A Poem a day keeps the melancholy away

Eliot Rosewater · 20-07-2010 12:10pm

I actually got a book printed once, over on Lulu.com. It was an illustrated collection of Kurt Vonnegut quotes I designed as a present. I might throw up a few examples on the Vonnegut thread.

George Orwell 1982 · 20-07-2010 2:05pm

Brendan Kennelly - Begin
Begin again to the summoning birds
to the sight of light at the window,
begin to the roar of morning traffic
all along Pembroke Road.
Every beginning is a promise
born in light and dying in dark
determination and exaltation of springtime
flowering the way to work.
Begin to the pageant of queuing girls
the arrogant loneliness of swans in the canal
bridges linking the past and the future
old friends passing through with us still.
Begin to the loneliness that cannot end
since it perhaps is what makes us begin,
begin to wonder at unknown faces
at crying birds in the sudden rain
at branches stark in the willing sunlight
at seagulls foraging for bread
at couples sharing a sunny secret
alone together while making good.
Though we live in a world that dreams of ending
that always seems about to give in
something that will not acknowledge conclusion
insists that we forever begin.

nompere · 21-07-2010 3:44pm

Friedrich Rückert wrote hundred of poems collectively known as Kindertotenlieder: songs on the death of children. He had lost a son and a daughter to scarlet fever.

Gustav Mahler took five of the poems and set them to music. This is an English translation of one of them:

When your dear mother
comes in through the door,
and I turn my head
to look at her,
my glance falls first
not on her face,
but on the place
nearer the threshold,
where you dear little face would be
when you bright with joy,
would enter, too,
as you used to, my little girl.

When your dear mother
comes through the door,
holding a flickering candle
it seems to me as if
you were entering too,
you slipped into the room with her,
as you used to do.
O you, refuge of your father,
light of joy,
extinguished all too soon!

Alice Milligan · 24-07-2010 10:59pm

This poem by Carl Sandburg is the eight poem in his collection The People, Yes.

Mildred Klinghofer whirled through youth in bloom. One baby came and was taken away, another came and was taken away. From her windows she saw the cornrows young and green. And later the final stand of the corn and the huddled shocks. And the blue mist of a winter thaw deepening at evening.
In her middle forties her first husband died. In her middle sixties her second husband died.
In her middle seventies her third husband died. And she died at mid-eighty with her fourth husband at the bedside. Thus she had known an editor, a lawyer, a grocer, a retired farmer.
To the first of them she had borne two children she had hungered for. And deep in her had stayed a child hunger.
In the last hours when her mind wondered, she cried imperiously, “My baby! Let me hold my baby!”
And her cries for this child, born of her mind, in her final moments of life, went on and on.
When they answered, “Your baby isn’t here” or “Your baby is coming soon if you will wait”, she kept on with her cry, “My baby! Let me hold my baby!”
And they made a rag doll and laid in her arms and she clutched it as a mother would.
And she was satisfied and her second childhood ended like her first, with a doll in her arms.
There are dreams stronger than death. Men and women die holding these dreams. Yes “stronger than death”; let the hammers beat on this slogan. Let the sea wash its salt against it and the blizzards drive wind and winter at it.
Let the undersea sharks try to break this bronze murmur. Let the gentle bush dig its root deep and spread upward to split one boulder.
Blame the frustrate? Some of them have lived stronger than death. Blame only the smug and scrupulous beyond reproach. Who made the guess Shakespeare died saying his best plays didn’t get written? Who swindles himself more deeply than the one saying, “I am holier than thou?”

“I love you”, said a great mother. “I love you for what you are knowing so well what you are. And I love you more yet than ever, child, for what you are going to be, knowing so well you are going far, knowing your great works are ahead, ahead and beyond, yonder and far over yet.”

KnifeWRENCH · 25-07-2010 7:39pm

I have never read poetry since my Leaving Cert days. Always wanted to get into it more; I think I'll be using this thread as a springboard to start!

