Poetry

[Harp]

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]

Rabelais would have enjoyed reading Whitman.

 

[Tux Toledo]

"An Account of a Steamboat's Arrival in San Francisco"

On top of Telegraph Hill, before the earthquake, there as a giant wooden statue of a woman whose arms would be raised whenever a ship bringing mail entered the harbor.

'Twis midday when first I saw the wooden amazon
Reaching her arms into the sky.
This will be the test, I thought,
Whether what I'd heard was just a lie.
I could see the chatter running through the wires
As I stared up at the hill.
My father ran from the barber shop
In close pursuit came old Bill,
A retired sea captain so he told us all,
He had a chest full of stories
And a chart upon the wall
That told the meaning of all the buoys
Scattered about the bay.

It was he with my father that grabbed my arms,
My feet dangling above the street,
Squinting my eyes for a fleeting glimpse
Of a member of that steamer fleet.
It had big black smokestacks coming out of the middle
And I couldn't see any sails.
Her name was "Sherry Ann"
And someone said she hunted whales.
But old Bill was sure he knew,
"It's ivory from Africa that she brings!"
But dad read in the paper the following morn
It just carried mail and other things
I wouldn't give a penny for.

Tux Toledo

 

[John Boyer]

I rest not from my great task!
To open the Eternal Worlds,
to open the immortal Eyes of Man
Inwards into the Worlds of Thought;
Into eternity, ever expanding
In the Bosom of God,
The Human Imagination.

-William Blake (from Jerusalem)

 

[Harp]

Beauty, strength, youth, are flowers but fading seen;
Duty, faith, love, are roots, and ever green.

George Peele

 

[John Boyer]

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand
God not in the least...
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four,
and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and
in my own face in the glass;
I find letters from God dropt in the street,
and every one is signed by God's name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know
that whereso'er I go
Others will punctually come forever and ever.

-Wlat Whitman (Excerpt from Song of Myself)

 

[John Boyer]

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our Life's Star
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness.
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
upon the growing boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy.

-William Wordsworth [Excerpt from Imitations of Immortality]

 

[markniklas]

Very nice poetry you people shared...
My Favorite poem is:

Never seek to tell thy love,
Love that never told can be;
For the gentle wind does move
Silently, invisibly.

I told my love, I told my love,
I told her all my heart;
Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears,
Ah! she did depart!

Soon as she was gone from me,
A traveler came by,
Silently, invisibly
He took her with a sigh.

 

[markniklas]

Very nice poetry you people shared...
My Favorite poem is:

Never seek to tell thy love,
Love that never told can be;
For the gentle wind does move
Silently, invisibly.

I told my love, I told my love,
I told her all my heart;
Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears,
Ah! she did depart!

Soon as she was gone from me,
A traveler came by,
Silently, invisibly
He took her with a sigh.

 

[Harp]

My Favorite poem is:

Never seek to tell thy love,
Love that never told can be....

Blake had a touch of Donne.

 

[John Boyer]

While browsing today, I stumbled upon these cheerful lines

When I consider life, 'tis all a cheat;
Yet, fool'd with hope, men favour the deceit;
Trust on, and think tomorrow will repay:
Tomorrow's falser than the former day;
Lies worse, and, while it says we shall be blest
With some new joys, cuts off what we possest.
Strange cozenage! None would live past years again,
Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain;
And, from the dregs of life, think to receive,
What the first sprightly running could not give.

--John Dryden [Aureng-Zebe (1676), Act IV, scene i.]

 

[Harp]

n

While browsing today, I stumbled upon these cheerful lines

When I consider life, 'tis all a cheat;
Yet, fool'd with hope, men favour the deceit;

Interesting that you came across Dryden, John; he haunts me.
The Poet Laureate felled from grace struck a chord heard
no doubt by Newman and Hopkins.

The intoxication of anger, like that of the grape,
shows us to others, but hides us from ourselves---

A Restoration theologian and convert, within his heart, J.D. must have been
an optimist by nature to have withstood all travail; and cynical verse serves
his artistic mirror reflective twist of soul. More a complex cipher
than the cardinal, and more temporal than the Jesuit, but the three shared
similar paths sketched by Boethius inside his prison cell long before
their respective births. Lady Philosophy banishes the sirens,
becoming Poetry herself.

 

[Harp]

Test your belief

in spirit on their faces staring
at you, on beauty's surrender
to truth, on the soul's selling
of itself for a corner

by the body's fire. Learn the thinness
of the window that is
between you and life, and how
the mind cuts itself if it goes through

R.S. Thomas, The Calling

 

[John Boyer]

Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

R.S. Thomas, The Bright Field

 

[Harp]

Thou too, O Earth-thine empires, lands and seas-
Least, with thy stars, of all the galaxies,
Globed from the drift like these, like these thou too
Shalt go. Thou art going, hour by hour, like these.

Nothing abides. Thy seas in delicate haze
Go off; those mooned sands forsake their place;
And where they are shall other seas in turn
Mow with their scythes of whiteness other bays.

Lucretius

 

[frank nitte]

XXXII.
There was a Door to which I found no Key:
There was a Veil past which I could not see:
Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee
There seemed—and then no more of Thee and Me.- omar kaiyyam

 

[frank nitte]

VII.
Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly—and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.-omar kaiyyam

 

[John Boyer]

King of the River (Excerpt)

If the heart were pure enough,
but it is not pure,
you would admit
that nothing compels
any more, nothing
at all abides,
but nostalgia and desire,
the two-way ladder
between heaven and hell.
On the threshold
of the last mystery,
at the brute absolute hour,
you have looked into the eyes
of your creature self,
which are glazed with madness,
and you say
he is not broken but endures,
limber and firm
in the state of his shining,
forever inheriting his salt kingdom,
from which he is banished
forever.

by Stanley Kunitz

 

[Harp]

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.

W. B Yeats, The Wild Swans at Coole

 

[John Boyer]

The People, Yes (Excerpt)

The people yes
The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
You can't laugh off their capacity to take it.
The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas.

--Carl Sandburg

 

[Harp]

Twists to Plato, Aeschylus,
Seneca and Mimnermus,
Pliny, Dionysius...
Who remove from remarkable hosts
Of agonized and friendly ghosts,
Lean and laugh at one who looks
To find kisses pressed in books.

...Hence from scenic bacchanal,
Preshrunk and droll prodigal!
Smallness that you had to spend,
Spent. Wench, whiskey and tail-end
Of your overseas disease
Rot and rout you by degrees.
-Close your fables and fatigues...

Gwendolyn Brooks, The Anniad