I only know that John Clare wrote The Shepherd's Calendar - and that he was an uneducated farm worker. And I like his poems.

I'm afraid I have a tendancy to find the authors more interesting than their books, and the poets more interesting than their poetry.

I do think this AGS poem is rather marvellous and I would value your opinions:-

Hymn to Proserpine
by Algernon Charles Swinburne
(AFTER THE PROCLAMATION IN ROME OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH)

Vicisti, Galilæe.

I have lived long enough, having seen one thing, that love hath an end;
Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend.
Thou art more than the day or the morrow, the seasons that laugh or that weep;
For these give joy and sorrow; but thou, Proserpina, sleep.
Sweet is the treading of wine, and sweet the feet of the dove;
But a goodlier gift is thine than foam of the grapes or love.
Yea, is not even Apollo, with hair and harpstring of gold,
A bitter God to follow, a beautiful God to behold?
I am sick of singing: the bays burn deep and chafe: I am fain
To rest a little from praise and grievous pleasure and pain.
For the Gods we know not of, who give us our daily breath,
We know they are cruel as love or life, and lovely as death.
O Gods dethroned and deceased, cast forth, wiped out in a day!
From your wrath is the world released, redeemed from your chains, men say.
New Gods are crowned in the city; their flowers have broken your rods;
They are merciful, clothed with pity, the young compassionate Gods.
But for me their new device is barren, the days are bare;
Things long past over suffice, and men forgotten that were.
Time and the Gods are at strife; ye dwell in the midst thereof,
Draining a little life from the barren breasts of love.
I say to you, cease, take rest; yea, I say to you all, be at peace,
Till the bitter milk of her breast and the barren bosom shall cease.
Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? but these thou shalt not take,
The laurel, the palms and the pæan, the breasts of the nymphs in the brake;
Breasts more soft than a dove's, that tremble with tenderer breath;
And all the wings of the Loves, and all the joy before death;
All the feet of the hours that sound as a single lyre,
Dropped and deep in the flowers, with strings that flicker like fire.
More than these wilt thou give, things fairer than all these things?
Nay, for a little we live, and life hath mutable wings.
A little while and we die; shall life not thrive as it may?
For no man under the sky lives twice, outliving his day.
And grief is a grievous thing, and a man hath enough of his tears:
Why should he labour, and bring fresh grief to blacken his years?
Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;
We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fulness of death.
Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day;
But love grows bitter with treason, and laurel outlives not May.
Sleep, shall we sleep after all? for the world is not sweet in the end;
For the old faiths loosen and fall, the new years ruin and rend.
Fate is a sea without shore, and the soul is a rock that abides;
But her ears are vexed with the roar and her face with the foam of the tides.
O lips that the live blood faints in, the leavings of racks and rods!
O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!
Though all men abase them before you in spirit, and all knees bend,
I kneel not neither adore you, but standing, look to the end.
All delicate days and pleasant, all spirits and sorrows are cast
Far out with the foam of the present that sweeps to the surf of the past:
Where beyond the extreme sea-wall, and between the remote sea-gates,
Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits:
Where, mighty with deepening sides, clad about with the seas as with wings,
And impelled of invisible tides, and fulfilled of unspeakable things,
White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and serpentine-curled,
Rolls, under the whitening wind of the future, the wave of the world.
The depths stand naked in sunder behind it, the storms flee away;
In the hollow before it the thunder is taken and snared as a prey;
In its sides is the north-wind bound; and its salt is of all men's tears;
With light of ruin, and sound of changes, and pulse of years:
With travail of day after day, and with trouble of hour upon hour;
And bitter as blood is the spray; and the crests are as fangs that devour:
And its vapour and storm of its steam as the sighing of spirits to be;
And its noise as the noise in a dream; and its depth as the roots of the sea:
And the height of its heads as the height of the utmost stars of the air:
And the ends of the earth at the might thereof tremble, and time is made bare.
Will ye bridle the deep sea with reins, will ye chasten the high sea with rods?
Will ye take her to chain her with chains, who is older than all ye Gods?
All ye as a wind shall go by, as a fire shall ye pass and be past;
Ye are Gods, and behold, ye shall die, and the waves be upon you at last.
In the darkness of time, in the deeps of the years, in the changes of things,
Ye shall sleep as a slain man sleeps, and the world shall forget you for kings.
Though the feet of thine high priests tread where thy lords and our forefathers trod,
Though these that were Gods are dead, and thou being dead art a God,
Though before thee the throned Cytherean be fallen, and hidden her head,
Yet thy kingdom shall pass, Galilean, thy dead shall go down to thee dead.
Of the maiden thy mother men sing as a goddess with grace clad around;
Thou art throned where another was king; where another was queen she is crowned.
Yea, once we had sight of another: but now she is queen, say these.
Not as thine, not as thine was our mother, a blossom of flowering seas,
Clothed round with the world's desire as with raiment, and fair as the foam,
And fleeter than kindled fire, and a goddess, and mother of Rome.
For thine came pale and a maiden, and sister to sorrow; but ours,
Her deep hair heavily laden with odour and colour of flowers,
White rose of the rose-white water, a silver splendour, a flame,
Bent down unto us that besought her, and earth grew sweet with her name.
For thine came weeping, a slave among slaves, and rejected; but she
Came flushed from the full-flushed wave, and imperial, her foot on the sea.
And the wonderful waters knew her, the winds and the viewless ways,
And the roses grew rosier, and bluer the sea-blue stream of the bays.
Ye are fallen, our lords, by what token? we wist that ye should not fall.
Ye were all so fair that are broken; and one more fair than ye all.
But I turn to her still, having seen she shall surely abide in the end;
Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend.
O daughter of earth, of my mother, her crown and blossom of birth,
I am also, I also, thy brother; I go as I came unto earth.
In the night where thine eyes are as moons are in heaven, the night where thou art,
Where the silence is more than all tunes, where sleep overflows from the heart,
Where the poppies are sweet as the rose in our world, and the red rose is white,
And the wind falls faint as it blows with the fume of the flowers of the night,
And the murmur of spirits that sleep in the shadow of Gods from afar
Grows dim in thine ears and deep as the deep dim soul of a star,
In the sweet low light of thy face, under heavens untrod by the sun,
Let my soul with their souls find place, and forget what is done and undone.
Thou art more than the Gods who number the days of our temporal breath;
For these give labour and slumber; but thou, Proserpina, death.
Therefore now at thy feet I abide for a season in silence. I know
I shall die as my fathers died, and sleep as they sleep; even so.
For the glass of the years is brittle wherein we gaze for a span;
A little soul for a little bears up this corpse which is man.*
So long I endure, no longer; and laugh not again, neither weep.
For there is no God found stronger than death; and death is a sleep.

