April 26, 2006
Curious Poetical George: Night Poetry I'm looking for Poems about night.
I've been commissioned to compose a song cycle with the general theme of Poems of the Night. I have a couple of Haiku that I like on that theme and I was wondering, since many of you are poetry lovin' monkeys, if you have any favorites along these lines.
I'm looking for "eastern" style poetry- that is, aphoristic, nature based lines, though they do not have to be by Asian authors. I'm partial to Rumi and Basho. Thanks oodles in advance.
Not Asian, but far and away the best night poem I know is Robert Frost's villanelle "Acquainted with the Night."
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-by;
And further still at an unearthly height
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
To this day I can't see a clock tower at night without getting shivers.
"At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.
The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry -- the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?
Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks."
--Domination of Black, by Wallace Stevens. Not quite eastern, but utterly beautiful.
gray's elegy springs to mind, at least the first four or five stanzas.
also, drawing down the moon, by charles tomlinson, viewable here
At night
Death
Finds me
Alone
Totally self-indulgent, me, but all my favorites keep rising to the top of my head, and I have to skim 'em off!
So we'll go no more a roving
Lord Byron
So we'll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.
For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.
Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a roving
By the light of the moon.
or this bit by Christina Rossetti:
What do the stars do
Up in the sky,
Higher than the wind can blow,
Or the clouds can fly?
Each star in its own glory
Circles, circles still;
As it was lit to shine and set,
And do its maker's will.
Or this choice Shakespeare sonnet:
Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,
The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;
But then begins a journey in my head,
To work my mind, when body's work's expired:
For then my thoughts, from far where I abide,
Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,
And keep my drooping eyelids open wide,
Looking on darkness which the blind do see
Save that my soul's imaginary sight
Presents thy shadow to my sightless view,
Which, like a jewel hung in ghastly night,
Makes black night beauteous and her old face new.
Lo! thus, by day my limbs, by night my mind,
For thee and for myself no quiet find.
Variations on 'The short night--'
eleven Yosa Buson haiku
beginning with the phrase
'The short night--'
Translated by Robert Hass
The short night--
on the hairy caterpillar
beads of dew.
The short night--
patrolmen
washing in the river.
The short night--
bubbles of crab froth
among the river reeds.
The short night--
a broom thrown away
on the beach.
The short night--
the Oi River
has sunk two feet.
The short night--
on the outskirts of the village
a small shop opening.
The short night--
broken, in the shallows,
a crescent moon.
The short night--
the peony
has opened.
The short night--
waves beating in,
an abandoned fire.
The short night--
near the pillow
a screen turning silver.
The short night--
shallow footprints
on the beach at Yui.
I'm fond of Baudelaire's poems, that often take place among night and darkness, but there are only two about night/twilight. Also, it's in French. I'm not 100% with any of the three translations at the site (I prefer 'Oh refreshing darkness!' for the last line, myself.)
from Fleurs du Mal online.
La Fin de la Journée
Sous une lumière blafarde
Court, danse et se tord sans raison
La Vie, impudente et criarde.
Aussi, sitôt qu'à l'horizon
La nuit voluptueuse monte,
Apaisant tout, même la faim,
Effaçant tout, même la honte,
Le Poète se dit: «Enfin!
Mon esprit, comme mes vertèbres,
Invoque ardemment le repos;
Le coeur plein de songes funèbres,
Je vais me coucher sur le dos
Et me rouler dans vos rideaux,
Ô rafraîchissantes ténèbres!»
Apologies for shameless self-indulgence (a la TUM), but this pome has some of my favorite night imagery while simultaneously being neither Asian nor haiku. The only Basho book I own is more of a biography than a decent translation (the beauty is that I bought it in a second hand bookstore and found a leaf pressed between the pages - it's now the bookark). You need the bees.
Preludes
I
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o'clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.
II
The morning comes to conciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.
With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.
III
You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up the between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision on the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed's edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.
IV
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o'clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling;
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
--T.S. Eliot
*blows horn for the Bees
A Ringing Bell
I lie in my bed,
Listening to the monastery bell.
In the still night
The sound re-echoes amongst the hills.
Frost gathers under the cold moon.
Under the overcast sky,
In the depths of the night,
The first tones are still reverberating
While the last tones are clear and sharp.
I listen and I can still hear them both,
but I cannot tell when they fade away.
I know the bondage and the vanity of the world.
