Poetry

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I'm starting this because I very nearly high jacked the equine obits thread by putting this up but An Capall inspired me :lol: I love Yeats and this has got to be in my top ten .

FAR off, most secret, and inviolate Rose,  
Enfold me in my hour of hours; where those  
Who sought thee in the Holy Sepulchre,  
Or in the wine vat, dwell beyond the stir  
And tumult of defeated dreams; and deep          5
Among pale eyelids, heavy with the sleep  
Men have named beauty. Thy great leaves enfold  
The ancient beards, the helms of ruby and gold  
Of the crowned Magi; and the king whose eyes  
Saw the Pierced Hands and Rood of elder rise   10
In druid vapour and make the torches dim;  
Till vain frenzy awoke and he died; and him  
Who met Fand walking among flaming dew  
By a gray shore where the wind never blew,  
And lost the world and Emer for a kiss;   15
And him who drove the gods out of their liss,  
And till a hundred morns had flowered red,  
Feasted and wept the barrows of his dead;  
And the proud dreaming king who flung the crown  
And sorrow away, and calling bard and clown   20
Dwelt among wine-stained wanderers in deep woods;  
And him who sold tillage, and house, and goods,  
And sought through lands and islands numberless years,  
Until he found with laughter and with tears,  
A woman, of so shining loveliness,   25
That men threshed corn at midnight by a tress,  
A little stolen tress. I, too, await  
The hour of thy great wind of love and hate.  
When shall the stars be blown about the sky,  
Like the sparks blown out of a smithy, and die?   30
Surely thine hour has come, thy great wind blows,  
Far off, most secret, and inviolate Rose?
 
Here's nice one. Bit girly though.

When You are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
 
Shakespeares sonnet 116 :D

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
 
I like Christina Rossetti and this is one of my favourites. Some may find it a bit depressing but I find it quite comforting.


Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann'd:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad
 
That's a lovely poem and not girly at all . Last thing you could accuse Yeats of being . I found an anthology last week when I was rummaging in the loft for other books and I've been re-reading it ever since . Here's another one that's definitely not girly

Leda and the Swan

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?
 
And here is one that Alan Morgan did not like much when i posted it - after that fascinating film about Byron.

SHE walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that 's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow'd to that tender light 5
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair'd the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face; 10
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow, 15
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!


And another great poem :




Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of "Spiritus Mundi"
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
 
One of my most prized posessions is a signed Brian Patten book. This is my favourite of his, A Blade Of Grass.

You ask for a poem.
I offer you a blade of grass.
You say it is not good enough.
You ask for a poem.

I say this blade of grass will do.
It has dressed itself in frost,
It is more immediate
Than any image of my making.

You say it is not a poem,
It is a blade of grass and grass
Is not quite good enough.
I offer you a blade of grass.

You are indignant.
You say it is too easy to offer grass.
It is absurd.
Anyone can offer a blade of grass.

You ask for a poem.
And so I write you a tragedy about
How a blade of grass
Becomes more and more difficult to offer,

And about how as you grow older
A blade of grass
Becomes more difficult to accept.
 
And how I am sure we all feel from time to time

Toads by Larkin

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison -
Just for paying a few bills!
That's out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losels, loblolly-men, louts-
They don't end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines-
they seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets - and yet
No one actually starves.

Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that's the stuff
That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
My way of getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.

I don't say, one bodies the other
One's spiritual truth;
But I do say it's hard to lose either,
When you have both.
 
On the subject of Larkin I love his poem 'At Grass'.

The eye can hardly pick them out
From the cold shade they shelter in,
Till wind distresses tail and mane;
Then one crops grass, and moves about
- The other seeming to look on -
And stands anonymous again

Yet fifteen years ago, perhaps
Two dozen distances surficed
To fable them: faint afternoons
Of Cups and Stakes and Handicaps,
Whereby their names were artificed
To inlay faded, classic Junes -

Silks at the start: against the sky
Numbers and parasols: outside,
Squadrons of empty cars, and heat,
And littered grass : then the long cry
Hanging unhushed till it subside
To stop-press columns on the street.

