The Poem You Like the Most Yet It Drives You to Despair

[Todd]

There are some poems I read where I think wtf am I doing writing poetry. The poem is so good and there's so much in it that I feel like I'm just playing games with this writing thing. Now I'm still going to write, but I wondered which poems do you like that at the same time drive you to despair (you connect to the poem like Salieri connected to Mozart and his music in Amadeus)...

Here's mine:

THE SEASONLESS by James Wright

When snows begin to fill the park,
It is not hard to keep the eyes
Secure against the flickering dark,
Aware of summer ghosts that rise.
The blistered trellis seems to move
The memory toward root and rose,
The empty fountain fills the air
With spray that spangled women’s hair;
And men who walk this park in love
May bide the time of falling snows.

The trees recall their greatness now;
they were not always vague and bowed
With loads that build the slender bough
Till branches bear a tasteless fruit.
A month ago they rose and bore
Fleshes of berry, leaf, and shade:
How painlessly a man recalls
The stain of green on crooked walls,
The summer never known before,
The garden heaped to bloom and fade.

Beyond the holly bush and path
The city lies to meet the night
And also there the quiet earth
Relies upon the lost delight
To rise again and fill the dark
With waterfalls and swallows sound.
Beyond the city’s lazy fume,
The sea repeats the fall of spume,
And gulls remember cries they made
When lovers fed them off the ground.

But lonely underneath a heap
Of overcoat and crusted ice,
A man goes by, and looks for sleep.
The spring of everlastingness.
Nothing about his face revives
A longing to evade the cold.
The night returns to keep him old,
And why should he, the lost and lulled,
Pray for the night of vanished lives,
The day of girls blown green and gold?

[heslopian]

Wow. That was an incredible poem Todd. I don't think I've heard of the poet before.

A Shooting Incident by Stevie Smith (1902 - 1971)

Man does not live by bread alone
Nor die alone for lack of it
For he may be well fed, and die,
Well housed, well married, still may die.
There is a hunger of the heart
Will slay him, though each day he feast
On bread and wine, and go well dresst,
And such a one was Colonel Yeast.
He was a noble simple man
But all within his heart was black
And as he walked the way along
He cried, alas alack,
And cried and sighed and sighed and cried,
I am a long delayéd suicide.
It was as though a fiend had swung
Him by the toe when he was young
And swung him so
And to and fro
And swore he said he should be most oppressed
When most against a loving friend he pressed.
And how he walks with gun and roar -
He is a colonel in the Indian Army -
Sporting upon a tiger's spoor
And with him goes his faithful escort, Harmi.
Oh Harmi dear I love the sun
And all the crooked jungle path
But most the water holes I love
with creatures peering from above.
Why do I pick the wilder animal?
It is because he is not fanciful.
I had a dog in England once,
I love him well, his name was Bunce,
And now I think I see him here,
And as I think, the scene grows clear,
An English scene. The colonel sighed.
The misty fells lay open wide
Upon his loving thought,
And dog Bunce ran again to start
The timid hare, and play his part
As he was taught.
Wild creature's eyes, the colonel said,
Are innocent and fathomless,
And when I look at them I see
That they are not aware of me,
And oh I find and oh I bless
A comfort in this emptiness.
They only see me when they want
To pounce upon me in the hunt.
But in the tame variety
There couches an anxiety
As if they yearned, yet knew not what
They yearned for, nor they yearned for not.
And so my dog would look at me
And it was pitiful to see
Such love and such dependency.
The human heart is not at ease
With animals that look like these.
The colonel paused and wiped his brow,
He felt his words were too dramatic
But as he knew no English they
Were lost upon the Asiatic.
Ah me, the bitter bitter love,
Why must it be so bitter,
Or animal, or man, or tree -
Would not no love be better?
As still in recollection bound
The Colonel gazed upon the ground
It seemed his senses in a swound
Had left him quite,
Then turning to his gun again
And stamping on his heavy pain,
He loaded up and in the sight
Beheld a tiger stepping bright.
He steps so lightly to his death,
The colonel shot him through the teeth.
I had a dream I beat dear Bunce,
He said, with many a weal
Until he lay down at my feet
All red from toe to heel
Then in my dream I rose and fled,
Crying, The dog, the dog is dead.
Now Harmi, mark, when daylight came,
My night and dream to shatter through
My dog came and so looked at me
I said, Why, Bunce, what's the matter with you?
Oh day and night, oh Holy Dove,
We slay the thing we most do love,
And it is pitiful to see
Our friends live but in memory.
But they are safe in memory
And are they not? the colonel said,
He turned and looked at Harmi so
That Harmi dropped his gun and fled.
When he came back again he found
The colonel dying of a wound,
And crying close upon the ground:
Oh bright bright blood that flows so bright
Within the wound myself did make
Oh jungle grass that drinks it up
And with my life thy thirst doth slake
Why has my hand this hour postponed
That sees me now with dust conjoined?
The Indian's tears fell like a blot
Upon the colonel's face
And carefully before he left
He put his hands in place.
Later upon his tomb, now grave now gay,
He daily danced to keep the fiends away.

