The Top 500 Poems: 300-201

Saffron · Thu Sep 09, 2010 8:22 pm


	DWill wrote: 240. "anyone lived in a pretty how town," by e.e. cummings.This one dings at two, but I have to say the more I read it the more I like it.

I love this one, so, 4 dings for me. This poem is sooo fun to say out loud or for that matter, to hear out loud.

froglipz · Thu Sep 09, 2010 11:39 pm

I guess I need a diagram, I can't even begin to make sense out of it. I like ee cummings generally, especially "the balloon man". Maybe I'm too tired tonite, but it might as well not be in English...

oblivion · Fri Sep 10, 2010 4:23 am

I'd given it 5 dings but only because one ding was already present with the dong.

DWill · Fri Sep 10, 2010 5:03 am


	froglipz wrote: I guess I need a diagram, I can't even begin to make sense out of it. I like ee cummings generally, especially "the balloon man". Maybe I'm too tired tonite, but it might as well not be in English...

Starting with knowing that "anyone" and "noone" are like names like Jack and Jill, makes it easier.

Saffron · Fri Sep 10, 2010 6:23 am

To Froglipz,
Here is my advice for "Pretty how town." Read or say out loud and let your mind "correct the poem" so that it makes sense. You do not have to try it just will. Also, it seems to me, the lines that list the seasons are meant to show the movement of time. After reading the poem is Cummings indicating fast or slow movement? One last thing, as DW said let names be filled in if it helps. Now take them back out, why might Cummings have used a nonsense and nameless way to indicate the persons in the poem? Does any of this help?

Saf

oblivion · Fri Sep 10, 2010 8:22 am

Hi Froggie,
it may help you understand the poem if you read the following:

JABBERWOCKY
Lewis Carroll
(from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872)

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

This is just the first stanza, but the point is, our "intuition" guides us correctly through this poem even though the actual words themselves are unknown to us or seem to make no sense. Our inner eye provides us with a picture. I'm sure you could paint one of the setting by just reading the stanza Carroll presents us with. Cummings does the same. Read it aloud several times, enjoy the sound of it, play with it and see what you allow your mind and intuition to come up with.
Enjoy!

DWill · Fri Sep 10, 2010 7:11 pm

Talk about bringing a good conversation to a dead halt (I fear). Here is no. 239, "Sweeney Among the Nightingales," by T. S. Eliot. Sorry, the inscription below the title in Greek, by Aeschylus, didn't copy here.

12. Sweeney among the Nightingales

APENECK SWEENEY spreads his knees
Letting his arms hang down to laugh,
The zebra stripes along his jaw
Swelling to maculate giraffe.

The circles of the stormy moon 5
Slide westward toward the River Plate,
Death and the Raven drift above
And Sweeney guards the hornèd gate.

Gloomy Orion and the Dog
Are veiled; and hushed the shrunken seas; 10
The person in the Spanish cape
Tries to sit on Sweeney’s knees

Slips and pulls the table cloth
Overturns a coffee-cup,
Reorganised upon the floor 15
She yawns and draws a stocking up;

The silent man in mocha brown
Sprawls at the window-sill and gapes;
The waiter brings in oranges
Bananas figs and hothouse grapes; 20

The silent vertebrate in brown
Contracts and concentrates, withdraws;
Rachel née Rabinovitch
Tears at the grapes with murderous paws;

She and the lady in the cape 25
Are suspect, thought to be in league;
Therefore the man with heavy eyes
Declines the gambit, shows fatigue,

Leaves the room and reappears
Outside the window, leaning in, 30
Branches of wistaria
Circumscribe a golden grin;

The host with someone indistinct
Converses at the door apart,
The nightingales are singing near 35
The Convent of the Sacred Heart,

And sang within the bloody wood
When Agamemnon cried aloud,
And let their liquid siftings fall
To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud. 40

froglipz · Sat Sep 11, 2010 3:12 am

Thanks guys thinking of anyone and noone as particular people helped it click into place for me. Although the up/down bells, still have me a little puzzled...

DWill · Sat Sep 11, 2010 9:40 pm

238. "The Soldier," by Rupert Brooke.

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Penelope · Sun Sep 12, 2010 7:18 am

Thanks DWill: It's unbearable!

