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[Meg]

[NimbleMarmoset]

thank ye. I absolutely adore this poem. I read it in school with my class. my class, being completely stupid, went on and on about how self-centered Walt Whitman was.

Song of Myself 33 - Walt Whitman

I understand the large hearts of heroes,
The courage of present times and all times;
How the skipper saw the crowded and rudderless wreck of the steam-ship, and Death chasing it up and down the storm;
How he knuckled tight, and gave not back one inch, and was faithful of days and faithful of nights,
And chalk’d in large letters, on a board, Be of good cheer, we will not desert you:
How he follow’d with them, and tack’d with them—and would not give it up;
How he saved the drifting company at last:
How the lank loose-gown’d women look’d when boated from the side of their prepared graves;
How the silent old-faced infants, and the lifted sick, and the sharp-lipp’d unshaved men:
All this I swallow—it tastes good—I like it well—it becomes mine;
I am the man—I suffer’d—I was there.

The disdain and calmness of olden martyrs;
The mother, condemn’d for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her children gazing on;
The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence, blowing, cover’d with sweat;
The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck—the murderous buckshot and the bullets;
All these I feel, or am.

I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs,
Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen;
I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn’d with the ooze of my skin;
I fall on the weeds and stones;
The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close,
Taunt my dizzy ears, and beat me violently over the head with whip-stocks.

Agonies are one of my changes of garments;
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels—I myself become the wounded person;
My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.

I am the mash’d fireman with breast-bone broken;
Tumbling walls buried me in their debris;
Heat and smoke I inspired—I heard the yelling shouts of my comrades;
I heard the distant click of their picks and shovels;
They have clear’d the beams away—they tenderly lift me forth.

I lie in the night air in my red shirt—the pervading hush is for my sake;
Painless after all I lie, exhausted but not so unhappy;
White and beautiful are the faces around me—the heads are bared of their fire-caps;
The kneeling crowd fades with the light of the torches.

Distant and dead resuscitate;
They show as the dial or move as the hands of me—I am the clock myself.

I am an old artillerist—I tell of my fort’s bombardment;
I am there again.

Again the long roll of the drummers;
Again the attacking cannon, mortars;
Again, to my listening ears, the cannon responsive.

I take part—I see and hear the whole;
The cries, curses, roar—the plaudits for well-aim’d shots;
The ambulanza slowly passing, trailing its red drip;
Workmen searching after damages, making indispensable repairs;
The fall of grenades through the rent roof—the fan-shaped explosion;
The whizz of limbs, heads, stone, wood, iron, high in the air.

Again gurgles the mouth of my dying general—he furiously waves with his hand;
He gasps through the clot, Mind not me—mind—the entrenchments.

[Meg]

[taciturnfriend]

Like Meg, I find Whitman strong stuff best taken in small doses.

Here is the most famous part of the prologue to Leaves of Grass:

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body… .

[NimbleMarmoset]

Seaweed - Longfellow

When descends on the Atlantic
The gigantic
Storm-wind of the equinox,
Landward in his wrath he scourges
The toiling surges,
Laden with seaweed from the rocks:

From Bermuda's reefs; from edges
Of sunken ledges,
In some far-off, bright Azore;
From Bahama, and the dashing,
Silver-flashing
Surges of San Salvador;

From the tumbling surf, that buries
The Orkneyan skerries,
Answering the hoarse Hebrides;
And from wrecks of ships, and drifting
Spars, uplifting
On the desolate, rainy seas;--

Ever drifting, drifting, drifting
On the shifting
Currents of the restless main;
Till in sheltered coves, and reaches
Of sandy beaches,
All have found repose again.

So when storms of wild emotion
Strike the ocean
Of the poet's soul, erelong
From each cave and rocky fastness,
In its vastness,
Floats some fragment of a song:

Front the far-off isles enchanted,
Heaven has planted
With the golden fruit of Truth;
From the flashing surf, whose vision
Gleams Elysian
In the tropic clime of Youth;

From the strong Will, and the Endeavor
That forever
Wrestle with the tides of Fate
From the wreck of Hopes far-scattered,
Tempest-shattered,
Floating waste and desolate;--

Ever drifting, drifting, drifting
On the shifting
Currents of the restless heart;
Till at length in books recorded,
They, like hoarded
Household words, no more depart.

