Favorite poem?

[Passenger]

My favourite Poem is (i think ) called somebody i don't actualy know who wrote it, anyhow it goes..:
Somebody always on my mind,
Like a beautiful thought all silver lined.
When I walk in the streets, or ride in the cars
Or stroll in the light of the silvery stars.

Somebody`s always on my mind.
Like an old sweet song, the lasting kind.
And it`s easy to see why I can`t forget,
for heaven began when we first met.

[stlukesguild]

I would have to go with Dante's "Divine Comedy" as my absolute single favorite poem, although I suspect that what you are after is shorter, lyrical poetry. Nevertheless, among poetic works I would have to place Dante's masterwork (along with Milton's "Paradise Lost", T.S. Eliot's "Wasteland", the Bible's "Song of Songs" Coleridge's "Christabel", Shelley's "Adonais" and Tennyson's "In Memoriam") as my favorite of the great longer works of poetry. Milton's "Paradise Lost" seems clearly to be the greatest of such achievements in English... his sensuous language maintaining a poetic height that rival's even Shakespeare, and is even more moving when one considers that his many gorgeous descriptive passages of sheer delight are the product of a poor, discredited, blind man dictating to his daughters after his wife has died. Dante, however, I must give the advantage to. The poem is a formal masterwork that pushes the abilities of all attempts at translation. The work has such a range as to surpass any other single work of literature: it is by turns audacious, heretical, proud, humble, erotic, angry, spiritual, earthy, visionary, etc... There are passages of endless visionary beauty... as well as of the most extreme horror (Ugolino!) and there are countless memorable scenes and characters.
Beyond the large-scale poem, it is almost impossible, to my mind, to select a single favorite poetic work. There are certainly poetic cycles or collections that I find endlessly fascinating: Blake's "Song's of Innocence and Experience", Baudelaire's "Fleurs du Mal", Verlaine's "Fetes Galantes", Rimbaud's "Illuminations", Whitman's "Leaves of Grass", Boris Pasternak's "My Sister- Life", and Rilke's "New Poems" and "Duino Elegies". Such works, to my mind, achieve a certain grandure experienced as a unified whole (rather like a song cycle or a suite in music) although they may also be enjoyed as individual pieces. To chose a single short poetic work however? Impossible! I can only offer a few choices that popped into my mind at this time. Asked on any other day and my selections undoubtedly would have been entirely different:

Robert Herrick 1591-1674

"To His Mistresses"

Put on your silks; and piece by piece
Give them the scent of Amber-Greece:
And for your breaths too, let them smell
Ambrosia-like, or Nectarell:
While other Gums their sweets perspire,
By your owne jewels set on fire.

"Delight in Disorder"

A sweet disorder in the dresse
Kindles in clothes a wantonesse:
A Lawne about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction:
An erring lace which here and there
Enthralls the Crimson stomacher:
A Cuffe, neglectfull, and thereby
Ribbands to flow confusedly:
A winning wave (desrving Note)
In the tempestuous Petticote:
A carelesse shooes-string, in whose tye
I see a wilde civility:
Doe more bewitch me, than when Art
Is too precise in every part.

"The Shooe Tying"

Anthea bade me tye her shooe;
I did, and kist the Instep too:
And would have kist unto her knee,
Had not her blush rebuked me.
"The Vine"
I dreamed this mortal part of mine
Was Metamorphoz'd to a Vine;
Which crawling one and every way,
Enthralled my dainty Lucia.
Me thought, her long small legs and thighs
I with my Tendrills did surprize:
Her Belly, Buttocks, and her Waiste
By my soft Nerv'lits were embraced:
About her head I writhing hung
And with rich clusters (hid among
the leaves) her Temples I behung:
So that my Lucia seemed to me
Young Bacchus ravisht by his tree.
My curles about her necke did craule,
And armes and hands they did enthraull:
So that she could not freely stir,
(All parts there made one prisoner.)
But when I crept with leaves to hide
those parts, which maides keep unespy'd
Such fleeting pleasure there I took
That with the fancie, I awook;
And found (Ah me!) this flesh of mine
More like a Stock than like a Vine.

