the main poem you keep comin' back to

  • TillieNeuen [she/her]
    ·
    1 year ago

    I couldn't name a main favorite, but there are some lines that stick with me. Like:

    "You shall love your crooked neighbor/With your crooked heart." This line has been important to me for a long time.

    As I Walked out One Evening by W.H. Auden

    As I walked out one evening,
    Walking down Bristol Street,
    The crowds upon the pavement
    Were fields of harvest wheat.

    And down by the brimming river
    I heard a lover sing
    Under an arch of the railway:
    ‘Love has no ending.

    ‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
    Till China and Africa meet,
    And the river jumps over the mountain
    And the salmon sing in the street,

    ‘I’ll love you till the ocean
    Is folded and hung up to dry
    And the seven stars go squawking
    Like geese about the sky.

    ‘The years shall run like rabbits,
    For in my arms I hold
    The Flower of the Ages,
    And the first love of the world.’

    But all the clocks in the city
    Began to whirr and chime:
    ‘O let not Time deceive you,
    You cannot conquer Time.

    ‘In the burrows of the Nightmare
    Where Justice naked is,
    Time watches from the shadow
    And coughs when you would kiss.

    ‘In headaches and in worry
    Vaguely life leaks away,
    And Time will have his fancy
    To-morrow or to-day.

    ‘Into many a green valley
    Drifts the appalling snow;
    Time breaks the threaded dances
    And the diver’s brilliant bow.

    ‘O plunge your hands in water,
    Plunge them in up to the wrist;
    Stare, stare in the basin
    And wonder what you’ve missed.

    ‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
    The desert sighs in the bed,
    And the crack in the tea-cup opens
    A lane to the land of the dead.

    ‘Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
    And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
    And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
    And Jill goes down on her back.

    ‘O look, look in the mirror,
    O look in your distress:
    Life remains a blessing
    Although you cannot bless.

    ‘O stand, stand at the window
    As the tears scald and start;
    You shall love your crooked neighbour
    With your crooked heart.’

    It was late, late in the evening,
    The lovers they were gone;
    The clocks had ceased their chiming,
    And the deep river ran on.

    Something about "Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn" just sounds perfect to me. That line is burned in my memory for some reason. Also the rest of the poem makes me think of people with Roman statuary as their profile pictures.

    Miniver Cheevy by Edwin Arlington Robinson

    Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
    Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
    He wept that he was ever born,
    And he had reasons.

    Miniver loved the days of old
    When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
    The vision of a warrior bold
    Would set him dancing.

    Miniver sighed for what was not,
    And dreamed, and rested from his labors;
    He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
    And Priam’s neighbors.

    Miniver mourned the ripe renown
    That made so many a name so fragrant;
    He mourned Romance, now on the town,
    And Art, a vagrant.

    Miniver loved the Medici,
    Albeit he had never seen one;
    He would have sinned incessantly
    Could he have been one.

    Miniver cursed the commonplace
    And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
    He missed the mediæval grace
    Of iron clothing.

    Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
    But sore annoyed was he without it;
    Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
    And thought about it.

    Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
    Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
    Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
    And kept on drinking.

    "My forebears forebore this way, in company." This is a poem that I keep coming back to, year after year. (CW: suicide)

    Chosen Blindness by Mary Karr

    I was blind to flowers for one thing.
    Picture a meadow stitched with dandelion,
    those seed stalks whose tall white heads

    poke up like ancestral ghosts
    (pale auroras of wisdom), but profligate,
    the fluff shot through with brown seeds

    that others might follow. I never saw it,
    just fixed on my own death, sat on the sofa
    ingesting poison, looked out

    at the rectangular field as if it were a postcard
    from some foreign land, useless, already cancelled.
    I sucked streams of gray smoke down my lungs

    to blacken me deeper. The embroidery sampler I did in x’s
    read BAD NEWS. The butterless popcorn I ate
    was a bowl full of spiders. Skinny?

    My skeleton forced itself forward. No word
    of praise passed my lips though a million breaths
    moved through me. That’s what human bodies do, keep

    breathing, no matter the venom their brains manufacture.

    Now I go to church. Who’d think it?
    We stand in rows, like graves, I’d once have thought,
    like herd beasts lined up for slaughter. Now I notice

    our bodies bend in the same places. We form the same angles.
    To sing together, we have to breathe in unison,
    draw the same air into the dark meat of our bodies

    as if it actually were spiritu sancti and ourselves
    that spirit incarnate. Every now and then,
    a toddler bolts up the main aisle, pursued

    by a lumbering adult. Babies list
    in sloping arms and toothless grin.
    The old lean on canes

    and chrome walkers set down slow. People
    pause to let them pass. Always a list of dead is read,
    always the sick are mentioned so your own aches

    seem aggressively minor. My forebears
    forbore this way, in company. Bread fed them,
    and they had to practice hope to keep

    plowing up the Dust Bowl’s
    starved earth in rows, year
    after fruitless year, till the cotton came back.

    At the end of my drinking,
    I coiled a garden hose in the back of my station wagon
    and set off driving to a town

    called Marblehead to breathe in the cool
    exhaust and thus stop thoughts from streaming
    through my mind like bad current.

    I’d left my infant son a note, glowing green
    on my computer screen, how he’d be
    better off. Now a column of sun

    through high windows shines
    on his blonde head. His hand
    holds half our hymnal, index finger

    underlining each word as we struggle
    to match up our voices, hold the beat,
    find the pattern emerging, feel the light

    that glows in our chests, keep it going.

    Somebody already mentioned "Dulce et Decorum Est," which is also one that stuck with me. "The Tyger" by William Blake also has some imagery that's burned in my memory. I think I have Bill Waterson to thank for my first introduction to that one. I've already given an Auden example, but "The Shield of Achilles" is another one by him that I love. Emily Dickinson is also a favorite, and really I could just keep listing so I'll stop now.

    Most hated poetry: Edmund Spencer was a war criminal whose cruelty is still remembered, but also he can never be forgiven for writing The Faerie Queene and I'm glad he died before he could finish all 12 books.

    • mazdak
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Removed by mod

      • TillieNeuen [she/her]
        ·
        1 year ago

        I like Elizabethan poetry too, but the faerie queene is a slog. It's been over a decade since I read it, so the details are fuzzy. I remember being bored out of my skull and becoming annoyed by the entire style of the thing--it is just. so. long. This is just my opinion though, so don't let me stop you. There are people who spend their careers studying it, so my opinion can't be universal. If you're interested, you should definitely give it a shot and see if you like it. It's not like you have to keep going if don't want to. Dip a toe in and see how it goes. There's a lot of symbolism and references in the piece, so you may want to find a good reference companion, or a very annotated edition. Or since you're reading for pleasure and not for a class, that may not matter anyway. If you do end up reading it, let me know what you think.