Some Poems
Images are sometimes not shown due to bandwidth/network limitations. Refreshing the page usually helps.
You are currently reading a thread in /lit/ - Literature
You are currently reading a thread in /lit/ - Literature
I'll be dumping some relatively rare poems today, feel free to join me. :)
Epistle to be Left in the Earth by Archibald MacLeish
...It is colder now,
there are many stars,
we are drifting
North by the Great Bear,
the leaves are falling,
THe water is stone in the scooped rocks,
to southward
Red sun grey air:
the crows are
Slow on their crooked wings,
the jays have left us:
Long since we passed the flares of Orion.
Each man believes in his heart he will die.
Many have written last thoughts and last letters.
None know if our deaths are now or forever:
None know if this wandering earth will be found.
We lie down and the snow covers our garments.
I pray you,
you (if any open this writing)
Make in your mouths the words that were our names.
I will tell you all we have learned,
I will tell you everything:
The earth is round,
there are springs under the orchards,
The loam cuts with a blunt knife,
beware of
Elms in thunder,
the lights in the sky are stars——
We think they do not see,
we think also
The trees do not know nor the leaves of the grasses hear us:
The birds too are ignorant.
Do not listen.
Do not stand at dark in the open windows.
We before you have heard this:
they are voices:
They are not words at all but the wind rising.
Also none among us has seen God.
(...We have thought often
The flaws of sun in the late and driving weather
Pointed to one tree but it was not so.)
As for the nights I warn you the nights are dangerous:
The wind changes at night and the dreams come.
It is very cold,
there are strange stars near Arcturus,
Voices are crying an unknown name in the sky
Ah! Sun-flower - William Blake (1794)
Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun:
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the travellers journey is done.
Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow:
Arise from their graves and aspire,
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.
>>7399092
What makes that poetry apart from the random line breaks?
>>7399121
4chan reset most of the formatting
but read it out loud to see
Oft, in the Stilly Night by Thomas Moore
Oft, in the stilly night,
Ere slumber’s chain has bound me,
Fond memory brings the light
Of other days around me;
The smiles, the tears,
Of boyhood’s years,
The words of love then spoken;
The eyes that shone,
Now dimm’d and gone,
The cheerful hearts now broken!
Thus, in the stilly night,
Ere slumber’s chain hath bound me,
Sad memory brings the light
Of other days around me.
When I remember all
The friends, so link’d together,
I’ve seen around me fall,
Like leaves in wintry weather;
I feel like one
Who treads alone
Some banquet-hall deserted,
Whose lights are fled,
Whose garlands dead,
And all but he departed!
Thus, in the stilly night,
Ere slumber’s chain has bound me,
Sad memory brings the light
Of other days around me.
Why is prose so much better than poetry?
Seriously, why are poems even considered good? Just put them to music and call it a song and be done with it.
Whenever I read poetry it just sounds like angsty bullshit or I feel like I'm at some poetry slam and a big black lesbian is lecturing me on how easy it is to be a white man and I'm like, "well yeah, tell me something I don't know."
Don't get me wrong, I've read some nice lines in certain poems, some even great lines, but never has a whole poem ever made me want to applaud or anything. I don't know. Maybe poetry slams have ruined poetry for me. Like poetry slams are the fucking worst. I don't know if there's anything that has ruined an art form more than the poetry slam. Improv ruining comedy is close. EDM festivals are close, too.
I don't know. I probably "just don't get it."
Of Dying Beauty by Louis Zukofsky
“Spare us of dying beauty,” cries out Youth,
“Of marble gods that moulder into dust-
Wide-eyed and pensive with an ancient truth
That even gods will go as old things must.”
Where fading splendor grays to powdered earth,
And time’s slow movement darkens quiet skies,
Youth weeps the old, yet gives new beauty birth
And molds again, though the old beauty dies.
Time plays an ancient dirge amid old places
Where ruins are a sign of passing strength,
As is the weariness of old faces
A token of a beauty gone at length.
Yet youth will always come self-willed and gay-
A sun-god in a temple of decay.
>>7399158
Semiotics, nigga. All of the ideas and none of the grammar. Clearer, easier.
>>7399174
You could argue Semiotics in the performance of a poem, nigga, but not in its publication. There's nothing clearer and easier about something that can only be interpreted however.
