Almanac Poetry: Desert Island Poetry – What is your favourite poem to be lost with?
Previously at the Footy Almanac we have had fun with our Desert Island series. We’ve devised lists of music, books, food, wine, and people we would like to be marooned with on a desert island, and now the Almanac would like to hear from you with your suggestions of favourite poetry you would like to be lost with. To start the ball rolling, here is one of my favourite poems by Philip Larkin.
Ocean, Humphrey; Philip Larkin; National Portrait Gallery, London;
image: Wiki Commons
The North Ship can be read Here.
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About Colin Ritchie
Retired teacher who enjoys following the Bombers, listening to music especially Bob Dylan, reading, and swimming.
Suburban Lovers by Bruce Dawe for many reasons but especially these lines, “Her thoughts lie/ kitten-curled in his” and “stars now have flown up out of the east.”
Excellent idea Col.
Hi Col. I love Larkin, particularly stuff like “The Whitsun Weddings”, “An Arundel Tomb”, “Dublinesque”, “The Dance”, “This Be The Verse”, “Aubade” … I could go on and on … though for my Desert Island Poetry, I would like to go really big and say The Complete Works of William Shakespeare; after all, the plays (on the whole) are written in blank verse and there are also songs in some of them – also, the massive volume contains his sonnets and longer poems – everything for a lifetime of island reading is here!
Sonnet 29
When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heav’n with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate.
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
I’d probably go for Bertolt Brecht’s, ‘Questions from a worker who reads’.
Glen!
Either:
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.
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,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
Or this:
anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn’t he danced his did.
Women and men(both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain
children guessed(but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more
when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone’s any was all to her
someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then)they
said their nevers they slept their dream
stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)
one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was
all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
noone and anyone earth by april
wish by spirit and if by yes.
Women and men(both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain
A Perfect Mess
BY MARY KARR
For David Freedman
I read somewhere
that if pedestrians didn’t break traffic laws to cross
Times Square whenever and by whatever means possible,
the whole city would stop, it would stop.
Cars would back up to Rhode Island,
an epic gridlock not even a cat
could thread through. It’s not law but the sprawl
of our separate wills that keeps us all flowing. Today I loved
the unprecedented gall
of the piano movers, shoving a roped-up baby grand
up Ninth Avenue before a thunderstorm.
They were a grim and hefty pair, cynical
as any day laborers. They knew what was coming,
the instrument white lacquered, the sky bulging black
as a bad water balloon and in one pinprick instant
it burst. A downpour like a fire hose.
For a few heartbeats, the whole city stalled,
paused, a heart thump, then it all went staccato.
And it was my pleasure to witness a not
insignificant miracle: in one instant every black
umbrella in Hell’s Kitchen opened on cue, everyone
still moving. It was a scene from an unwritten opera,
the sails of some vast armada.
And four old ladies interrupted their own slow progress
to accompany the piano movers.
each holding what might have once been
lace parasols over the grunting men. I passed next
the crowd of pastel ballerinas huddled
under the corner awning,
in line for an open call — stork-limbed, ankles
zigzagged with ribbon, a few passing a lit cigarette
around. The city feeds on beauty, starves
for it, breeds it. Coming home after midnight,
to my deserted block with its famously high
subway-rat count, I heard a tenor exhale pure
longing down the brick canyons, the steaming moon
opened its mouth to drink from on high…
The Song of Wandering Aengus
(William Yeats)
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
Can I be greedy and select two? Thanks, Col.
An Irish Airman foresees his death by W.B. Yeats
I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
The Listeners by Walter de la Mare
‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
’Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:—
‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,’ he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.
I suppose i should include Brecht’s wonderful words,seeing as i find the poem so inspiring.
Questions from a worker who reads. Bertolt Brecht.
Who built Thebes of the 7 gates?
In the books you will read the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon,many times demolished,
Who raised it up so many times?
In what houses of gold glittering Lima did its builders live?
Where, the evening the Great Wall of China was finished,did the masons go?
Great Rome is full of triumphal arches.
Who erected them?
Over whom did the Caesars triumph?
Had Byzantium, much praised in song, only palaces for its inhabitants?
Even in fabled Atlantis, the night that the ocean engulfed it,
The drowning still called out for their slaves.
The young Alexander conquered Italy.
Was he alone?
Caesar defeated the Gauls.
Did he not even have a cook with him?
Philip of Spain wept when his armada went down.
Was he the only one to weep?
Frederick the 2nd won the 7 years war.
Who else won it?
Every page a victory.
Who cooked the feast for the victors?
Every 10 years a great man.
Who paid the bill?
So many reports.
So many questions.
Glen!
Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas, a play for voices, poetry but strictly perhaps not a poem. Alternatively, Barbecue by Peter Kogan:
Which of us will one day sit alone
In that last isolation nothing mends,
Remembering a long-lost afternoon
And a casual gathering of friends?
The women, milky breasted, beautiful
Watching their children toddle on the grass;
The men, skylarking with a bat and ball
Until the Sunday sun begins to pass…
Decades on, this sun will re-emerge
With aching clarity in someone’s mind,
To shake and grieve them in their senile age
And shine the brighter when the eyes are blind
For one amongst us will outlive the rest
And weep to think, perhaps at ninety-five,
About this knife-edged brilliance of the past
When all of us were happy and alive
And so, my friends, let’s cling together now
Against the future that we cannot see
Let’s love each other, for we cannot know
Who the condemned survivor is to be
Ithaca, by Cavafy.
Churchgoing, by Larkin.
Alonso to Ferdinand, by Auden.
The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, by Coleridge
Ode on a Grecian Urn, by Keats.
Am I cheating? Who am I forgetting? Billy Collins. This is thankless… if not for fresh discoveries. So thank you Peter B. I’d never heard of Mary Karr. But will ravish her now. That’s a beauty.
I couldn’t resist including a single poem, like some others. It’s a difficult piece – I’ve puzzled over it and admired it for years – but the sheer beauty of its earlyish seventeenth century language is certainly one of the things that repeatedly draws me to it.
Aire and Angels (John Donne, published 1633)
TWICE or thrice had I loved thee,
Before I knew thy face or name;
So in a voice, so in a shapelesse flame,
Angells affect us oft, and worship’d bee;
Still when, to where thou wert, I came, 5
Some lovely glorious nothing I did see.
But since my soule, whose child love is,
Takes limmes of flesh, and else could nothing doe,
More subtile then the parent is,
Love must not be, but take a body too, 10
And therefore what thou wert, and who,
I bid Love aske, and now
That it assume thy body, I allow,
And fixe it selfe in thy lip, eye, and brow.
Whilst thus to ballast love, I thought, 15
And so more steddily to have gone,
With wares which would sinke admiration,
I saw, I had loves pinnace overfraught,
Ev’ry thy haire for love to worke upon
Is much too much, some fitter must be sought; 20
For, nor in nothing, nor in things
Extreme, and scatt’ring bright, can love inhere;
Then as an Angell, face, and wings
Of aire, not pure as it, yet pure doth weare,
So thy love may be my loves spheare; 25
Just such disparitie
As is twixt Aire and Angells puritie,
‘Twixt womens love, and mens will ever bee.