Vladimir Mayakovsky: Russian Poet

What do you think about him? My favorite is "The Cloud In Pants".

A Cloud In Trousers - epilogue

Your thoughts,
dreaming on a softened brain,
like an over-fed lackey on a greasy settee,
with my heart's bloody tatters I'll mock again;
impudent and caustic, I'll jeer to superfluity.

Of Grandfatherly gentleness I'm devoid,
there's not a single grey hair in my soul!
Thundering the world with the might of my voice,
I go by — handsome,
twenty-two-year-old.

Gentle ones!
You lay your love on a violin.
The crude lay their love on a drum.
but you can't, like me, turn inside out entirely,
and nothing but human lips become!

Out of chintz-covered drawing-rooms, come
and learn-
decorous bureaucrats of angelic leagues.

and you whose lips are calmly thumbed,
as a cook turns over cookery-book leaves.

If you like-
I'll be furiously flesh elemental,
or - changing to tones that the sunset arouses -
if you like-
I'll be extraordinary gentle,
not a man, but - a cloud in trousers!

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T. S. Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Eliot was born in St. Louis and educated at Harvard University, but most of his adult life was passed in London. In the vanguard of the artistic movement known as Modernism, Eliot was a unique innovator in poetry and The Waste Land (1922) stands as one of the most original and influential poems of the twentieth century. As a young man he suffered a religious crisis and a nervous breakdown before regaining his emotional equilibrium and Christian faith. His early poetry, including "Prufrock," deals with spiritually exhausted people who exist in the impersonal modern city. Prufrock is a representative character who cannot reconcile his thoughts and understanding with his feelings and will. The poem displays several levels of irony, the most important of which grows out of the vain, weak man's insights into his sterile life and his lack of will to change that life. The poem is replete with images of enervation and paralysis, such as the evening described as "etherized," immobile. Prufrock understands that he and his associates lack authenticity. One part of himself would like to startle them out of their meaningless lives, but to accomplish this he would have to risk disturbing his "universe," being rejected. The latter part of the poem captures his sense defeat for failing to act courageously. Eliot helped to set the modernist fashion for blending references to the classics with the most sordid type of realism, then expressing the blend in majestic language which seems to mock the subject.

What makes this poem different from a normal love song?

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized (2) upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust (3) restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo. (4)

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair--
[They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!"]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin--
[They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!"]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:--
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all--
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all--
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
. . . . .
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . .

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

. . . . .

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep . . . tired . . . or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, (5)
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter, (6)
I am no prophet--and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, (7) come from the dead
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"--
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: "That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all."

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the
floor--
And this, and so much more?--
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern (8) threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
"That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all."

. . . . .

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, (9) nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous--
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old . . .I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.


---------------
note;
(1) A passage from Dante Alighieri's Inferno (Canto 27, lines 61-66) spoken by Guido da Montefeltro in response to the questions of Dante, who Guido supposes is dead, since he is in Hell:. The flame in which Guido is encased vibrates as he speaks: "If I thought that that I was replying to someone who would ever return to the world, this flame would cease to flicker. But since no one ever returns from these depths alive, if what I've heard is true, I will answer you without fear of infamy."
(2) Anesthetized with ether; but also suggesting "made etherial," less real.
(3) Cheap bars and restaurants used to spread sawdust on the floor to soak up spilled beer, etc.
(4) The great Renaissance Italian artist.
(5) Cookies and ice cream.
(6) Like John the Baptist (see Matthew 14: 1-12)
(7) A man raised from death by Jesus (see John 11: 1-44). Eliot may also have had in mind the Lazarus in the parable told by Jesus in Luke 16:19-31, in which case the poetical Lazarus would have returned to deliver a message which the Biblical Lazarus could not.
(8) Early form of slide projector.
(9) Shakespeare's sensitive hero known for procrastination.

-------------
This is an excerpt from Reading About the World, Volume 2, edited by Paul Brians, Mary Gallwey, Douglas Hughes, Azfar Hussain, Richard Law, Michael Myers, Michael Neville, Roger Schlesinger, Alice Spitzer, and Susan Swan and published by Harcourt Brace Custom Books.


Paul Brians
Department of English
Washington State University
Pullman 99164-5020

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Poem Review: On Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush"

Thomas Hardy felt compelled to revolt against a degenerate Victorian hyperaesthesia in which exact articulations, the utterances of meaning and ideas were sacrificed to the melody. What I wish to explore is Hardy's modes of corrective style-- that is, diction, syntax, voice, his use of images and figurative language. It is the premise of this discussion that analyzing elements of poetic style in poems that are generally accepted as representative is one method of exploring the poet's ideas and beliefs. How someone takes or perceives the world is revealed in the way they speak Whether springing from a spontaneous effusion or produced through the fullest exercising of word craft, a poet's attutudes toward what poetry can and should be attempting to communicate are exhibited in style. In other words, style is meaningful and how a poem is said is as revealing as what is being said. I have selected Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush" as a representative poem for this discussion.

Hardy in his prolific output of over nine hundred poems, which he describes in his "Apology" as "miscellanies of verse" in "books of various character", reveals a cast of mind able to accept human experience as a provisional reality of chance and change. A poet's "whole-seeing" can, probably must, occur without an integrating system of belief (Hardy, 559). Hardy's autobiography, The Life of Thomas Hardy, written in the third person, exhibits his personal "reticence" as Tom Paulin notes. Although I find the creation of a seemingly detached biographer by the subject himself as an ambiguous procedure because it creates a persona whether it wants to or not, I believe Hardy's motive was to show a reluctance toward asserting convictions and to resist mythologizing the poetic vocation. In Life, Hardy states that "the mission of poetry is to record impressions, not convictions". He delivers a telling description of how his philosophy translates into a theory of poetry: "Unadjusted impressions have their value, and the road to a true philosophy of life seems to lie in humbly recording diverse readings of its phenomena as they are forced upon us by chance and change" (Paulin, 26).

"The Darkling Thrush" is a poem occasioned by the beginning of a new year and a new century. It is formally precise, comprised of four octaves with each stanza containing two quatrains in hymn measure. The movement of the first two stanzas is from observation of a winter landscape as perceived by an individual speaker to a terrible vision of the death of an era that the landscape seems to disclose. The action is in how the apprehension of this particular moment of seeing changes as the emotional impact of the scene solidifies.

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.

The diction is simple and direct, and the tone is the quiet voice of private conversation. The spectral quality of frost is accurate and unforced suggesting a hoary coating, age, and the ghostly quality literal in its Latin root "spectrum", which means appearance or image. The landscape is an "appearance" we are seeing through the eyes of a subjective perceiver. The phenomena of frost are precisely represented but it also coincides with the psychological state of the speaker which becomes evident as the poem develops. Whether he was leaning on the gate at the edge of a wooded grove in casual observation or from fatigue, a sense of oppressiveness is underscored by consonance. The sluggish weight of "Winter's dregs" picks up and compounds the effect of "spectre-gray" which, in turn, leads into an effect of exhalation in "desolate." The word "dregs" with its strong stress and combination of a hard consonant with a sibiliant in "gs" forces a caesura, and then desolate trails off from its strong stress. "DE solate" when spoken as normal speech lengthens its duration in a falling cadence in comparison to "COPpice GATE" even though it maintains regularity metrically. Although the line is enjambed, the tongue requires a little adjusting, and another slowing down occurs with "The", and "weakening" inserts an extra unstressed syllable, (iamb, anapest , iamb), to the full stop of "day".

The figure of the sun as a "weakening eye" is a personification, a trope resonating off Romantic associations such as Wordsworth's "eye of heaven" for the sun in "Resolution and Independence". It establishes the poem's time as at the closing of a particular day at the end of a seasonal year. Whether the Romantic allusion to visionary powers and their ebbing is noted or not, it is a suggestive adjective for a time when seeing is becoming more difficult due to a reduction of light. As the poem moves further away from visual observation to emotional coloration, it replaces concrete detail with pathetic fallacy, a rhetorical device by which we, in Santayana's words "dye the world our own color" (Santayana, 159).

The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres . . .


The next two lines also have a Romantic link to Coleridge's aeolian harp and the music it made at another dusk when it exemplified Unity, "one Life within us and abroad/ Which meets all motion and becomes its soul". A "wild harp" is also the image opening Coleridge's own "Ode to the Departing Year", a poem in which the harp is unable to evoke a lasting hope (Coleridge, 56). Now , at the turn of the nineteenth century in Hardy's poem, the lyric instrument is broken. It is important to note that the image springs from a concrete detail. The stems of a climbing vine, such as woodbine or hops, that could be found on a gate and neighboring trees, are part of the actual country scene. Vines, denuded and tangled in wintertime, do look like a mess of sprung strings. The vines elaborate subtly on the idea of dregs, both as the residuals of summer fertility and harvest, and the idea of lees, the base remainder of wine. The verb "scored" has several meanings: the idea of tallying up or recording costs or grudges or numbers in a competition as in time's losses and gains reduced to dead stems; the act of notching the sky which is visually accurate if one is looking up through vines and carries a hint of incisions that are painful, and the idea of a written orchestration or musical score which leads the observer to think of music and stringed instruments that are broken. The images, or the things named, of the first four lines have graduated by degrees from the actual things of the real world that they stand for to metaphor and personification, and then to a simile. This is a movement that widens the frame of reference that the tenor has to the vehicle. Hardy is using figurative devices, metaphor, simile, pathetic fallacy, in a way that increases the tentativeness of the comparisons. They resonate with the speaker's thought and emotion at an increasing remove from simple perception of actual details, a move that becomes full-blown in the second octave.

