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Thread: Poets' Corner - Post your poems/song lyrics here

  1. #11
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    Re: Poets' Corner - Post your poems/song lyrics here

    The Raven

    by Edgar Allan Poe

    First Published in 1845
    Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
    Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
    While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
    As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
    " 'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door;
    Only this, and nothing more."

    Ah, distinctly I remember, it was in the bleak December,
    And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
    Eagerly I wished the morrow; vainly I had sought to borrow
    From my books surcease of sorrow, sorrow for the lost Lenore,.
    For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore,
    Nameless here forevermore.

    And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
    Thrilled me---filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
    So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating,
    " 'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door,
    Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door.
    This it is, and nothing more."

    Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
    "Sir," said I, "or madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
    But the fact is, I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
    And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,
    That I scarce was sure I heard you." Here I opened wide the door;---
    Darkness there, and nothing more.

    Deep into the darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing
    Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before;
    But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
    And the only word there spoken was the whispered word,
    Lenore?, This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word,
    "Lenore!" Merely this, and nothing more.

    Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,
    Soon again I heard a tapping, something louder than before,
    "Surely," said I, "surely, that is something at my window lattice.
    Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore.
    Let my heart be still a moment, and this mystery explore.
    " 'Tis the wind, and nothing more."

    Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
    In there stepped a stately raven, of the saintly days of yore.
    Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
    But with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door.
    Perched upon a bust of Pallas, just above my chamber door,
    Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

    Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
    By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
    "Though thy crest be shorn and shaven thou," I said, "art sure no craven,
    Ghastly, grim, and ancient raven, wandering from the nightly shore.
    Tell me what the lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore."
    Quoth the raven, "Nevermore."

    Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
    Though its answer little meaning, little relevancy bore;
    For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
    Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door,
    Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,
    With such name as "Nevermore."

    But the raven, sitting lonely on that placid bust, spoke only
    That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
    Nothing further then he uttered; not a feather then he fluttered;
    Till I scarcely more than muttered, "Other friends have flown before;
    On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before."
    Then the bird said, "Nevermore."

    Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
    "Doubtless," said I, "what it utters is its only stock and store,
    Caught from some unhappy master, whom unmerciful disaster
    Followed fast and followed faster, till his songs one burden bore,---
    Till the dirges of his hope that melancholy burden bore
    Of "Never---nevermore."

    But the raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling,
    Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door;
    Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
    Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore --
    What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt and ominous bird of yore
    Meant in croaking "Nevermore."
    Thus I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing
    To the fowl, whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core;
    This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining
    On the cushion's velvet lining that the lamplight gloated o'er,
    But whose velvet violet lining with the lamplight gloating o'er
    She shall press, ah, nevermore!

    Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
    Swung by seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor.
    "Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee -- by these angels he hath
    Sent thee respite---respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore!
    Quaff, O quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!"
    Quoth the raven, "Nevermore!"

    "Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil!--prophet still, if bird or devil!
    Whether tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
    Desolate, yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted--
    On this home by horror haunted--tell me truly, I implore:
    Is there--is there balm in Gilead?--tell me--tell me I implore!"
    Quoth the raven, "Nevermore."

    "Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil--prophet still, if bird or devil!
    By that heaven that bends above us--by that God we both adore--
    Tell this soul with sorrow laden, if, within the distant Aidenn,
    It shall clasp a sainted maiden, whom the angels name Lenore---
    Clasp a rare and radiant maiden, whom the angels name Lenore?
    Quoth the raven, "Nevermore."

    "Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!" I shrieked, upstarting--
    "Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
    Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
    Leave my loneliness unbroken! -- quit the bust above my door!
    Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!"
    Quoth the raven, "Nevermore."

    And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
    On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
    And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming.
    And the lamplight o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
    And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
    Shall be lifted---nevermore!

    ---------- Post added at 17:25 ---------- Previous post was at 17:24 ----------

    Poe...arguably the greatest poet America has ever produced

  2. #12
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    Re: Poets' Corner - Post your poems/song lyrics here

    US has many fine poets, Agent N, and Poe is one of my favourites along with Sylvia Plath...