>>7399186
if you're going for objectivity, maybe not, but poetry is about the exact weight of individual words, whatever it means to the writer or reader. people just realized that almost every string of words is technically 'poetry' and got carried away with it. If we didn't have poetry, it would be a conspicuous absence, fuq the idiots alive right now performing slam poetry, especially my ex.
No Question by George Dillon
Seeing at last how each thing here beneath
The glimmering stars is lawful: having found
By a wide watch how scrupulously Death
To keep his tacit promises is bound,
How from their vagrance the disbanded dusts
Resume integrity in blood or bloom,
How punctually the sun-struck red rose thrusts
Its rigid flame into the golden gloom;
Knowing that ultimate prospect where appears
The accurate ebb and flood of furious water,
The undirected wind’s clean course, the sphere’s
Deliberate strong spinning, I would utter
No question now, nor prosecute in words
Why birds must fly, seeing the flight of birds.
>>7399193
Well at least we can agree that slam poetry is the fucking worst.
Antonio Machado
Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino,
sino estelas en la mar.
(Wanderer, your footsteps are
the road and nothing more;
wanderer, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
Walking makes the road,
and turning to look behind
you see the path that you
will never tread again.
Wanderer, there is no road,
only foam trails on the sea.)
>>7399247
>translating poetry
pls don't
Rain by Edward Thomas
Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying tonight or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.
>>7399158
Lmao. You obviously think you're smarter than you actually are.
>>7399323
Why? Because I don't like poetry?
From another thread:
Here is one of those arguments that will last forever, but which, nonetheless, each of us must settle privately - what is the minimum definition of a poem?
"Not prose." Well, then how can you tell? I refuse the pornographic proposition (I know it when I see it) because it fails to operate in a way that be described in either a royalty contract or a syllabus.
"A poem is verse." Again, not measurable. Merely an invitation to contention, also known as a troll.
"Poetry is structured." Aha. Now that can be agreed upon, while still allowing for the dissent of personal taste. And yet, the wag will point his yellow fingernail straight at the word structure and bemoan its ambiguity.
"Poetry is verse structured with some kind of programmatic intent that is accessible to more than one reader." WA LA - "so it is possible that I could write a poem whose lines are structured on the basis of the Fibonacci Sequence, but because readers who lack mathematics won't get it, they can agree it exists if explained to them. Which still leaves room for agreement and disagreement about the relative success of the piece within the presented intentional structure." Yes.
Mnemosyne by Trumbull Stickney
It’s autumn in the country I remember.
How warm a wind blew here about the ways!
And shadows on the hillside lay to slumber
During the long sun-sweetened summer-days.
It’s cold abroad the country I remember.
The swallows veering skimmed the golden grain
At midday with a wing aslant and limber;
And yellow cattle browsed upon the plain.
It’s empty down the country I remember.
I had a sister lovely in my sight:
Her hair was dark, her eyes were very sombre;
We sang together in the woods at night.
It’s lonely in the country I remember.
The babble of our children fills my ears,
And on our hearth I stare the perished ember
To flames that show all starry thro’ my tears.
It’s dark about the country I remember.
There are the mountains where I lived. The path
Is slushed with cattle-tracks and fallen timber,
The stumps are twisted by the tempests’ wrath.
But that I knew these places are my own,
I’d ask how came such wretchedness to cumber
The earth, and I to people it alone.
It rains across the country I remember.
When the Vacation is Over for Good
by Mark Strand
It will be strange
Knowing at last it couldn't go on forever,
The certain voice telling us over and over
That nothing would change,
And remembering too,
Because by then it will all be done with, the way
Things were, and how we had wasted time as though
There was nothing to do,
When, in a flash
The weather turned, and the lofty air became
Unbearably heavy, the wind strikingly dumb
And our cities like ash,
And knowing also,
What we never suspected, that it was something like summer
At its most august except that the nights were warmer
And the clouds seemed to glow,
And even then,
Because we will not have changed much, wondering what
Will become of things, and who will be left to do it
All over again,
And somehow trying,
But still unable, to know just what it was
That went so completely wrong, or why it is
We are dying.
Verner von Heidestam - Jewellery
(my translation)
Happiness is jewellery for women
Jewellery does not suit men
Stern gods, rough fates
And of bread, a frugal bite
Such is life for men
Winter Remembered by John Crowe Ransom
Two evils, monstrous either one apart,
Possessed me, and were long and loath at going:
A cry of Absence, Absence, in the heart,
And in the wood the furious winter blowing.
