What are your favourite poems?

[Flavoredia]

The Raven by E. A. Poe

[Arzoo]

In a previous post, I mentioned that Szymborska's poems are a good deal more than Marianne Moore's. That doesn't in anyway mean that hers' is a lesser body (of work). She has a way with words, her metaphors are razor-sharp and unique. In lines such as:
"the mind feels its way as though blind, walks along with its eyes on the ground" and "It has memory's ear that can hear without having to hear" shows the aptness of metaphor and in these:
"efforts of affection­ attain integration too tough for infraction." shows serious wordsmithery.

Here's a short and sweet poem (with a catchy ending):

The Past is Present

If external action is effete
  and rhyme is outmoded,
       I shall revert to you,
    Habakkuk, as when in a Bible class
          the teacher was speaking of unrhymed verse.
 He said - and I think I repeat his exact words­
          "Hebrew poetry is prose
     with a sort of heightened consciousness." Ecstasy affords
         the occasion and expediency determines the form.

- Marianne Moore

[Arzoo]

My favourite sonnet from my most-favoured poet :

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain;

When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love! – then on the shore

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

- John Keats

It was written in 1818 (as the Complete Poems informs me) a full year before, [Ode] To Autumn, which scholars attest and assert to be one of the few "perfect" poems in English Literature. Keats' fears (though not his Being) came to nought.

[Arzoo]

As I have mentioned before, Robert Frost is a complicated figure. In Modern English Poetry, when the interest in "rhyming" has seriously been weakened, we must look back to the past practitioners for notable examples. Here's one :

Acquainted with the Night

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain - and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

- Robert Frost

[Arzoo]

As T.S. Eliot had said somewhere, "a poet is not necessarily going to all the trouble (while composing a poem) not to communicate, but to relieve himself of the burden" a statement to which A.R. Ammons had a pertinent reply (in this thread: The Quotes Thread - Pg 3 - #22). Very much in the same vein, a poem from another past master:

The Pardon

My dog lay dead five days without a grave
In the thick of summer, hid in a clump of pine
And a jungle of grass and honey-suckle vine.
I who had loved him while he kept alive

Went only close enough to where he was
To sniff the heavy honey-suckle smell
Twined with another odor heavier still
And hear the flies' intolerable buzz.

Well, I was ten and very much afraid
In my kind world the dead were out of range
And I could not forgive the sad or strange
In beast or man. My father took the spade

And buried him. Last night I saw the grass
Slowly divide (it was the same scene
But now it glowed a fierce and mortal green)
And saw the dog emerging. I confess

I felt afraid again, but still he came
In the carnal sun, clothed in a hymn of flies,
And death was breeding in his lively eyes.
I started in to cry and call his name,

Asking forgiveness of his tongueless head.
... I dreamt the past was never past redeeming
But whether this was false or honest dreaming
I beg death's pardon now. And mourn the dead.

- Richard Wilbur, Collected Poems 1943-2004

(There is a small error in the only available epub version of Wilbur's poems on the internet. The misprint/typo is in the last line of the above poem where "mourn the dead" is garbled into German.)

[Arzoo]

Recently, saw in a newsletter how the ever-burgeoning ReptiCons are supposedly (esp. South Florida) leading to owls and pretty much everything being devoured (see Audubon.org, for a detailed report) more than ever. However, owls are not always so susceptible, as this poem from A.R. Ammons shows. It immediately came to my mind, it is based on a historic event in the Amazons as seen and reported by a Naturalist.

Jungle Knot

One morning Beebe
   found on a bank of the Amazon
an owl and snake
   dead in a coiled embrace:

   the vine prints its coil too deep into the tree
and leaved fire shoots greens of tender flame
      rising among the branches,
drawing behind a hardening, wooden clasp:

the tree does not
      generally escape
though it may live thralled for years,
   succumbing finally rather than at once,

      in the vine’s victory
the casting of its eventual death,
   though it may live years
on the skeletal trunk,

termites rising, the rain softening,
   a limb in storm
falling, the vine air-free at last, structure-less as death:
      the owl,

   Beebe says, underestimated
the anaconda’s size: hunger had deformed
      sight or caution, or
anaconda, come out in moonlight on the river bank,

had left half his length in shade: (you
      sometimes tackle
more than just what the light shows):
   the owl struck talons

      back of the anaconda’s head
but weight grounded him in surprise: the anaconda
   coiled, embracing heaving wings
and cry, and the talons, squeezed in, sank

killing snake and owl in tightened pain:
   errors of vision, errors of self-defense!
errors of wisdom, errors of desire!
      the vulture dives, unlocks four eyes.

