/lit/ - Literature

>>12538051
To An Athlete Dying Young
By A.E. Housman

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears.

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.

>this is a popular Housman poem about the beauty and the melancholy of losing someone at a young age, who will remain in memory forever youthful, vibrant, and victorious.

>>12538051
Where should I start with poetry? I feel like whenever I try to write things (e.g. lyrics), it always sounds uninspired and cheesy. Are there any good collections I should study?

OLD SONG
Hart Crane

Thy absence overflows the rose, –
From every petal gleam
Such words as it were vain to close,
Such tears as crowd the dream.

So eyes that mind thee fair and gone,
Bemused at waking, spend
On skies that gild thy remote dawn
More hopes than here attend.

The burden of the rose will fade
Sped in the spectrum’s kiss.
But here the thorn in sharpened shade
Weathers all loneliness.

I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body's weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity, —let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
>when you don't like him but he gives good dick

>>12538211
Well no matter how much talent you have you'll be shit at first, you probably need to write thousands of lines before any of them are good. As for poets to study it depends what exactly you're trying to write.

>>12538051
Art thou pale for weariness
By Percy Bysshe Shelley

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?

I don’t know what this poem is about but I sure do like it. I discovered it because it appears in A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man.

All that is gold does not glitter,Not all those who wander are lost;The old that is strong does not wither,Deep roots are not reached by the frost.From the ashes, a fire shall be woken,A light from the shadows shall spring;Renewed shall be blade that was broken,The crownless again shall be king.

>more epic than FNM
>more dense than a singularity
>more human than Pris and Roy

>>12538303
Is there some anthology of Tolkien poetry?
I usually skipped the poems on my first reading, but as I've grown to appreciate poetry, I've realized his poems are genius.

minä olin rupinen konna ja kivinen kanto
sinä olit kaurapuuro ja soppakauha

>>12538299
It's a poem on the moon anon. But I think some lonely people could apply it to themselves too.

>poetry
>in 2019

is there anything more pretentious, more cringeworthy and not self aware? and I mean that about anyone who reads short form poems in this day and age
back to instagram with you

>>12539211
>conforming blindly to the standards of modernity

now that is cucked

>>12539547
this is exactly what I meant, a delusional hipster so stuck up his own ass that he substitutes the current time period for his own, not even realizing the impossibility, and how laughable it is to pretend to be so uniquely above his contemporaries

>>12539565
> I am 12 and what are these fancy words

Get off /lit/ with your normie rage.

Hello poetry anon, good to see you again. My contribution is a timeless classic from Dylan Thomas about his dying father:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

The man himself reading it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mRec3VbH3w

A section from Keat's letter to Charles Cowden Clarke, which is one of my favourites.

Since I have walk’d with you through shady lanes
That freshly terminate in open plains,
And revel’d in a chat that ceased not
When at night-fall among your books we got:
No, nor when supper came, nor after that,—
Nor when reluctantly I took my hat;
No, nor till cordially you shook my hand
Mid-way between our homes:—your accents bland
Still sounded in my ears, when I no more
Could hear your footsteps touch the grav’ly floor.
Sometimes I lost them, and then found again;
You chang’d the footpath for the grassy plain.

Also, this little snippet from Pope which I've always found very funny.

Though oft the ear the open vowels tire,
While expletives their feeble aid do join,
And ten low words oft creep in one dull line:
While they ring round the same unvaried chimes,
With sure returns of still expected rhymes;
Where’er you find “the cooling western breeze,”
In the next line, it “whispers through the trees” …
Then, at the last and only couplet fraught
With some unmeaning thing they call a thought,
A needless Alexandrine ends the song
That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.

One of the best descriptions of how people who have never been to a war like to brag about it and incite others to go and live throw its hell. Like most old and flaccid politicians who condemn many naïve youths to early deaths only because of “muh politics” and "muh ambitions".

Dulce et Decorum Est

By Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Here's an excerpt of The Exequy by Henry King. I saw it on an old tombstone once.

