Re: poetry thread

[Guest]

Ruba'i

• Arabic for "quatrain"

• Used to describe a Persian quatrain, or its derivative form in English and other languages.

• Plural form anglicised (rubaiyat), is used to describe a collection of such quatrains.

• A number of possible rhyme schemes to the rubaiyat form, e.g. AABA, AAAA

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In Persian verse, a ruba'i is visually only two lines long, its rhyme falling at the middle and end of the lines.

Ruba'i in English

The verse form AABA as used in English verse is known as the Rubaiyat Quatrain due to its use by Edward FitzGerald in his famous 1859 translation, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Algernon Charles Swinburne, one of the first admirers of FitzGerald's translation of Khayyam's medieval Persian verses, was the first to imitate the stanza form, which subsequently became popular and was used widely, as in the case of Robert Frost's 1922 poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.

[Guest]

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Robert Frost (1874 – 1963)

Whose woods these are I think I know,
His house is in the village though.
He will not see me stopping here,
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer,
To stop without a farmhouse near,
Between the woods and frozen lake,
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake,
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep,
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening was written in 1922.
It is written in iambic tetrameter in the Rubaiyat stanza created by Edward Fitzgerald. Each verse (save the last) follows an a-a-b-a rhyming scheme, with the following verse's a's rhyming with that verse's b, which is a chain rhyme.
Overall, the rhyme scheme is AABA-BBCB-CCDC-DDDD

[Guest]

"A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread--and Thou"

I had an English teacher in high school who used this as a pick-up line.

...did she get you?

[Guest]

There's this old black and white movies, in which a very young Per Falk, playing the part of a ganster is killed in the end. Before the fade to credits, we see on the screen:

"The Moving Finger writes: and, having writ, moves on."

Do you mean Peter Falk, the actor who plays Columbo? He was in a lot of gangster movies.

[Guest]

...Pretty Boy Floyd was an early one. 1960. Falk had a bit part as Shorty Walters (so says Wiki).

[Guest]

Seamus Heaney

Sweeney's Lament on Ailsa Craig

...I'd love to be able to call up a place so powerfully with words.

[Guest]

"The Moving Finger writes: and, having writ, moves on."

There's such an air of impartial inevitability about that line.

[Guest]

MAD SONG
by: William Blake (1757-1827)

THE wild winds weep,
And the night is a-cold;
Come hither, Sleep,
And my griefs enfold! . . .
But lo! the morning peeps
Over the eastern steeps,
And the rustling beds of dawn
The earth do scorn.

Lo! to the vault
Of pavèd heaven,
With sorrow fraught,
My notes are driven:
They strike the ear of Night,
Make weak the eyes of Day;
They make mad the roaring winds,
And with the tempests play,

Like a fiend in a cloud,
With howling woe
After night I do crowd
And with night will go;
I turn my back to the east
From whence comforts have increased;
For light doth seize my brain
With frantic pain.

'Mad Song' is reprinted from English Poems. Ed. Edward Chauncey Baldwin.
New York: American Book Company, 1908.

[Guest]

Madly singing in the mountains: Bai Juyi
(Tang Dynasty: 772-846)

人各有一癖，我癖在章句。
万缘皆已消，此病独未去。
每逢美风景，或对好亲故。
高声咏一篇，恍若与神遇。
自为江上客，半在山中住。
有时新诗成，独上东岩路。
身倚白石崖，手攀青桂树。
狂吟惊林壑，猿鸟皆窥觑。
恐为世所嗤，故就无人处。

There is no one among men that has not a special failing:
And my failing consists in writing verses.
I have broken away from the thousand ties of life:
But this infirmity still remains behind.
Each time that I look at a fine landscape:
Each time that I meet a loved friend,
I raised my voice and recite a stanza of poetry
And marvel as though a God had crossed my path.
Ever since the day I was banished to Hsün-yang
Half my time I have lived among the hills.
And often, when I have finished a new poem,
Alone I climb the road to the Eastern Rock.
I lean my body on the banks of White Stone:
I pull down with my hands a green cassia branch.
My mad singing startles the valleys and hills:
The apes and birds all come to peep.
Fearing to become a laughing-stock to the world,
I choose a place that is unfrequented by men.

[Guest]

STRANGE AGITATION
Nasrudin

"Sahl Abdullah once went into a state of violent agitation, with physical manifestations, during a religious meeting.

Ibn Salim said: 'What is this state?'

