Poem of the Week - 2011

can i post my poem here? where shall i post? :) please reply..

Your own poetry can be posted in the Personal Poetry section:

http://www.online-literature.com/for...splay.php?f=14

it seems that the content of any image in these lines embodies a dominating theme of sadness and melancholy where the organic unity is valid and striking. for example, the poet employs images of "Dark-eyed Fanny" which emphasizes the theme of sadness and grimness, and "tears" that flow from her dark eyes signifies a need for purification and catharsis that the persona aspires to. them the transformation of images as "Down her cheaks, in bitter weepen'" as if the weapon becomes a candy with bitter flavor that intensifies her sense of sadness and grimness. the cause of these feelings seems to be a state of deception and betrayal on the part of the gender other who causes her broken heart.
the poem still needs a lot of interpretation to cover its dominant theme.
Best
Dr Abdullah Kurraz
Gaza- Palestine

Which poem are we covering? I can't tell which are comparisons and which are under discussion.

Been a while since we posted any poems in this thread. Would you like to post one, Stewed?

:)

Hm, okay. I'll have to try to think of something.

In an anthology I read a longer, more baffling poem of his which might have been better for deciphering; I didn't think I could find it on the internet, so here's this:

Hunting Horns
by Guillame Apollinaire

Our past is as noble and as tragic
As the mask of a tyrant
No tale of danger or of magic
Nothing so insignificant
Describes the pathos of our love

And Thomas de Quincy drinking his
Sweet and chaste and poisoned glass
Dreaming went to see his Ann
Let us since all passes pass
I shall look back only too often

Memories are hunting horns
Whose sound dies along the wind

What I don't understand is the middle stanza. Some more definite grammatical hook seems missing; we'd be able to tell why he's evoking de Quincy if we had a "like" or an "as though" to attach it definitely to some other part of the poem. Any recent readers of Confessions of an English Opium Eater around? I can't remember who Ann is.

The over-metaphor is love or passions tumbling through time, on the micro and macro level. He compares the love to deep history, touching on the idea of Agamemnon's mask (the mask claimed as Agamemnon's was dug up maybe 30 some odd years before the poem's composition) and the Trojan war, old epic and tragic archetypes of loss; and these are rejected on the surface, the comparison's don't cut it for the narrator, but they stay with the reader: he gives us a metaphor that's worn, that doesn't describe what he has inside, but that's still powerful enough to give an idea, and to set the elusive feeling in an idea of a deep sweep of time.

(de Quincy, and the tyrant's mask have a faint, possible connection. Helen served some narcotic drink to Telemachus and Menalaus, years after the war brought her home and years after Agamemnon's murder.)

And love is a tyrant. But now there's a metaphor closer to us and our shrivelled 21st century hearts: love as an addiction. But evoked for an emotional tone rather than argued as an equivalent; the narrator says he searches his memory the way de Quincy searched for something in the drug.

This leaves us feeling sort of passive and junkie-like, sprawled wistfully on our poetic ratty couches, and now the idea of the past re-starts, now that we're feeling like annual flowers in October. "Let us since all passes pass." I will let go because I can't let go and I will look back without trying to. We as readers are still in the feeling of stasis, and the ideas of history from the tyrant's mask and from de Quincy, join with the listless feeling, and we get a sense of of love and lovers being leaves blown down the historical lanes, ephemera.

History as a kind of tattering wind comes in at the end, with the memories dying along it. But this is the great part. The lover in the poem is almost a moored point of view; his memory, though, is alive and seeking, with almost an emotion and life of its own. Still without the substance to drown out the wind, but with more pathos, in this agency, than could have happened with our everyday idea of memory as a neutral, inert thing. Hunting horns sound archaic, in a misty romantic sort of way, and love as the chase is an old-school love metaphor; but horns dying in the wind aren't heard, they don't summon anything.

I love how gently stated the insufficiency of the old metaphors is, how it doesn't grotesquely become more important than the loneliness.

I'm not sure I'm doing this right, since I'm new, but I'm responding to the first poem posted on this thread. I was just struck by how powerful it is to suddenly have two short lines:

Hangen white,
Or wringen tight.

Yes it is a man's voice. Otherwise why should the grieving woman be seen as so weak that only a god can punish her offender? The irony and ridicule are unmistakbly there although there is also a hint of sympathy for the sufferer.

Ann, in Confessions of an Opium Eater, was the woman who had looked after him, and was a companion when he had fallen on hard times. He left London for a while to sort out his finances, and arranged to meet her at the usual meeting place a a few weeks, but she never turned up. He never saw her again, despite looking in all their usual haunts.

I like the poem.

Twice by Christina Rossetti

I took my heart in my hand
(O my love, O my love),
I said: Let me fall or stand,
Let me live or die,
But this once hear me speak-
(O my love, O my love)-
Yet a woman's words are weak;
You should speak, not I.

You took my heart in your hand
With a friendly smile,
With a critical eye you scanned,
Then set it down,
And said: It is still unripe,
Better wait a while;
Wait while the skylarks pipe,
Till the corn grows brown

As you set it down it broke-
Broke, but I did not wince;
I smiled at the speech you spoke,
At your judgment that I heard:
But I have not often smiled
Since then, nor questioned since,
Nor cared for corn-flowers wild,
Nor sung with the singing bird.

I take my heart in my hand,
O my God, O my God,
My broken heart in my hand:
Thou hast seen, judge Thou
My hope was written on sand,
O my God, O my God:
Now let Thy judgment stand-
Yea, judge me now

This contemned of a man,
This marred one heedless day,
This heart take Thou to scan
Both within and without:
Refine with fire its gold,
Purge Thou its dross away-
Yea, hold it in Thy hold,
Whence none can pluck it out.

I take my heart in my hand-
I shall not die, but live-
Before Thy face I stand;
I, for Thou callest such:
All that I have I bring,
All that I am I give,
Smile Thou and I shall sing,
But shall not question much.

This poem by Christina Rossetti has always been of special importance to me, and I just thought I'd put it out there to see what everyone else thinks.

The first three stanzas in this poem are directed to the persona's love and his rejection of her, while the last three talk about the her relationship with God; how he has taken her broken heart and made something good from it.

The thing I really love about Christina Rossetti is that she puts her whole soul into her poems, and the langauge she uses to express herself really speaks to me as a person.

I like it myself just the words itself used




http://www.herfree.com/avatar2.jpg

Ya, I can see it being an effective tool for that.http://www.hergoods.info/avatar2.jpg

The Cummings poem is brilliant. I think the line you quoted undulates quite musically.http://www.hergoods.info/avatar2.jpg