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    The Double Dream of Spring: Poems
    The Double Dream of Spring: Poems
    The Double Dream of Spring: Poems
    Ebook105 pages1 hour

    The Double Dream of Spring: Poems

    By John Ashbery

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    About this ebook

    One of Ashbery’s most important masterworks: Widely studied, critically admired, and essential to understanding one of the modern era’s most revolutionary poets

    The Double Dream of Spring, originally published in 1970, followed the critical success of John Ashbery’s National Book Award–nominated collection Rivers and Mountains and introduced the signature voice—reflective, acute, and attuned to modern language as it is spoken—that just a few years later would carry Ashbery’s Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Ashbery fans and lovers of modern poetry alike will recognize here some of the century’s most anthologized and critically admired works of poetry, including “Soonest Mended,” “Decoy,” “Sunrise in Suburbia,” “Evening in the Country,” the achingly beautiful long poem “Fragment,” and Ashbery’s so-called Popeye poem, the mordant and witty “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape.”
     
    The Double Dream of Spring helped cement Ashbery’s reputation as a must-read American poet, and no library of modern poetry is complete without it.
     

    Editor's Note

    Sublime, funny, personal...

    Few poets reward re-reading quite like John Ashbery. There's so much going on in every one of these poems—they're sublime, funny, personal, dreamlike, and contemplative, often all at once.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateSep 9, 2014
    ISBN9781480459182
    The Double Dream of Spring: Poems
    Author

    John Ashbery

    <p><strong>John Ashbery </strong>was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. He wrote more than twenty books of poetry, including <em>Quick Question; Planisphere; Notes from the Air; A Worldly Country; Where Shall I Wander; </em>and <em>Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, </em>which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. The winner of many prizes and awards, both nationally and internationally, he received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation in 2011 and a National Humanities Medal, presented by President Obama at the White House, in 2012. Ashbery died in September 2017 at the age of ninety.</p>

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      Book preview

      The Double Dream of Spring - John Ashbery

      The Task

      They are preparing to begin again:

      Problems, new pennant up the flagpole

      In a predicated romance.

      About the time the sun begins to cut laterally across

      The western hemisphere with its shadows, its carnival echoes,

      The fugitive lands crowd under separate names.

      It is the blankness that follows gaiety, and Everyman must depart

      Out there into stranded night, for his destiny

      Is to return unfruitful out of the lightness

      That passing time evokes. It was only

      Cloud-castles, adept to seize the past

      And possess it, through hurting. And the way is clear

      Now for linear acting into that time

      In whose corrosive mass he first discovered how to breathe.

      Just look at the filth you’ve made,

      See what you’ve done.

      Yet if these are regrets they stir only lightly

      The children playing after supper,

      Promise of the pillow and so much in the night to come.

      I plan to stay here a little while

      For these are moments only, moments of insight,

      And there are reaches to be attained,

      A last level of anxiety that melts

      In becoming, like miles under the pilgrim’s feet.

      Spring Day

      The immense hope, and forbearance

      Trailing out of night, to sidewalks of the day

      Like air breathed into a paper city, exhaled

      As night returns bringing doubts

      That swarm around the sleeper’s head

      But are fended off with clubs and knives, so that morning

      Installs again in cold hope

      The air that was yesterday, is what you are,

      In so many phases the head slips from the hand.

      The tears ride freely, laughs or sobs:

      What do they matter? There is free giving and taking;

      The giant body relaxed as though beside a stream

      Wakens to the force of it and has to recognize

      The secret sweetness before it turns into life—

      Sucked out of many exchanges, torn from the womb,

      Disinterred before completely dead—and heaves

      Its mountain-broad chest. "They were long in coming,

      Those others, and mattered so little that it slowed them

      To almost nothing. They were presumed dead,

      Their names honorably grafted on the landscape

      To be a memory to men. Until today

      We have been living in their shell.

      Now we break forth like a river breaking through a dam,

      Pausing over the puzzled, frightened plain,

      And our further progress shall be terrible,

      Turning fresh knives in the wounds

      In that gulf of recreation, that bare canvas

      As matter-of-fact as the traffic and the day’s noise."

      The mountain stopped shaking; its body

      Arched into its own contradiction, its enjoyment,

      As far from us lights were put out, memories of boys and girls

      Who walked here before the great change,

      Before the air mirrored us,

      Taking the opposite shape of our effort,

      Its inseparable comment and corollary

      But casting us farther and farther out.

      Wha—what happened? You are with

      The orange tree, so that its summer produce

      Can go back to where we got it wrong, then drip gently

      Into history, if it wants to. A page turned; we were

      Just now floundering in the wind of its colossal death.

      And whether it is Thursday, or the day is stormy,

      With thunder and rain, or the birds attack each other,

      We have rolled into another dream.

      No use charging the barriers of that other:

      It no longer exists. But you,

      Gracious and growing thing, with those leaves like stars,

      We shall soon give all our attention to you.

      Plainness in Diversity

      Silly girls your heads full of boys

      There is a last sample of talk on the outer side

      Your stand at last lifts to dumb evening

      It is reflected in the steep blue sides of the crater,

      So much water shall wash over these our breaths

      Yet shall remain unwashed at the end. The

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