Housman’s every word is lovely. One of the greatest poets ever, IMHO.
'Nother Housman, from me: Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries
*These, in the days when heaven was falling,
the hour when Earth’s foundations fled,
followed their mercenary calling,
And took their wages, and are dead
Their shoulders held the skies suspended,
they stood, and Earth’s foundations stay,
What God abandoned, these defended,
and saved the sum of things for pay.*
The only poem I know well enough to type from memory. (Though, to be fair, I forgot the second “and.” Sorry.)
Oh! How could I almost forget my close second favorite, Tränen des Vaterlands (Tears of the Fatherland). Which, alas, I haven’t commited to memory. Though I do have the song. (er…mournful German chanting absent from that version, I’m afraid. Check iTunes.)
Well, I was going to post Jabberwocky and anything by Dr. Suess, but I changed my mind.
speaks sadly
. . .oh, frabjous day, caloo, callay . . .
According to Michael Wood in his PBS series In Search of Shakespeare, in Shakespeare’s King John, Constance’s grief is referring to Shakespeare’s loss of his son Hamnet. I know that is controversial and (because I have researched it a bit since) not everyone agrees, and non-crazy smart folks disagree. But I choose to accept that this is exactly (or exactlye as Shakespeare might say) what he was talking about.
*
Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.
Then have I reason to be fond of grief.*
I can’t say I have one favorite poem. But this part of Blake’s Auguries of Innocence is one of my all time favorite images.
Masefield’s Cargoes is definitely one of my favourites:
*Quinquireme 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*
On different tack I also go for the prolific write Anon and Birds, Bags, Bears and Buns
The common cormorant or shag
Lays eggs inside a paper bag
The reason you will see, no doubt,
It is to keep the lightning out,
But what these unobservant birds
Have never noticed is that herds
Of wandering bears may come with buns
And steal the bags to hold the crumbs.
I had always been the “good girl.” I met a boy my senior year in high school who became an amazing part of my life. Through our relationship, I discovered that I had another side of my personality that I needed to explore. I found this poem early in our relationship and it has stayed with me for the last 23 years…it still moves me.
I still feel like this woman.
Dorothy Parker’s Resume has gotten me through some pretty bad days.
But my favourite, hands down, is Dylan Thomas’s Fern Hill:
- Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.*
Poetry does matter.
I always knew it did.
But there are deniers. Yes, there are.
And I don’t mean the sheerness of stockings . . .
Stunning.
Just wanted to note that. I can’t bring myself to pick a favorite right now…maybe in a later post.
Sailboat
“Spring & Fall”, by Gerard Manley Hopkins. It is very nearly perfect; my only criticism is extremely geeky: the comma at the end of the next-to-last-line should be a colon.
Okay, I’ve got a couple of candidates…that’s not cheating, is it?
First up is Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Victorian religious poet whom I am surprised to like. He simply doesn’t let language get in the way of his feelings, but beats it and bends it to suit his needs. See The Windhover, Pied Beauty, and God’s Grandeur. On preview, I see Skald the Rhymer is also a Hopkins fan. Good pick.
Then W. D. Sondgrass, whose other works I generally do not appreciate, except for the piercing Heart’s Needle. But I don’t come here to show you that one – instead, I love his April Inventory. It’s not too long, and well worth the click…I especially recommend it to men who are no longer feeling so young.
Next comes Robert Haas, whose works I was exposed to in college. Again, I find most of them exasperating, except this gem: Meditiation at Lagunitas
Lastly, Sharon Olds, whose works I came to on my own, almost by accident. In contrast to my experiences above, I love tons of her poems. She has a way of seeming direct and plain-spoken, even too direct for comfort, and then delivering a knockout blow. I’m a huge fan of the way she uses linebreaks to set up pacing and delivery.
I should caveat that Olds spent a long time (and several volumes of poetry) struggling with her anger at her parents, until she finally came to terms with it…those poems probably speak to some folks, but not so much to me. However, she’s brilliant on topics other than her rage at her parents; don’t make the mistake of giving up on her if you don’t like those poems.
I don’t know Olds peom to call my favorite. I especially like The Race, The Protestor, Gerbil Funeral, and Cambridge Elegy. But I guess I’ll pick the first poem of Olds’ I ever read. In October 1981, while feeling very alone at school, I picked up Poetry magazine, and was pretty much unimpressed by what I was reading in it…until I got to The Signal.
The Signal
for Col. J. P. Phillips
When they brought his body back from Dieppe
they told his wife how he’d died: his General
thought they had taken the beach, and sent in his
last reserves. Under cover of the smoke-screen the
wooden boats moved toward shore
loaded with Commandoes. Her husband was the leader,
the first man in the first boat to
break through the smoke and see the sand
dark with bodies, the tanks burning, the
guns thrown down, the landing craft
destroyed and filled with blood. In a rain of
bullets and shells from the shore, her husband had
put on a pair of white gloves and
turned his back to the enemy,
motioning to the following boats to
turn back. Long after
everyone else on his boat was dead he
continued to signal, then he too was
killed, but all the other boats had
seen him and turned back. They gave his wife the
medal and she buried him and
every night for thirty years she
floated through a wall of smoke and then
saw him at a distance, standing in a boa
facing her, the white gloves
blazing on his hands as he motioned her back toward her life.
Sailboat
Oh, and I have to plug Alan Dugan’s Love Song: I and Thou.
And Kenneth Fearing’s Love, 20¢ the First Quarter Mile.
And speaking as I did of female poets with a problem with their fathers, Sylvia Plath’s wonderfully compact Mushrooms.
I’m well beyond “a favorite,” aren’t I?
Sailboat
Two by Will:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds (Sonnet CXVI)
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Prospero:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
The Tempest, Act IV, scene i, 148–158
And then, for pure fun and economy, there’s Baseball’s Sad Lexicon:
These are the saddest of possible words:
“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,
Tinker and Evers and Chance.
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
Making a Giant hit into a double –
Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:
“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
– Franklin Pierce Adams
I wrote this poem for my daughter. It may not be real poetry (I know nothing of meter and such), but it was a good way to get her to memorize some things that I wanted to instill in her, and get her to think about. It became my favorite ‘poem’ as soon as she memorized it and really seemed to get it.
I will learn my past through questions and reading
I will love myself, and God, within
I will give my neighbor whatever he’s needing… To do any less would be a great sin
I will honor my elders, and father and mother; and ancestors buried in Africa’s sand
I will humble myself before sister and brother; I will get up and fight when I must take a stand
I will savor each drop of each day that I see; I will notice the land and the sea and the sky
I will live with laughter and honor and peace; and love and respect till the day that I die
My real favorite poem is Claude McKay, “If We Must Die”
IF we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
Cherrylog Road by
James Dickey
And I to my motorcycle
Parked like the soul of the junkyard
Restored, a bicycle fleshed
With power, and tore off
Up Highway 106 continually
Drunk on the wind in my mouth
Wringing the handlebar for speed
Wild to be wreckage forever
Here is mine.
With my favored translation
The Last Toast
I drink to the ruined house,
To the evil of my life,
To our shared loneliness
And I drink to you–
To the lie of lips that betrayed me,
To the deadly coldness of the eyes,
To the fact that the world is cruel and depraved,
To the fact that God did not save.
by Anna Akhmatova
June 27, 1934
Translated by Judith Hemschemeyer