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

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.

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…”

mmm, thanks for the reminder that not *all the world is looking forward to a season of mess and smelly foolishness, Max! I like your selected poem.

Dian as a contraction of Diana, the huntress

Yes, that was my take - as in the myth about her being seen bathing... so a kind of extended metaphor for his remark about "chaste", which I think is also punning on 'chased' and perhaps 'chasseur', hence his words "without joking..."!

Is it the use of vowels that gives the first stanza its fullness?
It makes your tongue move around like it would while eating the fruit.

Here's one for the English and the Anglophiles, magnificently set to music, and featured in a good film.

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among those dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

--William Blake

tongue move around like it would while eating the fruit

mm, I think you may have got something with that idea - the combination of complex mouth movements created by a wide range of consonants and open vowels does seem to suggest a full-mouthed chewing. When you try reading it aloud, there are some really tongue-tangling combinations (mists and mellow fruitfulness) that seem to be quite deliberate slowing effects, building a calm rhythm that suggests the sense of fruition and completion.

Autumn always makes me a bit melancholy ~ something about the smell in the air and the fading of summer's warmth.

Accordingly, a suitably depressing poem, to share the wealth.

The Definition of Love
by Andrew Marvell

My love is of a birth as rare
As 'tis for object strange and high:
It was begotten by Despair
Upon Impossibility.

Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble Hope could ne'er have flown
But vainly flapped its tinsel wing.

And yet I quickly might arrive
Where my extended soul is fixed,
But Fate does iron wedges drive,
And always crowds itself betwixt.

For Fate with jealous eye does see
Two perfect loves; nor lets them close:
Their union would her ruin be,
And her tyrannic pow'r depose.

And therefore her decrees of steel
Us and the distant poles have placed
(Though Love's whole world on us doth wheel)
Not by themselves to be embraced.

Unless the giddy heaven fall,
And earth some new convulsion tear;
And, us to join, the world should all
Be cramped into a planishpere.

As lines so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet:
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite can never meet.

Therefore the love which us doth bind,
But Fate so enviously debars,
Is the conjunction of the mind,
And opposition of the stars.

Quiet Emotions
by Judy Burnette

I always wanted more from you
than you were willing to give;
So now we've gone our separate ways
each with different lives to live.

The bond will always be there
the friendship always intact;
But the time for us has come and gone
and the pages of time, you can't turn back.

I will always be a friend to you
and wonder how you are;
The smiles and laughter I will remember
and our fights have become painless scars.

Sometimes on those busy days
when you've a thousand things to do;
Please let me glide slowly through your mind
and spend some time with you.

In that quiet moment
when you're surprised to find me there;
Just remember even with the distance between us
I am still someone who cares.

What a beautiful poem!

.

The one you posted - Thomas Hardy:
I can see, hear and feel what he writes there.

Echo, If you'd like to read more about this poem, here's a link to a Hardy site:

http://netforum.ilstu.edu/cgi-bin/netforum/ths/a/14--3.7.1

Echo, If you'd like to read more about this poem, here's a link to a Hardy site:

http://netforum.ilstu.edu/cgi-bin/netforum/ths/a/14--3.7.1

An offering from one of my favorite poets, perhaps even more timely now. I especially love the final two lines:

FOR THE ONE WHO WOULD TAKE MAN'S LIFE IN HIS HANDS

by Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966)

Tiger Christ unsheathed his sword,
Threw it down, became a lamb.
Swift spat upon the species, but
Took two women to his heart.
Samson who was strong as death
Paid his strength to kiss a slut.
Othello that stiff warrior
Was broken by a woman's heart.
Troy burned for a sea-tax, also for
Possession of a charming whore.
What do all examples show?
What must the finished murderer know?

You cannot sit on bayonets,
Nor can you eat among the dead.
When all are killed, you are alone,
A vacuum comes where hate has fed.
Murder's fruit is silent stone,
The gun increases poverty.
With what do these examples shine?
The soldier turned to girls and wine.
Love is the tact of every good,
The only warmth, the only peace.

