Birds and poetry (1 Viewer)

[Tyke]

Great poems Merlin & Andrew.
This is on thread at the end:-

GUESTLING WOOD

The woodland floor a firmament,
A galaxy of stars it seems:
Snow in april-angels staring-
Wood anemones serene.

Through the green sward thrusting fiercely,
Rank on rank and tier on tier;
Bluebell shafts obey the drum beat:
A subterranean army's spears.

Celandine's last lonely children
Cling in hollows; shy and few:
First of woodland's springtime colours,
Yellow, then the white and blue.

Bronze barked birches flash in sunlit
Clearings-knights! The coppiced tents
Of sweet chestnut-hazel lances-
Medieval tournament.

The ancient oak surveys it's valley:
Years have passed since first he faced
The little church across the river;
Lichened guardians of this place.

Blackcap pours lush liquid notes
Across the green splashed sussex wood:
Hunched old bullfinch stops and wheezes
"Spring again- ah that is good".

______________________
Colin

 

[Bascar]

'Guestling Wood' is a lovely poem, Colin, wonderfully descriptive and atmospheric. Thank you for sharing it.

I have in the past overlooked Milton for the only reason that I know someone that can recite L'Allegro in its entirety and almost makes a living from it. Whereas I personally could not recite any of my own poems totally, perhaps that in itself confirms their memorability???
best regards
Merlin

I take your point, Merlin, even though it may be a bit hard on poor old Milton, who seems to be quite blameless in the matter. What about learning Il Penseroso and giving as good as you get – after all, they say that the one poem cannot be fully appreciated without the other?! As for you not being able to recite your own poems fully, I suspect you are in good company there amongst almost all poets past and present!

Fast-forwarding 375 years since the Milton poems were written, this splendid tribute to Ted Hughes appears in Heaney’s ‘District and Circle’.

STERN

in memory of Ted Hughes

‘And what was it like,’ I asked him,
‘Meeting Eliot?’
‘When he looked at you,’
He said, ‘it was like standing on a quay
Watching the prow of the Queen Mary
Come towards you, very slowly.’

Now it seems
I’m standing on a pierhead watching him
All the while watching me as he rows out
And a wooden end-stopped stern
Labours and shimmers and dips,
Making no real headway.

Seamus Heaney


Andrew

 

[scampo]

Interesting poem, Andrew - Eliot and Hughes compared! Here's a very interesting and odd poem from Ted Hughes that I used to teach to younger students when I first began teaching. They always enjoyed drawing pictures of the 'creature':

Wodwo

What am I? Nosing here, turning leaves over
Following a faint stain on the air to the river’s edge
I enter water. What am I to split
The glassy grain of water looking upward I see the bed
Of the river above me upside down very clear
What am I doing here in mid-air? Why do I find
this frog so interesting as I inspect its most secret
interior and make it my own? Do these weeds
know me and name me to each other have they
seen me before, do I fit in their world? I seem
separate from the ground and not rooted but dropped
out of nothing casually I’ve no threads
fastening me to anything I can go anywhere
I seem to have been given the freedom
of this place what am I then? And picking
bits of bark off this rotten stump gives me
no pleasure and it’s no use so why do I do it
me and doing that have coincided very queerly
But what shall I be called am I the first
have I an owner what shape am I what
shape am I am I huge if I go
to the end on this way past these trees and past these trees
till I get tired that’s touching one wall of me
for the moment if I sit still how everything
stops to watch me I suppose I am the exact centre
but there’s all this what is it roots
roots roots roots and here’s the water
again very queer but I’ll go on looking

Ted Hughes

 

[Tyke]

I liked Stern Andrew-thanks for posting it & for your comments.

Wodwo is a wonderful poem Steve -I like that stream of thought with little punctuation-it does conjure the snuffling searching...whatever it is.Thanks.


Here's a John Clare for the season:-

Wood Pictures in Spring

The rich brown-umber hue the oaks unfold
When spring's young sunshine bathes their trunks in gold,
So rich, so beautiful, so past the power
Of words to paint--my heart aches for the dower
The pencil gives to soften and infuse
This brown luxuriance of unfolding hues,
This living luscious tinting woodlands give
Into a landscape that might breathe and live,
And this old gate that claps against the tree
The entrance of spring's paradise should be--
Yet paint itself with living nature fails:
The sunshine threading through these broken rails
In mellow shades no pencil e'er conveys,
And mind alone feels fancies and portrays.

John Clare
______________
Colin

 

[scampo]

"So rich, so beautiful, so past the power
Of words to paint"

John Clare
______________
Colin

Wonderful, Colin: Clare at his best.

