**The Poetry Thread **

A place to talk about poetry.

The Google's Garden

Now on the facing page you see
The Google's garden (looking East);
The animal, that sits on guard,
Is quite a harmless little beast.
Please note the 'Pleecemen Birds' as well
On either side stand sentinel.

The Tango

The Tango trips upon her toes,
(That's why she's called the Tango)
And if you tease her, off she goes
As quickly as she can go!

The Brown Willy

Just look at Brown Willy
Now isn't he silly?
He's just caught an eel in the water!
He'll throw it up high
Right into the sky
To be caught in the air by his daughter!

The Poggle

The Poggle, as you have probably heard,
Is also known as the Pineapple Bird.
By nature he is soft and gently kind
To smaller birds who love his fruity mind.
So tame that he will feed out of your hands.
(He lives exclusively on wasps with yellow bands.)

The Swank

The Swank is quick and full of vice,
He tortures beetles also mice.
He bites their legs off and he beats them
Into a pulp, and then he eats them.

The Mirabelle

Old sailors have a tale they tell,
How once the song of a Mirabelle
Enticed a ship upon the rocks
Where perished all the crew.
I think it most improbable
That such a bird would cast a spell
Upon a ship, don't you?



From: The Google Book

The Scottish poet Jackie Kay writes beautiful poetry about friendship, family and love.

Fiere

If ye went tae the tapmost hill, Fiere
Whaur we used tae clamb as girls,
Ye’d see the snow the day, Fiere,
Settling on the hills.
You’d mind o’ anither day, mibbe,
We ran doon the hill in the snow,
Sliding and singing oor way tae the foot,
Lassies laughing thegither – how braw.
The years slipping awa; oot in the weather.

And noo we’re suddenly auld, Fiere,
Oor friendship’s ne’er been weary.
We’ve aye seen the wurld differently.
Whaur would I hae been weyoot my jo,
My fiere, my fiercy, my dearie O?
Oor hair micht be silver noo,
Oor walk a wee bit doddery,
But we’ve had a whirl and a blast, girl,
Thru’ the cauld blast winter, thru spring, summer.

O’er a lifetime, my fiere, my bonnie lassie,
I’d defend you – you, me; blithe and blatter,
Here we gang doon the hill, nae matter,
Past the bracken, bothy, bonny braes, barley.
Oot by the roaring Sea, still havin a blether.
We who loved sincerely; we who loved sae fiercely.
The snow ne’er looked sae barrie,
Nor the winter trees sae pretty.
C’mon, c’mon my dearie – tak my hand, my fiere!

Perhaps the following poem is perhaps the world’s first (published) epithalamion on the occasion of a gay marriage.

The Marriage of Nick and Edward

When you get home from your wedding, dear boys,
And you’ve exchanged your plain and beautiful bands
—rose-gold with platinum for Nick,
rose-gold with gold for Edward—
and held together your handsome hands,
and kissed, and pledged a life of happiness,
I suggest you get out the Quaich,
your special two-handled drinking bowl—
made of pewter; for your gifted future—
and pour some Hallelujah into the loving cup
and knock back the rose-gold liquid
and drink up, drink up, drink up!

Here are your years stretching ahead,
and the rose-gold love of the newly wed.

From: Fiere

My New years resolution was to read a poem a day. I have just read Edwin's post. Does that count?

Good to have a poetry thread Edwin

Thanks for getting thread started. And, Bas, great new years resolution. We could, as a group, try posting a poem a day...

Skeins o geese

Skeins o geese write a word
across the sky. A word
struck lik a gong
afore I wis born.
The sky moves like cattle, lowin.

I’m as empty as stane, as fields
ploo’d but not sown, naked
an blin as a stane. Blin
tae the word, blin
tae a’ soon but geese ca’ing.

Wire twists lik archaic script
roon a gate. The barbs
sign tae the wind as though
it was deef. The word whistles
ower high for ma senses. Awa.

No’ lik the past which lies
strewn aroun. Nor sudden death.
No’ like a lover we’ll ken
an connect wi forever.
The hem of its going drags across the sky.

Whit dae birds write on the dusk?
A word niver spoken or read.
The skeins turn hame,
on the wind’s dumb moan, a soun,
maybe human, bereft.

KATHLEEN JAMIE (1989)

3> wow! an epithalamium for same sex marriage. How cool!

I love the Google book!

Praying for Rain on the Plains

If it comes,
let tractors stall hub-deep,
Pull off your boots and walk without socks,
squeeze globs of what you are. Feel mud like Vaseline,
the crushed and processed ferns and dinosaurs.
In a million years we'll ooze from vaults
and metal caskets, back in the mud where we belong.
Even west Texas dirt grows beans and cotton,
peppers that make us weep. Let rain come
by the bucket, let prices soar after floods,
let it hail. Pastors throughout the plains have prayed.
Farmers who sulk at home and tinker with plows
while their wives drive pickups to church,
even burned, skin-cancer atheists
stare at flat horizons without a cloud
and blink.

Walter McDonald - from The Gettysburg Review, Summer 1997. Later published in Great Lonely Places of the Texas Plains, 2003.

