A poem a day [Archive] - Debate Policy - Political Message Board

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

06-18-2015, 09:27 AM

A poem on divine revelation
by Hugh Henry Brackenridge
This is a day of happiness, sweet peace,
And heavenly sunshine; upon which conven'd
In full assembly fair, once more we view,
And hail with voice expressive of the heart,
Patrons and sons of this illustrious hall.
This hall more worthy of its rising fame
Than hall on mountain or romantic hill,
Where Druid bards sang to the hero's praise,
While round their woods and barren heaths was heard
The shrill calm echo of th' enchanting shell.
Than all those halls and lordly palaces
Where in the days of chivalry, each knight,
And baron brave in military pride
Shone in the brass and burning steel of war;
For in this hall more worthy of a strain
No envious sound forbidding peace is heard,
Fierce song of battle kindling martial rage
And desp'rate purpose in heroic minds:
But sacred truth fair science and each grace
Of virtue born; health, elegance and ease
And temp'rate mirth in social intercourse
Convey rich pleasure to the mind; and oft
The sacred muse in heaven-breathing song
Doth wrap the soul in extasy divine,
Inspiring joy and sentiment which not
The tale of war or song of Druids gave.
The song of Druids or the tale of war
With martial vigour every breast inspir'd,
With valour fierce and love of deathless fame;
But here a rich and splendid throng conven'd
From many a distant city and fair town,
Or rural seat by shore or mountain-stream,
Breathe joy and blessing to the human race,
Give countenance to arts themselves have known,
Inspire the love of heights themselves have reach'd,
Of noble science to enlarge the mind,
Of truth and virtue to adorn the soul,
And make the human nature grow divine.

Oh could the muse on this auspicious day
Begin a song of more majestic sound,
Or touch the lyre on some sublimer key,
Meet entertainment for the noble mind.
How shall the muse from this poetic bow'r
So long remov'd, and from this happy hill,
Where ev'ry grace and ev'ry virtue dwells,
And where the springs of knowledge and of thought
In riv'lets clear and gushing streams flow down
Attempt a strain? How sing in rapture high
Or touch in vari'd melody the lyre
The lyre so long neglected and each strain
Unmeditated, and long since forgot?
But yet constrain'd on this occasion sweet
To this fam'd hall and this assembly fair
With comely presence honouring the day,
She fain would pay a tributary strain.
A purer strain though not of equal praise
To that which Fingal heard when Ossian sung
With voice high rais'd in Selma hall of shells;
Or that which Pindar on th' Elean plain,
Sang with immortal skill and voice divine,
When native Thebes and ev'ry Grecian state
Pour'd forth her sons in rapid chariot race,
To shun the goal and reach the glorious palm.
He sang the pride of some ambitious chief,
For olive crowns and wreaths of glory won;
I sing the rise of that all glorious light,
Whose sacred dawn the aged fathers saw
By faith's clear eye, through many a cloud obscure
And heavy mist between: they saw it beam
From Judah's royal tribe, they saw it shine
O'er Judah's happy land, and bade the hills,
The rocky hills and barren vallies smile,
The desert blossom and the wilds rejoice.

This is that light and revelation pure,
Which Jacob saw and in prophetic view,
Did hail its author from the skies, and bade
The sceptre wait with sov'reignty and sway
On Judah's hand till Shiloh came. That light
Which Beor's son in clearer vision saw,
Its beams sore piercing his malignant eye;
But yet constrain'd by the eternal truth
Confess'd its origin and hail'd its rise,
Fresh as a star from Judah's sacred line.
This, Amos' son touch'd with seraphic fire
In after times beheld. He saw it beam
From Judah's royal tribe; he saw it shine
O'er Judah's happy land, and bade the hills,
The rocky hills and barren vallies smile,
The desert blossom and the wilds rejoice.

This is that light which purifies the soul,
From mist obscure, of envy, hate, and pride;
Bids love celestial in the bosom glow,
Fresh kindling up the intellectual eye
Of faith divine, in beatific view
Of that high glory and seraphic bliss,
Which he who reigns invisible, shall give
To wait on virtue in the realms of day.

This is that light which from remotest times
Shone to the just; gave sweet serenity,
And sunshine to the soul, of each wise sage,
Fam'd patriarch, and holy man of God,
Who in the infancy of time did walk
With step unerring, through those dreary shades,
Which veil'd the world e'er yet the golden sun
Of revelation beam'd. Seth, Enos, and
The family of him preserv'd from death
By flood of waters. Abram and that swain
Who erst exil'd in Midian did sing
The world from chaos rising, and the birth
Of various nature in the earth, or sea,
Or element of air, or heav'n above.

This is that light which on fair Zion hill
Descending gradual, in full radiance beam'd
O'er Canaan's happy land. Her fav'rite seers
Had intercourse divine with this pure source,
And oft from them a stream of light did flow,
To each adjoining vale and desert plain,
Lost in the umbrage of dark heathen shades.
'Twas at this stream the fabling poets drank
And sang how heav'n and earth from chaos rose;
'Twas at this stream the wiser sages drank
And straightway knew the soul immortal lives
Beyond the grave and all the wrecks of time.

From Judah's sacred hills a partial ray
Extraneous, visited and cheer'd the gloom
Spread o'er the shaded earth; yet more than half
In superstition and the dreams of night
Each hoary sage by long experience wise,
And high philosopher of learning fam'd
Lay buried deep shut from the light of day.
Shut from the light of revelation clear
In devious path they wandered oft,
Nor could strong reason with the partial beam
Of revelation, wholly dissipate
The midnight horrors of so dark an age.
Vain were their searches, and their reason vain,
Else whence the visionary tales receiv'd,
Of num'rous deities in earth, or heav'n
Or sea, or river, or the shades profound
Of Erebus, dark kingdom of the dead.
Weak deities of fabled origin
From king or hero, to the skies advanc'd
For sanguinary appetite, and skill
In cruel feats of arms, and tyranny
O'er ev'ry right, and privilege of man.
Vain were their searches, and their reason vain,
Else whence the sculptur'd image of a god,
And marble bust ador'd as deity,
Altar and hecatomb prepar'd for these,
Or human sacrifice when hecatomb
Consum'd in vain with ceremony dire,
And rites abhorr'd, denied the wish'd success.
Reason is dark, else why heroic deem'd
Fell suicide, as if 'twere fortitude
And higher merit to recede from life,
Shunning the ills of poverty, or pain,
Or wasting sickness, or the victor's sword,
Than to support with patience fully tried
As Job, thence equall'd with him in renown.

Shut from the light of revelation clear
The world lay hid in shades, and reason's lamp
Serv'd but to show how dark it was; but now
The joyous time with hasty steps advanc'd,
When truth no more should with a partial ray
Shine on the shaded earth; now on swift wings
The rosy hours brought on in beauty mild,
The day-spring from on high, and from the top
Of some fair mount Chaldean shepherds view
That orient star which Beor's son beheld,
From Aram east, and mark'd its lucid ray,
Shedding sweet influence on Judah's land.
Now o'er the plain of Bethl'em to the swains
Who kept their flocks beneath the dews of night,
A light appears expressive of that day
More general, which o'er the shaded earth
Breaks forth, and in the radiance of whose beams,
The humble shepherd, and the river-swain
By Jordan stream, or Galilea's lake,
Can see each truth and paradox explain'd,
Which not each wise philosopher of Greece,
Could tell, nor sage of India, nor the sons
Of Zoroaster, in deep secrets skill'd.

Such light on Canaan shone but not confin'd
With partial ray to Judah's favour'd land,
Each vale and region to the utmost bound
Of habitable earth, distant or nigh
Soon finds a gleam of this celestial day:
Fam'd Persia's mountains and rough Bactria's woods
And Media's vales and Shinar's distant plain:
The Lybian desert near Cyrene smiles
And Ethiopia hails it to her shores.
Arabia drinks the lustre of its ray
Than fountain sweeter, or the cooling brook
Which laves her burning sands; than stream long sought
Through desert flowing and the scorched plain
To Sheba's troop or Tema's caravan.

Egypt beholds the dawn of this fair morn
And boasts her rites mysterious no more;
Her hidden learning wrapt in symbols strange
Of hieroglyphic character, engrav'd
On marble pillar, or the mountain rock,
Or pyramid enduring many an age.
She now receives asserted and explain'd
That holy law, which on mount Sinai writ
By God's own finger, and to Moses giv'n,
And to the chosen seed, a rule of life.
And strict obedience due; but now once more
Grav'd on the living tablet of the heart,
And deep impress'd by energy divine,
Is legible through an eternal age.

North of Judea now this day appears
On Syria west, and in each city fair
Full many a church of noble fame doth rise.
In Antioch the seat of Syrian kings,
And old Damascus, where Hazael reign'd.
Now Cappadocia Mithridates' realm,
And poison-bearing Pontus, whose deep shades
Were shades of death, admit the light of truth.
In Asia less seven luminaries rise,
Bright lights, which with celestial vigour burn,
And give the day in fullest glory round.
There Symrna shines, and Thyatira there,
There Ephesus a sister light appears,
And Pergamus with kindred glory burns:
She burns enkindled with a purer flame
Than Troy of old, when Grecian kings combin'd
Had set her gates on fire: The Hellespont
And all th' Egean sea shone to the blaze.

But now more west the gracious day serene
On Athens rising, throws a dark eclipse
On that high learning by her sages taught,
In each high school of philosophic fame;
Vain wisdom, useless sophistry condemn'd,
As ignorance and foolishness of men.
Let her philosophers debate no more
In the Lyceum, or the Stoics porch,
Holding high converse, but in error lost
Of pain, and happiness, and fate supreme.
Fair truth from heav'n draws all their reas'ning high
In captive chains bound at her chariot wheels.

Now Rome imperial, mistress of the world
Drinks the pure lustre of the orient ray
Assuaging her fierce thirst of bloody war,
Dominion boundless, victory and fame;
Each bold centurion, and each prætor finds
A nobler empire to subdue themselves.

From Rome the mistress of the world in peace,
Far to the north the golden light ascends;
To Gaul and Britain and the utmost bound
Of Thule famous in poetic song,
Victorious there where not Rome's consuls brave,
Heroes, or conquering armies, ever came.
Far in the artic skies a light is seen,
Unlike that sun, which shall ere long retreat,
And leave their hills one half the year in shades.
Or that Aurora which the sailor sees
Beneath the pole in dancing beams of light,
Playing its gambols on the northern hills.
That light is vain and gives no genial heat,
To warm the tenants of those frozen climes,
Or give that heav'nly vigour to the soul,
Which truth divine and revelation brings;
And but for which each heart must still remain,
Hard as the rock on Scandanavia's shore,
Cold as the ice which bridges up her streams,
Fierce as the storm which tempests all her waves.

Thus in its dawn did sacred truth prevail,
In either hemisphere from north to south,
From east to west through the long tract of day.
From Shinar's plain to Thule's utmost isle,
From Persia's bay to Scandanavia's shores.
Cheer'd by its ray now ev'ry valley smiles,
And ev'ry lawn smote by its morning beam.
Now ev'ry hill reflects a purer ray,
Than when Aurora paints his woods in gold,
Or when the sun first in the orient sky,
Sets thick with gems the dewy mountain's brow.

The earth perceives a sov'reign virtue shed
And from each cave, and midnight haunt retires
Dark superstition, with her vot'ries skill'd,
In potent charm, or spell of magic pow'r;
In augury, by voice, or flight of birds,
Or boding sign at morn, or noon, or eve,
Portent and prodigy and omen dire.
Each oracle by Demon, or the craft
Of priests, made vocal, can declare no more
Of high renown, and victory secure,
To kings low prostrate at their bloody shrines.
No more with vain uncertainty perplex
Mistaken worshippers, or give unseen
Response ambiguous in some mystic sound,
And hollow murmer from the dark recess.
No more of Lybian Jove; Dodona's oaks,
In sacred grove give prophecy no more.
Th' infernal deities retire abash'd,
Our God himself on earth begins his reign;
Pure revelation beams on ev'ry land,
On ev'ry heart exerts a sov'reign sway,
And makes the human nature grow divine.

Now hideous war forgets one half her rage,
And smoothes her visage horible to view.
Celestial graces better sooth the soul,
Than vocal music, or the charming sound
Of harp or lyre. More than the golden lyre
Which Orpheus tun'd in melancholy notes,
Which almost pierc'd the dull cold ear of death,
And mov'd the grave to give him back his bride.

Peace with the graces and fair science now
Wait on the gospel car; science improv'd
Puts on a fairer dress; a fairer form
Now ev'ry art assumes; bold eloquence
Moves in a higher sphere than senates grave,
Or mix'd assembly, or the hall of kings,
Which erst with pompous panegyric rung.
Vain words and soothing flattery she hates,
And feigned tears, and tongue which silver-tipt
Moves in the cause of wickedness and pride.
She mourns not that fair liberty depress'd
Which kings tyrannic can extort, but that
Pure freedom of the soul to truth divine
Which first indulg'd her and with envious hand
Pluck'd thence, left hideous slavery behind.
She weeps not loss of property on earth,
Nor stirs the multitude to dire revenge
With headlong violence, but soothes the soul
To harmony and peace, bids them aspire
With emulation and pure zeal of heart,
To that high glory in the world unseen,
And crown celestial, which pure virtue gives.

Thus eloquence and poesy divine
A nobler range of sentiment receive;
Life brought to view and immortality,
A recent world through which bold fancy roves,
And gives new magic to the pow'r of song;
For where the streams of revelation flow
Unknown to bards of Helicon, or those
Who on the top of Pindus, or the banks
Of Arethusa and Eurotas stray'd,
The poet drinks, and glorying in new strength,
Soars high in rapture of sublimer strains;
Such as that prophet sang who tun'd his harp
On Zion hill and with seraphic praise
In psalm and sacred ode by Siloa's brook,
Drew HIS attention who first touch'd the soul
With taste of harmony, and bade the spheres
Move in rich measure to the songs on high.
Fill'd with this spirit poesy no more
Adorns that vain mythology believ'd,
By rude barbarian, and no more receives,
The tale traditional, and hymn profane,
Sung by high genius, basely prostitute.
New strains are heard, such as first in the morn
Of time, were sung by the angelic choirs,
When rising from chaotic state the earth
Orbicular was seen, and over head
The blazing sun, moon, planet, and each light
That gilds the firmament, rush'd into view.

Thus did the sun of revelation shine
Full on the earth, and grateful were its beams:
Its beams were grateful to the chosen seed,
To all whose works were worthy of the day.
But creatures lucifuge, whose ways were dark,
Ere this in shades of paganism hid,
Did vent their poison, and malignant breath,
To stain the splendour of the light divine,
Which pierc'd their cells and brought their deeds to view
Num'rous combin'd of ev'ry tongue and tribe,
Made battle proud, and impious war brought on,
Against the chosen sanctified by light.
Riches and pow'r leagu'd in their train were seen,
Sword, famine, flames and death before them prey'd.
Those faithful found, who undismay'd did bear
A noble evidence to truth, were slain.
Why should I sing of these or here record,
As if 'twere praise, in poesy or song,
Or sculptur'd stone, to eternize the names,
Which writ elsewhere in the fair book of life,
Shall live unsullied when each strain shall die:
Shall undefac'd remain when sculptur'd stone,
And monument, and bust, and storied urn
Perpetuates its sage and king no more.

The pow'r of torture and reproach was vain,
But what not torture or reproach could do,
Dark superstition did in part effect.
That superstition, which saint John beheld,
Rise in thick darkness from th' infernal lake.
Locust and scorpion in the smoke ascend,
False teacher, heretic, and Antichrist.
The noon day sun is dark'ned in the sky,
The moon forbears to give her wonted light.
Full many a century the darkness rul'd,
With heavier gloom than once on Egypt came,
Save that on some lone coast, or desert isle,
Where sep'rate far a chosen spirit dwelt,
A Goshen shone, with partial-streaming ray.
Night on the one side settles dark; on Rome,
It settles dark, and ev'ry land more west
Is wrapt in shades. Night on the east comes down
With gloom Tartarean, and in part it rose
From Tartary beneath the dusky pole.
The ruthless Turk, and Saracen in arms,
O'er-run the land the gospel once illum'd;
The holy land Judea once so nam'd,
And Syria west where many churches rose.
Those golden luminaries are remov'd,
Which once in Asia shone. Athens no more
For truth and learning fam'd. Corinth obscur'd,
Ionia mourns through all her sea-girt isles.

But yet once more the light of truth shall shine
In this obscure sojourn; shall shoot its beam
In morning beauty mild, o'er hill and dale.
See in Bohemia and the lands more west
The heavenly ray of revelation shines,
Fresh kindling up true love and purest zeal.

Britannia next beholds the risen day
In reformation bright; cheerful she hails
It from her snow-white cliffs, and bids her sons,
Rise from the mist of popery obscure.
Her worthier sons, whom not Rome's pontiff high,
Nor king with arbitrary sway could move.
Those mightier who with constancy untam'd,
Did quench the violence of fire, at death
Did smile, and maugre ev'ry pain, of bond,
Cold dark imprisonment, and scourge severe,
By hell-born popery devis'd, held fast
The Christian hope firm anchor of the soul.
Or those who shunning that fell rage of war,
And persecution dire, when civil pow'r,
Leagu'd in with sacerdotal sway triumph'd,
O'er ev'ry conscience, and the lives of men,
Did brave th' Atlantic deep and through its storms
Sought these Americ shores: these happier shores
Where birds of calm delight to play, where not
Rome's pontiff high, nor arbitrary king,
Leagu'd in with sacerdotal sway are known.
But peace and freedom link'd together dwell,
And reformation in full glory shines.
Oh for a muse of more exalted wing,
To celebrate those men who planted first
The christian church in these remotest lands;
From those high plains where spreads a colony,
Gen'rous and free, from Massachusett-shores,
To the cold lakes margin'd with snow: from that
Long dreary tract of shady woods and hills,
Where Hudson's icy stream rolls his cold wave,
To those more sunny bowers where zephyrs breath,
And round which flow in circling current swift
The Delaware and Susquehannah streams.
Thence to those smiling plains where Chesapeak
Spreads her maternal arms, encompassing
In soft embrace, full many a settlement,
Where opulence, with hospitality,
And polish'd manners, and the living plant
Of science blooming, sets their glory high [1].
Thence to Virginia, sister colony,
Lib'ral in sentiment, and breathing high,
The noble ardour of the freeborn soul.
To Carolina thence, and that warm clime
Where Georgia south in summer heat complains,
And distant thence towards the burning line.

These men deserve our song, and those who still,
With industry severe, and steady aim
Diffuse the light in this late dreary land,
In whose lone wastes and solitudes forlorn,
Death long sat brooding with his raven wing.
Who many 'a structure of great fame have rais'd,
College, and school, upon th' Atlantic coast,
Or inland town, through ev'ry province wide,
Which rising up like pyramids of fire,
Give light and glory to the western world.

These men we honour, and their names shall last
Sweet in the mouths and memory of men;
Or if vain man unconscious of their worth,
Refuse a tear when in some lonely vale
He sees those faithful laid; each breeze shall sigh,
Each passing gale shall mourn, each tree shall bend
Its heavy head, in sorrow o'er their tombs,
And some sad stream run ever weeping by.
Weep not O stream, nor mourn thou passing gale,
Beneath those grassy tombs their bodies lie,
But they have risen from each labour bere
To make their entrance on a nobler stage.
What though with us they walk the humble vale
Of indigence severe, with want oppress'd?
Riches belong not to their family,
Nor sloth luxurious nor the pride of kings;
But truth meek-ey'd and warm benevolence
Wisdom's high breeding in her sons rever'd
Bespeaks them each the children[2] of a king.
The christian truth of origin divine,
Grows not beneath the shade of civil pow'r,
Riches or wealth accompanied with pride;
Nor shall it bloom transplanted to that soil,
Where persecution, in malignant streams,
Flows out to water it; black streams and foul
Which from the lake of Tartarus break forth,
The sickly tide of Acheron which flows,
With putrid waves through the infernal shades.
This plant of heaven loves the gentle beams,
Of truth and meekness, and the kindly dew
Which fell on Zion hill; it loves the care
Of humble shepherds, and the rural swain,
And tended by their hands it flourishes
With fruit and blossoms, and soon gives a shade,
Beneath which ev'ry traveller shall rest,
Safe from the burning east-wind and the sun.
A vernal shade not with'ring like the gourd
Of him who warned Nineveh, but like
The aged oaks immortal on the plain
Of Kadesh, or tall cedars on the hill
Of Lebanon, and Hermon's shady top.

High is their fame through each succeeding age
Who build the walls of Zion upon earth.
Let mighty kings and potentates combine,
To raise a pyramid, which neither storm,
Nor sea indignant, nor the raging fire,
Nor time can waste, or from firm basis move.
Or let them strive by counsel or by arms,
To fix a throne, and in imperial sway,
Build up a kingdom shadowing the earth,
Unmov'd by thunder or impetuous storm
Of civil war, dark treason, or the shock
Of hostile nations, in dire league combin'd.
They build a kingdom of a nobler date,
Who build the kingdom of the Saviour God.
This, not descending rain, nor mighty storm,
Nor sea indignant, nor the raging fire,
Nor time shall waste, or from firm basis move.
Rounded on earth its head doth reach the skies,
Secure from thunder, and impetuous storm,
Of civil war, dark treason, or the shock
Of hostile nations in dire league combin'd.
This still shall flourish and survive the date,
Of each wide state and empire of the earth
Which yet shall rise, as now of those which once
From richest Asia or from Europe spread
On mighty base and shaded half the world.
Great Babylon which vex'd the chosen seed,
And by whose streams the captive Hebrews sat,
In desolation lies, and Syria west,
Where the Seleucidæ did fix their throne,
Loud-thund'ring thence o'er Judah's spoiled land,
Boasts her proud rule no more. Rome pagan next,
The raging furnace where the saints were tried,
No more enslaves mankind. Rome papal too
Contracts her reign and speaks proud things no more.
The throne of Ottoman is made to shake,
The Russian thund'ring to his firmest seat;
Another age shall see his empire fall.
Yet in the east the light of truth shall shine,
And like the sun returning after storms
Which long had raged through a sunless sky,
Shall beam beningly on forsaken lands.
The day serene once more on Zion hill
Descending gradual, shall in radiance beam
On Canaan's happy land. Her fav'rite seers
Have intercourse divine with this pure source;
Perennial thence rich streams of light shall flow,
To each adjoining vale and desert plain
Lost in the umbrage of dark heathen shades.
The gospel light shall gloriously survive
The wasting blaze of ev'ry baser fire.
The fire of Vesta, an eternal fire,
So falsely call'd and kept alive at Rome;
Sepulchral lamp in burial place of kings,
Burn'd unconsum'd for many ages down;
But yet not Vesta's fire eternal call'd
And kept alive at Rome, nor burning lamp
Hid in sepulchral monument of kings,
Shall bear an equal date with that true light,
Which shone from earth to heav'n, and which shall shine
Up through eternity, and be the light
Of heav'n, the new Jerusalem above.
This light from heav'n shall yet illume the earth
And give its beams to each benighted land
Now with new glory lighted up again.
Then ruthless Turk and Saracen shall know
The fallacies of him Medina bred,
And whose vain tomb, in Mecca they adore.
Then Jews shall view the great Messiah come,
And each rent tribe in caravan by land,
Or ship by sea, shall visit Palestine
Thrice holy then, with vile Idolatry
No more defil'd, altar on mountain head,
Green shady hill, or idol of the grove.
For there a light appears, with which compar'd,
That was a twilight shed by rite obscure,
And ceremony dark and sacrifice
Dimly significant of things to come.
Blest with this light no more they deviate
In out-way path; distinguished no more
By school or sect, Essene or Saducee,
Cairite or Scribe of Pharisaic mould.
Jew and Samaritan debate no more,
Whether on Gerizim or Zion hill
They shall bow down. Above Moriah's mount
Each eye is raised to him, whose temple is
Th' infinitude of space, whom earth, sea, sky
And heav'n itself cannot contain. No more
The noise of battle shall be heard, or shout
Of war by heathen princes wag'd; There's nought
Shall injure or destroy; they shall not hurt
In all my holy mountain saith the Lord.
The earth in peace and ev'ry shadow fled,
Bespeaks Emmanuel's happy reign when Jew,
And kindred Gentile shall no more contend,
Save in the holier strife of hymn and song,
To him who leads captive captivity,
Who shall collect the sons of Jacob's line,
And bring the fulness of the Gentiles in.
Thrice happy day when Gentiles are brought in
Complete and full; when with its genial beams
The day shall break on each benighted land
Which yet in darkness and in vision lies:
On Scythia and Tartary's bleak hills;
On mount Imaus, and Hyrcanian cliffs
Of Caucasus, and dark Iberian dales;
Japan and China, and the sea-girt isles
The ancient Ophir deem'd; for there rich gems
And diamond pearl, and purest gold is found.

Thrice happy day when this whole earth shall feel
The sacred ray of revelation shed,
Far to the west, through each remotest land
With equal glory rivalling the day
Pour'd on the east. When these Americ shores
Shall far and wide be light, and heav'nly day
Shall in full glory rise on many a reign,
Kingdom and empire bending to the south,
And nation touching the Pacific shore.
When Christian churches shall adorn the streams
Which now unheeded flow with current swift
Circling the hills, where fiercest beasts of prey,
Panther and wolf in nightly concert howl.
The Indian sage from superstition freed,
Be taught a nobler heav'n than cloud-topt-hill,
Or sep'rate island in the wat'ry waste.
The aged Sachem fix his moving tribe,
And grow humane now taught the arts of peace.
In human sacrifice delight no more,
Mad cantico or savage feast of war.
Such scenes of fierce barbarity no more
Be perpetrated there, but truth divine
Shine on the earth in one long cloudless day,
Till that last hour which shuts the scene of things,
When this pure light shall claim its native skies;
When the pure stream of revelation shall,
With refluent current visit its first hills:
There shall it mix with that crystalline wave,
Which laves the walls of Paradise on high,
And from beneath the seat of God doth spring.
This is that river from whose sacred head
The sanctified in golden arms draw light,
On either side of which that tree doth grow
Which yields immortal fruit, and in whose shade
If shade were needed there, the rapt shall sing,
In varied melody to harp and lyre,
The sacred song of Moses and the Lamb:
Eternity's high arches ring; 'Tis heard
Through both infinitudes of space and time.

Thus have I sung to this high-favour'd bow'r,
And sacred shades which taught me first to sing,
With grateful mind a tributary strain.
Sweet grove no more I visit you, no more
Beneath your shades shall meditate my lay.
Adieu ye lawns and thou fair hill adieu,
And you O shepherds, and ye graces fair
With comely presence honouring the day,
Far hence I go to some sequest'red vale
By woody hill or shady mountain side,
Where far from converse and the social band,
My days shall pass inglorious away: [3]
But this shall be my exultation still
My chiefest merit and my only joy,
That when the hunter on some western hill,
Or furzy glade shall see my grassy tomb,
And know the stream which mourns unheeded by,
He for a moment shall repress his step,
And say, There lies a Son of Nassau-Hall.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

06-19-2015, 10:13 AM

An August Midnight
by Thomas Hardy

I

A shaded lamp and a waving blind,
And the beat of a clock from a distant floor:
On this scene enter--winged, horned, and spined -
A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore;
While 'mid my page there idly stands
A sleepy fly, that rubs its hands . . .

II

Thus meet we five, in this still place,
At this point of time, at this point in space.
- My guests parade my new-penned ink,
Or bang at the lamp-glass, whirl, and sink.
"God's humblest, they!" I muse. Yet why?
They know Earth-secrets that know not I.

----------------------------------------------

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) own life wasn't similar to his stories. He was born on the Egdon Heath, in Dorset, near Dorchester. His father was a master mason and building contractor. Hardy's mother, whose tastes included Latin poets and French romances, provided for his education. After schooling in Dorchester Hardy was apprenticed to an architect. He worked in an office, which specialized in restoration of churches. In 1874 Hardy married Emma Lavinia Gifford, for whom he wrote 40 years later, after her death, a group of poems known as VETERIS VESTIGIAE FLAMMAE (Vestiges of an Old Flame).

At the age of 22 Hardy moved to London and started to write poems, which idealized the rural life. He was an assistant in the architectural firm of Arthur Blomfield, visited art galleries, attended evening classes in French at King's College, enjoyed Shakespeare and opera, and read works of Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and John Stuart Mills, whose positivism influenced him deeply. In 1867 Hardy left London for the family home in Dorset, and resumed work briefly with Hicks in Dorchester. He entered into a temporary engagement with Tryphena Sparks, a sixteen-year-old relative. Hardy continued his architectural work, but encouraged by Emma Lavinia Gifford, he started to consider literature as his "true vocation."

Unable to find public for his poetry, the novelist George Meredith advised Hardy to write a novel. His first novel, THE POOR MAN AND THE LADY, was written in 1867, but the book was rejected by many publishers and he destroyed the manuscript. His first book that gained notice, was FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD (1874). After its success Hardy was convinced that he could earn his living as an author. He devoted himself entirely to writing and produced a series of novels, among them THE RETURN OF NATIVE (1878), THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE (1886).

TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES (1891) came into conflict with Victorian morality. It explored the dark side of his family connections in Berkshire. In the story the poor villager girl Tess Durbeyfield is seduced by the wealthy Alec D'Uberville. She becomes pregnant but the child dies in infancy. Tess finds work as a dairymaid on a farm and falls in love with Angel Clare, a clergyman's son. They marry but when Tess tells Angel about her past, he hypocritically desert her. Tess becomes Alec's mistress. Angel returns from Brazil, repenting his harshness, but finds her living with Alec. Tess kills Alec in desperation, she is arrested and hanged.

Hardy's JUDE THE OBSCURE (1895) aroused even more debate. The story dramatized the conflict between carnal and spiritual life, tracing Jude Fawley's life from his boyhood to his early death. Jude marries Arabella, but deserts her. He falls in love with his cousin, hypersensitive Sue Bridehead, who marries the decaying schoolmaster, Phillotson, in a masochist fit. Jude and Sue obtain divorces, but their life together deteriorates under the pressure of poverty and social disapproval. The eldest son of Jude and Arabella, a grotesque boy nicknamed 'Father Time', kills their children and himself. Broken by the loss, Sue goes back to Phillotson, and Jude returns to Arabella. Soon thereafter Jude dies, and his last words are: "Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul?".

In 1896, disturbed by the public uproar over the unconventional subjects of two of his greatest novels, Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, Hardy announced that he would never write fiction again. A bishop solemnly burnt the book, 'probably in his despair at not being able to burn me', Hardy noted. Hardy's marriage had also suffered from the public outrage - critics on both sides of the Atlantic abused the author as degenerate and called the work itself disgusting. In April, 1912, Hardy wrote:

By 1885 the Hardys had settled near Dorchester at Max gate, a house designed by the author and built by his brother, Henry. With the exceptions of seasonal stays in London and occasional excursions abroad, his Bockhampton home, "a modest house, providing neither more nor less than the accommodation ... needed" (as Michael Millgate describes it in his biography of the author) was his home for the rest of his life.

After giving up the novel, Hardy brought out a first group of Wessex poems, some of which had been composed 30 years before. During the remainder of his life, Hardy continued to publish several collections of poems. "Hardy, in fact, was the ideal poet of a generation. He was the most passionate and the most learned of them all. He had the luck, singular in poets, of being able to achieve a competence other than by poetry and then devote the ending years of his life to his beloved verses." (Ford Madox Ford in The March of Literature, 1938) Hardy's gigantic panorama of the Napoleonic Wars, THE DYNASTS, composed between 1903 and 1908, was mostly in blank verse. Hardy succeeded on the death of his friend George Meredith to the presidency of the Society of Authors in 1909. King George V conferred on him the Order of Merit and he received in 1912 the gold medal of the Royal Society of Literature.

Hardy kept to his marriage with Emma Gifford although it was unhappy and he had - or he imagined he had - affairs with other women passing briefly through his life. Emma Hardy died in 1912 and in 1914 Hardy married his secretary, Florence Emily Dugdale, a woman in her 30's, almost 40 years younger than he. From 1920 through 1927 Hardy worked on his autobiography, which was disguised as the work of Florence Hardy. It appeared in two volumes (1928 and 1930). Hardy's last book published in his lifetime was HUMAN SHOWS, FAR PHANTASIES, SONGS AND TRIFLES (1925). WINTER WORDS IN VARIOUS MOODS AND METRES appeared posthumously in 1928.

Hardy died in Dorchester, Dorset, on January 11, 1928. His ashes were cremated in Dorchester and buried with impressive ceremonies in the Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey. According to a literary anecdote his heart was to be buried in Stinsford, his birthplace, and all went according to plan, until a cat belonging to the poet's sister snatched the heart off the kitchen, where it was temporarily kept, and disappeared into the woods with it.

The center of Hardy's novels was the rather desolate and history-freighted countryside around Dorchester. His novels bravely challenged many of the sexual and religious conventions of the Victorian age, and dared to present a bleak view into human nature. In the early 1860s, after the appearance Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), Hardy's faith was still unshaken, but he soon adopted the mechanical-determinist view of nature's cruelty, reflected in the inevitably tragic and self-destructive fates of his characters. In his poems Hardy depicted rural life without sentimentality - his mood was often stoically hopeless. "Though he was a modern, even a revolutionary writer in his time, most of us read him now as a lyrical pastoralist. It may be a sign of the times that some of us take his books to bed, as if even his pessimistic vision was one that enabled us to sleep soundly." (Anatole Broyard in New York Times, May 12, 1982)

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

06-20-2015, 09:25 AM

To Mr. Vaughan, Silurist on His Poems
by Katherine Philips

Had I ador'd the multitude, and thence
Got an antipathy to wit and sence,
And hug'd that fate, in hope the world would grant
'Twas good -- affection to be ignorant;
Yet the least ray of thy bright fancy seen
I had converted, or excuseless been:
For each birth of thy muse to after-times
Shall expatiate for all this age's crimes.
First shines the Armoret, twice crown'd by thee,
Once by they Love, next by Poetry;
Where thou the best of Unions dost dispence:
Truth cloth'd in wit, and Love in innocence.
So that the muddyest Lovers may learn here,
No fountains can be sweet that are not clear.
Then Juvenall reviv'd by thee declares
How flat man's Joys are, and how mean his cares;
And generously upbraids the world that they
Should such a value for their ruine pay.
But when thy sacred muse diverts her quill,
The Lantskip to design of Zion-Hill;32
As nothing else was worthy her or thee,
So we admire almost t'Idolatry.
What savage brest would not be rapt to find
Such Jewells insuch Cabinets enshrind'?
Thou (fill'd with joys too great to see or count)
Descend'st from thence like Moses from the Mount,
And with a candid, yet unquestioned aw,
Restorlst the Golden Age when Verse was Law.
Instructing us, thou so secur'st thy fame,
That nothing can distrub it but my name;
Nay I have hoped that standing so near thine
'Twill lose its drosse, and by degrees refine ...
"Live, till the disabused world consent
All truths of use, or strength, or ornament,
Are with such harmony by thee displaid,
As the whole world was first by number made
And from the charming rigour thy Muse brings
Learn there's no pleasure but in serious things.

---------------------------------------------------

Katherine Fowler was born on New Year's day, 1631 in London, England. Her father, John Fowler, was a Presbyterian merchant. Katherine was educated at one of the Hackney boarding-schools, where she became fluent in several languages. After the death of John Fowler, Katherine's mother married a Welshman, Hector Philips, and, in 1647, at the age of sixteen, Katherine was married to fifty-four-year old James Philips, Hector's son by his first wife.

In spite of the difference in their ages, there appears to have been little conflict between Katherine and James. What division there was, was political in nature: she was a Royalist; he supported Oliver Cromwell. This difference in their views is recorded in Katherine's poetry. However, James continued to reside on the coast of Wales, while his wife spent much of her time in London. He encouraged her literary activities and left her largely to her own devices.

Her time was not idly spent. Besides bearing two children (a son, Hector, who lived only forty days, and a daughter, Katherine, who lived to be married), Philips founded The Society of Friendship, wrote some hundred and sixteen poems, completed five verse translations, and translated two plays by Pierre Corneille (1606-1684) from the French. The earlier of these dramatic translations, a rendering of Pompey, was produced in 1663, the first play by a woman to be performed on the London stage. It was also performed, to great acclaim, in Dublin in the same year. The later translation, Horace, was not finished in her lifetime. Sir John Denham (1615 - 1669) completed her work, and the play was produced in 1668.

The Society of Friendship (1651-1661) was a semi-literary correspondence circle composed primarily of women, though men were also involved. The membership, however, is somewhat in question, as its members took pseudonyms from Classical literature (Katherine Philips, for instance, took the name Orinda, to which other members appended the accolade "Matchless." It is as "Matchless Orinda" that Philips is most often known, as this was her usual signature.) Poet Henry Vaughan (1622-1695) was probably a member, and in some degree a personal friend to Philips. It was as a preface to his poems that hers were first published, in 1651. (The only other publication of Philips' work in her lifetime was an unauthorized edition in 1664).

More important are the female members of the circle, especially Anne Owen, known in Philips's poems as Lucasia. Fully half of Philips's poetry is dedicated to this woman; the two seem to have been lovers in an emotional, if not in a physical, sense for about ten years. Also significant as correspondents and lovers and Mary Awbrey (Rosania) and Elizabeth Boyle (Celimena). Boyle's relationship with Philips, however, was cut short by Philips' death in 1664. These loves are prominent in Philips's poetry. Because she used the language of courtly love to describe her relationships, their extent and nature are not entirely certain, but the love between these women was most likely platonic. Philips remarked at time that love between women was pure, uncorrupted by the sexual. The poetry does not overtly suggest physical relationships. In fact, Philips' contemporaries often praised her modest, properly feminine subject matter.

Katherine Philips died of smallpox June 22, 1664, in London. She was thirty-three years old. Her death was mourned in verse by the metaphysical poet Abraham Cowley. The first authorized collection of her verse was not published until 1667. A century and a half later, the Romantic poet John Keats admired her work in a letter to a friend.
----------------------------------------------------------------

Just found this amazing poetess this morn. This poem struck me as a great one to post here.
Shows the brilliance of female poets . That women can think deeply and write as well as any man can.-Tyr

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

06-21-2015, 09:00 AM

The Sun Rising
******************************** by John Donne
Busy old fool, unruly sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows and through curtains, call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late schoolboys and sour 'prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the King will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices;
Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

Thy beams so reverend and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink
But that I would not lose her sight so long:
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and, tomorrow late, tell me
Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou left'st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear 'All here in one bed lay'.

She is all states, and all princes I;
Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world's contracted thus;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy centre is, these walls thy sphere.

------------------------------------------------------------------

John Donne was born in London into an old Roman Catholic family at a time when anti-Catholic feeling in England was near its height. He was educated at home by Catholic tutors. He attended both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, as well as Lincoln's Inn as a trainee lawyer, he never took any academic degrees and never practised law. In 1593 his younger brother Henry died in prison after being arrested for harbouring a priest. Somewhere around this time Donne renounced his faith. He read enormously in divinity, medicine, law and the classics and wrote to display his learning and wit. In 1598 he was appointed private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton and sat in Elizabeth's last parliament. In 1601 he secretly married seventeen-year-old Ann More, Lady Egerton's niece. Sir George More had Donne imprisoned for a brief period and dismissed from his post. The next fourteen years were marked by his attempts to live down his shame, and to try to make a living to support his growing family, but depending largely on the charity of friends and his wife's relations.

On the suggestion of James I who approved of the anti-Catholic sentiments of Pseudo-Martyr (1610), Donne took orders in 1615. In due course he was appointed Reader in Divinity at Lincoln's Inn and was deemed a great preacher. His wife died in 1617 aged thirty-three after giving birth to their twelfth child. In 1618 he went as chaplain to the Earl of Doncaster in his embassy to the German princes. His 'Hymn to Christ at the Author's Last Going into Germany', written before the journey, is full of the apprehension of death. In 1621 he was made Dean of St Paul's. His private devotions were published in 1624 and he continued to write sacred poetry almost up to his death. Towards the end of his life he became obsessed with death and preached what was called his own funeral sermon just a few weeks before he died.

The influence of his poetic style was widely felt in the sixteenth century. He tangibly influenced Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan and others, and is deemed the greatest of what John Dryden and Samuel Johnson called the 'metaphysical poets'.

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I am currently keeping a running list of 20 poets to read and study. As I drop one poet off the list I pick another poet up.
This is my newest choice to read and study.
This guy was a genius that influenced many Famous poets born long after he was passed on.. Tyr

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

06-22-2015, 09:33 AM

When I'm Killed
by Robert Graves

When I’m killed, don’t think of me
Buried there in Cambrin Wood,
Nor as in Zion think of me
With the Intolerable Good.
And there’s one thing that I know well,
I’m damned if I’ll be damned to Hell!

So when I’m killed, don’t wait for me,
Walking the dim corridor;
In Heaven or Hell, don’t wait for me,
Or you must wait for evermore.
You’ll find me buried, living-dead
In these verses that you’ve read.

So when I’m killed, don’t mourn for me,
Shot, poor lad, so bold and young,
Killed and gone — don’t mourn for me.
On your lips my life is hung:
O friends and lovers, you can save
Your playfellow from the grave.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Robert Graves was born in 1895 in Wimbledon, a suburb of London. Graves was known as a poet, lecturer and novelist. He was also known as a classicist and a mythographer. Perhaps his first known and revered poems were the poems Groves wrote behind the lines in World War One. He later became known as one of the most superb English language 'Love' poets. He then became recognised as one of the finest love poets writing in the English language.

Members of the poetry, novel writing, historian, and classical scholarly community often feel indebted to the man and his works. Robert Graves was born into an interesting time in history. He actually saw Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee procession at the age of two or three. His family was quite patriotic, educated, strict and upper middle class.He saw his father as an authoritarian. He was not liked by his peers in school, nor did he care much for them. He attended British public school. He feared most of his Masters at the school. When he did seek out company, it was of the same sex and his relationships were clearly same sex in orientation.

Although he had a scholarship secured in the classics at Oxford, he escaped his childhood and Father through leaving for the Great War. Graves married twice, once to Nancy Nicholson, and they had four children, and his second marriage to Beryl Pritchard brought forth four more children. Graves married Nancy Nicholson before the war.
Graves' own poetry and prose is the best source for a description of his war experiences. It suffices to say that Graves never found what he was looking for leaving for war, but rather, terror and madness in the war. He was wounded, left for dead and pronounced dead by his surgeon in the field and his commanding officer in a telegram to his parents but subsequently recovered to read the report of his own demise in The Times. He amazingly recovered and was given home service for the rest of the war.However, like many of his fellow soldiers who were disabled by war, he could not get over the guilt he had leaving the other soldiers to fight without him. Somehow, he insisted he be posted back to the front lines. The military surgeon threatened him with court marshall if he didn’t get off the front. Graves returned to England trained troops, while maintaining contact with his poet friends behind the lines. In this way he was able to save one friend from court martial after he published an antiwar manifesto.

Though their relationship was initially happy and productive (Nancy and Robert worked on a children's book together), the stress of family life, little money and Robert's continual shell-shocked condition caused them troubles. Laura Ridding arriving on the scene finished off their marriage.Laura Riding and Robert Graves' relationship was immensely influential upon both of their lives and careers. After Riding's arrival in England, she began to exert an influence on more than just Graves' writing. Following a sequence of events so crazy that they seem more suitable to fiction than reality (including, for example, Laura Riding leaping from a third floor window and breaking her pelvic bone in three places), Graves abandoned his family and moved with Riding from England to Spain. The events of this period were so momentous that all three biographers that have covered his story, dedicate a large part of their studies to this couple.It's easy to vilify Laura Riding. Graves was but one victim of her controlling personality and her ambition. But then, Graves had his victims too. What cannot be questioned is the value of some of the work that they did together. Much of it remains important to both literary history as well as to scholarship.

In 1943 Robert Graves received the news that his son, David, was missing in action. While he and Nancy held out hope that he would be found alive or that he might have been taken prisoner, later reports suggested otherwise. David, Robert and Nancy learned, had been shot while attempting to single-handedly take out a well-defended enemy position. The chances that he had survived were not good.By 1946 as England and Europe began to survey its post-War state, Graves managed to secure transport for his family back to Majorca. Once safely back there, then other than annual trips to England, occasional visits to the continent and even rarer trips to America, the Graves' made Deya their home for good. After 1948 and the publication of The White Goddess, as Graves' fame and celebrity grew, Graves began a period of discovering muses who provided him with a flesh-and-blood manifestation of his poetic and mythic muse. Some of these relationships were short, others seemed largely innocent and more flirtatious than serious or deeply poetic; however, four were, without doubt, significant to Graves' life and, subsequently, to his work.

Graves' first muse after Nancy Nicholson, Laura Riding and Beryl Graves, the first after he his White Goddess theories, was Judith Bledsoe. Judith was a naïve young girl who found in the older Graves something of a father figure Graves found in her the embodiment of the White Goddess.Graves had many celebrity friends including film stars like Ava Gardner and Ingrid Bergman, fellow writers like T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein. Robert Graves ceased writing after his 80th birthday and his celebrity status slowly began to fade. However, where his own career stopped, the critical and academic industry was just beginning. He died in 1985 in Deja, a Majorcan village that he had moved to and lived in since 1929.

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Graves lived 1895 until 1985. Myself, Ive never read a poem he wrote that was not great or at least very fine!
His influence on poetry was massive IMHO.-Tyr

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

06-23-2015, 02:03 PM

A Dream Within A Dream
------- by Edgar Allan Poe

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow--
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand--
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep--while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

06-24-2015, 02:24 PM

A deep one and a dark one that impressed me greatly.--Tyr
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

De Profundis

--------------------------------- by Georg Trakl

There is a stubble field on which a black rain falls.
There is a tree which, brown, stands lonely here.
There is a hissing wind which haunts deserted huts---
How sad this evening.

Past the village pond
The gentle orphan still gathers scanty ears of corn.
Golden and round her eyes are gazing in the dusk
And her lap awaits the heavenly bridegroom.

Returning home
Shepherds found the sweet body
Decayed in the bramble bush.

A shade I am remote from sombre hamlets.
The silence of God
I drank from the woodland well.

On my forehead cold metal forms.
Spiders look for my heart.
There is a light that fails in my mouth.

At night I found myself upon a heath,
Thick with garbage and the dust of stars.
In the hazel copse
Crystal angels have sounded once more.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

06-25-2015, 09:27 AM

Lucifer in Starlight
----------------by George Meredith

On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose.
Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend
Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened,
Where sinners hugged their spectre of repose.
Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those.
And now upon his western wing he leaned,
Now his huge bulk o'er Afric's sands careened,
Now the black planet shadowed Arctic snows.
Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars
With memory of the old revolt from Awe,
He reached a middle height, and at the stars,
Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank.
Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,
The army of unalterable law.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

06-26-2015, 10:45 AM

Dirge in Woods

----------------------------by George Meredith

A wind sways the pines,
And below
Not a breath of wild air;
Still as the mosses that glow
On the flooring and over the lines
Of the roots here and there.
The pine-tree drops its dead;
They are quiet, as under the sea.
Overhead, overhead
Rushes life in a race,
As the clouds the clouds chase;
And we go,
And we drop like the fruits of the tree,
Even we,
Even so.

LongTermGuy

06-26-2015, 05:54 PM

And in the east,
the birds called
louder to the Czar,
fiercely burdened after the long flight.
The whispers in the springtime,
brought warm incense sensations
sitting outside, frozen beneath the feet of winter,
destroying the wildlife, flowers fallen.
All was alive by day,
But shattered in the evening.
Awkward interactions, the
fishing man, the working blue collars
the lucky ones whose death was no longer myth...............

Sebastian JohnstonLindsay (http://www.poemhunter.com/sebastian-johnstonlindsay/poems/)

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

06-27-2015, 12:20 PM

Lord when the wise men came from farr

---------------------------------------------------- by Sidney Godolphin
LORD when the wise men came from farr
Ledd to thy Cradle by A Starr,
Then did the shepheards too rejoyce,
Instructed by thy Angells voyce,
Blest were the wisemen in their skill,
And shepheards in their harmelesse will.

Wisemen in tracing natures lawes
Ascend unto the highest cause,
Shepheards with humble fearefulnesse
Walke safely, though their light be lesse:
Though wisemen better know the way
It seemes noe honest heart can stray.

Ther is noe merrit in the wise
But love, (the shepheards sacrifice).
Wisemen all wayes of knowledge past,
To th' shepheards wonder come at last,
To know, can only wonder breede,
And not to know, is wonders seede.

A wiseman at the Alter bowes
And offers up his studied vowes
And is received; may not the teares,
Which spring too from a shepheards feares,
And sighs upon his fraylty spent,
Though not distinct, be eloquent?

Tis true, the object sanctifies
All passions which within us rise,
But since noe creature comprehends
The cause of causes, end of ends,
Hee who himselfe vouchsafes to know
Best pleases his creator soe.

When then our sorrowes we applye
To our owne wantes and poverty,
When wee looke up in all distresse
And our owne misery confesse
Sending both thankes and prayers above,
Then though wee do not know, we love.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

06-29-2015, 07:02 PM

Alcidor
------------------------------------ by Anne Kingsmill Finch

While Monarchs in stern Battle strove
For proud Imperial Sway;
Abandon'd to his milder Love,
Within a silent peaceful Grove,
Alcidor careless lay.

Some term'd it cold, unmanly Fear;
Some, Nicety of Sense,
That Drums and Trumpets cou'd not hear,
The sullying Blasts of Powder bear,
Or with foul Camps dispense.

A patient Martyr to their Scorn,
And each ill-fashion'd Jest;
The Youth, who but for Love was born,
Remain'd, and thought it vast Return,
To reign in Cloria's Breast.

But oh! a ruffling Soldier came
In all the Pomp of War:
The Gazettes long had spoke his Fame;
Now Hautboys his Approach proclaim,
And draw in Crouds from far.

Cloria unhappily wou'd gaze;
And as he nearer drew,
The Man of Feather and of Lace
Stopp'd short, and with profound Amaze
Took all her Charms to view.

A Bow, which from Campaigns he brought,
And to his Holsters low,
Herself, and the Spectators taught,
That Her the fairest Nymph he thought,
Of all that form'd the Row.

Next day, ere Phoebus cou'd be seen,
Or any Gate unbarr'd;
At hers, upon th' adjoining Green,
From Ranks, with waving Flags between,
Were soften'd Trumpets heard.

The Noon do's following Treats provide,
In the Pavilion's Shade;
The Neighborhood, and all beside,
That will attend the amorous Pride,
Are welcom'd with the Maid.

Poor Alcidor! thy Hopes are cross'd,
Go perish on the Ground;
Thy Sighs by stronger Notes are toss'd,
Drove back, or in the Passage lost;
Rich Wines thy Tears have drown'd.

In Women's Hearts, the softest Things
Which Nature cou'd devise,
Are yet some harsh, and jarring Strings,
That, when loud Fame, or Profit rings,
Will answer to the Noise

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

06-30-2015, 09:18 PM

VICTOR MARIE HUGO was born in Basancon, February 26, 1802.

His father was a military officer, hence in childhood Victor was not settled in any one locality, but was carried to Elba,
Corsica, Switzerland, and Italy.

In his seventh year he was taken to Paris, where his mother and an old priest superintended his education, and where he
commenced his classical studies in company with an elder brother, Eugene, and a young girl who afterward became his wife.
In 1811, his father having been made ......
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Boaz Asleep
-------------------------------by Victor Hugo

Boaz, overcome with weariness, by torchlight
made his pallet on the threshing floor
where all day he had worked, and now he slept
among the bushels of threshed wheat.

The old man owned wheatfields and barley,
and though he was rich, he was still fair-minded.
No filth soured the sweetness of his well.
No hot iron of torture whitened in his forge.

His beard was silver as a brook in April.
He bound sheaves without the strain of hate
or envy. He saw gleaners pass, and said,
Let handfuls of the fat ears fall to them.

The man's mind, clear of untoward feeling,
clothed itself in candor. He wore clean robes.
His heaped granaries spilled over always
toward the poor, no less than public fountains.

Boaz did well by his workers and by kinsmen.
He was generous, and moderate. Women held him
worthier than younger men, for youth is handsome,
but to him in his old age came greatness.

An old man, nearing his first source, may find
the timelessness beyond times of trouble.
And though fire burned in young men's eyes,
to Ruth the eyes of Boaz shone clear light.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

07-01-2015, 07:59 AM

Exile

BY the sad waters of separation
Where we have wandered by divers ways,
I have but the shadow and imitation
Of the old memorial days.

In music I have no consolation,
No roses are pale enough for me;
The sound of the waters of separation
Surpasseth roses and melody.

By the sad waters of separation
Dimly I hear from an hidden place
The sigh of mine ancient adoration:
Hardly can I remember your face.

If you be dead, no proclamation
Sprang to me over the waste, gray sea:
Living, the waters of separation
Sever for ever your soul from me.

No man knoweth our desolation;
Memory pales of the old delight;
While the sad waters of separation
Bear us on to the ultimate night

by Ernest Dowson

Balu

07-02-2015, 03:29 PM

Dear Robert,
I understand, that you gratified me by your poems, but where is your poem for today?
I am missing it!!! http://www.kolobok.us/smiles/standart/blush2.gif

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

07-02-2015, 06:15 PM

Dear Robert,
I understand, that you gratified me by your poems, but where is your poem for today?
I am missing it!!! http://www.kolobok.us/smiles/standart/blush2.gif

I beg your pardon. True ,I am late to post that poem. I will now do so and thanks !!-- :beer: :beer:--Tyr

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

07-02-2015, 06:23 PM

Because I Could Not Stop For Death
------------------------------------------- by Emily Dickinson

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--

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hope you enjoy this one. Got to run now , busy , busy man I be.. -Tyr

Balu

07-02-2015, 08:54 PM

Because I Could Not Stop For Death
------------------------------------------- by Emily Dickinson

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hope you enjoy this one. Got to run now , busy , busy man I be.. -Tyr

Such a pleasant thing it is to start a new day with your new poem! They are like a fork, attuning me to the positive mood. I can not stop admiring you talent.
Thank you again, Robert!
(Mow time is 4:50 a.m. now.)

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

07-03-2015, 09:58 AM

Poem by Robert Nehls

LIFE'S STORIES

His eyes are dark, but, there's still a spark.
There are canyons in his face.
His lungs are gone and it won't be long,
'Till his heart can't keep the pace.
He's lived three lives, had his share of wives.
The decades have been nine.
There's a soul to bare, with a joy to share.
And he always says, "I'm fine."

He's a wise old man and the whole damn clan,
Likes to hear him tell his tales.
He remembers when as a boy of ten,
He was raising up the sails,
Of his father's boat and he'll always gloat,
"It was hard work for a boy."
"Hell, it was hard for men, but I'd go again,
Just to feel that youthful joy."

With dreams to follow and pride to swallow,
He reached for life with lust.
Following his heart, met his first sweetheart,
On the street he calls, "False Trust."
After one short week, they were heard to speak,
"Until death do us part."
Then, the next two years, thunder, lightning, tears.
And she left with his torn heart.

