Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems
    Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems
    Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems
    Ebook298 pages2 hours

    Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems

    By Robert Bly

    3.5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    "Bly's imaginative prose poems radiate witty delight." — Library Journal

    A brilliant collection spanning half a century, from one of America's most powerful poets.

    Robert Bly had many roles in his illustrious career. He was a chronicler and mentor of young poets, was a leader of the antiwar movement, founded the men's movement, and wrote the bestselling book Iron John, which brought the men's movement to the attention of the world. Throughout these activities, Bly continued to deepen his own poetry, a vigorous voice in a period of more academic wordsmiths. Here he has presented his favorite poems of the last decades-timeless classics from Silence in the Snowy Fields, The Man in the Black Coat Turns, and Loving a Woman in Two Worlds. A complete section of marvelous new poems rounds out this collection, which offers a chance to reread, in a fresh setting, a lifetime of work dedicated to fresh perspectives. 

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 6, 2009
    ISBN9780061979736
    Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems
    Author

    Robert Bly

    Robert Bly's books of poetry include The Night Abraham Called to the Stars and My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy. His awards include the National Book Award for poetry and two Guggenheims. He lived in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

    Read more from Robert Bly

    Related to Eating the Honey of Words

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Stories in Formaldehyde: The Strange Pleasures of Taxonomizing Plot

      Oct 2, 2020

      There is something to be said about the cool rectilinear logic that claims any story can be stripped down to its raw schematics and analyzed as fundamental, universal, eternal plots that have existed before Gilgamesh’s cuneiform was wedged into wet c

      16 min read

    • Article

      Poetry

      Jul 6, 2021

      Poetry
      2 min read

    • Article

      Hello Darkness My Old Friend

      Jun 17, 2020

      Hello Darkness My Old Friend
      4 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Mar 4, 2024

      To Err Is Human; to Forgive, Supine —S. J. Perelman, Baby, It’s Cold Inside, 1970 You must know the bees have come early this year too: I see them visit aster, sweet Williams, bleeding hearts, and azalea blossoms hardy enough to not have crisped with

      3 min read

    • Article

      Mountain Time

      Jan 1, 2021

      In the air you don’t know who you are or where My own self feels it is in wind being born These are currents a man made one eighth of smokeless fire fears but chooses A path south from Anchorage to a Mountain House Ungovern the northern land to pass

      10 min read

    • Article

      Tessa Castro

      Mar 9, 2022

      IN COMPETITION No 277 you were invited to write a poem called Morning Sounds. The entries were vivid: half domestic, half outdoor. Tim Lloyd observed that ‘A bin lorry approaching in reverse/Sounds like an asthmatic seal.’ Liz Piper remembered, durin

      2 min read

    • Article

      More Poetry, Please

      Oct 6, 2021

      I’LL never forget the first time I read Edward Thomas’s As the Team’s Head-Brass. I had been familiar with Adlestrop from school and, later, had been introduced to Old Man and The Manor Farm (all three beautiful, rural vignettes), but the gentle pace

      5 min read

    • Article

      Poem Of The Week: The North Wind By Anne Brontë

      May 8, 2023

      That wind is from the North, I know it well;No other breeze could have so wild a swell.Now deep and loud it thunders round my cell,Then faintly dies,And softly sighs,And moans and murmurs mournfully.I know its language; thus is speaks to me – ‘I have

      3 min read

    • Article

      Stop Hating on Adjectives!

      Jun 12, 2019

      A common admonition in creative writing pedagogy is, “Cut as many adjectives as possible.” I propose that this rule springs from mere prejudice. The post Stop Hating on Adjectives! appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      Body Language

      Aug 14, 2019

      Body Language
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Herd word

      Jan 7, 2020

      The Herd word
      17 min read

    • Article

      In The Spotlight:your Writing Dark Side

      Dec 7, 2023

      Spooky season evidently offered creative inspiration aplenty for the WM writers, who responded to the call for writing in November’s crime-themed issue on the theme of ‘Dark Side’ with our fullest mailbox yet. The poetry and prose sent in demonstrate

      4 min read

    • Article

      Flood The World With Beauty

      Nov 1, 2019

      A big literary conference is probably not the best place for a poet dealing with a mental breakdown. But there I was at AWP, skittishly perusing tables at the book fair, under the garish lights of the Minneapolis Convention Center. For two years, par