I've always loved Herrick's work. He's a master of the miniature... rather like those Elizabethan cameos. (Its only fitting that my collection of his poems is itself a miniature volume.) He's all flowers, perfume and other sweet scents, gems, and beautiful women. His touch is exquisitely light... "precious" in the finest sense of the world. "The Vine" has ever made me smile... if not burst out into laughter.


Paul Verlaine (1844-1896)

"Innocents We"

Their long skirts and high heels battled away:
Depending on the ground's and breezes whim,
At times some stocking shone, low on the limb-
Too soon concealed!- tickling our naivte.

At times, as well, an envious bug would bite
Our lovlies' necks beneath the boughs, and we
Would glimpse a flash- white flesh, ah! ecstasy!-
And glut our mad young eyes on sheer delight.

Evening would fall, the autum day would draw
To its uncertain close: our belles would cling
Dreamingly to us, cooing, whispering
Lies that still set our souls trembling with awe.

I might have chosen almost any work from Verlaine's great collection, Fete's Gallantes (and avoided the most famous, "Claire de Lune") which always remind me a bit of Herrick and such older poets, as well as of paintings by Watteau. Still, Verlaine's work's have a melancholy... a sense that such a world of gallant lovers is now lost, that it also reminds me of Ravel's "La Valse," the great musical expression of a lost world of romance.

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)

THE CAT

Come here kitty- sheathe your claws!
Lie on my loving heart
And let me sink into your eyes
Of agate fused with steel.

When my fingers freely caress
Your head and supple spine,
And my hand thrills to the touch
Of your electric fur,

My mistress comes to mind. Her gaze-
Cold and deep as yours,
My pet- is like a stab of pain,

And from head to heels
A subtle scent- a dangerous perfume,
Rises from her brown flesh.


"A PHANTOM (The Perfume)"

Reader, you know how a church can reek
from one grain of incence you inhale
with careful greed- remember the smell?
Or the stubborn musk of an old sachet?

The spell is cast, the magic works,
and the present is the past- restored!
So a lover from beloved flesh
plucks subtle flowers of memory...

In bed her heavy resilient hair
- a living censer, like a sachet-
released its animal perfume,

and from discarded underclothes
still fervent with her sacred body's
form, there rose a scent of fur.


"Metamorphoses of the Vampire"

The woman, meanwhile, writhing like a snake
across hot coals and hiking up her breasts
over her corset stays, began to speak
as if her mouth had steeped each word in musk:
'My lips are smooth and with them I know how
to smother conscience somewhere in these sheets.
I make the old men laugh like little boys,
and on my triumphant bosom all tears dry.
Look at me naked and I will replace
sun and moon and every star in the sky.
So apt am I, dear scholar, in my lore
that once I fold a man in these fatal arms
or forfeit to his teeth my breasts which are
timid and teasing, tender and tyrannous,
upon these cushions, swooning with delight
the impotent angels would be damned for me!'

When she had sucked the marrow from my bones,
and I leaned toward her listlessly
to return her loving kisses, all I saw
was a kind of slimy wineskin brimming with pus!
I closed my eyes in a spasm of cold fear,
and when I opened them to the light of day,
beside me, instead of that potent mannequin,
who seemed to have drunk so deeply of my blood,
there trembled the wreckage of a skeleton
which grated with the cry of a weathervane
or a rusty signboard hanging from a pole,
battered by the wind on winter nights.



"There are odors succulent as young flesh,
sweet as flutes, and green as any grass,
while others- rich, corrupt and masterful-

possess the power of such infinite things
as incense, amber, benjamin, and musk,
to praise the sense's raptures- and the mind's."

Don't you just love the weaving of the senses... the description of scent in terms musical, visual, moral (corrupt)? Baudelaire's "Fleur du Mal" has long been one of my favorite collections of poems. He often has the death obsession of many Anglo-American poets of the period (Poe, etc...) but has a darker, smoldering eroticism.