Lost in grief a while, it was hard to smile.
And he wore his armor well.
Heartless, hurt and laden, but a fair young maiden
Put him under her sweet spell.
Speaking of her dreams, and the gold dust streams
Sparkled in her clear blue eyes.
Making his blood stir, and he followed her
To the land of pastel skies.

Bitter cold up there, but he didn't care.
She could make the hard ice melt.
Then his heart returned, and a fire burned.
True love was what he felt.
She could feel it to and the fever grew,
Like the child in her womb.
But, a family was not meant to be.
And her corpse became it's tomb.

His whole world shattered and nothing mattered.
Streams and canyons echoed pain.
Cursing God and man for the evil plan,
That was driving him insane.
Wandering aimlessly in the open sea,
Of demented souls that quit.
Two long years go by, and he can't deny,
He remembers none of it.

Then at twenty five, well, he comes alive,
And decides to live once more.
Like a broken spell, he walks out of hell,
Passing through life's open door.
Everyone there knows where the story goes,
And the old man kind of grins.
With a little wink, he begins to think,
This is where my life begins.

There was gold out there and he didn't care,
What it took to make it his.
"I'll be rich one day," he was heard to say,
"And that's just the way it is."
Well, he mucked and slaved but he never caved,
So the gold gave up the fight.
There were nuggets found measured by the pound;
Bringing golden dreams in sight.

Just a vagabond who was rich beyond,
The means of any king.
He was young with health and he bathed in wealth,
As the girls began to cling.
Well, he played the field, but he wouldn't yield,
To the pressures of the heart.
There were memories, love was some disease,
That could tear a soul apart.

He was rich it's true, but he also knew,
That you can't buy happiness.
So, he headed down to his old home town,
To what? He could only guess.
It was strange to see the old filigree,
Pressed in frames upon the wall.
Faces lost somehow to the years that now,
Drift into his heart's recall.

Seven years had passed since his father last,
Took a breath upon this earth.
Mother held him tight and to his delight,
He began to feel his worth.
No conditions there, love was everywhere,
Riches far beyond the gold.
So, he bought some land, and he took the hand,
Of fate with a life to mold.

Was a big barn dance, when another chance,
At true love was brought his way.
With her skin so fair, and her golden hair,
He was drawn to Jenny Mae.
Dancing close all night and to his delight,
She allowed a little kiss.
When he dreamed of her, the thought would occur.
There was too much there to miss.

He was ready then, his heart soared again,
And he longed to tie the knot.
Down upon his knee with a marriage plea,
A sweet wife was what he got.
Life brought so much joy when their baby boy,
Had been born out on the farm.
And eventually it was them plus three.
Fate had swung it's loving arm.

There were ups and downs, but the world goes round,
With reunions every year.
And he swells with pride as he holds his bride,
Sitting next to him it's clear,
That we may grow old, but there's always gold,
To share when love abounds.
Laughter all about, life that seems to shout,
Love's the greatest of all sounds.

Tell us more, they say, right up 'till today;
He's reminded where they were.
He includes them all in his tale as tall,
As an ancient Douglas fir.
Jenny holds his hand, ah, this life's so grand.
And the old man kind of grins.
With a little wink, he begins to think.
This is where my life begins.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

07-04-2015, 08:21 AM

A Good Knight In Prison
---------------------------------by William Morris

Wearily, drearily,
Half the day long,
Flap the great banners
High over the stone;
Strangely and eerily
Sounds the wind's song,
Bending the banner-poles.

While, all alone,
Watching the loophole's spark,
Lie I, with life all dark,
Feet tether'd, hands fetter'd
Fast to the stone,
The grim walls, square-letter'd
With prison'd men's groan.

Still strain the banner-poles
Through the wind's song,
Westward the banner rolls
Over my wrong.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

07-05-2015, 08:59 AM

Every day I bear a burden

----------------------------------------by Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi

Every day I bear a burden, and I bear this calamity for a purpose:
I bear the discomfort of cold and December's snow in hope of spring.
Before the fattener-up of all who are lean, I drag this so emaciated body;
Though they expel me from two hundred cities, I bear it for the sake of the love of a prince;
Though my shop and house be laid waste, I bear it in fidelity to a tulip bed.
God's love is a very strong fortress; I carry my soul's baggage inside a fortress.
I bear the arrogance of every stonehearted stranger for the sake of a friend, of one long-suffering;
For the sake of his ruby I dig out mountains and mine; for the sake of that rose-laden one I endure a thorn.
For the sake of those two intoxicating eyes of his, like the intoxicated I endure crop sickness;
For the sake of a quarry not to be contained in a snare, I spread out the snare and decoy of the hunter.
He said, "Will you bear this sorrow till the Resurrection?" Yes, Friend, I bear it, I bear it.
My breast is the Cave and Shams-e Tabrizi is the Companion of the Cave

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi

I lived from 1207-1273. I was from Afghanistan, and am in the Asian category.

My influences include Shams al-Din Tabrizi

Jalal al-Din Rumi was born on September 30, 1207 in Balkh (Afghanistan). His father Baha' Walad was descended from the first caliph Abu Bakr and was influenced by the ideas of Ahmad Ghazali, brother of the famous philosopher. Baha' Walad's sermons were published and still exist as Divine Sciences (Ma'arif). He fled the Mongols with his son in 1219, and it was reported that at Nishapur young Rumi met 'Attar, who gave him a copy of his Book of Mysteries (Asrar-nama). After a pilgrimage to Mecca and other travels, the family went to Rum (Anatolia). Baha' Walad was given an important teaching position in the capital at Konya (Iconium) in 1228 by Seljuk king 'Ala' al-Din Kayqubad (r. 1219-1236) and his vizier Mu'in al-Din. Rumi married and had a son, who later wrote his biography. In 1231 Rumi succeeded his late father as a religious teacher. His father's friend Burhan al-Din arrived and for nine years taught Rumi Sufism. Rumi probably met the philosopher ibn al-Arabi at Damascus.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

07-08-2015, 08:38 AM

Prayer at Sunrise

James Weldon Johnson, 1871 - 1928
.

Now thou art risen, and thy day begun.
How shrink the shrouding mists before thy face,
As up thou spring’st to thy diurnal race!
How darkness chases darkness to the west,
As shades of light on light rise radiant from thy crest!
For thee, great source of strength, emblem of might,
In hours of darkest gloom there is no night.
Thou shinest on though clouds hide thee from sight,
And through each break thou sendest down thy light.

O greater Maker of this Thy great sun,
Give me the strength this one day’s race to run,
Fill me with light, fill me with sun-like strength,
Fill me with joy to rob the day its length.
Light from within, light that will outward shine,
Strength to make strong some weaker heart than mine,
Joy to make glad each soul that feels its touch;
Great Father of the sun, I ask this much.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

07-09-2015, 11:38 AM

Today a double presentation of poems by Henley. Two of my favorites.. -Tyr

The Rain and the Wind
-------------by William Ernest Henley

The rain and the wind, the wind and the rain --
They are with us like a disease:
They worry the heart, they work the brain,
As they shoulder and clutch at the shrieking pane,
And savage the helpless trees.

What does it profit a man to know
These tattered and tumbling skies
A million stately stars will show,
And the ruining grace of the after-glow
And the rush of the wild sunrise?

Ever the rain -- the rain and the wind!
Come, hunch with me over the fire,
Dream of the dreams that leered and grinned,
Ere the blood of the Year got chilled and thinned,
And the death came on desire!
----------------------------------------------------

Between the Dusk of a Summer Night
----by William Ernest Henley

Between the dusk of a summer night
And the dawn of a summer day,
We caught at a mood as it passed in flight,
And we bade it stoop and stay.
And what with the dawn of night began
With the dusk of day was done;
For that is the way of woman and man,
When a hazard has made them one.
Arc upon arc, from shade to shine,
The World went thundering free;
And what was his errand but hers and mine --
The lords of him, I and she?
O, it's die we must, but it's live we can,
And the marvel of earth and sun
Is all for the joy of woman and man
And the longing that makes them one.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

07-10-2015, 06:26 PM

The Vine & Oak, A Fable
-----------------------------by Major Henry Livingston, Jr.

A vine from noblest lineage sprung
And with the choicest clusters hung,
In purple rob'd, reclining lay,
And catch'd the noontide's fervid ray;
The num'rous plants that deck the field
Did all the palm of beauty yield;
Pronounc'd her fairest of their train
And hail'd her empress of the plain.
A neighb'ring oak whose spiry height
In low-hung clouds was hid from sight,
Who dar'd a thousand howling storms;
Conscious of worth, sublimely stood,
The pride and glory of the wood.

He saw her all defenseless lay
To each invading beast a prey,
And wish'd to clasp her in his arms
And bear her far away from harms.
'Twas love -- 'twas tenderness -- 'twas all
That men the tender passion call.

He urg'd his suit but urg'd in vain,
The vine regardless of his pain
Still flirted with each flippant green
With seeing pleas'd, & being seen;
And as the syren Flattery sang
Would o'er the strains ecstatic hang;
Enjoy'd the minutes as they rose
Nor fears her bosom discompose.

But now the boding clouds arise
And scowling darkness veils the skies;
Harsh thunders roar -- red lightnings gleam,
And rushing torrents close the scene.

The fawning, adulating crowd
Who late in thronged xx bow'd
Now left their goddess of a day
To the O'erwhelming flood a prey,
which swell'd a deluge poured around
& tore her helpless from the ground;
Her rifled foliage floated wide
And ruby nectar ting'd the tide.

With eager eyes and heart dismayed
She look'd but look'd in vain for aid.
"And are my lovers fled," she cry'd,
"Who at my feet this morning sigh'd,
"And swore my reign would never end
"While youth and beauty had a friend?
"I am unhappy who believ'd!
"And they detested who deceived!
"Curse on that whim call'd maiden pride
"Which made me shun the name of bride
"When yonder oak confessed his flame
"And woo'd me in fair honor's name.
"But now repentance comes too late
"And all forlorn, I meet my fate."

The oak who safely wav'd above
Look'd down once more with eyes of love
(Love higher wrought with pity join'd
True mark of an exalted mind,)
Declared her coldness could suspend
But not his gen'rous passion end.
Beg'd to renew his am'rous plea,
As warm for union now as he,
To his embraces quick she flew
And felt & gave sensations new.

Enrich'd & graced by the sweet prise
He lifts her tendrils to the skies;
Whilst she, protected and carest,
Sinks in his arms completely blest.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Major Henry Livingston Jr (1748 - 1828) was born into a prominent family in Poughkeepsie, New York. His father was from Scotland and his mother was Dutch. He married in 1774 to Sarah (or Sally) Wells. A year later, right after his first child (Catherine) was born, he joined the American Revolution. Henry suffered greatly from the death of his wife in 1783. This tradgedy left him alone to raise their four children. On the ten year anniversary of his wife's death however, he remarried. He and his second wife (Jane Patterson) had four children together. Then in 1828, at the age of eighty, he died. Some of his decendants have stated that he is the true author of A Visit From St. Nicholas.

Unlike the man who has been recognized by most people as the true author of A Visit From St. Nicholas, Clement Clarke Moore, Henry Livingston was not well known. Most of his peotry was written for himself and his family and therefore was not published. His published works were clever, amusing, funny and good natured. He was an imaginative and creative person who it is hard not to like. His personality is a big part of Donald Foster's argument in Author Unknown in which he states his opinion that Henry Livingston is the true author.

Although Henry Livingston never claimed authorship of A Visit From St. Nicholas many of his decendants, such as his great great great great great grand daughter Mary Van Deusen, are determined to prove that he wrote it. Some of his other works have also been promoted by those who want to prove his authorship.

Biography by: This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License and uses material adapted in whole or in part from the Wikipedia article on Major Henry Livingston Jr.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

07-11-2015, 04:25 PM

Sonnet- Silence

------------------------ by Edgar Allan Poe

There are some qualities- some incorporate things,
That have a double life, which thus is made
A type of that twin entity which springs
From matter and light, evinced in solid and shade.
There is a two-fold Silence- sea and shore-
Body and soul. One dwells in lonely places,
Newly with grass o'ergrown; some solemn graces,
Some human memories and tearful lore,
Render him terrorless: his name's "No More."
He is the corporate Silence: dread him not!
No power hath he of evil in himself;
But should some urgent fate (untimely lot!)
Bring thee to meet his shadow (nameless elf,
That haunteth the lone regions where hath trod
No foot of man,) commend thyself to God!

LongTermGuy

07-11-2015, 09:08 PM

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

07-12-2015, 08:30 PM

Lines Written In Early Spring
---------------------------------- by William Wordsworth

I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And 'tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.

The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure:--
But the least motion which they made
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.

If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature's holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Wordsworth one of the truly great poets ...... One of my favorites. -Tyr

Loralei

07-12-2015, 09:40 PM

I have several of mine, but don't know where to post them.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

07-12-2015, 09:47 PM

i have several of mine, but don't know where to post them.

ok, give me a second.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

07-13-2015, 10:51 PM

The Living Lost

------------------------------ by William Cullen Bryant

Matron! the children of whose love,
Each to his grave, in youth have passed,
And now the mould is heaped above
The dearest and the last!
Bride! who dost wear the widow's veil
Before the wedding flowers are pale!
Ye deem the human heart endures
No deeper, bitterer grief than yours.

Yet there are pangs of keener wo,
Of which the sufferers never speak,
Nor to the world's cold pity show
The tears that scald the cheek,
Wrung from their eyelids by the shame
And guilt of those they shrink to name,
Whom once they loved, with cheerful will,
And love, though fallen and branded, still.

Weep, ye who sorrow for the dead,
Thus breaking hearts their pain relieve;
And graceful are the tears ye shed,
And honoured ye who grieve.

The praise of those who sleep in earth,
The pleasant memory of their worth,
The hope to meet when life is past,
Shall heal the tortured mind at last.

But ye, who for the living lost
That agony in secret bear,
Who shall with soothing words accost
The strength of your despair?
Grief for your sake is scorn for them
Whom ye lament and all condemn;
And o'er the world of spirits lies
A gloom from which ye turn your eyes.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

But ye, who for the living lost
That agony in secret bear,
Who shall with soothing words accost
The strength of your despair?
Grief for your sake is scorn for them
Whom ye lament and all condemn;
And o'er the world of spirits lies
A gloom from which ye turn your eyes.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Offered as a tribute to this nation(so fitting) , sadly now, being sent to its just reward. :guns2:-Tyr

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

07-15-2015, 07:53 AM

RHYMED DISTICHS.
----------------------- by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

RHYMED DISTICHS.

[The Distichs, of which these are given as a
specimen, are about forty in number.]

WHO trusts in God,
Fears not His rod.

THIS truth may be by all believed:
Whom God deceives, is well deceived.

HOW? when? and where?--No answer comes from high;
Thou wait'st for the Because, and yet thou ask'st not Why?

IF the whole is ever to gladden thee,
That whole in the smallest thing thou must see.

WATER its living strength first shows,
When obstacles its course oppose.

TRANSPARENT appears the radiant air,
Though steel and stone in its breast it may bear;
At length they'll meet with fiery power,
And metal and stones on the earth will shower.
------
WHATE'ER a living flame may surround,
No longer is shapeless, or earthly bound.
'Tis now invisible, flies from earth,
And hastens on high to the place of its birth.

1815.*
----------------------------------------------------------------
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born in 1749 in Frankfurt.
From 1765 to 1771 he studied law in Leibzig and Strasbourg
on request of his father. During his time at university he
already earned recognition with his poems and lyric. When
he returned to Frankfurt he practised law and worked on
his career as a poet and writer. In 1773 the Götz von
Berlichingen mit der eisenen Hand was published, making
Goethe a main representative for the Sturm und Drang
movement. Getting a lot of attention and recognition by
the literature world, Goethe is invited to Weimar, where
he took over many different political offices, but still
managed to concentrate on writing. Beside his literature
ambitions, he was also very interested in science, which
was more important to him, than his writing. From 1786 to
1790 he travelled through Italy where he undertook more
scientific researches. In 1794 he befriends Friedrich
Schiller with whom he developed a new style of writing,
which is now know as it's own literature epoch, the
Weimarer Klassik.

In 1908 Goethe finished Faust, between 1811-14 he wrote
his autobiography and in 1831 he finished Faust 2, which
got published posthumously. Goethe used and explored many
different styles in literature and turned out to be an
important personality to the world of literature.

Source: http://www.aboutvienna.org/personalities/goethe.htm

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

07-16-2015, 09:28 AM

A Poison Tree
-----------------------by William Blake

I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I watered it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears:
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine.

And into my garden stole.
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning glad I see,
My foe outstretched beneath the tree
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
O' the wishful thoughts this poem brings to my mind!-Tyr

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Digging
------------------------- by Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pin rest; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

07-17-2015, 09:10 AM

A double today, simply because this poet is in my top ten favorite poets list.
Both are classed as dark poems, a classification that interests me greatly. -Tyr

My Soul is Dark
------------------- by Lord Byron

My soul is dark - Oh! quickly string
The harp I yet can brook to hear;
And let thy gentle fingers fling
Its melting murmurs o'er mine ear.
If in this heart a hope be dear,
That sound shall charm it forth again:
If in these eyes there lurk a tear,
'Twill flow, and cease to burn my brain.

But bid the strain be wild and deep,
Nor let thy notes of joy be first:
I tell thee, minstrel, I must weep,
Or else this heavy heart will burst;
For it hath been by sorrow nursed,
And ached in sleepless silence, long;
And now 'tis doomed to know the worst,
And break at once - or yield to song.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Darkness
-------------------------- by Lord Byron

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chilled into a selfish prayer for light;
And they did live by watchfires—and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings—the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed,
And men were gathered round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other's face;
Happy were those which dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanoes, and their mountain-torch;
A fearful hope was all the world contained;
Forests were set on fire—but hour by hour
They fell and faded—and the crackling trunks
Extinguished with a crash—and all was black.
The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them: some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smiled;
And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and looked up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
With curses cast them down upon the dust,
And gnashed their teeth and howled; the wild birds shrieked,
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawled
And twined themselves among the multitude,
Hissing, but stingless—they were slain for food;
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again;—a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought—and that was death,
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails—men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devoured,
Even dogs assailed their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famished men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the drooping dead
Lured their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answered not with a caress—he died.
The crowd was famished by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place
Where had been heaped a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage: they raked up,
And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other's aspects—saw, and shrieked, and died—
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—
A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirred within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal; as they dropped
They slept on the abyss without a surge—
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The Moon, their mistress, had expired before;
The winds were withered in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perished! Darkness had no need
Of aid from them—She was the Universe!

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

07-18-2015, 09:27 AM

Those Winter Sundays
---------------------------by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My father did the same and did so with pure love and gentleness. I remember my Dad wearing shoes with holes in the bottom an extra year so we kids could have our new shoes for school. Shaving with no shave cream, going without a heavy winter coat, eating last if any food was left to it, etc. . More sacrifices he made but that only matters to we that benefited, we few that remember what he did as he was old and in bad health.
Truth is a true father love his children just as much as any mother ever has. I know I do... --Tyr

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A double presentation today...Tyr

To Nature
--------------------------- by Samuel Coleridge

It may indeed be fantasy when I
Essay to draw from all created things
Deep, heartfelt, inward joy that closely clings;
And trace in leaves and flowers that round me lie
Lessons of love and earnest piety.
So let it be; and if the wide world rings
In mock of this belief, it brings
Nor fear, nor grief, nor vain perplexity.
So will I build my altar in the fields,
And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be,
And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields
Shall be the incense I will yield to Thee,
Thee only God! and thou shalt not despise
Even me, the priest of this poor sacrifice.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

07-19-2015, 09:05 AM

Courage
------------------------------ by Robert William Service

Today I opened wide my eyes,
And stared with wonder and surprise,
To see beneath November skies
An apple blossom peer;
Upon a branch as bleak as night
It gleamed exultant on my sight,
A fairy beacon burning bright
Of hope and cheer.

"Alas!" said I, "poor foolish thing,
Have you mistaken this for Spring?
Behold, the thrush has taken wing,
And Winter's near."
Serene it seemed to lift its head:
"The Winter's wrath I do not dread,
Because I am," it proudly said,
"A Pioneer.

"Some apple blossom must be first,
With beauty's urgency to burst
Into a world for joy athirst,
And so I dare;
And I shall see what none shall see -
December skies gloom over me,
And mock them with my April glee,
And fearless fare.

"And I shall hear what none shall hear -
The hardy robin piping clear,
The Storm King gallop dark and drear
Across the sky;
And I shall know what none shall know -
The silent kisses of the snow,
The Christmas candles' silver glow,
Before I die.

"Then from your frost-gemmed window pane
One morning you will look in vain,
My smile of delicate disdain
No more to see;
But though I pass before my time,
And perish in the grale and grime,
Maybe you'll have a little rhyme
To spare for me."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So much wisdom in this poem.... -Tyr

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

07-20-2015, 06:11 PM

The Pain of Earth
----------------------- by George William Russell

DOES the earth grow grey with grief
For her hero darling fled?
Though her vales let fall no leaf,
In our hearts her tears are shed.

Still the stars laugh on above:
Not to them her grief is said;
Mourning for her hero love
In our hearts the tears are shed.

We her children mourn for him,
Mourn the elder hero dead;
In the twilight grey and dim
In our hearts the tears are shed.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

07-21-2015, 09:16 AM

To the Reader of These Sonnets
---------------------------------------- by Michael Drayton

Into these Loves who but for Passion looks,
At this first sight here let him lay them by
And seek elsewhere, in turning other books,
Which better may his labor satisfy.
No far-fetch'd sigh shall ever wound my breast,
Love from mine eye a tear shall never wring,
Nor in Ah me's my whining sonnets drest;
A libertine, fantasticly I sing.
My verse is the true image of my mind,
Ever in motion, still desiring change,
And as thus to variety inclin'd,
So in all humours sportively I range.
My Muse is rightly of the English strain,
That cannot long one fashion entertain.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

07-22-2015, 06:25 AM

The River of Life

===================== by Thomas Campbell

The more we live, more brief appear
Our life's succeeding stages;
A day to childhood seems a year,
And years like passing ages.

The gladsome current of our youth,
Ere passion yet disorders,
Steals lingering like a river smooth
Along its grassy borders.

But as the careworn cheek grows wan,
And sorrow's shafts fly thicker,
Ye stars, that measure life to man,
Why seem your courses quicker?

When joys have lost their bloom and breath,
And life itself is vapid,
Why, as we reach the Falls of Death
Feel we its tide more rapid?

It may be strange—yet who would change
Time's course to slower speeding,
When one by one our friends have gone,
And left our bosoms bleeding?

Heaven gives our years of fading strength
Indemnifying fleetness;
And those of youth, a seeming length,
Proportion'd to their sweetness.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So much wisdom in this fine poem by Campbell.. Closing stanza says it all methinks. As I am currently at the age of last standing , I see much more clearly now. -Tyr

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

07-23-2015, 11:14 AM

The Country of the Blind

--------------------------------by C. S. Lewis

Hard light bathed them-a whole nation of eyeless men,
Dark bipeds not aware how they were maimed. A long
Process, clearly, a slow curse,
Drained through centuries, left them thus.

At some transitional stage, then, a luckless few,
No doubt, must have had eyes after the up-to-date,
Normal type had achieved snug
Darkness, safe from the guns of heavn;

Whose blind mouths would abuse words that belonged to their
Great-grandsires, unabashed, talking of light in some
Eunuch'd, etiolated,
Fungoid sense, as a symbol of

Abstract thoughts. If a man, one that had eyes, a poor
Misfit, spoke of the grey dawn or the stars or green-
Sloped sea waves, or admired how
Warm tints change in a lady's cheek,

None complained he had used words from an alien tongue,
None question'd. It was worse. All would agree 'Of course,'
Came their answer. "We've all felt
Just like that." They were wrong. And he

Knew too much to be clear, could not explain. The words --
Sold, raped flung to the dogs -- now could avail no more;
Hence silence. But the mouldwarps,
With glib confidence, easily

Showed how tricks of the phrase, sheer metaphors could set
Fools concocting a myth, taking the worlds for things.
Do you think this a far-fetched
Picture? Go then about among

Men now famous; attempt speech on the truths that once,
Opaque, carved in divine forms, irremovable,
Dear but dear as a mountain-
Mass, stood plain to the inward eye.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
How did this author know what we would be encountering now?
Did he have such foresight or divining spirit or just know how history repeats itself because man's arrogance so often knows no bounds? Or perhaps a combination of both
Last two stanza's pure gold and entire poem is epic and brilliant writing!-Tyr

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

07-24-2015, 09:44 AM

Across the Sea Along the Shore
-------------------------------- by Arthur Hugh Clough

Across the sea, along the shore,
In numbers more and ever more,
From lonely hut and busy town,
The valley through, the mountain down,
What was it ye went out to see,
Ye silly folk Galilee?
The reed that in the wind doth shake?
The weed that washes in the lake?
The reeds that waver, the weeds that float?
A young man preaching in a boat.
What was it ye went out to hear
By sea and land from far and near?
A teacher? Rather seek the feet
Of those who sit in Moses' seat.
Go humbly seek, and bow to them,
Far off in great Jerusalem.
From them that in her courts ye saw,
Her perfect doctors of the law,
What is it came ye here to note?
A young man preaching in a boat.

A prophet! Boys and women weak!
Declare, or cease to rave;
Whence is it he hath learned to speak?
Say, who his doctrine gave?
A prophet? Prophet wherefore he
Of all in Israel tribes?
He teacheth with authority,
And not as do the Scribes.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

07-25-2015, 09:16 AM

Time of Roses
------------------------------by Thomas Hood

It was not in the Winter
Our loving lot was cast;
It was the time of roses—
We pluck'd them as we pass'd!

That churlish season never frown'd
On early lovers yet:
O no—the world was newly crown'd
With flowers when first we met!

'Twas twilight, and I bade you go,
But still you held me fast;
It was the time of roses—
We pluck'd them as we pass'd!

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

07-26-2015, 09:30 AM

The Gods Of Greece
-------------------------------------- by Friedrich von Schiller

Ye in the age gone by,
Who ruled the world--a world how lovely then!--
And guided still the steps of happy men
In the light leading-strings of careless joy!
Ah, flourished then your service of delight!
How different, oh, how different, in the day
When thy sweet fanes with many a wreath were bright,
O Venus Amathusia!

Then, through a veil of dreams
Woven by song, truth's youthful beauty glowed,
And life's redundant and rejoicing streams
Gave to the soulless, soul--where'r they flowed
Man gifted nature with divinity
To lift and link her to the breast of love;
All things betrayed to the initiate eye
The track of gods above!

Where lifeless--fixed afar,
A flaming ball to our dull sense is given,
Phoebus Apollo, in his golden car,
In silent glory swept the fields of heaven!
On yonder hill the Oread was adored,
In yonder tree the Dryad held her home;
And from her urn the gentle Naiad poured
The wavelet's silver foam.

Yon bay, chaste Daphne wreathed,
Yon stone was mournful Niobe's mute cell,
Low through yon sedges pastoral Syrinx breathed,
And through those groves wailed the sweet Philomel,
The tears of Ceres swelled in yonder rill--
Tears shed for Proserpine to Hades borne;
And, for her lost Adonis, yonder hill
Heard Cytherea mourn!--

Heaven's shapes were charmed unto
The mortal race of old Deucalion;
Pyrrha's fair daughter, humanly to woo,
Came down, in shepherd-guise, Latona's son
Between men, heroes, gods, harmonious then
Love wove sweet links and sympathies divine;
Blest Amathusia, heroes, gods, and men,
Equals before thy shrine!

Not to that culture gay,
Stern self-denial, or sharp penance wan!
Well might each heart be happy in that day--
For gods, the happy ones, were kin to man!
The beautiful alone the holy there!
No pleasure shamed the gods of that young race;
So that the chaste Camoenae favoring were,
And the subduing grace!

A palace every shrine;
Your sports heroic;--yours the crown
Of contests hallowed to a power divine,
As rushed the chariots thundering to renown.
Fair round the altar where the incense breathed,
Moved your melodious dance inspired; and fair
Above victorious brows, the garland wreathed
Sweet leaves round odorous hair!

The lively Thyrsus-swinger,
And the wild car the exulting panthers bore,
Announced the presence of the rapture-bringer--
Bounded the Satyr and blithe Faun before;
And Maenads, as the frenzy stung the soul,
Hymned in their maddening dance, the glorious wine--
As ever beckoned to the lusty bowl
The ruddy host divine!

Before the bed of death
No ghastly spectre stood--but from the porch
Of life, the lip--one kiss inhaled the breath,
And the mute graceful genius lowered a torch.
The judgment-balance of the realms below,
A judge, himself of mortal lineage, held;
The very furies at the Thracian's woe,
Were moved and music-spelled.

In the Elysian grove
The shades renewed the pleasures life held dear:
The faithful spouse rejoined remembered love,
And rushed along the meads the charioteer;
There Linus poured the old accustomed strain;
Admetus there Alcestis still could greet; his
Friend there once more Orestes could regain,
His arrows--Philoctetes!

More glorious than the meeds
That in their strife with labor nerved the brave,
To the great doer of renowned deeds
The Hebe and the heaven the Thunderer gave.
Before the rescued rescuer [10] of the dead,
Bowed down the silent and immortal host;
And the twain stars [11] their guiding lustre shed,
On the bark tempest-tossed!

Art thou, fair world, no more?
Return, thou virgin-bloom on Nature's face;
Ah, only on the minstrel's magic shore,
Can we the footstep of sweet fable trace!
The meadows mourn for the old hallowing life;
Vainly we search the earth of gods bereft;
Where once the warm and living shapes were rife,
Shadows alone are left!

Cold, from the north, has gone
Over the flowers the blast that killed their May;
And, to enrich the worship of the one,
A universe of gods must pass away!
Mourning, I search on yonder starry steeps,
But thee no more, Selene, there I see!
And through the woods I call, and o'er the deeps,
And--Echo answers me!

Deaf to the joys she gives--
Blind to the pomp of which she is possessed--
Unconscious of the spiritual power that lives
Around, and rules her--by our bliss unblessed--
Dull to the art that colors or creates,
Like the dead timepiece, godless nature creeps
Her plodding round, and, by the leaden weights,
The slavish motion keeps.

To-morrow to receive
New life, she digs her proper grave to-day;
And icy moons with weary sameness weave
From their own light their fulness and decay.
Home to the poet's land the gods are flown,
Light use in them that later world discerns,
Which, the diviner leading-strings outgrown,
On its own axle turns.

Home! and with them are gone
The hues they gazed on and the tones they heard;
Life's beauty and life's melody:--alone
Broods o'er the desolate void, the lifeless word;
Yet rescued from time's deluge, still they throng
Unseen the Pindus they were wont to cherish:
All, that which gains immortal life in song,
To mortal life must perish!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I have always loved this great poem. Especially this stanza..-Tyr

Before the bed of death
No ghastly spectre stood--but from the porch
Of life, the lip--one kiss inhaled the breath,
And the mute graceful genius lowered a torch.
The judgment-balance of the realms below,
A judge, himself of mortal lineage, held;
The very furies at the Thracian's woe,
Were moved and music-spelled.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

07-27-2015, 05:55 PM

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH was born at Cockermouth, Cumberland County, England, April 7, 1770, and he died on April 28, 1850. He was buried by the side of his daughter in the beautiful churchyard of Grasmere.

His father was law agent to Sir James Lowther, afterward Earl of Lonsdale, but he died when William
was in his seventh year.

The poet attended school first at Hawkshead School, then at Cambridge University. William was also
entered at St. Johns in 1787. Having finished his academical course, Wordsworth, in 1790, in company with
Mr. Robert James, a fellow-student, made a tour on the continent. With this friend Wordsworth made a
tour in North Wales the following year, after taking his degree in college. He was again in France
toward the close of the year 1791, and remained in that country about a twelvemonth. He had hailed
the French Revolution with feelings of enthusiastic admiration.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive
But to be young was very heaven.

A young friend, Raisley Calvert, dying in 1795, left him a sum. A further sum came to him as a part
of the estate of his father, who died intestate; and with this small competence Wordsworth devoted
himself to study and seclusion.

In 1793, in his twenty-third year, he appeared before the world as an author, in "Descriptive Sketches"
and "The Evening Walk." The sketches were made from his tour in Switzerland with his friend, and the Walk
was among the mountains of Westmoreland.

In 1795 Wordsworth and his sister were living at Racedown Lodge, in Somersetshire, where, in 1797,
they were visited by Coleridge. The meeting was mutually pleasant, and a life-long friendship was the
result. The intimate relations thus established induced Wordsworth and his sister to change their home
for a residence near Coleridge, at Alfoxen, near Neither Stowey. In this new home the poet composed
many of his lighter poems, also the "Borderers," a tragedy, which was rejected by the Covent Garden
Theatre. In 1797 appeared his "Lyrical Ballads," which also contained Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner."

In 1798, in company with his sister and Coleridge, he went to Germany, where he spent some time at
Hamburg, Ratzeburg and Goslar. Returning to England, he took up his residence at Grasmere, in
Westmoreland. In 1800 he reprinted his "Lyrical Ballads" with some additions, making two volumes.
Two years later he married Mary Hutchinson, to whom he addressed, the beautiful lines, "She was
a Phantom of Delight." In 1802, Wordsworth, with his sister and his friend Coleridge, visited Scotland.
This visit formed one of the most important periods of his literary life, as it led to the composition
of some of his finest lighter poems. In 1805 he completed the "Prelude, or Growth of my own Mind,
" a poem written in blank verse, but not published till after the author's death. In the same year
he also wrote his "Waggoner," but did not publish it till in 1819. At this time he purchased a cottage
and small estate at the head of Ulleswater, Lord Lonsdale generously assisting him. In 1807 he published
two volumes of "Poems."

In the spring of 1813 he removed from Grasmere to Royal Mount, where he remained for the rest of his life, a period of thirty-seven years. Here were passed his brightest days. He enjoyed retirement and almost perfect happiness, as seen in his lines:

Long have I loved what I behold,
The night that calms, the day that cheers;
The common growth of mother-earth
Suffices me--her tears, her mirth,
Her humblest mirth and tears.

The dragon's wing, the magic ring,
I shall not covet for my dower,
If I along that lowly way
With sympathetic heart may stray,
And with a soul of power.

At the same time he commenced to write poems of a higher order, thus greatly extending the circle of
his admirers. In 1814 he published "The Excursion," a philosophical poem in blank verse. By viewing man in connection with external nature, the poet blends his metaphysics with pictures of life and scenery. To build up and strengthen the powers of the mind, in contrast to the operations of sense, was ever his object. Like Bacon, Wordsworth would rather have believed all the fables in the Talmud and Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a mind--or that mind does not, by its external symbols, speak to the human heart. He lived under the habitual away of nature:

To me the meanest flower that blows can, give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

The removal of the poet to Rydal was marked by an incident of considerable importance in his personal
history. Through the influence of the Earl of Lonsdale, he was appointed distributor of stamps in the
county of Westmoreland, which added greatly to his income without engrossing all of his time. He was
now placed beyond the frowns of Fortune--if Fortune can ever be said to have frowned on one so independent of her smiles. The subsequent works of the poet were numerous--"The White Doe of Rylstone," a romantic narrative poem, yet colored with his peculiar genius; "Sonnets on the River Duddon" "The Waggoner;" "Peter Bell;" "Ecclesiastical Sketches;" "Yarrow Revisited," and others. His fame was extending rapidly. The universities of Durham and Oxford conferred academic honors upon him. Upon the death of his friend Southey, in 1843, he was made Poet Laureate of England, and the crown gave him a pension of per annum. Thus his income was increased and honors were showered upon him, making glad the closing years of his life. But sadness found its way into his household in 1847, caused by the death of his only daughter, Dora, then Mrs. Quillinan. Wordsworth survived the shock but three years, having reached the advanced age of eighty, always enjoying robust health and writing his poems in the open air. He died in 1850, on the anniversary of St. George, the patron saint of England.

Biography from: http://www.2020site.org/poetry/index.html

Lines Written In Early Spring
------------------------------------------------- by William Wordsworth

I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And 'tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.

The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure:--
But the least motion which they made
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.

If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature's holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

07-28-2015, 08:03 AM

Time and Grief
----------------------------------------- by William Lisle Bowles

O TIME! who know'st a lenient hand to lay
Softest on sorrow's wound, and slowly thence
(Lulling to sad repose the weary sense)
The faint pang stealest unperceived away;
On thee I rest my only hope at last,
And think, when thou hast dried the bitter tear
That flows in vain o'er all my soul held dear,
I may look back on every sorrow past,
And meet life's peaceful evening with a smile:
As some lone bird, at day's departing hour,
Sings in the sunbeam, of the transient shower
Forgetful, though its wings are wet the while:--
Yet ah! how much must this poor heart endure,
Which hopes from thee, and thee alone, a cure!

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

07-29-2015, 09:48 AM

Lost Love
--------------------------------------by Robert Graves

His eyes are quickened so with grief,
He can watch a grass or leaf
Every instant grow; he can
Clearly through a flint wall see,
Or watch the startled spirit flee
From the throat of a dead man.
Across two counties he can hear
And catch your words before you speak.
The woodlouse or the maggot's weak
Clamour rings in his sad ear,
And noise so slight it would surpass
Credence--drinking sound of grass,
Worm talk, clashing jaws of moth
Chumbling holes in cloth;
The groan of ants who undertake
Gigantic loads for honour's sake
(Their sinews creak, their breath comes thin);
Whir of spiders when they spin,
And minute whispering, mumbling, sighs
Of idle grubs and flies.
This man is quickened so with grief,
He wanders god-like or like thief
Inside and out, below, above,
Without relief seeking lost love.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

07-30-2015, 08:55 AM

Senlin: His Dark Origins --------------------------------by Conrad Aiken
1

Senlin sits before us, and we see him.
He smokes his pipe before us, and we hear him.
Is he small, with reddish hair,
Does he light his pipe with meditative stare,
And a pointed flame reflected in both eyes?
Is he sad and happy and foolish and wise?
Did no one see him enter the doors of the city,
Looking above him at the roofs and trees and skies?
'I stepped from a cloud', he says, 'as evening fell;
I walked on the sound of a bell;
I ran with winged heels along a gust;
Or is it true that I laughed and sprang from dust? . . .
Has no one, in a great autumnal forest,
When the wind bares the trees,
Heard the sad horn of Senlin slowly blown?
Has no one, on a mountain in the spring,
Heard Senlin sing?
Perhaps I came alone on a snow-white horse,—
Riding alone from the deep-starred night.
Perhaps I came on a ship whose sails were music,—
Sailing from moon or sun on a river of light.'

He lights his pipe with a pointed flame.
'Yet, there were many autumns before I came,
And many springs. And more will come, long after
There is no horn for me, or song, or laughter.

The city dissolves about us, and its walls
Become an ancient forest. There is no sound
Except where an old twig tires and falls;
Or a lizard among the dead leaves crawls;
Or a flutter is heard in darkness along the ground.

Has Senlin become a forest? Do we walk in Senlin?
Is Senlin the wood we walk in, —ourselves,—the world?
Senlin! we cry . . . Senlin! again . . . No answer,
Only soft broken echoes backward whirled . . .

Yet we would say: this is no wood at all,
But a small white room with a lamp upon the wall;
And Senlin, before us, pale, with reddish hair,
Lights his pipe with a meditative stare.

2

Senlin, walking beside us, swings his arms
And turns his head to look at walls and trees.
The wind comes whistling from shrill stars of winter,
The lights are jewels, black roots freeze.
'Did I, then, stretch from the bitter earth like these,
Reaching upward with slow and rigid pain
To seek, in another air, myself again?'

(Immense and solitary in a desert of rocks
Behold a bewildered oak
With white clouds screaming through its leafy brain.)
'Or was I the single ant, or tinier thing,
That crept from the rocks of buried time
And dedicated its holy life to climb
From atom to beetling atom, jagged grain to grain,
Patiently out of the darkness we call sleep
Into a hollow gigantic world of light
Thinking the sky to be its destined shell,
Hoping to fit it well!—'

The city dissolves about us, and its walls
Are mountains of rock cruelly carved by wind.
Sand streams down their wasting sides, sand
Mounts upward slowly about them: foot and hand
We crawl and bleed among them! Is this Senlin?

In the desert of Senlin must we live and die?
We hear the decay of rocks, the crash of boulders,
Snarling of sand on sand. 'Senlin!' we cry.
'Senlin!' again . . . Our shadows revolve in silence
Under the soulless brilliance of blue sky.

Yet we would say: there are no rocks at all,
Nor desert of sand . . . here by a city wall
White lights jewell the evening, black roots freeze,
And Senlin turns his head to look at trees.

3

It is evening, Senlin says, and in the evening,
By a silent shore, by a far distant sea,
White unicorns come gravely down to the water.
In the lilac dusk they come, they are white and stately,
Stars hang over the purple waveless sea;
A sea on which no sail was ever lifted,
Where a human voice was never heard.
The shadows of vague hills are dark on the water,
The silent stars seem silently to sing.
And gravely come white unicorns down to the water,
One by one they come and drink their fill;
And daisies burn like stars on the darkened hill.

It is evening Senlin says, and in the evening
The leaves on the trees, abandoned by the light,
Look to the earth, and whisper, and are still.
The bat with horned wings, tumbling through the darkness,
Breaks the web, and the spider falls to the ground.
The starry dewdrop gathers upon the oakleaf,
Clings to the edge, and falls without a sound.
Do maidens spread their white palms to the starlight
And walk three steps to the east and clearly sing?
Do dewdrops fall like a shower of stars from willows?
Has the small moon a ghostly ring? . . .
White skeletons dance on the moonlit grass,
Singing maidens are buried in deep graves,
The stars hang over a sea like polished glass . . .
And solemnly one by one in the darkness there
Neighing far off on the haunted air
White unicorns come gravely down to the water.

No silver bells are heard. The westering moon
Lights the pale floors of caverns by the sea.
Wet weed hangs on the rock. In shimmering pools
Left on the rocks by the receding sea
Starfish slowly turn their white and brown
Or writhe on the naked rocks and drown.
Do sea-girls haunt these caves—do we hear faint singing?
Do we hear from under the sea a faint bell ringing?
Was that a white hand lifted among the bubbles
And fallen softly back?
No, these shores and caverns are all silent,
Dead in the moonlight; only, far above,
On the smooth contours of these headlands,
White amid the eternal black,
One by one in the moonlight there
Neighing far off on the haunted air
The unicorns come down to the sea.

4

Senlin, walking before us in the sunlight,
Bending his small legs in a peculiar way,
Goes to his work with thoughts of the universe.
His hands are in his pockets, he smokes his pipe,
He is happily conscious of roofs and skies;
And, without turning his head, he turns his eyes
To regard white horses drawing a small white hearse.
The sky is brilliant between the roofs,
The windows flash in the yellow sun,
On the hard pavement ring the hoofs,
The light wheels softly run.
Bright particles of sunlight fall,
Quiver and flash, gyrate and burn,
Honey-like heat flows down the wall,
The white spokes dazzle and turn.

Senlin, walking before us in the sunlight,
Regards the hearse with an introspective eye.
'Is it my childhood there,' he asks,
'Sealed in a hearse and hurrying by?'
He taps his trowel against a stone;
The trowel sings with a silver tone.

'Nevertheless I know this well.
Bury it deep and toll a bell,
Bury it under land or sea,
You cannot bury it save in me.'

It is as if his soul had become a city,
With noisily peopled streets, and through these streets
Senlin himself comes driving a small white hearse . . .
'Senlin!' we cry. He does not turn his head.
But is that Senlin?—Or is this city Senlin,—
Quietly watching the burial of the dead?
Dumbly observing the cortège of its dead?
Yet we would say that all this is but madness:
Around a distant corner trots the hearse.
And Senlin walks before us in the sunlight
Happily conscious of his universe.

5

In the hot noon, in an old and savage garden,
The peach-tree grows. Its cruel and ugly roots
Rend and rifle the silent earth for moisture.
Above, in the blue, hang warm and golden fruits.
Look, how the cancerous roots crack mould and stone!
Earth, if she had a voice, would wail her pain.
Is she the victim, or is the tree the victim?
Delicate blossoms opened in the rain,
Black bees flew among them in the sunlight,
And sacked them ruthlessly; and no a bird
Hangs, sharp-eyed, in the leaves, and pecks the fruit;
And the peach-tree dreams, and does not say a word.
. . . Senlin, tapping his trowel against a stone,
Observes this tree he planted: it is his own.

'You will think it strange,' says Senlin, 'but this tree
Utters profound things in this garden;
And in its silence speaks to me.
I have sensations, when I stand beneath it,
As if its leaves looked at me, and could see;
And those thin leaves, even in windless air,
Seem to be whispering me a choral music,
Insubstantial but debonair.

"Regard," they seem to say,
"Our idiot root, which going its brutal way
Has cracked your garden wall!
Ugly, is it not?
A desecration of this place . . .
And yet, without it, could we exist at all?"
Thus, rustling with importance, they seem to me
To make their apology;
Yet, while they apologize,
Ask me a wary question with their eyes.
Yes, it is true their origin is low—
Brutish and dull and cruel . . . and it is true
Their roots have cracked the wall. But do we know
The leaves less cruel—the root less beautiful?
Sometimes it seems as if there grew
In the dull garden of my mind
A tree like this, which, singing with delicate leaves,
Yet cracks the wall with cruel roots and blind.
Sometimes, indeed, it appears to me
That I myself am such a tree . . .'

. . . And as we hear from Senlin these strange words
So, slowly, in the sunlight, he becomes this tree:
And among the pleasant leaves hang sharp-eyed birds
While cruel roots dig downward secretly.

6

Rustling among his odds and ends of knowledge
Suddenly, to his wonder, Senlin finds
How Cleopatra and Senebtisi
Were dug by many hands from ancient tombs.
Cloth after scented cloth the sage unwinds:
Delicious to see our futile modern sunlight
Dance like a harlot among these Dogs and Dooms!

First, the huge pyramid, with rock on rock
Bloodily piled to heaven; and under this
A gilded cavern, bat festooned;
And here in rows on rows, with gods about them,
Cloudily lustrous, dim, the sacred coffins,
Silver starred and crimson mooned.

What holy secret shall we now uncover?
Inside the outer coffin is a second;
Inside the second, smaller, lies a third.
This one is carved, and like a human body;
And painted over with fish and bull and bird.
Here are men walking stiffly in procession,
Blowing horns or lifting spears.
Where do they march to? Where do they come from?
Soft whine of horns is in our ears.

Inside, the third, a fourth . . . and this the artist,—
A priest, perhaps—did most to make resemble
The flesh of her who lies within.
The brown eyes widely stare at the bat-hung ceiling.
The hair is black, The mouth is thin.
Princess! Secret of life! We come to praise you!
The torch is lowered, this coffin too we open,
And the dark air is drunk with musk and myrrh.
Here are the thousand white and scented wrappings,
The gilded mask, and jeweled eyes, of her.

And now the body itself, brown, gaunt, and ugly,
And the hollow scull, in which the brains are withered,
Lie bare before us. Princess, is this all?
Something there was we asked that is not answered.
Soft bats, in rows, hang on the lustered wall.

And all we hear is a whisper sound of music,
Of brass horns dustily raised and briefly blown,
And a cry of grief; and men in a stiff procession
Marching away and softly gone.

7

'And am I then a pyramid?' says Senlin,
'In which are caves and coffins, where lies hidden
Some old and mocking hieroglyph of flesh?
Or am I rather the moonlight, spreading subtly
Above those stones and times?
Or the green blade of grass that bravely grows
Between to massive boulders of black basalt
Year after year, and fades and blows?

Senlin, sitting before us in the lamplight,
Laughs, and lights his pipe. The yellow flame
Minutely flares in his eyes, minutely dwindles.
Does a blade of grass have Senlin for a name?
Yet we would say that we have seen him somewhere,
A tiny spear of green beneath the blue,
Playing his destiny in a sun-warmed crevice
With the gigantic fates of frost and dew.

Does a spider come and spin his gossamer ladder
Rung by silver rung,
Chaining it fast to Senlin? Its faint shadow
Flung, waveringly, where his is flung?
Does a raindrop dazzle starlike down his length
Trying his futile strength?
A snowflake startle him? The stars defeat him?
Through aeons of dusk have birds above him sung?
Time is a wind, says Senlin; time, like music,
Blows over us its mournful beauty, passes,
And leaves behind a shadowy reflection,—
A helpless gesture of mist above the grasses.

8

In cold blue lucid dusk before the sunrise,
One yellow star sings over a peak of snow,
And melts and vanishes in a light like roses.
Through slanting mist, black rocks appear and glow.

The clouds flow downward, slowly as grey glaciers,
Or up to a pale rose-azure pass.
Blue streams tinkle down from snow to boulders,
From boulders to white grass.

Icicles on the pine tree melt
And softly flash in the sun:
In long straight lines the star-drops fall
One by one.

Is a voice heard while the shadows still are long,
Borne slowly down on the sparkling air?
Is a thin bell heard from the peak of silence?
Is someone among the high snows there?

Where the blue stream flows coldly among the meadows
And mist still clings to rock and tree
Senlin walks alone; and from that twilight
Looks darkly up, to see

The calm unmoving peak of snow-white silence,
The rocks aflame with ice, the rose-blue sky . . .
Ghost-like, a cloud descends from twinkling ledges,
To nod before the dwindling sun and die.

'Something there is,' says Senlin, 'in that mountain,
Something forgotten now, that once I knew . . .'
We walk before a sun-tipped peak in silence,
Our shadows descend before us, long and blue.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

07-31-2015, 08:36 AM

Imitation
--------------------------------------------by Alexander Pushkin

I saw the Death, and she was seating
By quiet entrance at my own home,
I saw the doors were opened in my tomb,
And there, and there my hope was a-flitting
I'll die, and traces of my past
In days of future will be never sighted,
Look of my eyes will never be delighted
By dear look, in my existence last.

Farewell the somber world, where, precipice above,
My gloomy road was a-streaming,
Where life for me was never cheering,
Where I was loving, having not to love!
The dazzling heavens' azure curtain,
Beloved hills, the brook's enchanting dance,
You, mourn -- the inspiration's chance,
You, peaceful shades of wilderness, uncertain,
And all -- farewell, farewell at once.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

08-01-2015, 09:37 AM

The Lost Legion
-------------------------------------by Rudyard Kipling

1895

There's a Legion that never was listed,
That carries no colours or crest,
But, split in a thousand detachments,
Is breaking the road for the rest.
Our fathers they left us their blessing --
They taught us, and groomed us, and crammed;
But we've shaken the Clubs and the Messes
To go and find out and be damned
(Dear boys!),
To go and get shot and be damned.

So some of us chivvy the slaver,
And some of us cherish the black,
And some of us hunt on the Oil Coast,
And some on the Wallaby track:
And some of us drift to Sarawak,
And some of us drift up The Fly,
And some share our tucker with tigers,
And some with the gentle Masai,
(Dear boys!),
Take tea with the giddy Masai.

We've painted The Islands vermilion,
We've pearled on half-shares in the Bay,
We've shouted on seven-ounce nuggets,
We've starved on a Seedeeboy's pay;
We've laughed at the world as we found it, --
Its women and cities and men --
From Sayyid Burgash in a tantrum
To the smoke-reddened eyes of Loben,
(Dear boys!),
We've a little account with Loben.

The ends of the Farth were our portion,
The ocean at large was our share.
There was never a skirmish to windward
But the Leaderless Legion was there:
Yes, somehow and somewhere and always
We were first when the trouble began,
From a lottery-row in Manila,
To an I. D. B. race on the Pan
(Dear boys!),
With the Mounted Police on the Pan.

We preach in advance of the Army,
We skirmish ahead of the Church,
With never a gunboat to help us
When we're scuppered and left in the lurch.
But we know as the cartridges finish,
And we're filed on our last little shelves,
That the Legion that never was listed
Will send us as good as ourselves
(Good men!),
Five hundred as good as ourselves!

Then a health (we must drink it in whispers),
To our wholly unauthorized horde --

To the line of our dusty foreloopers,
The Gentlemen Rovers abroad --
Yes, a health to ourselves ere we scatter,
For the steamer won't wait for the train,
And the Legion that never was listed
Goes back into quarters again!
'Regards!
Goes back under canvas again.
Hurrah!
The swag and the billy again.
Here's how!
The trail and the packhorse again.
Salue!
The trek and the laager again!
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From 120 years ago, this fantastic poem exhibits the so much of the character that made Britain the number on force and great empire in the world.
Speaks of deep duty, great courage and acceptance of taming much of the great brutality in the world, (by greater force of will, and temporarily greater brutality to get the job done).
The Western world now forgets(much to our sorrow) that to defeat Evil one has to use greater force and often greater brutality for a short period to end the struggle sooner.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

08-02-2015, 12:22 PM

Sonnet 02: Time Does Not Bring Relief; You All Have Lied
--------------------------------------------------------by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year's bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide

There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,—so with his memory they brim
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, "There is no memory of him here!"
And so stand stricken, so remembering him!

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

08-03-2015, 06:26 PM

The Young Soldier
-------------------------------by Wilfred Owen

It is not death
Without hereafter
To one in dearth
Of life and its laughter,

Nor the sweet murder
Dealt slow and even
Unto the martyr
Smiling at heaven:

It is the smile
Faint as a (waning) myth,
Faint, and exceeding small
On a boy's murdered mouth.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

08-04-2015, 10:13 AM

To Outer Nature
--------------------------- by Thomas Hardy

SHOW thee as I thought thee
When I early sought thee,
Omen-scouting,
All undoubting
Love alone had wrought thee--

Wrought thee for my pleasure,
Planned thee as a measure
For expounding
And resounding
Glad things that men treasure.

O for but a moment
Of that old endowment--
Light to gaily
See thy daily
Irisиd embowment!

But such readorning
Time forbids with scorning--
Makes me see things
Cease to be things
They were in my morning.

Fad'st thou, glow-forsaken,
Darkness-overtaken!
Thy first sweetness,
Radiance, meetness,
None shall reawaken.

Why not sempiternal
Thou and I? Our vernal
Brightness keeping,
Time outleaping;
Passed the hodiernal!

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

08-05-2015, 08:46 AM

A Lost Angel
-------------------------------------------- by Ellis Parker Butler

When first we met she seemed so white
I feared her;
As one might near a spirit bright
I neared her;
An angel pure from heaven above
I dreamed her,
And far too good for human love
I deemed her.
A spirit free from mortal taint
I thought her,
And incense as unto a saint
I brought her.

Well, incense burning did not seem
To please her,
And insolence I feared she’d deem
To squeeze her;
Nor did I dare for that same why
To kiss her,
Lest, shocked, she’d cause my eager eye
To miss her.
I sickened thinking of some way
To win her,
When lo! she asked me, one fine day,
To dinner!

Twas thus that made of common flesh
I found her,
And in a mortal lover’s mesh
I wound her.
Embraces, kisses, loving looks
I gave her,
And buying bon-bons, flowers and books,
I save her;
For her few honest, human taints
I love her,
Nor would I change for all the saints
Above her
Those eyes, that little face, that so
Endear her,
And all the human joy I know
When near her;
And I am glad, when to my breast
I press her,
She’s just a woman, like the rest,
God bless her!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

"And I am glad, when to my breast
I press her,
She’s just a woman, like the rest,
God bless her!"