      8 min read

    • Article

      Until The Sea Closed Over Us And The Light Was Gone

      Jul 1, 2020

      —Dante, Canto XXVI But if the truth is dreamed of toward the morning—El Paso Although it was really last summer’s song,all this summer Despacito played on as slower then I turned myself to gazeupon Juarez. The summer everything hurts my eyes, a dozen

      6 min read

    • Article

      Thought For The Year 2024

      Jan 3, 2024

      I sit in one of the divesOn Fifty-second StreetUncertain and afraidAs the clever hopes expireOf a low dishonest decade:Waves of anger and fearCirculate over the brightAnd darkened land of the earth… YOU might remember those opening lines of September

      3 min read

    • Article

      In The Ruins Of Paradise

      Dec 17, 2018

      In The Ruins Of Paradise
      18 min read

    • Article

      Must-Read Poetry: July 2018

      Jul 5, 2018

      Here are six notable books of poetry publishing in July. A Memory of the Future by Elizabeth Spires A book worthy of pondering—“how to find myself / when a self is so small”—Spires offers so many questions and considerations, yet they all return to o

      5 min read

    • Article

      Must-Read Poetry: December 2020

      Dec 7, 2020

      Finish out the year strong with notable poetry books by Thulani Davis, James Matthew Wilson, Michael Longley, and Anne Marie Macari. The post Must-Read Poetry: December 2020 appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Paul,

      Jul 1, 2020

      Houston, April 2019 The coarse and leafy stalks, like memory,Began to soften in my hands. The kaleMassaged with olive oil and salt. Silently, You sat on the couch as if in grisaille,Scrolling through the twitter of the state.A fragile, bluesy cover s

      14 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Jul 1, 2023

      Alláde donde yo soy es el único lugardonde unopuede agarrarse de la noche—como de una baranda— para no caeren la oscuridad. There,where I come from, is the only place I knowwhere you cangrab the nightlike a railing to keep from fallingthrough the dar

      1 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Jun 1, 2021

      The night of the year is approaching. What have we done with our talent? All nature prompts and reproves us. How early in the year it begins to be late! —Henry David Thoreau, Journal, August 18, 1853 I thought of Carthage, Baalbek, Jerusalem, Rome,

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Eating the Honey of Words

    3.5/5

    8 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      Because this is a compilation across much of his writing timeline, there is a wide variety of material. Interesting to see such diversity.

    Book preview

    Eating the Honey of Words - Robert Bly

    I

    EARLY POEMS

    1950—55

    SEASONS IN THE NORTH WOODS

    1

    The wheeling blue-bill mallards all night long

    With whistling wings curve down from gravelly clouds,

    While down below them, crazed on the chill lakes,

    The loons shake out their wings, dive down, and rise,

    Cry back up in reply. The Star that reaches

    Far past the Chair and the rush of Charles’s Wain,

    Bends down, and pondering in the blaze of night,

    Lifts fish from chill pits into April streams.

    2

    Cracking weed shells, and thwacking bills on bark,

    The agile companies of April sit

    As quaint and graceful as medieval guilds.

    Now the ruffed grouse beat their wings on rotting logs,

    And throb the spring away. Farmers dig holes,

    And women bring their lunch through wooded paths.

    Standing among the popple, the old hired man

    Hoists stones, and lifts his shirttail to his face.

    3

    Then soon, how soon, the summer’s days are gone;

    And blackbirds form in flocks, their duties through.

    And now the last autumnal freedom comes:

    Zumbrota acorns drop, sun-pushed as plums,

    To half-wild hogs in Cerro Gordo trees,

    And disappointed bees, with half-gold knees

    Sail home. It’s done. October’s cold is sweet,

    And winter will be stamping of the feet.

    A HOME IN DARK GRASS

    In the deep fall the body awakes

    And we find lions on the seashore—

    Nothing to fear.

    The wind rises; the water is born,

    Spreading white tomb-clothes on a rocky shore,

    Drawing us up

    From the bed of the land.

    We did not come to remain whole.

    We came to lose our leaves like the trees,

    Trees that start again,

    Drawing up from the great roots.

