Badmovies.org Forum

Any poets you guys like? Dickinson, Frost, Yeats, Basho, anyone?

I think good poetry still exists in our age, it has often just been set to music and we call it lyrics.

Lately I been re-discovering my adolescent favorite, George Gordon, Lord Byron, and here is the opening of his 1816 poem, The Dream.

It's been said people in Byron's time, undistracted by the things we are now, and also deprived of the instant availability of artificial light to disrupt the darkness, slept on average nine hours a night, and we know Byron was fond of staying up an entire day and then sleeping through half the next; that was his pattern. If that's true, then it's fair to say people then dreamed more plentifully than we do today with our brief times-out from our electric-lighted lives. I think in his age, and to a visionary like Byron, dreams were a recurring source of inspiration and wonder, and to enter into the dreaming state was as welcome then as bad movies are to us (or you guys) now.

And so one of his best works is about dreams. (The world becomes a dream, a dream becomes the world...)


I

Our life is twofold: Sleep hath its own world,
A boundary between the things misnamed
Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality,
And dreams in their developement have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of Joy;
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,
They take a weight from off our waking toils,
They do divide our being; they become
A portion of ourselves as of our time,
And look like heralds of Eternity;
They pass like spirits of the past,—they speak
Like Sibyls of the future; they have power—
The tyranny of pleasure and of pain;
They make us what we were not—what they will,
And shake us with the vision that's gone by,
The dread of vanished shadows—Are they so?
Is not the past all shadow?—What are they?
Creations of the mind?—The mind can make
Substance, and people planets of its own
With beings brighter than have been, and give
A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh.
I would recall a vision which I dreamed
Perchance in sleep—for in itself a thought,
A slumbering thought, is capable of years,
And curdles a long life into one hour.

I did an undergrad thesis on Yeats. (If I had it to do over I'd have done Robert Browning).

I agree that rock lyrics have taken the place of poetry in modern society, but I disagree that they are examples of "good poetry." The problem is that the music does the heavy lifting, encouraging laziness in writing. I think Tom Waits writes some beautiful lyrics, but when you print them on the page without the music I see a lot of sloppiness there. When he sings them you don't notice.

I remember Paul Simon denying his lyrics were poetry and saying something along the same lines. He mentioned "bluebirds over the cliffs of Dover" being "greeting card stuff," but immensely moving when sung.

My favorite poem is "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," about an aging man who is afraid to ask a (presumably younger) woman out on a date. (This resonates with me now, but it was still a favorite when I was 18). I'll just quote the ending:

"I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind?   Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown."

Poe

one class I did back in the day was literally just a 20 page on how the events in his life were reflected the mans work

For me, that one college class that truly rocked my world and changed my life was called "The Literature of the Great War."  The War Poets - Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Robert Service, and the others - wrote some of the most powerful, bitter, angry verse of all time.  This poem made the hair on the back of my neck stand up the first time I read it, and every time since.  Written by Robert Service, it is simply called  ON THE WIRE:

O God, take the sun from the sky!
 It's burning me, scorching me up.
God, can't You hear my cry?
 Water! A poor, little cup!
It's laughing, the cursed sun!
 See how it swells and swells
Fierce as a hundred hells!
 God, will it never have done?
It's searing the flesh on my bones;
 It's beating with hammers red
My eyeballs into my head;
 It's parching my very moans.
See! It's the size of the sky,
 And the sky is a torrent of fire,
Foaming on me as I lie
 Here on the wire . . . the wire. . . .

Of the thousands that wheeze and hum
 Heedlessly over my head,
Why can't a bullet come,
 Pierce to my brain instead,
Blacken forever my brain,
 Finish forever my pain?
Here in the hellish glare
 Why must I suffer so?
Is it God doesn't care?
 Is it God doesn't know?
Oh, to be killed outright,
 Clean in the clash of the fight!
That is a golden death,
 That is a boon; but this . . .
Drawing an anguished breath
 Under a hot abyss,
Under a stooping sky
 Of seething, sulphurous fire,
Scorching me up as I lie
 Here on the wire . . . the wire. . . .