When you so dearly love your wife the--"like all the rest"-- never applies.
To find that treasure, that person is a wonderful blessing. I now know...---Tyr

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

08-06-2015, 07:31 PM

Night Journey
------------------------by Theodore Roethke

Now as the train bears west,
Its rhythm rocks the earth,
And from my Pullman berth
I stare into the night
While others take their rest.
Bridges of iron lace,
A suddenness of trees,
A lap of mountain mist
All cross my line of sight,
Then a bleak wasted place,
And a lake below my knees.
Full on my neck I feel
The straining at a curve;
My muscles move with steel,
I wake in every nerve.
I watch a beacon swing
From dark to blazing bright;
We thunder through ravines
And gullies washed with light.
Beyond the mountain pass
Mist deepens on the pane;
We rush into a rain
That rattles double glass.
Wheels shake the roadbed stone,
The pistons jerk and shove,
I stay up half the night
To see the land I love.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

08-07-2015, 09:54 AM

The Dark Forest
------------------------ by Edward Thomas

Dark is the forest and deep, and overhead
Hang stars like seeds of light
In vain, though not since they were sown was bred
Anything more bright.

And evermore mighty multitudes ride
About, nor enter in;
Of the other multitudes that dwell inside
Never yet was one seen.

The forest foxglove is purple, the marguerite
Outside is gold and white,
Nor can those that pluck either blossom greet
The others, day or night.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

08-08-2015, 10:39 AM

The Loss Of The Eurydice
---------------------------------------------by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Foundered March 24. 1878

1

The Eurydice—it concerned thee, O Lord:
Three hundred souls, O alas! on board,
Some asleep unawakened, all un-
warned, eleven fathoms fallen

2

Where she foundered! One stroke
Felled and furled them, the hearts of oak!
And flockbells off the aerial
Downs' forefalls beat to the burial.

3

For did she pride her, freighted fully, on
Bounden bales or a hoard of bullion?—
Precious passing measure,
Lads and men her lade and treasure.

4

She had come from a cruise, training seamen—
Men, boldboys soon to be men:
Must it, worst weather,
Blast bole and bloom together?

5

No Atlantic squall overwrought her
Or rearing billow of the Biscay water:
Home was hard at hand
And the blow bore from land.

6

And you were a liar, O blue March day.
Bright sun lanced fire in the heavenly bay;
But what black Boreas wrecked her? he
Came equipped, deadly-electric,

7

A beetling baldbright cloud thorough England
Riding: there did stores not mingle? and
Hailropes hustle and grind their
Heavengravel? wolfsnow, worlds of it, wind there?

8

Now Carisbrook keep goes under in gloom;
Now it overvaults Appledurcombe;
Now near by Ventnor town
It hurls, hurls off Boniface Down.

9

Too proud, too proud, what a press she bore!
Royal, and all her royals wore.
Sharp with her, shorten sail!
Too late; lost; gone with the gale.

10

This was that fell capsize,
As half she had righted and hoped to rise
Death teeming in by her portholes
Raced down decks, round messes of mortals.

11

Then a lurch forward, frigate and men;
'All hands for themselves' the cry ran then;
But she who had housed them thither
Was around them, bound them or wound them with her.

12

Marcus Hare, high her captain,
Kept to her—care-drowned and wrapped in
Cheer's death, would follow
His charge through the champ-white water-in-a-wallow,

13

All under Channel to bury in a beach her
Cheeks: Right, rude of feature,
He thought he heard say
'Her commander! and thou too, and thou this way.'

14

It is even seen, time's something server,
In mankind's medley a duty-swerver,
At downright 'No or yes?'
Doffs all, drives full for righteousness.

15

Sydney Fletcher, Bristol-bred,
(Low lie his mates now on watery bed)
Takes to the seas and snows
As sheer down the ship goes.

16

Now her afterdraught gullies him too down;
Now he wrings for breath with the deathgush brown;
Till a lifebelt and God's will
Lend him a lift from the sea-swill.

17

Now he shoots short up to the round air;
Now he gasps, now he gazes everywhere;
But his eye no cliff, no coast or
Mark makes in the rivelling snowstorm.

18

Him, after an hour of wintry waves,
A schooner sights, with another, and saves,
And he boards her in Oh! such joy
He has lost count what came next, poor boy.—

19

They say who saw one sea-corpse cold
He was all of lovely manly mould,
Every inch a tar,
Of the best we boast our sailors are.

20

Look, foot to forelock, how all things suit! he
Is strung by duty, is strained to beauty,
And brown-as-dawning-skinned
With brine and shine and whirling wind.

21

O his nimble finger, his gnarled grip!
Leagues, leagues of seamanship
Slumber in these forsaken
Bones, this sinew, and will not waken.

22

He was but one like thousands more,
Day and night I deplore
My people and born own nation,
Fast foundering own generation.

23

I might let bygones be—our curse
Of ruinous shrine no hand or, worse,
Robbery's hand is busy to
Dress, hoar-hallowèd shrines unvisited;

24

Only the breathing temple and fleet
Life, this wildworth blown so sweet,
These daredeaths, ay this crew, in
Unchrist, all rolled in ruin—

25

Deeply surely I need to deplore it,
Wondering why my master bore it,
The riving off that race
So at home, time was, to his truth and grace

26

That a starlight-wender of ours would say
The marvellous Milk was Walsingham Way
And one—but let be, let be:
More, more than was will yet be.—

27

O well wept, mother have lost son;
Wept, wife; wept, sweetheart would be one:
Though grief yield them no good
Yet shed what tears sad truelove should.

28

But to Christ lord of thunder
Crouch; lay knee by earth low under:
'Holiest, loveliest, bravest,
Save my hero, O Hero savest.

29

And the prayer thou hearst me making
Have, at the awful overtaking,
Heard; have heard and granted
Grace that day grace was wanted.'

30

Not that hell knows redeeming,
But for souls sunk in seeming
Fresh, till doomfire burn all,
Prayer shall fetch pity eternal.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Truly great and epic write!!!! -Tyr

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

08-09-2015, 11:30 AM

ART ABOVE NATURE: TO JULIA
-------------------------------- by Robert Herrick

When I behold a forest spread
With silken trees upon thy head;
And when I see that other dress
Of flowers set in comeliness;
When I behold another grace
In the ascent of curious lace,
Which, like a pinnacle, doth shew
The top, and the top-gallant too;
Then, when I see thy tresses bound
Into an oval, square, or round,
And knit in knots far more than I.
Can tell by tongue, or True-love tie;
Next, when those lawny films I see
Play with a wild civility;
And all those airy silks to flow,
Alluring me, and tempting so--
I must confess, mine eye and heart
Dotes less on nature than on art.

Balu

08-09-2015, 12:10 PM

Robert, you a great help!
Me, I already help my grand children to learn and understand English on the basis of the poems and sonnets you are placing here.
Another vocabulary, another everything, comparing with that you can see in Mass-media.
Hope, in September-October they will amaze their teachers. :slap:

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

08-10-2015, 01:56 PM

Sorrow
---------------------------------------by Algernon Charles Swinburne

SORROW, on wing through the world for ever,
Here and there for awhile would borrow
Rest, if rest might haply deliver
Sorrow.

One thought lies close in her heart gnawn thorough
With pain, a weed in a dried-up river,
A rust-red share in an empty furrow.

Hearts that strain at her chain would sever
The link where yesterday frets to-morrow:
All things pass in the world, but never
Sorrow.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

08-11-2015, 08:49 AM

Pain has but one Acquaintance
----------------------------------------by Emily Dickinson

Pain has but one Acquaintance
And that is Death --
Each one unto the other
Society enough.

Pain is the Junior Party
By just a Second's right --
Death tenderly assists Him
And then absconds from Sight.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

08-12-2015, 09:51 AM

I

Saint Peter sat by the celestial gate:
His keys were rusty, and the lock was dull,
So little trouble had been given of late;
Not that the place by any means was full,
But since the Gallic era 'eight-eight'
The devils had ta'en a longer, stronger pull,
And 'a pull altogether,' as they say
At sea — which drew most souls another way.

II

The angels all were singing out of tune,
And hoarse with having little else to do,
Excepting to wind up the sun and moon,
Or curb a runaway young star or two,
Or wild colt of a comet, which too soon
Broke out of bounds o'er th' ethereal blue,
Splitting some planet with its playful tail,
As boats are sometimes by a wanton whale.

III

The guardian seraphs had retired on high,
Finding their charges past all care below;
Terrestrial business fill'd nought in the sky
Save the recording angel's black bureau;
Who found, indeed, the facts to multiply
With such rapidity of vice and woe,
That he had stripp'd off both his wings in quills,
And yet was in arrear of human ills.

IV

His business so augmented of late years,
That he was forced, against his will no doubt,
(Just like those cherubs, earthly ministers,)
For some resource to turn himself about,
And claim the help of his celestial peers,
To aid him ere he should be quite worn out
By the increased demand for his remarks:
Six angels and twelve saints were named his clerks.

V

This was a handsome board — at least for heaven;
And yet they had even then enough to do,
So many conqueror's cars were daily driven,
So many kingdoms fitted up anew;
Each day too slew its thousands six or seven,
Till at the crowning carnage, Waterloo,
They threw their pens down in divine disgust —
The page was so besmear'd with blood and dust.

VI

This by the way: 'tis not mine to record
What angels shrink Wrom: ZAAFXISHJEXXIMQZUIVO
On this occasion his own work abhorr'd,
So surfeited with the infernal revel:
Though he himself had sharpen'd every sword,
It almost quench'd his innate thirst of evil.
(Here Satan's sole good work deserves insertion —
'Tis, that he has both generals in reveration.)

VII

Let's skip a few short years of hollow peace,
Which peopled earth no better, hell as wont,
And heaven none — they form the tyrant's lease,
With nothing but new names subscribed upon't;
'Twill one day finish: meantime they increase,
'With seven heads and ten horns,' and all in front,
Like Saint John's foretold beast; but ours are born
Less formidable in the head than horn.

VIII

In the first year of freedom's second dawn
Died George the Third; although no tyrant, one
Who shielded tyrants, till each sense withdrawn
Left him nor mental nor external sun:
A better farmer ne'er brush'd dew from lawn,
A worse king never left a realm undone!
He died — but left his subjects still behind,
One half as mad — and t'other no less blind.

IX

He died! his death made no great stir on earth:
His burial made some pomp; there was profusion
Of velvet, gilding, brass, and no great dearth
Of aught but tears — save those shed by collusion.
For these things may be bought at their true worth;
Of elegy there was the due infusion —
Bought also; and the torches, cloaks, and banners,
Heralds, and relics of old Gothic manners,

X

Form'd a sepulchral melo-drame. Of all
The fools who flack's to swell or see the show,
Who cared about the corpse? The funeral
Made the attraction, and the black the woe.
There throbbed not there a thought which pierced the pall;
And when the gorgeous coffin was laid low,
It seamed the mockery of hell to fold
The rottenness of eighty years in gold.

XI

So mix his body with the dust! It might
Return to what it must far sooner, were
The natural compound left alone to fight
Its way back into earth, and fire, and air;
But the unnatural balsams merely blight
What nature made him at his birth, as bare
As the mere million's base unmarried clay —
Yet all his spices but prolong decay.

XII

He's dead — and upper earth with him has done;
He's buried; save the undertaker's bill,
Or lapidary scrawl, the world is gone
For him, unless he left a German will:
But where's the proctor who will ask his son?
In whom his qualities are reigning still,
Except that household virtue, most uncommon,
Of constancy to a bad, ugly woman.

XIII

'God save the king!' It is a large economy
In God to save the like; but if he will
Be saving, all the better; for not one am I
Of those who think damnation better still:
I hardly know too if not quite alone am I
In this small hope of bettering future ill
By circumscribing, with some slight restriction,
The eternity of hell's hot jurisdiction.

XIV

I know this is unpopular; I know
'Tis blasphemous; I know one may be damned
For hoping no one else may ever be so;
I know my catechism; I know we're caromed
With the best doctrines till we quite o'erflow;
I know that all save England's church have shamm'd,
And that the other twice two hundred churches
And synagogues have made a damn'd bad purchase.

XV

God help us all! God help me too! I am,
God knows, as helpless as the devil can wish,
And not a whit more difficult to damn,
Than is to bring to land a late-hook'd fish,
Or to the butcher to purvey the lamb;
Not that I'm fit for such a noble dish,
As one day will be that immortal fry
Of almost everybody born to die.

XVI

Saint Peter sat by the celestial gate,
And nodded o'er his keys; when, lo! there came
A wondrous noise he had not heard of late —
A rushing sound of wind, and stream, and flame;
In short, a roar of things extremely great,
Which would have made aught save a saint exclaim;
But he, with first a start and then a wink,
Said, 'There's another star gone out, I think!'

XVII

But ere he could return to his repose,
A cherub flapp'd his right wing o'er his eyes —
At which St. Peter yawn'd, and rubb'd his hose:
'Saint porter,' said the angel, 'prithee rise!'
Waving a goodly wing, which glow'd, as glows
An earthly peacock's tail, with heavenly dyes;
To which the saint replied, 'Well, what's the matter?
'Is Lucifer come back with all this clatter?'

XVIII

'No,' quoth the cherub; 'George the Third is dead.'
'And who is George the Third?' replied the apostle;
'What George? what Third?' 'The king of England,' said
The angel. 'Well, he won't find kings to jostle
Him on his way; but does he wear his head?
Because the last we saw here had a tussle,
And ne'er would have got into heaven's good graces,
Had he not flung his head in all our faces.

XIX

'He was, if I remember, king of France;
That head of his, which could not keep a crown
On earth, yet ventured in my face to advance
A claim to those of martyrs — like my own:
If I had had my sword, as I had once
When I cut ears off, I had cut him down;
But having but my keys, and not my brand,
I only knock'd his head from out his hand.

XX

'And then he set up such a headless howl,
That all the saints came out and took him in;
And there he sits by St. Paul, cheek by jowl;
That fellow Paul— the parvenù! The skin
Of St. Bartholomew, which makes his cowl
In heaven, and upon earth redeem'd his sin,
So as to make a martyr, never sped
Better than did this weak and wooden head.

XXI

'But had it come up here upon its shoulders,
There would have been a different tale to tell;
The fellow-feeling in the saint's beholders
Seems to have acted on them like a spell,
And so this very foolish head heaven solders
Back on its trunk: it may be very well,
And seems the custom here to overthrow
Whatever has been wisely done below.'

XXII

The angel answer'd, 'Peter! do not pout:
The king who comes has head and all entire,
And never knew much what it was about —
He did as doth the puppet — by its wire,
And will be judged like all the rest, no doubt:
My business and your own is not to inquire
Into such matters, but to mind our cue —
Which is to act as we are bid to do.'

XXIII

While thus they spake, the angelic caravan,
Arriving like a rush of mighty wind,
Cleaving the fields of space, as doth the swan
Some silver stream (say Ganges, Nile, or Inde,
Or Thames, or Tweed), and 'midst them an old man
With an old soul, and both extremely blind,
Halted before the gate, and in his shroud
Seated their fellow traveller on a cloud.

XXIV

But bringing up the rear of this bright host
A Spirit of a different aspect waves
His wings, like thunder-clouds above some coast
Whose barren beach with frequent wrecks is paved;
His brow was like the deep when tempest-toss'd;
Fierce and unfathomable thoughts engraved
Eternal wrath on his immortal face,
And where he gazed a gloom pervaded space.

XXV

As he drew near, he gazed upon the gate
Ne'er to be enter'd more by him or Sin,
With such a glance of supernatural hate,
As made Saint Peter wish himself within;
He potter'd with his keys at a great rate,
And sweated through his apostolic skin:
Of course his perspiration was but ichor,
Or some such other spiritual liquor.

XXIV

The very cherubs huddled all together,
Like birds when soars the falcon; and they felt
A tingling to the top of every feather,
And form'd a circle like Orion's belt
Around their poor old charge; who scarce knew whither
His guards had led him, though they gently dealt
With royal manes (for by many stories,
And true, we learn the angels all are Tories.)

XXVII

As things were in this posture, the gate flew
Asunder, and the flashing of its hinges
Flung over space an universal hue
Of many-colour'd flame, until its tinges
Reach'd even our speck of earth, and made a new
Aurora borealis spread its fringes
O'er the North Pole; the same seen, when ice-bound,
By Captain Parry's crew, in 'Melville's Sound.'

XXVIII

And from the gate thrown open issued beaming
A beautiful and mighty Thing of Light,
Radiant with glory, like a banner streaming
Victorious from some world-o'erthrowing fight:
My poor comparisons must needs be teeming
With earthly likenesses, for here the night
Of clay obscures our best conceptions, saving
Johanna Southcote, or Bob Southey raving.

XXIX

'Twas the archangel Michael; all men know
The make of angels and archangels, since
There's scarce a scribbler has not one to show,
From the fiends' leader to the angels' prince;
There also are some altar-pieces, though
I really can't say that they much evince
One's inner notions of immortal spirits;
But let the connoisseurs explain their merits.

XXX

Michael flew forth in glory and in good;
A goodly work of him from whom all glory
And good arise; the portal past — he stood;
Before him the young cherubs and saints hoary —
(I say young, begging to be understood
By looks, not years; and should be very sorry
To state, they were not older than St. Peter,
But merely that they seem'd a little sweeter.

XXXI

The cherubs and the saints bow'd down before
That arch-angelic Hierarch, the first
Of essences angelical, who wore
The aspect of a god; but this ne'er nursed
Pride in his heavenly bosom, in whose core
No thought, save for his Master's service, durst
Intrude, however glorified and high;
He knew him but the viceroy of the sky.

XXXII

He and the sombre, silent Spirit met —
They knew each other both for good and ill;
Such was their power, that neither could forget
His former friend and future foe; but still
There was a high, immortal, proud regret
In either's eye, as if 'twere less their will
Than destiny to make the eternal years
Their date of war, and their 'champ clos' the spheres.

XXXIII

But here they were in neutral space: we know
From Job, that Satan hath the power to pay
A heavenly visit thrice a year or so;
And that the 'sons of God', like those of clay,
Must keep him company; and we might show
From the same book, in how polite a way
The dialogue is held between the Powers
Of Good and Evil — but 'twould take up hours.

XXXIV

And this is not a theologic tract,
To prove with Hebrew and with Arabic,
If Job be allegory or a fact,
But a true narrative; and thus I pick
From out the whole but such and such an act
As sets aside the slightest thought of trick.
'Tis every tittle true, beyond suspicion,
And accurate as any other vision.

XXXV

The spirits were in neutral space, before
The gates of heaven; like eastern thresholds is
The place where Death's grand cause is argued o'er,
And souls despatch'd to that world or to this;
And therefore Michael and the other wore
A civil aspect: though they did not kiss,
Yet still between his Darkness and his Brightness
There pass'd a mutual glance of great politeness.

XXXVI

The Archangel bow'd, not like a modern beau,
But with a graceful Oriental bend,
Pressing one radiant arm just where below
The heart in good men is supposed to tend;
He turn'd as to an equal, not too low,
But kindly; Satan met his ancient friend
With more hauteur, as might an old Castilian
Poor noble meet a mushroom rich civilian.

XXXVII

He merely bent his diabolic brow
An instant; and then raising it, he stood
In act to assert his right or wrong, and show
Cause why King George by no means could or should
Make out a case to be exempt from woe
Eternal, more than other kings, endued
With better sense and hearts, whom history mentions,
Who long have 'paved hell with their good intentions.'

XXXVIII

Michael began: 'What wouldst thou with this man,
Now dead, and brought before the Lord? What ill
Hath he wrought since his mortal race began,
That thou cans't claim him? Speak! and do thy will,
If it be just: if in this earthly span
He hath been greatly failing to fulfil
His duties as a king and mortal, say,
And he is thine; if not, let him have way.'

XXXIX

'Michael!' replied the Prince of Air, 'even here,
Before the Gate of him thou servest, must
I claim my subject: and will make appear
That as he was my worshipper in dust,
So shall he be in spirit, although dear
To thee and thine, because nor wine nor lust
Were of his weaknesses; yet on the throne
He reign'd o'er millions to serve me alone.

XL

'Look to our earth, or rather mine; it was,
Once, more thy master's: but I triumph not
In this poor planet's conquest; nor, alas!
Need he thou servest envy me my lot:
With all the myriads of bright worlds which pass
In worship round him, he may have forgot
Yon weak creation of such paltry things;
I think few worth damnation save their kings, —

XLI

'And these but as a kind of quit-rent, to
Assert my right as lord: and even had
I such an inclination, 'twere (as you
Well know) superfluous; they are grown so bad,
That hell has nothing better left to do
Than leave them to themselves: so much more mad
And evil by their own internal curse,
Heaven cannot make them better, nor I worse.

XLII

'Look to the earth, I said, and say again:
When this old, blind, mad, helpless, weak, poor worm
Began in youth's first bloom and flush to reign,
The world and he both wore a different form,
And must of earth and all the watery plain
Of ocean call'd him king: through many a storm
His isles had floated on the abyss of time;
For the rough virtues chose them for their clime.

XLIII

'He came to his sceptre young: he leaves it old:
Look to the state in which he found his realm,
And left it; and his annals too behold,
How to a minion first he gave the helm;
How grew upon his heart a thirst for gold,
The beggar's vice, which can but overwhelm
The meanest of hearts; and for the rest, but glance
Thine eye along America and France.

XLIV

'Tis true, he was a tool from first to last
(I have the workmen safe); but as a tool
So let him be consumed. From out the past
Of ages, since mankind have known the rule
Of monarchs — from the bloody rolls amass'd
Of sin and slaughter — from the Cæsar's school,
Take the worst pupil; and produce a reign
More drench'd with gore, more cumber'd with the slain.

XLV

'He ever warr'd with freedom and the free:
Nations as men, home subjects, foreign foes,
So that they utter'd the word "Liberty!"
Found George the Third their first opponent. Whose
History was ever stain'd as his will be
With national and individual woes?
I grant his household abstinence; I grant
His neutral virtues, which most monarchs want;

XLVI

'I know he was a constant consort; own
He was a decent sire, and middling lord.
All this is much, and most upon a throne;
As temperance, if at Apicius' board,
Is more than at an anchorite's supper shown.
I grant him all the kindest can accord;
And this was well for him, but not for those
Millions who found him what oppression chose.

XLVII

'The New World shook him off; the Old yet groans
Beneath what he and his prepared, if not
Completed: he leaves heirs on many thrones
To all his vices, without what begot
Compassion for him — his tame virtues; drones
Who sleep, or despots who have not forgot
A lesson which shall be re-taught them, wake
Upon the thrones of earth; but let them quake!

XLVIII

'Five millions of the primitive, who hold
The faith which makes ye great on earth, implored
A part of that vast all they held of old, —
Freedom to worship — not alone your Lord,
Michael, but you, and you, Saint Peter! Cold
Must be your souls, if you have not abhorr'd
The foe to Catholic participation
In all the license of a Christian nation.

XLIX

'True! he allow'd them to pray God; but as
A consequence of prayer, refused the law
Which would have placed them upon the same base
With those who did not hold the saints in awe.'
But here Saint Peter started from his place,
And cried, 'You may the prisoner withdraw:
Ere heaven shall ope her portals to this Guelph,
While I am guard, may I be damn'd myself!

L

'Sooner will I with Cerberus exchange
My office (and his no sinecure)
Than see this royal Bedlam bigot range
The azure fields of heaven, of that be sure!'
'Saint!' replied Satan, 'you do well to avenge
The wrongs he made your satellites endure;
And if to this exchange you should be given,
I'll try to coax our Cerberus up to heaven!'

LI

Here Michael interposed: 'Good saint! and devil!
Pray, not so fast; you both outrun discretion.
Saint Peter! you were wont to be more civil!
Satan! excuse this warmth of his expression,
And condescension to the vulgar's level:
Event saints sometimes forget themselves in session.
Have you got more to say?' — 'No.' — If you please
I'll trouble you to call your witnesses.'

LII

Then Satan turn'd and waved his swarthy hand,
Which stirr'd with its electric qualities
Clouds farther off than we can understand,
Although we find him sometimes in our skies;
Infernal thunder shook both sea and land
In all the planets, and hell's batteries
Let off the artillery, which Milton mentions
As one of Satan's most sublime inventions.

LIII

This was a signal unto such damn'd souls
As have the privilege of their damnation
Extended far beyond the mere controls
Of worlds past, present, or to come; no station
Is theirs particularly in the rolls
Of hell assign'd; but where their inclination
Or business carries them in search of game,
They may range freely — being damn'd the same.

LIV

They're proud of this — as very well they may,
It being a sort of knighthood, or gilt key
Stuck in their loins; or like to an 'entré'
Up the back stairs, or such free-masonry.
I borrow my comparisons from clay,
Being clay myself. Let not those spirits be
Offended with such base low likenesses;
We know their posts are nobler far than these.

LV

When the great signal ran from heaven to hell —
About ten million times the distance reckon'd
From our sun to its earth, as we can tell
How much time it takes up, even to a second,
For every ray that travels to dispel
The fogs of London, through which, dimly beacon'd,
The weathercocks are gilt some thrice a year,
If that the summer is not too severe;

LVI

I say that I can tell — 'twas half a minute;
I know the solar beams take up more time
Ere, pack'd up for their journey, they begin it;
But then their telegraph is less sublime,
And if they ran a race, they would not win it
'Gainst Satan's couriers bound for their own clime.
The sun takes up some years for every ray
To reach its goal — the devil not half a day.

LVII

Upon the verge of space, about the size
Of half-a-crown, a little speck appear'd
(I've seen a something like it in the skies
In the Ægean, ere a squall); it near'd,
And growing bigger, took another guise;
Like an aërial ship it tack'd, and steer'd,
Or was steer'd (I am doubtful of the grammar
Of the last phrase, which makes the stanza stammer; —

LVIII

But take your choice): and then it grew a cloud;
And so it was — a cloud of witnesses.
But such a cloud! No land e'er saw a crowd
Of locusts numerous as the heavens saw these;
They shadow'd with their myriads space; their loud
And varied cries were like those of wild geese
(If nations may be liken'd to a goose),
And realised the phrase of 'hell broke loose.'

LIX

Here crash'd a sturdy oath of stout John Bull,
Who damn'd away his eyes as heretofore:
There Paddy brogued, 'By Jasus!' — 'What's your wull?'
The temperate Scot exclaim'd: the French ghost swore
In certain terms I shan't translate in full,
As the first coachman will; and 'midst the roar,
The voice of Jonathan was heard to express,
'Our president is going to war, I guess.'

LX

Besides there were the Spaniard, Dutch, and Dane;
In short, an universal shoal of shades,
From Otaheite's isle to Salisbury Plain,
Of all climes and professions, years and trades,
Ready to swear against the good king's reign,
Bitter as clubs in cards are against spades:
All summon'd by this grand 'subpoena,' to
Try if kings mayn't be damn'd like me or you.

LXI

When Michael saw this host, he first grew pale,
As angels can; next, like Italian twilight,
He turn'd all colours — as a peacock's tail,
Or sunset streaming through a Gothic skylight
In some old abbey, or a trout not stale,
Or distant lightning on the horizon by night,
Or a fresh rainbow, or a grand review
Of thirty regiments in red, green, and blue.

LXII

Then he address'd himself to Satan: 'Why —
My good old friend, for such I deem you, though
Our different parties make us fight so shy,
I ne'er mistake you for a personal foe;
Our difference is political, and I
Trust that, whatever may occur below,
You know my great respect for you; and this
Makes me regret whate'er you do amiss —

LXIII

'Why, my dear Lucifer, would you abuse
My call for witnesses? I did not mean
That you should half of earth and hell produce;
'Tis even superfluous, since two honest, clean
True testimonies are enough: we lose
Our time, nay, our eternity, between
The accusation and defence: if we
Hear both, 'twill stretch our immortality.'

LXIV

Satan replied, 'To me the matter is
Indifferent, in a personal point of view;
I can have fifty better souls than this
With far less trouble than we have gone through
Already; and I merely argued his
Late majesty of Britain's case with you
Upon a point of form: you may dispose
Of him; I've kings enough below, God knows!'

LXV

Thus spoke the Demon (late call'd 'multifaced'
By multo-scribbling Southey). 'Then we'll call
One or two persons of the myriads placed
Around our congress, and dispense with all
The rest,' quoth Michael: 'Who may be so graced
As to speak first? there's choice enough — who shall
It be?' Then Satan answer'd, 'There are many;
But you may choose Jack Wilkes as well as any.'

LXVI

A merry, cock-eyed, curious-looking sprite
Upon the instant started from the throng,
Dress'd in a fashion now forgotten quite;
For all the fashions of the flesh stick long
By people in the next world; where unite
All the costumes since Adam's, right or wrong,
From Eve's fig-leaf down to the petticoat,
Almost as scanty, of days less remote.

LXVII

The spirit look'd around upon the crowds
Assembled, and exclaim'd, 'My friends of all
The spheres, we shall catch cold amongst these clouds;
So let's to business: why this general call?
If those are freeholders I see in shrouds,
And 'tis for an election that they bawl,
Behold a candidate with unturn'd coat!
Saint Peter, may I count upon your vote?'

LXVIII

'Sir,' replied Michael, 'you mistake; these things
Are of a former life, and what we do
Above is more august; to judge of kings
Is the tribunal met: so now you know.'
'Then I presume those gentlemen with wings,'
Said Wilkes, 'are cherubs; and that soul below
Looks much like George the Third, but to my mind
A good deal older — Bless me! is he blind?'

LXIX

'He is what you behold him, and his doom
Depends upon his deeds,' the Angel said;
'If you have aught to arraign in him, the tomb
Give licence to the humblest beggar's head
To lift itself against the loftiest.' — 'Some,'
Said Wilkes, 'don't wait to see them laid in lead,
For such a liberty — and I, for one,
Have told them what I though beneath the sun.'

LXX

'Above the sun repeat, then, what thou hast
To urge against him,' said the Archangel. 'Why,'
Replied the spirit, 'since old scores are past,
Must I turn evidence? In faith, not I.
Besides, I beat him hollow at the last,
With all his Lords and Commons: in the sky
I don't like ripping up old stories, since
His conduct was but natural in a prince.

LXXI

'Foolish, no doubt, and wicked, to oppress
A poor unlucky devil without a shilling;
But then I blame the man himself much less
Than Bute and Grafton, and shall be unwilling
To see him punish'd here for their excess,
Since they were both damn'd long ago, and still in
Their place below: for me, I have forgiven,
And vote his "habeas corpus" into heaven.'

LXXII

'Wilkes,' said the Devil, 'I understand all this;
You turn'd to half a courtier ere you died,
And seem to think it would not be amiss
To grow a whole one on the other side
Of Charon's ferry; you forget that his
Reign is concluded; whatso'er betide,
He won't be sovereign more: you've lost your labor,
For at the best he will be but your neighbour.

LXXIII

'However, I knew what to think of it,
When I beheld you in your jesting way,
Flitting and whispering round about the spit
Where Belial, upon duty for the day,
With Fox's lard was basting William Pitt,
His pupil; I knew what to think, I say:
That fellow even in hell breeds farther ills;
I'll have him gagg'd — 'twas one of his own bills.

LXXIV

'Call Junius!' From the crowd a shadow stalk'd,
And at the same there was a general squeeze,
So that the very ghosts no longer walk'd
In comfort, at their own aërial ease,
But were all ramm'd, and jamm'd (but to be balk'd,
As we shall see), and jostled hands and knees,
Like wind compress'd and pent within a bladder,
Or like a human colic, which is sadder.

LXXV

The shadow came — a tall, thin, grey-hair'd figure,
That look'd as it had been a shade on earth;
Quick in it motions, with an air of vigour,
But nought to mar its breeding or its birth;
Now it wax'd little, then again grew bigger,
With now an air of gloom, or savage mirth;
But as you gazed upon its features, they
Changed every instant — to what, none could say.

LXXVI

The more intently the ghosts gazed, the less
Could they distinguish whose the features were;
The Devil himself seem'd puzzled even to guess;
They varied like a dream — now here, now there;
And several people swore from out the press
They knew him perfectly; and one could swear
He was his father: upon which another
Was sure he was his mother's cousin's brother:

LXXVII

Another, that he was a duke, or a knight,
An orator, a lawyer, or a priest,
A nabob, a man-midwife; but the wight
Mysterious changed his countenance at least
As oft as they their minds; though in full sight
He stood, the puzzle only was increased;
The man was a phantasmagoria in
Himself — he was so volatile and thin.

LXXVIII

The moment that you had pronounce him one,
Presto! his face change'd and he was another;
And when that change was hardly well put on,
It varied, till I don't think his own mother
(If that he had a mother) would her son
Have known, he shifted so from one to t'other;
Till guessing from a pleasure grew a task,
At this epistolary 'Iron Mask.'

LXXIX

For sometimes he like Cerberus would seem —
'Three gentlemen at once' (as sagely says
Good Mrs. Malaprop); then you might deem
That he was not even one; now many rays
Were flashing round him; and now a thick steam
Hid him from sight — like fogs on London days:
Now Burke, now Tooke he grew to people's fancies,
And certes often like Sir Philip Francis.

LXXX

I've an hypothesis — 'tis quite my own;
I never let it out till now, for fear
Of doing people harm about the throne,
And injuring some minister or peer,
On whom the stigma might perhaps be blown;
It is — my gentle public, lend thine ear!
'Tis, that what Junius we are wont to call
Was really, truly, nobody at all.

LXXXI

I don't see wherefore letters should not be
Written without hands, since we daily view
Them written without heads; and books, we see,
Are fill'd as well without the latter too:
And really till we fix on somebody
For certain sure to claim them as his due,
Their author, like the Niger's mouth, will bother
The world to say if there be mouth or author.

LXXXII

'And who and what art thou?' the Archangel said.
'For that you may consult my title-page,'
Replied this mighty shadow of a shade:
'If I have kept my secret half an age,
I scarce shall tell it now.' — 'Canst thou upbraid,'
Continued Michael, 'George Rex, or allege
Aught further?' Junius answer'd, 'You had better
First ask him for his answer to my letter:

LXXXIII

'My charges upon record will outlast
The brass of both his epitaph and tomb.'
'Repent'st thou not,' said Michael, 'of some past
Exaggeration? something which may doom
Thyself if false, as him if true? Thou wast
Too bitter — is it not so? — in thy gloom
Of passion?' — 'Passion!' cried the phantom dim,
'I loved my country, and I hated him.

LXXXIV

'What I have written, I have written: let
The rest be on his head or mine!' So spoke
Old 'Nominis Umbra'; and while speaking yet,
Away he melted in celestial smoke.
Then Satan said to Michael, 'Don't forget
To call George Washington, and John Horne Tooke,
And Franklin;' — but at this time was heard
A cry for room, though not a phantom stirr'd.

LXXXV

At length with jostling, elbowing, and the aid
Of cherubim appointed to that post,
The devil Asmodeus to the circle made
His way, and look'd as if his journey cost
Some trouble. When his burden down he laid,
'What's this?' cried Michael; 'why, 'tis not a ghost?'
'I know it,' quoth the incubus; 'but he
Shall be one, if you leave the affair to me.

LXXXVI

'Confound the renegado! I have sprain'd
My left wing, he's so heavy; one would think
Some of his works about his neck were chain'd.
But to the point; while hovering o'er the brink
Of Skiddaw (where as usual it still rain'd),
I saw a taper, far below me, wink,
And stooping, caught this fellow at a libel —
No less on history than the Holy Bible.

LXXXVII

'The former is the devil's scripture, and
The latter yours, good Michael: so the affair
Belongs to all of us, you understand.
I snatch'd him up just as you see him there,
And brought him off for sentence out of hand:
I've scarcely been ten minutes in the air —
At least a quarter it can hardly be:
I dare say that his wife is still at tea.'

LXXXVIII

Here Satan said, 'I know this man of old,
And have expected him for some time here;
A sillier fellow you will scarce behold,
Or more conceited in his petty sphere:
But surely it was not worth while to fold
Such trash below your wing, Asmodeus dear:
We had the poor wretch safe (without being bored
With carriage) coming of his own accord.

LXXXIX

'But since he's here, let's see what he has done.'
'Done!' cried Asmodeus, 'he anticipates
The very business you are now upon,
And scribbles as if head clerk to the Fates,
Who knows to what his ribaldry may run,
When such an ass as this, like Balaam's, prates?'
'Let's hear,' quoth Michael, 'what he has to say;
You know we're bound to that in every way.'

XC

Now the bard, glad to get an audience which
By no means oft was his case below,
Began to cough, and hawk, and hem, and pitch
His voice into that awful note of woe
To all unhappy hearers within reach
Of poets when the tide of rhyme's in flow;
But stuck fast with his first hexameter,
Not one of all whose gouty feet would stir.

XCI

But ere the spavin'd dactyls could be spurr'd
Into recitative, in great dismay
Both cherubim and seraphim were heard
To murmur loudly through their long array:
And Michael rose ere he could get a word
Of all his founder'd verses under way.
And cried, 'For God's sake stop, my friend! 'twere best —
Non Di, non homines —- you know the rest.'

XCII

A general bustle spread throughout the throng.
Which seem'd to hold all verse in detestation;
The angels had of course enough of song
When upon service; and the generation
Of ghosts had heard too much in life, not long
Before, to profit by a new occasion;
The monarch, mute till then, exclaim'd, 'What! What!
Pye come again? No more — no more of that!'

XCIII

The tumult grew; an universal cough
Convulsed the skies, as during a debate
When Castlereagh has been up long enough
(Before he was first minister of state,
I mean — the slaves hear now); some cried 'off, off!'
As at a farce; till, grown quite desperate,
The bard Saint Peter pray'd to interpose
(Himself an author) only for his prose.

XCIV

The varlet was not an ill-favour'd knave;
A good deal like a vulture in the face,
With a hook nose and a hawk'd eye, which gave
A smart and sharper-looking sort of grace
To his whole aspect, which, though rather grave,
Was by no means so ugly as his case;
But that, indeed, was hopeless as can be,
Quite a poetic felony, 'de se.'

XCV

Then Michael blew his trump, and still'd the noise
With one still greater, as is yet the mode
On earth besides; except some grumbling voice,
Which now and then will make a slight inroad
Upon decorous silence, few will twice
Lift up their lungs when fairly overcrow'd;
And now the bard could plead his own bad cause,
With all the attitudes of self-applause.

XCVI

He said — (I only give the heads) — he said,
He meant no harm in scribbling; 'twas his way
Upon all topics; 'twas, besides, his bread,
Of which he butter'd both sides; 'twould delay
Too long the assembly (he was pleased to dread),
And take up rather more time than a day,
To name his works — he would but cite a few —
'Wat Tyler' — 'Rhymes on Blenheim' — 'Waterloo.'

XCVII

He had written praises of a regicide:
He had written praises of all kings whatever;
He had written for republics far and wide;
And then against them bitterer than ever;
For pantisocracy he once had cried
Aloud, a scheme less moral than 'twas clever;
Then grew a hearty anti-Jacobin —
Had turn'd his coat — and would have turn'd his skin.

XCVIII

He had sung against all battles, and again
In their high praise and glory; he had call'd
Reviewing (1)'the ungentle craft,' and then
Become as base a critic as e'er crawl'd —
Fed, paid, and pamper'd by the very men
By whom his muse and morals had been maul'd:
He had written much blank verse, and blanker prose,
And more of both than anybody knows.

XCIX

He had written Wesley's life: — here turning round
To Satan, 'Sir, I'm ready to write yours,
In two octavo volumes, nicely bound,
With notes and preface, all that most allures
The pious purchaser; and there's no ground
For fear, for I can choose my own reviews:
So let me have the proper documents,
That I may add you to my other saints.'

C

Satan bow'd, and was silent. 'Well, if you,
With amiable modesty, decline
My offer, what says Michael? There are few
Whose memoirs could be render'd more divine.
Mine is a pen of all work; not so new
As it once was, but I would make you shine
Like your own trumpet. By the way, my own
Has more of brass in it, and is as well blown.

CI

'But talking about trumpets, here's my Vision!
Now you shall judge, all people; yes, you shall
Judge with my judgment, and by my decision
Be guided who shall enter heaven or fall.
I settle all these things by intuition,
Times present, past, to come, heaven, hell, and all,
Like King Alfonso(2). When I thus see double,
I save the Deity some worlds of trouble.'

CII

He ceased, and drew forth an MS.; and no
Persuasion on the part of devils, saints,
Or angels, now could stop the torrent; so
He read the first three lines of the contents;
But at the fourth, the whole spiritual show
Had vanish'd, with variety of scents,
Ambrosial and sulphureous, as they sprang,
Like lightning, off from his 'melodious twang.' (3)

CIII

Those grand heroics acted as a spell:
The angels stopp'd their ears and plied their pinions;
The devils ran howling, deafen'd, down to hell;
The ghosts fled, gibbering, for their own dominions —
(For 'tis not yet decided where they dwell,
And I leave every man to his opinions);
Michael took refuge in his trump — but, lo!
His teeth were set on edge, he could not blow!

CIV

Saint Peter, who has hitherto been known
For an impetuous saint, upraised his keys,
And at the fifth line knock'd the poet down;
Who fell like Phaeton, but more at ease,
Into his lake, for there he did not drown;
A different web being by the Destinies
Woven for the Laureate's final wreath, whene'er
Reform shall happen either here or there.

CV

He first sank to the bottom - like his works,
But soon rose to the surface — like himself;
For all corrupted things are bouy'd like corks,(4)
By their own rottenness, light as an elf,
Or wisp that flits o'er a morass: he lurks,
It may be, still, like dull books on a shelf,
In his own den, to scrawl some 'Life' or 'Vision,'
As Welborn says — 'the devil turn'd precisian.'

CVI

As for the rest, to come to the conclusion
Of this true dream, the telescope is gone
Which kept my optics free from all delusion,
And show'd me what I in my turn have shown;
All I saw farther, in the last confusion,
Was, that King George slipp'd into heaven for one;
And when the tumult dwindled to a calm,
I left him practising the hundredth psalm.

George Gordon Byron-The Vision Of Judgment

Balu

08-13-2015, 03:45 AM

I

Saint Peter sat by the celestial gate: ....

This is incredible and GRATE, Robert!:clap::slap:

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

08-13-2015, 11:28 PM

Autumnal Sonnet
--------------------------------------by William Allingham

Now Autumn's fire burns slowly along the woods,
And day by day the dead leaves fall and melt,
And night by night the monitory blast
Wails in the key-hold, telling how it pass'd
O'er empty fields, or upland solitudes,
Or grim wide wave; and now the power is felt
Of melancholy, tenderer in its moods
Than any joy indulgent summer dealt.
Dear friends, together in the glimmering eve,
Pensive and glad, with tones that recognise
The soft invisible dew in each one's eyes,
It may be, somewhat thus we shall have leave
To walk with memory,--when distant lies
Poor Earth, where we were wont to live and grieve.

------------------------------------------

Late Autumn
-----------------by William Allingham

October - and the skies are cool and gray
O'er stubbles emptied of their latest sheaf,
Bare meadow, and the slowly falling leaf.
The dignity of woods in rich decay
Accords full well with this majestic grief
That clothes our solemn purple hills to-day,
Whose afternoon is hush'd, and wintry brief
Only a robin sings from any spray.

And night sends up her pale cold moon, and spills
White mist around the hollows of the hills,
Phantoms of firth or lake; the peasant sees
His cot and stockyard, with the homestead trees,
Islanded; but no foolish terror thrills
His perfect harvesting; he sleeps at ease.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
A double offering today, both truly great poems.. -Tyr

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

08-14-2015, 01:11 AM

The Night Journey
-----------------------------by Rupert Brooke

Hands and lit faces eddy to a line;
The dazed last minutes click; the clamour dies.
Beyond the great-swung arc o' the roof, divine,
Night, smoky-scarv'd, with thousand coloured eyes

Glares the imperious mystery of the way.
Thirsty for dark, you feel the long-limbed train
Throb, stretch, thrill motion, slide, pull out and sway,
Strain for the far, pause, draw to strength again. . . .

As a man, caught by some great hour, will rise,
Slow-limbed, to meet the light or find his love;
And, breathing long, with staring sightless eyes,
Hands out, head back, agape and silent, move

Sure as a flood, smooth as a vast wind blowing;
And, gathering power and purpose as he goes,
Unstumbling, unreluctant, strong, unknowing,
Borne by a will not his, that lifts, that grows,

Sweep out to darkness, triumphing in his goal,
Out of the fire, out of the little room. . . .
-- There is an end appointed, O my soul!
Crimson and green the signals burn; the gloom

Is hung with steam's far-blowing livid streamers.
Lost into God, as lights in light, we fly,
Grown one with will, end-drunken huddled dreamers.
The white lights roar. The sounds of the world die.

And lips and laughter are forgotten things.
Speed sharpens; grows. Into the night, and on,
The strength and splendour of our purpose swings.
The lamps fade; and the stars. We are alone.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

08-15-2015, 11:13 AM

FRANCOIS VILLON�S PRAYER

While the world is still turning, and while the daylight is broad,
Oh Lord, pray, please give everyone what he or she hasn�t got.
Give the timid a horse to ride, give the wise a bright head,
Give the fortunate money and about me don�t forget.

While the world is still turning, Lord, You are omnipotent,
Let those striving for power wield it to their heart's content.
Give a break to the generous, at least for a day or two,
Pray, give Cain repentance, and remember me, too.

I know You are almighty, and I believe You are wise
Like a soldier killed in a battle believes he�s in paradise.
Like every eared creature believes, oh, my Lord, in You,
Like we believe, doing something, not knowing what we do.

Oh Lord, oh my sweet Lord, my blue eyed Lord, You�re good!
While the world is still turning, wondering, why it should,
While it has got sufficient fire and time, as You see,
Give each a little of something and remember about me!

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

08-16-2015, 08:01 AM

Федор Тютчев

* * *
К. Б.
Fyodor Tutchev

(translated from the Russian by Alec Vagapov)

***

Я встретил вас - и все былое
В отжившем сердце ожило;
Я вспомнил время золотое -
И сердцу стало так тепло...

Как поздней осени порою
Бывают дни, бывает час,
Когда повеет вдруг весною
И что-то встрепенется в нас,-

Так, весь обвеян духовеньем
Тех лет душевной полноты,
С давно забытым упоеньем
Смотрю на милые черты...

Как после вековой разлуки,
Гляжу на вас, как бы во сне,-
И вот - слышнее стали звуки,
Не умолкавшие во мне...

Тут не одно воспоминанье,
Тут жизнь заговорила вновь,-
И то же в нас очарованье,
И та ж в душе моей любовь!..

26 июля 1870

I met you, and the bygone moments
Awakened in my fainted heart;
The good old times, like golden omens,
Warmed up my soul, giving a start...

It's like in autumn, way belated,
A day, or hour, comes to pass
When breath of spring comes, unexpected,
And... something palpitates in us.

And wholly filled with inspiration
By all those hearty years and dates
With long forgotten exultation
I look at your amazing traits...

Like after years of separation
I stare at you, as if in dreams, -
And now... I hear the augmentation
Of never ending sounds, it seems.

It's not just simple recollection,
It's life that has begun to chat, -
The same old charm and admiration,
The same old love deep in my heart!

July 26th, 1870
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Федор Тютчев

Fyodor Tutchev

(translated from the Russian

by Alec Vagapov)

* * *
Сей день, я помню, для меня
Был утром жизненного дня:
Стояла молча предо мною,
Вздымалась грудь ее волною,
Алели щеки, как заря,
Все жарче рдея и горя!
И вдруг, как солнце молодое,
Любви признанье золотое
Исторглось из груди ея...
И новый мир увидел я!..

1830
***
To me, as I recall, that day
Was morning of my life's new way,
She stood in silence, I am retrieving,
Like tidal wave her chest was heaving,
Her cheeks aglow were turning red
Like sunrise glare overhead!
Then, like the rising sun, abruptly
Sweet word of love came out heartily...
And hearing the golden word
I got to know the brand-new world!

1830
-----------------------------------------------------------------
A double offering today, both truly great poems.. -Tyr

Balu

08-16-2015, 09:02 AM

Федор Тютчев
... A double offering today, both truly great poems.. -Tyr

Thank you Robert for your finding time to read. And I am very glad that you felt...
Every Poet let everything he has to say pass through his Soul. And the richer the Soul is the more chances for a poet to wright masterpieces.
You, Robert, is one of such luckiest persons. I am not flattering. You are not a girl. :beer:

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

08-17-2015, 09:28 PM

Loss And Gain
-------------------------------by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Virtue runs before the muse
And defies her skill,
She is rapt, and doth refuse
To wait a painter's will.

Star-adoring, occupied,
Virtue cannot bend her,
Just to please a poet's pride,
To parade her splendor.

The bard must be with good intent
No more his, but hers,
Throw away his pen and paint,
Kneel with worshippers.

Then, perchance, a sunny ray
From the heaven of fire,
His lost tools may over-pay,
And better his desire.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

08-18-2015, 09:21 AM

Sonnet
-----------------by Sir John Suckling

Oh, for some honest lover's ghost,
Some kind unbodied post
Sent from the shades below!
I strangely long to know
Whether the noble chaplets wear
Those that their mistress' scorn did bear
Or those that were used kindly.

For whatsoe'er they tell us here
To make those sufferings dear,
'Twill there, I fear, be found
That to the being crowned
T' have loved alone will not suffice,
Unless we also have been wise
And have our loves enjoyed.

What posture can we think him in
That, here unloved, again
Departs, and 's thither gone
Where each sits by his own?
Or how can that Elysium be
Where I my mistress still must see
Circled in other's arms?

For there the judges all are just,
And Sophonisba must
Be his whom she held dear,
Not his who loved her here.
The sweet Philoclea, since she died,
Lies by her Pirocles his side,
Not by Amphialus.

Some bays, perchance, or myrtle bough
For difference crowns the brow
Of those kind souls that were
The noble martyrs here;
And if that be the only odds,
(As who can tell?) ye kinder gods,
Give me the woman here!
------------------------------------------------------

Truly great poem. I am not familiar with this sonnet form myself..
Five 7 verses stanzas with 7th verse not rhymed. I like it a lot, will have to research this form.
As I plan on writing in this form very soon.. --Tyr

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

08-19-2015, 07:41 AM

Ballad for Gloom
--------------------------------------- by Ezra Pound

For God, our God is a gallant foe
That playeth behind the veil.

I have loved my God as a child at heart
That seeketh deep bosoms for rest,
I have loved my God as a maid to man—
But lo, this thing is best:

To love your God as a gallant foe that plays behind the veil;
To meet your God as the night winds meet beyond Arcturus' pale.

I have played with God for a woman,
I have staked with my God for truth,
I have lost to my God as a man, clear-eyed—
His dice be not of ruth.

For I am made as a naked blade,
But hear ye this thing in sooth:

Who loseth to God as man to man
Shall win at the turn of the game.
I have drawn my blade where the lightnings meet
But the ending is the same:
Who loseth to God as the sword blades lose
Shall win at the end of the game.

For God, our God is a gallant foe that playeth behind the veil.
Whom God deigns not to overthrow hath need of triple mail.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting
a modernist aesthetic in poetry. In the early teens of the twentieth century, he opened
a seminal exchange of work and ideas between British and American writers, and was famous
for the generosity with which he advanced the work of such major contemporaries as W. B. Yeats,
Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H. D., James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway
and especially T. S. Eliot. His own significant contributions to poetry begin with his
promulgation of Imagism, a movement in poetry which derived its technique from classical
Chinese and Japanese poetry - stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language, and
foregoing traditional rhyme and meter in order to, in Pound's words, "compose in the sequence
of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome." His later work, for nearly fifty
years, focused on the encyclopedic epic poem he entitled The Cantos.

Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885. He completed two years of college at the
University of Pennsylvania and earned a degree from Hamilton College in 1905. After teaching
at Wabash College for two years, he traveled abroad to Spain, Italy and London, where, as the
literary executor of the scholar Ernest Fenellosa, he became interested in Japanese and
Chinese poetry. He married Dorothy Shakespeare in 1914 and became London editor of the
Little Review in 1917. In 1924, he moved to Italy; during this period of voluntary exile,
Pound became involved in Fascist politics, and did not return to the United States until
1945, when he was arrested on charges of treason for broadcasting Fascist propaganda by
radio to the United States during the Second World War. In 1946, he was acquitted, but
declared mentally ill and committed to St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. During
his confinement, the jury of the Bollingen-Library of Congress Award (which included a
number of the most eminent writers of the time) decided to overlook Pound's political career
in the interest of recognizing his poetic achievements, and awarded him the prize for the
Pisan Cantos (1948). After continuous appeals from writers won his release from the hospital
in 1958, Pound returned to Italy and settled in Venice, where he died, a semi-recluse, in
1972.

Ezra Pound was a giant and a genius. Poetry owes him big time. As did may other poets he so clearly influenced and helped to make famous by that great influence and actually editing of their poems in some cases.. T.S. Eliot's great poetry fame is largely due to Ezra's influence and direct help.-Tyr

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

08-20-2015, 09:07 AM

On Anothers Sorrow
---------------------------------by William Blake

Can I see anothers woe,
And not be in sorrow too?
Can I see anothers grief,
And not seek for kind relief.

Can I see a falling tear.
And not feel my sorrows share,
Can a father see his child,
Weep, nor be with sorrow fill'd.

Can a mother sit and hear.
An infant groan an infant fear--
No no never can it be,
Never never can it be.

And can he who smiles on all
Hear the wren with sorrows small.
Hear the small bird's grief & care
Hear the woes that infants bear--

And not sit beside the nest
Pouring pity in their breast.
And not sit the cradle near
Weeping tear on infant's tear.

And not sit both night & day.
Wiping all our tears away.
O! no never can it be.
Never never can it be.

He doth give his joy to all,
He becomes an infant small,
He becomes a man of woe
He doth feel the sorrow too.

Think not. thou canst sigh a sigh,
And thy maker is not by.
Think not, thou canst weep a tear,
And thy maker is not near.

O! he gives to us his joy.
That our grief he may destroy
Till our grief is fled & gone
He doth sit by us and moan
-----------------------------------------------------------
^^^^^ Tis why I think Blake to be a top poet....... he can and does write so well without using excessive flowery language and massive numbers of metaphors. In that , he writes a lot more in the Frank Stanton vein! Using clearer precision in an much easier understood language to reach more readers. I tend to practice that myself. After early years of often writing as did the poets of old-- I pretty much gave that up, preferring plainer language but attempting to keep the imagery high and message still strong!
Not an easy task by any means!
Notice that I never post those, any of my old poems, written in that archaic language even with many of them being quite good?
I feel principle should trump ego. Thusly, I abandoned those poems.. -Tyr

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

08-21-2015, 06:12 AM

Journey's End
---------------------------------- by J. R. R. Tolkien

In western lands beneath the Sun
The flowers may rise in Spring,
The trees may bud, the waters run,
The merry finches sing.
Or there maybe 'tis cloudless night,
And swaying branches bear
The Elven-stars as jewels white
Amid their branching hair.