    So men captured by the Moors

    Wake, rowing in the cold ocean

    Air, living a second life.

    That we should learn of poverty and rags,

    That we should taste the weed of Dillinger,

    And swim in the sea,

    Not always walking on dry land,

    And, dancing, find in the trees a savior,

    A home in dark grass,

    And nourishment in death.

    LIVING IN THE FIRE

    No teak, nor piracies of marble

    Can match this pain,

    Not diamonds nor thyme

    Nor smoke of hyacinth

    No emeralds reach this pain,

    Which is gorgeous

    Oh Abraham! More than choirs

    Of teak or the owls of Spain.

    WHEN THE DUMB SPEAK

    There’s a joyful night in which we lose

    Everything, and drift

    Like a radish

    Rising and falling, and the ocean at last

    Throws us into the ocean;

    In that ocean we are sinking

    As if floating on darkness.

    The body raging,

    And driving itself, disappearing in smoke:

    Walks in large cities late at night,

    Reading the Bible in Christian Science windows,

    Or reading a history of Bougainville:

    Then the images appear—

    Images of grief,

    Images of the body shaken in the grave,

    And the graves filled with seawater;

    Fires in the sea,

    Bodies smoldering like ships,

    Images of wasted life,

    Life lost, imagination ruined,

    The house fallen,

    The gold sticks broken!

    Then shall the talkative be silent

    And the dumb will speak.

    WHERE WE MUST LOOK FOR HELP

    The dove returns; it found no resting place;

    It was in flight all night above the shaken seas.

    Beneath Ark eaves

    The dove shall magnify the tiger’s bed;

    Give the dove peace.

    The split-tail swallows leave the sill at dawn;

    At dusk blue swallows shall return.

    On the third day the crow shall fly;

    The crow, the crow, the spider-colored crow,

    The crow shall find new mud to walk upon.

    A DISPUTE

    The Lazy Man: In my dream I saw flowers.

    White flowers covered the hill.

    When I came near, I saw

    Swords lay among the flowers.

    The Tense Man: And I have cut the stony spur

    That laid unruly arms on the lawn,

    And cut to make that sure

    Green energy be gone.

    The Lazy Man: When the sweet man dies, stabbed

    By the boar, and his blood

    Darkens the river, young girls

    Beat their small breasts and cry.

    The Tense Man: If love, girl love, is but a jaunt,

    A fall that journeys to no spring,

    Then who will make the loaves

    And cry the calls to prayer?

    The Lazy Man: I saw flowers in my dream.

    White flowers covered the hill.

    When I came near, I saw

    Swords lay among the flowers.

    AWAKENING

    We are approaching sleep: the chestnut blossoms in the mind

    Mingle with thoughts of pain,

    And the long roots of barley, bitterness

    As of the oak roots staining the water dark

    In Louisiana, the wet streets soaked with rain

    And sodden blossoms, out of this

    We have come, a tunnel softly hurtling into darkness.

    The storm is coming. The small farmhouse in Minnesota

    Is hardly strong enough for the storm.

    Darkness, darkness in the grasses, darkness in trees.

    Even the water in wells trembles.

    Bodies give off darkness, and chrysanthemums

    Are dark, and horses, who are bearing great loads of hay

    To the deep barns where the dark air is moving from the corners.

    Lincoln’s statue, and the traffic. From the long past

    Into the long present

    A bird forgotten in these pressures, warbling,

    As the great wheel turns around, grinding

    The living in water.

    Washing, continual washing, in water now stained

    With blossoms and rotting logs, cries half-

    Muffled, from beneath the earth, the living finally as awake as the dead.

    UNREST

    A strange unrest hovers over the nation:

    This is the last dance, the wild tossing of Morgan’s seas,

    The division of spoils.

    A lassitude enters into the diamonds

    Of the body. In high school the explosion begins,

    The child is partly killed. When the fight is over,

    And the land and the sea

    Ruined, two shapes inside us rise, and move away.

    But the baboon whistles on the shores of death—

    Climbing and falling, tossing nuts and stones,

    He gambols by the tree

    Whose branches hold the expanses of cold,

    The planets whirling and the black sun,

    The cries of insects, and the tiny slaves

    In the prisons of bark:

    Charlemagne, we are approaching your islands!

