Poem of the Week

[Virgil]

Note to Jozy: I replied to your PM to your regular email. My PM box is full.

[Jozanny]

Note to Jozy: I replied to your PM to your regular email. My PM box is full.

I already read it Virgil, thank you. I need to find a good freelance writing community with members at my level for support--not that LN is not enriching on occasion; it is just not meeting all of my needs.

[stlukesguild]

I wasn't familiar with that Hugo poem, Jozy. The translation is by Andrew Lang... who is known for fairy-tales... and translations. I would recommend the recent E.H. and A.M. Blackmore translation of Hugo's Selected Poems. It offers a solid overview of Hugo's career in solid translation that avoid any Victorian mannerisms of many older translations. I also like Robert Lowell's version of The Expiation from his Imitations. It is an admittedly free translation... but perhaps the best I've read as English poetry:

Russia, 1812:

The snow fell, and its power was multiplied.
For the first time the Eagle1 bowed its head--
dark days! Slowly the Emperor returned--
behind him Moscow! Its onion domes still burned.
The snow rained down in blizzards--rained and froze.
Past each white waste a further white waste rose.
None recognized the captains or the flags.
Yesterday the Grand Army, today its dregs!
No one could tell the vanguard from the flanks.
The snow! The hurt men struggled from the ranks,
hid in the bellies of dead horses, in stacks
of shattered caissons. By the bivouacs,
one saw the picket dying at his post,
still standing in his saddle, white with frost,
the stone lips frozen to the bugle's mouth!
Bullets and grapeshot mingled with the snow,
that hailed...The guard, surprised at shivering, march
in a dream now; ice rimes the gray mustache.
The snow falls, always snow! The driving mire
submerges; men, trapped in that white empire,
have no more bread and march on barefoot--gaps!
They were no longer living men and troops,
but a dream drifting in a fog, a mystery...

the complete poem:

http://www.dl.ket.org/humanities/lit.../expiation.htm

[Jozanny]

Thanks for your reply, Jozanny

I will copy the last stanza here again:

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15212

I am not sure double "like/like" is needed here: "It's evident/ the art of losing's not too hard to master / though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster." Do you mean she uses it to mean "disaster-like"?

I am wondering if loding this person is really a disaster... But trying to persuade herself that it is not? By forcing herself to write it?

I do not know how many members might be able to access The New Republic homepage, but there is a great review of the Bishop/Lowell relationship, Words In Air.

Because I am a total doddering idiot, I did not realize that Bishop's "One Art" is a villanelle, which I should have known; it is one of the few traditional forms I'd one day like to try--and I also didn't know that Bishop's motive for writing "One Art" was fear of losing her companion, Alice Methfessel.

The TNR website is antsy in terms of allowing non-subscribers to view digital articles, but this is the kind of in-depth review for which I love them, and which is why publishing with them would by the greatest honor of my writing career.

[symphony]

May I?


Edward Thomas's

Rain

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
....

and here's the whole poem

[Jozanny]

May I?


Edward Thomas's

Rain

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.

and here's the whole poem

Wow. This was really something to read symphony, right before I am off to the showers with my numbing spastic left side....

I have been a poet all my life, and it is astonishing, humbling, to learn how much you don't know when you are deliberately shaking hands and becoming compatible with your own mortality. I've never heard of Edward Thomas, but in my estimation "Rain" strikes chords within that Yeats, in his tiresome perfection, cannot touch in me. Thank you. I'm an instant fan.

[stlukesguild]

Yes... quite moving... and I am immediately reminded of what was quite probably the last verses that Keat's... dying far too young of Tuberculosis... wrote:

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed- see, here it is-
I hold it towards you.

[keyheld]

May I?


Edward Thomas's

Rain

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
....

and here's the whole poem

The poem seems absent of feeling. You can definitely thank someone or something without mixing human feelings. I think this may be the type of tone he set. Throughout the poem you continually get this “coldness” in the imagery; whether it is from the “still and stiff reeds” in the “cold water”; from the rain pouring down on him as he ponders death (which indicates a literal loss of warmth from the body); from him praying that not the ones he loves, but the ones he loved do not feel what he feels about death…which is nothing; to the only type of love which the rain can’t wash away…the “love of death”. All of these images remove human feeling from the picture. Makes me believe the speaker wants to thank the rain because it will wash away all human feelings that’s associated with life.

[stlukesguild]

Devoid of human feelings? This is a poem written by Thomas while in training in preparation for being shipped off to the trenches in France at the height of WWI. This is a poem of someone contemplating his own mortality not in some abstract sense, but with the knowledge that death is a very real possibility. As the rain washes him cleaner than he has ever been he has seemingly come a sort of resolution... a making peace with death... not unlike Hamlet's "Let be." He portrays the rain as a sort of benediction... blessing the dead lying in the fileds. Yet at the same time he prays that no one whom he has once loved is dying tonight... or lying alone listening to the same rain that falls on him.

[Scheherazade]

"If You Forget Me" by Pablo Neruda:


"...
If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine. "

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/if-you-forget-me/

[Virgil]

Very pretty Scher. Thanks!

[prendrelemick]

I've always thought that in the second line, the "wind" was meteorological.

But on reading it just now, It could mean wind (as in twisting)

The word "banners" has conotations to both wind (blowing) and wind (twisting around )

I suppose this is a translation, (was he Chilean?) so does anyone know which it was in the original?

[ChinaRose]

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 among a crowd of stars.

[Silas Thorne]

Thanks China Rose. this is one of my favorites.

This poem touched me deeply the first time I read it, and has ever since. It's a beautiful poem. It seems to me to be about a woman remembering a past (and past loves) that she can never return to, except in her dreams as she stares into the fire.
I got a little distracted
by the second stanza at first, but I think that is the point, since it's about daydreaming and reminiscing, then brought back to the poem's present reality of the fire grate, with the 'And' which continues from the end of the description in the first stanza.

The love of the man who loved the pilgrim soul in her seems to be the Moon, that 'hid his face among a crowd of stars'.

Actually, when I look at the poem I get irritated by all the 'And' s, but when I read it, the 'And's seem quite natural.

That's my reaction to it anyway. I tend to get caught by the feeling and emotions of the words when I'm reading, so I probably miss a lot.

[wsww]

I have doubt this is to discuss about poems also post one by , right?
Also can't the poem be one written by me -something like that?