I have noticed though that my two favourite poets from Leaving Cert have not been mentioned yet; Sylvia Plath and T.S. Eliot.

Elm - Sylvia Plath

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root;
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was you madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it.
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallup thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, the big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin white, like arsenic.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand,a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radience scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I let her go. I let her go
Diminshed and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrevables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?--

Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.

And while it's far too long to post up here, T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is an amazing piece of work.

Procasinator · 26-07-2010 4:05pm

Emily Dickinson: "Hope" is the thing with feathers

"Hope" is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—

And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—
And sore must be the storm—
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm—

I've heard it in the chillest land—
And on the strangest Sea—
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb—of Me.

ragalag · 27-07-2010 12:40am

Living in the earth-deposits of our history

Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.
Power
Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power.

Adrienne Rich

I just love that last bit..the fragmenting quality really makes it..

Amazotheamazing · 07-08-2010 5:26pm

Are You There?

Each lover has some theory of his own
About the difference between the ache
Of being with his love, and being alone:

Why what, when dreaming, is dear flesh and bone
That really stirs the senses, when awake,
Appears a simulacrum of his own.

Narcissus disbelieves in the unknown;
He cannot join his image in the lake
So long as he assumes he is alone.

The child, the waterfall, the fire, the stone,
Are always up to mischief, though, and take
The universe for granted as their own.

The elderly, like Proust, are always prone
To think of love as a subjective fake;
The more they love, the more they feel alone.

Whatever view we hold, it must be shown
Why every lover has a wish to make
Some kind of otherness his own:
Perhaps, in fact, we never are alone.

WH Auden
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wl0P2Tf8e8&feature=related

metrovelvet · 07-08-2010 7:59pm

I really like that one, never came across it before. Thanks.

Alice Milligan · 08-08-2010 3:06pm

Complaint

To whom shall you complain, heart? Ever more /
shunned
your way wrestles through the impenetrable
people. The more to no avail perhaps,
because it holds to the direction,
holds to the direction of the future,
to what has been lost.

In the past. You complained? What was it? A fallen
berry of Joy, unripe.
But now my whole Tree of Joy is breaking,
in the storm my slowly grown Tree of Joy
is breaking.
Most beautiful thing in my invisible
landscape, you who made me more knowable
to angels, invisible ones.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Whippersnapper · 11-08-2010 12:26am

The Arrow and the Song

I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.

I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For, who has sight so keen and strong
That it can follow the flight of song?

Long, long afterward, in an oak
I found the arrow, still unbroke;
And the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

tomasocarthaigh · 11-08-2010 5:58pm

Not too many would do that for their friends...

Eliot Rosewater wrote: »

I just saw "Tom Crean" the stage show there. And its snowing. So heres a poem by Derek Mahon about the suicide of crippled Lawrence Oates, who gave his life so that the other 3 men of his South Pole expedition might make it back to the home camp alive, unburdened by his injury. He walked out of the tent into the cold in the middle of the night.

Antarctica
‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’
The others nod, pretending not to know.
At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.

He leaves them reading and begins to climb,
Goading his ghost into the howling snow;
He is just going outside and may be some time.

The tent recedes beneath its crust of rime
And frostbite is replaced by vertigo:
At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.

Need we consider it some sort of crime,
This numb self-sacrifice of the weakest? No,
He is just going outside and may be some time

In fact, for ever. Solitary enzyme,
Though the night yield no glimmer there will glow,
At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.

tomasocarthaigh · 11-08-2010 5:59pm

Here is my tuppence worth for today..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM2aOjmUgpo

Elessar · 11-08-2010 6:07pm

I came across this recently - I'm not a poem person but I think it strikes a cord:

Calmly we walk through this April's day

Calmly we walk through this April's day,
Metropolitan poetry here and there,
In the park sit pauper and rentier,
The screaming children, the motor-car
Fugitive about us, running away,
Between the worker and the millionaire
Number provides all distances,
It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,
Many great dears are taken away,
What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn...)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(...that time is the fire in which we burn.)

