The Poets' and Poetry-Lovers' Corner

[Jnyusa]

This thread is to catch the outpouring of non-nature poetry in Arda Unmarred ... where we (mainly me) got carried away on poetic topics distant from the purpose of Faramond's thread.

Original discussion can be found here:
The Poetry of Nature

Jn

[truehobbit]

*jumps up and down and claps hands*

I haven't yet had time to do justice to the lovely thread in Arda Unmarred, and didn't want to post when all I could say was "great thread", so I'm taking the chance here to say thanks for the poetry threads!

I couldn't really choose a favourite, I love poetry just too much (points to website button ), so it's hard to pick something to begin.
Here's something I love, both for the language and what it says, of a general enough nature to post in a new thread:

John Keats
Opening lines from: Endymion

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
’Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven’s brink.

[Pearly Di]

Oooh, Keats.

I love poetry, and studied it a long time ago, but I read so little these days ... despite having some really good poetry collections. I do often read poetry from LOTR ...

Anyway, here are two of my favourite poems of all time.

As kingfishers catch fire

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves - goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying what I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is -
Christ - for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844-1889
Educated at Oxford, converted to Roman Catholicism, became a Jesuit priest, was the Classics Professor at University College, Dublin. He suffered from serious depression. Not recognised as a poet until after his death. I love his poetry, which is complex, original, sophisticated and sensuous. He is a divine wordsmith.

Love

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guiltie of dust and sinne.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lack'd any thing.

A guest, I answer'd, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkinde, the ungratefull? Ah my deare,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marr'd them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame?
My deare, then I will serve.
You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.

George Herbert, 1593-1633
Anglican priest and poet.

[Jnyusa]

Pearl, I love Gerard Manley Hopkins too. Here is his Pied Beauty, written in the same spirit, I think, as the poem Hobby posted in Whistler's thread about the beauty of the oil refineries (Arda Unmarred):

Glory be to God for dappled things -
For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced - fold, fallow, and plow;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

He makes use of pure sound better than any other poet except, perhaps, Whitman.

Jn

[Pearly Di]

Gerard has many fans, methinks.

Poor guy. He was just so unhappy. I think he demanded impossible things of himself ...

'Glory be to God' is a glorious poem, definitely in my top ten.

He makes use of pure sound better than any other poet except, perhaps, Whitman.

Oh yes, absolutely.

I really must familiarise myself with Whitman ... I've not read many American poets. But here's a gem from e.e. cummings ...

EASTER DAY

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a true blue dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and of wings: and of the gay
great happenings illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any - lifted from the no
of all nothing - human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

e.e. cummings

[Sassafras]

Hummmph! I posted it Jn, in Faramond's thread.

But no matter. It is a most extrodinary piece of work.
Best appreciated by reading out loud; then you can really get the feel of the flow and the dip of the words and how the sounds combine to make a melody as natural and beautiful as a swift-flowing stream.

I adore cummings too.

This one:

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

[vison]

Into the tunnel of greengold light,
Up the winding hill. Ahead of me creeps
Traffic, and each driver is tapping the wheel
In impatience, craning necks to see past.

I sigh and drum my fingers on the wheel, too,
And think hard thoughts of the roadsweeper
Whose slow progress has brought
Our line of metal bugs crawling to a footpace.

Just then, glancing to my right,
I see a doe and fawn stepping, stepping
On dainty feet, into the shaft of light
That pierces the shadowed woods.

Here are great maples arching over,
Their rough bark hung with ferns;
Tender grass beneath, and the pale pink
Of Bleeding Hearts like little bells swaying.

Still as stones in a greengold pool,
They regard me with great dark eyes.
Then, in a heartbeat they glide into the shade
Out of my sight, and I drive on.

[Jnyusa]

Sass - so you did!

It was probably reading it in that thread that made me think of it! I'm trying to do too many things at once here. Got to slow down and think before I type.

Vison - that sounds as if it came straight out of the drive home you were talking about in the other thread. Did you just write that today?

(These people that can make poems pour out. It literally takes me years to finish a poem)

Jn

[vison]

Sass - so you did!

It was probably reading it in that thread that made me think of it! I'm trying to do too many things at once here. Got to slow down and think before I type.

Vison - that sounds as if it came straight out of the drive home you were talking about in the other thread. Did you just write that today?

(These people that can make poems pour out. It literally takes me years to finish a poem)

Jn

No, I wrote it in the spring. It isn't exactly the way I want it, but it will do.

