Piffka: I apologize for the delay in responding to your inquiry about my A2K name. A scraggly pup followed me home one rainy Easter Sunday and although I had vowed I would never have another dog, this pup needed dried and fed until I could locate the owner. I dubbed her
Orfant Annie (You know, the Orfant in the James Whitcomb Riley poem.) After a month of searching for her owner, I dropped the Orfant and inasmuch as Annie remained scraggly no matter how often I brushed her, my daughter renamed her
RaggedyAnnie. I chose that name for another site, but lost it during a blackout . I re-entered the site as Raggedyaggie, my own nickname (No, no, not Raggedy
) ---Aggie. (BTW, RaggedyAnnie came to my house to stay and chase the goblins away for another 14 years. )
I have already posted a few of my favorite Stephen Spender poems on Jjorge's thread. A favorite poem of mine is
W. H. Auden's Funeral Blues, but it is too sad to post here. I'll post Sara Teasdale's
Barter instead:
Life has loveliness to sell,
All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children's faces looking up
Holding wonder like a cup.
Life has loveliness to sell,
Music like a curve of gold,
Scent of pine trees in the rain,
Eyes that love you, arms that hold,
And for your spirit's still delight,
Holy thoughts that star the night.
Spend all you have for loveliness,
Buy it and never count the cost;
For one white singing hour of peace
Count many a year of strife well lost,
And for a breath of ecstasy
Give all you have been, or could be.
RaggedyAggie
That's a very lovely poem. It's going on my list.
RaggedyAggie -- Great story about the orphant pup -- thanks for sharing.
The poem is amazing, wonderful... I love it. The title makes it even better! I will have to look closer at Sara Teasdale -- she has name recognition in my poor brain, but nothing more, till now.
I KNEW it was going to be good when you said you liked Auden's Funeral Blues!
Jjorge -- haven't yet started my notebook, but Aggie's poem is definitely going in mine, as well!
edited to add --
Here's a well-known poem by Theodore Rottke, known for its sensuality and for its reference to another poet, Louise Bogan, who was his lover.
I Knew a Woman
I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I'd have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek.)
How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and stand;
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin:
I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;
She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,
Coming behind her for her pretty sake
(But what prodigious mowing did we make.)
Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:
Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;
My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;
Her several parts could keep a pure repose,
Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved.)
Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I'm martyr to a motion not my own;
What's freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways.)
RaggedyAggie
Funeral Blues is a favorite of mine too.
Piffka
My folder/notebook currently has at least 70 'favorite' poems and I have added many great poems to my list since I last updated the folder itself about six mos. ago.
A few days ago I tried to distill a list of my fifty favorite poems. It turned out to be very difficult. In a way it's easier for me to choose my two or three MOST favorite poems because once I get past the 'most favorite' category there are so-o-o-o many wonderful poems vying to be included in the fifty. Still, I'm working on the list of fifty.
When I finish it I will post it.
(There must be legions of people waiting with baited breath to learn my choices!
)
A friend reminded me of this song/ poem... I thought I'd like to add it:
Enchanted Gypsy
Words & music by Donovan 1967
A day once dawned
As sleepers yawned
A day of leaves so greeny, O
That a man rode high
In a tinker's sky
And bade me to go a-running, O
To follow the path of the gypsy, O
Seaweed clings to ruby rings
On the fingers of my lady, O
And the people in the town
They would not look round
To see me go a searching, O
To follow the path of the gypsy, O
I passed a glade
And took me shade
Beneath an oak so twisty, O
And a vision I saw as a crow did caw
No more need I go a-searching , O
To follow the enchanted gypsy, O
Seaweed clings to ruby rings
On the fingers of my lady, O
And the people in the town
They would not look round
To see me go a searching, O
To follow the path of the gypsy, O
His caravan was painted by a hand
That's touched every pebble in the ocean, O
And the pictures there
They move in thin air
There forever a-telling, O
The tales of the enchanted gypsy, O
Seaweed clings to ruby rings
On the fingers of my lady, O
And the people in the town
They would not look round
To see me go a searching, O
To follow the path of the gypsy, O
Seaweed clings to ruby rings
On the fingers of my lady, O
And the people in the town
They would not look round
To see me go a searching, O
To follow the path of the gypsy, O
Good Day! I had just posted four Sarah Teasdale poems when I was disconnected and they went
poof.
