the poetry thread

[bickster]

Have some Lord Byron, as read by Marianne Faithful with background music by Warren Ellis

 

[useless]

The candle is a fairy house
That's smooth and round and white
And Mother carries it about
Whenever it is night.

Right at the top a fairy lives
A lovely yellow one
And if you blow a little bit
It has all sorts of fun.

It bows and dances by itself
In such a clever way
And then it stretches very tall
" Well, it grows fast " you say.

The little chimney of the house
Is black and really sweet —
And there the candle fairy stands
Though you can't see its feet.

And when the dark is very big
And you've been having dreams
Then Mother brings the candle in
How friendly like it seems!

It's only just for Mothers that
The candle fairy comes;
And if you play with it, it bites
Your fingers and your thumbs.

But still you love it very much
This candle fairy, dear
Because, at night, it always means
That Mother's very near.

The Candle Fairy ~ Katherine Mansfield

[chrisp65]

I will design a town in the image of your face
Round the wrinkles of your eyes my footsteps you can trace
We could promenade down infra-nasel depression
The streets of your hands will never feel a recession

It's a secular day and it will be even better tomorrow
It's the first day of the intergrated transport hub
Let us celebrate this monumental progress
We have reduced emmisions by 75%

Trams
Inaugral Trams

[blandy]

2 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

I will design a town in the image of your face
Round the wrinkles of your eyes my footsteps you can trace
We could promenade down infra-nasel depression
The streets of your hands will never feel a recession

It's a secular day and it will be even better tomorrow
It's the first day of the intergrated transport hub
Let us celebrate this monumental progress
We have reduced emmisions by 75%

Trams
Inaugral Trams

Gryff/Gruff can't spell.

[chrisp65]

10 minutes ago, blandy said:

Gryff/Gruff can't spell.

Grabbed it from a site that had transposed from listening to the lyrics.

Didn’t post anymore because they had ??? Where they couldn’t make out a word.

(they had a Dylan song there too, it was something along the lines of ???? ?? ????? ????? ?? ?????? ? ????? ?? ??????)

Gruff’s innocent on this one.

[mjmooney]

39 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

they had a Dylan song there too, it was something along the lines of ???? ?? ????? ????? ?? ?????? ? ????? ?? ??????

Tell me a Dylan song where you can't make out the words. 

[chrisp65]

Just now, mjmooney said:

Tell me a Dylan song where you can't make out the words. 

Well I don’t know do I, I can’t make out the lyrics.

That one that sort of goes,  

Hhh. Mmmmh nnn mmmnhhh.

Hhhmmmn.  Mmmnnnnn hhhh

ooooooo nnnnnnmmnmnhhm

must be Santa must be Santa

 

Where you think from the production values it must be from the 80’s but it’s actually quite recent.

[mjmooney]

[useless]

SWARMING city, city full of dreams,

Where in a full day the spectre walks and speaks;

Mighty colossus, in your narrow veins

My story flows as flows the rising sap.

 

One morn, disputing with my tired soul,

And like a hero stiffening all my nerves,

I trod a suburb shaken by the jar

Of rolling wheels, where the fog magnified

The houses either side of that sad street,

So they seemed like two wharves the ebbing flood

Leaves desolate by the river-side. A mist,

Unclean and yellow, inundated space--

A scene that would have pleased an actor's soul.

Then suddenly an aged man, whose rags

Were yellow as the rainy sky, whose looks

Should have brought alms in floods upon his head,

Without the misery gleaming in his eye,

Appeared before me; and his pupils seemed

To have been washed with gall; the bitter frost

Sharpened his glance; and from his chin a beard

Sword-stiff and ragged, Judas-like stuck forth.

He was not bent but broken: his backbone

Made a so true right angle with his legs,

That, as he walked, the tapping stick which gave

The finish to the picture, made him seem

Like some infirm and stumbling quadruped

Or a three-legged Jew. Through snow and mud

He walked with troubled and uncertain gait,

As though his sabots trod upon the dead,

Indifferent and hostile to the world.

