Favorite lines of poetry

[Bluey]

The Listeners by Walter De La Mare was what got me into poetry in the beginning. I always found it very spooky. The poem is about a nameless guy who goes to a nameless house in the forest and asks for a nameless person. But all he encounters is the suspected presence of nameless unidentified entities.

Everything is left up in the air leaving your imagination to have an orgy of possibilities, including many analogies.

 

 

The last half of the poem is where he has given up and off on his horse he goes....

 

And he felt in his heart their strangeness,

Their stillness answering his cry,

While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,

’Neath the starred and leafy sky;

For he suddenly smote on the door, even

Louder, and lifted his head:—

‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,

That I kept my word,’ he said.

Never the least stir made the listeners,

Though every word he spake

Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house

From the one man left awake:

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,

And the sound of iron on stone,

And how the silence surged softly backward,

When the plunging hoofs were gone.

[LazarusShort]

Here's a brilliant poem from Dolphins at Cochin by Tom Buchan, a Scottish poet:

 

Suttie

 

One hirsute paw stuck in the pocket

os his tartan trousers

one plangent thigh rubbing the tableleg

 

the goshawk on his wrist

laying a slob of creaming hawkshit

along my carpet

 

this is Suttie this manmountain this

redbearded one-eyed monomaniac pseudomystic

pontificating with a highpitched ha

 

on God's quaterity Lake Chad Matisse

the habits of red deer and tonight

the high bland negligently overarching cosmic okay.

[Patricius]

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Our God, the heav'ns cannot hold Him, nor the earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him, Whom cherubim, worship night and day,
A breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, Whom angels fall down before,
The ox and ass and camel which adore.

Angels and archangels may have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;
But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the Beloved with a kiss.

What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.

 

And

 

Rosa Carmeli, florida Maria,

Intra tua nos gere viscera,

Et post mortem, transfer ad aethera,

O Maria.

 

O blossoming Mary, Rose of Carmel,

Receive us into thy womb,

And, after our death, bear us over unto Heaven,

O Maria!

Edited April 28, 2017 by Patricius

[the_gasman]

I am a little fairy.

My name is Nuff.

Fairy Nuff.

[Beechwood]

Innesfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

[the_gasman]

Ah, you can't beat a bit of Keats.

[Sasha Royale]

If all the world at once could be

On free land standing, with people free,

Then, to the moment would I speak,

" Abide with us. Thou art so beautiful. "

Edited April 28, 2017 by Sasha Royale

[Patricius]

Another beautiful poem I had forgotten -- the author is Fr Gerard Manley Hopkins S.J. It makes me think of Friday- and Saturday-evening Masses (Tridentine Latin) with only the priest and four or five of us, and God:

 

The Habit of Perfection

 

ELECTED Silence, sing to me

And beat upon my whorlèd ear,

Pipe me to pastures still and be

The music that I care to hear.

 

Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:

It is the shut, the curfew sent

From there where all surrenders come

Which only makes you eloquent.

 

Be shellèd, eyes, with double dark

And find the uncreated light:

This ruck and reel which you remark

Coils, keeps, and teases simple sight.

 

Palate, the hutch of tasty lust,

Desire not to be rinsed with wine:

The can must be so sweet, the crust

So fresh that come in fasts divine!

 

Nostrils, your careless breath that spend

Upon the stir and keep of pride,

What relish shall the censers send

Along the sanctuary side!

 

O feel-of-primrose hands,

O feet That want the yield of plushy sward,

But you shall walk the golden street

And you unhouse and house the Lord.

 

And, Poverty, be thou the bride

And now the marriage feast begun,

And lily-coloured clothes provide

Your spouse not laboured-at nor spun.

Edited April 30, 2017 by Patricius

[TSherbs]

Ah, you can't beat a bit of Keats.

 

Yeats?

 

Or are you saying that Yeats can't measure up to Keats?

[runnjump]

Ha, love it. But let me add one more line to it:

 

I am a little fairy.

My name is Nuff.

Fairy Nuff.

--> Nuff said.