Hasten, O God, Thy night!
 Hide from my eyes the sight
Of the body I stare and see
 Shattered so hideously.
I can't believe that it's mine.
 My body was white and sweet,
Flawless and fair and fine,
 Shapely from head to feet;
Oh no, I can never be
 The thing of horror I see
Under the rifle fire,
 Trussed on the wire . . . the wire. . . .

Of night and of death I dream;
 Night that will bring me peace,
Coolness and starry gleam,
 Stillness and death's release:
Ages and ages have passed, --
 Lo! it is night at last.
Night! but the guns roar out.
 Night! but the hosts attack.
Red and yellow and black
 Geysers of doom upspout.
Silver and green and red
 Star-shells hover and spread.
Yonder off to the right
 Fiercely kindles the fight;
Roaring near and more near,
 Thundering now in my ear;
Close to me, close . . . Oh, hark!
 Someone moans in the dark.
I hear, but I cannot see,
 I hear as the rest retire,
Someone is caught like me,
 Caught on the wire . . . the wire. . . .

Again the shuddering dawn,
 Weird and wicked and wan;
Again, and I've not yet gone.
 The man whom I heard is dead.
Now I can understand:
 A bullet hole in his head,
A pistol gripped in his hand.
 Well, he knew what to do, --
Yes, and now I know too. . . .


Hark the resentful guns!
 Oh , how thankful am I
To think my beloved ones
 Will never know how I die!
I've suffered more than my share;
I'm shattered beyond repair;
I've fought like a man the fight,
And now I demand the right
(God! how his fingers cling!)
To do without shame this thing.
Good! there's a bullet still;
 Now I'm ready to fire;
Blame me, God, if You will,
 Here on the wire . . . the wire. . . .

You probably read this one, then, even though Yeats was not a "War Poet." Still one of my favorites:

AN IRISH AIRMAN FORSEES HIS DEATH

I know that I shall meet my fate   
Somewhere among the clouds above;   
Those that I fight I do not hate   
Those that I guard I do not love;   
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,   
No likely end could bring them loss   
Or leave them happier than before.   
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,   
Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight   
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;   
I balanced all, brought all to mind,   
The years to come seemed waste of breath,   
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

Yes indeed!  My interest in the Great War was inspired, in the beginning, by the accounts of the flying aces of that war - a topic I love to this day.
That poem was included in several of the books I read on the war in the air.

Seems like lately I have been serially-recommending books in here (eeew, scary) but if you have an interest in whom the the figures who produced the poetry of World War One were before they went to combat, you may want to check out Juliet Nicolson's The Perfect Summer, a poignant history of the summer of 1911, in which Rupert Brooke, Leonard Woolf and other future Lost Generation figures spend this innocent antebellum season late in their youths, happily visiting the country and the shore, while around them the world chugs toward the war which is to come three years later. It's the sort of pinpoint precise history book that reads like a novel.

I been among the Romantics lately, perhaps the period at which English literature reached its creative height.

This one is no less magnificent for being famous, and never ever fails to focus me on my place in time, and drive home the impermanence of all that humans do. (And let's not forget, its composer deflowered his future wife atop her mother's grave. Sorry, that's just impressively macabre in a completely messed-up sense.)


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.

As a man with a Master's degree in Literature, I have a love of poetry. Among my favorites are Frost, Shakespeare, Poe, and Coleridge. Frost and Shakespeare both had a mastery of the language beyond nearly all others. But while Shakespeare was busy inventing words and word plays and such, Frost used plain, everyday language better than almost anyone I've ever read. Poe is just fun to read for his sing-song moroseness. Coleridge is also on the sing-song side of things ("Water, water everywhere/ And all the boards did shrink. / Water, water everywhere, / Nor any drop to drink"), but his opium-fueled fantasies are remarkable.

But one poem that has literally helped shape my life was one I learned in 7th grade: Kipling's "If."

If you can keep your head when all about you
   Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
   But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
   Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
   And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
   If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
   And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
   Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
   And stoop and build ‘em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
   And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
   And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
   To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
   Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”;

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
   Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
   If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run—
   Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

I wrote this in 1999.