Anyway, I had noticed such a contrast in the moods/tones of her poems, that I did a quick research and discovered that Sarah Teasdale, at age 45, divorced her husband of 15 years,and four years later
committed suicide. Here are two of her poems you might enjoy.
I Would Live in Your Love
I would live in your love as the sea-grasses live in the sea,
Borne up by each wave as it passes, drawn down by each wave that recedes;
I would empty my soul of the dreams that have gathered in me;
I would beat with your heart as it beats, I would follow your soul as it leads.
Dust
When I went to look at what had long been hidden,
A jewel laid long ago in a secret place,
I trembled, for I thought to see its dark deep fire --
But only a pinch of dust blew up in my face.
I almost gave my life long ago for a thing
That has gone to dust now, stinging my eyes --
It is strange how often a heart must be broken
Before the years can make it wise.
(Thank you Piffka and Jjorge for providing the stimulation I need for organizing my poems. I've started a folder
)
Too bad about sarah Teasdale. She is, however, only one in a long line of poets who were either depressed, suicidal, alcoholic, mentally ill, or all of the above. Poets such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, to name just a few.
Their distress and their art may be interconnected. IMO their work stands on its own and is not erased by their troubles or the manner of their death.
Oh, it is frustrating to lose a post!
Thanks for thanking me, RAggie, but it is all Jjorge who has this wonderful idea of collecting your own set of favorites. I just think! about it and know it is a wonderful idea. You've already started!!! Good for you.
I particularly loved the first poem by Sara Teasdale of these two new ones that you posted. In light of hearing about her sad life, the second one seems eloquently depressing.
Just to make us all feel even more dramatically morose, here is the sixth part of the ode;
John Keats' Ode to a Nightingale
Darlking I listen; and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mus'ed rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease up the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstacy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain --
To thy high requiem become a sod.
[I wish he'd reworked that last couplet which I think could be better.]
Aaah. That's beautiful.
Once, in finesse of fiddles found I
ecstasy,
In the flash of gold heels on the hard
pavement.
Now see I
That warmth's the very stuff of
poesy.
Oh, God, make small
The old star-eaten blanket of the sky,
That I may fold it round me and in
comfort lie.
(Thomas Ernest Hulme)
piffka
"I know a Woman" is on my list. I love it.
Thanks for the post from 'Ode to a Nightingale'
I LOVE the lines:
"I have been half in love with easeful death/
called him soft names in many a mus'ed rhyme..."
Keep 'em comin' folks!
Leonard Cohen -- Stories of the Street
Hmmm, I love RaggedyAggie's poem, especially the lines:
Oh, God, make small
The old star-eaten blanket of the sky,
That I may fold it round me and in
comfort lie.
What a wonderful plea!
Here's something a little different...
Stories Of The Street
The stories of the street are mine
The Spanish voices laugh
The Cadillacs go creeping down
Through the night and the poison gas
I lean from my window sill
In this old hotel I chose.
Yes, one hand on my suicide
And one hand on the rose.
I know you've heard it's over now
And war must surely come,
The cities they are broke in half
And the middle men are gone.
But let me ask you one more time
O children of the dust,
These hunters who are shrieking now
Do they speak for us?
And where do all these highways go
Now that we are free?
Why are the armies marching still
That were coming home to me?
O lady with your legs so fine
O stranger at your wheel
You are locked into your suffering
And your pleasures are the seal.
