Blog, On Poetic Contrast, Between Dark And Light
My two poems composed -one of dark, one of Light.
(1.)
The Horrid Night, The Terrible Nightmare
In a dance of serpents the long fangs drip
poison falling from needle sharp fang tips
chained here in this dark cavern of doom
with just one bite this will become my tomb
I ponder deep how did I end up here,
as my sweat oozes out buckets of fear !
Seems a dream, ghastly nightmare to endure
I think, tis true my heart is not so pure
but that proves what a weak mortal I be
one like all other, too blinded to see
I ponder deep how did I end up here,
as my sweat oozes out buckets of fear !
I cringe, three snakes slither over to me
in their cold serpent eyes hunger I see
agonizing with my shivers I wait
powerless, now cast into hands of dark Fate
I ponder deep how did I end up here,
as my sweat oozes out buckets of fear !
As minutes pass like weeks or painful days
aching brain conjures up some fleeing ways
If I sincerely pray maybe I live
I do, I think what treasures may I give
I ponder deep how did I end up here,
as my sweat oozes out buckets of fear !
Then from the dark a voice begins to speak
you are man, and man is evil and weak
I the master of fear reign in this dark
here you are like a bare tree with no bark
I ponder deep how did I end up here,
as my sweat oozes out buckets of fear !
I fought the strong urge to give a reply
I wanted to ask the hidden voice, why
on earth was I in this place brought and bound
in this frightening dark, deep underground
I ponder deep how did I end up here,
as my sweat oozes out buckets of fear !
How I do not know, the voice heard my mind
saying, I brought you because you are blind
in this cavern, a lesson you must learn
recalling life's warnings you once did spurn
I ponder deep how did I end up here,
as my sweat oozes out buckets of fear !
It was then I cried, God forgive me
I was truly a lost fool, now I see
Please rescue me from this dark abode
I know now it was my soul I then sold
I now know how I ended up down here,
where my sweat oozes out buckets of fear !
I give thanks, that this lost soul you now save!
With your mercy, I leave this self-made grave!
Robert J. Lindley, 11-28-2021
Rhyme (Dark)
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(2.)
From Seed A Promise, Treasures To Flourish On Earth
Seed waits not only for Spring's first shower
but for glorious rays of dawn's first hour
resting 'neath in its comfortable hidden bed
far away from cries of earth's ancient dead!
From seed a promise- treasures to flourish on earth.
Tis reminder, measures of life and love's true worth.
As world represents its raging black-seas
man exist, victim uttering sad pleas
battles fought, sacrificing flowing red
Alas! But vanity that gifts more dead!
From seed a promise- treasures to flourish on earth.
Tis reminder, measures of life and love's true worth.
Spring arrives, O' glory- of rising seeds
earthen harvests that many billions feeds
fruits of man's labors, Nature's blessed soil
does soul and body well, labor's hard toil.
From seed a promise- treasures to flourish on earth.
Tis reminder, measures of life and love's true worth.
Mankind walks onward in its blinded way
amidst darkness, victims to set to pay
forgetting divine gifts, walking dead roads
increasing chained hands, life's heavy loads.
From seed a promise- treasures to flourish on earth.
Tis reminder, measures of life and love's true worth.
Why mankind seeks sadden hearts, weary hands
one must embrace light's truth to understand
for that is the source of those waiting seeds
healing balm that stops black-rivers that bleed.
From seed a promise- treasures to flourish on earth.
Tis reminder, measures of life and love's true worth.
Seed waits not only for Spring's first shower
but for glorious rays of dawn's first hour
resting 'neath in its comfortable hidden bed
far away from cries of earth's ancient dead!
From seed a promise- treasures to flourish on earth.
Tis reminder, measures of life and love's true worth.
Robert J. Lindley, 11-28-2021
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(3)
Pray A Well Lit Path Be Your Choice
Pray a bright lit path be your choice
Let Dawn sings in its brightest voice
Its rays cast away black of night
Allowing Truth to shine in Light
Basking in that eternal glow
Both blind heart and soul shall then grow.