Poem: In The Second Person, Untitled

Spread-eagled, you lie before them
While they prod at you.
Prometheus himself never
Endured such offense as this.
And only so recently gone—
So recently!
On the stairs, the gardenias
In their vase
Seem to shiver in horror.
And as for you,
A night ago
They would have deferred to you,
These white-coated wonder-workers,
Shown courtesy due your life-warmth;
Now not so much as a sheet do they grant
In their prying, their photographing, their undressing,
     stripping, their inserting of thermometers,
Seeking to ascertain when it left you,
Your life,
When the stocking-garrote
Brought you down at the intruder’s hands.
Only later after “when?” has been discovered
Will they seek to betroth it to “why?”
     “how?” “whom?”
Only a job to them,
Only a job.
But as for me?
Oh, victim, twice humiliated,
How I feel for you and what you endure!
But only a little more lies ahead
Before the long serenity of the tomb.
Think on that, if anything you still may ponder…
But, no, how theistic of me to so address
This thing twice rudely robbed of its humanity,
This murder victim grown chill against the tile floor.

As an undergrad, I wrote a thirty plus page analysis on a Sylvia Plath poem. My experience analyzing literature and poetry is what lead me to later analyzing content I love: bad movies!

Which poem was it?

Daddy.

I LOVED that one! 

"So Daddy I'm finally through,
the black telephone's off at the root,
the voices just can't get through."

I remember the first time we read that, one of my classmates commented:

"So who was her Dad, Hermann Goering?"

It's been a number of years since I thought about it but, yeah, I had a lot of fun writing about that one.

Now I need to locate/dig out my Norton Anthology of Poetry.

I've got a friend who reads Wilfred Owen almost every time our poetry group meets (monthly). She is very taken with his imagery.

I am not a veteran, but here is my war poem:

One Week After the War

One week after the war,
I lay on the gurney, still as a headstone,
The only casualty of a battle
No one noticed,
An invisible soldier
Who jumped on a grenade he threw,
In order to save himself from an attack he instigated.
The heated skirmish raged for days,
Palpable hatred napalming
Both sides, hemmed in as they were in one body.
This was a war no one would win—
There weren’t even any
Mercenary arms dealers to profit from the destruction.
People passed near by the front
Without a glance at the carnage.
Some even smiled and spoke,
But I couldn’t hear them
Over the chaotic din of the duel:
Two war-ravaged adversaries,
Neither expecting a victory because winning was off the table.
I was just a grunt now,
Mechanically fighting against the enemy
Because someone told me to.
That someone may have been me, but I couldn’t remember for sure.
All around were bombs exploding in clouds of paralyzing fear
And incendiary ordnance riddling my numbed body with the
Hellfire of doubt and self-loathing.
The enemy, both a reflection of me
And invisible in the darkness that clouded my eyes and heart,
Charged again and again,
Ignoring my increasingly pitiful resistance.
I cried for help. I begged for backup.
But the words died on lips parched and cracked
From days of fighting without eating.
Then, in the very picture of irony,
Both sides raised a white flag
As exhaustion sapped me of the will to fight.
And so I lay,
A victim of an invisible war
Being fought for no reason
With an outcome that made the whole thing pointless.

Ivan Ivanovitch, Pragmatist

Ivan Ivanovitch was a pragmatist who kept his standards and expectations low.

In 1913, before the War and Revolution,
He had a house, five pigs, three goats, twenty chickens,
An ox, a small boat, three changes of clothes,
A grim wife, a cynical faith in Holy Church,
A nebulous image of God,
An oldest daughter often ill-used by the bastard son
Of the provincial tax assessor,
Three axes, four knives, two icons,
A holy relic bartered from a river-gypsy from Smolensk,
And a still hidden in the reeds.

Ivan Ivanovitch, after the Revolution, in 1923,
Had a house, a pig, two goats, twenty chickens,
A small boat, three changes of clothes,
A nebulous image of right and wrong,
A youngest daughter ill-used by a Bolshevik tax assessor,
Three axes, three knives,
A holy relic bartered from a river gypsy from Smolensk,
Eight phrases from Das Kapitol stuck in his head,
And a trio of stills hidden in the reeds.

Ivan Ivanovitch was a pragmatist who kept his standards and expectations low.

(From) A Song of Myself

I think I could turn and live with animals,
 they are so placid and self-contain'd,
 I stand and look at them long and long.