The age of lust is giving birth
But both the parents ask the nurse
To tell them fairy tales on both sides of the glass
Now the infant with his cord
is hauled in like a kite
And one eye filled with blueprints
One eye filled with night
O come with me my little one
And we will find that farm
And grow us grass and apples there
To keep all the animals warm
And if by chance I wake at night
And I ask you who I am
O take me to the slaughter house
I will wait there with the lamb.
With one hand on a hexagram
And one hand on a girl
I balance on a wishing well
That all men call the world
We are so small between the stars
So large against the sky
And lost among the subway crowds
I try to catch your eye.
Leonard Cohen (1968)
__________
Jjorge -- I wish you'd tell us more about the poems from your collection!
I'm just going to post a poem in the Burn's Topic, I hope you'll come there and find something to post yourself!
I didn't know whether to post this here or on the other thread, but since I'm here:
Daybreak
by Stephen Spender
At dawn she lay with her profile at that angle
Which, when she sleeps, seems the carved face of an angel.
Her hair a harp, the hand of a breeze follows
And plays, against the white cloud of the pillows.
Then, in a flush of rose, she woke, and her eyes that opened
Swam in blue through her rose flesh that dawned.
From her dew of lips, the drop of one word
Fell like the first of fountains: murmured
'Darling', upon my ears the song of the first bird.
'My dream becomes my dream' she said, 'come true.
I waken from you to my dream of you.'
Oh, my wakened dream then dared assume
The audacity of her sleep. Our dreams
Poured into each other's arms, like streams.
Jjorge, I too, would like to hear more from your collection that I might add them to mine.
Piffka, from my collection (You asked for it!)
Are you familiar with Anna Akhmatova?
She is considered by some to be the top Russian poet of the twentieth century. Of course those of us who don't read Russian can only know her through translation which is only slightly better than 'knowing' reality by studying from inside a cave, the shadows projected from the real world outside, to use Plato's metaphor.
Still, even in translation her work is very very moving. She doesn't have to write from imagination. She LIVED what she wrote so movingly.
She was born in the final years of czarist Russia to an aristocratic family. She was reportedly a great beauty as well as a brilliant student. She was in her early twenties and already achieving some note as a poet, when the Bolshevik revolution occurred. She experienced the execution and imprisonment of loved ones, and barely escaped imprisonment herself. Her work was banned in Russia for many years and the spector of arrest and imprisonment was always present to her.
Nevertheless, her poems were circulated secretly to a few people and were not lost:
Requiem 1935-1940
------------------------------
No foreign sky protected me,
no stranger's wing shielded my face.
I stand as witness to the common lot
survivor of that time, that place.
-1961
Instead of A Preface
In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent
seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in
Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified
me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue
from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called
by name before. Now she started out of the torpor
common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone
whispered there):
"Can you describe this?"
And I said: "I can."
Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over
what had once been her face.
-Leningrad, 1 April 1957
Dedication
Such grief might make the mountains stoop,
reverse the waters where they flow,
but cannot burst these ponderous bolts
that block us from the prison cells
crowded with mortal woe...
For some the wind can freshly blow,
for some the sunlight fade at ease,
but we, made partners in our dread,
hear but the grating of the keys,
and heavy-booted soldiers tread.
As if for early mass, we rose
and each day walked the wilderness,
trudging through silent street and square,
to congregate, less live than dead.
The sunlight declined, the Neva blurred,
and hope sang always from afar.
Whose sentence is decreed?...That moan,
that sudden spurt of woman's tears,
shows one distinguished from the rest,
as if they'd knocked her to the ground
and wrenched the heart out of her breast,
then let her go, reeling, alone.
Where are they now, my nameless friends
from those two years I spent in hell?
What specters mock them now, amid
the fury of Siberian snows,
or in the blighted circle of the moon?
To them I cry, Hail and Farewell!
-March 1940
Prologue
That was a time when only the dead
could smile, delivered from their wars,
and the sign, the soul, of Leningrad
dangled outside its prison-house;
and the regiments of the condemned,
herded in the railroad yards,
shrank from the engine's whistle-song
whose burden went, "Away pariahs!"
the stars of death stood over us.
