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The wind blows through the tunnel
Trying to find the sky.
Jane is breathing her hardest,
And John begins to sigh:
'I'm a Princeton professor
God knows what drove me to this.
I have a wife and family;
I've known marital bliss.
'But things were turning humdrum,
And I felt I was being false.
Every night in our bedroom
I wished I were someplace else."
|
What is the weather outside?
What is the weather within
That drives these two to excess
And into the arms of sin?
|
They are the children of Eros.
They move, but not too fast.
They want to extend their pleasure,
|
This is the foolish but understandable blaming of non-metaphysical changes in outside forces (i.e., the weather) for the obvious metaphysical reasons why he has sinned.
|
Mark Strand
|
The Couple
|
[Pre-Chorus]
Take a broken love song
Keep it by your side
Never be lonely
Find a place to hide
By the westway
|
Inside the scrubs
|
How long must we wait?
For they're killing us?
Killing us
|
HM Prison Wormwood Scrubs (informally “The Scrubs”) is a Category B men’s prison, located in the Wormwood Scrubs area of the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, in inner west London, England. The prison is operated by Her Majesty’s Prison Service.
|
Pete Doherty
|
Broken Love Song - 447705
|
The snowplough's buried on the drifted moor.
Carols shake your television
And nothing moved on the road but the wind
Hither and thither
The wind and three
Starving sheep.
Redwings from Norway rattle at the clouds
But comfortless sneezers puddle in pubs.
The robin looks in at the kitchen window
But all care huddles to hearths and kettles.
The sun lobs one wet snowball feebly
Grim and blue
|
The dusk of the coombe
And the swamp woodland
Sinks with the wren.
|
See old lips go purple and old brows go paler.
The stiff crow drops in the midnight silence.
Sneezes grow coughs and coughs grow painful.
|
‘Coombe’ is a variant spelling of ‘combe’, a very old (probably ultimately Celtic) English word meaning ‘valley’.
English, and English poetry, are full of these old words for aspects of the natural world which now rarely see the light of day. Peter Ackroyd writes about Shakespeare:
He was of the country […] Shakespeare has the widest vocabulary on the variety of weeds… disentangling hemlock from cuckoo-flower, the fumiter from the darnal.
When Hughes started publishing poetry in the early 1950s, Britain was undergoing considerable cultural change, as mass-produced, imported goods became the norm and it seemed as if humans were becoming insulated from the outside.
Hughes’s sometimes arcane vocabulary (and Seamus Heaney ’s after him) is a very deliberate attempt to combat this. An ardent student of Shakespeare (he published the gigantic Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being in 1992), he inherits some of the Shakespearean power with the lexicon of nature.
|
Ted Hughes
|
Christmas Card
|
null |
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
|
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
|
Frost may be alluding to Dante’s Inferno (in which both fire and ice are punishments in Hell) or to scientific accounts of Earth’s fate billions of years from now. The planet will either be consumed by the Sun, or survive as a cold and lifeless rock.
Alternatively, the later references to desire and hate suggest that Frost may intend a nonliteral meaning here. Maybe he is using the connotations of fire and ice to comment purely on human relationships rather than the apocalypse.
“In an anecdote he recounted in 1960 in a "Science and the Arts” presentation, prominent astronomer Harlow Shapley claims to have inspired “Fire and Ice”. Shapley describes an encounter he had with Robert Frost a year before the poem was published in which Frost, noting that Shapley was the astronomer of his day, asks him how the world will end. Shapley responded that either the sun will explode and incinerate the Earth, or the Earth will somehow escape this fate only to end up slowly freezing in deep space. Shapley was surprised at seeing “Fire and Ice” in print a year later, and referred to it as an example of how science can influence the creation of art, or clarify its meaning."
In Norse mythology, ragnarok, or the end or the world, in which the Gods (so humans, basically) must fight and then shuffle off to different patches of the rubble, both ice and fire feature in the show of destruction, while in christianity, it is mostly just fire. Frost could be referencing religious contradictions and arguments between religions, on the nature of humanity’s curtain call in the humorous tone of this poem, suggesting that such debates, while interesting, are more like eyes that don’t line up rather than totally divergent views.
|
Robert Frost
|
Fire and Ice
|
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
|
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
|
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
|
“It matters not how strait the gate” can literally be translated to: “It doesn’t matter how narrow the opening is.”
“The gate” is a metaphor for difficult challenges in life, or perhaps for life itself. It doesn’t matter how much pain we are going to suffer or how many injustices we are going to face: we can meet those challenges.
It is also a reference to Matthew 7:14
For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.
We need to match this reference to Henley’s reference in stanza one to ‘whatever gods may be’. This would take it out of a specific Christian context. However, though an atheist, Henley was Victorian and would be immersed in biblical references.
Scrolls were used by many ancient civilizations. For example, Judaism still uses scrolls in synagogue which have special sacred meaning. So scrolls suggest that our lives are underpinned by whatever god or God we believe in.
Most importantly, scrolls represents fate, what is ‘written’ for us specifically, whether or not in a Christian context. What Henley then says is that, despite destiny or fate that will affect his physical life, he is still in control of his spiritual self.
|
William Ernest Henley
|
Invictus
|
The Sexton keeps the Key to –
Putting up
Our Life – His Porcelain –
Like a Cup –
Discarded of the Housewife –
Quaint – or Broke –
A newer Sevres pleases –
Old Ones crack –
I could not die – with You –
For One must wait
To shut the Other's Gaze down –
You – could not –
|
And I – could I stand by
|
And see You – freeze –
Without my Right of Frost –
Death's privilege?
|
This line is significant, suggesting pain and hesitancy. She clearly rejects the idea of watching him die. Note the assonant “i"s in "I” and “by”. We can visualize her pointing to her breast and shrinking back from the body of her dead lover.
|
Emily Dickinson
|
I cannot live with You 640
|
O Mother Race! to thee I bring
This pledge of faith unwavering,
This tribute to thy glory.
I know the pangs which thou didst feel,
When Slavery crushed thee with its heel,
With thy dear blood all gory.
|
Sad days were those-ah, sad indeed!
|
But through the land the fruitful seed
Of better times was growing.
The plant of freedom upward sprung,
|
Day that made life feel unliveable
|
Paul Laurence Dunbar
|
Ode To Ethiopia
|
Huffy Henryhid the day,
unappeasable Henry sulked.
I see his point,—a trying to put things over.
It was the thought that they thought
they could do it made Henry wicked & away.
But he should have come out and talked.
All the world like a woolen lover
once did seem on Henry's side.
Then came a departure.
Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.
|
I don't see how Henry, pried
open for all the world to see, survived.
|
What he has now to say is a long
wonder the world can bear & be.
Once in a sycamore I was glad
|
“Pried / open for all the world to see,” alludes to Henry being an oyster that has been opened to be searched and plundered.
|
John Berryman
|
Dream Song 1
|
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow...
It would have been outside.
|
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache...
The sun was coming from the outside.
|
That scrawny cry--It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
|
Here the poet emphasizes that this comedic renewal is exogenous to himself – it must be the case, because it does not depend on the poet’s mind for animation. This is a reassuring thought to him, almost like a religion.
(Source: Open Yale Courses. )
|
Wallace Stevens
|
Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself
|
Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly
Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.
Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.
|
Soft fists insist on
|
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,
Even the paving.
|
Mushrooms, a fungus, tend to be fragile and small, hence “soft fists”. The alliterative f s and s s, produce an appropriately gentle sound.
‘Soft fists’ is oxymoronic . The insignificant appearance of the mushrooms is contradicted by ‘fists’, a dynamic symbol of strength and rebellion.
|
Sylvia Plath
|
Mushrooms
|
To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
|
The spikes of crocus.
|
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
|
Utilizing the word spikes instead of petals was intentional. Millay is implying that crocus (a symbol for Spring) is beautiful, but when closely observed, there is something vicious about it.
|
Edna St. Vincent Millay
|
Spring
|
null |
Now the Swan it floated on the English river
|
Ah the Rose of High Romance it opened wide
A sun tanned woman yearned me through the summer
And the judges watched us from the other side
|
Among other things the swan symbolizes poetry and the poet her- and himself. Background here is the swan was sacred to Apoll, the god of the arts, the legend that when the otherwise relatively mute swan sings a beautiful song when the animal dies (hence “swan song”).
