a document in the mail, commanding our appearance in court for some infraction. In most minds a summons is foremost a legal order, with penalties for non-compliance. So it might seem an unexpected choice for a poem that has nothing to do with the law and everything to do with matters of spirit.
A trip to the unabridged dictionary will soon reveal other possibilities. The verb “to summon” derives originally from the Latin “summonere,” “to give a hint.” I take the hint—especially given Robert Francis’s delight in the shadings words can assume—that he intends not simply to suggest a legal order but to blend it with some of the other meanings of “to summon,” such as “bring to the surface” (he managed to summon up the courage) or “call forth an image or idea” (a place that summons up many memories). A deep dive into the dictionary also reveals that as the word “summon” passed from Latin into Middle English and Old French it preserved the seed of something else: sub (“secretly”) + monere (“warn”). A summoning can thus refer to a spiritual calling forth, not simply a demand for one’s physical presence, and can contain a hint in the form of a warning.
What is the poem warning us of? At first that seems clear enough: we are cautioned against “going to sleep too soon,” and nothing in my reading of the poem suggests that this refers merely to physiological slumber. But what is “too soon”? The slumber itself remains artfully unspecific. Sleep can represent a number of things symbolically, as we all know. It often serves as a metaphor for death (“death’s second self, that seals up all in rest,” in Shakespeare’s sonnet 73) Or sleep can mean being inattentive or oblivious, even dangerously so, as in someone who is said to be asleep at the wheel. So sleep can be a form of intellectual or emotional blindness. Or sleep may represent laziness. And such lassitude can equally well be spiritual, intellectual, or moral in nature.
All of these meanings may coexist within Francis’s simple-seeming lyric, as I’m sure he was aware. But again: what kind of sleep is “too soon”? I suppose a fair reading could take it to be suicide, when someone cuts off his or her own life prematurely. This could make the poem one elaborate plea for the speaker’s friends to persuade him not to take his own life; to distract or interest him in the doings of the universe (northern lights, moon, and clouds) as antidote to the dark night of the soul. Or to persuade him of the beauties of companionship and activity (putting the light on; the walking is superb). Furthermore, it may require quite a loud and assertive intervention by one’s friends to avert the speaker from his depressive inclinations—hence all that stomping and pounding at all hours of the night.
All well and good. Students of a certain age tend to be drawn to suicidal interpretations, which accord well with the black-and-white moral calculus of the adolescent mind as well as their fledgling efforts at literary analysis. It is common for inexperienced poetry readers to seek “messages” in their poems more than nuance and unsettling ambiguity. So the drama of the speaker being rescued from possible death by the loud nocturnal intervention of a friend might go down well with the kind of reader who loves the Gothic in literature, such as the tales of Poe, which are so enduringly popular with the young.
In fact, I suspect this poem was chosen for that 1966 anthology for its appeal to the adolescent imagination—that insatiable hunger for companionship and acceptance as well as the growing desire for experiment, discovery, new experience, risk-taking. Adolescents have strong feelings, not just hormonal urges, about all sorts of things, and the young mind does gravitate toward broad-brush moral judgments as well as strong opinions. The percussive parade of verbs especially at the poem’s beginning might seem the opposite of middle-aged waffling and qualifying, or elder resignation: age-related attitudes which can bore or infuriate the young.
And while it may comfort us older folk to believe that our more measured attitudes are a result of wisdom, which is somehow truer and more profound that adolescent infatuations, declamations, and urgencies, the fuller truth is that that spirit of exploration, discovery, even rebellion is the seed of most positive (if also some negative) societal changes. Furthermore, the artist is often the sort of person who manages to remain in touch with the productive and healthy sort of orneriness and freedom of imagination common to the young. It’s not all immaturity and impatience.
But knowing Francis’s slyness, and in light of his self-description in his autobiography as a “happy pessimist,” I find the suicidal interpretation ultimately unfulfilling even as I recognize the power of the poem’s youthful extravagance. Certainly, the tone of the poem seems to emphasize happiness more than pessimism, and I detect no whiff of any despair deep enough to be called suicidal. To my mind and ear the poem is, in its rhythms, tone, and implications, a call not to mere survival (choosing life over death) but to awakening in a larger sense. That appeals to the enduring child in me as well as satisfying my adult recognitions.