Sleep on my love in thy cold bed
Never to be disquieted!
My last good-night! Thou wilt not wake
Till I thy fate shall overtake;
Till age, or grief, or sickness must
Marry my body to that dust
It so much loves, and fill the room
My heart keeps empty in thy tomb.
Stay for me there, I will not fail
To meet thee in that hollow vale.
And think not much of my delay;
I am already on the way,
And follow thee with all the speed
Desire can make, or sorrows breed.
Each minute is a short degree,
And ev'ry hour a step towards thee.

>>12538051
Your interpretation of this poem couldn't be more incorrect. The point is that children are more wise than adults in some matters. The point of saying "what it's about" defeats the purpose of poesy, and is made even worse when the interpreter cannot even answer the question himself.

>>12538211
There's a lot of great poetry out there to cover, it isn't as simple as "read poetry 101 anthology and that's it", but pic related may be a good starting place.
Start with tier 2/3.

>>12540234
Not OP, but what does she mean by insisting they are 7? Is she saying that her dead brother and sister have taken two forms - both dead and yet alive in spirit - and so therefore make up the missing two? I'm a little confused on that.

>>12540251
>Wordsworth in you're on the right track-tier

Yikes!

>>12540277
I read it as ranked (starting from entry level) by difficulty not quality.
The entry level and you're on the right track tiers are poets we studied in school (from 12 to 17), so they're obviously not too difficult.

>>12540297
I suppose, but then equally I would argue that a lot of the Levelled Up-tier and the Mama's Proud tier isn't massively difficult.

All in all I think having 'tiers' for poetry is a bit stupid.

>>12539211
Poetry is timeless. You would know this if you weren't completely and hopelessly illiterate. I am being 200% sincere when I say you do not belong on this board. Just because you did not encounter a barrier to entry does not mean there is none. But the internet has that effect on people.

What do poetryfags think of /lit/'s favourite poems?

>>12539565
>muh progress

fucking retard

>>12540268
Her refusal to say that she has only 4 siblings is out of honor for the dead. Imagine if you had only one sibling who died as a child and now someone is insisting you are an only child. The little girl does not want the memory of her siblings to die as their bodies have.

>>12540368
oh shit yeah I read the poem wrong

>>12540353
When was this polled? These are all worth reading. I had forgotten how much I once adored Keats.

>1/3:
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

>>12540442
>2/3:
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is senpai'd to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep? My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

>>12540449
>3/4, I miscalculated the length:
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.

>>12540454
>4/4:

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is senpai'd to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

>>12540353
>2 Eliots
>2 Keats
>Byron
>Ozymandias at 7th
>no Inferno
>Beowulf at 9
>no Shakespeare

Cringe

>>12540353
>Ozymandias
Good, but also meme-tier and too high
>The Raven
Meme-tier
>Dulce et Decorum est
Not bad, but how could this honestly be your favorite poem?
>If
Terrible. Shel Silverstein level.
>Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
Meme-tier, muh villanelle
>The Road Not Taken
Meme-tier, far from Frost's best
>The Second Coming
Easily the most overrated poem Yeats ever wrote
>America
Edgy, bad

The rest are acceptable, although the epics seem a little overrated and probably shouldn't share a list with lyric poems. I wish Wordsworth and Stevens were represented, among others. Also I feel there should be more pre-Romantic English poetry. Between Chaucer and Blake there's a lot more than just Paradise Lost. Only one I haven't read is the Gita.

This is a good idea for a thread. I never know what to read to get more into poetry.

>>12538211
I've been writing songs since I was 6 and only very recently have I made anything I'm proud of. Sure there's old stuff that has clever lines but I have no desire to make them more than nostalgic memories.

The Unknown Citizen
W. H. Auden

(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a
saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his
generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their
education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

>The point is pretty obvious. But I really admire the way Auden is able to write poetry that is clearly technically brilliant while also incorporating awkward and sometimes rather unmelodic phrases. Many of his poems are clunky in a sort of charming or even humorous way, and yet always he retains an admirable sense of sincerity and moral seriousness.

>>12540629
Oops I copied-pasted the poem and messed it up. Obviously "saint," "generation," and "education" belong at the ends of the preceding lines.