Homer was called the Swan of Meander, Vergil the Swan of Mantua. Most important for the interpretation of this song is that William Shakespeare was called The Swan of Avon, the Avon being the river flowing through Shaekspeare’s birth place Stratford.
|
Leonard Cohen
|
The Traitor
|
Their ministers,—who in lordly wise had stirred
Among the grandest objects of the sense,
And dealt with whatsoever they found there
As if they had within some lurking right
To wield it;—they, too, who, of gentle mood,
Had watched all gentle motions, and to these
Had fitted their own thoughts, schemers more wild,
And in the region of their peaceful selves;—
Now was it that both found, the meek and lofty
Did both find, helpers to their heart's desire,
And stuff at hand, plastic as they could wish;
Were called upon to exercise their skill,
|
Not in Utopia, subterranean fields,
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!
But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us,—the place where in the end
|
We find our happiness, or not at all!
|
An allusion to the Romantic emphasis on the natural and physical world.
|
William Wordsworth
|
The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement
|
You leave my name
Just that way!
He said, Mrs.,
(With a snort)
Just a K
Makes your name too short.
I said, I don't
Give a damn!
Leave me and my name
Just like I am!
Furthermore, rub out
That MRS., too--
|
I'll have you know
I'm Madam to you!
| null |
The census man is so bent on changing her last name, so she finally gives him something else he can change… Madam demands more respect than the more commonly used prefix Mrs.
|
Langston Hughes
|
Madam and the Census Man
|
Little poppies, little hell flames,
Do you do no harm?
You flicker. I cannot touch you.
I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.
And it exhausts me to watch you
|
Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.
|
A mouth just bloodied.
Little bloody skirts!
There are fumes that I cannot touch.
|
The poppies might still represent happiness. The ‘wrinkly and clear red’ skin of a mouth could suggest a smile.
A mouth could also suggest the source of hurting words, in the poet’s world of contradictions and bipolarities, words that appear harmless are potential daggers aimed to hurt and deceive.
|
Sylvia Plath
|
Poppies in July
|
I cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts.
|
The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper sunburned woman,
|
the mother of the year, the taker of seeds.
The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes, new beautiful things
come in the first spit of snow on the northwest wind, and the old things go,
|
Connecting man and nature is a common practice in poetry. In this situation, a woman’s scarf is being compared to a yellow cornflower, also called a Chrysanthemum Segetum. Though very beautiful, they are considered a weed by some, which hints in on the incoming destruction.
Another possible darker image is of the scarf being a metaphor for a hanging rope to hint on the death of beauty expressed in the previous stanza . This would suggest that beauty kills other beauty, for things get constantly replaced–a thought expressed the final stanza.
|
Carl Sandburg
|
Autumn Movement
|
It seems so long ago
Nancy was alone
Looking at the Late Late show
Through a semi-precious stone
In the House of Honesty
Her father was on trial
|
In the House of Mystery
|
There was no one at all
There was no one at all
It seems so long ago
|
The “House of Mystery” was a real place: an illegal abortion clinic in Bellevue, Pennsylvania. Many young women died from botched abortions there and were incinerated in a furnace in the basement. Dorothy Arnold is believed to have perished in 1910.
Those days must have seemed “so long ago” in 1969, but, considering the fate of Nancy, maybe not so long ago after all.
|
Leonard Cohen
|
Seems So Long Ago Nancy
|
null |
Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
|
And here on earth come emulating flies,
That though they never equal stars in size,
(And they were never really stars at heart)
|
Starlight
Night is dawning. Out of the darkness, “real” stars – distant pinpricks of light – are appearing in the sky.
|
Robert Frost
|
Fireflies in the Garden
|
754
My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun
In Corners—till a Day
The Owner passed—identified
And carried Me away
And now We roam in Sovereign Woods
And now We hunt the Doe
And every time I speak for Him
The Mountains straight reply
And do I smile, such cordial light
|
Upon the Valley glow
|
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let its pleasure through
And when at Night—Our good Day done
|
The environment is complex. Having referred to “Sovereign Woods” and “Mountains”, we now have reference to a “Valley”. What this signifies is a matter of conjecture.
This could relate to the submission of a woman to societal expectations; she smiles and pretends to enjoy doing so. And maybe she truly does. Or maybe this is a posture that she adopts in order to fit in.
It is noticeable that the gun doesn’t appear in these lines, implying that assertive masculinity has no place.
|
Emily Dickinson
|
My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun
|
She is neither pink nor pale,
And she never will be all mine;
|
She learned her hands in a fairy-tale,
And her mouth on a valentine.
|
She has more hair than she needs;
In the sun 'tis a woe to me!
And her voice is a string of colored beads,
|
“Hands” are a symbol for what one does, and “mouth” is a symbol for what one says. Whatever this woman does and says is done like she is living a fantasy, and maybe even detached from reality as a result. Notice how the title is “Witch-WIFE”, not “Witch-girl”, or “Witch-Woman”–so this poem may in fact be Millay’s view of married women.
|
Edna St. Vincent Millay
|
Witch-Wife
|
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height
One luminary clock against the sky
|
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
|
I have been one acquainted with the night.
|
What time is it on the moon?
The “luminary clock” acts as a divine body, sitting at an “unearthly height” in the sky and passing judgment on time, deeming that it is “neither wrong nor right.” In addition, since time is “neither wrong nor right”, it is deemed unimportant and insignificant; a solid judgment is not rendered on it. For the narrator, time is also unimportant since he does not keep track of time on his walks as he believes that there is no one waiting for him to come back.
|
Robert Frost
|
Acquainted with the Night
|
but age is the total of
our doing.
they have aged
badly
because they have
lived
out of focus,
they have refused to
see.
not their fault?
whose fault?
mine?
|
I am asked to hide
my viewpoint
from them
for fear of their
fear.
|
age is no crime
but the shame
of a deliberately
|
We are told to not make people upset with our conflicting views. To do so is seen as rude. In truth, trying to turn someone away from a flawed ideology or viewpoint is not a rude act, it is a kindness. In society today we get it backwards. Thinking that it is kind for us not to upset a person even if in the long run it will lead them down a better path is considered being mean, not kind.
Being kind isn’t preserving someone’s feelings, being kind is being willing to tell someone they are wrong, no matter how much they don’t want to hear it.
|
Charles Bukowski
|
Be Kind
|
I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
|
Boarded the train there's no getting off.
| null |
When you get on a train the doors are sealed shut until the destination has been reached. The speaker is too far along in her pregnancy to turn back or terminate. She could also very well be on the way to the hospital to deliver… Either way her babies are coming whether she likes it or not…
Once the baby is born, as well, she is pledged to its love and care, and the motherly instinct ensures there’s “no getting off” that responsibility.
|
Sylvia Plath
|
Metaphors
|
And bread loaf is not stone
I came up with one thing
And I don't believe I'm wrong
That nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
There are some millionaires
With money they can't use
Their wives run round like banshees
|
Their children sing the blues
|
They've got expensive doctors
To cure their hearts of stone.
But nobody
|
Let another reference to the theme of loneliness throughout the poem. Even though singing is usually something joyful, in this context they sing of loneliness and heartbreak in their lives that no one can help with.
|
Maya Angelou
|
Alone
|
The jane is zoned! no nightspot here, no bar
there, no sweet freeway, and no premises
for business purposes,
no loiterers or needers. Henry are
baffled. Have ev'ybody head for Maine,
utility-man take a train?
|
Arrive a time when all coons lose dere grip,
|
but is he come? Le's do a hoedown, gal,
one blue, one shuffle,
if them is all you seem to réquire. Strip,
|
This line is flamboyantly phrased in the blackface dialect that Berryman uses throughout the Dream Songs.
