|
Post by tannis on Feb 16, 2009 1:55:21 GMT
MRS APPLEYARD: I hope you have learned your poetry, Sara. Sit up straight, child. Hold your shoulders back. You're getting a dreadful stoop. Well, have you got your lines by heart? Well, have you? SARA: I can't. It doesn't make sense. MRS APPLEYARD: Sense! You little ignoramus! Evidently you don't know that Mrs. Felicia Hemans is considered one of the finest of our English poets. SARA: I know another piece of poetry by heart. It has ever so many verses, much more than "The Wreck of the Hesperus”. Would that do? MRS APPLEYARD: What is the name of this poem? SARA: "An Ode to St. Valentine”. MRS APPLEYARD: I'm not acquainted with it. Where did you find it? SARA: I didn't find it. I wrote it. MRS APPLEYARD: You wrote it? SARA: "Love abounds, love surrounds..." MRS APPLEYARD: Oh, no thank you, Sara. Strange as it may seem, I still prefer Mrs. Hemans. Give me your book and proceed to recite to me as far as you have gone. Your book, please, Sara. Thank you. Go on. SARA: I can't. MRS APPLEYARD: Not one line? I shall leave you now, Sara. I expect you to be word perfect when I send Miss Lumley in in half an hour. Otherwise, I'm afraid I shall have to send you to bed instead of letting you stay up until the others return from the picnic. SARA (to herself): Bertie! Bertie! Jesus, where are you? Oh, Miranda! ~ Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir, 1975)
MOON-LIGHT by Felicia Hemans, 1812
COME, gentle muse ! now all is calm, The dew descends, the air is balm; Unruffled is the glassy deep, While moon-beams o'er its bosom sleep; The gale of summer mildly blows, The wave in soothing murmur flows; Unclouded Vesper shines on high, And ev'ry flow'r has clos'd its tearful eye.
Oh ! at this hour, this placid hour, Soft music, wake thy magic pow'r ! Be mine to hear thy dulcet measure, Thy warbling strains, that whisper, pleasure; Thy heavenly airs, of cadence dying, And harp to every zephyr sighing; When roving by the shadowy beam, That gilds the fairy-bow'r and woodland-stream !
But all is still! no mellow sound Floats on the breeze of night around ; Yet fancy, with some airy spell, Can wake "sweet Echo" from her cell; Can charm her pensive votary's ear, With plaintive numbers melting near; And bid celestial spirits rise, To pour their wild, enchanted melodies.
I love the rosy dawn of day, When Zephyr wakes the laughing May; I love the summer-evening's close, That lulls the mind in calm repose; But sweeter far the hour serene, When softer colours paint the scene; When Vesper sheds a dewy ray, And o'er the sleeping wave the moon-beams play.
|
|
|
Post by tannis on Feb 16, 2009 12:00:14 GMT
IRMA: If only we could stay out all night and watch the moon rise. EDITH: Blanche said Sara writes poetry in the dunny! She found one there on the floor all about Miranda. MIRANDA: She's an orphan. IRMA: Sara reminds me of a little deer Papa brought home once. I looked after it, but it died. Mama always said it was doomed. EDITH: Doomed? What's that mean, Irma? IRMA: Doomed to die, of course. "The boy stood on the burning deck, whence all but he had fled, tra la..." I forget the rest. ~ Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir, 1975)
Felicia Hemans is now remembered popularly for her poem, "Casabianca", and in fact for one line only, "The boy stood on the burning deck". The poem commemorates an actual incident that occurred in 1798 during the Battle of the Nile aboard the French ship L'Orient. The young son Giocante (his age is variously given as ten, twelve and thirteen) of commander Louis de Casabianca remained at his post and perished when the flames caused the magazine to explode. This poem was a staple of elementary school readers in the United States over a period of about a century spanning, roughly, the 1850s through the 1950s.
"Casabianca" by Felicia Hemans, 1826
The boy stood on the burning deck Whence all but he had fled; The flame that lit the battle's wreck Shone round him o'er the dead.
Yet beautiful and bright he stood, As born to rule the storm; A creature of heroic blood, A proud, though child-like form.
The flames rolled on–he would not go Without his Father's word; That father, faint in death below, His voice no longer heard.
