Archive for the 'Poetry' Category
February 16, 2007 @ 5:05 pm | Filed under: Poetry
…Beyond the shadow of the ship,
I watched the water-snakes :
They moved in tracks of shining white,
And when they reared, the elfish light
Fell off in hoary flakes.
Within the shadow of the ship
I watched their rich attire :
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coiled and swam ; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire.
O happy living things ! no tongue
Their beauty might declare :
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware :
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware.
The self-same moment I could pray ;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.
Oh sleep ! it is a gentle thing,
Beloved from pole to pole !
To Mary Queen the praise be given !
She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven,
That slid into my soul…
—from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
February 2, 2007 @ 7:37 am | Filed under: Poetry
Sonnet: On the Sonnet
by John Keats
If by dull rhymes our English must be chain’d,
And, like Andromeda, the Sonnet sweet
Fetter’d, in spite of pained loveliness,
Let us find, if we must be constrain’d,
Sandals more interwoven and complete
To fit the naked foot of Poesy:
Let us inspect the Lyre, and weigh the stress
Of every chord, and see what may be gain’d
By ear industrious, and attention meet;
Misers of sound and syllable, no less
Than Midas of his coinage, let us be
Jealous of dead leaves in the bay wreath crown;
So, if we may not let the Muse be free,
She will be bound with garlands of her own.
January 26, 2007 @ 4:47 pm | Filed under: Little House, Poetry
This lovely old Scots ballad made its way into my first Martha book, Little House in the Highlands. I thought it particulary fitting in light of what little we knew about the real Martha Morse: that she married a man her family considered to be beneath her station, and she went to the New World to marry him and make a new life. "The lad, he was of courage bold; a gallant youth, nineteen years old; he’s made the hills and valleys roar, and the bonnie lassie, she’s gone with him…"
I loved those lines so much I quoted them in the dedication to Highlands.
|
‘Twas in the month of sweet July, Before the sun shone in the sky; There in between twa rigs o’ rye, Sure I heard twa lovers talking. He said, "My dear, I must gang away, "Of you, your father he tak’s great care "My father can fret and my mither frown, O, lassie, your fortune it is but sma’ The lassie’s courage began to fail, He’s ta’en her kerchie o’ linen fine, This lad he was of courage bold, |
" |
This couple they are married noo,
And they hae bairnies one or two,
And they bide in Brechin the winter through,
And in Montrose in summer.
This week’s Poetry Friday roundup can be found at Chicken Spaghetti.
January 12, 2007 @ 2:49 pm | Filed under: Books, Poetry
by John Keats
Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
The last four lines of this poem are quoted in the opening of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, which I am currently reading to my girls. I pulled out my tattered Keats and read them the whole sonnet, and we talked about our own first view of the Pacific just a few winged months ago. Rose ran for the globe, and our old friend Mr. Putty resumed his travels. First he had to trace Cortez’s path, then our own.
I love this poem. (Of course, I have yet to encounter a Keats poem I do not like. Of the Romantics, he is my favorite—his letters, his poetry, his energy. I took a course in the Romantics twice, once in college and once in grad school, largely as an excuse to indulge in long afternoons spent poring over Keats and call it "work.")
Jane noted its kinship to Dickinson’s "There Is No Frigate Like a Book," which she has memorized. So lively was our discussion that I made an impulsive decision and printed off the first few pages of The Iliad (not being able to locate my own copy right away), which I had not planned to begin with the children until spring. The moment was right, so I seized it.
"Sing, o Goddess," implores Homer, "the anger of Achilles…" What an opening! Not, sing of the war between Greece and Troy, or the kidnap of Helen, or the feast of the gods, or the golden apple; not any of the obvious openings. Sing of the anger of Achilles. Sing of his anger and what happened to his people as a result of his having been that angry. That is one killer hook.
