Prompt: At The End Of

For our July prompt, we look at Jane Kenyon’s poem “Three Songs at the End of Summer,” which features three portraits of late summer.

For our August issue, we ask for poems that use her title as a starting place. Not poems about summer, but about endings. Your title should be "Three ______ at the End of ________."  For example, you could write "Three Scenes at the End of an Affair," or "Three Haiku at the End of Life." You might write three stanzas, or three short poems, three sections, or even "Three Lines at the End of Day."

I do like how Jane's poem's three parts are connected through nature and also distinct in their sounds, moods, and atmosphere. Her second section consists of two three-line stanzas. The poem ends with lines that lead us gently into autumn. The poem views the end of August as the end of summer, the way young people often mark the end of summer with the start of another school year.

I had the new books—words, numbers,
and operations with numbers I did not
comprehend—and crayons, unspoiled
by use, in a blue canvas satchel
with red leather straps.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: July 31

Jane Kenyon (1947–1995) was an acclaimed American poet and translator known for her luminous, spare, and emotionally resonant verse. Her life and work deeply chronicled her lifelong struggle with clinical depression, her spiritual faith, and the quiet beauty of rural New England. 

She was married to poet Donald Hall. Following their marriage in 1972, the couple relocated to Hall's family home Eagle Pond Farm in Wilmot, New Hampshire. That location provided the natural imagery for much of her writing.

Her poetry includes From Room to Room (1978), The Boat of Quiet Hours (1986), Let Evening Come (1990) and Constance (1993). Her Collected Poems contain all four collections.

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Walking with Dante

Dante Alighieri is certainly one of the most influential poets in our history. Though The Divine Comedy is considered an essential work of Western civilization, Dante is also one of the least read poets, especially in this time. Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso are the story of a journey, and reading them is a journey for a modern reader.

In an episode    "Dante: The Most Famous, Least Read Poet," one person talks about how this 700-year-old poem helped a widower rebuild his life. I'm sure he is not the only reader who has journeyed through Hell and emerged along with the poet.

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To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
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Frost and Auden on Artificial Intelligence

Before you start typing a comment here about how Robert Frost and W.H. Auden had no knowledge of artificial intelligence, let me explain where I'm going here.

I often use AI to create images to illustrate my (too) many blog posts. I was creating an image of myself surrounded by poetry based on what a chatbot already knew about me from prior queries. (You can see the result here.)

I can imagine many classic and modern poets sitting at a computer. The computer, the Internet, and certainly AI would be something from science fiction or fantasy, but being inquisitive people, I have to imagine they would want to experiment. They would certainly have opinions about all of it. So I proposed a kind of thought experiment to several chatbots about poets and AI, and specifically these two poets.

Robert Frost and W. H. Auden likely would have responded to AI very differently in tone, but with overlapping concerns about language, humanity, and authenticity.

Frost would be suspicious of abstraction and more interested in the human voice. I think he distrusted systems that moved people away from lived experience and direct human encounter. He valued some ambiguity and the “sound of sense” in language.

Though he might have admired AI’s technical cleverness, he would reject poetry produced without genuine experience behind it. Frost often emphasized that poetry comes from:

AI suggests to me that Frost might have asked, "Can language still be poetry if nobody has lived it?"

Auden might be intellectually fascinated by AI but morally cautious. He was interested in psychology, science, systems of thought, and modernity’s strange transformations and how language shapes society and consciousness.

But Auden worried about propaganda, impersonality, bureaucratic thinking, and probably would not be a supporter of any misuse of technology. Perhaps, he would see AI as an extraordinary linguistic tool, and also a dangerous amplifier of mass conformity or emotional detachment.

Auden wrote, “Poetry makes nothing happen,” but he did not mean that poetry is powerless. He meant poetry changes inner life indirectly, through consciousness and moral perception. He likely would have questioned whether AI can truly participate in moral experience or only imitate its language.

If the two sat down for a conversation and played with AI together, they might have some common ground. They would probably resist the idea that intelligence is merely information processing. Human meaning comes from mortality and embodiment, and art emerges from uncertainty and lived contradiction. The language of poetry matters because people risk themselves in it.

Like many people today, they might warn that AI could encourage people to substitute fluent expression for genuine thought.

They just might concede that much human language is already formulaic, imitative, and patterned. But poetry, for them, was valuable precisely because it resisted that drift into automatic speech.

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To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
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Reading the 'Iliad' in the Afterlife

Archaeologists have found a papyrus copy of Homer’s Iliad on an ancient Egyptian mummy. This was the first time that a Greek literary text had been found used in the preservation process.

The discovery has implications for our knowledge of funerary practices and religious life in ancient Egypt. The papyrus was placed on the abdomen as part of the embalming ritual. That's not unusual. Egyptian mummies from this period have previously been found to carry papyri written in Greek. Those earlier papyri discoveries had text of magical or ritualistic content. This fragment was discovered in the abdomen of a mummy buried in a Roman-era tomb in Oxyrhynchus around 1,600 years ago. 

This is the second major discovery involving an ancient poetic text in recent weeks. I wrote earlier about the discovery of the oldest English copy of a poem. 

The identified Iliad text found is from the catalogue of ships in Book II of the epic poem, which contains a famous passage listing the Greek forces massing before Troy.

Why was this text chosen to be included with the mummification? Researchers say they are unsure why this particular Greek text was chosen for the mummification process.

Roman-era mummification in Oxyrhynchus combined traditional Egyptian, Greek, and Roman customs. Ancient Egyptian priests preserved bodies using natron salt to dehydrate them and wrapping them up in linen for about 40 days. Instead of using traditional canopic jars to preserve organs, they preferred to pack the body with preserved materials along with papyri containing Greek literature sealed with clay inside the chest or pelvic cavity.

Was it something to read in the afterlife?

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org