I keep coming back to this poem’s tone. As noted, “Summons” is full of imperatives, and rather strident ones at that: make me; show me; persuade me; wake me. Also some notably percussive verbs—stomp, bang. Yet to my ear the poem comes across as tender, loving, even yearning. Although grammatically couched as commands, the poem is in fact a series of entreaties, which all amount to a single plea, rooted in vulnerability. It’s the sort of plea you only dare to make with a very good friend, someone you trust and are already intimate with. (Who would beg a casual friend to come pounding on the door in the dead of night?) So I think of it as a love poem, and not a starry-eyed one, though it retains an endearing youthful spark.
We know from his autobiography (wonderfully titled The Trouble With Francis) that the poet was a shy, often lonely, courtly individual—one hardly can imagine him issuing commands or banging on anyone’s door. Since he was crafty poet, then, it’s not a far reach to wonder not just what sleep symbolizes, but who exactly is being summoned, and why? The summoning here seems twofold: he’s calling on an unnamed friend to come wake him up, should he fall into an unwise slumber, and to that end issuing all those staccato commands: make me, show me, tell me. At the same time the commands are like little mirrors: his commands are to return to him in the form of commands. He’s ordering an unnamed someone to give him orders. Hence, not commands at all but entreaties; hence, what I would call a love poem, however peculiar.
In that light I like to ponder the last lines: “Tell me the walking is superb. / Not only tell me but persuade me. / You know I’m not too hard persuaded.” With those insistent repetitions, with the easy familiarity implied in “you know,” with the colloquial ease of “not too hard persuaded,” Francis gives the strong impression of addressing a very intimate friend. To my ear it’s like a driver letting up a little on the brake just before the full stop, to avoid a jolt. He’s softening all those imperatives with a moment of implied tenderness and shared expectation.
Well, that’s just some of what I might say, if asked why I love this simple lyric. Or, in a different mood, I might just quote a favorite line of Robert Frost’s: “We love the things we love for what they are.”
Western wind, when will thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ! if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
The small rain down can rain?
Christ! if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
The fact that “Western Wind” is still alive to us hundreds of years after its composer became dust in that wind is, when you stop to think about it, an amazement. Such poetry needs no apologies, justifications, or analysis. Moreover, I find many poems changing over time as I change. Sometimes lyrics reveal their flaws; occasionally I have found myself embarrassed by my youthful taste, or a passing infatuation will go stale. But even more often, in my experience, poems improve with seasoning. And yes, with analysis. Like Mark Twain’s father in his famous quip, a dull-witted poem can gain in intelligence just by the process of my growing older, and presumably a bit wiser.
But how to write about poems that we love? Especially when they are as simple and straightforward as “Western Wind”? I know how to teach them. As a former teacher I’m comfortable with all the usual tools of analysis and appreciation. I enjoy interpreting poetry and swapping my responses with others (obviously—otherwise, why write a column such as this?) I most assuredly appreciate the value of evaluation and criticism, academic and otherwise.
Still, some poems that I adore do resist me. I’m not always sure why. One such piece is Robert Francis’s “Summons,” first published in his 1944 collection The Sound I Listened For and fairly often anthologized later. If you’re not familiar with his work, Francis (1901-1987) is well worth exploring in depth. His mentor and friend Robert Frost once said of him that he was, “of all the great neglected poets, the greatest.”
Summons
Keep me from going to sleep too soon
Or if I go to sleep too soon
Come wake me up. Come any hour
Of night. Come whistling up the road.
Stomp on the porch. Bang on the door.
Make me get out of bed and come
And let you in and light a light.
Tell me the northern lights are on
And make me look. Or tell me the clouds
Are doing something to the moon
They never did before, and show me.
See that I see. Talk to me till
I’m half as wide awake as you
And start to dress wondering why
I ever went to bed at all.
Tell me the walking is superb.
Not only tell me but persuade me.
You know I’m not too hard persuaded.
Keep me from going to sleep too soon
Or if I go to sleep too soon
Come wake me up. Come any hour
Of night. Come whistling up the road.
Stomp on the porch. Bang on the door.
Make me get out of bed and come
And let you in and light a light.
Tell me the northern lights are on
And make me look. Or tell me the clouds
Are doing something to the moon
They never did before, and show me.
See that I see. Talk to me till
I’m half as wide awake as you
And start to dress wondering why
I ever went to bed at all.
Tell me the walking is superb.
Not only tell me but persuade me.
You know I’m not too hard persuaded.
