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A Favorite Poem

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DWill

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Re: Delight in Disorder

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Saffron wrote:Now that we've mentioned the poem "Delight in Disorder" so many times, I think we should have it!


DELIGHT IN DISORDER.
by Robert Herrick


A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness :
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction :
An erring lace which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher :
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribbons to flow confusedly :
A winning wave (deserving note)
In the tempestuous petticoat :
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility :
Do more bewitch me than when art
Is too precise in every part.
I was just wondering how we're suposed to read the rhyming words here. Every other couplet appears to be an off-rhyme, unelss we're meant to distort the sound of the second rhyming word. This is what I do with "thrown" and "distract-sheown" and "thereby" and "confused-lie". I kind of like doing that. I know that it might be suggested that in Herrick's time, these words did rhyme, but I somewhat doubt they did.
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Saffron

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Re: Delight in Disorder

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DWill wrote: I was just wondering how we're suposed to read the rhyming words here. Every other couplet appears to be an off-rhyme, unelss we're meant to distort the sound of the second rhyming word. This is what I do with "thrown" and "distract-sheown" and "thereby" and "confused-lie". .
:laugh: You do take your time in responding to a post (Delight in Disorder posted 2/28/09), but well worth the wait! I can just hear you pronouncing "distract-sheown". :laugh:

post script: I think you are channeling W.B. Yeats! Have you heard the recordings of him reading? If not, you ought.
Last edited by Saffron on Sat Mar 28, 2009 8:17 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Saffron

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Gem: When I noticed your user name I thought of Wales right away. I always do when I see the name Gem. I almost wasn't surprised to see that is your location. When I was in high school I participated in an exchange program with a Welsh school. One of the students I became friendly with was a very nice young man named Gem. Ever since I've had fond associations with the name. It is also a character in my most favorite book To Kill A Mocking Bird.

At the end of college I spent a week at Christmas time visiting with some of the students I'd met from the exchange program. The place in Wales I visited was Pontymister, Gwent. What I remember most about Pontyminster is the row upon row of brick attached houses, all with startlingly different colored door; canary yellow, purple, royal blue, red, spring green and the like.
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Gem
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more favourite poems

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The thing with favourite poems is i have so many to choose from!
Here's another very atmospheric one:

The Darkling Thrush, Thomas Hardy

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

It is nice to hear that someone knows where Wales is - not many people (a certain George Bush included) don't! I think growing up in the coastal national park of West Wales contributed to how I like being outside a lot - and like to see a lot of atmospheric description in poetry.
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My daughter, who is spending a semester in Greece, took a side trip to Wales and just returned to Athens. A big fan of the fantasy genre, she had the idea to vist places mentioned by Susan Cooper in her books. I'm not sure how many she saw, but she did say she wants to learn to speak Welsh!

I echo your liking of atmospherics, by the way.
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Persimmons

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I am trying very hard to commit a poem to memory; a very challenging task for me. I've chosen a poem of Li-young Lee's called, "From Blossoms." Seeking a copy of this poem I found several others by Lee that are also formed around a fruit and a new favorite poem. This is long, but well worth the space it takes up! I especially like how Lee weaves together several different ideas, connecting them with the word persimmon and the experience of confusing one word with another.

Persimmons

by Li-Young Lee
In sixth grade Mrs. Walker
slapped the back of my head
and made me stand in the corner
for not knowing the difference
between persimmon and precision.
How to choose

persimmons. This is precision.
Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.
Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one
will be fragrant. How to eat:
put the knife away, lay down newspaper.
Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.
Chew the skin, suck it,
and swallow. Now, eat
the meat of the fruit,
so sweet,
all of it, to the heart.

Donna undresses, her stomach is white.
In the yard, dewy and shivering
with crickets, we lie naked,
face-up, face-down.
I teach her Chinese.
Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I’ve forgotten.
Naked: I’ve forgotten.
Ni, wo: you and me.
I part her legs,
remember to tell her
she is beautiful as the moon.

Other words
that got me into trouble were
fight and fright, wren and yarn.
Fight was what I did when I was frightened,
Fright was what I felt when I was fighting.
Wrens are small, plain birds,
yarn is what one knits with.
Wrens are soft as yarn.
My mother made birds out of yarn.
I loved to watch her tie the stuff;
a bird, a rabbit, a wee man.

Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class
and cut it up
so everyone could taste
a Chinese apple. Knowing
it wasn’t ripe or sweet, I didn’t eat
but watched the other faces.

My mother said every persimmon has a sun
inside, something golden, glowing,
warm as my face.

Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper,
forgotten and not yet ripe.
I took them and set both on my bedroom windowsill,
where each morning a cardinal
sang, The sun, the sun.

Finally understanding
he was going blind,
my father sat up all one night
waiting for a song, a ghost.
I gave him the persimmons,
swelled, heavy as sadness,
and sweet as love.

This year, in the muddy lighting
of my parents’ cellar, I rummage, looking
for something I lost.
My father sits on the tired, wooden stairs,
black cane between his knees,
hand over hand, gripping the handle.
He’s so happy that I’ve come home.
I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question.
All gone, he answers.

Under some blankets, I find a box.
Inside the box I find three scrolls.
I sit beside him and untie
three paintings by my father:
Hibiscus leaf and a white flower.
Two cats preening.
Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth.

He raises both hands to touch the cloth,
asks, Which is this?

This is persimmons, Father.

Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk,
the strength, the tense
precision in the wrist.
I painted them hundreds of times
eyes closed. These I painted blind.
Some things never leave a person:
scent of the hair of one you love,
the texture of persimmons,
in your palm, the ripe weight.
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Gem
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Great things have happened

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I have only read one of Gilly Cooper's books - The grey king. I found it, like some other Welsh literature, very bleak. It was good though.

This next poem isnt the most technically complex of poems. It is good though, maybe because I, as I suppose many people taking part in those young student through the night chats, can relate to it.

Great things have happened, Alden Nowlan

We were talking about the great things
that have happened in our lifetimes;
and I said, "Oh, I suppose the moon landing
was the greatest thing that has happened
in my time." But, of course, we were all lying.
The truth is the moon landing didn't mean
one-tenth as much to me as one night in 1963
when we lived in a three-room flat in what once had been
the mansion of some Victorian merchant prince
(our kitchen had been a clothes closet, I'm sure),
on a street where by now nobody lived
who could afford to live anywhere else.
That night, the three of us, Claudine, Johnnie and me,
woke up at half-past four in the morning
and ate cinnamon toast together.

"Is that all?" I hear somebody ask.

Oh, but we were silly with sleepiness
and, under our windows, the street-cleaners
were working their machines and conversing in Italian, and
everything was strange without being threatening,
even the tea-kettle whistled differently
than in the daytime: it was like the feeling
you get sometimes in a country you've never visited
before, when the bread doesn't taste quite the same,
the butter is a small adventure, and they put
paprika on the table instead of pepper,
except that there was nobody in this country
except the three of us, half-tipsy with the wonder
of being alive, and wholly enveloped in love.
Pellinore

For GentleReader9 re: A Favorite Poem

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In one of your posts, you mentioned memorizing "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" from an LP. It's possible that you're referring to a 1954 recording of Peter and the Wolf, Sorcerer's Apprentice, and Hewnry VIII Dances (RCA Victor LM-1803). The narrator was a dear friend of my family named Richard Hale. While his voice sounds British, he was actually from Tennessee. I knew him while I was growing up in Southern California. He'd dress up and perform as Abraham Lincoln at my elementary school every year, long before reenacting became popular. I was in Cub Scouts with a member of his extended family, and he in fact inspired many of my efforts in theater. His filmography is at http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0354989/.

If you no longer have the LP, I have some MP3s if you'd like - Please send me a message with a destination email.

All the best,

Dave Scott
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So many favorites

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I was trying to think of one of my most favorite poems and there are so many. But one of the earliest poems I can recall enjoying, at the age of 13, was Minstrel Man by Langston Hughes. The most moving and truly inspiring part of this poem is that I found the poem in an old English book that I got at a garage sale which housed such wonderful pieces of literature as the 51st Dragon and Minstrel Man and I didn't know that Langston Hughes was black or that he was referring to the plight of the African Americans who served European Americans. Instead, I saw the plight of the poor and the female and everyone who has been told to "get over it" or "be more positive" when they felt like killing someone or crying their eyes out. Here is the poem, judge for yourself how moving, albeit brief, it is.

Because my mouth

Is wide with laughter

And my throat

Is deep with song,

You do not think

I suffer after

I have held my pain

So long?



Because my mouth

Is wide with laughter,

You do not hear

My inner cry?

Because my feet

Are gay with dancing,

You do not know

I die?
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Came across this by Emily Brontë while reading Harold Bloom's How to Read and Why. I don't know why, but it appeals to me.

Often rebuked, yet always back returning

OFTEN rebuked, yet always back returning
To those first feelings that were born with me,
And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning
For idle dreams of things which cannot be:

Today, I will not seek the shadowy region;
Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear;
And visions rising, legion after legion,
Bring the unreal world too strangely near.

I'll walk, but not in old heroic traces,
And not in paths of high morality,
And not among the half-distinguished faces,
The clouded forms of long-past history.

I'll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding;
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain-side.

What have those lonely mountains worth revealing?
More glory, and more grief, than I can tell:
The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling
Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.
-Geo
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