Though here at journey's end I lie
In darkness buried deep,
Beyond all towers strong and high,
Beyond all mountains steep,
Above all shadows rides the Sun
And Stars for ever dwell:
I will not say the Day is done,
Nor bid the Stars farewell.

---------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------
Journey
---------------------------------------- by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Ah, could I lay me down in this long grass
And close my eyes, and let the quiet wind
Blow over me—I am so tired, so tired
Of passing pleasant places! All my life,
Following Care along the dusty road,
Have I looked back at loveliness and sighed;
Yet at my hand an unrelenting hand
Tugged ever, and I passed. All my life long
Over my shoulder have I looked at peace;
And now I fain would lie in this long grass
And close my eyes.
Yet onward!
Cat birds call
Through the long afternoon, and creeks at dusk
Are guttural. Whip-poor-wills wake and cry,
Drawing the twilight close about their throats.
Only my heart makes answer. Eager vines
Go up the rocks and wait; flushed apple-trees
Pause in their dance and break the ring for me;
And bayberry, that through sweet bevies thread
Of round-faced roses, pink and petulant,
Look back and beckon ere they disappear.
Only my heart, only my heart responds.
Yet, ah, my path is sweet on either side
All through the dragging day,—sharp underfoot
And hot, and like dead mist the dry dust hangs—
But far, oh, far as passionate eye can reach,
And long, ah, long as rapturous eye can cling,
The world is mine: blue hill, still silver lake,
Broad field, bright flower, and the long white road
A gateless garden, and an open path:
My feet to follow, and my heart to hold.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

08-22-2015, 08:06 AM

Sleep! Sleep! Beauty Bright
------------------------------------ by William Blake

Sleep! sleep! beauty bright,
Dreaming o'er the joys of night;
Sleep! sleep! in thy sleep
Little sorrows sit and weep.

Sweet Babe, in thy face
Soft desires I can trace,
Secret joys and secret smiles,
Little pretty infant wiles.

As thy softest limbs I feel,
Smiles as of the morning steal
O'er thy cheek, and o'er thy breast
Where thy little heart does rest.

O! the cunning wiles that creep
In thy little heart asleep.
When thy little heart does wake
Then the dreadful lightnings break,

From thy cheek and from thy eye,
O'er the youthful harvests nigh.
Infant wiles and infant smiles
Heaven and Earth of peace beguiles.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

08-23-2015, 09:48 AM

Hope and Fear
----------------------------- by Algernon Charles Swinburne

Beneath the shadow of dawn's aërial cope,
With eyes enkindled as the sun's own sphere,
Hope from the front of youth in godlike cheer
Looks Godward, past the shades where blind men grope
Round the dark door that prayers nor dreams can ope,
And makes for joy the very darkness dear
That gives her wide wings play; nor dreams that fear
At noon may rise and pierce the heart of hope.
Then, when the soul leaves off to dream and yearn,
May truth first purge her eyesight to discern
What, once being known, leaves time no power to appall;
Till yoiuth at last, ere yet youth be not, learn
The kind wise word that falls from years that fall--
"Hope thou not much, and fear thou not at all."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Always dearly loved this poem-especially the closing --
What, once being known, leaves time no power to appall;
Till yoiuth at last, ere yet youth be not, learn
The kind wise word that falls from years that fall--
"Hope thou not much, and fear thou not at all."

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

08-24-2015, 08:28 AM

To Ireland In The Coming Times
------------------------------------------by William Butler Yeats

Know, that I would accounted be
True brother of a company
That sang, to sweeten Ireland's wrong,
Ballad and story, rann and song;
Nor be I any less of them,
Because the red-rose-bordered hem
Of her, whose history began
Before God made the angelic clan,
Trails all about the written page.
When Time began to rant and rage
The measure of her flying feet
Made Ireland's heart begin to beat;
And Time bade all his candles flare
To light a measure here and there;
And may the thoughts of Ireland brood
Upon a measured guietude.
Nor may I less be counted one
With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson,
Because, to him who ponders well,
My rhymes more than their rhyming tell
Of things discovered in the deep,
Where only body's laid asleep.
For the elemental creatures go
About my table to and fro,
That hurry from unmeasured mind
To rant and rage in flood and wind,
Yet he who treads in measured ways
May surely barter gaze for gaze.
Man ever journeys on with them
After the red-rose-bordered hem.
Ah, faerics, dancing under the moon,
A Druid land, a Druid tune.!
While still I may, I write for you
The love I lived, the dream I knew.
From our birthday, until we die,
Is but the winking of an eye;
And we, our singing and our love,
What measurer Time has lit above,
And all benighted things that go
About my table to and fro,
Are passing on to where may be,
In truth's consuming ecstasy,
No place for love and dream at all;
For God goes by with white footfall.
I cast my heart into my rhymes,
That you, in the dim coming times,
May know how my heart went with them
After the red-rose-bordered hem.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

08-25-2015, 09:20 AM

The River of Life
---------------------------------by Thomas Campbell

The more we live, more brief appear
Our life's succeeding stages;
A day to childhood seems a year,
And years like passing ages.

The gladsome current of our youth,
Ere passion yet disorders,
Steals lingering like a river smooth
Along its grassy borders.

But as the careworn cheek grows wan,
And sorrow's shafts fly thicker,
Ye stars, that measure life to man,
Why seem your courses quicker?

When joys have lost their bloom and breath,
And life itself is vapid,
Why, as we reach the Falls of Death
Feel we its tide more rapid?

It may be strange—yet who would change
Time's course to slower speeding,
When one by one our friends have gone,
And left our bosoms bleeding?

Heaven gives our years of fading strength
Indemnifying fleetness;
And those of youth, a seeming length,
Proportion'd to their sweetness.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

08-26-2015, 07:33 AM

In Memory of Rupert Brooke
------------------------------------------------by Joyce Kilmer

In alien earth, across a troubled sea,
His body lies that was so fair and young.
His mouth is stopped, with half his songs unsung;
His arm is still, that struck to make men free.
But let no cloud of lamentation be
Where, on a warrior's grave, a lyre is hung.
We keep the echoes of his golden tongue,
We keep the vision of his chivalry.
So Israel's joy, the loveliest of kings,
Smote now his harp, and now the hostile horde.
To-day the starry roof of Heaven rings
With psalms a soldier made to praise his Lord;
And David rests beneath Eternal wings,
Song on his lips, and in his hand a sword.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
In Memory of a Child
--------------------------------------by Vachel Lindsay

I

The angels guide him now,
And watch his curly head,
And lead him in their games,
The little boy we led.

II

He cannot come to harm,
He knows more than we know,
His light is brighter far
Than daytime here below.

III

His path leads on and on,
Through pleasant lawns and flowers,
His brown eyes open wide
At grass more green than ours.

IV

With playmates like himself,
The shining boy will sing,
Exploring wondrous woods,
Sweet with eternal spring.

V

Yet, he is lost to us,
Far is his path of gold,
Far does the city seem,
Lonely our hearts and old.
------------------------------------------------------

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

08-27-2015, 08:13 AM

Harp of the North, Farewell!
----------------------------------------by Sir Walter Scott

Harp of the North, farewell! The hills grow dark,
On purple peaks a deeper shade descending;
In twilight copse the glow-worm lights her spark,
The deer, half-seen, are to the covert wending.
Resume thy wizard elm! the fountain lending,
And the wild breeze, thy wilder minstrelsy;
Thy numbers sweet with nature’s vespers blending,
With distant echo from the fold and lea,
And herd-boy’s evening pipe, and hum of housing bee.

Yet, once again, farewell, thou Minstrel Harp!
Yet, once again, forgive my feeble sway,
And little reck I of the censure sharp
May idly cavil at an idle lay.
Much have I owed thy strains on life’s long way,
Through secret woes the world has never known,
When on the weary night dawned wearier day,
And bitterer was the grief devoured alone.—
That I o’erlive such woes, Enchantress! is thine own.

Hark! as my lingering footsteps slow retire,
Some spirit of the Air has waked thy string!
’Tis now a seraph bold, with touch of fire,
’Tis now the brush of Fairy’s frolic wing.
Receding now, the dying numbers ring
Fainter and fainter down the rugged dell;
And now the mountain breezes scarcely bring
A wandering witch-note of the distant spell—
And now, ’tis silent all!—Enchantress, fare thee well!

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

08-28-2015, 09:31 AM

A Ballad of Hell
--------------------------------------------by John Davidson

'A letter from my love to-day!
Oh, unexpected, dear appeal!'
She struck a happy tear away,
And broke the crimson seal.

'My love, there is no help on earth,
No help in heaven; the dead-man's bell
Must toll our wedding; our first hearth
Must be the well-paved floor of hell.'

The colour died from out her face,
Her eyes like ghostly candles shone;
She cast dread looks about the place,
Then clenched her teeth and read right on.

'I may not pass the prison door;
Here must I rot from day to day,
Unless I wed whom I abhor,
My cousin, Blanche of Valencay.

'At midnight with my dagger keen,
I'll take my life; it must be so.
Meet me in hell to-night, my queen,
For weal and woe.'

She laughed although her face was wan,
She girded on her golden belt,
She took her jewelled ivory fan,
And at her glowing missal knelt.

Then rose, 'And am I mad?' she said:
She broke her fan, her belt untied;
With leather girt herself instead,
And stuck a dagger at her side.

She waited, shuddering in her room,
Till sleep had fallen on all the house.
She never flinched; she faced her doom:
They two must sin to keep their vows.

Then out into the night she went,
And, stooping, crept by hedge and tree;
Her rose-bush flung a snare of scent,
And caught a happy memory.

She fell, and lay a minute's space;
She tore the sward in her distress;
The dewy grass refreshed her face;
She rose and ran with lifted dress.

She started like a morn-caught ghost
Once when the moon came out and stood
To watch; the naked road she crossed,
And dived into the murmuring wood.

The branches snatched her streaming cloak;
A live thing shrieked; she made no stay!
She hurried to the trysting-oak—
Right well she knew the way.

Without a pause she bared her breast,
And drove her dagger home and fell,
And lay like one that takes her rest,
And died and wakened up in hell.

She bathed her spirit in the flame,
And near the centre took her post;
From all sides to her ears there came
The dreary anguish of the lost.

The devil started at her side,
Comely, and tall, and black as jet.
'I am young Malespina's bride;
Has he come hither yet?'

'My poppet, welcome to your bed.'
'Is Malespina here?'
'Not he! To-morrow he must wed
His cousin Blanche, my dear!'

'You lie, he died with me to-night.'
'Not he! it was a plot' ... 'You lie.'
'My dear, I never lie outright.'
'We died at midnight, he and I.'

The devil went. Without a groan
She, gathered up in one fierce prayer,
Took root in hell's midst all alone,
And waited for him there.

She dared to make herself at home
Amidst the wail, the uneasy stir.
The blood-stained flame that filled the dome,
Scentless and silent, shrouded her.

How long she stayed I cannot tell;
But when she felt his perfidy,
She marched across the floor of hell;
And all the damned stood up to see.

The devil stopped her at the brink:
She shook him off; she cried, 'Away!'
'My dear, you have gone mad, I think.'
'I was betrayed: I will not stay.'

Across the weltering deep she ran;
A stranger thing was never seen:
The damned stood silent to a man;
They saw the great gulf set between.

To her it seemed a meadow fair;
And flowers sprang up about her feet
She entered heaven; she climbed the stair
And knelt down at the mercy-seat.

Seraphs and saints with one great voice
Welcomed that soul that knew not fear.
Amazed to find it could rejoice,
Hell raised a hoarse, half-human cheer.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

08-28-2015, 11:45 PM

The Sea And the Hills
----------------------------------- by Rudyard Kipling
1902
Who hath desired the Sea? -- the sight of salt wind-hounded --
The heave and the halt and the hurl and the crash of the comber win hounded?
The sleek-barrelled swell before storm, grey, foamless, enormous, and growing --
Stark calm on the lap of the Line or the crazy-eyed hurricane blowing --
His Sea in no showing the same his Sea and the same 'neath each showing:
His Sea as she slackens or thrills?
So and no otherwise -- so and no otherwise -- hillmen desire their Hills!

Who hath desired the Sea? -- the immense and contemptuous surges?
The shudder, the stumble, the swerve, as the star-stabbing bow-sprit emerges?
The orderly clouds of the Trades, the ridged, roaring sapphire thereunder --
Unheralded cliff-haunting flaws and the headsail's low-volleying thunder --
His Sea in no wonder the same his Sea and the same through each wonder:
His Sea as she rages or stills?
So and no otherwise -- so and no otherwise -- hillmen desire their Hills.

Who hath desired the Sea? Her menaces swift as her mercies?
The in-rolling walls of the fog and the silver-winged breeze that disperses?
The unstable mined berg going South and the calvings and groans that de clare it --
White water half-guessed overside and the moon breaking timely to bare it --
His Sea as his fathers have dared -- his Sea as his children shall dare it:
His Sea as she serves him or kills?
So and no otherwise -- so and no otherwisc -- hillmen desire their Hills.

Who hath desired the Sea? Her excellent loneliness rather
Than forecourts of kings, and her outermost pits than the streets where men gather
Inland, among dust, under trees -- inland where the slayer may slay him --
Inland, out of reach of her arms, and the bosom whereon he must lay him
His Sea from the first that betrayed -- at the last that shall never betray him:
His Sea that his being fulfils?
So and no otherwise -- so and no otherwise -- hillmen desire their Hills.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

08-29-2015, 08:06 AM

A Prayer For Old Age
----------------------------------by William Butler Yeats

God guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He that sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow-bone;

From all that makes a wise old man
That can be praised of all;
O what am I that I should not seem
For the song's sake a fool?

I pray -- for word is out
And prayer comes round again --
That I may seem, though I die old,
A foolish, passionate man.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

08-30-2015, 09:46 AM

The Human Tree
-----------------------------------by G. K. Chesterton

Many have Earth's lovers been,
Tried in seas and wars, I ween;
Yet the mightiest have I seen:
Yea, the best saw I.
One that in a field alone
Stood up stiller than a stone
Lest a moth should fly.

Birds had nested in his hair,
On his shoon were mosses rare,
Insect empires flourished there,
Worms in ancient wars;
But his eyes burn like a glass,
Hearing a great sea of grass
Roar towards the stars.

From them to the human tree
Rose a cry continually:
`Thou art still, our Father, we
Fain would have thee nod.
Make the skies as blood below thee,
Though thou slay us, we shall know thee.
Answer us, O God!

`Show thine ancient fame and thunder,
Split the stillness once asunder,
Lest we whisper, lest we wonder
Art thou there at all?'
But I saw him there alone,
Standing stiller than a stone
Lest a moth should fall.
-------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------
I have read and even written many tree poems but this one is my favorite to read.--Tyr

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

08-31-2015, 08:06 AM

The Palace of Humbug by Lewis Carroll
Lays of Mystery,
Imagination, and Humor
--------------------------------------------------------by Lewis Carroll

Number 1

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And each damp thing that creeps and crawls
Went wobble-wobble on the walls.

Faint odours of departed cheese,
Blown on the dank, unwholesome breeze,
Awoke the never ending sneeze.

Strange pictures decked the arras drear,
Strange characters of woe and fear,
The humbugs of the social sphere.

One showed a vain and noisy prig,
That shouted empty words and big
At him that nodded in a wig.

And one, a dotard grim and gray,
Who wasteth childhood's happy day
In work more profitless than play.

Whose icy breast no pity warms,
Whose little victims sit in swarms,
And slowly sob on lower forms.

And one, a green thyme-honoured Bank,
Where flowers are growing wild and rank,
Like weeds that fringe a poisoned tank.

All birds of evil omen there
Flood with rich Notes the tainted air,
The witless wanderer to snare.

The fatal Notes neglected fall,
No creature heeds the treacherous call,
For all those goodly Strawn Baits Pall.

The wandering phantom broke and fled,
Straightway I saw within my head
A vision of a ghostly bed,

Where lay two worn decrepit men,
The fictions of a lawyer's pen,
Who never more might breathe again.

The serving-man of Richard Roe
Wept, inarticulate with woe:
She wept, that waiting on John Doe.

"Oh rouse", I urged, "the waning sense
With tales of tangled evidence,
Of suit, demurrer, and defence."

"Vain", she replied, "such mockeries:
For morbid fancies, such as these,
No suits can suit, no plea can please."

And bending o'er that man of straw,
She cried in grief and sudden awe,
Not inappropriately, "Law!"

The well-remembered voice he knew,
He smiled, he faintly muttered "Sue!"
(Her very name was legal too.)

The night was fled, the dawn was nigh:
A hurricane went raving by,
And swept the Vision from mine eye.

Vanished that dim and ghostly bed,
(The hangings, tape; the tape was red happy
'Tis o'er, and Doe and Roe are dead!

Oh, yet my spirit inly crawls,
What time it shudderingly recalls
That horrid dream of marble halls!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We today are not use to humor having such great depth and even darkness IMHO .
Whereas those educated long ago had a greater foundation to judge and to create from IMHO. -Tyr

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

09-01-2015, 09:05 PM

The Dog And His Master
------------------------------------by Anne Kingsmill Finch

NO better Dog e'er kept his Master's Door
Than honest Snarl, who spar'd nor Rich nor Poor;
But gave the Alarm, when any one drew nigh,
Nor let pretended Friends pass fearless by:
For which reprov'd, as better Fed than Taught,
He rightly thus expostulates the Fault.

To keep the House from Rascals was my Charge;
The Task was great, and the Commission large.
Nor did your Worship e'er declare your Mind,
That to the begging Crew it was confin'd;
Who shrink an Arm, or prop an able Knee,
Or turn up Eyes, till they're not seen, nor see.
To Thieves, who know the Penalty of Stealth,
And fairly stake their Necks against your Wealth,
These are the known Delinquents of the Times,
And Whips and Tyburn. testify their Crimes.

But since to Me there was by Nature lent
An exquisite Discerning by the Scent;
I trace a Flatt'rer, when he fawns and leers,
A rallying Wit, when he commends and jeers:
The greedy Parasite I grudging note,
Who praises the good Bits, that oil his Throat;
I mark the Lady, you so fondly toast,
That plays your Gold, when all her own is lost:
The Knave, who fences your Estate by Law,
Yet still reserves an undermining Flaw.
These and a thousand more, which I cou'd tell,
Provoke my Growling, and offend my Smell.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

09-02-2015, 07:52 AM

The Life Beyond
----------------------------------------------by Rupert Brooke

He wakes, who never thought to wake again,
Who held the end was Death. He opens eyes
Slowly, to one long livid oozing plain
Closed down by the strange eyeless heavens. He lies;
And waits; and once in timeless sick surmise
Through the dead air heaves up an unknown hand,
Like a dry branch. No life is in that land,
Himself not lives, but is a thing that cries;
An unmeaning point upon the mud; a speck
Of moveless horror; an Immortal One
Cleansed of the world, sentient and dead; a fly
Fast-stuck in grey sweat on a corpse's neck.

I thought when love for you died, I should die.
It's dead. Alone, most strangely, I live on.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

09-03-2015, 10:31 PM

The Young May Moon
-----------------------------------by Thomas Moore

The young May moon is beaming, love.
The glow-worm's lamp is gleaming, love.
How sweet to rove,
Through Morna's grove,
When the drowsy world is dreaming, love!
Then awake! -- the heavens look bright, my dear,
'Tis never too late for delight, my dear,
And the best of all ways
To lengthen our days
Is to steal a few hours from the night, my dear!

Now all the world is sleeping, love,
But the Sage, his star-watch keeping, love,
And I, whose star,
More glorious far,
Is the eye from that casement peeping, love.
Then awake! -- till rise of sun, my dear,
The Sage's glass we'll shun, my dear,
Or, in watching the flight
Of bodies of light,
He might happen to take thee for one, my dear.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

09-04-2015, 10:17 AM

ART ABOVE NATURE: TO JULIA
--------------------------------------------- by Robert Herrick

When I behold a forest spread
With silken trees upon thy head;
And when I see that other dress
Of flowers set in comeliness;
When I behold another grace
In the ascent of curious lace,
Which, like a pinnacle, doth shew
The top, and the top-gallant too;
Then, when I see thy tresses bound
Into an oval, square, or round,
And knit in knots far more than I.
Can tell by tongue, or True-love tie;
Next, when those lawny films I see
Play with a wild civility;
And all those airy silks to flow,
Alluring me, and tempting so--
I must confess, mine eye and heart
Dotes less on nature than on art.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

09-05-2015, 10:26 AM

While History's Muse
----------------------------------- by Thomas Moore

While History's Muse the memorial was keeping
Of all that the dark hand of Destiny weaves,
Beside her the Genius of Erin stood weeping,
For hers was the story that blotted the leaves.
But oh! how the tear in her eyelids grew bright,
When, after whole pages of sorrow and shame,
She saw History write,
With a pencil of light
That illumed the whole volume, her Wellington's name.

"Yet still the last crown of thy toils is remaining,
The grandest, the purest, even thou hast yet known;
Though proud was thy task, other nations unchaining,
Far prouder to heal the deep wounds of thy own.
At the foot of that throne, for whose weal thou hast stood,
Go, plead for the land that first cradled thy fame,
And, bright o'er the flood
Of her tears, and her blood,
Let the rainbow of Hope be her Wellington's name."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Just finished my rereading of the book, Admiral Of The Ocean, A Life Of Christopher Columbus by
Samuel Eliot Morison, published, February 1942. Amazing information in this great book.-Tyr

—Así es —replicó Sansón—, pero uno es escribir como poeta, y otro como historiador: el poeta puede contar o cantar las cosas, no como fueron, sino como debían ser; y el historiador las ha de escribir, no como debían ser, sino como fueron, sin añadir ni quitar a la verdad cosa alguna27.
Don Quixote part ii ch. 3

translated-
So is Samson replied , but one is writing as a poet, and another as historian , the poet can tell or sing things, not as they were, but as they should be ; and the historian has written , not as they should be , but as they were , without adding or removing alguna the truth thing .

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

09-06-2015, 01:03 AM

During Wind And Rain
--------------------------------------by Thomas Hardy

They sing their dearest songs --
He, she, all of them -- yea,
Treble and tenor and bass,
And one to play;
With the candles mooning each face....
Ah, no; the years O!
How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!

They clear the creeping moss --
Elders and juniors -- aye,
Making the pathways neat
And the garden gay;
And they build a shady seat....
Ah, no; the years, the years;
See, the white storm-birds wing across!

They are blithely breakfasting all --
Men and maidens -- yea,
Under the summer tree,
With a glimpse of the bay,
While pet fowl come to the knee....
Ah, no; the years O!
And the rotten rose is ript from the wall.

They change to a high new house,
He, she, all of them -- aye,
Clocks and carpets and chairs
On the lawn all day,
And brightest things that are theirs....
Ah, no; the years, the years;
Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

09-07-2015, 09:18 AM

Ancient History
-----------------------------by Siegfried Sassoon

Adam, a brown old vulture in the rain,
Shivered below his wind-whipped olive-trees;
Huddling sharp chin on scarred and scraggy knees,
He moaned and mumbled to his darkening brain;
‘He was the grandest of them all was Cain!
‘A lion laired in the hills, that none could tire:
‘Swift as a stag: a stallion of the plain,
‘Hungry and fierce with deeds of huge desire.’

Grimly he thought of Abel, soft and fair
A lover with disaster in his face,
And scarlet blossom twisted in bright hair.
‘Afraid to fight; was murder more disgrace?’
‘God always hated Cain’ He bowed his head
The gaunt wild man whose lovely sons were dead.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

09-08-2015, 07:50 AM

THE EYES OF BEAUTY
---------------------------------------------- by Charles Baudelaire

YOU are a sky of autumn, pale and rose;
But all the sea of sadness in my blood
Surges, and ebbing, leaves my lips morose,
Salt with the memory of the bitter flood.

In vain your hand glides my faint bosom o'er,
That which you seek, beloved, is desecrate
By woman's tooth and talon; ah, no more
Seek in me for a heart which those dogs ate.

It is a ruin where the jackals rest,
And rend and tear and glut themselves and slay--
A perfume swims about your naked breast!

Beauty, hard scourge of spirits, have your way!
With flame-like eyes that at bright feasts have flared
Burn up these tatters that the beasts have spared!
-----------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------
Do not fret if you do not get the gist of this great poem.
As one must usually be familiar with this Archaic language to comprehend most these old poems.
I am (40+ years of reading such), and even then quite often I have to read such poems two or three times.. :laugh:--Tyr

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

09-09-2015, 08:01 AM

Old Pardon, the Son of Reprieve
--------------------------------------------- by Andrew Barton Paterson
You never heard tell of the story?
Well, now, I can hardly believe!
Never heard of the honour and glory
Of Pardon, the son of Reprieve?
But maybe you're only a Johnnie
And don't know a horse from a hoe?
Well, well, don't get angry, my sonny,
But, really, a young un should know.
They bred him out back on the "Never",
His mother was Mameluke breed.
To the front -- and then stay there - was ever
The root of the Mameluke creed.
He seemed to inherit their wiry
Strong frames -- and their pluck to receive --
As hard as a flint and as fiery
Was Pardon, the son of Reprieve.

We ran him at many a meeting
At crossing and gully and town,
And nothing could give him a beating --
At least when our money was down.
For weight wouldn't stop him, nor distance,
Nor odds, though the others were fast;
He'd race with a dogged persistence,
And wear them all down at the last.

At the Turon the Yattendon filly
Led by lengths at the mile-and-a-half,
And we all began to look silly,
While her crowd were starting to laugh;
But the old horse came faster and faster,
His pluck told its tale, and his strength,
He gained on her, caught her, and passed her,
And won it, hands down, by a length.

And then we swooped down on Menindie
To run for the President's Cup;
Oh! that's a sweet township -- a shindy
To them is board, lodging, and sup.
Eye-openers they are, and their system
Is never to suffer defeat;
It's "win, tie, or wrangle" -- to best 'em
You must lose 'em, or else it's "dead heat".

We strolled down the township and found 'em
At drinking and gaming and play;
If sorrows they had, why they drowned 'em,
And betting was soon under way.
Their horses were good uns and fit uns,
There was plenty of cash in the town;
They backed their own horses like Britons,
And, Lord! how we rattled it down!

With gladness we thought of the morrow,
We counted our wages with glee,
A simile homely to borrow --
"There was plenty of milk in our tea."
You see we were green; and we never
Had even a thought of foul play,
Though we well might have known that the clever
Division would "put us away".

Experience docet, they tell us,
At least so I've frequently heard;
But, "dosing" or "stuffing", those fellows
Were up to each move on the board:
They got to his stall -- it is sinful
To think what such villains will do --
And they gave him a regular skinful
Of barley -- green barley -- to chew.

He munched it all night, and we found him
Next morning as full as a hog --
The girths wouldn't nearly meet round him;
He looked like an overfed frog.
We saw we were done like a dinner --
The odds were a thousand to one
Against Pardon turning up winner,
'Twas cruel to ask him to run.

We got to the course with our troubles,
A crestfallen couple were we;
And we heard the " books" calling the doubles --
A roar like the surf of the sea.
And over the tumult and louder
Rang "Any price Pardon, I lay!"
Says Jimmy, "The children of Judah
Are out on the warpath today."

Three miles in three heats: -- Ah, my sonny,
The horses in those days were stout,
They had to run well to win money;
I don't see such horses about.
Your six-furlong vermin that scamper
Half-a-mile with their feather-weight up,
They wouldn't earn much of their damper
In a race like the President's Cup.

The first heat was soon set a-going;
The Dancer went off to the front;
The Don on his quarters was showing,
With Pardon right out of the hunt.
He rolled and he weltered and wallowed --
You'd kick your hat faster, I'll bet;
They finished all bunched, and he followed
All lathered and dripping with sweat.

But troubles came thicker upon us,
For while we were rubbing him dry
The stewards came over to warn us:
"We hear you are running a bye!
If Pardon don't spiel like tarnation
And win the next heat -- if he can --
He'll earn a disqualification;
Just think over that now, my man!"

Our money all gone and our credit,
Our horse couldn't gallop a yard;
And then people thought that we did it
It really was terribly hard.
We were objects of mirth and derision
To folks in the lawn and the stand,
Anf the yells of the clever division
Of "Any price Pardon!" were grand.

We still had a chance for the money,
Two heats remained to be run:
If both fell to us -- why, my sonny,
The clever division were done.
And Pardon was better, we reckoned,
His sickness was passing away,
So we went to the post for the second
And principal heat of the day.

They're off and away with a rattle,
Like dogs from the leashes let slip,
And right at the back of the battle
He followed them under the whip.
They gained ten good lengths on him quickly
He dropped right away from the pack;
I tell you it made me feel sickly
To see the blue jacket fall back.

Our very last hope had departed --
We thought the old fellow was done,
When all of a sudden he started
To go like a shot from a gun.
His chances seemed slight to embolden
Our hearts; but, with teeth firmly set,
We thought, "Now or never! The old un
May reckon with some of 'em yet."

Then loud rose the war-cry for Pardon;
He swept like the wind down the dip,
And over the rise by the garden
The jockey was done with the whip.
The field was at sixes and sevens --
The pace at the first had been fast --
And hope seemed to drop from the heavens,
For Pardon was coming at last.

And how he did come! It was splendid;
He gained on them yards every bound,
Stretching out like a greyhound extended,
His girth laid right down on the ground.
A shimmer of silk in the cedars
As into the running they wheeled,
And out flashed the whips on the leaders,
For Pardon had collared the field.

Then right through the ruck he was sailing --
I knew that the battle was won --
The son of Haphazard was failing,
The Yattendon filly was done;
He cut down The Don and The Dancer,
He raced clean away from the mare --
He's in front! Catch him now if you can, sir!
And up went my hat in the air!

Then loud fron the lawn and the garden
Rose offers of "Ten to one on!"
"Who'll bet on the field? I back Pardon!"
No use; all the money was gone.
He came for the third heat light-hearted,
A-jumping and dancing about;
The others were done ere they started
Crestfallen, and tired, and worn out.

He won it, and ran it much faster
Than even the first, I believe;
Oh, he was the daddy, the master,
Was Pardon, the son of Reprieve.
He showed 'em the method of travel --
The boy sat still as a stone --
They never could see him for gravel;
He came in hard-held, and alone.

* * * * * * *

But he's old -- and his eyes are grown hollow
Like me, with my thatch of the snow;
When he dies, then I hope I may follow,
And go where the racehorses go.
I don't want no harping nor singing --
Such things with my style don't agree;
Where the hoofs of the horses are ringing
There's music sufficient for me.

And surely the thoroughbred horses
Will rise up again and begin
Fresh faces on far-away courses,
And p'raps they might let me slip in.
It would look rather well the race-card on
'Mongst Cherubs and Seraphs and things,
"Angel Harrison's black gelding Pardon,
Blue halo, white body and wings."

And if they have racing hereafter,
(And who is to say they will not?)
When the cheers and the shouting and laughter
Proclaim that the battle grows hot;
As they come down the racecourse a-steering,
He'll rush to the front, I believe;
And you'll hear the great multitude cheering
For Pardon, the son of Reprieve

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

09-10-2015, 06:46 PM

I cried at Pity -- not at Pain --
-------------------------------------------------- by Emily Dickinson

I cried at Pity -- not at Pain --
I heard a Woman say
"Poor Child" -- and something in her voice
Convicted me -- of me --

So long I fainted, to myself
It seemed the common way,
And Health, and Laughter, Curious things --
To look at, like a Toy --

To sometimes hear "Rich people" buy
And see the Parcel rolled --
And carried, I supposed -- to Heaven,
For children, made of Gold --

But not to touch, or wish for,
Or think of, with a sigh --
And so and so -- had been to me,
Had God willed differently.

I wish I knew that Woman's name --
So when she comes this way,
To hold my life, and hold my ears
For fear I hear her say

She's "sorry I am dead" -- again --
Just when the Grave and I --
Have sobbed ourselves almost to sleep,
Our only Lullaby -

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

09-11-2015, 09:38 AM

I'd Mourn the Hopes
---------------------------------------by Thomas Moore

I'd mourn the hopes that leave me,
If thy smiles had left me too;
I'd weep when friends deceive me,
If thou wert, like them, untrue.
But while I've thee before me,
With heart so warm and eyes so bright,
No clouds can linger o'er me,
That smile turns them all to light.

'Tis not in fate to harm me,
While fate leaves thy love to me:
'Tis not in joy to charm me,
Unless joy be shared with thee.
One minute's dream about thee
Were worth a long, an endless year
Of waking bliss without thee,
My own love, my only dear!

And though the hope be gone, love,
That long sparkled o'er our way,
Oh! we shall journey on, love,
More safely, without its ray.
Far better lights shall win me,
Along the path I've yet to roam --
The mind that burns within me,
And pure smiles from thee at home.

Thus, when the lamp that lighted
The traveller at first goes out,
He feels awhile benighted,
And looks round in fear and doubt.
But soon, the prospect clearing,
By cloudless starlight on he treads,
And thinks no lamp so cheering
As the light which Heaven sheds

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

09-12-2015, 08:07 AM

A Prayer in Darkness
------------------------------------ by G. K. Chesterton

This much, O heaven—if I should brood or rave,
Pity me not; but let the world be fed,
Yea, in my madness if I strike me dead,
Heed you the grass that grows upon my grave.

If I dare snarl between this sun and sod,
Whimper and clamour, give me grace to own,
In sun and rain and fruit in season shown,
The shining silence of the scorn of God.

Thank God the stars are set beyond my power,
If I must travail in a night of wrath,
Thank God my tears will never vex a moth,
Nor any curse of mine cut down a flower.

Men say the sun was darkened: yet I had
Thought it beat brightly, even on—Calvary:
And He that hung upon the Torturing Tree
Heard all the crickets singing, and was glad.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

09-13-2015, 12:52 PM

Dream Song 100: How this woman came by the courage
--------------------------------------------------------------- by John Berryman

How this woman came by the courage, how she got
the courage, Henry bemused himself in a frantic hot
night of the eight of July,
where it came from, did once the Lord frown down
upon her ancient cradle thinking 'This one
will do before she die

for two and seventy years of chipped indignities
at least,' and with his thunder clapped a promise?
In that far away town
who looked upon my mother with shame & rage
that any should endure such pilgrimage,
growled Henry sweating, grown

but not grown used to the goodness of this woman
in her great strength, in her hope superhuman,
no, no, not used at all.
I declare a mystery, he mumbled to himself,
of love, and took the bourbon from the shelf
and drank her a tall one, tall.

SassyLady

09-14-2015, 01:31 AM

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

09-14-2015, 08:27 AM

Really like this one ... I wonder if people who are not familiar with horse racing can even understand.

Smart ones can get some of it but unless really into horse racing they'll not get it all.
Even so, the poem is a truly great example of poetry!! :beer: :beer: -Tyr

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

09-14-2015, 06:26 PM

The Lost Pyx: A Mediaeval Legend
--------------------------------------------- by Thomas Hardy

Some say the spot is banned; that the pillar Cross-and-Hand
Attests to a deed of hell;
But of else than of bale is the mystic tale
That ancient Vale-folk tell.

Ere Cernel's Abbey ceased hereabout there dwelt a priest,
(In later life sub-prior
Of the brotherhood there, whose bones are now bare
In the field that was Cernel choir).

One night in his cell at the foot of yon dell
The priest heard a frequent cry:
"Go, father, in haste to the cot on the waste,
And shrive a man waiting to die."

Said the priest in a shout to the caller without,
"The night howls, the tree-trunks bow;
One may barely by day track so rugged a way,
And can I then do so now?"

No further word from the dark was heard,
And the priest moved never a limb;
And he slept and dreamed; till a Visage seemed
To frown from Heaven at him.

In a sweat he arose; and the storm shrieked shrill,
And smote as in savage joy;
While High-Stoy trees twanged to Bubb-Down Hill,
And Bubb-Down to High-Stoy.

There seemed not a holy thing in hail,
Nor shape of light or love,
From the Abbey north of Blackmore Vale
To the Abbey south thereof.

Yet he plodded thence through the dark immense,
And with many a stumbling stride
Through copse and briar climbed nigh and nigher
To the cot and the sick man's side.

When he would have unslung the Vessels uphung
To his arm in the steep ascent,
He made loud moan: the Pyx was gone
Of the Blessed Sacrament.

Then in dolorous dread he beat his head:
"No earthly prize or pelf
Is the thing I've lost in tempest tossed,
But the Body of Christ Himself!"

He thought of the Visage his dream revealed,
And turned towards whence he came,
Hands groping the ground along foot-track and field,
And head in a heat of shame.

Till here on the hill, betwixt vill and vill,
He noted a clear straight ray
Stretching down from the sky to a spot hard by,
Which shone with the light of day.

And gathered around the illumined ground
Were common beasts and rare,
All kneeling at gaze, and in pause profound
Attent on an object there.

'Twas the Pyx, unharmed 'mid the circling rows
Of Blackmore's hairy throng,
Whereof were oxen, sheep, and does,
And hares from the brakes among;

And badgers grey, and conies keen,
And squirrels of the tree,
And many a member seldom seen
Of Nature's family.

The ireful winds that scoured and swept
Through coppice, clump, and dell,
Within that holy circle slept
Calm as in hermit's cell.

Then the priest bent likewise to the sod
And thanked the Lord of Love,
And Blessed Mary, Mother of God,
And all the saints above.

And turning straight with his priceless freight,
He reached the dying one,
Whose passing sprite had been stayed for the rite
Without which bliss hath none.

And when by grace the priest won place,
And served the Abbey well,
He reared this stone to mark where shone
That midnight miracle.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

09-15-2015, 09:37 AM

A Poison Tree
----------------------------------by William Blake

I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I watered it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears:
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine.

And into my garden stole.
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning glad I see,
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.
--------------------------------------
--------------------------------------
This poet thinks and writes like me! :laugh:
Venom in the mind put to verse...
Perhaps I will write one with his theme given in that great poem --soon ---------Tyr

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

09-16-2015, 06:45 PM

On the Universality and Other Attributes of the God of Nature
----------------------------------------------------------- by Philip Freneau

ALL that we see, about, abroad,
What is it all, but nature's God?
In meaner works discovered here
No less than in the starry sphere.

In seas, on earth, this God is seen;
All that exist, upon Him lean;
He lives in all, and never strayed
A moment from the works He made:

His system fixed on general laws
Bespeaks a wise creating cause;
Impartially He rules mankind
And all that on this globe we find.

Unchanged in all that seems to change,
Unbounded space is His great range;
To one vast purpose always true,
No time, with Him, is old or new.

In all the attributes divine
Unlimited perfectings shine;
In these enwrapt, in these complete,
All virtues in that centre meet.

This power doth all powers transcend,
To all intelligence a friend,
Exists, the greatest and the best
Throughout all the worlds, to make them blest.

All that He did He first approved,
He all things into being loved;
O'er all He made He still presides,
For them in life, or death provides.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

09-17-2015, 10:02 AM

Holy Sonnet X: Death Be Not Proud
-------------------------------------------------------by John Donne

Death, be not proud, though some have callèd thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art 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 yet thy pictures be,
Much pleasure, then from thee much more, must low
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.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

09-18-2015, 08:02 AM

Autumn Birds
-------------------------------------------by John Clare

The wild duck startles like a sudden thought,
And heron slow as if it might be caught.
The flopping crows on weary wings go by
And grey beard jackdaws noising as they fly.
The crowds of starnels whizz and hurry by,
And darken like a clod the evening sky.
The larks like thunder rise and suthy round,
Then drop and nestle in the stubble ground.
The wild swan hurries hight and noises loud
With white neck peering to the evening cloud.
The weary rooks to distant woods are gone.
With lengths of tail the magpie winnows on
To neighbouring tree, and leaves the distant crow
While small birds nestle in the edge below.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

09-19-2015, 04:52 PM

Horses and Men in Rain
-----------------------------------------by Carl Sandburg

LET us sit by a hissing steam radiator a winter’s day,
gray wind pattering frozen raindrops on the window,
And let us talk about milk wagon drivers and grocery delivery boys.

Let us keep our feet in wool slippers and mix hot punches—
and talk about mail carriers
and messenger boys slipping along the icy sidewalks.

Let us write of olden, golden days and hunters of the Holy Grail
and men called “knights” riding horses in the rain,
in the cold frozen rain for ladies they loved.

A roustabout hunched on a coal wagon goes by, icicles drip on his hat rim,
sheets of ice wrapping the hunks of coal,
the caravanserai a gray blur in slant of rain.

Let us nudge the steam radiator with our wool slippers
and write poems of Launcelot, the hero, and Roland, the hero,
and all the olden golden men who rode horses in the rain.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

09-20-2015, 06:43 PM

Sorrow
--------------------------------- by Algernon Charles Swinburne

SORROW, on wing through the world for ever,
Here and there for awhile would borrow
Rest, if rest might haply deliver
Sorrow.

One thought lies close in her heart gnawn thorough
With pain, a weed in a dried-up river,
A rust-red share in an empty furrow.

Hearts that strain at her chain would sever
The link where yesterday frets to-morrow:
All things pass in the world, but never
Sorrow.
------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------
One of my favorites by Swinburne... deep, emotive and so well delivered. -Tyr

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

09-21-2015, 05:48 PM

Mid-ocean in War-time
-----------------------------------by Joyce Kilmer
(For My Mother)

The fragile splendour of the level sea,
The moon's serene and silver-veiled face,
Make of this vessel an enchanted place
Full of white mirth and golden sorcery.
Now, for a time, shall careless laughter be
Blended with song, to lend song sweeter grace,
And the old stars, in their unending race,
Shall heed and envy young humanity.
And yet to-night, a hundred leagues away,
These waters blush a strange and awful red.
Before the moon, a cloud obscenely grey
Rises from decks that crash with flying lead.
And these stars smile their immemorial way
On waves that shroud a thousand newly dead!

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

09-23-2015, 08:16 AM

Was There A Time
------------------------------------- by Dylan Thomas

Was there a time when dancers with their fiddles
In children's circuses could stay their troubles?
There was a time they could cry over books,
But time has set its maggot on their track.
Under the arc of the sky they are unsafe.
What's never known is safest in this life.
Under the skysigns they who have no arms
Have cleanest hands, and, as the heartless ghost
Alone's unhurt, so the blind man sees best.

----------------------------------------------****
----------------------------------------------****

To Ireland In The Coming Times
----------------------------------------------by William Butler Yeats

Know, that I would accounted be
True brother of a company
That sang, to sweeten Ireland's wrong,
Ballad and story, rann and song;
Nor be I any less of them,
Because the red-rose-bordered hem
Of her, whose history began
Before God made the angelic clan,
Trails all about the written page.
When Time began to rant and rage
The measure of her flying feet
Made Ireland's heart hegin to beat;
And Time bade all his candles flare
To light a measure here and there;
And may the thoughts of Ireland brood
Upon a measured guietude.
Nor may I less be counted one
With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson,
Because, to him who ponders well,
My rhymes more than their rhyming tell
Of things discovered in the deep,
Where only body's laid asleep.
For the elemental creatures go
About my table to and fro,
That hurry from unmeasured mind
To rant and rage in flood and wind,
Yet he who treads in measured ways
May surely barter gaze for gaze.
Man ever journeys on with them
After the red-rose-bordered hem.
Ah, faerics, dancing under the moon,
A Druid land, a Druid tune.!
While still I may, I write for you
The love I lived, the dream I knew.
From our birthday, until we die,
Is but the winking of an eye;
And we, our singing and our love,
What measurer Time has lit above,
And all benighted things that go
About my table to and fro,
Are passing on to where may be,
In truth's consuming ecstasy,
No place for love and dream at all;
For God goes by with white footfall.
I cast my heart into my rhymes,
That you, in the dim coming times,
May know how my heart went with them
After the red-rose-bordered hem.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

09-24-2015, 09:38 AM

Vision Of The Archangels, The
-----------------------------------------------------------by Rupert Brooke
Slowly up silent peaks, the white edge of the world,
Trod four archangels, clear against the unheeding sky,
Bearing, with quiet even steps, and great wings furled,
A little dingy coffin; where a child must lie,
It was so tiny. (Yet, you had fancied, God could never
Have bidden a child turn from the spring and the sunlight,
And shut him in that lonely shell, to drop for ever
Into the emptiness and silence, into the night. . . .)

They then from the sheer summit cast, and watched it fall,
Through unknown glooms, that frail black coffin -- and therein
God's little pitiful Body lying, worn and thin,
And curled up like some crumpled, lonely flower-petal --
Till it was no more visible; then turned again
With sorrowful quiet faces downward to the plain.

---------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------

The Guardian-Angel
--------------------------------------------by Robert Browning

A PICTURE AT FANO.

I.

Dear and great Angel, wouldst thou only leave
That child, when thou hast done with him, for me!
Let me sit all the day here, that when eve
Shall find performed thy special ministry,
And time come for departure, thou, suspending
Thy flight, mayst see another child for tending,
Another still, to quiet and retrieve.

II.

Then I shall feel thee step one step, no more,
From where thou standest now, to where I gaze,
---And suddenly my head is covered o'er
With those wings, white above the child who prays
Now on that tomb---and I shall feel thee guarding
Me, out of all the world; for me, discarding
Yon heaven thy home, that waits and opes its door.

III.

I would not look up thither past thy head
Because the door opes, like that child, I know,
For I should have thy gracious face instead,
Thou bird of God! And wilt thou bend me low
Like him, and lay, like his, my hands together,
And lift them up to pray, and gently tether
Me, as thy lamb there, with thy garment's spread?

IV.

If this was ever granted, I would rest
My bead beneath thine, while thy healing hands
Close-covered both my eyes beside thy breast,
Pressing the brain, which too much thought expands,
Back to its proper size again, and smoothing
Distortion down till every nerve had soothing,
And all lay quiet, happy and suppressed.

V.

How soon all worldly wrong would be repaired!
I think how I should view the earth and skies
And sea, when once again my brow was bared
After thy healing, with such different eyes.
O world, as God has made it! All is beauty:
And knowing this, is love, and love is duty.
What further may be sought for or declared?

VI.

Guercino drew this angel I saw teach
(Alfred, dear friend!)---that little child to pray,
Holding the little hands up, each to each
Pressed gently,---with his own head turned away
Over the earth where so much lay before him
Of work to do, though heaven was opening o'er him,
And he was left at Fano by the beach.

VII.

We were at Fano, and three times we went
To sit and see him in his chapel there,
And drink his beauty to our soul's content
---My angel with me too: and since I care
For dear Guercino's fame (to which in power
And glory comes this picture for a dower,
Fraught with a pathos so magnificent)---

VIII.

And since he did not work thus earnestly
At all times, and has else endured some wrong---
I took one thought his picture struck from me,
And spread it out, translating it to song.
My love is here. Where are you, dear old friend?
How rolls the Wairoa at your world's far end?
This is Ancona, yonder is the sea.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

09-25-2015, 08:36 AM

A Memory Of Youth
------------------------------------------by William Butler Yeats

The moments passed as at a play;
I had the wisdom love brings forth;
I had my share of mother-wit,
And yet for all that I could say,
And though I had her praise for it,
A cloud blown from the cut-throat North
Suddenly hid Love's moon away.

Believing every word I said,
I praised her body and her mind
Till pride had made her eyes grow bright,
And pleasure made her cheeks grow red,
And vanity her footfall light,
Yet we, for all that praise, could find
Nothing but darkness overhead.

We sat as silent as a stone,
We knew, though she'd not said a word,
That even the best of love must die,
And had been savagely undone
Were it not that Love upon the cry
Of a most ridiculous little bird
Tore from the clouds his marvelous moon.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

09-26-2015, 12:04 PM

Babylon
-----------------------------------by George William Russell

THE BLUE dusk ran between the streets: my love was winged within my mind,
It left to-day and yesterday and thrice a thousand years behind.
To-day was past and dead for me, for from to-day my feet had run
Through thrice a thousand years to walk the ways of ancient Babylon.
On temple top and palace roof the burnished gold flung back the rays
Of a red sunset that was dead and lost beyond a million days.
The tower of heaven turns darker blue, a starry sparkle now begins;
The mystery and magnificence, the myriad beauty and the sins
Come back to me. I walk beneath the shadowy multitude of towers;
Within the gloom the fountain jets its pallid mist in lily flowers.
The waters lull me and the scent of many gardens, and I hear
Familiar voices, and the voice I love is whispering in my ear.
Oh real as in dream all this; and then a hand on mine is laid:
The wave of phantom time withdraws; and that young Babylonian maid,
One drop of beauty left behind from all the flowing of that tide,
Is looking with the self-same eyes, and here in Ireland by my side.
Oh light our life in Babylon, but Babylon has taken wings,
While we are in the calm and proud procession of eternal things.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

09-27-2015, 07:55 AM

To Outer Nature
------------------------------------ by Thomas Hardy

SHOW thee as I thought thee
When I early sought thee,
Omen-scouting,
All undoubting
Love alone had wrought thee--

Wrought thee for my pleasure,
Planned thee as a measure
For expounding
And resounding
Glad things that men treasure.

O for but a moment
Of that old endowment--
Light to gaily
See thy daily
Irisиd embowment!

But such re-adorning
Time forbids with scorning--
Makes me see things
Cease to be things
They were in my morning.

Fad'st thou, glow-forsaken,
Darkness-overtaken!
Thy first sweetness,
Radiance, meetness,
None shall reawaken.

Why not sempiternal
Thou and I? Our vernal
Brightness keeping,
Time out-leaping;
Passed the hodiernal!

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

09-29-2015, 08:25 AM

Sad Steps
--------------------------by Philip Larkin

Groping back to bed after a piss
I part the thick curtains, and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon's cleanliness.

Four o'clock: wedge-shaped gardens lie
Under a cavernous, a wind-pierced sky.
There's something laughable about this,

The way the moon dashes through the clouds that blow
Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart
(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)

High and preposterous and separate--
Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!
O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,

One shivers slightly, looking up there.
The hardness and the brightness and the plain
far-reaching singleness of that wide stare

Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can't come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.
~ ~~ ~

Closing stanza, makes the poem understandable. Before reading that conclusion it was a jumble of insights , although great ones, they still needed a level of cohesion to be shown.-Tyr

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

09-30-2015, 11:42 AM

Only Dreams
------------------------------------------by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

A maiden sat in the sunset glow
Of the shadowy, beautiful Long Ago,
That we see through a mist of tears.
She sat and dreamed, with lips apart,
With thoughtful eyes and a beating heart,
Of the mystical future years;
And brighter far than the sunset skies
Was the vision seen by the maiden's eyes.

There were castles built of the summer air,
And beautiful voices were singing there,
In a soft and floating strain.
There were skies of azure and fields of green,
With never a cloud to come between,
And never a thought of pain;
There was the music, sweet as the silvery notes
That flow from a score of thrushes' throats.

There were hands to clasp with a loving hold;
There were lips to kiss, and eyes that told
More than the lips could say.
And all the faces she loved were there,
With their snowy brows untouched by care,
And locks that were never grey.
And Love was the melody each heart beat,
And the beautiful vision was all complete.

But the castles built of the summer wind
I have vainly sought. I only find
Shadows, all grim and cold; -
For I was the maiden who thought to see
Into the future years, - Ah, me!
And I am grey and old.
My dream of earth was as fair and bright
As my hope of heaven is to-night.

Dreams are but dreams at the very best,
And the friends I loved lay down to rest
With their faces hid away.
They had furrowed brows and snowy hair,
And they willing laid one day.
A shadow came over my vision scene
As the clouds of sorrow came in between.

The hands that I thought to clasp are crossed,
The lips and the beautiful eyes are lost,
And I seek them all in vain.
The gushes of melody, sweet and clear,
And the floating voices, I do not hear,
But only a sob of pain;
And the beating hearts have paused to rest.
Ah! dreams are but dreams at the very best.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

10-01-2015, 08:45 AM

Crazy Jane And Jack The Journeyman
--------------------------------------------by William Butler Yeats

I know, although when looks meet
I tremble to the bone,
The more I leave the door unlatched
The sooner love is gone,
For love is but a skein unwound
Between the dark and dawn.

A lonely ghost the ghost is
That to God shall come;
I - love's skein upon the ground,
My body in the tomb -
Shall leap into the light lost
In my mother's womb.

But were I left to lie alone
In an empty bed,
The skein so bound us ghost to ghost
When he turned his head
passing on the road that night,
Mine must walk when dead.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

10-02-2015, 07:00 AM

The Summer Rain
----------------------------------------------- by Henry David Thoreau

My books I'd fain cast off, I cannot read,
'Twixt every page my thoughts go stray at large
Down in the meadow, where is richer feed,
And will not mind to hit their proper targe.
Plutarch was good, and so was Homer too,
Our Shakespeare's life were rich to live again,
What Plutarch read, that was not good nor true,
Nor Shakespeare's books, unless his books were men.

Here while I lie beneath this walnut bough,
What care I for the Greeks or for Troy town,
If juster battles are enacted now
Between the ants upon this hummock's crown?

Bid Homer wait till I the issue learn,
If red or black the gods will favor most,
Or yonder Ajax will the phalanx turn,
Struggling to heave some rock against the host.

Tell Shakespeare to attend some leisure hour,
For now I've business with this drop of dew,
And see you not, the clouds prepare a shower--
I'll meet him shortly when the sky is blue.

This bed of herd's grass and wild oats was spread
Last year with nicer skill than monarchs use.
A clover tuft is pillow for my head,
And violets quite over-top my shoes.

And now the cordial clouds have shut all in,
And gently swells the wind to say all's well;
The scattered drops are falling fast and thin,
Some in the pool, some in the flower-bell.

I am well drenched upon my bed of oats;
But see that globe come rolling down its stem,
Now like a lonely planet there it floats,
And now it sinks into my garment's hem.

Drip drip the trees for all the country round,
And richness rare distills from every bough;
The wind alone it is makes every sound,
Shaking down crystals on the leaves below.

For shame the sun will never show himself,
Who could not with his beams e'er melt me so;
My dripping locks--they would become an elf,
Who in a beaded coat does gayly go.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

10-03-2015, 11:16 AM

Night Journey
---------------------------------- by Theodore Roethke

Now as the train bears west,
Its rhythm rocks the earth,
And from my Pullman berth
I stare into the night
While others take their rest.
Bridges of iron lace,
A suddenness of trees,
A lap of mountain mist
All cross my line of sight,
Then a bleak wasted place,
And a lake below my knees.
Full on my neck I feel
The straining at a curve;
My muscles move with steel,
I wake in every nerve.
I watch a beacon swing
From dark to blazing bright;
We thunder through ravines
And gullies washed with light.
Beyond the mountain pass
Mist deepens on the pane;
We rush into a rain
That rattles double glass.
Wheels shake the roadbed stone,
The pistons jerk and shove,
I stay up half the night
To see the land I love.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

10-04-2015, 02:35 PM

SIMON WIESENTHAL: SURVIVORS BURDEN
------------------------------------------------------------by Sharon Esther Lampert
A Survivor's Burden
A Memorial Tribute in Poetry to Simon Wiesenthal

After six million Jews were silenced:
Simon speaks above a hush.
Simon speaks above a whisper.
Simon speaks above an earshot.
Simon speaks out loud above the deafening scream of EVIL.