Just something I came across last night.

wow we had a wee Scots thing going there for a while. Thanks for posting that Jamie again Barry (as I said on my thread). I like the Kay poems too, kind of inspires me to write my own spin on a possible wedding.

Then the great plains. I wondered if there were a couple of typos, fell = feel? of=off? I'm not sure what I think about the ending, the atheists being skin cancered, maybe I haven't understood or it is just ironic (that the believers would believe the atheists to be prone to cancer?...or am I losing track? can scots be easier?)

Sorry Tony. Both are typo's, now fixed. I didn't proof read my typing...

I don't want to stumble over an evaluation and botch the whole thing, but I'm guessing he means something to the effect that the drought is so extreme it will put doubt into the staunchest atheist, depending on how you interpret "blink". There is play between prayer, church, biblical references, and the biblical dryness to the whole poem against the atheists and the hints at science in fossils and our future as forgotten ooze in a million years. I say play, perhaps better to say tension. And then further between desired meaning and the all apparent lack there of...how one latter seems to heighten the former.

The silence after post #10 has me self-conscious...I keep thinking about how wrong the post must be. Oye, silly stuff. Maybe better to just delete this and that...(but obviously I haven't, yet)

Sorry, been busy, and am at work right now, am just thinking...

no no no dont

synchronicity!

:)

#12 -15 Thanks and good and all that. Feeling better now. : )

First let me say I am going to try to desist posting fast and when tired. I didn't mean to come over like the poetry police re typos and things.

I like the way this starts and the oozing and all and where we may go, not sure if that is a secular or religious comment, which I like. the the thing about west texas crops, also I like that. Then it's Pastors who have prayed who have a sentence to themselves (therefore privileged somehow and superior?). then the others and the atheists get called 'skin cancered' and I am not sure what to make of that, maybe I am not following the tone of the poem. I get the blink bit, but thanks. I think I get similar to you in the how this all puts science and all belief in perspective. I'm just not sure of the tone of skin cancered atheists - is he taking the mick of those that might ascribe such illness as the judgement of god (are there such people or is that my prejudice to wonder if there may be?) or what....after the farmers not going to church, a point against their devotion maybe maybe it is ironic....it just feels quite important and I am not sure I understand it....though you are right maybe the blink again goes passed that they and the wives and the farmers and all all blink. It's just that here that skin cancered atheists stands out, I'm not familar with believers seeing atheists that way...or maybe my take on this is wrong its just happens to be that some may have skin cancer like the wives just happen to drive the church. some wives drive, some farmer toinker with plows (ploughs! to me) and some atheists have skin cancer, it doesn;t mean anything, but I think it probably does an my best guess is he digs at believers who think this way but I am not sure (as above) and its a different thing to the culture I am used to.

Sorry -- this may be my confusion revealing a lack of comprehension or subtlety. But I guess we all have our own anxieties about such and honest communciation is how to remove the blocks to understanding.

Btw I've also been thinking anbout how unspoken things may transmit thorugh spoken posts (something for Zeno this!) as it is without doubt I often post quicky and when not on holiday quickly as I have a lot to do and so a seeming judegmentalness may seem to be creeping into my posts not to mention my grumpy old gitness (or s it something else?). I'll do my best to stop that.

in which spirit -- sorry to any believers if my wonderings in this case seem to be labelling -- like I say I just don't know but it's all I can guess.

#17 Good stuff. I didn't get any judgmental sense from your previous posts.

Some ideas:
"while their wives drive pickups to church" - Isn't that a terrific line? So Texan. But if I keep that Texas in mind, west Texas where it's dry and more sparsely populated, where the culture becomes heavily religious, stringently intolerant. So, what are those farmers doing home from church? What are their atheist leanings? And then, what does it take for someone within that culture to turn atheist. It's a cultural condemnation, they are going to hell. Their souls will heat up from the friction of rubbing against the grain. To me the skin-cancer, which is from the sun, makes extra sense in that context. That becoming atheist has some psychological consequence...and also provides some insight into the persons psychology. Becoming non-religious is not for the weak.

I would hesitate to say he simply doesn't like atheists. It could be more the opposite.

I suppose it also suggests that the rain comes despite all these types of people doing these things, a putting in perspective.

I'm very wary of just that cultural condemnation and the various knots it may lead to Dan. I also think he's too sharp to be agin them, but I had to think about it. But that it is a seemingly valid cultural reference or judgement shocks me - but then I always get shocked by Christian groups judging others.

edited for typos, my own have been socking (sic) this week.

I've been watching the Presidential inauguration this noontime and I just wanted to note that I enjoyed Richard Blanco's poem. I thought it was much more accessible to the general audience than Caroline Alexander's four years ago. I'm hoping to pull a transcript off the web and post it here, excerpt or the whole thing. He read it well, and one couldn't help but notice the repetition of sounds...I really want to study it for a bit.

I thought it was a little long, but I liked it.

I loved the inaugural poem by Richard Blanco, and I'm very eager to see its transcript.

Here's a link to several poems written by Blanco:

Richard Blanco Poems You Can Read Online

>21 rebeccanyc:, 22 It's easy to come away remembering the theme of unity and oneness. One sun, one ground beneath us, one sky...

Here's the transcript of the Inaugural Poem, "One Today" by Richard Blanco.