Sahl said: This was not, as you imagine, power entering me. It was, on the contrary, due to my own weakness.'

Others present remarked: 'If that was weakness, what is power?

'Power; said Sahl, 'is when something like this enters, and the mind and body manifest nothing at all"'.

(from Wiki)
Nasrudin: a satirical Sufi figure believed to have lived during the Middle Ages (around 13th century), in Aksehir, and later in Konya, under the Seljuq rule. He was a populist philosopher and wise man, remembered for his funny stories and anecdotes. The Nasrudin stories are known throughout the Middle East and have touched cultures around the world. Superficially, most of the Nasrudin stories may be told as jokes or humorous anecdotes. They are told and retold endlessly in the teahouses and caravanserais of Asia and can be heard in homes and on the radio. But it is inherent in a Nasrudin story that it may be understood at many levels. There is the joke, followed by a moral — and usually the little extra which brings the consciousness of the potential mystic a little further on the way to realization



Nasrudin is the archetypal wise fool. He llived in the Middle East over 600 years ago. He is often depicted riding backwards on a donkey.

[Guest]

On what is best : Sappho

Some celebrate the beauty
of knights, or infantry,
or billowing flotillas
at battle on the sea.
Warfare has its glory,
but I place far above
these military splendors
the one thing that you love.

For proof of this contention
examine history:
we all remember Helen,
who left her family,
her child, and royal husband,
to take a stranger's hand:
her beauty had no equal,
but bowed to love's command.

As love then is the power
that none can disobey,
so too my thoughts must follow
my darling far away:
the sparkle of her laughter
would give me greater joy
than all the bronze-clad heroes

- translated from the Greek by Jon Corelis

[Guest]

A Crazed Girl

THAT crazed girl improvising her music.
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,

Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling She knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.

No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea.'

William Butler Yeats

[Guest]

The Great Wave Off Kanagawa
From "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji"; 1823-29 (140 Kb); Color woodcut, 10 x 15 in;



http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/hokusai/
Hokusai is generally more appreciated in the West than in Japan. His prints, as well as those by other Japanese printmakers, were imported to Paris in the mid-19th century. They were enthusiastically collected, especially by such impressionist artists as Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, whose work was profoundly influenced by them.

[Guest]

When I Have Fears

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd 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

[Guest]

The Funeral of Shelley by Louis Edouard Fournier.


P. B. Shelley
1792-1822
He was cremated on the beach at Viareggio where his body was washed up, and his ashes interred in the cemetery in Rome where lay already his son William, and John Keats. Also a philosophical and political essayist, and a gifted translator from German, Italian, Greek, Spanish and Arabic, he has taken his place as a major figure among the English Romantics: the poet of volcanic hope for a better world, of fiery aspirations shot upwards through bitter gloom.
http://www.keats-shelley-house.org/en/writers/writers-p-b-shelley/p-b-shelley-funeral-and-legacy

[Guest]

The Grave Of Shelley

LIKE burnt-out torches by a sick man's bed
Gaunt cypress-trees stand round the sun-bleached stone;
Here doth the little night-owl make her throne,
And the slight lizard show his jewelled head.
And, where the chaliced poppies flame to red,
In the still chamber of yon pyramid
Surely some Old-World Sphinx lurks darkly hid,
Grim warder of this pleasaunce of the dead.

Ah! sweet indeed to rest within the womb
Of Earth, great mother of eternal sleep,
But sweeter far for thee a restless tomb
In the blue cavern of an echoing deep,
Or where the tall ships founder in the gloom
Against the rocks of some wave-shattered steep.

Oscar Wilde

[Guest]

A Noiseless Patient Spider

A NOISELESS, patient spider,
I mark'd, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;
Mark'd how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them--ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,--seeking the spheres, to
connect them;
Till the bridge you will need, be form'd--till the ductile anchor
hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.

Walt Whitman

[Guest]

We Wear the Mask

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,--
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be overwise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!

Paul Laurence Dunbar

[Guest]

Richard Cory

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean-favoured and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good Morning!" and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich, yes, richer than a king,
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine -- we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked and waited for the light,
And went without the meat and cursed the bread,
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet in his head.