 

[Nerine]

Nerine,
Have a good time in Brittany
Merlin

I did, thanks, Merlin. Quite glorious and I saw so many things that I rarely see here. I saw a meadow filled with ragged robin (have to search for this flower over here!) also saw many green hairstreaks, swallowtail butterflies, kingfishers on the river; I heard the tawny owl at night and the cuckoo sang every day. Having said all that it is oh so good to be home!

Wonderful poems contributed while I was away, thanks everyone, I'm going to have a good read of them all.

I meant to put this one in before I left. It was for 1st May.


May Day

A delicate fabric of bird song
Floats in the air,
The smell of wet wild earth
Is everywhere.
Oh I must pass nothing by
Without loving it much,
The raindrop try with my lips,
The grass with my touch;
For how can I be sure
I shall see again
The world on the first of May
Shining after the rain?

Sara Teasdale

Nerine

 

[scampo]

May Day

A delicate fabric of bird song
Floats in the air,
The smell of wet wild earth
Is everywhere.
Oh I must pass nothing by
Without loving it much,
The raindrop try with my lips,
The grass with my touch;
For how can I be sure
I shall see again
The world on the first of May
Shining after the rain?

Sara Teasdale

Nerine

What lovely thoughts and true. Ah, ragged robin... a flower my late mother adored and which simply says "spring meadow". Why its flowers are so evocative, I can't really understand - their fragility, maybe? Like cowslips, they are rarer now than ever but I know a few places, thankfully.

 

[Tyke]

Welcome back Nerine.
What a simple lovely poem from Sara Teasdale.

I used to live in the South West where Ragged Robin always meant rushy pasture, wet heath & Small Pearl Bordered Fritillary.Happy memories.

Off to Scilly for a week now- have fun everyone.

Colin

 

[Nerine]

Have a good time in Scilly, Colin. I loved reading your "Guestling Wood", beautiful description of Spring flowers and I love the Hunched old bullfinch ! John Clare's "Wood Pictures in Spring" is quite beautiful. Thanks for that one too.

Nerine

 

[christineredgate]

Great selection of poems."May Day "is a great poem,many thanks ,Nerine.

 

[Bascar]

Steve, an interesting poem, Wodwo, weird but quite memorable.
Colin, a lovely poem from John Clare. Hope you have a good week in the Scillies.
Nerine, a beautiful little poem from Sara Teasdale to welcome in May. Nice to hear about your trip to Brittany.

These two poems are from Charlotte Mew (born 1869). She had a sad life, in constant dread of the insanity which afflicted two of her siblings, and in financial straits following the death of her father. She committed suicide in 1928. Her poetry seems to be little remembered now although at the time it received high praise from Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf and Siegfried Sassoon in particular. (The second poem reminds me of one of Tanny’s Australian poems (posted at #831 on page 34) in which he described the felling of an ancient gum tree.)

I So Liked Spring

I so liked Spring last year
Because you were here;-
The thrushes too-
Because it was these you so liked to hear-
I so liked you.

This year's a different thing,-
I'll not think of you.
But I'll like Spring because it is simply Spring
As the thrushes do.

Charlotte Mew


The Trees Are Down

- and he cried with a loud voice:
Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees -
(Revelation)

They are cutting down the great plane-trees at the end of
the gardens.
For days there has been the grate of the saw, the swish of
the branches as they fall,
The crash of the trunks, the rustle of trodden leaves,
With the 'Whoops' and the 'Whoa', the loud common talk,
the loud common laughs of the men, above it all.

I remember one evening of a long past Spring
Turning in at a gate, getting out of a cart, and finding
a large dead rat in the mud of the drive.
I remember thinking: alive or dead, a rat was a
god-forsaken thing,
But at least, in May, that even a rat should be alive.

The week's work here is as good as done. There is just
one bough
On the roped bole, in the fine grey rain,
Green and high
And lonely against the sky.
(Down now! -)
And but for that,
If an old dead rat
Did once, for a moment, unmake the Spring, I might never
have thought of him again.

It is not for a moment the Spring is unmade to-day;
These were great trees, it was in them from root to stem:
When the men with the 'Whoops' and the 'Whoas' have carted
the whole of the whispering loveliness away
Half the Spring, for me, will have gone with them.

It is going now, and my heart has been struck with the
hearts of the planes;
Half my life it has beat with these, in the sun, in the rains,
In the March wind, the May breeze,
In the great gales that came over to them across the roofs from the great seas.
There was only a quiet rain when they were dying;
They must have heard the sparrows flying,
And the small creeping creatures in the earth where they were lying -
But I, all day, I heard an angel crying:
'Hurt not the trees.'