But who can tell when we escape
From life and death?
-- Ch'ang Yu
Vive le elliot.
Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it's queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there's some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
-indulgence-
Vive le Frost, and New Hampshire.
Night on the Great River [three translations]
by Meng Hao-jan
(I)
Steering my little boat towards a misty islet,
I watch the sun descend while my sorrows grow:
In the vast night the sky hangs lower than the treetops,
But in the blue lake the moon is coming close.
translated by William Carlos Williams
(II)
Night on the Great River
We anchor the boat alongside a hazy island.
As the sun sets I am overwhelmed with nostalgia.
The plain stretches away without limit.
The sky is just above the tree tops.
The river flows quietly by.
The moon comes down amongst men.
translated by Kenneth Rexroth
(III)
Mooring on Chien-te River
The boat rocks at anchor by the misty island
Sunset, my loneliness comes again.
In these vast wilds the sky arches down to the trees.
In the clear river water, the moon draws near.
translated by Gary Snyder
Live Interval
Lightning or fishes
in the night of the ocean,
and birds, lightning
in the forest night.
Our bones are lightning
in the night of the flesh.
O world, all is night,
life is the lightning.
-Octavio Paz
from memory; I apologize for any mistakes
Islander, that's an interesting set of translations. Hmmmm. One person's nostalgia is another's sorrow is another's loneliness.
Yeah, StoryBored, I imagine that the sensitive translation of any poetry would be enormously complex and fraught with peril. It would be impossible to say which translation is the 'best' without being at once an 8th century Chinese poet and a modern western translator/poet of some considerable skill, which I sure ain't.
Maybe that's where music comes in...
Excellent, excellent, excellent! )))))))
Although I can't use all the suggestions made, I liked every damn one of them and I thank you for introducing me to stuff I was unfamilar with. Storybored's entry, in particular, is a juicy candidate for musical treatment and I immediately added it to my list. I'll probably use a couple more once I digest them.
Where is the Bees anyway?
Ach, that fool bees is here, delighted with all the poems above.
Ah, in truth, I adore Tommy Moore's Oft in the Stilly Night, though I know it's not at all what you're after, o thou lover of Rumi and Basho. And of course his friend Byron's "We'll Go No More A-Roving", one of the warmer night-songs, is a huge favorite with me, too.
sundown -- scarecrow
flings his shadow far
along my road
-- Shoha
Night sitting
The hermit doesn't sleep at night
in love with the blue of the vacant moon
The cool of the breeze
that rustles the trees
rustles him too.
-- Ching An, trans J.P.S.
Walking Back in Moonlight from
Bodhi Trees to the Guanghua Temple
Sound of a spring waterfalling down rocks.
Silent mountain deep in night.
Bright moon washes the pine woods clean.
A thousand peaks, all one color.
-- Ouyang Xiu
After Getting Drunk, Becoming Sober in the Night
Our party scattered at yellow dusk and I came home to bed;
I woke at midnight and went for a walk, leaning heavily on a friend.
As I lay on pillow, my vinous complexion, soothed by sleep, grew sober:
In front of the tower the ocean moon, accompanying the tide, had risen.
The swallows, about to return to the beams, went back to roost again;
The candle at my window, just going out, suddenly revived its light.
All the time till dawn came, still my thoughts were muddled;
And in my ears something sounded like the music of flutes and strings.
-- Bai Juyi, trans Arthur Waley
To the Tune of 'Mulberry-Picking Song'
Ten years ago I used to indulge in cups of wine
under a white moon, in clear wind,
but cares have withered me,
and age has comne with startling speed.
Hair at my temples has changed color, but my heart is the same.
I grasp a golden goblet
and listen again to old tunes,
familiar, that carry me into old days, drunk.
-- Ouyang Xiu
kamus: glad to be of service! good luck with the composing. (derail/flashback: been listening to the Goldberg Vs, you were right about giving them more time!).
bees: )))))))
Check the hermit thread under Japanese/Chinese hermits--lots of lovelies there
A favorite from one of my favorite authors, L. M. Montgomery:
NIGHT
A pale enchanted moon is sinking low
Behind the dunes that fringe the shadowy lea,
And there is haunted starlight on the flow
Of immemorial sea. I am alone and need no more pretend
Laughter or smile to hide a hungry heart;
I walk with solitude as with a friend
Enfolded and apart. We tread an eerie road across the moor
Where shadows weave upon their ghostly looms,
And winds sing an old lyric that might lure
Sad queens from ancient tombs. I am a sister to the loveliness
Of cool far hill and long-remembered shore,
Finding in it a sweet forgetfulness
Of all that hurt before. The world of day, its bitterness and cark,
No longer have the power to make me weep;
I welcome this communion of the dark
As toilers welcome sleep.