His use of this register of language raises the question of its use. One way we might phrase it is as a primal register of language of the American unconscious: full of alienation, with an implication of a deep historical violence, both farcical and with moments of supreme beauty.
As Adrienne Rich writes: “For blackface is the supreme dialect and posture of this country, going straight to the roots of our madness.”
|
John Berryman
|
Dream Song 2 Big Buttons Cornets: the advance
|
Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
|
Since I was born into this solitude.
|
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying tonight or lying still awake
|
This is an unsettling self-depricating comment on the poet’s character, implying a sense of unworthiness or emotional isolation; an inability to relate to those around him. Note that the word “solitude” appears in line two and also “solitary” in line ten.
|
Edward Thomas
|
Rain
|
null |
Willed down, waited for, in place at last and for good.
|
Trunk-hasped, cart-heavy, painted an ignorant brown.
And pew-strait, bin-deep, standing four-square as an ark.
If I lie in it, I am cribbed in seasoned deal
|
The opening line is characteristically Heaney; concise and dense, with alliterative “w"s. There is a rhythmic feel that draws the reader in, as well as an assumption that he is talking about the settle without needing to use the word.
|
Seamus Heaney
|
The Settle Bed
|
Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.
But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which
The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.
I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash
|
And retreated, not to affright it;
|
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark
And iridescent creature
|
This line is actually similar to line 4. In line 4, the narrator pauses at the writer’s door, not wanting to interrupt her writing process.
In this line, they are pausing and letting the starling be free on its own terms, not assisting it in any way.
|
Richard Wilbur
|
The Writer
|
null |
You love us when we're heroes, home on leave,
|
Or wounded in a mentionable place.
You worship decorations; you believe
That chivalry redeems the war's disgrace.
|
Sassoon is talking about how the women only miss them when they leave and the men can’t tell them what to do any more.
|
Siegfried Sassoon
|
Glory of Women
|
The highway is full of big cars going nowhere fast
And folks is smoking anything that'll burn
Some people wrap their lives around a cocktail glass
And you sit wondering
where you're going to turn.
I got it.
|
Come. And be my baby.
|
Some prophets say the world is gonna end tomorrow
But others say we've got a week or two
The paper is full of every kind of blooming horror
|
She only asks for him to come and be hers for the rest of time since the world is such a cruel and unforgiving place. They can spend their time together, their way.
|
Maya Angelou
|
Come And Be My Baby
|
This is the room I could never breathe in.
The black bunched in there like a bat,
No light
But the torch and its faint
Chinese yellow on appalling objects--
Black asininity. Decay.
Possession.
It is they who own me.
Neither cruel nor indifferent,
Only ignorant.
This is the time of hanging on for the bees--the bees
So slow I hardly know them,
|
Filing like soldiers
|
To the syrup tin
To make up for the honey I've taken.
Tate and Lyle keeps them going,
|
The soldier-like discipline of the bees might be significant, perhaps reflecting the discipline of an ordered society and way of life that Plath is seeking.
|
Sylvia Plath
|
Wintering
|
The mob arrives with stones and sticks
to maim and lame and do me in.
All the same, when I open my mouth,
they wobble like gin.
Diamonds and pearls
tumble from my tongue.
Or toads and serpents.
Depending on the mood I'm in.
I like the itch I provoke.
The rustle of rumor
like crinoline.
I am the woman of myth and bullshit.
|
(True. I authored some of it.)
|
I built my little house of ill repute.
Brick by brick. Labored,
loved and masoned it.
|
She enjoys the hate and the lies about just how bad she is. So much so that she even spreads roomers her self to get people to fear her even more.
|
Sandra Cisneros
|
Loose Woman
|
O SINGER of Persephone!
In the dim meadows desolate
Dost thou remember Sicily?
Still through the ivy flits the bee
Where Amaryllis lies in state
O Singer of Persephone!
Simætha calls on Hecate
And hears the wild dogs at the gate;
Dost thou remember Sicily?
Still by the light and laughing sea
|
Poor Polypheme bemoans his fate:
|
O Singer of Persephone!
And still in boyish rivalry
Young Daphnis challenges his mate:
|
In the first stanzas , the speaker asks how one can remember joy in despair, as well as be optimistic in despair. In this stanza, the speaker brings up another point: do we feel pity for the suffering of the evil? Does imposing evil onto evil make one evil?
Polyphemus (or Polypheme) was the leader of the man-eating giants from The Odyssey , and lived in the Land of the Cyclopes, which is also in Sicily . Odysseus defeated Polyphemus by stabbing him in the eye whilst he was drunk.
This is also a reference to Theocritus’s Idyll xi, wherein Polypheme laments over his unrequited love for the nymph Galatea.
|
Oscar Wilde
|
Theocritus
|
327
Before I got my eye put out
I liked as well to see
|
As other Creatures, that have Eyes
|
And know no other way
But were it told to me — Today
That I might have the sky
|
the “other Creatures” may mean “peers” and “other people.” By mentioning the fact that they have eyes too imply how they may be watching her all the time. No wonder why Dickinson wanted the “other Creature”’s eyes “put out” too!
(Perhaps Dickinson was jealous that their eyes did not get put out)
|
Emily Dickinson
|
Before I got my eye put out
|
Its sole duty!
Let all hope of grace beyond, lie there!
And while the face lies quiet there,
Who shall wonder
That I ponder
A conclusion? I will try it there.
As,—why must one, for the love foregone
Scout mere liking?
Thunder-striking
Earth,—the heaven, we looked above for, gone!
Why, with beauty, needs there money be,
Love with liking?
|
Crush the fly-king
In his gauze, because no honey-bee?
|
May not liking be so simple-sweet,
If love grew there
'Twould undo there
|
That is, squash lust for lack of love. Below, an illustration of crushed fly (whether king or not is an unknown) in its gauze:
|
Robert Browning
|
A Pretty Woman
|
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair'd the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express,
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.
And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,,
|
But tell of days in goodness spent,
|
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!
|
He begins the line “but” to suggest that a typical girl of this beauty might well be less than virtuous. She, by contrast, has moral beauty to match that of her face.
|
Lord Byron
|
She Walks in Beauty
|
I remember rooms that have had their part
In the steady slowing down of the heart.
The room in Paris, the room at Geneva,
The little damp room with the seaweed smell,
And that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide—
|
Rooms where for good or for ill—things died.
|
But there is the room where we (two) lie dead,
Though every morning we seem to wake and might just as well seem to sleep again
As we shall somewhere in the other quieter, dustier bed
|
The tone is ominous. The fluctuations of fortune are invoked in the phrase ‘for good or for ill’. Another caesura precedes the sinister ‘things died’. It is known that the poet had a tragic life. Young members of her family died or were committed to a mental asylum. This could be a literal reference to her siblings. But love, friendship, hope can also die. The imprecise ‘things’ leave this open. The reader can interpret this as they wish.
|
Charlotte Mew
|
Rooms
|
null |
I
|
That chill is in the air
Which the wise know well, and even have learned to bear.
This joy, I know,
|
Part I gives us an image of the sun setting, then snowflakes landing gracefully, except using darker wording to clue in on incoming doom in the next parts.
Each Part gets darker and darker, and Part I is merely a clue to it.
|
Edna St. Vincent Millay
|
Not So Far as the Forest
|
Uncoiled, is wound
To spring again;
The mind enmeshed
Laid straight in repose,
And the body refreshed
By feeding the rose–
These are but visions;
These would be
The grave's derisions,
Could the grave see.