He called aloud–'say, Father, say If yet my task is done?' He knew not that the chieftain lay Unconscious of his son.
'Speak, father!' once again he cried, 'If I may yet be gone!' And but the booming shots replied, And fast the flames rolled on.
Upon his brow he felt their breath, And in his waving hair, And looked from that lone post of death In still yet brave despair.
And shouted but once more aloud, 'My father! must I stay?' While o'er him fast, through sail and shroud, The wreathing fires made way.
They wrapt the ship in splendour wild, They caught the flag on high, And streamed above the gallant child, Like banners in the sky.
There came a burst of thunder sound– The boy–oh! where was he? Ask of the winds that far around With fragments strewed the sea!–
With mast, and helm, and pennon fair, That well had borne their part– But the noblest thing which perished there Was that young faithful heart.
Notes: Young Casabianca, a boy about thirteen years old, son of the admiral of the Orient, remained at his post (in the Battle of the Nile), after the ship had taken fire, and all the guns had been abandoned; and perished in the explosion of the vessel, when the flames had reached the powder.
|
|
|
Post by tannis on Feb 22, 2009 8:27:27 GMT
The Colossus by Sylvia Plath, 1959
"I shall never get you put together entirely, Pieced, glued, and properly jointed. Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles Proceed from your great lips. It's worse than a barnyard. Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle, Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other. Thirty years now I have labored To dredge the silt from your throat. I am none the wiser.
Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails of lysol I crawl like an ant in mourning Over the weedy acres of your brow To mend the immense skull plates and clear The bald, white tumuli of your eyes.
A blue sky out of the Oresteia Arches above us. O father, all by yourself You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum. I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress. Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered
In their old anarchy to the horizon-line. It would take more than a lightning-stroke To create such a ruin. Nights, I squat in the cornucopia Of your left ear, out of the wind,
Counting the red stars and those of plum- color. The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue. My hours are married to shadow. No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel On the blank stones of the landing.""The Colossus" (1959) assumes an ironic position (which will be further elaborated in "Little Fugue," and especially "Daddy") regarding the greatness, in all senses, of the lost father. The tension here between a passive daughter- and active writer-figure tends to tip towards a writerly re-construction (away from the excavations of the unconscious and dreamwork of the earlier father poems). Self-conscious references to the babble of language begin with the barnyard noises in the first stanza; by the end of the poem, attention to language, sound, and silence involves only the speaker herself. She "no longer" listens for the sound of a rescuer "On the blank stones of the landing"; this blankness resembles "The bald white tumuli of [the colossus-father's] eyes."' Although the sun itself rises under the tongue of this father (who is "pithy and historical as the Roman Forum"), he is no "oracle," nor is he in any way "pithy," though he may consider himself a "Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other." After thirty years of labor, the daughter/restoration-artist is "none the wiser" regarding what (if anything) he may have to say. This dead language is phallic in image ("the pillar of your tongue") and bestial in sound: "mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles." The doxies of daughterhood: Plath, Cixous, and the fatherfindarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3612/is_199604/ai_n8751551/pg_6The oedipalized scenario of 'Electra on the Azalea Path' relies on a bricolage of psychoanalytic, literary, and biographical texts. As in 'The Colossus', the classical paradigm of Aeschylus's Electra, in which the daughter avenges the murder of her father Agamemnon by inciting the murder of her mother Clytemnestra, is conflated with its latter-day psychoanalytic rewriting: the family romance, in which, according to Freud's narrative of female sexual development, the girl-child's formative discovery of her castration leads her to turn her affections away from the mother and toward the father. In 'The Colossus', the protagonist is part priestess of an 'oracle', part archaeological laborer. Like the speaker of 'Electra', she is dwarfed or miniaturized by a compulsively repeated ritual devotion to paternal remains.
A blue sky out of the Oresteia Arches above us. O father, all by yourself You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum. I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress. Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered
In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.
