Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Tuesday, August 6th, 2024.

Today's poem is by Robert Penn Warren, one of the Southern Agrarian or Fugitive Poets.

It was written in 1944, and it's called Bearded Oaks.

I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and read it one more time.

Bearded Oaks.

The Oaks, how subtle and marine, bearded, and all the layered light above them swims,

and thus the scene, recessed, awaits the positive night. So waiting we in the grass

now lie beneath the languorous tread of light. The grasses kelp-like satisfy the nameless motions of the

air. Upon the floor of light and time, unmurmuring of polyp made, we rest. We are, as light withdraws, twin atolls on a shelf of shade.

Ages to our construction went, dim architecture, hour by hour, and the violence forgot now, lent the present

stillness all its power. The storm of noon above us rolled of light, the fury, furious gold,

the long drag troubling us, the depth. Dark is unrocking, unripling, still.

Passion and slaughter, Ruth, decay, descend, minutely whispering down, silted down, swaying streams, to lay foundation for our

voicelessness.

All our debate is voiceless here, as all our rage, the rage of stone.

If hope is hopeless, then fearless is fear, and history is thus undone.

Our feet once wrought the hollow street with echo

when the lamps were dead at windows, once our headlights glare disturbed the dough that

leaping fled. I do not love you less that now the caged heart makes iron stroke, or less

that all that light once gave the graduate dark should now revoke.

We live in time, so little time, and we learn all so painfully, that we may spare this hour's term to practice for eternity.

...