Think not, when fire was bright upon my bricks,
And past the tight boards hardly a wind could enter,
I glowed like them, the simple burning sticks,
Far from my cause, my proper heat and center.
Better to walk forth in the frozen air
And wash my wound in the snows; that would be healing;
Because my heart would throb less painful there,
Being caked with cold, and past the smart of feeling.
And where I walked, the murderous winter blast
Would have this body bowed, these eyeballs streaming,
And though I think this heart’s blood froze not fast
It ran too small to spare one drop for dreaming.
Dear love, these fingers that had known your touch,
And tied our separate forces first together,
Were ten poor idiot fingers not worth much,
Ten frozen parsnips hanging in the weather.
>>7399092
awful
>>7399101
any songs of experience aren't "rare"
>>7399133
not good
>>7399158
because your mother drank a few pounds too much mercury when with child
>>7399169
bad
Zukofsky is general is just bad
>>7399208
eh, not so good
>>7399247
I don't read maid
>>7399287
awful
>>7399370
not good
>>7399389
awful
post some actually good poems if you're going to make this sort of thread, none of these are good, barring Blake, which is only good in sequence with the other songs of innocence and experience
>>7399400
This is quite funny, since he's referring presumably back to those hardy, dour vikings, who in fact loved a bit of bling. I think their gods are also often better described as 'cunts' than 'stern'.
>>7399430
how about instead of saying how bad they all are, post some you prefer
that would make too much sense
>>7399445
no, I just wanted to let you know that you're wasting your time reading fourth rate poetry, for your own sake
>>7399459
i don't need your help
>>7399459
Recommend some good poets then.
I don't think you will though.
>>7399430
Explain why poetry is good.
A Side Street by Louis Untermeyer
On the warm Sunday afternoons
And every evening in the Spring and Summer
When the night hurries the late home-corner
And the air grows softer, and scraps of tunes
Float from the open windows and jar
Against the voices of children and the hum of a car;
When the city noises commingle and melt
With a restless something half-seen, half-felt—
I see them always there,
Upon the low, smooth wall before the church;
That row of little girls who sit and stare
Like sparrows on a granite perch.
They come in twittering couples or walk alone
To their gray bough of stone,
Sometimes by twos and threes, sometimes as many as five—
But always they sit there on the narrow coping
Bright-eyed and solemn, scarcely hoping
To see more than what is merely moving and alive. . .
They hear the couples pass; the lisp of happy feet
Increases and the night grows suddenly sweet. . .
Before the quiet church that smells of death
They sit.
And Life sweeps past them with a rushing breath
And reaches out and plucks them by the hand
And calls them boldly, whispering to each
In some strange speech
They tremble to but cannot understand.
It thrills and troubles them, as one by one,
The days run off like water through a sieve;
While, with a gaze as candid as the sun,
Poignant and puzzled and inquisitive,
They come and sit,—
A part of life and yet apart from it.
thanks for the words opee
God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children by Yehuda Amichai
God has pity on kindergarten children.
He has less pity on school children
And on grownups he has no pity at all,
he leaves them alone,
and sometimes they must crawl on all fours
in the burning sand
to reach the first–aid station
covered with blood.
But perhaps he will watch over true lovers
and have mercy on them and shelter them
like a tree over the old man
sleeping on a public bench.
Perhaps we too will give them
the last rare coins of charity
that Mother handed down to us
so that their happiness may protect us
now and on other days.
Wie soll ich meine Seele halten, daß
sie nicht an deine rührt? Wie soll ich sie
hinheben über dich zu andern Dingen?
Ach gerne möcht ich sie bei irgendwas
Verlorenem im Dunkel unterbringen
an einer fremden stillen Stelle, die
nicht weiterschwingt,wenn deineTiefen schwingen.
Doch alles, was uns anrührt, dich und mich,
nimmt uns zusammen wie ein Bogenstrich,
der aus zwei Saiten eine Stimme zieht.
Auf welches Instrument sind wir gespannt?
Und welcher Spieler hat uns in der Hand?
O süßes Lied.
>>7399532
O rain at seven,
Pay-check at eleven——
Keep smiling the boss away,
Mary (what are you going to do?)
Gone seven——gone eleven,
And I'm still waiting you——
O blue-eyed Mary with the claret scarf,
Saturday Mary, mine!
It's high carillon
From the popcorn bells!
