luka

Well-known member
But there's no answer to that question. You're just trying to force me into saying the poem is bad. It just becomes an arm wrestle. Can you imagine enjoying reading a poem? What would that poem do to you? How would it operate? What would it's characteristics be? Can you understand why people read? Or does it seem just a sedate hobby for stay at homes, basically like knitting or doing the sudoku
 

luka

Well-known member
I mean, are you invested in 'proving' to yourself that reading is a waste of time? Or are you excited by the idea that this is something which can be learned and doing so makes reality more vivid, more real, more involved, more complex and more profound?
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
i have nothing against poems, i'm trying to learn about poetry.

i could easily imagine myself enjoying them. in fact i listened to ben watson read yours several time. i loved prediction tablet.

i'm probably not explaining myself very well.
 

luka

Well-known member
Why do you think corpse likes that poem so much? What's he getting out of it? Not that you are obliged to like what he does. I'm just curious.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
you've really got the wrong end of the stick. i'm talking solely about this one poem.

if i listened to a song i could say 'that chord their really makes me feel aspirational and then that drum bit here is so slick, makes me feel like the coolest bloke in the world. that synthesizer feels like a warm bed'.

i need the same done for the poem.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Why do you think corpse likes that poem so much? What's he getting out of it? Not that you are obliged to like what he does. I'm just curious.

i don't know. it might be that he's been told it something he's supposed to like and he's willed himself into doing so.

or maybe there's a beautiful bit of imagery i'm missing. or a great coupling of words that really bounces off the tongue.

i don't know. that's what i'm asking to be shown.
 

luka

Well-known member
I already did that to the best of my ability. There's no reason why you should like it. It's not a failure of the intellect or something. You could make a case against it on various grounds. But if you don't like it, just move on. Find one you do like.
 

luka

Well-known member
I would say it's a fairly minor poem by a poet I don't feel much affection for. As I say I like his book of mad occult diagrams of reality and time a lot, the poems I don't really read. But I don't think they are bad poems. They're just not to my taste.
 

luka

Well-known member
We'll take some acid one day and when your third eye is wide open I'll wave some poems in front of you and you'll see what it is.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
LoL

Very fun reading this.

I wouldn't say I'm crazy about that poem, although it did strike me when I read it, I felt he'd done something clever with the structure (which he did, as you can see in my learned analysis). Somehow that transition from "like the waters" to "by the waters" - there's something unearthly about that.

I picked it cos it was short and it sprang to mind.

But Luka's right, not a great choice, especially for someone looking for verbal intricacy. You want Shakespeare or something.

As to why I DO like the poem, as Luka says (and it's a cop out perhaps), it's hard to say. And it *is* like saying - why do I like X song so much. I could probably find out the music theory behind it. I could refer to this or that structural features or texture - and if *you* like the song too you'll understand what I mean. If you *don't* like it you'll consider my words just fluff or obfuscation.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Also I think you're right about the knees twisted like thorn trees being an obvious, trite image - that could be simply a weakeness in the poem - but somehow "by the waters" changes it for me. The metre in the trees bit extends out (and *becomes* more conventional!), and then "by the waters" returns like a funereal drill bell, and the image of the trees is fused with the image of the river.

It's good this - by hating the poem you've forced me to examine it more closely. Blessings to thee and thine
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
It's not a poem I would choose to introduce someone to poetry but corpsey is obsessed with ageing.

This is an important point - I made a bad choice with my selection cos barty isn't a prematurely wizened melancholic like wot I am. I think I've been obsessed with the transience of life since I was about 14.

This is one of the reasons why I can't help but love Philip Larkin. Love and fear him, because he summons up everything I fear is true of life - or of my life, anyway.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Worth saying here that until three or four years ago I thought most poetry was a load of rubbish, or at most a load of not rubbish that I had no feeling for.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Just looking at this https://doc.studenti.it/appunti/inglese/the-old-men-admiring-themselves-the-water-analysis.html

He interprets "By the waters" differently to how I've always read it.

