National Poetry Month Number 15 - Michael Hamburger - The Grape and Nut Letter

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair, Kashiana Singh,and (Nelson) Howard Miller.I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

Today's article is the third of three by Nelson Howard Miller, one of the major contributors to Poets’ Corner at https://theotherpages.org. Anything with the initials NM next to it, is thanks to him. He’s also a poet and a retired English professor.

Michael Hamburger (1924 - 2007) was a German-born writer whose family moved to Britain in 1933 where he grew up and was educated.  He was a poet, critic, teacher, and translator of many German-language poets.  Between 1966 and 1978, he held positions at a number of U. S. universities, but returned to England permanently in 1978.

He published over 20 volumes of poetry, employing both meter and rhyme as well as free verse; his subjects include themes of loss and the natural world, particularly man's relation to nature.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=33448

His poem "Grape and Nut Letter" is a thank-you letter to friends for allowing the speaker to pick "the last grapes / from your fallen vines" at the very end of the growing season; the grapes are just passing the point where they would be useful to humans and thus are "yours no longer"  but are still of value to

"insect, bird,

Rodent closer to soil

Than the makers of wine . . . ."

Similarly, the last of fruiting nuts are developing thicker shells which only the teeth of animals can penetrate, "no teeth but a squirrel's can crack," and which still contain "only a hint of savour."

The meaning here, the speaker says, is "Cryptic," but the significance, he implies, lies in the fact that nature does not exist just for man’s benefit alone; that dying vines "Still forbear to put out thorns" indicates that they exist for the benefit of other creatures as well, a theme that appears in several of his poems.

The full text of Michael Hamburger’s poem is online at The Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=33448

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