James Matthew Wilson's "Agricola: A Song for Planting

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 22 November 2024

⏱️ 8 minutes

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Summary

Today’s poem, from Wilson’s 2018 The Hanging God, takes a candid look at all the ways we overestimate, misunderstand, misrepresent, and undervalue our own human agency–all while leaning heavily on plenty of unspoken implications about the agency of God. Happy reading.

James Matthew Wilson is the Cullen Foundation Chair in English Literature and the founding director of the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Saint Thomas.The author of fourteen books, his most recent collection of poems is Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds(Word on Fire, 2024). The Strangeness of the Good (2020), won the poetry book of the year award from the Catholic Media Awards. The Dallas Institute of Humanities awarded him the Hiett Prize in 2017; Memoria College gave him the Parnassus Prize, in 2022; and the Conference on Christianity and Literature twice gave him the Lionel Basney Award.In addition to his role at the University of Saint Thomas, he serves as poet-in-residence of the Benedict XVI Institute, scholar-in-residence of Aquinas College, editor of Colosseum Books, and poetry editor of Modern Age magazine.Wilson was educated at the University of Michigan (B.A.), the University of Massachusetts (M.A.), and the University of Notre Dame (M.F.A., Ph.D.), where he subsequently held a Sorin Research Fellowship. Wilson joined the University of Saint Thomas, Houston, in 2021, when he co-founded the Master of Fine Arts program.

-bio via Wilson’s website

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem, podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is
0:06.1	Friday, November 22, 2004. Today's poem is from contemporary poet James Matthew Wilson,
0:13.8	who is the founding director of the creative writing MFA program at the University of St. Thomas.
0:20.5	He is a literary scholar. He is a
0:22.5	philosopher. And maybe not just one of the greatest formalist poets working today, but perhaps
0:28.6	one of the greatest poets working today. And add into that mix that he is just an all-around
0:33.7	decent human being and nice guy. The poem is Agricola, a song for planting.
0:41.4	I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and read it one more time.
0:48.4	My arms have labored such small cares and failed them.
0:53.6	So little as one seed I've sown or tossed among the tears,
0:58.1	shriveled with thirst and failed to feed. I've looked with hope on stony ground. I've sithed the
1:04.9	grain at autumn's blush, but now the earth is cold. The browned and fallen husks of last year crush beneath my booted
1:13.6	step. This year threatens to end new growth and drought. These dead stalks, tokens of that fear
1:21.2	for what our efforts bring about. What pretty lie did I speak when I cast my efforts to sustain each growth?
1:30.2	Each year forgives my sin, but remnants of each loss remain.
1:37.1	It is the autumn, the harvest time. Thanksgiving is next week, and we will be featuring a whole host of poems about food
1:45.8	next week. So this poem, Agricola, which is Latin for farmer, about sewing and reaping, seemed
1:55.9	appropriate. This is at once a very confessional poem dealing immediately with aspirations and failures.
2:05.7	Most of the poem is in an iambic meter, iambic tetrameter, eight syllables to a line, four stresses.
2:13.0	But the second line of the poem alters the meter or the meter breaks temporarily right at failed
2:21.1	as if to punctuate immediately out of the gate that this speaker is imperfect and in that
2:31.3	failure of rhythm the missed stress after failed them, we end up getting an extra syllable in that line too, which matches the one little seed that's cast astray, thrown to the wrong place, tossed among the tears.
	...

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