(no subject)

[proximoception]

Housman's two best poems, both from Last Poems, never far from my head. 1 of 2:

Tell me not here, it needs not saying,
What tune the enchantress plays
In aftermaths of soft September
Or under blanching mays,
For she and I were long acquainted
And I know all her ways.

On russet floors, by waters idle,
The pine lets fall its cone;
The cuckoo shouts all day at nothing
In leafy dells alone;
And traveler’s joy beguiles in autumn
Hearts that have lost their own.

On acres of the seeded grasses
The changing burnish heaves;
Or marshalled under moons of harvest
Stand still all night the sheaves;
Or beeches strip in storms for winter
And stain the wind with leaves.

Possess, as I possessed a season,
The countries I resign,
Where over elmy plains the highway
Would mount the hills and shine,
And full of shade the pillared forest
Would murmur and be mine.

For nature, heartless, witless nature,
Will neither care nor know
What stranger’s feet may find the meadow
And trespass there and go,
Nor ask amid the dews of morning
If they are mine or no.

Comments

[thelican.livejournal.com]

That is gorgeous. Strikes me as a more proper version of Swinburne's sensibility.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

It did make me think of "Garden of Proserpine" while transcribing it. I love Swinburne's impropriety, but Housman is better for the bad times. Him, Frost and Dickinson, I find. Stevens, Emerson and Wordsworth for when one feels a bit better, Whitman and Swinburne and Shelley when one feels best of all.

[thelican.livejournal.com]

That's interesting. There's no one poet to whom I turn in bad times - just certain modes of the poets I like best. For instance, certainly not most,/i> of Shakespeare - but for a long time, Richard the II's "you have but mistaken me all this time" speech - and Mowbray's speech just after Richard's sentenced him to exile. Then, certain melancholic but less analytical Stevens and Ashbery, one Bishop in particular, etc. Never just anything from one poet's oeuvre at those times - very particular modes.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

No, not every poem or anything--but Dickinson and Frost have a lot of how-to-take-it-when-it-sucks-and-if-you're-paying-attention-it-always-sucks poems. Many of which by both are often misread as sunny, doubtless to their shades' delight.

Stevens' war poems fit well, c. 2002-04, and "Long and Sluggish Lines" is a perennial wake-up poem for me, though Bloom's pretty convincing that it's anticipating his death. I just prefer to read it otherwise. Which Bishop?

[thelican.livejournal.com]

My comfort Bishop is predictable: "One Art." I've also taken solace in, I think it is, "Letter to New York;" what I most remember is the wistful beginning echoed in the last lines: "nevertheless I'd like to know / what you are doing and where you are going.

Tell me a few of your Frost and Stevens and Dickinson? (With Stevens, in bad times, I always go back to "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts" and "The Poems of Our Climate."

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I'll temporarily dodge the question by saying all three, and Emerson too in prose and verse, are poets I prefer to read around in at random. I don't think I do that with anyone else. It's a rare poem by any of them I don't love.

But Frost's Directive is one of the best poems ever. I love Into My Own, Trial by Existence, Once by the Pacific, West-Running Brook for the eddy, Birches, The Peaceful Shepherd, Closing Time (feel I'm getting this title wrong), Stopping by Woods and Acquainted with the Night, the one where everyone's looking out to sea, Nothing Gold Can Stay, Two Look at Two, The Most of It. Stopping just because my memory does.

I think I remember being most cheered over the years by Long and Sluggish Lines, River of Rivers in CT, Reality Is an Activity (I think I've read those three the most often, anyway after anthology stars like Sunday Morning, Ideas of Order, 13 Ways); special to me also are Owl in the Sarcophagus, Auroras, Rabbit as King, Mrs. Alfred Uruguay, I think Dry Loaf & Girl in a Nightgown & especially Martial Cadenza in the Bush years, Landscape with Boat, Old Philosopher in Rome. I honor Ordinary Evening as his very best but it can be exhausting. A lot of great Stevens moments I can't seem to connect with his tangential titles.

Dickinson I wouldn't know where to start.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Oh, Hyla Brook.