BookTalk.org

Babyblues had a good idea a few weeks back, to post a poem that reflects your current mood. Since DWill called me Sappho, I feel compelled to post one of her poems.


Without warning

Without warning
as a whirlwind
swoops on an oak
Love shakes my heart

Sappho

Excerpt from:
The Day Is Done
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


And a feeling of sadness comes o'er me
That my soul cannot resist:
A feeling of sadness and longing,
That is not akin to pain,
And resembles sorrow only
As the mist resembles the rain.
Come, read to me some poem,
Some simple and heartfelt lay,
That shall soothe this restless feeling,
And banish the thoughts of day.

Saffron,

You seem to have chosen that piece to connect with the tone of the Housman poems. That's just the pensiveness that he injects into them, kind of a delicious sadness. Say it loud: sad is not bad!

DWill

This poet it new to me. Here are the first 2 stanzas from Theodore Roethke's The Waking.


I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.


And to Will: Today I feel fortified enough to at least say, sadness is not all bad and some is most likely good.

Good choice! I like his "Open House," which I don't have in front of me. I just remember that it ends with the great sounding lines,
"An epic of the eyes/My love with no disguise." "My Papa's Waltz" often makes it into anthologies. So glad you are feeling stronger/better.

DWill

The world is an amazing and incomprehensible place sometimes. Coincidence? Serendipity? DWill responds to my post with the lines of a T. Roethke poem and mentions another, Open House -- which, me being me, must look up. The first webpage I come to is Kingfisher: A Journal for Art and Literature and find poems and paintings. Open House is stunning, but it is the paintings that catch me, Joel Brock Wine and Cheese (so like one of my favorite paintings). Yesterday, my daughter, just home from London, shows me a postcard of a painting, Vilhelm Hammershoi's Interior with Young Woman seen from the back. Without a thought I say, "That painting is like a poem." She turns the postcard around to show me the name of the exhibit -- The Poetry of Silence.

A bit of Roethek's
Open House

My secrets cry aloud.
I have no need for tongue.
My heart keeps open house,
My doors are widely swung.
An epic of the eyes
My love, with no disguise.

A link to The Poetry of Silence:
http://beardedroman.com/?p=163

DWill: When will you post us a poem?

All right, all right, Saffron. But go to "A favorite Poem" to see it.
DWill

DWill, I saw the poem here when first you posted. I made you a reply and then it was gone. So, off I went with copied post, to chase it and re-paste it!

For today; a poem I just came upon while searching for something else.

Published in 1922

The Barrier
by Claude McKay

I must not gaze at them although
Your eyes are dawning day;
I must not watch you as you go
Your sun-illumined way;

I hear but I must never heed
The fascinating note,
Which, fluting like a river reed,
Comes from your trembling throat;

I must not see upon your face
Love's softly glowing spark;
For there's the barrier of race,
You're fair and I am dark.

Thanks for the Claude McKay, Saffron. Anyone up for a "pairody"? As I've said, I'm drawn to the poetry of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It tends to be grandiose, dramatic (even melodramatic), and is more easily understood than modern poetry is for me. Back then, there was still one shared reality to be commented on; later it all fragmented. Now we seem to have more the idiosyncratic vision of each individual poet. But just to show I'm not completely antiquated, I've paired this old standard, "Dover Beach," (which I really like) with a modern take-off by Anthony Hecht.

DOVER BEACH

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Agaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold

THE DOVER BITCH
by Anthony Hecht

A Criticism of Life: for Andrews Wanning

So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, 'Try to be true to me,
And I'll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc.'
Well now, I knew this girl. It's true she had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck. She told me later on
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad,
Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds
And blandishments in French and the perfumes.
And then she got really angry. To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.
Anyway, she watched him pace the room
And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit,
And then she said one or two unprintable things.
But you mustn't judge her by that. What I mean to say is,
She's really all right. I still see her once in a while
And she always treats me right. We have a drink
And I give her a good time, and perhaps it's a year
Before I see her again, but there she is,
Running to fat, but dependable as they come.
And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d' Amour