In total there are 18 users online :: 0 registered, 0 hidden and 18 guests (based on users active over the past 60 minutes) Most users ever online was 1086 on Mon Jul 01, 2024 9:03 am
A platform to express and share your enthusiasm and passion for poetry. What are your treasured poems and poets? Don't hesitate to showcase the poems you've penned yourself!
lady of shallot wrote:I would be very proud to be all of those things to my beloved.
Sorry ladies, I was far too harsh.
The poem has some sweet images, but on first reading it seemed trite and even slightly forced and clompy. It gets a bit better on a second reading, but I'm not sure by very much. Maybe it is just that Elizabethan sensuality is not my cup of tea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Carew says his reputation went into steady decline until revived by Leavis, who penned the rapturous comment that Carew has claims to more distinction than he is commonly accorded. High praise indeed.
lady of shallot wrote:I would be very proud to be all of those things to my beloved.
Sorry ladies, I was far too harsh.
The poem has some sweet images, but on first reading it seemed trite and even slightly forced and clompy. It gets a bit better on a second reading, but I'm not sure by very much. Maybe it is just that Elizabethan sensuality is not my cup of tea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Carew says his reputation went into steady decline until revived by Leavis, who penned the rapturous comment that Carew has claims to more distinction than he is commonly accorded. High praise indeed.
I should have warned you, Robert....no, just kidding because I like the poem, too. Carew "belies with false compare," as Will S. would say, but I thought he hit it out of the park. I know, Robert: since this actually is a song, try putting it to music and singing it.
81. "Virtue," by George Herbert. This version has the archaic spellings, which I didn't think detracts from it. Note the differing opinions attached about Herbert. I think I'll go for 2 dings. A few too many "sweets" for me, but I like its sound otherwise.
¶ Vertue.
Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridall of the earth and skie:
The dew shall weep thy fall to night;
For thou must die.
Sweet rose, whose hue angrie and brave
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye:
Thy root is ever in its grave
And thou must die.
Sweet spring, full of sweet dayes and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie;
My musick shows ye have your closes,1
And all must die.
Onely a sweet and vertuous soul,
Like season’d timber, never gives;
But though the whole world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives.
1 closes - The musical ending, the final chord or chords of a piece of music. [Return] Technical music definition - There are 2 kinds of closes: 1. partial closes, a temporary, but unresolved, pause in the music, like a comma in a sentence (tonic chord before dominant), 2. full closes, like a period in a sentence (dominant or sub-dominant chord before tonic) [The sub-dominant chord followed by the tonic is also called the "A-men" ending].
Basic Outline:
1. Everything in this world ends/dies. Examples:
1. Day (stanza 1): its attraction (cool, calm, bright, marriage of earth and sky); image that illustrates death (dew shall weep)
2. Rose (stanza 2): its attraction (bearing the physical marks of anger and brave, finely dressed, color effects the viewer); image that illustrates death (root is in its grave)
3. Spring (stanza 3): its attraction made of "sweet days" [from stanza 1] and roses [from stanza 2]; image that illustrates death (music has its endings)
2. Virtue, the virtuous soul, is the exception (stanza 4): image that illustrates [seasoned timber retains its virtue; even when the world turns to coal, it lives (in the flame of the Last Judgment, end of the world)]
Related Interpretations and Criticism:
#
"Sweet," the word that George Herbert repeats in each stanza of this poem, has often been used to describe the effect of Herbert’s poetry, both for the calm, benevolent character and for the delectable sound of the poems when read aloud. But as the dire, even grim meaning of "Virtue" suggests, Herbert is also a poet who thought deeply and perhaps perpetually of death and resignation. A miniature quality in the images (the rash gazer wiping his eye, the box of sweets, the dew, the coal) heightens, by contrast, the totality of "But though the whole world turn to coal." The mingled finality and sweetness, harmony and destruction evoked by the poem all cohere in the word "closes," which means termination--here doomsday--but also is a technical word in music: The "closes" are the sweet musical phrases. - Robert Pinsky, U.S. Poet Laureate, on "Virtue"
#
His beauties of thought and diction are so overloaded with far-fetched conceits and quaintnesses; low, and vulgar, and even indelicate imagery, and a pertinacious appropriation of Scripture language and figure, in situations where they make a most unseemly exhibition, that there is now very little probability of his ever regaining the popularity which he has lost. That there was much, however, of the real Poetical temperament in the composition of his mind, the following lines, although not free from his characteristic blemishes, will abundantly prove: "Sweet Day ! so cool, so calm, so bright, " &c. -- Henry Neele, Lectures on English Poetry, 1827. [From Moulton's Library of Criticism.]