The first stanza ends with the speaker's awareness of the other humans for whom the landscape is also familiar although their effect on it is minimized by the verb "haunted". He was a solitary spectator. They were like ghostly presences that had retired to the comforts of their homes.

And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The first stanza establishes through a natural setting that a significant time, the end of day at the end of the year, is being recollected and retold by a solitary looker standing at a physical boundary, the edge of the woods. The scene has only the barest traces of life, in which natural and human presences are ghostly. What started as a simple description of a winter scene by a physically passive observer subtly develops into a kind of mindscape that implies a vigil. Although the situation of the poem is related in the past tense as a memory, we experience it as an "eye-record" in process , to use Hardy's own term. Hardy's use of figurative devices such as metaphor and simile, pathetic fallacy, his mini-dramas and dialogue poems are typically means of exploring the activity of perception.

Tom Paulin, in Thomas Hardy: Poetry of Perception, provides many examples from Hardy's prose, private papers, marginalia, etc. as well as examples from specific poems that elaborate on the variety of Hardy's researches into matters of perception, optical visions and illusions, and psychological varieties of perceptiveness. In the poem "Alike and Unlike," the experience of looking shows direct optical experience as a moment of seeing tinctured by the activity of the speaker's mind:

But our eye-records, like in hue and line,
Had superimposed upon them, that very day,
Gravings on your side deep, but slight on mine! --
(Hardy, 789)

Paulin points out a similar idea in Milton, where Satan says "The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven". One condition Hardy often dramatizes is the relationship between human consciousness in a solipsistic state and the external world. This is a condition that the Romantics also acknowledged and strove to overcome. Hardy accepts it as a part of man's emotional life. Hardy laments the losses caused by lack of attention "When Life unrolled its very best" in "The Going." In other poems, he evokes many instances of moments when the scenery or weather coincides and seems to be in collusion with emotional states such as the rain in "She Charged Me," which "Bent the spring of the spirit more and more" (Hardy, 277, 365).

Paulin quotes Hardy's notes on an essay by Ruskin. Ruskin is objecting to how second-rate poetry blurs reality when "it does not matter much what things are in themselves, but only what they are to us". The interest for Hardy seems not to be in deciding whether the received impression is true or false, but in how it is affected by the state of mind of the observer. Hardy quotes Ruskin:

The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl. the state of mind which attributes to it these characters of a living creature is one in which the reason is unhinged by grief. All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally categorize as the "pathetic fallacy" ( Paulin, 18).

Hardy's speculations about the faculty of memory were influenced by ideas raised by scientific empiricists who question whether the sky remains "blue" after the gaze is averted, for example. He was vitally interested in the activity of perception and all its variations when the perceiver's state of mind comes into conjunction with the landscape or external reality as it does in "The Darkling Thrush."

The second stanza introduces the fact that this moment in time also marks the end of a century. The landscape's features become like an immense body layed out. The first sentence shows the speaker's mind encompassing huge spaces of land and sky into the frightening spectacle of the Century's corpse in its coffin. It is a vision of death and cessation in elemental proportions. The sky is a lid. The image is the effect of a "vision" that is boxing in the world and time. "Seemed" is a linking verb that is associated with how something appears to an individual's mind. Its tone is non-assertive, implicitly equivocal, and has the informality of common speech.

The land's sharp feature seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death lament.

The second sentence, which completes the octave, emphasizes earthly shrinkage and dessication. The ending of the century is not a simple closing to the speaker, but an end which seems to sever it from any relation to the future. Every spirit, all of vegetal and human life is under the pall of this death.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

"Fervourless as I" is a highly suspicious qualification for anyone who has followed the escalation of emotional pitch in the poem. While the landscape has been painted in all of its funereal hopelessness, the vision is on a grand scale of "ancient" things. The wind "laments". Rather than lacking in intensity and ardor, the speaker's emotions have been boiling up, enlarging the individual response to a universal eclipsing of life force.

At once a voice arose among
The black twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

The third octave is the most irregular metrically, which is fitting because it is the site of a new, active, alive presence in the poem. The darkling thrush, in all its homeliness and diminutiveness, is the corporeal voice of the real world. It is a local manifestation of an aged symbol. The adjective "darkling" can be traced back to Keats, other bird harbingers in Romantic tradition, and Milton. But, for me, the choice to use it is moving because it seems to de-mythologize the event by attaching the noun ending "-ling" to soften "dark", emphasizing the commonal ( as in "worldling"), and diminutive or familiar (as in "yearling", "darling"). The bird's song is spontaneous and unpremeditated art realized. It "fling[s]" its "soul" into the "gloom" in the antithesis of the speaker's previous flinging of his dispirited soul upon the landscape. It breaks through the boxed-in moment in a joyful act. His exuberance appears to the speaker to be a choice, and not for mere survival in the "growing gloom", but for ardent and full-hearted participation. A lesser poet would have ended the poem here. Hardy refuses to provide a purely cathartic moment.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

31 December 1900
(Hardy, 150)

The speaker has not been convinced or transported out of the "growing gloom", but his response has been to "think". The landscape is not rewritten, nor is the fact that an era is over, but his emotional response is to listen to the birdsong and think of hope. Although the "blessed Hope" is a knowledge the bird has and of which the speaker is yet unaware because he cannot see anything in the landscape that justifies it except the bird itself, his acceptance of the unexpected "sign" emanating from a concrete reality, is where I find Hardy at his most humane. Hardy, as the poet outside the poem, is providing a dramatization and a variety of "whole-seeing" as the dialogic voice. And, for all of his negation, the speaker has introduced the ideas of positive opposites to the negatives of death, weakening eyes can strengthen with the new day and new season, broken musical instruments can be repaired, hard and dry seeds can sprout. These implied ideas prepare him, and us as readers, to accept the poem's outcome. The speaker in the poem is taking "a full look at the Worst", a required step in Hardy's thinking toward a "way to the Better" (Hardy, 557). While Hardy states that "we seem to be threatened with a new Dark Age", he shows one imperfect human response through the poem's speaker. In the midst of solipsism and despair, the speaker, nevertheless, is capable of suspending conviction and reacting with joy to possibility. I find the moment believably epiphanic and unsentimental.

Works Cited

# Hardy, Thomas. The Complete Poems. New York: Macmillan, 1976
# Paulin, Thomas. Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Perception. New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1975
# Santayana, George. Interpretation of Poetry and Religion. Cambridge: MIT Press,


--------
written by Gladys.Cardiff@wmich.edu. published at http://unix.cc.wmich.edu

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Poem for New Year: The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy (1902)


I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

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The true Sufi, a poem by Rumi

The True Sufi

What makes the Sufi? Purity of heart;
Not the patched mantle and the lust perverse
Of those vile earth-bound men who steal his name.
He in all dregs discerns the essence pure:
In hardship ease, in tribulation joy.
The phantom sentries, who with batons drawn
Guard Beauty's place-gate and curtained bower,
Give way before him, unafraid he passes,
And showing the King's arrow, enters in.

R. A. Nicholson

'Persian Poems', an Anthology of verse translations
edited by A.J.Arberry, Everyman's Library, 1972

More poems by Jalalluddin Rumi were collected at http://www.armory.com/~thrace/sufi/poems.html

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Ode for Kartini

I’m really disturbed by the poem,
They provoked women are suppressed,
Women were exprorieted her right.

Huh! It’s only your simply-mind.
May you pretend to be fool?

Across the ocean, west-to-east and south-to-north,
Women become suppressor.
Their seductions indoctrinate your passion.
They stab ahead, frankly,
But, you do not realize.
When you get up but was too late,
You are dispointed but,
time can’t be replayed.

Then, why you keep defending on them,
While you never got your right,
You are all being raped,
Your feeling, your thought, and
Your self-respect!
Which one is more cruel!

That’s why, now
Do not read the poem any more,
Besides for your mother, really,
She is the rasonable women,
We give respect,
Not them, not you!

Kartini should be cry knowing this,
She is know dispointed why did she used to defend her people,
If to day they turn in to be a suppressor.


by Hans, April 2006. In memorian to Kartini, former Indonesian female emantipation struggler.

