I'm pretty sure the original was written in Spanish.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0315733/
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I'm pretty sure the original was written in Spanish.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0315733/
To Endymion: definitely latin, translates roughly ...why does man exist if only to error, no error has any right to exist ...could be off on that quasi
My favourite of the moment has to be Donne's "Witchcraft by a Picture":
I fix mine eye on thine, and there
Pity the picture burning in thine eye;
My picture drowned in a transparent tear
When I look lower I espy;
Hadst thou the wicked skill
By pictures made and marred, to kill,
How many ways mightst thou perform thy will?
But now I have drunk thy sweet salt tears,
And though thou pour more i'll depart;
My picture vanished, vanish fears,
That I can be endamaged by that art;
Though thou retain of me
One picture more, yet that will be,
Being in thine own heart, from all malice free.
My favorite poem was,is and will always be Keats' ODE ON A GRECIAN URN. It's concluding lines "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'--that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know" is the essence of much of what I believe in...regardless of life's complexities and intellectual contentions.
Quote:
Originally Posted by quasimodo1
Endymion is right, Montejo writes in Spanish. He's from Venezuela, I believe. I got to know about him from the film. In "21 Grams" the main protagonist, played by Sean Penn, quotes the poem. The film is pretty good, I really enjoyed it. Although maybe the plot is a bit complicated, because not chronological.
My favourite from childhood, and if I am not mistaken, my first encounter with poetry.
Rebecca
Hilaire Belloc
Who Slammed Doors For Fun And Perished Miserably
A trick that everyone abhors
In little girls is slamming doors.
A wealthy banker’s little daughter
Who lived in Palace Green, Bayswater
(By name Rebecca Offendort),
Was given to this furious sport.
She would deliberately go
And slam the door like billy-o!
To make her uncle Jacob start.
She was not really bad at heart,
But only rather rude and wild;
She was an aggravating child…
It happened that a marble bust
Of Abraham was standing just
Above the door this little lamb
Had carefully prepared to slam,
And down it came! It knocked her flat!
It laid her out! She looked like that.
Her funeral sermon (which was long
And followed by a sacred song)
Mentioned her virtues, it is true,
But dwelt upon her vices too,
And showed the deadful end of one
Who goes and slams the door for fun.
The children who were brought to hear
The awful tale from far and near
Were much impressed, and inly swore
They never more would slam the door,
— As often they had done before.
Online text © 1998-2007 Poetry X. All rights reserved.
From Cautionary Tales for Children | 1920
I, too, love Tintern Abbey. Whenever I read the poem aloud, I am amazed at its musicality--I particularly love the line "the sounding cataract haunted me like a passion." I'm less fond of "Immortality Ode," though it rhymes...
Another poem whose musicality haunts me is Mark Strand's The Disquieting Muses, which starts with "Boredom sets in first, and then despair/ One tries to brush it off. It only grows." It's a villanelle, and the recurrence of certain phrases in the poem catches quite well what Wallace Stevens calls "the malady of the quotidian."
Lastly, I'm in love with Yeats's "The Wild Swans at Coole": the opening lines are "The trees are in their autumn beauty,/ and the woodland paths are dry./ Under the October twilight, the water/ Mirrors the still sky." I can't understand why he could write such a beautiful poem which exploits the slow movement of long vowels in order to create a feeling of nostalgia.
Maybe this has been posted already. I haven't read through all the pages, but am awed by the wonderful choices others have made:
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
W. B. Yeats
I Sit and Look Out by: Walt Whitman
I SIT and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame;
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done;
I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate;
I see the wife misused by her husband—I see the treacherous seducer of young women;
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be hid—I see these sights on the earth;
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny—I see martyrs and prisoners;
I observe a famine at sea—I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill’d, to preserve the lives of the rest;
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
All these—All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent.
To IrishBlues: There was my day, moving along just fine, and here comes THIS post of an amazing poem by Whitman and everything changes. I forgot how great he is, although he did live in Camden, ...thank you IB for a great posting. quasimodo1
Two fauvorites for my.
One by Emily Dickinson ¨I Hide Myself Withing my flower¨¨for its melancholic sweetness.
One, prose poem by the great Charles Baudelaire ¨The eyes of the poor¨...an ode to missunderstanding and the dessillussion of loving someone who dont share the same values of life.
Anytime quasimodo1. :)
TEARS,IDLE TEARS
Tears,idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.
Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.
Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.
All of creation is offended by this distress.
It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes,
rising. The lovers especially cannot bear it,
it fills them with unspeakable sadness, so that
they close their eyes again and hold each other, each
feeling the mortal singularity of the body
they have enchanted out of death for an hour or so,
and one day, running at sunset, the woman says to the man,
I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realized
that you could not, as much as I love you,
dear heart, cure my loneliness,
wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure him
that she did not mean to hurt him with this truth.
And the man is not hurt exactly,
he understands that life has limits, that people
die young, fail at love,
fail of their ambitions.
Robert Hass, excerpt from "Privilege of Being," from Human Wishes
Death, be not proud
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die.
By John Donne
The last two lines are the best in my opinion :)