After six million Jews were silenced:
Simon's voice shatters the ghetto walls of anti-Semitism.
Simon's voice bellows in the streets of Argentina.
Simon's voice hallows in the halls of JUSTICE.
Simon's voice harkens in the International Arena of INJUSTICE.

After six million Jews were silenced:
Simon Wiesenthal WALKS his TALK and JUSTICE is done:
Adolf Eichman is brought to JUSTICE.
Franz Stangl is brought to JUSTICE.
Franz Murer is brought to JUSTICE.
Erich Rajakowitsch is brought to JUSTICE.
Hermine Braunsteiner is brought to JUSTICE.
Karl Silberbauer is brought to JUSTICE.
Josef Schwammberger is brought to JUSTICE.
1,100 Nazi War Criminals are brought to JUSTICE.

After six million Jews were silenced:
Simon Says:
"This man is on my list as a suspected war criminal."
Simon Says:
"When history looks back I want people to know the Nazis weren't able to
kill millions of people and get away with it."
Simon Says:
"If we don't do anything about evil, that will encourage future
perpetrators."
Simon Says:
"My work is a warning for the murderers of tomorrow."
Simon Says:
"Survival is a privilege which entails obligations. I am forever asking
myself
what I can do for those who have not survived."
Simon Says:
"I have received many honors in my lifetime; when I die, these honors
will die with me,
but the Simon Wiesenthal Center will live on as my legacy."
Simon Says:
"My epitaph should read simply "SURVIVOR."
Simon Says (in the afterlife... to the six million Jews murdered in the
Holocaust):
"I didn't forget you."

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

10-05-2015, 08:14 AM

59. Death and Dr. Hornbook
-------------------------------------------------------by Robert Burns

SOME books are lies frae end to end,
And some great lies were never penn’d:
Ev’n ministers they hae been kenn’d,
In holy rapture,
A rousing whid at times to vend,
And nail’t wi’ Scripture.

But this that I am gaun to tell,
Which lately on a night befell,
Is just as true’s the Deil’s in hell
Or Dublin city:
That e’er he nearer comes oursel’
’S a muckle pity.

The clachan yill had made me canty,
I was na fou, but just had plenty;
I stacher’d whiles, but yet too tent aye
To free the ditches;
An’ hillocks, stanes, an’ bushes, kenn’d eye
Frae ghaists an’ witches.

The rising moon began to glowre
The distant Cumnock hills out-owre:
To count her horns, wi’ a my pow’r,
I set mysel’;
But whether she had three or four,
I cou’d na tell.

I was come round about the hill,
An’ todlin down on Willie’s mill,
Setting my staff wi’ a’ my skill,
To keep me sicker;
Tho’ leeward whiles, against my will,
I took a bicker.

I there wi’ Something did forgather,
That pat me in an eerie swither;
An’ awfu’ scythe, out-owre ae shouther,
Clear-dangling, hang;
A three-tae’d leister on the ither
Lay, large an’ lang.

Its stature seem’d lang Scotch ells twa,
The queerest shape that e’er I saw,
For fient a wame it had ava;
And then its shanks,
They were as thin, as sharp an’ sma’
As cheeks o’ branks.

“Guid-een,” quo’ I; “Friend! hae ye been mawin,
When ither folk are busy sawin!” 1
I seem’d to make a kind o’ stan’
But naething spak;
At length, says I, “Friend! whare ye gaun?
Will ye go back?”

It spak right howe,—“My name is Death,
But be na fley’d.”—Quoth I, “Guid faith,
Ye’re maybe come to stap my breath;
But tent me, billie;
I red ye weel, tak care o’ skaith
See, there’s a gully!”

“Gudeman,” quo’ he, “put up your whittle,
I’m no designed to try its mettle;
But if I did, I wad be kittle
To be mislear’d;
I wad na mind it, no that spittle
Out-owre my beard.”

“Weel, weel!” says I, “a bargain be’t;
Come, gie’s your hand, an’ sae we’re gree’t;
We’ll ease our shanks an tak a seat—
Come, gie’s your news;
This while ye hae been mony a gate,
At mony a house.” 2

“Ay, ay!” quo’ he, an’ shook his head,
“It’s e’en a lang, lang time indeed
Sin’ I began to nick the thread,
An’ choke the breath:
Folk maun do something for their bread,
An’ sae maun Death.

“Sax thousand years are near-hand fled
Sin’ I was to the butching bred,
An’ mony a scheme in vain’s been laid,
To stap or scar me;
Till ane Hornbook’s 3 ta’en up the trade,
And faith! he’ll waur me.

“Ye ken Hornbook i’ the clachan,
Deil mak his king’s-hood in spleuchan!
He’s grown sae weel acquaint wi’ Buchan 4
And ither chaps,
The weans haud out their fingers laughin,
An’ pouk my hips.

“See, here’s a scythe, an’ there’s dart,
They hae pierc’d mony a gallant heart;
But Doctor Hornbook, wi’ his art
An’ cursed skill,
Has made them baith no worth a f—t,
D—n’d haet they’ll kill!

“’Twas but yestreen, nae farther gane,
I threw a noble throw at ane;
Wi’ less, I’m sure, I’ve hundreds slain;
But deil-ma-care,
It just play’d dirl on the bane,
But did nae mair.

“Hornbook was by, wi’ ready art,
An’ had sae fortify’d the part,
That when I looked to my dart,
It was sae blunt,
Fient haet o’t wad hae pierc’d the heart
Of a kail-runt.

“I drew my scythe in sic a fury,
I near-hand cowpit wi’ my hurry,
But yet the bauld Apothecary
Withstood the shock;
I might as weel hae tried a quarry
O’ hard whin rock.

“Ev’n them he canna get attended,
Altho’ their face he ne’er had kend it,
Just —— in a kail-blade, an’ sent it,
As soon’s he smells ’t,
Baith their disease, and what will mend it,
At once he tells ’t.

“And then, a’ doctor’s saws an’ whittles,
Of a’ dimensions, shapes, an’ mettles,
A’ kind o’ boxes, mugs, an’ bottles,
He’s sure to hae;
Their Latin names as fast he rattles
As A B C.

“Calces o’ fossils, earths, and trees;
True sal-marinum o’ the seas;
The farina of beans an’ pease,
He has’t in plenty;
Aqua-fontis, what you please,
He can content ye.

“Forbye some new, uncommon weapons,
Urinus spiritus of capons;
Or mite-horn shavings, filings, scrapings,
Distill’d per se;
Sal-alkali o’ midge-tail clippings,
And mony mae.”

“Waes me for Johnie Ged’s-Hole 5 now,”
Quoth I, “if that thae news be true!
His braw calf-ward whare gowans grew,
Sae white and bonie,
Nae doubt they’ll rive it wi’ the plew;
They’ll ruin Johnie!”

The creature grain’d an eldritch laugh,
And says “Ye needna yoke the pleugh,
Kirkyards will soon be till’d eneugh,
Tak ye nae fear:
They’ll be trench’d wi’ mony a sheugh,
In twa-three year.

“Whare I kill’d ane, a fair strae-death,
By loss o’ blood or want of breath
This night I’m free to tak my aith,
That Hornbook’s skill
Has clad a score i’ their last claith,
By drap an’ pill.

“An honest wabster to his trade,
Whase wife’s twa nieves were scarce weel-bred
Gat tippence-worth to mend her head,
When it was sair;
The wife slade cannie to her bed,
But ne’er spak mair.

“A country laird had ta’en the batts,
Or some curmurring in his guts,
His only son for Hornbook sets,
An’ pays him well:
The lad, for twa guid gimmer-pets,
Was laird himsel’.

“A bonie lass—ye kend her name—
Some ill-brewn drink had hov’d her wame;
She trusts hersel’, to hide the shame,
In Hornbook’s care;
Horn sent her aff to her lang hame,
To hide it there.

“That’s just a swatch o’ Hornbook’s way;
Thus goes he on from day to day,
Thus does he poison, kill, an’ slay,
An’s weel paid for’t;
Yet stops me o’ my lawfu’ prey,
Wi’ his d—n’d dirt:

“But, hark! I’ll tell you of a plot,
Tho’ dinna ye be speakin o’t;
I’ll nail the self-conceited sot,
As dead’s a herrin;
Neist time we meet, I’ll wad a groat,
He gets his fairin!”

But just as he began to tell,
The auld kirk-hammer strak the bell
Some wee short hour ayont the twal’,
Which rais’d us baith:
I took the way that pleas’d mysel’,
And sae did Death.

Note 1. This recontre happened in seed-time, 1785.—R. B. [back]
Note 2. An epidemical fever was then raging in that country.—R. B. [back]
Note 3. This gentleman, Dr. Hornbook, is professionally a brother of the sovereign Order of the Ferula; but, by intuition and inspiration, is at once an apothecary, surgeon, and physician.—R. B. [back]
Note 4. Burchan’s Domestic Medicine.—R. B. [back]
Note 5. The grave-digger.—R. B. [back]

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

10-06-2015, 09:52 AM

Three Pieces on the Smoke of Autumn
----------------------------------------------------- by Carl Sandburg

SMOKE of autumn is on it all.
The streamers loosen and travel.
The red west is stopped with a gray haze.
They fill the ash trees, they wrap the oaks,
They make a long-tailed rider
In the pocket of the first, the earliest evening star.. . .
Three muskrats swim west on the Desplaines River.

There is a sheet of red ember glow on the river; it is dusk; and the muskrats one by one go on patrol routes west.

Around each slippery padding rat, a fan of ripples; in the silence of dusk a faint wash of ripples, the padding of the rats going west, in a dark and shivering river gold.

(A newspaper in my pocket says the Germans pierce the Italian line; I have letters from poets and sculptors in Greenwich Village; I have letters from an ambulance man in France and an I. W. W. man in Vladivostok.)

I lean on an ash and watch the lights fall, the red ember glow, and three muskrats swim west in a fan of ripples on a sheet of river gold.. . .
Better the blue silence and the gray west,
The autumn mist on the river,
And not any hate and not any love,
And not anything at all of the keen and the deep:
Only the peace of a dog head on a barn floor,
And the new corn shoveled in bushels
And the pumpkins brought from the corn rows,
Umber lights of the dark,
Umber lanterns of the loam dark.

Here a dog head dreams.
Not any hate, not any love.
Not anything but dreams.
Brother of dusk and umber.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

10-07-2015, 08:57 AM

Unstable Dream
-----------------------------------------by Sir Thomas Wyatt

Unstable dream, according to the place,
Be steadfast once, or else at least be true.
By tasted sweetness make me not to rue
The sudden loss of thy false feignèd grace.
By good respect in such a dangerous case
Thou broughtest not her into this tossing mew
But madest my sprite live, my care to renew,
My body in tempest her succour to embrace.
The body dead, the sprite had his desire,
Painless was th'one, th'other in delight.
Why then, alas, did it not keep it right,
Returning, to leap into the fire?
And where it was at wish, it could not remain,
Such mocks of dreams they turn to deadly pain.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

10-08-2015, 06:20 PM

Demon And Beast
------------------------------------------------- by William Butler Yeats

For certain minutes at the least
That crafty demon and that loud beast
That plague me day and night
Ran out of my sight;
Though I had long perned in the gyre,
Between my hatred and desire.
I saw my freedom won
And all laugh in the sun.

The glittering eyes in a death's head
Of old Luke Wadding's portrait said
Welcome, and the Ormondes all
Nodded upon the wall,
And even Strafford smiled as though
It made him happier to know
I understood his plan.
Now that the loud beast ran
There was no portrait in the Gallery
But beckoned to sweet company,
For all men's thoughts grew clear
Being dear as mine are dear.

But soon a tear-drop started up,
For aimless joy had made me stop
Beside the little lake
To watch a white gull take
A bit of bread thrown up into the air;
Now gyring down and perning there
He splashed where an absurd
Portly green-pated bird
Shook off the water from his back;
Being no more demoniac
A stupid happy creature
Could rouse my whole nature.

Yet I am certain as can be
That every natural victory
Belongs to beast or demon,
That never yet had freeman
Right mastery of natural things,
And that mere growing old, that brings
Chilled blood, this sweetness brought;
Yet have no dearer thought
Than that I may find out a way
To make it linger half a day.

O what a sweetness strayed
Through barren Thebaid,
Or by the Mareotic sea
When that exultant Anthony
And twice a thousand more
Starved upon the shore
And withered to a bag of bones!
What had the Caesars but their thrones?

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

10-09-2015, 05:57 PM

The Abnormal Is Not Courage
---------------------------------------------------------- by Jack Gilbert

The Poles rode out from Warsaw against the German
Tanks on horses. Rode knowing, in sunlight, with sabers,
A magnitude of beauty that allows me no peace.
And yet this poem would lessen that day. Question
The bravery. Say it's not courage. Call it a passion.
Would say courage isn't that. Not at its best.
It was impossible, and with form. They rode in sunlight,
Were mangled. But I say courage is not the abnormal.
Not the marvelous act. Not Macbeth with fine speeches.
The worthless can manage in public, or for the moment.
It is too near the whore's heart: the bounty of impulse,
And the failure to sustain even small kindness.
Not the marvelous act, but the evident conclusion of being.
Not strangeness, but a leap forward of the same quality.
Accomplishment. The even loyalty. But fresh.
Not the Prodigal Son, nor Faustus. But Penelope.
The thing steady and clear. Then the crescendo.
The real form. The culmination. And the exceeding.
Not the surprise. The amazed understanding. The marriage,
Not the month's rapture. Not the exception. The beauty
That is of many days. Steady and clear.
It is the normal excellence, of long accomplishment.
-------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------

Courage is the act of saying, my life I will now risk for a greater cause, person or thing.
Its also -- "It is the normal excellence, of long accomplishment."
As in a parent's sacrifices and endured hardships to care for children and attempt to give them better than they ever had. My father did both.. and never uttered a single word in complaint!---Tyr

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

10-10-2015, 09:27 AM

On Being Asked For A War Poem
-------------------------------------------------------- by William Butler Yeats

I think it better that in times like these
A poet's mouth be silent, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of medding who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter's night.

-----------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------

Portent
-----------------------------------by Robert William Service

Courage mes gars:
La guerre est proche.

I plant my little plot of beans,
I sit beneath my cyprus tree;
I do not know what trouble means,
I cultivate tranquillity . . .
But as to-day my walk I made
In all serenity and cheer,
I saw cut in an agave blade:
"Courage, my comrades, war is near!"

Seward I went, my feet were slow,
Awhile I dowsed upon the shore;
And then I roused with fear for lo!
I saw six grisly ships of war.
A grim, grey line of might and dread
Against the skyline looming sheer:
With horror to myself I said:
"Courage, my comrades, war is near!"

I saw my cottage on the hill
With rambling roses round the door;
It was so peaceful and so still
I sighed . . . and then it was no more.
A flash of flame, a rubble heap;
I cried aloud with woe and fear . . .
And wok myself from troubled sleep -
My home was safe, war was not near.

Oh, I am old, my step is frail,
My carcase bears a score of scars,
And as I climbed my homeward trail
Sadly I thought of other wars.
And when that agave leaf I saw
With vicious knife I made a blear
Of words clean-cut into the raw:
"Courage, my comrades, war is near!"

Who put hem there I do not know -
One of these rabid reds, no doubt;
But I for freedom struck my blow,
With bitter blade I scraped them out.
There now, said I, I will forget,
And smoke my pipe and drink my beer -
Yet in my mind these words were set:
"Courage, my comrades, war is near!"

"Courage, my comrades, war is near!"
I hear afar its hateful drums;
Its horrid din assails my ear:
I hope I die before it comes. . . .
Yet as into the town I go,
And listen to the rabble cheer,
I think with heart of weary woe:
War is not coming - WAR IS HERE.
-------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------

This= IS THE SUPREMACY IN POETIC WRITING!!!
IF--IF EVER I SHALL WRITE EVEN SO MUCH AS ONE SHORT POEM THAT EQUALS TO THIS GEM THAT WAS ONLY A PART OF THAT MAGNIFICENT POEM BY ROBERT SERVICE, I SHALL CONSIDER ALL MY TIME SPENT WRITING TO HAVE BEEN A GLOWING SUCCESS. --Tyr

"" Oh, I am old, my step is frail,
My carcase bears a score of scars,
And as I climbed my homeward trail
Sadly I thought of other wars.
And when that agave leaf I saw
With vicious knife I made a blear
Of words clean-cut into the raw:
"Courage, my comrades, war is near!"

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

10-11-2015, 09:27 AM

Now Art Has Lost Its Mental Charms
--------------------------------------------------- by William Blake
`Now Art has lost its mental charms
France shall subdue the world in arms.'
So spoke an Angel at my birth;
Then said `Descend thou upon earth,
Renew the Arts on Britain's shore,
And France shall fall down and adore.
With works of art their armies meet
And War shall sink beneath thy feet.
But if thy nation Arts refuse,
And if they scorn the immortal Muse,
France shall the arts of peace restore
And save thee from the ungrateful shore.'

Spirit who lov'st Britannia's Isle
Round which the fiends of commerce smile --

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

10-12-2015, 08:32 AM

A Ballad Of The Trees And The Master
------------------------------------------------------ by Sidney Lanier
Into the woods my Master went,
Clean forspent, forspent.
Into the woods my Master came,
Forspent with love and shame.
But the olives they were not blind to Him,
The little gray leaves were kind to Him:
The thorn-tree had a mind to Him
When into the woods He came.

Out of the woods my Master went,
And He was well content.
Out of the woods my Master came,
Content with death and shame.
When Death and Shame would woo Him last,
From under the trees they drew Him last:
'Twas on a tree they slew Him -- last
When out of the woods He came.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

10-13-2015, 08:38 PM

Ballad of Dead Friends
-------------------------------------- by Edwin Arlington Robinson
As we the withered ferns
By the roadway lying,
Time, the jester, spurns
All our prayers and prying --
All our tears and sighing,
Sorrow, change, and woe --
All our where-and-whying
For friends that come and go.

Life awakes and burns,
Age and death defying,
Till at last it learns
All but Love is dying;
Love's the trade we're plying,
God has willed it so;
Shrouds are what we're buying
For friends that come and go.

Man forever yearns
For the thing that's flying.
Everywhere he turns,
Men to dust are drying, --
Dust that wanders, eying
(With eyes that hardly glow)
New faces, dimly spying
For friends that come and go.

ENVOY

And thus we all are nighing
The truth we fear to know:
Death will end our crying
For friends that come and go.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

10-14-2015, 08:08 AM

somewhere i have never travelled
--------------------------------------------by E.E. Cummings

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

Source: http://www.familyfriendpoems.com/poem/somewhere-i-have-never-travelled#ixzz3oXzcK8BO
#FamilyFriendPoems

******************************
********************************
Biography Of E.E. Cummings

Edward Estlin Cummings was born on October 14, 1894 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cummings' parents were very open-minded in raising their son and encouraged him from an early age to write poetry and keep a journal. He attended Harvard University, from which he received both a bachelor's degree in 1915 and a master's degree in 1916. At Harvard, Cummings was introduced to many forward-thinking poets who greatly influenced his writing. His poems were first published in Eight Harvard Poets, an anthology, in 1917.

That same year, Cummings and a friend volunteered for the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps in France during World War I. After only a few months of service, the two were taken prisoner for suspected spying and kept in an internment camp for four months. Cummings studied art in Paris after the war and returned to the States in 1924 and by that time, his literary reputation preceded him. Cummings' first publication, a novel titled The Enormous Room (1922), recounted his experiences during the war. Critics welcomed the book with generally favorable reviews, as well as his first collections of poetry, Tulips and Chimneys (1923), XLI Poems (1925), and & (1925). Cummings' poetry challenged and experimented with all conventions of traditional language. At times he did not use punctuation or complete words and often abandoned the use of capital letters. He inventively adjusted standard syntax within his writing, with adjectives, for example, functioning as nouns.

Cummings traveled through Europe and was introduced to several creative movements, including Dada and Surrealist societies and Pablo Picasso's work, all of which influenced his later poetry. Two failed marriages brought a more mocking and critical tone to Cummings' poetry and art during the late twenties and early thirties, but soon after he married Marion Morehouse in 1934, his writing and painting returned to a more exultant milieu, embracing individualism, creativity, and nature. During the 1950's, Cummings began touring colleges and universities to read his poetry and lecture; his addresses at Harvard University evolved into an autobiographical book titled i: six nonlectures (1953).

In Cummings' later years, he was generously awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships and the Bolligen Prize in Poetry. A complete collection of his poetry, Poems, 1923-1954, was published in 1954, and his last volume of poetry, titled 95 Poems, appeared in 1959. Cummings died on September 3, 1962 in New Hampshire after suffering a stroke.

Source: http://www.familyfriendpoems.com/poet/e-e-cummings/#ixzz3oXyqWUJs
#FamilyFriendPoems

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

10-15-2015, 08:21 AM

A Lyric to Mirth
----------------------------------------by Robert Herrick

While the milder fates consent,
Let's enjoy our merriment :
Drink, and dance, and pipe, and play ;
Kiss our dollies night and day :
Crowned with clusters of the vine,
Let us sit, and quaff our wine.
Call on Bacchus, chant his praise ;
Shake the thyrse, and bite the bays :
Rouse Anacreon from the dead,
And return him drunk to bed :
Sing o'er Horace, for ere long
Death will come and mar the song :
Then shall Wilson and Gotiere
Never sing or play more here.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

10-17-2015, 08:02 AM

ART ABOVE NATURE: TO JULIA
-----------------------------------------------------by Robert Herrick

When I behold a forest spread
With silken trees upon thy head;
And when I see that other dress
Of flowers set in comeliness;
When I behold another grace
In the ascent of curious lace,
Which, like a pinnacle, doth shew
The top, and the top-gallant too;
Then, when I see thy tresses bound
Into an oval, square, or round,
And knit in knots far more than I.
Can tell by tongue, or True-love tie;
Next, when those lawny films I see
Play with a wild civility;
And all those airy silks to flow,
Alluring me, and tempting so--
I must confess, mine eye and heart
Dotes less on nature than on art.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

10-18-2015, 02:01 PM

Under The Moon
-----------------------------------------------by William Butler Yeats

I have no happiness in dreaming of Brycelinde,
Nor Avalon the grass-green hollow, nor Joyous Isle,
Where one found Lancelot crazed and hid him for a while;
Nor Uladh, when Naoise had thrown a sail upon the wind;
Nor lands that seem too dim to be burdens on the heart:
Land-under-Wave, where out of the moon's light and the sun's
Seven old sisters wind the threads of the long-lived ones,
Land-of-the-Tower, where Aengus has thrown the gates apart,
And Wood-of-Wonders, where one kills an ox at dawn,
To find it when night falls laid on a golden bier.
Therein are many queens like Branwen and Guinevere;
And Niamh and Laban and Fand, who could change to an otter or fawn,
And the wood-woman, whose lover was changed to a blue-eyed hawk;
And whether I go in my dreams by woodland, or dun, or shore,
Or on the unpeopled waves with kings to pull at the oar,
I hear the harp-string praise them, or hear their mournful talk.

Because of something told under the famished horn
Of the hunter's moon, that hung between the night and the day,
To dream of women whose beauty was folded in dis may,
Even in an old story, is a burden not to be borne.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Words that put gold on kingly crowns
pretty lace on princess gowns
Resting high on stately mounds
golden coins weighed out in pounds
Robert J.Lindley

Yeats-- Number 5 in my top ten favorite poets.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

10-19-2015, 08:58 AM

Charles Bukowski

---Alone With Everybody

the flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and the men drink too
much
and nobody finds the
one
but keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh.

there's no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.

nobody ever finds
the one.

the city dumps fill
the junkyards fill
the madhouses fill
the hospitals fill
the graveyards fill

nothing else
fills.

© by owner. Added by volunteers for educational
purposes and provided at no charge. Dmca

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

10-20-2015, 09:04 AM

Song for the Last Act
---------------------------------------------BY LOUISE BOGAN

Now that I have your face by heart, I look
Less at its features than its darkening frame
Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame,
Lie with quilled dahlias and the shepherd’s crook.
Beyond, a garden. There, in insolent ease
The lead and marble figures watch the show
Of yet another summer loath to go
Although the scythes hang in the apple trees.

Now that I have your face by heart, I look.

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read
In the black chords upon a dulling page
Music that is not meant for music’s cage,
Whose emblems mix with words that shake and bleed.
The staves are shuttled over with a stark
Unprinted silence. In a double dream
I must spell out the storm, the running stream.
The beat’s too swift. The notes shift in the dark.

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see
The wharves with their great ships and architraves;
The rigging and the cargo and the slaves
On a strange beach under a broken sky.
O not departure, but a voyage done!
The bales stand on the stone; the anchor weeps
Its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps
Beside the salt herb, in the lengthening sun.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/louise-bogan

Louise Bogan
1897–1970

Louise Bogan has been called by some critics the most accomplished woman poet of the twentieth century. Her subtle, restrained style was partially influenced by writers such as Rilke and Henry James, and partially by the English metaphysical poets such as George Herbert, John Donne, and Henry Vaughan, though she distanced herself from her intellectually rigorous, metaphysical contemporaries. Some critics have placed her in a category of brilliant minor poets described as the "reactionary generation." Aware of the success and modern pretentions of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, Bogan and others chose to use traditional techniques, though her poetry is modern and emotive without being sentimental, and her language is immediate and contemporary. Bogan's poetry contains a personal quality derived from personal experience, but it is not private or confessional. Her poems, most critics agree, are economical in words, masterpieces of crossed rhythms in which the meter opposes word groupings. Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Brett C. Millier named Bogan "one of the finest lyric poets America has produced," and added that "the fact that she was a woman and that she defended formal, lyric poetry in an age of expansive experimentation made evaluation of her work, until quite recently, somewhat condescending."

Bogan was born in Maine, the daughter of a mill worker. Her parents' marriage was not a happy one, due largely to her mother's mental and emotional instability. As the Bogans moved from one New England mill town to the next, May Bogan indulged in numerous extramarital affairs, which she flaunted. She also mystified her family with frequent and lengthy disappearances. Millier proposed that "the difficulties and instabilities of her childhood produced in Bogan a preoccupation with betrayal and a distrust of others, a highly romantic nature, and a preference for the arrangements of art over grim, workaday reality."

Bogan showed academic promise early, and through the help of a benefactor she was able to attend the Girls' Latin School in Boston. Then, after her freshman year at Boston University, she won a scholarship to Radcliffe, but turned it down to move to New York City with her husband. The couple eventually moved to the Panama Canal Zone, where she wrote some of the poems that would appear in her early collections. Bogan and her husband separated in 1919, and he died of pneumonia a year later. She moved to Vienna, where she lived a writer's life of solitude for three years. When she returned to live in New York in 1923, she worked in a bookstore and with cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead. She quickly became friends with such influential literary figures as Malcolm Cowley, Léonie Adams, William Carlos Williams, Conrad Aiken, and Edmund Wilson.

Body of This Death (1923) was her first volume of poetry, and it "contains several of Bogan's most memorable poems and in general reveals its author's preoccupations and tastes," advised Millier. "Betrayal, particularly sexual betrayal, is a constant theme." The critic found these poems, like Bogan's poetry in general, to be "made of meticulously distilled experience, distanced from the source by objective language." Several in the collection "address specifically female concerns and point to Bogan's ambivalent relationship with the tradition of female lyric poets." Millier added: "Her poems are by no means dogmatically feminist; Bogan held a deep distrust for all ideological commitment. In fact, she has been castigated somewhat unfairly by contemporary feminists." She followed this book with Dark Summer (1929), which included new poems along with several poems from Body of This Death.

Bogan's third book of poetry, Sleeping Fury (1937), further established Bogan as a modern master. In a review of that book, the Springfield Republican noted that "Miss Bogan's poetry appeals to the comparative few who appreciate delicacy and artistry in verse." A Books review said Bogan "has achieved a mastery of form rare in the realm of modern poetry. There is creative architecture in even the slightest of her lyrics. Miss Bogan works not as a landscape painter (while her visual imagery is exact, it does not depend on color alone), nor yet as a musician—although in many of her poems, the auditory imagery is superior to the visual: the ear listens, even as the eye sees. Her art is that of a sculpture." A Nation critic wrote, "Distinguished is the word one always thinks of in connection with Louise Bogan's poetry. Whatever form she tries, her art is sure, economical, and self-definitive. There is never in her poems a wasted adjective or phrase but always perfect clarity and a consistent mood precisely set down. She can write the completely artless lyric or the very subtle poem worked out through complex imagery."

Reviewing Poems and New Poems (1941) in Saturday Review, William Rose Benet noted, "Her poetry is, and always has been, intensely personal. She has inherited the Celtic magic of language, but has blended it somehow with the tartness of New England." Marianne Moore further observed in Nation, "Women are not noted for terseness, but Louise Bogan's art is compactness compacted. Emotion with her, as she has said of certain fiction is 'itself form, the kernel which builds outward form from inward intensity.' She uses a kind of forged rhetoric that nevertheless seems inevitable."

Collected Poems, 1923-1953 was reviewed in the New York Times by Richard Eberhart. "Louise Bogan's poems adhere to the center of English with a dark lyrical force," wrote Eberhart. "What she has to say is important. How she says it is pleasing. She is a compulsive poet first, a stylist second. When compulsion and style meet, we have a strong, inimitable Bogan poem." Saturday Review commented, "Louise Bogan is mistress of precise images and commands an extensive range of poetic accents and prosodic effects; she is also a musician, whose notes are as crystalline as those of Chopin's Preludes. More than this, one cannot read far in her pages without realizing that at the core of her poetry is mind-stuff which it is fashionable to call metaphysical." These poems are also important because they deal intelligently with the themes of sexual love and bodily decay.

The Blue Estuaries: Poems, 1923-1968 was the final collection of poems published before Bogan's death. The New York Times reviewed the book: "Now that we can see the sweep of forty-five years work in this collection of over a hundred poems, we can judge what a feat of character it has been. . . . [Her diction] stems from the severest lyrical tradition in English. . . . [Her language is] as supple as it is accurate, dealing with things in their own tones."

With the assistance of William Jay Smith, Bogan compiled an anthology of poems for children. The Golden Journey: Poems for Young People, with poems ranging from Shakespeare to Dylan Thomas, was described by James Dickey as possibly "the best general anthology of poems for young people ever compiled. By the poems they present, by their arrangement and timing, the editors subtly hold out the possibility that a child—though a child—is capable of rising to good poems, and so of becoming, through an encounter which also requires much of him, something more than he was. . . . [This book] could have been selected only by poets as distinguished as these two, and by human beings who realize that to make the wrong concessions to children is injurious to them."

Bogan also wrote a great deal of criticism. Achievement in American Poetry, 1900-1950 was a brief account of American poetry during the first half of this century. The Chicago Tribune described the book as "a delight. Like all Miss Bogan's criticism, this book is full of acute, spirited, and authoritative judgments of writers and works, expressed with grace and wit." The New York Times added, "Louise Bogan not only manages to compress a formidable amount of factual information into her small compass but also contrives to do a great deal of satisfactory talking about her facts." The United States Quarterly Book Review commented, "Miss Bogan's clarity of style, her ability to compress a great deal of information into a few lucid, interesting phrases, and her severely just appraisal form the chief attractions of this volume."

Commenting in the New York Times on Bogan's criticism, Thomas Lask declared that she "took a median position between the New Criticism at one end and sociological (or Marxian) criticism at the other. She refused to identify the poet with the historical processes of his age. ... On the other hand, she was not willing to strip the work down to its formal elements only, as if the poet was a disembodied muse living in no fixed time or place and without those idiosyncracies that made him what he was and no other. There is also little poking around in myth or in depth psychology." Lask found that Bogan's "manner was so quiet, her style so unemphatic that they sometimes obscured the force of her judgments. ... She could be wrong and she could be disappointing in her pieces, which is to say that she was mortal. An exquisite and scrupulous craftsman with a leaning to order, she had a natural tendency to respond to formal workmanship."

"Louise Bogan is a great lyric poet," concluded Paul Ramsey in Iowa Review. "To say that some of her lyrics will last as long as English is spoken is to say too little. For since value inheres in eternity, the worth of her poems is not finally to be measured by the length of enduring. To have written 'Song for the Last Act,' 'Old Countryside,' 'Men Loved Wholly beyond Wisdom,' . . . and some dozens of other poems of very nearly comparable excellence is to have wrought one of the high achievements of the human spirit, and to deserve our celebration and our love."

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

10-21-2015, 08:46 AM

The Violet Pressed in a Copy of Shakespeare
-----------------------------------------------------by Duncan Campbell Scott

HERE in the inmost of the master’s heart
This violet crisp with early dew,
Has come to leave her beauty and to part
With all her vivid hue.

And while in hollow glades and dells of musk, 5
Her fellows will reflower in bands,
Clasping the deeps of shade and emerald dusk,
With sweet inviolate hands,

She will lie here, a ghost of their delight,
Their lucent stems all ashen gray, 10
Their purples fallen into pulvil white,
Dull as the bluebird’s alula.

But here where human passions pulse in power,
She will transcend our Shakespeare’s art,
From Desdemona to a smothered flower, 15
Will leap the tragic heart.

And memory will recall in keener mood
The precinct fair where passion grew,
The stars within the water in the wood,
The moonlit grove, the odorous dew. 20

The voice that throbbed along the summer dark
Will float and pause and thrill,
In lonely cadence silvern as the lark,
To fail below the hill.

The reader will grow weary of the play, 25
Finding his heart half understood,
And with the young moon in the early dusk will stray
Beside the starry water in the wood.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

10-22-2015, 10:02 AM

Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae
----------------------------------------------------------------by Ernest Dowson

"I am not as I was under the reign of the good Cynara"—Horace

Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,
Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;
Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
When I awoke and found the dawn was gray:
I have been faithful to you, Cynara! in my fashion.

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long;
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ernest Dowson wrote a small handful of poems that are among the strongest in the English language. I consider him one of the very best "unknown" or "under-known" major poets, along with Louise Bogan. The poem above should make him forever immortal, unless readers lose their ears and their senses.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

10-23-2015, 12:14 AM

I. When The Ash-Tree Buds and The Maples
-------------------------------------------------------------by Duncan Campbell Scott

WHEN the ash-tree buds and the maples,
And the osier wands are red,
And the fairy sunlight dapples
Dales where the leaves are spread,
The pools are full of spring water,
Winter is dead.

When the bloodroot blows in the tangle,
And the lithe brooks run,
And the violets gleam and spangle
The glades in the golden sun, 10
The showers are bright as the sunlight,
April has won.

When the color is free in the grasses,
And the martins whip the mere,
And the Maryland-yellow-throat passes,
With his whistle quick and clear,
The willow is full of catkins;
May is here.

Then cut a reed by the river,
Make a song beneath the lime,
And blow with your lips a-quiver,
While your sweetheart carols the rhyme;
The glamour of love, the lyric of life,
The springtime- the springtime.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

10-24-2015, 12:20 PM

Madrigal
--------------------------------------------by Duncan Campbell Scott

SNOW-DROPS now begin in snows,
Crocuses to flush,
Gentle scilla buds and blows
Nurtured in the slush;
All about, like tinkling bells,
Falls the ice a-melting;
Ring, dilly dilly,- Sing, dilly dilly,-
Spring is here,
And the wolf is out of his den, O;
With a ren, O; and a fen, O;
And a den, den, den, O;
Sing, dilly dilly.

Slender moon is floating down
Through a vat of wine,
Bells knoll from the drowsy town,
Din- din- dine;
All about the red robins
Whistle in the dusk;
Ring, dilly dilly,- Sing, dilly dilly,-
Spring is here,
And the lambs are safe in their pen, O;
With a ren, O; and a fen, O;
And a den, den, den, O:
Sing, dilly dilly.

Comrade virgins clad in green
Quaff the nimble air;
Each one, if her mate’s unseen,Is the fairest fair;
Bran is hidden in the hedge
Breathing on his reeds;
Ring, dilly dilly- Sing, dilly dilly,-
Spring is here,
And maidens beware of the men, O;
With a ren, O; and a fen, O;
And a den, den, den, O;
Sing, dilly dilly.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

10-25-2015, 10:12 PM

At Melville's Tomb
-----------------------------------------------by Hart Crane

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men's bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death's bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.

Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides . . . High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.

Crane might have prophetically written "This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps" about himself, since he committed suicide by leaping from the deck of an ocean liner into the Atlantic Ocean.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

10-26-2015, 08:21 AM

Amor Umbratilis
-------------------------------- by Ernest Dowson

A gift of silence, sweet!
Who may not ever hear:
To lay down at your unobservant feet,
Is all the gift I bear.

I have no songs to sing,
That you should heed or know:
I have no lilies, in full hands, to fling
Across the path you go.

I cast my flowers away,
Blossoms unmeet for you!
The garland I have gathered in my day:
My rosemary and rue.

I watch you pass and pass,
Serene and cold: I lay
My lips upon your trodden daisied grass,
And turn my life away.

Yea, for I cast you, sweet!
This one gift, you shall take:
Like ointment, on your unobservant feet,
My silence for your sake.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

10-27-2015, 09:09 AM

CUCHULAIN'S FIGHT WITH THE SEA
-------------------------------------------------------------W. B. Yeats

A MAN came slowly from the setting sun,
To Emer, raddling raiment in her dun,
And said, 'I am that swineherd whom you bid
Go watch the road between the wood and tide,
But now I have no need to watch it more.'

Then Emer cast the web upon the floor,
And raising arms all raddled with the dye,
Parted her lips with a loud sudden cry.

That swineherd stared upon her face and said,
'No man alive, no man among the dead,
Has won the gold his cars of battle bring.'

'But if your master comes home triumphing
Why must you blench and shake from foot to crown?'

Thereon he shook the more and cast him down
Upon the web-heaped floor, and cried his word:
'With him is one sweet-throated like a bird.'

'You dare me to my face,' and thereupon
She smote with raddled fist, and where her son
Herded the cattle came with stumbling feet,
And cried with angry voice, 'It is not meet
To idle life away, a common herd.'

'I have long waited, mother, for that word:
But wherefore now?'

'There is a man to die;
You have the heaviest arm under the sky.'

'Whether under its daylight or its stars
My father stands amid his battle-cars.'

'But you have grown to be the taller man.'

'Yet somewhere under starlight or the sun
My father stands.'

'Aged, worn out with wars
On foot. on horseback or in battle-cars.'

'I only ask what way my journey lies,
For He who made you bitter made you wise.'

'The Red Branch camp in a great company
Between wood's rim and the horses of the sea.
Go there, and light a camp-fire at wood's rim;
But tell your name and lineage to him
Whose blade compels, and wait till they have found
Some feasting man that the same oath has bound.'

Among those feasting men Cuchulain dwelt,
And his young sweetheart close beside him knelt,
Stared on the mournful wonder of his eyes,
Even as Spring upon the ancient skies,
And pondered on the glory of his days;
And all around the harp-string told his praise,
And Conchubar, the Red Branch king of kings,
With his own fingers touched the brazen strings.

At last Cuchulain spake, 'Some man has made
His evening fire amid the leafy shade.
I have often heard him singing to and fro,
I have often heard the sweet sound of his bow.
Seek out what man he is.'

One went and came.
'He bade me let all know he gives his name
At the sword-point, and waits till we have found
Some feasting man that the same oath has bound.'

Cuchulain cried, 'I am the only man
Of all this host so bound from childhood on.

After short fighting in the leafy shade,
He spake to the young man, 'Is there no maid
Who loves you, no white arms to wrap you round,
Or do you long for the dim sleepy ground,
That you have come and dared me to my face?'

'The dooms of men are in God's hidden place,'

'Your head a while seemed like a woman's head
That I loved once.'

Again the fighting sped,
But now the war-rage in Cuchulain woke,
And through that new blade's guard the old blade
broke,
And pierced him.

'Speak before your breath is done.'

'Cuchulain I, mighty Cuchulain's son.'

'I put you from your pain. I can no more.'

While day its burden on to evening bore,
With head bowed on his knees Cuchulain stayed;
Then Conchubar sent that sweet-throated maid,
And she, to win him, his grey hair caressed;
In vain her arms, in vain her soft white breast.
Then Conchubar, the subtlest of all men,
Ranking his Druids round him ten by ten,
Spake thus: 'Cuchulain will dwell there and brood
For three days more in dreadful quietude,
And then arise, and raving slay us all.
Chaunt in his ear delusions magical,
That he may fight the horses of the sea.'
The Druids took them to their mystery,
And chaunted for three days.

Cuchulain stirred,
Stared on the horses of the sea, and heard
The cars of battle and his own name cried;
And fought with the invulnerable tide.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

10-28-2015, 08:19 AM

Sorrow is Come Like a Swallow To Nest
--------------------------- by Duncan Campbell Scott

SORROW is come like a swallow to nest,
Winging him up from the wind and the foam;
Mine is the heart that he loves the best,
He dreams of it when he dreams of home.

Strange! In the daylight off he flies,
Swift to the south away to the sea;
But when in the west the ruby dies,
With the growing stars he comes back to me.

With the slat, cool wind in his wing,
And the rush of tears that tingles and start,
With a throb at the throat so he cannot sing,
He nestles him into my lonely heart.

And he tells me of something I cannot name,
Something the sea with the sea-wind sings,
That somehow he and love are the same,
That they float and fly with the same swift wings.

I cherish and cherish my timid guest,
For oh, he has grown so dear to me
That my heart would break if he left his nest,
And dwelt in the strange land down by the sea.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

10-29-2015, 08:22 AM

Those Winter Sundays
--------------------------------------------------by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blue-black cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
-----------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------------

I believe Robert Hayden became an immortal poet with this poem.
I wonder how many children will read it and suddenly realize how much of their lives their parents sacrificed to their upbringing.
This poem is epically deep, and steeped in a realism so very few ever know. I lived much of that poem and saw my father sacrifice far more than any man I've ever seen do so since, myself included.
Yet he never uttered a solitary complaint...
Thats the kind of bravery/courage that I aspire to one day have...
And God willing, just may make it- one day, one day.... -Tyr

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

10-31-2015, 09:23 AM

The Skeleton's Defense of Carnality
----------------------------------------------------------by Jack Foley

Truly I have lost weight, I have lost weight,
grown lean in love’s defense,
in love’s defense grown grave.
It was concupiscence that brought me to the state:
all bone and a bit of skin
to keep the bone within.
Flesh is no heavy burden for one possessed of little
and accustomed to its loss.
I lean to love, which leaves me lean, till lean turn into lack.
A wanton bone, I sing my song
and travel where the bone is blown
and extricate true love from lust
as any man of wisdom must.
Then wherefore should I rage
against this pilgrimage
from gravel unto gravel?
Circuitous I travel
from love to lack / and lack to lack,
from lean to lack
and back.

I love this wicked little poem by the contemporary poet Jack Foley. The male skeleton is missing an important "member" required for lovemaking, so "lean" really does "turn into lack" when the "bone is blown."

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Because I could not stop for Death
---------------------------------------------by 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 –

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

11-01-2015, 06:19 PM

Part 6 from
The Dark Side of the Deity: Interlude
--------------------------------------------------------by Joe M. Ruggier

When Satan hurled, before the Dawn,
defiance at the Lord of History;
and Michael stood, and Glory shone,
Whose hand controlled the timeless Mystery?
Who but the Insult was the leveler;
Deliverer and bedeviler?

When Athens, sung in verse and prose,
caught all the World's imagination;
when Ilion fell, and Rome arose,
and Time went on like pagination:
Who but the Insult was the leveler;
Deliverer and bedeviler?

When books, in numberless infinities,
cross-fertilize the teeming brain,
and warring, vex the Soul with Vanities,
and Insults hurtle, Insults rain:
Who but the Insult is the leveler;
Deliverer and bedeviler?

And when we too shall cease to be,
like all the Kingdoms of the Past,
and groaning, gasping, wrenching free,
we bite, at last, alone, the dust:
Who but the Insult is the leveler;
Deliverer and bedeviler?

When church‑bells fill the wandering fields
with Love and Fear,
the Flesh and Blood of Jesus yields
deliverance dear,
to them who believe in the Compliment Sinsear.

Joe Ruggier is quite a story, having sold over 20,000 books by going door-to-door. He is a Maltese poet who now lives in British Columbia

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

11-02-2015, 09:11 AM

Dover Beach
--------------------------------------by Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm to-night,
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

This may be the first truly great modern poem, along with "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot. Matthew Arnold stopped writing poetry when he could no longer "create joy," but this magnificent poem will undoubtedly remain a joy forever.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

11-03-2015, 09:02 AM

Memory of My Father
--------------------------------------------------by Eunice de Chazeau

Standing ankle deep in this black river
silted with death, I feel the rush of it
like chains and the cold of it like a collar
of locked iron. I look to the mid-stream lit
only by the pallor of your face that flows
most terribly away; but no lament
is uttered across the water that will close
secretly over you when you are spent.

You, who were always a strong swimmer, would dive,
abhorring the gradual, and skim below
the ripple, while I gasped for fear you would never
come up. Then, like a seal, you would break above
the surface and I would breathe. Sinking now
will you be able to hold your breath forever?

This is the first of three poems by Eunice de Chazeau about her mother and father. Sometimes reading a good poem is like reading a highly condensed novel. I believe this is one such poem.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

11-04-2015, 09:45 AM

Adagio
---------------------------------by Duncan Campbell Scott

GRAVE maid, surrounded by the austere air
Of this delaying spring, what gentle grief,
What hovering, mystical melancholy
Hath covered thee with the translucent shadow?
The glaucous silver buds upon the tree,
And the light burst of blossom in the bush
Are the new year’s evangel: soon the birch
Will breathe in heaven with her myriad leaves
And hide the birds’ nests from the tuliped lawn;
But thou, with look askance and dreaming eyes,
Brooding on something subtly sad and sweet,
Art passive, and the world may have her way,
Hide the moraine of immemorial days
With bines and blossoms, so thine unvaried hour
Be not perplexed with the change of growth.
Within this sombre circle of the hills,
Thy girlish eyes have seen the winter’s close,
And what may lie beyond, where the sun falls,
Whenthe vale fills with rose, and the first star
Looks liquidly, thy quiet heart knows not.
The permanence of beauty haunts thy dreams,
And only as a land beyond desire,
Where the fixed glow may stain the vivid flower,
Where youth may lose his wings but keep his joy,
Does that far slope in the reluctant light
Lure thee beyond the barrier of the hills.
And often in the morning of the heart,
When memories are like crocus-buds in spring,
Thou hast up-builded in thy crystal soul
Immutable forms of things loved once and lost,
Or loved and never gained.
Now while the wind
From the reflowering bush gushes with perfume,
Thou hast a vision of a precinct fair,
Daled in the lustrous hills, where the mossed dial
Holds the slow shadow narrowed to a line;
Where a parterre of tulips hoards the light,
Changeless and pure in cups of tranquil gold;
Where bee-hives gray against the poplar shade,
Peopled with bees, hum in perpetual drone;
In a pavilion centred in the close,
Four viols build the perfect cube of sound;
A path beside the rosy barberry hedge,
Leads to the cool of water under spray,
Leads to the fountain-echoing ivied wall;
Pedestaled there, flecked with the linden shadows,
A guardian statue carved in purest stone,
Love and Mnemosyne; Mnemosyne
Mothering the Truant to an all-cherishing breast,
The wells of lore deepening her eyes, would
speak-
But Love hath laid his hand upon her lips.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

11-05-2015, 08:56 AM

The Highwayman
----------------------------------------------by Alfred Noyes

PART ONE

I
THE wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding—
Riding—riding—
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.

II
He'd a French cocked-hat on his forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin,
A coat of the claret velvet, and breeches of brown doe-skin;
They fitted with never a wrinkle: his boots were up to the thigh!
And he rode with a jewelled twinkle,
His pistol butts a-twinkle,
His rapier hilt a-twinkle, under the jewelled sky.

III
Over the cobbles he clattered and clashed in the dark inn-yard,
And he tapped with his whip on the shutters, but all was locked and barred;
He whistled a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
But the landlord's black-eyed daughter,
Bess, the landlord's daughter,
Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.

IV
And dark in the dark old inn-yard a stable-wicket creaked
Where Tim the ostler listened; his face was white and peaked;
His eyes were hollows of madness, his hair like mouldy hay,
But he loved the landlord's daughter,
The landlord's red-lipped daughter,
Dumb as a dog he listened, and he heard the robber say—

V
"One kiss, my bonny sweetheart, I'm after a prize to-night,
But I shall be back with the yellow gold before the morning light;
Yet, if they press me sharply, and harry me through the day,
Then look for me by moonlight,
Watch for me by moonlight,
I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way."

VI
He rose upright in the stirrups; he scarce could reach her hand,
But she loosened her hair i' the casement! His face burnt like a brand
As the black cascade of perfume came tumbling over his breast;
And he kissed its waves in the moonlight,
(Oh, sweet, black waves in the moonlight!)
Then he tugged at his rein in the moonlight, and galloped away to the West.

PART TWO

I
He did not come in the dawning; he did not come at noon;
And out o' the tawny sunset, before the rise o' the moon,
When the road was a gypsy's ribbon, looping the purple moor,
A red-coat troop came marching—
Marching—marching—
King George's men came matching, up to the old inn-door.

II
They said no word to the landlord, they drank his ale instead,
But they gagged his daughter and bound her to the foot of her narrow bed;
Two of them knelt at her casement, with muskets at their side!
There was death at every window;
And hell at one dark window;
For Bess could see, through her casement, the road that he would ride.

III
They had tied her up to attention, with many a sniggering jest;
They had bound a musket beside her, with the barrel beneath her breast!
"Now, keep good watch!" and they kissed her.
She heard the dead man say—
Look for me by moonlight;
Watch for me by moonlight;
I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way!

IV
She twisted her hands behind her; but all the knots held good!
She writhed her hands till her fingers were wet with sweat or blood!
They stretched and strained in the darkness, and the hours crawled by like years,
Till, now, on the stroke of midnight,
Cold, on the stroke of midnight,
The tip of one finger touched it! The trigger at least was hers!

V
The tip of one finger touched it; she strove no more for the rest!
Up, she stood up to attention, with the barrel beneath her breast,
She would not risk their hearing; she would not strive again;
For the road lay bare in the moonlight;
Blank and bare in the moonlight;
And the blood of her veins in the moonlight throbbed to her love's refrain.

VI
Tlot-tlot; tlot-tlot! Had they heard it? The horse-hoofs ringing clear;
Tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, in the distance? Were they deaf that they did not hear?
Down the ribbon of moonlight, over the brow of the hill,
The highwayman came riding,
Riding, riding!
The red-coats looked to their priming! She stood up, straight and still!

VII
Tlot-tlot, in the frosty silence! Tlot-tlot, in the echoing night!
Nearer he came and nearer! Her face was like a light!
Her eyes grew wide for a moment; she drew one last deep breath,
Then her finger moved in the moonlight,
Her musket shattered the moonlight,
Shattered her breast in the moonlight and warned him—with her death.

VIII
He turned; he spurred to the West; he did not know who stood
Bowed, with her head o'er the musket, drenched with her own red blood!
Not till the dawn he heard it, his face grew grey to hear
How Bess, the landlord's daughter,
The landlord's black-eyed daughter,
Had watched for her love in the moonlight, and died in the darkness there.

IX
Back, he spurred like a madman, shrieking a curse to the sky,
With the white road smoking behind him and his rapier brandished high!
Blood-red were his spurs i' the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat,
When they shot him down on the highway,
Down like a dog on the highway,
And he lay in his blood on the highway, with the bunch of lace at his throat.

X
And still of a winter's night, they say, when the wind is in the trees,
When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
A highwayman comes riding—
Riding—riding—
A highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door.

XI
Over the cobbles he clatters and clangs in the dark inn-yard;
He taps with his whip on the shutters, but all is locked and barred;
He whistles a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
But the landlord's black-eyed daughter,
Bess, the landlord's daughter,
Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.

PREVIOUSLY I HAD NEVER HEAR OF THIS POET BUT HIS TALENT IS MASSIVE AS JUST THIS POEM ALONE ILLUSTRATES.
GONNA RESEARCH HIM DEEPLY NOW. -TYR

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

11-06-2015, 09:33 AM

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/178489

ESSAY
For the Sake of People’s Poetry
Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us.

BY JUNE JORDAN
In America, the father is white; it is he who inaugurated the experiment of this republic. It is he who sailed his way into slave ownership and who availed himself of my mother—that African woman whose function was miserable—defined by his desirings, or his rage. It is he who continues to dominate the destiny of the Mississippi River, the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the life of my son. Understandably, then, I am curious about this man.

Most of the time my interest can be characterized as wary, at best. Other times, it is the interest a pedestrian feels for the fast traveling truck about to smash into him. Or her. Again. And at other times it is the curiosity of a stranger trying to figure out the system of the language that excludes her name and all of the names of all of her people. It is this last that leads me to the poet Walt Whitman.

Trying to understand the system responsible for every boring, inaccessible, irrelevant, derivative and pretentious poem that is glued to the marrow of required readings in American classrooms, or trying to understand the system responsible for the exclusion of every hilarious, amazing, visionary, pertinent and unforgettable poet from National Endowment of the Arts grants and from national publications, I come back to Walt Whitman.

What in the hell happened to him? Wasn’t he a white man? Wasn’t he some kind of a father to American literature? Didn’t he talk about this New World? Didn’t he see it? Didn’t he sing this New World, this America, on a New World, an American scale of his own visionary invention?

It so happens that Walt Whitman is the one white father who shares the systematic disadvantages of his heterogeneous offspring trapped inside a closet that is, in reality, as huge as the continental spread of North and South America. What Whitman envisioned, we, the people and the poets of the New World, embody. He has been punished for the moral questions that our very lives arouse.

At home as a child, I learned the poetry of the Bible and the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar. As a student, I diligently followed orthodox directions from The Canterbury Tales right through The Wasteland by that consummate Anglophile whose name I can never remember. And I kept waiting. It was, I thought, all right to deal with daffodils in the 17th century of an island as much like Manhattan as I resemble Queen Mary. But what about Dunbar? When was he coming up again? And where were the Black poets, altogether? And who were the women poets I might reasonably emulate? And wasn’t there, ever, a great poet who was crazy about Brooklyn or furious about war? And I kept waiting. And I kept writing my own poetry. And I kept reading apparently underground poetry: poetry kept strictly off campus. I kept reading the poetry of so many gifted students when I became a teacher. I kept listening to the wonderful poetry of the multiplying numbers of my friends who were and who are New World poets until I knew, for a fact, that there was and that there is an American, a New World poetry that is as personal, as public, as irresistible, as quick, as necessary, as unprecedented, as representative, as exalted, as speakably commonplace, and as musical as an emergency phone call.

But I didn’t know about Walt Whitman. Yes, I had heard about this bohemian, this homosexual, even, who wrote something about The Captain and The Lilacs in The Hallway, but nobody ever told me to read his work! Not only was Whitman not required reading, he was, on the contrary, presented as a rather hairy buffoon suffering from a childish proclivity for exercise and open air.

Nevertheless, it is through the study of the poems and the ideas of this particular white father that I have reached a tactical, if not strategic, understanding of the racist, sexist, and anti-American predicament that condemns most New World writing to peripheral/unpublished manuscript status.