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Seeking for paradise

As far I've passed by,
an endless journey,
No matter day goes dark,
cause the sun merely in dusk,

What should I name this circle
Such thigs are uncertain, unreal

Mom, don't you remember,
This won't be severe,
I beleive in the word,
since you're in my world

Mom, People are strange here,
untoucable as you're there, really,
I hate them all here,
as I hope the certainty

I was tired to trust again,
your word is no longer right,
You drove me in pain,
as if heaven brings sad.

Anonymous

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Reading "To Helen" a Poem by Edgar Allan Poe

by Siswo Harsono, a lecturer in English Department, Faculty of Letters, Diponegoro University. Now he is promoting and developing a blog for lectures. He also maintain lakonet.com for his project introducing traditional Indonesian play a.k.a "wayang" on the internet. Lakonet was published in two local Indonesian language: Jawa and Sunda, Indonesian National Language (Bahasa Indonesia) and also published in the international language, English.


When I read poems written by Edgar Allam Poe, I am interested in a poem entitled "To Helen". The poem has archetypal and psychological meanings. The archetypal meaning of the poem relates to Greek mythology; and the psychological one relates to the biography of Poe.

TO HELEN

Helen, thy beauty is to me

Like those Nicean barks of yore.

That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,

The weary, way-worn wanderer bore

To his own native shore.

On desperate seas long wont to roam,

Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,

Thy Naiad airs have brought me home

To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome.

Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche

How statue-like I see thee stand,

The agate lamp within thy hand!

Ah, Psyche, from the regions which

Are Holy-Land!

1831


In the poem, Poe poeticizes woman beauty by admiring and comparing to diva beauty. His adoration embodied in his language use. He addresses a woman named Helen by an aristocratic and poetic word "Thy". He does not use "you" because he puts Helen in high position. Like in praying and worshiping, Helen's beauty is Poe's religious-aesthetic object. How romantic he is!

At first, I would like to trace the mythological and biographical relations. And then I would like to analyze the poem by using Freudian psychoanalysis perspective.

Mythological Relation

The title of the poem "To Helen" refers to a woman named "Helen". There so many women named Helen, and it is hard to trace which one that Poe refers. In line 2, the word "Nicean", in line 7 the word "hyacinth", in line 8 the word "Naiad", in line 9 the word "Greece", in line 13 the word "agate", in line 14 the word "Psyche", refer to Ancient Greek. It is obvious that the name Helen refers to Helen of Troy in Greek mythology.

It seems to me that Poe uses the image of Helen to adore a goddess-like woman. Who is the woman? This question leads me to trace the biographical relation.

Biographical Relation

Poe wrote the poem when he fell in love with a woman. She was the mother of his friend, Rob. Her name's Jane Stith Stanard. Poe liked reading his poems for her. And Mrs. Stanard liked listening to his poems. Such a writer-reader relation makes them fall in love to each other. What kind of love is it? Is it a kind of motherly or a sonly love? It is a kind of Oedipal love.

Poe adores Mrs. Stanard like worshipping Helen, the prettiest goddess and the daughter of Zeus. But the life story of Mrs. Stanard is not like Helen. The love relation between Mrs. Stanard and Poe is not like Helen and Paris. Poe's allusion of Mrs. Stanard is Psyche because her beauty makes Hera feel deadly envious and jealous. Because of her beauty, the queen of the goddesses Hera governs Adonis to kill her. Such envy and jealousy cause the death of Mrs. Stanard and the sad end of his love.

This phenomenon guides me to analyze the poem by using psychoanalysis.

Psychological Relation

Referring to the biography of Poe, his mother Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins died in 1811 when he was two years old, then Mr. and Mrs. Alan nurtured him. The relation between Poe and his surrogate parents led to oedipal tendency. Poe loved his surrogate mother, Nancy Alan; and he hated his surrogate father John Alan. The oedipal relation made Poe love motherly women and hate fatherly men. His love is embodied in his dark romantic poems like "To Helen"; and his hate embodied in his tragic stories like "A Tell-Tale Heart".

Poe's oedipal love is not incest of matrimony relation like in Oedipus. His hate does not make him kill his (surrogate) father like in Oedipus. He expresses his oedipal love and hate in his works.

His love can be categorized as dark romanticism because it has sad and sorrowful ending. For him a beauty lies in the deadly moment of beautiful women he loved. It is a dark romantic moment of myterium tremendum.

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Suzanne Somers: "Touch Me"

Organic girl dropped by last night

For nothing in particular

Except to tell me again how beautiful and serene she feels

On uncooked vegetables and wheat germ fortified by bean sprouts–

Mixed with yeast and egg whites on really big days–

She not only meditates regularly, but looks at me like I should

And lectures me about meat and ice cream

And other aggressive foods I shouldn’t eat.

Suzanne Somers, in her book of poetry entitled Touch Me, published in 1980.

Friday’s Huffington Post has an amusing piece on celebrity poetry. In addition to this Somers tour de force, they also showcase the poetic works of Leonard Nimoy, including this breath-taking stanza:

I love you

not for what

I want you to be

But for what you are…

I dunno. I’d talk shit about these poems, but I don’t know much about poetry; I didn’t major in English because I didn’t feel like going to law school. I actually kind of like the Somers quote. It’s not, like, super deep and dense, but I fucking hate poetry like that. It’s like, “Yeah, dude, you’re a big fancy poet. You smoke filterless Lucky Strikes. You wear fedoras. You don’t own a TV. Your girlfriend smells funny and you have a pet rat named Kerouac and you think football is barbaric and when I tell you what I do for a living you roll your eyes for so long that even I get a headache, then you promptly launch into a story about this one time you smoked out with John Stamos, which isn’t at all hypocritical and fucking annoying, but whatever. When you’re not working the afternoon shift at the moribund local record store, you juxtapose big words in a way that is meaningless even to you, so you must be very cool, and I should envy your bohemian existence and the sheer joie de vive that certainly comes with owning a car worth less than my purse. Yes. I’m right on top of that, Rose.”

I’d much rather read poetry like that one from Suzanne; it conjures a clear image with a clear message. I fucking hate organic girl already. And I get it. And I know her. She’s annoying. And she dates Big Important Poetry Guy. And they both suck and we’re all polite to them while secretly hoping that one day even the incense will get sick of hearing them talk and burn their damn house down. I’ll take that over the over-thought, pretentious, angsty bullshit coming out of the MFA classes any day.

Anyway.

Check out the full article for rhymes by Charlie Sheen, Viggo Mortensen and Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy

Source: http://evilbeetgossip.film.com/

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Octavio Paz: A Tale of Two Gardens

Poems From India 1952-1995

by Octavio Paz.
Edited and translated
by Eliot Weinberger.
111 pp. New York:
New Directions. Paper, $8.

Octavio Paz modestly describes ''In Light of India'' -- and indeed all his prose work on India -- as a footnote to his poetry. Several beautiful and evocative poems included in ''A Tale of Two Gardens'' are from his ''East Slope,'' already well known to his admirers. For six years (1962-68) Mr. Paz, now in his 80's, was the Mexican Ambassador not only to India but to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal and Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was then called (he resigned because of his Government's 1968 massacre of student demonstrators in Mexico City). That was not his first visit to India. When he first went there, like so many newcomers, he had been overwhelmed and bewildered by the country's vastness and complexity; he had felt ''dizziness, horror, stupor, astonishment, joy, enthusiasm, nausea,'' but also an ''inescapable attraction.'' The apparent unreality of what he saw inspired his long poem ''Mutra,'' written in 1952 -- Muttra, or Mathura, being a Hindu holy city, the birthplace of the god Krishna.

The Spanish title of ''In Light of India'' is ''Vislumbres de la India,'' difficult to translate perhaps, meaning glimpses dimly seen, as in twilight. But, while it is true that the reader who knows India even a little is left wondering about certain omissions (what about the worship of the elephant god Ganesha, for instance, and the dreaded goddess Kali?), the essays in this ambitious book -- translated by Eliot Weinberger, who also edited the book of poems and translated many of them -- are certainly not ''glimpses''; they are the result of long experience and study, beginning with reminiscences of great charm but leading to disquisitions on India's history, its religions, philosophy and such things as caste, Sanskrit erotic poetry, sculpture and architecture. Mr. Paz also contrasts Mexico with India, and this in part is the theme of the title poem in ''A Tale of Two Gardens,'' where he evokes a romantic abandoned garden he had loved as a child and the garden he and his wife, Marie-Jose, had in Delhi. Gardens, trees, birds and flowers recur often in his poems.