I am one of those from whom "poetry" pours. Sometimes it's good and sometimes............it isn't!

[Ethel]

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

[vison]

Oh, Ethel. I love that poem! I'd forgotten it, somehow. See, Auden knew what you can't know until you're not young any more.

The second stanza, from September 1, 1939:

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.

Or, from his poem on the death of Yeats:

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the air-ports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
O all the instruments agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

There's more, but I always thought the meat of that poem was in the first stanza.

Yeats is another one. One of the sublimest poems, to me, is The Lake Isle of Innisfree.

[Ethel]

Oh! I knew you would recognize it, vison. Yeats, Auden and Frost are my favorite poets from the modern era.

Auden, grieving:

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

[Ethel]

And just one more favorite, this one by Mr Shakespeare, because it so vividly invokes the season...

WHEN icicles hang by the wall
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail;
When blood is nipt, and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl
Tu-whoo!
Tu-whit! tu-whoo! A merry note!
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

When all around the wind doth blow,
And coughing drowns the parson's saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow,
And Marian's nose looks red and raw;
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl—
Then nightly sings the staring owl
Tu-whoo!
Tu-whit! tu-whoo! A merry note!
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

[Jnyusa]

Agreed, Yeats is among my favorite of all poets.

Jn

[Pearly Di]

In the Chapel

This flame is moulded
to a supple sheen of
purest gold. Moths flutter
like white hands against
the glass, the cross is stark.
Outside the evening swells
in wind that gathers clouds
from dark.

I watch the light and then recall
the love I felt, the swirling
smokes of passion which arose.
Here all is deep and quiet, yet
trembling like a pulse beats
all the wealth of feeling
that I chose.

Candle on plain altar,
containing spark of life, I focus
sense of loss within your spire.
And God does not withdraw from fires
which flicker when I seem serene;
the flame's reflected in this window,
stilled to an expectant beauty,
shimmering far more vivid than my dreams.

October 1989, St. Julian's

[Teremia]

Pearl (Di!),

"As Kingfishers Catch Fire" and "Love (III)" are right at the very top of my list, too. On my annual backpacking/literary study trip this summer, "Kingfishers" was the text we spent the most time contemplating and enjoying.

ah.

[Rodia]

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Ethel...that made me go 'wow'. My father, too, wrote a poem about Breughel's Icarus... I wonder. He probably knows the poem you quote, I will have to ask him. It seems that painting has inspired quite a lot of people.

Here's a very rough translation, I apologise, if it sounds like rubbish it is my fault, not his:

They constantly praise the Icari- though only Dedalus made it
like the frail down shed from the wing
a boy's slim leg raised towards the skies
-meant everything. As if we were given
for defense, such strength as moths will show
when they crowd and fry at the lamp...
If
knowing the softness of wax we may reach
chosen shores- they pass us in song.
As they pass the peasant, or think he is odd
not to stare at Icarus...
Breughel, who was gray
knowing people, turned their eyes away
from sky-high drama. He knew we should not stare
at those Icari, nor fret over a fall
-though it be from high.
But to grab what is ours.
To save Icarus, had Dedalus turned back?

[Ethel]

Since we've now quoted two poems inspired by Breughel's painting, would it be inappropriate to paste it here? (Let me know if it is.) The really striking thing about the painting is that it's called "Icarus" - but all one can see of him are the two legs in the lower right corner. No one seems to have noticed that a boy fell from the sky.

[Rodia]

Good call.

After this, I dare anyone to tell me this board wasn't needed...it's a completely new experience. And the best thing is one can revel in all sorts of smart and culturey stuff among friends, without worrying about appearing too ignorant.



Long live the Hall of Fire!

[truehobbit]

Wow, about those poems inspired by the Breughel painting! I don't think I'd have come up with those deep thoughts myself at just looking at the picture, but I think it's very convincing!
(Ethel, who wrote the one you quoted?)
And thanks for posting the pic, I don't remember seeing it before - the depiction of sunset and the sunset-lighting of the whole landscape in it is just awesome! (I may be wrong here, but I think this kind of light-effect was quite an unheard-of achievement at the time. But that's for the art-forum. )

It is interesting to see how so many people love Hopkins - I've never been able to get into his writings.

I'm not much into modern poetry on the whole, but there is of course much great stuff, as shown in the excerpts here (and swoooon for Yeats! ).

The biggest at the moment for the Shakespeare quote, though - maybe it's just because I need something cheery right now, but it's a delightful summary of winter!