search soleil (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
searchsoleil) wrote2005-06-01 09:08 pm
searchsoleil) wrote2005-06-01 09:08 pm
Poetry and Epiphanies Go Hand In Hand
While in the midst of reading Teh Remus Angst Fic of Doom and Great Sobbing Messes That Were Once Young Women, I had a startling revelation about the poetry that I like.
That being, all of my favorite poetry -- the kind written by professionals and left to ferment in critical acclaim -- is about death/dead people/people who have lost loved ones.
The evidence doesn't lie.
Exhibit A: What I consider to be possibly the best poem ever written:
Dirge Without Music
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,--but the best is lost.
The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love, --
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave,
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
- Edna St. Vincent Millay
This poem makes me want to cry and swell and love. Everything about this poem is a triumph. Of course, I am a very poor judge, as I am only vaguely aware of what are considered the Greats in poetry, so perhaps, eventually, I will find something that tops this poem. For now, not so.
Still, this poem has a very, very depressing premise. It is about those who are dead and dying, the people we most hate to see leave us. It is not a happy poem, by any means.
Exhibit B: T.S. Eliot, who, despite being somewhat dry at times, I love with all sorts of parts in my being. Now, T.S. Eliot is not generally an optimistic poet (Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats notwithstanding) and I read a ton of his stuff. But, of course, one of the things I keep around is this number -- an excerpt from Four Quartets, Little Gidding. Just as a hint, this is just the beginning of a poem that is simultaneously about war, Eliot's fate as a poet, and his spiritual journey told as a modernized version of Dante's Inferno. I left the more complicated stuff out for sake of length, but if you're curious you can get it here.
Ash on an old man's sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
Dust inbreathed was a house-
The walls, the wainscot and the mouse,
The death of hope and despair,
This is the death of air.
There are flood and drouth
Over the eyes and in the mouth,
Dead water and dead sand
Contending for the upper hand.
The parched eviscerate soil
Gapes at the vanity of toil,
Laughs without mirth.
This is the death of earth.
Water and fire succeed
The town, the pasture and the weed.
Water and fire deride
The sacrifice that we denied.
Water and fire shall rot
The marred foundations we forgot,
Of sanctuary and choir.
This is the death of water and fire.
-From the beginnning of Little Gidding, Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot
Another one of my favorite poems that I keep in a folder of bits and bats (favorite quotes, poems, randomosity, etc.):
Echo
Come to me in the silence of the night;
Come in the speaking silence of a dream;
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright
As sunlight on a stream;
Come back in tears,
O memory, hope, love of finished years.
O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet,
Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,
Where souls brimful of love abide and meet,
Where thirsting longing eyes
Watch the slow door
That opening, letting in, lets out no more.
Yet come to me in dreams that I may live
My very life again though cold in death:
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
Speak low, lean low,
As long ago, my love, how long ago.
- Christina Rossetti
Are we noticing a pattern?
Here's a poem that I have loved since I was very small. Keep in mind that I hate ghost stories, and see if this is not highly out of character for me.
In Flander's Fields
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
- John McCrae
And another, in the same vein, that seems absurdly simple, but, as a poet myself, I can say definitely isn't, and I love it:
The Soldiers at Lauro
Young are our dead
Like babies they lie
The wombs they blest once
Not healed dry
And yet - too soon
Into each space
A cold earth falls
On colder face.
Quite still they lie
These fresh-cut reeds
Clutched in earth
Like winter seeds
But they will not bloom
When called by spring
To burst with leaf
And blossoming
They sleep on
In silent dust
As crosses rot
And helmets rust.
- Spike Milligan
Now here's the poem that sparked this epiphany:
That the science of cartography is limited
--and not simply by the fact that this shading of
forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,
the gloom of cypresses
is what I wish to prove.
When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.
Look down you said: this was once a famine road.
I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in
1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads to build.
Where they died, there the road ended
and ends still and when I take down
the map of this island, it is never so
I can say here is
the masterful, the apt rendering of
the spherical as flat, nor
an ingenious design which persuades a curve
into a plane,
but to tell myself again that
the line which says woodland and cries hunger
and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
and finds no horizon
will not be there.