"They had hands like claws, and their knees / Were twisted like the old thorn-trees / By the waters."

I always read it as "Besides the waters" - but he reads it as the water is twisting their knees, in the reflected image.

luka what do you think? and is it significant?

I think it's better the way he reads it. I feel like I've been a clot.
 
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Corpsey

bandz ahoy
The Mother Of God by William Butler Yeats
The threefold terror of love; a fallen flare
Through the hollow of an ear;
Wings beating about the room;
The terror of all terrors that I bore
The Heavens in my womb.

Had I not found content among the shows
Every common woman knows,
Chimney corner, garden walk,
Or rocky cistern where we tread the clothes
And gather all the talk?

What is this flesh I purchased with my pains,
This fallen star my milk sustains,
This love that makes my heart's blood stop
Or strikes a Sudden chill into my bones
And bids my hair stand up?
 

luka

Well-known member
I've got a feeling the Yeats is too aestheticised to appeal to Barty, too conventional in its effects. No sense of an active human life. No real voice cutting through. The stuff I like, Blake, Whitman, Pound, Prynne, Rimbaud whatever, all has this full human presence, it's real in a way Yeats is never real.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
True - its grandiose, heroic, bardic (not bahtic)

Also Yeats was never a people person - he was an aristocrat (or had pretensions towards it), almost at times a misanthrope.

Here's that Pound essay

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/65892/responsibilities-by-w-b-yeats

"I've not a word against the glamour as it appears in Yeats’ early poems, but we have had so many other pseudo--glamours and glamourlets and mists and fogs since the nineties that one is about ready for hard light.

And this quality of hard light is precisely what one finds in the beginning of his The Magi:

Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side.


Of course a passage like that, a passage of imagisme, may occur in a poem not otherwise imagiste, in the same way that a lyrical passage may occur in a narrative, or in some poem not otherwise lyrical. There have always been two sorts of poetry which are, for me at least, the most “poetic;” they are firstly, the sort of poetry which seems to be music just forcing itself into articulate speech, and, secondly, that sort of poetry which seems as if sculpture or painting were just forced or forcing itself into words. The gulf between evocation and description, in this latter case, is the unbridgeable difference between genius and talent. It is perhaps the highest function of art that it should fill the mind with a noble profusion of sounds and images, that it should furnish the life of the mind with such accompaniment and surrounding. At any rate Mr. Yeats’ work has done this in the past and still continues to do so."
 
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luka

Well-known member
Compare it to, for instance

33 stop this night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
34You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
35You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
36You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
37You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
##
38I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,
39But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
40There was never any more inception than there is now,
41Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
42And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
43Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Or

I’ve the whitish blue eye of my Gallic ancestors, the narrow skull, and the awkwardness in combat. I find my clothing as barbarous as theirs. But I don’t butter my hair.

The Gauls were the most inept flayers of cattle and burners of grass of their age.

From them I get: idolatry and love of sacrilege: – oh, all the vices, anger, lust – magnificent, the lust – above all lying and sloth!

I’ve a horror of all trades. Masters and workers: all peasants, ignoble. The hand on the pen’s the same as the hand at the plough. – What an age of hands! – I’ll never work! Anyway service goes too far. The honesty of beggary upsets me. Criminals disgust me like eunuchs: me, I’m whole, and it’s all one to me!

