post your favourite poem, lads. >Dulce et decorum est...

>>9230128

10/10 poem

good taste

>>9230128
Oread

BY H. D.

Whirl up, sea—
whirl your pointed pines,
splash your great pines
on our rocks,
hurl your green over us,
cover us with your pools of fir.

this or Prufrock or WCW's Pink Locust

Someone posted this in the last thread and i loved it:

>I Looked for Life and Did a Shadow See
>ByJames Galvin

Some little splinter
Of shadow purls
And weals down
The slewed stone
Chapel steps,
Slinks along
The riverrock wall
And disappears
Into the light.
Now ropy, riffled,
Now owlish, sere,
It smolders back
To sight beneath
A dwarfish, brindled tree
That chimes and sifts
And resurrects
In something’s sweet
And lethal breath.
This little shadow
Seems to know
(How can it know?
How can it not?)
Just when to flinch
Just where to loop and sag
And skitter down,
Just what to squirrel
And what to squander till
The light it lacks
Bleeds it back
And finds
My sleeping dark-haired girl —
O personal,
Impersonal,
Continual thrall —
And hammocks blue
In the hollows of her eyes.

Upon a window pane
What is left to say?
To and fro the seasons go
The decisions have been made

As time goes on, I wander so
Wondering where all the time has gone
Sky and sea, my only friends
In solitude, I am one

Clouds move as the waves
Effortless with grace
Trees dance as the wind flows
Only my creator to give praise

My eyes open to a world unknown
Under the waves I cast my presence
Walking through streets with lonesome grown
Grasping the hope of my relavence

>My Dream of Visiting Mount Tianyu
>By Li Bai

Seafaring men will tell you of the Land of the Immortals
that can never be reached through mists and massive waves;
the people of Yue tell stories of the Lady of the Heavens:
sometimes she'll reveal herself through shifting clouds and rainbows.
The Heavenly Lady reaches out to touch the sky,
higher than the Sacred Mountains, obscuring cities
with mile after mile of sky terrace
sloping down towards the southeast.

In my dream, I longed to go to Wu and Yue,
flying over Mirror Lake by moonlight,
my shadow on the lake below.
Arriving at Shan Creek,
the old Xie lodge was still there
with green water, gibbons howling.
At the lodge I put on straw sandals
to climb the stairway to the sky.
I could see half the country and the sunlit sea
and heard a cock crow overhead.

Among endless ravines and pathless cliffs,
admiring the flowers, I leaned on a boulder
and didn't notice darkness closing in.
Bears roared, dragons groaned, among the red cliffs and springs.
The deep forest trembled, the mountain peak crumbled,
dark clouds gathered, threatening rain,
mist spread over roiling water.
Columns opened up to thunderbolts,
the whole mountain chain was heaving.
Stones of the Heavenly Gateway tumbled;
with deafening noise, the center opened up
a vast and bottomless chasm.

Then sun and moon lit up the gold and silver terrace.
There, in rainbow clothes, riding on the wind,
dwellers in the clouds were gathering:
lute-playing tigers, chariots drawn by phoenix-birds,
immortals lined in rows, like fields of hemp.

Suddenly, I jumped in terror at this vision,
gasped and sighed in deep confusion.
Slowly I came to realize
pillow and cover were those clouds and mists.

This is always the way with human pleasure:
Ten Thousand Things beyond our reach
are carried off like water flowing east.

Leaving: my friend, who knows when i'll return?
White deer live in freedom on a green slope;
I must hurry off to that great mountain.
To stay here, bow and scrape to those in power,
would surely damage my integrity.

>>9230128
One of my least favourite famous war poems

>>9230256
Explain why you like that poem

>>9230500
why do you dislike it?

>>9230568
I don't

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
I

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees,
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.


II

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.


III

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.


IV

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

>the only thing worth knowing
I changed sides
of the road
walking
perhaps
to some ultimate
destination
I was wrong
it was only
another sidewalk
I had been
doing nothing
staring at letters
in books
without
knowing their meaning
the coffee got cold
I go for walks
when I get tired
of sitting.
I’d like to say
this is all true
but I only have
noise and vague memory
I have no idea
what I did
today.

>>9230256
I love HD, I prefer The Pool to that poem for her strict imagist pieces but that one is quite beautiful as well.

>>9231669
A classic. Yeats is an absolute master of the ottava rima.

My current favorite poem:

14

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) "Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no
Inner Resources." I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as Achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

-John Berryman

>>9232445
The formatting of the poem got fucked up - there is a stanza break after "means you have no"

Praise be to Nero's Neptune, the Titanic sails at dawn
Everybody's shouting, "Which side are you on?!"
And Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot fighting in the captain's tower
While calypso singers laugh at them and fishermen hold flowers
Between the windows of the sea where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much about Desolation Row
Yes, I received your letter yesterday, about the time the doorknob broke
When you asked me how I was doing, was that some kind of joke
All these people that you mention, yes, I know them, they're quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces and give them all another name
Right now, I can't read too good, don't send me no more letters no
Not unless you mail them from Desolation Row

-Bob Dylan ;)