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old hand
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Talk about a wordsmith. Edgar Poe's transcendent ability to weave the english language into a coherent syntax of rhyme, meter, meaning, and story, is Genius - period. -mw The Conqueror Worm -Edgar PoeLo! tis a gala night Within the lonesome latter years! An angel throng, bewinged, bedight In veils, and drowned in tears, Sit in a theatre, to see A play of hopes and fears, While the orchestra breathes fitfully The music of the spheres. Mimes, in the form of God on high, Mutter and mumble low, And hither and thither fly- Mere puppets they, who come and go At bidding of vast formless things That shift the scenery to and fro, Flapping from out their Condor wings Invisible Woe! That motley drama- oh, be sure It shall not be forgot! With its Phantom chased for evermore, By a crowd that seize it not, Through a circle that ever returneth in To the self-same spot, And much of Madness, and more of Sin, And Horror the soul of the plot. But see, amid the mimic rout A crawling shape intrude! A blood-red thing that writhes from out The scenic solitude! It writhes!- it writhes!- with mortal pangs The mimes become its food, And seraphs sob at vermin fangs In human gore imbued. Out- out are the lights- out all! And, over each quivering form, The curtain, a funeral pall, Comes down with the rush of a storm, While the angels, all pallid and wan, Uprising, unveiling, affirm That the play is the tragedy, "Man," And its hero the Conqueror Worm. *************** Listen...
...a crawling shape intrudes!
A blood red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes! - it writhes! - with mortal pangs,
The mimes become its food Don't you just love it? 
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Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 275
enthusiast
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enthusiast
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Posts: 275 |
W'ON, thanks for the alert!
Here's my offering, and kind of honoring 2 poets in a sense.
In Memory of W. B. Yeats
W. H. Auden
I
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
II
You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
III
Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
From Another Time by W. H. Auden, published by Random House. Copyright © 1940 W. H. Auden, renewed by The Estate of W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.
Copyright © 1997-2002 by The Academy of American Poets
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Posts: 1,289
veteran
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veteran
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 1,289 |
BELATED PALINODE FOR DYLAN THOMAS
In Wales at Laugharne at last I stand beside
..his cliff-perched writing shed
....above the coursing waters
......where the hawk hangs still
........above the cockle-strewn shingle
Where he walked in a glory of all his days
....(before the weather turned around)
And aie! aie! a waterbird far away
....cries and cries again
......over St. Johns Hill
And in his tilted boathouse now
....a tape of himself is playing --
......his lush voice
........his plush voice
..........his posh accent
............(too BBC-fulsome, cried the Welsh)
..............now echoes through his little
................upstairs room
And aie! aie!
.....echo the waterbirds once again
Beyond his sounding shed
....a fig tree hides the sea
......A fishboat heeled over
........a grebe afloat far out
..........a coracle abandoned
............a rusted coaler out of Cardiff still
..............a bold green headland lost in sun
Beyond which lie (across an ocean and a continent)
....San Francisco's white wood houses
......and a poet's sun-bleached cottage
........on Bolinas' far lagoon
..........with its wind-torn Little Mesa
............(so very like St. Johns Hill)
A single kestrel soars over
....riding the salt wind
........'high tide and the heron's call'
.........................................still echoing
...........(Aie! aie! it calls and calls again)
As in his listing boathouse now
....his great recorded voice runs out
......(grave as a gravedigger in his grave)
........leaving a sounding void of light
..........for poets and herons to fill
(Drowned down in New York's White Horse Tavern
....he went not gentle into his good night)
And Far West poets calling still
....over St. Johns Hill
......to the loveliest poet of all our days
........sweet singer of Swansea
..........lushed singer of Laugharne
............Dylan of all our days
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti, These Are My Rivers
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Joined: Feb 2002
Posts: 833
old hand
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old hand
Joined: Feb 2002
Posts: 833 |
When You Are Old W.B. Yeats When you are old and grey 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 the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars. I did that mostly from memory - had to look up the punctuation and one line....There was a time when I decided to start memorizing poetry, and I got quite a few down before I became lax and gave it up. Now this one is the principal one that remains in my head (as well as lines and fragments from Love Calls Us to the Things of This World, and from Prufrock). It was nice while it lasted, though....Think I'll try again. I love this poem, too.....Eh, there are sooo many pomes to love. Have been enjoying reading others' choices, too - interesting to see what different people choose. Whit, I WONDERED why you had some white dots in amongst your purple pome! I am too lazy to go back and fix "Love...." tonight - maybe another time. It IS crazy-making - as you said, the poet created the lines a certain way and we should respect that. The line breaks and indents do add a lot to the way a poem reads.
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
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but i was asked to edit, and i did, WO'N, whitman it doing loop de loops in his grave, i'll have you know.!Yes, thanks Helen ...you know how it kills me to do that, and especially to Whitman. But, when the only alternative is a wide thread here, what else can we do? Trying to read wide is maddening. And you're right...Walt probably is doing loop de loops in his grave...sorry guy.  Your Happy Epeolatrist!
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Posts: 6,296 |
To Shakespeare
After Three Hundred Years
Bright baffling Soul, least capturable of themes,
Thou, who display'dst a life of commonplace,
Leaving no intimate word or personal trace
Of high design outside the artistry
Of thy penned dreams,
Still shalt remain at heart unread eternally.
Through human orbits thy discourse to-day,
Despite thy formal pilgrimage, throbs on
In harmonies that cow Oblivion,
And, like the wind, with all-uncared effect
Maintain a sway
Not fore-desired, in tracks unchosen and unchecked.