    Lady Lazarus
    BY SYLVIA PLATH

    I have done it again.
    One year in every ten
    I manage it——

    A sort of walking miracle, my skin
    Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
    My right foot

    A paperweight,
    My face a featureless, fine
    Jew linen.

    Peel off the napkin
    O my enemy.
    Do I terrify?——

    The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
    The sour breath
    Will vanish in a day.

    Soon, soon the flesh
    The grave cave ate will be
    At home on me

    And I a smiling woman.
    I am only thirty.
    And like the cat I have nine times to die.

    This is Number Three.
    What a trash
    To annihilate each decade.

    What a million filaments.
    The peanut-crunching crowd
    Shoves in to see

    Them unwrap me hand and foot——
    The big strip tease.
    Gentlemen, ladies

    These are my hands
    My knees.
    I may be skin and bone,

    Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
    The first time it happened I was ten.
    It was an accident.

    The second time I meant
    To last it out and not come back at all.
    I rocked shut

    As a seashell.
    They had to call and call
    And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

    Dying
    Is an art, like everything else.
    I do it exceptionally well.

    I do it so it feels like hell.
    I do it so it feels real.
    I guess you could say I’ve a call.

    It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
    It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
    It’s the theatrical

    Comeback in broad day
    To the same place, the same face, the same brute
    Amused shout:

    ‘A miracle!’
    That knocks me out.
    There is a charge

    For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
    For the hearing of my heart——
    It really goes.

    And there is a charge, a very large charge
    For a word or a touch
    Or a bit of blood

    Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
    So, so, Herr Doktor.
    So, Herr Enemy.

    I am your opus,
    I am your valuable,
    The pure gold baby

    That melts to a shriek.
    I turn and burn.
    Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

    Ash, ash—
    You poke and stir.
    Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——

    A cake of soap,
    A wedding ring,
    A gold filling.

    Herr God, Herr Lucifer
    Beware
    Beware.

    Out of the ash
    I rise with my red hair
    And I eat men like air.
    __________________
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  3. #13
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    Re: Poets' Corner - Post your poems/song lyrics here

    I agree that the US has produced many fine poets who can speak to us across time and distance. Some more are Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg. Each has their own voice. There is no need to judge which is greatest.
    Last edited by hanshan; 06-10-17 at 01:32.

  4. #14
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    Re: Poets' Corner - Post your poems/song lyrics here

    Quote Originally Posted by hanshan View Post
    I agree that the US has produced many fine poets who can speak to us across time and distance. Some more are Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg. Each has their own voice. There is no need to judge which is greatest.
    Very true, Hanshan. This isn't about Nationality. Every country has its great literary figures...

    The Return

    Ezra Pound, 1885-1972

    See, they return; ah, see the tentative
    Movements, and the slow feet,
    The trouble in the pace and the uncertain
    Wavering!

    See, they return, one, and by one,
    With fear, as half-awakened;
    As if the snow should hesitate
    And murmur in the wind,
    and half turn back;
    These were the “Wing’d-with-Awe,"
    inviolable.

    Gods of the wingèd shoe!
    With them the silver hounds,
    sniffing the trace of air!

    Haie! Haie!
    These were the swift to harry;
    These the keen-scented;
    These were the souls of blood.

    Slow on the leash,
    pallid the leash-men!
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  5. #15
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    Re: Poets' Corner - Post your poems/song lyrics here

    Quote Originally Posted by hanshan View Post
    I agree that the US has produced many fine poets who can speak to us across time and distance. Some more are Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg. Each has their own voice. There is no need to judge which is greatest.

    Don't forget Whittier or McCann either...and many more. But Poe was probably the greatest of them all.

  6. #16
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    Re: Poets' Corner - Post your poems/song lyrics here

    And now a poem by an Australian poet, Kenneth Slessor. This poem was written in 1939. It is a meditation on the death of a friend of Slessor’s, Joe Lynch, who died, presumed drowned, in Sydney Harbour in 1927. The story is that one evening Lynch heard of a party on the north side of the harbour. He loaded up his coat with beer bottles and boarded the harbour ferry to make the journey. Some say he was knocked overboard by a wave, others that he jumped overboard saying he could swim the rest of the distance faster. His body was never found.