Before these United States came into being, the great poets of the world earned their lustre through undeniable forms of spontaneous popularity; generations of a people chose to memorize and then to further elaborate these songs and to impart them to the next generation. I am talking about people; African families and Greek families and the families of the Hebrew tribes and all that multitude to whom the Bhagavad-Gita is as daily as the sun! If these poems were not always religious, they were certainly moral in notice, or in accomplishment, or both. None of these great poems would be mistaken for the poetry of another country, another time. You do not find a single helicopter taking off or landing in any of the sonnets of Elizabethan England, nor do you run across rice and peas in any of the psalms! Evidently, one criterion for great poetry used to be the requirements of cultural nationalism.

But by the advent of the thirty-six year old poet, Walt Whitman, the phenomenon of a people’s poetry, or great poetry and its spontaneous popularity, could no longer be assumed. The physical immensity and the farflung population of this New World decisively separated poets from suitable means to produce and distribute their poetry. Now there would have to be intermediaries—critics and publishers—whose marketplace principles of scarcity would, logically, oppose them to populist traditions of art.

Old World concepts would replace the democratic and these elitist notions would prevail; in the context of such considerations, an American literary establishment antithetical to the New World meanings of America took root. And this is one reason why the pre-eminently American white father of American poetry exists primarily in the realm of caricature and rumor in his own country.

As a matter of fact, if you hope to hear about Whitman your best bet is to leave home. Ignore prevailing American criticism and, instead, ask anybody anywhere else in the world this question: As Shakespeare is to England, Dante to Italy, Tolstoy to Russia, Goethe to Germany, Aghostino Neto to Angola, Pablo Neruda to Chile, Mao-Tse-Tung to China, and Ho Chi Minh to Vietnam, who is the great American writer, the distinctively American poet, the giant American “literatus?” Undoubtedly, the answer will be Walt Whitman.

He is the poet who wrote:
A man’s body at auction
(For before the war I often go to the slave-mart and watch the sale.)
I help the auctioneer, the sloven does not half know his business. . .
Gentlemen look on this wonder.
Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for it. (1)
I ask you, today: Who in the United States would publish those lines? They are all wrong! In the first place there is nothing obscure, nothing contrived, nothing an ordinary strap-hanger in the subway would be puzzled by! In the second place, the voice of those lines is intimate and direct, at once; it is the voice of the poet who assumes that he speaks to an equal and that he need not fear that equality. On the contrary, the intimate distance between the poet and the reader is a distance that assumes there is everything important, between them, to be shared. And what is poetic about a line of words that runs as long as a regular, a spoken idea? You could more easily imagine an actual human being speaking such lines than you could imagine an artist composing them in a room carefully separated from the real life of his family. This can’t be poetry! Besides, these lines apparently serve an expressly moral purpose! Then is this didactic/political writing? Aha! This cannot be good poetry. And, in fact, you will never see, for example, The New Yorker Magazine publishing a poem marked by such splendid deficiencies.

Consider the inevitable, the irresistible, simplicity of that enormous moral idea:
Gentlemen look on this wonder.
Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for it . . .
This is not only one man, this the father of those who shall be fathers
in their turns
In him the start of populous states and rich republics, Of him count-
less immortal lives with countless embodiments and enjoyments
Crucial and obviously important and, hence, this is not an idea generally broadcast: the poet is trying to save a human being while even the poem cannot be saved from the insolence of marketplace evaluation!

Indeed Whitman and the traceable descendants of Walt Whitman, those who follow his democratic faith into obviously New World forms of experience and art, they suffer from establishment rejection and contempt the same as forced this archetypal American genius to publish, distribute, and review his own work, by himself. The descendants I have in mind include those unmistakeably contemporaneous young poets who base themselves upon domesticities such as disco, Las Vegas, MacDonalds, and $40 running shoes. Also within the Whitman tradition, Black and First World* poets traceably transform and further the egalitarian sensibility that isolates that one white father from his more powerful compatriots. I am thinking of the feminist poets evidently intent upon speaking with a maximal number and diversity of other Americans' lives. I am thinking of all the many first rank heroes of the New World who are overwhelmingly forced to publish their own works using a hand press, or whatever, or else give it up entirely.

That is to say, the only peoples who can test or verify the meaning of the United States as a democratic state, as a pluralistic culture, these are the very peoples whose contribution to a national vision and discovery meets with steadfast ridicule and disregard.

A democratic state does not, after all, exist for the few, but for the many. A democratic state is not proven by the welfare of the strong but by the welfare of the weak. And unless that many, that manifold constitution of diverse peoples can be seen as integral to the national art/the national consciousness, you might as well mean only Czechoslovakia when you talk about the USA, or only Ireland, or merely France, or exclusively white men.

Pablo Neruda is a New World poet whose fate differs from the other Whitman descendants because he was born into a country where the majority of the citizens did not mistake themselves for Englishmen or long to find themselves struggling, at most, with cucumber sandwiches and tea. He was never European. His anguish was not aroused by thee piece suits and rolled umbrellas. When he cries, towards the conclusion of The Heights of Machu Picchu, “Arise and birth with me, my brother,” (2) he plainly does not allude to Lord or Colonel Anybody At All. As he writes earlier, in that amazing poem:
I came by another way, river by river, street after street,
city by city, one bed and another,
forcing the salt of my mask through a wilderness;
and there, in the shame of the ultimate hovels, lampless
and tireless,
lacking bread or a stone or a stillness, alone in myself,
I whirled at my will, dying the death that was mine (3)
Of course Neruda has not escaped all of the untoward consequences common to Whitman descendants. American critics and translators never weary of asserting that Neruda is a quote great unquote poet despite the political commitment of his art and despite the artistic consequences of the commitment. Specifically, Neruda’s self-conscious decision to write in a manner readily comprehensible to the masses of his countrymen, and his self-conscious decision to specify, outright, the United Fruit Company when that was the instigating subject of his poem, become unfortunate moments in an otherwise supposedly sublime, not to mention surrealist, deeply Old World and European but nonetheless Chilean case history. To assure the validity of this perspective, the usual American critic and translator presents you with a smattering of the unfortunate, ostensibly political poetry and, on the other hand, buries you under volumes of Neruda’s early work that antedates the Spanish Civil War or, in other words, that antedates Neruda’s serious conversion to a political world view.

This kind of artistically indefensible censorship would have you perceive qualitative and even irreconcilable differences between the poet who wrote:
You, my antagonist, in that splintering dream
like the bristling glass of gardens, like a menace of ruinous bells, volleys
of blackening ivy at the perfume’s center,
enemy of the great hipbones my skin has touched
with a harrowing dew (4)
And the poet who wrote, some twenty years later, these lines from the poem entitled “The Dictators”:
Lament was perpetual and fell, like a plant and its pollen,
forcing a lightless increase in the blinded, big leaves
And bludgeon by bludgeon, on the terrible waters,
scale over scale in the bog,
the snout filled with silence and slime
and vendetta was born (5)
According to prevalent American criticism, that later poem of Neruda represents a lesser achievement precisely because it can be understood by more people, more easily, than the first. It is also derogated because this poem attacks a keystone of the Old World, namely dictatorship or, in other words, power and privilege for the few.

The peculiar North American vendetta against Walt Whitman, against the first son of this democratic union, can be further fathomed if you look at some facts: Neruda’s eminence is now acknowledged on international levels; it is known to encompass profound impact upon North American poets who do not realize the North American/Walt Whitman origins for so much that is singular and worthy in the poetry of Neruda. You will even find American critics who congratulate Neruda for overcoming the “Whitmanesque” content of his art. This perfidious arrogance is as calculated as it is common. You cannot persuade anyone seriously familiar with Neruda’s life and art that he could have found cause, at any point, to disagree with the tenets, the analysis and the authentic New World vision presented by Walt Whitman in his essay, Democratic Vistas, which remains the most signal and persuasive manifesto of New World thinking and belief in print.

Let me define my terms, in brief: New World does not mean New England. New World means non-European; it means new; it means big; it means heterogenous; it means unknown; it means free; it means an end to feudalism, caste, privilege, and the violence of power. It means wild in the sense that a tree growing away from the earth enacts a wild event. It means democratic in the sense that, as Whitman wrote:
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than
the journey-work of the stars. . .
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger
sextillions of infidels (6)
New World means that, as Whitman wrote, “I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart.” New World means, as Whitman said, “By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.”

In Democratic Vistas, Whitman declared,
As the greatest lessons of Nature through the universe are perhaps the lessons of variety and freedom, the same present the greatest lessons also in New World politics and progress . . . Sole among nationalities, these States have assumed the task to put in forms of history, power and practicality, on areas of amplitude rivaling the operations of the physical kosmos, the moral political speculations of ages, long, long deffer’d, the democratic republican principle, and the theory of development and perfection by voluntary standards and self reliance.
Listen to this white father; he is so weird! Here he is calling aloud for an American, a democratic spirit. An American, a democratic idea that could morally constrain and coordinate the material body of USA affluence and piratical outreach, more than a hundred years ago he wrote,
The great poems, Shakespeare included, are poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common people, the lifeblood of democracy. The models of our literature, as we get it from other lands, ultra marine, have had their birth in courts, and bask’d and grown in castle sunshine; all smells of princes’ favors ... Do you call those genteel little creatures American poets? Do you term that perpetual, pistareen, paste-pot work, American art, American drama, taste, verse? ... We see the sons and daughters of The New World, ignorant of its genius, not yet inaugurating the native, the universal, and the near, still importing the distant, the partial, the dead.
Abhorring the “thin sentiment of parlors, parasols, piano-song, tinkling rhymes,” Whitman conjured up a poetry of America, a poetry of democracy which would not “mean the smooth walks, trimm’d hedges, poseys and nightingales of the English poets, but the whole orb, with its geologic history, the Kosmos, carrying fire and snow that rolls through the illimitable areas, light as a feather, though weighing billions of tons.”

Well, what happened?

Whitman went ahead and wrote the poetry demanded by his vision. He became, by thousands upon thousands of words, a great American poet:
There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became,
And that object became part of him for the day
Or a certain part of the day,
Or for many years or stretching cycles of years
The early lilacs became part of this child,
And grass and white and red morning-glories,
and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird. . . (7)
And, elsewhere, he wrote:
It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation,
or ever some many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky,
so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river
and the bright flow, I was refresh’d,
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet
hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried,
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the
thick-stemm’d pipes of steamboats,
I look’d. . . (8)
This great American poet of democracy as cosmos, this poet of a continent as consciousness, this poet of the many people as one people, this poet of diction comprehensible to all, of a vision insisting on each, of a rhythm/a rhetorical momentum to transport the reader from the Brooklyn ferry into the hills of Alabama and back again, of line after line of bodily, concrete detail that constitutes the mysterious the cellular tissue of a nation indivisible but dependent upon and astonishing in its diversity, this white father of a great poetry deprived of its spontaneous popularity/a great poetry hidden away from the ordinary people it celebrates so well, he has been, again and again, cast aside as an undisciplined poseur, a merely freak eruption of prolix perversities.

Last year, the New York Times Book Review saw fit to import a European self-appointed critic of American literature to address the question: Is there a great American poet? Since this visitor was ignorant of the philosophy and the achievements of Walt Whitman, the visitor, Denis Donoghue, comfortably excluded every possible descendent of Whitman from his erstwhile cerebrations. Only one woman was mentioned (she, needless to add, did not qualify). No poets under fifty, and not one Black or First World poet received even cursory assessment. Not one poet of distinctively New World values, and their formal embodiment, managed to dent the suavity of Donoghue’s public display.

This New York Times event perpetuated American habits of beggarly, absurd deference to the Old World. And these habits bespeak more than marketplace intrusions into cultural realms. We erase ourselves through self hatred. We lend our silence to the American anti-American process whereby anything and anyone special to this nation state becomes liable to condemnation because it is what it is, truly.

Against self hatred there is Whitman and there are all of the New World poets who insistently devise legitimate varieties of cultural nationalism. There is Whitman and all of the poets whose lives have been baptized by witness to blood, by witness to cataclysmic, political confrontations from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era, through the Women’s Movement, and on and on through the conflicts between the hungry and the well-fed, the wasteful, the bullies.

In the poetry of the New World, you meet with a reverence for the material world that begins with a reverence for human life. There is an intellectual trust in sensuality as a means of knowledge, an easily deciphered system of reference, aspirations to a believable, collective voice and, consequently, emphatic preference for broadly accessible, spoken language. Deliberately balancing perception with vision, it seeks to match moral exhortation with sensory report.

All of the traceable descendants of Whitman have met with an establishment, academic reception disgracefully identical; except for the New World poets who live and write beyond the boundaries of the USA, the offspring of this one white father encounter everlasting marketplace disparagement as crude or optional or simplistic or, as Whitman himself wrote “hankering, gross, mystical, nude.”

I too am a descendant of Walt Whitman. And I am not by myself struggling to tell the truth about this history of so much land and so much blood, of so much that should be sacred and so much that has been desecrated and annihilated boastfully.

My brothers and my sisters of this New World, we remember that, as Whitman said,
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate
itself or be understood,
I see that the elementary laws never apologize (9)
We do not apologize that we are not Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Bishop. Or, as Whitman exclaimed, “I exist as I am, that is enough.”

New World poetry moves into and beyond the lives of Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda, Aghostino Neto, Gabriela Mistral, Langston Hughes, and Margaret Walker. I follow this movement with my own life. I am calm and smiling as we go. Is it not written, somewhere very near to me:
A man’s body at auction . . .
Gentlemen look on this wonder.
Whatever the bids of the bidders
they cannot be high enough for it . . .
And didn’t that weird white father predict this truth that is always growing:
I swear to you the architects shall appear without fail,
I swear to you they will understand you and justify you,
The greatest among them shall be he who best knows you
and encloses all and is faithful to all,
He and rest shall not forget you, they shall
perceive that you are not an iota less than they,
You shall be fully glorified in them (10)
Walt Whitman and all of the New World poets coming after him, we, too, go on singing this America.

*Given that they were first to exist on the planet and currently make up the majority, the author will refer to that part of the population usually termed Third World as the First World.

Notes

1. from “I Sing the Body Electric,” by Walt Whitman
2. from Section XII of The Heights of Macho Picchu, translated by Nathaniel Tarn, Farrar Straus and Giroux: New York
3. from The Heights of Macho Picchu, translated by Ben Bolitt, Evergreen Press
4. from “Woes and the Furies,” by Pablo Neruda in Selected Poems of Neruda, translated by Ben Bolitt, p. 101
5. Ibid. “The Dictators,” p. 161
6. from “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman
7. from “There was a Child Went Forth” by Walt Whitman
8. from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
9. from “Song of Myself”
10. from “Song of the Rolling Earth”

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

11-06-2015, 09:46 AM

ESSAY
For the Sake of People’s Poetry
Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us.

BY JUNE JORDAN
In America, the father is white; it is he who inaugurated the experiment of this republic. It is he who sailed his way into slave ownership and who availed himself of my mother—that African woman whose function was miserable—defined by his desirings, or his rage. It is he who continues to dominate the destiny of the Mississippi River, the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the life of my son. Understandably, then, I am curious about this man.

Most of the time my interest can be characterized as wary, at best. Other times, it is the interest a pedestrian feels for the fast traveling truck about to smash into him. Or her. Again. And at other times it is the curiosity of a stranger trying to figure out the system of the language that excludes her name and all of the names of all of her people. It is this last that leads me to the poet Walt Whitman.

Trying to understand the system responsible for every boring, inaccessible, irrelevant, derivative and pretentious poem that is glued to the marrow of required readings in American classrooms, or trying to understand the system responsible for the exclusion of every hilarious, amazing, visionary, pertinent and unforgettable poet from National Endowment of the Arts grants and from national publications, I come back to Walt Whitman.

What in the hell happened to him? Wasn’t he a white man? Wasn’t he some kind of a father to American literature? Didn’t he talk about this New World? Didn’t he see it? Didn’t he sing this New World, this America, on a New World, an American scale of his own visionary invention?

It so happens that Walt Whitman is the one white father who shares the systematic disadvantages of his heterogeneous offspring trapped inside a closet that is, in reality, as huge as the continental spread of North and South America. What Whitman envisioned, we, the people and the poets of the New World, embody. He has been punished for the moral questions that our very lives arouse.

At home as a child, I learned the poetry of the Bible and the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar. As a student, I diligently followed orthodox directions from The Canterbury Tales right through The Wasteland by that consummate Anglophile whose name I can never remember. And I kept waiting. It was, I thought, all right to deal with daffodils in the 17th century of an island as much like Manhattan as I resemble Queen Mary. But what about Dunbar? When was he coming up again? And where were the Black poets, altogether? And who were the women poets I might reasonably emulate? And wasn’t there, ever, a great poet who was crazy about Brooklyn or furious about war? And I kept waiting. And I kept writing my own poetry. And I kept reading apparently underground poetry: poetry kept strictly off campus. I kept reading the poetry of so many gifted students when I became a teacher. I kept listening to the wonderful poetry of the multiplying numbers of my friends who were and who are New World poets until I knew, for a fact, that there was and that there is an American, a New World poetry that is as personal, as public, as irresistible, as quick, as necessary, as unprecedented, as representative, as exalted, as speakably commonplace, and as musical as an emergency phone call.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(1.) Excerpt below taken from full body of previous text in my previous post..-Tyr

Pablo Neruda is a New World poet whose fate differs from the other Whitman descendants because he was born into a country where the majority of the citizens did not mistake themselves for Englishmen or long to find themselves struggling, at most, with cucumber sandwiches and tea. He was never European. His anguish was not aroused by thee piece suits and rolled umbrellas. When he cries, towards the conclusion of The Heights of Machu Picchu, “Arise and birth with me, my brother,” (2) he plainly does not allude to Lord or Colonel Anybody At All. As he writes earlier, in that amazing poem:
I came by another way, river by river, street after street,
city by city, one bed and another,
forcing the salt of my mask through a wilderness;
and there, in the shame of the ultimate hovels, lampless
and tireless,
lacking bread or a stone or a stillness, alone in myself,
I whirled at my will, dying the death that was mine (3)
Of course Neruda has not escaped all of the untoward consequences common to Whitman descendants. American critics and translators never weary of asserting that Neruda is a quote great unquote poet despite the political commitment of his art and despite the artistic consequences of the commitment. Specifically, Neruda’s self-conscious decision to write in a manner readily comprehensible to the masses of his countrymen, and his self-conscious decision to specify, outright, the United Fruit Company when that was the instigating subject of his poem, become unfortunate moments in an otherwise supposedly sublime, not to mention surrealist, deeply Old World and European but nonetheless Chilean case history. To assure the validity of this perspective, the usual American critic and translator presents you with a smattering of the unfortunate, ostensibly political poetry and, on the other hand, buries you under volumes of Neruda’s early work that antedates the Spanish Civil War or, in other words, that antedates Neruda’s serious conversion to a political world view.

I do not knock Pablo Neruda being a fine poet.. as truly he is--so are many others for that matter.
However, this legendary status the elitist morons try to bestow upon him is damn sickening to me!
I could point out other so-called minor poets that put Pablo to shame but do not get the fame given Pablo by modern fools simply because his name being Pablo and his leftist political leanings.
Whereas, in my view, in my world--- politics in poetry is a damn invasive cancer that should be cut out every place it invades.
So much of his fame rests upon the desire to advance a political ideology! ffing morons...-Tyr

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

11-06-2015, 09:52 AM

HAHA, I NEED MY COFFEE.
Presented this in the wrong thread but will just let it stay. :laugh::laugh:--TYR

LongTermGuy

11-06-2015, 11:02 AM

HAHA, I NEED MY COFFEE.
Presented this in the wrong thread but will just let it stay. :laugh::laugh:--TYR

Tyr.....your funny!:laugh: Understand the coffee thing!:coffee:

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

11-07-2015, 02:51 PM

At Les Éboulements
---------------------------by Duncan Scott Campbell

A GLAMOUR on the phantom shore
Of golden pallid green,
Gray purple in the flats before,
The river streams between.

From hazy hamlets, one by one,
Beyond the island bars,
The casements in the setting sun
Flash back in violet stars.

A brig is straining out for sea,
To Norway or to France she goes,
And all her happy flags are free,
Her sails are flushed with rose.

----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
The Cup
-------------------------------by Duncan Scott Campbell

HERE is pleasure; drink it down.
Here is sorrow; drain it dry.
Tilt the goblet, don’t ask why.
Here is madness; down it goes.
Here’s a dagger and a kiss,
Don’t ask what the reason is.
Drink your liquor, no one knows;
Drink it bravely like a lord.
Do not roll a coward eye,
Pain and pleasure is one sword
Hacking out your destiny;
Do not say, "It is not just."
That word won’t apply to life;
You must drink because you must;
Tilt the goblet, cease the strife.
Here at last is something good,
Just to warm your flagging blood.
Don’t take breath-
At the bottom of the cup
Here is death:
Drink it up.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

11-08-2015, 02:08 PM

Down on the Shore
------------------------------------- by William Allingham

Down on the shore, on the sunny shore!
Where the salt smell cheers the land;
Where the tide moves bright under boundless light,
And the surge on the glittering strand;
Where the children wade in the shallow pools,
Or run from the froth in play;
Where the swift little boats with milk-white wings
Are crossing the sapphire bay,
And the ship in full sail, with a fortunate gale,
Holds proudy on her way;
Where the nets are spread on the grass to dry,
And asleep, hard by, the fishermen lie,
Under the tent of the warm blue sky,
With the hushing wave on its golden floor
To sing their lullaby.

Down on the shore, on the stormy shore!
Beset by a growling sea,
Whose mad waves leap on the rocky steep
Like wolves up a traveller's tree;
Where the foam flies wide, and an angry blast
Blows the curlew off, with a screech;
Where the brown sea-wrack, torn up by the roots,
Is flung out of fishes' reach;
And the tall ship rolls on the hidden shoals,
And scatters her planks on the beach;
Where slate and straw through the village spin,
And a cottage fronts the fiercest din
With a sailor's wife sitting sad within,
Hearkening the wind and the water's roar,
Till at last her tears begin.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

11-09-2015, 09:12 AM

Bread and Music
-----------------------------------------by Conrad Aiken

Music I heard with you was more than music,
And bread I broke with you was more than bread;
Now that I am without you, all is desolate;
All that was once so beautiful is dead.

Your hands once touched this table and this silver,
And I have seen your fingers hold this glass.
These things do not remember you, belovèd,
And yet your touch upon them will not pass.

For it was in my heart you moved among them,
And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes;
And in my heart they will remember always,—
They knew you once, O beautiful and wise.

In his best poems Conrad Aiken rivals W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane as masters of modern English poetic meter. Aiken's "Bread and Music" is one of my favorite poems, regardless of era.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

11-10-2015, 08:50 AM

Depths
------------------------------------------by Richard Moore

Once more home is a strange place: by the ocean a
big house now, and the small houses are memories,
once live images, vacant
thoughts here, sinking and vanishing.

Rough sea now on the shore thundering brokenly
draws back stones with a roar out into quiet and
far depths, darkly to lie there
years, years—there not a sound from them.

New waves out of the night's mist and obscurity
lunge up high on the beach, spending their energy,
each wave angrily dying,
all shapes endlessly altering,

yet out there in the depths nothing is modified.
Earthquakes won't even move—no, nor the hurricane—
one stone there, nor a glance of
sun's light stir its identity.

This is a wonderfully haunting poem by the poet Richard Moore, who lived in a dilapidated mansion close by the sea, until his death.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

11-11-2015, 09:10 AM

Dulce Et Decorum Est
---------------------------------------------by Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" appears in Horace's Odes. The "old lie" means: "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country." Wilfred Owen stands at the vanguard of the great anti-war poets and singer-songwriters. "Dulce Et Decorum Est" may be the most important poem in the English language: one that eventually leads to the abolition of war. But in any case, Wilfred Owen was undoubtedly a major poet, and one of the first great truly modern English poets. He died just before the armistice that ended World War I. There's no telling what he might have accomplished if he had lived, but he left behind a good number of immortal poems: all of them penned within the short period of time between his enlistment and death.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

11-13-2015, 09:40 AM

The Unreturning
by Wilfred Owen

Suddenly night crushed out the day and hurled
Her remnants over cloud-peaks, thunder-walled.
Then fell a stillness such as harks appalled
When far-gone dead return upon the world.

There watched I for the Dead; but no ghost woke.
Each one whom Life exiled I named and called.
But they were all too far, or dumbed, or thralled,
And never one fared back to me or spoke.

Then peered the indefinite unshapen dawn
With vacant gloaming, sad as half-lit minds,
The weak-limned hour when sick men's sighs are drained.
And while I wondered on their being withdrawn,
Gagged by the smothering Wing which none unbinds,
I dreaded even a heaven with doors so chained.

This is another powerful poem by one of the very best war poets.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

11-14-2015, 09:51 AM

After the Rain
----------------------------------by Jared Carter

After the rain, it’s time to walk the field
again, near where the river bends. Each year
I come to look for what this place will yield—
lost things still rising here.

The farmer’s plow turns over, without fail,
a crop of arrowheads, but where or why
they fall is hard to say. They seem, like hail,
dropped from an empty sky,

yet for an hour or two, after the rain
has washed away the dusty afterbirth
of their return, a few will show up plain
on the reopened earth.

Still, even these are hard to see—
at first they look like any other stone.
The trick to finding them is not to be
too sure about what’s known;

conviction’s liable to say straight off
this one’s a leaf, or that one’s merely clay,
and miss the point: after the rain, soft
furrows show one way

across the field, but what is hidden here
requires a different view—the glance of one
not looking straight ahead, who in the clear
light of the morning sun

simply keeps wandering across the rows,
letting his own perspective change.
After the rain, perhaps, something will show,
glittering and strange.

I admire this poem by the contemporary poet Jared Carter, especially its closing lines. This poem capitalizes on the poet's capacity for wonder.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

11-15-2015, 10:55 AM

Rondel
-----------------------------------by Kevin N. Roberts

Our time has passed on swift and careless feet,
With sighs and smiles and songs both sad and sweet.
Our perfect hours have grown and gone so fast,
And these are things we never can repeat.
Though we might plead and pray that it would last,
Our time has passed.

Like shreds of mist entangled in a tree,
Like surf and sea foam on a foaming sea,
Like all good things we know can never last,
Too soon we'll see the end of you and me.
Despite the days and realms that we amassed,
Our time has passed.

Kevin Nicholas Roberts [1969-2008] was a poet, fiction writer and professor of English Literature. He died on December 10, 2008. Kevin had lived and studied all over the United States and had also spent three years in the English countryside of Suffolk writing Romantic poetry and studying the Romantic Masters beside the North Sea. His poetry has been compared to that of Swinburne, one of his major influences. Kevin was born on the 4th of April in the United States, which, accounting for the hour of his birth and the time zone difference, just happened to be Swinburne's birthdate, April the 5th, in England. And he told me once that he believed he was the reincarnation of Swinburne.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

11-16-2015, 10:46 AM

N. W.
-------------------------------by Robert Mezey

On a certain street there is a certain door,
Unyielding, around which rockroses rise,
Charged with the scent of a lost paradise,
Which in the evening sunlight opens no more,
Or not to me. Once, in a better light,
Dearly awaited arms would wait for me
And in the impatient fading of the day
The joy and peace of the embracing night.
No more of that. Now, a day breaks and dies,
Releasing empty hours and impure
Fantasies, and the abuse of literature,
The lawless images and artful lies,
And pointless tears, and the envy of other men.
And then the longing for oblivion.
after Borges
---------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------

This is a wonderful poem about loss, by a contemporary poet.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

11-17-2015, 08:02 PM

Word Made Flesh
------------------------------------------------by Ann Drysdale

On the broad steps of the Basilica
The feckless hopefully hold out their hands,
Often with some success; the privileged
Lighten their consciences by a few pence
On their way to receive the sacrament.

On the seventeenth step two beggars sit
Paying no regard to the worshippers
Who file past on their way to salvation.
They do not ask for alms. They are engrossed,
Skillfully masturbating one another.

Most who have noticed this pretend they haven’t;
Some of the other beggars wish they wouldn’t.
Poor relief is incumbent on the rich
And by taking things into their own hands
They spoil the scene for everybody else.

Our Lord said, “silver and gold have I none
But such as I have give I thee”. The words
Are here made flesh; with beatific sigh
One gives the other benison, slipping
All that he has into the waiting hand
Of somebody who shares his human need.

The newly shriven filter down the steps
Averting their eyes from the seventeenth,
Where the first beggar, in a state of grace,
Works selflessly towards the second coming.

I absolutely love Ann Drysdale's poem. If only there was a God whose grace extended to beggars masturbating each other on the steps of a Basilica! But then what use would there be for the hellfire-and-brimstone condemners of humankind?

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

11-18-2015, 09:30 AM

from Word from the Hills
a sonnet sequence in four movements
--------------------------------------------------------------by Richard Moore

11
You were so solid, father, cold and raw
as these north winters, where your angry will
first hardened, as the earth when the long chill
deepens—as is this country's cruel law—
yet under trackless snow, without a flaw
covering meadow, road, and stubbled hill,
the springs and muffled streams were running still,
dark until spring came, and the awful thaw.
In your decay a gentleness appears
I hadn't guessed—when, gray as rotting snow,
propped in your chair, your face will run with tears,
trying to speak, and your hand, stiff and slow,
will touch my child—who, sensing the cold years
in your eyes, cries until you let her go.

This poem about the poet's father and daughter proves that real life can be darker and more frightening than any horror story.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

11-19-2015, 10:20 AM

Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae
by Ernest Dowson

"I am not as I was under the reign of the good Cynara"—Horace

Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,
Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;
Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
When I awoke and found the dawn was gray:
I have been faithful to you, Cynara! in my fashion.

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long;
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

Ernest Dowson wrote a small handful of poems that are among the strongest in the English language. I consider him one of the very best "unknown" or "under-known" major poets, along with Louise Bogan. The poem above should make him forever immortal, unless readers lose their ears and their senses.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

11-22-2015, 12:07 PM

MEN IMPROVE WITH THE YEARS
----------------------------------------------------------by W. B. Yeats

I AM worn out with dreams;
A weather-worn, marble triton
Among the streams;
And all day long I look
Upon this lady's beauty
As though I had found in a book
A pictured beauty,
pleased to have filled the eyes
Or the discerning ears,
Delighted to be but wise,
For men improve with the years;
And yet, and yet,
Is this my dream, or the truth?
O would that we had met
When I had my burning youth!
But I grow old among dreams,
A weather-worn, marble triton
Among the streams.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

11-23-2015, 05:52 PM

By Night when Others Soundly Slept
-------------------------------------------------------BY ANNE BRADSTREET
1
By night when others soundly slept
And hath at once both ease and Rest,
My waking eyes were open kept
And so to lie I found it best.

2
I sought him whom my Soul did Love,
With tears I sought him earnestly.
He bow’d his ear down from Above.
In vain I did not seek or cry.

3
My hungry Soul he fill’d with Good;
He in his Bottle put my tears,
My smarting wounds washt in his blood,
And banisht thence my Doubts and fears.

4
What to my Saviour shall I give
Who freely hath done this for me?
I’ll serve him here whilst I shall live
And Love him to Eternity.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

11-24-2015, 07:26 PM

Dylan Thomas
75 years ago •

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieve it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

11-25-2015, 10:35 AM

Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat inchohare longam
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------by Ernest Dowson

"The brevity of life forbids us to entertain hopes of long duration" —Horace

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

Dowson died at age 32 and is only known for a few poems today, but his best poems are highly memorable. He's one of my favorite lesser-known poets.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

11-27-2015, 01:20 AM

A Last Word
-------------------------------------by Ernest Dowson

Let us go hence: the night is now at hand;
The day is overworn, the birds all flown;
And we have reaped the crops the gods have sown;
Despair and death; deep darkness o'er the land,
Broods like an owl; we cannot understand
Laughter or tears, for we have only known
Surpassing vanity: vain things alone
Have driven our perverse and aimless band.
Let us go hence, somewhither strange and cold,
To Hollow Lands where just men and unjust
Find end of labour, where's rest for the old,
Freedom to all from love and fear and lust.
Twine our torn hands! O pray the earth enfold
Our life-sick hearts and turn them into dust.

Dowson's influence on the language and other writers can be seen in phrases like "gone with the wind" and "the days of wine and roses." His work certainly influenced T. S. Eliot, who said that certain lines of Dowson's "have always run in my head."

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

11-28-2015, 10:56 AM

BELLS BEYOND THE FOREST

WILD-EYED woodlands, here I rest me, underneath the gaunt and ghastly trees;
Underneath fantastic-fronted caverns crammed with many a muffled breeze.

Far away from dusky towns and cities twinkling with the feet of men;
Listening to a sound of mellow music fleeting down the gusty glen;
Sitting by a rapid torrent, with the broken sunset in my face;
By a rapid, roaring torrent, tumbling through a dark and lonely place!
And I hear the bells beyond the forest, and the voice of distant streams;
And a flood of swelling singing, wafting round a world of ruined dreams.

Like to one who watches daylight dying from a lofty mountain spire,
When the autumn splendour scatters like a gust of faintly-gleaming fire;
So the silent spirit looketh through a mist of faded smiles and tears,
While across it stealeth all the sad and sweet divinity of years —
All the scenes of shine and shadow; light and darkness sleeping side by side
When my heart was wedded to existence, as a bridegroom to his bride:
While I travelled gaily onward with the vapours crowding in my wake,
Deeming that the Present hid the glory where the promised Morn would break.

Like to one who, by the waters standing, marks the reeling ocean wave
Moaning, hide his head all torn and shivered underneath his lonely cave,
So the soul within me glances at the tides of Purpose where they creep,
Dashed to fragments by the yawning ridges circling Life's tempestuous Deep!
Oh! the tattered leaves are dropping, dropping round me like a fall of rain;
While the dust of many a broken aspiration sweeps my troubled brain;

With the yearnings after Beauty, and the longings to be good and great;
And the thoughts of catching Fortune, flying on the tardy wings of Fate.

Bells, beyond the forest chiming, where is all the inspiration now
That was wont to flush my forehead, and to chase the pallor from my brow?
Did I not, amongst these thickets, weave my thoughts and passions into rhyme,
Trusting that the words were golden, hoping for the praise of after-time?
Where have all those fancies fled to? Can the fond delusion linger still,
When the Evening withers o'er me, and the night is creeping up the hill?
If the years of strength have left me, and my life begins to fail and fade,
Who will learn my simple ballads; who will stay to sing the songs I've made?

Bells, beyond the forest ringing, lo, I hasten to the world again;
For the sun has smote the empty windows, and the day is on the wane!
Hear I not a dreamy echo, soughing through the rafters of the tree;
Like a sound of stormy rivers, or the ravings of a restless sea?
Should I loiter here to listen, while this fitful wind is on the wing?
No, the heart of Time is sobbing, and my spirit is a withered thing!
Let the rapid torrents tumble, let the woodlands whistle in the blast;
Mighty minstrels sing behind me, but the promise of my youth is past.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

11-29-2015, 01:24 PM

ACHAN
(From “Jephthah”.)
------------------------------------by Henry Kendall

HATH he not followed a star through the darkness,
Ye people who sit at the table of Jephthah?
Oh! turn with the face to a light in the mountains,
Behold it is further from Achan than ever!

“I know how it is with my brothers in Mizpeh,”
Said Achan, the swift-footed runner of Zorah,
“They look at the wood they have hewn for the altar;
And think of a shadow in sackcloth and ashes.

“I know how it is with the daughter of Jephthah,
(O Ada, my love, and the fairest of women!)
She wails in the time when her heart is so zealous
For God who hath stricken the children of Ammon.

“I said I would bring her the odours of Edom,
And armfuls of spices to set at the banquet!
Behold I have fronted the chieftain her father;
And strong men have wept for the leader of thousands!

“My love is a rose of the roses of Sharon,
All lonely and bright as the Moon in the myrtles!
Her lips, like to honeycombs, fill with the sweetness
That Achan the thirsty is hindered from drinking.

“Her women have wept for the love that is wasted
Like wine, which is spilt when the people are wanting,
And hot winds have dried all the cisterns of Elim!
For love that is wasted her women were wailing!

“The timbrels fall silent! And dost thou not hear it,
A voice, like the sound of a lute when we loiter,
And sit by the pools in the valleys of Arnon,
And suck the cool grapes that are growing in clusters?

“She glides, like a myrrh-scented wind, through the willows,
O Ada! behold it is Achan that speaketh:
I know thou art near me, but never can see thee,
Because of the horrible drouth in mine eyelids.”

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

11-30-2015, 09:38 PM

Equation
----------by Duncan Campbell Scott

WHEN we grow old, and time looks like a thief,
That was the spendthrift of our dearest days;
When color mingles merged in silvered grays;
When joys are ever memoried to be brief;
When beauty fades; when hope is under feof;
When all our moods are mantled in a haze;
When sprightly pleasure for a penance plays
The part of prudence in the weeds of grief;
It will suffice if unto memory
Visit the voices and the eager grace
Of days that promised never to forget;
If they will flow like rumors of the sea,
Heard under honied lindens in the place,
Where start the maruerite and mignonette.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

12-01-2015, 08:20 AM

Minutiae
-----------------by Leslie Mellichamp

The sunrise summons us like men,
Its tumult fills the eastern sky,
Its promise gives the strength of ten,
But we can't answer to the cry.

For there are things to carry out,
And out, to carry in once more,
And things that we must push about,
Or pull, or tend, or count, or score.

And then there are the cleaning days,
And time to scratch and shave and scent:
In marvelous and godlike ways
The crimson tide of life is spent.

In my regular rambling searches for new poetry to read I found this true gem that strikes a deep chord within my soul.-Tyr

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

12-02-2015, 11:06 AM

IN THE DEPTHS OF THE FOREST
-----------------------------by Henry Kendall

IN the depths of a Forest secluded and wild,
The night voices whisper in passionate numbers;
And I'm leaning again, as I did when a child,
O'er the grave where my father so quietly slumbers.

The years have rolled by with a thundering sound
But I knew, O ye woodlands, affection would know it,
And the spot which I stand on is sanctified ground
By the love that I bear to him sleeping below it.

Oh! well may the winds with a saddening moan
Go fitfully over the branches so dreary;
And well may I kneel by the time-shattered stone,
And rejoice that a rest has been found for the weary.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

12-03-2015, 08:37 AM

The Touchstone
------------------------------------------- by William Allingham

A man there came, whence none could tell,
Bearing a Touchstone in his hand;
And tested all things in the land
By its unerring spell.

Quick birth of transmutation smote
The fair to foul, the foul to fair;
Purple nor ermine did he spare,
Nor scorn the dusty coat.

Of heirloom jewels, prized so much,
Were many changed to chips and clods,
And even statues of the Gods
Crumbled beneath its touch.

Then angrily the people cried,
"The loss outweighs the profit far;
Our goods suffice us as they are
We will not have then tried."

And since they could not so prevail
To check this unrelenting guest,
They seized him, saying - "Let him test
How real it is, our jail!"

But, though they slew him with the sword,
And in a fire his Touchstone burn'd,
Its doings could not be o'erturned,
Its undoings restored.

And when to stop all future harm,
They strew'd its ashes on the breeze;
They little guess'd each grain of these
Convey'd the perfect charm.

North, south, in rings and amulets,
Throughout the crowded world 'tis borne;
Which, as a fashion long outworn,
In ancient mind forgets.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

12-04-2015, 10:31 PM

The Life Beyond
------------------------------by Rupert Brooke
He wakes, who never thought to wake again,
Who held the end was Death. He opens eyes
Slowly, to one long livid oozing plain
Closed down by the strange eyeless heavens. He lies;
And waits; and once in timeless sick surmise
Through the dead air heaves up an unknown hand,
Like a dry branch. No life is in that land,
Himself not lives, but is a thing that cries;
An unmeaning point upon the mud; a speck
Of moveless horror; an Immortal One
Cleansed of the world, sentient and dead; a fly
Fast-stuck in grey sweat on a corpse's neck.

I thought when love for you died, I should die.
It's dead. Alone, most strangely, I live on.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

12-05-2015, 11:24 AM

Songs Of Experience: Introduction
-----------------------------------------------------by William Blake

Hear the voice of the Bard!
Who Present, Past, & Future sees
Whose ears have heard
The Holy Word,
That walk'd among the ancient trees.

Calling the lapsed Soul
And weeping in the evening dew;
That might controll.
The starry pole;
And fallen fallen light renew!

O Earth O Earth return!
Arise from out the dewy grass;
Night is worn,
And the morn
Rises from the slumbrous mass.

Turn away no more:
Why wilt thou turn away
The starry floor
The watery shore
Is given thee till the break of day.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

12-06-2015, 12:23 PM

image: http://www.poetry-archive.com/w_pic.gif

THE SEA

---------------------by: John Stuart Blackie (1809-1895)

What dost thou say,
Thou old grey sea,
Thou broad briny water
To me?
With thy ripple and thy plash,
And thy waves as they lash
The old grey rocks on the shore?
With thy tempests as they roar,
And thy crested billows hoar,
And thy tide evermore,
Fresh and free;
With thy floods as they come,
And thy voice never dumb,
What thought art thou speaking to me?
What thing should I say
On this bright summer day,
Thou strange human dreamer, to thee?
One wonder the same
All things do proclaim
In the sky, and the land, and the sea;
'Tis the unsleeping force
Of a GOD in his course,
Whose life is the law of the whole,
As he breathes out his power
In the pulse of the hour,
And the march of the years as they roll;
You may measure his ways
In the weeks and the days,
And the stars as they wheel round the pole,
But no finger is thine
To touch the divine
All-plastic, all-permeant soul,
As it shapes and it moulds,
And its virtue unfolds,
In the garden of things as they grow,
And flings forth the tide
Of its strength far and wide,
In wonders above and below.

Thou huge-heaving sea
That art speaking to me
Of the power and the pride of a God,
I would travel like thee
With force fresh and free
Through the breadth of my human abode,
Never languid and low,
But with bountiful flow,
Of thoughts that are kindred to God;
Ever surging and streaming,
Ever beaming and gleaming,
Like the lights as they shift on the glass,
Ever swelling and heaving,
And largely receiving
The beauty of things as they pass.

Thou broad-billowed sea
Never sundered from thee
May I wander the welkin below;
May the plash and the roar
Of thy waves on the shore
Beat the march to my feet as they go;
Ever strong, ever free,
When the breath of the sea
Like the fan of an angel I know;
Every rising with power,
To the call of the hour,
Like the swell of thy tides as they flow.
"The Sea" is reprinted from The Selected Poems of John Stuart Blackie. Ed. Archibald Stodart Walker. London: John Macqueen, 1896.

Read more at http://www.poetry-archive.com/b/the_sea.html#eT7IZJmVdO5UA1wb.99

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

12-07-2015, 08:48 AM

Most Sweet It Is With Unuplifted Eyes
-------------------------------------------William Wordsworth, 1770 - 1850

Most sweet it is with unuplifted eyes
To pace the ground, if path be there or none,
While a fair region round the traveller lies
Which he forbears again to look upon;
Pleased rather with some soft ideal scene,
The work of Fancy, or some happy tone
Of meditation, slipping in between
The beauty coming and the beauty gone.
If Thought and Love desert us from that day,
Let us break off all commerce with the Muse:
With Thought and Love companions of our way,
Whate’er the senses take or may refuse,
The Mind’s internal heaven shall shed her dews
Of inspiration on the humblest lay.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

12-08-2015, 08:35 AM

I Am a Little World Made Cunningly (Holy Sonnet V)
-----------------------------------------------------------John Donne, 1572 - 1631

I am a little world made cunningly
Of elements, and an angelic spright,
But black sin hath betrayed to endless night
My worlds both parts, and oh! both parts must die.
You, which beyond that heaven which was most high
Have found new spheres and of new lands can write,
Pour new seas in mine eyes, that so I might
Drown my world with my weeping earnestly,
Or wash it, if it must be drowned no more:
But oh! it must be burnt; alas the fire
Of lust and envy burnt it heretofore,
And made it fouler; Let their flames retire,
And burn me, O Lord, with a fiery zeal
Of thee and thy house, which doth in eating heal.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

12-09-2015, 09:57 AM

A Lady Who Thinks She Is Thirty
--------------------------------------------------- by Ogden Nash
Unwillingly Miranda wakes,
Feels the sun with terror,
One unwilling step she takes,
Shuddering to the mirror.

Miranda in Miranda's sight
Is old and gray and dirty;
Twenty-nine she was last night;
This morning she is thirty.

Shining like the morning star,
Like the twilight shining,
Haunted by a calendar,
Miranda is a-pining.

Silly girl, silver girl,
Draw the mirror toward you;
Time who makes the years to whirl
Adorned as he adored you.

Time is timelessness for you;
Calendars for the human;
What's a year, or thirty, to
Loveliness made woman?

Oh, Night will not see thirty again,
Yet soft her wing, Miranda;
Pick up your glass and tell me, then--
How old is Spring, Miranda?

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

12-10-2015, 08:52 AM

Symbolism
----------------------------------by George William Russell

NOW when the spirit in us wakes and broods,
Filled with home yearnings, drowsily it flings
From its deep heart high dreams and mystic moods,
Mixed with the memory of the loved earth things:
Clothing the vast with a familiar face;
Reaching its right hand forth to greet the starry race.

Wondrously near and clear the great warm fires
Stare from the blue; so shows the cottage light
To the field labourer whose heart desires
The old folk by the nook, the welcome bright
From the house-wife long parted from at dawn—
So the star villages in God’s great depths withdrawn.

Nearer to Thee, not by delusion led,
Though there no house fires burn nor bright eyes gaze:
We rise, but by the symbol charioted,
Through loved things rising up to Love’s own ways:
By these the soul unto the vast has wings
And sets the seal celestial on all mortal things.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

12-12-2015, 10:10 AM

The Glove and The Lions
-------------------------------------------- by James Henry Leigh Hunt
King Francis was a hearty king, and loved a royal sport,
And one day as his lions fought, sat looking on the court;
The nobles filled the benches, and the ladies in their pride,
And 'mongst them sat the Count de Lorge, with one for whom he sighed:
And truly 'twas a gallant thing to see that crowning show,
Valour and love, and a king above, and the royal beasts below.

Ramped and roared the lions, with horrid laughing jaws;
They bit, they glared, gave blows like beams, a wind went with their paws;
With wallowing might and stifled roar they rolled on one another;
Till all the pit with sand and mane was in a thunderous smother;
The bloody foam above the bars came whisking through the air;
Said Francis then, "Faith, gentlemen, we're better here than there."

De Lorge's love o'erheard the King, a beauteous lively dame
With smiling lips and sharp bright eyes, which always seemed the same;
She thought, the Count my lover is brave as brave can be;
He surely would do wondrous things to show his love of me;
King, ladies, lovers, all look on; the occasion is divine;
I'll drop my glove, to prove his love; great glory will be mine.

She dropped her glove, to prove his love, then looked at him and smiled;
He bowed, and in a moment leaped among the lions wild:
The leap was quick, return was quick, he has regained his place,
Then threw the glove, but not with love, right in the lady's face.
"By God!" said Francis, "rightly done!" and he rose from where he sat:
"No love," quoth he, "but vanity, sets love a task like that."
--------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------

The leap was quick, return was quick, he has regained his place,
Then threw the glove, but not with love, right in the lady's face.
"By God!" said Francis, "rightly done!" and he rose from where he sat:
"No love," quoth he, "but vanity, sets love a task like that."

^^^^^ Wisdom in poetry my friends..--Tyr

Myself, I say -- he should have escorted her in with him to retrieve that glove.. ;)

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

12-13-2015, 10:45 AM

William Morris was born in Walthamstow, Essex, on 24 March 1834. The son of a wealthy businessman, he enjoyed a comfortable childhood before going to Marlborough and Exeter College, Oxford.

He originally intended to take holy orders, but his reading of the social criticism of Carlyle, Kingsley and Ruskin led him to reconsider the Church and devote his life to art.

After leaving Oxford, Morris was briefly articled to G. E. Street, the Gothic Revival architect, but he soon left, having determined to become a painter. His admiration for the Pre-Raphaelites led him to be introduced to Dante Gabriel Rossetti whose influence can be seen on Morris's only surviving painting La Belle Iseult.

Arts and Crafts
In the 1860s Morris decided that his creative future lay in the field of the decorative arts. His career as a designer began when he decorated the Red House, Bexleyheath, which had been built for him by Philip Webb.

The success of this venture led to the formation of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. in 1861. The 'Firm' (later renamed Morris & Co) was particularly well-known for its stained glass, examples of which can be seen in churches throughout Britain. Morris produced some 150 designs which are often characterised by their delightful foliage patterns.

Among his many other works were Icelandic and classical translations, Sigurd the Volsung, The Pilgrims of Hope, and a series of prose romances which included A Dream of John Ball, News from Nowhere, and The Well at the World's End.

Politics
Morris entered national politics in 1876 as treasurer of the Eastern Question Association. This was a post he was to occupy in two further radical organisations: the National Liberal League and the Radical Union.

He soon became disillusioned with the Liberals and in 1883 joined the socialist Democratic Federation. After disagreements with the Federation's leader, H M. Hyndman, he formed the Socialist League, and later the Hammersmith Socialist Society.

During the 1880s he was probably the most active propagandist for the socialist cause, giving hundreds of lectures and speeches throughout the country.

The Kelmscott Press
In 1890 Morris founded the Kelmscott Press in premises near his last home at Kelmscott House in Hammersmith (now the headquarters of the William Morris Society). Morris designed three typefaces for the Press: Golden, Chaucer, and Troy. These were inspired respectively by fifteenth-century Italian and German typography. In all, sixty-six volumes were printed by the Kelmscott Press, the most impressive of which was its magnificent edition of Chaucer which was published in 1896. Morris died at Kelmscott House on 3 October 1896.

Biography by:
http://www.morrissociety.org/

Sad-Eyed and Soft and Grey
--------------------------------------------------- by William Morris
Sad-Eyed and soft and grey thou art, o morn!
Across the long grass of the marshy plain
Thy west wind whispers of the coming rain,
Thy lark forgets that May is grown forlorn
Above the lush blades of the springing corn,
Thy thrush within the high elms strives in vain
To store up tales of spring for summer's pain -
Vain day, why wert thou from the dark night born?

O many-voiced strange morn, why must thou break
With vain desire the softness of my dream
Where she and I alone on earth did seem?
How hadst thou heart from me that land to take
Wherein she wandered softly for my sake
And I and she no harm of love might deem?

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

12-14-2015, 10:03 AM

The Lockless Door
------------------------------------------------ by Robert Frost

It went many years,
But at last came a knock,
And I thought of the door
With no lock to lock.

I blew out the light,
I tip-toed the floor,
And raised both hands
In prayer to the door.

But the knock came again.
My window was wide;
I climbed on the sill
And descended outside.

Back over the sill
I bade a 'Come in'
To whatever the knock
At the door may have been.

So at a knock
I emptied my cage
To hide in the world
And alter with age.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------
As a much younger man I loved this poem by Frost, now 40+ years later I have heard the knock
and understand the last stanza much , much better!!

"So at a knock
I emptied my cage
To hide in the world
And alter with age."

Trust me on this , its a very deep and most sobering realization..... --Tyr

Balu

12-14-2015, 11:06 PM

--------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------
As a much younger man I loved this poem by Frost, now 40+ years later I have heard the knock
and understand the last stanza much , much better!!

"So at a knock
I emptied my cage
To hide in the world
And alter with age."

Trust me on this , its a very deep and most sobering realization..... --Tyr

Right you are, Robert! Excellent words to express the feelings. http://www.kolobok.us/smiles/standart/good.gif

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

12-16-2015, 10:45 AM

A Forest Hymn
---------------------------------------------------by William Cullen Bryant
The groves were God's first temples. Ere man learned
To hew the shaft, and lay the architrave,
And spread the roof above them,---ere he framed
The lofty vault, to gather and roll back
The sound of anthems; in the darkling wood,
Amidst the cool and silence, he knelt down,
And offered to the Mightiest solemn thanks
And supplication. For his simple heart
Might not resist the sacred influences,
Which, from the stilly twilight of the place,
And from the gray old trunks that high in heaven
Mingled their mossy boughs, and from the sound
Of the invisible breath that swayed at once
All their green tops, stole over him, and bowed
His spirit with the thought of boundless power
And inaccessible majesty. Ah, why
Should we, in the world's riper years, neglect
God's ancient sanctuaries, and adore
Only among the crowd, and under roofs,
That our frail hands have raised? Let me, at least,
Here, in the shadow of this aged wood,
Offer one hymn---thrice happy, if it find
Acceptance in His ear.
Father, thy hand
Hath reared these venerable columns, thou
Didst weave this verdant roof. Thou didst look down
Upon the naked earth, and, forthwith, rose
All these fair ranks of trees. They, in thy sun,
Budded, and shook their green leaves in the breeze,
And shot towards heaven. The century-living crow,
Whose birth was in their tops, grew old and died
Among their branches, till, at last, they stood,
As now they stand, massy, and tall, and dark,
Fit shrine for humble worshipper to hold
Communion with his Maker. These dim vaults,
These winding aisles, of human pomp and pride
Report not. No fantastic carvings show
The boast of our vain race to change the form
Of thy fair works. But thou art here---thou fill'st
The solitude. Thou art in the soft winds
That run along the summit of these trees
In music; thou art in the cooler breath
That from the inmost darkness of the place
Comes, scarcely felt; the barky trunks, the ground,
The fresh moist ground, are all instinct with thee.
Here is continual worship;---Nature, here,
In the tranquility that thou dost love,
Enjoys thy presence. Noiselessly, around,
From perch to perch, the solitary bird
Passes; and yon clear spring, that, midst its herbs,
Wells softly forth and wandering steeps the roots
Of half the mighty forest, tells no tale
Of all the good it does. Thou hast not left
Thyself without a witness, in these shades,
Of thy perfections. Grandeur, strength, and grace
Are here to speak of thee. This mighty oak---
By whose immovable stem I stand and seem
Almost annihilated---not a prince,
In all that proud old world beyond the deep,
E'er wore his crown as lofty as he
Wears the green coronal of leaves with which
Thy hand has graced him. Nestled at his root
Is beauty, such as blooms not in the glare
Of the broad sun. That delicate forest flower
With scented breath, and look so like a smile,
Seems, as it issues from the shapeless mould,
An emanation of the indwelling Life,
A visible token of the upholding Love,
That are the soul of this wide universe.

My heart is awed within me when I think
Of the great miracle that still goes on,
In silence, round me---the perpetual work
Of thy creation, finished, yet renewed
Forever. Written on thy works I read
The lesson of thy own eternity.
Lo! all grow old and die---but see again,
How on the faltering footsteps of decay
Youth presses----ever gay and beautiful youth
In all its beautiful forms. These lofty trees
Wave not less proudly that their ancestors
Moulder beneath them. Oh, there is not lost
One of earth's charms: upon her bosom yet,
After the flight of untold centuries,
The freshness of her far beginning lies
And yet shall lie. Life mocks the idle hate
Of his arch enemy Death---yea, seats himself
Upon the tyrant's throne---the sepulchre,
And of the triumphs of his ghastly foe
Makes his own nourishment. For he came forth
From thine own bosom, and shall have no end.