Pray a blessing soon comes your way
As dark night yields to break of day
Wherein Dawn's glow your heart delights
Hope its power reveals to sight
Songs of better days echo loud
We learn to stand up bold and proud.
Pray your sorrows are washed away
Life renewed destroys the grey
Peace and new cheer are again found
In scourging dark we are not bound
Laughter across the land is heard
And pray, we thank God, is the word.
Pray a bright lit path be your choice
Let Dawn sings in its brightest voice
Its rays cast away black of night
Allowing Truth to shine in Light
Basking in that eternal glow
Both blind heart and soul shall then grow.
Robert J. Lindley, 4-13-2020
Rhyme, ( New Rays Of Hope, Amidst This Doom And Gloom )
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https://interestingliterature.com/2018/02/10-of-the-best-poems-about-darkness/
LITERATURE
10 of the Best Poems about Darkness
Interesting Literature
LITERATURE
10 of the Best Poems about Darkness
The greatest dark poems selected by Dr Oliver Tearle
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Poetry isn’t all sweetness and light, of course. In fact, much of it is concerned with the darker aspects of the natural world, whether it’s the mystery or solemnity of night-time darkness or some other, more abstract or metaphorical kind of darkness (‘O dark dark dark’, as T. S. Eliot put it in Four Quartets). Here, we offer ten of the best poems about darkness of various kinds.
1. Charlotte Smith, ‘Written near a Port on a Dark Evening’.
All is black shadow but the lucid line
Marked by the light surf on the level sand,
Or where afar the ship-lights faintly shine
Like wandering fairy fires, that oft on land
Misled the pilgrim …
This sonnet was written by one of the great proto-Romantic poets of the second half of the eighteenth century. Smith’s sonnets anticipate Romanticism partly because nature in her poetry is so often feared with an awesome power that verges on the terrifying: ‘life’s long darkling way’ is brooding and full of menace here.
2. Lord Byron, ‘Darkness’.
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day …
This poem was inspired by a curious incident: the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, which drastically altered the weather conditions across the world and led to 1816 being branded ‘the Year without a Summer’. The same event also led to Byron’s trip to Lake Geneva and his ghost-story writing competition, which produced Mary Shelley’s masterpiece Frankenstein.
For Byron, the extermination of the sun seemed like a dream, yet it was ‘no dream’ but a strange and almost sublimely terrifying reality.
3. Robert Browning, ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’.
If at his counsel I should turn aside
Into that ominous tract which, all agree,
Hides the Dark Tower. Yet acquiescingly
I did turn as he pointed: neither pride
Nor hope rekindling at the end descried,
So much as gladness that some end might be …
A grotesque quasi-medieval dramatic monologue detailing the quest of the titular Roland, this poem was produced in an attempt to overcome writer’s block: in 1852 Browning had set himself the New Year’s Resolution to write a new poem every day, and this vivid dreamscape is what arose from his fevered imagination.
Browning borrowed the title from a line in Shakespeare’s King Lear; the character of Roland as he appears in Browning’s poem has in turn inspired Stephen King to write his Dark Tower series, while J. K. Rowling borrowed the word ‘slughorn’ from the poem when creating the name of her character Horace Slughorn.
4. Emily Dickinson, ‘We grow accustomed to the Dark’.
We grow accustomed to the Dark –
When Light is put away –
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Good bye –
A Moment – We Uncertain step
For newness of the night –
Then – fit our Vision to the Dark –
And meet the Road – erect …
The first line of this poem also provides the poem with its main theme: the way our eyes adjust to the darkness, just as our minds adapt to the bleakness of life and contemplation of the ‘night’ that is death.
5. Thomas Hardy, ‘The Darkling Thrush’.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead,
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited.
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small,
With blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom …
This classic Hardy poem captures the mood of a winter evening as the sun, ‘the weakening eye of day’, sets below the horizon and gives way to dusk on New Year’s Eve. Hardy hears a thrush singing, and wonders whether the thrush is aware of some reason to be hopeful for the coming new year, some reason of which Hardy himself is unaware.