Do memories plague their ears like flies?
They shake their heads. Dusk brims the shadows.
Summer by summer all stole away,
The starting-gates, the crowd and cries -
All but the unmolesting meadows.
Almanacked, their names live; they

Have slipped their names, and stand at ease,
Or gallop for what must be joy,
And not a fieldglass sees them home,
Or curious stop-watch prophesies:
Only the grooms, and the grooms boy,
With bridles in the evening come.
 
Glad to see people responding to this . I love Yeats because he's romantic but he has an edge and he's visceral , his poetry is so evocative . I love Phillip Larkin too who is totally different in style but he's so real
I love this poem because it's real life and it's honest


Next, Please
By Philip Larkin

Always too eager for the future,
Pick up bad habits of expectancy.
Something is always approaching, every day
Till then we say,


Watching from a bluff the tiny, clear,
Sparkling armada of promises draw near.
How slow they are!
And how much time they waste,
Refusing to make haste!

Yet still they leave us holding wretched stalks
Of disappointment, for, though nothing balks
Each big approach, leaning with brasswork prinked,
Each rope distinct,

Flagged, and the figurehead with golden tits
Arching our way, it never anchors; it's
No sooner present than it turns to past.
Right to the last

We think each one will heave to and unload
All good into our lives, all we are owed
For waiting so devoutly and so long.
But we are wrong:


Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.
 
My English teacher at school hated Philip Larkins work and tried hard to get me to stop reading it! He said he was boring and depressive, to which I replied "No, that's Thomas Hardy you've just described". I probably did all the Larkin coursework that I did just to spite him :lol:
 
Meanwhile back to the sonnets and as the rain fell this evening i thought of the fourth line

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 owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
 
Originally posted by Griffin@Aug 8 2006, 10:03 PM
My English teacher at school hated Philip Larkins work and tried hard to get me to stop reading it! He said he was boring and depressive, to which I replied "No, that's Thomas Hardy you've just described". I probably did all the Larkin coursework that I did just to spite him :lol:
Click to expand...
Not Faringdon Community College I hope ?
 
Sonnets are lovely but I don't think they have the relevance that Larkins work has. I'm not dissing them but I'm sure you did Larkin Ardross. Did his stuff now get you at all ?
 
Originally posted by Ardross+Aug 8 2006, 10:17 PM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (Ardross @ Aug 8 2006, 10:17 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-Griffin@Aug 8 2006, 10:03 PM
My English teacher at school hated Philip Larkins work and tried hard to get me to stop reading it! He said he was boring and depressive, to which I replied "No, that's Thomas Hardy you've just described". I probably did all the Larkin coursework that I did just to spite him :lol:
Click to expand...
Not Faringdon Community College I hope ? [/b][/quote]
No, a ghastly place called Leon in Milton Keynes. Mr Collins was short, bald and really loved himself. I wonder if he's still there.........
 
Larkin has always got under my skin Sols but Shakespeare is timeless .He speaks to all of us of each and every generation . Whether we can listen in the modern world is another matter of course .
 
My favourite at times is Patrick Kavanagh. For those who don't know of him he was a man of the soil from the border, who came to 'bohemian' Dublin and was so out of sorts with the world he became almost grumpy enough to be a moderator.

Next time you are in Dublin, say for a game at Landsdowne or staying at the Berkely Court - his memorial is a seat on the Canal, which he loved. It is foretold in this poem.

Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin

O commemorate me where there is water,
Canal water, preferably, so stilly
Greeny at the heart of summer. Brother
Commemorate me thus beautifully
Where by a lock niagarously roars
The falls for those who sit in the tremendous silence
Of mid-July. No one will speak in prose
Who finds his way to these Parnassian islands.
A swan goes by head low with many apologies,
Fantastic light looks through the eyes of bridges -
And look! A barge comes bringing from Athy
And other far-flung towns mythologies.
O commemorate me with no hero-courageous
Tomb - just a canal-bank seat for the passer-by.
 
