Poetry

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

The Late Wasp

You that through all the dying summer
Came every morning to our breakfast table,
A lonely bachelor mummer,
And fed on the marmalade
So deeply, all your strength was scarcely able
To prise you from the sweet pit you had made —
You and the earth have now grown older,
And your blue thoroughfares have felt a change;
They have grown colder;
And it is strange
How the familiar avenues of the air
Crumble now, crumble; the good air will not hold,
All cracked and perished with the cold;
And down you dive through nothing and through despair.

Edwin MUIR (1887 - 1959)

[johncorrigan]

The Late Wasp

You that through all the dying summer
Came every morning to our breakfast table,
A lonely bachelor mummer,
And fed on the marmalade
So deeply, all your strength was scarcely able
To prise you from the sweet pit you had made —
You and the earth have now grown older,
And your blue thoroughfares have felt a change;
They have grown colder;
And it is strange
How the familiar avenues of the air
Crumble now, crumble; the good air will not hold,
All cracked and perished with the cold;
And down you dive through nothing and through despair.

Edwin MUIR (1887 - 1959)

Not so many wasps around here this year - too cold, I assume, ferney. Loved those last three poems.
I've spent a fair bit of summer reading Mary Oliver. Now 80, she continues to invite the reader into a world of nature and spirit.

Roses, Late Summer

What happens
to the leaves after
they turn red and golden and fall
away? What happens

to the singing birds
when they can't sing
any longer? What happens
to their quick wings?

Do you think there is any
personal heaven
for any of us?
Do you think anyone,

the other side of that darkness,
will call to us, meaning us?
Beyond the trees
the foxes keep teaching their children

to live in the valley.
so they never seem to vanish, they are always there
in the blossom of the light
that stands up every morning

in the dark sky.
And over one more set of hills,
along the sea,
the last roses have opened their factories of sweetness

and are giving it back to the world.
If I had another life
I would want to spend it all on some
unstinting happiness.

I would be a fox, or a tree
full of waving branches.
I wouldn't mind being a rose
in a field full of roses.

Fear has not yet occurred to them, nor ambition.
Reason they have not yet thought of.
Neither do they ask how long they must be roses, and then what.
Or any other foolish question.
by Mary Oliver

[Lat-Literal]

Not so many wasps around here this year - too cold, I assume, ferney. Loved those last three poems.
I've spent a fair bit of summer reading Mary Oliver. Now 80, she continues to invite the reader into a world of nature and spirit.

Roses, Late Summer

What happens
to the leaves after
they turn red and golden and fall
away? What happens

to the singing birds
when they can't sing
any longer? What happens
to their quick wings?

Do you think there is any
personal heaven
for any of us?
Do you think anyone,

the other side of that darkness,
will call to us, meaning us?
Beyond the trees
the foxes keep teaching their children

to live in the valley.
so they never seem to vanish, they are always there
in the blossom of the light
that stands up every morning

in the dark sky.
And over one more set of hills,
along the sea,
the last roses have opened their factories of sweetness

and are giving it back to the world.
If I had another life
I would want to spend it all on some
unstinting happiness.

I would be a fox, or a tree
full of waving branches.
I wouldn't mind being a rose
in a field full of roses.

Fear has not yet occurred to them, nor ambition.
Reason they have not yet thought of.
Neither do they ask how long they must be roses, and then what.
Or any other foolish question.
by Mary Oliver

I love that poem, JC.

Many thanks for it!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I love that poem, JC.
Many thanks for it!

Still pondering on Tevot's Lowell, too ... never read that one before.

[johncorrigan]

I love that poem, JC.

Many thanks for it!

I posted a couple of others by Mary Oliver a while back, Lat, if you fancy a look. They're here: http://www.for3.org/forums/showthrea...835#post494835
and here: http://www.for3.org/forums/showthrea...099#post495099

[Lat-Literal]

I posted a couple of others by Mary Oliver a while back, Lat, if you fancy a look. They're here: http://www.for3.org/forums/showthrea...835#post494835
and here: http://www.for3.org/forums/showthrea...099#post495099

Yes - she is my kind of writer.