This rhetoric of mourning objectifications is governed by anachronism; the 'blue sky out of the Oresteia' which 'arches above' the protagonists of 'The Colossus' has the flattened, depthless gloss of a stage property, recalling the antinaturalistic lighting of de Chirico's landscapes and still lifes. The discourse of classicism associated with the paternal effigy is shadowed by intimations of a forgotten or obscured violence; the colossus, after all, is both an architectural ruin and a dismembered body which the speaker desperately longs to reconstruct. In 'The Colossus', the speaker's classicism is identified as perverse; she is in love with a paternal law invested in the petrified membra disjecta of tradition. Her labor of restitution and repair has become merely fetishistic, an academic study of Greek and Roman architectural styled ('fluted bones', 'acanthine hair'). The cult of the architectural detail, which marks the conversion of the body into stone forms, typifies de Chirico's metaphysical paintings, for example in the pleated robe of the standing mannequin in The Disquieting Muses, which resembles a fluted column. Parallel instances in Plath's poetry include the 'pillars, porticoes, rotundas' of 'Barren Woman', the 'flutings' of babies' 'Ionian death-gowns' in 'Death and Co.', and the 'perfected' woman of 'Edge' ('The illusion of a Greek necessity flows in the scrolls of her toga').
In casting herself as oracular devotee of an 'epic' literary father, the daughter-in-mourning seems to mark herself as lacking his greatness. Her despairing self-abasement before the remains of a father who cannot be recovered in memory can be seen as a compulsive rehearsal of his imagined or mythic achievements, a ritual of self-humiliation and parodic miniaturization which cuts her down to size. Yet the oedipalized 'Electra' scenario draws attention to its own excessiveness and indeed perversity, signaling a disturbance in the meanings of femininity. 'Tradition' is constituted through a self-conscious mythologizing of the death of the father; it comes to occupy the status of a fetish, a substitute and compensatory fiction, forestalling a prior loss, which is coded as maternal. As in 'Electra on Azalea Path', melancholic incorporation of the dead father is accompanied by a double movement of symbolic inflation and parodic reduction. The oracle utters only carnivalesque animal noises ('Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles'), which mock the idea of 'Tradition' as a repository of divine authority, as well as the elaborate repressions which constitute the formalist poet-daughter. The discourse of the closed, classical body generates its own negation through the return of a repressed oral materiality.
'I'll be There...The Glass Dog', Giorgio de Chirico, 1914
Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath's Art of the Visual by Kathleen Connors, Sally Bayley (2007; pp.178-180)
|
|
|
Post by Al Truest on Mar 20, 2009 0:37:42 GMT
...To her that is the fairest under heaven, I seem as nothing in the mighty world, And cannot will my will, nor work my work Wholly, nor make myself in mine own realm Victor and lord. But were I joined with her, Then might we live together as one life, And reigning with one will in everything Have power on this dark land to lighten it, And power on this dead world to make it live....
Tennyson
|
|
|
Post by tannis on Mar 22, 2009 0:00:24 GMT
Emily Dickinson (#828)
The Robin is the One That interrupt the Morn With hurried — few — express Reports When March is scarcely on –
The Robin is the One That overflow the Noon With her cherubic quantity – An April but begun –
The Robin is the One That speechless from her Nest Submit that Home — and Certainty And Sanctity, are best
Emily Dickinson (#254)
“Hope” is the thing with feathers – That perches in the soul – And sings the tune without the words – And never stops — at all –
And sweetest — in the Gale — is heard – And sore must be the storm – That could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm –
I’ve heard it in the chillest land – And on the strangest Sea – Yet, never, in Extremity, It asked a crumb — of Me.
|
|
|
Post by tannis on Mar 28, 2009 17:27:54 GMT
MY BEAUTEOUS SCRIPT
I know no script so true as a garden wall With honeysuckle and heliotrope intertwined, And elder flowers spread In misty loveliness, and larkspur, And wallflower, yea and stock and cowslip, And tansy, and little tufts of pansies, And knots of violets bordered along its base, And over all, the sun Spreading a golden mantle, And the winds kissing. and shadows lurking. And now and then a bird. Shuttling through the vines, or spraying songs Across the scentful spot.
THE VEILED PRINCESS
You who behold me know me not, For while thou dost commune With my fellowship, I am apart from thee. My spirit basks confidently Within Saffron Days.
She is leopard-footed and her locks Are bound with silver cords, Wherein poppies hang; and night Is in her eyes, a pale-lit night, Whose throat is circleted of white stars.
