"Socko" Openers

[AuntShecky]

Quick!
Even though their creation spans several centuries, see if you can see what the following
lines have in common:

For God’s Sake hold your tongue and let me love

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds


Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope

A fly buzz’d by when I died

Break, break, break
On these cold, gray stones, O Sea!

Those are opening lines to what editors of anthologies often term “beloved” poems. And one of the reasons they are so beloved is that their opening lines are stunning.
I say “stunning” because they stop us in our tracks – - the reader can’t help himself; he has to keep reading.

Some poems open with a paradox or a contradiction or rhetorical question that defies an answer. The opening statement makes us scratch our heads – “Whoa!” Whatever does this mean ? From John Donne, the bizarre juxtaposition of a squared-off sphere :

At the round earth’s imagined corners

From the same poet, question about the speaker’s piety in an apparent challenge to the Almighty:

Batter my heart, three-person’d God

Time-traveling to the 20th c. “Beat” poets , beam on to this curve ball or a pitcher’s “change up” from Gregory Corso:

I dreamed of Ted Williams
leaning at night a
against the Eiffel Tower,
weeping

On the other hand, plain, ordinary, garden-variety items arranged in a unique way can introduce
an extraordinary poem –
like these opening lines from that insurance man, Wallace Stevens:

One’s grand flights, one’s Sunday baths
Occur as they occur

Or from the San Francisco bookshop operator, Lawrence Ferlinghetti:

The pennycandystore beyond the El
is where I first
fell in love
with unreality

Huh? “Unreality”? That old change-up again. . .
I guess you get the idea now. Opening “big,” opening small – it doesn’t matter as long as
the first line or so of your poem “grabs” the reader.

Thus, an “open” invitation for my fellow Networkers to:
post other opening lines from well-known beloved poems
AND
to post their own original works containing “socko” openers.

And by the way, here are the mystery poets whose lines “opened” this thread:
Donne, Shakespeare, Eliot, Dickinson, Tennyson.

[PrinceMyshkin]

Yes, I too am a sucker for openings that grab you by the collar and won't let go. You will excuse me for digressing I hope, if I remark about other genres and offer these openings that I have loved:

1) "Every time I get off the subway at the Far Rockway station and smell the leak out of the men's room and the brine from the pickle barrels, an instant rage comes over me!"

Or this from a novel in progress by a then student of mine:

2) "My mother was born in a small village."

3) One that I am meaning to write:

Call me, Ishmael!

You never write! You haven't dropped by to visit me since I can't remember when!

Meanwhile, that farshtunkineh whale keeps going back and forth, overturning boats with its tail, killing the tourist trade!


1: Alfred Kazin, A Walker in the City
2: Madeleine Thien, unpublished novel
3: Work in progress, tentatively titled "Moby's Dick," the experience of a naval private eye....

[TheFifthElement]

A few from fellow Lit-netters :

Interlude (firefangled)

In time she returned to constellations

Ruah (Demien)

Arianna pushes a dandelion on me-

First in Line (Prince Myshkin)

Take your vibrator and your husband,

Eclipse (ampoule)

I like a little day time
Mixed into my night time

The Old Man (Lote-Tree)

I see my destiny, my ending
In the folds of the skin
In the old man's face,

[AuntShecky]

The opening lines posted by the previous LitNetWorkers
were great.
I searched in vain among the 20+ year old cache of verses written by yours truly, and I couldn't really find one that had a socko opening.
But I came across the following (written circa 1999 when we were supposed to "Party like it was. . ." that year, though the Millennium didn't really begin til 2001.)
Anyway, in the following ditty, I knew that the phrase "fairytale of science" originated w. Lord Tennyson and was paying him homage, post-Modern style. Now reading it almost a decade later, I see some echoes, "sampling," "quoting" or fragments -- somewhat like that of "The Waste Land", though I would never be so presumptuous to mention myself in the same sentence as Eliot --that one find's in Tennyson's "Locksley Hall." Thus concludes another Auntie intro that runs on too long.
Here's the poem:


Evidence


Curse these city lights!
Since they've dimmed the sky,
the hopeful seeker must rely
on the documented sights
from the fairytale of science
for the truths of white dwarfs, red giants,
and the diaphanous, soft-purple clouds
of galaxies. There is more. Deep down
beneath skin and stone, tiny sphere upon sphere
and whizzing bits harmonize music of their own,
universes too minute for an instrument to hear
which we are told are there
only through the vapor trails left behind:

all of which is evidence of Mind --
so uncluttered that clusters of detail become form,
become care, become Love, to Whom all swarm
unknowingly, inevitably, all to thrive, all to hang.
What does origin matter, then -- Genesis or Big Bang?
Trust the Teller, trust the tale, trust the evidence.

