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Joined: Jul 2000
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old hand
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OP
old hand
Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 1,094 |
It's been a while since we've had a good ol' thread of poems. Well, here's one to share our favorite poems, beautiful, inspirational, meaningful or even humorous words that you love.
I'll start off with a couple that are rather apt for us.
The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
The Retreat
Henry Vaughan
Happy those early days! when I
Shined in my angel-infancy.
Before I understood this place
Appointed for my second race,
Or taught my soul to fancy ought
But a white, celestial thought,
When yet I had not walked above
A mile or two, from my first love,
And looking back (at that short space)
Could see a glimpse of his bright face;
When on some gilded cloud or flower
My gazing soul would dwell an hour,
And in those weaker glories spy
Some shadows of eternity;
Before I taught my tongue to wound
My conscience with a sinful sound,
Or had the black art to dispense
A sev'ral sin to ev'ry sense,
But felt through all this fleshly dress
Bright shoots of everlastingness.
O, how I long to travel back
And tread again that ancient track!
That I might once more reach that plain,
Where first I left my glorious train;
From whence th' inlightened spirit sees
That shady city in palm trees;
But (ah!) my soul with too much stay
Is drunk, and staggers in the way.
Some men a forward motion love,
But I by backward steps would move
And when this dust falls to the urn
In that state I came, return.
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Joined: Jan 2001
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Posts: 13,858 |
Dear JazzO: since I lack the talent for making worthwhile comments on poetry, forgive me for asking if the word "ought" would not more properly be "aught". My dictionary does give "ought" as a variant, but I doubt many people would recognize that.
Or taught my soul to fancy ought
But a white, celestial thought,
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Who loots my heart steals traveled trash
For carved upon a trunk of ash
Is Floyd loves Flora with a flash
Of yestereven's balderdash.
- Walt Kelly
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Posts: 11,613
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Wordwind, that Shaker tune is in our hymnal as "Lord of the Dance", with different words.
==========================================================
Here's a poem I found on Bibliomania. I think it's neat, how the meaning of the old words can be determined, though the spellings are so different. In this site, you can run your cursor over the footnote number, and a little box with the meaning comes up right there. (Sheyne means bright.)
Anonymous. XV-XVI Century
15th Cent.
25 May in the Green-Wood
IN somer when the shawes be sheyne,1
And leves be large and long,
Hit is full merry in feyre foreste
To here the foulys song.
To se the dere draw to the dale
And leve the hilles hee,
And shadow him in the leves grene
Under the green-wode tree.
Hit befell on Whitsontide
Early in a May mornyng,
The Sonne up faire can shyne,
And the briddis mery can syng.
‘This is a mery mornyng,’ said Litulle Johne,
‘Be Hym that dyed on tre;
A more mery man than I am one
Lyves not in Christiantàe.
‘Pluk up thi hert, my dere mayster,’
Litulle Johne can say,
‘And thynk hit is a fulle fayre tyme
In a mornynge of May.’
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Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 1,289
veteran
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veteran
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 1,289 |
Here's one of my favorites which, to me at least, displays most if not all of the adjectives which Jazzo used in his heading. Being in stark modern style, if now somewhat dated language and references (50's), it's a contrast to Jackie's ancient poem. The author termed this an "oral message"; along with 6 other works written at the same time, it was intended to be recited to a jazz accompaniment. It's especially appropriate now that the infamous holiday season is almost upon us (in another 10 years or so, merchants will be pushing Christmas merchandise the day after Michaelmas).
CHRIST CLIMBED DOWN
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no rootless Christmas trees
hung with candycanes and breakable stars
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no gilded Christmas trees
and to tinsel Christmas trees
and no tinfoil Christmas trees
and no pink plastic Christmas trees
and no gold Christmas trees
and no black Christmas trees
and no powderblue Christmas trees
hung with electric candles
and encircled by tin electric trains
and clever cornball relatives
Christ climed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no intrepid Bible salesmen
covered the territory
in two-tone cadillacs
and where no Sears Roebuck creches
complete wih plastic babe in manger
arrived by parcel post
the babe by special delivery
and where no televised Wise Men
praised the Lord Calvert Whiskey
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no fat handshaking stranger
in a red flanned suit
and a fake white beard
went around passing himself off
as some sort of North Pole saint
crossing the desert to Bethlehem
Pennsylvania
in a Volkswagon sled
drawn by rollicking Adirondack reindeer
with German names
and bearing sacks of Humble Gifts
from Saks Fifth Avenue
for everybody's imagined Christ child
Christ climed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no Bing Crosby carollers
groaned of a tight Christmas
and where no Radio City angels
iceskated wingless
thru a winter wonderland
into a jinglebell heaven
daily at 8:30
with Midnight Mass matinees
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and softly stole away into
some anonymous Mary's womb again
where in the darkest night
of everybody's anonymous soul
He awaits again
an unimaginable
and impossibly
Immaculate Reconception
the very craziest
of Second Comings
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Oral Messages from A Coney Island of the Mind
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Posts: 273
enthusiast
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enthusiast
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Posts: 273 |
From An die Freude Friedrich Schiller. These words are so dear to me, I can't help singing them, as odious a sound as that is.  Seid umschlungen, Millionen! Diesen Kuß der ganzen Welt! Brüder! über'm Sternenzelt Muß ein lieber Vater wohnen. Ihr stürzt nieder, Millionen? Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt? Such ihn über'm Sternenzelt! Über Sternen muß er wohnen.
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Here’s an old favourite that I always love, and most especially at this time of year as late sunshine plays across the autumnal reds and golden browns of country landscapes: John Keats, of course, the cockney sparrow ;)
To Autumn
1
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm summer days will never cease,
For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
2
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
3
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
I love the way he builds a rich pattern of imagery in the first stanza, redolent of burgeoning fruit and a full harvest – then moves on via the extraordinary personification of the season in the second, through to the images of incipient death in the last. There is an elegiac build, both sweet and sad. The overall rhythm contributes an extraordinary and careful accumulation of sensuous effect, almost like leaves settling in gentle layers under the yielding trees.
In a letter dated Tuesday 21 September 1819, Keats wrote this to his friend John Reynolds, which seems to date the poem as written on Sunday 19th – I think he was staying in Winchester at this point in his life, just returned from the Isle of Wight:
“… How beautiful the season is now – How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather – Dian skies – I never lik’d stubble fields so much as now - Aye better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow a stubble plain looks warm – in the same way that some pictures look warm – This struck me so much in my Sunday’s walk that I composed upon it. I hope you are better employed than in gaping after weather. I have been at different times so happy as not to know what weather it was…”
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