Poetry Page

[BarbStAubrey]

The Apple Orchard           ~ by Shawn Bailey The dew-softened blades of fescue wet my feet, small brushstrokes of icy wetness on my way to the orchard. The sunlight scatters the morning mist that shelters the trees from the horizon. I spy the juicy red apples lounging in the trees, moist with dawn and there are thousands of them. Fruitful, edible decor.

Autumn Poetry

In this Discussion we share what stirs our heart -
Bring us a gift of a poem
Yours, or the work of another poet.

• Famous Poets and Poems about Autumn
• Fall Season Poems

Discussion Leaders: Barb & fairanna

[roshanarose]

A beautiful poem.  A remarkable poet.  Any writer who can make use of my senses is remarkable.  I can smell those apples.  Mmmmm so sweet and tangy.  Thanks for the sensation (scentsation).

[Babi]

Oh, we all recognize what happens when the day has been full of a
repetitious chose, don't we? Frost captures it beautifully. Sometimes
in my mind I would feel that I could not fall asleep until I had
finished some vague, demanding chore.

  Only in dreams or half-sleep do images merge with sounds and scents.
What do you think of this one?

 The Song in the Dream     
by Saskia Hamilton 

 The song itself had hinges. The clasp on the eighteenth-century Bible
had hinges, which creaked; when you released the catch,
the book would sigh and expand.

The song was of two wholes joined by hinges,
and I was worried about the joining, the spaces in between
the joints, the weight of each side straining them.

[BarbStAubrey]

hmmm that poem took me all over with thoughts - maybe the song is the opening hinges - and then I thought of the hinges on doors and trunks and the connections that are held in place by the hinges as well as the one who opens the lid or door causing the hinges to sing. Wonderful metaphor - interesting how we no longer hinge book covers -

I am thinking that anything hinged holds something we value - when I was young diaries were still hinged - today what is essentially a personal diary is the makings of a blog or page on facebook or a constent twitter announcing your thoughts to who ever in the world wants to know.

But then I look around in this room and notice the most  inane doors are  hinged - the door to the room, the closet door and the doors to two cabinets that hold things like paper. ink and folders and sets of instructional tapes. Nothing on the level of an eighteenth century Bible. I wonder if eighteenth century Koran's were hinged and then I wonder what other religions keep holy certain books and if so what are they and how were they clasped.

[BarbStAubrey]

Shel silverstein has a silly poem about Hinges...

Hinges

If we had hinges on our head
There wouldn't be no sin,
'Cause we could take the bad stuff out
And leave the good stuff in.

[BarbStAubrey]

here is another Hinge poem by Maggie Dietz.

Hinge
 
   In a damp camel wool coat
      The door-hinges creaked
 
   Thickened with Winston smoke
      Fresh snow on the fedora's rim
 
   He waited for them
      Turning to dew in the kitchen
 
   Until they came from their work
      Steam rising from his shoulders
 
   Assembling oranges and cloves
      Like smoke
 
   Losing the oranges, rusted as hinges
      His eyes invisible
 
   (Like bushes surrounded with bees)
      Behind glasses frosted as flutes
 
   They flocked to that place
      In the safe cupboard …

[roshanarose]

The creaking hinge of my cranium has allowed a Greek poem to venture out onto this page. 

ITHAKA

Constantine Cavafy

As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon - don't be afraid of them:
you'll never find things like that one on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon - you won't encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbours you're seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfumes of every kind -
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you're destined for.
But don't hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you're old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you've gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvellous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you'll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean

[BarbStAubrey]

marvelous - exotic and wise... I love it...

[Babi]

Barb, the line that stood out to me in 'Song in the Dream, and seemed
to hold it's meaning,  is   

"when you released the catch,
                                 the book would sigh and expand".

The poet speaks of two halves joined by the hinges and her fear of the
strain on that joining. It speaks to me of a relationship that has become very confining.

