I love "Ozymandias." Is it a failure to keep a strong legacy, or that all things must come to an end?
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I love "Ozymandias." Is it a failure to keep a strong legacy, or that all things must come to an end?
I think both of those could be considered the same thing to some.
I do not think that is what the poem is about at all. I thought the poem was about the artist, and how it is the artist's vision that stands time, while the empire and feats of Ozymandias have crumbled and are no more.Quote:
Originally Posted by qimissung
Good point. Could the poem, perhaps, encompass both ideas? I think it could, and probably does. That idea makes me think of Shakespeare's Sonnet XVIII, in which he assures the beloved that she will live eternally..."so long lives this and this gives life to thee."
In accordance with my newest signature, one of my favourites...
L'Irréparable
Pouvons-nous étouffer le vieux, le long Remords,
Qui vit, s'agite et se tortille
Et se nourrit de nous comme le ver des morts,
Comme du chêne la chenille?
Pouvons-nous étouffer l'implacable Remords?
Dans quel philtre, dans quel vin, dans quelle tisane,
Noierons-nous ce vieil ennemi,
Destructeur et gourmand comme la courtisane,
Patient comme la fourmi?
Dans quel philtre? — dans quel vin? — dans quelle tisane?
Dis-le, belle sorcière, oh! dis, si tu le sais,
À cet esprit comblé d'angoisse
Et pareil au mourant qu'écrasent les blessés,
Que le sabot du cheval froisse,
Dis-le, belle sorcière, oh! dis, si tu le sais,
À cet agonisant que le loup déjà flaire
Et que surveille le corbeau,
À ce soldat brisé! s'il faut qu'il désespère
D'avoir sa croix et son tombeau;
Ce pauvre agonisant que déjà le loup flaire!
Peut-on illuminer un ciel bourbeux et noir?
Peut-on déchirer des ténèbres
Plus denses que la poix, sans matin et sans soir,
Sans astres, sans éclairs funèbres?
Peut-on illuminer un ciel bourbeux et noir?
L'Espérance qui brille aux carreaux de l'Auberge
Est soufflée, est morte à jamais!
Sans lune et sans rayons, trouver où l'on héberge
Les martyrs d'un chemin mauvais!
Le Diable a tout éteint aux carreaux de l'Auberge!
Adorable sorcière, aimes-tu les damnés?
Dis, connais-tu l'irrémissible?
Connais-tu le Remords, aux traits empoisonnés,
À qui notre coeur sert de cible?
Adorable sorcière, aimes-tu les damnés?
L'Irréparable ronge avec sa dent maudite
Notre âme, piteux monument,
Et souvent il attaque ainsi que le termite,
Par la base le bâtiment.
L'Irréparable ronge avec sa dent maudite!
— J'ai vu parfois, au fond d'un théâtre banal
Qu'enflammait l'orchestre sonore,
Une fée allumer dans un ciel infernal
Une miraculeuse aurore;
J'ai vu parfois au fond d'un théâtre banal
Un être, qui n'était que lumière, or et gaze,
Terrasser l'énorme Satan;
Mais mon coeur, que jamais ne visite l'extase,
Est un théâtre où l'on attend
Toujours. toujours en vain, l'Etre aux ailes de gaze!
— Charles Baudelaire
The Irreparable
Can we stifle the old, the lingering Remorse,
That lives, quivers and writhes,
And feeds on us like the worm on the dead,
Like the grub on the oak?
Can we stifle implacable Remorse?
In what philtre, in what potion, what wine,
Shall we drown this old enemy,
Destructive and greedy as a harlot,
Patient as the ant?
In what philtre, in what potion, what wine?
Tell it, fair sorceress, O! tell it, if you know,
To this spirit filled with anguish,
So like a dying man crushed beneath the wounded,
Who is struck by the horses' shoes;
Tell it, fair sorceress, O! tell it, if you know,
To this dying man whom the wolf already scents
And whom the crow watches,
To this broken soldier! if he must despair
Of having his cross and his grave,
This poor, dying man whom the wolf already scents!
Can one illuminate a black and miry sky?
Can one tear asunder darkness
Thicker than pitch, without morning, without evening,
Without stars, without ominous lightning?
Can one illuminate a black and miry sky?
Hope that shines in the windows of the Inn
Is snuffed out, dead forever!
Without the moon, without light, to find where they lodge
The martyrs of an evil road!
The Devil has put out all the lights at the Inn!
Adorable sorceress, do you love the damned?
Say, do you know the irremissible?
Do you know Remorse, with the poisoned darts,
For whom our hearts serve as targets?
Adorable sorceress, do you love the damned?
The Irreparable gnaws with his accurst teeth
Our soul, pitiful monument,
And often he attacks like the termite
The foundations of the building.
The Irreparable gnaws with his accurst teeth!
— Sometimes I have seen at the back of a trite stage
Enlivened by a deep-toned orchestra,
A fairy set ablaze a miraculous dawn
In an infernal sky;
Sometimes I have been at the back of a trite stage
A being who was only light, gold and gauze,
Throw down the enormous Satan;
But my heart, which rapture never visits,
Is a playhouse where one awaits
Always, always in vain, the Being with gauze wings!