More Yeats:

"He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven"

HAD I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
 
Another one

Cowper this time:

The poplars are felled, farewell to the shade
And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade:
The winds play no longer and sing in the leaves,
Nor Ouse on his bosom their image receives.

Twelve years have elapsed since I first took a view
Of my favourite field, and the bank where they grew,
And now in the grass behold they are laid,
And the tree is my seat that once lent me a shade.

The blackbird has fled to another retreat
Where the hazels afford him a screen from the heat;
And the scene where his melody charmed me before
Resounds with his sweet-flowing ditty no more.

My fugitive years are all hasting away,
And I must ere long lie as lowly as they,
With a turf on my breast and a stone at my head,
Ere another such grove shall arise in its stead.

'Tis a sight to engage me, if anything can,
To muse on the perishing pleasures of man;
Short-lived as we are, our enjoyments, I see,
Have a still shorter date, and die sooner than we.
 
Fair enough Ardross . It's not a competitive sport . Shakespeare is timeless , The quality of mercy is not strained .
 
Shakespeare is for me a marvel . Whenever I get time to read any or to see a play - I wish I had time for more.
 
I agree . I don't mean to take him lightly .Sometimes my mood suits Larkin better . One of the most evocative and poignant poems I know is Faith Healing . Absolutely crippling poem . Brutal and touching at the same time . I suppose it's only his view but he sums up the desperation and need so well and even if he's only partly right he hit on something . He was a perceptive man .

Slowly the women file to where he stands
Upright in rimless glasses, silver hair,
Dark suit, white collar. Stewards tirelessly
Persuade them onwards to his voice and hands,
Within whose warm spring rain of loving care
Each dwells some twenty seconds. Now, dear child,
What's wrong, the deep American voice demands,
And, scarcely pausing, goes into a prayer
Directing God about this eye, that knee.
Their heads are clasped abruptly; then, exiled

Like losing thoughts, they go in silence; some
Sheepishly stray, not back into their lives
Just yet; but some stay stiff, twitching and loud
With deep hoarse tears, as if a kind of dumb
And idiot child within them still survives
To re-awake at kindness, thinking a voice
At last calls them alone, that hands have come
To lift and lighten; and such joy arrives
Their thick tongues blort, their eyes squeeze grief, a crowd
Of huge unheard answers jam and rejoice -

What's wrong! Moustached in flowered frocks they shake:
By now, all's wrong. In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps
As all they might have done had they been loved.
That nothing cures. An immense slackening ache,
As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps,
Spreads slowly through them - that, and the voice above
Saying Dear child, and all time has disproved.
 
Originally posted by an capall@Aug 8 2006, 10:41 PM
My favourite at times is Patrick Kavanagh. For those who don't know of him he was a man of the soil from the border, who came to 'bohemian' Dublin and was so out of sorts with the world he became almost grumpy enough to be a moderator.

Next time you are in Dublin, say for a game at Landsdowne or staying at the Berkely Court - his memorial is a seat on the Canal, which he loved. It is foretold in this poem.

Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin

O commemorate me where there is water,
Canal water, preferably, so stilly
Greeny at the heart of summer. Brother
Commemorate me thus beautifully
Where by a lock niagarously roars
The falls for those who sit in the tremendous silence
Of mid-July. No one will speak in prose
Who finds his way to these Parnassian islands.
A swan goes by head low with many apologies,
Fantastic light looks through the eyes of bridges -
And look! A barge comes bringing from Athy
And other far-flung towns mythologies.
O commemorate me with no hero-courageous
Tomb - just a canal-bank seat for the passer-by.
Click to expand...
Of The Great Hunger fame ?
 
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