Here is the wish
Of one that died
|
Like a beached fish
On the ebb of the tide:
|
That he might wait
Till the tide came back,
To see if a crate,
|
“Beached” has two meanings–To be “beached” is to be stranded out of a body of water, but it also means “to cause someone to suffer a loss.” [The fish has suffered greatly from the tide, which has beached it, perhaps how Millay feels at times]
To die “on the ebb of the tide” means to die slowly and gradually; the tide is the grim reaper, and the sea is Death. For a fish to be on an ebb gives us an image of a dead body.
|
Edna St. Vincent Millay
|
Moriturus
|
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
|
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
|
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more,
|
The words “rapture” and “lonely” create a juxtaposition between immense joy and solitude. Humans are by nature social creatures and thrive off of interaction with other people. This stanza opens up the movie “Into the Wild” which sets up on a stillness you can only find in nature. The movie focuses on the purity of nature and it’s quiet, refreshing, uncorrupted state. In “Into the Wild” a young adult who just graduated college embarks on a journey into the Alaskan wilderness all alone.
|
Lord Byron
|
There Is Pleasure In The Pathless Woods
|
Always through blinding cables, to our joy,
Of thy white seizure springs the prophecy:
Always through spiring cordage, pyramids
Of silver sequel, Deity's young name
Kinetic of white choiring wings . . . ascends.
Migrations that must needs void memory,
Inventions that cobblestone the heart,—
Unspeakable Thou Bridge to Thee, O Love.
Thy pardon for this history, whitest Flower,
O Answerer of all,—Anemone,—
Now while thy petals spend the suns about us, hold—
(O Thou whose radiance doth inherit me)
|
Atlantis,—hold thy floating singer late!
|
So to thine Everpresence, beyond time,
Like spears ensanguined of one tolling star
That bleeds infinity—the orphic strings,
|
The implication here is that the poet is sinking and singing as he desperately tries to stay afloat. Perhaps an oblique reference to Crane’s personal troubles: he was a severe alcoholic only a few years away from suicide.
Perhaps also a reference to Matthew 14:28-31, in which Jesus tells Peter to walk on water:
Matthew 14:28 And Peter answered him and said, Lord, if it be thou, bid me come unto thee on the water.
Matthew 14:29: And he said, Come. And when Peter was come down out of the ship, he walked on the water, to go to Jesus.
Matthew 14:30: But when he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me.
Matthew 14:31: And immediately Jesus stretched forth his hand, and caught him, and said unto him, O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?
Crane may be struggling with doubt, pleading for the strength to keep faith with his art (his “singing”).
Compare also Bob Dylan in “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (1962):
Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinking But I’ll know my song well before I start singing
|
Hart Crane
|
Atlantis
|
Your father's gone a-hunting
He's deep in the forest so wild
And he cannot take his wife with him
He cannot take his child
Your father's gone a-hunting
In the quicksand and the clay
And a woman cannot follow him
Although she knows the way
Your father's gone a-hunting
|
Through the silver and the glass
|
Where only greed can enter
But spirit, spirit cannot pass
Your father's gone a-hunting
|
Lewis Carroll’s continutation of “ Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ” was called “ Through the Looking-Glass ” since Alice in this book has to climb through a mirror to find a world beyond ours. Cohen uses the motif but makes it darker by mentioning that only greed can pass through the mirror.
|
Leonard Cohen
|
Hunters Lullaby
|
While the rain fell on the November woodland shoulder of Exmoor
While the traffic-jam along the road honked and shouted
Because the farmers were parking wherever they could
And scrambling to the bank-top to stare through the tree-fringe
Which was leafless,
The stag ran through the private forest.
While the rain drummed on the roofs of the parked cars
And the kids inside cried and daubed their chocolate and fought
And mothers and aunts and grandmothers
Were a tangle of undoing sandwiches and screwed-round gossiping heads
Steaming up the windows,
|
The stag loped through his favourite valley.
|
While the blue horseman down in the boggy meadow
Sodden nearly black, on sodden horses,
Spaced as at a military parade,
|
Again there is the contrasting smoothness of the stag’s movement, with ‘loped’ conjuring the idea of easy elegance. The ‘favourite valley’ again suggests an animal comfortable in its habitat.
|
Ted Hughes
|
The Stag
|
My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but O! my soul is white;
White as an angel is the English child:
But I am black as if bereav'd of light.
My mother taught me underneath a tree
And sitting down before the heat of day,
She took me on her lap and kissed me,
And pointing to the east began to say.
Look on the rising sun: there God does live
And gives his light, and gives his heat away.
And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive
|
Comfort in morning joy in the noonday.
|
And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love,
And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face
|
Being in the presence of God, metaphorically receiving his light, brings spiritual comfort.
|
William Blake
|
The Little Black Boy Songs of Innocence
|
And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum −
Kept beating − beating − till I thought
My Mind was going numb −
And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space − began to toll,
As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here −
|
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down −
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing − then −
| null |
Before they’re able to let go and face reality, people enters a state of denial, refusing to accept the reality of the loss. The “Plank that held the speaker’s attempts to deny the reality of death “[breaks]” causing her to “drop down, and down” as she plummets into the void of acceptance and the dark reality. By “hit[ting] a World,” Dickinson suggests permanence, emphasizing the fleeting feeling of closure. Despite innate desires to find peace, closure is unattainable, elusive, and inaccessible for humanity.
By using the words “hit” and “plunge,” Dickinson engages effective diction, rendering a feeling of abrupt change — Dickinson thus mirrors drowning, suggesting one is immersed in failure to find closure. Furthermore, the speaker is “finished knowing,” proving the desperate attempts to legitimize death to be ill-fated.
Any pursuit of knowledge or logic has essentially been lost, leaving the speaker in a limbo-state of nothingness, stuck in between a world of naivety and a world of compliance. The speaker ultimately lingers in cynicism, confusion, and heartache, never understanding death. By concluding the last stanza with a dash, as opposed to a period, Dickinson amplifies the suffering that concurs with lack of closure; she closes the poem with ambiguity, the same vagueness that haunts the mourning process.
|
Emily Dickinson
|
280
|
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
|
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
|
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
|
Fyodor Dostoevsky writes about the plague of indifference in his novel The Brothers Karamazov . Dostoevsky makes the argument that indifference is worse than outright malice because it makes the victim feel humiliated and insignificant.
Auden disagrees here – he says that indifference is the least of man’s concerns. Considering his homosexuality, he probably would have preferred indifference to the cruel treatment homosexuals receive.
|
W. H. Auden
|
The More Loving One
|
The world imagined is the ultimate good.
This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:
Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.
Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous,
Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one…
|
How high that highest candle lights the dark.
|
Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.
|
Even if “God and the imagination are one"—if God is imagined, or simply the equivalent of the human imagination—the concept and belief still consoles, still "lights the dark.”
Regardless of the existence or nonexistence of any God, the notion comforts. Stevens borrows from biblical imagery to make his point. (Here are 100 verses about God providing light to the world of darkness.) He also paraphrases Portia in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (V.i): “How far that little candle throws his beams!”
If it is the “imagination” considered as “that highest candle”, the speaker appears to find great comfort from imagination. Imagination here likely includes the full extent of thought, as a “vital boundary” and “rendezvous” is considered, and for the latter of which we “collect ourselves… / …into one thing.” This “rendezvous” is based upon ideas form the first stanza, “the world imagined”.
|
Wallace Stevens
|
Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour
|
If your Nerve, deny you—
Go above your Nerve—
He can lean against the Grave,
If he fear to swerve—
That's a steady posture—
Never any bend
Held of those Brass arms—
Best Giant made—
|
If your Soul seesaw—
Lift the Flesh door—
The Poltroon wants Oxygen—
Nothing more—
| null |
Poltroon is a 16th century word meaning fool or coward. It has etymological roots to the Latin pullus meaning young animal. Dickinson suggests that the fool is focused only his animal survival; using oxygen, breathing, as a representation of this, she describes the opening of the mouth as the lifting of a flesh door.
She mocks the naïvety of these fools struggling to delve into introspection of the self. Dickinson suggests if you’re having trouble confronting yourself, you will just have to enjoy your meaningless “nothing more”.
|
Emily Dickinson
|
If your Nerve deny you 292
|
Rock:
My father, twenty-five, in the same suit
Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack
Still two years old and trembling at his feet
My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress
Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat,
Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass.
Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light.