[NimbleMarmoset]

Mezzo Cammin - Longfellow

Half of my life is gone, and I have let
The years slip from me and have not fulfilled
The aspiration of my youth, to build
Some tower of song with lofty parapet.
Not indolence, nor pleasure, nor the fret
Of restless passions that would not be stilled,
But sorrow, and a care that almost killed,
Kept me from what I may accomplish yet;
Though, half way up the hill, I see the Past
Lying beneath me with its sounds and sights,--
A city in the twilight dim and vast,
With smoking roofs, soft bells, and gleaming lights.--
And hear above me on the autumnal blast
The cataract of Death far thundering from the heights.

[Meg]

Hmm . . . I think Longfellow is among my least favorite of the canonical (or really I should say popular?) American poets. His poetry is too easy somehow. Although, admittedly I haven't read it since middle school perhaps, so that's an old judgment. In keeping with the American theme:

One of his most famous and everyone will know this one but I am consistently annoyed by people claiming Frost was a cold or unpleasant poet (although I've seen videos of him when he was quite elderly and he certainly was crotchety) and then saying something like, "'Good fences make good neighbors' that pretty much sums him up for me." I mean if you're going to use a poem to attack a poet's character you should at least understand the poem first. Anyway . . .

The Mending Wall

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it
And spills the upper boulder in the sun,
And make gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there,
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."


And for a very different part of the spectrum (and a man whose poetry Frost no doubt despised):

From Spring and All by William Carlos Williams

I.

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the

northeast - a cold wind Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken

[NimbleMarmoset]

[Meg]

I didn't mean to make you sad.

[NimbleMarmoset]

No! Look! I'm smiling at the end of that sentence! Not sad! See? There!

[taciturnfriend]

Lilypod asked for a repost of a gargoyle poem from the previous thread. Is this the one?

Gargoyle
Ray Templeton

Butt-ugly, built to spit, the ultimate survivor
hangs there frozen, moves when you look away.
Last night the rain kept him busy, but the night before
at twelve thirteen, it seems that he took off across the marshes
stole a jug of altar wine and roistered with his friends
from Blythburgh and Beccles. You can see he still
has bags under his eyes, and how his left horn broke
the time he fell out of a belfry, drunk.

[Lilypod]

Yes, that's the one. Thank you.

[taciturnfriend]

Well worth reading: George Szirtes's T S Eliot Lecture, delivered last month. Some of you may recall Don Paterson's Eliot Lecture, which I posted on the previous thread. In part, Szirtes responds directly to that.

"Parties without dancing bring out a very silly side of me, I'm afraid. It's one of the reasons I like dancing. My mouth is shut and my feet fully occupied." - George Szirtes (not from the above lecture!)


Edited to add: this was in the Guardian, a kind of taster for the Eliot lecture. Short and to the point.

[taciturnfriend]

Thistles
Ted Hughes

Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men
Thistles spike the summer air
And crackle open under a blue-black pressure.

Every one a revengeful burst
Of resurrection, a grasped fistful
Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up

From the underground stain of a decayed Viking.
They are like pale hair and the gutturals of dialects.
Every one manages a plume of blood.

Then they grow grey like men.
Mown down, it is a feud. Their sons appear
Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.



Alice Oswald on Ted Hughes's nature poetry

[Meg]

Ok . . . so I actually feel thoroughly awkward doing this, but I'm putting together a final portfolio for my poetry class and really wrestling with this poem, so I was hoping for some feedback/advice. Part of my problem is integrating the two scenes, although comments on other aspects would be welcome as well. I'm not terribly sensitive, so anyone commenting should feel free to be as harsh as they like. In fact, that would be more helpful by far then being unnecessarily kind.

Cathedrals

The drive along the QEW that night -
violin solos on repeat and my sister
curled like a leaf in the passenger seat -
is present now, in someone else's church.
The stained glass becomes fogged mirrors,
the sound of strings contained and sorrowing.

Tonight the Rhapsody Pathetique leaps up to
the arching nave of St. John the Divine
and shatters desolately against the walls.
“We must remember what we have done,”
the minister says, “lest we forget
what we are capable of doing.”

Two rows before me, a husband speaks in the ear
of a wife, a grandmother's thin hand
combs slowly through her grandson's hair.
The singer begins a Yiddish song and he
is in the ghetto once again, both of us
pale-faced with our fragile memories.

Three months ago, crossing the bridge
from Canada, at night, in the yellow pool
of the duty-free, tired customs agent
leaning from his booth with hand extended,
Vivaldi waltzing out the window,
and our griefs were much the same.