"One Today"

One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores,
peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces
of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth
across the Great Plains, then charging across the Rockies.
One light, waking up rooftops, under each one, a story
told by our silent gestures moving behind windows.

My face, your face, millions of faces in morning’s mirrors,
each one yawning to life, crescendoing into our day:
pencil-yellow school buses, the rhythm of traffic lights,
fruit stands: apples, limes, and oranges arrayed like rainbows
begging our praise. Silver trucks heavy with oil or paper -- bricks or milk, teeming over highways alongside us,
on our way to clean tables, read ledgers, or save lives -- to teach geometry, or ring up groceries as my mother did
for twenty years, so I could write this poem.

All of us as vital as the one light we move through,
the same light on blackboards with lessons for the day:
equations to solve, history to question, or atoms imagined,
the “I have a dream” we keep dreaming,
or the impossible vocabulary of sorrow that won’t explain
the empty desks of twenty children marked absent
today, and forever. Many prayers, but one light
breathing color into stained glass windows,
life into the faces of bronze statues, warmth
onto the steps of our museums and park benches
as mothers watch children slide into the day.

One ground. Our ground, rooting us to every stalk
of corn, every head of wheat sown by sweat
and hands, hands gleaning coal or planting windmills
in deserts and hilltops that keep us warm, hands
digging trenches, routing pipes and cables, hands
as worn as my father’s cutting sugarcane
so my brother and I could have books and shoes.

The dust of farms and deserts, cities and plains
mingled by one wind -- our breath. Breathe. Hear it
through the day’s gorgeous din of honking cabs,
buses launching down avenues, the symphony
of footsteps, guitars, and screeching subways,
the unexpected song bird on your clothes line.

Hear: squeaky playground swings, trains whistling,
or whispers across cafe tables, Hear: the doors we open
for each other all day, saying: hello, shalom,
buon giorno, howdy, namaste, or buenos días
in the language my mother taught me -- in every language
spoken into one wind carrying our lives
without prejudice, as these words break from my lips.

One sky: since the Appalachians and Sierras claimed
their majesty, and the Mississippi and Colorado worked
their way to the sea. Thank the work of our hands:
weaving steel into bridges, finishing one more report
for the boss on time, stitching another wound
or uniform, the first brush stroke on a portrait,
or the last floor on the Freedom Tower
jutting into a sky that yields to our resilience.

One sky, toward which we sometimes lift our eyes
tired from work: some days guessing at the weather
of our lives, some days giving thanks for a love
that loves you back, sometimes praising a mother
who knew how to give, or forgiving a father
who couldn’t give what you wanted.

We head home: through the gloss of rain or weight
of snow, or the plum blush of dusk, but always -- home,
always under one sky, our sky. And always one moon
like a silent drum tapping on every rooftop
and every window, of one country -- all of us --
facing the stars
hope -- a new constellation
waiting for us to map it,
waiting for us to name it -- together.

Thanks Darryl. Some uppity all-of-us-together-ness in there maybe, but very appropriate for the day. But, I do like it. "but always—home,/ always under one sky"

Thanks, Darryl. If you didn't hear Bianco read it, it can be heard here. Sometimes I think poetry is my music. I love the sounds the words, the embedded cadences... "...plum blush of dusk" (all that assonance), "One sky, toward which we sometimes life our eyes" - the delicate rhyme between "sky" and "eyes"...the repetition of words, the rhythm of some of his lines. Nice.

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white-haired shadow roaming like a dream
The ever-silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.

Alas! for this gray shadow, once a man -
So glorious in his beauty and thy choice,
Who madest him thy chosen, that he seemed
To his great heart none other than a God!
I asked thee, "Give me immortality."
Then didst thou grant mine asking with a smile,
Like wealthy men who care not how they give.
But thy strong Hours indignant worked their wills,
And beat me down and marred and wasted me,
And though they could not end me, left me maimed
To dwell in presence of immortal youth,
Immortal age beside immortal youth,
And all I was, in ashes. Can thy love,
Thy beauty, make amends, though even now,
Close over us, the silver star, thy guide,
Shines in those tremulous eyes that fill with tears
To hear me? Let me go: take back thy gift:
Why should a man desire in any way
To vary from the kindly race of men,
Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance
Where all should pause, as is most meet for all?

A soft air fans the cloud apart; there comes
A glimpse of that dark world where I was born.
Once more the old mysterious glimmer steals
From thy pure brows, and from thy shoulders pure,
And bosom beating with a heart renewed.
Thy cheek begins to redden through the gloom,
Thy sweet eyes brighten slowly close to mine,
Ere yet they blind the stars, and the wild team
Which love thee, yearning for thy yoke, arise,
And shake the darkness from their loosened manes,
And beat the twilight into flakes of fire.

Lo! ever thus thou growest beautiful
In silence, then before thine answer given
Departest, and thy tears are on my cheek.

Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears,
And make me tremble lest a saying learnt,
In days far-off, on that dark earth, be true?
"The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts."

