The Top 500 Poems: 300-201

froglipz · Sun Jul 18, 2010 4:38 pm

Thanks Saffron for moving us... It does get cumbersome when the discussion is 10-20 pages long.

DWill · Mon Jul 19, 2010 12:42 pm


	Saffron wrote: Saffron: Living in the state of Virginia where we celebrate Lee, Jackson, King Day (yes, believe it or not we do), I can vouch for the still lingering smell of the Civil War.

To give our state, the "Old Dominion," a little bit of credit, we used to celebrate Lee-Jackson-King day, but several years ago we changed, so that now Lee-Jackson day is a Friday, I think, and MLK day is the following Monday.

Tate's poem is very heady. I feel inadequate before it, not sure of what I should be thinking about the poet's attitude toward our years of madness 150 years ago, a madness still celebrated by some in the South. I suppose that having some sense of history, which the newer generations may lack altogether, is one positive thing that could be said for nostalgia for the Lost Cause.

Although I don't understand this poem, I think it was good that poets once grappled with big & important subjects more than they do now.

Saffron · Mon Jul 19, 2010 4:37 pm

DWill wrote:


	Saffron wrote: Saffron: Living in the state of Virginia where we celebrate Lee, Jackson, King Day (yes, believe it or not we do), I can vouch for the still lingering smell of the Civil War.

To give our state, the "Old Dominion," a little bit of credit, we used to celebrate Lee-Jackson-King day, but several years ago we changed, so that now Lee-Jackson day is a Friday, I think, and MLK day is the following Monday.

Of course you are right. Space out on my part.

"In 2000, Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore proposed splitting Lee-Jackson-King Day into two separate holidays"

Given the change was made 10 years ago, you'd of thought I'd have been more on the ball about it. Back to poetry - I agree that it is ashame that poets today seems to shy away from taking on important social events and issues. Poetry has become very personal and idiosyncratic.

Saffron · Mon Jul 19, 2010 10:29 pm

Here is the rest of "Ode to the Confederate Dead"; thought I might as well post the rest.

Turn your eyes to the immoderate past,
Turn to the inscrutable infantry rising
Demons out of the earth they will not last.
Stonewall, Stonewall, and the sunken fields of hemp,
Shiloh, Antietam, Malvern Hill, Bull Run.
Lost in that orient of the thick and fast
You will curse the setting sun.

Cursing only the leaves crying
Like an old man in a storm

You hear the shout, the crazy hemlocks point
With troubled fingers to the silence which
Smothers you, a mummy, in time.

The hound bitch
Toothless and dying, in a musty cellar
Hears the wind only.

Now that the salt of their blood
Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea,
Seals the malignant purity of the flood,
What shall we who count our days and bow
Our heads with a commemorial woe
In the ribboned coats of grim felicity,
What shall we say of the bones, unclean,
Whose verdurous anonymity will grow?
The ragged arms, the ragged heads and eyes
Lost in these acres of the insane green?
The gray lean spiders come, they come and go;
In a tangle of willows without light
The singular screech-owl's tight
Invisible lyric seeds the mind
With the furious murmur of their chivalry.

We shall say only the leaves
Flying, plunge and expire

We shall say only the leaves whispering
In the improbable mist of nightfall
That flies on multiple wing:
Night is the beginning and the end
And in between the ends of distraction
Waits mute speculation, the patient curse
That stones the eyes, or like the jaguar leaps
For his own image in a jungle pool, his victim.

What shall we say who have knowledge
Carried to the heart? Shall we take the act
To the grave? Shall we, more hopeful, set up the grave
In the house? The ravenous grave?

Leave now
The shut gate and the decomposing wall:
The gentle serpent, green in the mulberry bush,
Riots with his tongue through the hush--
Sentinel of the grave who counts us all!

DWill · Tue Jul 20, 2010 7:18 pm

Here I am, with a computer now working, but not totally rehabbed, it seems. I didn't pay for the service, so guess I can't complain. Like many people who have to be unconnected for a while, I didn't find it difficult and even thought that it'd be a good idea to plan periods of unconnectedness. There is a new book out called "Hamlet's Blackberry," in which the author spells out the ill effects of this remote connectedness. I heard him say on the radio that our new plight really hit him when he stopped on a New York street corner and noticed he was surrounded by 9 or 10 people, every one of whom was looking at a handheld device. This in a city in which there is a lot to be noticed around oneself. And I have to agree, it's weird to be there with people who aren't really there.

But to the topic at hand. No, I'm afraid Mr. Tate's poem sails over my head. I read a little about it and didn't understand the analysis. Oh, well. Will no. 290, "Hurt Hawks," by Robinson Jeffers, be one that I can bridge to?

I

The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,
The wing trails like a banner in defeat,

No more to use the sky forever but live with famine
And pain a few days: cat nor coyote
Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons.

He stands under the oak-bush and waits
The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom
And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it.

He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.
The curs of the day come and torment him
At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head,

The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.
The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those
That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.

You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him;
Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;
Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him.

II

I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk;
but the great redtail
Had nothing left but unable misery
From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.

We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom,
He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,
Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old
Implacable arrogance.

I gave him the lead gift in the twilight.
What fell was relaxed, Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising
Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.

froglipz · Wed Jul 21, 2010 1:15 am

Oddly enough this poem reminds me of John Denver....

oblivion · Wed Jul 21, 2010 5:10 am


	froglipz wrote: Oddly enough this poem reminds me of John Denver....

I can understand that!

Dwill, I did indeed find a path to this poem; I think it was the use of adjectives that put me there. And I must admit to liking it, especially the juxtaposition of parts I and II.

