Poetry Page

[BarbStAubrey]

J.W. Waterhouse Famous Poets and Poems about Spring Link to: Spring Poems Discussion Leaders: Barb

Join Us! For a Season of Spring Poetry Sonnet VII ~ John Milton How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,        Stol'n on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!        My hasting days fly on with full career,        But my late spring no bud or blossom shew'th. Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth        That I to manhood am arriv'd so near;        And inward ripeness doth much less appear,        That some more timely-happy spirits endu'th. Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,        It shall be still in strictest measure ev'n        To that same lot, however mean or high, Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heav'n:        All is, if I have grace to use it so        As ever in my great Task-Master's eye.

[BarbStAubrey]

Easter 1916
          ~ William Butler Yeats

    I

    I have met them at close of day
    Coming with vivid faces
    From counter or desk among grey
    Eighteenth-century houses.
    I have passed with a nod of the head
    Or polite meaningless words,
    Or have lingered awhile and said
    Polite meaningless words,
    And thought before I had done
    Of a mocking tale or a gibe
    To please a companion
    Around the fire at the club,
    Being certain that they and I
    But lived where motley is worn:
    All changed, changed utterly:
    A terrible beauty is born.

    II

    That woman's days were spent
    In ignorant good will,
    Her nights in argument
    Until her voice grew shrill.
    What voice more sweet than hers
    When young and beautiful,
    She rode to harriers?
    This man had kept a school
    And rode our winged horse.
    This other his helper and friend
    Was coming into his force;
    He might have won fame in the end,
    So sensitive his nature seemed,
    So daring and sweet his thought.
    This other man I had dreamed
    A drunken, vain-glorious lout.
    He had done most bitter wrong
    To some who are near my heart,
    Yet I number him in the song;
    He, too, has resigned his part
    In the casual comedy;
    He, too, has been changed in his turn,
    Transformed utterly:
    A terrible beauty is born.

    III

    Hearts with one purpose alone
    Through summer and winter, seem
    Enchanted to a stone
    To trouble the living stream.
    The horse that comes from the road,
    The rider, the birds that range
    From cloud to tumbling cloud,
    Minute by minute change.
    A shadow of cloud on the stream
    Changes minute by minute;
    A horse-hoof slides on the brim;
    And a horse plashes within it
    Where long-legged moor-hens dive
    And hens to moor-cocks call.
    Minute by minute they live:
    The stone's in the midst of all.

    IV

    Too long a sacrifice
    Can make a stone of the heart.
    O when may it suffice?
    That is heaven's part, our part
    To murmur name upon name,
    As a mother names her child
    When sleep at last has come
    On limbs that had run wild.
    What is it but nightfall?
    No, no, not night but death.
    Was it needless death after all?
    For England may keep faith
    For all that is done and said.
    We know their dream; enough
    To know they dreamed and are dead.
    And what if excess of love
    Bewildered them till they died?
    I write it out in a verse --
    MacDonagh and MacBride
    And Connolly and Pearse
    Now and in time to be,
    Wherever green is worn,
    Are changed, changed utterly:
    A terrible beauty is born.

[BarbStAubrey]

April Rain Song
          ~  Langston Hughes

Let the rain kiss you.
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops.
Let the rain sing you a lullaby.

The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk.
The rain makes running pools in the gutter.
The rain plays a little sleep-song on our roof at night—

And I love the rain.
 

[JoanK]

I too love the rain.

[BarbStAubrey]

Magic birds were dancing
in the mystic marsh.
The grass swayed with them,
and the shallow waters,
and the earth fluttered under them.
The earth was dancing with the cranes,
and the low sun, and the wind and sky.

~ Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

[BarbStAubrey]

Thus weave for us
a garment of brightness
That we may walk fittingly
where grass is green,
O our mother the earth,
O our father the sky.

~ Native American Prayer (Tewa Pueblo)

[JoanK]

That is beautiful.

[bellemere]

The little South Boston nun who taught my  college poetry course, loved Robert Frost.  this time of year she liked to declaim,
"Come with rainn thou loud southwestah!
Bring the singah!  Bring the nestah!

[PatH]

 

[Octavia]

 I feel like a stranger, I've been gone so long.
 I've been plagued with eye trouble and really had to give up reading/writing for months. Looking around for a substitute I heard on the ABC that reading poetry with archaic language has been found to spark neurons in our brains (Shakespeare, Wordsworth etc.) and because I always had a thing for Tennyson's
Morte D'Arthur, and was getting concerned about forgetting words, I decided to memorise it, all 7 and a half pages in my old school Book Of Poetry!
 I only had to read 4 lines at a time and walk around reciting it over and over, and then add it to the rest in my head.
It felt like scaling Mt. Everest, I couldn't see the finish line, but just trudged on each day, never truly believing I'd see the summit. Now in my head, indelibly inked, are 7 and 1/2 epic pages. Sometimes I hated Arthur and sometimes the 'bold Sir Bedivere',( he was always The Bold Sir Bedivere), but we've made up now.
And it really did help my mind, because I memorised 3 more poems, fairly effortlessly, in quick succession.
Now to catch up here and everywhere!