Some black hole, crushing and dense,
has sucked up wisdom and mystical sense;
price tags and product codes have blinded Beauty's eye,
and if our lives depended upon eloquence,
the populace would shrivel up and die.
Even neo-Luddites find comfort in CDs and jet planes
while the transcendental trolley is stuck on a track in our brains,
or we hoist glasses to progress, bowing to our own share,
before attempting to ride home on an old plodding mare;

Or looking into the abysmal betrayal in the heart,
we think everything's doomed -- doomed! -- from the start.
The sun will burn out; the world will break apart,
as the millennial clock ticks out its final twelves.

We never stop to ask
Who will save us from ourselves,
disregarding the evidence.


Aunt Shecky
All rights reserved

[Il Penseroso]

I often write a poem by spontaneously thinking up a line, writing it, then trying to complete the thought with the rest of the poem. Often I feel my poetic abilities are limited to where I can't quite finish a poem with the resolution/gusto I'd like. A few openers from my poems that I'm fond of:


Bumblebees

Thick black floating orbs,
stretching in swift rotation
the garden routine...


Night Dancer

Her ankles move
like tufts of string...


Lines

All day doodlers stamp their sporadic lines,
scratching indifferent constellations in black
on white...


And one I still hope to finish...

Days drag like a kitten on
cardboard, warm fluff on the slick
surface of solitude...

[Il Penseroso]

Stevens, "Man With the Blue Guitar"

The man bent over his guitar,
a shearsman of sorts...


Ashbery, "Clepsydra"

Hasn't the sky? Returned from moving the other
Authority recently dropped, wrested as much of
That severe sunshine as you need now on the way
You go.


Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium"

That is no country for old men...

[AuntShecky]

The choices by Il Penseroso (great poem by Milton, by the bye) are very apt!
Also, do you think "The Man with the Blue Guitar" and the painting might be about Django, as we do know that its starting point was the monumental Picasso.

[Il Penseroso]

Django? I had not heard that before. Care to elaborate?

[TheFifthElement]

From 'Illicit' by D H Lawrence:

"In front of the sombre mountains, a faint, lost ribbon
of rainbow,"

'The Garden' by Ezra Pound

"Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall"

'Summer Song' by William Carlos Williams

"Wanderer moon
smiling a
faintly ironical smile"

[AuntShecky]

Django Reinhardt ( 1910-1953) Legendary figure in jazz.
Born in Belgium to a Gypsy entertainer, Django lost the use of two fingers in his right hand after a caravan fire in 1928. Because of his physical limitations, Django created a new technique for the guitar. He rose to fame by playing with violinists such as Stephane Grapelli and Joe Venuti, along with fellow guitarist, Eddie Lang. Django's influence on musicians persists to this day; in that aspect he is in the same company as Bix Biederbecke and Louis Armstrong.
I am working on a ditty about Django and if I finish it and it's any good as all I will post it on the thread titled "Your poems inspired by music."

[blp]

'Home is so sad...' - Philip Larkin

There's a story about Harold Pinter being asked, when he was relatively young and unknown in the sixties, to write a play for ITV in England. The commissioner was an aggressive American who apprised Pinter forcefully of his belief in the importance of a really punchy opening, something to really grab the audience by the throat. Pinter wrote an opening in which a young man asks his mother whether she's ironed his shirt, and informed his employer, 'You know that punchy opening you wanted? I've written it.'

[blp]

I tend to like openings that take it easy. Still, this is pretty socko I guess:

'Call the roller of big cigars...' - Wallace Stevens, The Emperor of Ice Cream