And as to being disconnected for a while: that is the reason we do not have any internet connection in the house in France. It's a wonderful respite!

DWill · Wed Jul 21, 2010 6:11 am

It's funny, the quirky associations that can pop into our heads. I never would have thought of John Denver in relation to "Hurt Hawks." Jeffers is rough around the edges, uncompromising, too, in his view of humans' place in nature. No rhapsodizing about nature at all for him, yet he seems to be a nature poet. Saffron dug up some background on him a while back that identified his philosophy as "inhumanism." That seems related to both Thoreau and the more modern idea of biocentrism. Jeffers seems to say that if we really are part of nature, then our sole focus can't be on our human project and we can't bend the entire world to our wishes. That's a philosophy that many today would agree with, or at least pay lip service to. Almost nobody manages to put the thought into action, though; it goes too much against the grain put into us by evolution.

289. "Leisure," by William Henry Davies. Davies' autobiography is titled The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908).

WHAT is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?—

No time to stand beneath the boughs,
And stare as long as sheep and cows:

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass:

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night:

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance:

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began?

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

Saffron · Wed Jul 21, 2010 9:07 am


	froglipz wrote: Oddly enough this poem reminds me of John Denver....


	DWill wrote: It's funny, the quirky associations that can pop into our heads. I never would have thought of John Denver in relation to "Hurt Hawks."

The association is most likely due to the fact Denver wrote a song called "Eagle & The Hawk". The first LP I ever bought with my very own money was a John Denver.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ArnbiHx6hk

oblivion · Wed Jul 21, 2010 1:08 pm

WHAT is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?—William Henry Davies

Like many people who have to be unconnected for a while, I didn't find it difficult and even thought that it'd be a good idea to plan periods of unconnectedness.--dwill

No other comment necessary

lindad_amato · Wed Jul 21, 2010 5:49 pm

299. St Lucy

I find Donne to be one of the most sensual poets to have ever written. I find this expecially interesting since he was a minister and attempting to show that corporeal love was beneath the higher love of God.
The theme of Lucy is of a lover who feels he has been reduced to nothing by the loss of his love. Yet, as John Carey points out in his John Donne- Life, Mind and Art, Donne cannot allow himself to be simply nothing. He must be "of the first nothing"; from the "elixir" that created life.

Love's Alchemy is another of his poems that is worth reading.

DWill · Thu Jul 22, 2010 5:31 am


	lindad_amato wrote: 299. St Lucy I find Donne to be one of the most sensual poets to have ever written. I find this expecially interesting since he was a minister and attempting to show that corporeal love was beneath the higher love of God. The theme of Lucy is of a lover who feels he has been reduced to nothing by the loss of his love. Yet, as John Carey points out in his John Donne- Life, Mind and Art, Donne cannot allow himself to be simply nothing. He must be "of the first nothing"; from the "elixir" that created life. Love's Alchemy is another of his poems that is worth reading.

Thanks for your comment, and I hope you will stay around to talk with us about Donne and other poets. It's funny that you mention the John Carey book. I now recall that as a grad student who did a project on Donne, Carey's was one of the books I used. I hadn't thought again about the book until you brought it up. Unfortunately, "Love's Alchemy" is not in the 500, but as several people have said, that is no indication of lower quality. Why don't you post the poem in one of the other poetry threads? We'd be happy to see it there and discuss it.

288. "Eros Turannos," by E. A. Robinson

She fears him, and will always ask
What fated her to choose him;
She meets in his engaging mask
All reasons to refuse him;
But what she meets and what she fears
Are less than are the downward years
Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs
Of age, were she to lose him.

Between a blurred sagacity
That once had power to sound him,
And Love, that will not let him be
The Judas that she found him,
Her pride assuages her almost,
As if it were alone the cost.
He sees that he will not be lost,
And waits and looks around him.

A sense of ocean and old trees
Envelops and allures him;
Tradition, touching all he sees,
Beguiles and reassures him;
And all her doubts of what he says
Are dimmed with what she knows of days--
Till even prejudice delays,
And fades, and she secures him.

The falling leaf inaugurates
The reign of her confusion;
The pounding wave reverberates
The dirge of her illusion;
And home, where passion lived and died,
Becomes a place where she can hide,
While all the town and harbor side
Vibrate with her seclusion.

A comment by Robert Pinsky:
The woman Robinson writes about in this poem must choose between a disastrous love affair and no love affair at all. She chooses the calamity. The material is like that of much American country music--this is a cheatin' song, in its way, and also a song about small-town life, the way gossip about an extraordinary person can somehow elevate both the locale and that heroic figure. Story becomes myth in that communal whispering, an effect Robinson imitates with his amazing rhymes, a kind of hyper-ballad. It's worth noting that Robinson knew small-town life and also suffering; he was destitute until President Theodore Roosevelt, directed by one of the Roosevelt children to a book of Robinson's, created a government job for the poet.

froglipz · Thu Jul 22, 2010 12:59 pm

The Eagle and the Hawk was indeed the connection, after this poem I mentioned to my beloved how I miss John Denver's music, and later found a VERY complete collection on my desk....

I like the "condemned fatality" of this last poem. She knows she is hurling herself into a train wreck, and yet hurl she must. Another way to say 'tis better to have loved and lost......

lindad_amato · Thu Jul 22, 2010 3:38 pm

Am I the only person who finds the format of this forum awkward? I keep losing the thread of the discussion on each poem

froglipz · Thu Jul 22, 2010 5:03 pm

Maybe it's a little difficult at first, but after the first time you post in it, it sends you updates when there are changes, and then it gets easier. When I jumped in the pool they were only up to 50ish.

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