In ‘The Darkling Thrush’ itself we are given clues that religion is on the speaker’s mind. In the third stanza, when the thrush of the title appears (‘darkling’ is an old poetic word for ‘in darkness’ – it also, incidentally, echoes Matthew Arnold‘s use of the word in his famous poem about declining faith, ‘Dover Beach’, published in 1867), its song is described as ‘evensong’, suggesting the church service, while the use of the word ‘soul’ also suggests the spiritual. (Such a religiously inflected analysis of Hardy’s poem is reinforced by ‘carolings’ in the next stanza.)
6. Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day’.
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay …
One of Hopkins’s ‘Terrible Sonnets’, this poem is one of the finest evocations of a sleepless night that English poetry has produced. When we wake to find that it’s not yet morning but we are still surrounded by darkness, and undergo some sort of ‘dark night of the soul’, we often feel as Hopkins describes here. For him it is a spiritual battle as well as a mere case of insomnia.
As so often with Hopkins, the spiritual and psychological are experienced as a vivid visceral force that is physical as well as metaphysical: his depression and doubt weigh upon him like heartburn or indigestion (‘heartburn’ picking up on the poet’s more abstract address to his ‘heart’ in the third line of the poem, but also leading into the ‘blood’ mentioned a couple of lines later).
7. Carl Sandburg, ‘Moonset’.
This short poem is almost actively ‘unpoetical’ in its imagery, and offers a fresh look at the moon. The poem’s final image of ‘dark listening to dark’ is especially eye-catching.
8. Edward Thomas, ‘The Dark Forest’.
Dark is the forest and deep, and overhead
Hang stars like seeds of light
In vain, though not since they were sown was bred
Anything more bright …
This poem from the wonderful nature poet Edward Thomas (1878-1917) begins by describing a forest at night, above whose trees the stars shine like ‘seeds of light’.
9. Joseph Campbell, ‘Darkness’.
One of the first ‘modern’ poems written in English, this short lyric by the Irish-born poet Joseph Campbell (1879-1944) shares affinities with the poems of T. E. Hulme, and seems in some respects to prefigure the ‘bog’ poems of Seamus Heaney. You can read Campbell’s ‘Darkness’ by clicking on the link below, which will also take you to three other short poems by Campbell.
10. Philip Larkin, ‘Going’.
Philip Larkin never learned, in Sigmund Freud’s memorable phrase about King Lear, to make friends with the necessity of dying. ‘Going’ is an early example of Larkin’s mature engagement with the terrifying realization that death will come for us all.
In ten unrhymed lines, ‘Going’ explores death without ever mentioning it by name, instead referring to it, slightly elliptically, as ‘an evening’ that is ‘coming in’. Larkin uses the metaphor of the coming evening – an evening which ‘lights no lamps’ because there is no hope of staving off this darkness, the darkness of death.
Continue to explore classic poetry with these short poems about death and dying, our pick of the best poems about eyes, and these classic poems about secrets. We also recommend The Oxford Book of English Verse – perhaps the best poetry anthology on the market (we offer our pick of the best poetry anthologies here).
The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.
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On Poetry- Coming from Light,
The desire to gift in poetic verse -- Love, Joy , Happiness, Greater Understanding in verse.-Robert
https://interestingliterature.com/2017/06/10-of-the-best-poems-about-happiness/
LITERATURE
10 of the Best Poems about Happiness
Previously we’ve offered ten of the most powerful poems about depression. Now, to complement that post, here are ten of the very best poems about being happy. Hurrah! If you’re after more classic poems about happiness, we recommend the wonderful anthology, Heaven on Earth: 101 Happy Poems, edited by Wendy Cope, which includes some of the poems listed below.
Anonymous, ‘Pangur Bán’. This Old Irish poem was written by a monk in the ninth century – about his cat. It features in our pick of the best cat poems, but it’s also a gloriously happy poem (well, cats bring so much happiness, after all), with its talk of delight, merriment, and bliss. (Pangur Bán is the name of the monk’s cat.) Describing the life of the monk in his study with his cat as his happy companion, ‘Pangur Bán’ has everything for the cat-lover and book-lover. Just as the scholar goes in search of knowledge, so his faithful companion goes in search of mice.
