Poetry. (2 Viewers)

[irene adler]

unsurprising. Celan would tempt me into learning German, but first priority is Spanish for the writing of Arturo Perez-Reverte, my love my literary love, my future husband.
&that Putin description was more to scare the girl, but you must admit he's the most intriguing leader around.
ah, Russian faded grandeur - at least we have mod electives to satisfy; but to visit? -first must be Paris, we owe ourselves.

for the sake of relevance [beat poetry, just for your sake]:

Mexican Loneliness - Kerouac

And I am an unhappy stranger
grooking in the streets of Mexico-
My friends have died on me, my
lovers disappeared, my whores banned,
my bed rocked and heaved by
earthquake - and no holy weed
to get high by candlelight
and dream - only fumes of buses,
dust storms, and maids peeking at me
thru a hole in the door
secretly drilled to watch
masturbators fuck pillows -
I am the Gargoyle
of Our Lady
dreaming in space
gray mist dreams -
My face is pointed towards Napoleon
-- I have no form --
My address book is full of RIPs
I have no value in the food,
at home without honour, -
My only friend is an old fag
without a typewriter
Who, if he's my friend,
I'll be buggered.
I have some mayonnaise left,
a whole unwanted bottle of oil,
peasants washing my sky light,
a nut clearing his throat
In the bathroom next to mine
a hundred times a da
Sharing my common ceiling -
If I get drunk I get thirsty
- if I walk my foot breaks down
- if I smile my mask's a farce
- if I cry I'm just a child -
- if I remember I'm a liar
- if I write the writing's done -
- if I die the dying's over -
- if I live the dying's just begun -
- if I wait the waiting's longer
- if I go the going's gone -
- if I sleep the bliss is heavy -
the bliss is heavy on my lids
- if I go to cheap movies
the bedbugs get me -
Expensive movies I can't afford
- if I do nothing
Nothing does.

 

[picaresque]

hmm. paris. ok -- now my brain just ran away from me. do not mention that city unless you want me to grin like clown on narcotics and float around the house, mmmk?

and wow. how kind of you to accommodate my love of the beat poets. >facepalm<

 

[irene adler]

<smirk> I do my best...


NIGHT RAY --Celan

Most brightly of all burned the hair of my evening loved one:
to her I send the coffin of lightest wood.
Waves billow round it as round the bed of our dream in Rome;
it wears a white wig as I do and speaks hoarsely:
it talks as I do when I grant admittance to hearts.
It knows a French song about love, I sang it in autumn
when I stopped as a tourist in Lateland and wrote my letters to morning.

A fine boat is that coffin carved in the coppice of feelings.
I too drift in it downbloodstream, younger still than your eye.
Now you are young as a bird dropped dead in March snow,
now it comes to you, sings you its love song from France.
You are light: you will sleep through my spring till it's over.
I am lighter:
in front of strangers I sing.

 

[Gregor Samsa]

John Keats-Ode on a Grecian Urn
I
Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme;
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loath?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

II
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone;
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kidd,
Though winning near the goal-yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

III
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearie'd,
Forever piping songs forever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
Forever warm and still to be enjoyed,
Forever panting, and forever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

IV
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands dressed?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets forevermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

V
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity; Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'that is all
Ye know on earth, and all you need to know.

 

[Gregor Samsa]

T.S Elliot-Preludes
1
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o'clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days,
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps,
And then the lighting of the lamps.

2
The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.
With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.

3
You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed's edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.

4
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o'clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling;
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

 

[eviltama]

Shakespear - Sonnet LVII.

BEING your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do, till you require.
Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour,
Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,
Nor think the bitterness of absence sour
When you have bid your servant once adieu;
Nor dare I question with my jealous thought
Where you may be, or your affairs suppose,
But, like a sad slave, stay and think of nought,
Save, where you are how happy you make those.
So true a fool is love that in your will,
Though you do anything, he thinks no ill.

 

[eviltama]

These are Keats poems i like.. most are sorta long so i've linked them for you so they dont clutter up the forum too much.

John Keats. 17951821

Ode to a Nightingale http://www.bartleby.com/101/624.html

La Belle Dame Sans Merci http://www.bartleby.com/106/193.html

To Autumn http://www.bartleby.com/101/627.html

William Blake - Auguries of Innocence http://www.bartleby.com/236/60.html


"THE SUN HAS LONG BEEN SET" - William Wordsworth.

THE sun has long been set,
The stars are out by twos and threes,
The little birds are piping yet
Among the bushes and trees;
There's a cuckoo, and one or two thrushes,
And a far-off wind that rushes,
And a sound of water that gushes,
And the cuckoo's sovereign cry
Fills all the hollow of the sky.
Who would "go parading"
In London, "and masquerading,"
On such a night of June
With that beautiful soft half-moon,
And all these innocent blisses?
On such a night as this is!
1804.

 

[Gregor Samsa]

William Shakespeare-Sonnet CXXXVIII
When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutored youth,
Unlearne'd in the world's false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue;
On both sides thus is simple truth supressed.
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore not I that I am old?
Oh, love's best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told.
Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flattered be.