    The term “five bells” refers to the bell notes that are rung to mark off time on board a ship.

    Five Bells - Poem by Kenneth Slessor

    Time that is moved by little fidget wheels
    Is not my time, the flood that does not flow.
    Between the double and the single bell
    Of a ship's hour, between a round of bells
    From the dark warship riding there below,
    I have lived many lives, and this one life
    Of Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells.

    Deep and dissolving verticals of light
    Ferry the falls of moonshine down. Five bells
    Coldly rung out in a machine's voice. Night and water
    Pour to one rip of darkness, the Harbour floats
    In the air, the Cross hangs upside-down in water.

    Why do I think of you, dead man, why thieve
    These profitless lodgings from the flukes of thought
    Anchored in Time? You have gone from earth,
    Gone even from the meaning of a name;
    Yet something's there, yet something forms its lips
    And hits and cries against the ports of space,
    Beating their sides to make its fury heard.

    Are you shouting at me, dead man, squeezing your face
    In agonies of speech on speechless panes?
    Cry louder, beat the windows, bawl your name!

    But I hear nothing, nothing...only bells,
    Five bells, the bumpkin calculus of Time.
    Your echoes die, your voice is dowsed by Life,
    There's not a mouth can fly the pygmy strait -
    Nothing except the memory of some bones
    Long shoved away, and sucked away, in mud;
    And unimportant things you might have done,
    Or once I thought you did; but you forgot,
    And all have now forgotten - looks and words
    And slops of beer; your coat with buttons off,
    Your gaunt chin and pricked eye, and raging tales
    Of Irish kings and English perfidy,
    And dirtier perfidy of publicans
    Groaning to God from Darlinghurst.
    Five bells.

    Then I saw the road, I heard the thunder
    Tumble, and felt the talons of the rain
    The night we came to Moorebank in slab-dark,
    So dark you bore no body, had no face,
    But a sheer voice that rattled out of air
    (As now you'd cry if I could break the glass),
    A voice that spoke beside me in the bush,
    Loud for a breath or bitten off by wind,
    Of Milton, melons, and the Rights of Man,
    And blowing flutes, and how Tahitian girls
    Are brown and angry-tongued, and Sydney girls
    Are white and angry-tongued, or so you'd found.
    But all I heard was words that didn't join
    So Milton became melons, melons girls,
    And fifty mouths, it seemed, were out that night,
    And in each tree an Ear was bending down,
    Or something that had just run, gone behind the grass,
    When blank and bone-white, like a maniac's thought,
    The naphtha-flash of lightning slit the sky,
    Knifing the dark with deathly photographs.
    There's not so many with so poor a purse
    Or fierce a need, must fare by night like that,
    Five miles in darkness on a country track,
    But when you do, that's what you think.
    Five bells.

    In Melbourne, your appetite had gone,
    Your angers too; they had been leeched away
    By the soft archery of summer rains
    And the sponge-paws of wetness, the slow damp
    That stuck the leaves of living, snailed the mind,
    And showed your bones, that had been sharp with rage,
    The sodden ectasies of rectitude.
    I thought of what you'd written in faint ink,
    Your journal with the sawn-off lock, that stayed behind
    With other things you left, all without use,
    All without meaning now, except a sign
    That someone had been living who now was dead:
    "At Labassa. Room 6 x 8
    On top of the tower; because of this, very dark
    And cold in winter. Everything has been stowed
    Into this room - 500 books all shapes
    And colours, dealt across the floor
    And over sills and on the laps of chairs;
    Guns, photoes of many differant things
    And differant curioes that I obtained..."