Ay me! ay me! with what another heart
In days far-off, and with what other eyes
I used to watch -if I be he that watched -
The lucid outline forming round thee; saw
The dim curls kindle into sunny rings;
Changed with thy mystic change, and felt my blood
Glow with the glow that slowly crimsoned all
Thy presence and thy portals, while I lay,
Mouth, forehead, eyelids, growing dewy-warm
With kisses balmier than half-opening buds
Of April, and could hear the lips that kissed
Whispering I knew not what of wild and sweet,
Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing,
While Ilion like a mist rose into towers.

Yet hold me not for ever in thine East:
How can my nature longer mix with thine?
Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold
Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet
Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam
Floats up from those dim fields about the homes
Of happy men that have the power to die,
And grassy barrows of the happier dead.
Release me, and restore me to the ground;
Thou seest all things, thou wilt see my grave:
Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn;
I earth in earth forget these empty courts,
And thee returning on thy silver wheels.

Tithonus
1833
Tennyson

(Tithonus, you remember, was given immortality by his lover, Aurora, but she forgot to make it immortally young, and so he became immortally older and older.....)

Sublime, TC, sublime!

That induced tears. At work. Fortunately there was welling only, no spillage, and my desk is at the back of the class. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.

"The Broken Tower"

The bell-rope that gathers God at dawn
Dispatches me as though I dropped down the knell
Of a spent day - to wander the cathedral lawn
From pit to crucifix, feet chill on steps from hell.

Have you not heard, have you not seen that corps
Of shadows in the tower, whose shoulders sway
Antiphonal carillons launched before
The stars are caught and hived in the sun's ray?

The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;
And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave
Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score
Of broken intervals... And I, their sexton slave!

Oval encyclicals in canyons heaping
The impasse high with choir. Banked voices slain!
Pagodas, campaniles with reveilles outleaping -
O terraced echoes prostrate on the plain!...

And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

My word I poured. But was it cognate, scored
Of that tribunal monarch of the air
Whose thigh embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word
In wounds pledged once to hope, - cleft to despair?

The steep encroachments of my blood left me
No answer (could blood hold such a lofty tower
As flings the question true?) - or is it she
Whose sweet mortality stirs latent power? -

And through whose pulse I hear, counting the strokes
My veins recall and add, revived and sure
The angelus of wars my chest evokes:
What I hold healed, original now, and pure...

And builds, within, a tower that is not stone
(Not stone can jacket heaven) - but slip
Of pebbles, - visible wings of silence sown
In azure circles, widening as they dip

The matrix of the heart, lift down the eye
That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower...
The commodious , tall decorum of that sky
Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its shower.

- Hart Crane, 1932

(One of Crane's last published poems. Yes, I know it is difficult, and contains obscure words, but I love it.)

#30 That is an excellent poem by Hart Crane that deserves to be read and re-read

The first thing that struck me about it were the literary references in the first three stanzas:

....I dropped down the knell
Of a spent day

reminds me of the first line of Thomas Grays Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day.

In the third stanza there is:

...my long-scattered score
Of broken intervals...

which sounds like it could have been lifted from T S Eliots The love Song of J Alfred Prufrock:

.....through certain half deserted streets
The muttering retreats.

And the stanza three starts with:

The Bells, I say, the bells.....

perhaps Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

I think your right about the allusions, Barry, especially Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. As far as Eliot is concerned, the whole of Crane's long poem, The Bridge, was written in reaction to Eliot's The Waste Land, so I'm sure that Eliot had a profound, if antagonistic, influence upon Crane.

The poem also refers extensively to Spenser: for instance, the title refers to Spenser's line, "The old ruines of a broken toure".

Out upon it, I have loved
Three whole days together;
And am like to love three more
If it hold fair weather.

Time shall moult away his wings
Ere he shall discover
In the whole wide world again
SUch a constant lover.

But a pox upon't, no praise
There is due at all to me:
Love with me had made no stay,
Had it been any but she.

Had it any been but she
and that very very Face
There had been at least ere this
A dozen dozen in her place.

Sir John Suckling
1656

Ah, good old Sir John Suckling! He seems to have had some problems with love... I actually prefer "Why so pale and wan, fond lover?" - devil take her!

Lines Written in a Blank Leaf of the ‘Prometheus Unbound’

Write it in gold - a Spirit of the sun,
An Intellect ablaze with heavenly thoughts,
A soul with all the dews of pathos shining,
Odorous with love, and sweet to silent woe
With the dark glories of concentrate song,
Was sphered in mortal earth. Angelic sounds
Alive with panting thoughts sunned the dim world.
The bright creations of an human heart
Wrought magic in the bosoms of mankind.
A flooding summer burst on Poetry;
Of which the crowning sun, the night of beauty,
The dancing showers, the birds, whose anthems wild
Note after note unbind the enchanted leaves
Of breaking buds, eve, and the flow of dawn,
Were centred and condensed in his one name
As in a providence - and that was SHELLEY.

- Thomas Lovell Beddoes, 1822

Good stuff. Hadn't heard of TLB before.

Oh yes poems on the poetry thread - wonderful

What about poems with gold in the first line as in post #35.

Here is an obvious one.

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
By John Keats 1795–1821 John Keats

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

>36 dchaikin: Thanks, Dan. TLB is most famous for Death's Jest-Book, a drama based on Renaissance revenge-tragedies (like Hamlet, although H is a bit of a mould-breaker). He was trained as a doctor, and finally committed suicide in Basel.