    We are returning now to the snowy trees,

    Charlemagne, through which you rode all night

    With stiff hands. Now

    The darkness is falling, in which we sleep

    And wake, a darkness in which thieves shudder

    And the insane have a hunger for snow,

    And stiff-faced men like me

    Fall on their knees in the dungeons of sleep.

    THREE CHORAL STANZAS

    1

    I have gone down the old Tobacco Trail;

    All over Tennessee the dead stand up

    And shake the briars out of ballad bones!

    Those torn in Shiloh meadows come alive.

    I saw the worms march into Cumberland

    And slumbering trees shout out the welcome there

    To shrouds approaching from the Donner Pass.

    2

    The moon shines down on the Spanish battlefield.

    There crumpled, trampled, pierced, or prone and whole,

    The pale steel knights lie dead in weeds and gleam,

    Friends raise them up, remove the bowels and lungs,

    And in the cavities lay evergreens.

    Tenderly they lift the dead to wagon-floors,

    And men with wounds are bound on boughs of pine.

    3

    We write long poems, and make high towers, because

    Those traveling to the grave do not return.

    What has wild Pliny sent back since he died?

    And dust has muffled Blackhawk’s awkward tongue.

    The dead do not come back; it is because

    No word returns that we will never give in,

    Nor without crowns will we be satisfied.

    A POEM FOR THE DRUNKARD PRESIDENT

    Columbus guessed that below the Jamaican hills

    There were cobalt porcelains, Geese Flying

    Amid Three Clouds, Shang incense burners,

    Hares made of gold pounding jade rice.

    He died in chains, in a dungeon, growling like a dog.

    Coronado, hankering for Cibola’s cities, inquired

    Of the Cherokees. They said, Go to Kansas. His men

    Buried DeSoto at night beneath the Mississippi.

    Little Crow died with skunk-fur bands on his wrists.

    Long Head charged the rifles naked. Some men

    Taunted the Algonquins while tied to the stake.

    Others died on high scaffolds in Texas;

    Hat Sutton died in Great Neck on a rope.

    MacKenzie broke up on the Labrador rocks.

    These risky ones died in ambushes, in dance

    Halls, with cow skulls in the Snake River snows.

    A soldier wrote to his mother: "Today we marched

    Back, after a battle, to our previous position

    In a heavy rain. We passed a drunk man

    Asleep in the ditch. It was General Grant."

    All the old singing says it: It will all

    End in ashes. The kept life is the lost life.

    It is still true. What moves us in our tents?

    The spectacle of Grant, lying drunk, in the rain.

    II

    SILENCE IN THE SNOWY FIELDS and Related Poems

    1958—78

    WAITING FOR NIGHT TO COME

    I

    How much I long for the night to come

    Again—I am restless all afternoon—

    And the huge stars to appear

    All over the heavens!…The black spaces between stars…

    And the blue to fade away.

    II

    I worked on poems with my back to the window,

    Waiting for the darkness that I remember

    Noticing from my cradle.

    When I step over and open the door, I am

    A salmon slipping over the gravel into the ocean.

    III

    One star stands alone in the western darkness:

    Arcturus. Caught in their love, the Arabs called it

    The Keeper of Heaven. I think

    It was in the womb that I received

    The thirst for the dark heavens.

    NIGHT

    I

    If I think of a horse wandering about sleeplessly

    All night on this short grass covered with moonlight,

    I feel a joy, as if I had thought

    Of a pirate ship ploughing through dark flowers.

    II

    The box elders around us are full of joy,

    Obeying what is beneath them.

    The lilacs are sleeping, and the plants are sleeping;

    Even the wood made into a casket is asleep.

    III

    The butterfly is carrying loam on its wings;

    The toad is bearing tiny bits of granite in his skin.

    The leaves at the crown of the tree are asleep

    Like the dark bits of earth at its root.

    IV

    Alive, we are like a sleek black water beetle,

    Skating across still water in any direction

    We choose, and soon to be swallowed

    Suddenly from beneath.

    SNOWFALL IN THE AFTERNOON

    I

    The grass is half-covered with snow.

    It was the sort of snowfall that starts

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1