The Top 500 Poems: 400-301

[oblivion]

Nice juxtaposition to Dowson.

These 2 lines...

"Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay."

...sum the poem up very nicely, I think. Whether one actually really "likes" Yeats or not, he is indeed an indisputable mater of the language.

[bleachededen]

*sigh* Nothing here is striking my interest. I guess I'll just lurk in the shadows until a poem strikes my fancy. It's cold and lonely in the shadows, though. Please throw me a good poem soon, please.

[DWill]

323. "A Prayer for My Daughter," by W. B. Yeats

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle
But Gregory's wood and one bare hill
Whereby the haystack- and roof-levelling wind,
Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.

I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
And under the arches of the bridge, and scream
In the elms above the flooded stream;
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.

Helen being chosen found life flat and dull
And later had much trouble from a fool,
While that great Queen, that rose out of the spray,
Being fatherless could have her way
Yet chose a bandy-leggd smith for man.
It's certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.

In courtesy I'd have her chiefly learned;
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those that are not entirely beautiful;
Yet many, that have played the fool
For beauty's very self, has charm made wise,
And many a poor man that has roved,
Loved and thought himself beloved,
From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.

May she become a flourishing hidden tree
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing round
Their magnanimities of sound,
Nor but in merriment begin a chase,
Nor but in merriment a quarrel.
O may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

My mind, because the minds that I have loved,
The sort of beauty that I have approved,
Prosper but little, has dried up of late,
Yet knows that to be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief.
If there's no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of Plenty's horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?

Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will;
She can, though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all's accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony's a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

June 1919

[bleachededen]

Nice accidental Father's Day theme, DWill.

But...I just can't do it. I'm trying to read the Yeats and enjoy it because he's considered one of the best poets of ever, but I can't even finish the poem. I just can't do it. It's so boring and heavy handed that I feel like I'm driving a car with a broken wheel --clunk, clunk, clunk -- and the rhymes hit me like a hammer in my ear, thud thud thud and I almost want to steal the baby and give it to Theodore Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss), because at least his rhymes are fun, silly, and not so pretentious that I feel like I need an ascot and ruffled shirt just to finish reading the poem. And does it really need to be like twelve stanzas long? Is his daughter going to be as obnoxiously verbose as he is?

Disney's Sleeping Beauty covered this topic very well, but they accomplished it in a much shorter time, and used three colorful fairies (which is already an improvement), an angelic choir to back up each blessing, and Disney animation to make a father's blessing to his daughter honest and beautiful (I give the father credit because he invited the fairies to begin with). So, in my opinion, Yeats = Fail, Disney = Win.

My own father gave me the same kind of wishful "when you grow up" prayer when I was a baby, and although his poetry resembles Eliot's and needs lengthy explanation to be understood, even by his own family who also experienced the event he may be writing about, his "blessing" for me was much more succinct:

1. Don't ever let yourself become dependent on a man.
2. Don't ever become a member of an orthodox church of any religion.
(He later told me that if I were to do this, he would disown me. Tattoos and piercings are frowned upon, but acceptable, rainbow colored hair is laughed at, but acceptable, drinking excessively and using drugs are punishable, but still somewhat tolerated, but become an Orthodox Jew or a fundamentalist Christian and I'd no longer have a father. I guess you have to draw the line somewhere!)

Also amusing to note is that when I was about 6 or 7 years old, I told my father that I wanted to be a cheerleader, and his exact words in response were, "Over my dead body."

Needless to say, I have a very eccentric family, but they've made me who I am today, and since that means I'm having this conversation with the fine folks at BookTalk, I guess it could be worse.

I totally love my dad, and I wouldn't want him to be any different. Happy Father's Day, everyone.

[DWill]

Nice accidental Father's Day theme, DWill.

