I met ayont the cairney
a lass wi tousie hair
Singin till a bairnie
That wis nae langer there
Wunds wi warlds tae swing
Widne sing sae sweet
The licht than bends owre aa thing
Is less taen up wi it.
Hugh MacDiarmid.
and Sonnet 116. Did it at school, loved it ever since. And the Wasteland. And of course, Paradise Lost. And anything by Norman MacCaig. He is, indeed, a God of poetry.
On the topic of MacCaig, my favourite of his was always:Originally Posted by Lyn
Assisi
The dwarf with his hands on backwards
Sat, slumped like a half filled sack
On tiny twisted legs from which
Sawdust might run,
Outside the three tiers of churches built
In honour of St Francis, brother
Of the poor, talker with birds, Over whom
He had the advantage
Of not being dead yet
A priest explained
How clever it was of Giotto
To make his frescoes tell stories
That would reveal to the illiterate the goodness
Of God and the suffering
Of His Son. I understood
The explanation and
The cleverness.
A rush of tourists, clucking contentedly,
Fluttered around him as he scattered
The grain of the word. It was they who had passed
The ruined temple outside, whose eyes
Wept pus, whose back was higher
Than his head, whose lopsided mouth
Said, Grazie in a voice as sweet
As a child's when she speaks to her mother
Or a bird's, when it spoke
To St Francis
Another couple of my favourite poems by 20th Century Scots are:
One Cigarette (Edwin Morgan)
No smoke without you, my fire.
After you left,
your cigarette glowed in on my ashtray
and sent up a long thread of such quiet grey
I smiled in wonder who would believe its signal
of so much love. One cigarette
in the non-smoker's tray.
As the last spire
trembles up, a sudden draught
blows it winding into my face.
Is it smell, is it taste?
You are here again, and I am drunk on your tobacco lips.
Out with the light.
Let the smoke lie back in the dark.
Till I hear the very ash
sigh down among the flowers of brass
I'll breathe, and long past midnight, your last kiss.
&
For the unknown seamen of the 1939 - 1945 war (Iain Crichton Smith)
One would like to be able to write something for them
not for the sake of writing but because
a man should be named in dying as well as living,
in drowning as well as on death-bed, and because
the brain being brain must try to establish laws.
Yet these events are not amenable
to any discipline that we can impose
and are not in the end even imaginable.
What happened was simply this, bad luck for those
who have lain here twelve years in a changing pose
These things happen and there's no explaining,
and to call them "chosen" might abuse a word.
It is better also not to assume a mourning,
moaning stance. These may well have concurred
in whatever struck them through the absurd
or maybe meaningful. One simply doesn't
know enough, or understand what came
out of the altering weather in a fashioned
descriptive phrase that was common to each name
or may have surrounded each like a dear frame.
Best not to make much of it and leave these seamen
in the equally altering acre they now have
inherited from strangers though yet human.
They fell from sea to earth, from grave to grave,
and, griefless now, taught others how to grieve.
There once was a scotsman named Drew
Who put too much wine in his stew
He felt a bit drunk
And fell off his bunk
And landed smack into his shoe ~(C) Ms Niamh Anne King
It's long but one I like. Not my favourite because I cannot make a choice like that. This is Francis Thompson's 'The Hound of Heaven.
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat -- and a voice beat
More instant than the Feet --
"All things betray thee, who betrayest Me."
I pleaded, outlaw-wise,
By many a hearted casement, curtained red,
Trellised with intertwining charities;
(For, though I knew His love Who followèd,
Yet was I sore adread
Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside.)
But, if one little casement parted wide,
The gust of his approach would clash it to :
Fear wist not to evade, as Love wist to pursue.
Across the margent of the world I fled,
And troubled the gold gateways of the stars,
Smiting for shelter on their clangèd bars ;
Fretted to dulcet jars
And silvern chatter the pale ports o' the moon.
I said to Dawn : Be sudden -- to Eve : Be soon ;
With thy young skiey blossoms heap me over
From this tremendous Lover--
Float thy vague veil about me, lest He see !
I tempted all His servitors, but to find
My own betrayal in their constancy,
In faith to Him their fickleness to me,
Their traitorous trueness, and their loyal deceit.
