Poetry, no apologies for length
part 6
A little under represented so I'll chuck a few in the pot. Not my favourite thing but that's because I'm too lazy to do the work. The compression of meaning requires it really. I found that when I had to even stuff I disliked (E.G Philip Sydney and much of renaissance pining love poetry) opened up in interesting ways

So we start there
John Donne-Anything, read anything at all by this wonderful poet. It's a bit awkward but that gives an oddly modern feel to it. Check this out but take time over it


A NOCTURNAL UPON ST. LUCY'S DAY,
BEING THE SHORTEST DAY.
by John Donne


'TIS the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks ;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays ;
The world's whole sap is sunk ;
The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed's-feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr'd ; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring ;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness ;
He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death—things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that's good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have ;
I, by Love's limbec, am the grave
Of all, that's nothing. Oft a flood
Have we two wept, and so
Drown'd the whole world, us two ; oft did we grow,
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else ; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death—which word wrongs her—
Of the first nothing the elixir grown ;
Were I a man, that I were one
I needs must know ; I should prefer,
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means ; yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love ; all, all some properties invest.
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.

But I am none ; nor will my sun renew.
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
At this time to the Goat is run
To fetch new lust, and give it you,
Enjoy your summer all,
Since she enjoys her long night's festival.
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year's and the day's deep midnight is.


Thomas Hardy-Start with Chosen Poems anthology
A good poet and an awful novelist. Technically accomplished structure and rhyme and it looks effortless.

T.S Eliot-The Wasteland and other poems
A good start. Willfully elitist and hard going. Don't sweat the detail at first. Read it through and let the total effect wash through you. Plenty of time to play literary detective smartyboots later. Nothing else like it.

Shakespeare's Sonnets
These still resonate very clearly across time. Take a small number at a time rather than piling in. Unless you are really keen I'd leave the longer stuff. A lot more background in classics, early modern social forms and courtly love make it a bit hard for casual reading. Still good just less amenable to modern minds

Sylvia Plath
Marmite choice time. If unfamiliar pick up Ariel and if it doesn't do it give up. If you already know her then you have the complete poems already. A sample. See how long it lasts as it's still copyright. If taken down just Google Medusa

Medusa

Off that landspit of stony mouth-plugs,
Eyes rolled by white sticks,
Ears cupping the sea's incoherences,
You house your unnerving head–God-ball,
Lens of mercies,
Your stooges
Plying their wild cells in my keel's shadow,
Pushing by like hearts,
Red stigmata at the very center,
Riding the rip tide to the nearest point of
departure,

Dragging their Jesus hair.
Did I escape, I wonder?
My mind winds to you
Old barnacled umbilicus, Atlantic cable,
Keeping itself, it seems, in a state of miraculous
repair.

In any case, you are always there,
Tremulous breath at the end of my line,
Curve of water upleaping
To my water rod, dazzling and grateful,
Touching and sucking.
I didn't call you.
I didn't call you at all.
Nevertheless, nevertheless
You steamed to me over the sea,
Fat and red, a placenta

Paralyzing the kicking lovers.
Cobra light
Squeezing the breath from the blood bells
Of the fuchsia. I could draw no breath,
Dead and moneyless,

Overexposed, like an X-ray.
Who do you think you are?
A Communion wafer? Blubbery Mary?
I shall take no bite of your body,
Bottle in which I live,

Ghastly Vatican.
I am sick to death of hot salt.
Green as eunuchs, your wishes
Hiss at my sins.
Off, off, eely tentacle!
There is nothing between us.


Honourable mentions as this has gone on long enough to Gerard Manley Hopkins,Philip Larkin, Ben Johnson and many more. On second thoughts one more-
unless you have a heart of stone
read it and weep

On My First Son
by Ben Jonson

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy ;
My sin was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy.
Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
Oh, could I lose all father now ! For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon 'scaped world's and flesh's rage,
And if no other misery, yet age !
Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say, Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such
As what he loves may never like too much.
(unclestinky, Mon 9 Jan 2012, 18:54, 13 replies)

*sniggers*
" upleaping
To my water rod, dazzling and grateful,
Touching and sucking."
( Infidel , shit and wrong, Mon 9 Jan 2012, 19:46, closed)

my faves:
Gray's Elegy
Noyes's The Highwayman
fwiw
( Squilliam but . . . . *I'm* the one with all the talent!, Tue 10 Jan 2012, 0:12, closed)

Elegy is Excellent
Love and Death, a Woody Allen film but also sums up so much poetry. And in the end what else is there
(unclestinky, Tue 10 Jan 2012, 2:27, closed)

Spoken like a true
public schoolboy. Cameron was probably in your house.
(the other guy not the one that gave you coochie warts, Tue 10 Jan 2012, 1:12, closed)

Quite.
Poems are for dirty queers, I bet the bastard knows a bit of Latin too, elitist swine.
( Infidel , shit and wrong, Tue 10 Jan 2012, 1:59, closed)

Obviously, after all
Adeo in teneris consuescere multum est
and also
Cave ab homine unius libri
and on the dirty queer point think Blackadder;s Bishop of Bath and Wells
"I'll do anything
to anything" because
Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto
As for being elitist well durr. Some people are better than others
adversus solem ne loquitor


(Frankly I totally cheated here as almost all the Latin I learned has been lost to massive drugs)
(unclestinky, Tue 10 Jan 2012, 3:07, closed)

Heh, not bad.
I'm all for a bit of poetry learnin' anyhoo, iffn it gets me laid. Which it has.
( Infidel , shit and wrong, Tue 10 Jan 2012, 4:28, closed)

laid right out in the pub when the real men is watchn the rugerbee
( enoughblueskyforsailorstrousers, Tue 10 Jan 2012, 9:11, closed)

On a bench In the pub garden,
With the real man's girl. Oh the romance.
Oh the lies.
( Infidel , shit and wrong, Tue 10 Jan 2012, 12:14, closed)

Had to add a War poet so have a Wilfred Owen
ANTHEM FOR DOOMED YOUTH



What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries5 now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, –
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds
(unclestinky, Tue 10 Jan 2012, 3:11, closed)

The war poems
seem to pull me into a deep melancholy which hangs around for days. I like, love some of the work but it gets to me like no other.
I suppose it's just doing its job.
( Infidel , shit and wrong, Tue 10 Jan 2012, 4:30, closed)

Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay.

( stuj (^(^;;^)^) GO TEAM SPIDERS!(^(^;;^)^), Tue 10 Jan 2012, 7:40, closed)

Yeats
Can't believe that slipped my mind.

Read any try this though
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: a waste of desert sand;
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
Wind 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?
(unclestinky, Tue 10 Jan 2012, 22:36, closed)