Poetry

[Pabmusic]

EASTER HYMN

If in that Syrian garden, ages slain,
You sleep, and know not you are dead in vain,
Nor even in dreams behold how dark or bright
Ascends in smoke and fire by day and night
The hate you died to quench and could but fan,
Sleep well and see no morning, son of man.

But if, the grave rent and the stone rolled by,
At the right hand of majesty on high
You sit, and sitting so remember yet
Your tears, your agony and bloody sweat,
Your cross and passion and the life you gave,
Bow hither out of heaven and see and save.

A. E. Housman

[johncorrigan]

If, like me, you love Edinburgh, take this short walk by the Meadows in the company of the great MacCaig.

Edinburgh Stroll



I leave the Tollcross traffic and walk by the Meadows between two rows of trees, all looking
as grave as Elders of the Kirk – but
wait till the wind blows.



Dogs are hunting for smells. A few men are practising approach shots
on the dwarfish golf course. Some children are incomprehensibly playing.



And between two heaps of jackets a boy scores a goal –
the best one ever.



Past the Infirmary I go back to the traffic, cross it, and there’s Sandy Bell’s Bar.



Tollcross to Sandy Bell’s Bar
a short walk with a long conclusion

Norman MacCaig

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

The Snapped Thread

Desire first, by a natural miracle
United bodies, united hearts, blazed beauty;
Transcended bodies, transcended hearts.

Two souls, now unalterably one
In whole love, everywhere and forever,
Soar out of twilight, through upper air.
Let fall their sensuous burden.

Is it kind, though, is it honest, even
To consort with none but spirits -
Leaving true-wedded hearts like ours
In enforced, night-long separation,
Each to its random bodily inclination,
The thread of miracle snapped?


Robert Graves

[Pabmusic]

Heraclitus

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead, 

They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.

I wept, as I remembered, how often you and I 

Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.


And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,

A handful of grey ashes, long long ago at rest,

Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;

For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.


William Johnson Cory (1823-1892)

A housemaster at Eton for a quarter of a century, he left suddenly under a cloud (an early Operation Yewtree, I suspect). This is, IMHO, a superb verse rendition of this epitaph from Callimachus of Alexandria (310?–240 BCE) for his friend, the poet Heraclitus (the comic poet, not the philosopher):

Εἰπέ τις, Ἡράκλειτε, τεὸν μόρον ἐς δέ με δάκρυ

ἤγαγεν ἐμνήσθην δ᾿ ὁσσάκις ἀμφότεροι
ἠέλιον
λέσχῃ κατεδύσαμεν. ἀλλὰ σὺ μέν που,

ξεῖν᾿ Ἁλικαρνησεῦ, τετράπαλαι σποδιή,

αἱ δὲ τεαὶ ζώουσιν ἀηδόνες, ᾗσιν ὁ πάντων

ἁρπακτὴς Ἀίδης οὐκ ἐπὶ χεῖρα βαλεῖ.

My Greek is truly bad, but a literal translation would be something like:

Someone said you'd died, Heraclitus,
and it made me cry when I remembered how often we talked till the sun set.
And you, my friend from Halicarnassus, rest somewhere, long long ago turned to dust;
but they, your nightingales, live on, on which Hades who grabs everything shall not lay his hand.

There's a lovely, simple setting for choir by Stanford.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Other Rooms

Afterwards, all he could remember clearly
Was the sound that the rain made, splattering
Against the paper wrappers of the flowers

Someone had been arranging around her grave.
He turned away from the window. When people
Are always there one tends to forget them.

And moved a cushion, but did not sit.
To be gone, a person needs to have been,
To be somebody something once happened to.

He thought perhaps to make some tea. When
There is not love enough to go around,
It ought to be the dead who go without.

Another room, another frontier. There would
Be others: stairs and doors. He could
Recall their bodies' fond acquaintanceship.

These were her gloves. Something akin,
He guessed, to immortality lay in his longing.
Elsewhere would be her shoes, and other things.