[JoanK]

And if we have Greek poets, are they to be followed by Romans? Here is young Virgil, before he wrote the Aeneid, in a (one of many) period when Rome was in chaos:

From GEORGICS I

   by Virgil

         I feel the dread,
and the sun burns me, burns like a fever.
The world is full of war, and at home, crime
resembles a war. Men flock to the city
leaving their fields to weeds, their tools to rust.
Plowshares now are beaten into swords.
It’s bad in Asia, bad in Europe, bad...
No treaties hold, no laws hold, nothing
But Mars, blood red ... He holds it all
hurtling through the sky in his chariot.
I feel those wheels rumble. I feel the sway
of speed. The horses are mad and running faster.
They ought to check. They ought to answer the reins.
There ought to be reins.

         But there are none.

[BarbStAubrey]

Wow Joan talk about descriptive - no wonder we still read Virgil - I can  almost take this poem and tweek the words about the men who first left their farms for the city manufacturing job and now their children leave their home for want of any job.

No treaties hold, no laws hold the problem, there are no laws preventing or making it difficult for companies to send their manufacturing to other nations. Well I better be careful I am sounding too political however, I feel the dread of rumbling wheels that have been with us now for nearly a decade.

Babi when you spoke of the joining I started to look for photos of  18 century hinged bibles and found this nugget - evidently the 17th century Bible Box was the beginnings of a what later became a desk.
http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/bible-boxes-were-also-desks/

[PatH]

Goodness, JoanK, you're going to get me to read Virgil yet.  That's magnificent.  It could be a description of every lawless period from then to now.

Roshanarose, I really like "Ithaka".  Here and in the "Author, Author" discussion you're reminding me of a poet I hadn't thought about for a few years.  Time to do some rereading.

[kiwilady]

He is saying "Stop the World I want to get off!" but he knows its too late and he cannot stop what is happening. Like many of our generation feel about the world situation right now.

Carolyn

[PatH]

"The horses are mad and running faster.
They ought to check. They ought to answer the reins.
There ought to be reins.

         But there are none."

[roshanarose]

I loved the Virgil poem also. 

I thought that you might like to know that "Ithaka" was read by Maurice Templesman at Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' funeral.

[BarbStAubrey]

change of pace

An Arab Love-Song
          ~ Francis Thompson. 1859–1907
 
THE hunchèd camels of the night   
Trouble the bright   
And silver waters of the moon.   
The Maiden of the Morn will soon   
Through Heaven stray and sing,           
Star gathering.   
   
Now while the dark about our loves is strewn,   
Light of my dark, blood of my heart, O come!   
And night will catch her breath up, and be dumb.   
   
Leave thy father, leave thy mother   
And thy brother;   
Leave the black tents of thy tribe apart!   
Am I not thy father and thy brother,   
And thy mother?   
And thou—what needest with thy tribe's black tents   
Who hast the red pavilion of my heart?

[BarbStAubrey]

I wonder if his song is after hearing the hinges on a Bible

Go, songs, for ended is our brief, sweet play
          ~ by Francis Thompson

Go, songs, for ended is our brief, sweet play;
Go, children of swift joy and tardy sorrow:
And some are sung, and that was yesterday,
And some are unsung, and that may be tomorrow.

Go forth; and if it be o'er stony way,
Old joy can lend what newer grief must borrow:
And it was sweet, and that was yesterday,
And sweet is sweet, though purchased with sorrow.

Go, songs, and come not back from your far way:
And if men ask you why ye smile and sorrow,
Tell them ye grieve, for your hearts know Today,
Tell them ye smile, for your eyes know Tomorrow.

[BarbStAubrey]

I kept thinking it was Shelley and couldn't find this poem to Virgil - voila found it however it is Lord Tennyson who wrote

To Virgil
          ~ by Lord Alfred Tennyson at the Request of the Mantuans for the 19th Centenary of Virgil's Death

Roman Virgil, thou that singest
Ilion's lofty temples robed in fire,
Ilion falling, Rome arising,
wars, and filial faith, and Dido's pyre;

Landscape-lover, lord of language
more than he that sang the Works and Days,
All the chosen coin of fancy
flashing out from many a golden phrase;