Edwin Arlington Robinson

[Guest]

Verlaine and Rimbaud: Poets from hell

an article by Christina Patterson. 2006
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/verlaine-and-rimbaud-poets-from-hell-525605.html

He lived in a squalid loft in a seedy part of town. He was often drunk, drugged and violent. He abused his friends, but relied on them to bail him out. Baby-faced and fiercely talented, this lyricist of love and death had a cult following and an angelic smile. "I know these passions and disasters too well," wrote Arthur Rimbaud in 1873, "the rages, the debauches, the madness."

When he wrote those words, the great French poet was living in a house in Camden Town. The terraced house is still there, though in a dilapidated state and in an area that can only be described as bleak. Beside the front door there is a simple plaque: "The French poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud lived here May-July 1873". The words can't begin to do justice to the slice of turbulent history that lies behind those walls. Since the house is currently on the market, it is a history that is in danger of being lost.

Arthur Rimbaud first met Paul Verlaine in 1871. Rimbaud was 17, Verlaine 27. Both were brilliant, volatile and utterly committed to the quest for the new, in art and life. Rimbaud was a young poet in search of a patron. Verlaine was a young poet in search of distraction - not least from his miserable marriage to Mathilde, whom he regularly hit. Verlaine's brother-in-law described Rimbaud as "a vile, vicious, disgusting, smutty little schoolboy", but Verlaine found him an "exquisite creature". He didn't seem to mind that Rimbaud rarely washed, left turds under one friend's pillow, and put sulphuric acid in the drink of another; not to mention that he hacked at his wrists with a penknife and stabbed him in the thigh. But by then, he was in love. The two of them ran off to Brussels and then London.

Rimbaud was "delighted and astonished" by London. Verlaine was overwhelmed by the "incessant railways on splendid cast-iron bridges" and the "brutal, loud-mouthed people in the streets", but inspired by the "interminable docks. The city was, he wrote, "prudish, but with every vice on offer", and, "permanently sozzled, despite ridiculous bills on drunkenness". The two poets were often sozzled, too: on ale, gin and absinthe. Rimbaud's extraordinary sonnet "Voyelles" (Vowels), which gained an instant cult following, was clearly inspired by his experiments with "the Green Fairy".

At other times, their drinking was less productive. They fought like cats, sometimes with knives rolled in towels. "As soon as mutilation had been achieved," according to Rimbaud's biographer Graham Robb,"they put the knives away and went to the pub."

Their relationship ended with a slap in the face with a wet fish. When Verlaine came home one day with a fish and a bottle of oil, Rimbaud sniggered. Furious at being mocked, Verlaine whacked him with the fish, then stormed off to Brussels and threatened suicide. After pawning his lover's clothes, Rimbaud followed him and, in a Brussels hotel, they had their final row. With the gun he'd planned to kill himself with, Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the arm. He was jailed for two years.

Throughout this time, however, both poets were producing work that would earn them a place in world literature. Verlaine wrote much of his Romances sans paroles; Rimbaud wrote many of the poems in Illuminations. Hailed as a masterpiece of modernism, the latter included the extraordinary polyphonic prose poem, "Une saison en enfer" (A Season in Hell).

These were clearly not pieces tossed off in the pub. Rimbaud would spend hours polishing his lines in the British Library. He was, according to Robb, "ferociously self-disciplined". He may have smashed rooms up, but this was, Robb tells me, "partly a way of smashing the image that he was supposed to have. He came from the provinces and so was patronised by the Parisian poets. He never really did become a Parisian. And that is why it would be much more fitting to have a Rimbaud house in London than in Paris".

For Lisa Appignanesi, one of a number of writers spearheading a campaign to save the Camden house, "it would be wonderful to insert their presence on to the London literary map, and to have a historical site that also thinks about the values of transgression". Rimbaud and Verlaine, she explains, "were both transgressive writers who influenced not only modernism but also the young for many generations, including the world of rock and pop". Indeed. Picasso, André Breton, Jean Cocteau, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison have all named Rimbaud as an influence. And Patti Smith talks of her debt to the writer she dubbed "the first punk poet". Her song "Land: Horses/ Land of a Thousand Dances/ La Mer (de)" even coined the verb "to go Rimbaud".

Even Pete Doherty, who has claimed Baudelaire as an influence, seems to share some of Rimbaud's proclivities. Like Rimbaud, he was a brilliant pupil who published poems as a teenager. And like Rimbaud, he's seems keen on opiates and blades, even writing poems in his own blood. But, for the Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, "there's something rather self-conscious in Doherty's attempts to conform to the Rimbaud model. It's all so attention-seeking".

