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Joined: Mar 2001
Posts: 4,189
Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Mar 2001
Posts: 4,189 |
In honor of National Poetry Month in the US (April), I thought I'd start a new poetry thread...it's been awhile.
ABOUT THESE POEMS
by Boris Pasternak (1890-1960)
On pavements I shall trample them
With broken glass and sun in turn.
In winter I shall open them
For the peeling ceiling to learn.
The garret will start to declaim
With a bow to the window frame.
Calamities, eccentricities
Will leapfrog to the cornices.
The blizzard will not month after month
Scour ends and beginnings with snow.
I shall remember: there is the sun.
And see: the light changed long ago.
When Christmas with a jackdaw glint
Peeps out, the day will suddenly
Brighten, revealing many things
Unnoticed by my love and me.
Shielding my face at the window
And scarfed against the rasping air,
I shall shout to the kids: Hey, you,
What century is out there?
Who beat a pathway to the door,
To the entrance walled up with snow,
While I was smoking with Byron
And drinking with Edgar Poe?
Received in Darial as a friend,
As in the armoury or hell,
I dipped my life, like Lermontov's
Passion, like lips in alcohol.
1917
from Selected Poems, © 1983 by Peter France
Your Happy Epeolatrist!
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Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 1,094
old hand
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old hand
Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 1,094 |
Oh boy, I love these threads.
I have two that go together. The original classic (one of my favorite poems) and a modern humorous response that I encountered recently.
Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; -on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
The Dover Bitch: A Criticism of Life by Anthony Hecht (b. 1922)
So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, "Try to be true to me,
And I'll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc."
Well now, I knew this girl. It's true she had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck. She told me later on
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad,
Thinking of all the wine and enormousd beds
And blandishments in French and the perfumes.
And then she got really angry. To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.
Anyway, she watched him pace the room
And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit,
And then she said one or two unprintable things.
But you mustn't judge her by that. What I mean to say is,
She's really all right. I still see her once in a while
And she always treats me right.
We have a drink
And I give her a good time, and perhaps it's a year
Before I see her again, but there she is,
Running to fat, but dependable as the come,
And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d'Amour.
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Joined: Mar 2001
Posts: 4,189
Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Mar 2001
Posts: 4,189 |
THE SONG OF THE BLODEUWEDD
From THE MABINOGION
Anonymous, Welsh -- c. 1063
Not of father nor of mother
Was my blood, was my body.
I was spellbound by Gwydion,
Prime enchanter of the Britons,
When he formed me of nine blossoms,
.......Nine buds of various kind:
From primrose of the mountain,
Broom, meadow-sweet and cockle,
........Together intertwined,
From the bean in its shade bearing
A white spectral army
.....Of earth, of earthy kind,
From blossoms of the nettle,
Oak, thorn and bashful chestnut--
Nine powers of nine flowers,
......Nine powers in me combined,
............Nine buds of plant and tree.
Long and white are my fingers
............As the ninth wave of the sea.
translated by Robert Graves(Welcome back, mav!  ) Your Happy Epeolatrist!
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Joined: Feb 2002
Posts: 833
old hand
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old hand
Joined: Feb 2002
Posts: 833 |
possibly my favourite pome of all time (bar only T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock) Love Calls Us to the Things of This World by Richard Wilbur (b. 1921) The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels. Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing; Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
"Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven." Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world's hunks and colours
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises, "Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance." (Q: why, o why, won't this effing discussion board program let me put in the spaces as they occur in the poem? how are others managing it? I've tried tabs, I've tried using the space bar, and neither appears to be working, if the post preview is to be believed. It is DAMNED FRUSTRATING. )
EDIT: Okay, thanks tsuwm....Have used the <pre> and </pre> formatting to fix up this 'ere pome 'ere. Discovered something irritating when I did - that configuration adds a blank line at the end, but within the brackets does NOT allow blank lines - so at the end of each verse I had to close the format and start it again on the next line (if you follow me). Still - good to know....
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Joined: Mar 2001
Posts: 4,189
Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Mar 2001
Posts: 4,189 |
(here is an old gem, a tribute to words, as it were) THE SONG OF THE HAPPY SHEPHERD
From CROSSWAYS, 1889
by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
‘The stars are threshed, and the souls are threshed from their husks.’—William Blake
To A. E.
