Civic Studies » notes on poems

Caedmon’s Hymn and modern responses

Peter — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 14:28:00 +0000

According to Edward Hirsh, “English poetry began with a vision.” He’s referring to “Caedmon’s Hymn,” probably the earliest surviving verse in Old English. It’s embedded in a story that Bede wrote around the year 730 CE. Seamus Heaney calls this story “the myth of the beginning of English sacred poetry.” Bede tells of an exemplary […] Continue reading →

“Complaint,” by Hannah Arendt

Peter — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 15:52:07 +0000

Hannah Arendt wrote the poem “Klage” (“Lament” or “Complaint”) in the winter of 1925-6, the season when she turned 20 and broke off a passionate relationship with her teacher, Martin Heidegger. It appears in What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt (Liveright, 2024), translated by Samantha Rose Hill with Genese Grill. Hill’s translations are […]

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Rilke, The Grownup

Peter — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 15:55:34 +0000

The GrownupAll this stood on her and was the worldAnd stood on her with everything, fear and grace,As trees stand, growing and straight,All image and imageless like the Ark. And solemnly, as if placed on a people.And she endured it, bore it--The flying, escaping, distant,The immense, not yet learned--Calm as a woman bearing waterIn a […]

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Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man

Peter — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 15:28:02 +0000

One must have a mind of winterTo regard the frost and the boughsOf the pine-trees crusted with snow;And have been cold a long timeTo behold the junipers shagged with ice,The spruces rough in the distant glitterOf the January sun; and not to thinkOf any misery in the sound of the wind,In the sound of a […]

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‘every thing that lives is holy’: Blake’s radical relativism

Peter — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 22:03:56 +0000

Perhaps each species has a different “umwelt,” a unique enveloping environment that is experienced and influenced by the organism’s sensory organs and nervous system. In that case, reality is not one connected thing, but rather everything that you can I could possibly experience and describe, plus the many other universes that are “enacted” (Varela, Thompson […] Continue reading →

Najwan Darwish on living in doubt

Peter — Fri, 20 Oct 2023 15:59:20 +0000

(Translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, from Najwan Darwish, Exhausted on the Cross, NYRB Books 2021.) I don’t know the Arabic word that is the title of this poem. The English word can mean a logical fallacy–changing the meaning of a term between one part of an argument and another–or a deliberate trick. Macbeth calls a […] Continue reading →

three great paintings in dialogue

Peter — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 16:28:26 +0000

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC displays The Feast of the Gods by Giovanni Bellini with additions by Titian (1514/1529), The Old Musician by Edouard Manet (1862), and The Family of Saltimbanques by Pablo Picasso (1905). These major works talk to each other.* We might say that the Bellini is a work of […] Continue reading →

Mani Rao’s innovative Sanskrit translations

Peter — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 19:02:30 +0000

How can you translate writing that’s densely allusive if you expect few of your readers to recognize the allusions? How can you translate poetry–or any other formally complex writing–into a totally different language while conveying some of the experience of the original form? And how can you translate passages from a language that has one […] Continue reading →

MacNeice on other people

Peter — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 16:58:43 +0000

Canto xvii of Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journey (1939) opens with luxurious experiences, such as watching a morning scene over breakfast and lying in a bath “under / Ascending scrolls of steam,” feeling “the ego merge as the pores open … And the body purrs like a cat.” He writes these passages in the first person […] Continue reading →

there are tears of things

Peter — Mon, 02 Jan 2023 15:29:18 +0000

One of the most famous–and notoriously ambiguous–phrases in all of Latin literature is Virgil’s “sunt lacrimae rerum” (Aeneid 1, 462). In his response to the Covid pandemic, Pope Francis interprets the phrase in an environmentalist spirit: If everything is connected, it is hard to imagine that this global disaster is unrelated to our way of approaching […] Continue reading →