Poem for the day

I watched The Shipping News tonight, and the ending brought to mind this poem, "The Untold Want":

The untold want by life and land ne'er granted,
Now voyager sail thou forth to seek and find.

-- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Poem for the day: Be Drunken

One of my Western Culture professors had us watch Long Day's Journey Into Night in class one day. I watched it again the other night; this poem (spoken by a dreamy Dean Stockwell) has always stuck with me:

Be Drunken, Always. That is the point; nothing else matters. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weigh you down and crush you to the earth, be drunken continually.

Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry or with virtue, as you please. But be drunken.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace, or on the green grass in a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and find the drunkenness half or entirely gone, ask of the wind, of the wave, of the star, of the bird, of the clock, of all that flies, of all that speaks, ask what hour it is; and wind, wave, star, bird, or clock will answer you: "It is the hour to be drunken! Be Drunken, if you would not be the martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry or with virtue, as you please."

-- Charles Baudelaire

Poem from a friend

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

-- Derek Walcott

Poem for the day

An old standard by Shelley, "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.

Poem for the day

I saw this over at The Daily Dish. It worked on me. Here it is:

Scaffolding

Masons, when they start upon a building,
Are careful to test out the scaffolding;

Make sure that planks won't slip at busy points,
Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints.

And yet all this comes down when the job's done
Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.

So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me

Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall
Confident that we have built our wall.

by Seamus Heaney

One of my favorite poems

"somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond" by E.E. Cummings:

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

Sorry for the small font, it's the only way I could get the line breaks right in this narrow blog format... You can also find it here.

The persistence of objects

The problem with unpacking, especially when I get to the point I'm at--dealing with memorabilia and the other flotsam of my life--is the repeated intrusions of the past. I find a photograph (of friends at a twacked pool party) or a letter (from my sister during my first year of college) or a collection of poems (saved because they mattered so much). Unpacking a box can seem to take as many years as the echoes of its contents.

One of the poems I found--a sonnet by Petrarch--is one that I've searched for on the web twice in the last couple of years, unable to find even a mention of it. I wrote one of my best college papers about his sonnets. I was struggling with issues of my sexuality, and his yearning for his Laura illuminated my own turmoil.

So now I'll put it out there (Google, please index this one right away :-).

Here is Petrarch's Sonnet 131:

Now while the wind and earth and heavens rest,
While sleep holds beast and feathered bird in fee,
And high above a calm and waveless sea
The silent stars obey the night's behest,
I lie awake and yearning, sore distressed
Tortured by thoughts of my sweet enemy;
And though her face recalled brings death to me
'Tis only with such dreams I soothe my breast.
So from one living fountain, gushing clear,
Pour forth alike the bitter and the sweet,
And one same hand can deal me good or ill;
Whence every day I die anew of fear
And live again to learn that hope's a cheat,
So peace of heart or mind escapes me still.