Poetry Corner

Originally posted by Pianoman1
I
Have
Learned
So much from God
That I can no longer
Call
Myself

A Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim,
A Buddhist, a Jew.

The Truth has shared so much of Itself
With me

That I can no longer call myself
A man, a woman, an angel
Or even
A pure
Soul.

Love has
Befriended Hafiz so completely
It has turned to ash
And freed
Me

Of every concept and image
My mind has ever known.

Some prose for a change:

I looked through the Gideon Bible in my motel room for tales of great destruction.

The sun was risen upon the Earth when Lot entered into Zo-ar, I read. Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of Heaven; and He overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground. So it goes.

Those were vile people in both those cities, as is well known. The world was better off without them. And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5

Originally posted by NoEarthlyReason
Some prose for a change:

[quote]I looked through the Gideon Bible in my motel room for tales of great destruction.

The sun was risen upon the Earth when Lot entered into Zo-ar, I read. [i]Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of Heaven; and He overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and a ...[text shortened]... the same kind of feelings as their countries are torn apart by ISIS or Boko Haram, to name but two.

Because I could not stop for Death--

Because I could not stop for Death--
He kindly stopped for me--
The Carriage held but just Ourselves--
And Immortality.

We slowly drove--He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility--

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess--in the Ring--
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain--
We passed the Setting Sun--

Or rather--He passed us--
The Dews drew quivering and chill--
For only Gossamer, my Gown--
My Tippet--only Tulle--

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground--
The Roof was scarcely visible--
The Cornice--in the Ground--

Since then--'tis Centuries--and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity--

~Emily Dickinson

"Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) is buried in West Cemetery, Amherst, Hampshire County, Massachusetts, America.

Gravestone of Emily Dickinson: "Called Back".

Emily was educated at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoake. As a young woman she was outgoing and sociable but gradually she began to withdraw from the world until, by the age of 30, she was a virtual recluse. She was however a prolific letter writer and corresponded, in particular, with Samuel Bowles, the editor of the Springfield Republican.

During her lifetime she had only a handful of poems published and these were heavily edited. After Emily's death, her sister discovered more than 1800 of her poems in a dresser drawer in her house in Amherst. These poems were finally published in 1890 (edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and T.W. Higginson) - with their original punctuation and presentation restored.

At first Emily was regarded as a quirky, minor poet but her reputation has grown steadily and she is seen today as having a unique voice and style. Emily's poetry reflected her powerful sense of isolation and inner conflict. She is sometimes known as the 'Belle' or 'Nun of Amherst'".
http://www.poetsgraves.co.uk/dickinson.htm

Anecdotal Footnote: Decades ago it was my privilege to visit her gravesite late one wintry afternoon in Amherst, Massachusetts.....

Death, be not proud (Holy Sonnet 10)

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou’art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy’or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

John Donne, 1572 - 1631

Holy Sonnet: 74

John Donne

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Originally posted by Grampy Bobby
Because I could not stop for Death--

~Emily Dickinson

Originally posted by Grampy Bobby
Death, be not proud (Holy Sonnet 10)

John Donne, 1572 - 1631

Originally posted by Shallow Blue
The tritest of the trite poems, from the tritest of the trite poets.

I cannot for the life of me understand why you Yanks worship this two-penny rhymester Dickinson so much. Even in Dutch we have better poets, and we're just about the least poetic people on Earth.

Originally posted by Shallow Blue
Much, much better. A real poet, a real thinker, and a real human. For whom the bell tolls...

(Oh, and Hemingway was not good enough to abuse that title.)

Anthem for Doomed Youth

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

British Poet, Wilfred Owen (1893–1918)

Note: Since first reading this poem (written by a soldier who died at the age
of twenty five years old) many sunsets still remind me of its final line.

Wilfred Owen (1893–1918)

“Wilfred Owen, who wrote some of the best British poetry on World War I, composed nearly all of his poems in slightly over a year, from August 1917 to September 1918. In November 1918 he was killed in action at the age of twenty-five, one week before the Armistice. Only five poems were published in his lifetime—three in the Nation and two that appeared anonymously in the Hydra, a journal he edited in 1917 when he was a patient at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh. Shortly after his death, seven more of his poems appeared in the 1919 volume of Edith Sitwell's annual anthology, Wheels, a volume dedicated to his memory, and in 1919 and 1920 seven other poems appeared in periodicals.

Almost all of Owen’s poems, therefore, appeared posthumously: Poems (1920), edited by Siegfried Sassoon with the assistance of Edith Sitwell, contains twenty-three poems; The Poems of Wilfred Owen (1931), edited by Edmund Blunden, adds nineteen poems to this number; and The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen (1963), edited by C. Day Lewis, contains eighty poems, adding some juvenilia, minor poems, and fragments but omitting a few of the poems from Blunden’s edition.

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born on 18 March 1893, in Oswestry, on the Welsh border of Shropshire, in the beautiful and spacious home of his maternal grandfather. Wilfred’s father, Thomas, a former seaman, had returned from India to marry Susan Shaw; throughout the rest of his life Thomas felt constrained by his somewhat…” http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/wilfred-owen

The Idea of Order at Key West

Wallace Stevens, 1879 - 1955

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard.
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.

If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

A Dead Boche

Robert Graves

To you who’d read my songs of War
And only hear of blood and fame,
I’ll say (you’ve heard it said before)
”War’s Hell!” and if you doubt the same,
Today I found in Mametz Wood
A certain cure for lust of blood:

Where, propped against a shattered trunk,
In a great mess of things unclean,
Sat a dead Boche; he scowled and stunk
With clothes and face a sodden green,
Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired,
Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.