Archive for the Literature Category

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When you are old

Posted in Poetry with tags , on October 6, 2012 by telescoper

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

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Sonnet No. 25 (for National Poetry Day)

Posted in Poetry with tags , , , on October 4, 2012 by telescoper

I’m a bit ashamed that being very busy I forgot that today, Thursday 4th October, is National Poetry Day the theme of which this year is “stars”. I wish I’d remembered and would have posted something appropriate to mark the occasion, but this will have to do…


Let those who are in favour with their stars
Of public honour and proud titles boast,
Whilst I, whom fortune of such triumph bars,
Unlook’d for joy in that I honour most.
Great princes’ favourites their fair leaves spread
But as the marigold at the sun’s eye,
And in themselves their pride lies buried,
For at a frown they in their glory die.
The painful warrior famoused for fight,
After a thousand victories once foil’d,
Is from the book of honour razed quite,
And all the rest forgot for which he toil’d:
Then happy I, that love and am beloved
Where I may not remove nor be removed.

Sonnet No.25 , by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

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Lover Man

Posted in Jazz, Literature with tags , , , on October 3, 2012 by telescoper

I huddled in the cold, rainy wind and watched everything across the sad vineyards of October in the valley. My mind was filled with that great song “Lover Man” as Billie Holiday sings it; I had my own concert in the bushes. “Someday we’ll meet, and you’ll dry all my tears, and whisper sweet, little things in my ear, hugging and a-kissing, oh what we’ve been missing, Lover Man, oh where can you be …” It’s not the words so much as their great harmonic tune and the way Billie sings it, like a woman stroking her man’s hair in soft lamplight.

Jack Kerouac, On the Road.

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Giving up smoking…

Posted in Poetry with tags , , , on September 29, 2012 by telescoper

There’s not a Shakespeare sonnet 
Or a Beethoven quartet 
That’s easier to like than you 
Or harder to forget. 

You think that sounds extravagant? 
I haven’t finished yet – 
I like you more than I would like 
To have a cigarette. 

by Wendy Cope (b. 1945).

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Lay your sleeping head, my love..

Posted in Poetry with tags , on September 25, 2012 by telescoper

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit’s sensual ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of sweetness show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

by W.H. Auden (1907-1973)

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Sonnet No. 20

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on September 22, 2012 by telescoper

On most occasions when I post one of Shakespeare’s sonnets I don’t comment on the content or meaning, preferring to let you all make your own interpretation. This one, however, think deserves some discussion. At first reading it appears to be describing the poet’s love for a feminine-looking young man, and that has led to the interpretation that it was written about one of the many actors that played female roles on the Elizabethan stage. That could well be the case, of course, but it’s not at all obvious to me that this is describing sexual desire for said gender-bending individual. In fact, if you study this sonnet carefully you will find numerous puns and a liberal dose of sexual innuendo so I rather think this is just a bit of fun, rather than a serious discussion of the bard’s sexuality. The reference to “prick” in the penultimate line is obvious, but there’s also “nothing” in the previous line which Shakespeare often uses as a euphemism for a vagina. An even more clever and playful element is the existence of an extra unstressed syllable in each line (making 11 instead of the usual 10 in iambic pentameter), suggesting something added, fairly obviously a penis; the suggestion is that nature made this beautiful person as a woman but then added the “one thing” referred to in the poem.

Anyway, what I love most about this particular sonnet is its humour and ambivalence. That’s probably also why I enjoyed watching the Ladyboys of Bangkok so much on my birthday. So I hereby dedicate this post to them!


A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted,
Hast thou the master mistress of my passion,
A woman’s gentle heart but not acquainted
With shifting change as is false women’s fashion,
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling:
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth,
A man in hue all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created,
Till nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she pricked thee out for women’s pleasure,
Mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure.


Sonnet No.20 , by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

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Nothing Gold Can Stay

Posted in Open Access, Poetry with tags , , , on September 13, 2012 by telescoper

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

by Robert Frost (1874-1963)

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To the Moon

Posted in Poetry, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on September 8, 2012 by telescoper

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven, and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,—
And ever-changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?

by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822).

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Insomnia

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on September 3, 2012 by telescoper

Now you hear what the house has to say.
Pipes clanking, water running in the dark,
the mortgaged walls shifting in discomfort,
and voices mounting in an endless drone
of small complaints like the sounds of a family
that year by year you’ve learned how to ignore.

But now you must listen to the things you own,
all that you’ve worked for these past years,
the murmur of property, of things in disrepair,
the moving parts about to come undone,
and twisting in the sheets remember all
the faces you could not bring yourself to love.

How many voices have escaped you until now,
the venting furnace, the floorboards underfoot,
the steady accusations of the clock
numbering the minutes no one will mark.
The terrible clarity this moment brings,
the useless insight, the unbroken dark.

by Dana Gioia (b. 1950).

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Sonnet of the Sweet Complaint

Posted in Poetry with tags , , , on August 28, 2012 by telescoper

Never let me lose the marvel 
of your statue-like eyes, or the accent 
the solitary rose of your breath 
places on my cheek at night.
I am afraid of being, on this shore, 
a branchless trunk, and what I most regret 
is having no flower, pulp, or clay 
for the worm of my despair.
If you are my hidden treasure, 
if you are my cross, my dampened pain, 
if I am a dog, and you alone my master,
never let me lose what I have gained, 
and adorn the branches of your river 
with leaves of my estranged Autumn.

by Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936).

This poem is from a collection called Sonetos del amor oscuro (“Sonnets of Dark Love”), which contains the last verses ever written by Lorca. They were written to a young man, with whom the poet had a secret love affair, whose identity remained unknown until earlier this year (2012) when letters and other documents were found which revealed him to be the (then) 19-year old Juan Ramírez de Lucas.

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