 

His double followed him: tatters and stick

And back and eye and beard, all were the same;

Out of the same Hell, indistinguishable,

These centenarian twins, these spectres odd,

Trod the same pace toward some end unknown.

To what fell complot was I then exposed?

Humiliated by what evil chance?

For as the minutes one by one went by

Seven times I saw this sinister old man

Repeat his image there before my eyes!

 

Let him who smiles at my inquietude,

Who never trembled at a fear like mine,

Know that in their decrepitude's despite

These seven old hideous monsters had the mien

Of beings immortal.

 

Then, I thought, must I,

Undying, contemplate the awful eighth;

Inexorable, fatal, and ironic double;

Disgusting Phoenix, father of himself

And his own son? In terror then I turned

My back upon the infernal band, and fled

To my own place, and closed my door; distraught

And like a drunkard who sees all things twice,

With feverish troubled spirit, chilly and sick,

Wounded by mystery and absurdity!

 

In vain my reason tried to cross the bar,

The whirling storm but drove her back again;

And my soul tossed, and tossed, an outworn wreck,

Mastless, upon a monstrous, shoreless sea.

Charles Baudelaire - Les Sept vieillards

[Xann]

[Big Salad]

Best poem ever written imo:

 

 

[mjmooney]

Sun shines easy, sun shines gay 
On bug-house, warehouse, brewery, market, 
On the chocolate factory and the B.S.A., 
On the Greek town hall and Josiah Mason; 
On the Mitchells and Butlers Tudor pubs, 
On the white police and the one-way traffic 
And glances off the chromium hubs 
And the metal studs in the sleek macadam. 
Eight years back about this time 
I came to live in this hazy city 
To work in a building caked with grime 
Teaching the classics to Midland students; 
Virgil, Livy, the usual round, 
Principal parts and the lost digamma; 
And to hear the prison-like lecture room resound 
To Homer in a Dudley accent. 
But Life was comfortable, life was fine 
With two in a bed and patchwork cushions 
And checks and tassels on the washing-line, 
A gramophone, a cat, and the smell of jasmine. 
The steaks were tender, the films were fun, 
The walls were striped like a Russian ballet, 
There were lots of things undone 
But nobody cared, for the days were early. 
Nobody niggled, nobody cared, 
The soul was deaf to the mounting debit, 
The soul was unprepared 
But the firelight danced on the ply-wood ceiling. 
We drove round Shropshire in a bijou car — 
Bewdley, Cleobury Mortimer, Ludlow — 
And the map of England was a toy bazaar 
And the telephone wires were idle music. 
And sun shone easy, sun shone hard 
On quickly dropping pear-tree blossom 
And pigeons courting in the cobbled yard 
With flashing necks and notes of thunder. 
We slept in linen, we cooked with wine, 
We paid in cash and took no notice 
Of how the train ran down the line 
Into the sun against the signal. 
We lived in Birmingham through the slump Line your boots with a piece of paper — 
Sunlight dancing on the rubbish dump, 
On the queues of men and the hungry chimneys. 
And the next election came — 
Labour defeats in Erdington and Aston; 
And life went on — for us went on the same; 
Who were we to count the losses? 
Some went back to work and the void 
Took on shape while others climbing 
The uphill nights of the unemployed 
Woke in the morning to factory hooters. 
Little on the plate and nothing in the post; 
Queue in the rain or try the public 
Library where the eye may coast 
Columns of print for a hopeful harbour. 
But roads ran easy, roads ran gay 
Clear of the city and we together 
Could put on tweeds for a getaway 
South or west to Clee or the Cotswolds; 
Forty to the gallon; into the green 
Fields in the past of English history; 
Flies in the bonnet and dust on the screen 
And no look back to the burning city. 
That was then and now is now, 
Here again on a passing visit, 
Passing through but how 
Memory blocks the passage. 
Just as in 1931 
Sun shines easy but I no longer 
Docket a place in the sun — 
No wife, no ivory tower, no funk-hole. 
The night grows purple, the crisis hangs 
Over the roofs like a Persian army 
And all of Xenophon’s parasangs 
Would take us only an inch from danger. 
Black-out practice and A.R.P., 
Newsboys driving a roaring business, 
The flapping paper snatched to see 
If anything has, or has not, happened. 
And I go to the Birmingham Hippodrome 
Packed to the roof and primed for laughter 
And beautifully at home 
With the ukulele and the comic chestnuts; 
‘As pals we meet, as pals we part’ — 
Embonpoint and a new tiara; 
The comedian spilling the apple-cart 
Of doubles entendres and doggerel verses 
And the next day begins 
Again with alarm and anxious 
Listening to bulletins 
From distant, measured voices 
Arguing for peace 
While the zero hour approaches, 
While the eagles gather and the petrol and oil and grease 
Have all been applied and the vultures back the eagles. 
But once again 
The crisis is put off and things look better 
And we feel negotiation is not vain — 
Save my skin and damn my conscience. 
And negotiation wins, 
If you can call it winning, 
And here we are — just as before — safe in our skins; 
Glory to God for Munich. 
And stocks go up and wrecks 
Are salved and politicians’ reputations 
Go up like Jack-on-the-Beanstalk; only the Czechs 
Go down and without fighting. 