Thou that singest wheat and woodland,
tilth and vineyard, hive and horse and herd;
All the charm of all the Muses
often flowering in a lonely word;

Poet of the happy Tityrus
piping underneath his beechen bowers;
Poet of the poet-satyr
whom the laughing shepherd bound with flowers;

Chanter of the Pollio, glorying
in the blissful years again to be,
Summers of the snakeless meadow,
unlaborious earth and oarless sea;

Thou that seest Universal
Nature moved by Universal Mind;
Thou majestic in thy sadness
at the doubtful doom of human kind;

Light among the vanished ages;
star that gildest yet this phantom shore;
Golden branch amid the shadows,
kings and realms that pass to rise no more;

Now thy Forum roars no longer,
fallen every purple Caesar's dome -
Tho' thine ocean-roll of rhythm
sound for ever of Imperial Rome -

Now the Rome of slaves hath perished,
and the Rome of freemen holds her place,
I, from out the Northern Island
sundered once from all the human race,

I salute thee, Mantovano,
I that loved thee since my day began,
Wielder of the stateliest measure
ever moulded by the lips of man.

[Babi]

 Oh, these were great!  That poem of Virgil was so much more lovely
than the translation of his work that I read.  The Arab love song was just right. And thanks for the article on the Bible boxes, BARB. 

[Tomereader1]

 there are no laws preventing or making it difficult for companies to send their manufacturing to other nations.
I simply loved that "Virgil".  Sending mfg. to other nations: this fall, well soon on TV, there will be a series (comedy) Outsourced (maybe not quite) There was a very cute little movie titled Outsourced, which was funny and enjoyable, but the permutations behind it are not funny.  Day by day, week by week, more and more of us lose jobs to outsourcing.  We need to make it difficult for companies to send their  mfg. outside our borders.  
Even the ancient poetry tells us "the more things change, the more things stay the same".  Now I will step down before the political police jump all over me! LOL

[fairanna]

Oh I  come here and am fed ....my whole body, my senses , my mind , my heart ...I smile . I laugh , I weep and sigh  for poets speak of so many things......how can people not love poetry  ? I feel sadden for those who disdain and never read or hear poetry spoken....thank you everyone for sharing the poems posted .....I have read and re read the last two pages ---in them you offered a  banquet ............and fed my heart, my soul, my mind...that is what poetry does ..reading poems from the past we are reminded the world has always been the same .......every since Cain killed Abel  man has sought to destroy what God has wrought........instead of seeking ways to get along we keep inventing newer weapons,   fists, stick. swords, guns , tanks, planes, and now weapons of mass destruction ..Whatever poet I have read I have learned something ...not always noble or good  because poets SEE the world and write about what they see and feel
 
I am at a point where I have begun  to feel able and capable again.. and each day I pick up one of my books of poetry because I need to read what someone has said and find something that speaks to me...and this discussion opens my mind as I read of newer poets ( not always young just  new to me)   I am going to share another of Ted Koosers Poems and bless you for your sharing  

SCREECH OWL

All night each reedy, whinny
from a bird no bigger than a heart
flies out of a tall black pine
and , in a breath , is taken away
by the stars. Yet, with small hope
from the center of darkness,
it calls out again and again.

When I returned home ..finally ...I sat on a deck swing  it was almost dark and in a tree I saw one of the owls that have lived here since we moved here in 1972.....I no longer hear them but know they are there......they prefer the tallest branches and in the past I never saw them but could hear them  I am glad this one spent a few minutes visiting me before he flew away......it helped to make me feel welcome....always , anna

[kiwilady]

Hello Anna!

Lovely to meet you here.

Carolyn

[JoanK]

What wonderful poems here today. I go into my day refreshed.

[Gumtree]

Barbara: Thanks for posting the Tennyson To Virgil. It's a poem of my youth and once I had it by heart but I haven't read it for such a long time though occasionally a few lines from it will flit through my mind - for years almost always when I come across something remarkable that someone has done ( in any field) I say to myself the line from the last verse:

 I salute thee, Mantovano

That comma after thee, is a masterstroke by Tennyson as it emphasises both thee and Mantovano - at least in my reading.

