Written by
William Blake |
Come, kings, and listen to my song:
When Gwin, the son of Nore,
Over the nations of the North
His cruel sceptre bore;
The nobles of the land did feed
Upon the hungry poor;
They tear the poor man's lamb, and drive
The needy from their door.
`The land is desolate; our wives
And children cry for bread;
Arise, and pull the tyrant down!
Let Gwin be humbl?d!'
Gordred the giant rous'd himself
From sleeping in his cave;
He shook the hills, and in the clouds
The troubl'd banners wave.
Beneath them roll'd, like tempests black,
The num'rous sons of blood;
Like lions' whelps, roaring abroad,
Seeking their nightly food.
Down Bleron's hills they dreadful rush,
Their cry ascends the clouds;
The trampling horse and clanging arms
Like rushing mighty floods!
Their wives and children, weeping loud,
Follow in wild array,
Howling like ghosts, furious as wolves
In the bleak wintry day.
`Pull down the tyrant to the dust,
Let Gwin be humbl?d,'
They cry, `and let ten thousand lives
Pay for the tyrant's head.
'
From tow'r to tow'r the watchmen cry,
`O Gwin, the son of Nore,
Arouse thyself! the nations, black
Like clouds, come rolling o'er!'
Gwin rear'd his shield, his palace shakes,
His chiefs come rushing round;
Each, like an awful thunder cloud,
With voice of solemn sound:
Like rear?d stones around a grave
They stand around the King;
Then suddenly each seiz'd his spear,
And clashing steel does ring.
The husbandman does leave his plough
To wade thro' fields of gore;
The merchant binds his brows in steel,
And leaves the trading shore;
The shepherd leaves his mellow pipe,
And sounds the trumpet shrill;
The workman throws his hammer down
To heave the bloody bill.
Like the tall ghost of Barraton
Who sports in stormy sky,
Gwin leads his host, as black as night
When pestilence does fly,
With horses and with chariots--
And all his spearmen b 1000 old
March to the sound of mournful song,
Like clouds around him roll'd.
Gwin lifts his hand--the nations halt;
`Prepare for war!' he cries--
Gordred appears!--his frowning brow
Troubles our northern skies.
The armies stand, like balances
Held in th' Almighty's hand;--
`Gwin, thou hast fill'd thy measure up:
Thou'rt swept from out the land.
'
And now the raging armies rush'd
Like warring mighty seas;
The heav'ns are shook with roaring war,
The dust ascends the skies!
Earth smokes with blood, and groans and shakes
To drink her children's gore,
A sea of blood; nor can the eye
See to the trembling shore!
And on the verge of this wild sea
Famine and death doth cry;
The cries of women and of babes
Over the field doth fly.
The King is seen raging afar,
With all his men of might;
Like blazing comets scattering death
Thro' the red fev'rous night.
Beneath his arm like sheep they die,
And groan upon the plain;
The battle faints, and bloody men
Fight upon hills of slain.
Now death is sick, and riven men
Labour and toil for life;
Steed rolls on steed, and shield on shield,
Sunk in this sea of strife!
The god of war is drunk with blood;
The earth doth faint and fail;
The stench of blood makes sick the heav'ns;
Ghosts glut the throat of hell!
O what have kings to answer for
Before that awful throne;
When thousand deaths for vengeance cry,
And ghosts accusing groan!
Like blazing comets in the sky
That shake the stars of light,
Which drop like fruit unto the earth
Thro' the fierce burning night;
Like these did Gwin and Gordred meet,
And the first blow decides;
Down from the brow unto the breast
Gordred his head divides!
Gwin fell: the sons of Norway fled,
All that remain'd alive;
The rest did fill the vale of death,
For them the eagles strive.
The river Dorman roll'd their blood
Into the northern sea;
Who mourn'd his sons, and overwhelm'd
The pleasant south country.
|
Written by
William Butler Yeats |
Was it the double of my dream
The woman that by me lay
Dreamed, or did we halve a dream
Under the first cold gleam of day?
I thought: "There is a waterfall
Upon Ben Bulben side
That all my childhood counted dear;
Were I to travel far and wide
I could not find a thing so dear.
'
My memories had magnified
So many times childish delight.
I would have touched it like a child
But knew my finger could but have touched
Cold stone and water.
I grew wild.
Even accusing Heaven because
It had set down among its laws:
Nothing that we love over-much
Is ponderable to our touch.
I dreamed towards break of day,
The cold blown spray in my nostril.