>37 baswood: Can't think of one right now, Barry, but I'll think about it... Great poem by Keats. Just a shame that he got his facts wrong! (It wasn't Cortez who saw the Pacific first).

TLB also features as the unnamed poet in the last volume of Robertson Davies's Cornish Trilogy

# 38 - poetic licence if ever I saw a get out of jail card.

I've loved all three poems, didn't know the first, think I have heard the second.

I was thinking Yeats may have gold in a first line, lots of gold I can think of in his poems, but have not found it in a first line now I am thinking about it.

Edit - and then I found this (didn't like it at first but soon changed my mind):

The Mask

‘PUT off that mask of burning gold
With emerald eyes.’
‘O no, my dear, you make so bold
To find if hearts be wild and wise,
And yet not cold.’

‘I would but find what’s there to find,
Love or deceit.’
‘It was the mask engaged your mind,
And after set your heart to beat,
Not what’s behind.’

‘But lest you are my enemy,
I must enquire.’
‘O no, my dear, let all that be,
What matter, so there is but fire
In you, in me?’

>39 tomcatMurr: That's interesting, TC. I'll get to the Cornish Trilogy soon (hopefully). How do you know it's him if he's unnamed?

>40 tonikat: I can't think of a Yeats poem with gold in the first line, either, but there might very well be one.

Here's something I found on the Internet that should satisfy Barry's criteria. ;)

Gold!

Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold!
Bright and yellow, hard and cold
Molten, graven, hammered and rolled,
Heavy to get and light to hold,
Hoarded, bartered, bought and sold,
Stolen, borrowed, squandered, doled,
Spurned by young, but hung by old
To the verge of a church yard mold;
Price of many a crime untold.
Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold!
Good or bad a thousand fold!
How widely it agencies vary,
To save - to ruin - to curse - to bless -
As even its minted coins express :
Now stamped with the image of Queen Bess,
And now of a bloody Mary.

Thomas Hood

>41 dmsteyn: because some of his verse is quoted, but his name is never given. :)

Tony, of course you must be thinking of Yeats's Byzantium poems, which are full of gold enamelling to keep a drowzy Emperor awake (but not in the first line)!

gold in the second line: is that acceptable?

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

To a child
G.M Hopkins
1918

Hope you can all see I edited in a Yeats poetry soon after posting, not one I remembered, Google.

I was thinking of Byzantium poems, but also the end of the song of wandering Aengus (an all time favourite of mine) and the cloths of heaven poem (another though I cannot spell that title at work without the next me)... But think it's probably in lots of others, and then we have the Golden Dawn too.

Love the Hopkins. Reminded me of Edward Thomas, that poem about the plant growing at the door. Glynn Maxwell writes about it in on Poetry very well, made me start to look at Thomas, similar themes anyway.

>43 tomcatMurr: I also like the Hopkins - it's the same poem I studied at university in my first year when we dealt with sprung rhythm.

ETA: I'm glad that the poetry thread is so lively!

I have always struggled with Hopkin's ideas of inscape and instress, but I love the sounds his poetry makes.

I have huge admiration for Hopkins. One of my saints. But his ideas of sprung rhythm, inscape instress etc are not worth much, I'm afraid to say.

Why do you say that, TC?

More gold, especially in the first line.

Here is Lawrence Durrell reading his 'A Portrait of Theodora'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eCn16uudfU

#37 Love that poem. It was one of the first ones I memorized when I (briefly) started memorizing poems a few years ago.

>48 tomcatMurr:
well, partly to make Baz feel better about his struggle with Hopkins's ideas, but also because I think Hopkins was a much better poet than he was theorist of prosody. If you read his poetry placing the stress where he wants you to, according to the diacritics, it simply doesn't work: the stresses he indicates work totally against the natural stresses of the language.

as far as I recall (and my memory is somewhat hazy, it must be admitted) his notion of instress was designed to liberate poetry from the regularity of metrical feet. But this seems to be to be a straw man. There is very little poetry in English that has a totally regular metre. Any poet worth his salt knows that the metre has to be stretched, played around with, to avoid stupifying the reader, and part of the greatness of any poet is the relationship he sets up between the regularity of the metre and the steps he takes to break that regularity. Only very bad poets never vary their meter. Think of Racine! So I think Hopkins's ideas were not as original as he thought they were, nor as original as his verse itself.

However, I'm open to being talked around to a new appreciation of inscape and instress!

in the meantime, I thought it would be fun and interesting to put up a little library of various meters, the more arcane and out of the way, the better. As a collaborative effort we might have more success, than one person doing this on their own.

Here is some trochaic octameter, a very rare meter in English:

Comrades, leave me here a little, while as yet 't is early morn:
Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon the bugle-horn.

'T is the place, and all around it, as of old, the curlews call,
Dreary gleams about the moorland flying over Locksley Hall;

Tennyson, Locksley Hall

and Arthur Hough CLough's verse novel Amours de Voyage is written in : iambic hexameter

Tell me, my friend, do you think that the grain would sprout in the furrow
Did it not truly accept as its summum and ultimum bonus
That mere common and may-be indifferent soil it is set in?

and because I cannot resist, and because I feel bad about being away for so long from the thread, some more Tennyson:

COURAGE!” he said, and pointed toward the land,
“This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon.”
In the afternoon they came unto a land
In which it seemed always afternoon.
All round the coast the languid air did swoon, 5
Breathing like one that hath a weary dream.
Full-faced above the valley stood the moon;
And, like a downward smoke, the slender stream
Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem.

