POETRY IN MOTION

Today is World Poetry Day, and I'm going to use very few of my own words in my blog post. Instead I'd like to share with you three or four of my favourite poems, and although poetry analysis was part of my literature studies, I'm not going to force an analysis on you. I think poetry should basically speak for itself, making it up to each of us to interpret the meaning and the message. Some poems may not even try to deliver a message - they're written for the pure joy of juxtaposing words.

It's terribly difficult to choose among my favourite poets! There are so many that I feel close to! I will start with the American Robert Frost, an easily accessible poet at first sight, with realistic, concrete language, but with layers of reflection and afterthought.

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that, the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - 

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Big Mama underneath big trees - photo taken by Grete

Two of my all time favourite poets, that I turn to again and again, are W.B.Yeats and T.S. Eliot. Yeats, being Irish, wrote many poems about Ireland's identity and nationalism. Again - hard to chose - but this poem is packed with heavy symbolism, foreboding, loss of faith, dangers facing the modern man - and fear of war and evil times:

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Detail from the Priory at Serrabone, the Pyrenees, France

I'm such a fan of these two guys that I have photos of them in my bar - together with some of my other men!

T.S. Eliot hardly needs any presentation - he's known to most people because he's so often quoted. here are some of his most famous lines - from Little Gidding part V:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, remembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

Between two waves of the sea.

Quick now, here, now, always-

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one. 

Photos by Grete

Oh yes. Oh yes!

T.S. Eliot is of course very famous for The Waste Land, which is very long, and though it too is often quoted in parts, I think it should be read as one. If you can take half an hour sometime to do just that, I promise you a deeply moving literary moment.

I'll end today's post with another one of T.S. Eliot's poems. This made an impression on me the first time I read it! I know huge parts of it by heart. These are the first and the last verses of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

Let us go then, you and I

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells;

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question...

Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?'

Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

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.

Hugging trees again

The Priory at Serrabone, France