My spirit basks in a Saffron Day, Heavy of sweet scents, yea, Twixt thee and me, oh you my fellow, In a silver veil, through which Thou seest not, and I behold thee!
THE DECEIVER
I know you, you shamster! I saw you smirking, grinning Nodding through the day, and I knew you lied. With mincing steps you gaited before men, shouting of your valor, Yet you, you idiot, I knew you were lying! And your hand shook and your knees were shaking.
I know you, you shamster! I heard you honeying your words, Licking your lips and smacking o'er them, twiddling your thumbs In ecstasy over your latest wit.
I know you, you shamster! You are the me the world knows.
~ Patience Worthwww.patienceworth.org/patienceworthpoems_008.htmThis web site is dedicated to the memory of Patience Worth, who through the mediumship of Pearl Lenore Curran, transmitted from some other reality, outstanding high quality literature of unexcelled beauty and philosophical thought.
|
|
|
Post by tannis on May 31, 2009 22:27:06 GMT
Hardcastle Crags (1957) (originally entitled Nocturne)
Flintlike, her feet struck Such a racket of echoes from the steely street, Tacking in moon-blued crooks from the black Stone-built town, that she heard the quick air ignite Its tinder and shake
A firework of echoes from wall To wall of the dark, dwarfed cottages. But the echoes died at her back as the walls Gave way to fields and the incessant seethe of grasses Riding in the full
Of the moon, manes to the wind, Tireless, tied, as a moon-bound sea Moves on its root. Though a mist-wraith wound Up from the fissured valley and hung shoulder-high Ahead, it fattened
To no family-featured ghost, Nor did any word body with a name The blank mood she walked in. Once past The dream-peopled village, her eyes entertained no dream, And the sandman's dust
Lost luster under her footsoles. The long wind, paring her person down To a pinch of flame, blew its burdened whistle In the whorl of her ear, and like a scooped-out pumpkin crown Her head cupped the babel.
All the night gave her, in return For the paltry gift of her bulk and the beat Of her heart was the humped indifferent iron Of its hills, and its pastures bordered by black stone set On black stone. Barns
Guarded broods and litters Behind shut doors; the dairy herds Knelt in the meadow mute as boulders; Sheep drowsed stoneward in their tussocks of wool, and birds, Twig-sleep, wore
Granite ruffs, their shadows The guise of leaves. The whole landscape Loomed absolute as the antique world was Once in its earliest sway of lymph and sap, Unaltered by eyes,
Enough to snuff the quick Of her small heat out, but before the weight Of stones and hills of stones could break Her down to mere quartz grit n that stony light She turned back.
The Great Carbuncle (1957)
We came over the moor-top Through air streaming and green-lit, Stone farms foundering in it, Valleys of grass altering In a light neither dawn
Nor nightfall, out hands, faces Lucent as percelain, the earth's Claim and weight gone out of them. Some such transfiguring moved The eight pilgrims towards its source--
Toward the great jewel: shown often, Never given; hidden, yet Simultaneously seen On moor-top, at sea-bottom, Knowable only by light
Other than noon, that moon, stars --- The once-known way becoming Wholly other, and ourselves Estranged, changed, suspended where Angels are rumored, clearly
Floating , among the floating Tables and chairs. Gravity's Lost in the lift and drift of An easier element Than earth, and there is nothing
So fine we cannot do it. But nearing means distancing: At the common homecoming Light withdraws. Chairs, tables drop Down: the body weighs like stone.
Witch Burning (1959)
In the marketplace they are piling the dry sticks. A thicket of shadows is a poor coat. I inhabit The wax image of myself, a doll's body. Sickness begins here: I am the dartboard for witches. Only the devil can eat teh devil out. In the month of red leaves I climb to a bed of fire.
It is easy to blame the dark: the mouth of a door, The cellar's belly. They've blown my sparkler out. A black-sharded lady keeps me in parrot cage. What large eyes the dead have! I am intimate with a hairy spirit. Smoke wheels from the beak of this empty jar.
If I am a little one, I can do no harm. If I don't move about, I'll knock nothing over. So I said, Sitting under a potlid, tiny and inert as a rice grain. They are turning the burners up, ring after ring. We are full of starch, my small white fellows. We grow. It hurts at first. The red tongues will teach the truth.
