www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/forians.htm
at the site click on "news" (upper left), scroll down page 1, click on to page 2, scroll and search for orpheus/ballada by vladislav khodasevich as translated to english from the russian by frazier.
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www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/forians.htm
at the site click on "news" (upper left), scroll down page 1, click on to page 2, scroll and search for orpheus/ballada by vladislav khodasevich as translated to english from the russian by frazier.
saladin:
wunderbar und fantastiche. danke schoen.
Dover Beach
by Mathew Arnold
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair.
Upon the straights;-on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where sea meets the moon-blanched sand,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then begin again,
With tremendous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the AEgaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its meloncholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wild, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain,
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
-1848
Elysium
Past the despairing wail--
And the bright banquets of the Elysian vale
Melt every care away!
Delight, that breathes and moves forever,
Glides through sweet fields like some sweet river!
Elysian life survey!
There, fresh with youth, o'er jocund meads,
His merry west-winds blithely leads
The ever-blooming May!
Through gold-woven dreams goes the dance of the hours,
In space without bounds swell the soul and its powers,
And truth, with no veil, gives her face to the day.
And joy to-day and joy to-morrow,
But wafts the airy soul aloft;
The very name is lost to sorrow,
And pain is rapture tuned more exquisitely soft.
Here the pilgrim reposes the world-weary limb,
And forgets in the shadow, cool-breathing and dim,
The load he shall bear never more;
Here the mower, his sickle at rest, by the streams,
Lulled with harp-strings, reviews, in the calm of his dreams,
The fields, when the harvest is o'er.
Here, he, whose ears drank in the battle roar,
Whose banners streamed upon the startled wind
A thunder-storm,--before whose thunder tread
The mountains trembled,--in soft sleep reclined,
By the sweet brook that o'er its pebbly bed
In silver plays, and murmurs to the shore,
Hears the stern clangor of wild spears no more!
Here the true spouse the lost-beloved regains,
And on the enamelled couch of summer-plains
Mingles sweet kisses with the zephyr's breath.
Here, crowned at last, love never knows decay,
Living through ages its one bridal day,
Safe from the stroke of death!
- Friedrich von Schiller
Quote:
Originally Posted by adi_lcool_007
Love it!
It answers Iago's; "To suckle fools and chronicle small beer." jibe, better than Desdemona's retort.
I enjoy the Promethean bard Percy Bysshe Shelley. One of my favorite verses by him is lines 147 to 159 in the poetical achievement Epipsychidion:
Thy wisdom speaks in me, and bids me dare
Beacon the rocks on which high hearts are wrecked.
I never was attached to that great sect,
Whose doctrine is, that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion, though it is in the code
Of modern morals, and the beaten road
Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread,
Who travel to their home among the dead
By the broad highway of the world, and so
With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,
The dreariest and the longest journey go.
I like the poem "Bells" by Poe. The man was a genius, whether or not you go for morbid stories about crazy people. I don't have it with me at the moment, but he used repetition, euphony, and cacaphony so that you could literally hear the beat of wedding bells and alarm bells. The first are joyful, the second are compared to a demon king dancing "in a happy runic rhyme."
This fragment is read and mused upon by Freddie, the main character of E. M. Forster's "The Longest Journey" (guess where he got the title!), who reaches some interesting conclusions...Quote:
Originally Posted by Shadow Poet
I like "Epipsychidion" too... there are some quite moving passages, such as the one in which he refers to the Moon, the Planet and the Comet...
I love 'The Mask' by W.B. Yeats.
There's too many, my favourite poets are Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire though.
I have always enjoyed The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe.
Cat
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
....
- Dylan Thomas
I think that one of the best poets of all time was Idris Davies, a Valley poet from Rhymney, in South Wales. Some of his work is actually in Welsh, the best of the bunch being "Cwm Rhymni", which tells if a youn Silurian poet returning to the coal-minig town in which he grew up. His best work ever, in my humble opinion, was the series Gwalia Deserta, the history of the hardships in the South Wales coalfiele from 1926 to about 1935. Superb
A Poem that touches my heart and the one i can think of right now is "Is My Team Ploughing" by A. E. Houseman
It is simple but it touches upon the everlasting question of death and mortality...
'Is my team ploughing,
That I was used to drive
And hear the harness jingle
When I was man alive?'
Ay, the horses trample,
The harness jingles now;
No change though you lie under
The land you used to plough.
'Is football playing
Along the river shore,
With lads to chase the leather,
Now I stand up no more?'
Ay, the ball is flying,
The lads play heart and soul;
The goal stands up, the keeper
Stands up to keep the goal.
'Is my girl happy,
That I thought hard to leave,
And has she tired of weeping
As she lies down at eve?'
Ay, she lies down lightly,
She lies not down to weep:
Your girl is well contented.
Be still, my lad, and sleep.
'Is my friend hearty,
Now I am thin and pine,
And has he found to sleep in
A better bed than mine?'
Yes, lad, I lie easy,
I lie as lads would choose;
I cheer a dead man's sweetheart,
Never ask me whose.
I like this poem very much
A special world for you and me
A special bond one cannot see
It wraps us up in its cocoon
And holds us fiercely in its womb.
Its fingers spread like fine spun gold
Gently nestling us to the fold
Like silken thread it holds us fast
Bonds like this are meant to last.
And though at times a thread may break
A new one forms in its wake
To bind us closer and keep us strong
In a special world, where we belog
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