4.6 • 729 Ratings
🗓️ 12 January 2019
⏱️ 7 minutes
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Welcome to The Daily Poem. Today's poem is W.S. Merwin's "Fox Sleep."
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0:00.0 | Welcome back to the Daily Poem here in the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern. |
0:09.1 | Today's poem is by W.S. Merwin, an American poet who is still living. He's 91 years old. |
0:15.2 | He has won two Pulitzer Prizes in 1971 and 2009. He won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2005. He has won the |
0:22.6 | Penn Translation Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, and he has been the |
0:27.4 | United States Poet Laureate. Merwin is absolutely one of the preeminent modern American poets. |
0:34.9 | And the poem that I'm going to read today is called Fox Sleep. It's from the |
0:39.0 | vixen, which was published in 1996, a collection published in 1996. This poem actually has |
0:44.7 | several parts to it, I think six parts to it, maybe, seven, something like that. I'm going to read |
0:49.7 | the first section of that poem. This is how it goes. On a road through the mountains with a friend |
0:57.4 | many years ago, I came to a curve on a slope where a clear stream flowed down, flashing across |
1:04.1 | dark rocks through its own echoes that could neither be caught nor forgotten. It was the turning |
1:09.7 | of autumn, and already the mornings were cold, |
1:12.1 | with ragged clouds in the hollows long after sunrise. But the pasture sagging like a roof, |
1:18.6 | the glassy water and flickering yellow leaves, and the few poplars and knotted plum trees |
1:22.8 | were held up in a handful of sunlight that made the slates on the silent mill by the stream |
1:28.2 | glisten white above their ruin. And a few relics of the life before had been arranged in front |
1:33.4 | of the open millhouse, to wait, pale in the daylight, out on the open mountain, after whatever |
1:39.7 | they had been made for was over. The dew was drying on them, and there were few who took that road |
1:45.0 | who might buy one of them and take it away somewhere, to be unusual, to be the only one, |
1:50.0 | to become unknown. A wooden bed stood there on rocks, a cradle the color of dust, a cracked |
1:56.8 | oil jar, iron pots, wooden wheels, iron wheels, stone wheels, the tall box of a clock, |
2:03.6 | and among them a ring of white stone the size of an embrace set into another of the same size, |
... |
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