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Poems - by Orbler

Poems - April 2006

Sonnet 55

April 28th 2006 09:35
Sonnet 55
by William Shakespeare

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone besmear'd with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lover's eyes.

Many of Shakespeare's sonnets are about the destructiveness of Time and the impermanence of youth and beauty. This one differs from most on this theme because rather than being melancholic and hopeless, it's full of confidence that with poetry he can immortalise the young man he loves by preserving his memory. The sonnet has been criticised for being too forcedly bold and overconfident, which is out of character after the sonnets preceding this one, but the fact that we're reading it today proves that Shakespeare's grand claims were justified!
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If - Rudyard Kipling

April 26th 2006 02:09
Just about everyone is familiar with Rudyard Kipling, whether they know it or not. He is the author of "The Jungle Book", "Kim", "Just So Stories", "Gunga Din" and plenty of other famous works, as well as being the inventor of the term "the white man's burden". While many are at odds with his politics, the appeal of his writing, especially his writing for children, has well and truly outweighed such objections.

This is a very popular poem and has been presented to countless children by their parents and teachers as general advice on how to behave toward yourself and others. It's been criticised for being too obvious in some ways, and for being too prohibitive in others. And of course, the gender-specificity puts some people off. But really, the advice is as good for girls as it is for boys, and while a lot of it is really just common sense, at least it's nicely put!
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John Keats

April 25th 2006 11:41
John Keats is one of the most well known of the English Romantics, even though he only lived to the age of 25 and didn't have time to build up a very large oeuvre. Yeats wrote of him

I see a schoolboy when I think of him,
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William Blake

April 24th 2006 10:21
William Blake is one of my favourite poets, so you can expect to see more of his poems here in future. His work (he was also a painter and printmaker and saw his work in this area as inseparable from his poetry) only gained public recognition after his death in 1827, but he has become one of England's best known and best loved poets.

Blake was a Unitarian and believed in equality of class, race and sex and a lot of his work reflects this, though often in Christian allegory. The following poem shows how strongly he was against child labour, which was very common in 18th century London.
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Sonnet - To Science

April 22nd 2006 10:07
I've just had a sudden holiday sprung on me, leaving tomorrow morning and won't be back until Wednesday, so I'll quickly set up some poems to appear on the next couple of days, though I don't have time to say much about them! You can always do that yourselves anyway . Obviously I won't be able to respond to comments until Wednesday, but when Wednesday comes I will.

Anyway, I'd meant to wait a while before another Edgar Allan Poe poem, but I suppose now is as good a time as any to bring you a poem of his that shows his lighter side, though it's still a bit depressing overall. It's something most of us can relate to and will probably become even more relevant in years to come, as science advances and gives boring explanations for even more things!
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Constance Woodrow

April 20th 2006 02:55
Constance Woodrow was an English-born Canadian poet. She died very young, at 38. "Defeat" was written in 1928, when she was 28 years old. During her lifetime she published two volumes of verse, The Captive Gypsy (1928) and The Celtic Heart (1929) and worked in a famous Toronto bookshop.

This poem is a good representation of why many people are afraid to get close in relationships, to have their 'dreaming heart' awakened. If and when the relationship ends, things seem even worse than they were before, a darker grey than the grey yesterdays, and once it's happened once you are afraid to try again. Once bitten, twice shy and all that. I'm lucky and this has never happened to me, so I'm still looking at the world through rose-coloured glasses and can cheerfully give Tennyson's advice, "'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all". I'd be interested to hear others' opinions though - are the pleasures of love greater than the pain of the loss of it?
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Ambrose Bierce

April 19th 2006 03:36
Ambrose Bierce was a sharp-tongued and cynical American who wrote mostly short stories, poetry and verse and was also a harsh critic of others' work. A purist when it came to the English language, he published a small grammar guide called "Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults", with the explanation that "few words have more than one literal and serviceable meaning, however many metaphorical, derivative, related, or even unrelated, meanings lexicographers may think it worth while to gather from all sorts and conditions of men, with which to bloat their absurd and misleading dictionaries". This low opinion of dictionary writers led him to create his own, but with definitions intended to be the opposite of misleading: "The Devil's Dictionary" was originally published as "The Cynic's Word Book" and its satirical definitions lampoon and expose doublespeak and hypocrisy, or simply make fun of human behaviour. Many definitions are accompanied by short poems, which demonstrate both Bierce's talent with words and his sardonic sense of humour. This one, attributed to "Halcyon Jones", one of Bierce's inexplicable pennames, is one of my favourites, as much for the definition as for the poem.

Weather, n. The climate of an hour. A permanent topic of conversation among persons whom it does not interest, but who have inherited the tendency to chatter about it from naked arboreal ancestors whom it keenly concerned. The setting up of official weather bureaus and their maintenance in mendacity prove that even governments are accessible to suasion by the rude forefathers of the jungle.
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Shakespeare Poetry

April 18th 2006 04:52
Shakespeare needs no introduction, but I'll give a little background information on his sonnets. There were 154 of them and all except Sonnet 126 are twelve lines long, followed by a final couplet which adds a twist or gives clarification to the preceding lines. They were often written to one of three people, who are referred to nowadays as the Fair Lord, the Rival Poet, and the Dark Lady. There is some conjecture as to their real identities, or if they were even real people. It also isn't known whether or not the sonnets are autobiographical.