I first encountered “Summons” in seventh or eighth grade, when I would have been thirteen years old. I don’t know if the program still exists, but back then the public schools gave pupils the opportunity to purchase paperbacks at steep discounts. I seem to recall prices of 25 cents or so for paperbacks that even then had list prices of double or quadruple that. Every few months I could take a couple dollars from my saved-up allowance and soon own my own personal copies of half a dozen books. Thus it was that the poetry anthology Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle fell into my hands. Published by Scholastic Books in 1966, it was, I believe, the first poetry book I selected and bought with my own money. The Cat in the Hat and A. A. Milne’s poems came earlier, and I dearly love them to this day; but my parents gave those classics to me. I chose this one. I still have no idea why. I wasn’t a poetry lover back then, by any means. Though already an avid reader, I mostly devoured comic books, adventure stories, science fiction, and young adult novels about sports and animals. Likely it was the anthology’s weird and whimsical title. Poetry did not become a dominant feature of my life for at least five more years, but I do remember several poems vividly from that collection, in addition to Francis’s. It was my first introduction, for instance, to William Carlos Williams, among other excellent poets.
“Summons” was thus just about the first poem that truly got under my skin. For over a half century I’ve loved this poem. So it does seem odd that, in thirty-seven years of teaching, I never once taught it. That was true with a number of deep favorites. I would half-jokingly say that I couldn’t bear to hear prematurely jaded undergraduates announce that the poem was dumb, or worse, that they didn’t get what the poet was “trying to say.” But I think the truth was more shaded than that. For one thing, I was fearful, probably, that I could not do justice to it, couldn’t teach it well enough to persuade students to love it as I do.
Students never unanimously love anything, of course. Nor should they: de gustibus non est disputandum and all that. Still, every literature teacher gets used to hearing that Macbeth is “really depressing.” Or being informed each fall by students who have read three poems that Dickinson is “too weird.” Over time it can get wearisome. Even so, my students were, by and large, quite good-spirited, bright, and angling to please their professor. I’m sure most of them would have given “Summons” a good try, and no doubt some would have come to love it. But not all, naturally. I think I was not ready to receive or demand any halfhearted appreciation of this poem that to my mind is near perfect.
I also suspect I may have simply needed to claim certain works as my own. To maintain some area of my life in poetry that was untouched by criticism, analysis, debate, all the usual rough-and-tumble of literary dispute and evaluation.
By the way, from time to time I did teach other poems by Francis, and in prose I’ve written a fair amount about his work, including a lengthy overview and analysis published back in 1985, when the poet was still alive (he died in 1987 just shy of his 86th birthday.)
For me “Summons” was and remains a touchstone, a poem to be celebrated and applied to important life events. In fact I have recited it at several wedding ceremonies as well as one funeral (in celebration not of death, naturally, but of the spirit of the deceased). The poem is simple enough to be understood by a thirteen-year-old on a first reading, but powerful enough to resonate.
In any case, this is not a memoir but an appreciation of a poem I’ve been nourished by—how strange to say this!— for most of my life. And perhaps these are also notes for the class session on “Summons” that I never did teach. I might start, as I often would in the classroom, by zeroing in on a single detail, in this case the plain one-word title. What do we think of when we see the word “summons”? Perhaps an unpleasant memory of a document in the mail, commanding our appearance in court for some infraction. In most minds a summons is foremost a legal order, with penalties for non-compliance. So it might seem an unexpected choice for a poem that has nothing to do with the law and everything to do with matters of spirit.
A trip to the unabridged dictionary will soon reveal other possibilities. The verb “to summon” derives originally from the Latin “summonere,” “to give a hint.” I take the hint—especially given Robert Francis’s delight in the shadings words can assume—that he intends not simply to suggest a legal order but to blend it with some of the other meanings of “to summon,” such as “bring to the surface” (he managed to summon up the courage) or “call forth an image or idea” (a place that summons up many memories). A deep dive into the dictionary also reveals that as the word “summon” passed from Latin into Middle English and Old French it preserved the seed of something else: sub (“secretly”) + monere (“warn”). A summoning can thus refer to a spiritual calling forth, not simply a demand for one’s physical presence, and can contain a hint in the form of a warning.
What is the poem warning us of? At first that seems clear enough: we are cautioned against “going to sleep too soon,” and nothing in my reading of the poem suggests that this refers merely to physiological slumber. But what is “too soon”? The slumber itself remains artfully unspecific. Sleep can represent a number of things symbolically, as we all know. It often serves as a metaphor for death (“death’s second self, that seals up all in rest,” in Shakespeare’s sonnet 73) Or sleep can mean being inattentive or oblivious, even dangerously so, as in someone who is said to be asleep at the wheel. So sleep can be a form of intellectual or emotional blindness. Or sleep may represent laziness. And such lassitude can equally well be spiritual, intellectual, or moral in nature.
