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Post by rosabelbelieve on Apr 21, 2008 23:01:21 GMT
Oh, okay. I thought you meant something I had written, which was a bit confusing. Funny, I thought you might like the quoted poem and half had you in mind when I posted it. I haven't been reading him that much lately, but Williams is a very interesting poet.
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Post by rosabelbelieve on Apr 22, 2008 0:44:34 GMT
Some more poems... Buddha in Glory
Center of all centers, core of cores, almond self-enclosed, and growing sweet-- all this universe, to the furthest stars all beyond them, is your flesh, your fruit.
Now you feel how nothing clings to you; your vast shell reaches into endless space, and there the rich, thick fluids rise and flow. Illuminated in your infinite peace,
a billion stars go spinning through the night, blazing high above your head. But in you is the presence that will be, when all the stars are dead.
(Rainer Maria Rilke)
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Post by rosabelbelieve on Apr 22, 2008 1:10:15 GMT
Asphodel, That Greeny Flower (Book One)
Of asphodel, that greeny flower, like a buttercup upon its branching stem- save that it's green and wooden- I come, my sweet, to sing to you. We lived long together a life filled, if you will, with flowers. So that I was cheered when I came first to know that there were flowers also in hell. Today I'm filled with the fading memory of those flowers that we both loved, even to this poor colorless thing- I saw it when I was a child- little prized among the living but the dead see, asking among themselves: What do I remember that was shaped as this thing is shaped? while our eyes fill with tears. Of love, abiding love it will be telling though too weak a wash of crimson colors it to make it wholly credible. There is something something urgent I have to say to you and you alone but it must wait while I drink in the joy of your approach, perhaps for the last time. And so with fear in my heart I drag it out and keep on talking for I dare not stop. Listen while I talk on against time. It will not be for long. I have forgot and yet I see clearly enough something central to the sky which ranges round it. An odor springs from it! A sweetest odor! Honeysuckle! And now there comes the buzzing of a bee! and a whole flood of sister memories! Only give me time, time to recall them before I shall speak out. Give me time, time. When I was a boy I kept a book to which, from time to time, I added pressed flowers until, after a time, I had a good collection. The asphodel, forebodingly, among them. I bring you, reawakened, a memory of those flowers. They were sweet when I pressed them and retained something of their sweetness a long time. It is a curious odor, a moral odor, that brings me near to you. The color was the first to go. There had come to me a challenge, your dear self, mortal as I was, the lily's throat to the hummingbird! Endless wealth, I thought, held out its arms to me. A thousand tropics in an apple blossom. The generous earth itself gave us lief. The whole world became my garden! But the sea which no one tends is also a garden when the sun strikes it and the waves are wakened. I have seen it and so have you when it puts all flowers to shame. Too, there are the starfish stiffened by the sun and other sea wrack and weeds. We knew that along with the rest of it for we were born by the sea, knew its rose hedges to the very water's brink. There the pink mallow grows and in their season strawberries and there, later, we went to gather the wild plum. I cannot say that I have gone to hell for your love but often found myself there in your pursuit. I do not like it and wanted to be in heaven. Hear me out. Do not turn away. I have learned much in my life from books and out of them about love. Death is not the end of it. There is a hierarchy which can be attained, I think, in its service. Its guerdon is a fairy flower; a cat of twenty lives. If no one came to try it the world would be the loser. It has been for you and me as one who watches a storm come in over the water. We have stood from year to year before the spectacle of our lives with joined hands. The storm unfolds. Lightning plays about the edges of the clouds. The sky to the north is placid, blue in the afterglow as the storm piles up. It is a flower that will soon reach the apex of its bloom. We danced, in our minds, and read a book together. You remember? It was a serious book. And so books entered our lives. The sea! The sea! Always when I think of the sea there comes to mind the Iliad and Helen's public fault that bred it. Were it not for that there would have been no poem but the world if we had remembered, those crimson petals spilled among the stones, would have called it simply murder. The sexual orchid that bloomed then sending so many disinterested men to their graves has left its memory to a race of fools or heroes if silence is a virtue. The sea alone with its multiplicity holds any hope. The storm has proven abortive but we remain after the thoughts it roused to re-cement our lives. It is the mind the mind that must be cured short of death's intervention, and the will becomes again a garden. The poem is complex and the place made in our lives for the poem. Silence can be complex too, but you do not get far with silence. Begin again. It is like Homer's catalogue of ships: it fills up the time. I speak in figures, well enough, the dresses you wear are figures also, we could not meet otherwise. When I speak of flowers it is to recall that at one time we were young. All women are not Helen, I know that, but have Helen in their hearts. My sweet, you have it also, therefore I love you and could not love you otherwise. Imagine you saw a field made up of women all silver-white. What should you do but love them? The storm bursts or fades! it is not the end of the world. Love is something else, or so I thought it, a garden which expands, though I knew you as a woman and never thought otherwise, until the whole sea has been taken up and all its gardens. It was the love of love, the love that swallows up all else, a grateful love, a love of nature, of people, of animals, a love engendering gentleness and goodness that moved me and that I saw in you. I should have known, though I did not, that the lily-of-the-valley is a flower makes many ill who whiff it. We had our children, rivals in the general onslaught. I put them aside though I cared for them. as well as any man could care for his children according to my lights. You understand I had to meet you after the event and have still to meet you. Love to which you too shall bow along with me- a flower a weakest flower shall be our trust and not because we are too feeble to do otherwise but because at the height of my power I risked what I had to do, therefore to prove that we love each other while my very bones sweated that I could not cry to you in the act. Of asphodel, that greeny flower, I come, my sweet, to sing to you! My heart rouses thinking to bring you news of something that concerns you and concerns many men. Look at what passes for the new. You will not find it there but in despised poems. It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. Hear me out for I too am concerned and every man who wants to die at peace in his bed besides.