Or

Hang it all, Robert Browning,
there can be but the one "Sordello."
But Sordello, and my Sordello?
Lo Sordels si fo di Mantovana.
So-shu churned in the sea.
Seal sports in the spray-whited circles of cliff-wash,
Sleek head, daughter of Lir,
eyes of Picasso
Under black fur-hood, lithe daughter of Ocean;
And the wave runs in the beach-groove:
"Eleanor, ελεναυς and ελεπτολις!"
And poor old Homer blind, blind, as a bat,
Ear, ear for the sea-surge, murmur of old men's voices:
"Let her go back to the ships,
Back among Grecian faces, lest evil come on our own,
Evil and further evil, and a curse cursed on our children,
Moves, yes she moves like a goddess
And has the face of a god
and the voice of Schoeney's daughters,
And doom goes with her in walking,
Let her go back to the ships,
back among Grecian voices."
And by the beach-run, Tyro,
Twisted arms of the sea-god,
Lithe sinews of water, gripping her, cross-hold,
And the blue-gray glass of the wave tents them,
Glare azure of water, cold-welter, close cover.
Quiet sun-tawny sand-stretch,
The gulls broad out their wings,
nipping between the splay feathers;
Snipe come for their bath,
bend out their wing-joints,
Spread wet wings to the sun-film,
And by Scios,
to left of the Naxos passage,
Naviform rock overgrown,
algæ cling to its edge,
There is a wine-red glow in the shallows,
a tin flash in the sun-dazzle.
 

luka

Well-known member
Of the primeval Priest’s assum’d power,
When Eternals spurn’d back his Religion,
And gave him a place in the North,
Obscure, shadowy, void, solitary.

Eternals! I hear your call gladly.
Dictate swift wingèd words, and fear not
To unfold your dark visions of torment.


CHAP. I

1. LO, a Shadow of horror is risen
In Eternity! unknown, unprolific,
Self-clos’d, all-repelling. What Demon
Hath form’d this abominable Void,
This soul-shudd’ring Vacuum? Some said 5
It is Urizen. But unknown, abstracted,
Brooding, secret, the dark Power hid.

2. Times on times he divided, and measur’d
Space by space in his ninefold darkness,
Unseen, unknown; changes appear’d 10
Like desolate mountains, rifted furious
By the black winds of perturbation.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Ash on an old man's sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
Dust inbreathed was a house—
The walls, the wainscot and the mouse,
The death of hope and despair,
This is the death of air.

There are flood and drouth
Over the eyes and in the mouth,
Dead water and dead sand
Contending for the upper hand.
The parched eviscerate soil
Gapes at the vanity of toil,
Laughs without mirth.
This is the death of earth.

Water and fire succeed
The town, the pasture and the weed.
Water and fire deride
The sacrifice that we denied.
Water and fire shall rot
The marred foundations we forgot,
Of sanctuary and choir.
This is the death of water and fire.

In the uncertain hour before the morning
Near the ending of interminable night
At the recurrent end of the unending
After the dark dove with the flickering tongue
Had passed below the horizon of his homing
While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin
Over the asphalt where no other sound was
Between three districts whence the smoke arose
I met one walking, loitering and hurried
As if blown towards me like the metal leaves
Before the urban dawn wind unresisting.
And as I fixed upon the down-turned face
That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge
The first-met stranger in the waning dusk
I caught the sudden look of some dead master
Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled
Both one and many; in the brown baked features
The eyes of a familiar compound ghost
Both intimate and unidentifiable.
So I assumed a double part, and cried
And heard another's voice cry: 'What! are you here?'
Although we were not. I was still the same,
Knowing myself yet being someone other—
And he a face still forming; yet the words sufficed
To compel the recognition they preceded.
And so, compliant to the common wind,
Too strange to each other for misunderstanding,
In concord at this intersection time
Of meeting nowhere, no before and after,
We trod the pavement in a dead patrol.
I said: 'The wonder that I feel is easy,
Yet ease is cause of wonder. Therefore speak:
I may not comprehend, may not remember.'
And he: 'I am not eager to rehearse
My thoughts and theory which you have forgotten.
These things have served their purpose: let them be.
So with your own, and pray they be forgiven
By others, as I pray you to forgive
Both bad and good. Last season's fruit is eaten
And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.
For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
But, as the passage now presents no hindrance
To the spirit unappeased and peregrine
Between two worlds become much like each other,
So I find words I never thought to speak
In streets I never thought I should revisit
When I left my body on a distant shore.
Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
To purify the dialect of the tribe
And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,
Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.
First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others' harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
Then fools' approval stings, and honour stains.
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.'
The day was breaking. In the disfigured street
He left me, with a kind of valediction,
And faded on the blowing of the horn.
 
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