A land of streams! some, like a downward smoke, 10
Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go;
And some thro’ wavering lights and shadows broke,
Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below.
They saw the gleaming river seaward flow
From the inner land; far off, three mountain-tops, 15
Three silent pinnacles of aged snow,
Stood sunset-flush’d; and, dew’d with showery drops,
Up-clomb the shadowy pine above the woven copse.

The charmed sunset linger’d low adown
In the red West; thro’ mountain clefts the dale 20
Was seen far inland, and the yellow down
Border’d with palm, and many a winding vale
And meadow, set with slender galingale;
A land where all things always seem’d the same!
And round about the keel with faces pale, 25
Dark faces pale against that rosy flame,
The mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters came.

Branches they bore of that enchanted stem,
Laden with flower and fruit, whereof they gave
To each, but whoso did receive of them 30
And taste, to him the gushing of the wave
Far far away did seem to mourn and rave
On alien shores; and if his fellow spake,
His voice was thin, as voices from the grave;
And deep-asleep he seem’d, yet all awake, 35
And music in his ears his beating heart did make.

They sat them down upon the yellow sand,
Between the sun and moon upon the shore;
And sweet it was to dream of Fatherland,
Of child, and wife, and slave; but evermore 40
Most weary seem’d the sea, weary the oar,
Weary the wandering fields of barren foam.
Then some one said, “We will return no more;”
And all at once they sang, “Our island home
Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam.”

The Lotus Eaters

I love it for its arresting opening couplet among other things.



illustration by WEF Britten from 1901 edition

>52 tomcatMurr: I completely agree with most of what your saying, TC. I do, however, think that the sprung rhythm can work, to a degree, but only for shorter poems. I would hate having to wrench my reading of the lines for a whole canto of a longer work.

>53 tomcatMurr: Challenge accepted! (Ok, I know it isn't a challenge, but anyway...)

Here is some iambic monometer:

Thus I
Passe by,
And die:
As one,
Unknown,
And gone.

Robert Herrick, "Upon His Departure Hence"

And a famous example of anapaestic tetrameter:

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Lord Byron, "The Destruction of Sennacherib"

But I think you're talking of sprung rhythm more than inscape and instress. I'm no Hopkins expert, I am beginning to explore him, I wonder if he links sprung rhytthm to inscape and instress, I want to learn that by reading more.

But no matter how you scan lines, people always differ.

i think an important thing is that it worked for him -- maybe that is true of any poets prosody, the important thing.

But inscape and instress I like very much as ideas of what is and of apprehending it, a beautiful idea that gestures at soemthing it can't ever really say.

I don't want to claim to know more about Hopkins than I do, but I'm aware that sprung rhythm differs from inscape and instress. I think Hopkins might have linked them somewhow, but I'm not sure.

sorry dmsteyn, I have been thinking abot how to say this for a while, and also checked what i knew...really i was responding to tomcat and post 52.

I'm very bad..I have not made it through the Tennyson and your meter posts.

I count syllables really, meter, not up to worrying too much about stress, I find that hard and also like I say something people tend to disagree on -- reading Glyn Maxwell's On Poetry I think he makes a point that these stress words all come from Greek and apply to Greek, whilst we are applying them to English -- though maybe he did not say it as bluntly as that. So I must admit my head is a bit in the sand about them still...bad bad bad me.
I'm also not sure my way of speaking fits the way things are usually scanned, at least in some ways, the stress anyway.....or maybe that is my excuse for always tying myself in knots with it.

No worries, Tony!

Enjoying the poetry and the discussion. Some old favorites here that I haven't thought of in years, especially "The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold."

Metrical Feet

Trochee from long to short;
From long to long in solemn sort.
Slow Spondee stalks; strong foot! yet ill able
Ever to come up with Dactyl trisyllable.
Iambics march from short to long
With a leap and a bound the swift Anapaests throng;
One syllable long, with one short at each side,
Amphibrachys hastes with a stately stride:-
First and last being long, middle short, Amphimacer
Strikes his thundering hoofs like a proud high-bred Racer

S T Coleridge

(Coleridge wrote this for his sons; each line is in the foot it names}

I've read this Barry, very good....doesn;t help me remember them all though (i tell you I am almost wilfully bad about this all) -- I understand some people may quibble even with this, as to how it scans.

your point about how to scan/speak it is a good one Tony, and it's not as easy as it looks sometimes, especially when you realise that an anapaest (short short long) is also a dactyl (long short short) starting in a different place. If you string a whole load of anapests together, like this:

short short long short short long short short long short short long short short long short short long short short long

and ditch the first two syllables, and the last one:

long short short long short short long short short long short short long short short long short short

then you get a whole string of dactyls.

When you're in the middle of the line, who's to say whether you are in the middle of a dactyl or an anapaest?