All of these meanings may coexist within Francis’s simple-seeming lyric, as I’m sure he was aware. But again: what kind of sleep is “too soon”? I suppose a fair reading could take it to be suicide, when someone cuts off his or her own life prematurely. This could make the poem one elaborate plea for the speaker’s friends to persuade him not to take his own life; to distract or interest him in the doings of the universe (northern lights, moon, and clouds) as antidote to the dark night of the soul. Or to persuade him of the beauties of companionship and activity (putting the light on; the walking is superb). Furthermore, it may require quite a loud and assertive intervention by one’s friends to avert the speaker from his depressive inclinations—hence all that stomping and pounding at all hours of the night.
All well and good. Students of a certain age tend to be drawn to suicidal interpretations, which accord well with the black-and-white moral calculus of the adolescent mind as well as their fledgling efforts at literary analysis. It is common for inexperienced poetry readers to seek “messages” in their poems more than nuance and unsettling ambiguity. So the drama of the speaker being rescued from possible death by the loud nocturnal intervention of a friend might go down well with the kind of reader who loves the Gothic in literature, such as the tales of Poe, which are so enduringly popular with the young.
In fact, I suspect this poem was chosen for that 1966 anthology for its appeal to the adolescent imagination—that insatiable hunger for companionship and acceptance as well as the growing desire for experiment, discovery, new experience, risk-taking. Adolescents have strong feelings, not just hormonal urges, about all sorts of things, and the young mind does gravitate toward broad-brush moral judgments as well as strong opinions. The percussive parade of verbs especially at the poem’s beginning might seem the opposite of middle-aged waffling and qualifying, or elder resignation: age-related attitudes which can bore or infuriate the young.
And while it may comfort us older folk to believe that our more measured attitudes are a result of wisdom, which is somehow truer and more profound that adolescent infatuations, declamations, and urgencies, the fuller truth is that that spirit of exploration, discovery, even rebellion is the seed of most positive (if also some negative) societal changes. Furthermore, the artist is often the sort of person who manages to remain in touch with the productive and healthy sort of orneriness and freedom of imagination common to the young. It’s not all immaturity and impatience.
But knowing Francis’s slyness, and in light of his self-description in his autobiography as a “happy pessimist,” I find the suicidal interpretation ultimately unfulfilling even as I recognize the power of the poem’s youthful extravagance. Certainly, the tone of the poem seems to emphasize happiness more than pessimism, and I detect no whiff of any despair deep enough to be called suicidal. To my mind and ear the poem is, in its rhythms, tone, and implications, a call not to mere survival (choosing life over death) but to awakening in a larger sense. That appeals to the enduring child in me as well as satisfying my adult recognitions.
I keep coming back to this poem’s tone. As noted, “Summons” is full of imperatives, and rather strident ones at that: make me; show me; persuade me; wake me. Also some notably percussive verbs—stomp, bang. Yet to my ear the poem comes across as tender, loving, even yearning. Although grammatically couched as commands, the poem is in fact a series of entreaties, which all amount to a single plea, rooted in vulnerability. It’s the sort of plea you only dare to make with a very good friend, someone you trust and are already intimate with. (Who would beg a casual friend to come pounding on the door in the dead of night?) So I think of it as a love poem, and not a starry-eyed one, though it retains an endearing youthful spark.
We know from his autobiography (wonderfully titled The Trouble With Francis) that the poet was a shy, often lonely, courtly individual—one hardly can imagine him issuing commands or banging on anyone’s door. Since he was crafty poet, then, it’s not a far reach to wonder not just what sleep symbolizes, but who exactly is being summoned, and why? The summoning here seems twofold: he’s calling on an unnamed friend to come wake him up, should he fall into an unwise slumber, and to that end issuing all those staccato commands: make me, show me, tell me. At the same time the commands are like little mirrors: his commands are to return to him in the form of commands. He’s ordering an unnamed someone to give him orders. Hence, not commands at all but entreaties; hence, what I would call a love poem, however peculiar.
In that light I like to ponder the last lines: “Tell me the walking is superb. / Not only tell me but persuade me. / You know I’m not too hard persuaded.” With those insistent repetitions, with the easy familiarity implied in “you know,” with the colloquial ease of “not too hard persuaded,” Francis gives the strong impression of addressing a very intimate friend. To my ear it’s like a driver letting up a little on the brake just before the full stop, to avoid a jolt. He’s softening all those imperatives with a moment of implied tenderness and shared expectation.
Well, that’s just some of what I might say, if asked why I love this simple lyric. Or, in a different mood, I might just quote a favorite line of Robert Frost’s: “We love the things we love for what they are.”
© 2021 David Graham
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