Charlotte Mew


Andrew

 

[scampo]

I So Liked Spring

I so liked Spring last year
Because you were here;-
The thrushes too-
Because it was these you so liked to hear-
I so liked you.

...


Andrew

A lovely poem from Charlotte Mew, Andrew - I have read only a few of her poems and, as you say, she is less heard today than she deserves. Her poem reminded me of Mnaley Hopkins's Binsey Poplars, which might have already been posted:

Binsey Poplars
felled 1879

MY aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.

O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew—
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being só slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a pr ick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc únselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

PS Isn't it incredible that the word pr ick had to be misspelled to allow it to print in this post. I do feel that infantile censorship of this kind is something of a poor a signifier of our times.

 

[Bascar]

Steve, thanks for ‘Binsey Poplars’. I wasn’t familiar with the poem so I looked it up on Google and discovered that the felled trees in Binsey were replaced immediately and that these replacements are now nearing the end of their natural life, are beginning to fall in storms, and will themselves soon have to be felled and replaced! Still, I know how Hopkins must have felt. I remember some years ago, during the Dutch elm devastation, how bereft I felt when a long avenue of magnificent elms, lining a country road in Wiltshire and forming a great lofty tunnel, had to be cut down as a result of the disease. I am sure it was a feeling many others had up and down the country at that time.

I am fascinated by Hopkins’ use of ‘sprung rhythm’, though I’m not sure I wholly follow his marked accentuation. Anyway here is another example of it, in a poem I learned a long time ago.

SPRING AND FALL

to a Young Child

Márgarét, are you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! 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 springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Gerard Manley Hopkins


Another poem of Hopkins that I like is this short one, which I am sure has a wider appeal than for those entering a nunnery!

I HAVE DESIRED TO GO
(a nun takes the veil)

I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.

And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.

Gerard Manley Hopkins


Andrew

PS I wholly agree with your postscript, Steve. I tried using the 'p' word by typing in 'I had a p.... of conscience' and, sure enough, it was blanked out. It really makes one despair.

 

[scampo]

...

PS I wholly agree with your postscript, Steve. I tried using the 'p' word by typing in 'I had a p.... of conscience' and, sure enough, it was blanked out. It really makes one despair. Andrew

I feel it's patronising and infantile, but there you are - it's with us.

I can never quite get the hang of Hopkins' rhythm and I'm not quite sure what he was trying to achieve.

I do so like these lines from Binsey Poplars, though:

"...O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew—
Hack and rack the growing green!"

With plans to build 9,600 homes and a new bypass through one of our most precious and beautiful areas of countryside, I recognise his despair.

 

[Mickymouse]

With plans to build 9,600 homes and a new bypass through one of our most precious and beautiful areas of countryside, I recognise his despair.

Yes we have similar stuff going on here, "Look upon my works and despair" I don't know where they come from and I am sure it's not really relevant but that line always comes to mind when I read such things.

Mick

 

[scampo]

Yes we have similar stuff going on here, "Look upon my works and despair" I don't know where they come from and I am sure it's not really relevant but that line always comes to mind when I read such things.

Mick

It would be daft to say that we're running out of countryside, but we are the most densely populated of Europe's countries, I read - and it does feel that way at times.

Why this government has so flagrantly worked at boosting our already swollen population, I'll never understand.

 

[Mickymouse]

It would be daft to say that we're running out of countryside, but we are the most densely populated of Europe's countries, I read - and it does feel that way at times.

Why this government has so flagrantly worked at boosting our already swollen population, I'll never understand.

Boring post alert. I agree except it isn't daft to say we are running out of countryside. We are, specially down here. Better get back on topic.

Mick

 

[scampo]

Whoops - sorry if anyone found my last posts boring. Thanks for the tip, Mick. Back on thread, then. A lovely haunting final line.

Song

Two doves upon the selfsame branch,
Two lilies on a single stem,
Two butterflies upon one flower:—
Oh happy they who look on them.
Who look upon them hand in hand
Flushed in the rosy summer light;
Who look upon them hand in hand
And never give a thought to night.

Christina Rossetti

 

[christineredgate]

Beautiful but simple little poem,Steve,by Christine Rossetti

 

[Mickymouse]

Whoops - sorry if anyone found my last posts boring. Thanks for the tip, Mick. Back on thread, then. A lovely haunting final line.

My turn to say whoops, I didn't mean you Steve, the boring thread alert was a feeble joke about my, I agree post.

Mick