HOwever, you mentioned Gavin Maxwell, whose book I have not read. the names of the rhythmical units come from the Greek, sure, but the rhythms themselves are not an artificial imposition onto English. These are the rhythms inherent in English because English is a stressed language (Chinese is not). If GM is implying that scanning English poetry in this way is an imposition from another language onto English (is this what he is saying?), then all the more reason for me not to read him, because he is wrong.

We had some anapestic tetrameter in 50.

Here is its mirror, a dactylic tetrameter, from the ever adorable John Betjeman:

Kind o’er the kinderbank leans my Myfanwy,
White o’er the playpen the sheen of her dress,
Fresh from the bathroom and soft in the nursery
Soap scented fingers I long to caress.

Yes I know it's not easy. The author is Glyn Maxwell - I find it an excellent book....I have read to the end of the prosody chapter....but I can't claim i have repreesented his views, he really wrotes very well.

Part of me thinks of the aphorism 'grammar is the bondage of kings' -- this would seem a kingly bondage (ooo errr). Or it may be the difference between regulated monetary exchaneg and barter - barter can be very effective, and also appropriate.

I find stress hard, but I hear rhythm -- but cannot say I have a scientific grasp over it.

well, hopefully, our little library of meters will help you there. :)

I read this last night and realised I had forgotten how incredibly powerful it is:

O loss of sight, of thee I most complain!
Blind among enemies! O worse than chains,
Dungeon, or beggary, or decrepit age!
Light, the prime work of God, to me is extinct, 70
And all her various objects of delight
Annulled, which might in part my grief have eased.
Inferior to the vilest now become
Of man or worm, the vilest here excel me:
They creep, yet see; I, dark in light, exposed 75
To daily fraud, contempt, abuse and wrong,
Within doors, or without, still as a fool,
In power of others, never in my own—
Scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half.
O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, 80
Irrecoverábly dark, total eclipse
Without all hope of day!
O first-created Beam, and thou great Word,
“Let there be light, and light was over all,”
Why am I thus bereaved thy prime decree?

John Milton.
Samson Agonistes

Indeed!

I posted this on one of the Kindle fora - thought it may be of interest here too:

Got my first Kindle in the autumn. I read quite a bit of poetry and got Kathleen Jamie's The Overhaul (fantastic btw) and a John Burnside volume (unread) on the Kindle - one reason for all this being I am simply running out of room for books. At first I was unsure of reading the Jamie, but it was fine and I'm enjoying the Kindle very much. Of course I have also added a whole library of free classics. but then considering other additions - I'm wondering about their quality.

I did get Mathew Hollis' biography of Edward Thomas Now all roads lead to France (also excellent so far) and also an annotated version of Thomas' complete poems, which are great and the latter seemed to be a Kindle version of a printed book. I'm unsure of some of the very cheap collected versions you can get - i think the Delphi series for example, others too - I usually choose editions quite carefully for printed texts. I see there are some Kindle versions of Shakespeare plays (Oxford which I enjoy, don't think i have seen Arden), yet obviously I can get lots of others and lots of other poets besides. I'd be interested in anyone else's experience of these editions.

i was really hoping to get a version of Spenser's The Faerie Queen, an edition I had heard was excellent, think it was Penguin -- yet very pricey for the Kindle too, i seem to remember it was more expensive than the paperback, very disappointing.

I do have some uncertainty about format on the page, so play with font size for example for Thomas at times.

I have had a kindle for about a year now and have learnt to be careful what I download, especially with relation to out of copyright books, because you can end up with a bowdlerised version. It is always worth checking the price of newish books and comparing them with booksellers over the net. It is also great if you can't wait to read a book because you can have it in your hand in under 30 seconds. I would not be without it and it usually travels with me wherever I go.

Yes, I am starting to feel the same way. It could be dangerous ot my credit card though.

I use a tablet with a Kindle app and am enjoying it. You don't get a lot of bargains anymore but there are some and the selection is getting better. I also like being able to carry a lot of books in a small space. My mother got a Kindle to save book shelf space.

Uh oh. I don't think I qualify to post on here......wait, actually maybe this means I should spend MORE time here. I scored 29% on this poetry quiz for Poetry Month.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Books

ETA: I challenge anyone to get a lower score. No cheating.

I scored 71%, but not because I actually knew the answers. I guessed a lot.

For the ones I got right, I've read a fair amount by those poets, so I could make an educated guess based on syntax and vocabulary, while for the ones I got wrong, I really haven't read much by those poets at all.

I was guessing on most also (obviously) just based on what little I knew about the poets available as answers.

53% clearly I guessed a lot too.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2013/0405/What-poetry-could-teach-a-...

I also thought this was rather nice to see, although it didn't really say much.

I got 71% too, but it's only because I'm a good guesser. There were several that I actually knew, though.

47% puts me near the bottom of the class

I am not even going to try.... Sigh

I used to listen every day to Writer's Almanac just so I could hear a poem a day. When I moved, the local public radio station didn't play Writer's Almanac, so I had to get the book.



And I have some favorite poems in it (in case you wondered what all those little colored flags were about). Here's one of them. It is especially lovely if you read it out loud.

Directions

Joseph Stroud

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world.