"What have I said?" asked Socrates,
"Affirmed extremes, cried yes and no,
Taken all parts, denied myself,
Praised the caress, extolled the blow,
Soldier and lover quite deranged
Until their motions are exchanged.
--What do all examples show?
What can any actor know?
The contradiction in every act,
The infinite task of the human heart."

(c) 1954 by Delmore Schwartz


"A vacuum comes where hate has fed." rings increasingly poignant for me, especially in light of current events.

I thought this might be appropriate,with it being remembrance sunday on the 11th

DUCE ET DECORUM EST

bent double, like old beggars under sacks
knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue;deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.


Gas! Gas! Quick boys! - An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone was still crying out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.-
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.


If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon we threw him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devils sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer , bitter as the cud
Of vile , incurable sores on innocent tongues, -
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori



WILFRED OWEN
killed in action 1918

the Duncster ( lethal bones)

A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM

by Edgar Allan Poe

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow--
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand--
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep--while I weep!
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

--1827

(note: the italics are the author's)

Lines Composed Above Tintern Abbey

William Wordsworth

(These are some excerpted lines from the Lines:)

And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity, 60
The picture of the mind revives again:
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. And so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man 70
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all.--I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love, 80
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.--That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur, other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompence. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes 90
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels 100
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,--both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul 110
Of all my moral being.

This is a great credo...
WW

I posted this poem in the Spanish only version some time ago. I learned it by heart because the first time I ever heard it said was at the circle up North by a guy who mangled the Spanish so badly that I just had to tell him so. His reaction?"You learn the Spanish, then, and we'll say it together." By the time I got it learned, he had moved to California and we have never, in 15 years, said this poem together. I still remember it in hopes...(I just can't remember the dang title!)

Tu vientre sabe mas
Que tu cabeza
Pero no tanto
Como tus musclos
Esa
Es la fuerza bella
Negra
De tu cuerpo desnudo
Signo de selva
El tuyo
Con tus collares rojos
Tus brazeletes de oro curvo
Y ese caiman
Nadando en el Zambeze
De tus ojos.
-Nicolas Guiellen


Your belly knows more
Than your head
But not as much
As your thighs
That
Is the beautiful black force
Of your naked body
Sign of the jungle
Yours
With your red necklaces
Your curved bracelets of gold
And that alligator
Swimming in the Zambeze
Of your eyes.

Duncan Large, in anticipation of Remembrance Day, posted Wilfred Owens' best-known poem.

Today is Nov. 11, Armistice Day, as older USns call it. So herewith the quintessential WWI poem and another one, more controversial, from the same era.

In Flanders Fields (1915)

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
in Flanders fields.

-- John McCrae


Recessional

God of our fathers, known of old --
Lord of our far-flung battle-line --
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine --
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies --
The captains and the kings depart --
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts be with us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!

Far-call'd our navies melt away --
On dune and headland sinks the fire --
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe --
Such boasting as the Gentiles use
Or lesser breeds without the Law --
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard --
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding calls not Thee to guard --
For frantic boast and foolish word,
Have Mercy on Thy People, Lord!

-- Rudyard Kipling

BIRCHES

Robert Frost

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-coloured
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground,
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm,
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows--
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
>From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

*Note from WW: Not that I'm wishing an ice storm on anyone, but, if all are safe, ice storms are lovely.

Max, I think much of poetry has to do with turning the flame down, as Hemingway said, to the point just before it flashes out. He was writing about prose. Sylvia Plath said it just as well, and I paraphrase roughly: "Prose is an open hand; poetry is a closed fist." The enemy is death, so to wave a cape before its nose, most particularly in autumn and winter, is a daring feat. And in that daunting challenge probably lies much of the fascination. Sam Clemens wrote that the best way to defeat the devil is to laugh at him; poets prance around him.

As Max says, "A pox on all your bottom-dwelling melancholy!"

The Maze, by W. H. Auden:
Anthropos apteros for days
Walked whistling round and round the maze,
Relying happily upon
His temperament for getting on.