Was looking at Robin Fulton's translations of some of Swedish poet Tomas Trantomer's haiku; though not especially night-songs, these in particular caught my eye:
On a rocky ledge
the crack in the charmed cliff shows.
The dream an iceberg.
Encroaching shadows ...
We are astray in the woods
in the mushroom clan.
Hold on, nightingale!
Out of the depths it's growing --
we are in disguise.
Hear the swish of rain.
To reach right into it I
whisper a secret.
Bees-much thanks.
KH- Loved that one a lot.
SB- very happy you stuck with the Goldbergs. They will be no doubt be the solace of my dotage.
And thanks everybody, again. If the premiere doesn't suck too badly, I'll revisit the thread and link to a recording of the piece after the concert in July.
Hey I'm working on this thing and it occurred to me that a lullaby might be worthy of inclusion as a type of "night poetry". Anyone have suggestions along this line? Thanks, as always.
Tricky thing about lullabies is that most of the good ones have already been set to music. Maybe bees would write you an original text?
every time he does that I fall asleep though.
You're free to use mine, but there are surely easier ways to commit professional suicide as a composer.
Seem to recall something to this effect from reading long ago, I think from the romantic antiquarian, novelist, and poet, Sir Walter Scott:
Those knights are dust;
Their swords are rust;
Their souls are with
The saints, we trust.
;]
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzznkkkzzzzzzz
The Visitor
In Spanish he whispers there is no time left.
It is the sound of scythes arcing in wheat,
the ache of some field song in Salvador.
The wind along the prison, cautious
as Francisco's hands on the inside, touching
the walls as he walks, it is his wife's breath
slipping into his cell each night while he
imagines his hand to be hers. It is a small country.
There is nothing one man will not do to another.
-- Carolyn Forche
Unknowing before the heavens of my life
I stand in wonder. O the great stars.
The rising and the going down. How quiet.
As if I didn't exist. Am I part? Have I dismissed
the pure influence? Do high tide and low tide
alternate in my blood according to this order?
I will cast off all wishes, all other links,
accustom my heart to its remotest space. Better
it live in the terror of its stars than
seemingly protected, soothed by something near.
Paris, early 1913
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Gah! Trans. - Edward Snow...
short but comprehensive summary [of all the subjects fit for lyric poetry:]
1. I went out into the woods today and it made me feel, you know, sort of religious.
2. We're not getting any younger.
3. It is sure is cold and lonely (a) without you, honey, or (b)with you, honey.
4. Sadness seems but the other side of the coin of happiness, and vice verse, and in any case the coin is too soon spent and on we know not what.
-- Williams Matthews, quoted by Edward Hirsch
Gah!
=vice versa
I think Rilke hit 3 of those in that pome...
At least, Chimp.
Thinking a damned-if-I-do-damned-if-I-don't option could be crammed somehow into number three.
But that way lies a long dull catalogue.
Birds Sleep in My Hair
our groves
erased
I cruise the naked void
dressed
in the call of an owl
Mother, hold this ground
fastened in the throat of night
fugitive bones
we have prayed, fasted, cut our skin and
danced for two days straight
catapults of fire, armed men, a world unmade
where have they come from
rising like old poison
fold us back, white day, your face in the oak leaves
take us back
-- Janet Jennings
By Leonard, of course.
Days of Kindness (Stranger Music, 1993)
Greece is a good place
to look at the moon, isn't it
You can read by moonlight
You can read on the terrace
You can see a face
as you saw it when you were young
There was good light then
oil lamps and candles
and those little flames
that floated on a cork in olive oil
What I loved in my old life
I haven't forgotten
It lives in my spine
Marianne and the child
The days of kindness
It rises in my spine
and it manifests as tears
I pray that loving memory
exists for them too
the precious ones I overthrew
for an education in the world
Hydra, 1985
---
My Mother Asleep (Book of Longing, 2006)
remembering my mother
at a theater in Athens
thirty
thirty-five years ago
a revue by Theodorakis
those great songs
she fell asleep
in the chair beside me
in the open air theatre
she had arrived that day
from Montreal
and the play started
close to midnight
and she slept through
the mandolins
and the great songs
I was young
I hadn't had my children
I didn't know how far away
your love could be
I didn't know
how tired you could get
A Clear Midnight
This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best.
