Ship of Fools: World Poetry Day

Thread: World Poetry Day Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.

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Posted by Kaplan Corday (# 16119) on :

Apparently UNESCO has nominated next Friday (21/3) as World Poetry Day.

Not sure about the copyright implications, Hosts, but if permissible, it would be good to celebrate this week by quoting favourites (as long as it's not Paradise Lost or The Fairy Queen in entirety) chosen because they are so good, so bad, or just because of their associations for you.

Original poems, too - I wouldn't have suggested this in the past, because they can be as excruciating as listening to a description of someone's last night's dream, but I have on occasion been pleasantly surprised.

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

I'm all in favour of poetry. We need to be careful about copyright, though, so for the avoidance of doubt:

Up to four (4) lines may be quoted but a link must be provided to the rest of the poem, please (and your hosts would be very grateful if you could resist posting a long list of links!).

If you can't find the poem on the internet, this is often because it's only available in a printed book, and the imprint page of the printed book will almost always have a some kind of clause saying you can't reproduce the poem elsewhere.

Your own original poems are okay for inclusion on this thread but please remember that while you will retain copyright of your own poem, the Ship also has copyright of everything you post here.

That's the hostly bit done - looking forward to your contributions!

* * *

I'll kick off with Seamus Heaney's excellent The Shipping Forecast. I love the way he's put this together, and the "bay that toiled like mortar" is an excellent way of phrasing it.

Also Yeats' beautiful poem, The Lake Isle of Innisfree.

Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :

Poetry, four lines could be four words or four hundred.

One of my favourites Fog by Carl Sandburg.
The fog comes
on little cat feet.

ETA: Beautiful in its simplicity, yet evokes much.

[ 15. March 2014, 16:39: Message edited by: lilBuddha ]

Posted by Hedgehog (# 14125) on :

I have long been fond of "Curiosity" by Alastair Reid.

Only the curious have, if they live, a tale
worth telling at all.

Posted by leo (# 1458) on :

I hate poetry. Arty farty. Avoiding the struggle for justice sand peace by merely writing about it. Or saying that the only struggle is to 'express ourselves' while the world goes hang.

Posted by Sioni Sais (# 5713) on :

quote:
Originally posted by leo:
I hate poetry. Arty farty. Avoiding the struggle for justice sand peace by merely writing about it. Or saying that the only struggle is to 'express ourselves' while the world goes hang.

Well, that's the Book of Psalms on the scrapheap then, which is a shame as there is plenty in there pleading for peace and justice, expressed with more clarity than in much of the prose writing in scripture.

Posted by Moo (# 107) on :

quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
One of my favourites Fog by Carl Sandburg.
The fog comes
on little cat feet.

I like that very much. I also like the parody,

quote:
The frog comes in on little flat feet.

Moo

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

quote:
Originally posted by leo:
I hate poetry. Arty farty. Avoiding the struggle for justice sand peace by merely writing about it. Or saying that the only struggle is to 'express ourselves' while the world goes hang.

Poetry is an expression of many things, including the attempts to capture a scene, a feeling, a mood; sum up something beautiful in words; express love, joy; make the reader smile or laugh; become closer to God, attempt to express a feeling of the numinous - and so much more than in your definition. There are odes, sonnets, clerihews, free verse, limericks, ballads, epics, sagas, and so much more.

Poetry speaks for us when we cannot articulate something ourselves; a good poet has a turn of phrase that lingers in the mind and sums up the definition or the concept neatly, and in a way that makes you think. A good poem and a good quote will last you a lifetime and enrich you. They are an ancient, and noble tradition, and the mark of a civilized society.

There can be a joy to be found in discovering a new, beautiful, or thought-provoking way of looking at the world, and a pleasure and a comfort to be found in rediscovering old favourites, sometimes half remembered. I'm sorry you hate all of them.

Keats, on Autumn

Jenny Joseph's "Warning"

9th century Irish poem on winter

Posted by ken (# 2460) on :

quote:
Originally posted by leo:

I hate poetry. Arty farty.

I feel sorry for you. Some people are, unfortunately born blind or deaf. Few of them boast about it.