Some of the sonnets aren't written to or about a specific person, but are ruminations on love, time and mortality, such as the following, Shakespeare's 116th sonnet. A few hints on possibly unfamiliar expressions in this poem: the "ever-fixed mark" is a beacon, such as a tower or rock, to help lost ships (every wand'ring bark) to navigate stormy seas. Since it is referred to in this poem as "the star", it is probably a reference to the Pole star, which in the Northern hemisphere never appears to move and is useful for navigation. The "edge of doom" is the Day of Judgement or the day of a person's death.
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Edwin Arlington Robinson

April 17th 2006 14:04
Today's poet is a genuine "starving artist". For a large portion of his life Edwin Arlington Robinson lived in self-imposed poverty and obscurity, focusing almost entirely on writing. Despite his life being beset by difficulties, his devotion paid off and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1922.

Although Robinson lived at the turn of the 20th century when poets were becoming more experimental, he stuck to conventional poetic forms like sonnets and quatrains. In this respect he has more in common with earlier English poets than with his American contemporaries. His subjects were often unfortunate people who were repressed or ruined by a materialistic society, and Robinson excelled at showing their inner strength and spirit, in a sympathetic but never condescending manner. I haven't read a lot of his work, but he is nevertheless one of my favourite poets - his combination of rigidly conventional style with down-to-earth, modern content is very effective and unique, and can make the frequently blunt and unpleasant endings to his poems quite startling, as in this, one of his most famous pieces of work (any Simon & Garfunkel fans will know the song based on it).
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Edward Gorey

April 14th 2006 07:06
EDWARD GOREY (1925 - 2000)

Edward Gorey was born in Chicago in 1925 and wrote and illustrated more than 100 books. Most are short, blackly humourous poems illustrated with Gorey's distinctive etchings, which have a sinister atmosphere and an old-fashioned English style. Many of these books are next to impossible to find nowadays, but are available in the "Amphigorey" anthologies, or as original copies at extremely high prices if you look hard enough. He also illustrated many other books, including Dracula and The War of the Worlds.
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Edgar Allan Poe

April 13th 2006 04:22
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (1809 - 1849)

The 19th century American writer Edgar Allan Poe is famous for his macabre short stories, which at the time were a unique combination of mystery and the gothic or supernatural. Some stories you may have heard of include "The Tell Tale Heart", "The Fall of the House of Usher", "The Pit and the Pendulum" and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". I personally prefer his prose to his poetry, as I find it much more original and has more of his own style. However, there are exceptions to this, and this hypnotic, tension-building poem is one of them.

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Elizabeth I

April 12th 2006 04:20
I'm going to make an effort to feature a good number of female poets in this blog, though it's a lot harder to find good uncopyrighted poems by women, since many of the most popular are also quite recent, and many of the older ones are relatively unknown.

But one who will be known to everyone is Queen Elizabeth I. She was Queen of England and Ireland from 1558 until her death in 1603. She never married, despite the parliament insisting she did so when she nearly died of smallpox, because they were concerned that there would be civil war upon her death if she didn't produce an heir. But she was stubborn, and not only refused to marry but also refused to nominate an heir. Though she had a reputation for being flirtatious she was also very indecisive, and more than one of her poems express regret for having turned lovers away when she was "young and fair". It was rumoured that she was in love with the earl of Leicester, Robert Dudley, whom she couldn't have, and so wouldn't have anyone else, or perhaps she simply didn't want to share her power with another. Whatever her reason for never marrying, her poetry makes it clear that she was not as hardhearted or detached as she might have appeared. The following poem was written when Elizabeth was in her mid-thirties.

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Ernest Hemingway

April 11th 2006 04:22
Moving away from the very Britishness of Lord Byron, here we have an entirely different beast, the American writer Ernest Miller Hemingway. Probably more famous for his novels (For Whom the Bell Tolls might, well, ring a bell, as might The Old Man and the Sea) than for his poetry, he was one of the instigators of that laconic, terse style familiar to any fan of the Beat generation, Hunter S. Thompson, J.D. Salinger and other such quintessentially American writers.

While his poems are definitely not in keeping with the same literary tradition as those of Lord Byron, the two shared a notorious reputation. Hemingway came under fire for his arrogance and lifestyle, but such things pale into insignificance when compared to his achievements, including a Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize, and his lasting literary influence. He committed suicide in 1961, aged 61.

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Lord Byron - She Walks in Beauty

April 10th 2006 04:03
Hello everyone! Welcome to the first post of my new "Daily Poem" blog. I'll be posting about one poet each day, as the name implies, usually with some background information on the poet and one or more poems. I'm planning on covering a variety of genres, styles and time periods, but of course comments with suggestions as to what types of poetry you're interested in are more than welcome.

Anyway, for this first blog, I've chosen a Lord Byron poem I discovered recently via slightly unusual means: I was watching the most recent film version of Vanity Fair (a movie I highly recommend), and the music in the opening credits is the following poem set to music, and sung by Sissel. The song has a beautiful, haunting atmosphere and stuck with me, so I looked the poem up and here it is!
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post end text

April 8th 2006 04:42
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April 8th 2006 04:42
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April 8th 2006 04:42
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April 8th 2006 04:42
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