To all swift things for swiftness did I sue ;
Clung to the whistling mane of every wind.
But whether they swept, smoothly fleet,
The long savannahs of the blue ;
Or whether, Thunder-driven,
They clanged his chariot 'thwart a heaven,
Plashy with flying lightnings round the spurn o' their feet :--
Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue.
Still with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
Came on the following Feet,
And a Voice above their beat--
"Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me."
I sought no more that after which I strayed,
In face of man or maid ;
But still within the little children's eyes
Seems something, something that replies,
They at least are for me, surely for me !
I turned me to them very wistfully ;
But just as their young eyes grew sudden fair
With dawning answers there,
Their angel plucked them from me by the hair.
"Come then, ye other children, Nature's -- share
With me" (said I) "your delicate fellowship ;
Let me greet you lip to lip,
Let me twine with you caresses,
Wantoning
With our Lady-Mother's vagrant tresses,
Banqueting
With her in her wind-walled palace,
Underneath her azured daïs,
Quaffing, as your taintless way is,
From a chalice
Lucent-weeping out of the dayspring."
So it was done :
I in their delicate fellowship was one --
Drew the bolt of Nature's secrecies.
I knew all the swift importings
On the wilful face of skies ;
I knew how the clouds arise
Spumèd of the wild sea-snortings ;
All that's born or dies
Rose and drooped with ; made them shapers
Of mine own moods, or wailful or divine ;
With them joyed and was bereaven.
I was heavy with the even,
When she lit her glimmering tapers
Round the day's dead sanctities.
I laughed in the morning's eyes.
I triumphed and I saddened with all weather,
Heaven and I wept together,
And its sweet tears were salt with mortal mine ;
Against the red throb of its sunset-heart
I laid my own to beat,
And share commingling heat ;
But not by that, by that, was eased my human smart.
In vain my tears were wet on Heaven's grey cheek.
For ah ! we know not what each other says,
These things and I ; in sound I speak--
Their sound is but their stir, they speak by silences.
Nature, poor stepdame, cannot slake my drouth ;
Let her, if she would owe me,
Drop yon blue bosom-veil of sky, and show me
The breasts o' her tenderness ;
Never did any milk of hers once bless
My thirsting mouth.
Nigh and nigh draws the chase,
With unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy ;
And past those noisèd Feet
A Voice comes yet more fleet --
"Lo ! naught contents thee, who content'st not Me."
Naked I wait thy Love's uplifted stroke !
My harness piece by piece Thou hast hewn from me,
And smitten me to my knee ;
I am defenceless utterly.
I slept, methinks, and woke,
And, slowly gazing, find me stripped in sleep.
In the rash lustihead of my young powers,
I shook the pillaring hours
And pulled my life upon me ; grimed with smears,
I stand amid the dust o' the mounded years --
My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.
My days have crackled and gone up in smoke,
Have puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream.
Yea, faileth now even dream
The dreamer, and the lute the lutanist ;
Even the linked fantasies, in whose blossomy twist
I swung the earth a trinket at my wrist,
Are yielding ; cords of all too weak account
For earth with heavy griefs so overplussed.
Ah ! is Thy love indeed
A weed, albeit an amaranthine weed,
Suffering no flowers except its own to mount ?
Ah ! must --
Designer infinite !--
Ah ! must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn with it ?
My freshness spent its wavering shower i' the dust ;
And now my heart is as a broken fount,
Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever
From the dank thoughts that shiver
Upon the sighful branches of my mind.
Such is ; what is to be ?
The pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind ?
I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds ;
Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds
From the hid battlements of Eternity ;
Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then
Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again.
But not ere him who summoneth
I first have seen, enwound
With glooming robes purpureal, cypress-crowned ;
His name I know, and what his trumpet saith.
Whether man's heart or life it be which yields
Thee harvest, must Thy harvest-fields
Be dunged with rotten death ?
Now of that long pursuit
Comes on at hand the bruit ;
That Voice is round me like a bursting sea :
"And is thy earth so marred,
Shattered in shard on shard ?
Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest me !
"Strange, piteous, futile thing !
Wherefore should any set thee love apart ?