It must be impossible to read or understand the Bible if you don't get poetry. Or to understand liturgy.

quote:
Originally posted by leo:

Avoiding the struggle for justice sand peace by merely writing about it. Or saying that the only struggle is to 'express ourselves' while the world goes hang.

A few too many single malts? You are surely too intelligent to write bollocks like that while in possession of your faculties.

Posted by Ariston (# 10894) on :

Like many bloodless, boring, and unemotional logic-choppers, I find a fair bit of poetry a bit too sentimental for my taste—not bad, mind you, just a bit heavy on the overt emotion. Like I said, bloodless and boring.

So of course I like the stuff that uses obscure, complicated forms and extended conceits to hide powerful feeling behind walls of logic and cleverness. John Donne, anyone? Too clever by half, I'll grant you; if I hadn't written a thesis that involved Thomistic angelology, I would have never figured out the conceit behind "Air and Angels." However, the overwrought style forces you to engage with Donne, to enter his mind, to read his poems at a more than superficial level if you're going to read them at all; you can't half-read a Donne sonnet. Also, nobody does frighteningly calm and collected hurt, jealous rages like Donne in "The Apparition." Something about how he so carefully controls his conceit, manipulates such a complicated sonnet-based form with a really weird rhyme scheme, while channeling the thrashing, complex emotions of one who's just been scorned—well, only Donne could pull that off.

Also: Borges. While it helps a bit if you know about his philosophy (summary: thinking about something hard enough makes it real; trying to think like someone, like in trying to figure out their poetry, makes you them), "Elegy for a Park" still channels that longing for a place and time lost in memory, to reclaim what exists only in your mind—but when you understand it, you realize that this poem is remaking the lost park each time it is read, bringing it back into existence, that

quote:
We are time, the indivisible river,
are Uxmal, Carthage and the ruined
walls of the Romans and the lost
park that these lines commemorate.

Posted by Kaplan Corday (# 16119) on :

quote:
Originally posted by leo:
I hate poetry. Arty farty. Avoiding the struggle for justice sand peace by merely writing about it. Or saying that the only struggle is to 'express ourselves' while the world goes hang.

I hate poetry,
It's arty farty.
Rather than pay verse compliments to a tree,
I'll toe the line of the Party.

Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :

quote:
Originally posted by leo:
I hate poetry. Arty farty. Avoiding the struggle for justice sand peace by merely writing about it. Or saying that the only struggle is to 'express ourselves' while the world goes hang.

Poetry is words,
words have power.
Poetry foments revolution,
its words name the hour.

Posted by Ariston (# 10894) on :

Ah! That quote from Akhmatova! "Instead of a Preface," from Requiem, 1935-1940!

At dawn they came and took you away.
You were my dead; I walked behind...
Like the wives of Peter's troopers in Red Square
I'll stand and howl under the Kremlin towers.

Posted by Firenze (# 619) on :

... men ne cunnon
secgan tó sóðe seleraédenne
hæleð under heofenum hwá þaém hlæste onféng

(Men do not know - neither sage counsellors nor heroes under Heaven - who received that cargo)

From the opening passage of Beowulf - the ship with its load of treasure and a dead king drifting out in to the dark sea... Anytime I need a cold shiver I think of those lines.

I am having a mental image of leo interrupting a Viking feast to tell the skald that poetry is all arty-farty. It's the wonder of poetry that it can reach across 12 centuries - or 28 for Homer - and clench your heart. Other things civilisations leave behind may impress or puzzle us, but the poetry leaps like a live thing.

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

quote:
Originally posted by ken:
A few too many single malts? You are surely too intelligent to write bollocks like that while in possession of your faculties.

Ken, you know perfectly well that personal attacks are not permitted in Heaven. You're free to disagree with Leo's point of view, but please do so in a way that deals with the argument, not the person. And preferably, in a way that adds to the discussion.

And that reminder goes for anyone else who may be thinking of picking up this tangent.

