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OP
OP
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Thanks, Bob--this one's mine.Hi, lusy!
OP
CROSSING THE BAR
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea.
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson
This has been set to a beautiful tune and can be found in the Methodist Hymnal.
Thank you, Bob. It is a lovely song. I had not known it had been put to music until I heard it on the radio one day, not too long after my friend's body had given up. I sat there transfixed, with tears streaming. I first heard of the poem in one of the Anne of Green Gables series, maybe the fifth one.
The sonnet is by Lope de Vega, a sixteenth century Spanish poet. This is a translation done by Alix Ingber, a professor of Spanish at Sweet Briar College in Virginia. They are found at
http://sonnets.spanish.sbc.edu/Vega_Repente.html
Soneto de repente
Un soneto me manda hacer Violante,
que en mi vida me he visto en tal aprieto;
catorce versos dicen que es soneto,
burla burlando van los tres delante.
Yo pensé que no hallara consonante
y estoy a la mitad de otro cuarteto,
mas si me veo en el primer terceto,
no hay cosa en los cuartetos que me espante.
Por el primer terceto voy entrando,
y parece que entré con pie derecho
pues fin con este verso le voy dando.
Ya estoy en el segundo y aun sospecho
que voy los trece versos acabando:
contad si son catorce y está hecho.
Instant Sonnet
A sonnet Violante bids me write,
such grief I hope never again to see;
they say a sonnet's made of fourteen lines:
lo and behold, before this line go three.
I thought that I could never get this far,
and now I'm halfway into quatrain two;
but if at the first tercet I arrive,
I'll have no fear: there's nothing I can't do!
The tercets I have just begun to pen;
I know I must be headed the right way,
for with this line I finish number one.
Now I am in the second, and suspect
that I have written nearly thirteen lines:
count them, that makes fourteen, and look -- it's done.
(©Alix Ingber, 1995)
Marianna
But liquor is quicker.
Odgen Nash
Actually, one of my favorite poem's is John Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," but I don't have the text with me here at work.
A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
As virtuous men passe mildly away,
And whisper to their soules, to goe,
Whilst some of their sad friends doe say,
The breath goes now, and some say, no:
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No teare-floods, nor sigh-tempests move,
T'were prophanation of our joyes
To tell the layetie our love.
Moving of th'earth brings harmes and feares,
Men reckon what it did and meant,
But trepidation of the spheares,
Though greater farre, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers love
(Whose soule is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.
But we by a love, so much refin'd.
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care lesse, eyes, lips, and hands to misse.
Our two soules therefore, which are one,
Though I must goe, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to ayery thinnesse beate.
If they be two, they are two so
As stiffe twin compasses are two,
Thy soule the fixt foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the'other doe.
And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth rome,
It leanes, and hearkens after it,
And growes erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to mee, who must
Like th'other foot, obliquely runne;
Thy firmnes drawes my circle just,
And makes me end, where I begunne.
My favorite is probably The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, but it's even longer, so I won't post it here... go to http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_2/eliot.html if you'd like to be reminded of Eliot's sweetness.
Later edit > Whoa! I just scrolled through that page, rereading the poem, and somehow I associated a completely different tone with it - or maybe it just means something different to me now that I'm older... anyhow, I don't think sweetness is really what I meant. Still love the poem, but.
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