 They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
 They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
 They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
 Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
 Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
 Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
---Walt Whitman

Digging 

Between my finger and my thumb   
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound   
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:   
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds   
Bends low, comes up twenty years away   
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills   
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft   
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.   
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.

Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

---Seamus Heaney 

I composed this in my head on the way to town today, while in a very giddy frame of mind:

If I were a lungfish, and shrimp were my favorite dish,
I'd eat a clam.
For some variety, and to show piety
To Neptune of the Sea
Whose fish I am.

It fits perfectly to the tune of the old church hymn: "My Faith Looks Up to Thee."

I like it, Indy!

After enduring a Soviet Far Eastern prison, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn concluded there was nothing worse in life than physical pain. With respect to his direct experience, I think losing someone you love gives bodily pain a run for its money, and when I was twenty-one and entombed by grief, I used to read this poem over and over and over and over, not because it relieved me like, say In Memoriam, or Thanatopsis, but because it tortured me worse.

Sorry if it is vulgar to put it this way, but back then this poem, which doesn't seem so significant now, f**ked me up.


And You Must Die


And you as well must die, beloved dust,
And all your beauty stand you in no stead;
This flawless, vital hand, this perfect head,
This body of flame and steel, before the gust
Of Death, or under his autumnal frost,
Shall be as any leaf, be no less dead
Than the first leaf that fell,—this wonder fled.
Altered, estranged, disintegrated, lost.
Nor shall my love avail you in your hour.
In spite of all my love, you will arise
Upon that day and wander down the air
Obscurely as the unattended flower,
It mattering not how beautiful you were,
Or how beloved above all else that dies.

--Edna St. Vincent Millay

Way too serious.  I prefer this one:

"The tusks that clashed in mighty brawls
of mastodons, are billiard balls.
The sword of Charlemagne the Just
is ferric oxide, known as rust.
The mighty bear whose potent hug
was feared by all, is now a rug.
Great Caesar's bust is on the shelf,
And I'm not feeling well myself."

Ogden Nash

This poem freaked me out in high school:


 :buggedout:

A flea and a fly in a flue,

Were caught, so what could they do?

Said the fly, "Let us flee."

"Let us fly," said the flea.

So they flew through a flaw in the flue.

Dislike

If he was a dog
And you were a flower,
He'd hike his leg,
And give you a shower.

--Old '80s jump-rope chant

This one makes me think of my aging parents.

"Now, O now, in this brown land
Where Love did so sweet music make
We two shall wander, hand in hand,
Forbearing for old friendship's sake
Nor grieve because our love was gay
Which now is ended in this way.

A rogue in red and yellow dress
Is knocking, knocking at the tree
And all around our loneliness
The wind is whistling merrily.
The leaves — they do not sigh at all
When the year takes them in the fall.

Now, O now, we hear no more
The vilanelle and roundelay!
Yet will we kiss, sweetheart, before
We take sad leave at close of day.
Grieve not, sweetheart, for anything —
The year, the year is gathering."
---XXXIII, James Joyce

There once was a fat man from Leeds,
Who swallowed a packet of seeds.
Within half an hour,
His dick was a flower,
And his balls were all covered in weeds,
                               -Morgan Freeman, 1995

I like to read poems in cemeteries, and a day like this, so cold out that I am alone, is in some ways most perfect of all for the undertaking.

A Golden Day

I found you and I lost you,
All on a gleaming day.
The day was filled with sunshine,
And the land was full of May.

A golden bird was singing
Its melody divine,
I found you and I loved you,
And all the world was mine.

I found you and I lost you,
All on a golden day,
But when I dream of you, dear,
It is always brimming May.

--Paul Laurence Dunbar

I have always loved this one from THE CHRONICLES OF THOMAS COVENANT:

"Seven wards of ancient lore, for Land's protection, wall and door
And one High Lord to wield the Law, keep incorrupt all Earthpower's core.
Seven words for ill's despite, banes for evil's dooming wight,
and one pure Lord to hold the Staff, bar the Land from Foul's betraying sight.
Seven hells for broken faith, for Land's betrayer, man or wraith,
and one brave Lord to deal the doom, keep the blacking blight from beauty's bloom."