[BarbStAubrey]

Octavia welcome back - the poetry page has been lingering - the heart went out of me after Babi passed away - it was hard when Fairanna passed on but Babi was such an unexpected shock and she was a daily poster here in poetry.

I thought I was going to resurrect the discussion by August 1 but I became overwhelmed with so much and then got off on other tangents but I will this month put us together again - I have an idea that involves more photos and a heading that is weekly rather than changing for the seasons of the year - in the meantime please feel free to post - I still need more time to get my ducks in a row as the saying goes.

[Octavia]

I was shocked and saddened by Babi's death too, Barb. She was always here, with a succinct and well timed remark, I thought it would always be like that. She must be missed so much by people who knew her much longer than I did.
Don't push yourself to do things while your heart is still hurting. We aren't encouraged to mourn enough in this country. It's move on, put things behind you, don't embarrass us with your grief-be normal. Whatever normal is. There's plenty of pages here that can be revisited.
Take your time.

[BarbStAubrey]

Thanks you are so thoughtful and I appreciate it. 

[BarbStAubrey]

Oh my - we have many poems to fill up the number of posts for a new page and so I am changing our heading here -

The loss of Seamus Heaney today reminded me of how some years ago Fairanna had devoted a month to Seamus Heaney when we were doing a poet a month and Babi often shared the poems of Seamus Heaney - she liked his down to earth message

And so I had this fantasy picture of all three of them along with their poet friends in a pub in heaven sharing stories and their poems - to honor all three let's, this month of September share only poems written by Seamus Heaney and if you have any of the poems written by Fairanna let's include them as well.

[BarbStAubrey]

I am going to post some short poems and some quotes to get us to the top of a new page

[BarbStAubrey]

‘Walk on air against your better judgment’: Heaney on life, poetry, God and Ireland

Seamus Heaney at home in 1999 - Photograph: Pat Langan/The Irish Times


Quotes which made him popular around the world.

“I can’t think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people’s understanding of what’s going on in the world.” (This Week magazine, 2004)


   

[BarbStAubrey]

“If you have the words, there’s always a chance that you’ll find the way.”

“History says, don’t hope ....

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave.

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme” (The Cure at Troy, 1991)

[BarbStAubrey]

“Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what’s said and what’s done.” (Beowulf: A New Verse Translation, 2001)

[BarbStAubrey]

JoanP reminded us of our very successful discussion some years ago of the Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf- I still have my copy of his new at the time translation - do you?

[BarbStAubrey]

“Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world.” (The Redress of Poetry, 1990)

Walk on air against your better judgement.” (Nobel Lecture, 1995)

[BarbStAubrey]

“I’m going to afford myself a year off.... and wait and see, and live in panic for the next poem.” (2010)

“At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.”

[BarbStAubrey]

From the Irish Times

Taoiseach Enda Kenny has said the death of Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney today has brought a “great sorrow to Ireland” and only the poet himself could describe the depth of his loss to the nation.

Mr Kenny said: “For us, Seamus Heaney was the keeper of language, our codes, our essence as a people”.

Heaney died this morning at the Blackrock Clinic aged 74 after a short illness

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/tributes-paid-to-keeper-of-language-seamus-heaney-1.1510607

[BarbStAubrey]

Being an artist is dragging your innermost feelings out,
giving a piece of yourself, no matter in which art form, in which medium.

~ Henry Rollins

[BarbStAubrey]

We know that in September,
we will wander through the warm winds of summer's wreckage.
We will welcome summer's ghost.

~ Henry Rollins

[BarbStAubrey]

By all these lovely tokens September days are here,
With summer's best of weather And autumn's best of cheer.

~ Helen Hunt Jackson

[BarbStAubrey]

I love September, especially when we're in it.

~ Willie Stargill

[BarbStAubrey]

Expecting is the greatest impediment to living.
In anticipation of tomorrow, it loses today.

~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca

[BarbStAubrey]

Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.

~ Seamus Heaney

[BarbStAubrey]

Nobody knows what anticipation is anymore.
Everything is so immediate.

~ Joan Jett

[BarbStAubrey]

End of Summer
          By Stanley Kunitz

An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.
 
I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones,
Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.
 
Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
That part of my life was over.
 
Already the iron door of the north
Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows
Order their populations forth,
And a cruel wind blows.

[BarbStAubrey]

The End of Summer
          By Rachel Hadas

Sweet smell of phlox drifting across the lawn—
an early warning of the end of summer.
August is fading fast, and by September
the little purple flowers will all be gone.

Season, project, and vacation done.
One more year in everybody’s life.
Add a notch to the old hunting knife
Time keeps testing with a horny thumb.

Over the summer months hung an unspoken
aura of urgency. In late July
galactic pulsings filled the midnight sky
like silent screaming, so that, strangely woken,

we looked at one another in the dark,
then at the milky magical debris
arcing across, dwarfing our meek mortality.
There were two ways to live: get on with work,

redeem the time, ignore the imminence
of cataclysm; or else take it slow,
be as tranquil as the neighbors’ cow
we love to tickle through the barbed wire fence
(she paces through her days in massive innocence,
or, seeing green pastures, we imagine so).