I note that her, quote, dissolution into the natural world troubles some critics of a feminist nature. With all due respect to them, they are entitled to their opinions. But at six or seven, I was more mud and rock pool and foliage than I was ever flesh and blood when not being music. That romanticism went broader because there was then - there remains to this day - a sense of awe and wonder in regard to the sea, the sky and the elements. The additional strand is what was a rather beery and laddish romp across the land with tents etc which evolved naturally. While it was always in groups, it was guided in my head by the books by Sillitoe and similar others about blokes coming back from wars. They took themselves off walking alone with map and compass essentially, I think, to rid themselves of the links between war and the land in their heads. They never sought to dissolve but nor did they have any time for dominance/mastery. As a bloke, I always got that point absolutely. It is not necessarily, though, a version of masculinity with which feminism aligns.

[vinteuil]

There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct preeminence retain
A fructifying virtue, whence, depressed
By trivial occupations and the round
Of ordinary discourse, our minds -
Especially the imaginative power -
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
Such moments chiefly seem to have their date
In our first childhood.

Wordsworth Prelude [1799] ll.288-96

[Lat-Literal]

There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct preeminence retain
A fructifying virtue, whence, depressed
By trivial occupations and the round
Of ordinary discourse, our minds -
Especially the imaginative power -
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
Such moments chiefly seem to have their date
In our first childhood.

Wordsworth Prelude [1799] ll.288-96

Yes indeed - and many thanks.

[vinteuil]

The Bone-setter's Epitaph

What slip, Thomas, two centuries dust, bone
setter of this parish, who alone saw
each fell's ridge and pitfall in the contour
of a knuckle, whose fingertips could teach
(how deft the touch, timed to the just click
that brings the ankle home) how every breach
in nature has a justice of its own
and why, upright Thomas; what moment's doubt
brought you to where the dog-rose clambers thick
and low? Perhaps at last you sensed the reach
of lapwings, like unbroken seasons wheel about,
chose then your setting, chose it well -
hills, well-knit fields, a single man-spun bell,
the one thing flat for miles. That, and your stone.

Matterdale churchyard
March 1973

[silvestrione]

Almost too late for this one:

A Crane fly in September

She is struggling through grass-mesh – not flying,
Her wide-winged, stiff, weightless basket-work of limbs
Rocking, like an antique wain, a top-heavy ceremonial cart
Across mountain summits
(Not planing over water, dipping her tail)
But blundering with long strides, long reachings, reelings
And ginger-glistening wings
From collision to collision.
Aimless in no particular direction,
Just exerting her last to escape out of the overwhelming
Of whatever it is, legs, grass,
The garden, the county, the country, the world –

Sometimes she rests long minutes in the grass forest
Like a fairytale hero, only a marvel can help her.
She cannot fathom the mystery of this forest
In which, for instance, this giant watches –
The giant who knows she cannot be helped in any way.

Her jointed bamboo fuselage,
Her lobster shoulders, and her face
Like a pinhead dragon, with its tender moustache,
And the simple colourless church windows of her wings
Will come to an end, in mid-search, quite soon.
Everything about her, every perfected vestment
Is already superfluous.
The monstrous excess of her legs and curly feet
Are a problem beyond her.
The calculus of glucose and chitin inadequate
To plot her through the infinities of the stems.

The frayed apple leaves, the grunting raven, the defunct tractor
Sunk in nettles, wait with their multiplications
Like other galaxies.
The sky’s Northward September procession, the vast
soft armistice,
Like an Empire on the move,
Abandons her, tinily embattled
With her cumbering limbs and cumbered brain.

by Ted Hughes (1930-1998)

[johncorrigan]

Iris Dement's releasing a record with songs inspired by Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Went to have a look at her and liked this one.
‘Now the pillow’s,’

Now the pillow’s

Hot on both sides.

