Poetry

[John Boyer]

My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top

While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

W.B. Yeats

 

[rue]

AT NIGHTFALL

I need so much the quiet of your love,
After the day's loud strife;
I need your calm all other things above,
After the stress of life.

I crave the haven that in your dear heart lies,
After all toil is done;
I need the starshine of your heavenly eyes,
After the day's great sun.

Charles Hanson Towne (1877-1949)

 

[Harp]

The bullet cleared the briars
off the top of the ditch, drove
particles of his bone at a four
miles per hour walk, to rejoin a road
like a swine with a tusk
which has grown round into his head.

Within minutes of that noontide
priceless manuscripts floated over
the city, releasing the scent
of partition, and the stray light
in the straitjacket of the Republic
paid out the head money of his soul.

Medbh McGuckian, The Truciler

Writing from the advantage distance Time affords, and against literary
background provided by other scribes, McGuckian evokes phantasm; seemingly
sentimental, yet devoid of such amidst paratactic arrangement of metaphors
and dislocated syntax. Her chronology of the assassination of Michael Collins
works backward, past the souless bullet's trajectory to Irish partition, and Collins'
nemesis, Eamon de Valera.

McGuckian's own perspective on Collins is more oblique.
However, she encapsules Churchill's ridicule of Collins:

Corner boy in excelsis, with towels
framed all round the railings,
Ireland is yours, take it.

The antithesis of Yeats, McGuckian is a refreshing breeze, all at once enigmatic
but replete with imagery that inflicts Poetry's mortal wound upon the reader.
McGuckian's paean to Robert Frost, Frost in Beaconsfield opens a window to
her own soul that is both cryptic and compelling, and perhaps reluctantly given.

 

[Harp]

If the form of this world cannot stay the same,
but suffers so many violent changes,
what folly it is to trust man's tumbling fortunes...
One thing is certain, fixed by eternal law:
nothing that is born can last.

Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy; Book II, Poem III

 

[rue]

Sonnet 14

If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love's sake only. Do not say
'I love her for her smile—her look—her way
Of speaking gently,—for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day'—
For these things in themselves, Beloved, may
Be changed, or change for thee,—and love, so wrought,
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry,—
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!
But love me for love's sake, that evermore
Thou mayst love on, through love's eternity.

~Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806 – 1861)

 

[Harp]

"Who so loves believes the impossible."

Elizabeth Barrett Browning :love:

 

[rue]

One Way Of Love

All June I bound the rose in sheaves.
Now, rose by rose, I strip the leaves
And strew them where Pauline may pass.
She will not turn aside? Alas!
Let them lie. Suppose they die?
The chance was they might take her eye.

How many a month I strove to suit
These stubborn fingers to the lute!
To-day I venture all I know.
She will not hear my music? So!
Break the string; fold music's wing:
Suppose Pauline had bade me sing!

My whole life long I learned to love.
This hour my utmost art I prove
And speak my passion---heaven or hell?
She will not give me heaven? 'Tis well!
Lose who may---I still can say,
Those who win heaven, blest are they!

Robert Browning (1812-1889)

 

[John Boyer]

Welcome Morning

"So while I think of it,
let me paint a thank-you on my palm
for this God, this laughter of the morning,
lest it go unspoken.

The Joy that isn't shared, I've heard,
dies young."

--Anne Sexton [Excerpt from Welcome Morning]

 

[Harp]

Let the blood riot,
Give it its will;
It shall grow quiet,
It shall grow still.

Countee Cullen, Nothing Endures

 

[Berlin]

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs.
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots.
Of tired, outstripped, Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud.
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen
1893 - 1918

 

[Harp]

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless chimes and starry skies,
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meets in her aspect and her eyes.....

Lord Byron, She Walks in Beauty

 

[Pompidou]

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless chimes and starry skies,
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meets in her aspect and her eyes.....

Lord Byron, She Walks in Beauty

Lord Byron, Mary Shelly and Percy Shelly were all good friends - imagine the conversations they must've had.

 

[Harp]

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's correspondence with Edgar Allan Poe
offer a whisper of Poetry's life beneath the cloak of conjecture.
Seek out such documents and a door to the past magically opens.

 

[Wally_Hood]

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

Robert Hayden

 

[Harp]

The human heart has hidden treasures.
In secret kept, in silence sealed.
The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams,
the pleasures whose charm were broken if revealed.

Charlotte Bronte

 

[Berlin]

Red lips are not so red
As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.
Kindness of wooed and wooer
Seems shame to their love pure.
O Love, your eyes lose lure
When I behold eyes blinded in my stead!
Your slender attitude
Trembles not exquisite like limbs knife-skewed,
Rolling and rolling there
Where God seems not to care;
Till the fierce love they bear
Cramps them in death's extreme decrepitude.

Your voice sings not so soft,-
Though even as wind murmuring through raftered loft,-
Your dear voice is not dear,
Gentle, and evening clear,
As theirs whom none now hear,
Now earth has stopped their piteous mouths that coughed.

Heart, you were never hot
Nor large, nor full like hearts made great with shot;
And though your hand be pale,
Paler are all which trail
Your cross through flame and hail:
Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not.



- Wilfred Owen

 

[lynnequintana]

How Do I Love Thee?

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

-Elizabeth Barrett Browning-

 

[Nathan Dodge]

"I Saw Myself"

I saw myself
a ring of bone
in the clear stream
of all of it

and vowed
always to be open to it
that all of it
might flow through

and then heard
"ring of bone" where
ring is what a

bell does



~Lew Welch

 

[Harp]

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight....


-Elizabeth Barrett Browning-

Mrs Browning is the wisest of the Sibyls,
wiser even than that mighty figure whom Michael Angelo
painted on the roof of the Sistine Chapel at Rome,
poring over the scroll of mystery, and trying to decipher
the secrets of Fate; for she realized that, while Knowledge
is power, Suffering is part of Knowledge.

Oscar Wilde

A miser critic of conflicted heart and tormented soul,
Wilde's remark peels back layers of emotion which undoubtedly
found solace in Elizabeth's poetry.

How I love this lady. :love:

 

[Harp]

Heaven in thy creation did decree
That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell;
Whate'er thy thoughts or thy heart's workings be,
Thy looks should nothing thence but sweetness tell.

Shakespeare