There have been holy men who hid themselves
Deep in the woody wilderness, and gave
Their lives to thought and prayer, till they outlived
The generation born with them, nor seemed
Less aged than the hoary trees and rocks
Around them;---and there have been holy men
Who deemed it were not well to pass life thus.
But let me often to these solitudes
Retire, and in thy presence reassure
My feeble virtue. Here its enemies,
The passions, at thy plainer footsteps shrink
And tremble and are still. Oh, God! when thou
Dost scare the world with falling thunderbolts, or fill,
With all the waters of the firmament,
The swift dark whirlwind that uproots the woods
And drowns the village; when, at thy call,
Uprises the great deep and throws himself
Upon the continent, and overwhelms
Its cities---who forgets not, at the sight
Of these tremendous tokens of thy power,
His pride, and lays his strifes and follies by?
Oh, from these sterner aspects of thy face
Spare me and mine, nor let us need the wrath
Of the mad unchained elements to teach
Who rules them. Be it ours to meditate,
In these calm shades, thy milder majesty,
And to the beautiful order of the works
Learn to conform the order of our lives.
-------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------
One of my top favorites by Bryant!!--Tyr

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

12-17-2015, 09:22 AM

Call To Account!
------------------------------------------by Vladimir Mayakovsky
The drum of war thunders and thunders.
It calls: thrust iron into the living.
From every country
slave after slave
are thrown onto bayonet steel.
For the sake of what?
The earth shivers
hungry
and stripped.
Mankind is vapourised in a blood bath
only so
someone
somewhere
can get hold of Albania.
Human gangs bound in malice,
blow after blow strikes the world
only for
someone’s vessels
to pass without charge
through the Bosporus.
Soon
the world
won’t have a rib intact.
And its soul will be pulled out.
And trampled down
only for someone,
to lay
their hands on
Mesopotamia.
Why does
a boot
crush the Earth — fissured and rough?
What is above the battles’ sky -
Freedom?
God?
Money!
When will you stand to your full height,
you,
giving them your life?
When will you hurl a question to their faces:
Why are we fighting?

Translated: by Lika Galkina with Jasper Goss, 2005

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

12-18-2015, 10:53 AM

Ode On The Pleasure Arising From Vicissitude
------------------------------------------------------------- by Thomas Gray
Now the golden Morn aloft
Waves her dew-bespangled wing,
With vermeil cheek and whisper soft
She wooes the tardy Spring:
Till April starts, and calls around
The sleeping fragrance from the ground,
And lightly o'er the living scene
Scatters his freshest, tenderest green.

New-born flocks, in rustic dance,
Frisking ply their feeble feet;
Forgetful of their wintry trance
The birds his presence greet:
But chief, the skylark warbles high
His trembling thrilling ecstasy;
And, lessening from the dazzled sight,
Melts into air and liquid light.

Yesterday the sullen year
Saw the snowy whirlwind fly;
Mute was the music of the air,
The herd stood drooping by:
Their raptures now that wildly flow
No yesterday nor morrow know;
'Tis Man alone that joy descries
With forward and reverted eyes.

Smiles on past Misfortune's brow
Soft Reflection's hand can trace,
And o'er the cheek of Sorrow throw
A melancholy grace;
While Hope prolongs our happier hour,
Or deepest shades, that dimly lour
And blacken round our weary way,
Gilds with a gleam of distant day.

Still, where rosy Pleasure leads
See a kindred Grief pursue;
Behind the steps that Misery treads
Approaching Comfort view:
The hues of bliss more brightly glow
Chastised by sabler tints of woe,
And blended form, with artful strife,
The strength and harmony of life.

See the wretch that long has tost
On the thorny bed of pain,
At length repair his vigour lost,
And breathe and walk again:
The meanest floweret of the vale,
The simplest note that swells the gale,
The common sun, the air, the skies,
To him are opening Paradise.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

12-19-2015, 10:07 AM

A Farewell
-----------------------------------------------------by Coventry Patmore

With all my will, but much against my heart,
We two now part.
My Very Dear,
Our solace is, the sad road lies so clear.
It needs no art,
With faint, averted feet
And many a tear,
In our opposèd paths to persevere.
Go thou to East, I West.
We will not say
There 's any hope, it is so far away.
But, O, my Best,
When the one darling of our widowhead,
The nursling Grief,
Is dead,
And no dews blur our eyes
To see the peach-bloom come in evening skies,
Perchance we may,
Where now this night is day,
And even through faith of still averted feet,
Making full circle of our banishment,
Amazèd meet;
The bitter journey to the bourne so sweet
Seasoning the termless feast of our content
With tears of recognition never dry.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

12-20-2015, 10:13 AM

Beloved, Let Us Once More Praise The Rain
------------------------------------------------------- by Conrad Aiken

Beloved, let us once more praise the rain.
Let us discover some new alphabet,
For this, the often praised; and be ourselves,
The rain, the chickweed, and the burdock leaf,
The green-white privet flower, the spotted stone,
And all that welcomes the rain; the sparrow too,—
Who watches with a hard eye from seclusion,
Beneath the elm-tree bough, till rain is done.
There is an oriole who, upside down,
Hangs at his nest, and flicks an orange wing,—
Under a tree as dead and still as lead;
There is a single leaf, in all this heaven
Of leaves, which rain has loosened from its twig:
The stem breaks, and it falls, but it is caught
Upon a sister leaf, and thus she hangs;
There is an acorn cup, beside a mushroom
Which catches three drops from the stooping cloud.
The timid bee goes back to the hive; the fly
Under the broad leaf of the hollyhock
Perpends stupid with cold; the raindark snail
Surveys the wet world from a watery stone...
And still the syllables of water whisper:
The wheel of cloud whirs slowly: while we wait
In the dark room; and in your heart I find
One silver raindrop,—on a hawthorn leaf,—
Orion in a cobweb, and the World.
-----------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------
One of my favorite poems by Conrad Aiken.--Tyr

------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174244

Miniver Cheevy
BY EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON
Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons.

Miniver loved the days of old
When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
Would set him dancing.

Miniver sighed for what was not,
And dreamed, and rested from his labors;
He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
And Priam’s neighbors.

Miniver mourned the ripe renown
That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
And Art, a vagrant.

Miniver loved the Medici,
Albeit he had never seen one;
He would have sinned incessantly
Could he have been one.

Miniver cursed the commonplace
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediæval grace
Of iron clothing.

Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
But sore annoyed was he without it;
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
And thought about it.

Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

12-22-2015, 01:53 PM

Femina Contra Mundum
-----------------------------------------------by G. K. Chesterton

The sun was black with judgment, and the moon
Blood: but between
I saw a man stand, saying: 'To me at least
The grass is green.

'There was no star that I forgot to fear
With love and wonder.
The birds have loved me'; but no answer came --
Only the thunder.

Once more the man stood, saying: 'A cottage door,
Where through I gazed
That instant as I turned -- yea, I am vile;
Yet my eyes blazed.

'For I had weighed the mountains in a balance,
And the skies in a scale,
I come to sell the stars -- old lamps for new --
Old stars for sale.'

Then a calm voice fell all the thunder through,
A tone less rough:
'Thou hast begun to love one of my works
Almost enough.'
----------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------
My favorite poem by Chesterton!!!!

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

12-23-2015, 10:18 AM

The Raven Days
--------------------------------by Sidney Lanier

Our hearths are gone out and our hearts are broken,
And but the ghosts of homes to us remain,
And ghastly eyes and hollow sighs give token
From friend to friend of an unspoken pain.

O Raven days, dark Raven days of sorrow,
Bring to us in your whetted ivory beaks
Some sign out of the far land of To-morrow,
Some strip of sea-green dawn, some orange streaks.

Ye float in dusky files, forever croaking.
Ye chill our manhood with your dreary shade.
Dumb in the dark, not even God invoking,
We lie in chains, too weak to be afraid.

O Raven days, dark Raven days of sorrow,
Will ever any warm light come again?
Will ever the lit mountains of To-morrow
Begin to gleam athwart the mournful plain?

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

12-24-2015, 09:53 AM

A Nation's Strength

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, poet, and lecturer who lived from 1803-1882. He spoke and wrote about Transcendentalism, which is a belief system that puts importance on an individual rather than a whole society. He was a leader of this movement. This poem is a showcase of that belief. Emerson believed people were the ones who made a nation strong. It wasn't because of the wealth or societal structures like politics and religion. In Transcendentalism, the value is placed on a person, and following one's own instincts rather than conforming to what a society orders is encouraged. Emerson's motto was, "Trust thyself."

A Nation's Strength

-----------------------------------------------By Ralph Waldo Emerson
What makes a nation's pillars high
And its foundations strong?
What makes it mighty to defy
The foes that round it throng?

It is not gold. Its kingdoms grand
Go down in battle shock;
Its shafts are laid on sinking sand,
Not on abiding rock.

Is it the sword? Ask the red dust
Of empires passed away;
The blood has turned their stones to rust,
Their glory to decay.

And is it pride? Ah, that bright crown
Has seemed to nations sweet;
But God has struck its luster down
In ashes at his feet.

Not gold but only men can make
A people great and strong;
Men who for truth and honor's sake
Stand fast and suffer long.

Brave men who work while others sleep,
Who dare while others fly...
They build a nation's pillars deep
And lift them to the sky.
---------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------
While we celebrate this holiday,we would be well served to honor the men and women that insure
our remaining freedoms here. They always deserve more well wishes, thanks, smiles, handshakes and
appreciative attention than they get ..Tyr

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

12-26-2015, 08:09 AM

Joseph von Eichendorff
(1788–1857). Poet and novelist Joseph von Eichendorff is considered one of the great writers of the German Romantic movement. (In literature and other arts, the Romantic movement exalted feeling and the imagination above rigid forms and traditions.)

Eichendorff was born on March 10, 1788, near Ratibor, Prussia (in what is now Poland). From a family of Silesian nobility, Eichendorff studied law at Heidelberg, where he published his first verse and became acquainted with the circle of Romantics. Continuing his studies in Berlin in 1809–10, he met the leaders of the Romantic national movement. When the Prussian war of liberation broke out in 1813, Eichendorff enlisted in the military and fought against Napoleon.

The Napoleonic wars, which brought about the decline of the Eichendorff family, are the source of nostalgia in his poetry. During these war years he wrote two of his most important prose works: a long Romantic novel, Ahnung und Gegenwart (1819; Premonition and Present), which is pervaded by the hopelessness and despair of the political situation and the need for a spiritual, rather than a political, cure for moral ills; and Novellen des Marmorbilds (1819; Novellas of a Marble Statue), which contains supernatural elements and is described by Eichendorff as a fairy tale. After the war he held posts in the Prussian civil service in Danzig and Königsberg (now Gdansk, Poland, and Kaliningrad, Russia, respectively) and, after 1831, in Berlin.

The poems in Eichendorff's collection Gedichte (1837; Poems), particularly those expressing his special sensitivity to nature, gained the popularity of folk songs and inspired such composers as Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn, and Richard Strauss. In 1826 he published his most important prose work, Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing), which, with its combination of the dreamlike and the realistic, is considered a high point of Romantic fiction. In 1844 he retired from the civil service to devote himself entirely to his writing, publishing a history of German literature and several translations of Spanish authors. Eichendorff died on Nov. 26, 1857, in Neisse.

Biography from: Britannica.com

Mondnacht (Night Of The Moon)
---------------------------------------------- by Joseph Freiherr Von Eichendorff

Es war, als hätt' der Himmel
Die Erde still geküsst
Dass sie im Blütenschimmer
Von ihm nun träumen müsst

Die Luft ging durch die Felder
Die Ähren wogten sacht
Es rauschten leis die Wälder
So sternklar war die Nacht

Und meine Seele spannte
Weit ihre Flügel aus
Flog durch die stillen Lande
Als flöge sie nach Haus

It was as though the sky
had silently kissed the earth,
so that it now had to dream of sky
in shimmers of flowers.

The air went through the fields,
the corn-ears leaned heavy down
the woods swished softly—
so clear with stars was the night

And my soul stretched
its wings out wide,
flew through the silent lands
as though it were flying home.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

12-27-2015, 09:49 AM

To The Dead in the Graveyard Underneath My Window

----------------------------------------------------BY ADELAIDE CRAPSEY
(Written in A Moment of Exasperation)

How can you lie so still? All day I watch
And never a blade of all the green sod moves
To show where restlessly you toss and turn,
And fling a desperate arm or draw up knees
Stiffened and aching from their long disuse;
I watch all night and not one ghost comes forth
To take its freedom of the midnight hour.
Oh, have you no rebellion in your bones?
The very worms must scorn you where you lie,
A pallid mouldering acquiescent folk,
Meek habitants of unresented graves.
Why are you there in your straight row on row
Where I must ever see you from my bed
That in your mere dumb presence iterate
The text so weary in my ears: "Lie still
And rest; be patient and lie still and rest."
I'll not be patient! I will not lie still!
There is a brown road runs between the pines,
And further on the purple woodlands lie,
And still beyond blue mountains lift and loom;
And I would walk the road and I would be
Deep in the wooded shade and I would reach
The windy mountain tops that touch the clouds.
My eyes may follow but my feet are held.
Recumbent as you others must I too
Submit? Be mimic of your movelessness
With pillow and counterpane for stone and sod?
And if the many sayings of the wise
Teach of submission I will not submit
But with a spirit all unreconciled
Flash an unquenched defiance to the stars.
Better it is to walk, to run, to dance,
Better it is to laugh and leap and sing,
To know the open skies of dawn and night,
To move untrammeled down the flaming noon,
And I will clamour it through weary days
Keeping the edge of deprivation sharp,
Nor with the pliant speaking on my lips
Of resignation, sister to defeat.
I'll not be patient. I will not lie still.

And in ironic quietude who is
The despot of our days and lord of dust
Needs but, scarce heeding, wait to drop
Grim casual comment on rebellion's end;
"Yes, yes . . Willful and petulant but now
As dead and quiet as the others are."
And this each body and ghost of you hath heard
That in your graves do therefore lie so still.

------------------------
------------------------

Adelaide Crapsey
1878–1914
Adelaide Crapsey
Adelaide Crapsey is best remembered as the inventor of the cinquain and as a poet whose compressed lyrics "are a remarkable testament of a spirit 'flashing unquenched defiance to the stars,'" as quoted in Boston Transcript. Though her mature work was published posthumously due to her untimely death at the age of thirty-six, Crapsey nevertheless spent her brief life ardently pursuing her art. Her few publications received enthusiastic acclaim. Perhaps critics were initially drawn to Crapsey because she cut a tragic figure, but in the years after her demise her popularity waned. Modern readers looking for Crapsey's work are hard-pressed to find it in any anthology printed after 1950—even those with a women's literature focus. Crapsey's poetry deals largely with the subjects of death and dying, a predilection doubtlessly influenced by her knowledge of her own terminal illness. In addition to her poetry, Crapsey also produced a small but meticulously researched study of English metrics that also drew the praise of several contemporary reviewers.

Crapsey edited only one collection of her own verse during her lifetime. Verse, as the volume was called, was published in 1915, shortly after her death. It contained sixty-three poems. Two subsequent and more complete collections were edited by a Smith colleague and published under the same title in 1922 and 1934. Each volume included a number of previously unreleased poems. Crapsey's entire poetic oeuvre encompasses fewer than one hundred poems, but she wrote them up to the end, even from her sickroom in a sanatorium at Saranac Lake, New York. Perhaps because of Crapsey's lingering illness, her work centered primarily on her confrontation with mortality. The subject of death took on more than usual significance to a poet who knew she would not live to see old—or perhaps even middle—age. Diagnosed with tuberculosis of the brain lining in 1911, Crapsey chose not to reveal her sickness to her family until its severity made it impossible to keep the secret any longer. She showed no such reticence to speak of death in her verse, however, and even a small sampling of her poems demonstrated her preoccupation with her impending demise. In a selection of fifteen of her more accomplished poems, Crapsey's vocabulary includes the words or variations of words such as: death, grave, monument, memorial, pain, bleak, ghosts, wan, cold, silent, immortal, shroud, grey, bitter, ice, alone, shutter, spirit, quiet, still, bones, and graveyard. She also makes reference to the afterlife, invoking the mythological river Styx. In her poems the season is perpetually autumn or winter, and the reader visits bleak (though also beautiful) natural scenes and elegant cemeteries.

When Verse was published in 1916, the critics responded both to the tragic tone that infused the poems and to Crapsey's exquisite grasp of metrics and form. "To her genuine poetic ability Miss Crapsey added a considerable technical knowledge of metrics. In the verse form which she invented and called the cinquain she has done some of her best work—clear cut ideas sharply focused, single impressions etched in a few significant lines," wrote a reviewer for the Independent. A critic for the Boston Transcript called the poems "marvelously chiseled gems." In fact, the technical problems, not the poetic sentiments behind the poems, most interested Crapsey herself. Crapsey thought of her researches as her "only serious work" stated Susan Sutton Smith in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, and regarded some of her verses "mere by-products" of her metrical studies.

It was the poet's first love that drove her to write the 1918 volume, A Study in English Metrics. Though Crapsey attempted to publish her theories earlier, the Study was also released posthumously. The surprisingly slim book consisted of only eighty pages, yet Crapsey managed to articulate her interesting and meticulous methods in a manner that a writer for the North American praised for its subtlety and clarity. Smith summarized Crapsey's theory as an attempt "to classify poets by comparing the percentage of one—or two—syllable words with the percentage of polysyllabic words in their poems. She hoped to develop a theory of the relation between natural accent and poetic accent in English verse." Crapsey included supporting analysis and statistical tabulation from the works of Tennyson, Swinburne, Francis Thompson, and Maurice Hewlett. Remarkably compressed for such complex and mathematical theory, a reviewer for Brooklyn Magazine also found the work successful, commending Crapsey for her efforts. A Springfield Republican critic also compared Crapsey's technical approach to the poetics of her contemporaries, saying "With new schools of poetry springing up every day, and new theories of rhyme and meter being advanced constantly, A Study in English Metrics strikes a rational note."

Another important component in Crapsey's work was her reliance on the methods of Japanese tanka and haiku. With her invention of the cinquain, Crapsey created an American form similar to these Japanese predecessors. Like Ezra Pound, she admired the Japanese poets for their compressed language and formal aesthetics. The five unrhymed lines of the cinquain followed strict accentual-syllabic requirements. The lines consisted of two, four, six, eight, and two syllables (or accents), respectively. In addition to her preferred metrical scheme, Smith noted that Crapsey strove for a kind superposition of ideas similar to the "break," or sudden perception of truth typically found in Japanese haiku.

Reminiscent of her trademark compression and signature cinquain, Crapsey's life was brief, brilliant, and tinged with tragedy. Unfortunately Crapsey's reputation with modern readers has declined, and her poetry has fallen out of print and is rarely anthologized. As a New Republic reviewer stated in its review of Verse in 1916, Crapsey's "emotion was true and poignant, her craft exacting, her spirit the artist's. She should be reckoned and warmly cherished as a poet."

CAREER

Poet and inventor of the cinquain. Teacher of literature, Kemper Hall, 1902-04; teacher of literature at Connecticut Preparatory School, 1908; instructor in poetry, Smith College, 1910.

----------------------------------
----------------------------------

Another important component in Crapsey's work was her reliance on the methods of Japanese tanka and haiku. With her invention of the cinquain, Crapsey created an American form similar to these Japanese predecessors. Like Ezra Pound, she admired the Japanese poets for their compressed language and formal aesthetics. The five unrhymed lines of the cinquain followed strict accentual-syllabic requirements. The lines consisted of two, four, six, eight, and two syllables (or accents), respectively. In addition to her preferred metrical scheme, Smith noted that Crapsey strove for a kind superposition of ideas similar to the "break," or sudden perception of truth typically found in Japanese haiku.

^^^^ Absolutely brilliant poetess but I myself am not a fan of the --cinquain poetry form--
I've written maybe three for contests , won 2nd place with one , 4th place and unplaced with the third if my memory serves me well on that ..

Yet the presented poem authored by her(certainly no cinquain) is brilliant, powerful , emotional and speaks from her heart while knowing that she is dying.
How is it that poets of this caliber and greatness are largely ignored?
Answer= liberal intelligensia, the bane of this world....she apparently did not fit the mode they wanted presented and perhaps did not advance their cause! Which to them, is tantamount to being spit on..-Tyr

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

12-29-2015, 10:56 AM

The Poet's Corner
-------------------------------------------by Laura Riding Jackson
Here where the end of bone is no end of song
And the earth is bedecked with immortality
In what was poetry
And now is pride beside
And nationality,
Here is a battle with no bravery
But if the coward's tongue has gone
Swording his own lusty lung.
Listen if there is victory
Written into a library
Waving the books in banners
Soldierly at last, for the lines
Go marching on, delivered of the soul.

And happily may they rest beyond
Suspicion now, the incomprehensibles
Traitorous in such talking
As chattered over their countries' boundaries.
The graves are gardened and the whispering
Stops at the hedges, there is singing
Of it in the ranks, there is a hush
Where the ground has limits
And the rest is loveliness.

And loveliness?
Death has an understanding of it
Loyal to many flags
And is a silent ally of any country
Beset in its mortal heart
With immortal poetry.

-----------------------------------------------------

Laura Riding Jackson was born Laura Reichenthal on January 16, 1901, in New York City. From 1918 to 1921, she attended Cornell University. In 1920, she married Louis Gottschalk, a professor of history at Cornell. Her work soon attracted the notice of "The Fugitives," a group of writers centered on Vanderbilt University whose members included John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren. The group met regularly to read and discuss poetry and philosophy, and published a poetry magazine, The Fugitive. In 1923 she began calling herself Laura Riding Gottschalk, and her first published poem appeared in The Fugitive; the following year she received the group's "Nashville Prize" for poetry. She was invited to join the group, accepting in March 1925. That same year, Riding and Gottshalk divorced, and she moved to New York City. While in New York, she became friends with various writers, including the poet Hart Crane.

In 1925, Robert Graves invited her to collaborate on a book, and she left New York for England. Riding lived abroad, mainly in England and Mallorca, Spain, from 1926 to 1939. In 1927 she officially changed her name to Laura Riding. That same year, she established the Seizin Press with Graves, serving as managing partner of the press until 1938. She and Graves co-wrote A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), and from 1935 to 1938 they edited Epilogue, a journal in which they explored new principles of textual analysis that were to influence the development of the New Criticism.

In 1941, having returned to the United States, Riding married Schuyler Brinckerhoff Jackson, a poet, critic, and former poetry editor of Time magazine. In 1943, they moved to Wabasso, Florida, where they became involved in citrus farming. For many years she worked with her husband on A Dictionary of Related Meanings, a project she had begun in the 1930s. They also collaborated on Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words, which she completed in 1974, six years after Schuyler Jackson's death. She was honored with the Mark Rothko Appreciation Award in 1971, a Guggenheim fellowship in 1973, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1979, and, in 1991, Yale University's Bollingen Prize for her lifetime contribution to poetry.

Jackson published collections of short stories and essays under several forms of her name and the pseudonym Madeleine Vara. Her most successful book was Lives of Wives (1939), a work of historical fiction. She completed more than a dozen volumes of poetry before renouncing the craft as "inadequate" in the late 1930s. She continued to write prose, however, releasing The Telling in 1973 and How a Poem Comes to Be in 1980. Jackson died in 1991 in Wabasso, Florida.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

12-30-2015, 07:27 PM

WREATH OF SONNETS
--------------------------------------------------- by Vlanes (Vladislav Nekliaev)
To Jena Woodhouse

This way of minutes miserably mixed
With their own blinks misunderstood
By birds and trees, this eye-born sisterhood,
Whose lisps and whispers ripen in betwixt,
While nature hastens to complete a list
Of symbols that pull down a dusty hood
O’er wrinkled worlds that lately love to brood
On past, not having present to persist.

And if sometimes they happen to perform
Some droning dance which smells of here and now,
With springing forms and circles staying warm,
They start to tremble on a pointed prow
Of universe and dream of their home
In whirls destroying leaves to leave a bough.

In whirls destroying leaves to leave a bough
The small transparent boat is all on end,
It doesn’t matter whether sea or land
To choose – it would be stranded, anyhow.
The things have grouped together to allow
No pass for it and, like a gluing hand,
Their sick perception struggles to amend
Its constitution, to a shading sough.

And, full of odours of a fallen fruit,
Refusing both to curse and to kotow
Through all the modulations of pursuit,
It blocks the creek where many of a scow,
Entangled in the tunnel of a flute,
The tree of time intends to disavow.

The tree of time intends to disavow
All breathing forms, creations of the word,
And when it ends to ravish and to cord
Strange, subtle ones – then it directs its brow
Towards itself and, having stopped to bow,
Strikes with the flat of its reversing sword
The stagnant dells, and pinches the brass chord
On the world’s lute that does endure somehow.

And so it stands and multiplies its arms,
And stiffens fingers, and imprints a fist
Upon its trunk, and presses bloodless gums
With lips of clefts, and feels not in the least
How it has harmed and how it still harms
Its own growth through cumulating mist.

Its own growth through cumulating mist
Sees every soul that never waits an answer,
And, as reaction, multiplies the stanze
Of plashing waves that wandered, howled, and creased,
And reared like an omniform blue beast,
But now lull reflection cast by Cancer,
Orion stretching like a dreaming lancer,
Great Bear from the starry woods dismissed.

And curves of sails repeat with some declension
Dense brimming curves of billows and, displeased
At their half-successful imitation,
Go round like eyeballs of the diseased
Or claws of eagles, and discharge the tension
Of thorny things too tired to insist.

Of thorny things too tired to insist,
Some grow enough to spring a velvet flower
And some still go on to fall or hover
If they’re inclined to darken or to feast
Among their crumbling castles, ever seized
By fear that they’d spend the only dower
Of total chance, and that the grapes are sour,
And that in landscape something would be missed.

So they reflect, to move or to restrain,
While mist is changing colours, and a sow
Triumphantly reclines on sprouted grain,
Revelling crying crows make a row
And fields refrain from modulating rain
On dragging forth their red decaying plough.

On dragging forth their red decaying plough,
The ploughmen of years drop down dead,
Recurrent shower bends his silver head,
Still mumbling vague and undetermined vow
Concerning future: ‘twill be fruitful, how –
He wouldn’t say, he was himself misled
By music of reverberating lead
That hits the ship within the only clow.

Thus feelings, having set and fixed their aim,
And paid for it like Faustus Lenau,
Have never strength to chase it or to claim
Back their past where they could die or dow,
The blade of passion stabs them all the same,
Stuck in the mud to be a blooming bow.

Stuck in the mud to be a blooming bow
Of images, illusions of the mind,
Ships always leave their better winds behind
As if they do not need them in the slough.
Frail memory is dying to endow
Dim sketches with retouch of any kind,
Its fervent fingers hurry on to bind
Thin legs of past, the future’s sacred cow.

All broken visions gather in the central
Immobile juncture of the thoughts that ceased
To pay with pain their ever growing rental
Under the sun that slides from west to east,
Disputing that the time is transcendental,
Amid the meadows mellowed and appeased.

Amid the meadows mellowed and appeased
The tower-clock of time is slow or silent,
The present is encircled like an island
With humid airs that have already breezed.
On goes the busy wind, a hair-stylist,
Whose rushy hands are quick, but hardly violent,
In azure shrines he found his lonely aisle, and
Old frescoes with recognition glimpsed.

For time collects its power from the things
And pushes on the sun like a huge tire,
And other suns to this one tightly links.
Supreme reversibility of fire
Has total strength and future but, methinks,
The ardent heads of poppies go higher.

The ardent heads of poppies go higher,
Because they have what other creatures miss –
Much concentration of enfolded peace
Intact within accelerating gyre
Of images which all of air hire
And all of land, just to express the bliss
Of chirping their eternal vocalise,
Like shabby puppets jerking on a wire.

Illusions have to hide their real size
To redirect the universe again,
For its perception not to be precise
When they the fields of ages start to scan
Like tumbleweeds that have much tighter ties
Than cypress-trees, in spite of their span.

Than cypress-trees, in spite of their span,
And so on, because they’re made of matter
Quite different from undecided patter
Of heavy drops upon some rusted can
Or crimson rays that gaily lift a ban
From singing, jumping, whispering – the latter
By quality, perhaps, is somewhat better,
But all that matters forms a single clan.

Though there exists a mere alien sort
Of things that cannot wander in the mire
And always give immediate retort
When anything intrudes upon the spire
Of their existence, firmer than a fort,
Than ripe, discursive, meditative brier.

Than ripe, discursive, meditative brier
Of days that weren’t predicted by the life
Absorbed in counterpoint of rest and strife,
Proclaiming, like a vigorous messiah,
Its crazy maxims o’er the fumy pyre,
Washing with its own tears its bloody knife –
Those, other things for ever dance and thrive
As do Aglaia, Euphrosyne, Thalia.

Their being, unrestrained by lofty order
Of elements that rules a beast, a man,
A planet, is more passionate and colder:
In their marble woods where panting Pan
Merged music into death, the last flute-holder,
Oblivion unfolds its fiery fan.

Oblivion unfolds its fiery fan
Considered by the sequences of theses
To be life minus memory, but this is
Too simple, and they obviously can
Do better, if reject their former plan.
Without this the definition misses
The point, as do at dawn the scarlet scissors
That slash the night’s flamboyant caravan.

Unchained perception running on the edge
Of heads and tails, suppresses its desire
To cleave the coin with its smoothed out wedge.
Our term has definitions given prior:
Life minus future - sounds like a pledge,
For time, as has been promised, will retire.

For time, as has been promised, will retire
With withered bushes and unflourished plants,
With all this globe that curses and enchants,
With human mind, an inconsistent dyer.
The next will start: indeed, it will be dryer
Than our time with its belated grants,
That lives on dying memories and chants
Its metaphors to a translucent lyre.

The next one will reduce its own presence,
Say, to a horse that here never ran,
Or to a bird with subtly seething essence,
Or to the ocean, this richly tuned organ:
It can exist when either grows or lessens
With everything that finished or began.

With everything that finished or began
The constellations, totally unbound,
Will bump into each other with a sound
Resembling tumbles of a crashing van.
The reason is a moth on a tartan,
The soul is like a skinny hungry hound
Which puts a quaking hare on the ground
Before a sporting vegetarian.

But everything will certainly return,
So bloom the tulips when the shafts have hissed,
A shoot will spring from a deserted urn
With a carven maiden kissing a harpist,
And growing real, the creatures will re-learn
This way of minutes miserably mixed.

This way of minutes miserably mixed
In whirls destroying leaves to leave a bough,
The tree of time intends to disavow
Its own growth through cumulating mist
Of thorny things too tired to insist
On dragging forth their red decaying plough
Stuck in the mud to be a blooming bow
Amid the meadows mellowed and appeased.

The ardent heads of poppies go higher
Than cypress-trees, in spite of their span,
Than ripe, discursive, meditative brier:
Oblivion unfolds its fiery fan,
For time, as has been promised, will retire
With everything that finished or began.
-----------------------------------------------------------
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Stunning sonnet verses exhibiting majestic and deep talent!!!
This poet shall one day be remembered for this presentation, if , if for nothing else IMHO.-TYR

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

12-31-2015, 08:32 AM

Conrad in Twilight
---------------------------------------by John Crowe Ransom

Conrad, Conrad, aren't you old
To sit so late in your mouldy garden?
And I think Conrad knows it well,
Nursing his knees, too rheumy and cold
To warm the wraith of a Forest of Arden.

Neuralgia in the back of his neck,
His lungs filling with such miasma,
His feet dipping in leafage and muck:
Conrad! you've forgotten asthma.

Conrad's house has thick red walls,
The log on Conrad's hearth is blazing,
Slippers and pipe and tea are served,
Butter and toast are meant for pleasing!
Still Conrad's back is not uncurved
And here's an autumn on him, teasing.

Autumn days in our section
Are the most used-up thing on earth
(Or in the waters under the earth)
Having no more color nor predilection
Than cornstalks too wet for the fire,
A ribbon rotting on the byre,
A man's face as weathered as straw
By the summer's flare and winter's flaw.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

01-01-2016, 11:25 AM

Wild With All Regrets
-------------------------------------------------- by Wilfred Owen
(Another version of "A Terre".)

To Siegfried Sassoon

My arms have mutinied against me -- brutes!
My fingers fidget like ten idle brats,
My back's been stiff for hours, damned hours.
Death never gives his squad a Stand-at-ease.
I can't read. There: it's no use. Take your book.
A short life and a merry one, my buck!
We said we'd hate to grow dead old. But now,
Not to live old seems awful: not to renew
My boyhood with my boys, and teach 'em hitting,
Shooting and hunting, -- all the arts of hurting!
-- Well, that's what I learnt. That, and making money.
Your fifty years in store seem none too many;
But I've five minutes. God! For just two years
To help myself to this good air of yours!
One Spring! Is one too hard to spare? Too long?
Spring air would find its own way to my lung,
And grow me legs as quick as lilac-shoots.

Yes, there's the orderly. He'll change the sheets
When I'm lugged out, oh, couldn't I do that?
Here in this coffin of a bed, I've thought
I'd like to kneel and sweep his floors for ever, --
And ask no nights off when the bustle's over,
For I'd enjoy the dirt; who's prejudiced
Against a grimed hand when his own's quite dust, --
Less live than specks that in the sun-shafts turn?
Dear dust, -- in rooms, on roads, on faces' tan!
I'd love to be a sweep's boy, black as Town;
Yes, or a muckman. Must I be his load?
A flea would do. If one chap wasn't bloody,
Or went stone-cold, I'd find another body.

Which I shan't manage now. Unless it's yours.
I shall stay in you, friend, for some few hours.
You'll feel my heavy spirit chill your chest,
And climb your throat on sobs, until it's chased
On sighs, and wiped from off your lips by wind.

I think on your rich breathing, brother, I'll be weaned
To do without what blood remained me from my wound.

5th December 1917.
__________________________________________________ _________________
__________________________________________________ ___________________

Wilfred Owen was born near Oswestry, Shropshire, where his father worked on the railway. He was educated at the Birkenhead Institute, Liverpool and Shrewsbury Technical College. He worked as a pupil-teacher in a poor country parish before a shortage of money forced him to drop his hopes of studying at the University of London and take up a teaching post in Bordeaux (1913). He was tutoring in the Pyrenees when war was declared and enlisted as shortly afterwards.

In 1917 he suffered severe concussion and 'trench-fever' whilst fighting on the Somme and spent a period recuperating at Craiglockart War Hospital, near Edinburgh. It was he that he met Siegfried Sassoon who read his poems, suggested how they might be improved, and offered him much encouragement.

He was posted back to France in 1918 where he won the MC before being killed on the Sombre Canal a week before the Armistice was signed.

His poetry owes its beauty to a deep ingrained sense of compassion coupled with grim realism. Owen is also acknowledged as a technically accomplished poet and master of metrical variety.

Poems such as 'Dulce Decorum Est' and 'Anthem for doomed Youth' have done much to influence our attitudes towards war.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

01-03-2016, 12:13 AM

Love and Black Magic
------------------------------------------------by Robert Graves

To the woods, to the woods is the wizard gone;
In his grotto the maiden sits alone.
She gazes up with a weary smile
At the rafter-hanging crocodile,
The slowly swinging crocodile.
Scorn has she of her master’s gear,
Cauldron, alembic, crystal sphere,
Phial, philtre—“Fiddlededee
For all such trumpery trash!” quo’ she.
“A soldier is the lad for me;
Hey and hither, my lad!

“Oh, here have I ever lain forlorn:
My father died ere I was born,
Mother was by a wizard wed,
And oft I wish I had died instead—
Often I wish I were long time dead.
But, delving deep in my master’s lore,
I have won of magic power such store
I can turn a skull—oh, fiddlededee
For all this curious craft!” quo’ she.
“A soldier is the lad for me;
Hey and hither, my lad!

“To bring my brave boy unto my arms,
What need have I of magic charms—
‘Abracadabra!’ and ‘Prestopuff’?
I have but to wish, and that is enough.
The charms are vain, one wish is enough.
My master pledged my hand to a wizard;
Transformed would I be to toad or lizard
If e’er he guessed—but fiddlededee
For a black-browed sorcerer, now,” quo’ she.
“Let Cupid smile and the fiend must flee;
Hey and hither, my lad.”

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Robert Graves was born in 1895 in Wimbledon, a suburb of London. Graves was known as a poet, lecturer and novelist. He was also known as a classicist and a mythographer. Perhaps his first known and revered poems were the poems Groves wrote behind the lines in World War One. He later became known as one of the most superb English language 'Love' poets. He then became recognised as one of the finest love poets writing in the English language.

Members of the poetry, novel writing, historian, and classical scholarly community often feel indebted to the man and his works. Robert Graves was born into an interesting time in history. He actually saw Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee procession at the age of two or three. His family was quite patriotic, educated, strict and upper middle class.He saw his father as an authoritarian. He was not liked by his peers in school, nor did he care much for them. He attended British public school. He feared most of his Masters at the school. When he did seek out company, it was of the same sex and his relationships were clearly same sex in orientation.

Although he had a scholarship secured in the classics at Oxford, he escaped his childhood and Father through leaving for the Great War. Graves married twice, once to Nancy Nicholson, and they had four children, and his second marriage to Beryl Pritchard brought forth four more children. Graves married Nancy Nicholson before the war.
Graves' own poetry and prose is the best source for a description of his war experiences. It suffices to say that Graves never found what he was looking for leaving for war, but rather, terror and madness in the war. He was wounded, left for dead and pronounced dead by his surgeon in the field and his commanding officer in a telegram to his parents but subsequently recovered to read the report of his own demise in The Times. He amazingly recovered and was given home service for the rest of the war.However, like many of his fellow soldiers who were disabled by war, he could not get over the guilt he had leaving the other soldiers to fight without him. Somehow, he insisted he be posted back to the front lines. The military surgeon threatened him with court marshall if he didn’t get off the front. Graves returned to England trained troops, while maintaining contact with his poet friends behind the lines. In this way he was able to save one friend from court martial after he published an antiwar manifesto.

Though their relationship was initially happy and productive (Nancy and Robert worked on a children's book together), the stress of family life, little money and Robert's continual shell-shocked condition caused them troubles. Laura Ridding arriving on the scene finished off their marriage.Laura Riding and Robert Graves' relationship was immensely influential upon both of their lives and careers. After Riding's arrival in England, she began to exert an influence on more than just Graves' writing. Following a sequence of events so crazy that they seem more suitable to fiction than reality (including, for example, Laura Riding leaping from a third floor window and breaking her pelvic bone in three places), Graves abandoned his family and moved with Riding from England to Spain. The events of this period were so momentous that all three biographers that have covered his story, dedicate a large part of their studies to this couple.It's easy to vilify Laura Riding. Graves was but one victim of her controlling personality and her ambition. But then, Graves had his victims too. What cannot be questioned is the value of some of the work that they did together. Much of it remains important to both literary history as well as to scholarship.

In 1943 Robert Graves received the news that his son, David, was missing in action. While he and Nancy held out hope that he would be found alive or that he might have been taken prisoner, later reports suggested otherwise. David, Robert and Nancy learned, had been shot while attempting to single-handedly take out a well-defended enemy position. The chances that he had survived were not good.By 1946 as England and Europe began to survey its post-War state, Graves managed to secure transport for his family back to Majorca. Once safely back there, then other than annual trips to England, occasional visits to the continent and even rarer trips to America, the Graves' made Deya their home for good. After 1948 and the publication of The White Goddess, as Graves' fame and celebrity grew, Graves began a period of discovering muses who provided him with a flesh-and-blood manifestation of his poetic and mythic muse. Some of these relationships were short, others seemed largely innocent and more flirtatious than serious or deeply poetic; however, four were, without doubt, significant to Graves' life and, subsequently, to his work.

Graves' first muse after Nancy Nicholson, Laura Riding and Beryl Graves, the first after he his White Goddess theories, was Judith Bledsoe. Judith was a naïve young girl who found in the older Graves something of a father figure Graves found in her the embodiment of the White Goddess.Graves had many celebrity friends including film stars like Ava Gardner and Ingrid Bergman, fellow writers like T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein. Robert Graves ceased writing after his 80th birthday and his celebrity status slowly began to fade. However, where his own career stopped, the critical and academic industry was just beginning. He died in 1985 in Deja, a Majorcan village that he had moved to and lived in since 1929.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

01-04-2016, 09:00 AM

My Foe
-----------------------------------------------by Robert William Service
A Belgian Priest-Soldier Speaks;

GURR! You cochon! Stand and fight!
Show your mettle! Snarl and bite!
Spawn of an accursed race,
Turn and meet me face to face!
Here amid the wreck and rout
Let us grip and have it out!
Here where ruins rock and reel
Let us settle, steel to steel!
Look! Our houses, how they spit
Sparks from brands your friends have lit.
See! Our gutters running red,
Bright with blood your friends have shed.
Hark! Amid your drunken brawl
How our maidens shriek and call.
Why have you come here alone,
To this hearth's blood-spattered stone?
Come to ravish, come to loot,
Come to play the ghoulish brute.
Ah, indeed! We well are met,
Bayonet to bayonet.
God! I never killed a man:
Now I'll do the best I can.
Rip you to the evil heart,
Laugh to see the life-blood start.
Bah! You swine! I hate you so.
Show you mercy? No! . . . and no! . . .

There! I've done it. See! He lies
Death a-staring from his eyes;
Glazing eyeballs, panting breath,
How it's horrible, is Death!
Plucking at his bloody lips
With his trembling finger-tips;
Choking in a dreadful way
As if he would something say
In that uncouth tongue of his. . . .
Oh, how horrible Death is!

How I wish that he would die!
So unnerved, unmanned am I.
See! His twitching face is white!
See! His bubbling blood is bright.
Why do I not shout with glee?
What strange spell is over me?
There he lies; the fight was fair;
Let me toss my cap in air.
Why am I so silent? Why
Do I pray for him to die?
Where is all my vengeful joy?
Ugh! My foe is but a boy.

I'd a brother of his age
Perished in the war's red rage;
Perished in the Ypres hell:
Oh, I loved my brother well.
And though I be hard and grim,
How it makes me think of him!
He had just such flaxen hair
As the lad that's lying there.
Just such frank blue eyes were his. . . .
God! How horrible war is!

I have reason to be gay:
There is one less foe to slay.
I have reason to be glad:
Yet -- my foe is such a lad.
So I watch in dull amaze,
See his dying eyes a-glaze,
See his face grow glorified,
See his hands outstretched and wide
To that bit of ruined wall
Where the flames have ceased to crawl,
Where amid the crumbling bricks
Hangs a blackebed crucifix.

Now, oh now I understand.
Quick I press it in his hand,
Close his feeble finger-tips,
Hold it to his faltering lips.
As I watch his welling blood
I would stem it if I could.
God of Pity, let him live!
God of Love, forgive, forgive.

* * * *

His face looked strangely, as he died,
Like that of One they crucified.
And in the pocket of his coat
I found a letter; thus he wrote:
The things I've seen! Oh, mother dear,
I'm wondering can God be here?
To-night amid the drunken brawl
I saw a Cross hung on a wall;
I'll seek it now, and there alone
Perhaps I may atone, atone. . . .

Ah no! 'Tis I who must atone.
No other saw but God alone;
Yet how can I forget the sight
Of that face so woeful white!
Dead I kissed him as he lay,
Knelt by him and tried to pray;
Left him lying there at rest,
Crucifix upon his breast.

Not for him the pity be.
Ye who pity, pity me,
Crawling now the ways I trod,
Blood-guilty in sight of God.
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Service wrote 876 poems. And this is one of my favorites that he wrote.
He clearly does not get the recognition that his poetry deserves. -Tyr

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

01-05-2016, 10:42 AM

He fell among Thieves
-------------------------------------------------------by Sir Henry Newbolt

‘Ye have robb’d,’ said he, ‘ye have slaughter’d and made an end,
Take your ill-got plunder, and bury the dead:
What will ye more of your guest and sometime friend?’
‘Blood for our blood,’ they said.

He laugh’d: ‘If one may settle the score for five,
I am ready; but let the reckoning stand till day:
I have loved the sunlight as dearly as any alive.’
‘You shall die at dawn,’ said they.

He flung his empty revolver down the slope,
He climb’d alone to the Eastward edge of the trees;
All night long in a dream untroubled of hope
He brooded, clasping his knees.

He did not hear the monotonous roar that fills
The ravine where the Yassоn river sullenly flows;
He did not see the starlight on the Laspur hills,
Or the far Afghan snows.

He saw the April noon on his books aglow,
The wistaria trailing in at the window wide;
He heard his father’s voice from the terrace below
Calling him down to ride.

He saw the gray little church across the park,
The mounds that hid the loved and honour’d dead;
The Norman arch, the chancel softly dark,
The brasses black and red.

He saw the School Close, sunny and green,
The runner beside him, the stand by the parapet wall,
The distant tape, and the crowd roaring between,
His own name over all.

He saw the dark wainscot and timber’d roof,
The long tables, and the faces merry and keen;
The College Eight and their trainer dining aloof,
The Dons on the daлis serene.

He watch’d the liner’s stem ploughing the foam,
He felt her trembling speed and the thrash of her screw.
He heard the passengers’ voices talking of home,
He saw the flag she flew.

And now it was dawn. He rose strong on his feet,
And strode to his ruin’d camp below the wood;
He drank the breath of the morning cool and sweet:
His murderers round him stood.

Light on the Laspur hills was broadening fast,
The blood-red snow-peaks chill’d to a dazzling white;
He turn’d, and saw the golden circle at last,
Cut by the Eastern height.

‘O glorious Life, Who dwellest in earth and sun,
I have lived, I praise and adore Thee.’
A sword swept.
Over the pass the voices one by one
Faded, and the hill slept.
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MY FAVORITE POEM BY THIS GREAT BUT LITTLE KNOWN POET--TYR

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

01-06-2016, 09:00 AM

The Caverns of the Grave I've Seen
----------------------------------------------------- by William Blake

The Caverns of the Grave I've seen,
And these I show'd to England's Queen.
But now the Caves of Hell I view,
Who shall I dare to show them to?
What mighty soul i 362 n Beauty's form
Shall dauntless view the infernal storm?
Egremont's Countess can control
The flames of Hell that round me roll;
If she refuse, I still go on
Till the Heavens and Earth are gone,
Still admir'd by noble minds,
Follow'd by Envy on the winds,
Re-engrav'd time after time,
Ever in their youthful prime,
My designs unchang'd remain.
Time may rage, but rage in vain.
For above Time's troubled fountains,
On the great Atlantic Mountains,
In my Golden House on high,
There they shine eternally.
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One of my favorite poems by Blake.. -Tyr

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

01-07-2016, 09:28 AM

An Exile's Farewell
------------------------------------------by Adam Lindsay Gordon
The ocean heaves around us still
With long and measured swell,
The autumn gales our canvas fill,
Our ship rides smooth and well.
The broad Atlantic's bed of foam
Still breaks against our prow;
I shed no tears at quitting home,
Nor will I shed them now!

Against the bulwarks on the poop
I lean, and watch the sun
Behind the red horizon stoop —
His race is nearly run.
Those waves will never quench his light,
O'er which they seem to close,
To-morrow he will rise as bright
As he this morning rose.

How brightly gleams the orb of day
Across the trackless sea!
How lightly dance the waves that play
Like dolphins in our lee!
The restless waters seem to say,
In smothered tones to me,
How many thousand miles away
My native land must be!

Speak, Ocean! is my Home the same
Now all is new to me? —
The tropic sky's resplendent flame,
The vast expanse of sea?
Does all around her, yet unchanged,
The well-known aspect wear?
Oh! can the leagues that I have ranged
Have made no difference there?

How vivid Recollection's hand
Recalls the scene once more!
I see the same tall poplars stand
Beside the garden door;
I see the bird-cage hanging still;
And where my sister set
The flowers in the window-sill —
Can they be living yet?

Let woman's nature cherish grief,
I rarely heave a sigh
Before emotion takes relief
In listless apathy;
While from my pipe the vapours curl
Towards the evening sky,
And 'neath my feet the billows whirl
In dull monotony!

The sky still wears the crimson streak
Of Sol's departing ray,
Some briny drops are on my cheek,
'Tis but the salt sea spray!
Then let our barque the ocean roam,
Our keel the billows plough;
I shed no tears at quitting home,
Nor will I shed them now!

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

01-08-2016, 10:15 AM

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

01-09-2016, 08:12 PM

Meadowsweet
------------------------------------by William Allingham

Through grass, through amber'd cornfields, our slow Stream--
Fringed with its flags and reeds and rushes tall,
And Meadowsweet, the chosen of them all
By wandering children, yellow as the cream
Of those great cows--winds on as in a dream
By mill and footbridge, hamlet old and small
(Red roofs, gray tower), and sees the sunset gleam
On mullion'd windows of an ivied Hall.

There, once upon a time, the heavy King
Trod out its perfume from the Meadowsweet,
Strown like a woman's love beneath his feet,
In stately dance or jovial banqueting,
When all was new; and in its wayfaring
Our Streamlet curved, as now, through grass and wheat.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

01-10-2016, 12:20 PM

The Things We Dare Not Tell
------------------------------------------------- by Henry Lawson

The fields are fair in autumn yet, and the sun's still shining there,
But we bow our heads and we brood and fret, because of the masks we wear;
Or we nod and smile the social while, and we say we're doing well,
But we break our hearts, oh, we break our hearts! for the things we must not tell.

There's the old love wronged ere the new was won, there's the light of long ago;
There's the cruel lie that we suffer for, and the public must not know.
So we go through life with a ghastly mask, and we're doing fairly well,
While they break our hearts, oh, they kill our hearts! do the things we must not tell.

We see but pride in a selfish breast, while a heart is breaking there;
Oh, the world would be such a kindly world if all men's hearts lay bare!
We live and share the living lie, we are doing very well,
While they eat our hearts as the years go by, do the things we dare not tell.

We bow us down to a dusty shrine, or a temple in the East,
Or we stand and drink to the world-old creed, with the coffins at the feast;
We fight it down, and we live it down, or we bear it bravely well,
But the best men die of a broken heart for the things they cannot tell.
------------------------------------------------------
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My favorite poem by Lawson!!!--Tyr

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

01-12-2016, 09:18 AM

A Woman's Shortcomings
-------------------------------------- by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

She has laughed as softly as if she sighed,
She has counted six, and over,
Of a purse well filled, and a heart well tried -
Oh, each a worthy lover!
They "give her time"; for her soul must slip
Where the world has set the grooving;
She will lie to none with her fair red lip:
But love seeks truer loving.

She trembles her fan in a sweetness dumb,
As her thoughts were beyond recalling;
With a glance for one, and a glance for some,
From her eyelids rising and falling;
Speaks common words with a blushful air,
Hears bold words, unreproving;
But her silence says - what she never will swear -
And love seeks better loving.

Go, lady! lean to the night-guitar,
And drop a smile to the bringer;
Then smile as sweetly, when he is far,
At the voice of an in-door singer.
Bask tenderly beneath tender eyes;
Glance lightly, on their removing;
And join new vows to old perjuries -
But dare not call it loving!

Unless you can think, when the song is done,
No other is soft in the rhythm;
Unless you can feel, when left by One,
That all men else go with him;
Unless you can know, when unpraised by his breath,
That your beauty itself wants proving;
Unless you can swear "For life, for death!" -
Oh, fear to call it loving!

Unless you can muse in a crowd all day
On the absent face that fixed you;
Unless you can love, as the angels may,
With the breadth of heaven betwixt you;
Unless you can dream that his faith is fast,
Through behoving and unbehoving;
Unless you can die when the dream is past -
Oh, never call it loving!

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

01-13-2016, 10:34 AM

Death
----------------------------------------by Helen Hunt Jackson

My body, eh? Friend Death, how now?
Why all this tedious pomp of writ?
Thou hast reclaimed it sure and slow
For half a century bit by bit.

In faith thou knowest more to-day
Than I do, where it can be found!
This shrivelled lump of suffering clay,
To which I am now chained and bound,

Has not of kith or kin a trace
To the good body once I bore;
Look at this shrunken, ghastly face:
Didst ever see that face before?

Ah, well, friend Death, good friend thou art;
Thy only fault thy lagging gait,
Mistaken pity in thy heart
For timorous ones that bid thee wait.

Do quickly all thou hast to do,
Nor I nor mine will hindrance make;
I shall be free when thou art through;
I grudge thee nought that thou must take!

Stay! I have lied; I grudge thee one,
Yes, two I grudge thee at this last,--
Two members which have faithful done
My will and bidding in the past.

I grudge thee this right hand of mine;
I grudge thee this quick-beating heart;
They never gave me coward sign,
Nor played me once the traitor's part.

I see now why in olden days
Men in barbaric love or hate
Nailed enemies' hands at wild crossways,
Shrined leaders' hearts in costly state:

The symbol, sign and instrument
Of each soul's purpose, passion, strife,
Of fires in which are poured and spent
Their all of love, their all of life.

O feeble, mighty human hand!
O fragile, dauntless human heart!
The universe holds nothing planned
With such sublime, transcendent art!

Yes, Death, I own I grudge thee mine
Poor little hand, so feeble now;
Its wrinkled palm, its altered line,
Its veins so pallid and so slow --

Ah, well, friend Death, good friend thou art;
I shall be free when thou art through.
Take all there is -- take hand and heart;
There must be somewhere work to do

------------------------------------------------------------------
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"Ah, well, friend Death, good friend thou art;
I shall be free when thou art through.
Take all there is -- take hand and heart;
There must be somewhere work to do"

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

01-14-2016, 09:02 AM

The Quarry
------------------------------------------- by William Vaughn Moody

Between the rice swamps and the fields of tea
I met a sacred elephant, snow-white.
Upon his back a huge pagoda towered
Full of brass gods and food of sacrifice.
Upon his forehead sat a golden throne,
The massy metal twisted into shapes
Grotesque, antediluvian, such as move
In myth or have their broken images
Sealed in the stony middle of the hills.
A peacock spread his thousand dyes to screen
The yellow sunlight from the head of one
Who sat upon the throne, clad stiff with gems,
Heirlooms of dynasties of buried kings,--
Himself the likeness of a buried king,
With frozen gesture and unfocused eyes.
The trappings of the beast were over-scrawled
With broideries--sea-shapes and flying things,
Fan-trees and dwarfed nodosities of pine,
Mixed with old alphabets, and faded lore
Fallen from ecstatic mouths before the Flood,
Or gathered by the daughters when they walked
Eastward in Eden with the Sons of God
Whom love and the deep moon made garrulous
Between the carven tusks his trunk hung dead;
Blind as the eyes of pearl in Buddha's brow
His beaded eyes stared thwart upon the road;
And feebler than the doting knees of eid,
His joints, of size to swing the builder's crane
Across the war-walls of the Anakim,
Made vain and shaken haste. Good need was his
To hasten: panting, foaming, on the slot
Came many brutes of prey, their several hates
Laid by until the sharing of the spoil.
Just as they gathered stomach for the leap,
The sun was darkened, and wide-balanced wings
Beat downward on the trade-wind from the sea.
A wheel of shadow sped along the fields
And o'er the dreaming cities. Suddenly
My heart misgave me, and I cried aloud,
"Alas! What dost thou here? What dost thou here? "
The great beasts and the little halted sharp,
Eyed the grand circler, doubting his intent.
Straightway the wind flawed and he came about,
Stooping to take the vanward of the pack;
Then turned, between the chasers and the chased,
Crying a word I could not understand,--
But stiller-tongued, with eyes somewhat askance,
They settled to the slot and disappeared.
--------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------

William Vaughn Moody Biography

William Vaughn Moody was born July 8, 1869, in Spenser, Indiana. His parents died when he was young, and he worked his way through prep school and Harvard University, where he recieved both his B.A. (1893) and M.A. (1894), and became co-editor of Harvard Monthly. From 1894-95 he held the position of assistant in the English Department to Louis E. Gates. In 1895, Moody relocated to The University of Chicago as an instructor, a position that he held until 1903, when he was promoted to an assistant professorship. He left the University in 1907 to concentrate on his poetry.