She pours tea from a Thermos, the milk straight
From an old H.P. sauce-bottle, a screw
Of paper for a cork; slowly sets out
The same three plates, the tin cups painted blue.
|
The sky whitens as if lit by three suns
|
My mother shades her eyes and looks my way
Over the drifted stream. My father spins
A stone along the water. Leisurely
|
And we are definitely in the spiritual world. The ‘three suns’ may symbolically represent the three members of the family; the world is brighter when they are together.
It may also suggest that the speaker is talking about the Holy Trinity, as we know in the first line he states that he believes that his parents are somewhere beyond ‘Eden Rock’.
And yet this is ambiguous as there is another explanation. A parhelion is a meteorological phenomenon, caused by ice crystals in the air, where an illusion of three suns appears in the sky. The poet seems to be teasing the reader with uncertainty.
|
Charles Causley
|
Eden Rock
|
In my daydream College for Bards, the curriculum would be as follows:
1) In addition to English, at least one ancient language, probably Greek or Hebrew, and two modern languages would be required.
2) Thousands of lines of poetry in these languages would be learned by heart.
3) The library would contain no books of literary criticism, and the only critical exercise required of students would be the writing of parodies.
4) Courses in prosody, rhetoric and comparative philology would be required of all students, and every student would have to select three courses out of courses in mathematics, natural history, geology, meteorology, archaeology, mythology, liturgics, cooking.
|
5) Every student would be required to look after a domestic animal and cultivate a garden plot.
| null |
Perhaps to promote self-sufficiency and a sense of responsibility.
Gardening and caring for animals also develops character; by cleaning up after animals and laboring on the land the students would be more grounded in reality.
Gardening allows one to learn from nature and learn the philosophy of life and living things.
|
W. H. Auden
|
College for Bards
|
null |
(In memory of Ann Jones)
|
After the funeral, mule praises, brays,
Windshake of sailshaped ears, muffle-toed tap
Tap happily of one peg in the thick
|
Ann Jones is Dylan Thomas’s aunt. When he was a boy he would spend his summers on her farm in Llangain, Carmarthenshire.
|
Dylan Thomas
|
After the Funeral
|
Sonnet XIX
When I consider how my light is spent,
E're half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide,
Lodg'd with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve there with my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
|
Doth God exact day-labor, light deny'd,
|
I fondly ask; But patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts, who best
|
It has taken the speaker six lines to get through the part of the sentence that begins “When.” Now he goes on to say what happens. He wonders if God demands that people undertake hard, physical work, when they don’t have any light, which could mean vision specifically or talents in general.
|
John Milton
|
Sonnet 19: When I Consider How My Light Is Spent
|
E're half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide,
Lodg'd with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve there with my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
Doth God exact day-labor, light deny'd,
I fondly ask; But patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts, who best
Bear his milde yoke, they serve him best, his State
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o'er land and ocean without rest:
|
They also serve who only stand and waite.
| null |
The poem ends with the narrator’s final reflection: vindication of the his personal passivity.
|
John Milton
|
Sonnet 19: When I Consider How My Light Is Spent
|
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once,
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
|
Let the lamp affix its beam.
|
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
|
“Affix” also has a tone of finality, indicating that the light beam will no longer move. This adds to the idea that despite all the movement and life happening around her, the woman has reached the final state of death.
|
Wallace Stevens
|
The Emperor of Ice Cream
|
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
|
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
|
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
|
Beat writers often valued the merit of their own experience above the standards of behavior imposed on them by society.
Again, Kerouac asserts that writing is an individual process and that one should write in “amazement for [one]self.”
|
Jack Kerouac
|
Belief Technique For Modern Prose
|
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
|
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
|
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
|
The speaker half-convinces himself that he can always come back and return to the first path, the one he is now rejecting. But he knows the reality is that once you’ve made a choice, that choice takes you farther and farther down a path from which it’s hard to return and start over .
This could also mean that the path we choose in life is determined by chance and choice. They cannot be separated.
|
Robert Frost
|
The Road Not Taken
|
Twas on a Holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean
The children walking two & two in red & blue & green
Grey headed beadles walked before with wands as white as snow
Till into the high dome of Pauls they like Thames waters flow
O what a multitude they seemed these flowers of London town
Seated in companies they sit with radiance all their own
The hum of multitudes was there but multitudes of lambs
|
Thousands of little boys & girls raising their innocent hands
|
Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song
Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among
Beneath them sit the aged men wise guardians of the poor
|
They are described as raising their hands to heaven in prayer, ostensibly in thanks for the ‘benevolence’ of the charitable organisations that house them. This is ambiguous; they were more likely to be pleading to God for kinder treatment.
|
William Blake
|
Holy Thursday Songs of Innocence
|
Poetry should treat
Of lofty things
Soaring thoughts
And birds with wings.
The Muse of Poetry
Should not know
|
That roses
In manure grow.
|
The Muse of Poetry
Should not care
That earthly pain
|
Juxtaposition. Hughes uses this line to show that beautiful things, such as poetry, that affect those who observe them often are born from circumstances that are not socially acceptable to talk about. Hughes echoes this idea in Call to Creation without using the sarcastic tone that he assumes throughout this poem. In both poems, Hughes reminds the reader that there are bad things that happen every day, and the dark moments of our history cannot be ignored.
This line also makes me think of the Outkast song, Roses.
|
Langston Hughes
|
Formula
|
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,
|
Previous Hardy wrote of a ‘death-lament, a compressed compound noun, that contrasts with the joyful 'full-hearted’. The ‘evensong’ is the first religious reference, a church service that praises God at the end of the day.
|
Thomas Hardy
|
The Darkling Thrush
|
I felt a Cleaving in my Mind −
As if my Brain had split −
I tried to match it − Seam by Seam −
But could not make them fit.
|
The thought behind, I strove to join
Unto the thought before −
But Sequence raveled out of Sound
|
Like Ball − upon a Floor.
|
Dickinson further explains the idea of a “Cleaving” mind – the difficulty in collecting one’s thoughts in a cohesive manner when dealing with a loss is extremely difficult, because you are so overwhelmed with contradictory feelings, and failure to eventually join together these thoughts could lead to the “Sequence” raveling out “Like Ball – upon a Floor”.
The lack of a unified train of thought can lead to decrease in mental stability.
|
Emily Dickinson
|
937
|
Pale beds of blowing rushes
Where no leaf blooms or blushes
Save this whereout she crushes
For dead men deadly wine.
Pale, without name or number,
In fruitless fields of corn,
They bow themselves and slumber
All night till light is born;
And like a soul belated,
In hell and heaven unmated,
By cloud and mist abated
Comes out of darkness morn.
|
Though one were strong as seven,
|
He too with death shall dwell,
Nor wake with wings in heaven,
Nor weep for pains in hell;
|
‘Even if someone had the strength of seven men…’
The ‘were’ is a use of the subjunctive mode or “mood” , which is becoming increasingly rare in colloquial English.
‘seven’ is probably used for the sake of rhyme, but it also has great significance within (and without) the Bible, as Swinburne and his contemporaries would have known. The poet himself had long ago lost the faith that he’d learned as a child & so the line may have a bitter underwriting: ‘Even though a man have great faith in the Seven (days of creation in Genesis ; declarations of divinity in John; seven trumpets to herald the destruction of Jericho in Exodus , etc.), it will not spare him from death & eternal night.’
|
Algernon Charles Swinburne
|
The Garden Of Proserpine
|
I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –
|
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air –
Between the Heaves of Storm –
|
The Eyes around – had wrung them dry –
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset – when the King
|
The fly has a huge presence throughout, which is amplified here. Death engenders a distinctive atmosphere — silence and thoughtfulness as well as grief and tears. The repetition of “Stilless” suggests quiet and serenity, but this is undermined by the fly.
The reader may wonder if this irritating insect signifies the speaker’s feelings about herself; the littleness of individuals, even dying ones, in the face of momentous death.
There are two contrasting effects, that of quiet and serenity and, in contrast, the momentous and violent “Heaves of Storm”; the latter we presume representing death.
