More me poetry

This week I came across a poem I wrote a while back in the spur of the moment and thought that it's time to share it. It's short and sweet (I hope rather like me!) and doesn't' have a particularly interesting title, but I like to think it follows the vein of my favourite country-focused poems. I have just visited Cornwall and so it's been on my mind a lot.

Enjoy!

Rainy walk with a loved one

It's raining, muddied ground, chilly air

But we walk

Bitter cold of winter stinging hands

But we walk

Wind so strong you need one another's support

But we walk

Because whenever we walk this path, this track, this field,

We smile as if it were sunny

Like the last time.

Like the first time.

Edible Poetry

Today I baked three batches of yummy cooked goods, and feel inspired to cover a foody poem. And the one I have found has lines that strangely link in with last week's poem, noting how 'good night' is not always a pleasant notion. Also, I love the coincidence of the poet's name: Mary Lamb.

Breakfast

A dinner party, coffee, tea,
Sandwich, or supper, all may be
In their way pleasant. But to me
Not one of these deserves the praise
That welcomer of new-born days,
A breakfast, merits; ever giving
Cheerful notice we are living
Another day refreshed by sleep,
When its festival we keep.
Now although I would not slight
Those kindly words we use ‘Good night',
Yet parting words are words of sorrow,
And may not vie with sweet ‘Good Morrow',
With which again our friends we greet,
When in the breakfast-room we meet,
At the social table round,
Listening to the lively sound
Of those notes which never tire,
Of urn, or kettle on the fire.
Sleepy Robert never hears
Or urn, or kettle; he appears
When all have finished, one by one
Dropping off, and breakfast done.
Yet has he too his own pleasure,
His breakfast hour's his hour of leisure;
And, left alone, he reads or muses,
Or else in idle mood he uses
To sit and watch the venturous fly,
Where the sugar's piled high,
Clambering o'er the lumps so white,
Rocky cliffs of sweet delight.

The main image in this poem is that breakfast is a rejuvenator, bringing a new beginning with each new day. The modifier 'new-born' is strongly emotive, connoting the bare purity which babies have and adults lack. Power is given to 'breakfast', as it is named 'the welcomer', and is personified to '[merit]' praise, again evoking the image of the benign child.

I perceived a sad yet relieved note in the section, 'we are living/ Another day'. It is broken up by enjambment and so I felt the slight pause imitated a sigh of relief that 'another day' has been given to the narrator. Ergo, I researched the poet's life and found she suffered with mental illness, which caused her to kill her mother, leading her to confinement. So the importance of breakfast is heightened in this case, as perhaps the thought of suicide, destitution or imprisonment was looming, and eating at leisure became a sign of safety for another few hours at least.

'Parting words are words of sorrow'. As I have mentioned, this chimes with Shelley's words a few decades before. The contrast of night and morning is highlighted with the rhyme to 'morrow'. This was a time of polite company, where one would stay with friends far longer than today, and so again the feeling of security is reinforced through the meeting in the 'breakfast-room'.

Even the servants ('Sleepy Robert') were given 'leisure' at breakfast. Then we drop further down the social scale to the 'fly', who is made akin to humans in the way that it enjoys breakfast in its own way, with a metaphorical 'cliff' symbolising human love of nature at the time also. Perhaps we are all, like animals, slaves to our appetites, but why not enjoy that fact as well as one can?

P.B.S: Poems by Shelley

Shelley's is another life cut short, at the age of 29. And yet another who was not fully appreciated in his time either. Some say he drowned himself, others that it was an accident in a storm. Either way, it is incredible how much work he managed to put out into the world in such a short time.

I often come to research a poet and find that I have read one of their works before. This time, I find it is Shelley's poem 'Ozymandias', which I rather enjoyed when I came across it at GCSE level. The poem I have chosen, however, has a different focus from that of ancient kingdoms to the very present, written perhaps about one of his two wives, or even many of his female companions, with whom he often had platonic relations.


Good Night

Good-night? ah! no; the hour is ill
Which severs those it should unite;
Let us remain together still,
Then it will be good night.

How can I call the lone night good,
Though thy sweet wishes wing its flight?
Be it not said, thought, understood --
Then it will be -- good night.

To hearts which near each other move
From evening close to morning light,
The night is good; because, my love,
They never say good-night.                         

This poem revolves around a rather solemn pun; that the 'good' in 'good-night' might be an elliptical phrase, wishing someone well on departure, but can be received by that someone bitterly due to the very fact of the departure.

The poem begins as if a mental musing after being wished a 'good-night'. The narrator questions himself as to how the speaker could have truly wished this if they loved him as equally as he loves them. For surely, he thinks, they would have stayed 'unite[d]' in order for all to be happy and good.

