the arbitrary list of favourite poets and poems part II I'll try not to overdo it, promise

Love's Philosophy

by Percy Bysshe Shelley
(1803-1822)

The fountains mingle with the river,
And the rivers with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix forever,
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In one another's being mingle;--
Why not I with thine?  

See! the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower would be forgiven,
If it disdained it's brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea;--
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?



This is rather sad, but lovely sad and I think it evokes a lot of images and emotions. Just try to visualize what Shelley wrote, it is so beautiful.



My last one, maybe I'll add some more another time, but I'll stop with Seamus Heaney. It really made me sad that he passed away. I've always loved Irish poetry, Yeats first of all, but Seamus Heaney is directly next in line. My heartfelt sympathy rests with the family.


Digging

Between my finger and my thumb   

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound   

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:   

My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds   

Bends low, comes up twenty years away   

Stooping in rhythm through potato drills   

Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft   

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked,

Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.   

Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day

Than any other man on Toner’s bog.

Once I carried him milk in a bottle

Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

Over his shoulder, going down and down

For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

The arbitrary list of favourite poets and poems

One of the poets who impressed me deeper than most others was Siegfried Sassoon. Most of his writings are about war, and I really hate that topic. What I read from his poems really gave me the creeps and it set my imagination flaring, alas, in the wrong direction, because I got nightmares from reading his poems. Nevertheless, for me, he is among the greatest, though I cannot stand what he writes about, he really left an impression. If it is easy to scare you, maybe you should wait for another poem, I am going to put here, because most of the ones I like are about love.

The Dug- Out

Why do you lie with your legs ungainly huddled,
And one arm bent across your sullen, cold,
Exhausted face? It hurts my heart to watch you,
Deep-shadowed from the candle's guttering gold;
And you wonder why I shake you by the shoulder;
Drowsy, you mumble and sigh and turn your head...
You are too young to fall asleep for ever;
And when you sleep you remind me of the dead.

St Venant, Jul 1918



and the inevitable Shakespeare, I know it is a rather drastic change of subjects, but it makes me depressive if there is only a morbid poem in my list to start with. Usually poetry is something that helps to cheer me up.

SONNET 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
   If this be error and upon me proved,
   I never writ, nor no man ever loved.