Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote . . .

[promethia_tenk]

According to kaffyr , it is National Poetry Month!  I think poetry is my favorite sort of literature sometimes.  It's as if a mood mated with a puzzle and then they had a strange incantation-child that can take almost any form it wishes and yet is beguilingly solid.  I'll admit I like the difficult stuff that you can rip through in layers and layers and layers and need to look at from twelve different angles, but that does take quite a lot of time and concentration.  Below the cut then, two relatively brief and straight-forward poems.  Both real favorites of mine.  Both have been haunting me a bit of late because of certain thematic resonances I'm seeing with Doctor Who . . .


Lines from The Tempest by Shakespeare:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich, and strange.








"Preludes" by T.S. Eliot (Moff Who puts me powerfully in mind of Eliot.  Especially "The Waste Land."  But here's something that has a bit of the feel of that without being 17 pages long plus footnotes.)

ETA: now with pictures!  And my campaign to convince everybody that "The Beast Below" is amazing continues apace:

I

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o'clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimneypots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps.

II

The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.

With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.

III

You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed's edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.

IV

His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o'clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

Comments

[snogged.livejournal.com]

Wonderful poem choices!!

[promethia_tenk]

Thanks very much!

[ladymercury-10.livejournal.com]

I love "Full Fathom Five!" I read it a long time ago in an anthology. Have you read "Fear No More the Heat O' the Sun?" It's from a different play of his, and it's also fantastic.

[promethia_tenk]

Um, no I'm not sure if I have. Which play?

[ladymercury-10.livejournal.com]

Cymbeline.

[promethia_tenk]

*goes to read finally*

That's quite entrancing--thank you :)

[ladymercury-10.livejournal.com]

Glad you liked it. :)

[owlboy]

Eliot is my homeboy<3

[promethia_tenk]

The more I read of him, the more I'm forced to conclude that Moff goes to sleep with a copy of his collected works under his pillow.

[owlboy]

I looked up something about Eliot and series 5 that I saw ages ago to show you, but it was written by you. Lol derp.

I would LOVE to know Moff's writing influences.

[promethia_tenk]

Haha! You know, I think you're the second person that's happened to? I don't remember who it was, but same thing.

>>I would LOVE to know Moff's writing influences.

I'm guessing that would be a fairly extensive list, just going by the way he mashes so much together.