The questioning continues in the second stanza, with less violent and angry a temperament as in the first ('severs'). He admits that his lover's use of the 'good night' phrase is a 'sweet' one, as if to calm himself in an afterthought through right branching. He follows his question with an imperative prayer, augmented from the hortatory 'let us', to relay his increasing passion on the subject. The repetition of 'be' emphasises his focus on the state of separate existence of the two lovers, of what is and is not.

He then focuses on the distance itself, with the spatial adjectives 'near' and 'close' juxtaposed line by line. The hypallage of the the latter depicts the evening as a time to be spent intimately with a companion, meaning that separation should occur rather in the day, when 'light' comes. The rhyme with 'light' and 'night' following shortly links the two part of the day, however, suggesting that he wishes the night to be spent as they do the days. It almost appears paradoxical, then, that when the night is good, good-night is 'never' said. But perhaps the implication is that words are not needed when the physical will suffice during the night time.

Kinky Catullus

Now we can return to my random weekly posts. As I received a book of the Roman poet Catullus' poems when leaving school, I thought it would be worth while looking at one of them (in translation of course!).

Catullus' moods vary greatly, from lovelorn to erotic. I thought the latter might be fun to attempt for once!

So, here we have:

Poem 69

Wonder not, Rufus, why none of the opposite sex
wishes to place her dainty thighs beneath you,
not even if you undermine her virtue with gifts of choice
silk or the enticement of a pellucid gem.
You are being hurt by an ugly rumour which asserts
that beneath your armpits dwells a ferocious goat.
This they fear, and no wonder; for it's a right rank
beast that no pretty girl will go to bed with.
So either get rid of this painful affront to the nostrils
or cease to wonder why the ladies flee.

This is a invective poem, written to a man who once was Catullus' friend, until perhaps he slept with Catullus' lover. He wrote many poems to or about people he knows, attacking their personalities and habits in order to make the reader laugh, as they perhaps recognise the common traits in others they know.

Here the problem is that Rufus supposedly has personal odour issues. The argument that Rufus has stolen Catullus' lover, Clodia, is supported by this poem, as the effect of his smell is that he fails to charm the ladies, an insult which would have been pertinent in this case.

Thus, Catullus opposes the 'dainty' women, evoking an image of purity and cleanliness, including in their appearance and smell, with his 'rank' manner. Even labelling the rumour as 'ugly' implies Rufus himself suits it.

The choice of the goat for the smelly animal is an interesting one, because goats are often associated with sexual excess, as donkeys and apes are. So Catullus makes the matter even worse for Rufus, as not only is he unable to obtain the women for his pleasures, but he is in a state of perpetual unfulfilled desire.

While this poem may seem trivial, others about Catullus bemoan their lost friendship in a much more sincere manner, and his love poems to Lesbia or even his lamentations of his brothers' death portray a much more forlorn side to the poet. Well worth a read.

Edward Thomas

So, we have reached the final poet of the Dymock group. This one apparently was the last to actually start writing poetry, in 1914, partly due to the war (which eventually led him to his death) and due to his discussions with Frost, his now close friend. Thus, I have chosen a poem which can be read either with or without the war context, as it is called,

LIBERTY
The last light has gone out of the world, except
This moonlight lying on the grass like frost
Beyond the brink of the tall elm's shadow.
It is as if everything else had slept
Many an age, unforgotten and lost --
The men that were, the things done, long ago,
All I have thought; and but the moon and I
Live yet and here stand idle over a grave
Where all is buried. Both have liberty
To dream what we could do if we were free
To do some thing we had desired long,
The moon and I. There's none less free than who
Does nothing and has nothing else to do,
Being free only for what is not to his mind,
And nothing is to his mind. If every hour
Like this one passing that I have spent among
The wiser others when I have forgot
To wonder whether I was free or not,
Were piled before me, and not lost behind,
And I could take and carry them away
I should be rich; or if I had the power
To wipe out every one and not again
Regret, I should be rich to be so poor.
And yet I still am half in love with pain,
With what is imperfect, with both tears and mirth,
With things that have an end, with life and earth,
And this moon that leaves me dark within the door.

It is rather an eerie thought, to imagine oneself as the only person on the planet, or for time to have stopped and only you left in motion. Thus, Thomas takes the warmth from the envisioned place in the poem, by providing the cold moonlight over the sun, and likening it to 'frost'. I am reading Tess of the D'Urbervilles at the minute, and this scene reminds me of when Tess wishes to become one with the forest and seclude herself from human relations, at liberty to have no responsibility in the world.

The 'things done long ago' interest me. It is hard to comprehend, sometimes, that past ages have really occurred, that regimes and empires have really fallen, making one feel rather insignificant, a complete contrast to the absolute significance of being the only person alive.

Yet the narrator is not entirely alone, as the moon is personified as a companion, watching on as he contemplates life, linking to the stationary trees we covered before; neither can move to enact their desires, which makes man lucky. The fact that we can perceive the difference between good and bad, depicted in the final four lines, adds to our fortune, whether we always remember that in the bad times or not.