[Fit_to_Print]

The earth turns over, our side feels the cold

[Bookman]

[Carrau]

“What though the sea with waves continuall

Doe eate the earth, it is no more at all ;

Ne is the earth the lesse, or loseth ought :

For whatsoever from one place doth fall

Is with the tyde unto another brought :

For there is nothing lost, that may be found if sought.”

― Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene

 

I love the imagery in these:

 

Something told the wild geese

It was time to go,

Though the fields lay golden

Something whispered, "snow."

-"Something Told the Wild Geese," Rachel Field

 

No cloud above, no earth below,—

A universe of sky and snow!

-"Snow-bound," John Greenleaf Whittier

 

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide.

 

Now, of my threescore years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.

 

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.

-"Lovliest of Trees," from A Shropshire Lad, AE Houseman

[Doulton]

"Slowed Down Blackbird"

Alice Oswald

Blackbird fretting in the frozen hedge
In the first Slow-fall of the year when wind
Stuck in a Slow-drift lags behind
The twilight's trailing edge

Three inches underfoot
The Slow is settling Stillness is afloat
Last chorister holding the longest note
Lost in a Storm of Falling Slow he sings

As if engrossed by inward awkward things
The tick tick tick of leaves
Keeps losing time the Bleak Sky barely breathes
All evening long a Slow-cloud drips and grieves

Three inches underfoot
The Slow is settling Stillness is afloat
Last chorister holding the longest note
Lost in a Storm of Falling Slow he sings:

In the New Year the wind will blow
The world be shaken the shadows grow
But on this Slowy night nothing but Slow
Which if it lasts nothing will be but Now

*****************

I like this poem, although I don't know if it belongs in the same Forum with Wordsworth, Hopkins, and Houseman. It seems to include tributes, however indirect, to the Beatles and Wallace Stevens.

[Carrau]

Doulton,

Should the word “slow” be “snow” wherever it is found in “Slowed Down Blackbird?”

[Doulton]

I think it's correct. I copied it from this collection:

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/dec/18/carols-christmas-poetry?CMP=share_btn_link

 

Alice Oswald has become well-known for revisions and reinventions. I don't know that she is the easiest poet to come to terms with, but she's received a lot of accolades for her word play. I think she does make sense in a way that the "language" poets never had for me. She's very original, yet a bit of a literary magpie.

 

She oddly enough has yet another poem called "Slowed Down Blackbird".

[sansenri]

Eugenio Montale

 

 

Meriggiare pallido e assorto
presso un rovente muro d'orto,
ascoltare tra i pruni e gli sterpi
schiocchi di merli, frusci di serpi.

Nelle crepe dei suolo o su la veccia
spiar le file di rosse formiche
ch'ora si rompono ed ora s'intrecciano
a sommo di minuscole biche.

Osservare tra frondi il palpitare
lontano di scaglie di mare
mentre si levano tremuli scricchi
di cicale dai calvi picchi.

E andando nel sole che abbaglia
sentire con triste meraviglia
com'è tutta la vita e il suo travaglio
in questo seguitare una muraglia
che ha in cima cocci aguzzi di bottiglia.

 

 

translated from the Italian by Millicent Bell

 

To slump at noon thought-sick and pale
under the scorching garden wall,
to hear a snake scrape past, the blackbirds creak
in the dry thorn thicket, the brushwood brake.

 

Between tufts of vetch, in the cracks of the ground
to spy out the ants’ long lines of march;
now they reach the top of a crumb-sized mound,
the lines break, they stumble into a ditch.

 

To observe between the leaves the pulse
beneath the sea’s scaly skin,
while from the dry cliffs the cicada calls
like a knife on the grinder’s stone.

 

And going into the sun’s blaze
once more, to feel, with sad surprise
how all life and its battles
is in this walk alongside a wall
topped with sharp bits of glass from broken bottles.

[Doulton]

Thank you, Sansenri. That's a lovely poem. It takes me right back to summer. Until the final line, it seems like a superb nature poem and then people interfere and provide the "sad surprise." Alas!

[Goingbuddha]

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

 

W.B. Yeats.

[Doulton]

I love Yeats; thank you for that post, Goingbuddha. The following stanza from his "Vacillation" has certainly spoken to me:

 

"Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled."

 

 

How human it is....