The alliterative , sibilant “s"s imitate the sound of the buzzing fly. And yet this mutates into the storm — and so the boundary between the fly’s presence on earth and the speaker’s death is blurred.
|
Emily Dickinson
|
I heard a Fly buzz 465
|
To fling my arms wide
In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done.
Then rest at cool evening
Beneath a tall tree
While night comes on gently,
Dark like me--
|
That is my dream!
|
To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun,
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
|
The word “dream” echoes like a refrain throughout Hughes’s poetry, most famously in “Harlem” (“What happens to a dream deferred?…”). The impact can be felt, among other places, in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches and writings (“I Have A Dream,” etc.).
|
Langston Hughes
|
Dream Variations
|
Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.
Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.
|
Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
|
War's annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.
|
The first stanza had a man and his old horse, the second a burning pile of weeds, and this third stanza has two humans – a maid (young woman) and her “wight” (young man) They are the corollary to the opening stanza.
The colon provides a break, a caesura , in which the pace slows and the heavy moral lesson is propounded in the last two lines.
|
Thomas Hardy
|
In Time of The Breaking of Nations
|
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today
O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free
|
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
|
Who made America
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain
|
America was built on ideas that ANYBODY regardless of social class, skin color, religion, etc. could call America their own.
Everybody could live the “American Dream” and could start from rags to riches and be treated equally: everybody in America could dictate their own future with equal opportunity, just like how the founding fathers intended it to be.
|
Langston Hughes
|
Let America Be America Again
|
The darkness crumbles away.
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet's poppy
|
To stick behind my ear.
|
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
|
Typical of the understated tone of the poem, Rosenberg uses unglamorous everyday speech — the poppy is stuck rather than placed or fitted behind his ear. It is an unconscious symbolic act, predicting the poet’s impending death.
|
Isaac Rosenberg
|
Break of Day in the Trenches
|
And the unlucky rose.
Climb up the crane, learn the sailor's words
When the ships from the islands laden with birds
Come in.
Tell your stories of fishing and other men's wives:
The expansive moments of constricted lives
In the lighted inn.
But do not imagine we do not know
Nor that what you hide with such care won't show
At a glance.
Nothing is done, nothing is said,
But don't make the mistake of believing us dead:
|
I shouldn't dance.
|
We're afraid in that case you'll have a fall.
We've been watching you over the garden wall
For hours.
|
A slightly English way of saying “I wouldn’t dance if I were you.”
|
W. H. Auden
|
The Two
|
TELL me not, Sweet, I am unkind,
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
To war and arms I fly.
True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.
Yet this inconstancy is such
As thou too shalt adore;
|
I could not love thee, Dear, so much,
Loved I not Honour more.
| null |
A very powerful and most quoted part of the poem. He says that he could not love her as much without loving honour more.
Perhaps his honour gives him the depth character to love her, or causes him to love certain attributes in her.
The affectionate salutation ‘Dear’ is capitalised, as it is in the opening stanza when he refers to her as ‘Sweet’. He may do this to demonstrate her importance to him. It matches the capitalised ‘Honour’ His love of both are intertwined and inseparable.
|
Richard Lovelace
|
To Lucasta Going to the Wars
|
The two executioners stalk along over the knolls,
Bearing two axes with heavy heads shining and wide,
And a long limp two-handled saw toothed for cutting great boles,
And so they approach the proud tree that bears the death-mark on its side.
Jackets doffed they swing axes and chop away just above ground,
And the chips fly about and lie white on the moss and fallen leaves;
Till a broad deep gash in the bark is hewn all the way round,
And one of them tries to hook upward a rope, which at last he achieves.
The saw then begins, till the top of the tall giant shivers:
The shivers are seen to grow greater with each cut than before:
They edge out the saw, tug the rope; but the tree only quivers,
|
And kneeling and sawing again, they step back to try pulling once more.
|
Then, lastly, the living mast sways, further sways: with a shout
Job and Ike rush aside. Readied the end of its long staying powers
The tree crashes downward: it shakes all its neighbours throughout,
|
After attempting to saw at the tree again, they try pull it down once again using the rope attached to the tree.
|
Thomas Hardy
|
Throwing a Tree
|
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need
|
Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the Flag to-day
Can tell the definition
So clear, of Victory
|
As he, defeated, dying
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
|
The “purple Host” is a metaphor for royalty and, in this context, the capitalised “Victory”. They have taken the Flag — an example of metonymy — which is representative of victory on a battle field, but also representative of success in life.
Note the word “Host” is archaic, meaning army or military force. The capital “H” and the archaism add to the significance. It represents every conquering army across the centuries, as well as every successful human endeavour.
|
Emily Dickinson
|
Success is counted Sweetest
|
What is the meaning
Of old tongues
Reaping havoc
In new places?
The blinding illumination,
Even as you short-
Circuit us
Into further darkness?
What is the meaning of trees
Falling heavy as whales
Their crusted roots
Their cratered graves?
|
O why is my heart unchained?
|
Tropical Oya of the Weather,
I am aligning myself to you,
I am following the movement of your winds,
|
This forms a dramatic climax. The poet asks the key rhetorical question. The storm, despite its fearsome strength, releases or ‘unchains’ the poet’s heart.
There is a deeper significance; a reference to slavery of previous centuries. Not only is the poet’s heart released, but she is freed from deep and ancestral bondage; the negative part of her heritage.
|
Grace Nichols
|
Hurricane Hits England
|
null |
Wir Haben ein Gesetz,
Und nach dem Gesetz soll er sterben.
|
The dowsed coals fume and hiss after your meal
Of grilled brook trout, and you saunter off for a walk
Down the fern trail. It doesn't matter where to,
|
“We have a law, and according to the law, he must die” in German. This line comes from Martin Luther’s German translation of the Gospel of John, though here Hecht uses it as the Nazis' justification for the murders of so many innocents.
|
Anthony Hecht
|
The Book of Yolek
|
Trav'ling lady, stay awhile
Until the night is over
I'm just a station on your way
I know I am not your lover
Well I lived with a child of snow
|
When I was a soldier
|
And I fought every man for her
Until the nights grew colder
She used to wear her hair like you
|
One of the many references to being a soldier in Cohen’s songs.
Some others:
The Partisan
Field Commanded Cohen
The Captain
Story of Isaac
Last Year’s Man
First We Take Manhattan
|
Leonard Cohen
|
Winter Lady
|
He knew in the hour he died
That his heart had never spoken
In eighty years of days.
|
O for the tall tower broken
|
Memorial is denied:
And the unchanging cairn
The pipes could set ablaze
|
The ‘tall tower’ is a metaphor for his father’s father, someone Baxter looked up to. The implication is positive, despite the distance that the old man established.
The exclamatory ‘O’ is an inarticulate expression of grief and regret that the man’s strength and power is ‘broken’ by age and frailty.
|
James K. Baxter
|
Elegy for My Fathers Father
|
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you—Nobody—Too?
Then there's a pair of us?
|
Don't tell! they'd advertise—you know!
|
How dreary—to be—Somebody!
How public—like a Frog—
To tell one's name—the livelong June—
|
Some versions of the poem (inaccurately) give this line as –
Don’t tell! They’d banish us, you know
– eliminating Dickinson’s inventive punctuation and changing the meaning
Far from feeling inferior or unwanted by the masses, Dickinson is making a choice of solitude (she knows that if she publishes her poems she will become a viral meme – but she wants to avoid that!) “Advertise” is a word with an air of modernity as well
Also, she’s not explaining this to the reader. “You know!” is meant to indicate “you already know what I’m talking about! Being relevant to society sucks”
|
Emily Dickinson
|
Im Nobody Who Are You?
|
The tree of life and the tree of life
Unloosing their moons, month after month, to no purpose.
The blood flood is the flood of love,
The absolute sacrifice.
It means: no more idols but me,
Me and you.
