Poetry Thread

[The Judge]

Thanks for those two Jeffers' poems, J-Sun. They were magical and wonderful.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

Amazon, after endless trouble and delay, deception and discord (but also, and fortunately, a badly needed refund) finally delivered Rosetti's Goblin Market with Rackham illustrations.

Supposed to be for children but both sensuous and sensual. NOT about what it appears to be on the surface. However, my favorite line remains:

We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots.

Goblin Market

 

[GOLLUM]

There's a fair deal of controversy that still surrounds Goblin Market to this day and I had known of the Poem and the Rosetti clan in fact I may have a copy of it in one of my anthologies but not with Rackham's illustrations. I have a beautiful edition of Hawthorne's Wonder Book with Rackham's illustrations though. He was a superb artist. How do the illustrations for Goblin Market 'stack up' or complement the work in your opinion Teresa?

 

[Extollager]

Here is Ruth Pitter's poem "Sudden Heaven":

All was as it had ever been --
The worn familiar book,
The oak beyond the hawthorn seen,
The misty woodland's look:


The starling perched upon the tree
With his long tress of straw --
When suddenly heaven blazed on me,
And suddenly I saw:


Saw all as it would ever be,
In bliss too great to tell;
For ever safe, for ever free,
All bright with miracle:


Saw as in heaven the thorn arrayed,
The tree beside the door;
And I must die -- but O my shade
Shall dwell there evermore.
​

 

[Extollager]

One more by Ruth Pitter --

THE SPARROW'S SKULL

Memento Mori. Written at the Fall of France.

The kingdoms fall in sequence, like the waves on the shore.
All save divine and desperate hopes go down, they are no more.
Solitary is our place, the castle in the sea,
And I muse on those I have loved, and on those who have loved me.

I gather up my loves, and keep them all warm,
While above our heads blows the bitter storm:
The blessed natural loves, of life-supporting flame,
And those whose name is Wonder, which have no other name.

The skull is in my hand, the minute cup of bone,
And I remember her, the tame, the loving one,
Who came in at the window, and seemed to have a mind
More towards sorrowful man than to those of her own kind.

She came for a long time, but at length she grew old;
And on her death-day she came, so feeble and so bold;
And all day, as if knowing what the day would bring,
She waited by the window, with her head beneath her wing.

And I will keep the skull, for in the hollow here
Lodged the minute brain that had outgrown a fear;
Transcended an old terror, and found a new love,
And entered a strange life, a world it was not of.

Even so, dread God! even so, my Lord!
The fire is at my feet, and at my breast the sword:
And I must gather up my soul, and clap my wings, and flee
Into the heart of terror, to find myself in thee.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

There's a fair deal of controversy that still surrounds Goblin Market to this day ... How do the illustrations for Goblin Market 'stack up' or complement the work in your opinion Teresa?

Rosetti herself wrote to her publisher that the poem was not meant for children. In public, she went along with the fiction that it was. Some of the imagery is hard to interpret as being about anything other than sex. In some places it hits you right in the face.

The Rackham illustrations are good. In some of them the goblins look too benign, but otherwise they are very good. I've seen better, though, but I can't remember where.

 

[J-Sun]

Thanks for those two Jeffers' poems, J-Sun. They were magical and wonderful.

I'm very glad you enjoyed them.

I've been linking to poems by poets I like, naturally enough. Not to say I dislike the following, but they're on a different level (or levels). But the poems, in their vastly (and how) different ways still have something: Tennyson's frequently anthologized but still majestic "Ulysses" and Dorothy Parker's slightly less majestic "Résumé".

 

[GOLLUM]

Rosetti herself wrote to her publisher that the poem was not meant for children. In public, she went along with the fiction that it was. Some of the imagery is hard to interpret as being about anything other than sex. In some places it hits you right in the face.

The Rackham illustrations are good. In some of them the goblins look too benign, but otherwise they are very good. I've seen better, though, but I can't remember where.

Interesting. I wasn't aware that she had actually written, admitting this.

If you do recall where you've seen better illustrations than Rackham in the context of what you are referring to please let me know. I am interested in such things.

 

[Extollager]

A couple of poems by Kipling, that rather counter the common view of him as an unrepentant imperialist snob...
If you want to read more Kipling verse, there's a pdf collected edition at openlibrary.org, which in itself is a site that you could browse for years...

To my loss, I don't know Kipling's poetry yet.

But he is a great short story writer, one of the greatest, whether for the macabre or for many of the other things for which we turn to fiction.

 

[Extollager]

Here is a poem that impressed me the first time I read it, many years ago. I lost track of it, found it again, lost it again; and got hold of it a few days ago.

Unfortunately the Chrons word processor does not countenance the indentation of the original but insists on "correcting" it; you should imagine "And horribly embarrassed" as indented about 15 spaces, and "Than in" and "when" as indented about ten spaces. "When" should also be printed somewhat more largely than any of the other words in the poem.


