What are your favourite poems?

[Arzoo]

Some Housman. Alfred Edward.

Along the field as we came by
A year ago, my love and I,
The aspen over stile and stone
Was talking to itself alone.
‘Oh who are these that kiss and pass?
A country lover and his lass;
Two lovers looking to be wed;
And time shall put them both to bed,
But she shall lie with earth above,
And he beside another love.’

And sure enough beneath the tree
There walks another love with me,
And overhead the aspen heaves
Its rainy-sounding silver leaves;
And I spell nothing in their stir,
But now perhaps they speak to her,
And plain for her to understand
They talk about a time at hand
When I shall sleep with clover clad,
And she beside another lad.

- From A Shropshire Lad.

[Arzoo]

Among the best, introspective poems (or as the Yeats would say - A Poem is an account of quarrel with oneself) :

Love (III)

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lacked anything.

A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.

- George Herbert

[Arzoo]

Wallace Stevens' On the Road Home (WB's post a few pages back) with its chilling last stanza (...roundest/....warmest/Closest and strongest) is especially pertinent in the perennial age of ideology. Stevens speaks there of avowing doctrines in favor of perception, of measuring the world not by thought but by the eye. He also has nice poem on reading and thinking about "poems" (or as he puts it: "man carrying poem").

Man carrying Thing

The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully. Illustration:

A brune figure in winter evening resists
Identity. The thing he carries resists

The most necessitous sense. Accept them, then,
As secondary (parts not quite perceived

Of the obvious whole, uncertain particles
Of the certain solid, the primary free from doubt,

Things floating like the first hundred flakes of snow
Out of a storm we must endure all night,

Out of a storm of secondary things),
A horror of thoughts that suddenly are real.

We must endure our thoughts all night, until
The bright obvious stands motionless in cold.

- Wallace Stevens

[Arzoo]

Robert Frost - for me, is a very complex figure. There's no denying his instinctive, spontaneous talent for poetry but studying him in depth gives me a mixed feeling. I'll quote one of his lesser known lyric instead of the more famous one.

Once by the Pacific

The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God's last Put out the Light was spoken.

- Robert Frost

*** The more famous lyric is the one about the "wintry woods, and the dreary dusk, and that prodigious and poignant end - two closing lines identical in every syllable, but one personal and physical, and the other metaphysical and universal" - is supposedly known by heart, by every American boy.  

[Arzoo]

I came across poems of Mark Ford thanks to Helen Vendler's (I usually keep track of her every book or article) glowing reviews of his stuff. Certainly, they are funny and intriguing and even more so to people steeped in English Poetry. Here's one of them :

Six Children (2011)

“Though unmarried I have had six children.”
 - Walt Whitman

The first woman I ever got with child wore calico
In Carolina. She was hoeing beans; as a languorous breeze
I caressed her loins, until her hoe lay abandoned in the furrow.

The second was braving the tumultuous seas that encircle
This fish-shaped isle; by the time a sudden riptide tore
Her from my grasp, she had known the full power of Paumanok.

One matron I waylaid—or was it she who waylaid
Me?—on a tram that shook and rattled and
Rang from Battery Park to Washington Heights and back.

O Pocahontas! You died as Rebecca Rolfe, and are buried
In Gravesend. Your distant descendant, her swollen belly
Taut as a drum, avoids my eye, and that of other menfolk.

While my glorious diva hurls her enraptured soul to the gods,
I sit, dove-like, brooding in the stalls; what in me is vast,
Dark, and abysmal, her voice illumines and makes pregnant.

Some day, all together, we will stride the open road, wheeling
In an outsized pram my sixth, this broken, mustachioed
Soldier whose wounds I bind up nightly. His mother I forget.

- Mark Ford, Selected Poems

It is a glowing, potent gesture to Whitman and not just because of the epigraph. The unfamiliar tropes can be easily cleared by Google searching.

[joew771]

Emily Dickinson is one of the greatest poets ever.

There are about a million websites about her, so go look at those, but here are a couple of my faves.


Emily Dickinson, 1830 - 1886

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, 1830 - 1886

I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air –
Between the Heaves of Storm –

The Eyes around – had wrung them dry –
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset – when the King
Be witnessed – in the Room –

I willed my Keepsakes – Signed away
What portions of me be
Assignable – and then it was
There interposed a Fly –

With Blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz –
Between the light – and me –
And then the Windows failed – and then
I could not see to see –

she's amazing.

