by hilzoy
O soft embalmer of the still midnight,
Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,
Our gloom-pleas’d eyes, embower’d from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine:
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close
In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes,
Or wait the “Amen,” ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities.
Then save me, or the passed day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes,–
Save me from curious Conscience, that still lords
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,
And seal the hushed Casket of my Soul.”— John Keats
To sleep! perchance to dream:–ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.
Nice! I’m posting some pieces at my site this year for National Poetry Month, but wrote a more extensive post last year on the Favorite Poem Project that also linked several poetry sites (they’re all on my blogroll, anyway). I’ll repeat the piece I used to kick things off this year:
This Is Just to Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
– William Carlos Williams
This must be where Lennon got the idea for “I’m Only Sleeping”.
There are days when
one should be able
to pluck off one’s head
like a dented or worn
helmet, straight from
the nape and collarbone
(those crackling branches!)
and place it firmly down
in the bed of a flowing stream.
Clear, clean, chill currents
coursing and spuming through
the sour and stale compartments
of the brain, dimmed eardrums,
bleared eyesockets, filmed tongue.
And then set it back again
on the base of the shoulders:
well tamped down, of course,
the laved skin and mouth,
the marble of the eyes
rinsed and ready
for love; for prophecy?
There Are Days, John Montague
imaginary blonde girl and the creep who cooked dinner
it was an August kind of September
late afternoon
smooth and sunny, golden
cooking time
the oak of the living room floor
simmering in the sun
distracted other smells
fallen apples
overripe under a neighbor’s tree
and chicken cooking over charcoal
i was hungry
her warm tangle of hair
yellowed-up the room
asleep on the floor, in sunshine
in her green dress
as an ear of sweet corn sleeping
unashamed on plywood
road-side, for sale
i considered her
and she rolled awake
onto an elbow
asked me what i was doing
watching her like some Creep
three for a dollar?, i said
tossed a quarter and a dime
into the ashtray
i went to get butter
she stood up to stretch
you’re a creep , you know that?
what’s for dinner?
(me, 93)
There is a great post on The Carpetbagger Report from a few days ago about the mainstream media’s (specifically Time magazine’s) ignoring the prosecutor purge scandal.
http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/10367.html
What explains the failure of the mainstream media to cover the purge scandal for so long, and so many other scandals? Do you think somebody just set up newspaper editors to cheat on their wives, and threatened to tell if the editors wouldn’t play ball when they come back some day and ask for something?
It wouldn’t be that hard to do, when you think about it. People wouldn’t talk about it.
Keats? Oh, hil, you’re askin’ for it …
Should I put in the early sonnet that ends –
My ear is open like a greedy shark,
To catch the tunings of a voice divine.
No, I really, really shouldn’t. Here’s a bit about the closing of a harvest-time day, from the end of “Ode to Autumn” –
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
javelina: I have a dim memory of you coming flying into my dorm room, sometime during freshman year, all aghast at the comparison between these two versions of the same episode.
Keats:
“Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;”
Someone I can’t remember, though the clunky words have stuck in my mind all these years:
“There she stood among the stooks
Praising God with sweetest looks.”
A Swarm Of Gnats
Many thousand glittering motes
Crowd forward greedily together
In trembling circles.
Extravagantly carousing away
For a whole hour rapidly vanishing,
They rave, delirious, a shrill whir,
Shivering with joy against death.
While kingdoms, sunk into ruin,
Whose thrones, heavy with gold, instantly scattered
Into night and legend, without leaving a trace,
Have never known so fierce a dancing.
– Hermann Hesse
Yes Hilzoy, it’s a good poem and all, but have a listen to Britten’s setting of it in his Serenade. Preferably sung by Anthony Rolfe Johnson. Divine.
Andrew: I know. I love it. That’s partly why I chose it.
I love the whole Serenade, in fact.
The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me
“the withness of the body” –Whitehead
The heavy bear who goes with me,
A manifold honey to smear his face,
Clumsy and lumbering here and there,
The central ton of every place,
The hungry beating brutish one
In love with candy, anger, and sleep,
Crazy factotum, dishevelling all,
Climbs the building, kicks the football,
Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city.
Breathing at my side, that heavy animal,
That heavy bear who sleeps with me,
Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar,
A sweetness intimate as the water’s clasp,
Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope
Trembles and shows the darkness beneath.
–The strutting show-off is terrified,
Dressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants,
Trembles to think that his quivering meat
Must finally wince to nothing at all.
That inescapable animal walks with me,
Has followed me since the black womb held,
Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,
A caricature, a swollen shadow,
A stupid clown of the spirit’s motive,
Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness,
The secret life of belly and bone,
Opaque, too near, my private, yet unknown,
Stretches to embrace the very dear
With whom I would walk without him near,
Touches her grossly, although a word
Would bare my heart and make me clear,
Stumbles, flounders, and strives to be fed
Dragging me with him in his mouthing care,
Amid the hundred million of his kind,
the scrimmage of appetite everywhere.
