Who's Your Favorite Poet?
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KinskiTemper
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My favorite William Butler Yeats poem:
The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves
The brilliant moon and all the milky sky,
And all that famous harmony of leaves,
Had blotted out man's image and his cry.
A girl arose that had red mournful lips
And seemed the greatness of the world in tears,
Doomed like Odysseus and the laboring ships
And proud as Priam murdered with his peers,
Arose, and on the instant clamorous eaves,
A climbing moon upon an empty sky,
And all that lamentation leaves,
Could but compose man's image and his cry.
The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves
The brilliant moon and all the milky sky,
And all that famous harmony of leaves,
Had blotted out man's image and his cry.
A girl arose that had red mournful lips
And seemed the greatness of the world in tears,
Doomed like Odysseus and the laboring ships
And proud as Priam murdered with his peers,
Arose, and on the instant clamorous eaves,
A climbing moon upon an empty sky,
And all that lamentation leaves,
Could but compose man's image and his cry.
Marshall
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Kinski, your mentioning the Yeats poem reminds me of some Yeats learned by heart a long time ago. I type from memory so may make mistakes:
Oh but there is wisdom in what the sages said:
but stretch that body for a while, and lay down that head,
till I have told the sages where man is comforted.
How could passion run so deep, had I never thought
that the crime of being born blackens all our lot---
but where the crime's committed, the crime can be forgot!
===========
I whispered "I am too young..."
and then "I am old enough."
wherefore I threw a penny
to find out if I might love.
Go and love, go and love, young man,
if the lady be young and fair.
Ah penny, brown penny, brown penny,
I am looped in the loops of her hair.
For love is the crooked thing:
there is nobody wise enough
to find out all that is in it.
For he should be thinking of love
till the stars had run away
and the shadows eaten the moon.
Ah penny, brown penny, brown penny,
one cannot begin it too soon!
Oh but there is wisdom in what the sages said:
but stretch that body for a while, and lay down that head,
till I have told the sages where man is comforted.
How could passion run so deep, had I never thought
that the crime of being born blackens all our lot---
but where the crime's committed, the crime can be forgot!
===========
I whispered "I am too young..."
and then "I am old enough."
wherefore I threw a penny
to find out if I might love.
Go and love, go and love, young man,
if the lady be young and fair.
Ah penny, brown penny, brown penny,
I am looped in the loops of her hair.
For love is the crooked thing:
there is nobody wise enough
to find out all that is in it.
For he should be thinking of love
till the stars had run away
and the shadows eaten the moon.
Ah penny, brown penny, brown penny,
one cannot begin it too soon!
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one of the ones i like from yeats
Leda and the Swan
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
Leda and the Swan
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
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Marshall
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A great poem, Jake. I am happy to be among people who love Yeats poems. There are more that stick in the mind and I want to type in at a later time but I want to see if you like this more low-key poem of Wilbur. Maybe if we like the same Yeats we might like the same Wilbur. Maybe not.
He's a new Englander and a grandfather. Widower now.
====================================
Fringing the woods, the stone walls, and the lanes,
old thickets everywhere have come alive:
their new leaves reaching out in fans of five
from tangles over-arched by this year's canes.
They have their flowers too, it being June,
and here or here in brambled dark and light,
are small five-petaled blooms of chalky white,
and random-clustered and as loosely strewn
as the far stars, of which we now are told
that ever faster do they bolt away,
and that a night may come in which, some say,
we shall have only blackness to behold.
I have no time for any change so great,
but I shall see the August weather spur
berries to ripen, where the flowers were:
dark berries, savage sweet, and worth the wait.
And there will come a moment to be quick!
and save some from the birds, and I shall need
two pails, old clothes in which to stain and bleed,
and a grandchild to talk with while we pick.
He's a new Englander and a grandfather. Widower now.
====================================
Fringing the woods, the stone walls, and the lanes,
old thickets everywhere have come alive:
their new leaves reaching out in fans of five
from tangles over-arched by this year's canes.
