Poetry

[Bill Walker]

Poetry is something Ive been drawn to for a couple of years, maybe in some it comes with age....the appreciation, or maybe just the patience required for reading and introspective thought.......who knows ?

My life since aged 10 (besides my job) has been all about music, studying it, playing it, learning how to read it, write it and formulate/understand things in my head like Harmony, Counterpoint etc and I still love all aspects of it, but poetry has entered my world and Im darn glad it did.


I was reading this the other day and really admired it, its about the loss of innocence, its better if you hear it of course as you can appreciate Hopkins syntax and rolling words into one..........please posts your favourite works;

Spring and Fall: To a Young Child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow's spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

[BlueBearBoots]

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.


Xanadu, Coleridge. But that one line has stuck with me since school

 

[billymumphrey]

For some reason the following two poems have always stayed with me.

"Ozymandias"

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

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 out 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?

 

[Bill Walker]

For some reason the following two poems have always stayed with me.

"Ozymandias"

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

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 out 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?

Shelley's poem....

Ozymandias was an alternative name for the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses II. Shelley began writing his poem in 1817, soon after the announcement of the British Museum's acquisition (nicking/pilfering) of a large fragment of a statue of Ramesses II from the thirteenth-century BC

The central theme of "Ozymandias" is contrasting the inevitable decline of all leaders and of the empires they build with their pretensions to greatness............How true ;)

Not sure on the other one.....interesting though.

 

[TangerineSteve17]

I got into poetry a bit when I was younger. I'm no lord byron but I wrote this when I met my girlfriend when I was 18, suprised I still remember the words.

It is ours. Yours and mine.
Is it in our souls? Perhaps.
Is it in our hearts?
In our minds?
It does not matter where, only that it is.
And the artists can not paint it.
And the craftsmen can not make it.
And the lonesome can not dream it.
And the poets can not fake it.
It is verity in all it's truth.
and I'd die for you.

Crap style of course but it's still true. Especially the last bit.

 

[Bill Walker]

I got into poetry a bit when I was younger. I'm no lord byron but I wrote this when I met my girlfriend when I was 18, suprised I still remember the words.

It is ours. Yours and mine.
Is it in our souls? Perhaps.
Is it in our hearts?
In our minds?
It does not matter where, only that it is.
And the artists can not paint it.
And the craftsmen can not make it.
And the lonesome can not dream it.
And the poets can not fake it.
It is verity in all it's truth.
and I'd die for you.

Crap style of course but it's still true. Especially the last bit.

Very nice that mate..

 

[BlueBearBoots]

I got into poetry a bit when I was younger. I'm no lord byron but I wrote this when I met my girlfriend when I was 18, suprised I still remember the words.

It is ours. Yours and mine.
Is it in our souls? Perhaps.
Is it in our hearts?
In our minds?
It does not matter where, only that it is.
And the artists can not paint it.
And the craftsmen can not make it.
And the lonesome can not dream it.
And the poets can not fake it.
It is verity in all it's truth.
and I'd die for you.

Crap style of course but it's still true. Especially the last bit.

lovely, stick to poetry rather than jokes :)

 

[Citizen of Legoland]

Not a fan of romantic poetry, but did enjoy (if enjoy is the word) the WW1 poets when I was at school - very emotional stuff.

My favourite style though is comedy but I can only remember two ...

The boy stood on the burning deck,
His leg was all a-quiver,
He gave a cough,
His leg fell off,
And floated down the river.

or


I must go down to the sea again,
To the lonely sea and the sky,
I left my shoes and socks there,
I wonder if they're dry.

 

[Bill Walker]

An Australian Poet from Canberra. This is a bit of "Pozieres cemetery (WW1 France)" Very moving!

Rest on lads! Like Caesar's men
these knew that all wars worth the game
are won in lousy weather.

Known unto God
their name liveth forever - Johnson, Hagan,
Brown-Jones, Brentley, Symons, Bright
and Worth. To X-ray eyes
they pack in oddly. Fingers a clinking heap
below wry ribs; the haunch-bones
disconnected; curve of the buttock, beef
of the biceps, jowl-slack gone. Scarce weeping-room
between one's toe-bones and the next row's crowns.

- -

In France's tranquil evening light the grey phantoms rise
-a thrush-like clink of plate and mug, a laugh, a whistle;
nasal orders start the toil. Great-coated bodies tumbling
others into holes. The coat that kept the mammal warmth within
is snatched back as they fall, lie crumpled like shot grouse.

- Our fathers: did they dream as yabbying boys on
their farms in Deniliquin, Horsham, Scotshead, Yass,
of so deep a subsoil waiting for their bones?
So many lads they planted in those weeks -
if men could turn to hazels, as in myth,
these fields would copse impenetrable with boughs
that sob and shed black tears on breaking.

Instead two old men hobble down the rows
dreaming of young men whom they knew; while
honour and folly hold the ground
under the gently piddling skies of France.



Pozières is a village in northern France that became a major World War 1 battlefield. With trenches destroyed, soldiers fought from shell-holes. The Australians suffered terrible casualties to take the village, which by then did not exist.

 

[The Flash]

"Telly" - By The Flash

Here I sit, watching TV,
I like it,
It likes me.