Poetry

[Harp]

Summer delights the scholar
With knowledge and reason.
Who is happy in hedgerow
Or meadow as he?

Paying no dues to the parish,
He argues in logic
And has no care of cattle
But a satchel and stick...

But in winter by the big fires,
The ignorant hear his fiddle,
And he battles on the chessboard
As the land lord bids him.

Austin Clarke, The Scholar

 

[Derek WC]

In my signature, which I recently wrote:

As I drift to sleep,
Into wonderful dreams,
I begin to creep.

I think it's called a haiku or something like that.

 

[Wally_Hood]

In my signature, which I recently wrote:

As I drift to sleep,
Into wonderful dreams,
I begin to creep.

I think it's called a haiku or something like that.

Three lines, with 5 syllables in the first, 7 syllables in the second line, and then 5 syllables in the final line, makes a haiku. Usually about themes of nature, life lessons, or classically, zen encapsulations.

 

[John Boyer]

Futility

Move him into the sun--
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
the kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds,--
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved--still warm--too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
--O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?

--Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
[Excellent example of Owens use of pararhyme]

 

[John Boyer]

This Living Hand

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed--see here it is--
I hold it towards you.

--John Keats

 

[randooch]

In my signature, which I recently wrote:

As I drift to sleep,
Into wonderful dreams,
I begin to creep.

I think it's called a haiku or something like that.

They're also fun when related to human nature:

These are my demands:
Guns, money, and a fast car.
See you in hell, Pal!

 

[Derek WC]

Ahh, yes. I thought that was what it was called.

That's great, Randooch.

Do any of you guys write your own?

 

[Wally_Hood]

Move him into the sun--
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
the kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds,--
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved--still warm--too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
--O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?

--Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
[Excellent example of Owens use of pararhyme]

Wilfred Owen wrote some amazing poetry. I had learned the term "slant rhyme" for end rhymes that are similarly spelled and pronounced.

 

[rue]

Insomnia

Thin are the night-skirts left behind
By daybreak hours that onward creep,
And thin, alas! the shred of sleep
That wavers with the spirit's wind:
But in half-dreams that shift and roll
And still remember and forget,
My soul this hour has drawn your soul
A little nearer yet.

Our lives, most dear, are never near,
Our thoughts are never far apart,
Though all that draws us heart to heart
Seems fainter now and now more clear.
To-night Love claims his full control,
And with desire and with regret
My soul this hour has drawn your soul
A little nearer yet.

Is there a home where heavy earth
Melts to bright air that breathes no pain,
Where water leaves no thirst again
And springing fire is Love's new birth?
If faith long bound to one true goal
May there at length its hope beget,
My soul that hour shall draw your soul
For ever nearer yet.

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
(1828 – 1882)

 

[rue]

If I were King

If I were king---ah love, if I were king!
What tributary nations would I bring
To stoop before your sceptre and to swear
Allegiance to you lips and eyes and hair.
Beneath your feet what treaseures I would fling:---
The stars should be your pearls upon a string,
The world a ruby for your finger ring,
And you should have the sun and moon to wear
If i were king.

Let these wild dreams and wilder words take wing,
Deep in the woods I hear a shepherd sing
A simple ballad to a sylvan air,
Of love that ever finds your face more fair.
I could not give you any godlier thing
If I were king.

Justin Huntly MCCarthy
(1859 – 1936)

 

[Harp]

Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight
And burned is Apollo's laurel bough
That sometime grew within this learned man.
Faustus is gone; regard his hellish fall,
Whose fiendful fortune may exhort the wise
Only to wonder at unlawful things,
Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits
To practice more than heavenly power permits.

Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus V;III

 

[John Boyer]

The Sanctuary

If I could keep my innermost Me
Fearless, aloof and free
Of the least breath of love or hate,
And not disconsolate
At the sick load of sorrow laid on men;
If I could keep a sanctuary there
Free even of prayer,
If I could do this, then,
With quiet candor as I grew more wise
I could look even at God with grave forgiving eyes.

--Sarah Teasdale (1884-1933)

 

[Harp]

But we dream we are rooted in earth-Dust!
Flesh falls within sight of us, we, though our flowers the same.
Wave with the meadow, forget that there must
The sour scythe cringe, and the blear share come.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

[John Boyer]

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch

I want them to water-ski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

-Billy Collins

 

[Harp]

:eusa_clap

 

[kokopelli]

Possibly a bit O prose... Ode to the range pistol..

Good discussion.. However, a range pistol is in fact a definable thing therefore it does exist. It's not the carry pistol that I shoot at the range, nor is it the target pistol that I shoot bulls-eye or other disciplined matches with. A range pistol is something that lives for that weekly trip to the range.. Like a hunting dog that tears up the path around the fence.. It don't worry much about shot placement or concealment, but when all the magazines are loaded and the truck is pointed toward the range.. It's alive.. When the cover shirt is lifted over the grip frame and/or the pistol is upholstered, everything goes into some sort of exotic slow motion. The recoil from the first shot rocks you back on your feet and the next six are like hot sex or something.. When the slide locks open and you turn the pistol a little to the left to drop the mag, the lane light reflects off the slide and the fresh magazine as it progresses home. Then there's the sound of the slide racking to battery.. It's like the sound of your mothers voice and Madonna all mixed together. The next three minutes and 12 magazines are like the dance of the sugarplum fairies.. Some sort of transcendental blues where time stands still.. When it's over and you're walking out of the range, there's a silence of whispered delight as most everyone with a pistol at heart is now re-living those three minutes.. They, like me, go home with a HOORAH and the desire to own a range pistol.. BUT.. I digress.. Grin Cheers.. Ron

 

[Harp]

For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Not harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey

 

[Renault]

It doesn't come close to replacing, but this little bit from Brother Kipling has helped me these last couple of years deal with things.

My Boy Jack
1914-1918


'Have you news of my boy Jack?'
Not this tide.
'When d'you think that he'll come back?'
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.
'Has anyone else had word of him?'
Not this tide.
For what is sunk will hardly swim,
Not with this wind blowing and this tide.
'Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?'
None this tide,
Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind-
Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.
Then hold your head up all the more,
This tide,
And every tide;
Because he was the son you bore,
And gave to that wind blowing and that tide!

 

[John Boyer]

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge
that pass all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the
women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap'd stones, elder,
mullein and poke-weed.

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself [excerpt]

 

[John Boyer]

Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!
A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.
If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me!
If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift!
If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed
By the fine, fine wind that takes its course through
the chaos of the world...

-D.H. Lawrence [Song of a Man Who Has Come Through]