In fact, not being cows, we have no choice.
Summer or winter, country, city, we
are prisoners from the start and automatically,
hemmed in, harangued by the one clamorous voice.

Not light but language shocks us out of sleep
ideas of doom transformed to meteors
we translate back to portents of the wars
looming above the nervous watch we keep.

[BarbStAubrey]

XXXIX (from Last Poems)
          by AE Housman

When summer's end is nighing
  And skies at evening cloud,
I muse on change and fortune
  And all the feats I vowed
  When I was young and proud.

The weathercock at sunset
  Would lose the slanted ray,
And I would climb the beacon
  That looked to Wales away
  And saw the last of day.

From hill and cloud and heaven
  The hues of evening died;
Night welled through lane and hollow
  And hushed the countryside,
  But I had youth and pride.

And I with earth and nightfall
  In converse high would stand,
Late, till the west was ashen
  And darkness hard at hand,
  And the eye lost the land.

The year might age, and cloudy
  The lessening day might close,
But air of other summers
  Breathed from beyond the snows,
  And I had hope of those.

They came and were and are not
  And come no more anew;
And all the years and seasons
  That ever can ensue
  Must now be worse and few.

So here's an end of roaming
  On eves when autumn nighs:
The ear too fondly listens
  For summer's parting sighs,
  And then the heart replies.

[BarbStAubrey]

[BarbStAubrey]

[Sleeping sister of a farther sky]
          By Karen Volkman

Sleeping sister of a farther sky,
dropped from zenith like a tender tone,
the lucid apex of a scale unknown
whose whitest whisper is an opaque cry
 
of measureless frequency, the spectral sigh
you breath, bright hydrogen and brighter zone
of fissured carbon, consummated moan
and ceaseless rapture of a brilliant why.
 
Will nothing wake you from your livid rest?
Essence of ether and astral stone
the stunned polarities your substance weaves
 
in one bright making, like a dream of leaves
in the tree’s mind, summered. Or as a brooding bone
roots constellations in the body’s nest.

[BarbStAubrey]

['Joy of my life, full oft for loving you']
          By Edmund Spenser

Joy of my life, full oft for loving you
    I bless my lot, that was so lucky placed:
    But then the more your own mishap I rue,
    That are so much by so mean love embased.
For had the equal heavens so much you graced
    In this as in the rest, ye might invent
    Some heavenly wit, whose verse could have enchased
    Your glorious name in golden monument.
But since ye deign’d so goodly to relent
    To me your thrall, in whom is little worth,
    That little that I am shall all be spent
    In setting your immortal praises forth;
Whose lofty argument uplifting me
    Shall lift you up unto an high degree.

[BarbStAubrey]

Golden Retrievals
          By Mark Doty

Fetch? Balls and sticks capture my attention
seconds at a time. Catch? I don’t think so.
Bunny, tumbling leaf, a squirrel who’s—oh
joy—actually scared. Sniff the wind, then

I’m off again: muck, pond, ditch, residue
of any thrillingly dead thing. And you?
Either you’re sunk in the past, half our walk,
thinking of what you never can bring back,

or else you’re off in some fog concerning
—tomorrow, is that what you call it? My work:
to unsnare time’s warp (and woof!), retrieving,
my haze-headed friend, you. This shining bark,

a Zen master’s bronzy gong, calls you here,
entirely, now: bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow.

[BarbStAubrey]

The Cricket and the Grasshopper
          By Dan Beachy-Quick

The senseless leaf   in the fevered hand
Grows hot, near blood-heat, but never grows
Green. Weeks ago the dove’s last cooing strain
Settled silent in the nest to brood slow
Absence from song. The dropped leaf cools
On the uncut grass, supple still, still green,
Twining still these fingers as they listless pull
The tangle straight until the tangle tightens
And the hand is caught, another fallen leaf.
The poetry of the earth never ceases
Ceasing — one blade of grass denies belief
Until its mere thread bears the grasshopper’s
Whole weight, and the black cricket sings unseen,
Desire living in a hole beneath the tangle’s green.

[BarbStAubrey]

Fairy-tale Logic
          By A. E. Stallings

Fairy tales are full of impossible tasks:
Gather the chin hairs of a man-eating goat,
Or cross a sulphuric lake in a leaky boat,
Select the prince from a row of identical masks,
Tiptoe up to a dragon where it basks
And snatch its bone; count dust specks, mote by mote,
Or learn the phone directory by rote.
Always it’s impossible what someone asks—

You have to fight magic with magic. You have to believe
That you have something impossible up your sleeve,
The language of snakes, perhaps, an invisible cloak,
An army of ants at your beck, or a lethal joke,
The will to do whatever must be done:
Marry a monster. Hand over your firstborn son.

[BarbStAubrey]

Almost there - I must say it has been fun finding these poems and then the photos that enhance the quote or poem - the interent gets more delightful each year. I just need to be at 3680 for the top of the page to feature the new heading

[BarbStAubrey]

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything
without losing your temper or your self-confidence.

~ Robert Frost