Night, sleep, death, and the stars.
--Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1900
night
falls
crow
settles
Memory seems to have cast a net of confusion over me, so let me give this for amends:
The Knight's Tomb
Where is the grave of Sir Arthur O'Kellyn?
Where may the grave of that good man be?
By the side of a spring, on the breast of Helvellyn,
Under the twigs of a young birch tree!
The oak that in summer was sweet to hear,
And rustled its leaves in the fall of the year,
And whistled and roared in the winter alone
Is gone, and the birch in its stead is grown --
The Knight's bones are dust,
And his good sword rust;
His soul is with the saints, I trust.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Night Sitting
The hermit doesn't sleep at night:
in love with the blue of the vacant moon
The cool of the breeze
that rustles the trees
rustles him too
-- Ching An, trans J.P. Seaton
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.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.
I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves, but worse.
-- Gerard Manley Hopkins, "I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark"
Bees, the best Hopkins is this:
Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Windhover
To Christ our Lord
I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, 5
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion 10
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
but Pied Beauty comes a close second
Pied Beauty
GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
The man could weave words.
I once argued in my class that the Windhover might also refer to Lucifer, as much of the imagery can be attributed to him as well. It was good for a laugh, and about fifteen minutes of otherwise fairly stodgy tutorial time (due to silent, unresponsive classmates, not the poetry).
Both are fine poems, I agree, BlueHorse, but I was adhering there to the broad theme of night poetry.
My personal favorite by Hopkins is this one, which I first encountered when I was nine, falling so hard in love with how he said what he said that I knew I wanted to write poetry myself:
Spring and Fall
to a young child
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now, no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
I once argued in my class that the Windhover might also refer to Lucifer, as much of the imagery can be attributed to him as well.
Maybe he noticed that, and that's why he chose that specific title!
Awesome pomes, anyway!
Yes, we went away from the night poetry--but what a digression!!
To return to our topic:
Silver
Slowly, silently, now the moon
Walks the night in her silver shoon;
This way, and that, she peers, and sees
Silver fruit upon silver trees;
One by one the casements catch
Her beams beneath the silvery thatch;
Couched in his kennel, like a log,
With paws of silver sleeps the dog;
From their shadowy coat the white breasts peep
Of doves in a silver-feathered sleep;
A harvest mouse goes scampering by,
With silver claws, and silver eye;
And moveless fish in the water gleam,
By silver reeds in a silver stream.
- Walter de la Mare
A second helping of Byron, anyone?
The Dream
Our life is twofold; Sleep hath its own world,
A boundary between the things misnamed
Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality,
And dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy;
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,
They take a weight from off waking toils,
They do divide our being; they become
A portion of ourselves as of our time,
And look like heralds of eternity;
They pass like spirits of the past -they speak
Like sibyls of the future; they have power -
The tyranny of pleasure and of pain;
They make us what we were not -what they will,
And shake us with the vision that's gone by,
The dread of vanished shadows -Are they so?
Is not the past all shadow? -What are they?
Creations of the mind? -The mind can make
Substances, and people planets of its own
With beings brighter than have been, and give
A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh.
I would recall a vision which I dreamed
Perchance in sleep -for in itself a thought,
A slumbering thought, is capable of years,
And curdles a long life into one hour.
The cicada sings
In the rotten willow.
Antares, the fire star,
Rolls in the west.
- Anonymous
The River Scrapes Against Night
Through the scrim of the tent
I map constellations, fearful
I may have missed one
of the bland white sheep
lined up for counting,
fuzzy with their own bleating fatigue.
No matter how hard I stare
I can't find the boundaries
between river and canyon,
canyon and sky. Bats
swoop close, intimate,
alarming. Night keeps knocking
without a hint of politeness.
I'm not fooled
by steady breathing.
We are this small.
This brief.
-- Wendy Mnookin
MMMMMM, very nice.
Agreed.
When the Moon
When the moon rises and women in flowery dresses are strolling,
I am struck by their eyes, eyelashes, and the whole arrangement of the world.
It seems to me that from such a strong mutual attraction
The ultimate truth should issue at last.
