amelia_petkova

A poem for today: Dirge Without Music by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

I read in this morning's paper that the poet Wislawa Szymborska has died. I'm going to go read over her collection of poetry that I've kept since my freshman year in college and cry now.

ETA: Her obituary in the New York Times

I never got around to posting a list of recs from Yuletide this year but one of the fics I really liked features her poetry: At the Spring

Why must bookstores' poetry sections be so small? I went looking for A Shropshire Lad by A.E. Housman at Borders, Books & Music and it wasn't there. In the paper I'm writing about him I state that his poetry has remained loved, but it's hard to say that in good conscience when all of his writing must be bought online.

*headdesk*

...make me love being an English major. The past couple days in one of my literature classes we've been listening to the CDs for the book Poetry Speaks. It contains recordings of English and American poets reading their poems. We've listened to

--Alfred Lord Tennyson
--Walt Whitman
--Robert Frost
--William Butler Yeats
--T.S. Eliot
--Dylan Thomas Gwendolyn Brooks
--Langston Hughes
--W.H. Auden

The entire time I was fangirling Yeats and Gwendolyn Brooks. You can't understand Tennyson and Whitman, but come on! We heard the voices of people writing during the Victorian Period and the (American) Civil War!!! You don't get much more literary kick-ass than that.

The World is Too Much With Us
William Wordsworth

The World is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours
And are up-gather'd now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.-Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn,-
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

No other updates, except that I am still being attacked by plot bunnies, and it is a coin-toss as to whether I will or will not get writing done during my spring vacation.

Love Is Not All
Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
and rise and sink and rise and sink again.
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
pinned down by need and moaning for release
or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It may well be. I do not think I would.

I strongly recommend reading Savage Beauty , a biography about Millay.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree
William Butler Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evenings full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear the lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

One of the most moving books of poetry that I have read. Even more so because what it speaks of is happening now, right at this very moment

A Soldier's Arabic
Brian Turner

This is a strange new kind of war where you learn
just as much as you are able to believe.
--Ernest Hemingway

The word for love, habib , is written from right
to left, starting where we would end it
and ending where we might begin.

Where we would end a war
another might take as a beginning,
or as an echo of history, recited again.

Speak the word for death, maut ,
and you will hear the cursives of the wind
driven into the veil of the unknown.

This is a language made of blood.
It is made of sand, and time.
To be spoken, it must be earned.

...not to annoy the Fae?

The Erl-King
Goethe

Who rides there so late through the night dark and drear?
The father it is, with his infant so dear;
He holdeth the boy tightly clasp'd in his arm,
He holdeth him safely, he keepeth him warm.

"My son, wherefore seek'st thou thy face thus to hide?"
"Look, father, the Erl-King is close by our side!
Dost see not the Erl-King, with crown and with train?"
"My son, 'tis the mist rising over the plain."

"Oh, come, thou dear infant! oh come thou with me!
Full many a game I will play there with thee;
On my strand, lovely flowers their blossoms unfold,
My mother shall grace thee with garments of gold."

"My father, my father, and dost thou not hear
The words that the Erl-King now breathes in mine ear?"
"Be calm, dearest child, 'tis thy fancy deceives;
'Tis the sad wind that sighs through the withering leaves."

"Wilt go, then, dear infant, wilt go with me there?
My daughters shall tend thee with sisterly care.
My daughters by night their glad festival keep,
They'll dance thee, and rock thee, and sing thee to sleep."

"My father, my father, and dost thou not see,
How the Erl-King his daughters has brought here for me?"
"My darling, my darling, I see it aright,
'Tis the aged grey willows deceiving thy sight."

"I love thee, I'm charm'd by thy beauty, dear boy!
And if thou'rt unwilling, then force I'll employ."
"My father, my father, he seizes me fast,
Full sorely the Erl-King has hurt me at last."

The father now gallops, with terror half wild,
He grasps in his arms the poor shuddering child;
He reaches his courtyard with toil and with dread,
The child in his arms finds he motionless, dead.

( NaNoWriMo rambling )

Note to self: Get some more writing done before NaNoWriMo starts. It can be something as small as a drabble or a haiku, although the pirate story would be preferred.

I will later kick myself for not posting one of the sexy poems, but I just couldn't pass up this one.

The Inkwell
Constantine P. Cavafy

Honest inkwell, sacred to the poet,
whence a whole world emerges,
as each figure draws near you,
it returns with a new kind of grace.

Where did your ink discover such fabulous
wealth! As each of its drops falls
on the paper it sets one more diamond
among the diamonds of our fantasy.

Who taught you the words that you launch
into the world's midst, and they fire us?
Even our children's children will read them
with the same feeling and warmth.

Where did you find these words that though they echo
in our ears as if heard for the first time,
yet do not appear entirely strange--
our hearts must have known them in another life.

The pen you moisten resembles a hand
moving around the clock of the soul.
It counts and determines the moments of feeling,
it counts and changes the hours of the soul.

Honest inkwell, sacred to the poet,
from whose ink a world emerges--
now comes to mind how many people
will be lost in it if deep sleep

should overtake the poet some night. 
The words will always be there; but what strange hand
will be able to find them, bring them to us?
You, faithful to the poet, will refuse it.