And yet, at thy last breath, with mindless note
The borough clocks but samely tongued the hour,
The Avon just as always glassed the tower,
Thy age was published on thy passing-bell
But in due rote
With other dwellers' deaths accorded a like knell.
And at the strokes some townsman (met, maybe,
And thereon queried by some squire's good dame
Driving in shopward) may have given thy name,
With, 'Yes, a worthy man and well-to-do;
Though, as for me,
I knew him but by just a neighbour's nod, 'tis true.
'I' faith, few knew him much here, save by word,
He having elsewhere led his busier life;
Though to be sure he left with us his wife.'
--'Ah, one of the tradesmen's sons, I now recall. . . .
Witty, I've heard. . . .
We did not know him. . . . Well, good-day. Death comes to all.'
So, like a strange bright bird we sometimes find
To mingle with the barn-door brood awhile,
Then vanish from their homely domicile--
Into man's poesy, we wot not whence,
Flew thy strange mind,
Lodged there a radiant guest, and sped for ever thence.
Thomas Hardy
1916
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Posts: 320
enthusiast
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enthusiast
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I love this poem; it's so moving and at the same time so very funny.
A Supermarket in California by Allen Ginsberg
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman,
for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a
headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole familites shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corrridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermrket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
I hate the way this thing refuses to indent and space properly. Well, the words are still there.
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Carpal Tunnel
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In several of the pems recently posted, the poet refers by name to other poets. I'll offer two more in that theme.
A word is in order on the first, The Poets at Tea by Barry Pain. Pain imagines ten poets conversing over tea; in each section of the poem, one poet speaks in his characteristic voice. To keep this post brief I've included only three of the ten, Macauley (abbreviated), Poe, and Walt Whitman. (omitting Tennyson, Swinburne, Cowper, Browning, Wordsworth, Rossetti and Burns)
Pour, varlet, pour the water,
The water steaming hot!
A spoonful for each man of us,
Another for the pot! ...
Whiter than snow the crystals
Grown sweet 'neath tropic fires,
More righ the herb of China's field,
The pasture-lands more fragrance yield;
Forever let Britania wield
The teapost of her sires!
Here's a mellow cup of tea -- golden tea!
What a world or rapturous thought its fragance brings to me!
Oh, from out the silver cells
How it wells!
How it smells!
Keeping tune, tune, tune,
To the tintinnabulation of the spoon.
And the kettle on the fire
Boils its spout off with desire,
With a desperate desire
And a crystalline endeavor
Now, now to sit, or never,
On the top of the pale-faced moon,
But he alwyays came home to tea, tea, tea, tea, tea,
Tea to the n-th.
One cup for my self-hood,
Many for you. Allons, camerados, we will drink together,
O hand-in-hand! That tea-spoon, please when you've done with it.
What butter-colored hair you've got. I don't want to be personal.
All right, then, you needn't. You're a stale-cadaver.
Eigthteen-pence if the bottles are returned.
Allons, from all bat-eyed formulas.
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Carpal Tunnel
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And the second, a biting sonnet by James Kenneth Stephen
Wordsworth
Two voices are there: one is of the deep;
It learns the storm cloud's thunderous melody,
Now roars, now murmurs with the changing sea,
Now birdlike pipes, now closes soft in sleep;
And one is of an old half-witted sheep
Which bleats articulate monotony,
And indicates that two and one are three,
That grass is green, lakes damp, and mountains steep:
And, Wordsworth, both are thine: at certain times,
Forth from the heart of thy melodious rhymes
The form and pressure of high thoughts will burst;
At other times -- good Lord! I'd rather be
Quite unacquainted with the A, B, C,
Than write such hopeless rubbish as thy worst.
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
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Robert Graves served with the British Army in the Royal Welch Fusiliers druring WWI, seeing some of the most brutal battles of the war.
THE NEXT WAR
by Robert Graves (1895-1985)
You young friskies who today
Jump and fight in Father’s hay
With bows and arrows and wooden spears,
Playing at Royal Welch Fusiliers,
Happy though these hours you spend,
Have they warned you how games end?
Boys, from the first time you prod
And thrust with spears of curtain-rod,
From the first time you tear and slash
Your long-bows from the garden ash,
Or fit your shaft with a blue jay feather,
Binding the split tops together,
From that same hour by fate you’re bound
As champions of this stony ground,
Loyal and true in everything,
To serve your Army and your King,
Prepared to starve and sweat and die
Under some fierce foreign sky,
If only to keep safe those joys
That belong to British boys,
To keep young Prussians from the soft
Scented hay of father’s loft,
And stop young Slavs from cutting bows
And bendy spears from Welsh hedgerows.
...Another War soon gets begun,
A dirtier, a more glorious one;
Then, boys, you’ll have to play, all in;
It’s the cruellest team will win.
So hold your nose against the stink
And never stop too long to think.
Wars don’t change except in name;
The next one must go just the same,
And new foul tricks unguessed before
Will win and justify this War.
Kaisers and Czars will strut the stage
Once more with pomp and greed and rage;
Courtly ministers will stop
At home and fight to the last drop;
By the million men will die
In some new horrible agony;
And children here will thrust and poke,
Shoot and die, and laugh at the joke,
With bows and arrows and wooden spears,
Playing at Royal Welch Fusiliers.
© 1917 by Robert Graves
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