'Could mortal lip divine'

Could mortal lip divine
The undeveloped Freight
Of a delivered syllable
'Twould crumble with the weight.

Emily Dickinson


The Cow

The cow is of the bovine ilk;
One end is moo, the other, milk.

Ogden Nash


Cowper's Tame Hare

She came to him in dreams - her ears
Diddering like antennae, and her eyes
Wide as dark flowers where the dew
Holds and dissolves a purple hoard of shadows.
The thunder clouds crouched back, and the world opened
Tiny and bright as a celandine after rain.
A gentle light was on her, so that he
Who saw the talons in the vetch
Remberered now how buttercup and daisy
Would bounce like springs when a child's foot stepped off
them.
Oh, but never dared he touch -
Her fur was still electric to the fingers.

Yet of all the beasts blazoned in gilt and blood
In the black-bound scriptures of his mind,
Pentacostal dove and paschal lamb,
Eagle, lion, serpent, she alone
Lived also in the noon of ducks and sparrows;
And the cleft-mouthed kiss which plugged the night with
fever
Was sweetened by a lunch of docks and lettuce.

Norman Nicholson

Rereading "Cotton" , I think its ambiguity on slavery and colonialism creates tension and doubt in the poem, which is interesting.

I'm really partial to Emily Dickinson poetry but not sure I'm really 'getting' this one. I'll read it over a few more times.

And this is quite a line ... 'and the cleft-mouthed kiss which plugged the night with fever' ...

Beddoes did write sonnets and since this poem is 14 lines, I thought it might be a sonnet but the rhyming seems a little elusive and the meter .. well maybe .. anyway, to me, crocs are special because they inspire feelings of wonder and terror in roughly equal proportion. And they are so ... prehistoric. I think 'river dragon' is a great description. With all of its grotesque qualities, this croc is a mother (maybe a good mother?) and co-operates with the hummingbird for their mutual benefit .. interesting observations of crocodile personality and life we might not often think of.

A Crocodile

Hard by the lilied Nile I saw
A duskish river dragon stretch along.
The brown habergeon of his limbs enamelled
With sanguine alamandines and rainy pearl:
And on his back there lay a young one sleeping,
No bigger than a mouse; with eyes like beads,
And a small fragment of its speckled egg
Remaining on its harmless, pulpy snout;
A thing to laugh at, as it gaped to catch
The baulking merry flies. In the iron jaws
Of the great devil-beast, like a pale soul
Fluttering in rocky hell, lightsomely flew
A snowy trochilus, with roseate beak
Tearing the hairy leeches from his throat.

Thomas Lovell Beddoes

Hard by the lilied Nile I saw
A duskish river dragon stretch along.

What a brilliant opening. I love that word 'duskish'.

The description of the baby on her back is great too:-

with eyes like beads,
And a small fragment of its speckled egg
Remaining on its harmless, pulpy snout;
A thing to laugh at, as it gaped to catch
The baulking merry flies.

I'm glad giselle told us that the 'snowy trochilus' was a hummingbird.....because I wouldn't have known. Amazing word picture.

Going back to Edward Thomas, I recall from Robert Frost's biography that Frost and Thomas were good friends, and Frost must have met him when he went to England as a young man and there, actually, became a poet. Can anyone see why these two might have felt something in common?

The Dymock poets were a literary group of the early 20th century who made their home near the village of Dymock in Gloucestershire, England, near to the border with Herefordshire. They were Robert Frost, Lascelles Abercrombie, Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, and John Drinkwater, some of whom lived near the village in the period between 1911 and 1914. Eleanor Farjeon, who was involved with Edward Thomas, also visited. They published their own quarterly, entitled 'New Numbers', containing poems such as Brooke's poem "The Soldier". The First World War, which saw the death of Thomas, resulted in the break-up of the community.

I think that Robert Frost and Edward Thomas both had a genuine love of rural life. Frost writing about New England and Edward Thomas writing, not so much about Old England, but with acute and affectionate observation, did they not?

I'm glad giselle told us that the 'snowy trochilus' was a hummingbird.....because I wouldn't have known. Amazing word picture.

Yes, me too, and I had to look up habergeon and alamandines. I loved this after getting the whole picture:

The brown habergeon of his limbs enamelled
With sanguine alamandines and rainy pearl:

Great poem.

The three before this one were well grouped for contrast. Though, I am certain that the opposite end of the moo is not the mile. The Emily Dickinson one was quite elusive in meaning, but I what I understood it to mean is that what we say can mean so much more than we realize. Cowper's Tame Hare was a hard one for me to understand and I think that I am still missing the meaning, though I really liked it. It is one that really grows on you with each reading.

It is nice to have the whole picture when reading a poem and sometimes the meaning of words is obscure and clouds the poem's meaning. But this also contributes to making poetry interesting.

"what I understood it to mean is that what we say can mean so much more than we realize" ... I think this is so, but Dickinson's use of 'mortal' and 'divine' in the first line suggests more somehow ..

Could mortal lip divine
The undeveloped Freight
Of a delivered syllable
'Twould crumble with the weight.

On meanings, BTW, I cannot claim to have known that a trochilus is a hummingbird, although I did know it was a small bird because I have heard of this strange phenomenon where a bird will behave in this manner and the crocodile will co-operate.

I suspect that Beddoes had other meanings to his poem, some symbolism perhaps. Apparently Beddoes was obsessed with death and afterlife, so I suppose one might observe that the hummingbird is flying in and out of the jaws of death and doing so for its benefit (yummy leeches) and the crocodile's benefit (parasite removal). I couldn't guess what this might have meant in Beddoes mind.

I'm going to skip Wordsworth until I can find a printed text and go on to Sylvia Plath.

Crossing the Water

Black lake, black boat, two black, cut-paper people.
Where do the black trees go that drink here?
Their shadows must cover Canada.

A little light is filtering from the water flowers.
Their leaves do not wish us to hurry:
They are round and flat and full of dark advice.

Cold worlds shake from the oar.
The spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes.
A snag is lifting a valedictory, pale hand;

Stars open among the lilies,
Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?
This is the silence of astounded souls.

Sylvia Plath

Penelope wrote: I think that Robert Frost and Edward Thomas both had a genuine love of rural life. Frost writing about New England and Edward Thomas writing, not so much about Old England, but with acute and affectionate observation, did they not?

I can imagine them walking about the English countryside wearing twede and hats and tall boots and stopping to lean on a fence rail and smoke a pipe while looking out over the landscape and discussing poetry.

Crossing the Water in an interesting poem. The introduction is black, the word is used four times, and shapeless. The next stanza introduces light, at first maybe offering hope, but then 'dark advice' steals that away. Next, the darkness is back with coldness and fear. And finally, stars open and there is beauty, but beauty of a dangerous kind. I love the ending: This is the silence of astounded souls.

I know that Silvia Plath was a depressive and this fact gets in the way of her poetry for me.

I can't really contemplate this poem without being aware of her sadness.