Ariel
Heaven Host

Posted by Kaplan Corday (# 16119) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Firenze:
... men ne cunnon
secgan tó sóðe seleraédenne
hæleð under heofenum hwá þaém hlæste onféng

(Men do not know - neither sage counsellors nor heroes under Heaven - who received that cargo)

From the opening passage of Beowulf - the ship with its load of treasure and a dead king drifting out in to the dark sea... Anytime I need a cold shiver I think of those lines.

Thanks for that Firenze.

I have read Beowulf, but many years ago, and in translation.

The line carries some reminders of Tennyson's description of the passing of Arthur, but is far more wild and tragic and powerful - it makes Tennyson in comparison seem flat and safe.

Posted by Kaplan Corday (# 16119) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:

Also Yeats' beautiful poem, The Lake Isle of Innisfree.

It is beautiful, as is so much of Yeats's poetry despite his having been a complete fruitcake, but Evelyn Waugh has spoilt it for many of us by using it to take the piss in his The Loved One.

Posted by Kaplan Corday (# 16119) on :

My only lines of original poetry were written when I was about ten.

An old uncle died, and l received the school prize books from his boyhood, which consisted of G.A. Henty-style heroic fiction based on English history.

They inspired me to write a poem on the battle of Trafalgar, which began:

Twas in the year 1805
That our brave Nelson did deprive
The French, for whom success was sure,
Of five score of ships or more.

It is not the bad poetry which worries so much as its bizarre anachronicity – I must have been a weird child.

I also wrote a sonnet for my future wife when we started going out, which we can’t find, which is just as well, because it was bloody awful.

Here are some favourite lines from Philip Larkin:

…..Those flowers, that gate,
Those misty parks and motors, lacerate
Simply by being over; you
Contract my heart by looking out of date.

The “lacerate Simply by being over’ is perfect.

http://allpoetry.com/poem/8495747-Lines-On-A-Young-Ladys-Photograph-Album-by-Philip-Larkin

Posted by Firenze (# 619) on :

Which puts me in mind of Obvious Poetry : stuff that seems hackneyed now, but, when you first encountered it as a child, thrilled you to bits. You would even - well, I did - copy it out into exercise books. I once wrote out the entire Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam, not to mention The Garden of Proserpine -

Dead dreams of days forsaken,
Blind buds that snows have shaken,
Wild leaves that winds have taken,
Red strays of ruined springs.

I think I was very into fin d' siècle stuff when I was eleven. Then I cheered up a bit, and wrote out an awful lot of Chesterton -

Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far
Don John of Austria is going to the war,
Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold
In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold

To this day, I seldom go out on a cold, snowy morning but I think -

On Linden when the sun was low,
All bloodless lay the untrodden snow,
And dark as winter was the flow
Of Iser, rolling rapidly.

And that's - what - sixty years since opened the Dragon Book of English Verse on the likes of that?

Poetry - good, bad, indifferent - becomes part of you, the way you think and feel. It's not just what oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed, but rather you did not know, until you read poetry, what there was to express.

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Firenze:
I once wrote out the entire Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam...

I have a tiny little pocket version of the Fitzgerald translation that I bought at Foyles in Charing Cross Road when I was about 14. I memorized most of it, in instalments, on the evenings when I was waiting for a bus, usually late, to go to evening classes. I can still quote chunks of it.

The other poet who has accompanied me throughout most of my life has been TS Eliot, whose way with phrases and imagery is unparalleled. From The Wasteland and through many a commute ("unreal city, under the brown fog of a winter dawn/A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many...") through the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ("I have measured out my life in coffee spoons") to the loveliness of Usk (scroll down to the third on this page), he is quotable.

Posted by Curiosity killed ... (# 11770) on :

The one I memorised as a child was Cargoes - along with some Blake, more Masefield and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We kept being pushed to learn John Clare because he was the Northamptonshire poet, but although I read him, I didn't find the chords there I found in Hardy on the same subjects.

A more recent discovery is U A Fanthorpe. I first encountered her with Not My Best Side and went to the National Gallery to see the painting, but I keep tripping over her poems and still liking them:
Atlas, which starts:

quote:
There is a kind of love called maintenance
Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it;

Which checks the insurance, and doesn’t forget
The milkman; which remembers to plant bulbs;

and The Wicked Fairy at the Manger make me think.