But she that beside me lay
Had watched in bitterer sleep
The marvellous stag of Arthur,
That lofty white stag, leap
From mountain steep to steep.
|
Written by
Barry Tebb |
You were the one I wanted most to know
So like yet unlike, like fire and snow,
The casual voice, the sharp invective,
The barbed wit, the lapsed Irish Protestant
Who never gave a ****, crossed the palms
Of the great and good with coins hot with contempt
For the fakers and the tricksters whose poetry
Deftly bent to fashion’s latest slant.
You wrote from the heart, feelings on your sleeve,
But feelings are all a master poet needs:
You broke all the taboos, whores and fags and booze,
While I sighed over books and began to snooze
Until your voice broke through the haze
Of a quarter century’s sleep.
“Wake up you git
And bloody write!” I did and never stopped
And like you told the truth about how bad poetry
Rots the soul and slapped a New Gen face or two
And kicked some arses in painful places,
And so like you, got omitted from the posh anthologies
Where Penguin and Picador fill the pages
With the boring poetasters you went for in your rages,
Ex-friends like Harrison who missed you out.
You never could see the envy in their enmity.
Longley was the worst, a hypocrite to boot,
All you said about him never did come out;
I’ve tried myself to nail others of that ilk
Hither and thither they slide and slither
And crawl out of the muck white as brides’
Fat with OBE’s, sinecures and sighs
And Collected Poems no one buys.
Yet ‘Mainstrem’, your last but one collection,
I had to wait months for, the last borrower
Kept it for two years and likely I’ll do the same
Your poetry’s like no other, no one could tame
Your roaring fury or your searing pain.
You bared your soul in a most unfashionable way
But everything in me says your verse will stay,
Your love for your fourth and final wife,
The last chance marriage that went right
The children you loved so much but knew
You wouldn’t live to see grown up, so caught
Their growing pains and joys with a painter’s eye
And lyric skill as fine as Wordsworth’s best
they drank her welcome to his heritage
of grey, grey-green, wet earth and shapes of stone.
Who weds a landscape will not die alone.
Those you castigated never forgave.
Omitted you as casually as passing an unmarked grave,
Armitage, I name you, a blackguard and a knave,
Who knows no more of poetry than McGonagall the brave,
Yet tops the list of Faber’s ‘Best Poets of Our Age’.
Longley gave you just ten lines in ‘Irish Poets Now’
Most missed you out entirely for the troubles you gave
Accusing like Zola those poetic whores
Who sold themselves to fashion when time after time
Your passions brought you to your knees, lashing
At those poetasters when their puffed-up slime
Won the medals and the prizes time after time
And got them all the limelight while your books
Were quietly ignored, the better you wrote,
The fewer got bought.
Belatedly I found a poem of yours ‘Leeds 2’
In ‘Flashpoint’, a paint-stained worn out
School anthology from 1962.
Out of the blue
I wrote to you but the letter came back ‘Gone away
N.
F.
A.
’ then I tried again and had a marvellous letter back
Full of stories of the great and good and all their private sins,
You knew where the bodies were buried.
Who put the knife in, who slept with who
For what reward.
They never could shut you up
Or put you in a pen or pay you off and then came
Morley, Hulse and Kennedy’s ‘New Poetry’
Which did more damage to the course of poetry
Than anything I’ve read - poets unembarrassed
By the need to know more than what’s politically
White as snow.
Constantine and Jackie Kay
And Hoffman with the right connections.
Sweeney and O’Brien bleeding in all the politically
Sensitive places, Peter Reading lifting
Horror headlines from the Sun to make a splash.
Sansom and Maxwell, Jamie and Greenlaw.
Proving lack of talent is no barrier to fame
If you lick the right arses and say how nice they taste.
Crawling up the ladder, declaring **** is grace.
A talented drunken public servant
Has the world’s ear and hates me.
He ought to be in prison for misuse
Of public funds and bigotry;
But there’s some sparkle in his poetry.
You never flinched in the attack
But gave the devils their due:
The ‘Honest Ulsterman’ you founded
Lost its honesty the day you withdrew
But floundered on, publicly sighed and
Ungraciously expired as soon as you died.
You went with fallen women, smoked and sang and boozed,
Loved your many children, wrote poetry
As good as Yeats but the ignominy you had to bear
Bred an immortality impossible to share.
You showed us your own peccadilloes,
Your early lust for fame, but you learned
The cost of suffering, love and talent winning through,
Your best books your last, just two, like the letters
You wrote before your life was through.
