Howard Nemerov's "De Anima"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 29 February 2024

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For the day that only comes ‘round once every four years, we have a haunting poem about missed connections–and from a poet with a “Leap Day” birthday, no less.

Howard Nemerov was born on February 29, 1920, in New York, New York. Throughout World War II, he served as a pilot in the Royal Canadian unit of the U. S. Army Air Force. He married in 1944, and after the war, having earned the rank of first lieutenant, returned to New York with his wife to complete his first book.

Nemerov was first hired to teach literature to World War II veterans at Hamilton College in New York. His teaching career flourished, and he went on to teach at Bennington College, Brandeis University, and Washington University in St. Louis, where he was Distinguished Poet in Residence from 1969 until his death.

In addition to a dozen collections of poetry, he was also an accomplished prose writer with several collections of non-fiction essays to his name.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:04.2	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Thursday, February 29th, 2024, leap day.
0:10.7	So happy leap day to all of you out there.
0:14.2	And if your birthday happens to be today, then congratulations to you.
0:21.6	You're always aging at one-fourth the rate of the rest of us, for good or for ill.
0:28.6	You may be surprised to find, I'm constantly surprised to find that there are not a lot of great poems about leap year and leap day.
0:41.7	And when I say there aren't a lot of great poems, I mean, there aren't a lot of poems.
0:45.7	The best known maybe is Mother Goose's poem about how many days each month has.
0:52.0	And there's a line in there about February, which has 29 every fourth year.
0:58.5	But that's about as good as it gets. I could be wrong, and I hope that I am, but my searches have
1:06.0	never turned up decent poems about the phenomenon that is this unusual day.
1:13.8	If you know of any great leap year and leap day poems, please make your way over to our
1:20.1	substack page and leave those poems in the comments under this episode that will really come in handy four years from now.
1:31.9	In the meantime, today's poem is by Howard Nemerov and really doesn't have a lot to do with
1:38.9	leap year. It's called De Anima. I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and then read it one more time.
1:52.8	Now it is night.
1:54.7	Now in the brilliant room a girl stands at the window looking out,
1:59.3	but sees in the darkness of the frame only her own image.
2:05.0	And there is a young man across the street who looks at the girl and into the brilliant room.
2:11.6	They might be in love, might be about to meet, if this were a romance.
2:21.4	In looking at herself, she tries to look beyond herself and half become another, admiring and resenting, maybe dreaming her lover might see her so.
2:31.5	The other, the stranger standing in cold and dark,
	...

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