Posted by Sioni Sais (# 5713) on :

Kaplan Corday alleges that Yeats was a fruitcake but there's a tradition of mental illness amongst poets, possibly worth a Purg thread of its own.

I discovered John Clare, the "Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" after leaving school (I didn't engage with poetry at school, and have exam failures to prove it) and his poetry, whether written before he was committed to various asylums or afterwards is powerful stuff, reminiscent of the seventeenth century metaphysicals though written in the industrial era.

Posted by L'organist (# 17338) on :

I found it mildly depressing that on World Poetry Day the Property supplement in The Times misquoted Wordsworth for a feature on waterside properties. According to them, Daffodils contains the line "Along the lake..".

Posted by Firenze (# 619) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Sioni Sais:
Kaplan Corday alleges that Yeats was a fruitcake but there's a tradition of mental illness amongst poets, possibly worth a Purg thread of its own.

The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact?

While there may have been some who were barking, the majority have held down day jobs as civil servants, theatrical managers, clergymen, Distributer of Stamps for Westmoreland, medical student etc - and, of course, Professional Writer.

Posted by Moo (# 107) on :

One of my favorite stanzas of poetry is from Byron's "The Isles of Greece".

A king sate on the rocky brow
Which looks o'er sea-born Salamis;
And ships, by thousands, lay below,
And men in nations;—all were his!
He counted them at break of day—
And when the sun set, where were they?

The rest of the poem has many good lines, but none as good as this.

Moo

Posted by North East Quine (# 13049) on :

I shared Firenze's youthful love of "The Garden of Proserpine" and, like Curiosity Killed, learned "Cargoes" off by heart at school.

My favourites include Eliot's "Journey of the Magi" and William Souter's "The Permanence of the Young Men."

Another I love, but which isn't online, is Bessie Craigmyle's "Old Letters" about discovering, whilst clearing her late father's papers, fifty years worth of letters from his University room-mate. It was written in the 1880s.

Posted by Firenze (# 619) on :

Someone I discovered at Uni was Frost. I love Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening because it is, on the face of it, almost a nothing poem, but it has this extraordinary undertow:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Posted by georgiaboy (# 11294) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Firenze:
-

of Chesterton -

Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far
Don John of Austria is going to the war,
Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold
In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold

Thanks for that, Firenze. I first enountered 'Lepanto' when it was read aloud (complete!) by a history professor on the anniversary of the battle. I've loved it ever since. I particularly like the characterizations of the sovereigns of Europe before the battle, and the cameo of Cervantes toward the end.

Posted by Firenze (# 619) on :

quote:
Originally posted by leo:
Avoiding the struggle for justice sand peace by merely writing about it.

Really? Would Peterloo have become so iconic without The Masque of Anarchy?

Would we understand the pity of war without Owen, Sassoon, Thomas and Rosenberg?

Mandelstam? Akhmatova? Ask them what 'mere' writing brought.

Posted by Kaplan Corday (# 16119) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Moo:
One of my favorite stanzas of poetry is from Byron's "The Isles of Greece".

A king sate on the rocky brow
Which looks o'er sea-born Salamis;
And ships, by thousands, lay below,
And men in nations;—all were his!
He counted them at break of day—
And when the sun set, where were they?

The rest of the poem has many good lines, but none as good as this.

Moo

Echoes of Shelley's Ozymandias, which could also be added to Firenze's list.

Posted by fletcher christian (# 13919) on :

I quite like Li Po

Posted by Drifting Star (# 12799) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Firenze:

quote:
Originally posted by leo:
Avoiding the struggle for justice sand peace by merely writing about it.
Really? Would Peterloo have become so iconic without The Masque of Anarchy?

Would we understand the pity of war without Owen, Sassoon, Thomas and Rosenberg?

Mandelstam? Akhmatova? Ask them what 'mere' writing brought.

And let's add Studdert Kennedy, the pacifist in the trenches struggling against the horror to take Christ's peace and love into the fires of hell, whose poetry was a release for him, and is a gift to us.