I would offer this excerpt from Rupert Brooke's poem:

The Old Vicarage at Grantchester:

God! I will pack, and take a train,
And get me to England once again!
For England's the one land, I know,
Where men with Splendid Hearts may go;
And Cambridgeshire, of all England,
The shire for Men who Understand;
And of that district I prefer
The lovely hamlet Grantchester.
For Cambridge people rarely smile,
Being urban, squat, and packed with guile;
And Royston men in the far South
Are black and fierce and strange of mouth;
At Over they fling oaths at one
And worse than oaths at Trumpington,
And Ditton girls are mean and dirty,
And there's none in Harston under thirty,
And folks in Shelford and those parts
Have twisted lips and twisted hearts,
And Barton men make Cockney rhymes,
And Coton's full of nameless crimes,
And things are done you'd not believe
At Madingley, on Christmas Eve.
Strong men have run for miles and miles,
When one from Cherry Hinton smiles;
Strong men have blanched, and shot their wives,
Rather than send them to St. Ives;
Strong men have cried like babes, bydam,
To hear what happened at Babraham.
But Grantehester! ah, Grantchester!
There's peace and holy quiet there,
Great clouds along pacific skies,
And men and women with straight eyes,
Lithe children lovelier than a dream,
A bosky wood, a slumberous stream,
And little kindly winds that creep
Round twilight corners, half asleep.
In Grantchester their skins are white;
They bathe by day, they bathe by night;
The women there do all they ought;
The men observe the Rules of Thought.
They love the Good; they worship Truth;
They laugh uproariously in youth;
(And when they get to feeling old,
They up and shoot themselves, I'm told)...

Oh what a loss this beautiful man was to humanity.

(For instance, he would never have constructed so clumsy a sentence as the above. :blush:

)

DWill · Sun Sep 12, 2010 5:50 pm


	Penelope wrote: Thanks DWill: It's unbearable! I would offer this excerpt from Rupert Brooke's poem: The Old Vicarage at Grantchester:

It's a beautiful poem, you're right, Penelope, and I'm sure it has even more power for you. Not that often that patriotism, love of country, comes out sounding so good in a poem. Thanks for the completely different Brooke excerpt, which reminds me a little of Housman in his satiric mode. I don't really know a single thing about Brooke, but now you've put him on the radar screen for me.


	Quote: Oh what a loss this beautiful man was to humanity. (For instance, he would never have constructed so clumsy a sentence as the above. )

Maybe, but there was no doubt about the meaning.

DWill · Sun Sep 12, 2010 10:35 pm

237. "Chicago," by Carl Sandburg. Nope, I don't ding on this one.

HOG Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I
have seen your painted women under the gas lamps
luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it
is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to
kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the
faces of women and children I have seen the marks
of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who
sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer
and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing
so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on
job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the
little soft cities;

Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning
as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with
white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young
man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has
never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse.
and under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of
Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog
Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with
Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

oblivion · Mon Sep 13, 2010 4:05 am

Reminds me a bit of a very poor imitation of German Expressionism. My parents almost got me off poetry at a very early age when, for some inexplicable reason, they presented me with a book by Sandburg--his Rutabaga Stories. Can we give minus-dings?

DWill · Mon Sep 13, 2010 5:51 am


	oblivion wrote: Reminds me a bit of a very poor imitation of German Expressionism. My parents almost got me off poetry at a very early age when, for some inexplicable reason, they presented me with a book by Sandburg--his Rutabaga Stories. Can we give minus-dings?

Or maybe bad Whitman (who can himself be bad, IMO). I had suggested a raspberry for "loser" poems, but then I like raspberries too much for that. How about a gong, as in the old Gong Show?

Saffron · Mon Sep 13, 2010 6:04 am

DWill wrote:


	oblivion wrote: Reminds me a bit of a very poor imitation of German Expressionism. My parents almost got me off poetry at a very early age when, for some inexplicable reason, they presented me with a book by Sandburg--his Rutabaga Stories. Can we give minus-dings?

Or maybe bad Whitman (who can himself be bad, IMO). I had suggested a raspberry for "loser" poems, but then I like raspberries too much for that. How about a gong, as in the old Gong Show?

I am with DW and oblivion on the Sandburg. Gongs - okay, let's go with it. Is it out of 4 or 5, I forget.

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