Religion and Ethics Forum
General Category => Literature, Music, Art & Entertainment => Topic started by: Nearly Sane on June 15, 2020, 10:19:41 PM
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Anne Sexton: Her Kind
I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.
I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.
I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.
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I've always like humorous poems: the dafter the better and seeing this thread reminded me of Walter McCorrisken, a fellow Scot who styled himself 'The World's Worst Poet' and even ended up on Parkinson - and he's still around at age 94. Two examples of his 'work'.
A funny thing happened to my brother Jim,
Somebody threw a tomato at him.
Now tomatoes are soft and don't hurt the skin,
but this one was specially packed in a tin
A three-legged dog rode
westward wan day
Doon tae the jile at
Moosejaw
''Sheriff'' he said on an
unsteady leg
''Sheriff Ah've come for
ma paw''
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Think I've posted about this Edward Thomas poem before:
Yes. I remember Adlestrop
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat, the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
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I went through Adlestrop on one of my two week-long bike tours of the West Country in the early noughties. It's a very small place to have had a station of its own. The station went log ago, but the railway line is still there and in use. The old station sign is now fixed above a bench in the village centre.
https://farm1.staticflickr.com/75/204081358_915054f8bb_z.jpg?zz=1
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The last verse occasionally, if I'm in my cups, can get me get a bit dewy-eyed, but it doesn't actually make me blub, but I love it, so it qualifies for this thread. Being a literary snob, I prefer the original spelling of old poems.
A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning
As virtuous men passe mildly away,
And whisper to their soules, to goe,
Whilst some of their sad friends doe say,
The breath goes now, and some say, no.
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No teare-floods, nor sigh-tempests move,
T’were prophanation of our joyes
To tell the layetie our love.
Moving of th’earth brings harmes and feares,
Men reckon what it did and meant,
But trepidation of the spheares,
Though greater farre, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers love
(Whose soule is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.
But we by a love, so much refin’d,
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care lesse, eyes, lips, hands to misse.
Our two soules therefore, which are one,
Though I must goe, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to ayery thinnesse beate.
If they be two, they are two so
As stiffe twin compasses are two,
Thy soule the fixt foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the’other doe.
And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth rome,
It leanes, and hearkens after it,
And growes erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to mee, who must
Like th’other foot, obliquely runne.
Thy firmnes makes my circle just,
And makes me end, where I begunne.
John Donne
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Tired by Langston Hughes
I am so tired of waiting,
Aren’t you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
And cut the world in two –
And see what worms are eating
At the rind.
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There was a young fellow from Ghent
Whose prick was so long that it bent.
To save himself trouble
He put it in double,
And instead of coming, he went.
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The older I get, the more I want to get the last stanza of Tennyson's 'Ullyses' put up on my wall somewhere...
'Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
O.
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John Keats, as a surgeon's apprentice and medical student was well aware of the implications of tuberculosis. It had carried off his mother and at least one brother. Although this sonnet is believed to refer to a chance encounter in a park when he was about 18, it also suggests his premonition of untimely death. He was 25 when he was carried off by consumption.
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high pil`d books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And feel that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
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I could not dig: I dared not to rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?
Rudyard Kipling
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Dylan Thomas
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In the Mid-Midwinter
Liz Lochhead
after John Donne’s ‘A Nocturnal on St Lucy’s Day’
At midday on the year’s midnight
into my mind came
I saw the new moon late yestreen
wi the auld moon in her airms
though, no,
there is no moon of course –
there’s nothing very much of anything to speak of
in the sky except a gey dreich greyness
rain-laden over Glasgow and today
there is the very least of even this for us to get
but
the light comes back
the light always comes back
and this begins tomorrow with
however many minutes more of sun and serotonin.
Meanwhile
there will be the winter moon for us to love the longest,
fat in the frosty sky among the sharpest stars,
and lines of old songs we can’t remember
why we know
or when first we heard them
will aye come back
once in a blue moon to us
unbidden
and bless us with their long-travelled light.
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Willie built a guillotine,
And tried it out on sister, Jean.
Said Mother, as she fetched the mop,
These messy games have got to stop!
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Mark Alexander Boyd
SONET OF VENUS AND CUPID
Fra banc to banc, fra wod to wod, I rin
Ourhailit with my feble fantasie,
Lyk til a leif that fallis from a trie
Or til a reid ourblawin with the wind.
Twa gods gyds me: the ane of tham is blind,
Ye, and a bairn brocht up in vanitie;
The nixt a wyf ingenrit of the se,
And lichter nor a dauphin with hir fin.
Unhappie is the man for evirmair
That teils the sand and sawis in the aire;
Bot twyse unhappier is he, I lairn,
That feidis in his hairt a mad desyre,
And follows on a woman throw the fyre,
Led be a blind and teichit be a bairn.
And for anyone strugglung with the old Scots
SONNET OF VENUS AND CUPID
From bank to bank, from wood to wood, I run
Overcome with my feeble fantasy,
Likened to a leaf that falls from a tree
Or to a reed blown over with the wind.
Two gods guide me: the one of them is blind,
True, and a child brought up in vanity;
The next a wife, engendered by the sea,
And lither than a dolphin with her fin.
Unhappy is the man for evermore
That tills the sand and sows in the air;
But twice unhappier is he, I learn,
That finds in his heart a mad desire,
And follows on a woman through the fire,
Led by a blind and taught by a child.
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Larkin