(William Carlos Williams)What do you think of this one, Al? It's not the whole poem, but that seems impossible to find online, and I can't really type it up. But I think it's a beautiful and moving poem, and maybe you'd like it if you liked 'Rain.'
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Post by rosabelbelieve on Apr 22, 2008 1:17:26 GMT
Oh, ugh - and the line structure completely disappears. Not sure how to fix that, wait a moment... EDIT - Hmm. It looks fine in the little modify post box, so I can't think what to do with it? Well, this shows the original format: www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15541
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Post by rosabelbelieve on Apr 22, 2008 16:14:52 GMT
Solitude
So many stones have been thrown at me, That I'm not frightened of them anymore, And the pit has become a solid tower, Tall among tall towers. I thank the builders, May care and sadness pass them by. From here I'll see the sunrise earlier, Here the sun's last ray rejoices. And into the windows of my room The northern breezes often fly. And from my hand a dove eats grains of wheat... As for my unfinished page, The Muse's tawny hand, divinely calm And delicate, will finish it.
(Anna Akhmatova)
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Post by rosabelbelieve on May 9, 2008 0:59:04 GMT
Spring and All by William Carlos Williams
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 awakenAnother one of William Carlos Williams.
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Adena
Moving
This time around we dance - we're chosen ones
Posts: 611
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Post by Adena on May 9, 2008 7:53:07 GMT
Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound's the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.
-Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, Robert Frost
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Post by rosabelbelieve on May 9, 2008 14:25:51 GMT
^ I live only a small distance away from farms and woods this poem was written about. Thank you for posting it.
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Adena
Moving
This time around we dance - we're chosen ones
Posts: 611
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Post by Adena on May 10, 2008 10:59:46 GMT
'But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.'
I have promises to keep myself, and sleeping is not my intended course of action any time soon. I'm pleased you liked it.
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Post by rosabelbelieve on May 18, 2008 18:53:47 GMT
The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo (Maidens’ song from St. Winefred’s Well)
THE LEADEN ECHO
How to kéep—is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce, latch or catch or key to keep Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, … from vanishing away? Ó is there no frowning of these wrinkles, rankéd wrinkles deep, Dówn? no waving off of these most mournful messengers, still messengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey? No there ’s none, there ’s none, O no there ’s none, Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair, Do what you may do, what, do what you may, And wisdom is early to despair: Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done To keep at bay Age and age’s evils, hoar hair, Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death’s worst, winding sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay; So be beginning, be beginning to despair. O there ’s none; no no no there ’s none: Be beginning to despair, to despair, Despair, despair, despair, despair.
THE GOLDEN ECHO
Spare! There ís one, yes I have one (Hush there!); Only not within seeing of the sun, Not within the singeing of the strong sun, Tall sun’s tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth’s air, Somewhere elsewhere there is ah well where! one, Oné. Yes I can tell such a key, I do know such a place, Where whatever’s prized and passes of us, everything that ’s fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly away with, done away with, undone, Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet dearly and dangerously sweet Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matchèd face, The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet, Never fleets móre, fastened with the tenderest truth To its own best being and its loveliness of youth: it is an everlastingness of, O it is an all youth! Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace, Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace— Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath, And with sighs soaring, soaring síghs deliver Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver. See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair Is, hair of the head, numbered. Nay, what we had lighthanded left in surly the mere mould Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wind what while we slept, This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold What while we, while we slumbered. O then, weary then why When the thing we freely fórfeit is kept with fonder a care, Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder A care kept.—Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where.— Yonder.—What high as that! We follow, now we follow.—Yonder, yes yonder, yonder, Yonder.
Gerard Manley Hopkins Came across this recently and found it very interesting. I like his poetic style, I think.
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Post by Al Truest on May 18, 2008 19:02:32 GMT
I like these very much ^ The words seem to flood effortlessly. And the structure is much more than flowery prose - unlike many con temporary poems that struggle to fit the classification as poetry.
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Post by rosabelbelieve on May 18, 2008 19:05:04 GMT
Don't they? I like the feeling they sort of have of blossoming spontaneously and yet with a strong inner order. Glad you enjoyed them.
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Adena
Moving
This time around we dance - we're chosen ones
Posts: 611
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Post by Adena on May 19, 2008 0:49:07 GMT
Interesting. I'd have to say, it's quite a clever poem.
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Post by tannis on May 31, 2008 0:01:50 GMT
THE SECOND COMING by William Butler YeatsTurning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand; A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? JONI MITCHELL: Slouching towards Bethlehemwww.youtube.com/watch?v=cg0xMry2m9s
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Post by rosabelbelieve on May 31, 2008 0:06:13 GMT
I was reading some William Butler Yeats' work just yesterday. Interesting poem, and thank you for posting it. I especially like the end part.
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