Julian Barnes, who is also involved in the campaign to preserve the house, included quotations from Rimbaud and Verlaine in Metroland, his first novel. Part One has an epigraph from Rimbaud's "Voyelles". Part Two has one from Verlaine: "Moi qui ai connu Rimbaud, je sais qu'il se foutait pas mal si 'A' était rouge ou vert. Il le voyait comme ça, mais c'est tout." ("I who knew Rimbaud, know that he really didn't give a damn whether 'A' was red or green. He saw it like that, but that's all.")

"Rimbaud's 'Voyelles'," says Barnes, "is about how you see life at 18. The Verlaine quote is about how realism kicks in." It is, in other words, about growing up. Pete Doherty, take note.

(Graham Robb's 'Rimbaud' is published by Picador).

[Guest]

What Sayest Thou, Traveller

What sayst thou, traveller, of all thou saw'st afar?
On every tree hangs boredom, ripening to its fall,
Didst gather it, thou smoking yon thy sad cigar,
Black, casting an incongruous shadow on the wall?

Thine eyes are just as dead as ever they have been,
Unchanged is thy grimace, thy dolefulness is one,
Thou mind'st one of the wan moon through the rigging seen,
The wrinkled sea beneath the golden morning sun,

The ancient graveyard with new gravestones every day,-
But, come, regale us with appropriate detail,
Those disillusions weeping at the fountains, say,
Those new disgusts, just like their brothers, littered stale,

Those women! Say the glare, the identical dismay
Of ugliness and evil, always, in all lands,
And say Love, too,-and Politics, moreover, say,
With ink-dishonored blood upon their shameless hands.

And then, above all else, neglect not to recite
Thy proper feats, thou dragging thy simplicity
Wherever people love, wherever people fight,
In such a sad and foolish kind, in verity!

Has that dull innocence been punished as it should?
What say'st thou? Man is hard,-but woman? And thy tears,
Who has been drinking? And into what ear so good
Dost pour thy woes for it to pour in other ears?

Ah, others! ah, thyself! Gulled with such curious ease,
That used to dream (Doth not the soul with laughter fill?)
One knows not what poetic, delicate decease,-
Thou sort of angel with the paralytic will!

But now what are thy plans, thine aims? Art thou of might?
Or has long shedding tears disqualified thy heart?
The tree is scarcely hardy, judging it at sight,
And by thy looks no topping conqueror thou art.

So awkward, too! With the additional offence
Of being now a sort of dazed idyllic bard
That poses in a window, contemplating thence
The silly noon-day sky with an impressed regard.

So totally the same in this extreme decay!
But in thy place a being with some sense, pardy,
Would wish at least to lead the dance, since he must pay
The fiddlers,-at some risk of flutt'ring passers-by!

Canst not, by rummaging within thy consciousness,
Find some bright vice to bare, as 't were a flashing sword?
Some gay, audacious vice, which wield with dexterousness,
And make to shine, and shoot red lightnings Heavenward!

Hast one, or more? If more, the better! And plunge in,
And bravely lay about thee, indiscriminate,
And wear that face of indolence that masks the grin
Of hate at once full-feasted and insatiate.

Not well to be a dupe in this good universe,
Where there is nothing to allure in happiness
Save in it wriggle aught of shameful and perverse,-
And not to be a dupe, one must be merciless!

-Ah, human wisdom, ah, new things have claimed mine eyes,
And of that past-of weary recollection!-
Thy voice described, for still more sinister advice,
All I remember is the evil I have done.

In all the curious movements of my sad career,
Of others and myself, the chequered road I trod,
Of my accounted sorrows, good and evil cheer,
I nothing have retained except the grace of God!

If I am punished, 'tis most fit I should be so;
Played to its end is mortal man's and woman's role,-
But steadfastly I hope I too one day shall know
The peace and pardon promised every Christian soul.

Well not to be a dupe in this world of a day,
But not to be one in the world that hath no end,
That which it doth behoove the soul to be and stay
Is merciful, not merciless,-deluded friend.

Paul Verlaine

[Guest]

Richard Cory

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean-favoured and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good Morning!" and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich, yes, richer than a king,
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine -- we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked and waited for the light,
And went without the meat and cursed the bread,
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet in his head.

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Eat your heart out Paul Simon.

[Guest]

Richard Cory
Edwin Arlington Robinson

Eat your heart out Paul Simon.

[Guest]

This Is Just To Say
William Carlos Williams
Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams
Kenneth Koch

[sil]

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