They have their flowers too, it being June,
and here or here in brambled dark and light,
are small five-petaled blooms of chalky white,
and random-clustered and as loosely strewn
as the far stars, of which we now are told
that ever faster do they bolt away,
and that a night may come in which, some say,
we shall have only blackness to behold.
I have no time for any change so great,
but I shall see the August weather spur
berries to ripen, where the flowers were:
dark berries, savage sweet, and worth the wait.
And there will come a moment to be quick!
and save some from the birds, and I shall need
two pails, old clothes in which to stain and bleed,
and a grandchild to talk with while we pick.
DevilsAdvocate
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I don’t get into poetry much, which is my fault. I like modern abstract painting, but I struggle with modern unconventional poetry. Which again, I expect is my lack of experience and knowledge. I should read more poetry.
So Robert Frost is easily likable to me. Sort of the Paul McCartney of poetry I guess.
But to me, there is something about Coleridge that is magical that just can’t be touched by anyone else. I don’t know exactly what it is. He can seem simple, but his words always seem to got in an unexpected direction. And there is tone or cadence that always seems to be right.
So Robert Frost is easily likable to me. Sort of the Paul McCartney of poetry I guess.
But to me, there is something about Coleridge that is magical that just can’t be touched by anyone else. I don’t know exactly what it is. He can seem simple, but his words always seem to got in an unexpected direction. And there is tone or cadence that always seems to be right.
DevilsAdvocate
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good one
and that a night may come in which, some say,
we shall have only blackness to behold.
I have no time for any change so great,
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I love Tang dynasty Chinese poets.
If you like the early 20th century imagists (Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, ect.), but have not read Tang dynasty poetry, you might want to check it out. Here is a great site http://www.chinese-poems.com/. Ezra Pound seemed to either take a lot of his imagism style from the Tang Dynasty poets, especially Li Bai, or at least find an earlier echo of what he was trying to accomplish in the Tang poet’s compact, dense writing.
Even though they are from the 7th century A.D., and from a culture a world away, they express an exceptional sense of humanism that is still approachable to us. The three heavy hitters are generally considered to be Li Bai, who is known for his sense of humanity, Wang Wei, who is known for his landscape imagism, and Du Fu who was a master of both the form, and subtle expression of complex emotions through physical objects.
Here is a short one by Li Bai named “Seeing off a Friend”
Green hills above the northern wall,
White water winding east of the city.
On this spot our single act of parting,
The lonely tumbleweed journeys ten thousand li.
Drifting clouds echo the traveller's thoughts,
The setting sun reflects my old friend's feelings.
You wave your hand and set off from this place,
Your horse whinnies as it leaves.
If you like the early 20th century imagists (Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, ect.), but have not read Tang dynasty poetry, you might want to check it out. Here is a great site http://www.chinese-poems.com/. Ezra Pound seemed to either take a lot of his imagism style from the Tang Dynasty poets, especially Li Bai, or at least find an earlier echo of what he was trying to accomplish in the Tang poet’s compact, dense writing.
Even though they are from the 7th century A.D., and from a culture a world away, they express an exceptional sense of humanism that is still approachable to us. The three heavy hitters are generally considered to be Li Bai, who is known for his sense of humanity, Wang Wei, who is known for his landscape imagism, and Du Fu who was a master of both the form, and subtle expression of complex emotions through physical objects.
Here is a short one by Li Bai named “Seeing off a Friend”
Green hills above the northern wall,
White water winding east of the city.
On this spot our single act of parting,
The lonely tumbleweed journeys ten thousand li.
Drifting clouds echo the traveller's thoughts,
The setting sun reflects my old friend's feelings.
You wave your hand and set off from this place,
Your horse whinnies as it leaves.
blobru
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Wonderful poem (written a year before he died -- "Presence of an External Master of Knowledge" -- full text here & brief intro). It's a continuation of an oft-quoted Tennyson poem, "Ulysses" (text here; + 7 different readings), where near the end of his life Ulysses has grown restless and resolves to set sail again in search of knowledge (lines 57-64):
'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...