Pigeons by the million——
And Spring in Prince Street
Where green figs gleam
By oyster shells!
O Mary, leaning from the high wheat tower,
Let down your golden hair!
High in the noon of May
On cornices of daffodils
The slender violets stray.
Crap-shooting gangs in Bleecker reign,
Peonies with pony manes——
Forget-me-nots at windowpanes:
Out of the way-up nickel-dime tower shine,
Cathedral Mary,
shine!——
>>7399537
There is a garden in her face
Where roses and white lilies blow;
A heavenly paradise is that place,
Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow:
There cherries grow which none may buy
Till “Cherry-ripe” themselves do cry.
Those cherries fairly do enclose
Of orient pearl a double row,
Which when her lovely laughter shows,
They look like rose-buds filled with snow;
Yet them no peer nor prince can buy
Till “Cherry-ripe” themselves do cry.
Her eyes like angels watch them still;
Her brows like bended bows do stand,
Threat'ning with piercing frowns to kill
All that attempt with eye or hand
Those sacred cherries to come nigh,
Till “Cherry-ripe” themselves do cry.
>>7399542
Bah! I have sung women in three cities,
But it is all the same;
And I will sing of the sun.
Lips, words, and you snare them,
Dreams, words, and they are as jewels,
Strange spells of old deity,
Ravens, nights, allurement:
And they are not;
Having become the souls of song.
Eyes, dreams, lips, and the night goes.
Being upon the road once more,
They are not.
Forgetful in their towers of our tuneing
Once for wind-runeing
They dream us-toward and
Sighing, say, "Would Cino,
"Passionate Cino, of the wrinkling eyes,
"Gay Cino, of quick laughter,
"Cino, of the dare, the jibe.
"Frail Cino, strongest of his tribe
"That tramp old ways beneath the sun-light,
"Would Cino of the Luth were here!
Once, twice a year—-
Vaguely thus word they:
"Cino?" "Oh, eh, Cino Polnesi
"The singer is't you mean?"
"Ah yes, passed once our way,
"A saucy fellow, but . . .
"(Oh they are all one these vagabonds),
"Peste! 'tis his own songs?
"Or some other's that he sings?
"But you, My Lord, how with your city?"
My you "My Lord," God's pity!
And all I knew were out, My Lord, you
Were Lack-land Cino, e'en as I am,
O Sinistro.
I have sung women in three cities.
But it is all one.
I will sing of the sun.
. . . eh? . . . they mostly had grey eyes ,
But it is all one, I will sing of the sun.
"'Pollo Phoibee , old tin pan, you
Glory to Zeus' aegis-day,
Shield o' steel-blue, th' heaven o'er us
Hath for boss thy lustre gay!
"'Pollo Phoibee, to our way-fare
Make thy laugh our wander-lied;
Bid thy 'flugence bear away care.
Cloud and rain-tears pass they fleet!
Seeking e'er the new-laid rast-way
To the gardens of the sun . . .
I have sung women in three cities
But it is all one.
I will sing of the white birds
In the blue waters of heaven,
The clouds that are spray to its sea.
>>7399559
Go, lovely Rose—
Tell her that wastes her time and me,
That now she knows,
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be.
Tell her that’s young,
And shuns to have her graces spied,
That hadst thou sprung
In deserts where no men abide,
Thou must have uncommended died.
Small is the worth
Of beauty from the light retired:
Bid her come forth,
Suffer herself to be desired,
And not blush so to be admired.
Then die—that she
The common fate of all things rare
May read in thee;
How small a part of time they share
That are so wondrous sweet and fair!
>>7399580
One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
"Vain man," said she, "that dost in vain assay,
A mortal thing so to immortalize;
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my name be wiped out likewise."
"Not so," (quod I) "let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your vertues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name:
Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew."
George Dillon
I think you are closer to me than anything-
Not as a dream alone, but as a part:
I hear your breast beat through me like a wing,
I feel your hands immediate on my heart.
You are the noose of sleep pulled slowly tight;
You are the pulsing nerve in tooth and toe;
You are the sweat upon me in the night;
You are the engine urging me to go.
Then I recall how you are none of these-
Only a woman, far away and fair,
Looking in mirrors, keeping old promises,
Laughing at stories I shall never share:
Till love seems to much sadness, and I seem
Like one more fagot in the flames of a dream.
