Category: Poems I Love

First published in my private blog the summer of 2009 following a lovely trip to Niagara Falls.  The picture taken is one of several such impossibly perfect shots.

The Gyres
–William Butler Yeats

The gyres! the gyres! Old Rocky Face, look forth;
Things thought too long can be no longer thought,
For beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth,
And ancient lineaments are blotted out.
Irrational streams of blood are staining earth;
Empedocles has thrown all things about;
Hector is dead and there’s a light in Troy;
We that look on but laugh in tragic joy.
What matter though numb nightmare ride on top,
And blood and mire the sensitive body stain?
What matter? Heave no sigh, let no tear drop,
A-greater, a more gracious time has gone;
For painted forms or boxes of make-up
In ancient tombs I sighed, but not again;
What matter? Out of cavern comes a voice,
And all it knows is that one word “Rejoice!’
Conduct and work grow coarse, and coarse the soul,
What matter? Those that Rocky Face holds dear,
Lovers of horses and of women, shall,
From marble of a broken sepulchre,
Or dark betwixt the polecat and the owl,
Or any rich, dark nothing disinter
The workman, noble and saint, and all things run
On that unfashionable gyre again.

First published in my private blog in the spring of 2009.  Note on picture:  close-up of a magnolia tree preparing to burst forth in bloom.

Irreparableness
–Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I have been in the meadows all the day
And gathered there the nosegay that you see
Singing within myself as bird or bee
When such do field-work on a morn of May.
But, now I look upon my flowers, decay
Has met them in my hands more fatally
Because more warmly clasped,–and sobs are free
To come instead of songs. What do you say,
Sweet counsellors, dear friends ? that I should go
Back straightway to the fields and gather more ?
Another, sooth, may do it, but not I !
My heart is very tired, my strength is low,
My hands are full of blossoms plucked before,
Held dead within them till myself shall die.

First published in my private blog the summer of 2009.  Note on picture:  A stunning piece of artwork on display at the 2009 Ann Arbor Summer Art Festival.  I didn’t buy it, but asked the artist if I might take a picture of it to which the answer, of course, was a yes!

The Indian to His Love
-William Butler Yeats

The island dreams under the dawn
And great boughs drop tranquillity;
The peahens dance on a smooth lawn,
A parrot sways upon a tree,
Raging at his own image in the enamelled sea.
Here we will moor our lonely ship
And wander ever with woven hands,
Murmuring softly lip to lip,
Along the grass, along the sands,
Murmuring how far away are the unquiet lands:
How we alone of mortals are
Hid under quiet boughs apart,
While our love grows an Indian star,
A meteor of the burning heart,
One with the tide that gleams, the wings that gleam
and dart,
The heavy boughs, the burnished dove
That moans and sighs a hundred days:
How when we die our shades will rove,
When eve has hushed the feathered ways,
With vapoury footsole by the water’s drowsy blaze.

First published in my private blog on Friday, August 29, 2008

Byzantium is this mythical place in Yeats’ poems that is like a crossroads of the mortal and the immortal; the old and the young; the now and the there.  I was reminded of this recently, and looked up the poem in its entirety.  What a beautiful poem it is!  The imagery of sailing to this mythical place on the wings of youth and strength are vivid, but so also is the concession of youth and even nature itself being temporal and transient. 

But true immortality rests with the soul.  And speaking of youth – and the notion of invincibility and vanity that sometimes go with it – here are some images from last month.  I’m sailing to Byzantium via Vellore in the great state of Tamilnadu in the southern part of India.  The magnolia tree in the background, I believe, is sure to outlast me!

Sailing to Byzantium

 

W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)

 

THAT is no country for old men. The young

In one another’s arms, birds in the trees

– Those dying generations – at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

 

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

 

O sages standing in God’s holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

 

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

I Died For Beauty

—Emily Dickinson 

I died for beauty, but was scarce

Adjusted in the tomb,

When one who died for truth was lain

In an adjoining room. 

He questioned softly why I failed?

"For beauty," I replied.

"And I for truth – the two are one;

We brethren are," he said. 

And so, as kinsmen met a-night,

We talked between the rooms,

Until the moss had reached our lips,

And covered up our names. 

I wonder if these lines were inspired by yet another poem by one of the great English Romantic poets, John Keats.  Keats (who lived to be all of twenty-five years old) writes in Ode on a Grecian Urn:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty, –that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Are Beauty and Truth one and the same?  Must they be the ultimate pursuit of every human being?  Is it is a faulty line of thought that suggests that one ought to be an artist to pursue these?  If you've found one have you then also found the other?  I've heard that in mathematics, two things are proved to be equal if the difference of them can be proved to be arbitrarily small.  Would this principle then apply to these two abstract concepts?  Are these then to be considered as absolutes or are they dynamic?  

May you find your own path in weighing the two in order to come to your own reality about how the two size up for you. 

Note on picture:  This is a picture that was part of an exhibit on the children of Rwanda.  I see both Truth and Beauty in one.