Mother of beetles, only unclench your hand: I'll fly through the candles' mouth like a singeless moth. Give me back my shape. I am ready to construe the days I coupled with dust in the shadow of a stone. My ankles brighten. Brightness ascends my thighs. I am lost, I am lost, in the roves of all this light.
Ariel (1962)
Stasis in darkness. Then the substanceless blue Pour of tor and distances.
God's lioness, How one we grow, Pivot of heels and knees!--The furrow
Splits and passes, sister to The brown arc Of the neck I cannot catch,
Nigger-eye Berries cast dark Hooks----
Black sweet blood mouthfuls, Shadows. Something else
Hauls me through air---- Thighs, hair; Flakes from my heels.
White Godiva, I unpeel---- Dead hands, dead stringencies.
And now I Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas. The child's cry
Melts in the wall. And I Am the arrow,
The dew that flies, Suicidal, at one with the drive Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning.John Wilson: And of course "Aerial" itself, it's the name of Sylvia Plath's most famous collection [Ariel, 1965]. Is that a nod to her at all, or is that just a coincidence? Kate: I think it's just a coincidence, which there seem to be a lot of because people mention lots of things, like apparently there's a Mrs. Bartolozzi who Joseph Haydn wrote pieces for, who I was completely unaware of. BBC4 "Front Row" November 4, 2005www.gaffaweb.org/reaching/iv05_bbc_front_row.htmlAriel, written on Plath's 30th birthday, is about a woman breaking free from the psychological fetters that had bound her from childhood--the "shoulds and oughts" of a woman's role in that time. Now in October 1963, Plath is emerging from the trauma of her failed marriage, rediscovering and redefining herself in a psychic rebirth. Ariel was the blithe spirit who yearned for release in Shakespeare's The Tempest. Ariel was also the name of the horse she sometimes rode on Dartmoor near the Devon village where she and Ted Hughes had bought an old church rectory the year before. In addition, "Ariel," as Plath herself wrote on a typescript draft of the poem, also means "Lion[ess] of God" in Hebrew. It is to be her new identity, as an agent of apocalypse and revelation when she is unleashed.www.sylviaplathforum.com/ariel.htmlsee more: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath www.stanford.edu/class/engl187/docs/plathpoem.html 'Wuthering Heights' by Sylvia Plath katebush.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=kickinside&action=display&thread=1671&page=4 BBC4 programme on Sylvia Plath's poem "Wuthering Heights" www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00kfc1f/A_Poets_Guide_to_Britain_Sylvia_Plath/ REVIEW: This programme looks at Sylvia Plath's poem "Wuthering Heights", written in 1961 and first published in book-form in CROSSING THE WATER (1971). "Wuthering Heights", inspired by Plath's visits up to Yorkshire to visit her in-laws and, specifically, by her walk up to Top Withens, the ruinous farmhouse up on the moors outside Haworth and popularly considered to be Emily Bronte's model for Wuthering Heights in her only novel. Plath went to Yorkshire first in 1956, shortly after her marriage to Ted Hughes, and wrote OTHER Yorkshire poems responding to that wild, sometimes energizing, sometimes bleak landscape. Sheers examines two of these poems, "Hardcastle Crags" (originally entitled "Nocturne") and "The Great Carbuncle" in some detail, showing us how their tone-powerful, strange, unsettling- and some of their images feed later into "Wuthering Heights." Wild though this landscape is to most British people, he points out how much more alien it must have seemed to an American, especially one like Plath who was also contending with a dramatic and threatening INNER landscape. He visits Hardcastle Crags, a wooded valley that is close to Heptonstall, and then heaves over the moor to a pub at Widdop, a much more isolated community, and listens into the telling of some local ghost stories. Thus, to the element of landscape very present in the poem, and to the element of menace (which is partly a reflection of Plath's inner struggle, her mindscape), is added a THIRD element: otherworldliness, the presence (covert) of other lives, the life of Emily Bronte, the lives of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, passionate, in some ways tormented, and very much influenced by their physical surroundings: the wind, the rain, the dark stones. Sheers concludes that it is in "Wuthering Heights" that Plath finally stops being intimidated by England's literary heritage and lays her very own claim to it. She refers to Bronte via the poem's title but the poem itself, the experience of the moors, is very much hers. "The grasses and her state of mind" become one.sylviaplathinfo.blogspot.com/2009/05/review-wuthering-heights-from-poets.html
|
|
|
Post by tannis on Sept 26, 2009 17:27:24 GMT
The Sermon of the Twelve Acknowledgments by Anne Sexton, 1975
January? The month is dumb. It is fraudulent. It does not cleanse itself. The hens lay blood-stained eggs. Do not lend your bread to anyone lest it nevermore rise. Do not eat lentils or your hair will fall out.