(This is the school in which we learn...)
What is the self amid this blaze?
What am I now that I was then
Which I shall suffer and act again,
The theodicy I wrote in my high school days
Restored all life from infancy,
The children shouting are bright as they run
(This is the school in which they learn . . .)
Ravished entirely in their passing play!
(...that time is the fire in which they burn.)

Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!
Where is my father and Eleanor?
Not where are they now, dead seven years,
But what they were then?
No more? No more?
From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,
Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume
Not where they are now (where are they now?)
But what they were then, both beautiful;

Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.

Delmore Schwartz

metrovelvet · 16-08-2010 9:20pm

Mock Orange

BY LOUISE GLÜCK

It is not the moon, I tell you.
It is these flowers
lighting the yard.

I hate them.
I hate them as I hate sex,
the man’s mouth
sealing my mouth, the man’s
paralyzing body—

and the cry that always escapes,
the low, humiliating
premise of union—

In my mind tonight
I hear the question and pursuing answer
fused in one sound
that mounts and mounts and then
is split into the old selves,
the tired antagonisms. Do you see?
We were made fools of.
And the scent of mock orange
drifts through the window.

How can I rest?
How can I be content
when there is still
that odor in the world?

Amazotheamazing · 27-08-2010 4:02am

Let Me Die a Youngman's Death

Let me die a youngman's death
not a clean and inbetween
the sheets holywater death
not a famous-last-words
peaceful out of breath death

When I'm 73
and in constant good tumour
may I be mown down at dawn
by a bright red sports car
on my way home
from an allnight party

Or when I'm 91
with silver hair
and sitting in a barber's chair
may rival gangsters
with hamfisted tommyguns burst in
and give me a short back and insides

Or when I'm 104
and banned from the Cavern
may my mistress
catching me in bed with her daughter
and fearing for her son
cut me up into little pieces
and throw away every piece but one

Let me die a youngman's death
not a free from sin tiptoe in
candle wax and waning death
not a curtains drawn by angels borne
'what a nice way to go' death

Roger McGough

Alice Milligan · 30-08-2010 8:35pm

Happiness

A state you must dare not enter
with hopes of staying,
quicksand in the marshes, and all

the roads leading to a castle
that doesn't exist.
But there it is, as promised,

with its perfect bridge above
the crocodiles,
and its doors forever open.

Stephen Dunn

ANarcho-Munk · 31-08-2010 2:22am

^
That poem really hit the spot for the mood i'm in right now.
Its optimistic starkness (if you can call it that) really touched me. It helps that i've been reading into a lot of existentialism lately, the basic ideas of which seems emphasised in the subject matter of the poem. The all important goal of the individual to achieve, and hold onto, happiness - no matter what the severity of the struggle entails.

Its underlying melancholy also reminded me of this fatalistic Derek Walcott poem, for one reason or another.

Endings

Things do not explode,
they fail, they fade,

as sunlight fades from the flesh,
as the foam drains quick in the sand,

even love's lightning flash
has no thunderous end.

it dies with the sound
of flowers fading like the flesh

from sweating pumice stone,
everything shapes this

till we are left
with the silence that surrounds Beethoven's head.

-Derek Walcott

nompere · 30-09-2010 4:09pm

This thread deserves to be bumped. I can't believe that this will be the first post in all September.

Anyway ...

This one goes back to my schooldays, but I still like the sounds throughout the poem.