Y'know, the most admirable thing about CH to me is that he is such a good literature guy in general. Really loves the stuff and is wise about it. I had some criticisms of the book, too, but also liked it.

I was especially impressed by the line:
"Where the poppies are sweet as the rose in our world, and the red rose is white..."

I also like:
"O Gods dethroned and deceased, cast forth, wiped out in a day"
Thank you for this one, Penelope. This is more interesting than the other and I think he was more "into it".
Dwill, CH is also a fan of Nabokov (my favorite author). Hurra! Is there a thread for discussing Hitch22?

LoL the edge of a green carpetedhill, thick with verdant forest

I would give it a ding heard over the babble of a springtime brook that has wrested it's way out of it's banks and is cascading down the rocky hillside through a tumble of boulders.....

Ah, you have illuminated a mystery for me, Penelope. We have caught William Harmon, editor of The top 500 (and most of you thought I was just making up this list), in a serious error. Where he lists the titles of the Top 500 in the back of the book, he has "Hymn to Prosperine" as no. 232. That poem, however, is not listed in the index at all. So I looked in Swinburne's section of the book and found "The Garden of Prosperine, which is the poem I posted. But is the real no. 232 the poem you have given us? After reading it, and partially understanding it, I would guess, definitely not! The "Hymn" is iconoclastic and blasphemous, not the type that would make it into anthologies, unlike the more inoffensive "Garden" by the same poet. It's strange that "Hymn" is more like what I was hoping for when reading "Garden," wilder and more daring. It's somewhat obscure to me, but I get from it the feeling of loss that this late pagan speaker has on the victory of the Christian faith over the old gods. But he also sees the power of the new religion led by the "pale Galilean."

P.S. I didn't find a reference to friendship with W. & C. W. I think died in 1850, ACS born in 1837. And it would be strange to imagine the stuffy W. as a friend of ACS anyway!

Another member (I forget how to spell her name) was interested in discussing "The Missionary Position," which I said I would do with her and then never got a hold of the book (bad DWill). We had talked a little about Hitch-22 in that thread. But why don't you start one up?

Will you do it with just anybody?



Do you know, I never paid any attention when my Mum told me we were related to Swinburne, because I'd never heard of him. I did used to boast of it now and then in later years. However, about ten or more years ago, the BBC did a series on the TV about the Romantic Poets. Keats, Byron et al. When they did Swinburne, I was so appalled......he didn't seem anything to be proud of at all, a bit of a maniac, in fact.

That is when I began to collect and read his poetry, which is very good, I could recognise that, but it didn't do a lot for me. Except I like 'the Hymn' particularly, and I got the feeling he was raling against the loss or taming of the peoples' passionate and 'very celtic' nature religions. We have a lot of standing stones from druidic times over here, and various depictions of the head of 'the green man' very ancient. In fact one was dug up carved into a stone in our local village churchyard. It was very crude carving but it was definitely a horned human head. Being me, I love this sort of thing, so hence I liked the poem very much. Having said that.....I'm glad we had Christianity, I love our church, and I'm sad that I don't believe in it anymore.

The vicar wouldn't give me the carving though.

Ah--now I see you can be a very naughty lady!



