Today...
*Great Poetry Reading Day
*Kiss your mate day
Since my mate is unavailable.. I suppose I will read some poetry.
But to give this blog a little substance, I will leave any readers with a couple great poems (a couple of which I only read this year...)
Because I Could Not Stop for Death- Emily Dickinson
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.
We passed the school, where children strove
At recess, in the ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.
Or rather, he passed us;
The dews grew quivering and chill,
For only gossamer my gown,My tippet only tulle.*
We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.
Since then 'tis centuries, and yet each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.
* How much do you love the diction here?
** Oh, the irony. Love it.
Dover Beach- Matthew Arnold
*Top 5 in my favorites, for about 6 or 7 years now.
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Agaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.*
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,**
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
* Gorgeous imagery.. no? I adore the description paralleling the ocean.
** How I feel about the future at the moment. "So various, so beautiful, so new."
* Awwwww!
Okay that's enough for now,
I do have another for someone to look up themselves.. "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning". I have a reason I'm not posting this one, but I cant say because the person I'm saving this for might read it! It has a great message, one that has spoken to me more loudly than any other poem I've read in years.
All for now,
Aimee OC
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.
We passed the school, where children strove
At recess, in the ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.
Or rather, he passed us;
The dews grew quivering and chill,
For only gossamer my gown,My tippet only tulle.*
We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.
Since then 'tis centuries, and yet each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.
* How much do you love the diction here?
** Oh, the irony. Love it.
Dover Beach- Matthew Arnold
*Top 5 in my favorites, for about 6 or 7 years now.
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Agaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.*
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,**
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
* Gorgeous imagery.. no? I adore the description paralleling the ocean.
** How I feel about the future at the moment. "So various, so beautiful, so new."
- Sonnet 18- Will Shakespeare
- Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
- Thou art more lovely and more temperate:*
- Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
- And summer's lease hath all too short a date,
- Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
- And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
- And every fair from fair sometime declines,
- By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed.
- But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
- Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
- Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
- When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st.
-
- So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
- So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
* One of the best one-liners I've ever heard.** Heart melting!
Nothing Gold Can Stay- Robert Frost* A favorite since grade 8
Nature's first green is goldHer hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
* ooh, personification!** ooh, allusion!
Butterfly- Unknown author* Just a cute rhyming one, I remembered it because of a poetry project I did in grade 6. Ha!
Today I saw a butterfly,
as it floated in the air;
Its wings were spread in splendor,
Unaware that I was there.
It was such a thing of beauty,
It was a sight to see;
It was the perfect masterpiece,
Full of grace and majesty.
I found myself thinking,
to what can this compare?
And then, of course, I thought of you,
And I wished that you were there.*
God sure was extra careful,
When He formed and fashioned you;
You too, became a masterpiece,
Yet God is still not through.
He's daily making changes,
that other folks can't see;
You're already true perfection,
At least you are to me.
* Awwwww!
Okay that's enough for now,
I do have another for someone to look up themselves.. "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning". I have a reason I'm not posting this one, but I cant say because the person I'm saving this for might read it! It has a great message, one that has spoken to me more loudly than any other poem I've read in years.
All for now,
Aimee OC