Cargoes

Quinquereme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amythysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

John Masefield

What I find interesting is his spelling of "amythyst". When you search the net for this poem you find both the spelling used above and the correct form of "amethyst". "Amythyst" is the more common, and it seems to appear on those sites that care most about poetry, so I suspect it is what Masefield actually used. I wonder why? (I also found one use of "amethest" but I suspect that the author of that website was probably illiterate!)

fontanalis · 01-10-2010 5:51pm

Short and sweet

So many gods, so many creeds;
So many paths that wind and wind,
While just the art of being kind
Is all the sad world needs

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Happyman42 · 06-10-2010 12:08pm

useurename wrote: »

no other word will do.for thats what it was.gravy
gravy these past ten years
alive,sober,working,loving and
being loved by a good woman.eleven years
ago he was told he had ten months to live
at the rate he was going. and he was going
nowhere but down.so he changed his ways
somehow.he quit drinking! and the rest
after that it was all gravy,every minute
of it,up to and incuding when he was told about,
well,somethings that were breaking down and
building up inside his head."don't weep for me"
he said to his friends."i'm a lucky man.
i've had ten years longer than i or anyone
expected.pure gravy.and don't forget it

"gravy" by raymond carver
i really love this poem.

Great thread!...if only for the gem above, never read that before.

Came across this gem recently, (apparently the first three lines of the last stanza were quoted by JFK as he boarded the steps of his plane leaving Ireland.)

Forever

THOSE we love truly never die,
Though year by year the sad memorial wreath,
A ring and flowers, types of life and death,
Are laid upon their graves.

For death the pure life saves,
And life all pure is love; and love can reach
From heaven to earth, and nobler lessons teach
Than those by mortals read.

Well blest is he who has a dear one dead:
A friend he has whose face will never change—
A dear communion that will not grow strange;
The anchor of a love is death.

The blessed sweetness of a loving breath
Will reach our cheek all fresh through weary years.
For her who died long since, ah! waste not tears,
She's thine unto the end.

Thank God for one dead friend,
With face still radiant with the light of truth,
Whose love comes laden with the scent of youth,
Through twenty years of death.

John Boyle O'Reilly

tomasocarthaigh · 06-10-2010 1:19pm

Id forgotton all about this thread until I saw the update in my emails. Below is my offering for today, one of my own...

"I Hope When Old
To Waste My Time"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6h5SMfKdsk

I hope when old to waste my time
And be idle playing chess
And think myself clever so doing
For I must confess
Of the game I am a fan
Though at it I'm little good
And instead of a sign maybe I ought to give up
I think that practice more, I should.
Shaw thought little of it
And I thought of his quote
When I took my pen in hand
And this small poem I wrote
For to enjoy life, even if wasted
It is every mans right
Indeed many say the same of us poets
That we waste our time when we write.
I hope when old to waste my time
Among friends, playing chess
And maybe still writing a line or too
Passing thoughts to express
To indulge both it would be bliss
Keep from the eyes the tears
That wash the faces of many of age
Who have little to while away the years...

Happyman42 · 07-10-2010 11:48am

Happy Poetry Day!

Ireland Unfree

Ireland you gave me false Gods and cult prayer and guilt demons to feed small town snide smile niceties ingrained into the heartwood of your mythology
Ireland you said my faith was weak when I questioned you authority
Ireland I believed in you -

Ireland I am no longer a devotee of your sham clergy
there are no forged rosaries on my lips
Ireland you have become the monster you preached against
sins confess whispering in the ear of the beast devouring children’s souls on the altar of your corrupt house
Ireland I do not fear the Godhead of state and church
Ireland you taught me what I am not
Ireland your sacred hills are bleeding
Ireland your hallowed mountains have been stripped mined
Ireland the perpetrators hide in your glens
Ireland I curse your Celtic tiger that blistered your beautiful skin with tattooed landscape debt chained tombs
Ireland you are a wastelands of wealth
Ireland the famine of your greed devours your reason
Ireland you are an exorbitant cheap icon
Ireland the serpent was never banished
Ireland your politicians want Hollywood smiles
Ireland I will not tip my hat to you
Ireland your schools do not educate your children’s spirit
Ireland your babies throw themselves into rivers
Ireland you do not feed your poor
Ireland your Doctors do not heal the sick dying in Cancer rooms of fear
Ireland I walked your stark byways trying to find some part of me that belonged
Ireland you spun a yarn of heroes and motherland
Ireland your sectarian shrines perpetuate division
Ireland your legend has reared a terrible reality
Ireland the banshee no longer keens your unfulfilled prophecies
Ireland I am not your prodigal daughter
Ireland I do not resemble your face
Ireland your deities will burn me as a witch
Ireland I am the abandoned child because I spoke back
Ireland you will not take away my voice
Ireland I will not lie for you
Ireland I am not constrained by any contract of your controlled liberty
Ireland unlike you I am free.