[workerbee]

"Tattered Kaddish" by Adrienne Rich

Taurean reaper of the wild apple field
messenger from earthmire gleaning
transcripts of fog
in the nineteenth year and the eleventh month
speak your tattered Kaddish for all suicides

Praise to life though it crumbled in like a tunnel
on ones we knew and loved

     Praise to life though its windows blew shut
     on the breathing-room of ones we knew and loved

Praise to life though ones we knew and loved
loved it badly, too well, and not enough

     Praise to life though it tightened like a knot
     on the hearts of ones we thought we knew loved us

Praise to life giving room and reason
to ones we knew and loved who felt unpraisable

     Praise to them, how they loved it, when they could.


-- from An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991)

https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/16790758/

[Arzoo]

I've been reading a good deal of Szymborska lately. Her poems are prophetic, funny and something a good deal more than Marianne Moore's. Among female poets, the only comparison that seems legitimate and can rival hers' is perhaps of Dickinson. Here's a plain prose translation of one:

Parable

Some fishermen pulled a bottle from the deep. It held a piece of paper, with these words: “Somebody save me! I’m here. The ocean cast me on this desert island. I am standing on the shore waiting for help. Hurry! I’m here!”

“There’s no date. I bet it’s already too late anyway. It could have been floating for years,” the first fisherman said.

“And he doesn’t say where. It’s not even clear which ocean,” the second fisherman said.

“It’s not too late, or too far. The island Here is everywhere,” the third fisherman said.

They all felt awkward. No one spoke. That’s how it goes with universal truths.

- from the book Salt, collected in Map.

https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/1411688..._(8_books)

[ill88eagle]

Most of my favorite poems are in dansih, and it doesnt translate well. You can try to look up people like Peter Laugesen and Inger Christensen. Oh and what's her name... Tove Ditlevsen. I'll post a gem for you though. Alvaro De Campos (AKA Fernando Pessoa), The Triumphal Ode:

In the painful light of big electric factory-lamps
I have a fever and I write.
I write grinding my teeth, a beast for the beauty of this,
For the beauty of this thing wholly unknown to the ancients.

O wheels, O gears, eternal r-r-r-r-r-r!
Strong restrained spasm of furious mechanism!
In fury within and without myself,
Through all my nerves dissected, outside,
My nipples distended with everything I feel!
I have dry lips, O great modern noises,
From listening to you much too closely,
And my head burns, wanting to sing you
With an excessive expression of all my feelings,
An excess contemporaneous with you, O machines!

In fever, looking at motors as if at tropical Nature —
Vast human tropics of iron and fire and force —
I sing, and I sing the present, and also the past and the future,
Because the present is all the past and all the future
And Plato and Virgil are in machines and electric lights
Because the human Virgil and Plato had existed in other times,
And pieces of Alexander The Great from say the fiftieth century,
Molecules making the mind of Aeschylus feverish in the 100th century,
Moving through these transmission-belts and pistons and fliers,
Howling, grinding, whispering, clattering, clanking,
Becoming an excess of bodily caresses in a single caress in my soul.

Ah, to be able to express myself wholly the way a motor expresses itself!
Without completion, like a machine!
To go through life triumphantly like a late-model auto!
To at least be physically penetrated by all this,
Rend myself totally, open myself completely, make myself permeable
To the perfume of oil and heat and coal
Given off by this stupendous, black, artificial, insatiable flora!

Fraternity with every dynamic!
Promiscuous fury of being part-agent
Of the ferric, cosmopolite wheeling
Of strenuous railways,
Of the cargo-transport drudgery of boats,
Of the slow lubricious turning of derricks,
Of the disciplined tumult of factories,
And of the whispering near-silence and monotony of transmission belts!

European hours, producers, squeezed
Between mechanisms and useful tasks!
Great cities motionless in the cafes —
In the cafes — oases of noisy uselessness
Wherein are crystallized and precipitated
The gossip and gestures of The Useful,
And the wheels, the toothed wheels and the bearings of The Progressive!
New Soulless Minerva of quays and train-stations!
New enthusiasms of the Moment’s stature!
Plated keels of rippled steel lean smiling against dock
Or dry-dock, raised up, on the inclined planes of the ports!
Activity international, transatlantic, Canadian-Pacific!
Lights and feverish wasting of time in bars, in hotels,
In Longchamps and the Derbies and the Ascots,
And Piccadillies and Avenues de l’Opera
Entering the foundation of my soul!