So, in their sulfur loveliness, in their smiles
These mannequins lean tonight
In Munich, morgue between Paris and Rome,
Naked and bald in their furs,
Orange lollies on silver sticks,
Intolerable, without minds.
|
The snow drops its pieces of darkness,
|
Nobody's about. In the hotels
Hands will be opening doors and setting
Down shoes for a polish of carbon
|
This echoes line one and also calls to mind Wilfred Owen’s poem, ‘Exposure’ , where he writes ‘Less deadly than the air that shudders black with snow.’ The meaning of this oxymoron , a contradiction in terms, is difficult to interpret, but clearly the snow represents the negativity and mental numbness of women and society’s low expectations of them.
|
Sylvia Plath
|
The Munich Mannequins
|
I know what my heart is like
Since your love died:
It is like a hollow ledge
|
Holding a little pool
Left there by the tide,
A little tepid pool,
Drying inward from the edge.
| null |
This “little pool” may be a puddle of her tears. Or perhaps it is a metaphor for her emotions-the feelings of heartbreak.
The water similes used in this poem are powerful. Water is commonly used as a metaphor for Time in poetry-for it to be shrinking and small may symbolize her Time (her life) slowly running out.
|
Edna St. Vincent Millay
|
Ebb
|
Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane
O' foggage green!
An' bleak December's winds ensuin
Baith snell an' keen!
Thou saw the fields laid bare an' wast
An' weary Winter comin fast
An' cozie here, beneath the blast
Thou thought to dwell
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell
|
That wee-bit heap o' leaves an' stibble
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble
But house or hald
To thole the Winter's sleety dribble
An' cranreuch cauld!
|
But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane
In proving foresight may be vain
The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men
|
Rough English translation:
That small bit heap of leaves and stubble, Has cost you many a weary nibble! Now you are turned out, for all your trouble, Without house or holding, To endure the winter’s sleety dribble, And hoar-frost cold.
Although it looks humble to him, the mouse’s nest took massive effort to build. Now for all the trouble she’d gone through to construct it, she has nothing but cold to look forward to. The speaker feels remorse for destroying her home.
|
Robert Burns
|
To a Mouse
|
Twas on a Holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean
The children walking two & two in red & blue & green
Grey headed beadles walked before with wands as white as snow
|
Till into the high dome of Pauls they like Thames waters flow
|
O what a multitude they seemed these flowers of London town
Seated in companies they sit with radiance all their own
The hum of multitudes was there but multitudes of lambs
|
The simile emphasises the flow of children — several thousands — the numbers of orphans in London was huge.
The Thames reference is ironic. The verb ‘flow’ suggests the sort of symbolic ‘freedom’ that belongs to the river, but not to the poorer class in a society that was minutely controlled by the power of the ruling elite and the church.
We might question the comparison with Thames waters. Is this a comparison with the pure natural world? Or should we bear in mind that the Thames was polluted; an open sewer? It is for the reader to speculate.
|
William Blake
|
Holy Thursday Songs of Innocence
|
I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
|
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
|
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.
|
She is carry something of value in her (or, at least something deemed valuble by society), like newly minted money in a purse. Of course, this also means that she is only the purse.
|
Sylvia Plath
|
Metaphors
|
Here once, through an alley Titanic
Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul—
Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.
These were days when my heart was volcanic
As the scoriac rivers that roll—
As the lavas that restlessly roll
Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek
In the ultimate climes of the pole—
That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek
In the realms of the Boreal Pole.
Our talk had been serious and sober
But our thoughts they were palsied and sere—
|
Our memories were treacherous and sere;
|
For we knew not the month was October,
And we marked not the night of the year—
(Ah, night of all nights in the year!)
|
The use of “treacherous and sere” in this line, while creating a repetition with the previous line (both ending with “sere), also serve to establish a sense of unfamiliarity felt by the speaker. The line goes deeper that mere unfamiliarity by stating that it is "Our memories” that “were treacherous and sere,” which adds a layer of potential recognition. The speaker may have been there before, which creates a foreshadowing of revelations to come. Because the tone of Poe’s language is foreboding, hence “treacherous” rather than “unclear” or “foggy,” it can be expected that the foreshadowed revelation will be a negative one.
|
Edgar Allan Poe
|
Ulalume
|
No more walks in the wood:
The trees have all been cut
Down, and where once they stood
Not even a wagon rut
Appears along the path
Low brush is taking over.
No more walks in the wood;
This is the aftermath
|
Of afternoons in the clover
|
Fields where we once made love
Then wandered home together
Where the trees arched above,
|
In the language of flowers (see link), white clover is traditionally associated with promises. Here it may symbolize the promises of young love.
|
John Hollander
|
An Old-Fashioned Song
|
null |
There is no Frigate like a Book
|
To take us Lands away,
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –
|
Like a frigate, which is physically a very large naval boat, a simple book has the power to take us away from reality.
|
Emily Dickinson
|
There is no frigate like a book 1263
|
I empty myself of the names of others. I empty my pockets.
I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road.
At night I turn back the clocks;
I open the family album and look at myself as a boy.
What good does it do? The hours have done their job.
I say my own name. I say goodbye.
The words follow each other downwind.
|
I love my wife but send her away.
|
My parents rise out of their thrones
into the milky rooms of clouds. How can I sing?
Time tells me what I am. I change and I am the same.
|
We have to accept the fleeing of our loved ones and they have to do the same for us. We don’t have another option, there is no easy way out.
|
Mark Strand
|
The Remains
|
Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
|
Stop here, or gently pass!
|
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
|
Another imperative follows, given emphasis by the exclamation mark and the shorter line – a trimeter rather than the tetrameters that preceed it. The reader’s likely response is to want to know more.
|
William Wordsworth
|
The Solitary Reaper
|
'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
|
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
|
"Their colour is a diabolic die."
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.
|
The word sable means dark, black.
It’s an interesting word choice since it’s more often used in reference to the animal or its expensive pelt. It brings into the poem connotations of market value and the inhumanity of chattel slavery.
|
Phillis Wheatley
|
On Being Brought from Africa to America
|
Near where the chartered Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every man,
In every Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear.
How the Chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackning church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.
But most thro' midnight streets I hear
|
How the youthful Harlot's curse
|
Blasts the new-born Infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.
|
The desperation of London is summed up by the young prostitute cursing. Is she cursing as in swearing, or cursing others, like the men who exploit her? Or is she herself, also cursed?
Her curse furthermore harms the new-born infant. “Blasts” would suggest that her own howl of anger and grief frightens her child; she doesn’t take his tears into account. She may be cursing the child himself or her fate. But Blake’s main point is in the final line: her curse calls down judgment on the poor state of marriage at the time (infidelity was taken for granted by many men) and turns the carriage ridden by newlyweds into a hearse.
The word “youthful” here is a direct criticism of the conditions for young, working-class women in the time of George III. Poor urban women worked as seamstresses (which required skill that took time to learn), and in domestic service.
The early industrial revolution, (the ‘Romantic’ era) when Blake lived, started in the north of England; factory work for women and children was beginning to grow and mill towns to spring up, though conditions in the mills and factories were terrible. But in London those who failed to find work sewing or in domestic service fell back on prostitution as the most viable means of subsistence. This was the fate for thousands of young women with nowhere else to turn. Before taking up the profession, this young unencumbered girl might have been an ‘English rose’ as opposed to her now haggard, cursing self.
|
William Blake
|
London
|
null |
Well, son, I'll tell you:
Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
|
It's had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
|
The first line of the poem orients us to the speaker of the poem: a mother, talking to her son.
The poem begins with the mother speaking in metaphor , comparing her life to a staircase. The imagery of a “crystal stair” can be associated with a perfect life where everything goes right. She tells her son, in colloquial, familiar language, that life hasn’t been the best to her.
|
Langston Hughes
|
Mother to Son
|
Once there was a tree and she loved little boy. And every day the boy would come and he would gather her leaves And make them into crowns and play king of the forest. He would climb up her trunk and swing from her branches and eat apples. And they would play hide and go seek. And, when he was tired, he would sleep in her shade. And the boy loved the tree very much. And the tree was happy.
