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The Cool Web

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on August 9, 2012 by telescoper

Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose,
How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,
How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by,

But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the roses’s cruel scent,
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.

There’s a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.

But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children’s day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad, no doubt, and die that way.

by Robert Graves (1895-1985)

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Against Entropy

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on July 30, 2012 by telescoper

The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days
Perhaps you will not miss them. That’s the joke.
The universe winds down. That’s how it’s made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you’ll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.

by John M. Ford (1957-2006)

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There’s a shoulder where death comes to cry

Posted in Music, Poetry with tags , , , on July 26, 2012 by telescoper

I heard this song Take this Waltz by Leonard Cohen a long time ago, and found it very mysterious as I didn’t know what it was about. Lately I found this youtube clip with a preface by Mr Cohen himself that explains that it is a tribute to the Spanish Poet Federico Garcia Lorca. I can’t say I know much about Lorca’s poetry, even in English translation, but I wish I did.

Lorca was born in 1898, and was murdered in 1936 by fascists during the Spanish Civil War. His body was never found.

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In darkness let me dwell

Posted in Music, Poetry with tags , , on July 25, 2012 by telescoper

In darkness let me dwell; the ground shall sorrow be,
The roof despair, to bar all cheerful light from me;
The walls of marble black, that moist’ned still shall weep;
My music, hellish jarring sounds, to banish friendly sleep.
Thus, wedded to my woes, and bedded in my tomb,
O let me dying live, till death doth come, till death doth come.

My dainties grief shall be, and tears my poison’d wine,
My sighs the air, through which my panting heart shall pine:
My robes my mind shall suit exceeding blackest night,
My study shall be tragic thoughts, sad fancy to delight.
Pale ghosts and frightful shades shall my acquaintance be:
O thus, my hapless joy, I haste to thee, I haste to thee.

by John Dowland (1563-1620). Here sung by the wonderful counter-tenor Andreas Scholl…

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A Walk after Dark

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on July 23, 2012 by telescoper

A cloudless night like this
Can set the spirit soaring:
After a tiring day
The clockwork spectacle is
Impressive in a slightly boring
Eighteenth-century way.

It soothed adolescence a lot
To meet so shameless a stare;
The things I did could not
Be so shocking as they said
If that would still be there
After the shocked were dead.

Now, unready to die
But already at the stage
When one starts to resent the young,
I am glad those points in the sky
May also be counted among
The creatures of Middle-age.

It’s cosier thinking of night
As more an Old People’s Home
Than a shed for a faultless machine,
That the red pre-Cambrian light
Is gone like Imperial Rome
Or myself at seventeen.

Yet however much we may like
The stoic manner in which
The classical authors wrote,
Only the young and the rich
Have the nerve or the figure to strike
The lacrimae rerum note.

For the present stalks abroad
Like the past and its wronged again
Whimper and are ignored,
And the truth cannot be hid;
Somebody chose their pain,
What needn’t have happened did.

Occurring this very night
By no established rule,
Some event may already have hurled
Its first little No at the right
Of the laws we accept to school
Our post-diluvian world:

But the stars burn on overhead,
Unconscious of final ends,
As I walk home to bed,
Asking what judgement waits
My person, all my friends,
And these United States.

Written in 1948 by by W. H. Auden (1907-1973)

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No worst, there is none

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on July 23, 2012 by telescoper

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing –
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked ‘No ling-
-ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief’.

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

by Gerald Manley Hopkins (1844-89).

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Mutability

Posted in Poetry with tags , on July 18, 2012 by telescoper

From low to high doth dissolution climb,
And sink from high to low, along a scale
Of awful notes, whose concord shall not fail:
A musical but melancholy chime,
Which they can hear who meddle not with crime,
Nor avarice, nor over-anxious care.
Truth fails not; but her outward forms that bear
The longest date do melt like frosty rime,
That in the morning whitened hill and plain
And is no more; drop like the tower sublime
Of yesterday, which royally did wear
His crown of weeds, but could not even sustain
Some casual shout that broke the silent air,
Or the unimaginable touch of Time.

by William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

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I Had a Hippopotamus

Posted in Poetry with tags , , , , on July 13, 2012 by telescoper

I had a hippopotamus; I kept him in a shed
And fed him upon vitamins and vegetable bread.
I made him my companion on many cheery walks,
And had his portrait done by a celebrity in chalks.

His charming eccentricities were known on every side.
The creature’s popularity was wonderfully wide.
He frolicked with the Rector in a dozen friendly tussles,
Who could not but remark on his hippopotamuscles.

If he should be affected by depression or the dumps
By hippopotameasles or hippopotamumps
I never knew a particle of peace ’till it was plain
He was hippopotamasticating properly again.

I had a hippopotamus, I loved him as a friend
But beautiful relationships are bound to have an end.
Time takes, alas! our joys from us and robs us of our blisses.
My hippopotamus turned out to be a hippopotamissus.

My housekeeper regarded him with jaundice in her eye.
She did not want a colony of hippopotami.
She borrowed a machine gun from her soldier-nephew, Percy
And showed my hippopotamus no hippopotamercy.

My house now lacks the glamour that the charming creature gave.
The garage where I kept him is as silent as a grave.
No longer he displays among the motor-tires and spanners
His hippopotamastery of hippopotamanners.

No longer now he gambols in the orchard in the Spring;
No longer do I lead him through the village on a string;
No longer in the mornings does the neighborhood rejoice
To his hippopotamusically-modulated voice.

I had a hippopotamus, but nothing upon earth
Is constant in its happiness or lasting in its mirth.
No joy that life can give me can be strong enough to smother
My sorrow for that might-have-been-a-hippopotamother.

by Patrick Barrington (1908-90).

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Safe Mode

Posted in Biographical, Poetry on July 11, 2012 by telescoper

It’s broken down.
So what? Who cares?
Silence. Move on.

System restart.
Using safe mode.
(Without plug-ins).

Should do the trick.
Or perhaps not.
Who cares? Move on.

Claim a refund?
No warranty…
Take to the tip?

It was rather
Expensive. True,
but years ago.

Not worth the cost
Of repairing,
Things of that sort.

In the mean time,
Back in its box.
Leave it a while.

Switch the thing off
Then on again.
You know the drill.

Usually works.
If not, just get
Another one;

A different
Make this time, more
Reliable.

by Peter Coles (aged 49).

 

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The Rain

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on July 2, 2012 by telescoper

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent—
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.

by Robert Creeley (1926-2005).

 

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