Do not rely on February except when your cat has kittens, throbbing into the snow. Do not use knives and forks unless there is a thaw, like the yawn of a baby. The sun in this month begets a headache like an angel slapping you in the face.
Earthquakes mean March. The dragon will move, and the earth will open like a wound. There will be great rain or snow so have some coal for your uncle. The sun of this month cures all. Therefore, old women say: Let the sun of March shine on my daughter, but let the sun of February shine on my daughter-in-law. However, if you go to a party dressed as the anti-Christ you will be frozen to death by morning.
During the rainstorms of April the oyster rises from the sea and opens its shell— rain enters it— when it sinks the raindrops become the pearl. So take a picnic, open your body, and give birth to pearls.
June and July? These are the months we call Boiling Water. There is sweat on the cat but the grape marries herself to the sun.
Hesitate in August. Be shy. Let your toes tremble in their sandals. However, pick the grape and eat with confidence. The grape is the blood of God. Watch out when holding a knife or you will behead St. John the Baptist.
Touch the Cross in September, knock on it three times and say aloud the name of the Lord. Put seven bowls of salt on the roof overnight and the next morning the damp one will foretell the month of rain. Do not faint in September or you will wake up in a dead city.
If someone dies in October do not sweep the house for three days or the rest of you will go. Also do not step on a boy's head for the devil will enter your ears like music.
November? Shave, whether you have hair or not. Hair is not good, nothing is allowed to grow, all is allowed to die. Because nothing grows you may be tempted to count the stars but beware, in November counting the stars gives you boils. Beware the tall people, they will go mad. Don't harm the turtle dove because he is a great shoe that has swallowed Christ's blood.
December? On December fourth water spurts out of the mouse. Put herbs in its eyes and boil corn and put the corn away for the night so that the Lord may trample on it and bring you luck. For many days the Lord has been shut up in the oven. After that He is boiled, but He never dies, never dies.
|
|
|
Post by tannis on Sept 30, 2009 1:27:37 GMT
Carousel By Ann Lauterbach
To embark it lifts, flies up, scans the view: The river, slit between highway and sky; The sky, a distant plinth Set between deckle-edged bricks. She likes the way it comes out of the blue. Inside, petals are temporarily blazed, Light as Japanese sleeves in the wind. Those were purple, dye of purple herbs Brushed on silk, unpluckable, walking across. "Won't the guards see you wave your sleeves to me?"
Nevertheless she is afraid. She does not know how to cross paths and stop. Images keep her awake, waiting. What comes out of the blue? Why smile? There it flies low over inclined fields, A dossier of wings. Elsewhere, An outline on a box indicating prowess. She gets the binoculars out to see up close. Copper pans are dusty on the wall And she is full of tears, the dread of tears.
Above the river: an outline of smokestacks. They could be set to music or dance, But she is waiting for the mist to rise. Her wish? Carnal, flamboyant. A landscape Charged, noisy, dangerous, Faintly dangerous as she crosses the street. She knows things spread, shadow enlarging image, Illicit perceptions of blue mornings, gentian evenings. Altering goes on, even on days that are mostly night, And she is rapt, watching, almost heraldic.
All across the country the hero peers Uneasily over the shoulder of a girl. She has never been away, is full of tears. Dread of tears. She mentions her father. Tennis whites, weekend admirers, Trips back from Japan with silk kimonos. "Once, I picked a lily from a pond And was stung by bees." The horses Are all in a circle. Music begins. She sits on the red smiling horse and waits to ascend.