And Russia, guiltless, beloved, writhed
under the crunch of bloodstained boots,
under the wheels of Black Marias.
l
At dawn they came and took you away.
You were my dead: I walked behind.
In the dark room children cried,
the holy candle gasped for air.
Your lips were chill from the ikon's kiss,
sweat bloomed on your brow - those deathly flowers!
Like the wives of Peter's troopers in Red Square
I'll stand and howl under the Kremlin towers.
-1935
2
Quietly flows the quiet Don;
into my house slips the yellow moon.
It leaps the sill, its cap askew,
and balks at a shadow, that yellow moon.
This woman is sick to her marrow-bone,
this woman is utterly alone,
with husband dead, with son away
in jail. Pray for me. Pray.
3
Not, not mine: it's somebody else's wound.
I could never have borne it. So take the thing
that happened, hide it, stick it in the ground.
Whisk the lamps away...
Night.
4
They should have shown you -mocker,
delight of your friends, hearts'thief,
naughtiest girl of Pushkin's town -
this picture of your fated years,
as under the glowering wall you stand,
shabby, three hundredth in line,
clutching a parcel in your hand,
and the New Years ice scorched by your tears.
See there the prison poplar bending!
No sound. No sound. Yet how many
innocent lives are ending...
5
For seventeen months I have cried aloud,
calling you back to your lair.
I hurl myself at the hangman's foot.
You are my son, changed into nightmare.
Confusion occupies the world,
and I am powerless to tell
somebody brute from something human,
or on what day the word spells, "Kill!"
Nothing is left but dusty flowers,
the tinkling thurible, and tracks
that lead to nowhere. Night of stone,
whose bright enormous star
stares me straight in the eyes,
promising death, ah soon!
6
The weeks fly out of mind,
I doubt that it ocurred:
how into your prison, child,
the white nights, blazing, stared;
and still, as I draw breath,
they fix their buzzard eyes
on what the high cross shows,
this body of your death.
7
The Sentence
The word dropped like a stone
on my still living breast.
Confess: I was prepared,
am somehow ready for the test.
So much to do today:
Kill memory, kill pain,
turn heart into a stone,
and yet prepare to live again.
Not quite. Hot summer's feast
brings rumors of carouse.
How long have I foreseen
this brilliant day, this empty house?
8
To Death
You will come in any case - so why not now?
How long I wait and wait. The bad times fall.
I have put out the light and opened the door
for you, because you are simple and magical.
Assume, then, any form that suits your wish,
take aim, and blast at me with poisoned shot,
or strangle me like an efficient mugger,
or else infect me - typhus - be my lot -
or spring out of the fairy tale you wrote,
the one we're sick of hearing, day and night,
where the blue hatband marches up the stairs,
led by the janitor, pale with fright.
It's all the same to me. The Yenisei swirls,
the North star shines, as it will shine forever;
and the blue lustre of my loved one's eyes
is clouded over by the final horror.
- The House on the Fontanka
19 August 1939
9
Already madness lifts its wing
to cover half my soul.
That taste of opiate wine!
Lure of the dark valley!
Now everything is clear.
I admit my defeat. The tongue
of my ravings in my ear
is the tongue of a stranger.
No use to fall down on my knees
and beg for mercy's sake.
Nothing I counted mine, out of my life,
is mine to take:
not my son's terrible eyes,
not the elaborate stone flower
of grief, not the day of the storm,
not the trial of the visiting hour,
not the dear coolness of his hands,
not the lime trees' agitated shade,
not the thin cricket-sound
of consolation's parting word.
- 4 May 1940
10
Crucifixion
"Do not weep for me Mother,
when I am in my grave."
l
A choir of angels glorified the hour,
the vault of heaven was disolved in fire.
"Father, why hast thou forsaken me?
Mother, I beg you do not weep for me..."
ll
Mary Magdalene beat her breasts and sobbed,
His dear disciple, stone-faced stared.
