Ahhh, feel the wankery power of the English major. But I don't think you have to be an English major to have a favorite poem. Poetry can be moving or funny, poignant or novel, or it can remind you of some time in your life when you were someone else. So what do you like, Hubskyites? What poems take your fancy?
I've been thinking about this a lot since I recently rediscovered my own favorite. It's incredibly tempting to pick something like Jabberwocky or something that tickles my funny bone ("Does anybody want any flotsam? I've gotsam. Does anybody want any jetsam? I can getsam.") But whenever I see Tom o' Bedlam, I remember why it's so good:
- From the hag and hungry Goblin
that into rags would rend ye
and the spirit that stands by the naked man
in the book of moons defend ye
That of your five sound senses
you never be forsaken,
Nor wander from your selves with Tom
abroad to beg your bacon.
While I do sing any food any feeding feeding drink or clothing, Come dame or maid, be not afraid poor Tom will injure nothing.
Of thirty bare years have I twice twenty been enraged and of forty been three times fifteen in durance soundly caged. On the lordly lofts of Bedlam with stubble soft and dainty, brave bracelets strong sweet whips ding dong with wholesome hunger plenty. And now I sing etc.
With a thought I took for Maudlin and a cruse of cockle pottage, with a thing thus tall sky bless you all I befell into this dotage. I slept not since the Conquest till then I never waked Till the roguish boy of love where I lay me found and strip't me naked. And now I sing etc.
When I short have shorn my sow's face and swigg'd my horny barrel In an oaken Inn I pound my skin as a suit of gilt apparel The moon's my constant Mistress and the lowly owl my marrow. The flaming Drake and the Night crow make me music to my sorrow. While I do sing etc.
The palsy plagues my pulses when I prig your pigs or pullen your culvers take or matchless make your Chanticleer or sullen When I want provant with Humphrey I sup, and when benighted I repose in Paul's with waking souls yet never am affrighted. But I do sing etc.
I know more than Apollo, for oft when he lies sleeping I see the stars at bloody wars in the wounded welkin weeping, The moon embrace her shepherd and the queen of love her warrior, While the first doth horn the star of morn and the next the heavenly Farrier. While I do sing etc.
The Gypsy Snap and Pedro are none of Tom's Comradoes the punk I scorn and the cutpurse sworn and the roaring boys' bravadoes, The meek and the white the gentle, me handle touch and spare not but those that cross Tom Rhinosceros do what the Panther dare not. Although I sing etc.
With an host of furious fancies whereof I am commander with a burning spear and a horse of air, to the wilderness I wander. By a knight of ghosts and shadows I summon'd am to Tourney ten leagues beyond the wide world's end me think it is no journey. Yet will I sing etc.
But then, it's also massively tempting to throw a second poem in there for fear of neglecting a masterpiece. If you're not bored to tears already or if you could do with a chuckle, I also love archys autobiography by Don Marquis, written from the point of view of a cockroach who jumps up and down on the keys of a typewriter. That's why there are no capitals or punctuation - archy can't hit two keys at the same time.
For All
Ah to be alive on a mid-September morn fording a stream barefoot, pants rolled up, holding boots, pack on, sunshine, ice in the shallows, northern rockies.
Rustle and shimmer of icy creek waters stones turn underfoot, small and hard as toes cold nose dripping singing inside creek music, heart music, smell of sun on gravel.
I pledge allegiance
I pledge allegiance to the soil of Turtle Island, and to the beings who thereon dwell one ecosystem in diversity under the sun With joyful interpenetration for all.
- They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don't have any kids yourself.
This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin.
For some reason this poem cheers me up.
many of course, on the "poems I like" dance card - but here's one I think of, when I think about the notion that if you've had one big passion that doesn't end in broken glass, then it's been a good run...
Love Is Not All
Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; Yet many a man is making friends with death Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour, Pinned down by pain and moaning for release, Or nagged by want past resolution's power, I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food. It well may be. I do not think I would. - Edna St. Vincent Millay
I can't find some of my favorite poems that I'd like to share, but I have posted three of my favorites on hubski in the past.
One Train May Hide Another by Kenneth Koch Flight by James Tate Closing time at the Second Avenue Deli by Alan Dugan
I was also hoping to share another one of Koch's poems, The Art of Love but it's quite long and I can't find it posted online. It's long enough that I wouldn't care to type it out myself, but it's a great poem. If I had to make a list of poets who have most shaped my ideas on what poems should be like (and everyone who reads or writes poetry should develop their own ideas of what poetry should be) an unorganized list would have to be, Kenneth Koch and to some extent the other New York School poets, James Tate, C.P. Cavafy, Alan Dugan, Pablo Neruda and Bill Knott.