(all selections from Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal" in translations by Richard Howard)

[stlukesguild]

William Blake (1757-1827)

"The Tyger"

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears;
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

This most famous of Blake's "Songs of Experience" (deservedly so) is illustrative of the cycle as a whole, utilizing a deceptive simplicity to express rather profound concepts. I have long held this lyric in my memory, like many nursery rhymes and poems learned in my youth. Like a nursery rhyme, it's hynotic and chant-like... seeming oh so simple at first... but soon revealing greater depths of thought. I'm always struck with chills as the poet finally confronts us with the ultimate question, "Did he who made the Lamb, make thee?", before returning once again to the begining, "Tyger Tyger..."

My next two selected "favorites" illustrate a favorite conceit of poets everwhere and for all time: the expression of the idea that the lover will be sorry if she doesn't give in to the poet now... essentially, the use of the poem in an attempt to seduce the disdainful object of the poet's affections. Examples are endless throughout poetry, from the works of the great troubadors and Provencal poets, through Petrarch, Sidney, Spencer, Shakespeare, on through the famous, "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may..." to the present. Two of my favorites, however, are Pierre Ronsard's "When You Are Old" and W.B. Yeat's poem of the same name. I have been told by those who should know (those who can easily read the French original) that Ronsard's is the greater poem, but I must say that I prefer Yeats':

Pierre Ronsard (1524-1585)

"When You Are Old" (Quand vous serez bienne vielle...)

When you are old, at eve, by candlelight,
Sitting by the fire, to unwind you skein and spin,
You'll sing my verses and in wonderment will say:
"Ronsard so honored me when I was young and fair."

Then every servent girl of yours, on hearing this,
Thenceforth, though she be half asleep at humdrum toil,
Will rouse herself to listen when she hears my name,
And lines that sanctify your name with deathless praise.

I'll be beneath the earth, and just a boneless ghost'
In the myrtle's shade, I'll be taking my repose;
And you beside the hearth will be a huddled crone

Regretting my lost love and your own proud disdain.
So heed my words, and live, 'wait not tomorrow's dawn,
But pick life's roses now, today, before they're gone.'


William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

"When You Are Old"

When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled,
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.


I also recently returned to a few poems by Goethe. I still have enough German (I can read it as long as I have a good dictionary along side) to appreciate a few in the original:

Meine Ruh ist hin
Mein Herz ist schwer,
Ich finde sie nimmer
Und nimmermehr

Wo ich ihn nicht hab,
Ist mir das Grab,
Die ganze Welt
Ist mir vergallt.

Mein armer Kopf
Ist mir verruckt,
Mein armer Sinn
Ist mir zerstuckt.

Meine Ruh ist hin
Mein Herz ist schwer,
Ich finde sie nimmer
Und nimmermehr.

Nach ihm nur schau ich
Zum Fenster hinaus,
Nach ihm nur geh ich
Aus dem Haus.

Sein hoher Gang
Sein edle Gestalt,
Seines Mundes Lacheln,
Seiner Augen Gewalt.

Und seiner Rede
Zauberfluss,
Sein Handedrucke,
Und, ach, sein Kuss!

Meine Ruh ist hin,
Meine Herz ist schwer
Iche finde sie nimmer
Und nimmermehr

Meine Busen drangt
Sich nach ihm hin,
Ach durch ich fassen
Und halten ihn.

Und kussen ihn,
So wie ich wollt,
An seinen Kussen
Vergehen sollt!

The German original throbs and lurches just like the spinning wheel of the song (to my mind) although it may seem to do so even more due to my having experienced it often in Schubert's great song-setting. The English translation (by the way) goes like this:

No peace of mind
Heartache and pain,
No peace I find
Ever again

Wher he is not
For me to have
Is a bitter spot
For me the grave

Poor head of mine
Turned upside-down
Poor heart of mine
To shreds is torn

No peace.....

Go to the window
Only to see,
Or out of doors
If there he be.