But...I just can't do it. I'm trying to read the Yeats and enjoy it because he's considered one of the best poets of ever, but I can't even finish the poem. I just can't do it. It's so boring and heavy handed that I feel like I'm driving a car with a broken wheel --clunk, clunk, clunk -- and the rhymes hit me like a hammer in my ear, thud thud thud and I almost want to steal the baby and give it to Theodore Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss), because at least his rhymes are fun, silly, and not so pretentious that I feel like I need an ascot and ruffled shirt just to finish reading the poem. And does it really need to be like twelve stanzas long? Is his daughter going to be as obnoxiously verbose as he is?

Disney's Sleeping Beauty covered this topic very well, but they accomplished it in a much shorter time, and used three colorful fairies (which is already an improvement), an angelic choir to back up each blessing, and Disney animation to make a father's blessing to his daughter honest and beautiful (I give the father credit because he invited the fairies to begin with). So, in my opinion, Yeats = Fail, Disney = Win.

I seem to have as big a thing against Disney as you have against Yeats! I can think of little in a Disney cartoon that moved me, unless you include Pixar as part of Disney. But regarding this poem, surely it is very sententious, I agree with that. Its craft I have a lot higher opinion of than you have. The fact that Yeats calls it a prayer may be to partly excuse the heavy tone. I know his view of what a woman should become is old-fashioned and even sexist, but then again there is validity in his wish that she marry someone who believes as Yeats does--that custom and ceremony are necessary to any culture that deserves the word. Poor Yeats was so affected by the radical politics of his great love, Maude Gonne (stanza 10). I wonder what his wife thought about him never being able to get over her.

[bleachededen]

I seem to have as big a thing against Disney as you have against Yeats! I can think of little in a Disney cartoon that moved me, unless you include Pixar as part of Disney.

Have you seen Disney's newest full-length animated feature, The Princess and the Frog? There is a character in that movie, a Cajun firefly named Raymond (Ray for short), whom I loved and attached to so much that I literally cry at the end of the movie, when he dies in a heroic effort to save the heroine. I cry at the death of a BUG. I kill bugs every single day, and I take pleasure in it, because bugs creep me out and make me angry and I hate them. But Disney gave this one bug so much character and personality that I felt that I lost a friend when his light finally went out and his Cajun speech slurred and then stopped. And I cried at the death of a firefly, a grown woman crying at the death of an animated firefly. It wasn't even something that reminded me of childhood, thereby making me nostalgic and longing for more innocent times, I just really loved that firefly! There'd be a poem in that if I had been watching a real firefly die and not an animated character, but nevertheless, as many blunders as Disney has made in their stories, they still have characters and moments such as this one, that can make me bawl like a little baby over the squishing of a bug.

That's the only defensive speech I'll make about Disney. I can understand your disdain for it, but I have my sentimental moments, and I am still strongly attached to things I loved as a child, as well as newer children's movies that are well written. I think it's one of the healthy ways I cope with my anxiety and mood swings, something to sooth me and calm me down. But in general, I think Disney is over-sentimental (not to mention the bastardizing of classic stories), but I would still rather watch a Disney movie than read that Yeats poem again.

I guess there's no accounting for taste.

[DWill]

322. "When I Was One and Twenty," by A. E. Housman

WHEN I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
‘Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;

Give pearls away and rubies 5
But keep your fancy free.’
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again, 10
‘The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;

’Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue.’
And I am two-and-twenty, 15
And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.

321. "Inversnaid," by G. M. Hopkins

THIS darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth 5
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through, 10
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet; 15
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

[GaryG48]

I chuckle every time I read "When I was one and twenty." "Tis true, tis true"
However, again and vain do not rhyme--so there!

[DWill]

I chuckle every time I read "When I was one and twenty." "Tis true, tis true"
However, again and vain do not rhyme--so there!

I guess they might rhyme if you're from Housman's 'hood!

[DWill]

320. "A Birthday," by Christina Rosetti


MY heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water'd shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these,
Because my love is come to me.

Raise me a daïs of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.