Anyway, here is one of my favorite Neruda poems, originally titled by Neruda Soneto XII Note: the English translation is taken from I Explain a Few Things edited by Ilan Stavans, 2007. I'm not sure who translated it.
‘Carnal Apple, Woman Filled, Burning Moon,’
Carnal apple, Woman filled, burning moon,
dark smell of seaweed, crush of mud and light,
what secret knowledge is clasped between your pillars?
What primal night does Man touch with his senses?
Ay, Love is a journey through waters and stars,
through suffocating air, sharp tempests of grain:
Love is a war of lightning,
and two bodies ruined by a single sweetness.
Kiss by kiss I cover your tiny infinity,
your margins, your rivers, your diminutive villages,
and a genital fire, transformed by delight,
slips through the narrow channels of blood
to precipitate a nocturnal carnation,
to be, and be nothing but light in the dark.
Soneto XII
Plena mujer, manzana carnal, luna caliente,
espeso aroma de algas, lodo y luz machacados,
qué oscura claridad se abre entre tus columnas?
Qué antigua noche el hombre toca con sus sentidos?
Ay, amar es un viaje con agua y con estrellas,
con aire ahogado y bruscas tempestades de harina:
amar es un combate de relámpagos
y dos cuerpos por una sola miel derrotados.
Beso a beso recorro tu pequeño infinito,
tus márgenes, tus ríos, tus pueblos diminutos,
y el fuego genital transformado en delicia
corre por los delgados caminos de la sangre
hasta preciptitarse come un clavel nocturno,
hasta ser y no ser sino un rayo en la sombre.Speaking of Neruda, this is one of my favorite poems by him. I have it memorized and hanging on my wall in my bedroom.
Love- Pablo Neruda
What's wrong with you, with us,
what's happening to us?
Ah our love is a harsh cord
that binds us wounding us
and if we want
to leave our wound,
to separate,
it makes a new knot for us and condemns us
to drain our blood and burn together.
What's wrong with you? I look at you
and I find nothing in you but two eyes
like all eyes, a mouth
lost among a thousand mouths that I have kissed, more beautiful,
a body just like those that have slipped
beneath my body without leaving any memory.
And how empty you went through the world
like a wheat-colored jar
without air, without sound, without substance!
I vainly sought in you
depth for my arms
that dig, without cease, beneath the earth:
beneath your skin, beneath your eyes,
nothing,
beneath your double breast scarcely
raised
a current of crystalline order
that does not know why it flows singing.
Why, why, why,
my love, why?Fire and Ice by Robert Frost
Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.
They Feed They Lion by Philip Levine
Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter, Out of black bean and wet slate bread, Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar, Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies, They Lion grow.
Out of the gray hills Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride, West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties, Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps, Out of the bones' need to sharpen and the muscles' to stretch, They Lion grow.
Earth is eating trees, fence posts, Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones, "Come home, Come home!" From pig balls, From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness, From the furred ear and the full jowl come The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose They Lion grow.
From the sweet glues of the trotters Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower Of the hams the thorax of caves, From "Bow Down" come "Rise Up," Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels, The grained arm that pulls the hands, They Lion grow.
From my five arms and all my hands, From all my white sins forgiven, they feed, From my car passing under the stars, They Lion, from my children inherit, From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion, From they sack and they belly opened And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth They feed they Lion and he comes.
--------------- Philip Levine's blue-collar baseness of human condition thrush up against the ebullient resonance of our shared world has always struck me as a powerful part of contemporary poetry.
that poem played a part in triggering this one by Lucie Brock-Broido, which you may enjoy for that reason:
- "Am Moor"
Am lean against. Am the heavy hour
Hand at urge, At the verge of one. Am the ice comb of the tonsured
Hair, am the second Hand, halted, the velvet opera glove. Am slant. Am fen, the injure
Wind at withins, Stranger where the storm forms a face if the body stands enough
In a weather this Cripple & this rough. Am shunt. Was moon-shaped helmet left
In bog, was condition Of a spirit shorn, childlike & herd. Was Andalusian, ambsace,
Bird. Am kept. Was keeper of the badly marred, was furious done god, was
Patient, was bad Luck, was nurse. Ninety badly wounded men lay baying
In the reddened reedy Hay of Saxony, was surgeon to their flinch & hoop, was hospice
To their torso hall, Was numinous creature to their dying
Off. Am numb. Was shoulder & queer luck. Am among.
Was gaunt. Was--why--or the mutton & moss. Was the rented room.
Was chamber & ambage & tender & burn. Am esurient, was the hungry form.