This spell is too real to be broken. Have some nuts. Have some cheddar cheese. The caprice is his; his sudden entrances And willowy lies strapped into rhymes, bouquets. He comes down the aisle wearing vestments. She receives his blessing, is given Dominion over events, the right to tell stories. "I ride through the sky to the place That houses beginnings. I fly As the crow, as the snow, as smoke, as wind."
Another pal from college dies Leaving us unchanged, but fewer. Her secret is the only one left, and so wanted. Early that morning the wind absorbed him. His will rose and departed, taking her with it. And certainly she saw it rise from the pond While the woman stood aside, modest as death. To recollect is to choose. The event Sets music in motion; the horse Rises and falls in its circular path.
I like masks, deeper shades of blue, How it concludes black. A swimmer is adorned with one arm Rising out of the blue. A man in the sea. A painting of a man in the sea. I like the way it comes out of the blue. The horse rises and falls; my sleeves are waving. It is not dark that scares me, but the limit Which places the house in the field, the horse in its stall.
A bald supple surface falls between cracks As the door slowly opens. Light is one way to wake up, image another, But she must tiptoe across the floor To tell her secret. The floor is cold. She does not know how to say it. We must invent a new mood, Gargoyles, scents, purple-robed figures Walking the courtyard. The horse did not fly up. The horse is wingless.
Those who never loved him say He was witness to dust, shelter of his hours, Among the faithless, faithless. They cannot see in the dark. We are gregarious, blind dolls. Over her shoulder, the painting depicts will. Staring at the view, she has a sense of place And of omission. The ways in which we live Are earmarked for letting go, and so She makes her descent, plucks it, rises into the blue.
~ "Carousel" was published in Aerial, an anthology conceived by Yvonne Jacquette and edited by Edwin Denby (1981).
|
|
|
Post by Al Truest on Oct 20, 2009 1:50:41 GMT
Youth and Age by: Sappho (c. 610-570 B.C.) translated by H. de Vere Stacpoole
If love thou hast for me, not hate, Arise and find a younger mate; For I no longer will abide Where youth and age lie side by side.
**********
The Dust of Timas by: Sappho (c. 610-570 B.C.) translated by Edwin Arlington Robinson
This dust was Timas; and they say That almost on her wedding day She found her bridal home to be The dark house of Persephone. And many maidens, knowing then That she would not come back again, Unbound their curls; and all in tears, They cut them off with sharpened shears.
**********
Evening by: Sappho (c. 610-570 B.C.) translated by H. de Vere Stacpoole
Children astray to their mothers, and goats to the herd, Sheep to the shepherd, through twilight the wings of the bird, All things that morning has scattered with fingers of gold, All things thou bringest, O Evening! at last to the fold.
|
|
|
Post by Al Truest on Nov 4, 2009 22:26:18 GMT
If You Forget Me
I want you to know one thing.
You know how this is: if I look at the crystal moon, at the red branch of the slow autumn at my window, if I touch near the fire the impalpable ash or the wrinkled body of the log, everything carries me to you, as if everything that exists, aromas, light, metals, were little boats that sail toward those isles of yours that wait for me.
Well, now, if little by little you stop loving me I shall stop loving you little by little.
If suddenly you forget me do not look for me, for I shall already have forgotten you.
If you think it long and mad, the wind of banners that passes through my life, and you decide to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have roots, remember that on that day, at that hour, I shall lift my arms and my roots will set off to seek another land.
But if each day, each hour, you feel that you are destined for me with implacable sweetness, if each day a flower climbs up to your lips to seek me, ah my love, ah my own, in me all that fire is repeated, in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten, my love feeds on your love, beloved, and as long as you live it will be in your arms without leaving mine
Pablo Neruda
peacefulrivers.homestead.com/PabloNeruda.html#anchor_16118
|
|
|
Post by Al Truest on Nov 5, 2009 0:39:18 GMT
Risk by Anais Nin
And then the day came, when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to Blossom.
|
|
|
Post by Al Truest on Nov 8, 2009 17:41:42 GMT
I Don't Know If You're Alive Or Dead
Anna Akhmatova
I don't know if you're alive or dead. Can you on earth be sought, Or only when the sunsets fade Be mourned serenely in my thought?