Seeing none but I makes much of naught" (He said),
"And human love needs human meriting :
How hast thou merited --
Of all man's clotted clay the dingiest clot ?
Alack, thou knowest not
How little worthy of any love thou art !
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,
Save Me, save only Me ?
All which I took from thee I did but take,
Not for thy harms,
But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms.
All which thy child's mistake
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home :
Rise, clasp My hand, and come !"
Halts by me that footfall :
Is my gloom, after all,
Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly ?
"Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He Whom thou seekest !
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest me."
Matthew Arnold:
Requiscat
Strew on her roses, roses,
And never a spray of yew.
In quiet she reposes;
Ah, would that I did too!
Her mirth the world required;
She bathed it in smiles of glee.
But her heart was tired, tired,
And now they let her be.
Her life was turning, turning,
In mazes of heat and sound.
But for peace her soul was yearning,
And now peace laps her round.
Her cabin'd ample spirit,
It fultter'd and fail'd for breath.
Tonight it doth inherit
The vasty hall of death.
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.
W.B.Yeats
and also
The Stolen Child
WHERE dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scare could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.
W.B.Yeats
Last edited by Mrs. Dalloway; 03-10-2007 at 06:21 PM.
"De primer van foradar-me les orelles
i de llavors ençà duc arracades.
No prengueu aquest bosc per una alzina."
Maria Mercè Marçal
This has to be one of my favorites. It is short sweet and romantic
I wrote your name in the sky,
but the wind blew it away.
I wrote your name in the sand,
but the waves washed it away.
I wrote your name in my heart,
and forever it will stay.
Here is another that I adore
I Asked God
- John Raine -
I asked God for a flower, he gave me a bouquet
I asked God for a minute, he gave me a day
I asked God for true love, he gave me that too
I asked for an angel and he gave me you.
JUST KEEP SWIMMING!
JUST KEEP SWIMMING!
JUST KEEP SWIMMING, SWIMMING, SWIMMING!
WHAT DO WE DO?
WE SWIM!
I feel I should be more specific. "Requiscat" is beautiful, but definitely won't be my favorite poem for long.
I enjoy e. e. cummings, Robert Frost, Stephen Crane, Carl Sandburg, and Dorothy Parker.
I loved Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner."
And T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land."
And, Mrs. Dalloway? I like that Yeats poem too.
Last edited by Sarasvati; 03-11-2007 at 12:41 AM.
Which one?The Stolen Child or the other? They're great!
I also like the Ancient Mariner!!It's the only poem I like from Coleridge.
"De primer van foradar-me les orelles
i de llavors ençà duc arracades.
No prengueu aquest bosc per una alzina."
Maria Mercè Marçal
Conrad Aiken's 'Window', and TS Eliot's 'Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock'... both definitely come to mind when I think of my favourites! Other favourite poets of mine are Rainer Maria Rilke and Pablo Neruda
Good choice!
"Come away O human child!To the waters of the wild, With a faery hand in hand, For the worlds more full of weeping than you can understand."
W.B.Yeats
"If it looks like a Dwarf and smells like a Dwarf, then it's probably a Dwarf (or a latrine wearing dungarees)"
Artemins Fowl and the Lost Colony by Eoin Colfer
my poems-please comment Forum Rules
The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe, whom is my favorite Poet.
-Sharita
Hey, that's my favorite too! I also like The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost.The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe, whom is my favorite Poet.
"You ask me 'why I like him.'
Nay
I cannot; nay I would not, say.
I think it vile to pidgeonhole
The pros and cons of a kindred soul.
You 'wonder he should be my friend.'
But then why should you comprehend
Thank God for this--a new--surprise:
My eyes, remember, are not your eyes.
Cherish this one small mystery
And marvel not that love can be
"In spite of all his many flaws.'
In spite? Supposing I said
'Because.'
A truce, a truce to questioning:
'We two are friends' tells everything.
Yet if you must know, this is why:
Because he is he, and I am I.
Friends, by Edward Verrall Lucas.
I always thought this one was really cute:
I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you a nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us-don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
-Emliy Dickinson
Tomorrow always holds the promise of something new and exciting. I am the Jetsons meet the Flintstones.
I love that poem!
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