His mother stood apart. No other looked
Into her secret eyes. Nobody dared.
- -1940 - 1943
Epilogue
1
I have learned how faces fall to bone,
how under the eyelids terror lurks,
how suffering inscribes on cheeks
the hard lines of its cuneiform texts,
how glossy black or ash-fair locks
turn overnight to tarnished silver,
how smiles fade on submissive lips,
and fear quavers in a dry titter.
And I pray not for myself alone...
for all who stood outside the jail,
in bitter cold or summer's blaze,
with me under that blind red wall.
ll
Remembrance hour returns with the returning year.
I see, hear, I touch you drawing near:
The one we tried to help to the sentries booth,
and who no longer walks this precious earth,
and that one who would toss her pretty mane
and say, "It's just like coming home again."
I want to name the names of all that host,
but they snatched up the list, and now it's lost.
I've woven them a garment that's prepared
out of poor words, those that I overheard,
and will hold fast to every word and glance
all of my days, even in new mischance,
and if a gag should blind my tortured mouth,
through which a hundred million people shout,
then let them pray for me, as I do pray
for them, this eve of my remembrance day.
And if my country ever should assent
to casting in my name a monument,
I should be proud to have my memory graced,
but only if the monument be placed
not near the sea on which my eyes first opened -
my last link with the sea has long been broken -
not, in the Tsar's garden near the sacred stump,
where a grieved shadow hunts my body's warmth,
but here, where I endured three hundred hours
in line before the implacable iron bars.
Because even in blissful death I fear
to lose the clangor of the Black Marias,
to lose the banging of that odious gate
and the old crone howling like a wounded beast.
And from my motionless bronze-lidded sockets
may the melting snow, like teardrops, slowly trickle,
and a prison dove coo somewhere over and over,
as the ships sail softly down the flowing Neva.
- March 1940
Did anyone else learn
The Highwayman, by Alfred Noyes, in the 7th or 8th grade? Admittedly, it isn't the greatest poem in the world, but, once you've learned it, it stays with you forever. That was proven to me late yesterday afternoon, when I looked out my office window, saw the almost-full moon drifting in and out of a thin bank of clouds, and immediately thought of the line, "The moon was a ghostly galleon". I quoted that line to the assistant whose cubicle is outside my office, and was amazed to discover she had never heard of the poem. She's a very bright, very well-read 27-year-old, so if she's unfamiliar with
The Highwayman, that suggests to me that, sometime in the past 40 years (since I was in the 7th grade), it stopped being taught in 7th- and 8th-grade English classes.
I think that's a shame, because -- while the poem may be a bit of an old chestnut -- it was a good way of introducing children to a variety of poetic devices: "The moon was a ghostly galleon" of course illustrates the use of both metaphor and alliteration, and then there was the way the onward-rushing rhythm of the poem was supposed to suggest the movement of the highwayman's horse, as it carried him along to his rendezvous with the landlord's daughter (I forget the name of that device). So, in honor of a poem that has stayed in my mind for 40 years, here are the first verses of Alfred Noyes's
The Highwayman. For anyone who doesn't know how it ends, you can find the complete poem at
http://www.geocities.com/~spanoudi/poems/noyes01.html
The wind was a torrent of darkness upon the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight looping the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding--
Riding--riding--
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn door.
He'd a French cocked hat on his forehead, and a bunch of lace at his chin;
He'd a coat of the claret velvet, and breeches of fine doe-skin.
They fitted with never a wrinkle; his boots were up to his thigh!
And he rode with a jeweled twinkle--
His rapier hilt a-twinkle--
His pistol butts a-twinkle, under the jeweled sky.
Over the cobbles he clattered and clashed in the dark inn-yard,
He tapped with his whip on the shutters, but all was locked and barred,
He whistled a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
But the landlord's black-eyed daughter--
Bess, the landlord's daughter--
Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.
