Poem of the moment

Saffron · Sat Aug 02, 2008 10:35 am

Babyblues had a good idea a few weeks back, to post a poem that reflects your current mood. Since DWill called me Sappho, I feel compelled to post one of her poems.

Without warning

Without warning
as a whirlwind
swoops on an oak
Love shakes my heart

Sappho

Saffron · Sun Aug 03, 2008 9:11 pm

Excerpt from:
The Day Is Done
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

And a feeling of sadness comes o'er me
That my soul cannot resist:
A feeling of sadness and longing,
That is not akin to pain,
And resembles sorrow only
As the mist resembles the rain.
Come, read to me some poem,
Some simple and heartfelt lay,
That shall soothe this restless feeling,
And banish the thoughts of day.

DWill · Mon Aug 04, 2008 4:56 pm

Saffron,

You seem to have chosen that piece to connect with the tone of the Housman poems. That's just the pensiveness that he injects into them, kind of a delicious sadness. Say it loud: sad is not bad!

DWill

Saffron · Tue Aug 05, 2008 9:06 pm

This poet it new to me. Here are the first 2 stanzas from Theodore Roethke's The Waking.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

And to Will: Today I feel fortified enough to at least say, sadness is not all bad and some is most likely good.

DWill · Tue Aug 05, 2008 10:38 pm

Good choice! I like his "Open House," which I don't have in front of me. I just remember that it ends with the great sounding lines,
"An epic of the eyes/My love with no disguise." "My Papa's Waltz" often makes it into anthologies. So glad you are feeling stronger/better.

DWill

Saffron · Wed Aug 06, 2008 5:46 am

The world is an amazing and incomprehensible place sometimes. Coincidence? Serendipity? DWill responds to my post with the lines of a T. Roethke poem and mentions another, Open House -- which, me being me, must look up. The first webpage I come to is Kingfisher: A Journal for Art and Literature and find poems and paintings. Open House is stunning, but it is the paintings that catch me, Joel Brock Wine and Cheese (so like one of my favorite paintings). Yesterday, my daughter, just home from London, shows me a postcard of a painting, Vilhelm Hammershoi's Interior with Young Woman seen from the back. Without a thought I say, "That painting is like a poem." She turns the postcard around to show me the name of the exhibit -- The Poetry of Silence.

A bit of Roethek's
Open House

My secrets cry aloud.
I have no need for tongue.
My heart keeps open house,
My doors are widely swung.
An epic of the eyes
My love, with no disguise.

A link to The Poetry of Silence:
http://beardedroman.com/?p=163

DWill: When will you post us a poem?

DWill · Wed Aug 06, 2008 8:04 pm

All right, all right, Saffron. But go to "A favorite Poem" to see it.
DWill

Saffron · Wed Aug 06, 2008 8:28 pm

DWill, I saw the poem here when first you posted. I made you a reply and then it was gone. So, off I went with copied post, to chase it and re-paste it!

Saffron · Fri Aug 08, 2008 6:01 pm

For today; a poem I just came upon while searching for something else.

Published in 1922

The Barrier
by Claude McKay

I must not gaze at them although
Your eyes are dawning day;
I must not watch you as you go
Your sun-illumined way;

I hear but I must never heed
The fascinating note,
Which, fluting like a river reed,
Comes from your trembling throat;

I must not see upon your face
Love's softly glowing spark;
For there's the barrier of race,
You're fair and I am dark.

DWill · Fri Aug 08, 2008 9:32 pm

Thanks for the Claude McKay, Saffron. Anyone up for a "pairody"? As I've said, I'm drawn to the poetry of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It tends to be grandiose, dramatic (even melodramatic), and is more easily understood than modern poetry is for me. Back then, there was still one shared reality to be commented on; later it all fragmented. Now we seem to have more the idiosyncratic vision of each individual poet. But just to show I'm not completely antiquated, I've paired this old standard, "Dover Beach," (which I really like) with a modern take-off by Anthony Hecht.

DOVER BEACH

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Agaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold

THE DOVER BITCH
by Anthony Hecht

A Criticism of Life: for Andrews Wanning

So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, 'Try to be true to me,
And I'll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc.'
Well now, I knew this girl. It's true she had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck. She told me later on
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad,
Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds
And blandishments in French and the perfumes.
And then she got really angry. To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.
Anyway, she watched him pace the room
And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit,
And then she said one or two unprintable things.
But you mustn't judge her by that. What I mean to say is,
She's really all right. I still see her once in a while
And she always treats me right. We have a drink
And I give her a good time, and perhaps it's a year
Before I see her again, but there she is,
Running to fat, but dependable as they come.
And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d' Amour

Saffron · Fri Aug 08, 2008 10:20 pm

DW,
What is it about Dover Beach that you like? By the way, I loved reading both poems back to back. It took me several readings to figure out that I liked it. It captures mine own feeling of nakedness in the world and the need to piece together from remnants some garment to ward off the chill.

Saff

Saffron · Sat Aug 09, 2008 6:47 am

Good morning!
A poem to set the tone for my day; at least I hope.

From New And Selected Poems an excerpt from The Summer Day by Mary Oliver

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

When I am reading Mary Oliver, especially her poems from New And Selected Poems (1991-1992) I always think of Robert Frost. I think the reason is that her poems are rooted in a careful observation of nature as are many of his. The similarity stops here I think. Oliver is a much more joyful poet.

DWill · Sat Aug 09, 2008 7:24 pm


	Saffron wrote: What is it about Dover Beach that you like? Saff

Hi ya, Saff,
I like several things about it. One is the lines, how they preserve some formal quality with their rhymes yet are uneven and conversational. I like the painterly quality of the opening stanza, too. Most of all, I like the cadences, especially the way the long sentences play themselves out like the waves spending themselves on the beach, esp. in lines 9-14 and 24-28. I'm always a sucker for these rhythms, no matter what the subject, but with the addition of "The eternal note of sadness", well that hits my sweet spot.

It's not that I really feel so much what the speaker feels--the loss of any possibility of religious faith, or even dismay at the modern world--but he sells me on how he must feel, and that is enough. Look at the last stanza, again one long sentence rolling in, a poignant (to me) expression of alienation and indeed a nightmarish vision. The last three lines are probably in contention for the title of most memorable in the language:

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of strugle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Thanks for asking!

DWill

DWill · Sat Aug 09, 2008 7:38 pm


	Saffron wrote: When I am reading Mary Oliver, especially her poems from New And Selected Poems (1991-1992) I always think of Robert Frost. I think the reason is that her poems are rooted in a careful observation of nature as are many of his. The similarity stops here I think. Oliver is a much more joyful poet.

No, he doesn't seem to do joy very often. He was not a particularly happy man. Additionally, Frost is not a modern poet, even though he had contemporaries who were modern poets. He doesn't ever speak directly to us, do you think?, as Oliver and others do. We overhear him but are not addressed by him. That is the effect of formality, perhaps. Emily Dickinson strikes us as so modern partly because she does speak to us in a seemingly personal way.

DW

DWill · Sun Aug 10, 2008 5:09 am

Thinking a little more about my statement about Frost, if it is true in general about him not engaging the reader closely, there are notable exceptions, poems where he speaks to "you." The very first poem in his first book is an example!

THE PASTURE

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I shan't be gone long--You come too.

I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother. It's so young
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I shan't be gone long--You come too.

And then, in one of my favorites , "Directive," he takes the reader ("you") almost literally by the hand on a journey back into time.

Maybe I should say, "Never mind."

DWill

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