>>7399090
Why are you stealing these people's words and posting them on the internet for free without their permission?
The Broken Tower by Hart Crane
The bell-rope that gathers God at dawn
Dispatches me as though I dropped down the knell
Of a spent day - to wander the cathedral lawn
From pit to crucifix, feet chill on steps from hell.
Have you not heard, have you not seen that corps
Of shadows in the tower, whose shoulders sway
Antiphonal carillons launched before
The stars are caught and hived in the sun's ray?
The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;
And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave
Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score
Of broken intervals… And I, their sexton slave!
Oval encyclicals in canyons heaping
The impasse high with choir. Banked voices slain!
Pagodas, campaniles with reveilles out leaping-
O terraced echoes prostrate on the plain!…
And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.
My word I poured. But was it cognate, scored
Of that tribunal monarch of the air
Whose thigh embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word
In wounds pledged once to hope - cleft to despair?
The steep encroachments of my blood left me
No answer (could blood hold such a lofty tower
As flings the question true?) -or is it she
Whose sweet mortality stirs latent power?-
And through whose pulse I hear, counting the strokes
My veins recall and add, revived and sure
The angelus of wars my chest evokes:
What I hold healed, original now, and pure…
And builds, within, a tower that is not stone
(Not stone can jacket heaven) - but slip
Of pebbles, - visible wings of silence sown
In azure circles, widening as they dip
The matrix of the heart, lift down the eye
That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower…
The commodious, tall decorum of that sky
Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its shower.
>>7399768
the comrade OP does it for the collective
Discordants by Conrad Aiken
Music I heard with you was more than music,
And bread I broke with you was more than bread;
Now that I am without you, all is desolate;
All that was once so beautiful is dead.
Your hands once touched this table and this silver,
And I have seen your fingers hold this glass.
These things do not remember you, beloved,--
And yet your touch upon them will not pass.
For it was in my heart you moved among them,
And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes;
And in my heart they will remember always,--
They knew you once, O beautiful and wise.
Todesfuge by Paul Celan
Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends
wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts
wir trinken und trinken
wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng
Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt
der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete
er schreibt es und tritt vor das Haus und es blitzen die Sterne er pfeift seine Rüden herbei
er pfeift seine Juden hervor läßt schaufeln ein Grab in der Erde
er befiehlt uns spielt auf nun zum Tanz
Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts
wir trinken dich morgens und mittags wir trinken dich abends
wir trinken und trinken
Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt
der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete
Dein aschenes Haar Sulamith wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng
Er ruft stecht tiefer ins Erdreich ihr einen ihr andern singet und spielt
er greift nach dem Eisen im Gurt er schwingts seine Augen sind blau
stecht tiefer die Spaten ihr einen ihr andern spielt weiter zum Tanz auf
Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts
wir trinken dich mittags und morgens wir trinken dich abends
wir trinken und trinken
ein Mann wohnt im Haus dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith er spielt mit den Schlangen
Er ruft spielt süßer den Tod der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
er ruft streicht dunkler die Geigen dann steigt ihr als Rauch in die Luft
dann habt ihr ein Grab in den Wolken da liegt man nicht eng
Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts
wir trinken dich mittags der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
wir trinken dich abends und morgens wir trinken und trinken
der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland sein Auge ist blau
er trifft dich mit bleierner Kugel er trifft dich genau
ein Mann wohnt im Haus dein goldenes Haar Margarete
er hetzt seine Rüden auf uns er schenkt uns ein Grab in der Luft
er spielt mit den Schlangen und träumet der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith
>>7399768
Where do you think they were copied from in the first place?
Also, many of these are IP expired, most long ago.
First Song by Galway Kinnell
Then it was dusk in Illinois, the small boy
After an afternoon of carting dung
Hung on the rail fence, a sapped thing
Weary to crying. Dark was growing tall
And he began to hear the pond frogs all
Calling on his ear with what seemed their joy.
Soon their sound was pleasant for a boy
Listening in the smoky dusk and the nightfall
Of Illinois, and from the fields two small
Boys came bearing cornstalk violins
And they rubbed the cornstalk bows with resins
And the three sat there scraping of their joy.
It was now fine music the frogs and the boys
Did in the towering Illinois twilight make
And into dark in spite of a shoulder's ache
A boy's hunched body loved out of a stalk
The first song of his happiness, and the song woke
His heart to the darkness and into the sadness of joy.
