Thank you Saffron.

I do think this is a thought-provoking piece. It seems like a 'man's' poem to me, because men don't have conversations with one another about 'feelings' and they certainly didn't in Matthew Arnold's day. It would have been considered frightfully bad form.

They talk about football and cars.

I know that this is about the inability, not just the unwillingness, to express ones deepest wonderings. I don't think it's about emotions, do you?

I like the bit about wondering where we've come from and where we are going.

But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us—to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.

Sort of viewing myself from outside and saying 'Why is she doing this?'

All the rushing about described by Matthew Arnold .....is the reason we are told in our hectic lives....to practise Mindfulness....like the Bhuddists.

But one learns not to share ones musings......'cos those who do, unless they are poets.....are often crashing bores.

I knew the mass of men conceal’d
Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal’d
They would by other men be met
With blank indifference, or with blame reprov’d;

Shakespeare wrote:

To thine own self be true, thou cans't not then be false to any man.

And I always, think, 'well, I would be true to myself, if I knew who I was'.

And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well—but ’t is not true!

I remember two others and myself, at work in an antique centre, having a conversation about this.

Lovely, but very brash young man said, 'I think you should just be yourself when dealing with customers'.

I said, 'Well, I don't know who I am really'.

Rita, my contemporary, said, 'I don't know who I am either'.

Andy, the brash young man said, 'You're both basket cases'.

Saffron,
I think I mentioned this poem to you once. Reading it again, I see it owes a lot to Wordsworth's "Intimations Ode," and Arnold did credit Wordsworth's poetry with a "healing power" that enabled Arnold to overcome despair. The poem is fairly wordy and has that Victorian sentimentality, but it has high moments, moments that capture our tragic isolation from an authentic feeling of what it is to be alive.

"The same heart beats in every human breast" = "We have all one human heart" (Wordsworth, "The Old Cumberland Beggar")

But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us—to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.

This is the part that reminds me most of a part of Wordsworth's great poem "Tintern Abbey":

These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration:--feelings too 30
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world, 40
Is lightened:--that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,--
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

I think you could be right about "The Buried Life" being a man's poem, in that it has been more culturally taboo for men to get to the heart of things with each other, and therefore we have the stand-ins for communication such as sports and politics. It seems to me to be partly emotions that Arnold is talking about not being able to release, though, perhaps without even knowing that this is the case. He puts it all in philosophical terms, but maybe it could be largely remedied by not being afraid to say we're scared, lonely, unhappy, happy, etc.

I am a dope, of course it's about emotion!!

Light flows our war of mocking words, and yet,
Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet!

By the time I got to the end, I'd forgotten about the opening lines! Duh!!

You know that my son is a Falconer and works at a bird of prey centre so my mind is often on such, because exotic birds sometimes visit my home.

BARN OWL
Ernie Morgan found him, a small
Fur mitten inexplicably upright,
And hissing like a treble kettle
Beneath the tree he’d fallen from.
His bright eye frightened Ernie,
Who popped a rusty bucket over him
And ran for us. We kept him
In a backyard shed, perched
On the rung of a broken deck-chair,
In canvas faded to his down’s biscuit.
Men from the pits, their own childhood
Spent waste in the crippling earth,
Held him gently, brought him mice
From the wealth of our riddled tenements,
Saw that we understood his tenderness,
His tiny body under its puffed quilt,
Then left us alone. We called him Snowy.
He was never clumsy. He flew
From the first like a skilled moth,
Sifting the air with feathers,
Floating it softly to the place he wanted.
At dusk he’d stir, preen, stand
At the window ledge, fly. It was
A catching of the heart to see him go.
Six months we kept him, saw him
Grow beautiful in a way each thought
His own knowledge. One afternoon,
Home with pretended illness, I watched him
Leave. It was daylight. He lifted slowly
Over the Hughes’ roof, his cream face calm,
And never came back. I saw this;
And tell it for the first time,
Having wanted to keep his mystery.