--Czeslaw Milosz
Sleeping in the Forest
I thought the earth
remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds. I slept
as never before, a stone
on the riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated
light as moths among the branches
of the perfect trees. All night
I heard the small kingdoms breathing
around me, the insects, and the birds
who do their work in the darkness. All night
I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better
-- Mary OLiver
Poetry
And it was at that age ... Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know. I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't even know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.
I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.
And I, infinitesmal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.
-- Pablo Neruda, trans A. Reid
That's fantastic, Bees.
For some reason, I would like to hear that set to music.
Well, this is kamus' thread.
Selkie
in memory of Michael Donaghy
'I'm not stopping,'
he said, shrugging off his skin
like a wet-suit, then stretching it
on the bodhran's frame,
'let's play.'
And he played till dawn:
all the jigs and reels
he knew, before he stood
and drained the last
from his glass, slipped back in
to the seal-skin,
into a new day, saluting us
with that famous grin,
'That's me away.'
-- Robin Robertson
The Search
Three generations gone and I return
To the fields of the Acevedos
Who were my ancestors. Vaguely
I have searched for them in this old house
White and rectangular, in the coolness
Of its two verandas, in the lengthening
Shadow that its pillars cast,
In the timeless shriek of a bird,
In the rain that wears the terraced roof away,
In the twilight of the mirrors,
In a reflection, an echo which was theirs
And now is mine without my knowing it.
I have looked at the windows wrought-iron bars
Which deflected the desert spears,
The palm-trees struck by lightening,
The black bulls from Aberdeen, the evening,
The casuarinas they never saw.
Here was the sword and here was danger
And the hard proscriptions, the risings;
Firm on their horses, here
The long-leagued ranchers ruled
The plain with no beginning and no end.
Pedro, Pascal, Miguel, Judas, Tadeo ...
Who will tell me whether mysteriously,
Under this roof of one sole night,
Far beyond the years and dust,
Beyond the crystal of the memory,
We have not joined and fused in one,
I in a dream, but they in death.
-- Jorge Luis Borges, trans Charles Tomlinson
Moon
On this summer night
All the household lies asleep,
And in the doorway,
For once open after dark,
Stands the moon, brilliant, cloudless.
-- Jusammi Chikako, trans E.A. Cranston
My candle burns at both ends,
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes,
and oh, my friends -
It gives a lovely light.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
O Daedalus, Fly Away Home
For Maia and Julie)
Drifting night in the Georgia pines,
coonskin drum and jubilee banjo.
Pretty Malinda, dance with me.
Night is juba, night is congo.
Pretty Malinda, dance with me.
Night is an African juju man
weaving a wish and a weariness together
to make two wings.
O fly away home fly away
Do you remember Africa?
O cleave the air fly away home
My gran, he flew back to Africa,
just spread his arms and
flew away home.
Drifting night in the windy pines;
night is laughing, night is a longing.
Pretty Malinda, come to me.
Night is a mourning juju man
weaving a wish and a weariness together
to make two wings.
O fly away home fly away
--Robert Hayden
A wonderful selection, petebest!
The Mujin Flowers Blossom on the Rolling Graves
The Mujin flowers blossom on the rolling graves,
these hills are lovely, and luminous.
The radiant sun goes down into the trees
as one by one, the flowers fall.
Outside my window a cricket is singing,
transient thing in the thorn.
Mayflies play for their three days,
their wings are as slender and pretty as feathers.
Who are their costumes designed for?
To decorate their little moment.
The life of man is also brief.
Our hearts know it. We should
try our best to live.
-- Juan Chi, trans Graham Hartill and Wu Fusbeng
written in pencil in the sealed railway car
here in this carload
i am eve
with abel my son
if you see my other son
cain son of man
tell him i
--Dan Pagis, trans Stephen Mitchell
Tears in Sleep
All night the cocks crew, under a moon like day,
And I, in the cage of sleep, on a stranger's breast,
Shed tears, like a task not to be put away --
In the false light, false grief in my happy bed,
A labor of tears, set against joy's undoing.
I would not wake at your word, I had tears to say.
I clung to the bars of the dream and they were said,
And pain's derisive hand had given me rest
From the night giving off flames, and the dark renewing.
-- Louise Bogan
Return
I know she is light and faithless,
But she has come back half repentant
And very pale and very sad.
