After last week’s poetry post … that was partly a diatribe … I feel like focusing on poetry that is just as lyrical as possible. But, ideally, by poets I haven’t mentioned before, or not very often. Hmm.
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
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*
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
*
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*
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And ’mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw;
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
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Great choices.
I also discovered I can identify Gerald Manley Hopkins by style. I don’t know Windhover but took one look at the poem and said it’s by Hopkins. Had to look up ‘sillion’ and discovered he coined it, meaning freshly ploughed earth.
One of the poems I still have memorized from highschool was by Coleridge.
In Kologne, a town of monks and bones
and pavements fanged with murderous stones
and rags and hags and hideous wenches,
I counted two and seventy stenches –
all well-defined, and several stinks.
Ye nymphs that reign o’er sewers and sinks –
the River Rhine, it is well known,
doth wash the city of Kologne.
But tell me, nymphs, what power divine
shall henceforth wash the River Rhine?
I love how the words roll off your tongue, and the sly “and several stinks” still makes me laugh.
And speaking of modern poetry – are you defining it as a time period or a style? Because the style of ‘modern poetry’ is pretty dreadful. But there are still a lot of pretty good, traditional-style poems being written in the present and recent past.
Leilani, I was deliberately going a bit overboard with that rant. Out of the millions of people writing poetry, it did seem likely a tiny number must be striving to write really great poetry. I’m sure you’re right; it’s just that all the modern poetry I trip over is “prose with line breaks,” and I really mean, “banal, uninteresting, and trivial prose with line breaks, less meaningful than a Hallmark card.” So, if “traditional-style” poems have been written in the past fifteen years, or even past forty years, I haven’t been aware of them.
However, a couple of the comments on the previous post did note far more interesting poems that draw on literate allusion, such as “The Wife’s Disaster Manuel.” And I’m glad, I truly am! But it must feel like Sisyphus, trying to roll a stone uphill against an overwhelming flood of banality. The general refusal to say, “This poem is terrible” comes with a necessary inability to say, “And this poem is good,” so good poetry — it seems to me — is largely unrecognized.
I hope I’m overstating that as well! But OMG the flood of horrible non-poetry is what I see; the gems tossed into the flood just are not visible.
I did notice the overboard-ness. ;) Just a wee bit.
You do have to go out of your way to find modern ‘traditional’ poetry though, that’s for sure. I write poetry, or at least, I used to – I haven’t really for a while – and spent a good deal of time hunting up literary e-zines that published traditional-style poems, with style and rhythm and form and (shock!) rhymes and so forth, so I could submit mine there; as well as belonging to several poetry forums where other people were writing that kind of thing. And there’s some good stuff! Just the finding of it is tricksy.
Leilani, I sort of wish we had a “like” or “upvote” button here, because I don’t write poetry NOW, but I used to, a bit, in high school and college, and I would have been in exactly the same position — looking for anyplace at all that published lyric poetry.