Your favorite poetry image(s)

Cafe Society
41

Also on the subject of recalling the Trojan War: the second part of Menelaus and Helen by Rupert Brooke:

*So far the poet. How should he behold
That journey home, the long connubial years?
He does not tell you how white Helen bears
Child on legitimate child, becomes a scold,
Haggard with virtue. Menelaus bold
Waxed garrulous, and sacked a hundred Troys
'Twixt noon and supper. And her golden voice
Got shrill as he grew deafer. And both were old.

Often he wonders why on earth he went
Troyward, or why poor Paris ever came.
Oft she weeps, gummy-eyed and impotent;
Her dry shanks twitch at Paris’ mumbled name.
So Menelaus nagged; and Helen cried;
And Paris slept on by Scamander side.*

42

The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.

43

A couple more:

Naming of Parts by Henry Reed. The contrast between the gun and the tree, given in a cold, analytical tone, always gets me. A snippet:

This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.

And The Death of the Hired Man by Robert Frost, how much of a dreamer she is, compared to her husband’s practicality:

*Part of a moon was falling down the west,
Dragging the whole sky with it to the hills.
Its light poured softly in her lap. She saw
And spread her apron to it. She put out her hand
Among the harp-like morning-glory strings,
Taut with the dew from garden bed to eaves,
As if she played unheard the tenderness
That wrought on him beside her in the night.
“Warren,” she said, “he has come home to die:
You needn’t be afraid he’ll leave you this time.” *

44

You can’t beat the last stanza of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”
Especially the last three lines for imagery.

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.

45

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

46

Campion, Henry Reed is great. Do you also like “Judging Distances”?

I’d like to add two little Eliot snippets:

and

47

I love all the horse imagery in Sitting in a Small Screenhouse on a Summer Morning, by James Wright. Especially this bit from the last verse:

*It is so still now, I hear the horse
Clear his nostrils.
He has crept out of the green places behind me …

Last night I paused at the edge of darkness,
And slept with green dew, alone.
I have come a long way, to surrender my shadow
To the shadow of a horse. *
48

So many have posted great ones! I’ll skip the repetion of Cummings and Eliot. Here are a couple of my faves:
The Unquiet Bed - Dorothy Livesay

The woman I am
Is not what you see
I’m not just bones
And crockery.

A Note on the Public Transportation System - Alden Nowlan

You can stop talking
but you can’t forget
the broken wires
dangling there between you.

As I Walked Out One Evening - W.H. Auden

'O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you’ve missed.
…
‘O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.’

49

I had forgotten that one; but I do like it, for the same reason. You get the impression that he’s so torn about doing his job. The line about the distance between him and the couple making love under the tree is almost painful.

There may be dead ground in between; and I may not have got
The knack of judging a distance; I will only venture
A guess that perhaps between me and the apparent lovers,
(Who, incidentally, appear by now to have finished,)
At seven o’clock from the houses, is roughly a distance
Of about one year and a half.

50

The Second Coming, WB Yeats

“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 Sea of Sunset, Emily Dickinson

“Night after night her purple traffic
Strews the landing with opal bales;
Merchantmen poise upon horizons,
Dip, and vanish with fairy sails.”

The Lake Isle of Innisfree, W.B. Yeats

"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 gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core."

Dulce Et Decorum Est, Wilfred Owen

“But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering 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.”

51

I’m doing this from memory, forgive inaccuracies:

Prufrock (again!?! but this bit makes me cry)
I grow old, I grow old,
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind?
Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall where white trousers and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing,
each to each.

I do not think they will sing to me.

e.e. cummings (sets the scene so beautifully)

anyone lived in a pretty how town
with up so floating many bells down

Ferlinghetti (anything from Coney Island of the Mind is fab )

The dog trots freely in the streets
and the things he sees are bigger than himself

52

Oops. That should be “wear” rather than “where” in Prufrock. Ok, I’m tired. So sue me!

53

Yup, more e. e. cummings, but you have to hand it to the man for sheer imagery. I find this entire poem incredibly touching, but I’ll try to pare it down:

54

I need to read more poetry, I bring up the same few poems any time one of these threads creeps around.

My absolute favorite image is the most gorgeous picture of anticipation that I have ever read (granted, translated into English), Pablo Neruda “Alliance (Sonata)”

And I could very well just quote my favorite poem in entirety, since it is only 55 words (for reference, the quote above is 36), most monosyllabic. It is an exercise in simplicity, one or two images making up the entire poem: Mark Strand “Keeping Things Whole” (note: as short as it is, I am not directly quoting since it is an entire work and I do not wish to run afoul of the mods or copyright)

55

Thanks for this link. I really do like that poem; both it and the poet are new to me.

That’s the kind of image I had in mind when I posted the OP.

In an earlier post koeeoaddi had:

“I have come a long way, to surrender my shadow
To the shadow of a horse.”

Somehow, those images involving shadows, echoes, emptiness, and the absence of stimuli in general appeal to something in me that I find it hard to define.

Another example that really needs the entire poem for the image to make sense (at least for me) is Louise Bogan’s Medusa. Perhaps it took the awareness of who/what Medusa was all about for the chill to run through my bones on those last two lines, but the effect is there still.

Can you think of other such things, or is my description still too vague?

56

The lament of Marcellus, from Aeneid VI. Dryden’s translation. It is not a short selection, but the poem itself is immense and freelyavailable.

57

Ok, in retrospect, that was probably way too long. Please feel free to truncate at will and with no hard feelings. The entire lament is really worth reading if epic is your thing.

58

Some John Keats that stirred my insides:

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d - see here it is -
I hold it towards you.

59

Ruth Comfort Mitchell

The Vinegar Man is a long time dead; he died when he tore his valentine.

John Ciardi

Whenever Silence sits down with boys,
He looks over his shoulder and here comes NOISE!

Harold Monro

*Nymph, nymph, what are your beads?

Green glass, goblin. Why do you stare at them?

Give them me. Give them me.

No.*