Neil Curry

[ardcarp]

This was on Words and Music last night, wonderfully read:


Lament

When I was a windy boy and a bit
And the black spit of the chapel fold,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of women),
I tiptoed shy in the gooseberry wood,
The rude owl cried like a tell-tale tit,
I skipped in a blush as the big girls rolled
Nine-pin down on donkey's common,
And on seesaw sunday nights I wooed
Whoever I would with my wicked eyes,
The whole of the moon I could love and leave
All the green leaved little weddings' wives
In the coal black bush and let them grieve.

When I was a gusty man and a half
And the black beast of the beetles' pews
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of bitches),
Not a boy and a bit in the wick-
Dipping moon and drunk as a new dropped calf,
I whistled all night in the twisted flues,
Midwives grew in the midnight ditches,
And the sizzling sheets of the town cried, Quick!-
Whenever I dove in a breast high shoal,
Wherever I ramped in the clover quilts,
Whatsoever I did in the coal-
Black night, I left my quivering prints.

When I was a man you could call a man
And the black cross of the holy house,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of welcome),
Brandy and ripe in my bright, bass prime,
No springtailed tom in the red hot town
With every simmering woman his mouse
But a hillocky bull in the swelter
Of summer come in his great good time
To the sultry, biding herds, I said,
Oh, time enough when the blood runs cold,
And I lie down but to sleep in bed,
For my sulking, skulking, coal black soul!

When I was half the man I was
And serve me right as the preachers warn,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of downfall),
No flailing calf or cat in a flame
Or hickory bull in milky grass
But a black sheep with a crumpled horn,
At last the soul from its foul mousehole
Slunk pouting out when the limp time came;
And I gave my soul a blind, slashed eye,
Gristle and rind, and a roarers' life,
And I shoved it into the coal black sky
To find a woman's soul for a wife.

Now I am a man no more no more
And a black reward for a roaring life,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of strangers),
Tidy and cursed in my dove cooed room
I lie down thin and hear the good bells jaw--
For, oh, my soul found a sunday wife
In the coal black sky and she bore angels!
Harpies around me out of her womb!
Chastity prays for me, piety sings,
Innocence sweetens my last black breath,
Modesty hides my thighs in her wings,
And all the deadly virtues plague my death!

Dylan Thomas

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness;
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find,
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds and other seas;
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.

How well the skillful gard'ner drew
Of flowers and herbs this diall new,
Where from above the milder sun
Does through a fragrant zodiac run;
And as it works, th'industrious bee
Computes its time as well as we.
How could such sweet and wholesome hours
Be reckon'd but with herbs and flow'rs!


from The Garden, Andrew MARVELL

[Barbirollians]

A lyric rather than a poem . Played at the funeral at the insistence of his wife for a friend who died much too young seven years ago now which is a shock

I can no longer see
Don't believe my eyes
any more
Can hardly believe
Feelings all turned around

I'm much too lazy
To give up
Besides it would be too soon
Because there's always a way

We were bound together
Would have died for
each other
Bent the rain into a bow1
Lent each other our trust

We tried to
Turn while
schussing
Nothing was too late
But much was too soon

We have shoved each other
Through all the tides
We got sidetracked together
Loved desperately

We denied the truth
The best we could
It was a piece
of heaven
That you exist

Every room you
Flooded with sun
Every frustration
You turned around

Nordic noble
Your gentle goodness
Your untamed pride
Life isn't fair

Danced the movie
In a silver room
From a golden balcony
We stood in awe of eternity

Helplessly sunken, drunken
And everything was allowed
Together in time-lapse
Midsummer-Night's Dream

Every room you
Flooded with sun
Every frustration
You turned around

Nordic noble
Your gentle goodness
Your untamed pride
Life isn't fair

Your confident stride
Your true poetry
Your serene dignity
Your unshakeable
grace

Your destiny
You defied
You never betrayed
Your plan for happiness
Your plan for happiness

I'm not leaving here
I've extended my stay
New time travel
Open world

I have you safe
Inside my soul
I'll carry you with me
Until the curtain falls

I'll carry you with me
Until the curtain falls

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

We denied the truth
The best we could
It was a piece
of heaven
That you exist

Every room you
Flooded with sun
Every frustration
You turned around

Nordic noble
Your gentle goodness
Your untamed pride
Life isn't fair

Wir haben die Wahrheit
So gut es ging verlogen
Es war ein Stück
vom Himmel
Dass es dich gibt