And in the lines you quote from Stevens's continuation, he finds knowledge: maybe not the external proof that Tennyson's Ulysses was after; but self-knowledge, which hints at an external "right to be".
Great symbolic figure for poets, Ulysses. Defied the gods and lived to tell the tale; literary precursor of the Greek age of enlightenment to come (where man and not the gods become the source of knowledge, gain the right to ask questions, to reason, the right to be man).
Is that Pound's translation? (I think he is the best poet to have attempted it; though other translators complain he took too many liberties with the original Chinese.)
I love the poems from that era, too. Must be a great challenge to order and convey the compressed sense of Chinese characters in aphabetic English. Here's another Li Bai poem of farewell (recalling "Ulysses", from the pov of one left behind) in 14 translations. Without knowing the original, and while all are quite lovely, I think I prefer this one (frames the parting most simply, blends the sentiment with the scene, the spacing [for the reader's emotion], "blossoms curl like smoke" and the last line resonate especially: tr. John Knoepfle and Wang Shouyi):
my old friend leaves yellow crane pavilion
he is going to the west
sailing to yangzhou in march
while blossoms curl like smoke on the river
how far away the lone sail
fading into the clear blue sky
only the yangtze river remains
it is flowing at the edge of the world
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Wudang
BOFH
Li Bai translations by Dan Docherty
Farewelling a Friend at Ching Shan
Bei Kuo lies at the foot of Mount Ching
White water surrounds the eastern city
Here betwixt them we say farewell
A solitary sail on a journey of 10,000 miles
Wandering like floating clouds
The sun waning like our friendship of old
Waving you farewell
As your panting horse neighs in sadness
Also this translation seems to work well
http://www.asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1832&Itemid=352
Farewelling a Friend at Ching Shan
Bei Kuo lies at the foot of Mount Ching
White water surrounds the eastern city
Here betwixt them we say farewell
A solitary sail on a journey of 10,000 miles
Wandering like floating clouds
The sun waning like our friendship of old
Waving you farewell
As your panting horse neighs in sadness
Also this translation seems to work well
http://www.asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1832&Itemid=352
Marshall
Thinker
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And in Canto 26 of Inferno Ulysses is talking to Dante and recalls the last voyage he made with his companions. How when they had reached the pillars of hercules he spoke to them, urging adventurous discovery beyond the limits of what they knew.
"O frati", dissi "che per cento milia
perigli siete giunti a l'occidente,
a questa tanto picciola vigilia
d'i nostri sensi ch'è del rimanente
non vogliate negar l'esperïenza,
di retro al sol, del mondo sanza gente.
Considerate la vostra semenza:
fatti non foste a viver come bruti,
ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza".
Oh brothers, I said, who through a hundred thousand
dangers have arrived at the west (edge of known world),
to this so brief waking time
of our senses which remains us
let us not deny the experience
of the return path of the sun (on the other side of the earth)
and the unpeopled world (space, the final frontier)
Consider your breeding,
you were not made to live simply as animals,
but to follow virtue and knowledge.
=================
Nice Chinese echo!
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Skepticemea
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Kipling or Larkin, for me. I'm neither racist or depressed, by the way.
I’m not sure who did that translation blobru. There does seem to be two schools of thought with translations, either use the Chinese as a base for writing an English poem, or translating the Chinese language directly into English. Pound defiantly took liberty with the language, he knew no Chinese when he started, and had a lot of misunderstandings about the way the Chinese language worked (his first translations were based on notes from an American ambassador to Japan who had Japanese translations of Li Bai’s poems, but Pound had ended up with such beautiful things.
Keneth Rexroth is another of my favorite American translators of clasical Chines poems.
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Marshall
Thinker
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Do you like this? I think maybe it's one of the great poems in English:
...