    In Sydney, by the spent aquarium-flare
    Of penny gaslight on pink wallpaper,
    We argued about blowing up the world,
    But you were living backward, so each night
    You crept a moment closer to the breast,
    And they were living, all of them, those frames
    And shapes of flesh that had perplexed your youth,
    And most your father, the old man gone blind,
    With fingers always round a fiddle's neck,
    That graveyard mason whose fair monuments
    And tablets cut with dreams of piety
    Rest on the bosoms of a thousand men
    Staked bone by bone, in quiet astonishment
    At cargoes they had never thought to bear,
    These funeral-cakes of sweet and sculptured stone.

    Where have you gone? The tide is over you,
    The turn of midnight water's over you,
    As Time is over you, and mystery,
    And memory, the flood that does not flow.
    You have no suburb, like those easier dead
    In private berths of dissolution laid -
    The tide goes over, the waves ride over you
    And let their shadows down like shining hair,
    But they are Water; and the sea-pinks bend
    Like lilies in your teeth, but they are Weed;
    And you are only part of an Idea.
    I felt the wet push its black thumb-balls in,
    The night you died, I felt your eardrums crack,
    And the short agony, the longer dream,
    The Nothing that was neither long nor short;
    But I was bound, and could not go that way,
    But I was blind, and could not feel your hand.
    If I could find an answer, could only find
    Your meaning, or could say why you were here
    Who now are gone, what purpose gave you breath
    Or seized it back, might I not hear your voice?

    I looked out my window in the dark
    At waves with diamond quills and combs of light
    That arched their mackerel-backs and smacked the sand
    In the moon's drench, that straight enormous glaze,
    And ships far off asleep, and Harbour-buoys
    Tossing their fireballs wearily each to each,
    And tried to hear your voice, but all I heard
    Was a boat's whistle, and the scraping squeal
    Of seabirds' voices far away, and bells,
    Five bells. Five bells coldly ringing out.
    Five bells.

    Kenneth Slessor

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    Re: Poets' Corner - Post your poems/song lyrics here

    All things pass

    All things pass
    A sunrise does not last all morning
    All things pass
    A cloudburst does not last all day
    All things pass
    Nor a sunset all night
    All things pass
    What always changes?
    Earth---sky---thunder---mountain---water---wind---fire---lake
    These change
    And if these do not last
    Do man's visions last?
    Do man's illusions?
    Take theses as they come
    All things pass.
    __________________
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  8. #18
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    Re: Poets' Corner - Post your poems/song lyrics here

    Quote Originally Posted by hanshan View Post
    And now a poem by an Australian poet, Kenneth Slessor. This poem was written in 1939. It is a meditation on the death of a friend of Slessor’s, Joe Lynch, who died, presumed drowned, in Sydney Harbour in 1927. The story is that one evening Lynch heard of a party on the north side of the harbour. He loaded up his coat with beer bottles and boarded the harbour ferry to make the journey. Some say he was knocked overboard by a wave, others that he jumped overboard saying he could swim the rest of the distance faster. His body was never found.

    The term “five bells” refers to the bell notes that are rung to mark off time on board a ship.


    Why do I think of you, dead man, why thieve
    These profitless lodgings from the flukes of thought
    Anchored in Time? You have gone from earth,
    Gone even from the meaning of a name;
    Yet something's there, yet something forms its lips
    And hits and cries against the ports of space,
    Beating their sides to make its fury heard.
    What a powerful reflection on what we leave behind in others when we die...the haunting memories and grief that torment the mind...

    Thank you for posting, Hanshan.
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    Re: Poets' Corner - Post your poems/song lyrics here

    Ozymandias

    BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

    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.”



    Source: Shelley’s Poetry and Prose (1977)
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    Re: Poets' Corner - Post your poems/song lyrics here

    Do not go gentle into that good night

    Dylan Thomas, 1914 - 1953

    Do not go gentle into that good night,
    Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
    Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

    Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
    Because their words had forked no lightning they
    Do not go gentle into that good night.

    Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
    Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
    Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

    Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
    And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
    Do not go gentle into that good night.

    Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
    Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
    Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

    And you, my father, there on the sad height,
    Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
    Do not go gentle into that good night.
    Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
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