Stephen R. Donaldson

Mortality

Ashes to ashes, dust unto dust,
What of his loving, what of his lust?
What of his passion, what of his pain?
What of his poverty, what of his pride?
Earth, the great mother, has called him again:
Deeply he sleeps, the world's verdict defied.
Shall he be tried again? Shall he go free?
Who shall the court convene? Where shall it be?
No answer on the land, none from the sea.
Only we know that as he did, we must:
You with your theories, you with your trust,--
Ashes to ashes, dust unto dust!

--Paul Laurence Dunbar

The Challenge of Thor.

I am the God Thor,
 I am the War God,
 I am the Thunderer!
 Here in my Northland,
 My fastness and fortress,
 Reign I forever!
Here amid icebergs
 Rule I the nations;
 This is my hammer,
 Miölner the mighty;
 Giants and sorcerers
 Cannot withstand it!

These are the gauntlets
 Wherewith I wield it,
 And hurl it afar off;
 This is my girdle;
 Whenever I brace it,
 Strength is redoubled!

The light thou beholdest
 Stream through the heavens,
 In flashes of crimson,
 Is but my red beard
 Blown by the night-wind,
 Affrighting the nations!
 Jove is my brother;
 Mine eyes are the lightning;
 The wheels of my chariot
 Roll in the thunder,
 The blows of my hammer
 Ring in the earthquake!

Force rules the world still,
 Has ruled it, shall rule it;
 Meekness is weakness,
 Strength is triumphant,
 Over the whole earth
 Still is it Thor's-Day!

Thou art a God too,
 O Galilean!
 And thus singled-handed
 Unto the combat,
 Gauntlet or Gospel,
 Here I defy thee!

---Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

(Thor lost, by the way.)

In 1936 Mitja Nikisch, the thirty-seven-year-old German-born modern composer, died of lymphoma in Venice, where he had been living in self-imposed exile, a harsh critic of the National Socialist regime in his homeland. On his last day, Nikisch completed his three-movement magnum opus Andante et Remanza, Scherzo Fantasie Pathetique, and died later that evening. Some weeks after his funeral his wife Barbara discovered that on his deathbed he had also written a poem for her, and hid it so she would not immediately find it. In translation the poem reads:

Pause for a bit, wanderer,
I am home,
In my sphere,
The stars shine brightly.
Think of me,
You are only a guest
On this earth,
Where everything is in vain.
Rest yourself, pick a flower
And continue on your way.

Anyone for 18th century verse?



For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry


For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.
For this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.
For fifthly he washes himself.
For sixthly he rolls upon wash.
For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.
For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.
For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.
For tenthly he goes in quest of food.
For having consider'd God and himself he will consider his neighbour.
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.
For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.
For when his day's work is done his business more properly begins.
For he keeps the Lord's watch in the night against the adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.
For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.
For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses.
For he will not do destruction, if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation.
For he purrs in thankfulness, when God tells him he's a good Cat.
For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon.
For every house is incomplete without him and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.
For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the departure of the Children of Israel from Egypt.
For every family had one cat at least in the bag.
For the English Cats are the best in Europe.
For he is the cleanest in the use of his forepaws of any quadruped.
For the dexterity of his defence is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly.
For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.
For he is tenacious of his point.
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
For he knows that God is his Saviour.
For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.
For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.
For he is of the Lord's poor and so indeed is he called by benevolence perpetually--Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat.
For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better.
For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in complete cat.
For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants in music.
For he is docile and can learn certain things.
For he can set up with gravity which is patience upon approbation.
For he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment.
For he can jump over a stick which is patience upon proof positive.
For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command.
For he can jump from an eminence into his master's bosom.
For he can catch the cork and toss it again.
For he is hated by the hypocrite and miser.
For the former is afraid of detection.
For the latter refuses the charge.
For he camels his back to bear the first notion of business.
For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly.
For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services.
For he killed the Ichneumon-rat very pernicious by land.
For his ears are so acute that they sting again.
For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention.
For by stroking of him I have found out electricity.
For I perceived God's light about him both wax and fire.
For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast.
For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
For, tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped.
For he can tread to all the measures upon the music.
For he can swim for life.
For he can creep.