A second candle

Dies, the ravens cry

Endlessly.

No sleep all night,

Too late to think of sleep…

How unbearably white

The blind’s white deep.

Hello, Morning!

Anna Akhmatova

[Lat-Literal]

All good - even excellent. Can anyone help me out on Alfred Noyes? I included a poem in my personal English O'Level anthology called "Summer and the Blind Children". It was by Alfred Noyes. Can't find it on the net. There was always a feeling around AN. Not quite politically correct. I also included in the "anth" Stevie Smith, Ferlihnghetti and others. Now I read: "Noyes is often portrayed by hostile critics as a militarist and jingoist. Actually, he was a pacifist who hated war and lectured against it". Any thoughts at all on Alf Noyes?

[Lat-Literal]

All good - even excellent. Can anyone help me out on Alfred Noyes? I included a poem in my personal English O'Level anthology called "Summer and the Blind Children". It was by Alfred Noyes. Can't find it on the net. There was always a feeling around AN. Not quite politically correct. I also included in the "anth" Stevie Smith, Ferlihnghetti and others. Now I read: "Noyes is often portrayed by hostile critics as a militarist and jingoist. Actually, he was a pacifist who hated war and lectured against it". Any thoughts at all on Alf Noyes?

Hah......it is "Spring and the Blind Children" and it is included in Philip Larkin's "Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Verse (1973)". According to the following article, he had when in the Foreign Office a somewhat controversial role in regard to Roger Casement who I think is referred to in a song by The Pogues? But clearly Larkin considered the poem to be a good one even if he was very much out of fashion in that decade and there does appear to be some link to him in George Orwell's work but I can't ascertain what it is precisely.

http://literature.proquestlearning.com/critRef/displayItemById.do?QueryType=reference&forAuthor=40424&BackTo=Author%20Page&ItemID=bio40424%20pqllit_ref_lib

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Ted HUGHES

October Dawn

October is marigold, and yet
A glass half full of wine left out

To the dark heaven all night, by dawn
Has dreamed a premonition

Of ice across its eye as if
The ice-age had begun to heave.

The lawn overtrodden and strewn
From the night before, and the whistling green

Shrubbery are doomed. Ice
Has got its spearhead into place.

First a skin, delicately here
Restraining a ripple from the air;

Soon plate and rivet on pond and brook;
Then tons of chain and massive lock

To hold rivers. Then, sound by sight
Will Mammoth and Saber-tooth celebrate

Reunion while a fist of cold
Squeezes the fire at the core of the world,

Squeezes the fire at the core of the heart,
And now it is about to start.

[johncorrigan]

To Brian Friel on his Eightieth Birthday

Irina – a bitterly attractive young middle-aged French woman
Originally from the Vaucluse but long resident in Paris –
Not only had not the slightest interest in me
But had pointedly sensual technique of making that clear,
Pursing her lips in abstract formulation of kisses.
But as well as her golden tresses and her buck teeth
She was affectionate, thoughtful, hospitable
And seeing how sheep-astray I was in Paris
She invited me to supper in her apartment in the 19th
With a male laboratory technician and a female civil servant.
I felt like an old ram looking into a plate-glass shop window
Unable not to see my horned visage peering back out at me,
Pining to crash through it.
Anyway...that night in her roof-top apartment in the 19th arrondissement
I asked to go to the toilet and traversing her hall in twilight
I entered her tiny bedroom by mistake;
There on the wall at the foot of her super king-size bed,
Her super king-size bed in her minuscule bedroom,
There on the pristine white wall
Was a floor-to-ceiling poster in green and black,
Gigantic black characters of the alphabet on pure green ground,
Expertly framed in walnut. They read:
THE AFTERNOON IN DUBLIN BRIAN FRIEL KISSED ME ON THE CHEEK.

Paul Durcan