We talked about it, the girls and I, of how anger can have such a grave impact, can set off a chain reaction like the force that pushes over the first domino. But we didn’t talk long, for Homer pulled us back. My pages broke off mid-sentence, and I was sent back to the printer by a pack of outraged girls. Printed off a few more, and got the biggest laugh of the entire day over the exchange between Calchas, seer of the Greeks, and Achilles, when Calchas says, "Sure I know why Apollo is mad at you guys! I’ll tell you who’s got him all riled up, but you have to swear to protect me when I name the name." And Achilles says, "Dude. I’ve totally got your back, even if it’s, like, Agamemnon or someone." And Calchas says, "Cool. It’s Agamemnon."
Honestly, is there anything that tickles a homeschooling mama more than hearing her kids guffaw over Homer?
This week’s Poetry Friday roundup can be found at Big A little a.
September 22, 2006 @ 11:25 am | Filed under: Poetry
I wish I could post this Randall Jarrell poem in its entirety, but it is of course under copyright, and I can’t find it anywhere online. If you want to see the rest, you’ll have to look it up at the library, I guess. It would be well worth your time. I’ve never read anything that more poignantly captures the emotional wrench of moving. In this case, we’re experiencing the move through the eyes of a very young girl who knows that nothing will ever be the same again.
Moving
by Randall Jarrell
Some of the sky is grey and some of it is white.
The leaves have lost their heads
And are dancing round the tree in circles, dead;
The cat is in it.
A smeared, banged, tow-headed
Girl in a flowered, flour-sack print
Sniffles and holds up her last bite
Of bread and butter and brown sugar to the wind.
Butter the cat’s paws
And bread the wind. We are moving.
I shall never again sing
Good morning, Dear Teacher, to my own dear teacher.
Never again
Will Augusta be the capital of Maine.
The dew has rusted the catch of the strap of my satchel
And the sun has fallen from the place where it was chained
With a blue construction-paper chain…
***
There is so much more. When the girl thinks about how someone else must draw the Thanksgiving decorations for her classroom, your heart might break.
Even more moving are the lines:
Never again will Orion
Fall on my speller through the star
Taped on the broken window by my cot.
This is what makes Jarrell a master, this ability to capture with perfect clarity the point of view of his speaker. The little girl obviously lives in poverty, and for all we know she is going to a better house, a better life. The poem doesn’t tell us whether this is an upward move or a downward one.
What the girl knows is that everything she knows is changing. A child, like a poet, clings to small pieces of beauty wherever she finds them, and this child has found a piece in the cracked glass of a window. The tape covering the glass makes a star, and stars shine through it.
She studies her speller by starlight, and her strongest attachments are to her school and her teacher. Wherever she is going, for better or worse, she is leaving those things behind, and we can only hope that the stars will continue to shine on her efforts.
September 8, 2006 @ 8:55 pm | Filed under: Poetry
The Author to Her Book
by Anne Bradstreet
Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,
Who after birth didst by my side remain,
Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,
Who thee abroad, exposed to public view,
Made thee in rags, halting to th’ press to trudge,
Where errors were not lessened (all may judge).
At thy return my blushing was not small,
My rambling brat (in print) should mother call,
I cast thee by as one unfit for light,
The visage was so irksome in my sight;
Yet being mine own, at length affection would
Thy blemishes amend, if so I could.
I washed thy face, but more defects I saw,
And rubbing off a spot still made a flaw.
I stretched thy joints to make thee even feet,
Yet still thou run’st more hobbling than is meet;
In better dress to trim thee was my mind,
But nought save homespun cloth i’ th’ house I find.
In this array ‘mongst vulgars may’st thou roam.
In critic’s hands beware thou dost not come,
And take thy way where yet thou art not known;
If for thy father asked, say thou hadst none;
And for thy mother, she alas is poor,
Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.
August 30, 2006 @ 2:33 am | Filed under: Poetry
Distracted by her baby’s new accomplishment, the mother failed to notice the stray body part lying on the rug.
August 11, 2006 @ 2:16 pm | Filed under: Poetry
I asked her to pick out a poem for today’s contribution. She disappeared with Favorite Poems Old and New and came back with this one, (marked with a twig, appropriately enough).