The hundredth time he sighted, though,
A bush he left an hour ago,
He halted where four alleys crossed
And recognised that he was lost.

"Where am I? Metaphysics says
No question can be asked unless
It has an answer, so I can
Assume this maze has got a plan.

"If theologians are correct,
A Plan implies an Architect:
A God-built maze would be, I'm sure,
The Universe in miniature.

"Are data from the world of sense,
In that case, valid evidence?
What, in the universe I know,
Can give directions how to go?

"All Mathematics would suggest
A steady straight line as the best,
But left and right alternately
Is consonant with History.

"Aesthetics, though, believes all Art
Intends to gratify the heart:
Rejecting disciplines like these,
Must I, then, go which way I please?

"Such reasoning is only true
If we accept the classic view,
Which we have no right to assert
According to the introvert,

"His absolute presupposition
Is: Man creates his own condition.
This maze was not divinely built
But is secreted by my guilt.

"The centre that I cannot find
Is known to my unconscious mind;
I have no reason to despair
Because I am already there.

"My problem is how not to will;
They move most quickly who stand still:
I'm only lost until I see
I'm lost because I want to be.

"If this should fail, perhaps I should,
As certain educators would,
Content myself with this conclusion:
In theory there is no solution.

"All statements about what I feel,
Like I-am-lost, are quite unreal:
My knowledge ends where it began;
A hedge is taller than a man."

Anthropos apteros, perplexed
To know which turning to take next,
Looked up and wished he were a bird
To whom such doubts must seem absurd.

My favorite e e cummings poem is about my favorite season:

in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it's
spring
and
the

goat-footed

balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee

SPRING POOLS

by Robert Frost

These pools that, though in forests, still reflect
The total sky almost without defect,
And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,
Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,
And yet not out by any brook or river,
But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.

These trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods--
Let them think twice before they use their powers
To blot out and drink up and sweep away
These flowery waters and these watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday.

The Idea of Order at Key West

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.

If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there was never a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of sea
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

W. H. Auden

Faun

Haunched like a faun, he hooed
From grove of moon-glint and fen-frost
Until all owls in the twigged forest
Flapped black to look and brood
On the call this man made.

No sound but a drunken coot
Lurching home along river bank.
Stars hung water-sunk, so a rank
Of double star-eyes lit
Boughs where those owls sat.

An arena of yellow eyes
Watched the changing shape he cut,
Saw hoof harden from foot, saw sprout
Goat-horns. Marked how god rose
And galloped woodward in that guise.

Sylvia Plath

Will someone here comment on this poem, in a PM or otherwise?

Thanks,
WindWood

Faun:A Semantical Dissection
...ooh goody,I like to interpret poems.

MECHANICS: Faun is a well crafted, maybe even brilliantly, crafted poem. The poem is vocally pleasing. The use of thirty-seven "o's" in eighty-nine words bring about a uniting flow to the lyrics. This occurrence of "o's" is about three times normal usage. But better still, Path's use of seven "double o's",(about ten times normal usage)gives the readers the impression that the owl eyes described in the text are looking up from the page to us. (Subliminally, of course.) Intergraded with this stunt is a remarkable talent for painting a mood and a landscape with only a modicum of words.
STORYLINE: The episode that gave birth to this poem is real rather than allusive; A woman awaits the return of her husband who is very late in returning home. She hears a cry emanating from the swamp by the river. She walks to a stand of barren trees and watches his approach. He is drunk. He falls and fills the stark woodland with a drunken scream. After a moment he gets up, now steady, and walks toward the cabin. The woman turns and walks back to the cabin. She is sad. She knows that the man, the drunkard, the adulterer, will soon walk through the cabin door, glib in manner, mitigating her concerns with charm and flirtatious wit. And the morning will begin another day...
COMMENT: The once obligatory and now simply bothersome literary allusions to classical Greek and Roman mythology almost ruined a great poem, but didn't. I never liked Sylvia Plath. I never forgave her for her posthumous embrace of radical feminism. I've changed my mind.

