Poems that have moved you

[shawnbm]

I looked back and did not see anything about poetry, so if this is redundant--I apologize in advance. I started thinking about poems that have lingered with me over the years or that really wacked me up side the head when I first read them. I will be fifty soon and poetry--as far as I can tell--is not as well known or taught (from what I can see from my kids' experience) as part of a core curriculum these days. The recently passed Maya Angelou received a lot of press a few years back and certainly is an exception to what I indicate. At any rate, I will start by saying that as a lifetime South Floridian, poems by Robert Frost really attracted me--Fire and Ice, Nothing Gold Can Stay, Birches, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening and a host of others just drew me into a world I did not know. I still go back and read them every now and then.

Ezra Pound's Cantos were startling in their ferocity and his poetry was so erudite and vigorous, but the guy he highly recommended, T. S. Elliot, really got my mind going. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was like nothing I had ever read or heard of. From there I headed into The Waste Land, a poem that is still one of the most amazing pieces of literature that likely has ever been written. Like Frost, I can go back and read some of their works since I still have by anthology from college, which, like many, is where I was introduced to many of these works.

Romancero Sonambulo by Garcia Lorca is a wonderful piece of Spanish poetry and I have enjoyed the works of Antonio Machado, but it has been years since I have read either of them.

Shakespeare and Cervantes kind of stand like towers over all writers and poets of western civilization and trying to cite to one or another of their writings would be futile. The same could be said of the man who invented the modern Italian language, Fr. Dante Alighieri, although La Comedia Divina is all you need to consider.

All of this being said, poetry ceased being something I sought out or read much of likely over twenty five years ago. Work and raising kids takes up so much time. When I do read, I am perusing four books at a time, when not reading the Bible--which contains more beautiful poetry than just about anything else; i.e., Canticle of Canticles, the Psalter, Lamentations, etc.

How about y'all? Any poems or other pieces of literature along the same lines that have moved you?

 

[Kieran]

Great idea for a thread, Shawn!

I agree, poetry just isn't read so much anymore. Partly this could because it's seen as elitist, which is a poor excuse, and inaccurate, and also because the modern entertainments are visual, and aural. Music and movies. Books are even in jeopardy, threatened by downloads and computer games. But books are still read, and poetry is still a niche activity.

Beside the bed, I have Leonard Cohens Book of Longing, which is made of simple verse, but profound too. Leonard Cohen is catchy, but he also delivers a distinctive view. Likewise Emily Dickinson, who's also bedside for me. I dip into these books, read a poem or two before sleeping. Yeats, of course.

Recently I've been helped by our buddy Tented to find a decent translation of the Iliad by Homer. I want this for two reasons: it's the oldest western work of literature, and also I'm hooked on ancient greek history, art, writing. Now, most of the Greek stuff is beyond me, it's deep and highly precise, you need to go back over things twice, they're heavy. Homer is no exception and I doubt I'll be able to follow what's happening, but I recently read a book about Helen of Troy, and I know the background to the tale, and also, I got this book for €3.75, translated by Alexander Pope, so at that price I can't lose. It opens with invaluable notes and introduction. It's a challenge, that's how I see it, and I'll enjoy it from that aspect, even if the rest of it's beyond me.

Of the ones you mentioned, I read the TS Eliot poems, and Dantes inferno, translated by Dorothy L. Sayers, which had the benefit of keeping the original rhyme scheme, which made it a lot catchier from my perspective. I read quite a few Shakespeare sonnets and A Lover's Complaint, which unfortunately I didn't understand. :laydownlaughing

But isn't this the beauty of poetry? Sometimes the language is so exciting and perfectly formed, that we don't have to dwell too much on meaning, if we don't get it. It can be pleasing on the eye. Some osmosis takes place and we get something from it. It's weird and revolutionary and suggestive and direct. There's notebooks which can help translate it into common meaning, if we need that...

 

[shawnbm]

I was in an Irish pub here in Fort Lauderdale for a late lunch yesterday, and they had lots of Yeats' poetry on the walls. Of course, there The Lake Isle of Innisfree, but I really like Never Give All the Heart--it speaks to me, as it has to millions.