But time went by, And the boy grew older. And the tree was often alone. Then one day the boy came to the tree and the tree said:
"Come, Boy, come and climb up my trunk and swing from my branches and eat apples and play in my shade and be "happy".
"I am too big to climb and play" said the boy. "I want to buy thing and have fun. I want some money. Can you give me some money?"
"I'm sorry" said the tree, "but I have no money. I have only leaves and apples. Take my apples, Boy, and sell them in city. Then you will have money and you'll be happy"
And so the boy climb up the tree and gathered her apples and carried them away.
|
And the tree was happy...
|
But the boy stayed away for a long time and the tree was sad.
And then one day the boy came back and the tree shook with joy, and she said:
"Come, Boy come and climb up my trunk and swing from my branches and eat apples and play in my shade and be "happy"."
|
Although it seems as if the boy is using the tree, the tree is content with being of any minute use to the boy, for the boys happiness is cause of her own.
|
Shel Silverstein
|
The Giving Tree
|
(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
|
And all the reports of his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of the old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
|
Except for the war till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
|
Now he was not a saint because he submitted to God or because he helped feed the hungry and clothe poor. Oh no! This guy was a saint because he submitted to the constraints of society.
|
W. H. Auden
|
The Unknown Citizen
|
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
|
Let be be finale of seem.
|
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
|
“Seem” could also be referring to the “wenches” and “boys,” as they are described by the speaker in terms of what they are wearing and how they are keeping up appearances by bringing flowers to the funeral. These are the struggles that people face in their lives daily, as they make choices that will dictate how they “seem” to others. Meanwhile, the woman who has passed away reached the finale and is who she is, without having to deal with how she appears to others.
|
Wallace Stevens
|
The Emperor of Ice Cream
|
SILENT, the Lord of the world
|
Eyes from the heavenly height,
|
Girt by his far-shining train,
Us, who with banners unfurl'd
Fight life's many-chanc'd fight
|
“Eyes” is here used as a verb, in the sense that the Lord is looking at “Us” (appearing in line 4).
The “heavenly height” is an expression of divinity and dignity, while creating distance: God may have the power to see us from this realm, but not the other way around, and people’s immoral acts are keeping them far away from it.
|
Matthew Arnold
|
Men of Genius
|
There will be no edges, but curves.
Clean lines pointing only forward.
History, with its hard spine & dog-eared
Corners, will be replaced with nuance,
Just like the dinosaurs gave way
To mounds and mounds of ice.
Women will still be women, but
The distinction will be empty. Sex,
Having outlived every threat, will gratify
Only the mind, which is where it will exist.
For kicks, we'll dance for ourselves
|
Before mirrors studded with golden bulbs.
|
The oldest among us will recognize that glow—
But the word sun will have been re-assigned
To the Standard Uranium-Neutralizing device
|
She’s is referring to the vanity mirrors used in high end boutique fitting rooms, in actresses dressing rooms or makeup rooms.
|
Tracy K. Smith
|
Sci-fi
|
Oh I hope you run into them, you who've been travelling so long
Yes you who must leave everything that you cannot control
It begins with your family, but soon it comes round to your soul
Well I've been where you're hanging, I think I can see how you're pinned:
When you're not feeling holy, your loneliness says that you've sinned
Well they lay down beside me, I made my confession to them
They touched both my eyes and I touched the dew on their hem
If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn
They will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem
When I left they were sleeping, I hope you run into them soon
Don't turn on the lights, you can read their address by the moon
And you won't make me jealous if I hear that they sweetened your night:
|
We weren't lovers like that and besides it would still be all right
|
We weren't lovers like that and besides it would still be all right
|
Leonard Cohen is arguably a feminist but definitely a true lover and admirer of women, as is also revealed in “I’m Your Man” and many other of his songs.
Here he declares simply that the subject(s) of the songs have as much right as he does to choose her (their) lovers.
He repeats a similar line in the song “Winter Lady” when he says:
I’m just a station on your way, I know I’m not your lover
These lines follow the theme of the passing, fleeting, yet deeply meaningful encounter.
|
Leonard Cohen
|
Sisters of Mercy
|
Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies,
That though they never equal stars in size,
(And they were never really stars at heart)
|
Achieve at times a very star-like start.
|
Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.
|
Childhood
Playing off of the similarity between the words “star” and “start,” Frost implies that people who are still young (in the start of their lives) are more likely to directly link fireflies and stars.
As children grow up, they experience a drastic transition, passing from a world where everything seems miraculous to one in which fireflies represent no more than mere bugs.
Far too often, imagination and curiosity and wonder, and teenagers and adults no longer “reach for the stars.”
As Pablo Picasso supposedly claimed,
All children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.
Though childhood doesn’t last, exploring one’s surroundings with imagination, curiosity, and wonder can always (and perhaps especially in adulthood) help break up the monotony of day-to-day life.
|
Robert Frost
|
Fireflies in the Garden
|
It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration; the broad sun
Is sinking down in its tranquility;
|
The gentleness of heaven broods o'er the Sea;
|
Listen! the mighty Being is awake,
And doth with his eternal motion make
A sound like thunder—everlastingly.
|
This echoes the first verses of the Book of Genesis:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.
The word for “moving over” is literally something like “brooding over,” as a fowl broods over its eggs to keep them safe and warm. Wordsworth depicts his poetic contemplation of the sky as a new act of creation, or as an observation of a new Genesis moment.
|
William Wordsworth
|
It Is a Beauteous Evening Calm and Free
|
I said, What
Can I do for you?
He said, You know
Your rent is due.
I said, Listen,
Before I'd pay
I'd go to Hades
And rot away!
The sink is broke,
The water don't run,
And you ain't done a thing
You promised to've done.
|
Back window's cracked,
Kitchen floor squeaks,
|
There's rats in the cellar,
And the attic leaks.
He said, Madam,
|
Alberta K. Johnson states that she refuses to remit payment for her living quarters unless the owner of the place addresses the deplorable condition of the property.
|
Langston Hughes
|
Madam and The Rent Man
|
null |
PROM THE GREEK OF BION
|
[Published by Forman, "Poetical Works of P. B. S.", 1876.]
I mourn Adonis dead—loveliest Adonis—
Dead, dead Adonis—and the Loves lament.
|
Bion of Smyrna was a Greek bucolic poet, who flourished about 100 BC. Most of his work is lost. There remain 17 fragments (preserved in ancient anthologies) and the Epitaph of Adonis , also known as Lament for Adonis (which is preserved in several late medieval manuscripts of bucolic poetry).
|
Percy Bysshe Shelley
|
Fragment of The Elegy On The Death Of Adonis
|
Lincoln?
He was a mystery in smoke and flags
Saying yes to the smoke, yes to the flags,
Yes to the paradoxes of democracy,
|
Yes to the hopes of government
|
Of the people by the people for the people,
No to debauchery of the public mind,
No to personal malice nursed and fed,
|
By using lines such as “Yes to the hopes …”, Sandburg outlines the beliefs and theories of Lincoln. He contras ideas which Lincoln supports with actions he views as unnecessary or not agreeable.
|
Carl Sandburg
|
The People Yes
|
Abandoned to beauty and pride
The thorn of the night in your bosom
The spear of the age in your side
Lost in the rages of fragrance
Lost in the rags of remorse
Lost in the waves of a sickness
That loosens the high silver nerves
Oh chosen love, Oh frozen love
Oh tangle of matter and ghost
Oh darling of angels, demons and saints
And the whole broken-hearted host
Gentle this soul
|
And come forth from the cloud of unknowing
|
And kiss the cheek of the moon
The New Jerusalem glowing
Why tarry all night in the ruin
|
The Cloud of Unknowing is a phrase from the anonymous religious tract of the same name (written in late 14th century). The tract tells the reader to do away with all intellectual attempts to understand God. One should put all thoughts under a Cloud of Forgetting and pierce God’s Cloud of Unknowing with the dart of longing love. Thus God can be “grasped and held”.
|
Leonard Cohen
|
The Window
|
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