Favorite Poems/Poets

[Kyoshi]

My favourite poem is Strange Meeting by Wilfred Owen. Read it for the first time when I was sixteen and fell in love with it.

Titanic wars had groined.

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall;
By his dead smile, I knew we stood in Hell.
With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
"Strange, friend," I said, "Here is no cause to mourn."
"None," said the other, "Save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something has been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled.
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress,
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
Courage was mine, and I had mystery;
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery;
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.
I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now . . ."

EDIT: I hope this thread doesn't get locked soon since I only discovered it now (I'm kneeling to you mods).

[Kyoshi]

Futility by Wilfred Owen, it gets me every time:

Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields half-sown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds,—
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved—still warm—too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?

[Disputatious]

EDIT: I hope this thread doesn't get locked soon since I only discovered it now (I'm kneeling to you mods).

We can always do a second part, and have a link made back to this part. One of the moderators contributes to the thread, so we may be hopeful about this.

[Disputatious]

I'd never actually looked at AE Housman's poetry before, though I was aware of the Ezra Pound spoof. I've Googled it. He was a rampant doggerelist. He reminds me a lot of Julia A Moore except that he was a bit more fluent in his hackneyed and strangled metaphors, and better at using metre. But his stuff is actually quite fun.

You will not be shocked, I trust, to learn that my primary exposure to Housman's poetry came via songs by George Butterworth, Ralph Vaughn Williams, etc. That gives me a different perspective, perhaps, on his poems. Also I have actually stood on Breedon top, which gives me a sense of personal connection to "On Breedon Hill", at least. (That was about thirty years ago.) Housman was not pleased with attempts to put music to his poems, but at least, unlike Yeats, he did not actively put road blocks in the path of composers trying to do that.

Some of his poems are less in the way of doggerel than others: e.g. "On the Idle Hill of Summer", the which I posted last November, along with a link to Butterworth's setting: both poem and music seem to me more somber and expressive than "When I was One and Twenty".

[The Killer Snark]

Never knew that about Yeats. I'm in the process actually of trying to find musical settings of Tennyson and Swinburne. He's not a poet I personally like - behind all of the Hopkinsesque diction I don't think he had much to say - but I think the Stravinsky/Dylan Thomas opera collaboration would have been very interesting, which of course was cut short because of Thomas' premature death.

[Disputatious]

Peter Warlock wrote a piece called "The Curlew" which set that and several other Yeats poems. Yeats initially blocked publication of the score, presumably on the grounds that it included the texts of the poems. A performance of Warlock's music was reviewed very favorably, after which Yeats relented and permitted publication.

One Tennyson poem was included in Benjamin Britten's "Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings", and several in a song cycle by Arthur Somerville on the "Maud" poems, including, yes, "Come Into The Garden, Maud". There are probably other settings, but those are the ones I know of.

As for Swinburne, there are probably things out there, but the thing I have encountered is more in the way of a chant entitled "The Swinburne Stomp" by the sixties folk rock group The Fugs, who mixed songs based on Blake poems and such, including an attempt to sing a poem by Sappho in some approximation to the original Greek, with songs like "Wet Dream" which was an attempt to satirize early sixties guy groups with a rather literal account of the phenomenon, and political satire such as the song "Kill for Peace". (One of the members of the group, Tuli Kupferburg, taught English Lit at City University in New York.) They did not sing well and their musicianship was suspect, to say the least, but they were certainly interesting in their own way.

[Disputatious]

Oops, hit post before fixing all the line ends: have patience please.

Here is the Tennyson poem that Britten set:

from The Princess: The Splendour Falls on Castle Walls

BY ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

The splendour falls on castle walls

And snowy summits old in story:

The long light shakes across the lakes,

And the wild cataract leaps in glory.

Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,

Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,

And thinner, clearer, farther going!

O sweet and far from cliff and scar

The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!

Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying:

Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O love, they die in yon rich sky,

They faint on hill or field or river:

Our echoes roll from soul to soul,

And grow for ever and for ever.

Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,

And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.

You can see why Britten liked this: the imagery practically calls for music.

One should note that another poem among those Britten included in that work was one of the most bitter Blake ever wrote, viz. "O Rose, Thou Art Sick". I think Britten choose very well for the work with a fine contrast of mood and sentiment among the poems.

Will return from harvesting You Tube shortly