Edward Dyer, ‘My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is’.
My mind to me a kingdom is;
Such present joys therein I find,
That it excels all other bliss
That earth affords or grows by kind:
Though much I want that most would have,
Yet still my mind forbids to crave …
This poem by Sir Edward Dyer (1543-1607) might be regarded as the Elizabethan version of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’: the poem extols the virtues of a clean conscience and resisting the temptation to take delight on other people’s misfortune. Well, we say this poem is by Edward Dyer; it used to be unquestionably attributed to him, but doubt has been cast over Dyer’s authorship, with some instead crediting Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford.
Edmund Spenser, from Amoretti.
Oft, when my spirit doth spread her bolder wings,
In mind to mount up to the purest sky;
It down is weighed with thought of earthly things,
And clogged with burden of mortality;
Where, when that sovereign beauty it doth spy,
Resembling heaven’s glory in her light,
Drawn with sweet pleasure’s bait, it back doth fly,
And unto heaven forgets her former flight …
This poem, beginning ‘Oft when my spirit doth spread her bolder wings’, is part of Spenser’s sonnet sequence Amoretti. In summary, Spenser says that when he wishes to think of higher things, his mind is bogged down by thoughts of mortality; but he comes to the conclusion that the way to ensure happiness is to find heaven among earthly things.
William Wordsworth, ‘I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud’.
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
Given that the daffodils in this famous Wordsworth poem lift the poet’s spirits when he is feeling a little lost or thoughtful, and fill his heart with pleasure, we feel it deserves its place among this pick of the greatest happiness poems. On 15 April 1802, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy were walking around Glencoyne Bay in Ullswater when they came upon a ‘long belt’ of daffodils, as Dorothy put it memorably in her journal. Dorothy Wordsworth wrote of the encounter with the daffodils, ‘we saw a few daffodils close to the water side, we fancied that the lake had floated the seed ashore & that the little colony had so sprung up – But as we went along there were more & yet more & at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about & about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness & the rest tossed and reeled and danced & seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the Lake, they looked so gay ever dancing ever changing.’ The influence of this passage from Dorothy’s journal, recalling this happy event, can be seen in Wordsworth’s poem.
Christina Rossetti, ‘A Birthday’.
My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water’d shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me …
‘My heart is like a singing bird’: right from this poem’s opening line, the mood is joyful. One of the most famous happy poems to feature on this list, ‘A Birthday’ is about ‘the birthday of my life’ arriving to the speaker, because her ‘love is come to me’. A fine poem by one of the Victorian era’s greatest poets.
Emily Dickinson, ‘How Happy Is the Little Stone’. In this short poem, Emily Dickinson (1830-86) considers the simple life of the small things in nature – specifically, the little stone whose ‘coat of elemental brown / A passing universe put on’. Much like Wordsworth in his ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’, Dickinson ponders the simple happiness that we get from observing nature.
Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Happy Thought’. This poem from Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885) is only two lines long, so is worth quoting in full here:
The world is so full of a number of things,
I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.
E. E. Cummings, ‘i thank You God for this most amazing’. This idiosyncratic take on the Shakespearean sonnet form is the perfect poem to read on a day when you feel almost deliriously happy and glad to be alive, and your eyes and ears seem attuned to the world around you to an unusually high degree (something Cummings’ concluding couplet captures wonderfully).
Philip Larkin, ‘Coming’. One of Larkin’s earliest mature poems was called ‘Going’; this poem, written a few years later when the poet was still in his twenties, might be viewed as a companion piece to that other poem. Unusually for the lugubrious Larkin, ‘Coming’ is about how the coming of spring makes the poet feel almost inexplicably happy.
Jenny Joseph, ‘The Sun Has Burst the Sky’. ‘The sun has burst the sky / Because I love you’: so begins this wonderfully joyful poem about being in love, from the poet who also gave us ‘Warning’, about growing old and wearing purple. This poem doesn’t feature in the Heaven on Earth anthology, but is too joyous a happy poem to be omitted from this list.
The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem
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