THE GARDEN PARTY by Hilaire Belloc

The Rich arrived in pairs
And also in Rolls Royces;
They talked of their affairs
In loud and strident voices.

(The Husbands and the Wives
Of this select society
Lead independent lives
Of infinite variety.)

The Poor arrived in Fords,
Whose features they resembled,
They laughed to see so many Lords
And Ladies all assembled.

The People in Between
Looked underdone and harassed,
And out of place and mean,
And horribly embarrassed.

For the hoary social curse
Gets hoarier and hoarier,
And it stinks a trifle worse
Than in
The days of Queen Victoria,
when
They married and gave in marriage,
They danced at the County Ball,
And some of them kept a carriage.
AND THE FLOOD DESTROYED THEM ALL.

 

[Fried Egg]

I must admit that I just get my head around poetry, I can't understand or appreciate it. Must be a kind of mental block I have.

It's strange because, on the one hand, I will often enjoy what one might call prose poetry, and on the other hand, I will often enjoy songs with poetic lyrics. But just plain poetry...for some reason I can't see the attraction.

 

[Connavar]

I found english translations online of my poetry heorine Södergran. I was surprised her translation to english was so well done that i almost thought she was english speaking poet!

The Land That Is Not

I long for the land that is not,
For all that is, I am weary of wanting.
The moon speaks to me in silvern runes
About the land that is not.
The land where all our wishes become wondrously fulfilled,
The land where all our fetters fall,
The land where we cool our bleeding forehead
In the dew of the moon.
My life was a burning illusion,
But one thing I have found and one thing I have really won -
The road to the land that is not.

In the land that is not
My beloved walks with a glittering crown.
Who is my beloved? The night is dark
And the stars quiver in reply.
Who is my beloved? What is his name?
The heavens arch higher and higher
And a human child is drowned in the endless fogs
And knows no reply.
But a human child is nothing but certainty.
And it stretches its arms higher than all heavens.
And there comes a reply:
I am the one you love and always shall love.


About her exile issues since she lived in St.Petersbrug and not her swedish speaking part of Finland.

 

[J-Sun]

I must admit that I just get my head around poetry, I can't understand or appreciate it. Must be a kind of mental block I have.

It's strange because, on the one hand, I will often enjoy what one might call prose poetry, and on the other hand, I will often enjoy songs with poetic lyrics. But just plain poetry...for some reason I can't see the attraction.

While there are a handful of paintings I like, I don't much get painting. I'd guess most people have some form of an "art" they don't much connect with.

As I understand it, certain forms like epics come from bardic chants and certain others, like the theater, were basically religious acts, and "lyric" poetry derives from the lyre, i.e., were set to music. Modern poetry more or less follows from the printing press - the idea of reading poems alone was kind of weird. Many people like the theater but don't like reading Shakespeare's plays detached from the stage - almost everybody loves songs but few read many song lyrics other than to find out what the heck the singer actually said. So it's not weird to me that you like poetry just fine, but want it closer to its original musical/chanted/social context.

That said, while I prefer a plain, clear, prose style I like poems as a proper place to be word crazy and play with nuances and detailed sounds and meanings. I also like how poems can tell a story or express complete complex thoughts like fiction or treatises, but they can also be fragmentary, evocative, semi-fictional, semi-non-fictional, in a way that is hard to achieve appropriately in other forms. And, while I like my share of epics, I also love that lyric poetry can be short, which is something I frequently value (except, apparently, in my own posts ). There's a lot more, but that's some of it.

Anyway, here's a couple more from "not quite my favorite" poets:

Elizabeth Barrett Browning - When our two souls stand up erect and strong
Wallace Stevens - The Poems of Our Climate

-- Actually, the more I think on Horace, or the closet dramas of Seneca, and whatnot, the more I think the potted history above is completely indefensible, but I still think there's some obvious truth to the general idea that much poetry was of a public, musical nature and is far less so now.

 

[Connavar]

I must admit that I just get my head around poetry, I can't understand or appreciate it. Must be a kind of mental block I have.

It's strange because, on the one hand, I will often enjoy what one might call prose poetry, and on the other hand, I will often enjoy songs with poetic lyrics. But just plain poetry...for some reason I can't see the attraction.

I was the same until 2009-2010. I never saw the point of fancy words that rhyme in short poems. I didnt think of epic poems,long verse poems, long prose poems. When i took time to read classic poems of different kinds i saw a good poem is like any short story or novel. Some are fancy prose,excellent word by word like prose stylist in prose works and some say social important things like political,social novels.

Its like why i did start reading SFF books because i saw an Asimov book or any classic SF. I started reading poetry only because romantic era poetry sound wonderful, fantastic to me. It depends if you want to see if its for you or not.