The past, as Gandhi clearly saw, has been decisive in shaping modern India. Unlike the Spaniards in Mexico, the British were not concerned with obliterating ancient cults and customs, or in imposing Christianity. Mr. Paz is quite flattering about the British raj. He describes the conquest of India as a colossal historical feat lasting over a hundred years and involving extraordinary and wise personalities. India had never before been united into a single whole. There were certainly some dreadful abuses and cruelty. The mutiny of 1857, more of a revolt than a revolution, failed because it was localized and lacked unity of action. Bloody revenge followed, but in 1858 religious freedom was proclaimed by the British, India became a viceroyalty and Indians were given the right to serve in their own Government. But this also had the effect of removing Muslims from some traditional positions of privilege, in a sense deliberately, since they had been regarded as the main perpetrators of the mutiny.

So, ultimately, the British left democracy and the rule of law as their legacy. As Mr. Paz puts it, independence in 1947 was the triumph of British ideas and institutions, without the British. And here he makes comparisons with Latin American countries, where independence was achieved through wars, which in turn became ''the seedbeds for the caudillos, the local military bosses.'' ''With them,'' he says, ''began the sickness that is endemic to our societies: militarism and its consequences -- coups d'etat, uprisings, civil wars.''

That the British legacy included leaving intact the ancient religions and ethnic and cultural divisions led almost immediately to terrible massacres, and to the old Indian Empire being torn into India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. There is also more recent unrest among the Sikhs, and in Kashmir, where the predominantly Muslim population is ruled by India. This is a huge subject dealt with by Mr. Paz in a suitably concise manner. Understandably, he finds himself unable to answer the question whether Muslims and Hindus are ''two civilizations occupying a single territory, or . . . two religions nurtured by a single civilization.'' The lingua franca, by and large, remains English; it has been reckoned that there are at least 150 languages on the subcontinent, and over 580 dialects. Yet, as Mr. Paz says of Islam and Hinduism, ''the presence of the strictest and most extreme form of monotheism alongside the richest and most varied polytheism is, more than a historical paradox, a deep wound.''

Separateness is most obvious in approaches to architecture. Some of the most sublimely beautiful buildings are from the Islamic Mogul domination in the 16th and 17th centuries -- mostly in Rajasthan. The Taj Mahal could not be more different from the wonderful, exotic and ornate Hindu temples at Ellora, Trichinopoly, Tajore and Madurai, not to mention the amazing, acrobatically erotic sculptures at Khajraho.

Gandhi was a traditional Hindu, but Western thought influenced him profoundly. His campaign for tolerance and nonviolence was acceptable to the Hindu masses, again to quote Mr. Paz, because he ''embodied a figure venerated by all Hindus: the ascetic who renounces the world'' -- incorruptible. But to extremists his efforts to unite Hindus and Muslims made him a heretic, and for this he was assassinated. To us in the West, two of the most baffling aspects of Hindu doctrine are caste and the transmigration of souls. Mr. Paz regards transmigration with a certain dismay and attempts to explain caste, which he says must be dissociated from class. There are over 3,000 castes, each with complicated rules of kinship, each revolving around the immutable principle of purity. He provides a fascinating summary of this obscure subject, but has to leave the shocking problem of the untouchables in the air. An easier subject is the union of eroticism with religion, manifested in literature, art and especially sculpture. Mr. Paz has translated some of the poetry, which may have inspired the passionate love poems to his adored Marie-Jose included in ''A Tale of Two Gardens.''

Much of the last section of ''In Light of India'' is devoted to aspects of Hindu philosophy, explaining, for instance, how the Christian concepts of original sin and redemption would be incomprehensible to the Hindu. The four traditional aims in Hinduism are karma, the domain of pleasure and sexual enjoyment; artha, related to material success; dharma, which represents morals, duty, family obligations and caste; and moksha, self-knowledge and ''liberation from the chains of existence.'' Apart from dying, the only way to break away from caste is to renounce the world and become a yogi, a holy man or hermit. Yet the true yogi ''does not seek to separate his soul from his body . . . he wants to convert it into a weapon of liberation.'' Although pleasure is one of the goals of life, ''the wise man casts it aside and seeks the path of abstinence and solitary meditation. . . . Chastity gives strength for the great battle'' -- emancipating the soul from rebirths and uniting it with the Supreme Being.

Returning to Gandhi, Mr. Paz shows how his faith in dharma -- ''the truth of the humble with no other sword than that of nonviolence'' -- and his dream of the happy, traditional village, plying traditional crafts, have now been smashed. Gandhi once said, ''I am not the enemy of the English; I am the enemy of their civilization.'' He meant he believed in democracy but hated Western technology and industry. Now, Mr. Paz says, the population explosion has meant that ''every village is a pit of misery and despair'' -- mostly, yes, but not entirely true. Mr. Paz, too, recoils from Western materialism, the doctrines of envy, the demon of money, the vulgarity in popular entertainment. He is also horrified by the rise of fundamentalism. ''Why,'' he asks, ''don't they call it by its true name, fanaticism?'' He looks back to 1968, to his last glimpse of India, when he and Marie-Jose went again to the island of Elephanta, near Bombay, to see the glorious sculptures -- ''sexual incarnations of the most abstract thought'' -- above all, Shiva and Parvati, the divine couple, a vision of happiness, eternal. ''It was as though we were leaving ourselves,'' he says. ''Shiva and Parvati: we worship you not as gods but as images of the divinity of man.'' Ahead lay Mexico and the aftermath of the students' struggle for democracy.


This review written by Raleigh Trevelyan, published at nytimes.com. He is the author of ''The Golden Oriole: A Two Hundred-Year History of an English Family in India'' and ''The Companion Guide to Sicily.''

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How to Write a Poem

Writing a poem is all about observing the world within you or around you. You can write about anything from love to the rusty gate at the old farm. As long as you are enjoying it or finding it releases something from inside you, you're on the right track.

Just follow the following steps:

1. Read and listen to poetry. Whether someone who has never seen a sonnet nor heard haiku can truly be a poet is an open question. It is almost certain, though, that any poet who has been published or who has garnered any following enhanced their skills by reading or listening to good poetry, even if they later scoffed at conventional notions of what was "good." "Good" poems fall into two categories: those that are recognized as classics and those that you like. Poems typically being short, there is no reason not to explore plenty of both.

2. Learn about modern poetry. You may remember rhyming poetry from textbooks. That is an old style. Modern poetry does not usually rhyme at the end of lines. Search the Internet for a list of poet laureates. Read the poetry written by the current poets on that list to see what is popular today--especially if you are interested in publication of your poetry.

3.Original manuscript of Longfellow's "The Village Blacksmith." The revisions on the page give us an idea of how the poem evolved.
Find a spark. A poem may be born as a snippet of verse, maybe just a line or two that seems to come out of nowhere. That's what's usually called inspiration, and once you have that beginning you simply need to flesh it out, to build the rest of the poem around it. At other times you may want to write about a specific thing or idea. If this is the case, do a little planning. Write down all the words and phrases that come to mind when you think of that idea. Allow yourself to put all your ideas into words. It may sound difficult, but do not be afraid to voice your exact feelings. Emotions are what make poems, and if you lie about your emotions it can be easily sensed in the poem. Write them down as quickly as possible, and when you're done, go through the list and look for connections or certain items that get your creative juices flowing.

4. Think about what you want to achieve with your poem. Perhaps you want to write a poem to express your love for your boyfriend or girlfriend; perhaps you want to commemorate a tragic event; or maybe you just want to get an "A" in your poetry class. Think about why you are writing your poem and who your intended audience is, and then proceed in your writing accordingly.

5. Decide what poetry style suits your subject. If you see "Winter icicles / plummeting like Enron stock..." perhaps you've got a haiku in your head. As a poet, you have a wide variety of set forms to choose from: limericks, sonnets, villanelles ... the list goes on and on. You may also choose to abandon form altogether and write your poem in free verse. While the choice may not always be as obvious as the example above, the best form for the poem will usually manifest itself during your writing.

6. Listen to your poem. While many people today have been exposed to poetry only in written form, poetry was predominantly an aural art for thousands of years, and the sound of a poem is still important. As you write and edit your poem, read it aloud and listen to how it sounds.

7. Write down your thoughts as they come to you. Don't edit as you write, or do edit as you write - the choice is yours. However, you should try both methods at least a couple times to see what works best for you.

8. Choose the right words. It's been said that if a novel is "words in the best order," then a poem is "the best words in the best order." Think of the words you use as building blocks of different sizes and shapes. Some words will fit together perfectly, and some won't. You want to keep working at your poem until you have built a strong structure of words. Use only those words that are necessary, those that enhance the meaning of the poem. Choose your words carefully. The differences between similar sounding words or synonyms can lead to interesting word play.