Leslie Norris

nice thread peoples doing a power of good

here's an eric johnson lyric to "trail of tears" but it always read like a poem to me

Take me from these earth bound chains
I must find it once again
The meaning of equality
We will never hide in shame
But forever guard the flame
Burning for eternity

Hundreds of nights
Oh, my body cries
A trail of tears

Promises sometimes don't keep
Freedom, put to sleep, and now I know
(I lay my body down)
Written with the words you tell
Stories, a lesson in life from long ago

Hold on, hold dear
The time is near
When you'll know why
The spirit flies

Children carried on your back
Driven through the wind and cold
How have you become so few
But in the end, oh, I will see
Your spiritual liberty
Forever to be with you

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9sMTTd802k

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears

We as Choctaws rather chose to suffer and be free, than live under the degrading influence of laws, which our voice could not be heard in their formation.

My Aunt Pat writes poetry and this one that she wrote has been circling my head since 2006 when she sent me the copy of Avec that she was published in.

Summer Disconnect

fluttering butterfly days
maple spinners circling solemn silent smiles
buzzing bee loud glades
peace
purring on the knee


spider slashing nights
sharp sticky silk scoring skin
frantic falling tragic tumbling
terror
wrenching awakening escape


maybe

when I think about it I have the words bouncing around in my head for a long time. they are very rhythmic and alliterative, and the meanings change sometimes....

The world is too much today. With daughters half way round the globe it is hard to want to look at the news. I am just glad the daughter that had been in Japan 3 weeks ago, is now home. I came across this Wendle Berry poem on the website of daughter number 2's program abroad (New Zealand -- had been located in Christchurch and now relocated to the North Island). All I can say to this poem is, YES.

The Peace of Wild Things
by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of the wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

The day I came across this poem was the day a Gerard Manley Hopkin's poem was post on the Top 500 thread. It seemed like providence. The reason I came across the poem is because it was read at Elizabeth Taylor's funeral. I have been thinking about it all week. I love the way Hoplins uses language -- it seems playful to me, even when the subject matter of his poem is serious.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89). Poems. 1918.

36. The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo
(Maidens’ song from St. Winefred’s Well)


THE LEADEN ECHO

HOW to kéep—is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce, latch or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, … from vanishing away?
Ó is there no frowning of these wrinkles, rankéd wrinkles deep,
Dówn? no waving off of these most mournful messengers, still messengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey?
No there ’s none, there ’s none, O no there ’s none, 5
Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair,
Do what you may do, what, do what you may,
And wisdom is early to despair:
Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done
To keep at bay 10
Age and age’s evils, hoar hair,
Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death’s worst, winding sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay;
So be beginning, be beginning to despair.
O there ’s none; no no no there ’s none:
Be beginning to despair, to despair, 15
Despair, despair, despair, despair.

THE GOLDEN ECHO

Spare!
There ís one, yes I have one (Hush there!);
Only not within seeing of the sun,
Not within the singeing of the strong sun, 20
Tall sun’s tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth’s air,
Somewhere elsewhere there is ah well where! one,
Oné. Yes I can tell such a key, I do know such a place,
Where whatever’s prized and passes of us, everything that ’s fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly away with, done away with, undone,
Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet dearly and dangerously sweet 25
Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matchèd face,
The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet,
Never fleets móre, fastened with the tenderest truth
To its own best being and its loveliness of youth: it is an everlastingness of, O it is an all youth!
Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace, 30
Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace—
Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath,
And with sighs soaring, soaring síghs deliver
Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death
Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver. 35
See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair
Is, hair of the head, numbered.
Nay, what we had lighthanded left in surly the mere mould
Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wind what while we slept,
This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold 40
What while we, while we slumbered.
O then, weary then why
When the thing we freely fórfeit is kept with fonder a care,
Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept
Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder 45
A care kept.—Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where.—
Yonder.—What high as that! We follow, now we follow.—Yonder, yes yonder, yonder,
Yonder.

The 'Echoes' Saffron are incredible read aloud. Thank-you!

Reminded me of 'the new heaven and earth' of Revelation 21
where God is said to 'make all things new'.

And of where we are encouraged to 'lay up for yourselves treasure in heaven where moth and rust do not corrupt, nor theives break in and steal'...

When the thing we freely fórfeit is kept with fonder a care,
Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept
Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder 45
A care kept.—Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where.—
Yonder.—What high as that! We follow, now we follow.—Yonder, yes yonder, yonder,
Yonder.

Wonderful lines!
_________________