#
At Bemerton he lived, as he wrote, the ideal life of "A Priest to the Temple." While his simple sermons and his life of goodness won his people to a good life, he was writing poems which should catch the hearts of the next generation and enlist men's sentiment and sympathy in the restoration of the Church. Herbert's life was itself the noblest of his poems, and while it had the beauty of his verses it had their quaintnesses as well. Those exquisite lines of his, so characteristic of his age and his style, give a picture suggestive of his own character:
"Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky."
-- William Holden Hutton, Social England, 1895, ed. Traill, vol. iv, p. 34. [From Moulton's Library of Criticism.]
Musical Interpretations:
* C. Hubert H. Parry (1848-1918) wrote music for this poem as "Sweet day, so cool."
* Barney Childs, "Virtue".
* Nick Peros, "Virtue".
* Adam Taylor (1981-), "Sweet day", op. 28 (2003) [SSA chorus a cappella], from Four Songs of Calm, no. 1.
* Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), "Sweet day", 1896.
* "Vertue" an anthem by Red Dragon To open music in another window.
Penelope wrote: think some of us 'ladies' grow up to, not give two darn toots whether a mere man thinks we have stars in our eyes and moonlight in our hair.
Some of us decide that the best thing is to be on the same wavelength.
Are they mutually exclusive? Just two different phases of love.
Here is one of my favorite poems of disillusioned love Rupert Brooke
And I recall, lose, grasp, forget again,
And still remember, a tale I have heard or known,
An empty tale, of idleness and pain,
Of two who loved - or did not love - and one
Whose perplexed heart did evil foolishly,
A long while since, and by some other sea.
"I shall be careful to say nothing at all
About myself or what I know of him
Or the vaguest thought I have -- no matter how dim,
Tonight if it so happen that he call."
And now ten minutes later the doorbell rang
And into the hall he stepped as he always did
With a face and a bearing that quite poorly hid
His brain that burned and his heart that fairly sang
And his tongue that wanted to be rid of the truth.
As well as she could, for she was very loath
To signify how she felt, she kept very still,
But soon her heart cracked loud as a coffee mill
And her brain swung like a comet in the dark
And her tongue raced like a squirrel in the park.
Merrill Moore (1903-1957)
I love this poem very much, but don't think it is widely known.
Quote:
think some of us 'ladies' grow up to, not give two darn toots whether a mere man thinks we have stars in our eyes and moonlight in our hair.
Some of us decide that the best thing is to be on the same wavelength.
Are they mutually exclusive? Just two different phases of love.
I am having a grumpy day. But I do think that the 'first flush' of love is in our imaginations...and doesn't last. I'm thinking of Elizabeth Taylor's many marriages. I think if we believe the love songs...then we go on looking for that exciting all-absorbing love and expect it to last.
In my experience and from what I can observe it doesn't last. What is left after it wears away, can be real and lovely, but it doesn't seem to always work out that way.
I like truth in my poetry.....if I can't recognise truth...then it loses its beauty for me.
Pompous twit, aren't I? And Grumpy to boot!
Only those become weary of angling who bring nothing to it but the idea of catching fish.
He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world is mad....