The meeting you wanted could never happen:
I didn’t know about the stroke
That stilled your tongue and pen
But if you passed your mantle on to me
I’ll try and take up where you left off,
Give praise where praise is due
And blast the living daylights from those writers who
Betray the sacred art of making poetry true
To suffering and love, to passion and remorse
And try to steer a flimsy world upon a saner course.
|
Written by
William Butler Yeats |
I
Under the Great Comedian's tomb the crowd.
A bundle of tempestuous cloud is blown
About the sky; where that is clear of cloud
Brightness remains; a brighter star shoots down;
What shudders run through all that animal blood?
What is this sacrifice? Can someone there
Recall the Cretan barb that pierced a star?
Rich foliage that the starlight glittered through,
A frenzied crowd, and where the branches sprang
A beautiful seated boy; a sacred bow;
A woman, and an arrow on a string;
A pierced boy, image of a star laid low.
That woman, the Great Mother imaging,
Cut out his heart.
Some master of design
Stamped boy and tree upon Sicilian coin.
An age is the reversal of an age:
When strangers murdered Emmet, Fitzgerald, Tone,
We lived like men that watch a painted stage.
What matter for the scene, the scene once gone:
It had not touched our lives.
But popular rage,
Hysterica passio dragged this quarry down.
None shared our guilt; nor did we play a part
Upon a painted stage when we devoured his heart.
Come, fix upon me that accusing eye.
I thirst for accusation.
All that was sung.
All that was said in Ireland is a lie
Bred out of the c-ontagion of the throng,
Saving the rhyme rats hear before they die.
Leave nothing but the nothingS that belong
To this bare soul, let all men judge that can
Whether it be an animal or a man.
II
The rest I pass, one sentence I unsay.
Had de Valera eaten parnell's heart
No loose-lipped demagogue had won the day.
No civil rancour torn the land apart.
Had Cosgrave eaten parnell's heart, the land's
Imagination had been satisfied,
Or lacking that, government in such hands.
O'Higgins its sole statesman had not died.
Had even O'Duffy - but I name no more -
Their school a crowd, his master solitude;
Through Jonathan Swift's clark grove he passed, and there
plucked bitter wisdom that enriched his blood.
|
Written by
John Crowe Ransom |
Do not enforce the tired wolf
Dragging his infected wound homeward
To sit tonight with the warm children
Naming the pretty kings of France.
The images of the invaded mind
Being as the monsters in the dreams
Of your most brief enchanted headful,
Suppose a miracle of confusion:
That dreamed and undreamt become each other
And mix the night and day of your mind;
And it does not matter your twice crying
From mouth unbeautied against the pillow
To avert the gun of the same old soldier;
For cry, cock-crow, or the iron bell
Can crack the sleep-sense of outrage,
Annihilate phantoms who were nothing.
But now, by our perverse supposal,
There is a drift of fog on your mornings;
You in your peignoir, dainty at your orange cup,
Feel poising round the sunny room
Invisible evil, deprived and bold.
All day the clock will metronome
Your gallant fear; the needles clicking,
The heels detonating the stair's cavern
Freshening the water in the blue bowls
For the buck berries, with not all your love,
You shall he listening for the low wind,
The warning sibilance of pines.
You like a waning moon, and I accusing
Our too banded Eumenides,
While you pronounce Noes wanderingly
And smooth the heads of the hungry children.
|
Written by
Weldon Kees |
Not a third that walks beside me,
But five or six or more.
Whether at dusk or daybreak
Or at blinding noon, a retinue
Of shadows that no door
Excludes.
--One like a kind of scrawl,
Hands scrawled trembling and blue,
A harelipped and hunchbacked dwarf
With a smile like a grapefruit rind,
Who jabbers the way I do
When the brain is empty and tired
And the guests no longer care:
A clown, who shudders and suddenly
Is a man with a mouth of cotton
Trapped in a dentist's chair.
Not a third that walks beside me,
But five or six or more:
One with his face gone rotten,
Most hideous of all,
Whose crutches shriek on the sidewalk
As a fingernail on a slate
Tears open some splintered door
Of childhood.
Down the hall
We enter a thousand rooms
That pour the hours back,
That silhouette the walls
With shadows ripped from war,
Accusing and rigid, black
As the streets we are discolored by.
The crutches fall to the floor.
Not a third that walks beside me,
But five or six, or more
Than fingers or brain can bear--
A monster strung with guts,
A coward covered with hair,
Matted and down to his knees,
Murderers, liars, thieves,
Moving in darkened rows
Through daylight and evening air
Until the eyelids close,
Snapped like the blades of a knife,
And your dream of their death begins.