- Eavan Boland
There is only one conclusion to be reached: I am a closet angst whore.
Seriously. What the heck?
That being, all of my favorite poetry -- the kind written by professionals and left to ferment in critical acclaim -- is about death/dead people/people who have lost loved ones.
The evidence doesn't lie.
Exhibit A: What I consider to be possibly the best poem ever written:
Dirge Without Music
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,--but the best is lost.
The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love, --
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave,
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
- Edna St. Vincent Millay
This poem makes me want to cry and swell and love. Everything about this poem is a triumph. Of course, I am a very poor judge, as I am only vaguely aware of what are considered the Greats in poetry, so perhaps, eventually, I will find something that tops this poem. For now, not so.
Still, this poem has a very, very depressing premise. It is about those who are dead and dying, the people we most hate to see leave us. It is not a happy poem, by any means.
Exhibit B: T.S. Eliot, who, despite being somewhat dry at times, I love with all sorts of parts in my being. Now, T.S. Eliot is not generally an optimistic poet (Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats notwithstanding) and I read a ton of his stuff. But, of course, one of the things I keep around is this number -- an excerpt from Four Quartets, Little Gidding. Just as a hint, this is just the beginning of a poem that is simultaneously about war, Eliot's fate as a poet, and his spiritual journey told as a modernized version of Dante's Inferno. I left the more complicated stuff out for sake of length, but if you're curious you can get it here.
Ash on an old man's sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
Dust inbreathed was a house-
The walls, the wainscot and the mouse,
The death of hope and despair,
This is the death of air.
There are flood and drouth
Over the eyes and in the mouth,
Dead water and dead sand
Contending for the upper hand.
The parched eviscerate soil
Gapes at the vanity of toil,
Laughs without mirth.
This is the death of earth.
Water and fire succeed
The town, the pasture and the weed.
Water and fire deride
The sacrifice that we denied.
Water and fire shall rot
The marred foundations we forgot,
Of sanctuary and choir.
This is the death of water and fire.
-From the beginnning of Little Gidding, Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot
Another one of my favorite poems that I keep in a folder of bits and bats (favorite quotes, poems, randomosity, etc.):
Echo
Come to me in the silence of the night;
Come in the speaking silence of a dream;
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright
As sunlight on a stream;
Come back in tears,
O memory, hope, love of finished years.
O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet,
Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,
Where souls brimful of love abide and meet,
Where thirsting longing eyes
Watch the slow door
That opening, letting in, lets out no more.
Yet come to me in dreams that I may live
My very life again though cold in death:
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
Speak low, lean low,
As long ago, my love, how long ago.
- Christina Rossetti
Are we noticing a pattern?
Here's a poem that I have loved since I was very small. Keep in mind that I hate ghost stories, and see if this is not highly out of character for me.
In Flander's Fields
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
- John McCrae
And another, in the same vein, that seems absurdly simple, but, as a poet myself, I can say definitely isn't, and I love it:
The Soldiers at Lauro
Young are our dead
Like babies they lie
The wombs they blest once
Not healed dry
And yet - too soon
Into each space
A cold earth falls
On colder face.
Quite still they lie
These fresh-cut reeds
Clutched in earth
Like winter seeds
But they will not bloom
When called by spring
To burst with leaf
And blossoming
They sleep on
In silent dust
As crosses rot
And helmets rust.
- Spike Milligan
Now here's the poem that sparked this epiphany:
That the science of cartography is limited
--and not simply by the fact that this shading of
forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,
the gloom of cypresses
is what I wish to prove.
When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.
Look down you said: this was once a famine road.
I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in
1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads to build.
Where they died, there the road ended
and ends still and when I take down
the map of this island, it is never so
I can say here is
the masterful, the apt rendering of
the spherical as flat, nor
an ingenious design which persuades a curve
into a plane,
but to tell myself again that
the line which says woodland and cries hunger
and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
and finds no horizon
will not be there.
- Eavan Boland
There is only one conclusion to be reached: I am a closet angst whore.
Seriously. What the heck?