Many thanks, Milum. The only line that troubles me in your reading is the one in which the faun gallops woodward. In the first lines, he is going home--but at the end he's galloping woodward. Is it that the home is in the woods, simply...or could there be something more threatening suggested here? Yes, he's headed home, but his head is elsewhere--this goat man who's more at home in the woods?

I like your reading very much, by the way.

Best regards,
Woodward

Introduction to Songs of Innocence

William Blake


Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me:

``Pipe a song about a Lamb!''
So I piped with a merry chear.
``Piper, pipe that song again;''
So I piped: he wept to hear.

``Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe;
Sing thy songs of happy chear:''
So I sung the same again,
While he wept with joy to hear.

``Piper, sit thee down and write
In a book, that all may read.''
So he vanish'd from my sight,
And I pluck'd a hollow reed,

And I made a rural pen,
And I stain'd the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs,
Every child may joy to hear.

Ah, Blake! Here's one of his that has become a favorite of mine since discovering it fairly recently, though I've long been enthralled with his work. The odd spelling, capitalization, and punctuation are all his:

THE SMILE

There is a Smile of Love
And there is a Smile of deceit
And there is a Smile of Smiles
In which these two Smiles meet

And there is a Frown of Hate
And there is a Frown of Disdain
And there is a Frown of Frowns
Which you strive to forget in vain

For it sticks in the Hearts deep Core
And it sticks in the deep Back bone
And no Smile that ever was smild
But only one Smile alone

That betwixt the Cradle & Grave
It only once Smild can be
But when it once is Smild
Theres an end to all Misery


--William Blake

I came across this poem by Yeats on another board. It describes the begetting of a certain New Yorker dear to all our hearts. As it is quite a graphic description of sexual violence I've put it in white so that those would rather not read it can hurry on to the next post.

Leda and the Swan W. B. Yeats

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?


Bingley

Bingley, very good to read Yeats here. But why indifferentbeak? That's troublesome.

WW

It describes the begetting of a certain New Yorker dear to all our hearts.

As certain aspects of said begetting have been the subject of prior board discussion, it should be added that Yeat's description represents but one view thereof. Indeed, according to my research it was [pardon, but the choice of word here is both unavoidable and irresistable] a seminal source for that view.

In reply to:

---

But why indifferentbeak? That's troublesome.

---

I assume Yeats is saying that Zeus, like some other males, loses interest once, to be crude, he's got his rocks off .

Bingley

Couldn't resist following the last poem and discussion up with this:

THE HEAVY BEAR WHO GOES WITH ME

by Delmore Schwartz

"the withness of the body"

The heavy bear who goes with me,
A manifold honey to smear his face,
Clumsy and lumbering here and there,
The central ton of every place,
The hungry beating brutish one
In love with candy, anger, and sleep,
Crazy factotum, dishevelling all,
Climbs the building, kicks the football,
Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city.

Breathing at my side, the heavy animal,
That heavy bear who sleeps with me,
Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar,
A sweetness intimate as the water's clasp,
Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope
Trembles and shows the darkness beneath.
--The strutting show-off is terrified,
Dressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants,
Trembles to think that his quivering meat
Must finally wince to nothing at all.

That inescapable animal walks with me,
Has followed me since the black womb held,
Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,
A caricature, a swollen shadow,
A stupid clown of the spirit's motive,
Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness,
The secret life of belly and bone,
Opaque, too near, my private, yet unknown,
Stretches to embrace the very dear
With whom I would walk without him near,
Touches her grossly, although a word
Would bare my heart and make me clear,
Stumbles, flounders, and strives to be fed
Dragging me with him in his mouthing care,
Amid the hundred million of his kind,
The scrimmage of appetite everywhere.

©1938 by Delmore Schwartz

One of the strongest poems on male sexuality I've ever read! But, then again, perhaps that's just an element in a deeper image?

THE MIDDLE

When I remember bygone days
I think how evening follows morn;
So many I loved were not yet dead,
So many I love were not yet born.

Ogden Nash
©1951 by Ogden Nash