Delmore Schwartz
Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in fire;
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Robert Frost
Posted by: Amos Newcombe | April 04, 2007 at 08:37 AM
Amos, I’ve always loved that one. Although I’m digging all the pieces posted…
The Fate of the Fat Man’s Son
The Fat Man’s sire was a leaner man from the Northern hemisphere;
He lived in a day ere the fat began to smother us all out here;
He worked for years in the building trade, when the trades were good estates,
And grafted still when his “pile” was made, but he and his men were mates.
He paid them well when the times were good-he never put on the screw;
His words were short, and his manners rude; but his heart was right, they knew.
And they knew the price of each job he took, in the days when a job meant “graft”,
For the book he kept was an open book, as fitted that grand old craft.
His foremen’s rule was firm, but fair, the rules of his shop were just;
His eldest son was a workman there-’twas much to the son’s disgust.
“The boss” had houses and land in town-a fact he wouldn’t deny;
But when times were flinty the rents came down-they never were extra high.
He kept his houses in good repair; what he promised was always done;
He always knew how his tenants were, for he knew them every one.
He steadily, honestly, ran his race, and finished and went to rest-
Some tears were shed for the hard old case with a heart in his hairy chest.
He lay for weeks, so the foremen tell, but his men’s respect he had;
And the work had never been done so well as it was “when the boss was bad”.
The workman came in their Sunday best, they were men from many lands,
The boss’s coffin was borne to rest by four of his oldest hands.
The hopeful son, in the sight of men, some crocodile tears let drop;
He never put on the clothes again that he wore in his father’s shop.
His father’s friends and his father’s ways were a lot too slow for him;
He joined in booms and he spent his days with men who were in the swim.
He lowered the wages and raised the rents, and he voted straight for greed,
For law and order and cent per cent were parts of the Fat Man’s creed.
He turned the widows and orphans out for the shillings they failed to find,
The tenants went to the right about if the rent was a week behind.
The girls that slaved in his sweating mills, the rents of the pubs he owned,
And many a brothel paid the bills when the Fat Man’s table “groaned”.
The Fat Man’s son to a high school went as his father’s weight increased,
And several years of his life he spent in the study of tongues deceased.
He shone as “stroke” in the sculling race, the match of his day he won;
He sowed his oats and he went the pace-he lived like a Fat Man’s son.
The Fat Man died one day in his chair, as many a Fat Man dies;
His bloated body was packed with care in a coffin of extra size.
The ghouls of death in their human shape, with looks severely grave,
And damp, limp women in yards of crape prevailed at the Fat Man’s grave.
The will was read by a lawyer mild. The property all was-gone!
The son was left with a wife and child, and nothing to keep them on.
He cursed his fate and he blamed the dead that he had never learnt a trade;
He worked in his father’s father’s shed for the wage that his father paid.
He led a strike, and he got the sack when the paltry point was won;
They offered bribes, but he turned his back, though he was a Fat Man’s son.
To tell it all were a lengthy task-his poverty’s black despair-
Go out in the world yourself and ask poor devils who have been there.
His life embittered and health destroyed ere half of his years had run,
The saddest case with the unemployed was that of the Fat Man’s son.
His daughter worked in a sweating den, where the pure and the vile were mixed,
A shilling a day was the wages then by her fat grandfather fixed.
His senses swam in a lurid mist as desperate things he thought-
The Fat Man’s son was an Anarchist, a couple of shingles short.
His poor wife died, and his son was gaoled; his daughter-she didn’t go right.
And he blew up a ship that his sire had sailed with a cartridge of dynamite.
The papers never exactly knew how the fiendish deed was done,
When the good ship Greed and its blackleg crew went down with the Fat Man’s son.
Henry Lawson – 1895
http://www.cultureandrecreation.gov.au/articles/lawson/
Comment on the WCW. With a link to st‘s great version here in a crocodile-theme thread.
I’ve always loved that one.
I’ll take that as an invitation to post my
cheap imitationhomage.Some say my car is colored silver;
Some say it’s gray.
Now silver is the nicer word,
But marketing hype gets so absurd,
I hold with those who favor gray.
But, on a cold winter day,
No sky of blue but steely gray,
The snow is brown with dirt from town —
every face sprouts a frown —
We take our comfort as we can.
Silver is its color then.
Is it International Poetry Month also?
Via a diary at Daily Kos, poem from Guantanamo, scratched onto a styrofoam cup:
Just as the heart beats in the darkness of the body,
so I, despite this cage, continue to beat with life.
Those who have no courage or honor consider themselves free,
but they are slaves.
I am flying on the wings of thought, and so,
even in this cage, I know a greater freedom.
Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost
An ageless them, reminiscent of ‘Die Gedanken sind frei’.
Nell, I love Pete Seeger’s version of “Die Gedanken sind frei”. He doesn’t include the last verse, but uses the version here.
Is it International Poetry Month also?
It had better be.
And another haiku. Brownie points to whoever can figure out the connection without looking it up:
Hop out of my way
And allow me, please, to plant
Bamboo, Mr. Toad!
– Chora