Possessors and possessed,
They keep the bedside wake
As a doctor or a wife
Might wait the darkness through
Until the pale daybreak--
Protectors of your life.
|
Written by
Ella Wheeler Wilcox |
Changed? Yes, I will confess it – I have changed.
I do not love you in the old fond way.
I am your friend still – time has not estranged
One kindly feeling of that vanished day.
But the bright glamour which made life a dream,
The rapture of that time, its sweet content,
Like visions of a sleeper’s brain they seem –
And yet I cannot tell you how they went.
Why do you gaze with such accusing eyes
Upon me, dear? It is so very strange
That hearts, like all things underneath God’s skies,
Should sometimes feel the influence of change?
The birds, the flowers, the foliage of the trees,
The stars which seem so fixed, and so sublime,
Vast continents, and the eternal seas, -
All these do change, with ever-changing time.
The face our mirror shows us year on year
Is not the same; our dearest aim, or need,
Our lightest thought, or feeling hope, or fear,
All, all the law of alternation heed.
How can we ask the human heart to stay,
Content with fancies of Youth’s earliest hours?
The year outgrows the violets of May,
Although, maybe, there are no fairer flowers.
And life may hold no sweeter love than this,
Which lies so cold, so voiceless, and so dumb,
And will I miss it, dear? Why, yes, we miss
The violets always – till the roses come!
|
Written by
Fernando Pessoa |
Happy the maimed, the halt, the mad, the blind--
All who, stamped separate by curtailing birth,
Owe no duty's allegiance to mankind
Nor stand a valuing in their scheme of worth!
But I, whom Fate, not Nature, did curtail,
By no exterior voidness being exempt,
Must bear accusing glances where I fail,
Fixed in the general orbit of contempt.
Fate, less than Nature in being kind to lacking,
Giving the ill, shows not as outer cause,
Making our mock-free will the mirror's backing
Which Fate's own acts as if in itself shows;
And men, like children, seeing the image there,
Take place for cause and make our will Fate bear.
|
Written by
D. H. Lawrence |
The little pansies by the road have turned
Away their purple faces and their gold,
And evening has taken all the bees from the thyme,
And all the scent is shed away by the cold.
Against the hard and pale blue evening sky
The mountain's new-dropped summer snow is clear
Glistening in steadfast stillness: like transcendent
Clean pain sending on us a chill down here.
Chirst on the Cross! -- his beautiful young man's body
Has fallen dead upon the nails, and hangs
White and loose at last, with all the pain
Drawn on his mouth, eyes broken at last by his pangs.
And slowly down the mountain road, belated,
A bullock wagon comes; so I am ashamed
To gaze any more at the Christ, whom the mountain snows
Whitely confront; I wait on the grass, am lamed.
The breath of the bullock stains the hard, chill air,
The band is across its brow, and it scarcely seems
To draw the load, so still and slow it moves,
While the driver on the shaft sits crouched in dreams.
Surely about his sunburnt face is something
That vexes me with wonder.
He sits so still
Here among all this silence, crouching forward,
Dreaming and letting the bullock take its will.
I stand aside on the grass to let them go;
-- And Christ, I have met his accusing eyes again,
The brown eyes black with misery and hate, that look
Full in my own, and the torment starts again.
One moment the hate leaps at me standing there,
One moment I see the stillness of agony,
Something frozen in the silence that dare not be
Loosed, one moment the darkness frightens me.
Then among the averted pansies, beneath the high
White peaks of snow, at the foot of the sunken Christ
I stand in a chill of anguish, trying to say
The joy I bought was not too highly priced.
But he has gone, motionless, hating me,
Living as the mountains do, because they are strong,
With a pale, dead Christ on the crucifix of his heart,
And breathing the frozen memory of his wrong.
Still in his nostrils the frozen breath of despair,
And heart like a cross that bears dead agony
Of naked love, clenched in his fists the shame,
And in his belly the smouldering hate of me.
And I, as I stand in the cold, averted flowers,
Feel the shame-wounds in his hands pierce through my own,
And breathe despair that turns my lungs to stone
And know the dead Christ weighing on my bone.
|
Written by
William Shakespeare |
That god forbid, that made me first your slave,
I should in thought control your times of pleasure,
Or at your hand th' account of hours to crave,
Being your vassal bound to stay your leisure!
O, let me suffer, being at your beck,
Th' imprisoned absence of your liberty,
And patience tame to sufferance, bide each check,
Without accusing you of injury.
Be where you list, your charter is so strong
That you your self may privilage your time
To what you will; to you it doth belong
Your self to pardon of self-doing crime.
I am to wait, though waiting so be hell,
Not blame your pleasure, be it ill or well.
|