9. Use concrete imagery and vivid descriptions.
* Love, hate, happiness: these are all abstract concepts. Many, maybe all, poems are, deep down, about emotions and other abstractions, but it's hard to build a strong poem using only abstractions - it's just not interesting. The key, then, is to replace or enhance abstractions with concrete images, things that you can appreciate with your senses: a rose, a shark, or a crackling fire, for example. The concept of the objective correlative may be useful. An objective correlative is an object, several objects, or a series of events (all concrete things) that evoke the emotion or idea of the poem.
* Really powerful poetry not only uses concrete images; it also describes them vividly. Show your readers and listeners what you're talking about--help them to experience the imagery of the poem. Put in some "sensory" handles. These are words that describe the things that you hear, see, taste, touch, and smell, so that the reader can identify with their own experience. Give some examples rather than purely mental/intellectual descriptions. For example: "He made a loud sound" versus "He made a loud sound like a hippo eating 100 stale pecan pies with metal teeth".

10. Use poetic devices to enhance your poem's beauty and meaning. The most well known poetic device is rhyme. Rhyme can add suspense to your lines, enhance your meaning, or make the poem more cohesive. It can also make it prettier. Don't overuse rhyme. It's a crime. In fact you don't have to use rhyme at all. Other poetic devices include meter, metaphor, assonance, alliteration, and repetition. If you don't know what these are, you may want to look in a poetry book or search the internet. Poetic devices can make a poem or, if they bring too much attention to themselves, they can ruin it.

11. Save your most powerful message or insight for the end of your poem. The last line is to a poem what a punch line is to a joke--something that evokes an emotional response. Give the reader something to think about, something to dwell on after reading your poem. Resist the urge to explain it; let the reader become engaged with the poem in developing an understanding of your experience or message.

12. Edit your poem. When the basic poem is written, set it aside for awhile and then read the poem out loud to yourself. Go through it and balance the choice of words with the rhythm. Take out unnecessary words and replace imagery that isn't working. Some people edit a poem all at once, while others come back to it again and again over time. Don't be afraid to rewrite if some part of the poem is not working. Sometimes you just can't fix something that essentially doesn't work.

13. Get opinions. It can be hard to critique your own work, so after you've done an initial edit, try to get some friends or a poetry group (there are plenty online) to look at your poem for you. You may not like all their suggestions, and you don't have to take any of them, but you might find some insight that will make your poem better. Feedback is good. Pass your poem around, and ask your friends to critique your work. Tell them to be honest, even if it's painful. Filter their responses or ignore them altogether and edit as you see fit.

Tips

* Do you find that you never feel inspired when you sit down to write a poem? It's a common problem, and you can solve it by carrying a notebook with you everywhere in which you can jot down poem ideas as they come to you. Then, when you're ready to write, just get out the notebook and find an idea that catches your fancy.

* You might want to listen to soothing music or look at pictures to calm and inspire you.

* Don't forget that surprise makes art (writing) extra special. If you're going to drag out the tired old rose metaphor in a love poem, put your own twist on it.

* Don't give up. You'll probably find that your poems become better and easier to write as you write more of them.

* Poems can make a great gift.

* Keep all of your poetry in a book whether you like it or not. In the future, you might be able to salvage some of the throwaways or publish your best work.


Warnings

* Avoid cliches or overused images. "The world is your oyster," is neither a brilliant nor an original observation.

* If you are writing a poem to be sent to a newspaper or a family-friendly magazine, choose your words and topic with care. You don't want the paper to censor your original work or reject it because of profanity.

* Avoid sharing your work with people who do not appreciate poetry. This is a mistake that can discourage you from being a poet. It is often difficult to explain that you are just trying your hand at something new. The best thing to do is ask someone you know who will support you (who also happens to appreciate the art of the written word) to kindly critique you.

* To guard against plagiarism, do what you can to reinforce your copyrights to your work. One way to do this is to make a copy of your work, seal it into an envelope, place a stamp on it, and mail it back to yourself. When you receive it in the mail, don't open it. The un-opened envelope can provide additional evidence that you are the copyright holder should it ever be in question, although it is not guaranteed to prove it in court.

* If you have too much imagery, it can actually hurt your poem. "Explosively radiating sunshine slammed through my window" is just over the top.

* If you want others to read your poetry, ask yourself "If somebody else showed me this, would I like it?" If the answer is "no," edit the poem some more.

* If you're simply brimming with ideas and inspiration, don't try to fit it all into one poem. You'll have the chance to write more in the future.

Source: http://www.wikihow.com/Write-a-Poem

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Pablo Neruda: Impressive Poem Collection

Ode to Sadness

Sadness, scarab
with seven crippled feet,
spiderweb egg,
scramble-brained rat,
bitch's skeleton:
No entry here.
Don't come in.
Go away.
Go back
south with your umbrella,
go back
north with your serpent's teeth.
A poet lives here.
No sadness may
cross this threshold.
Through these windows
comes the breath of the world,
fresh red roses,
flags embroidered with
the victories of the people.
No.
No entry.
Flap
your bat's wings,
I will trample the feathers
that fall from your mantle,
I will sweep the bits and pieces
of your carcass to
the four corners of the wind,
I will wring your neck,
I will stitch your eyelids shut,
I will sew your shroud,
sadness, and bury your rodent bones
beneath the springtime of an apple tree.



If You Forget Me

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.


In the night we shall go in

In the night we shall go in,
we shall go in to steal
a flowering, flowering branch.

We shall climb over the wall
in the darkness of the alien garden,
two shadows in the shadow.

Winter is not yet gone,
and the apple tree appears
suddenly changed into
a fragment of cascade stars.

In the night we shall go in
up to its trembling firmament,
and your hands, your little hands
and mine will steal the stars.

And silently to our house
in the night and the shadow,
perfume's silent step,
and with starry feet,
the clear body of spring.


Tower of Light

O tower of light, sad beauty
that magnified necklaces and statues in the sea,
calcareous eye, insignia of the vast waters, cry
of the mourning petrel, tooth of the sea, wife
of the Oceanian wind, O separate rose
from the long stem of the trampled bush
that the depths, converted into archipelago,
O natural star, green diadem,
alone in your lonesome dynasty,
still unattainable, elusive, desolate
like one drop, like one grape, like the sea.


Ode to Wine

Day-colored wine,
night-colored wine,
wine with purple feet
or wine with topaz blood,
wine,
starry child
of earth,
wine, smooth
as a golden sword,
soft
as lascivious velvet,
wine, spiral-seashelled
and full of wonder,
amorous,
marine;
never has one goblet contained you,
one song, one man,
you are choral, gregarious,
at the least, you must be shared.
At times
you feed on mortal
memories;
your wave carries us
from tomb to tomb,
stonecutter of icy sepulchers,
and we weep
transitory tears;
your
glorious
spring dress
is different,
blood rises through the shoots,
wind incites the day,
nothing is left
of your immutable soul.
Wine
stirs the spring, happiness
bursts through the earth like a plant,
walls crumble,
and rocky cliffs,
chasms close,
as song is born.
A jug of wine, and thou beside me
in the wilderness,
sang the ancient poet.
Let the wine pitcher
add to the kiss of love its own.

My darling, suddenly
the line of your hip
becomes the brimming curve
of the wine goblet,
your breast is the grape cluster,
your nipples are the grapes,
the gleam of spirits lights your hair,
and your navel is a chaste seal
stamped on the vessel of your belly,
your love an inexhaustible
cascade of wine,
light that illuminates my senses,
the earthly splendor of life.

But you are more than love,
the fiery kiss,
the heat of fire,
more than the wine of life;
you are
the community of man,
translucency,
chorus of discipline,
abundance of flowers.
I like on the table,
when we're speaking,
the light of a bottle
of intelligent wine.
Drink it,
and remember in every
drop of gold,
in every topaz glass,
in every purple ladle,
that autumn labored
to fill the vessel with wine;
and in the ritual of his office,
let the simple man remember
to think of the soil and of his duty,
to propagate the canticle of the wine.

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Pablo Neruda: Early Life and Love Poetry

Neruda was the son of José del Carmen Reyes, a railway worker, and Rosa Basoalto. His mother died within a month of Neruda's birth, and two years later the family moved to Temuco, a small town farther south in Chile, where his father remarried. Pablo Neruda was a precocious boy who began to write poetry at age 10. His father tried to discourage him from writing and never cared for his poems, which was probably why the young poet began to publish under the pseudonym Pablo Neruda, which he was legally to adopt in 1946. He entered the Temuco Boys' School in 1910 and finished his secondary schooling there in 1920. Tall, shy, and lonely, Neftalí read voraciously and was encouraged by the principal of the Temuco Girls' School, Gabriela Mistral, a gifted poet who would herself later become a Nobel laureate.