[billy]

seriously and you'll laugh at me i'm sure.
the below poem is for me the epitome of a love poem

She Walks In Beauty By George Gordon Byron. (1788 – 1824).

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meets in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellow’d to that tender light
Which Heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair’d the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress
Or softly lightens o’er her face,
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek and o’er that brow
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent;
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent.

[heslopian]

I wouldn't dream of laughing at you We're not your burly drinking buddies Bilbo, you don't have to be ashamed

[billy]

twat...i'm not ashamed, i just wouldn't think others would think of it as a poem the thread descripes. i would love to write love poems as good as this

[heslopian]

It is a great poem. One of the few Victorian love poems which doesn't make me retch.

[Leanne]

I know that feeling well, Billy -- and strangely enough, it's mostly Byron's poetry that does it to me. Bastard.

Todd's and Jack's choices have now gone onto my favourites list too. "Till branches bear a tasteless fruit" -- damn!

I have two:

A Parcel of Rogues -- Robert Burns

Fareweel to a' our Scottish fame,
Fareweel our ancient glory;
Fareweel ev'n to the Scottish name,
Sae famed in martial story!
Now Sark rins over Solway sands,
And Tweed rins to the ocean,
To mark where England's province stands—
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!

What force or guile could not subdue
Thro' many warlike ages,
Is wrought now by a coward few,
For hireling traitor's wages.
The English steel we could disdain,
Secure in valour's station;
But English gold has been our bane—
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!

O, would or I had seen the day
That treason thus could sell us,
My auld grey head had lien in clay
Wi' Bruce and loyal Wallace!
But pith and power, till my last hour,
I'll mak this declaration:
We're bought and sold for English gold—
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!


The Last Parade -- A B Paterson

With never a sound of trumpet,
With never a flag displayed,
The last of the old campaigners
Lined up for the last parade.

Weary they were and battered,
Shoeless, and knocked about;
From under their ragged forelocks
Their hungry eyes looked out.

And they watched as the old commander
Read out, to the cheering men,
The Nation's thanks and the orders
To carry them home again.

And the last of the old campaigners,
Sinewy, lean, and spare —
He spoke for his hungry comrades:
'Have we not done our share?

'Starving and tired and thirsty
We limped on the blazing plain;
And after a long night's picket
You saddled us up again.

'We froze on the wind-swept kopjes
When the frost lay snowy-white.
Never a halt in the daytime,
Never a rest at night!

'We knew when the rifles rattled
From the hillside bare and brown,
And over our weary shoulders
We felt warm blood run down,

'As we turned for the stretching gallop,
Crushed to the earth with weight;
But we carried our riders through it —
Carried them p'raps too late.

'Steel! We were steel to stand it —
We that have lasted through,
We that are old campaigners
Pitiful, poor, and few.

'Over the sea you brought us,
Over the leagues of foam:
Now we have served you fairly
Will you not take us home?

'Home to the Hunter River,
To the flats where the lucerne grows;
Home where the Murrumbidgee
Runs white with the melted snows.

'This is a small thing surely!
Will not you give command
That the last of the old campaigners
Go back to their native land?'

They looked at the grim commander,
But never a sign he made.
'Dismiss!' and the old campaigners
Moved off from their last parade.

[Todd]

Jack,

That's a great poem! I've never read something that long that so fully captured my interest.
So many good lines that reveal the character of the Colonel:

Oh Harmi dear I love the sun
And all the crooked jungle path

This is when you know for certain it's going to go seriously wrong.

Thanks for sharing it.

---

Billy,

On some level I know we all give you crap, but yeah wanting to write love poems like Byron I fully get that. I came into poetry late, but I remember when I first read this poem. The first line alone damn.

---

Sometimes as a reader of largely free verse (barring my choice above), I feel I miss out on a lot. I enjoyed both of those Leanne...Burns makes the difficult seem effortless. I loved:

The English steel we could disdain,
Secure in valour's station;
But English gold has been our bane—
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!


And Paterson gave a narrative where you actually felt empathy for these campaigners.

If you read their biographies they'd probably both piss me off (Oh, yeah that was a first draft and I was drunk...Hey I was drunk too...Shut up Byron! You're always drunk.)

[Leanne]

The thing that hurts me most is the great poet's ability to be elegantly simple and in doing so, to capture the heart of an entire nation. What a wonderful thing, to be beloved for the way your words build cultural identity, even centuries after they're written.