A butterfly needs somewhere to rest
At evening.
Anon., translated from the Japanese by E. Powys Mathers
Kyrie
At times my life suddenly opens its eyes in the dark.
A feeling of masses of people pushing blindly
through the streets, excitedly, toward some miracle,
while I remain here and no one sees me.
It is like the child who falls asleep in terror
listening to the heavy thumps of his heart.
For a long, long time till morning puts his light in the locks
and the doors of darkness open.
-- Thomas Transtromer, translated by Robert Bly
A New Way to Live
I am tired of forgiving like
At night. A forum for seriousness is like
an intervention. Please to be cast
As a serious aid like a pretty thing to the memory.
Like a belligernet thing in the memory true.
An attachment like trees is not like
a human attachment at all.
To hear a bell ring and then put a bell in it
Is like trees that hear the sun and then
Put a sun in it like thirst.
-- Katherine Lederer
Bamboo Pavilion
I sit alone among the tallest of the tall bamboo,
pluck the lute, and whistle melodies, again.
This deep grove's unknown to other men.
Bright moon, when it comes: we shine together.
-- Wang Wei, trans J.P. Seaton
Words, Wide Night
Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.
This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say
it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.
La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine
the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you and this
is what it is like or what it is like in words.
--Carol Ann Duffy
The Mower To the Glowworms
Ye living lamps, by whose dear light
The nightingale does sit so late,
And studying all the summer-night
Her matchless song does meditate;
Ye country comets, that portend
No war, nor princes funeral,
Shining unto no higher end
Than to presage the grass's fall;
Ye glowworms, whose officious flame
To wand'ring mowers shows the way,
That in the night have lost their aim,
And after foolish fires do stray;
Your courteous lights in vain you waste,
Since Juliana here is come,
For she my mind hath so displaced
That I shall never find my home.
Marvell
And thanks for that last one, mr Beeswacky, sir.
And yours is a Marvell!
I love Marvell deeply, but when I own a copy of the collected verse of Beeswacky, I'll be happy a man.
Night night.
or, a happy man
Bee both?
Bee fuddled
Ahem
Or che 'l ciel et la terra e'l vento tace
et le fere e gli augelli il sonno affrena,
notte il carro stellato in giro mena
et nel suo letto il mar senz'onda giace,
vegghio, penso, ardo, piango; et chi mi sface
sempre m'è inanzi per mia dolce pena:
guerra è 'l mio stato, d'ira e di duol piena,
et sol di lei pensando ò qualche pace.
Così sol d'una chiara fonte viva
move 'l dolce et l'amoro ond'io mi pasco,
una man sola mi risana et punge;
et perchè 'l mio martir non giunga a riva
mille volte il dì moro et mille nasco,
tanto da la salute mia son lunge.
- Petrarch
Now the heavens and the earth and the winds are silent, and sleep reins in the beasts and birds, Night drives her starry car around, and in its bed the sea lies without a wave,
I am awake, I think, I burn, I weep; and she who destroys me is always before me, to my sweet pain: war is my state, full of sorrow and suffering, and only thinking of her do I have any peace.
Thus from one clear living fountain alone spring the sweet and the bitter on which I feed; one hand alone heals me and pierces me.
And that my suffering may not reach an end, a thousand times a day I die and a thousand I am born, so far from health am I.
(trans. Robert M. Durling, but obviously, it's much prettier in Italian)
So, kamus-ter, any news on the project?
A Clear Midnight
This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou
lovest best.
Night, sleep, and the stars.
-- Walt Whitman
Saddest Poem
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
Write, for instance: "The night is full of stars,
and the stars, blue, shiver in the distance."
The night wind whirls in the sky and sings.
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
On nights like this, I held her in my arms.
I kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her.
How could I not have loved her large, still eyes?
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
To think I don't have her. To feel that I've lost her.
To hear the immense night, more immense without her.
And the poem falls to the soul as dew to grass.
What does it matter that my love couldn't keep her.
The night is full of stars and she is not with me.
That's all. Far away, someone sings. Far away.
My soul is lost without her.
As if to bring her near, my eyes search for her.
My heart searches for her and she is not with me.
The same night that whitens the same trees.
We, we who were, we are the same no longer.
I no longer love her, true, but how much I loved her.
My voice searched the wind to touch her ear.
Someone else's. She will be someone else's. As she once
belonged to my kisses.