>>12538203
Not the poster.
This one comes from a collection of poems which talk of the countryside during the first Boer war. It was ignored at first though gained popularity during the second Boer war and later ww1.
I am away and phone posting but I would like to add that you fellows should read To His Coy Mistress.

Good job on making this thread OP.

Saint Judas

When I went out to kill myself, I caught
A pack of hoodlums beating up a man.
Running to spare his suffering, I forgot
My name, my number, how my day began,
How soldiers milled around the garden stone
And sang amusing songs; how all that day
Their javelins measured crowds; how I alone
Bargained the proper coins, and slipped away.

Banished from heaven, I found this victim beaten,
Stripped, kneed, and left to cry. Dropping my rope
Aside, I ran, ignored the uniforms:
Then I remembered bread my flesh had eaten,
The kiss that ate my flesh. Flayed without hope,
I held the man for nothing in my arms.

James Arlington Wright

Easter Sunday, 1985
Charles Martin, 1942
To take steps toward the reappearance alive of the disappeared is a subversive act,
and measures will be adopted to deal with it.
—General Oscar Mejia Victores,
President of Guatemala


In the Palace of the President this morning,
The General is gripped by the suspicion
That those who were disappeared will be returning
In a subversive act of resurrection.

Why do you worry? The disappeared can never
Be brought back from wherever they were taken;
The age of miracles is gone forever;
These are not sleeping, nor will they awaken.

And if some tell you Christ once reappeared
Alive, one Easter morning, that he was seen—
Give them the lie, for who today can find him?

He is perhaps with those who were disappeared,
Broken and killed, flung into some ravine
With his arms safely wired up behind him.

Donald Justice, “The Wall”

The wall surrounding them they never saw;
The angels, often. Angels were as common
As birds or butterflies, but looked more human.
As long as the wings were furled, they felt no awe.
Beasts, too, were friendly. They could find no flaw
In all of Eden: this was the first omen.
The second was the dream which woke the woman.
She dreamed she saw the lion sharpen his claw.
As for the fruit, it had no taste at all.
They had been warned of what was bound to happen.
They had been told of something called the world.
They had been told and told about the wall.
They saw it now; the gate was standing open.
As they advanced, the giant wings unfurled.

Fall morning

As a child I once found
a dying god. He lay still
between his wings and waited
for them to set him
free. Man is
dust; only gods can die.
At dawn he had sunken
down on a mountain, which now trembled
under the heartbeats. Only the
string of the trail held it together. High
in the East fervid innards gushed out
between the clouds. I understood,
that a god uses all of
reality when he suffers. Afterwards,
he resembled a dead bird,
but I knew, that so deeply
can no bird die.


This is a poem by Swedish speaking Finnish poet Gösta Ågren, translated by me. I can do some more translations if you like his style. Here is the original too:

Höstmorgon

Som barn fann jag en gång
en döende gud. Han låg stilla
mellan sina vingar och väntade
på att de skulle släppa honom
fri. Människan är
stoft; endast gudar kan dö.
I gryningen hade han sjunkit
ned på ett berg, som nu darrade
under hjärtslagen. Bara stigens
snöre höll det samman. Högt
i öster vällde glödande inälvor
ut mellan molnen. Jag förstod,
att en gud använder hela
verkligheten som kropp
när han lider. Efteråt
liknade han en död fågel,
men jag visste, att så djupt
kan ingen fågel dö.

>>12540353
Fine although I suspect most of these people don't read much poetry.

>>12540473
The Divine Comedy is 3rd

>>12540768
Anon I love Gösta Ågren. There's something very wild buried in his words. I'm not a native speaker though so it's hard to fully appreciate. Can we be friends? Would love to hear more of your translations.

>>12540810
Oh yeah I missed that

>>12539194
Damn. How did I not get that. Love Shelley though, would post “to a Skylark” here if it wasn’t so long

>>12538211

>>12540996
>reading pop literature about poetry before reading actually poetry
ishygddt

>>12541003

>>12541064
How is it bait?
I'm honestly trying to stop any impressionable anons from taking your retarded advice.

>>12541153