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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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It appears that Horace Smith was wordy rather than witty. Max, you're right. A better title may have been "A futile attempt at writing a poem which will make others think that I am on the same intellectual plane as P.B Shelley any day of the week."I think that mine is much pithier and to the point than his.  We could have a competition coming up with better titles to Smith's poem than Smith managed!
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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old hand
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old hand
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>Perhaps this has something of the spirit you and Rhu were talking about, Avy?
Actually Mav "Old Khayyam's" spirit (correct me if I am wrong, Rhub) is the serious other-worldly question of death and life and the contrasting quirky solution he has to it. "There is no lasting meaning to death and life anyway so just enjoy yourself with wine, woman(man), and song"
But regarding "the strange and evocative magic of Kubla Khan" Yes you are right! I won't say that there is no 'richness of the east' in English poetry. There is Kubla Khan and there is also Abhou Ben Adhem and others.
These are a few from a collection of his verses that describe Khayyam in a potter's shop, when the pots start speaking to him:
And strange to tell, among the Earthen Lot
Some could articulate, while others not:
A suddenly one more impatient cried -
Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?
Then said another - 'Surely not in vain
My substance from common Earth was Ta'en,
That He who subtly wrought me into Shape
Should stamp me back to common Earth again.'
None answer'd this; but after Silence spake
A vessel of a more ungainly Make:
'They sneer at me for leaning all awry;
What! Did the Hand then of the Potter shake?'
Then said another with a long-drawn Sigh,
'My Clay with long oblivion is gone dry:
But, fill me with the old familiar juice,
Methinks I might recover by-and-bye!'
Cheers!
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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fill me with the old familiar juice...
Thanks, Avy, that made me both chuckle and ponder on reflection. I guess that's what you mean.
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enthusiast
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enthusiast
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 275 |
I hope this will not put a damper to the this bright and sunny thread...
When You Are Old
When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep:
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountain overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
A free adaptation by William Butler Yeats of a Pierre Ronsard poem.
chronist
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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I had thoughts of showing all six here, but together is not how she wrote them only how I set them to music, so you'll have to wait 'til I get recordings made for Max's site...
Message For Me
The sound
of the sad soughing
of pines and birches,
as the wild winds
of winter
flail the high branches,
has a message for me:
Man is not alone
to suffer
the fate of age;
all nature, in due season,
reaches the wintertime of life,
in the same
relentless way.
Marie Engebretson-Jackson
(sorry, no rhyming)
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Posts: 11,613
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 11,613 |
fill me with the old familiar juice...
Thanks, Avy, that made me both chuckle and ponder on reflection.
Oh, mav--does that mean what I think it does? In water?
(pond water?) Which is the true, and which the (slightly) altered one? Or is neither neither, but each a separate entity, the truth according to itself?
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addict
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addict
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This is a wonderful thread and thank you whoever resurrected it. (And a special congrats to William for daring to post. Beautiful!)
I'd forgotten just how much I liked Baudelaire - only glad to get back to him when I have learned a little more about poetry and can appreciate the cleverness of some of the stuff he does. Look at the form and the way the lines repeat! As for the rest of it - wow!
Not strictly relevant, but one of my most treasured possessions is a book my grandmother gave me. It's a simple black-bound book, but through her life she used to write in it poems and extracts from books that particularly struck her. A very personal anthology. She gave it to me when I was at university, with blank pages still in the back, and since then I've carried on, writing in poems and passages that strike me. I hope that one day I too will have someone to pass the book on to. And I recommend that anyone who loves words considers keeping a book like this. It's the nearest I think she could have got to letting me into her soul. I get all soggy thinking about it even now, years later.
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enthusiast
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enthusiast
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Bridget>>>>
Not strictly relevant, but one of my most treasured possessions is a book my grandmother gave me. It's a simple black-bound book, but through her life she used to write in it poems and extracts from books that particularly struck her. A very personal anthology. She gave it to me when I was at university, with blank pages still in the back, and since then I've carried on, writing in poems and passages that strike me. I hope that one day I too will have someone to pass the book on to. And I recommend that anyone who loves words considers keeping a book like this.
I wish that children in school, the minute they learn how to write, should be encouraged to keep a journal or a notebook, every year that they are in school. They should be allowed ample time to write in this journal everyday. observations, snippets of poetry, descriptions, etc. I know that some dedicated English or writing teachers do this, but not every one.
chronist
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newbie
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newbie
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As my contribution to this delightfully meandering thread, here is a cri-de-coeur on behalf of our inarticulate arboreal friends against the insensitivity of poets, or at least those (unlike myself) who publish in traditional media.
Notably, this little sonnet is a double acrostic, with the first and last letters of each line spelling out the first, while preserving rhyme and metre. If you think such a contrivance is easy to assemble, I invite you to try one yourself.
Acrostics on paper
A cross sticks on paper; trees weep
Convinced that no man heeds their plea
Red cedars, bereaved, cannot sleep
Ovid gulps down his minestrone
Sequoias, sequestered, afar
Shed tears from their loftiest height
Stenographers swill at the bar
Trees moan to the moon, bark stark white
Ionesco, egged on by their roe,
Chews sturgeons entire, and whole cows!
Keening cries of the weeping willow
Stab silence and dead souls arouse
Our poets enjoy jours de soupe –
Night’s falling, limbs tremble, leaves droop.
Rusty
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Aug 2000
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"Old Khayyam's" spirit (correct me if I am wrong, Rhub) is the serious other-worldly question of death and life and the contrasting quirky solution he has to it. "There is no lasting meaning to death and life anyway so just enjoy yourself with wine, woman(man), and song"
I wouldn't dream of correcting you, Avy. not when you have captured the essence of Kayyam's philosphy of life (and death.)in far better words than I could manage. He shows himself as essentially a fatalist, especaially in those quatrains - of which there are many - concerning the Potter and the Pots.
BTW, Kayyam's continual references to wine are, from my point of view as a social historian, very interesting as a documentary indication that Islam did not start off with a total ban on alcohol. It is analagous with the Methodists, over here, who did not really adopt temperance until the 1830s, well after the death of Wesley, their founder. Does anyone know when and why Islam adopted their opposition to "the grape?"
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