After the poem of the week this feels like balm for my soul.
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After the poem of the week this feels like balm for my soul.
I feel like it would be a really happy poem if it weren't for the repetition of, "lying in the wet clay." You can't finnish the poem without remembering that she is dead and isn't doing all the things he talks of any more. It's especially the fact he uses 'wet clay' and not something nicer. Despite the continual assurance (or maybe because of it) that he is not thinking of her dead it seems that he constantly is.
Thank you for this one Unnamable. It's beautiful, and I don't think I've come across this poet before.
But isn't that what's most hopeful and loving about this poem. My favorite line is this: "Among your earthiest words the angels stray." Her earthiness is what was so wonderful about her in life. It was her being a part of the earth that made her angelic, and now that she's literally a part of the earth, she is more angelic still. This poem draws its heaven from the ground.Quote:
I feel like it would be a really happy poem if it weren't for the repetition of, "lying in the wet clay."
For once Virgil, I entirely agree with you.Quote:
Originally Posted by “Virgil”
You have no idea how happy it makes me feel to read that. “Beautiful” is the only word that can do it justice. It almost makes me believe I have a soul. ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by “Isagel”
Dark Lady, I think it’s a beautiful poem but I don’t think it’s meant to be a ‘happy poem’ – she is dead, after all. I wouldn’t like the poem at all if he simply tried to prettify the situation. It would reduce genuine emotion to mere sentiment.
Patrick Kavanagh is a sadly under-appreciated Irish poet. Your point about the importance of the land is right. Here’s another of his:Quote:
Originally Posted by Petrarch's Love
Shancoduff
My black hills have never seen the sun rising,
Eternally they look north towards Armagh.
Lot's wife would not be salt if she had been
Incurious as my black hills that are happy
When dawn whitens Glassdrummond chapel.
My hills hoard the bright shillings of March
While the sun searches in every pocket.
They are my Alps and I have climbed the Matterhorn
With a sheaf of hay for three perishing calves
In the field under the Big Forth of Rocksavage.
The sleety winds fondle the rushy beards of Shancoduff
While the cattle-drovers sheltering in the Featherna Bush
Look up and say: ‘Who owns them hungry hills
That the water-hen and snipe must have forsaken?
A poet? Then by heavens he must be poor.'
I hear and is my heart not badly shaken?
Great last line.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
I don't think he is saying it is a waste to be kind; he is saying don't respect your elders, jsut because they are your elders! It's a crazy social construct after all - isn't it? Respect people who earn your respect - what ever their age. It's illogical and false to do other wise. I see what you are saying, and you have to make allowances for the fact that they may be 'waning'! But don't elevate them to 'respected' purely because they are old(er)!
But for me this resonates the most:
we are always asked
to understand the other person's
viewpoint
no matter how
out-dated
foolish or
obnoxious.
- the age is not important to me; as it shouldn't be when considering 'respect'!
Indeed. I'll have to put Kavanagh's work on my ever increasing list of things to read this summer.Quote:
Great last line.
Don't get me wrong I wouldn't like the poem to gloss over the death either that was just my initial thought on it. It just has that great balance of happy memories being slightly shadowed by the present reality.Quote:
Originally Posted by The Unnamable
That’s a good description of life at its least awful. :DQuote:
Originally Posted by Dark Lady
CUBA
My eldest sister arrived home that morning
In her white muslin evening dress.
'Who the hell do you think you are,
Running out to dances in next to nothing?
As though we hadn't enough bother
With the world at war, if not at an end.'
My father was pounding the breakfast-table.
'Those Yankees were touch and go as it was -
If you'd heard Patton at Armagh -
But this Kennedy's nearly an Irishman
So he's not much better than ourselves.
And him with only to say the word.
If you've got anything on your mind
Maybe you should make your peace with God.'
I could hear May from beyond the curtain.
'Bless me. Father, for I have sinned.
I told a lie once, I was disobedient once.
And, Father, a boy touched me once.'
'Tell me, child. Was this touch immodest?
Did he touch your breast, for example?'
'He brushed against me, Father. Very gently.'
Hey now, I thought we had a routine going about double posting poems.... Actually I like this one, although the second stanza is a bit of a jumble to me. Perhaps I should study my history a bit better, especially being an American. Although maybe British Lit. is where it's at. Ha, also I think The Unnamable forgot the writer of the poem. Infallible my ***!!
I’m pretty sure that I posted it but it seems to have been bowdlerised. As I received neither a notification nor any explanation for why this was done, I don’t know. Anyway, Paul Muldoon wrote the poem. chmpman, may I ask what you mean by “Perhaps I should study my history a bit better, especially being an American”?
Not to be confused with PJ Kavanagh, a younger Anglo-Irish poet, also with a pastoral bent.Quote:
Originally Posted by The Unnamable
Apparently, the two men were once, by chance, left alone together in a pub. PJ was still quite young and in awe of the more famous Patrick and went quiet, hoping for some acknowledgement from the elder sage. All he got was: 'Why don't you change yer ****in' name?'
This fits an experience I had the other night extraordinarily well. I was out with my mother and her boyfriend and an old friend of hers, a psychotherapist. I started ribbing my mother, good naturedly I though, about how neither I nor her boyfriend were following the table manners she'd taught me as a kid - elbows on the table, asking for things within reach to be passed to you etc. The psychotherapist lady started badly losing her cool, first asking me to understand that my mother and her were 'very old' and then saying that these rules were simply ways of ensuring 'consideration' for other people. I started to point out that these rules were often as much about unkindness as kindness in various ways and she simply snapped at me, looking genuinely distressed, that it was an 'argument' she didn't want to have.Quote:
Originally Posted by Bandini
I think the 'be kind' title is irony. It underlines the idea that kindness to someone who's made obnoxiousness or thoughtlessness a credo may be an unkindness to oneself.Quote:
Originally Posted by Bandini
No poem yet today?
Elegy for Jane
(My student, thrown by a horse)
I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,
A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing,
And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.
Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw,
Stirring the clearest water.
My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.
If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.
Theodore Roethke