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National Poetry Month 2009

Here's the game -- each day of April I will start a post with a letter of the alphabet (in order) and make a post relating to poetry that begins with that letter. Please join in!

A



Auden (W.H.)

Are we supposed to suggest more and more "A's"? Okay, if so, I'll put down "Alastor," which is a poem, a longish one I think, by Percy Bysshe Shelley. As you can tell, I never read it, but just happen to remember the title.

DWill wrote:Are we supposed to suggest more and more "A's"? Okay, if so, I'll put down "Alastor," which is a poem,....

Yes, that was the idea. You could post a line of poetry, whole poem, a title, or say -- Assonance.

Assonance is refrain of vowel sounds to create internal rhyming within phrases or sentences, and together with alliteration and consonance serves as one of the building blocks of verse. For example, in the phrase "Do you like blue?", the "oo" (ou/ue) sound is repeated within the sentence and is assonant.

The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

DWill wrote:The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

Yeats! Right?

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Philip Larkin

Thanks go out to DWill for getting this thread going! Since April has 30 days and there are only 26 letters to the alphabet, I'll use numbers for the the last 4 days.

B

Back they sputter like the fires of love, the bees to their broken home

Should I site the poem and poet or let you guess? I'll let you guess.

To the rolling of the bells--
Of the bells, bells, bells:--
To the tolling of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells bells,
Bells, bells, bells--
To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.