I've just spent a very long time trying to find one verse of his to post here, but every truly striking verse needed to be read with the others around it. I've settled on this, from the poem that gave me my username.

Thy radiancy of glory strikes me dumb,
Yet cries within my soul for power to raise
Such miracles of music as would sum thy splendour in a phrase,
Storing it safe for all the years to come.

Most of his poetry is here, but you'll have to scroll through as the links on the index don't appear to be working.

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

Li Po rocks.

Posted by ken (# 2460) on :

Tiny extract from what is arguably the best poem from the man who was probably America's greates poet of the twentieth century. (And at least one of his likley rivals comes from the same town - what is it about paterson, New Jersey - is there something in the water?)

It needs to be read aloud. All 350 mostly long lines of it. This is a man who knows how the English language works.

See From Kaddish for Naomi by Allen Ginsberg.

quote:
Originally posted by Firenze:

quote:
Originally posted by leo:
Avoiding the struggle for justice sand peace by merely writing about it.
Really? Would Peterloo have become so iconic without The Masque of Anarchy?

Would we understand the pity of war without Owen, Sassoon, Thomas and Rosenberg?

Mandelstam? Akhmatova? Ask them what 'mere' writing brought.

Well, yes. And what about John Ball, John Milton, John Bunyan, Robert Burns, William Blake, Pushkin, Shelley, Byron, Heine, Gorki, Joe Hill, Langston Hughes, Woody Guthrie, Hamish Henderson, Victor Jara? And loads more

(let's ALL just go with four lines, ok?)

[ 17. March 2014, 21:04: Message edited by: Firenze ]

Posted by Sir Kevin (# 3492) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:

9th century Irish poem on winter

I liked that. I liked that a lot!

Posted by no prophet (# 15560) on :

The Canadian First Nations poet E. Pauline Johnson. Erie Waters. Her poems are more than 100 years old now, she died in 1913, so out of copyright.

"A dash of yellow sand,
Wind-scattered and sun-tanned;
Some waves that curl and cream along the margin of the strand; "

Which has been repeated about many a pristine northern lake.

Her poem Brier contains an Easter thought;

"My selfish prayers, I ask but one thing now,
That these harsh hands of mine add not unto
The crown of thorns upon your bleeding brow. "

Poetry, like other art, is life sustaining and also can be challenging. Without the poetry of liturgy, perhaps I would be dead, or feel dead at least. But it does take time and patience for some verse, more work than some are willing when with smart phone in hand and the perfect playlist plugging up their ears and brains.

Posted by HCH (# 14313) on :

I am fond of much of Kipling's verse, such as one
of his memorials (in this case to Canadian dead in the Great War):

"From little towns in a far land we came,
To save our honour and a world aflame.
By little towns in a far land we sleep;
And trust that world we won for you to keep."

Posted by Firenze (# 619) on :

He had his moments, Kipling.

They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know

The Way Through the Woods

Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :

Kipling: Epitaphs of the War 1914-18

Common Form:
If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.

(Kipling's son died in the war.)

Posted by St. Gwladys (# 14504) on :

I love "The Warsong of the men of Dinas Fawr" by Thomas Love Peacock:

The mountain sheep arer sweeter
But the valley sheep are fatter.
We therefore deem it meeter
To carry off the latter.

I first learned it in junior school, and Carreg Cennen in Carmarthenshire would be a suitable stronghold for the warrior chieftain.
I also like some of the poetry of Idris davies, who was lkocal to where I live, in particular "Sad bells of Rhymney" and "Maggie Fach"

Posted by Ariston (# 10894) on :

I've always had mixed feelings about Kipling. On the one hand, he can be read as a right imperialist tosser who needs to be condemned as Patriarchy Apologist #1. On the other, he can be read as something else. On the third, I absolutely hate "If," though that may be as much the contexts in which it's used as anything else. On the fourth, if his verse isn't just musical like nothing else—yes, even sing-song, but song!—I don't know what is.

Posted by Porridge (# 15405) on :

quote:
Originally posted by leo:
I hate poetry.

Here's a cure for that.

quote:
Originally posted by leo:
Arty farty.

Not this one.

Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Ariston:
On the third, I absolutely hate "If," though that may be as much the contexts in which it's used as anything else.

Auden talks about treating poetry as magic. Someone comes across a poem, and instead of reading it, thinks if everybody else read this they would see how right I am.
Thus (Auden's examples):
If, as magic: old school public schoolteacher reads If, thinks this is just the sort of thing to give the boys. If the teacher had really read the poem he would think, I have never staked my whole fortune on one throw of pitch and toss; I am not nor will ever be a man.
The Waste Land (*), as magic: schoolboy reads and thinks, if only everyone read it they would realise why I'm misunderstood and can't be expected to do any work. If the boy had really read it he would think, I am a senile hermaphrodite.

(*) This is back in the mid-twentieth century. Ten years ago it would have been Radiohead.

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

quote:
Originally posted by leo:
I hate poetry.

Here's a good poem.

Posted by Curiosity killed ... (# 11770) on :

I read If thinking of Stalky from Stalky & Co and think that's possibly what Kipling was trying to epitomise. Kipling was Beetle. And they didn't think Stalky was particularly sane in his doings.

Kipling's poems often appear interleaved between the short stories in his books and they can be a bit of light relief from the intensity of the previous story, but yes, real ditties many of them.

Posted by Kaplan Corday (# 16119) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Curiosity killed ...:
I read If thinking of Stalky from Stalky & Co and think that's possibly what Kipling was trying to epitomise. Kipling was Beetle. And they didn't think Stalky was particularly sane in his doings.

Kipling actually wrote If... in honour of Starr Jameson, of Jameson Raid fame who, whatever else you might think of him, did risk his life and career on "one turn of pitch-and-toss".

Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on :

Poetry can be deeply moving. This has always moved me like no other.

Posted by aunt jane (# 10139) on :

Are we allowed to mention French poetry? Or Welsh?
If Kipling's "If" really is the best that can be offered from English poetry, we are really in a sorry state.
What about some Shakespeare? Or TS Eliot - but then, with Eliot, before or after he became a Christian?

Posted by Jengie Jon (# 273) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
Poetry can be deeply moving. This has always moved me like no other.

Interestingly Professor John Carey cited it this morning on Midweek for much the same reason.

Jengie

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

quote:
Originally posted by aunt jane:
Are we allowed to mention French poetry? Or Welsh?

Absolutely - in translation. "World Poetry Day" is an international event. You’re welcome to provide some links to your own favourite poems. I was going to get to Baudelaire eventually, but via Cavafy, from Alexandria, and Khalil Gibran, and possibly Rumi, and some others.

quote:
If Kipling's "If" really is the best that can be offered from English poetry, we are really in a sorry state.
What about some Shakespeare? Or TS Eliot - but then, with Eliot, before or after he became a Christian?

It’s about people’s own personal choices - the poems they themselves like the best, or that have made the most impact. And if you look upthread, you’ll see that I myself am a fan of TS Eliot.

Posted by Firenze (# 619) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
Poetry can be deeply moving. This has always moved me like no other.

Another of the same heart-wringing ilk.

Posted by Alaric the Goth (# 511) on :

This is the only poem I've had published:
Keep Britain Tidy
Sharpthorn at the roadside
Strewn with rubbish, grey with grime.

Ash-spring on the wasteland
Passed by blind ones
Broken-branched, bruised.
"The wasteland's a disgrace
Tidy up, grub out, straighten"
But I saw the shoots in Spring
The late leaves after the grey days
And I felt sane, and knew
That at least my eyes
Were still open.

Board behind the broken fence
'Open space, woodland, amenity'
But here had been butterflies
Grey limestone from a Permian sea
Small plants of Alpine peaks.
Now there is the board
Beneath it grass; below grass, garbage
Burying blue wings, dead flowers, grey rock.

The thorn remains, untidy, but untidied.
The tyre tracks cover the bare and barren space.

AE

Posted by fletcher christian (# 13919) on :

Angelou Maya is very good, with a strong social message, and I quite like Gwendolyn Brooks although, she can be a little dark at times.

Posted by Porridge (# 15405) on :

This poem never fails to stir me.