- and now that I'm learning Latin with Ginny the final couplet takes on added meaning for me :

Wielder of the stateliest measure
ever moulded by the lips of man.

The more I learn of Latin the truer the stateliest measure becomes.

This is only one more example of how our appreciation of poetry grows with our own experience.

Again, my thanks - you quite made my day!

[Babi]

So glad you are home and feeling more yourself again, ANNA. Where do you live, that you have owls so close by?  I don't believe I've ever seen a live owl.

  I came across this; Goodfellow is new to me, but I like his style.

      Morning Mist
Successive layers of mist
Slowly rise to greet us
We, the exhausted
Half insane from lack of sleep
yet unable to sustain our indifference
to the unfolding awesome beauty
A multi-layered mist
set against an awakening Sun
An incomprehensible ghost-dance
Shifting hues of soft light play upon our tired eyes
We drive slowly our breaths shallow and silent
for fear that the spell be broken and the mist disperse
Disperse like a forgotten dream.

Stephen Goodfellow
 

 

[BarbStAubrey]

 lovely Babi -  driving back from my daughter's coming off t hose mountains I often can look down into a Valley of layers of mist - thank goodness the road is high enough so that I can drive on and not be blanketed.

I am remembering as a teen mist on the water so thick all you could hear was the sounds of a bouy rocking, a distant fog horn and the slapping of water against the side of the boat. The mist swallowed up human voices then gradually from gray and white it sparkled yellow and then an orange. You knew the sun was trying to break through and  you had to quick cover up to prevent a severe sunburn that is brutal in a yellow mist. Slowly moving, calling out as we go we picked our way back to shore even before the mist would blow out to sea, always around 10: in the morning.

Thoreau does a poem about Mist

Mist  

  Low-anchored cloud,
Newfoundland air,
Fountain head and source of rivers,
Dew-cloth, dream drapery,
And napkin spread by fays;
Drifting meadow of the air,
Where bloom the dasied banks and violets,
And in whose fenny labyrinth
The bittern booms and heron wades;
Spirit of the lake and seas and rivers,
Bear only purfumes and the scent
Of healing herbs to just men's fields!
 

[BarbStAubrey]

Robert Frost always pleases doesn't he...

Going for Water
           ~ Robert Frost (1915)
 
The well was dry beside the door,
  And so we went with pail and can
Across the fields behind the house
  To seek the brook if still it ran;

Not loth to have excuse to go,
  Because the autumn eve was fair
(Though chill), because the fields were ours,
  And by the brook our woods were there.

We ran as if to meet the moon
  That slowly dawned behind the trees,
The barren boughs without the leaves,
  Without the birds, without the breeze.

But once within the wood, we paused
  Like gnomes that hid us from the moon,
Ready to run to hiding new
  With laughter when she found us soon.

Each laid on other a staying hand
  To listen ere we dared to look,
And in the hush we joined to make
  We heard, we knew we heard the brook.

A note as from a single place,
  A slender tinkling fall that made
Now drops that floated on the pool
  Like pearls, and now a silver blade.
 

[BarbStAubrey]

ah and the Irish mist...

The Lost Heifer
          ~ Austin Clarke

When the black herds of the rain were grazing,
In the gap of the pure cold wind
And the watery hazes of the hazel
Brought her into my mind,
I thought of the last honey by the water
That no hive can find.

Brightness was drenching through the branches
When she wandered again,
Turning sliver out of dark grasses
Where the skylark had lain,
And her voice coming softly over the meadow
Was the mist becoming rain.

[JoanK]

Beautiful.

[fairanna]

I have often found it interesting that a poem will make me SEE AND FEEL when only an exceptional piece of prose does the same  ----
Growing up when  we had 78 records played on wind up phonographs ..you didn't just hear it once but many times ...and when with my first pay check at 16 I purchased a Philco electric phono player it was MAGIC...and I played the records OVER AND OVER for myself and my friends..and memorized a lot of songs..I find that I often recall a special song and this week I have been singing THE SEPTEMBER SONG ... I don't recall who sang it but I keep feeling it was some one new from play whose name I don't recall I did copy it from the net since I wanted to make sure I was right AND I WAS and thought I would share my memory with you....

