Saffron wrote: Note to DWill: Don't forget to switch threads when you get to #200

Oh, if I only could confidently say "don't worry"! I always hear my second grade teaching saying "Indent!" when I repeatedly forget about something.

I have lov’d her all my youth;
But now old, as you see,
Love likes not the falling fruit
From the withered tree.

This is horrible.....I feel a bit like a fallen fruit from withered tree!

Do you know the poem from Africa which goes:-

Why do you walk through the grass wearing gloves
Oh Fat White Lady whom nobody loves?

Well, I'm never gonna be like that, I swore it many moons ago.

My grandchildren really do love me. And My husband of 46 years is rather fond of me....but this is a horrid poem....and I give it minus five dings.

216. "The Fury of Aerial Bombardment," by Richard Eberhart. I think regarding this one I agree with Penelope that dings can seem of place with some poems.

You would think the fury of aerial bombardment
Would rouse God to relent; the infinite spaces
Are still silent. He looks on shock-pried faces.
History, even, does not know what is meant.

You would feel that after so many centuries
God would give man to repent; yet he can kill
As Cain could, but with multitudinous will,
No farther advanced than in his ancient furies

Was man made stupid to see his own stupidity?
Is God by definition indifferent, beyond us all?
Is the eternal truth man's fighting soul
Wherein the Beast ravens in its own avidity?

Of Van Wettering I speak, and Averill,
Names on a list, whose faces I do not recall
But they are gone to early death, who late in school
Distinguished the belt feed lever from the belt holding pawl.

Notes

In his collection of essays "Of Poetry and Poets," Eberhart said that he wrote "The Fury of Aerial Bombardment" in 1944 while, as a Navy officer, teaching aerial free gunnery; that too often names of his students turned up on the death lists; and that this depressed him so much that, feeling acutely the ruthlessness and senselessness of war, he wrote the first three stanzas of the poem. It was probably a week or two later that, feeling something should be added, something quite removed from the passion of the first three stanzas, he composed the final stanza. This, he wrote, it is said, in relation to the others made the poem particularly modern and, if he had not added it, he would probably never have published the poem. "This is an example of a certain fortuitous quality determining the fate of a poem."

Do you know, I don't think I like poetry really...I always thought I did.

But then, I have a lot of aches and pains today, arthritis playing up.

that's too bad Penelope about the arthritis, I know it does wear on a person. Maybe you should wait a bit longer before throwing in the towel on poetry, there are definitely some good poems coming up...at least I think so, based on what I haven't seen yet, and I am not the most well versed (sorry, couldn't resist it) by far. This current stuff may not be to your liking, but it doesn't end here

I love your signature btw!

215. "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," by Langston Hughes

I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

froglipz wrote:

that's too bad Penelope about the arthritis, I know it does wear on a person. Maybe you should wait a bit longer before throwing in the towel on poetry,

Thank you, frog...you are kind...and now I know why I like Americans.....the British would just tell me to stop all that self-indulgent wingeing!!

Better today though! Many thanks!

The Hughes was direct and simple and reminded me of the lyrics of a spiritual. I think actually music would make it better.

214. "The Dance," by William Carlos Williams. See the picture at http://www.english.emory.edu/classes/pa ... rmess.html

In Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling
about the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess.


Pieter Brueghel, Kermesse (1567-8)
Oil on canvas, approximately 45 inches x 64.5 inches. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

What do you think? I have to admit, for me there is so little apparently here, that it must be a sign that I'm not appreciating this as it should be appreciated.

meh....no dings...nothing really, take it or leave it ::shrugs::

DWill wrote:The Hughes was direct and simple and reminded me of the lyrics of a spiritual. I think actually music would make it better.

I think Hughes intended the poem to sound like a spiritual. I love some of his poetry, this one is just okay, so, 1 1/2 dings.

"The Dance," by William Carlos Williams
. . .
What do you think? I have to admit, for me there is so little apparently here, that it must be a sign that I'm not appreciating this as it should be appreciated.

Williams was a favorite poet of mine when I was in high school and some how I've never come across this poem before. Even more surprising to me is that apparently Williams wrote several poems from paintings by Pieter Brueghel. Not sure how I missed that?! I love the painting of the dancers, but not so sure I love the poem. I need to read this one aloud a few more times before I decide on dings.