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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: World Poetry Day
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Alaric the Goth
Shipmate
# 511
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Posted
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
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'Angels and demons dancing in my head,
Lunatics and monsters underneath my bed' ('Totem', Rush)
Posts: 3322 | From: West Thriding | Registered: Jun 2001
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fletcher christian
Mutinous Seadog
# 13919
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Posted
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.
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'God is love insaturable, love impossible to describe'
Staretz Silouan
Posts: 5235 | From: a prefecture | Registered: Jul 2008
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Porridge
Shipmate
# 15405
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Posted
This poem never fails to stir me.
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Spiggott: Everything I've ever told you is a lie, including that.
Moon: Including what?
Spiggott: That everything I've ever told you is a lie.
Moon: That's not true!
Posts: 3925 | From: Upper right corner | Registered: Jan 2010
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Kaplan Corday
Shipmate
# 16119
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Posted
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 ]
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Firenze
Ordinary decent pagan
# 619
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Posted
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?
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Firenze
Ordinary decent pagan
# 619
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Posted
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
Posts: 17302 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Jun 2001
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aunt jane
Shipmate
# 10139
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Posted
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
Posts: 97 | From: South East of England | Registered: Aug 2005
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georgiaboy
Shipmate
# 11294
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Posted
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.
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You can't retire from a calling.
Posts: 1675 | From: saint meinrad, IN | Registered: Apr 2006
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Ian Climacus
Liturgical Slattern
# 944
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Posted
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 ;
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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
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Welease Woderwick
Sister Incubus Nightmare
# 10424
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Posted
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.
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I give thanks for unknown blessings already on their way.
Fancy a break in South India?
Accessible Homestay Guesthouse in Central Kerala, contact me for details
What part of Matt. 7:1 don't you understand?
Posts: 48139 | From: 1st on the right, straight on 'til morning | Registered: Sep 2005
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Kaplan Corday
Shipmate
# 16119
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Posted
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”.
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Firenze
Ordinary decent pagan
# 619
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Posted
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.
Posts: 17302 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Jun 2001
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Kaplan Corday
Shipmate
# 16119
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Firenze:
You'd forgive him a lot for this though.
Yep.
Or choose to ignore it, anyway.
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QLib
Bad Example
# 43
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Posted
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.
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Tradition is the handing down of the flame, not the worship of the ashes Gustav Mahler.
Posts: 8913 | From: Page 28 | Registered: May 2001
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Firenze
Ordinary decent pagan
# 619
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Posted
...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
Posts: 17302 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Jun 2001
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Ariel
Shipmate
# 58
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Posted
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
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Firenze
Ordinary decent pagan
# 619
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Posted
The first one reminds me of Mirror by Plath.
The last two lines constitute what I think is described as a Brilliancy.
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
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.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
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An die Freude
Shipmate
# 14794
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Posted
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.
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"I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable."
Walt Whitman
Formerly JFH
Posts: 851 | From: Proud Socialist Monarchy of Sweden | Registered: May 2009
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Jengie jon
Semper Reformanda
# 273
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Posted
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 ]
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"To violate a persons ability to distinguish fact from fantasy is the epistemological equivalent of rape." Noretta Koertge
Back to my blog
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Jengie jon
Semper Reformanda
# 273
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Posted
Apologies for that mess.
Jengie
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"To violate a persons ability to distinguish fact from fantasy is the epistemological equivalent of rape." Noretta Koertge
Back to my blog
Posts: 20894 | From: city of steel, butterflies and rainbows | Registered: May 2001
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Jengie jon
Semper Reformanda
# 273
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Posted
Thank you.
Jengie
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"To violate a persons ability to distinguish fact from fantasy is the epistemological equivalent of rape." Noretta Koertge
Back to my blog
Posts: 20894 | From: city of steel, butterflies and rainbows | Registered: May 2001
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Kaplan Corday
Shipmate
# 16119
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Posted
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 ]
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
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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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
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