SEPTEMBER SONG

Oh, it's a long, long while from May to December
But the days grow short when you reach September
When the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame
One doesn't have time for the waiting game.

Oh , the days dwindle down to a precious few
             September, November
And these few precious days I'll spend with you
These  precious days I'll spend  with you.

When we marry we always hope the precious days will last until the end ..but  sadly that is not always true bur good memories do survive and that helps some......love to all .. anna

[PatH]

September Song is from the musical "Knickerbocker Holiday", with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Maxwell Anderson.

Weill said that whenever he wrote a song, he heard it in the voice of Lotte Lenya, his wife, singer, and best interpreter of his songs.  So here's a clip of her singing it, though in this case I don't think she's that great.  Her husky voice is perfect for a lot of his stuff, though.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdc4oBnu_fw

[PatH]

Anna--amen to the rest of what you said.

[Babi]

 A regional bit of knowledge us inlanders wouldn't know. I had
no idea one could get a bad sunburn as it came out of an orange
mist. In fact, I didn't know there was such a thing as yellow and
orange mist.
   I liked Thoreau's "Mist" very much. The Frost I knew. Austin
Clarke's lost heifer puzzles me a bit.  What has a heifer to do with a
honey hive?  If this is a woman he is writing of, she won't thank him
to be called a heifer.

 "SEPTEMBER SONG" is a favorite with me, ANNA.

[BarbStAubrey]

Babi next to Yeats, Austin Clarke is Ireland's second best known and loved poet of that era. He was a Journalist in England for 15 years before going back to Ireland to write plays, novels and poems. His novels are out of print and a collection of his plays has been translated into English since 2000. His poetry has continued to be read and available in English. What is remarkable is how he wrote poetry in English using the poetry pattern of speech and rhythm of the Gallic.

You have to be careful looking up the novels of Austin Clarke since there is a more recent author from Canada with the same name. The Irish Austin Clarke writes as Yeats did about Ireland's past much of it in mythology.

The key to understanding the poem about the cows [which are in the rain like a black mass with no distinction between individual cows] is the line about the last honey near the water that no hive can find. You have to stretch a bit but it is a memory of a sweet time with his lady and so the soft rolling mist is reminding him of her loveliness. The cows, because they have a different look as if a surreal body of a black herd sets you up to realize in the mist and rain everything takes on a different form the easier to bring memory images to life.

Thanks for the memory Annafair, The 1920s and 30s sure was an era in the US of classical songs that still resonates and is included in the repertoire of only the best performers today. No whipping the crowds up with a Kurt Weill, Gershwin or Cole Porter song. September Song really captures the month doesn't it - the soft melody and then that line the days dwindle down - pause - to a precious few  captures how the days are getting shorter in addition to the months of the year are only a few.

Oh yes, Babi when you are in a boat and there is a morning mist often it is not a gray and cloudy day so when the sun is in the sky it is as if each droplet of mist is a magnifying class for the sun and the mist takes on a yellowish orangey ting - looking at it from an area where you are out of the mist it still appears to be a light almost white gray. Not as dark as it was before the sun was high in the sky but in the middle of the mist it is no longer this gray mass and yes, in a mist just like on a bright overcast day the sun is magnified through all that moisture and you come up with a severe sun burn unless you wear a shirt and a hat or a bandanna on your forehead. I am not sure if today's sun blocks are a help but then I have not been in a mist out on the water in a few years.

[BarbStAubrey]

here is another Austin Clarke poem...

The Blackbird Of Derrycairn  

   Stop, stop and listen for the bough top
Is whistling and the sun is brighter
Than God's own shadow in the cup now!
Forget the hour-bell. Mournful matins
Will sound, Patric, as well at nightfall.

Faintly through mist of broken water
Fionn heard my melody in Norway.
He found the forest track, he brought back
This beak to gild the branch and tell, there,
Why men must welcome in the daylight.