During this time at the University, Moody published an untitled volume of poetry, as well as two poetic dramas, The Masque of Judgment in 1900, and The Fire Bringer in 1904. However, he is mostly noted for his 1906 play The Great Divide, hailed at the time as the "Great American Drama."

In 1908, Moody was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He married Harriet C. Brainerd on May 7, 1909. Also in that year, he saw his play The Faith Healer produced, an event that while it attracted some attention, was not considered a dramatic success. William Vaughn Moody was working on another poetic drama, The Death of Eve, when he died in Colorado Springs, CO, on October 17, 1910.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

01-15-2016, 09:49 AM

The Children of Lir
-----------------------------------------------------------------------by Katharine Tynan

Out upon the sand-dunes thrive the coarse long grasses;
Herons standing knee-deep in the brackish pool;
Overhead the sunset fire and flame amasses
And the moon to eastward rises pale and cool.
Rose and green around her, silver-gray and pearly,
Chequered with the black rooks flying home to bed;
For, to wake at daybreak, birds must couch them early:
And the day's a long one since the dawn was red.

On the chilly lakelet, in that pleasant gloaming,
See the sad swans sailing: they shall have no rest:
Never a voice to greet them save the bittern's booming
Where the ghostly sallows sway against the West.
'Sister,' saith the gray swan, 'Sister, I am weary,'
Turning to the white swan wet, despairing eyes;
'O' she saith, 'my young one! O' she saith, 'my dearie !'
Casts her wings about him with a storm of cries.

Woe for Lir's sweet children whom their vile stepmother
Glamoured with her witch-spells for a thousand years;
Died their father raving, on his throne another,
Blind before the end came from the burning tears.
Long the swans have wandered over lake and river;
Gone is all the glory of the race of Lir:
Gone and long forgotten like a dream of fever:
But the swans remember the sweet days that were.

Hugh, the black and white swan with the beauteous feathers,
Fiachra, the black swan with the emerald breast,
Conn, the youngest, dearest, sheltered in all weathers,
Him his snow-white sister loves the tenderest.
These her mother gave her as she lay a-dying;
To her faithful keeping; faithful hath she been,
With her wings spread o'er them when the tempest's crying,
And her songs so hopeful when the sky's serene.

Other swans have nests made 'mid the reeds and rushes,
Lined with downy feathers where the cygnets sleep
Dreaming, if a bird dreams, till the daylight blushes,
Then they sail out swiftly on the current deep.
With the proud swan-father, tall, and strong, and stately,
And the mild swan-mother, grave with household cares,
All well-born and comely, all rejoicing greatly:
Full of honest pleasure is a life like theirs.

But alas ! for my swans with the human nature,
Sick with human longings, starved for human ties,
With their hearts all human cramped to a bird's stature.
And the human weeping in the bird's soft eyes.
Never shall my swans build nests in some green river,
Never fly to Southward in the autumn gray,
Rear no tender children, love no mates for ever;
Robbed alike of bird's joys and of man's are they.

Babbles Conn the youngest, 'Sister, I remember
At my father's palace how I went in silk,
Ate the juicy deer-flesh roasted from the ember,
Drank from golden goblets my child's draught of milk.
Once I rode a-hunting, laughed to see the hurry,
Shouted at the ball-play, on the lake did row;
You had for your beauty gauds that shone so rarely.'
'Peace' saith Fionnuala, 'that was long ago.'

'Sister,' saith Fiachra, 'well do I remember
How the flaming torches lit the banquet-hall,
And the fire leapt skyward in the mid-December,
And among the rushes slept our staghounds tall.
By our father's right hand you sat shyly gazing,
Smiling half and sighing, with your eyes a-glow,
As the bards sang loudly all your beauty praising. '
'Peace,' saith Fionnuala, 'that was long ago.'

'Sister,' then saith Hugh 'most do I remember
One I called my brother, one, earth's goodliest man,
Strong as forest oaks are where the wild vines clamber,
First at feast or hunting, in the battle's van.
Angus, you were handsome, wise, and true, and tender,
Loved by every comrade, feared by every foe:
Low, low, lies your beauty, all forgot your splendour.'
'Peace,' saith Fionnuala, 'that was long ago.'

Dews are in the clear air and the roselight paling;
Over sands and sedges shines the evening star;
And the moon's disc lonely high in heaven is sailing;
Silvered all the spear-heads of the rushes are.
Housed warm are all things as the night grows colder,
Water-fowl and sky-fowl dreamless in the nest;
But the swans go drifting, drooping wing and shoulder
Cleaving the still water where the fishes rest.

Nymphs
-----------------------------------------------------by Katharine Tynan
Where are ye now, O beautiful girls of the mountain,
Oreads all ?
Nothing at all stirs here save the drip of the fountain;
Answers our call
Only the heart-glad thrush, in the Vale of Thrushes;
Stirs in the brake
But the dew-bright ear of the hare in his couch of rushes
Listening, awake.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Katharine Tynan was born in Dublin, Ireland on 23rd January 1859. She was the daughter of a cattle farmer and spent most of her childhood on his farms. She was a keen reader and began writing poetry whilst in her teens.

In 1884 she fell in lve with Oxford graduate Charles Fagan. The melancholy love poetry she wrote following his death a year later aptly demonstrates her ability to convey deep feeling.

In 1886 she met W.B. Yeats and they became life-long friends. He even proposed to her at one point, but it was to scholar Henry Albert Hinkson that she eventually became married in 1893. They had three children together: Theobald Henry (1897), Giles Aylmer (1899), and Pamela Mary (1900).

Tynan produced a great deal of writing during her career. It is reported that she was capable of delivering one novel per month! Apart from two anthologies, sixteen other collections of poetry, five plays, seven books of devotion, and one book about her dogs, she wrote over 105 popular novels, twelve collections of short stories, and innumerable newspaper articles. Her work was marked by an unusual blend of Catholicism and feminism, but was always drawn from real life.

Tynan suffered from bouts of depression throughout her life, but particularly after the sudden death of her husband in 1919. However, she kept writing, especially poetry, up until her death in London in 1931.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

01-16-2016, 06:22 PM

Light Shining out of Darkness
--------------------------------------------------------by William Cowper

God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He plants His footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.

Deep in unfathomable mines
Of never-failing skill,
He treasures up His bright designs,
And works His sovereign will.

Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take,
The clouds ye so much dread
Are big with mercy, and shall break
In blessings on your head.

Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,
But trust Him for His grace;
Behind a frowning providence
He hides a smiling face.

His purposes will ripen fast,
Unfolding every hour;
The bud may have a bitter taste,
But sweet will be the flower.

Blind unbelief is sure to err,
And scan His work in vain:
God is His own interpreter,
And he will make it plain

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

01-17-2016, 08:58 AM

The Hollow Men
---------------------------------------------------------- by T. S. Eliot

Mistah Kurtz -- he dead.

A penny for the Old Guy

I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer --

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

01-18-2016, 10:11 AM

Not
by Paul Valery
Your footsteps , children of my silence,
Holy , slowly placed ,
Towards the bed of my vigilance
Proceed mute and frozen .

Nobody pure , divine shadow,
They are soft, not your chosen !
Gods ... all the gifts I guess
Come to me on those naked feet!

If thy lips advanced ,
You prepare to appease ,
At the inhabitant of my thoughts
The food of a kiss ,

Do not hurry this tender act,
Sweetness of being and not being ,
Because I 've lived to expect ,
And my heart was only your footsteps .

Original text

Les pas
---------------------------------------------by Paul Valery
Tes pas, enfants de mon silence,
Saintement, lentement placés,
Vers le lit de ma vigilance
Procèdent muets et glacés.

Personne pure, ombre divine,
Qu'ils sont doux, tes pas retenus !
Dieux !... tous les dons que je devine
Viennent à moi sur ces pieds nus !

Si, de tes lèvres avancées,
Tu prépares pour l'apaiser,
A l'habitant de mes pensées
La nourriture d'un baiser,

Ne hâte pas cet acte tendre,
Douceur d'être et de n'être pas,
Car j'ai vécu de vous attendre,
Et mon coeur n'était que vos pas.
------------------------------------------------------
Paul Valery Biography

Paul Valéry, French poet, essayist, and critic was born in Sète, France in 1871. His father, Barthelmy Valéry, was a customs officer at the sea port of Sète, and his mother, Fanny Grassi, who was the daughter of an Italian consul and a descended from Venetian nobility.
He was educated in Sette and at the lycée and University of Montpellier, and obtained his licence in 1892 after studying law there. In this same year, Valéry fell in love with a young Spanish girl but suffered a personal crisis. It was at this time he discovered the 'revolution of the mind', during a stormy night in Genoa. He turned his back on writing poetry and dedicated himself to gaining 'maximum knowledge and control of his intellect.' The very act of writing, he decided, was one of vanity, and set to free himself at no matter what cost, from those falsehoods: literature and sentiment. During this time he published two prose works. In Introdution de la Methode de Leonard da Vince (1894) he claimed that "all criticism is the cause of the work as in the eyes of the law the criminal is the cause of the crime. Far rather are they both the effects." La Soiree Avec Monsieur Teste (1896) which came to be the first part of his Teste cycle.
The publisher Gaston Gallimard, asked Valéry to collect and revise the poetry he had written in the 1890s. Valéry's original plan was to produce a poem of some forty lines, but he finished with one of his major works, La Jeune Pataque, which brought him immediate fame.

His 'mélodrames' Amphion and Sémiramis, found the stage at the Paris Opera in 1931 and 1934. Valéry was elected to the Académie Française in 1925 and in 1933 he was made administrative head of the Centre Universitaire Méditerranéen at Nice.In 1937 Valéry was appointed professor of poetry at the Collège de France. In 1939 he wrote the libretto for Germaine Taillefer's Cantate du Narcisse. Valéry died in Paris on July 20, 1945, and was returned to Sète for his burial.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

01-19-2016, 10:31 AM

I Am Of Ireland
----------------------------------------- by William Butler Yeats

'I am of Ireland,
And the Holy Land of Ireland,
And time runs on,' cried she.
'Come out of charity,
Come dance with me in Ireland.'

One man, one man alone
In that outlandish gear,
One solitary man
Of all that rambled there
Had turned his stately head.
That is a long way off,
And time runs on,' he said,
'And the night grows rough.'

'I am of Ireland,
And the Holy Land of Ireland,
And time runs on,' cried she.
'Come out of charity
And dance with me in Ireland.'

'The fiddlers are all thumbs,
Or the fiddle-string accursed,
The drums and the kettledrums
And the trumpets all are burst,
And the trombone,' cried he,
'The trumpet and trombone,'
And cocked a malicious eye,
'But time runs on, runs on.'

I am of Ireland,
And the Holy Land of Ireland,
And time runs on,' cried she.
"Come out of charity
And dance with me in Ireland.'

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

01-20-2016, 11:10 AM

Farm Boy After Summer
-----------------------------------------by Robert Francis

A seated statue of himself he seems.
A bronze slowness becomes him. Patently
The page he contemplates he doesn't see.

The lesson, the long lesson, has been summer.
His mind holds summer, as his skin holds sun.
For once the homework, all of it, was done.

What were the crops, where were the fiery fields
Where for so many days so many hours
The sun assaulted him with glittering showers.

Expect a certain absence in his presence.
Expect all winter long a summer scholar,
For scarcely all its snows can cool that color.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

01-21-2016, 09:48 AM

Before Sleep
-------------------------------------------by Ezra Pound

The lateral vibrations caress me,
They leap and caress me,
They work pathetically in my favour,
They seek my financial good.

She of the spear stands present.
The gods of the underworld attend me, O Annubis,
These are they of thy company.
With a pathetic solicitude they attend me;
Undulant,
Their realm is the lateral courses.

Light!
I am up to follow thee, Pallas.
Up and out of their caresses.
You were gone up as a rocket,
Bending your passages from right to left and from left to right
In the flat projection of a spiral.
The gods of drugged sleep attend me,
Wishing me well;
I am up to follow thee, Pallas.

--------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------

Ezra Pound is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry. In the early teens of the twentieth century, he opened a seminal exchange of work and ideas between British and American writers, and was famous for the generosity with which he advanced the work of such major contemporaries as W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H. D., James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and especially T. S. Eliot. His own significant contributions to poetry begin with his promulgation of Imagism, a movement in poetry which derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry - stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language, and foregoing traditional rhyme and meter in order to, in Pound's words, "compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome." His later work, for nearly fifty years, focused on the encyclopedic epic poem he entitled The Cantos.

Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885. He completed two years of college at the University of Pennsylvania and earned a degree from Hamilton College in 1905. After teaching at Wabash College for two years, he traveled abroad to Spain, Italy and London, where, as the literary executor of the scholar Ernest Fenellosa, he became interested in Japanese and Chinese poetry. He married Dorothy Shakespeare in 1914 and became London editor of the Little Review in 1917. In 1924, he moved to Italy; during this period of voluntary exile, Pound became involved in Fascist politics, and did not return to the United States until 1945, when he was arrested on charges of treason for broadcasting Fascist propaganda by radio to the United States during the Second World War. In 1946, he was acquitted, but declared mentally ill and committed to St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. During his confinement, the jury of the Bollingen-Library of Congress Award (which included a number of the most eminent writers of the time) decided to overlook Pound's political career in the interest of recognizing his poetic achievements, and awarded him the prize for the Pisan Cantos (1948). After continuous appeals from writers won his release from the hospital in 1958, Pound returned to Italy and settled in Venice, where he died, a semi-recluse, in 1972.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

01-22-2016, 10:52 AM

For The Moment
--------------------------------------------by Pierre Reverdy

Life is simple and gay
The bright sun rings with a quiet sound
The sound of the bells has quieted
down
This morning the light hits it all
The footlights of my head are lit again
And the room I live in is finally bright

Just one beam is enough
Just one burst of laughter
My joy that shakes the house
Restrains those wanting to die
By the notes of its song

I sing off-key
Ah it's funny
My mouth open to every breeze
Spews mad notes everywhere
That emerge I don't know how
To fly toward other ears

Listen I'm not crazy
I laugh at the bottom of the stairs
Before the wide-open door
In the sunlight scattered
On the wall among green vines
And my arms are held out toward you

It's today I love you

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

01-23-2016, 11:32 AM

Hamatreya
-----------------------------by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Bulkeley, Hunt, Willard, Hosmer, Meriam, Flint,
Possessed the land which rendered to their toil
Hay, corn, roots, hemp, flax, apples, wool and wood.
Each of these landlords walked amidst his farm,
Saying, "'Tis mine, my children's and my name's.
How sweet the west wind sounds in my own trees!
How graceful climb those shadows on my hill!
I fancy these pure waters and the flags
Know me, as does my dog: we sympathize;
And, I affirm, my actions smack of the soil.'

Where are these men? Asleep beneath their grounds:
And strangers, fond as they, their furrows plough.
Earth laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boys
Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs;
Who steer the plough, but cannot steer their feet
Clear of the grave.
They added ridge to valley, brook to pond,
And sighed for all that bounded their domain;
'This suits me for a pasture; that's my park;
We must have clay, lime, gravel, granite-ledge,
And misty lowland, where to go for peat.
The land is well,--lies fairly to the south.
'Tis good, when you have crossed the sea and back,
To find the sitfast acres where you left them.'
Ah! the hot owner sees not Death, who adds
Him to his land, a lump of mould the more.
Hear what the Earth says:--

Earth-Song

'Mine and yours;
Mine, not yours, Earth endures;
Stars abide--
Shine down in the old sea;
Old are the shores;
But where are old men?
I who have seen much,
Such have I never seen.

'The lawyer's deed
Ran sure,
In tail,
To them, and to their heirs
Who shall succeed,
Without fail,
Forevermore.

'Here is the land,
Shaggy with wood,
With its old valley,
Mound and flood.
"But the heritors?--
Fled like the flood's foam.
The lawyer, and the laws,
And the kingdom,
Clean swept here from.

'They called me theirs,
Who so controlled me;
Yet every one
Wished to stay, and is gone,
How am I theirs,
If they cannot hold me,
But I hold them?'

When I heard the Earth-song,
I was no longer brave;
My avarice cooled
Like lust in the chill of the grave.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

01-24-2016, 11:02 AM

Pegasus at Wanlockhead
-------------------------------------------by Robert Burns

WITH Pegasus upon a day,
Apollo, weary flying,
Through frosty hills the journey lay,
On foot the way was plying.

Poor slipshod giddy Pegasus
Was but a sorry walker;
To Vulcan then Apollo goes,
To get a frosty caulker.

Obliging Vulcan fell to work,
Threw by his coat and bonnet,
And did Sol’s business in a crack;
Sol paid him with a sonnet.

Ye Vulcan’s sons of Wanlockhead,
Pity my sad disaster;
My Pegasus is poorly shod,
I’ll pay you like my master.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

01-25-2016, 09:20 AM

I Loved Thee, Atthis, in the Long Ago
-----------------------------------------------------------------by Bliss Carman

(Sappho XXIII)
I loved thee, Atthis, in the long ago,
When the great oleanders were in flower
In the broad herded meadows full of sun.
And we would often at the fall of dusk
Wander together by the silver stream,
When the soft grass-heads were all wet with dew
And purple-misted in the fading light.
And joy I knew and sorrow at thy voice,
And the superb magnificence of love,—
The loneliness that saddens solitude,
And the sweet speech that makes it durable,—
The bitter longing and the keen desire,
The sweet companionship through quiet days
In the slow ample beauty of the world,
And the unutterable glad release
Within the temple of the holy night.
O Atthis, how I loved thee long ago
In that fair perished summer by the sea!
--------------------------------------
--------------------------------------
Bliss Carman Biography

Born April 15, 1861 in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Son of William Carman and Sophia Mary Bliss (Sophia Mary Bliss was a descendant of Daniel Bliss of Concord, Massachusetts, the great-grandfather of Ralph Waldo Emerson; and was the aunt of Charles G.D. Roberts).

Educated at Collegiate Grammar School, Fredericton, along with his cousin Charles G.D. Roberts. In 1878 entered the University of New Brunswick, where he excelled in classics. Graduated in 1881.

Enrolled in Oxford University, but after only three days of attendance left for Edinburgh University, where some friends from New Brunswick were enrolled; studied physics, mathematics and philosophy. Did not write examinations. Returned to Fredericton in 1883, taught at Collegiate Grammar School, and read law. In 1884, while Roberts was editor of Goldwin Smith's The Week, had his first poem published ("Ma belle Canadienne.")

In 1886 entered Harvard University. At Harvard was influenced by philosophers Josiah Royce and George Santayana. Was also affected by his friendship with Richard Hovey and was influenced by the humanistic, transcendental work of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1886 had his poem "Low tide at Grand Pr‚" published in Atlantic Monthly.

Left Harvard in 1888, and worked as an editor in New York and Boston, for such journals as The Atlantic, Cosmopolitan, Current Literature, The Chapbook, The Independent, Literary World, and The Outlook. While at The Independent, published poems by Pauline Johnson, Archibald Lampman, Duncan Campbell Scott and other Canadian authors.

In 1893 published a poetry collection, Low tide on grand pr‚, winning international recognition; and between 1894 and 1900 published Songs from Vagabondia, a 3-volume series.

In 1896 met Dr. Morris Lee King and his wife, Mary Perry King. Was influenced by the philosophy of Mrs. King. Collaborated with her on The making of personality (1908) and on several other books, brochures, masques and interpretive dances. Moved in 1908 to New Canaan, Connecticut, near the Kings' estate; spent summers in a cabin near their summer home.

Met Madelaine Galbraith at a reception following her appearance in a play at Hart House, University of Toronto. She later lived in New York, studied acting and toured with several companies.

Between 1902 and 1905 published The pipes of Pan (poetry; 5 vol.'s). Edited The world's best poetry (10 vol.'s; 1904) and The Oxford book of American verse (1927). Published five books of essays, three dozen books of poetry and countless limited editions.

Memberships: was made Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1925.

Awards: in 1906 was awarded an LL.D. by the University of New Brunswick; in 1928 was awarded the Lorne Pierce Gold Medal by the Royal Society of Canada; was posthumously awarded a medal by the Poetry Society of America.

I have been sadly remiss in that I have failed so far to present many of this poet's great poems.
I cut my teeth on his poetry back in 1970 thru 1974.
He always places in my top twenty favorite poets and rates high on my list of favorite geniuses read.--Tyr

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

01-26-2016, 09:34 AM

A Threnody for Robert Louis Stevenson
------------------------------------------------------------by Bliss William Carman

COLD, the dull cold! What ails the sun,
And takes the heart out of the day?
What makes the morning look so mean,
The Common so forlorn and gray?

The wintry city's granite heart
Beats on in iron mockery,
And like the roaming mountain rains,
I hear the thresh of feet go by.

It is the lonely human surf
Surging through alleys chill with grime,
The muttering churning ceaseless floe
Adrift out of the North of time.

Fades, it all fades! I only see
The poster with its reds and blues
Bidding the heart stand still to take
Its desolating stab of news.

That intimate and magic name:
' Dead in Samoa.' . . . Cry your cries,
O city of the golden dome,
Under the gray Atlantic skies!

But I have wander-biddings now.
Far down the latitudes of sun,
An island mountain of the sea,
Piercing the green and rosy zone,

Goes up into the wondrous day.
And there the brown-limbed island men
Are bearing up for burial,
Within the sun's departing ken,

The master of the roving kind.
And there where time will set no mark
For his irrevocable rest,
Under the spacious melting dark,

With all the nomad tented stars
About him, they have laid him down
Above the crumbling of the sea,
Beyond the turmoil of renown.

O all you hearts about the world
In whom the truant gipsy blood,
Under the frost of this pale time,
Sleeps like the daring sap and flood

That dream of April and reprieve!
You whom the haunted vision drives,
Incredulous of home and ease,
Perfection's lovers all your lives!

You whom the wander-spirit loves
To lead by some forgotten clue
For ever vanishing beyond
Horizon brinks for ever new;

The road, unmarked, ordained, whereby
Your brothers of the field and air
Before you, faithful, blind, and glad,
Emerged from chaos pair by pair;

The road whereby you too must come,
In the unvexed and fabled years
Into the country of your dream,
With all your knowledge in arrears!

You who can never quite forget
Your glimpse of Beauty as she passed,
The well-head where her knee was pressed,
The dew wherein her foot was cast;

O you who bid the paint and clay
Be glorious when you are dead,
And fit the plangent words in rhyme
Where the dark secret lurks unsaid;

You brethren of the light-heart guild,
The mystic fellowcraft of joy,
Who tarry for the news of truth,
And listen for some vast ahoy

Blown in from sea, who crowd the wharves
With eager eyes that wait the ship
Whose foreign tongue may fill the world
With wondrous tales from lip to lip;

Our restless loved adventurer,
On secret orders come to him,
Has slipped his cable, cleared the reef,
And melted on the white sea-rim.

O granite hills, go down in blue!
And like green clouds in opal calms,
You anchored islands of the main,
Float up your loom of feathery palms!

For deep within your dales, where lies
A valiant earthling stark and dumb,
This savage undiscerning heart
Is with the silent chiefs who come

To mourn their kin and bear him gifts,—
Who kiss his hand, and take their place,
This last night he receives his friends,
The journey-wonder on his face.

He 'was not born for age.' Ah no,
For everlasting youth is his!
Part of the lyric of the earth
With spring and leaf and blade he is.

'Twill nevermore be April now
But there will lurk a thought of him
At the street corners, gay with flowers
From rainy valleys purple-dim.

O chiefs, you do not mourn alone!
In that stern North where mystery broods,
Our mother grief has many sons
Bred in those iron solitudes.

It does not help them, to have laid
Their coil of lightning under seas;
They are as impotent as you
To mend the loosened wrists and knees.

And yet how many a harvest night,
When the great luminous meteors flare
Along the trenches of the dusk,
The men who dwell beneath the Bear,

Seeing those vagrants of the sky
Float through the deep beyond their hark,
Like Arabs through the wastes of air,—
A flash, a dream, from dark to dark,—

Must feel the solemn large surmise:
By a dim, vast and perilous way
We sweep through undetermined time,
Illumining this quench of clay,

A moment staunched, then forth again.
Ah, not alone you climb the steep
To set your loving burden down
Against the mighty knees of sleep.

With you we hold the sombre faith
Where creeds are sown like rain at sea;
And leave the loveliest child of earth
To slumber where he longed to be.

His fathers lit the dangerous coast
To steer the daring merchant home;
His courage lights the darkling port
Where every sea-worn sail must come.

And since he was the type of all
That strain in us which still must fare,
The fleeting migrant of a day,
Heart-high, outbound for otherwhere,

Now therefore, where the passing ships
Hang on the edges of the noon,
And Northern liners trail their smoke
Across the rising yellow moon,

Bound for his home, with shuddering screw
That beats its strength out into speed,
Until the pacing watch descries
On the sea-line a scarlet seed

Smoulder and kindle and set fire
To the dark selvedge of the night,
The deep blue tapestry of stars,
Then sheet the dome in pearly light,

There in perpetual tides of day,
Where men may praise him and deplore,
The place of his lone grave shall be
A seamark set for evermore,

High on a peak adrift with mist,
And round whose bases, far beneath
The snow-white wheeling tropic birds,
The emerald dragon breaks his teeth.

Bliss William Carman
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Song Before Sailing
--------------------------------------- by Bliss William Carman

Wind of the dead men's feet,
Blow down the empty street
Of this old city by the sea
With news for me!
Blow me beyond the grime
And pestilence of time!
I am too sick at heart to war
With failure any more.
Thy chill is in my bones;
The moonlight on the stones
Is pale, and palpable, and cold;
I am as one grown old.

I call from room to room
Through the deserted gloom;
The echoes are all words I know,
Lost in some long ago.

I prowl from door to door,
And find no comrade more.
The wolfish fear that children feel
Is snuffing at my heel.

I hear the hollow sound
Of a great ship coming round,
The thunder of tackle and the tread
Of sailors overhead.

That stormy-blown hulloo
Has orders for me, too.
I see thee, hand at mouth, and hark,
My captain of the dark.

O wind of the great East,
By whom we are released
From this strange dusty port to sail
Beyond our fellows' hail,

Under the stars that keep
The entry of the deep,
Thy somber voice brings up the sea's
Forgotten melodies;

And I have no more need
Of bread, or wine, or creed,
Bound for the colonies of time
Beyond the farthest prime.

Wind of the dead men's feet,
Blow through the empty street;
The last adventurer am I,
Then, world, goodby!

Bliss William Carman

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

01-27-2016, 09:00 AM

The Moon Maiden's Song
--------------------------------------------------- by Ernest Dowson

Sleep! Cast thy canopy
Over this sleeper's brain,
Dim grow his memory,
When he wake again.

Love stays a summer night,
Till lights of morning come;
Then takes her winged flight
Back to her starry home.

Sleep! Yet thy days are mine;
Love's seal is over thee:
Far though my ways from thine,
Dim though thy memory.

Love stays a summer night,
Till lights of morning come;
Then takes her winged flight
Back to her starry home.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

01-28-2016, 07:10 AM

Growltiger's Last Stand
-------------------------------------------------by T. S. Eliot

GROWLTIGER was a Bravo Cat, who lived upon a barge;
In fact he was the roughest cat that ever roamed at large.
From Gravesend up to Oxford he pursued his evil aims,
Rejoicing in his title of "The Terror of the Thames."

His manners and appearance did not calculate to please;
His coat was torn and seedy, he was baggy at the knees;
One ear was somewhat missing, no need to tell you why,
And he scowled upon a hostile world from one forbidding eye.

The cottagers of Rotherhithe knew something of his fame,
At Hammersmith and Putney people shuddered at his name.
They would fortify the hen-house, lock up the silly goose,
When the rumour ran along the shore: GROWLTIGER'S ON THE LOOSE!

Woe to the weak canary, that fluttered from its cage;
Woe to the pampered Pekinese, that faced Growltiger's rage.
Woe to the bristly Bandicoot, that lurks on foreign ships,
And woe to any Cat with whom Growltiger came to grips!

But most to Cats of foreign race his hatred had been vowed;
To Cats of foreign name and race no quarter was allowed.
The Persian and the Siamese regarded him with fear--
Because it was a Siamese had mauled his missing ear.

Now on a peaceful summer night, all nature seemed at play,
The tender moon was shining bright, the barge at Molesey lay.
All in the balmy moonlight it lay rocking on the tide--
And Growltiger was disposed to show his sentimental side.

His bucko mate, GRUMBUSKIN, long since had disappeared,
For to the Bell at Hampton he had gone to wet his beard;
And his bosun, TUMBLEBRUTUS, he too had stol'n away-
In the yard behind the Lion he was prowling for his prey.

In the forepeak of the vessel Growltiger sate alone,
Concentrating his attention on the Lady GRIDDLEBONE.
And his raffish crew were sleeping in their barrels and their bunks--
As the Siamese came creeping in their sampans and their junks.

Growltiger had no eye or ear for aught but Griddlebone,
And the Lady seemed enraptured by his manly baritone,
Disposed to relaxation, and awaiting no surprise--
But the moonlight shone reflected from a thousand bright blue eyes.

And closer still and closer the sampans circled round,
And yet from all the enemy there was not heard a sound.
The lovers sang their last duet, in danger of their lives--
For the foe was armed with toasting forks and cruel carving knives.
Then GILBERT gave the signal to his fierce Mongolian horde;
With a frightful burst of fireworks the Chinks they swarmed aboard.
Abandoning their sampans, and their pullaways and junks,
They battened down the hatches on the crew within their bunks.

Then Griddlebone she gave a screech, for she was badly skeered;
I am sorry to admit it, but she quickly disappeared.
She probably escaped with ease, I'm sure she was not drowned--
But a serried ring of flashing steel Growltiger did surround.

The ruthless foe pressed forward, in stubborn rank on rank;
Growltiger to his vast surprise was forced to walk the plank.
He who a hundred victims had driven to that drop,
At the end of all his crimes was forced to go ker-flip, ker-flop.

Oh there was joy in Wapping when the news flew through the land;
At Maidenhead and Henley there was dancing on the strand.
Rats were roasted whole at Brentford, and at Victoria Dock,
And a day of celebration was commanded in Bangkok.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

01-29-2016, 07:55 AM

To the Memory of the Brave Americans
----------------------------------------------------- by Philip Freneau

Under General Greene, in South Carolina,
who fell in the action of September 8, 1781

AT Eutaw Springs the valiant died;
Their limbs with dust are covered o'er--
Weep on, ye springs, your tearful tide;
How many heroes are no more!

If in this wreck or ruin, they
Can yet be thought to claim a tear,
O smite your gentle breast, and say
The friends of freedom slumber here!

Thou, who shalt trace this bloody plain,
If goodness rules thy generous breast,
Sigh for the wasted rural reign;
Sign for the shepherds, sunk to rest!

Stranger, their humble graves adorn;
You too may fall, and ask a tear;
'Tis not the beauty of the morn
That proves the evening shall be clear.--

They saw their injured country's woe;
The flaming town, the wasted field;
Then rushed to meet the insulting foe;
They took the spear--but left the shield.

Led by thy conquering genius, Greene,
The Britons they compelled to fly;
None distant viewed the fatal plain,
None grieved, in such a cause to die--

But, like the Parthian, famed of old,
Who, flying, still their arrows threw,
These routed Britons, full as bold,
Retreated, and retreating slew.

Now rest in peace, our patriot band,
Though far from nature's limits thrown,
We trust they find a happier land,
A brighter sunshine of their own.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------

""Stranger, their humble graves adorn;
You too may fall, and ask a tear;
'Tis not the beauty of the morn
That proves the evening shall be clear.--""

^^^ Why Freneau is one of my favorite poets!! -Tyr

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

01-30-2016, 07:30 PM

For My Daughter
------------------------------------- by David Ignatow

When I die choose a star
and name it after me
that you may know
I have not abandoned
or forgotten you.
You were such a star to me,
following you through birth
and childhood, my hand
in your hand.

When I die
choose a star and name it
after me so that I may shine
down on you, until you join
me in darkness and silence
together.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

01-31-2016, 03:14 PM

The Poet's Corner
--------------------------------------------by Laura Riding Jackson

Here where the end of bone is no end of song
And the earth is bedecked with immortality
In what was poetry
And now is pride beside
And nationality,
Here is a battle with no bravery
But if the coward's tongue has gone
Swording his own lusty lung.
Listen if there is victory
Written into a library
Waving the books in banners
Soldierly at last, for the lines
Go marching on, delivered of the soul.

And happily may they rest beyond
Suspicion now, the incomprehensibles
Traitorous in such talking
As chattered over their countries' boundaries.
The graves are gardened and the whispering
Stops at the hedges, there is singing
Of it in the ranks, there is a hush
Where the ground has limits
And the rest is loveliness.

And loveliness?
Death has an understanding of it
Loyal to many flags
And is a silent ally of any country
Beset in its mortal heart
With immortal poetry.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

01-31-2016, 11:34 PM

SCARECROW CRIMES
----------------------------------------- by John Lindley

In Hayfield I imagine
not just the nuts and bolts of split cockpits
but a Spitfire’s sunk fuselage

has smoked out its entirety unseen
from one century to the next.
At Edale Cross, Birch Vale or Kinder,

in rock, field or peat bog
more than machinery beds down and is lost,
it’s true

but here in this field
with all of the exposed corn,
yellow as scattered light

bubble-packing the soil,
the vanishings are less numerous
but no less strange -

a child here, a dog there,
a stoat whose teeth weren’t defence enough
have become a cache of quiet forgettings,

plucked without fuss
and gone without trace
and a frayed crucifix -

tweed coat, stoved in chest
and stitched neck ruff -
has shrugged his coat hanger shoulders

and pogo’d west from the rising sun.
In the first tatters of light
blameless crows rattle in the wind.
John Lindley
------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------

CROW AND AUDEN
---------------------------------------------------- by John Lindley

A misprint in a newspaper reported: ‘Auden stepped from the train and was greeted by a small but enthusiastic crow.’

‘Hmm,’ Auden thought when first he saw
the bird, as train came to a stop,
‘I’ll make this image mine before
some Yorkshire upstart snaps it up.’

He drew a notebook from his mac’,
unclipped a biro from his tweed,
stared at the crow, the crow stared back
then recognising him indeed

began to stun the platform crowd,
began to flap, began to sing,
and the poet wrote about its loud
and flattering beak, applauding wings.

Reporters, fans all stood amazed.
It seemed as if all clocks had stopped.
Only Auden stood unfazed.
Only his chin hadn’t dropped.

He pulled a Woodbine from its pack,
pulled out a match and struck a light,
stared at the crow, the crow stared back.
The night mail train pulled into sight.
John Lindley

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

02-01-2016, 11:06 PM

A LOOK INTO THE GULF
------------------------------------------------by Edwin Markham

I LOOKED one night, and there the Semiramis,
With all her mourning doves about her head,
Sat rocking on an ancient road of Hell,
Withered and eyeless, chanting to the moon
Snatches of song they sang to her of old
Upon the lighted roofs of Nineveh.
And then her voice rang out with rattling laugh:
"The bugles! they are crying back again--
Bugles that broke the nights of Babylon,
And then went crying on through Nineveh.
....................
Stand back, ye trembling messengers of ill!
Women, let go my hair: I am the Queen,
A whirlwind and a blaze of swords to quell
Insurgent cities. Let the iron tread
Of armies shake the earth. Look, lofty towers:
Assyria goes by upon the wind!"
And so she babbles by the ancient road,
While cities turned to dust upon the Earth
Rise through her whirling brain to live again--
Babbles all night, and when her voice is dead
Her weary lips beat on without a sound.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

02-02-2016, 11:15 AM

The Highwayman
------------------------------------------by Alfred Noyes

PART ONE

The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding--
Riding--riding--
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inndoor.

He'd a French cocked-hat on his forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin,
A coat of claret velvet, and breeches of brown doeskin;
They fitted with never a wrinkle: his boots were up to the thigh!
And he rode with a jewelled twinkle,
His pistol butts a-twinkle
His rapier hilt a-twinkle, under the jewelled sky.

Over the cobbles he clattered and clashed in the dard inn-yard,
And he tapped with his whip on the shutters, but all was locked and barred;
He whistled a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
But the landlord's black-eyed daughter,
Bess, the landlord's daughter,
Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.

And dark in the dark old inn-yard a stable-wicket creaked
Where Tim the ostler listened; his face was white and peaked;
His eyes were hollows of madness, his hair like moldy hay,
But he loved the landlord's daughter,
The landlord's red-lipped daughter,
Dumb as a dog he listened, and heard the robber say--

"One kiss, my bonny sweetheart, I'm after a prize tonight,
But I shall be back with the yellow gold before morning light;
Yet, if they press me sharply, and harry me through the day,
Then look for me by moonlight,
Watch for me by moonlight,
I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way."

He rose upright in the stirrups; he scarce could reach her hand,
But she loosened her hair i' the casement! His face burnt like a brand
As the black cascade of perfume came tumbling over his breast;
And he kissed its waves in the moonlight,
(Oh, sweet black waves in the moonlight!)
Then he tugged at his rein in the moonlight, and galloped away to the West.

PART TWO

He did not come in the dawning; he did not come at noon;
And out o' the tawny sunset, before the rise o' the moon,
When the road was a gypsy's ribbon, looping the purple moor,
A red coat troop came marching--
marching--marching--
King George's men came marching, up to the old inn-door.

They said no word to the landlord, they drank his ale instead,
But they gagged his daughter and bound her to the foot of her narrow bed;
Two fo them knelt at her casement, with muskets at their side!
There was death at every window;
And hell at one dark window;
For Bess could see, through her casement, the road that he would ride.

They had tied her up to attention, with many a sniggering jest;
They had bound a musket beside her, with the barrel beneath her breast!
"Now keep good watch!" and they kissed her. She heard the dead man say--
Look for me by moonlight;
Watch for me by moonlight;
I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way!

She twisted her hands behind her; but all the knots held good!
She writhed her hands till her fingers were wet with sweat or blood!
They stretched and strained in the darkness, and the hours crawled by like years,
Till, now, on the stroke of midnight,
Cold, on the stroke of midnight,
The tip of one finger touched it! The trigger at least was hers!

The tip of one finger touched it; she strove no more for rest!
Up, she stood to attention, with the barrel beneath her breast,
She would not risk their hearing; she would not strive again;
For the road lay bare in the moonlight;
Blank and bare in the moonlight;
And the blood of her veins in the moonlight throbbed to her love's refrain

Tlot-tlot; tlot-tlot! Had they heard it? This horse-hoofs ringing clear;
Tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, in the distance? Were they deaf that they did not hear?
Down the ribbon of moonlight, over the brow of the hill,
The highwayman came riding,
Riding, riding!
The red-coats looked to their priming! She stood up, straight and still!

Tlot-tlot, in the frosty silence! Tlot-tlot in the echoing night!
Nearer he came and nearer! Her face was like a light!
Her eyes grew wide for a moment; she drew one last deep breath,
Then her finger moved in the moonlight,
Her musket shattered the moonlight,
Shattered her breast in the moonlight and warned him - with her death.

He turned; he spurred to the West; he did not know who stood
Bowed, with her head o'er the musket, drenched with her own red blood!
Not till the dawn he heard it, his face grew gray to hear
How Bess, the landlord's daughter,
The landlords black-eyed daughter,
Had watched her love in the moonlight, and died in the darkness there.

Back, he spurred like a madman, shreiking a curse to the sky,
with the white road smoking behind him, and his rapier brain dished high!
Blood-red were his spurs i' the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat.
When they shot him down in the highway,
Down like a dog on the highway,
And he lay his blood on the highway, with a bunch of lace at his throat.

And still of a winter's night, they say, when the wind is in the trees,
When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cluody seas,
When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
A highwayman comes riding--
Riding--riding--
A highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door.

Over the cobbles he clatters and clangs in the dark inn-yard;
He taps with his whip on the shutters, but all is locked and barred;
He whistles a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
But the landlord's daughter,
Bess, the landlord's daughter,
Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.
-------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------

Alfred Noyes biography

Alfred Noyes was the son of Alfred and Amelia Adams Noyes. He was born on the 16th of September in the year 1880 in the town of Wolverhamton, England. His father was a teacher and taught Latin and Greek and in Aberystwyth, Wales. In 1898, Alfred attended Exeter College in Oxford. Though he failed to earn a degree, the young poet published his first collection of poetry, The Loom of Years, in 1902.

Between 1903 and 1908, Noyes published five volumes of poetry including The Forest of Wild Thyme (1905) and The Flower of Old Japan and Other Poems (1907). His books were widely reviewed and were published both in Britain and the United States. Among his best-known poems from this time are The Highwayman and Drake. Drake, which appeared serially in Blackwood's Magazine, was a two-hundred page epic about life at sea.

Noyes married Garnett Daniels in 1907, and they had three children. His increasing popularity allowed the family to live off royalty checks. In 1914, Noyes accepted a teaching position at Princeton University, where he taught English Literature until 1923. He was a noted critic of modernist writers, particularly James Joyce. Likewise, his work at this time was criticized by some for its refusal to embrace the modernist movement.

In 1922 he began an epic called The Torch Bearers, which was published in three volumes (Watchers of the Sky, 1922; The Book of Earth, 1925; and The Last Voyage, 1930). The book was inspired by his visit to a telescope located at Mount Wilson, California and attempted to reconcile his views of science with religion.

After the death of his wife, Garnett in 1926, Noyes converted to Roman Catholicism and married his second wife, Mary Angela Mayne Weld-Blundell. In 1929, the family moved to Lisle Combe, St Lawrence, Isle of Wight where Noyes continued to write essays and poems, culminating in the collection, Orchard's Bay (1939). Alfred Noyes died on June 25, 1958, and was buried on the Isle of Wight.

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

02-03-2016, 10:06 AM

In The Village Of My Ancestors
-------------------------------------------------------------- by Vasko Popa
Someone embraces me
Someone looks at me with the eyes of a wolf
Someone takes off his hat
So I can see him better

Everyone asks me
Do you know how I'm related to you

Unknown old men and women
Appropriate the names
Of young men and women from my memory

I ask one of them
Tell me for God's sake
Is George the Wolf still living

That's me he answers
With a voice from the next world

I touch his cheek with my hand
And beg him with my eyes
To tell me if I'm living too
----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------

Vasko Popa born June 29, 1922, Grebenac, Serbia, Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes [later Yugoslavia]
died Jan. 5, 1991, Belgrade, Yugo.

Serbian poet who wrote in a succinct modernist style that owed more to French surrealism and Serbian folk traditions than to the Socialist Realism that dominated Eastern European literature after World War II.

Popa fought with a partisan group during World War II and then studied in Vienna and Bucharest before completing his education at the University of Belgrade (1949). He took a job as an editor in Belgrade, and in 1953 he published his first major verse collection, Kora (“Bark”). His other important work included Nepocin-polje (1956; “Field of No Rest”), Sporedno nebo (1968; “Secondary Heaven”), Uspravna zemlja (1972; Earth Erect), Vucja so (1975; “Wolf's Salt”), and Od zlata jabuka (1958; The Golden Apple), an anthology of Serbian folk literature. His Collected Poems, 1943–76, a compilation in English translation, appeared in 1978, with an introduction by the British poet Ted Hughes.

Biography from: britannica.com

LongTermGuy

02-03-2016, 10:34 AM

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

02-04-2016, 10:30 AM

Ballad of Dead Friends
--------------------------------------------------by Edwin Arlington Robinson

As we the withered ferns
By the roadway lying,
Time, the jester, spurns
All our prayers and prying --
All our tears and sighing,
Sorrow, change, and woe --
All our where-and-whying
For friends that come and go.

Life awakes and burns,
Age and death defying,
Till at last it learns
All but Love is dying;
Love's the trade we're plying,
God has willed it so;
Shrouds are what we're buying
For friends that come and go.

Man forever yearns
For the thing that's flying.
Everywhere he turns,
Men to dust are drying, --
Dust that wanders, eying
(With eyes that hardly glow)
New faces, dimly spying
For friends that come and go.

ENVOY

And thus we all are nighing
The truth we fear to know:
Death will end our crying
For friends that come and go.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Another one-Tyr

The Story Of The Ashes And The Flame
by Edwin Arlington Robinson
No matter why, nor whence, nor when she came,
There was her place. No matter what men said,
No matter what she was; living or dead,
Faithful or not,he loved her all the same.
The story was as old as human shame,
But ever since that lonely night she fled,
With books to blind him, he had only read
The story of the ashes and the flame.

There she was always coming pretty soon
To fool him back, with penitent scared eyes
That had in them the laughter of the moon
For baffled lovers, and to make him think—
Before she gave him time enough to wink—
Her kisses were the keys to Paradise.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Biography- Edwin Arlington Robinson

On December 22nd, 1869, Edwin Arlington Robinson was born to Edwin Robinson and Mary Elizabeth Palmer in Head Tide, Maine. Growing up he lived in a town on the Kennecbec River called Gardiner, Maine. In a lot of his later poetry he bases a fictional town, Tilbury Town, on Gardiner. His family, which also consisted of two other brothers, lived moderately on his father's income, who worked as an important timber merchant. Robinson started seriously writing poetry at age 11, and was a talented writer for someone his age.

Despite his father's wishes, Robinson attended Harvard for two years, but had to leave because his family's money was running short. In 1892 his father died, resulting in Robinson and his family becoming quite poor. Later in 1896 his mother died of a serious illness. Some of Robinson's poetry grew from these unfortunate incidents.

After leaving Harvard, Robinson moved to New York City, and lived in Greenwich Village, in a house where many other artists and writers had once lived. He was very poor during this time, and didn't have much to support himself at all. He could basically carry all of his worldly possessions in one backpack.

In the 1890's he began to publish some of his poetry, mostly with the help of some of his friends. His first two books were "The Torrent and the Night Before" and "The Children of the Night" (based on the death of his mother). His third published book was "Captain Craig", and his forth was "The Town Down the River", which former President Theodore Roosevelt helped to get published.

Robinson, at the time, was working underground inspecting construction when Roosevelt discovered him. Roosevelt liked Robinson's work, and helped him to get a clerkship in the New York City Customs House. At this job, Robinson made enough income to support himself, and was able to devote most of his time to writing poetry. From this time on, Robinson's money problems were over.

After 1911 Robinson spent his summers in New Hampshire, and spent much time writing and publishing his poetry. By this time his books supported him for the rest of his life.

During his lifetime, Edwin Arlington Robinson won three Pulitzer Prizes for his poetry. The first time was in 1922; "Collected Poems" won his first Pulitzer. In 1925, he won his second for "The Man Who Died Twice". And he won his final Pulitzer in 1928 for "Tristram". During the 1920's he was often called "The Greatest Living American Poet", and later in his life was hailed the foremost figure of "New Poetry". Even though Robinson mostly wrote about traditional things (some being days of his old hometown, and King Authurs Court), nothing new or experimental, he still was considered a legend after his time.

Robinson died on April 6th, 1935 in New York City. By this time all his immediate family had died. He wrote many popular and great poems during his days, some of these are: "Merlin", "Lancelot", "Richard Cory", "Miniver Cheevy", "Mr. Flood's Party", "For a Dead Lady", and "Luke Havergal".

Tyr-Ziu Saxnot

02-05-2016, 08:58 AM

Liberty

or a hundred years the pulse of time
Has throbbed for Liberty;
For a hundred years the grand old clime
Columbia has been free;
For a hundred years our country's love,
The Stars and Stripes, has waved above.

Away far out on the gulf of years--
Misty and faint and white
Through the fogs of wrong--a sail appears,
And the Mayflower heaves in sight,
And drifts again, with its little flock
Of a hundred souls, on Plymouth Rock.

Do you see them there--as long, long since--
Through the lens of History;
Do you see them there as their chieftain prints
In the snow his bended knee,
And lifts his voice through the wintry blast
In thanks for a peaceful home at last?

Though the skies are dark and the coast is bleak,
And the storm is wild and fierce,
Its frozen flake on the upturned cheek
Of the Pilgrim melts in tears,
And the dawn that springs from the darkness there
Is the morning light of an answered prayer.

The morning light of the day of Peace
That gladdens the aching eyes,
And gives to the soul that sweet release
That the present verifies,--
Nor a snow so deep, nor a wind so chill
To quench the flame of a freeman's will!

II

Days of toil when the bleeding hand
Of the pioneer grew numb,
When the untilled tracts of the barren land
Where the weary ones had come
Could offer nought from a fruitful soil
To stay the strength of the stranger's toil.

Days of pain, when the heart beat low,
And the empty hours went by
Pitiless, with the wail of woe
And the moan of Hunger's cry--
When the trembling hands upraised in prayer
Had only the strength to hold them there.

Days when the voice of hope had fled--
Days when the eyes grown weak
Were folded to, and the tears they shed
Were frost on a frozen cheek--
When the storm bent down from the skies and gave
A shroud of snow for the Pilgrim's grave.

Days at last when the smiling sun
Glanced down from a summer sky,
And a music rang where the rivers run,
And the waves went laughing by;
And the rose peeped over the mossy bank
While the wild deer stood in the stream and drank.

And the birds sang out so loud and good,
In a symphony so clear
And pure and sweet that the woodman stood
With his ax upraised to hear,
And to shape the words of the tongue unknown
Into a language all his own--

1

'Sing! every bird, to-day!
Sing for the sky so clear,
And the gracious breath of the atmosphere
Shall waft our cares away.
Sing! sing! for the sunshine free;
Sing through the land from sea to sea;
Lift each voice in the highest key
And sing for Liberty!'

2

'Sing for the arms that fling
Their fetters in the dust
And lift their hands in higher trust
Unto the one Great King;
Sing for the patriot heart and hand;
Sing for the country they have planned;
Sing that the world may understand
This is Freedom's land!'

3

'Sing in the tones of prayer,
Sing till the soaring soul
Shall float above the world's control
In freedom everywhere!
Sing for the good that is to be,
Sing for the eyes that are to see
The land where man at last is free,
O sing for liberty!'

III

A holy quiet reigned, save where the hand
Of labor sent a murmur through the land,
And happy voices in a harmony
Taught every lisping breeze a melody.
A nest of cabins, where the smoke upcurled
A breathing incense to the other world.
A land of languor from the sun of noon,
That fainted slowly to the pallid moon,
Till stars, thick-scattered in the garden-land
Of Heaven by the great Jehovah's hand,
Had blossomed into light to look upon
The dusky warrior with his arrow drawn,
As skulking from the covert of the night
With serpent cunning and a fiend's delight,
With murderous spirit, and a yell of hate
The voice of Hell might tremble to translate:
When the fond mother's tender lullaby
Went quavering in shrieks all suddenly,
And baby-lips were dabbled with the stain
Of crimson at the bosom of the slain,
And peaceful homes and fortunes ruined--lost
In smoldering embers of the holocaust.
Yet on and on, through years of gloom and strife,
Our country struggled into stronger life;
Till colonies, like footprints in the sand,
Marked Freedom's pathway winding through the land--
And not the footprints to be swept away
Before the storm we hatched in Boston Bay,--
But footprints where the path of war begun
That led to Bunker Hill and Lexington,--
For he who "dared to lead where others dared
To follow" found the promise there declared
Of Liberty, in blood of Freedom's host
Baptized to Father, Son, and Holy Ghost!

Oh, there were times when every patriot breast
Was riotous with sentiments expressed
In tones that swelled in volume till the sound
Of lusty war itself was well-nigh drowned.
Oh, those were times when happy eyes with tears
Brimmed o'er as all the misty doubts and fears
Were washed away, and Hope with gracious mien,
Reigned from her throne again a sovereign queen.
Until at last, upon a day like this
When flowers were blushing at the summer's kiss,
And when the sky was cloudless as the face
Of some sweet infant in its angel grace,--
There came a sound of music, thrown afloat
Upon the balmy air--a clanging note
Reiterated from the brazen throat
Of Independence Bell: A sound so sweet,
The clamoring throngs of people in the streets
Were stilled as at the solemn voice of prayer,
And heads were bowed, and lips were moving there
That made no sound--until the spell had passed,
And then, as when all sudden comes the blast
Of some tornado, came the cheer on cheer
Of every eager voice, while far and near
The echoing bells upon the atmosphere
Set glorious rumors floating, till the ear
Of every listening patriot tingled clear,
And thrilled with joy and jubilee to hear.

I

'Stir all your echoes up,
O Independence Bell,
And pour from your inverted cup
The song we love so well.

'Lift high your happy voice,
And swing your iron tongue
Till syllables of praise rejoice
That never yet were sung.

'Ring in the gleaming dawn
Of Freedom--Toll the knell
Of Tyranny, and then ring on,
O Independence Bell.--

'Ring on, and drown the moan,
Above the patriot slain,
Till sorrow's voice shall catch the tone
And join the glad refrain.

'Ring out the wounds of wrong
And rankle in the breast;
Your music like a slumber-song
Will lull revenge to rest.

'Ring out from Occident
To Orient, and peal
From continent to continent
The mighty joy you feel.

'Ring! Independence Bell!
Ring on till worlds to be
Shall listen to the tale you tell
Of love and Liberty!'

IV

O Liberty--the dearest word
A bleeding country ever heard,--
We lay our hopes upon thy shrine
And offer up our lives for thine.
You gave us many happy years
Of peace and plenty ere the tears
A mourning country wept were dried
Above the graves of those who died
Upon thy threshold. And again
When newer wars were bred, and men
Went marching in the cannon's breath
And died for thee and loved the death,
While, high above them, gleaming bright,
The dear old flag remained in sight,
And lighted up their dying eyes
With smiles that brightened paradise.
O Liberty, it is thy power
To gladden us in every hour
Of gloom, and lead us by thy hand
As little children through a land
Of bud and blossom; while the days
Are filled with sunshine, and thy praise
Is warbled in the roundelays
Of joyous birds, and in the song
Of waters, murmuring along
The paths of peace, whose flowery fringe
Has roses finding deeper tinge
Of crimson, looking on themselves
Reflected--leaning from the shelves
Of cliff and crag and mossy mound
Of emerald splendor shadow-drowned.--
We hail thy presence, as you come
With bugle blast and rolling drum,
And booming guns and shouts of glee
Commingled in a symphony
That thrills the worlds that throng to see
The glory of thy pageantry.
And with thy praise, we breathe a prayer
That God who leaves you in our care
May favor us from this day on
With thy dear presence--till the dawn
Of Heaven, breaking on thy face,
Lights up thy first abiding place.

by James Whitcomb Riley
New Castle, July 4, 1878