- Archie R. Ammons, Corson's Inlet


Note - Here's a brief explanation from Ammons himself:

"Obviously the jungle knot comes at the end, when the snake and the owl are . . . You know, Beebe was a naturalist who did indeed explore the Amazon, and many other things as well. I guess all I’m trying to say is that as with the vine when it grows up the tree, there’s a kind of dependence on the part of the vine on the tree. But then if the vine is too successful it kills the tree, and so you have, naturalistically, you have forces in nature and in ourselves and in the mind and in these metaphorical representations of that . . . binds, where one kind of energy is interlocked with another kind and either one destroys the other, or one becomes dominant over the other, or if they are equally matched they destroy each other. But then there’s always a mechanism in nature that lets the knot decay. Or a vulture comes down and what was unlockable he unlocks. He takes their eyes out. And that wrestling match is over. That show is over. So that these knots of intertwined energy occur, psychically, physically, outside and elsewhere, and these are some representations of that."

[Arzoo]

The following ballad, although hypnotic and hallucinatory in its original tongue, i.e. German bears out more or less well in English. The closest examples will be Poe's The Bells or The Raven. Thankfully, we have a bilingual edition before us: sense and sound can be correlated easily by checking with the English in the next page. Here it is, adapted many a time (Schubert, famously), but none having as much as power and force as the text itself. It's about a father and his child riding through the mist and wood while otherworldly figures haunt and beckon the child.

Erlkönig (The Erl-King)

My son, what is it, why cover your face?
Father, you see him, there in that place,
The elfin king with his cloak and crown?
It is only the mist rising up, my son.

"Dear little child, will you come with me?
Beautiful games I'll play with thee;
Bright are the flowers we'll find on the shore,
My mother has golden robes full score."

Father, O father, and did you not hear
What the elfin king breathed into my ear?
Lie quiet, my child, now never you mind:
Dry leaves it was that click in the wind.

"Come along now, you're a fine little lad,
My daughters will serve you, see you are glad;
My daughters dance all night in a ring,
They'll cradle and dance you and lullaby sing."

Father, now look, in the gloom, do you see
The elfin daughters beckon to me?
My son, my son, I see it and say:
Those old willows, they look so gray.

"I love you, beguiled by your beauty I am,
If you are unwilling I'll force you to come!''
Father, his fingers grip me,
The elfin king has hurt me so!

Now struck with horror the father rides fast,
His gasping child in his arm to the last,
Home through thick and thin he sped:
Locked in his arm, the child was dead.

- Johann Wolfgang Goethe, 1782

Can I just add that the Schubert or any other adaption involving a baritone or a tenor completely ruins it when what is required is sort of a murmurous or susurrous quality? Its an intimate incantation not a public oration. No wonder Debussy thought Schubert had a tin ear.

[Arzoo]

For people with having difficulties with the night and sleep:

How to Sleep


Child in the womb,
Or saint on a tomb -
Which way shall I lie
To fall asleep?
The keen moon stares
From the back of the sky,
The clouds are all home
Like driven sheep.

Bright drops of time
One and two chime,
I turn and lie straight
With folded hands;
Convent-child, Pope,
They choose this state,
And their minds are wiped calm
As sea-levelled sands.

So my thoughts are:
But sleep stays as far,
Till I crouch on one side
Like a foetus again –
For sleeping, like death,
Must be won without pride,
With a nod from nature,
With a lack of strain,
And a loss of stature.

- Philip Larkin

[sammartin8935]

Five little ducks
Went out one day
Over the hill and far away
Mother duck said
"Quack, quack, quack, quack."
But only four little ducks came back.

Four little ducks
Went out one day
Over the hill and far away
Mother duck said
"Quack, quack, quack, quack."
But only three little ducks came back.

Three little ducks
Went out one day
Over the hill and far away
Mother duck said
"Quack, quack, quack, quack."
But only two little ducks came back.

Two little ducks
Went out one day
Over the hill and far away
Mother duck said
"Quack, quack, quack, quack."
But only one little duck came back.

One little duck
Went out one day
Over the hill and far away
Mother duck said
"Quack, quack, quack, quack."
But none of the five little ducks came back.

Sad mother duck
Went out one day
Over the hill and far away
The sad mother duck said
"Quack, quack, quack."
And all of the five little ducks came back.

[iowagal]

60 yard pass
by Charles Bukowski

most people don’t do very well and I get discouraged with
their existence, it’s such a waste:

all those bodies, all those lives
malfunctioning: lousy quarterbacks, bad waitresses,

in-competent carwash boys and presidents,
cowardly goal-keepers inept garage mechanics

bumbling tax accountants
and so forth

yet

now and then
I see a single performer doing something with a
natural excellence

it can be
a waitress in some cheap cafe or a 3rd string
quarterback

coming off the bench with 24 seconds on the clock
and completing that winning
60 yard pass

which lets me believe that
the possibility of the miracle is here with us
almost every day

and I’m glad that now and then
some 3rd string quarterback
shows me the truth of that belief
whether it be in science, art, philosophy,
medicine, politics, and/or etc.

else I’d shoot all the lights out of
this fucking city
right now