Hé-la the streets, Hé-la the squares, Hé-la-ho la foule!
All the passersby stopping at the display-windows!
Businessmen, vagrants, exaggeratedly well-dressed crooks;
Evident members of aristocratic clubs;
Squalid dubious figures; paterfamilias, vaguely happy
And paternal down to the gold chain crossing their vests
From pocket to pocket!
Everything going by, everything unendingly going by!
Overly accentuated presence of coquettes;
Interesting banality (who knows if there’s something inside?)
Of the petit-bourgeois women, generally mother and daughter,
Walking in the street with some destination in mind,
The grace, feminine and false, of the pederasts going by, slowly;
And all the simply elegant people who promenade to be seen
And have a soul inside them, after all!
(Oh, I’d just love to pimp all this!)

Marvelous beauty of political corruption,
Delicious financial and diplomatic scandals,
Political aggression in the streets,
And now and then regicide’s comet
Illuminating with Prodigy and Fanfare
The ordinarily clear skies of quotidian Civilization!

Contradictory notices in the journals,
Political articles insincerely sincere,
News passez á-la-caisse, inordinate crimes —
Two columns of it continued on page two!
Fresh smell of typographic ink!
Newly hung posters, wet!

Yellow journalism in its white wrapper!
How I love you all, all, all,
How I love you in every way,
With my eyes and with my ears and with my smell
And with my touch (what palpating you represents to me!)
And with my intelligence like an antenna you make vibrate!
Ah, how all my senses are in heat for you!
Fertilizers, steam-threshers, agricultural advances!
Agronomochemistry! Commerce nearly a science!
O cases of traveling salesmen,
Traveling salesmen, Industry’s knights-errant,
Human extensions of factories and calm offices!

O merchandise in showcases! O mannequins! O latest models!
O useless articles everyone wants to buy!
Olá great department stores!
O neon advertisements appearing one after another, only to disappear!
Olá everything with which today constructs itself, with which today becomes different from yesterday!
Eh, reinforced concrete, cement mixer, new processes!
Progress of gloriously deadly armaments!
Armor, cannons, machine-guns, submarines, airplanes!
I love you, all and everything, like a beast.

I love you carnivorously,
Pervertedly twisting my vision
In you, O great, banal, useful, useless things,
O utterly modern things,
O my contemporaries, actual and proximate form
Of the immediate system of the Universe!
New Revelation, metallic and dynamic, of God!

O factories, O laboratories, O music halls, O Luna-Parks,
O battleships, O bridges, O floating docks,
In my turbulent and incandescing mind
I possess you like a beautiful woman,
I possess you completely like a beautiful woman one doesn’t love,
Whom one meets randomly and finds very attractive.

Hé-la-ho façades of great stores!
Hé-la-ho elevators of great edifices!
Hé-la-ho ministerial reappointments!
Parliament, politics, relators of budgets,
Falsified budgets!
(A budget is as natural as a tree
And a parliament is as beautiful as a butterfly.)

Hé-la-ho the fascination with all of life,
Because everything is life, from the bright things in showcases
To the mysterious bridge of night between the stars
And the ancient solemn sea bathing the coasts
Just as compassionately
As when Plato was really Plato
In his real presence, in his flesh, with his soul inside,
Speaking with Aristotle who was not to be his disciple.

I could die ground up by a motor
With the delicious surrender felt by a woman possessed.
Hurl me into furnaces!
Shove me under trains!
Bludgeon me aboard ships!
Masochism through mechanism!
Sadism of whatever’s modern and me and the clamor!

Hoopla-ho jockey who’s just won the Derby,
Biting your bi-colored cap!
(To be so tall I couldn’t fit through any door!
Ah, for me, seeing is a sexual perversion!)

Hé-la, hé-la, hé-la, cathedrals!
Let me break my head against your corners
And be carried bloody through the streets
By people who have no idea who I am!

O tramways, funiculars, metropolitans,
Rub yourselves against me until I come!
Hilla! hilla! hilla-ho!
Guffaw full in my face,
O you automobiles crowded with roisters and whores,
O streets’ quotidian multitudes neither happy nor sad,
Anonymous multicolor river where I can’t bathe myself like I want to!
Ah, what complex lives, what things there are in every house!
Ah, to know all those lives in full, the difficulties with money,
Domestic squabbles, unsuspected debaucheries,
The thoughts you have all alone in your room,
The gestures you make when nobody’s watching!
Not knowing all this is not knowing anything, O rage,
O rage wasting my thin face
Like fever and lust and hunger,
Sometimes agitating my hands
In absurd crispations right in the middle of the rabble
In the streets full of encounters!