His gracious figure
Lofty walk,
His mouth, the smile!
That piercing look,

And speech that flows
With sorceries
His hand, his touch,
And, ah!, his kiss!

No peace....

For him I long
with al my might,
Could I but touch
And hold him tight.

And kiss him, kiss him,
Just as I may,
Under his kisses,
Melt away.

As strong as Christopher Middleton's translation is (he is one of the greatest modern translators from German) his poem is but a pale echo of the magic in the original. One wonders how seemingly simple poems like Blake's "Tyger, Tyger" or Yeat's "When You are Old" translate into another language. Unlike a great narrative epic (The Divine Comedy or Paradise Lost) such lyrics seem to rely on the most subtle influections and suggestions of the language and the music they make. How must Emily Dickenson lose out in French or Spanish... all the suggestions of Milton, Puritan church hymns, old English children's songs are thus lost.
Other favorite poems by Goethe include his "Erlkonig" (also familiar through a Schubert setting) in which a father races against time on a stormy night to rush his sick child to medical care, while the boy hallucinates (?) the "Erlkonig" (death) seeking to seduce him, which the father suggests are merely the shadows of the trees or the howls of the wind... and yet... the boy ends up dead. Another beloved Goethe poem is the very short, "Another Night Song":

Uber allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh
In allen Wipfeln
Spurest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vogelein schweigen im Wald
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.

Which is beautifully rendered by R.W. Longfellow:

O'er all the hill-tops
Is quiet now
In all the tree-tops
Hearest thou
Hardly a breath;
The birds are asleep in the trees:
Wait, soon like these
Thou, too, shalt rest.

[stlukesguild]

Although these are perhaps not all that familiar to the English reader, I wouldn't think to call them esoteric in any way. They are probably as familiar to the German reader as "Ozymandias" is to the English. I guess that I am saying that although I have done more than my share of reading along esoteric lines... I, too, return to the well-worn familiar classics as my most favored poems. I still can't get away from:

Ulysses, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoy’d
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.


I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.


This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle–
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.


There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me–
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads–you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

or Shakespeare's:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

And what the hell, I can't avoid Shelley's "Ozymandias":

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Dylan Thomas' 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.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Auden's Funeral Blues:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever; I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood,
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Dickinson's:

THERE’S a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.

Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.

None may teach it anything,
’T is the seal, despair,—
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.

When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, ’t is like the distance
On the look of death.

And just recently I came across this one by Robert Browning and I was immediately floored:

Porphyria's Lover:

The rain set early in to-night,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
And did its worst to vex the lake:
I listened with heart fit to break.
When glided in Porphyria; straight
She shut the cold out and the storm,
And kneeled and made the cheerless grate
Blaze up, and all the cottage warm;
Which done, she rose, and from her form
Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl,
And laid her soiled gloves by, untied
Her hat and let the damp hair fall,
And, last, she sat down by my side
And called me. When no voice replied,
She put my arm about her waist,
And made her smooth white shoulder bare,
And all her yellow hair displaced,
And, stooping, made my cheek lie there,
And spread, o'er all, her yellow hair,
Murmuring how she loved me--she
Too weak, for all her heart's endeavour,
To set its struggling passion free
From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
And give herself to me for ever.
But passion sometimes would prevail,
Nor could to-night's gay feast restrain
A sudden thought of one so pale
For love of her, and all in vain:
So, she was come through wind and rain.
Be sure I looked up at her eyes
Happy and proud; at last I knew
Porphyria worshipped me; surprise
Made my heart swell, and still it grew
While I debated what to do.
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
I am quite sure she felt no pain.
As a shut bud that holds a bee,
I warily oped her lids: again
Laughed the blue eyes without a stain.
And I untightened next the tress
About her neck; her cheek once more
Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss:
I propped her head up as before,
Only, this time my shoulder bore
Her head, which droops upon it still:
The smiling rosy little head,
So glad it has its utmost will,
That all it scorned at once is fled,
And I, its love, am gained instead!
Porphyria's love: she guessed not how
Her darling one wish would be heard.
And thus we sit together now,
And all night long we have not stirred,
And yet God has not said a word!