 
---Christopher Smart

From Robert Burns, just because people will struggle a little to read it...

Is there for honest Poverty
That hings his head, an' a' that;
The coward slave-we pass him by,
We dare be poor for a' that!
For a' that, an' a' that.
Our toils obscure an' a' that,
The rank is but the guinea's stamp,
The Man's the gowd for a' that.

What though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hoddin grey, an' a that;
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine;
A Man's a Man for a' that:
For a' that, and a' that,
Their tinsel show, an' a' that;
The honest man, tho' e'er sae poor,
Is king o' men for a' that.

Ye see yon birkie, ca'd a lord,
Wha struts, an' stares, an' a' that;
Tho' hundreds worship at his word,
He's but a coof for a' that:
For a' that, an' a' that,
His ribband, star, an' a' that:
The man o' independent mind
He looks an' laughs at a' that.

A prince can mak a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, an' a' that;
But an honest man's abon his might,
Gude faith, he maunna fa' that!
For a' that, an' a' that,
Their dignities an' a' that;
The pith o' sense, an' pride o' worth,
Are higher rank than a' that.

Then let us pray that come it may,
(As come it will for a' that,)
That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth,
Shall bear the gree, an' a' that.
For a' that, an' a' that,
It's coming yet for a' that,
That Man to Man, the world o'er,
Shall brothers be for a' that.

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens. 

- William Carlos Williams 

Spirits of the Dead

I

Thy soul shall find itself alone
’Mid dark thoughts of the gray tombstone—
Not one, of all the crowd, to pry
Into thine hour of secrecy.


       II

Be silent in that solitude,
   Which is not loneliness—for then
The spirits of the dead who stood
   In life before thee are again
In death around thee—and their will
Shall overshadow thee: be still.


       III

The night, tho’ clear, shall frown—
And the stars shall look not down
From their high thrones in the heaven,
With light like Hope to mortals given—
But their red orbs, without beam,
To thy weariness shall seem
As a burning and a fever
Which would cling to thee for ever.


       IV

Now are thoughts thou shalt not banish,
Now are visions ne’er to vanish;
From thy spirit shall they pass
No more—like dew-drop from the grass.


       V

The breeze—the breath of God—is still—
And the mist upon the hill,
Shadowy—shadowy—yet unbroken,
Is a symbol and a token—
How it hangs upon the trees,
A mystery of mysteries!

- EDGAR ALLAN POE 

Sermon In Verse

My body is my prison,
And I would be so obedient to the Law,
As not to break prison;
I would not hasten my death by starving
Or macerating this body.
But if this prison be burnt down by continual fevers,
Or blown down with continual vapours,
Would any man be so in love
With the ground upon which that prison stood
As to desire rather to stay there,
Than to go home?

--John Donne

Free
Unfettered, shriven, free.
Dream that what is dreamed will be;
Hold eyes clasped shut until they see
And sing the silent prophecy.
And be free
Unfettered, shriven, free.

Lone -
Unfriended, bondless, lone.
Drink of loss until tis done.
Till silence is communion
And yet - 
Unfriended, bondless, lone.

Deep -
Unbottomed, endless, deep.
Touch the true mysterious Keep.
Where halls of fealty laugh and weep,
While  treachers through the dooming creep
In blood
Unbottomed, endless, deep.

Stephen R. Donaldson

Verses From Part II of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner


The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.

About, about, in reel and rout
The death-fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch's oils,
Burnt green, and blue and white.

And some in dreams assurèd were
Of the Spirit that plagued us so;
Nine fathom deep he had followed us
From the land of mist and snow.

And every tongue, through utter drought,
Was withered at the root;
We could not speak, no more than if
We had been choked with soot.

"Good morning, good morning!"
  the General said, when we met him last week on the way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of'em dead,
 and we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
"He's a cheery old card," grunted Harry to Jack.
  as they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
But he did for them both with his plan of attack.

- Siegfried Sassoon, "The General"  (1917)

This is how I feel today:

I account this world a tedious theater
For I must play a part against my will.

--John Webster

The Duchess of Malfi