(From "Autumn Journal" by Louis Macneice, written at the time of the 'Peace in our time' Munich crisis in 1938) 

[MakemineVanilla]

On 10/10/2011 at 22:03, mjmooney said:

Correct. More specifically, every line is an anagram of "Washington Crossing the Delaware ".

 

In other news, I have just completed my annual reading of Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal.

McNeice is a recent discovery of mine and I was glad to find his work fulfils the definition of poetry offered by Wiki.

 

[useless]

 

[MakemineVanilla]

Some years ago I remember hearing a poem about a father returning home drunk and carries his kid around on his shoulders.

I think it is written from the kid's point of view.

Can anyone tell me what it might be?

[alreadyexists]

When I feel in a melancholy mood I often turn to poetry to make me feel like someone else shared these kinds of feelings. I don’t know how else to express it but when I’m blue it’s like knowing someone else expressed these feelings so eloquently makes me feel less alone. 
 

My wife and I have our second child on the way in a few weeks, and with both my parents gone I find myself missing them so much around these kinds of big life events. I find Philip Larkin (as quoted by the OP) often sums things up so well and with such an insight in to that special kind of pain that we all feel sometimes. This is one I often think of around these times:

 

The Mower

BY PHILIP LARKIN

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found   
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,   

Killed. It had been in the long grass. 
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.   
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world   
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not. 
The first day after a death, the new absence

Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind

While there is still time.

Edited March 4, 2022 by alreadyexists

[alreadyexists]

A lovely poem I read the other day for the first time:

 

[useless]

They have watered the street,
It shines in the glare of lamps,
Cold, white lamps,
And lies
Like a slow-moving river,
Barred with silver and black.
Cabs go down it,
One,
And then another.
Between them I hear the shuffling of feet.
Tramps doze on the window-ledges,
Night-walkers pass along the sidewalks.
The city is squalid and sinister,
With the silver-barred street in the midst,
Slow-moving,
A river leading nowhere.
Opposite my window,
The moon cuts,
Clear and round,
Through the plum-coloured night.
She cannot light the city;
It is too bright.
It has white lamps,
And glitters coldly.
I stand in the window and watch the moon.
She is thin and lustreless,
But I love her.
I know the moon,
And this is an alien city.

Amy Lowell

[mjmooney]

National Poetry Day, apparently. 

Eden Rock

They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock: My father, twenty-five, in the same suit
Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack
Still two years old and trembling at his feet.
My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress
Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat,
Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass. Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light.
She pours tea from a Thermos, the milk straight From an old H.P. sauce-bottle, a screw
Of paper for a cork; slowly sets out
The same three plates, the tin cups painted blue.
The sky whitens as if lit by three suns.
My mother shades her eyes and looks my way Over the drifted stream. My father spins
A stone along the water. Leisurely,
They beckon to me from the other bank.
I hear them call, ‘See where the stream-path is! Crossing is not as hard as you might think.’
I had not thought that it would be like this.

Charles Causley
 

[useless]