Her voice, her light body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, true, but perhaps I love her.
Love is so short and oblivion so long.
Because on nights like this I held her in my arms,
my soul is lost without her.
Although this may be the last pain she causes me,
and this may be the last poem I write for her.
-- Pablo Neruda
Oooh, bees, that's always been one of my favorite bits of Whit. And the Neruda is goergeorgeous!
Mr Beeswacky, sir: once again I'll thank you for a poem I didn't know, yet clarifies a situation. Thankyou.
Nocturne
The moon's huge corona is one clue,
and the willow's limb-long sway
another—this slow
ache within music. And now the night
unrolls its ashen arc, what
Whistler longed for as
he sampled London's East End bars and
whores. Can fuckable flesh heal
this pain that precedes
paint and brush stroke, the antecedents
of starlight? If we seem lost,
its simple: We are.
And Whistler's blocky nocturnes still build
canvases of blue on black:
a non-descript boat
on gaslamp-lit water, the two men
erect silhouettes that stir
the depths with hooked poles.
Whether the stone-lined Thames or the cat-
tailed Kings, each river's prism
swallows the dim dusk—
even the fish dream of an old world
flood plain that spreads like twilight,
that creamy clay swirl
of alluvium, a mudpack for
each wounded age. Whistler's eye
for the smoky dark
sharpens this July evening as the
geography of moonlight
descends and takes hold.
If we look down from this bridge, as if
rivers hold the sky, we'll see
the silver echo
and sputter of holiday rockets,
their aerial shock and spray
the brief rain of fire.
-- Robert Vasquez
This was a great thread from my viewpoint- so many great choices. Thanks to everyone kind enough to contribute. As I promised before, I would post something of the finished product. Here, very belatedly, is a setting of A Ringing Bell as suggested by Storybored. I also set TUM's suggestion of Acquainted With the Night. These are from the first performance (happily, there have been several now)-the recording quality is not great and the performances got better after this, but it's not so bad either. I also set Bone's suggestion of "Live Interval" and I'll post that soon. Hopefully later, I'll get some better recordings.
Thanks again all!
Yeah, kamus!!
Nicely done, kamus!
Oooooooh, purty!
On "Night," I especially loved the text painting, and the interplay between the flute and voice on "Goodbye." Haunting, but in a beautiful way.
I just realized that I had also taken kittenhead's suggestion of "Night" and set that too. In fact, of the five songs in the cycle, four of them had text that was supplied by Monkeys. The remaining song was a setting of this haiku:
Through a hole
in a borrowed tent
the Milky Way
steve shapiro
I wonder if that makes it the first classical work with substantial material contributed by blog participants?. I'll post the other movements as I get the time. I could probably spend the next few years setting the rest of the great poetry on this page had I unlimited time. As it is, I gotta get to the store to buy some diapers.
Thanks again for the poetry and your kind comments.
As promised here are the remaining songs in the cycle:
Night
Live Interval
Through a Hole
I should note with some embarrassment that Night and Live Interval are fragments of the original text. My word processor suffered a glitch where the first half of Live Interval and the second half of "Night" were cutoff on the printout I used to compose to. It was only after I had completed the pieces (and a day before the first rehearsal) that I realized they were incomplete- duh! Somehow they seemed poetically satisfying enough as I was working on them. I will have to complete the missing verse someday. Also, I am the pianist on "Hole" as the pianist in Windsong, the chamber group that commissioned the piece, was unable to navigate the technical difficulties in time-I found this out the day of the premiere and it sent me into a frenzy of last minute practice- I struggled a little bit too- if I had known I was going to have to play the damn thing myself, I would have written a much easier part :-).
Missing is the flute prelude (I'll add that when I find it). The order in performance was: I Nightbird (flute solo) / II A Ringing Bell / III Through a Hole / IV Night / V Live Interval / VI Waltz Before Midnight (clarinet solo) / VII Acquainted with the Night
By the way, rereading this thread- wow- such great poems! Also it is so sad that Bees and The_Bone no longer seem to habituate these environs anymore.
Whoa, thanks for this kamus.
To hear an original piece of music set to a favourite poem, toooooo cool!
It really is!
"Acquainted with the Night" has so much special meaning for me, and I think that kamus's music has perfectly captured the spirit of the thing.
Thanks guys
Absolutely lovely!
Brilliant, kamus!
These are just lovely, Kamus. As I listen, the stars come out.
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