Neftalí started to publish his poems, first in the local newspapers and later in magazines published in the Chilean capital, Santiago. In 1921 he moved to Santiago to continue his studies and become a French teacher. There he experienced loneliness and hunger and took up a bohemian lifestyle. His first book of poems, Crepusculario, was published in 1923. The poems, subtle and elegant, were in the tradition of Symbolist poetry, or rather its Hispanic version, Modernismo. His second book, Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (1924; Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair), was inspired by an unhappy love affair. It became an instant success and is still one of Neruda's most popular books. The verse in Twenty Love Poems is vigorous, poignant, and direct, yet subtle and very original in its imagery and metaphors. The poems express young, passionate, unhappy love perhaps better than any book of poetry in the long Romantic tradition. --Encyclopædia Britannica

Sourcea: www.aspirennies.com

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Edgar Allan Poe: Poem Collection

SERENADE

So sweet the hour, so calm the time,
I feel it more than half a crime,
When Nature sleeps and stars are mute,
To mar the silence ev'n with lute.
At rest on ocean's brilliant dyes
An image of Elysium lies:
Seven Pleiades entranced in Heaven,
Form in the deep another seven:
Endymion nodding from above
Sees in the sea a second love.
Within the valleys dim and brown,
And on the spectral mountain's crown,
The wearied light is dying down,
And earth, and stars, and sea, and sky
Are redolent of sleep, as I
Am redolent of thee and thine
Enthralling love, my Adeline.
But list, O list,--so soft and low
Thy lover's voice tonight shall flow,
That, scarce awake, thy soul shall deem
My words the music of a dream.
Thus, while no single sound too rude
Upon thy slumber shall intrude,
Our thoughts, our souls--O God above!
In every deed shall mingle, love.


THE CITY IN THE SEA

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.

No rays from the holy heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently,
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free:
Up domes, up spires, up kingly halls,
Up fanes, up Babylon-like walls,
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers,
Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathed friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.

Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.

There open fanes and gaping graves
Yawn level with the luminous waves;
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol's diamond eye,--
Not the gayly-jewelled dead,
Tempt the waters from their bed;
For no ripples curl, alas,
Along that wilderness of glass;
No swellings tell that winds may be
Upon some far-off happier sea;
No heavings hint that winds have been
On seas less hideously serene!

But lo, a stir is in the air!
The wave--there is a movement there!
As if the towers had thrust aside,
In slightly sinking, the dull tide;
As if their tops had feebly given
A void within the filmy Heaven!
The waves have now a redder glow,
The hours are breathing faint and low;
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence.


THE RAVEN

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,--
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
"'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door.
Only this and nothing more.

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow;--vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow--sorrow for the lost Lenore,
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore:
Nameless here for evermore.

And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me--filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating
"'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door,
Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door:
This it is and nothing more."

Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
"Sir," said I, "or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you"--here I opened wide the door:--
Darkness there and nothing more.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, "Lenore?"
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, "Lenore:"
Merely this and nothing more.

Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,
Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.
Surely," said I, "surely that is something at my window lattice;
Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore;
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore:
'Tis the wind and nothing more."

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore.
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door,
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door:
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,--
"Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore:
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning--little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door,
Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,
With such name as "Nevermore."

But the Raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing further then he uttered, not a feather then he fluttered,
Till I scarcely more than muttered,--"Other friends have flown before;
On the morrow he will leave me, as my Hopes have flown before."
Then the bird said, "Nevermore."

Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
"Doubtless," said I, "what it utters is its only stock and store,
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore:
Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore
Of 'Never--nevermore.'"

But the Raven still beguiling all my fancy into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door;
Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore,
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking "Nevermore."

This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing
To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core;
This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining
On the cushion's velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o'er,
But whose velvet violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o'er
She shall press, ah, nevermore!

Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.
"Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee--by these angels he hath sent thee
Respite--respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore!
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil! prophet still, if bird or devil!
Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted--
On this home by Horror haunted--tell me truly, I implore:
Is there--is there balm in Gilead?--tell me--tell me, I implore!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

Prophet! "said I, "thing of evil--prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us, by that God we both adore,
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore:
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

"Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!" I shrieked, upstarting:
"Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken! quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor:
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted--nevermore!


ANNABEL LEE

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love,
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me;
Yes, that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we,
Of many far wiser than we;
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling,--my darling,--my life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.


THE VALLEY OF UNREST

Once it smiled a silent dell
Where the people did not dwell;
They had gone unto the wars,
Trusting to the mild-eyed stars,
Nightly, from their azure towers,
To keep watch above the flowers,
In the midst of which all day
The red sunlight lazily lay.
Now each visitor shall confess
The sad valley's restlessness.
Nothing there is motionless--
Nothing save the airs that brood
Over the magic solitude.
Ah, by no wind are stirred those trees
That palpitate like the chill seas
Around the misty Hebrides!
Ah, by no wind those clouds are driven
That rustle through the unquiet Heaven
Uneasily, from morn till even,
Over the violets there that lie
In myriad types of the human eye--
Over the lilies there that wave
And weep above a nameless grave!
They wave:--from out their fragrant tops
Eternal dews come down in drops.
They weep:--from off their delicate stems
Perennial tears descend in gems.

ALONE

From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then--in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life--was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by,
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.


THE LAKE

In spring of youth it was my lot
To haunt of the wide world a spot
The which I could not love the less--
So lovely was the loneliness
Of a wild lake, with black rock bound,
And the tall pines that towered around.

But when the Night had thrown her pall
Upon that spot, as upon all,
And the mystic wind went by
Murmuring in melody--
Then--ah then I would awake
To the terror of the lone lake.

Yet that terror was not fright,
But a tremulous delight--
A feeling not the jewelled mine
Could teach or bribe me to define--
Nor Love--although the Love were thine.

Death was in that poisonous wave,
And in its gulf a fitting grave
For him who thence could solace bring
To his lone imagining--
Whose solitary soul could make
An Eden of that dim lake.

Read More......

Ten Poems to Change Your Life

By Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat

Detail of book:
Ten Poems to Change Your Life
Roger Housden
Crown Publishing 06/01 Hardcover $16.00
ISBN: 9780340825105

We heard Roger Housden, author of nine books including Sacred America: The Emerging Spirit of the People, recite some heartfelt poems one night at a bookstore. We were impressed by the fervor of his soul as he allowed himself to be transported on the wings of spiritual wordsmiths. This wonderful work is brimming over with his insights and enthusiasm for ecstatic poets.

"Great poetry can alter the way we see ourselves," Housden writes. "It can change the way we see the world. You may never have read a poem in your life, and yet you can pick up a volume, open it to any page, and suddenly see your own original face there; suddenly find yourself blown into a world full of awe, dread, wonder, marvel, deep sorrow, and joy."

The author believes that the ten poems he has chosen are prime examples of a genuine poetry of the spirit. They are timeless creations that embrace matter and "reach into territory that lies just beyond our conscious experience." Housden begins with Mary Oliver's "The Journey," which challenges us to unfurl our authentic self, and ends with "The Dark Night," where St. John of the Cross celebrates the inner life and union with God.

In between are the marvels of Antonio Machado, who reveals to us that we can profitably harvest our failures ("Last Night As I Was Sleeping"); Walt Whitman, who emboldens us to question our familiar identity ("Song of Myself"); Rumi, who ponders the meaning of grace ("Zero Circle"); Kabir who wants us to savor mystery instead of being imprisoned in our belief systems ("The Time Before Death"); Galway Kinnell, who affirms erotic love ("Last Gods"); W. S. Merwin, who brings us into a close encounter with the end of life ("For the Anniversary of My Death"); and Derek Walcott, who hurrahs the moments when we come home to our true selves ("Love After Love").

Our favorite poem in this superb collection is "Ode to My Socks" where Pablo Neruda models for us the spiritual path of wonder. Here even ordinary things become resplendent with meaning, joy, and pleasure. These are "dangerous poems," as Housden calls them, for they are catalysts capable of transforming how we see ourselves, others, the Beloved, and the world in which we live.

Source: www.spiritualityandpractice.com

Read More......

W. H. Auden (1907-73)

That night when joy began
Our narrowest veins to flush,
We waited for the flash
Of morning's levelled gun.

But morning let us pass,
And day by day relief
Outgrows his nervous laugh,
Grown credulous of peace,

As mile by mile is seen
No trespasser's reproach,
And love's best glasses reach
No fields but are his own.That night when joy began


November 1931
["Five Songs" II --Collected Poems (ed. Mendelson)]
Copyright (c) 1976, 1991 The Estate of W. H. Auden

Bibliography

* Bahlke, G. W., The Later Auden (1970)
* Bloomfield, B. C., and Edward Mendelson, W. H. Auden: A Bibliography 1924-1969 (1972)
* Bold, Alan ed., W. H. Auden: The Far Interior (1985)
* Callan, Edward, Auden: A Carnival of Intellect (1983)
* Carpenter, Humphrey, W. H. Auden: A Biography (1981)
* Farnan, D. J., Auden in Love (1984)
* Gingerich, M. E., W. H. Auden: A Reference Guide (1978)
* Greenberg, Herbert, Quest for the Necessary: W. H. Auden and the Dilemma of Divided Consciousness (1968)
* Haffenden, John, ed., W. H. Auden: The Critical Heritage (1983)
* Hecht, Anthony, The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W. H. Auden (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993)
* Levy, Alan, W. H. Auden: In the Autumn of the Age of Anxiety (1983)
* McDiarmid, Lucy, Saving Civilization: Yeats, Eliot, and Auden between the Wars (1984)
* Mendelson, Edward, The Early Auden (1981)
* Mendelson, Edward, ed., W. H. Auden: Plays (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988)
* Mendelson, Edward, ed., W. H. Auden: Collected Poems (New York: Vintage Books, 1991)
* Rodway, Allan, Preface to Auden (1984)
* Rowse, A. L., The Poet Auden (1988)
* Wright, G. T., W. H. Auden, rev. ed. (1981)

Read More......

