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comment by wasoxygen
wasoxygen  ·  3179 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Another essay on modern poetry

I tried to read one of the linked poems and my mobile browser fell apart under the weight of the ads. So there's that. Yet I was planning to let my Atlantic subscription lapse because all the content appears online before in print.





user-inactivated  ·  3179 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yeah no one can read the Atlantic anymore.

I did like "From a Window" pretty well:

    Incurable and unbelieving

    In any truth but the truth of grieving,

    I saw a tree inside a tree

    Rise kaleidoscopically

    As if the leaves had livelier ghosts.

    I pressed my face as close

    To the pane as I could get

    To watch that fitful, fluent spirit

    That seemed a single being undefined

    Or countless beings of one mind

    Haul its strange cohesion

    Beyond the limits of my vision

    Over the house heavenwards.

    Of course I knew those leaves were birds.

    Of course that old tree stood

    Exactly as it had and would

    (But why should it seem fuller now?)

    And though a man’s mind might endow

    Even a tree with some excess

    Of life to which a man seems witness,

    That life is not the life of men.

    And that is where the joy came in.

Of course, hubski still doesn't have intelligent formatting. But hey.