All is for you: the daily prayer, The sleepless heat at night, And of my verses, the white Flock, and of my eyes, the blue fire.
No-one was more cherished, no-one tortured Me more, not Even the one who betrayed me to torture, Not even the one who caressed me and forgot.
************************************
I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You
Pablo Neruda*
I do not love you except because I love you; I go from loving to not loving you, From waiting to not waiting for you My heart moves from cold to fire.
I love you only because it's you the one I love; I hate you deeply, and hating you Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.
Maybe January light will consume My heart with its cruel Ray, stealing my key to true calm.
In this part of the story I am the one who Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you, Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.
[/center] * This is my new favorite poet.
|
|
|
Post by tannis on Nov 9, 2009 0:27:34 GMT
Anne Sexton (November 9, 1928, Newton, Massachusetts–October 4, 1974, Weston, Massachusetts). I have just read the Diane Middlebrook biography of Anne Sexton. Incredible insight into this born again poet. Thoroughly recommended! To A Friend Whose Work Has Come To Triumph Anne Sexton, All My Pretty Ones, 1962
Consider Icarus, pasting those sticky wings on, testing that strange little tug at his shoulder blade, and think of that first flawless moment over the lawn of the labyrinth. Think of the difference it made! There below are the trees, as awkward as camels; and here are the shocked starlings pumping past and think of innocent Icarus who is doing quite well: larger than a sail, over the fog and the blast of the plushy ocean, he goes. Admire his wings! Feel the fire at his neck and see how casually he glances up and is caught, wondrously tunneling into that hot eye. Who cares that he fell back to the sea? See him acclaiming the sun and come plunging down while his sensible daddy goes straight into town.
With Mercy for the Greedy - Video www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJbfkH65WFM Anne Sexton, All My Pretty Ones, 1962
|
|
|
Post by Al Truest on Nov 12, 2009 1:25:10 GMT
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zD9W9SZj9w... La Beauté Je suis belle, ô mortels! comme un rêve de pierre, Et mon sein, où chacun s'est meurtri tour à tour, Est fait pour inspirer au poète un amour Eternel et muet ainsi que la matière. Je trône dans l'azur comme un sphinx incompris; J'unis un coeur de neige à la blancheur des cygnes; Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes, Et jamais je ne pleure et jamais je ne ris. Les poètes, devant mes grandes attitudes, Que j'ai l'air d'emprunter aux plus fiers monuments, Consumeront leurs jours en d'austères études; Car j'ai, pour fasciner ces dociles amants, De purs miroirs qui font toutes choses plus belles: Mes yeux, mes larges yeux aux clartés éternelles! — Charles Baudelaire ...................... Hymne à la Beauté Viens-tu du ciel profond ou sors-tu de l'abîme, O Beauté? ton regard, infernal et divin, Verse confusément le bienfait et le crime, Et l'on peut pour cela te comparer au vin. Tu contiens dans ton oeil le couchant et l'aurore; Tu répands des parfums comme un soir orageux; Tes baisers sont un philtre et ta bouche une amphore Qui font le héros lâche et l'enfant courageux. Sors-tu du gouffre noir ou descends-tu des astres? Le Destin charmé suit tes jupons comme un chien; Tu sèmes au hasard la joie et les désastres, Et tu gouvernes tout et ne réponds de rien. Tu marches sur des morts, Beauté, dont tu te moques; De tes bijoux l'Horreur n'est pas le moins charmant, Et le Meurtre, parmi tes plus chères breloques, Sur ton ventre orgueilleux danse amoureusement. L'éphémère ébloui vole vers toi, chandelle, Crépite, flambe et dit: Bénissons ce flambeau! L'amoureux pantelant incliné sur sa belle A l'air d'un moribond caressant son tombeau. Que tu viennes du ciel ou de l'enfer, qu'importe, Ô Beauté! monstre énorme, effrayant, ingénu! Si ton oeil, ton souris, ton pied, m'ouvrent la porte D'un Infini que j'aime et n'ai jamais connu? De Satan ou de Dieu, qu'importe? Ange ou Sirène, Qu'importe, si tu rends, — fée aux yeux de velours, Rythme, parfum, lueur, ô mon unique reine! — L'univers moins hideux et les instants moins lourds? — Charles Baudelaire
|
|