Du hast jeden Raum
Mit Sonne geflutet
Hast jeden Verdruss
Ins Gegenteil verkehrt

Nordisch nobel
Deine sanftmütige Güte
Dein unbändiger Stolz
Das Leben ist nicht fair

Not a piece (or artist) whom I'd heard of before - youTube provides a link to the original:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC81i2M30Bc

[Tevot]

Lament III

Lay the cold boys in the earth

At Mons and Hartlepool:

Prove to anyone who doubts

That blood and iron rule.

Let the river thickly speak

In tongues of silt and lead.

Teach us our impediment:

We cannot face the dead.

Run the waters furnace-red,

Afire all night long.

If we're to live then we've to make

An elemental song:

The object of the exercise

Is furnishing the world

With battleships, and thunderbolts

The gods would once have hurled.

How shall we know ourselves except

As sparks on blood-red streams,

Where fire-tongued our utterance

Incinerates our dreams?

Lay the cold boys in the earth

At Loos and Stockton town.

Still the blazing river mouth

And shut the engines down.

Sean O'Brien

[Barbirollians]

Wir haben die Wahrheit
So gut es ging verlogen
Es war ein Stück
vom Himmel
Dass es dich gibt

Du hast jeden Raum
Mit Sonne geflutet
Hast jeden Verdruss
Ins Gegenteil verkehrt

Nordisch nobel
Deine sanftmütige Güte
Dein unbändiger Stolz
Das Leben ist nicht fair

Not a piece (or artist) whom I'd heard of before - youTube provides a link to the original:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC81i2M30Bc

Yes it was the writer's version in German that was played .

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

A Short Film

It was not meant to hurt.
It had been made for happy remembering
By people who were still too young
To have learned about memory.

Now it is a dangerous weapon, a time-bomb,
Which is a kind of body-bomb, long-term, too,
Only film, a few fragments of you skipping, a few seconds,
You aged about ten there, skipping and still skipping.

Not very clear grey, made out of mist and smudge,
This thing has a fine fuse, less a fuse
Than a wavelength attuned, an electronic detonator
To what lies in your grave inside us.

And how that explosion would hurt
Is not just an idea of horror but a flash of fine sweat
Over the skin-surface, a bracing of nerves
For something that has already happened.


from Birthday Letters by Ted HUGHES

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Neil Curry (#110) has published six volumes of poetry (a seventh is about to appear) as well as studies of Christopher Smart, George Herbert and other poets. He was for many years Head of English at Cartmel Comprehensive. Alas, I never saw him teach, but I did have the luxury of attending the Shakespeare lectures given by Geoffrey Hill:


Love, oh my love, it will come
Sure enough. A storm
Broods over the dry earth all day.
At night the shutters throb in its downpour.

The metaphor holds; is a snug house.
You are outside, lost somewhere. I find myself
Devouring verses of stranger passion
And exile. The exact words

Are fed into my blank hunger for you.


... the last of the five pieces that make up The Songbook of Sebastian Arrurruz, one of the cycles that together make up the collection King Log from 1968.

[amateur51]

Theophilos Palaiologos


This is the last year, this the last
of the Greek emperors. And, alas,
how sadly those around him talk.
Kyr Theophilos Palaiologos
in his grief, in his despair, says:
“I would rather die than live.”

Ah, Kyr Theophilos Palaiologos,
how much of the pathos, the yearning of our race,
how much weariness
(such exhaustion from injustice and persecution)
your six tragic words contained.




Translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard

(C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Edited by George Savidis. Revised Edition. Princeton University Press, 1992)

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I keep seeing the Cavafy Collected Poems in the Salts Gallery bookshop - one day!

A whole fortnight since the last posting! Tempus fugiting all over the place again - I've just posted this on the Maya Angelou RIP thread; more than a touch of the Nielsen fourths:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqOqo50LSZ0

... phenomenal.