I guess that's how I feel, too--glad we had Christianity but not believing in any of it now. From a purely selfish view, I'm aware that if I said I wish we hadn't had Xtianity, I'd be wishing myself out of existence. But it goes beyond that . We can never know what might have been if just one little event or two had not happened 2,000 years ago and Xtianity was derailed. Then would we be looking back on how things had turned out in that alternate history and saying how satisfied we are with it all? I very much doubt it.

But, back to the 500. This one, no. 231 is a parody by Lewis Carroll. Trouble for me is that I'm unfamilar with the poem by Southey being parodied, so the poem doesn't set me to dinging.


FATHER WILLIAM

You are old, Father William," the young man said,
"And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head --
Do you think, at your age, it is right?

"In my youth," Father William replied to his son,
"I feared it might injure the brain;
But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again."

"You are old," said the youth, "as I mentioned before,
And you have grown most uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door --
Pray, what is the reason for that?"

"In my youth," said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
"I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this ointment -- one shilling a box --
Allow me to sell you a couple?"

"You are old," said the youth, "and your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak --
Pray, how did you manage to do it?"

"In my youth," said his father, "I took to the law,
And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw,
Has lasted the rest of my life."

"You are old," said the youth, "one would hardly suppose
That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose --
What made you so awfully clever?"

"I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"
Said his father, "Don't give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I'll kick you downstairs.

Well, I had to look up the original (which is grotesquely cliché and sticks to your mouth like cotton candy) and is summed up by the last stanza:

"I am cheerful, young man, Father William replied,
Let the cause thy attention engage;
In the days of my youth I remember'd my God!
And He hath not forgotten my age."

I certainly appreciate Carroll's version of it now and it gets a full 4 dings!

Oh, and Penelope and Dwill, if the two of you keep this up, you should check into the nonfiction forum under Christopher Hitchens' "Missionary Position".

No, in this case, it's fiction!

I give 'Father William' - a dinga linga ling.

But how boring, the missionary position -- why not try the Community Forum and check into the Chamber and . . .
Oh, how we digress!

I'm sorry....trying to look cool....when I'm not....

sycophantic; obsequious - moi??

That one has been dinging for me since my childhood. My father could rattle that one off whenever we asked him too...4 dings for me, even if I had no idea the parody, the humor is enough to sustain me.

Then, dear froglipz, you'll like the next one, and I do too and give it 4 dings.

230. "The Walrus and the Carpenter," by Lewis Carroll

The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright--
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.

The moon was shining sulkily,
Because she thought the sun
Had got no business to be there
After the day was done--
"It's very rude of him," she said,
"To come and spoil the fun!"

The sea was wet as wet could be,
The sands were dry as dry.
You could not see a cloud, because
No cloud was in the sky:
No birds were flying overhead--
There were no birds to fly.

The Walrus and the Carpenter
Were walking close at hand;
They wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand:
"If this were only cleared away,"
They said, "it would be grand!"

"If seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year.
Do you suppose," the Walrus said,
"That they could get it clear?"
"I doubt it," said the Carpenter,
And shed a bitter tear.

"O Oysters, come and walk with us!"
The Walrus did beseech.
"A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,
Along the briny beach:
We cannot do with more than four,
To give a hand to each."

The eldest Oyster looked at him,
But never a word he said:
The eldest Oyster winked his eye,
And shook his heavy head--
Meaning to say he did not choose
To leave the oyster-bed.

But four young Oysters hurried up,
All eager for the treat:
Their coats were brushed, their faces washed,
Their shoes were clean and neat--
And this was odd, because, you know,
They hadn't any feet.

Four other Oysters followed them,
And yet another four;
And thick and fast they came at last,
And more, and more, and more--
All hopping through the frothy waves,
And scrambling to the shore.

The Walrus and the Carpenter
Walked on a mile or so,
And then they rested on a rock
Conveniently low:
And all the little Oysters stood
And waited in a row.

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."

"But wait a bit," the Oysters cried,
"Before we have our chat;
For some of us are out of breath,
And all of us are fat!"
"No hurry!" said the Carpenter.
They thanked him much for that.

"A loaf of bread," the Walrus said,
"Is what we chiefly need:
Pepper and vinegar besides
Are very good indeed--
Now if you're ready, Oysters dear,
We can begin to feed."

"But not on us!" the Oysters cried,
Turning a little blue.
"After such kindness, that would be
A dismal thing to do!"
"The night is fine," the Walrus said.
"Do you admire the view?

"It was so kind of you to come!
And you are very nice!"
The Carpenter said nothing but
"Cut us another slice:
I wish you were not quite so deaf--
I've had to ask you twice!"

"It seems a shame," the Walrus said,
"To play them such a trick,
After we've brought them out so far,
And made them trot so quick!"
The Carpenter said nothing but
"The butter's spread too thick!"

"I weep for you," the Walrus said:
"I deeply sympathize."
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket-handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.

"O Oysters," said the Carpenter,
"You've had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?'
But answer came there none--
And this was scarcely odd, because
They'd eaten every one.