Ah, and the people, ordinary and dirty, who seem always the same,
Who use foul words as a matter of course,
Whose sons steal at the doors of groceries,
And whose daughters of eight — and I find this beautiful and I love it! —
Masturbate men of decent aspect in the stairwells.
The riffraff who walk the scaffolding and go home
Through alleyways almost unreal in their narrow putrefaction.
Marvelous human people living like dogs,
Beneath every moral system,
For whom no religion at all was made,
Nor art created,
Nor politics destined for them!
How I love you all, because you’re the way you are,
Neither immoral for all your lowness, nor bad, nor good,
Untouched by progress,
Marvelous fauna on the bed of the sea of life!

(At the pump in the yard of my house
The donkey walks at the wheel, walks at the wheel,
And the mystery of the world is just that size.
Wipe your sweat with your arm, discontented worker.
The sunlight smothers the silence of the spheres
And we all must die,
O somber crepuscular pine-groves,
Pine-groves where my childhood was something other
Than what I am today...)
But, ah, again, constant mechanical rage!
Again, mobile obsession of omnibuses.
Again the fury of being on every train at the same exact time
In every part of the world,
Of saying farewell aboard every ship
At this very instant loading iron or detaching from docks.
O iron, O steel, O aluminum, O burnished plates of steel!
O quays, O ports, O railways, O derricks, O tugboats!

Hé-la great rail disasters!
Hé-la collapsing mine-shafts!
Hé-la delicious shipwrecks of the great transatlantics!
Hé-la-ho revolutions here, there, all over everywhere,
Alterations to constitutions, wars, treaties, invasions,
Noise, injustice, violence, and maybe soon to come,
A great invasion of yellow barbarians into Europe,
And another Sun on a new Horizon!

What does it matter, but what does all this matter
In the fulgent blood-red contemporaneous noise,
The cruel and delicious noise of today’s civilization?
Everything obliterated except the Moment,
The Moment with the hot nude torso and a stoker,
The stridently noisy and mechanical Moment,
The dynamic Moment passing through every bacchant
Of iron and bronze in a drunken spree of metals.

Eia trains, eia bridges, eia hotels at dinnertime,
Eia apparata of every kind, ferrous, brute, and minimal,
Precision instruments, machines for grinding, for digging,
Motors, drillers, rotary engines!

Eia! eia! eia!
Eia electricity, the aching nerves of Matter!
Eia wireless telegraph, metallic affinity with the Unconscious!
Eia tunnels, canals, Panama, Kiel, Suez!
Eia all the past in the present!
Eia the whole future already in us! eia!
Eia! eia! eia!
Useful ferric fruits of the cosmopolitan factory-tree!
Eia! eia! eia, eia-ho-o-o!
I don’t even know if I exist inside. I whirl, I wheel, I engineer myself.
Couple me with every train.
Hoist me on every quay.
I whirl in every ship’s propellor.
Eia! eia-ho eia!
Eia! I am mechanical heat and electricity!
Eia! the rails, the machine-housings — Europe!
Eia and hurrah for me-all and everything, machines working, eia!

To leap with everything above everything! Hoopla!

Hoopla, hoopla, hoopla-ho, hoopla!
Hé-la! hé-ho! Ho-o-o-o-o!
Z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z!

If only I could be everybody everywhere!

[Arzoo]

Lest Melville be remembered for his obsessive outpourings and a vitriolic violent approach with words, here's a more calm and poignant poem. Melville detested violence among his fellowmen, in one poem he writes:
All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys/ The champions and enthusiasts of the state/Turbid ardors and vain joys.
Melville's ambition is also second to none: on turning completely to verse he attempts Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land which is twice the size of the greatest English epic Paradise Lost. However, before I digress completely, here's the poem (from Aspects of War) :

Ball's Bluff : A Reverie

One noonday, at my window in the town,
I saw a sight—saddest that eyes can see—
Young soldiers marching lustily
Unto the wars,
With fifes, and flags in mottoed pageantry;
While all the porches, walks, and doors
Were rich with ladies cheering royally.
 
They moved like Juny morning on the wave,
Their hearts were fresh as clover in its prime
(It was the breezy summer-time),
Life throbbed so strong,
How should they dream that Death in a rosy clime
Would come to thin their shining throng?
Youth feels immortal, like the gods sublime.
 
Weeks passed; and at my window, leaving bed,
By night I mused, of easeful sleep bereft,
On those brave boys (Ah War! thy theft);
Some marching feet
Found pause at last by cliffs Potomac cleft;
Wakeful I mused, while in the street
Far footfalls died away till none were left.

- Hermann Melville, 1861