Friedrich Schiller' Poem: " The Artists"

translated by Marianna Wertz

How fair, O Man, do you, your palm branch holding
Stand at the century's unfolding
In proud and noble manhood's prime
With faculties revealed, with spirit's fullness
Full earnest mild, in action-wealthy stillness,
The ripest son of time,
Free through reason, strong through law's measure,
Through meekness great, and rich in treasure,
Which long your breast to you did not disclose,
Nature's own lord, she glories in your bridle,
Who in a thousand fights assays your mettle
And shining under you from out the wild arose!

Besot with vic'try operose,
Let not the hand be now forgotten,
Which on life's desolated strand
The whimpering abandoned orphan,
A savage fortune's booty, found,
The spirit's future dignity did early
To your young heart in silentness display,
And sullied concupiscence surely
Did from your tender bosom turn away,
The good one, who in lofty duty
Did playfully instruct your youthfulness,
And the elevated virtue's myst'ry
In easy riddles left for you to guess,
Who, more mature to see him on returning,
In foreign arms her darling one she laid,
O fall not to degenerated yearning
To be her abject serving woman's maid!
In labor is the bee your master,
In skillfulness the earthworm has your teacher grown,
Your knowledge you do share with spirit minds far vaster,
'Tis {Art,} O Man, you have alone!

The land which knowledge does reside in
You reached through beauty's morning gate.
Its higher gleam to now abide in,
The mind on charms must concentrate.
What by the sound of Muses' singing
With trembling sweet did pierce you through,
A strength unto your bosom bringing
Which to the world-soul lifted you.

What, after many thousand years' expiring,
An aging reason first did find,
In symbol great and beautiful was lying
Revealed before unto the childlike mind.
To virtue's love her sweet form has us drafted,
A softer sense did bold depravity restrain
Ere yet a Solon legislation crafted,
Whose languid blooms did slow constrain.
Oh! Ere the thinker's spirit daring
Had of e'erlasting space conceived,
Who to the starry theater staring,
Ne'er its presentiment perceived?

She, with Orions circling her visage,
To glorify her majesty sublime,
As purer spirits contemplate her image
Consuming, o'er the stars does climb,
Upon her sunny throne upraising,
Urania, so dreadful yet so grand,
Unburdened of her crown ablazing,
Does there--as {Beauty} 'fore us stand.
The belt of grace 'round her receiving,
That she, as child, the children understand:
What here as Beauty we're perceiving,
Will first as {Truth} before us come to stand.

When the Creator from out His living presence
All mankind to mortality expelled,
And to the light, a later reappearance
To find on senses' heavy path compelled,
When all of Heaven's beings turned from him their faces,
She chose, alone, with man to be,
With the forsaken, banished races,
Magnanimous, in their mortality.
Here she in sloping flight does hover,
Around her love in land of senses' thrall,
And paints, deceiving as a lover,
Elysium upon his prison wall.

When in this nurse's arms so tender,
The frail mankind still reposed,
There holy bloodlust stirred up not an ember,
There guiltless blood was not exposed.
The heart, which she directs in gentle binding,
The servile retinue of Duty does disdain,
Her light's path falling, lovelier but winding,
Onto morality's sunlighted plain.
They who her service chaste abided
No baser urges tempt, no fates affright,
As under holy power they resided,
Then with pure spirit lives they are united
Again into sweet freedom's right.

The blissful, whom from millions, to her serving
The purest, she did consecrate,
Within whose breast she deemed her throne deserving
And through whose mouth did mightiness relate,
Whom she selected at e'er-flaming altars
To see her holy fire never falters,
Without a veil appeared she only 'fore their eye,
Whom she in tender union would ally!
Rejoice then in the honorable standing
Wherein high order has uplifted you:
In the exalted spirit world 'tis true,
You held of man the highest standing.

Till you proportion to the world brought back,
Which serve with joy all things created,
A boundless form, arrayed in evening crepe of black,
Close 'round him here, by feeble beams illuminated,
A shape of troops pugnaciously,
Which held his sense in slav'ry's bands restrained,
And rough, unsocialized as he,
At him their thousand powers trained,
--So stood creation 'fore the savage.
Within blind appetite's complete control,
By mere appearances now bidden,
Flies by him, unenjoyed and ever hidden,
So beautif'ly fair Nature's soul.

And as she fleeting overhead now stole,
You caught the friendly spirits up in tether
With tender sense, with quiet hand,
And learned how in harmonious band
To bring them socially together.
So lightly floating felt the view
Of slender shapes of cedar cultivated;
The crystal of the billows radiated
The quiv'ring image back to you.
How could you miss the lovely intimation,
With which, benevolent, fair Nature toward you drew?

Then Art, to steal her shadow forth in imitation,
The image swimming on the wave displayed to you.
Her very being parted from her,
A phantom of herself, as dream,
She jumped into the silver stream,
Herself to offer to her robber.
The beaut'ous plastic art awoke within your heart.
Too noble not at rest to be conceiving
In sand, in clay--did you to shadow life impart,
In outline its substantial self receiving.
The sweet desire for action lively woke--
From out your breast the first creation broke.

Held under careful observation
And captured by your watchful view,
The private forms betrayed in revelation
The talisman, which captivated you.
The wonder-working laws, the measure
Of charm's investigated treasure
In gentle bond were by inventive mind
Into your handiwork combined.
The obelisk and pyramid ascended,
The herm arose, the column sprang on high,
The forest's melody from reedy pipe flowed by,
And heroes' deeds in singing never ended.

The sampling of a flow'ry bed
Is bound in nosegay with a sage selection,
And thus did Art from Nature first e'er tread;
Then nosegays were into a wreath wound in collection,
And thus a second, higher Art began
From the creative hand of Man.
The child of Beauty, needing no more,
Perfected as if from your hand departed,
The crown does forfeit, that it wore,
Once actuality's imparted.
The column must, unto proportion bent,
Close ranks with all its sisters in formation,
To Maenad's harp in acclamation,
The hero in the hero host is blent.

Soon gathered near barbarians, astounded,
To see the new creations forth they ran.
Look, the delighted crowd resounded,
Look there, all this was done by Man!
As happy and more social pairs abounded,
They seized hold of the singer's lyre,
Which titans, giant battles celebrated
And lion-slayers, who, while singers did inspire,
From out their hearers heroes had created.
Then, first time, did the mind partake
Of joys more peaceful, reassuring,
Which are but from afar alluring,
Which won't its creature greed awake,
Which though enjoyed are still enduring.

Now from its carnal sleep did wrestle
The soul, so beautiful and free,
By you unchained sprang forth the vassal
Of care in lap of joy to be.
Now limits of the beast abated
And Man on his unclouded brow rang out,
And thought, that foreign stranger elevated,
From his astonished brain sprang out.
Now {stood} Man, and to starry legions
Displayed his kingly countenance,
Then to these lofty sunlit regions
His thanks conveyed through speaking glance.
Upon his cheek did smiling flower,
His voice, by sentiments now played,
Unfolded into song's full power,
Emotions moistened eye betrayed,
And jest, with charm in graceful federation,
His lips poured out in animation.

Entombed in instincts worms inherit,
In carnal pleasure full entwined,
You recognized within his mind
The noble seed of loving spirit.
Though love did instinct base inherit,
That better seed from out did bring
He thanks that shepherd first did sing.
Unto thought's level elevated
Desire more modest then cascaded
Melodic'ly from singer's mouth.
The cheeks from dew drops softly burning,
The steadfast, unextinguished yearning,
The union of all souls set forth.

The wisdom of the wise, the mild's mildness,
Nobility's grace, the strong one's power
You wed into a single likeness
And placed it into glory's bower.
The man who 'fore the unknown trembled,
Its mere reflection came to love;
Great heroes burning he assembled,
To equal that great One above.
From all archtypal Beauty the first ringing
{You} made in Nature to resound in singing.

The passions' frenzied, wild stress,
The lawless whims of fortune,
The instincts' and the duties' press
You set with your acute emotion
On straight-edge to their destination.
What Nature in her great and grand procession
In widespread distances has torn apart,
Becomes in play, in song's expression
Coherent, easy to impart.
By Furies' singing much affected,
The murder draws, though not detected,
The fate of death from out their art.
And long ere sages venture with a finding,
An Iliad is fortune's mysteries unwinding
For young antiquity unfurled;
From Thespis' chariot descending
Came Providence into the world.

