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post #136 of 140
4/7/11 at 8:43pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by whoopee View Post
I've read this poem by Li-Young Lee dozens of times, torn it apart, love it.

Persimmons - Li-Young Lee

absolutely beautiful. i really, really love li-young lee. this and the city in which i love you.

i have many that i like, can't pick one fav, but at the moment, Wordsworth's Ode keeps playing in my head again and again. too long to reproduce, but the following is my favorite.

What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.


the full poem here: http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww331.html
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post #137 of 140
4/7/11 at 8:53pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by StephenHero View Post
When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer by Walt Whitman



When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.


^Hmm, I just dog-eared this in my copy of Leaves of Grass.

The first Stanza of Verse 3 of A Song for Occupations by Whitman:

The sun and stars that float in the open air,
The apple-shaped earth and we upon it, surely the drift of them is
something grand,
I do not know what it is except that it is grand, and that it is happiness,
And that the enclosing purport of us here is not speculation or bon-mot
or recconoissance,
And that it is not something which by luck may turn out well for us, and
without luck must be a failure for us,
And not something which may yet be retracted in a certain contingency.
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post #138 of 140
4/8/11 at 12:50pm
This poem by Philip Larkin on death is quite terrifying; scares me more than any horror story or movie.


Aubade

\tI work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
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post #139 of 140
4/8/11 at 12:59pm
Philip Larkin is great

Quote:
The widest prairies have electric fences,
For though old cattle know they must not stray
Young steers are always scenting purer water
Not here but anywhere. Beyond the wires

Leads them to blunder up against the wires
Whose muscle-shredding violence gives no quarter.
Young steers become old cattle from that day,
Electric limits to their widest senses.
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post #140 of 140
4/8/11 at 3:54pm
Frank O'Hara, Poem Read At Joan Mitchell's

http://books.google.com/books?id=J1evY4wjjy0C&lpg=PA265&ots=IZpAuKP8dS&dq=frank%20o'hara%20poem%20read%20at%20joan%20mitchell's&pg=PA265#v=onepage&q&f=false
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