Dark in the dark old inn-yard a stable-wicket creaked
Where Tim, the ostler listened--his face was white and peaked--
His eyes were hollows of madness, his hair like mouldy hay,
But he loved the landlord's daughter--
The landlord's black-eyed daughter;
Dumb as a dog he listened, and he heard the robber say:
"One kiss, my bonny sweetheart; I'm after a prize tonight,
But I shall be back with the yellow gold before the morning light.
Yet if they press me sharply, and harry me through the day,
Then look for me by moonlight,
Watch for me by moonlight,
I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way."
*NOTE*
I just realized I left out of Requiem part ll of the Epilogue. It
comprises the last 34 lines of the poem.
I just finished adding those lines (thank goodness for the editing function!) so, anyone who happened to read it within a few minutes of my initial posting may want to check to see if they missed it the first time around.
bree
I sort of like the highwayman, despite it's melodrama, probably for the reasons you cite.
jjorge that is so beautiful.
Joanne
Glad you liked Akhmatova. It took me almost two hours (one finger method) to type out 'Requiem.'
Aaah, Jjorge. Thank you for taking the time to post the Akhmatova poem. How can one describe it? Achingly, heart-breakingly beautiful? I have added it to my notebook.
Bree: Is it non-causal synchronicity? :wink: Just two days ago, a friend asked me to print a copy of The Highwayman for her. After printing it, I then read and enjoyed Noyes' The Barrel-Organ - "in the land where the dead dreams go".(I like that phrase). In school (I don't remember the grade) I had to memorize Whitman's Oh Captain, My Captain. My friend's class learned the The Higwayman.
Piffka, raggedyaggie, bree, et al
Here are two more Akhmatova poems from my notebook:
***************
"This Cruel Age Has Deflected Me..."
This cruel age has deflected me,
like a river from its course.
Strayed from its familiar shores,
my changeling life has flowed
into a sister channel.
How many spectacles I've missed;
the curtain rising without me,
and falling too. How many friends
I never had the chance to meet.
Here in the only city I can claim,
where I could sleepwalk and not lose my way,
how many foreign skylines I can dream,
not to be witnessed through my tears.
And how many verses I have failed to write!
Their secret chorus stalks me
close behind. One day, perhaps,
they'll strangle me.
I know beginnings, I know endings too,
and life-in-death, and something else
I'd rather not recall just now.
And a certain woman
has usurped my place
and bears my rightful name,
leaving a nickname for my use,
with which I've done the best I could.
The grave I go to will not be my own.
But if I could step outside myself
and contemplate the person I am,
I should know at last what envy is.
*****************
And from her early years:
(before the Revolution, I think)
"The Muse"
All that I am hangs by a thread tonight
as I wait for her whom no one can command.
Whatever I cherish most - youth, freedom, glory -
fades before her who bears the flute in her hand.
And look! she comes...she tosses back her veil,
staring me down, serene and pitiless.
"Are you the one,"I ask, "whom Dante heard dictate
the lines of his 'Inferno'?" She answers: "Yes."
Oh my gosh. Jjorge! I am in awe... of you for finding and typing that all in and of Anna Ahkmatova whom I'd never heard of before.
The translator's words are so powerful and well-chosen, whether describing a scene or the deepest feelings from the Requiem. Whoever did that seems to have done a better job than just shadows on a cave wall. What a story, an awful, awful story.
The Muse is such a perfect poet's poem. Love that. Also the poem of the two people... the happy one she should have been, the bereft one she became.
Really, really great. Thanks.
Okay, now I'll go back and read the Highwayman, but I didn't want to break the spell of Ahkmatova.
I went to a website and found several poems and a lot of information about her. Here is a short, poignant poem:
Wild honey has the scent of freedom,
dust--of a ray of sun,
a girl's mouth--of a violet,
and gold--has no perfume.
Watery--the mignonette,
and like an apple--love,
but we have found out forever
that blood smells only of blood.
1933
--Translated by Jane Kenyon