[stlukesguild]

As for more recent works, what of this devastating poem by Anthony Hecht, from his volume, "The Hard Years"?:

"More Light! More Light!":

Composed in the tower before his execution
These moving verses, and being brought at that time
Painfully to the stake, submitting, declaring thus:
"I emplore my God to witness that I have made no crime."

Nor was he forsaken of courage, but the death was horrible,
The sack of gunpowder failing to ignite.
His legs were blistered sticks on which the black sap
Bubbled and burst as he howled for the kindly light.

And that was but one, and by no means the worst;
Permitted, at least, his painful dignity;
As such were by made prayers in the name of Christ,
That shall judge all men, for his soul's tranquility.

We move now to outside a German wood.
Three men are there commanded to dig a hole
In which the two Jews are ordered to lie down
And be buried alive by the third, who is a Pole.

Not light from the shrine at Weimar, beyond the hill
Nor light from heaven appeared. But he did refuse.
A Luger settled back deeply in its glove.
He was ordered to change places with the Jews.

Much casual death had drained away their souls.
The thick dirt mounted toward the quivering chin.
When only the head was exposed the order came
To dig him out again and get back in.

No light, no light in the blue Polish eye.
When he finished a riding boot packed down the earth.
The Luger hovered lightly in its glove.
He was shot in the belly and in three hours bled to death.

No prayer or incense rose up in those hours
Which grew to be years, and every day came mute
Ghosts from the oven, sifting through crisp air
And settled upon his eyes in a black soot.

I find this to be an unbearably heartbreaking poem... and yet... it is a poem in which heroism is unrewarded... in which their is no light from heaven... nor from art/culture (Weimar of Goethe). Every figure within is dehumanized. The Jews have already become soulless beings. The Pole's heroic actions are rewarded with a death as violent and slowly painful as that afforded to the Jews... only after his humanity is stripped from him... and even the German guard is reduced to nothing more than his unhuman attributes: his Luger and his boot.

On a similar theme... and equally devastating... there's Paul Celan:

"Death Fugue"

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown
we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink it
we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair
Margarete
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are flashing he whistles his pack out
he whistles his Jews out in earth has them dig for a grave
he commands us strike up for the dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink in the morning at noon we drink you at
sundown
we drink and we drink you
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair
Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith we dig a grave in the breezes there
one lies unconfined

He calls out jab deeper into the earth you lot you others sing now and play
he grabs at the iron in his belt he waves it his eyes are blue
jab deeper you lot with your spades you others play for the dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon in the morning we drink you at sundown
we drink and we drink you
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith he plays with the serpents
He calls out more sweetly play death death is a master from Germany
he calls out more darkly now stroke your strings then as smoke you will rise into air
then a grave you will have in the clouds there one lies unconfined

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany
we drink you at sundown and in the morning we drink and we drink you
death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue
he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his pack on us he grants us a grave in the air
he plays with the serpents and daydreams death is a master from Germany

your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith

This fugue immediately calls to my mind the most tragic works of Bach the Passions and cantatas such as no. 80 (Ich habe genug) in the manner in which Celan almost echoes the contrapunctal structures of a fugue... the repetition theme that keeps reappearing... horribly... yet changes each time. I assume a similar intention by Celan (especially with the Death Fugue. title). The poem may also undoubtedly owe much to the tradition of German lyric love poetry by authors such as Heine and Goethe rooted in folk songs. Who cannot recognize Margarite as aluding to Goethe's "Faust". Like Faust... yet in a horrific, crude manner, Celan's "man who lives in the house"... the Nazi officer... also spars with the devil... with evil (Mephistopholes... the snakes with which he plays...). The image of the Shulamith's "ashen hair" is an almost unbearable perversion of how the dark Hebrew woman was portrayed in the Song of Solomon... or of the image of tribulations of the Hebrew people prophesized in various of the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible. The conflict of high art with the crude... and the horrific remind me of some of the images from Spielberg's "Schindler's List". I am especially reminded of the scene in which a young German officer has discovered an abandonned piano in one of the homes they are searching in the ghetto, and he begins to play (is it Bach...? Mozart...? I forget) a very staccatto piece which is accented by the flashing and the burst of machine gun fire as the Jews are hunted down. The conflict of what the German people have achieved... the sublime heights of art contrasted with such absolute evil, reminds us that education and culture do not insure us against such. Again... like Hecht's poem... I find that the controlled artifice of the structure makes the horror seem even more unbearable... which it was, as Celan's ghosts continued to haunt him until he committed suicide.

