| Poetry week post 6- Alfred Noyes, Sherwood |
[Apr. 22nd, 2008|08:06 pm] |
This is a poem I discovered by accident a few years ago when wandering around bartleby.com. I love the rhythm, once again, and the use of relatively simple words to create and sustain a mood. This poem is almost always best if read aloud.
Sherwood
Sherwood in the twilight, is Robin Hood awake?
Grey and ghostly shadows are gliding through the brake,
Shadows of the dappled deer, dreaming of the morn,
Dreaming of a shadowy man that winds a shadowy horn.
( Read more... ) |
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| Poetry week post 5- Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Triumph of Time |
[Apr. 21st, 2008|08:15 am] |
Some people think this is Swinburne's greatest poem. I'm not so sure about that, but it is one of the most beautiful- mixing deep, bitter personal sadness (it's now generally accepted that Swinburne was deeply in love with his cousin Mary Gordon, and devastated when she married someone else; he never married himself) with highly poeticized language and a sea-section that evokes the ocean only to find out that it is never going to be enough to make the speaker forget.
The Triumph of Time
Before our lives divide for ever,
While time is with us and hands are free,
(Time, swift to fasten and swift to sever
Hand from hand, as we stand by the sea)
I will say no word that a man might say
Whose whole life's love goes down in a day;
For this could never have been; and never,
Though the gods and the years relent, shall be.
( Read more... ) |
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| Poetry week post 4- George Meredith, "The Lark Ascending" |
[Apr. 20th, 2008|04:41 pm] |
This is one of the few poems I've ever read where I can hear the bird singing. Poems like "Ode to a Nightingale" and "To a Skylark" are more about the metaphoric images the bird brings up in the mind of the poet with its song. But Meredith was usually interested in reconciling human imagination with literal nature, and this poem is one of his more successful efforts to do that.
The Lark Ascending
He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound,
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake,
All intervolved and spreading wide,
Like water-dimples down a tide
Where ripple ripple overcurls
And eddy into eddy whirls;
( Read more... ) |
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| Poetry Week post 3- William Sharp/Fiona Macleod, The Tryst of Queen Hynde |
[Apr. 19th, 2008|04:41 pm] |
This poem is by a minor late Victorian author, William Sharp, whose own poems didn't sell very well. He created a female pseudonym, Fiona Macleod, whom he successfully maintained for over ten years, whose poems were very different (drawing on Celtic myth and a Celtic "atmosphere"), and who sold very well. Other than his wife and a female cousin whom he asked to pose as Macleod a few times, not many people knew Sharp's secret; "Fiona" was a recluse in Scotland and wrote long letters to other authors, including W. B. Yeats. Sharp seems to have regarded her as a separate personality, and the strain of keeping it up may have been one reason he died young.
I like this poem because it's very sharp, uses simple words to make a great impact, and tells a legend about an adulterous queen that's, well, pretty damn different from the usual.
THE TRYST OF QUEEN HYNDE
Queen Hynde was in the rowan-wood
with scarlet fruit aflame,
Her face was as the berries were, one sun-
hot wave of shame.
( Read more... ) |
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| Poetry week 2- Hertha, Algernon Charles Swinburne |
[Apr. 18th, 2008|11:56 am] |
This, for me, is the most beautiful of Swinburne's anti-Christian/alternative religion poems. Not only the phrasing and the rhythm but the philosophy expressed (that humans are kin to animals; that nature continues existing whether you believe in it or not; that nature, the only force which is anything like what we call divine, requires no worship) thrill me. I can't say I believe in Swinburne's visions all the time, but I believe in them while I'm reading the poetry, and "Hertha" comes closest of his poems to expressing my permanent ideas.
"Hertha" by Algernon Charles Swinburne- originally published in Songs Before Sunrise, 1871.
I AM that which began;
Out of me the years roll;
Out of me God and man;
I am equal and whole;
God changes, and man, and the form of them bodily; I am the soul.
( Read more... ) |
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| 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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