The woods of Arcady are dead,
And over is their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey Truth is now her painted toy;
Yet still she turns her restless head:
But O, sick children of the world,
Of all the many changing things
In dreary dancing past us whirled,
To the cracked tune that Chronos sings,
Words alone are certain good.
Where are now the warring kings,
Word be-mockers?—By the Rood
Where are now the warring kings?
An idle word is now their glory,
By the stammering schoolboy said,
Reading some entangled story:
The kings of the old time are dead;
The wandering earth herself may be
Only a sudden flaming word,
In clanging space a moment heard,
Troubling the endless reverie.
Then nowise worship dusty deeds,
Nor seek, for this is also sooth,
To hunger fiercely after truth,
Lest all thy toiling only breeds
New dreams, new dreams; there is no truth
Saving in thine own heart. Seek, then,
No learning from the starry men,
Who follow with the optic glass
The whirling ways of stars that pass—
Seek, then, for this is also sooth,
No word of theirs—the cold star-bane
Has cloven and rent their hearts in twain,
And dead is all their human truth.
Go gather by the humming sea
Some twisted, echo-harbouring shell,
And to its lips thy story tell,
And they thy comforters will be,
Rewarding in melodious guile
Thy fretful words a little while,
Till they shall singing fade in ruth
And die a pearly brotherhood;
For words alone are certain good:
Sing, then, for this is also sooth.
I must be gone: there is a grave
Where daffodil and lily wave,
And I would please the hapless faun,
Buried under the sleepy ground,
With mirthful songs before the dawn.
His shouting days with mirth were crowned;
And still I dream he treads the lawn,
Walking ghostly in the dew,
Pierced by my glad singing through,
My songs of old earth’s dreamy youth:
But ah! she dreams not now; dream thou!
For fair are poppies on the brow:
Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.
© 1938 by William Butler Yeatsmg, I've had the same problem and it drives me crazy, because preserving the poet's intended form is imperative to me. I tried the [pre] code but can't get it to work correctly. So I just settled on whiting out dots for indentations. This board and others I've frequented all seem to shove everything flush left...even at the Poetry Archives. If there's a technical trick to this I'm missing I'd also appreciate someone clueing us in. Thanks.  Your Happy Epeolatrist!
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Joined: Mar 2001
Posts: 4,189
Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Mar 2001
Posts: 4,189 |
From SONG OF MYSELF
Walt Whitman
48.
I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is,
And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud,
And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth,
And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times,
And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero,
And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel'd universe,
And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.
And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,
(No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.)
I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.
Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign'd by God's name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe'er I go,
Others will punctually come for ever and ever.
Your Happy Epeolatrist!
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Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 5,400
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 5,400 |
this is one of my favorite Whitman poems: When I heard the Learn’d AstronomerWHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams,
to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer,
where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick; 5
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
I came back and edited the poem.. did you notice, each line got longer, and drearier, till you got to line four.
and line four, is very long. it drones on like the learn'd astronomer.. each line every worder, creating sense of dreary boring words, piled one on top of an other..
break the line, and you lose a lot of that.. the first word of every line is bold now.
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.!
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Joined: Jan 2002
Posts: 1,526
veteran
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veteran
Joined: Jan 2002
Posts: 1,526 |
Spring and Fall
(to a young child)
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. Poems: 1876-1889. Copied from http://www.daytips.com/pages/poemaday.htmlIt's amazing for me to think that some joker several thousand miles away scribbled something 130 years ago that I still today can read and love. k
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Posts: 320
enthusiast
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enthusiast
Joined: Jan 2002
Posts: 320 |
The Emperor of Ice-Cream by Wallace Stevens
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream
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Joined: Aug 2001
Posts: 2,605
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Aug 2001
Posts: 2,605 |
Too long to post but well worth it and amusing throughout is Nothing to Wear by William Allen Butler. You can find it in bartleby, at http://www.bartleby.com/102/157.html[also mentioned just now in the "nude/naked" thread]
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