Take a plane to London.
From King's Cross take the direct train to York.
Rent a car and drive across the vale to Ripon,
then into the dales toward the valley of the Nidd,
a narrow road with high stone walls on each side,
and soon you'll be on the moors. There's a pub,
The Drovers, where it's warm inside, a tiny room,
you can stand at the counter and drink a pint of Old Peculiar.
For a moment everything will be all right. You're back
at a beginning. Soon you'll walk into Yorkshire country,
into dells, farms, into blackberry and cloud country.
You'll walk for hours. You'll walk the freshness
back into your life. This is true. You can do this.
Even now, sitting at your desk, worrying, troubled,
you can gaze across Middlesmoor to Ramsgill,
the copses, the abbeys of slanting light, the fells,
you can look down on that figure walking toward Scar House,
cheeks flushed, curlews rising in front of him, walking,
making his way, working his life, step by step, into grace.

That is indeed beautiful M-J. Thanks.

mkboylan -- I think it is a good poem because it makes me heartsick and homesick for a place I've never been and only seen in a few pictures. That's a powerful poem in my eyes.

I got 59%. I think that I knew 5 of the selections. A friend of mine reads the writer's almanac every day. I think I will try to pick up the habit.

M-J - That poem by Stroud is a good poem to keep in mind while sitting at my desk.

I got 59%, and that only because I guessed well.

waiting for wine that doesn't come

Jade wine jars tied in blue silk...
What's taking that wineseller so long?

Mountain flowers smiling, taunting me,
It's the perfect time to sip some wine.

ladle it out beneath my east window
at dusk, wandering orioles back again.

Spring breezes and their drunken guest:
today, we were meant for each other.

Li Bai
trans: David Hinton

#84 Nice

This one got me today.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/238966

Poem of the Day: Women Like Me
BY WENDY ROSE
making promises they can’t keep.
For you, Grandmother, I said I would pull
each invading burr and thistle from your skin,
cut out the dizzy brittle eucalypt,
take from the ground the dark oily poison–
all to restore you happy and proud,
the whole of you transformed
and bursting into tomorrow.
But where do I cut first?
Where should I begin to pull?
Should it be the Russian thistle
down the hill where backhoes
have bitten? Or African senecio
or tumbleweed bouncing
above the wind? Or the middle finger
of my right hand? Or my left eye
or the other one? Or a slice
from the small of my back, a slab of fat
from my thigh? I am broken
as much as any native ground,
my roots tap a thousand migrations.
My daughters were never born, I am
as much the invader as the native,
as much the last day of life as the first.
I presumed you to be as bitter as me,
to tremble and rage against alien weight.
Who should blossom? Who should receive pollen?
Who should be rooted, who pruned,
who watered, who picked?
Should I feed the white-faced cattle
who wait for the death train to come
or comb the wild seeds from their tails?
Who should return across the sea
or the Bering Strait or the world before this one
or the Mother Ground? Who should go screaming
to some other planet, burn up or melt
in a distant sun? Who should be healed
and who hurt? Who should dry
under summer’s white sky, who should shrivel
at the first sign of drought? Who should be remembered?
Who should be the sterile chimera of earth and of another place,
alien with a native face,
native with an alien face?

Wendy Rose, “Woman Like Me” from Itch Like Crazy. Copyright © 2002 by Wendy Rose. Reprinted by permission of University of Arizona Press.

Source: Itch Like Crazy (University of Arizona Press, 2002)

WENDY ROSE
Biography
More poems by this author

Murr - Li Bai leaves me feeling jealous the time he has on hand to get drunk and sit at that window getting lost in sad thoughts about it, or at least to go through the motions of thinking about doing all that. Too busy here in RL.

Merrikay - enjoyed that.

I am reading Book of Blues by Jack Kerouac. It is excellent poetry. In the last five years I have started making poetry a bigger portion of my reading diet. I wish I had done it long ago. It's a different way to use language that is very expressive.

I got the Pakistan issue of Granta, the first time I have ever read any literary journal. I am enjoying it, but I felt my cultural ignorance throughout the first story. The second entry was a poem, and I could easily see the connections between people of many cultures.

Merrikay - Good for you. There are whole worlds inside those literary journals.

>84 tomcatMurr:, 87

I hope you do all realize that when Chinese poets sing the praise of "wine" they do not bow to Bacchus' red or white, but rather get drunk on 76 - 112 proof sorghum-based liquor.

Interesting, given the centrality of sorghum in Red Sorghum (and they do make wine from it in the novel). Is this true throughout China (i.e., would they make rice wine in parts of China that grow more rice than sorghum?)?

124. Academic graffiti (In memoriam Ogden Nash)
Finished reading: 1 October 2013



Academic graffiti (In memoriam Ogden Nash) is a collection of very light, playful verse by W.H. Auden. Much of it is nonsense, some quite funny. A booklet which can be read in less than an hour.

Martin Buber
Never said "Thou" to a tuber:
Despite his creed,
He did not feel the need.

Lord Byron
Once succumbed to a Siren:
His flesh was weak,
Hers Greek.

Charles Dickens
Could find nothing to say to chickens,
But gossipping with rabbits
Became one of his habits.

Sir Rider Haggard,
Was completely staggered
When his bride-to-be
Announced "I AM SHE!"

Joseph Haydn
Never read Dryden
Nor did John Dryden
Ever hear Haydn.

Those are too funny. Especially liked the one about Rider Haggard.

Great fun