Written by
Walt Whitman |
I SIT and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame;
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with themselves, remorseful after
deeds
done;
I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt,
desperate;
I see the wife misused by her husband—I see the treacherous seducer of young women;
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be hid—I see these
sights on
the earth;
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny—I see martyrs and prisoners;
I observe a famine at sea—I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be
kill’d, to
preserve the lives of the rest;
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor,
and
upon
*******, and the like;
All these—All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent.
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Written by
Barry Tebb |
Barbarous insult to Yeats’ memory and Claudel’s
Allen, thank God you are dead, you who breathed the air of Apollinaire,
Ghost of Reverdy bear witness to the mendacity of his clamour,
Hart Crane, rise from the estuary of the great river you drowned in,
John Clare, rise from your country churchyard grave,
Gray, from your carv?d tomb and Wilde, cast off your winged shield
In P?re Lachaise,
Rise poets, rise and drive the barbarous horde without the sacred gates
of Art
Where it has crept and quenched the flame, rendering the Nine silent
And bereft and covered in shame.
Pastmaster of Post Modernist jargon, defiler of the tombs of great poets
Whose souls hover in Elysium or crouch along the banks of black Lethe
Begging a crown to lay on Charon’s palm.
Souls of the great dead rise and deliver us from one who negates
Poetry as the realm of the numinous, toyer with words, vain hack of
Academe,
Spoiler of the silver stream of poetry’s wind-harp voice unseen
Traducer, seducer, traitor, hands red with blood, bearer of the ultimate guilt
Of trahison des clercs, murderer of the subtle spirit of Mallarm?,
Defiler of poetry’s purity as defined by Rilke and Val?ry
Praiser of ultimate poetastry-Duhig’s penny ranting-condemner of Jimmy Simmons-
One Leeds Jimmy who could fix the world’s Duhigs once and for all,
Write them into the ground and still have a hundred lyrics in his quiver.
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Written by
Robert William Service |
The God of Scribes looked down and saw
The bitter band of seven,
Who had outraged his holy law
And lost their hope of Heaven:
Came Villon, petty thief and pimp,
And obscene Baudelaire,
And Byron with his letcher limp,
And Poe with starry stare.
And Wilde who lived his hell on earth,
And Burns, the baudy bard,
And Francis Thompson, from his birth
Malevolently starred.
.
.
.
As like a line of livid ghosts
They started to paradise,
The galaxy of Heaven's hosts
Looked down in soft surmise.
Said God: "You bastards of my love,
You are my chosen sons;
Come, I will set you high above
These merely holy ones.
Your sins you've paid in gall and grief,
So to these radiant skies,
Seducer, drunkard, dopester, thief,
Immortally arise.
I am your Father, fond and just,
And all your folly see;
Your beastiality and lust
I also know in me.
You did the task I gave to you .
.
.
Arise and sit beside
My Son, the best beloved, who
Was also crucified.
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