Posted by Kaplan Corday (# 16119) on :

With rue my heart is laden

Reminiscent of Shakespeare's "Golden lads and girls all must / As chimney-sweepers, come to dust".

I am a little embarrassed at loving Housman, because I am aware of his faults.

However, Douglas Gresham claims that he once came across his step-father C.S. Lewis and mother Joy both in tears while reading Housman together, so I am in good company!

[ 21. March 2014, 05:40: Message edited by: Firenze ]

Posted by Kaplan Corday (# 16119) on :

To cheer us up, here is the immortal William McGonagall's The Tay Bridge Disaster.

http://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk/gems/the-tay-bridge-disaster

[ 21. March 2014, 03:37: Message edited by: Kaplan Corday ]

Posted by Firenze (# 619) on :

Houseman is that teensy bit facile.

Though I like Is my team ploughing as sung by Bryn Terfel - where he gets the reedy voice of the ghost and then lets loose the full bass baritone for the living man.

And you do have to like Kingsmill's parody - What, still alive at twenty-two?

Posted by aunt jane (# 10139) on :

William Shakespeare, one of the Sonnets I think number 18

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

[ 21. March 2014, 08:25: Message edited by: Firenze ]

Posted by Firenze (# 619) on :

116.

Edited the post because, having asked posters to use links/max quotes of 4 lines, it behoves us to apply that equally, irrespective of how irreproachably dead and out of copyright a poet may be.

Firenze
Heaven Host

Posted by aunt jane (# 10139) on :

Seems a pity. I was going to put up some TS Eliot (not one of the nasty ones) or Baudelaire, but cannot possibly do justice with only 4 lines and can only find them in printed books. Could I put up some more of my own compositions I wonder? Perhaps not in Heaven

Posted by georgiaboy (# 11294) on :

While I agree with all the reservations/objections to 'If', I feel that much of Kipling's shortcomings can be forgiven because of 'Recessional,' written as a counter-blast to the jingoism generated by Q Vic's jubilee.

Posted by Ian Climacus (# 944) on :

Thank you all; I do find poetry speaks to me in a deep way but I am rather ignorant of what is out there. I did study Donne in school so I raise my hand Ariston; the one that speaks to me often is Holy Sonnet 14 [Batter my heart, three-person'd God]:

quote:
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy ;
...
Except you enthrall me, (I) never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

When I travel I like to read novels and works from local authors [in translation if in a non-native English land], and I rather liked Lebanese poet Jawdat R Haydar's The Temple in Baalbeck after I'd visited it, with its calls from the past to the tourists of today; and he has a broad range of subjects. But going back to my first sentence above I like Verse with its description of poems as deep and vast, and light leading us:

quote:
Bless them, illustrious poets of yore,
Who have engineered and left at the shore
A lighthouse of poesy, yesterday,
A glare of the past, that will show us the way

Posted by QLib (# 43) on :

Here's Yeats, pretending to agree with leo, and yet showing why he's so wrong:

I think it better that in times like these
A poet keep his mouth shut...

Fruitcake is way too harsh IMHO; I would say weird, but in a totally acceptable way, for a poet.

Posted by Welease Woderwick (# 10424) on :

That Yeats for some reason reminded me of this little snippet of bitterness from Siegfried Sassoon - I first came across it in my early teens and it has resonated within me ever since.

Posted by Kaplan Corday (# 16119) on :

quote:
Originally posted by QLib:
Here's Yeats, pretending to agree with leo, and yet showing why he's so wrong:

I think it better that in times like these
A poet keep his mouth shut...

Fruitcake is way too harsh IMHO; I would say weird, but in a totally acceptable way, for a poet.

Scarcely an overstatement, I would have thought.

Yeats was into spiritualism, ouija boards, occultism, mysticism, séances, astrology, Hermeticism – the lot.

C.S. Lewis revered him as a poet, but used terms such as “insanity” and “mumbo-jumbo” in describing him.

A more recent admirer of his poetry, Clive James, in his Slouching Toward Yeats, used expressions such as “flim flam”, “self-deceiving boondoggle”, “rickety paranormal hobbyhorse” and “spiritualist clap-trap”.