[Virgil]

St. Lukes Guild

Welcome to lit net. You seem like someone who will really enjoyed this place. I hope you check out the Poem of the Week thread where we discuss and debate a poem for an entire week. The "More Light! More Light!" poem drew a heated debate. I hope ypu'll join us. This week is a Wallace Stevens poem. Actually today (friday) is the start of a new poem for the week, and I don't believe anyone has selected any. Perhaps you can select one.

[WilliamBlake]

The Garden of Love

I laid me down upon a bank,
Where Love lay sleeping;
I heard among the rushes dank
Weeping, weeping.

Then I went to the heath and the wild,
To the thistles and thorns of the waste;
And they told me how they were beguiled,
Driven out, and compelled to the chaste.

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut
And "Thou shalt not," writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.

(I went to a Catholic school for 12 years so the last line "and priests in black gowns were walking their rounds, and binding with briars my joys and desires" amuses me and William Blake in general is just so great).

[Jean-Baptiste]

I've maintained for many years that Ezra Pound was a hack. But things change, and now I love him and can allow him the room to talk to his own poetry as to something that he loved dearly. "Half cracked," indeed.

"FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS

Come, my songs, let us express our baser pas-
sions,
Let us express our envy of the man with a
steady job and no worry about the future.
You are very idle, my songs.
I fear you will come to a bad end.
You stand about in the streets,
You loiter at the corners and bus-stops,
You do next to nothing at all.

You do not even express our inner nobilities,
You will come to a very bad end.

And I?
I have gone half cracked,
I have talked to you so much that
I almost see you about me,
Insolent little beasts, shameless, devoid of clothing!

But you, newest song of the lot,
You are not old enough to have done much mischief,
I will get you a green coat out of China
With dragons worked upon it,
I will get you the scarlet silk trousers
From the statue of the infant Christ in Santa Maria
Novella,
Lest they say we are lacking in taste,
Or that there is no caste in this family."

I love the humor of this poem, and the countless others like it in his writings; though, admittedly, Pound was a much better poet when dealing with reality.

[collinsc]

What are peoples opinion on the best poem ever !?!

[mono]

Hello, collinsc, welcome to the forum.
Despite its length, you may find this thread helpful regarding your question. Personally, I could never possibly narrow down one poem as my absolute favorite, but it ranges somewhere between Emily Dickinson, Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, D.H. Lawrence, Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and an uncountable number of others.

[collinsc]

Thanks Mono.

I am a Literature Forum virgin!
I will check out the link

[Monica]

I've been reading recently poems by William Butler Yeats. I really enjoyed some of them. Here are a couple:

He wishes for the cloths of heaven

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.


Down by the Sally Gardens

Down by the Sally Gardens my love and I did meet;
She passed the Sally Gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.

In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

[Nossa]

My fav. poem is Shakespeare's 55th sonnet
"Not Marble nor the glided momuments"

[Nossa]

I've been reading recently poems by William Butler Yeats. I really enjoyed some of them. Here are a couple:

He wishes for the cloths of heaven

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.


Down by the Sally Gardens

Down by the Sally Gardens my love and I did meet;
She passed the Sally Gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.

In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

I LOVE W.B Yeats poems...GREAT choice

[Pendragon]

I'll just say Poe's The Raven, and let it go at that. I'm sure almost everyone knows the poem, so no need to post it.