(translation by William Aggeler)
CONUNDRUMS
Tell me a word
that you've often heard,
yet it makes you squint
when you see it in print!
Tell me a thing
that you've often seen
yet if put in a book
it makes you turn green!
Tell me a thing
that you often do,
when described in a story
shocks you through and through!
Tell me what's wrong
with words or with you
that you don't mind the thing
yet the name is taboo.
Antonio Machado -- (1875 - 1939) -- "I dreamt
you took me"
up a white lane
through the heart of the green field
toward the blue of the high mountains,
toward the blue peaks,
one still morning.
I felt your hand in mine,
your perfect matching hand,
your girlish voice in my ear
like a new bell,
like the untouched bell
of a spring dawn.
It was your voice and your hand
in the dreams, so real, so true!...
Hope, live on -- who knows
what the earth can swallow up!
MOUNTAIN LIFE
IN summer dusk the valley lies
With far-flung shadow veil;
A cloud-sea laps the precipice
Before the evening gale:
The welter of the cloud-waves grey
Cuts off from keenest sight
The glacier, looking out by day
O'er all the district, far away,
And crowned with golden light.
But o'er the smouldering cloud-wrack's flow,
Where gold and amber kiss,
Stands up the archipelago,
A home of shining peace.
The mountain eagle seems to sail
A ship far seen at even;
And over all a serried pale
Of peaks, like giants ranked in mail,
Fronts westward threatening heaven.
But look, a steading nestles, close
Beneath the ice-fields bound,
Where purple cliffs and glittering snows
The quiet home surround.
Here place and people seem to be
A world apart, alone; --
Cut off from men by spate and scree
It has a heaven more broad, more free,
A sunshine all its own.
Look: mute the saeter-maiden stays,
Half shadow, half aflame;
The deep, still vision of her gaze
Was never word to name.
She names it not herself, nor knows
What goal my be its will;
While cow-bells chime and alp-horn blows
It bears her where the sunset glows,
Or, maybe, further still.
Too brief, thy life on highland wolds
Where close the glaciers jut;
Too soon the snowstorm's cloak enfolds
Stone byre and pine-log hut.
Then wilt thou ply with hearth ablaze
The winter's well-worn tasks; --
But spin thy wool with cheerful face:
One sunset in the mountain pays
For all their winter asks.
VARIATIONS ON A FRAGMENT BY TRUMBULL STICKNEY
I hear a river thro' the valley wander
Whose water runs, the song alone remaining.
A rainbow stands and summer passes under,
Flowing like silence in the light of wonder.
In the near distances it is still raining
Where now the valley fills again with thunder,
Where now the river in her wide meander,
Losing at each loop what she had been gaining,
Moves into what one might as well call yonder.
The way of the dark water is to ponder
The way the light sings as of something waning.
The far-off water fall can sound asunder
Stillness of distances, as if in blunder,
Tumbling over the rim of all explaining.
Water proves nothing, but can only maunder.
Shadows show nothing, but can only launder
The lovely land that sunset had been staining,
Long fields of which the failing light grows fonder.
Here summer stands while all its songs pass under,
A riverbank still time runs by, remaining.
I will remember rainbows as I wander.
John Hollander
"TO THE MOON" BY Giacomo Leopardi (translated by Eamon Grennan) Now that the year has come full circle, I remember climbing this hill, heartbroken, To gaze up at the graceful sight of you, And how you hang then above those woods, As you do tonight, bathing them in brightness. But at that time your face seemed nothing, But a cloudy shimmering through my tears, So wrewtched was the life I led: and lead still... Nothing changes, moon of my delight. Yet... I find pleasure in recollection, in calling back, My season of grief: when one is young. And hope is a long road, memory, A short one, how welcome then, The remembrance of things past-- no matter, How sad, and the heart still grieving.
The vastest things are those we may not learn.
We are not taught to die, nor to be born,
Nor how to burn
With love.
How pitiful is our enforced return
To those small things we are the masters of.
- Mervyn Peake
A SHROPSHIRE LAD: LIV
by AE Housman
With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.
By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.
From Wandering, Notes and Sketches
(translated by James Wright)
COUNTRY CEMETERY
............
Blessed ones, who lie sheltered,
Nestled against the heart of the good earth,
Blessed, who have come home, gentle and nameless,
To rest in the mother's lap.
But listen, from the hives and blossoms
Longing for life sings to me.
Out of the tangled roots of dreams
The long dead being breaks into the light,
The ruins of life, darkly buried,
Transform themselves and demand the present,
And the queenly earth-mother
Shudders in the effort of birth.
The sweet treasure of peace in the hollowed grave
Rocks gently as a dream in the night.
The dream of death is only the dark smoke
Under which the fires of life are burning.
{excerpt}
I Am
by John Clare (1793-1864)
I am! yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest--that I loved the best--
Are strange--nay, rather stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below--above the vaulted sky.
To Kafka's Crow: I'd not seen this one by Clare in a decade...what an amazing grouping of words it is. Although it is not perhaps the more popular general theme of "rose-lipt maidens" and "lightfoot lads", it (Clare's poem), is not depressing, which, sometimes is my only requirement of poetry. Thanks for remembering it.