Am anatomy. Was the bleating thing.
Ozymandius
I met a traveler from an antique land Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal these words appear: My name is Ozymandius, King of Kings, Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
For anyone curious, there is a neat story about this poem as well. It was written as a contest between Mary Shelley's (Frankenstein) husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Horace Smith. His is here:
IN Egypt's sandy silence, all alone, Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws The only shadow that the Desert knows:— "I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone, "The King of Kings; this mighty City shows "The wonders of my hand."— The City's gone,— Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose The site of this forgotten Babylon.
We wonder,—and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
Not much of a poem, more of an inspirational quote, but it's in verse, so why the hell not.
- If you think you are beaten, you are;
If you think you dare not, you don't.
If you'd like to win, but think you can't
It's almost a cinch you won't.
If you think you'll lose, you've lost,
For out in the world we find
Success being with a fellow's will;
It's all in the state of mind.
- If you think you're outclassed, you are:
You've got to think high to rise.
You've got to be sure of yourself before
You can ever win a prize.
Life's battles don't always go
To the stronger or faster man,
But soon or late the man who wins
Is the one who thinks he can.
― Walter D. Wintle
- When the bells justle in the tower
The hollow night amid,
Then on my tongue the taste is sour
Of all I ever did.
"Ulysses"
--Tennyson
- It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel; I will drink Life to the lees. All times I have enjoy'd Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades Vext the dim sea. I am become a name; For always roaming with a hungry heart Much have I seen and known,-- cities of men And manners, climates, councils, governments, Myself not least, but honor'd of them all,-- And drunk delight of battle with my peers, Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy. I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move. How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use! As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life Were all too little, and of one to me Little remains; but every hour is saved >From that eternal silence, something more, A bringer of new things; and vile it were For some three suns to store and hoard myself, And this gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
This is my son, mine own Telemachus, to whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,-- Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfill This labor, by slow prudence to make mild A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees Subdue them to the useful and the good. Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere Of common duties, decent not to fail In offices of tenderness, and pay Meet adoration to my household gods, When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail; There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners, Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me,-- That ever with a frolic welcome took The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed Free hearts, free foreheads,-- you and I are old; Old age hath yet his honor and his toil. Death closes all; but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods. The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks; The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends. 'T is not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down; It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,-- One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
TERRA INCOGNITA There are vast realms of consciousness still undreamed of vast ranges of experience, like the humming of unseen harps, we know nothing of, within us.
Oh when man has escaped from the barbed-wire entanglement of his own ideas and his own mechanical devices there is a marvelous rich world of contact and sheer fluid beauty and fearless face-to-face awareness of now-naked life and me, and you, and other men and women and grapes, and ghouls, and ghosts and green moonlight and ruddy-orange limbs stirring the limbo of the unknown air, and eyes so soft softer than the space between the stars. And all things, and nothing, and being and not-being alternately palpitate, when at last we escape the barbed-wire enclosure of Know-Thyself, knowing we can never know, we can but touch, and wonder, and ponder, and make our effort and dangle in a last fastidious fine delight as the fuchsia does, dangling her reckless drop of purple after so much putting forth and slow mounting marvel of a little tree. -D.H Lawrence
cW, I'd be curious as to your choice(s) for some of your favorites.
Oh man. Great thread! Fun poems, all. As for my own, I'll just go ahead and waffle. The short list includes Milosz's Ars Poetica, frost's Accidentally on Purpose, Borges' The Suicide, Bishop's One Art, Bukowski's Something for the Touts, the Nuns, the Grocery Store Clerks, and You, and Stevens' The Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock. Lately, I've been blown away by Averill Curdy's Song and Error (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/236832), which I first heard on poetry foundation.org's poem of the day podcast. Still, I think the top spot must go to Rilke, for this one:
The Man Watching
I can tell by the way the trees beat, after so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes that a storm is coming, and I hear the far-off fields say things I can't bear without a friend, I can't love without a sister
The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on across the woods and across time, and the world looks as if it had no age: the landscape like a line in the psalm book, is seriousness and weight and eternity.
What we choose to fight is so tiny! What fights us is so great! If only we would let ourselves be dominated as things do by some immense storm, we would become strong too, and not need names.
When we win it's with small things, and the triumph itself makes us small. What is extraordinary and eternal does not want to be bent by us. I mean the Angel who appeared to the wrestlers of the Old Testament: when the wrestler's sinews grew long like metal strings, he felt them under his fingers like chords of deep music.
Whoever was beaten by this Angel (who often simply declined the fight) went away proud and strengthened and great from that harsh hand, that kneaded him as if to change his shape. Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings.