poetry imp lines (english literature)

8/12/2019 Poetry Imp Lines (English Literature)

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I have a sense of melancholy isolation, life rapidly

vanishing, all that usual things

CHURCH GOING (1954)

The Less Deceived (TLD)

Once I am sure there's nothing going on/I step

inside, letting the door thud shut.

I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,/Reflect

the place was not worth stopping for.Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,

And always end much at a loss like this,

Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,

When churches will fall completely out of use

Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

And what remains when disbelief has gone?

I wonder who

Will be the last, the very last, to seek

This place for what it was;

A serious house on serious earth it is

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

BLEANEY (1955 TWW)

Circumstantial

So it happens that I lie

Where Mr Bleaney lay, and stub my fags

On the same saucer-souvenir, and try

Stuffing my ears with cotton-wool, to drown

The jabbering set he egged her on to buy.

Telling himself that this was home, and grinned

That how we live measures our own nature,

And at his age having no more to show

Than one hired box should make him pretty sure

He warranted no better, I don't know.

AMBULENCE (1961 TWW)

Closed like confessionals, they thread

Loud noons of cities, giving back

None of the glances they absorb.They come to rest at any kerb:

All streets in time are visited.

The trafic parts to let go by

Brings closer what is left to come,

And dulls to distance all we are.

MCMXIV (1964)

The Whitsun Weddings (TWW)

Those long uneven lines

Standing as patientlyAs if they were stretched outside

The Oval or Villa Park,

Never such innocence,

Never before or since,

As changed itself to past

Without a word--the men

Leaving the gardens tidy,

The thousands of marriages

Lasting a little while longer:

Never such innocence again.

TED HUGHES (1930-1998)

British Poet Laureate from 1984

He wanted to capture not just live animals, but the

aliveness of animals in their natural state: their

wildness, their quiddity, the fox-ness of the fox and

the crow-ness of the crow. Thomas Nye

earlier poetic work is rooted in nature and, inparticular, the innocent savagery of animals, an

interest from an early age. He wrote frequently of

the mixture of beauty and violence in the natural

world. Animals serve as a metaphor for his view on

life: animals live out a struggle for the survival of the

fittest in the same way that humans strive for

ascendancy and success. Examples can be seen in

the poems "Hawk Roosting" and "Jaguar"

THAT MORNING

(Eliadean illud tempus moment)

(Rf: Southern Alaska in Summer 1980)

..There the body

Separated, golden and imperishable,

From its doubting thought a spirit-beacon

Lit by the power of the salmon

That came on, came on, and kept on coming

Lifting us toward some dazzle of blessing

One wrong thought might darken. As if the fallen

World and salmon were over. As if these

Were the imperishable fish

That had let the world pass away

So we found the end of our journey.

So we stood, alive in the river of light,

Among the creatures of light, creatures of light.

THOUGHT FOX (The Hawk in the rain 1957)

I imagine this midnight moments forest:

Something else is alive

Beside the clocks loneliness

And this blank page where my fingers move.Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox

It enters the dark hole of the head.

The window is starless still; the clock ticks,

The page is printed.

Full Moon and Little Frieda (wodwo)

A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the

clank of a bucket

And you listening.

A spider's web, tense for the dew's touch.A pail lifted, still and brimming mirror

To tempt a first star to a tremor.

..The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing

amazed at a work

That points at him amazed.

CHAUCER (1343-1400)

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote The

droghte of March hath perced to the roote . . .


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To hold the reins of the straining attention

Of your imagined audienceyou declaimed Chaucer

To a field of cows.

What would happen

If you were to stop? Would they attack you,

Scared by the shock of silence, or wanting more?

So you had to go on. You went on

And twenty cows stayed with you hypnotized.

I imagine I shooed them away. ButYour sostenuto rendering of Chaucer

Was already perpetual. What followed

Found my attention too full

And had to go back into oblivion.

SEAMUS HEANEY (1939-2013)

TOLLUND MAN (found in 1950)

(Rf: The bog people by P.V. Glob)

Some day I will go to Aarhus

To see his peat-brown head,

The mild pods of his eye-lids,

His pointed skin cap.

Naked except for

The cap, noose and girdle

Bridegroom to the goddess

I could risk blasphemy,

Consecrate the cauldron bog

Our holy ground and pray

Him to make germinate

The scattered, ambushed

Flesh of labourers,

Stockinged corpses

Laid out in the farmyards,

Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard

Watching the pointing hands

Of country people,

Not knowing their tongue.

Out here in Jutland

In the old man-killing parishes

I will feel lost,

Unhappy and at home

CASTING AND GATHERING

(Dedicate to Ted Hughes)

Words themselves are doors.

I am still standing there, awake and dreamy

I have grown older and can see them both

Years and years ago, these sounds took sides

(start)

I love hushed air. I trust contrariness.

Years and years go past and I cannot moveFor I see that when one man casts, the other gathers

And then vice versa, without changing sides.

THE CONSTABLE CALLS

I assumed

Small guilts and sat

Imagining the black hole in the barracks

His cap was upside down

On the floor, next his chair

Arithmetic and fear.

Closed the domesday book

His boot pushed off

And the bicycle ticked, ticked, ticked.

PERSONAL HELICON

(For Michael Longley)

..is essentially a simple tribute to the lost child in

all adults Lindsey H.As a child, they could not keep me from wells

And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.

I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells

Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,

To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring

Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme

To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

TOOME ROAD

Nations are born in the hearts of the poets and

prosper and die in the hands of politicians. (A.I)

How long were they approaching down my roads

As if they owned them? The whole country was

sleeping.

Whom should I run to tell

Among all of those with their back doors on the

latch

For the bringer of bad news, that small-hours

visitant

Who, by being expected, might be kept distant?

DIGGING

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests/I'll dig with it.

poetry imp lines (english literature)

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