“Fruitcake”?

Like another Clive, I “stand astonished at my own moderation”.

Posted by Firenze (# 619) on :

Tbf, there was a lot of it about in the 1890s. You'd forgive him a lot for this though.

Though he was shrewd enough to recognise his circus animals for what they were. And I find myself not infrequently remarking -

Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

Posted by Kaplan Corday (# 16119) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Firenze:
You'd forgive him a lot for this though.

Yep.

Or choose to ignore it, anyway.

Posted by QLib (# 43) on :

Lots of people indulge in fruitcake and ride around on rickety hobby horses - doesn't mean that fruitcake is what they are made of. And, with all due respect to the Blessed Clive, a man who poured a great deal of time and energy into imagining how Christ might appear on other planets, is hardly in a position to point the finger. And Yeats undoubtedly understood fanaticism.

Posted by Firenze (# 619) on :

...Out of Ireland have we come.
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.

I think Auden understood -

. You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

In Memory of W B Yeats

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Kaplan Corday:
Yeats was into spiritualism, ouija boards, occultism, mysticism, séances, astrology, Hermeticism – the lot.

It's not the stuff of which fruitcakes are made. There are plenty of New Age types around today who might share his interests. Also, as has been said, it was fashionable at that time.

Anyway, back to poetry. Cavafy wrote some good ones.

Candles
A Prince of Western Libya

Posted by Firenze (# 619) on :

The first one reminds me of Mirror by Plath.

The last two lines constitute what I think is described as a Brilliancy.

Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :

When it comes to fruitcakery Yeats has nothing on Blake. And Blake was a genius because he was a fruitcake, and a fruitcake because he was a genius, sometimes at the same time.

Posted by JFH (# 14794) on :

I personally love If by Kipling. I'm not quite sure what contexts it is usually attached to in the English-speaking world however, and I realise that it could be something kitschy there - I first came across it in a brilliant translation to Swedish and am still surprised to find out other people know of it, as it like most poetry is entirely unknown in my part of the world (Scandinavia).

I would link stuff if I could only find decent English translations, or any at all.

Posted by Jengie Jon (# 273) on :

My response to Leo was to look for Still I rise by Maya Angelou and because I can have four lines then how about

quote:
Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

More seriously while volunteering on Iona someone introduced me to the poems of Mary Oliver. I recently came across a recording of her reading Wild Geese which is perhaps her best known. It is the sort of poem where different things come out at different times so at the moment I am picking the following four lines

quote:

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes

Jengie

[ 24. March 2014, 17:49: Message edited by: Firenze ]

Posted by Jengie Jon (# 273) on :

Apologies for that mess.

Jengie

Posted by Firenze (# 619) on :

Sorted.

Posted by Jengie Jon (# 273) on :

Thank you.

Jengie

Posted by Kaplan Corday (# 16119) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
When it comes to fruitcakery Yeats has nothing on Blake.

Blake had a fraction fewer nuts and raisins, I would argue, but yes, a close call.

Blake’s idiosyncrasies are a bit more endearing than Yeats’s, from happening to notice God peering through his window, to greeting guests while sitting naked with in the garden with his wife, as Adam and Eve, while reciting Paradise Lost.

Blake’s Jerusalem has suffered from the Proms and Billy Bragg, but The Tiger still works, and “mind-forged manacles” is unforgettable.

The “Like a fiend hid in a cloud” of Infant Sorrow (“My father groan’d! my mother wept. / Into the dangerous world I leapt”) is an improvement on Wordsworth’s “trailing clouds of glory do we come”.

[ 25. March 2014, 03:17: Message edited by: Kaplan Corday ]

Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Kaplan Corday:
The “Like a fiend hid in a cloud” of Infant Sorrow (“My father groan’d! my mother wept. / Into the dangerous world I leapt”) is an improvement on Wordsworth’s “trailing clouds of glory do we come”.

Wordsworth's passage was an expression of Wordsworth's experience; Blake's an expression of Blake's worldview. One would want to keep both, although Wordsworth the author is a more likeable character. (Wordsworth the person was it appears a git.)

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