 

[Kieran]

That's a strong one, Shawn, brief but battering.


Never give all the Heart

Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that’s lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.

 

[Kieran]

One poem I loved in school was Lepanto, by GK Chesterton. Such a rousing, dynamic piece. You read it and you see fireworks going off, cannons blazing, you hear loud music.

"Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,
Don John of Austria is going to the war"

Oh yessir, he is. He is indeedy!

 

[Murat Baslamisli]

Great thread.
Poetry always amazes me. Even the ones I have no clue about...I have written lyrics for songs and I guess they are closely related, but good poetry can really make words jump out of a page. Quick sips or long gulps, all work.

I have a lot of favorites, but this little one I have first heard of in the movie The Grey, most likely written by the director, quoted by Liam Neeson, just does it for me:

Once more into the fray
Into the last good fight I'll ever know.
Live and die on this day...
Live and die on this day..


Simple yet it gets me out of bed when I do not feel like it.

 

[Riotbeard]

I love poetry but I don't get to read it much since I finished undergrad.

I will start with my favorite poems of all time: Stephen Crane:

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter -- bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."

Second Stephen Crane Poem I love:

A man said to the universe:
"Sir I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."

Crane is so short and brutal. I also love, love wallace Steven's Poem "Sunday Morning" which made me feel more secure about not being religious, but is too long to post here (Look it up Murat and other atheists). I also really like Bukowski's Poetry, but no specific one comes to mind. Phillip Larkin's Sunday Morning is great. "The Wasteland" is amazing! I also love William Carlos Williams, John Dunne, Edgar Allen Poe... I also have a great record of Vincent Price reading Percy Shelly. That is the stuff that jumps out. Oh wait, I love, love William Blake and also enjoy some Lord Byron...

 

[Kieran]

I never heard of Steven Crane, Riotbeard, but they're two incredible poems, especially the first. Here's the Wallace Stevens, a beautiful one, too, very lyrical and strong language...

 

[Murat Baslamisli]

I love poetry but I don't get to read it much since I finished undergrad.

I will start with my favorite poems of all time: Stephen Crane:

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter -- bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."

Second Stephen Crane Poem I love:

A man said to the universe:
"Sir I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."

Crane is so short and brutal. I also love, love wallace Steven's Poem "Sunday Morning" which made me feel more secure about not being religious, but is too long to post here (Look it up Murat and other atheists). I also really like Bukowski's Poetry, but no specific one comes to mind. Phillip Larkin's Sunday Morning is great. "The Wasteland" is amazing! I also love William Carlos Williams, John Dunne, Edgar Allen Poe... I also have a great record of Vincent Price reading Percy Shelly. That is the stuff that jumps out. Oh wait, I love, love William Blake and also enjoy some Lord Byron...

I got into Crane when I first saw "In the desert" , at the beginning of a book, either by Stephen King, or maybe Koontz, I cannot remember which, and now it is driving me crazy, so I will go to my library and look at the beginning of all the suspect books that might have it...

 

[tented]

I got into Crane when I first saw "In the desert" , at the beginning of a book, either by Stephen King, or maybe Koontz, I cannot remember which, and now it is driving me crazy, so I will go to my library and look at the beginning of all the suspect books that might have it...

I think you're thinking of Stephen King's "The Stand" but I'm not positive.

 

[Murat Baslamisli]

^Nope. I checked. I am still looking. Going crazy.

 

[Riotbeard]

I never heard of Steven Crane, Riotbeard, but they're two incredible poems, especially the first. Here's the Wallace Stevens, a beautiful one, too, very lyrical and strong language...

He is more known for his prose. He wrote the Red Badge of Courage, but I think he is a better poet personally. A lot of American students read the Red Badge of Courage not sure if that is well known across the pond.

 

[Murat Baslamisli]

Found it !
It was the opening of Four Past Midnight, a collection of four novellas, written in 1990.

