| Poetry week post 1- George Meredith, Love in the Valley |
[Apr. 17th, 2008|09:00 am] |
This week I'm going to post a poem a day that I find beautiful- in the imagery, in the rhythm, and in the thoughts presented. That's a very particular category, since it cuts out poems I find cute, purely satirical poems, and poems like "The Waste Land" where I might find individual lines beautiful but do not understand what the fuck is going on,* so I don't admire them as a whole.
Today's piece of poetry is, surprise, mid-Victorian, and by George Meredith. He's known for obscurity in his poems, and "Love in the Valley" is not entirely free of that, while at the same time having some of the attributes of a traditional love poem. However, the natural images are beautiful; it's not quite a narrative but a series of images in which the relationship between the girl and the narrator, and the natural world, are both important; and the rhythm is wonderful and almost unique, since only two or three other poems in English use it from what I've read.
Love in the Valley
Under yonder beech-tree single on the green-sward,
Couched with her arms behind her golden head,
Knees and tresses folded to slip and ripple idly,
Lies my young love sleeping in the shade.
Had I the heart to slide an arm beneath her,
Press her parting lips as her waist I gather slow,
Waking in amazement she could not but embrace me:
Then would she hold me and never let me go?
( Read more... )
*In general, Modernism and I do not get on.**
**Except for Virginia Woolf. |
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