and a bit of poetry

[Nearly Sane]

Having spent a lot of time travelling, this always touches me.


http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/webtexts/Bradstreet/bradlet.htm

[Nearly Sane]

I know I have posted this before because Gordon hadn't read it and said so, but still worth repeating

http://www.solearabiantree.net/namingofparts/namingofparts.html

[john]

Nearly Sane

If you like 1st World War Poetry, may I recommend to you the CD by THE TIGER LILIES called A DREAM TURNS SOUR.


https://youtu.be/AEq_ZIxHz_M

The Tiger Lilies are a very unusual cult band with a huge following and this CD is all war poems made into songs it is IMO very moving.

[Nearly Sane]

Nearly Sane

If you like 1st World War Poetry, may I recommend to you the CD by THE TIGER LILIES called A DREAM TURNS SOUR.


https://youtu.be/AEq_ZIxHz_M

The Tiger Lilies are a very unusual cult band with a huge following and this CD is all war poems made into songs it is IMO very moving.

Thanks for that, john, WI look into it
 As a partial return of the favour, if you like poetry set to music, one of my favourite artists, James Grant did a CD of poetry set to his music, called I Shot The Albatross

[Shaker]

I know that this is a big claim, but I've long thought that considered purely for its music, A. E. Housman's 'Far in a Western Brookland' may be be the most beautiful assemblage of words in the English language:

http://goo.gl/V1OxCr

All the more so given that it was set to music for a tenor and piano quintet (part of a 1923 song-cycle called Ludlow and Teme) in an indescribably lovely setting by the poet and composer Ivor Gurney - unfortunately I can't find a version online to link to, although you can hear a short excerpt (only a minute or so, unfortunately) from the best recording IMO here - track 16: http://goo.gl/LHmYh3

[john]

In my opinion the best ever attempt at setting poetry to music is the series of 4 CDs by Sir John Betjeman and Jim Parker; University Rag, Banana Blush, Late Flowering Lust and Sir John Betjeman's Britain.

Banana Blush was nominated by the BBC as being the top cult CD of all time. These CDs are now collector's items. I have all 4.

Here is a link to utube of one of these pieces. The poem has Betjeman reminiscing about his dead father who was deaf. Very moving. 


https://youtu.be/82u00RIfErQ

[john]

PS

Nearly Sane

Have ordered I shot the Albatross from Amazon..... They only had one copy at £14.99 and no cheap ones available.

Could not find a link to listen to that CD anywhere. Have listened to other stuff by Grant though, who I had never heard of before, sounds like a cross between Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce. But I see that the Albatross CD features other singers.

Thanks for the pointer.

John

[john]

Nearly Sane

Got my "I shot the Albatross" Cd a few days ago and have listened to it several times. I like the "spoken" tracks more than the "sung" ones where the words get lost.


Disappointed that the sleeve notes do not contain the poems. Easy enough to look up on google but having them together in one place would have been good. I like to read lyrics whilst listening it increases my understanding.

Still a good CD thanks for the tip.

[Sebastian Toe]

There was a young man named Vlad
His jokes were incredibly bad
On Religion and Ethics
He leads the Pathetics
With 'intuits' both bonkers and mad.

[Nearly Sane]

Nearly Sane

Got my "I shot the Albatross" Cd a few days ago and have listened to it several times. I like the "spoken" tracks more than the "sung" ones where the words get lost.


Disappointed that the sleeve notes do not contain the poems. Easy enough to look up on google but having them together in one place would have been good. I like to read lyrics whilst listening it increases my understanding.

Still a good CD thanks for the tip.

Glad you liked it, he's a brilliant artist to see live, though the word curmudgeonly might have been invented for him. With age he is mellowing

[Shaker]

There was a young man named Vlad
His jokes were incredibly bad
On Religion and Ethics
He leads the Pathetics
With 'intuits' both bonkers and mad.

Top man!

[Nearly Sane]

Emily Dickinson   

Cocoon above! Cocoon below!


Cocoon above! Cocoon below!
Stealthy Cocoon, why hide you so
What all the world suspect?
An hour, and gay on every tree
Your secret, perched in ecstasy
Defies imprisonment!

An hour in Chrysalis to pass,
Then gay above receding grass
A Butterfly to go!
A moment to interrogate,
Then wiser than a "Surrogate,"
The Universe to know!

[Steve H]

This is similar in theme to the poem in the opening post, and I find it rather moving, especially the last stanza.

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
John Donne
1572 – 1631

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
   And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
   "The breath goes now," and some say, "No,"

So let us melt, and make no noise,
   No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
   To tell the laity our love.

Moving of the earth brings harms and fears,
   Men reckon what it did and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
   Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
   (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
   Those things which elemented it.

But we, by a love so much refined
   That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
   Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
   Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion.
   Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
   As stiff twin compasses are two:
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
   To move, but doth, if the other do;

And though it in the centre sit,
   Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
   And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
   Like the other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
   And makes me end where I begun.

[Nearly Sane]

When you and I are buried
With grasses over head,
The memory of our fights will stand
Above this bare and tortured land,
We knew ere we were dead.

Though grasses grow at Vimy,
And poppies at Messines,
And in High Wood the children play,
The craters and the graves will stay
To show what things have been.

Though all be quiet in day-time,
The night shall bring a change,
And peasants walking home will see
Shell-torn meadow and riven tree,
And their own fields grown strange.

They shall hear live men crying,
They shall see dead men lie,
Shall hear the rattling Maxims fire,
And by the broken twists of wire
Gold flares light up the sky.

And in their new-built houses
The frightened folk will see
Pale bombers coming down the street,
And hear the flurry of charging feet,
And the crash of Victory.

This is our Earth baptizèd
With the red wine of War.
Horror and courage hand in hand
Shall brood upon the stricken land
In silence evermore.

E. Alan Mackintosh

[Nearly Sane]

August 1914
BY MAY WEDDERBURN CANNAN
The sun rose over the sweep of the hill
    All bare for the gathered hay,
And a blackbird sang by the window-sill,
    And a girl knelt down to pray:
          ‘Whom Thou hast kept through the night, O Lord,
          Keep Thou safe through the day.’
 
The sun rose over the shell-swept height,
     The guns are over the way,
And a soldier turned from the toil of the night
    To the toil of another day,
          And a bullet sang by the parapet
          To drive in the new-turned clay.
 
The sun sank slow by the sweep of the hill,
     They had carried all the hay,
And a blackbird sang by the window-sill,
    And a girl knelt down to pray:
          ‘Keep Thou safe through the night, O Lord,
          Whom Thou hast kept through the day.’
 
The sun sank slow by the shell-swept height,
    The guns had prepared a way,
And a soldier turned to sleep that night
    Who would not wake for the day,
          And a blackbird flew from the window-sill,
          When a girl knelt down to pray.

[Nearly Sane]

Le Bateau Ivre by Rimbaud performed by Fanny Ardant


https://youtu.be/OmcsIwWKmGg?si=LbvuHCMFSeB8TN_w

[Nearly Sane]

FROM A RAILWAY CARRIAGE

Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in a battle,
All through the meadows the horses and cattle:
All of the sights of the hill and the plain
Fly as thick as driving rain;
And ever again, in the wink of an eye,
Painted stations whistle by.

Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,
All by himself and gathering brambles;
Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;
And there is the green for stringing the daisies!
Here is a cart run away in the road
Lumping along with man and load;
And here is a mill and there is a river:
Each a glimpse and gone for ever!

Robert Louis Stevenson

[Nearly Sane]

.

[Nearly Sane]

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.