But in the great course of the world
Too early was your symmetry ascending.
When swarthy hand of destiny,
What she before your eye had raveled,
Would not before your eye untie,
Then life to the abyss did fly,
Before full lovely circle traveled--
Then you did draw, with bold, audacious might,
The arc still further into future's night;
Then hurled yourself and never quivered
Into Avernus' swarthy ocean wave
And there the life that fled discovered
Beyond the urn, beyond the grave;
And then appeared with torch o'erturned the image
Of blooming Pollux, who on Castor leans so nigh:
The shadow that completes the Moon's full visage,
Before the silver circle fills on high.

Yet higher still, to ever higher stations
Creative genius soared to be.
One sees already rise creations from creations
From harmonies comes harmony.
What here delights the drunken eye alone,
Is there in service to the higher beauty;
The charms which do this nymph adorn,
In a divine Athena soften gently:
The forces which in wrestler's muscle rage,
Must seek in godly Beauty silence tender;
The figure proud of Jove, the wonder of his age,
Does in Olympus' temple homage render.

The world, transformed by labor's hand,
The human heart, by new impulses greeted,
And exercised in battles heated,
Do your creation's scope expand.
So Man, now far advanced, on pinions elevated,
With thanks does Art transport on high,
New worlds of beauty are created
From nature richer made thereby.
The bounds of knowledge melt away,
The mind, in your light vic'tries sharpened,
In mere enjoyments quickly ripened
To race through all the artificial powers,
Does set its sights on Nature's distant towers,
And overtakes her on her dusky way.
He weighs her now with human calculations,
Does gauge with measures she herself has lent;
Much better versed in Beauty's obligations,
To pass before his eye she now is sent.
In self-contented, youthful joy he raises
In loan unto the spheres his harmony,
The universal edifice he praises
And shows it off as symmetry.

Now everything that he discovers
Does tell him of proportion fair.
Fair Beauty's golden belt uncovers
In his life's course her weaving there;
While blest Perfection 'fore him hovers
In all your works victoriously e'er.
Wherever joy unblemished hurries,
Wherever silent sorrow flees,
Where contemplation thoughtful tarries,
Where tears of misery he sees,
Where thousand frights at him are 'raying;
Do follow seas of harmony,
He sees the Graces three in playing,
And, his emotions soft-refined displaying,
He strives to join the lovely company.
Soft, as the lines alluring coil together,
As all phenomena around
In softened contour blend in one another
Just so, his life's light breath is bound.
His spirit melts in Harmony's great ocean,
Which 'round his senses lustfully now flows
And quietly his thoughts, enraptured, close
On ever-present Cytherea, in devotion.
With destiny in lofty unity,
Sustained in calm on Muses and on Graces,
His friendly breast exposed obligingly,
Is struck as threat'ning arrow races
From gentle bowstring of necessity.

The trusted favorites of blessed Harmony,
Companions who to gladden life have striven,
The noblest and the dearest, those which she,
Who gave us life, that we might live has given!
That man unshackled of his duty now takes heed,
The fetters loves which him do lead,
Not prey to iron scepter of contingency,
{This} thanks you--your eternity,
And a sublime reward is your heart's treasure.
That 'round the cup in which our freedoms run
The gods of joy do joke with pleasure,
The charming dream is lovely spun,
Embraced for this be, in full measure!
The Spirit glittering and bright,
Who cloaked Necessity with grace, does order
Unto his starry vault, unto his ether,
To serve us graciously and right,
Who in destruction still adorns himself, delights us
With the sublime where he affrights us,
To be like this great Artist seek.
As on the brooklet mirror-sleek
The bright-hued banks a-dancing glimmer
With sunset's glow and flow'ry field,
So on our barren life does shimmer
The poet's lively shadow-world.
You have to us, as bride garmented,
The frightening unknown presented,
Our destiny without relent.
Just as your urns the bones do cover,
You put a magic, sweet sheen over
The dreadful sorrow's choir lament.
Throughout millenia I've hurried,
In boundless realm of ages past,
How Mankind laughs where'er you've tarried,
How dreary when you're gone at last.

What once with feathers soaring upward
Full force from your creating hands did climb,
Again itself within your arms discovered,
When silent victory of time
From off his cheeks life's rosy flower
The strength from out his members stole
And sadly, steps now lacking power,
The old man staggered on his pole.
Then you from fountain freshly rendered
The wave of life to thirsty tendered;
Twice did the epoch gain its youth anew,
Twice from the seed which you yourself did strew.

By savage hordes expatriated,
The last of off'ring brands you snatched away
From Orient's fair altars desecrated
And brought it to the Occident to stay.
There dawned the lovely fugitive much feted,
The new day, from the East, now in the West,
And on Hesperia's meadows germinated
Ionia's renewed and blooming best.
Into men's souls now cast a Nature fairer
Soft mirroring, a fair reflection bright,
And in these souls bejewelled there came aglitter
To reign the goddess great of light.
One saw the falling of a million shackles,
And for the slaves the rights of men now heard,
As brother peacefully with brother travels,
So mildly has the young mankind matured.
With inner lofty joy inspired
Of fortune's gift you take your part,
And in humility attired
With silent merit you depart.

If on the paths of thought without obstruction
Now roams th'investigator, fortune bold,
And, drunken with the paeons' loud eruption,
He reaches rashly for the crown to hold;
If now it is his rash conception
To noble guide dispatch with hireling's bread,
While by Art's dreamed-for throne's erection
The first slave office to permit instead:--
Forgive him--th'crown of all perfection
Does hover bright above your head.
With you, the spring's first blooming flower,
Fair Nature's soul-formation first arose,
With you, the harvest's joyful power,
Does Nature's self-perfecting close.

Emerged from humble clay, from stoney traces,
Creative Art, with peaceful victories embraces
The mind's unmeasured, vast domain.
What but discoverers in knowledge's high places
Can conquer, did for you its conquest gain.
The treasures which the thinker has collected
Will only in your arms first warm his heart,
When science is, by beauty ripened and perfected,
Ennobled to a work of art--
When he up to the hilltop with you sallies
And to his eye, in evening's shining part,
Is suddenly revealed--the lovely valleys.

The richer satisfied his fleeting vision,
The loftier the orders which the mind
Does fly through in {one} magic union,
Does circumscribe in {one} enjoyment blind;
The wider ope are thoughts and feelings growing
To richer play of harmonies now showing,
To beauty's more abundant streaming van--
The lovelier the pieces of the universal plan,
Which now, disfigured, tarnish its creation,
He then sees lofty forms bring to perfection.
The lovelier the riddles from the night,
The richer is the world that he embraces,
The broader streams the sea in which he races,
The weaker grows his destiny's blind might,
The higher are his urges striving,
The smaller he himself, the greater grows his loving.

So lead him, the hidden pathway show
Through ever purer forms, through music clearer,
Through ever higher heights and beauty fuller
Up poetry's beflowered ladder go--
At last, at epoch's ripest hour,
Yet one more happy inspiration bright,
The recent age of Man's poetic flight,
And--he will glide in arms of Truth's full power.

And she, the gently Cypria,
By fiery crown illuminated,
Before her son-grown-man now elevated,
Unveiled--as Urania;
So much the sooner by him sighted,
The {lovelier,} from her now flown!
Thus sweet, thus happily delighted
Stood once Ulysses' noble son,
When she, divine, who shared his youth as partner,
Was then transfigured to Jove's daughter.

The dignity of Man into your hands is given,
Protector be!
It sinks with you! With you it is arisen!
The sacred magic of poetry
A world-plan wise is serving
To th'ocean, steer it e'er unswerving,
Of lofty harmony!

Fair Truth, by her own time rejected,
By Poetry now be protected,
And refuge find in the Muses' choir.
In highest and abundant splendor,
More fright'ning in her veil of wonder,
Then let her rise aloft in singing
And vengeance win with music ringing
Upon her persecutor's ear.

You free sons of the freest mother,
Swing upward with a constant face,
And strive then after no crown other,
To highest Beauty's beaming place.
The sisters who from here departed
In the mother's lap you soon will see;
What souls of beauty have imparted
Must excellent and perfect be.
Uplift yourselves on wings emboldened
Above your epoch's course be drawn;
See in your mirror now engoldened
The coming century's fair dawn.
On thousand twisting pathways chasing,
So rich in multiplicity,
Come forward, then, with arms embracing
Around the throne of unity.
As into gentle beams of seven
Divides the lovely shimmer white,
As also rainbow beams of seven
Dissolve into white beams of light--
So, play in thousandfolded clar'ty,
Enchanted 'round the heady sight,
So flow back in {one} band of ver'ty,
Into {one} single stream of light!

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