(no subject)

[proximoception]

Another cemetery poem I hadn't known about:

At Lulworth Cove a Century Back, Hardy

Had I but lived a hundred years ago
I might have gone, as I have gone this year,
By Warmwell Cross on to a Cove I know,
And Time have placed his finger on me there:

"You see that man?" — I might have looked, and said,
"O yes: I see him. One that boat has brought
Which dropped down Channel round Saint Alban's Head.
So commonplace a youth calls not my thought."

"You see that man?" — "Why yes; I told you; yes:
Of an idling town-sort; thin; hair brown in hue;
And as the evening light scants less and less
He looks up at a star, as many do."

"You see that man?" — "Nay, leave me!" then I plead,
"I have fifteen miles to vamp across the lea,
And it grows dark, and I am weary-kneed:
I have said the third time; yes, that man I see!"

"Good. That man goes to Rome — to death, despair;
And no one notes him now but you and I:
A hundred years, and the world will follow him there,
And bend with reverence where his ashes lie."


The star was this one:


Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature’s patient sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

Comments

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

I never knew that Hardy poem. I'm noticing for the first time that the Keats poem is punctuated as a long, single sentence, which sounds right for a love poem, but Petrarch and Shakespeare don't seem to have done it much. I should read more Hardy.

[parishat.livejournal.com]

the keats is a sonnet--sometimes those are punctuated that way, or if they're not, they seem to be.

do you know that Hollander poem about the epitaph, found in a Florida cemetery, "I told you I was sick!"?