He loved the breeze that warns the black grouse,
The shouts of gillies in the morning
When packs are counted and the swans cloud
Loch Erne, but more than all those voices
My throat rejoicing from the hawthorn.

In little cells behind a cashel,
Patric, no handbell gives a glad sound.
But knowledge is found among the branches.
Listen! That song that shakes my feathers
Will thong the leather of your satchels.

Cashel in this poem I think it is referring to the Rock of Cashel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_of_Cashel

The poem seems to be saying that the conversion of the Irish by St. Patrick was as quiet and all encompassing as a breeze or mist blown to Norway from Ireland or the natural gathering of birds.
 

[fairanna]

I love all the poems posted and as always I not only read them but FEEL them SEE them  I loved the one you just posted and it reminds me of fall or spring when the geese and ducks arrive here on the lakes and ponds of Virginia ,,sometimes they almost fill the ponds and the grasses roundabout   I can almost hear them say  Hey that was some trip was'nt it? and I think our leader did a good job  He was last when we left last winter .. so glad to see him back I didnt get as far as Canada this year .. you know I am getting old and dont know how many years I have left . but boy it has been great ...I feel sorry for humans ,,tethered to the ground ...and planes just get in the way ..no wind smoothing your feathers as you go....oh well it has been a great life..hope to see you next year

[fairanna]

Poems of Thomas Hardy

Days to Remember

Do you recall
That day in Fall
When we walked toward Saint Alban's Head,
On thistledown that summer had shed,
Or must I remind you?
Winged thistle -seeds which hitherto
Had lain as none were there ,or few,
But rose at the brush of your petti-coat seam
(As ghosts might rise of the recent dead)
And sailed on the breeze in a nebulous stream
Like a comet's tail behind you:
You don't recall
That  day in Fall?

Then do you remember
That sad November
When you left me never to see me more,
And looked quite other than theretofore,
As if it could not be you?
And lay by the window whence you had gazed
So many times when blamed or praised,
Morning or noon, through years and years,
Accepting the gifts that Fortune bore,
Sharing, enduring , joys, hopes, fears!
Well: I never more did see you-
Say you remember
That sad November!

He lived a long time for his time and wrote a lot of poems ..this book is his whole collection and it has 931 pages and the printing is sort of small...A lot of his poems makes me think he is writing them when he  was older  Remembering the past .the people he once knew I know I do the same .....there are so few left from my childhood days I do keep in touch with several and it makes me glad I can say do you remember when we met, when we were three at Sunday School ? Or when we started to date? Those memories are life gifts...and like the poem it is good to be able to say  SAY YOU REMEMBER THOSE CHILDHOOD DAYS>. anna

[Babi]

 Thanks for explaining the Clarke poem, BARB. The 'honey near the
water' did sound like a romantic tryst. It just didn't make sense
in context until you explained it.
  Also, the mist. Our mists tend to be low-lying, so I've never
seen the sun from within the mist. I do understand about getting
sunburn on overcast days. I learned that one the hard way.

 Treasure those memories, ANNA.  Growing up as I did, moving about every
other year, I had no lasting childhood friends.  It's a lack I can only measure
by seeing the closeness of my daughter to the friends she grew up with.

[roshanarose]

Thomas Hardy is such a wonderful writer.  I think the poem I remember most of his is "The Ruined Maid".  I have the complete "Novels of Thomas Hardy", but, to my shame, have not read all of them, although I have read "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" and "Far from the Madding Crowd" three times each.

I remember after reading a certain section in "Jude the Obscure" feeling as though someone had punched me in the stomach.  Not many writers can cause that kind of sensation.  I could never bring myself to read thre book again.

Excellent choice of Hardy's work Anna!

[Babi]

 I've read some of Hardy's works, but I found him too depressing and
did not read all of them.

  I looked for the rest of this poem, but these four lines are all
I could find.
  "Sorrow and scarlet leaf,
Sad thoughts and sunny weather.
Ah me, this glory and this grief
Agree not well together!"-   Thomas Parsons, 1880, A Song For September