I was going crazy, I am so happy i found it.

 

[tented]

Great thread, Shawn!

I'm a huge poetry fan. I love everything from the short and simple, to the lengthy and complex.

---

William Carlos Williams - The Red Wheelbarrow:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

---

Gertrude Stein - Sugar

A violent luck and a whole sample and even then quiet.

Water is squeezing, water is almost squeezing on lard. Water, water is a mountain and it is selected and it is so practical that there is no use in money. A mind under is exact and so it is necessary to have a mouth and eye glasses.

A question of sudden rises and more time than awfulness is so easy and shady. There is precisely that noise.

A peck a small piece not privately overseen, not at all not a slice, not at all crestfallen and open, not at all mounting and chaining and evenly surpassing, all the bidding comes to tea.

A separation is not tightly in worsted and sauce, it is so kept well and sectionally.

Put it in the stew, put it to shame. A little slight shadow and a solid fine furnace.

The teasing is tender and trying and thoughtful.

The line which sets sprinkling to be a remedy is beside the best cold.

A puzzle, a monster puzzle, a heavy choking, a neglected Tuesday.

Wet crossing and a likeness, any likeness, a likeness has blisters, it has that and teeth, it has the staggering blindly and a little green, any little green is ordinary.

One, two and one, two, nine, second and five and that.

A blaze, a search in between, a cow, only any wet place, only this tune.

Cut a gas jet uglier and then pierce pierce in between the next and negligence. Choose the rate to pay and pet pet very much. A collection of all around, a signal poison, a lack of languor and more hurts at ease.

A white bird, a colored mine, a mixed orange, a dog.

Cuddling comes in continuing a change.

A piece of separate outstanding rushing is so blind with open delicacy.

A canoe is orderly. A period is solemn. A cow is accepted.

A nice old chain is widening, it is absent, it is laid by.

---

William Butler Yeats - The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

---

Yeats - Among School Children

I
I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and histories,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way — the children’s eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

II
I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
Above a sinking fire, a tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to tragedy —
Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato’s parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

III
And thinking of that fit of grief or rage
I look upon one child or t’other there
And wonder if she stood so at that age —
For even daughters of the swan can share
Something of every paddler’s heritage —
And had that colour upon cheek or hair,
And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
She stands before me as a living child.

IV
Her present image floats into the mind —
Did Quattrocento finger fashion it
Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
And I though never of Ledaean kind
Had pretty plumage once — enough of that,
Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

V
What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her Son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

VI
Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

VII
Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother’s reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts — O presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise —
O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise;

VIII
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

 

[tented]

T.S. Eliot - Preludes, No. 1

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o'clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.

 

[tented]

If you haven't read Eliot's Four Quartets, I can't recommend them highly enough. They are the apex of modern poetry.

They're far too long to quote in full here, but they're the source of such famous lines as:

"Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable."

"human kind
Cannot bear very much reality."

"The detail of the pattern is movement"

"In my beginning is my end .... in my end is my beginning."

"I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant-
Among other things - or one way of putting the same thing:
That the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray
Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,
Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened."

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."

 

[TsarMatt]

I love poetry, too. Among my favourite poets are Les Murray, William Blake, Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath. I do think, however, that William Blake's London is one of the greatest pieces of writing I have ever come across:

I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear

How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls

But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse

 

[shawnbm]

Oh, boys, you really are bringing the poems to the thread and I greatly enjoy this as I drink my coffee. I can't believe tented recounted William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow". I have it with notes next to it in my anthology. It is one I have always liked, but have not read in many years. Thank you.

I have meant to read T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets and now the link is here. I shall make the time between now and Monday. Your postings of his Preludes, No.1 was another one I've not read in years. And then there is more Yeats--YES!!! I look forward to more postings.

 

[shawnbm]

An excellent decision to move this thread to this particular area. I am going to be reading my anthology tonight and will post additional poems that have moved me over the years. I'm sure there are some I have completely forgotten about with time.

 

[Kieran]

Did someone mention Shelley?

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".