I Stood Tiptoe Upon a Little Hill
by John Keats
I STOOD tip-toe upon a little hill,
The air was cooling, and so very still,
That the sweet buds which with a modest pride
Pull droopingly, in slanting curve aside,
Their scantly leaved, and finely tapering stems,
Had not yet lost those starry diadems
Caught from the early sobbing of the morn.
The clouds were pure and white as flocks new shorn,
And fresh from the clear brook; sweetly they slept
On the blue fields of heaven, and then there crept
A little noiseless noise among the leaves,
Born of the very sigh that silence heaves:
For not the faintest motion could be seen
Of all the shades that slanted o’er the green.
Read the rest here.
June 30, 2006 @ 8:03 am | Filed under: Poetry
I think this poem is still under copyright, so click here to read the whole thing.
by Rainer Maria Rilke
It would be good to give much thought, before
you try to find words for something so lost,
for those long childhood afternoons you knew
that vanished so completely—and why?
We’re still reminded: sometimes by a rain,
but we can no longer say what it means…
Links to more Poetry Friday contributions to come later. (I dare not speculate as to how much later. Things are a little hectic around here.)
June 30, 2006 @ 4:04 am | Filed under: Books, Picture Book Spotlight, Poetry
Only Opal: The Diary of a Young Girl
I put this book on hold at the library after reading a review of it—somewhere. I couldn’t remember where. After I read it to my girls, I had to Google Blogsearch it because I needed to know a) who to thank for steering me toward it and b) if other homeschoolers were writing about the thing that pierced my heart about this book.
When the blogsearch landed on Karen Edmisten I thought: Well, of COURSE.
This heartbreakingly beautiful picture book is based on the diary of a young girl named Opal Whitely, a turn-of-the-century child whose parents died and left her to be bounced from one lumber camp to the next in the care of cold and uncaring foster parents. Opal’s surviving record of her very early days—she was only five or six when she kept this diary—is a stunning portrait of a tender, hopeful spirit clinging to every tiny shred of beauty to be found in a grim world. A dark-eyed mouse lives in her pocket; a tall, straight-backed tree offers her strength and support. Opal has no one to love her, so she pours out her own love upon the calf in the field, even though her kind attentions earn her harsh words from the nameless woman who houses her (and works her half to death).
That the foster mother is nameless is telling: Opal is overflowing with names for the creatures she loves. As Karen Edmisten writes,
“Opal finds solace and beauty in nature and in the books her parents left her. From these books, she discovers names for her friends: her pet mouse becomes Felix Mendelssohn, her calf is Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her favorite tree is christened Michael Raphael.”
And that’s the thing that so moved me—and frightened me, in a way—about this book. Did little Opal encountered the composer, the poet, and the archangels on her own in the books her parents left behind, or were their names already familiar to her because she had learned them at her mama’s knee? I can imagine the young mother in the lumber camp, reciting poetry to her tiny daughter; a father humming snatches of a Mendelssohn melody he caught in a drawing room somewhere far away.
Am I just projecting? Is it that I read poetry—some of the very same poems, no doubt—to my own children, and their father the classical music buff plays them symphonies (very loudly) and waxes enthusiastic about the talents of certain composers? Does Only Opal pierce my heart because my children have learned about St. Michael and St. Raphael at my knee, and seeing this delicate child left abandoned to callous strangers reminds me that we are none of us guaranteed the chance to nurture our little ones all the way to adulthood? Suppose (I don’t like to suppose it) something were to happen, and Scott and I were gone. Have we planted enough fruit-bearing seeds in the children’s hearts to nourish them through whatever trials life might hold for them?
I came away from Only Opal feeling profoundly grateful for the time we have had thus far, and for the freedom we have had to make the most of that time. Thankful for the books that have shaped our days together: the many, many mornings we have spent curled up over a volume of poetry and the evenings when I had to shout “Pass the salt” over the crescendo of a Shostakovich symphony. I cannot imagine a scenario in which my children had no one to love them but a ragged little field mouse, but surely there will be times of distress or loss in their lives sooner or later. I cannot protect them from that. What I can do, what I must do, is bequeath to them a store of treasures—the fine music, the fine words, the fine and glorious tenets of our faith—that will sustain them through the unknowns that lie ahead.