...
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.
And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
blobru
Philosopher
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青山橫北郭 , ..白水遶東城 ｏ
此地一為別, 孤蓬萬里征 ｏ
浮雲遊子意, 落日故人情 ｏ
揮手自茲去, 蕭簫斑馬鳴 ｏ
There are the forty Chinese characters (8 lines, 5 each: lines 1-4 on the left, 5-8 on the right) in the original Chinese. I'm guessing line 1 2nd character, 山, is "mountain", and line 2 3rd character, 一, is "water"; is line 5 1st character, 白, "cloud", I wonder? Would be nice to have a character by character rendering to see the choices being made: notice, for example, that Docherty's translation uses "farewell" in both lines 3 & 7, yet no Chinese character in those lines repeats (and his line 7 is so compact, have to wonder what original ideas are being compacted).
Here's a comparison of a Pound translation with ones by William Carlos Williams and David Hinton. Pound's is the most natural and, as the webpage author points out, puts us in touch with the feelings of a couple (bride's pov) in a traditional Chinese arranged marriage from over a millenium ago.
Ulysses sure didn't fare too well in Dante's theology. He ends up roasting in a flame in the eighth circle of hell (2nd lowest, suite just above Judas) for having committed fraud (while in classical Greek culture he was celebrated for his guile and quick wits). Dante had him sailing off to the other side of the world, only to sink and drown in sight of Mt Purgatory (because, as every medieval xtian knew, you can't be forgiven and purged of your sins until you accept christ, and Ulysses was about a thousand years too old for that; so... into the flame for you, buddy).
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Skepticemea
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It's beautifully resigned and weary, as if he knows that life is just one occurrence after another.
My favourite Larkin might possibly be, "This Be The Verse".
They f*** you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were f****d up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
Wudang
BOFH
Which brings me to the magnificently crafted Neutral Tone by Hardy
Neutral Tones
Neutral Tones
We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod,
- They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.
Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles solved years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro -
On which lost the more by our love.
The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing….
Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
And a pond edged with grayish leaves.
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod,
- They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.
Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles solved years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro -
On which lost the more by our love.
The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing….
Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
And a pond edged with grayish leaves.
Wudang
BOFH
You're right on Mountain = Shan but you laid it out wrong. The first 2 characters on the 2nd part of line 1 are white water.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/白
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/水
blobru
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Thanks, Wudang! (figures you'd know Chinese;
do you speak it?) As you say, it's not lines 1-4 on the left etc. as I had posted; it's 1 & 2 on top, 3 & 4 next line, and so on...青山橫北郭 , ..白水遶東城 ｏ
此地一為別, 孤蓬萬里征 ｏ
浮雲遊子意, 落日故人情 ｏ
揮手自茲去, 蕭簫斑馬鳴 ｏ
Here's a character-by-character translation using wiktionary (usually first suggested meaning, leaving verb as infinitive):
blue mountain across north outer_city
white water coil_around east castle
this earth one do separate
orphan raspberry ten_thousand miles invade
float clouds wander offspring heart
fall sun ancient man feeling
direct hand self now leave
soughing flute mottled horse bird_cry
Yields an at times surprising, at times bizarre, pidgin 'poem'. The first two lines convey the setting nicely; the third might mean "here we part", only stated more formally; the fourth(!) -- yikes! (sounds like a Toho monster movie -- "orphan raspberry" [is it a falling blossom?] might refer to the sail of the departing ship as in Docherty's translation, which "invades" [sets out on a journey of] "ten_thousand" miles); the fifth seems an apt metaphor: watching the clouds wander off and float away as if they were children of his heart; and the sixth: sunset evokes ancient human feeling; the seventh might just mean "wave good-bye", again stated formally; the eighth and last must describe the whinny of the horse: the soughing flute of the spotted horse's bird_cry.
Beautiful way to end a poem (and easy to see where translators would have a job containing all that sense in brief English).
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