 

[Gregor Samsa]

W.H Auden-September 1st, 1939
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyskrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

 

[Gregor Samsa]

W.B Yeats-The Wild Swans at Coole
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the wayer
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamarous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

Has an alternating meter and everything.

 

[Gregor Samsa]

Keats and Yeats are on your site..

WB Yeats-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 Agamemmon 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?

 

[chelloveck]

idunno if it's been mentioned yet, but i love shakespeare's sonnet "shall i compare thee to a summer's day'...or something like that

 

[Gregor Samsa]

Originally posted by chelloveck
idunno if it's been mentioned yet, but i love shakespeare's sonnet "shall i compare thee to a summer's day'...or something like that

Sonnet XVIII.
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;
Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair sometimes declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimmed;
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 breath, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

 

[chelloveck]

yup...tis a good one

 

[Nupil]

Hello there ...

I'm not the greatest fan of poetry (If I have to read Glass Jar again, I'm going to go mad. Or In the Park - I chose the poems I liked of hers, Father and Child being my favourite!) ... but I have some that I do adore and considering I've just discovered The Reading Room thought to share...

I know that some despise him and others adore him ... but I like selected Frost poetry:

The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Fire & Ice
Some say the world will end in fire;
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Stopping By the Woods On a Snowy Evening
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it's queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there's some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

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.

I love Sappho's work - just because she is frugal words to convey such heady emotions. Something I defintiely don't possess! (Though some would argue that it's not really poetry she wrote ... I think it's great)

Without Warning
Without warning
as a whirlwind
swoops on an oak
Love shakes my heart

The Muses
It is the Muses
who have caused me
to be honred: they
taught me their craft

Tonight I've watched
Tonight I've watched
the moon and then
the Pleiades
go down

The night is now
half-gone; youth
goes; I am

in bed alone

With His Venom
With his venom
irresistible
and bittersweet

that loosener
of limbs, Love

reptile-like
strikes me down

 

[Nupil]

I'm about to give up!!!!

I've hunted absolutely everywhere for Robert Gray's poetry. He is someone else that I've really really enjoyed. Now I could hunt it out of my garage ... but that's for later.

I was going to type up this poem - but I got it online (Sometimes you really do have to love the net) ... but this would easily have to be one of my top 5 poems.

Kubla Khan
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round :
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh ! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover !
A savage place ! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover !
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced :
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail :
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean :
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war !
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves ;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice !

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw :
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome ! those caves of ice !
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware ! Beware !
His flashing eyes, his floating hair !
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

I adore that poem by ST Coleridge. I don't know why, but adore is most definitely not too strong of a word to use here.

I'm undecided about Ode to a Nightingale by Keats.

Also ... it's not quite poetry (Maybe it is?) but something definitely worth checking out if you favour something like Sappho's that I do ... is Rubiyt by Omar Khayym (it's originally written in Arabic but was translated by someone by the name of Fitzgerald if my memory serves me right). It's a small collection of verses really, and I enjoy it.

A book of verses underneath the bough
a jug of wine, a loaf of bread - and thou
besides me singing in the wilderness -
oh, wilderness were paradise enow!

Can anyone find me Robert Gray poetry online? I've got a right headache from searching for it. And my google wont work! (What is a girl to do?)

 

[eviltama]

http://www.duffyandsnellgrove.com.au/authors/gray.htm

http://infocus.sl.nsw.gov.au/res/sublist.cfm?subName=GRAY, ROBERT

still looking, so i'll post more if i find any.

 

[braindrainedAsh]

I love poetry by the romantics... Coleridge (love Kubla Khan!), Wordsworth, Keats (grecian urn is great) and the gang....

Some favs of mine
Ode to Autumn by Keats http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poem1136.html

When Lilacs Last at the Dooryard Bloomed by Walt Whitman http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poem2292.html I particularly like the italicized section.

Anthem to Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poem1541.html (the sounds of the letters create a "sound picture", at least in my mind)

Daffodils by Wordsworth http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poem2337.html it's just so cheery

Also I like Ode by Arthur O'Shaughnessy http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poem1540.html

And my favorite poem, which I think is so beautiful, is Remember by Christina Rossetti

Remember

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 the future that you plann'd.
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to councel then, or pray.
But 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.


It'sm just such a beautiful poem in my opinion...

 

[Gregor Samsa]

Originally posted by Nupil
Also ... it's not quite poetry (Maybe it is?) but something definitely worth checking out if you favour something like Sappho's that I do ... is Rubiyt by Omar Khayym (it's originally written in Arabic but was translated by someone by the name of Fitzgerald if my memory serves me right). It's a small collection of verses really, and I enjoy it.

A book of verses underneath the bough
a jug of wine, a loaf of bread - and thou
besides me singing in the wilderness -
oh, wilderness were paradise enow!

Edward Fitzgerald.

Dylan Thomas-Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentlre into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentlre into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

(What gives it an added sad edge is that Thomas died within a year of the composition of this poem.)

 

[+:: $i[Q]u3 ::+]

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."

ahh.. this is so beautiful =)