Pamela Brown

metrovelvet · 07-10-2010 12:14pm

Mother

Nuala Ni Dhomnail

You gave me a dress
and then took it back from me.
You gave me a horse
which you sold in my absence.
You gave me a harp
and then asked me back for it.
And you gave me life.

At the miser’s dinner-party
every bite is counted.

What would you say
if I tore the dress
if I drowned the horse
if I broke the harp
if I choked the strings
the strings of life?
Even if
I walked off a cliff?
I know your answer.

With your medieval mind
you’d announce me dead
and on the medical reports
you’d write the words
“ingrate”, “schizophrenic”.

Alice Milligan · 10-10-2010 1:08pm

As a white stone in the well's cool deepness,
There lays in me one wonderful remembrance.
I am not able and don't want to miss this:
It is my torture and my utter gladness.

I think, that he whose look will be directed
Into my eyes, at once will see it whole.
He will become more thoughtful and dejected
Than someone, hearing a story of a dole.

I knew: the gods turned once, in their madness,
Men into things, not killing humane senses.
You've been turned in to my reminiscences
To make eternal the unearthly sadness

Anna Akhmatova

Dorcha · 11-10-2010 1:44pm

Nothing quite sets out the futility and folly of war like this poem by Sigfreid Sasson

On passing the new Menin Gate

Who will remember, passing through this Gate,
The unheroic Dead who fed the guns?
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate –
Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?
Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.

Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;
Paid, with a pile of peace–complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp.
Here was the world’s worst wound. And here with pride
‘Their name liveth for ever,’ the Gateway claims.

Was ever an immolation so belied
As these intolerably nameless names?
Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.

Denerick · 15-10-2010 4:32pm

I hear an army by James Joyce.

I hear an army charging upon the land,
And the thunder of horses plunging; foam about their knees:
Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand,
Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the Charioteers.

They cry into the night their battle name:
I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling laughter.
They cleave the gloom of dreams, a blinding flame,
Clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil.

They come shaking in triumph their long grey hair:
They come out of the sea and run shouting by the shore.
My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair?
My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?

15-10-2010 8:36pm

Stars, I have seen them fall,
But when they drop and die
No star is lost at all
From all the star-sown sky.
The toil of all that be
Helps not the primal fault;
It rains into the sea,
And still the sea is salt.

A. E. Housman

Callan57 · 17-10-2010 12:45am

The Enchantment by Thoma Otway

I did but look and love awhile,
'Twas but for one half-hour;
Then to resist I had no will,
And now I have no power.

To sigh and wish is all my ease;
Sighs which do heat impart
Enough to melt the coldest ice,
Yet cannot warm your heart

O would your pity give my heart
One corner of your breast,
'Twould learn of yours the winning art,
And quickly steal the rest.

Ian C · 17-10-2010 3:42am

O Where Are You Going?

"O where are you going?" said reader to rider,
"That valley is fatal when furnaces burn,
Yonder's the midden whose odours will madden,
That gap is the grave where the tall return."

"O do you imagine," said fearer to farer,
"That dusk will delay on your path to the pass,
Your diligent looking discover the lacking
Your footsteps feel from granite to grass?"

"O what was that bird," said horror to hearer,
"Did you see that shape in the twisted trees?
Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly,
The spot on your skin is a shocking disease."

"Out of this house," said rider to reader,
"Yours never will," said farer to fearer,
"They're looking for you," said hearer to horror,
As he left them there, as he left them there.

WH Auden

A Poem a day keeps the melancholy away

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