In a world overlaying this one
where you never left and things
never changed -
we are sitting, right now,
on your bed, smoking and drinking tea,
just back from the gym.
You are reading me your thoughts
out of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius,
whilst I ponder
the reason for the lonely tugging of my heart,
which can feel your absence,
even from here.
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Wednesday, 07 October 2009
Thursday, 01 October 2009
A Modern Love Song
Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment, except,Of course, those practical considerations of time and distance,
I must have time to finish my degree after all, and you,
Well, we both know you've got important things on your mind.
Let me not to the marriage of true desires admit impediment,
Except if you want to travel later, or if you hate my friends,
Or if you get jealous or if I get bored, or if either of us
Decides to be gay, there'll be no hard feelings of course
It's all a bit outdated these days, anyway.
A Hymn to Mowbray
Ossewa trolley, where do you go
In the nighttime, carrying your cargo
Of ragged clothes and rotten food,
Tattered cardboard to build frayed shelter,
And scruffy discards with which to build a
Memory?
Ossewa trolley, the squeaking wheels
Of your street serenade, bassline
To the calling melodies of the Trolley Men
The Mowbray Men, the Men who live
Their lives in public, who take tea
Outside the 7/11
Ossewa trolley, where do you go
With a load as big as that lady's groceries,
With a home as big as that lady's
Groceries, where do you go in the
Nighttime, is there a journey of streets?
Is there a journey of memory?
Do you squeak along the trails of the
Empty mountain, do you rattle a worship
To the Togo, a song for the old clay
That saw itself and laughed, remember
Displacement, remember Da Gama, remember
And ask, old ossewa of the new streets:
Where is this
Future
They spoke of?
In the nighttime, carrying your cargo
Of ragged clothes and rotten food,
Tattered cardboard to build frayed shelter,
And scruffy discards with which to build a
Memory?
Ossewa trolley, the squeaking wheels
Of your street serenade, bassline
To the calling melodies of the Trolley Men
The Mowbray Men, the Men who live
Their lives in public, who take tea
Outside the 7/11
Ossewa trolley, where do you go
With a load as big as that lady's groceries,
With a home as big as that lady's
Groceries, where do you go in the
Nighttime, is there a journey of streets?
Is there a journey of memory?
Do you squeak along the trails of the
Empty mountain, do you rattle a worship
To the Togo, a song for the old clay
That saw itself and laughed, remember
Displacement, remember Da Gama, remember
And ask, old ossewa of the new streets:
Where is this
Future
They spoke of?
Sunday, 28 June 2009
To a Skylark
Shelley's famous "To a Skylark" begins:
Hail to thee, blithe spirit!
Bird thou never wert-
That from heaven or near it
Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
The Romantics wrote countless songs about similarly unpremeditated bird-poets. The bird was thought of as the ultimate untrained artist, who sang whatever its "full heart" prompted it to. This notion is premised on the idea that birdsong is individualistic, random and fully innate.
The terribly un-Romantic truth, though, is that bird song is far more a learnt behaviour than one would imagine. Bird song is actually pre-set for each species, and very little individualistic variation goes into it. Baby birds that are raised away from any other birds of their species never learn to sing "properly", and end up unintelligable to other birds of their kind. These birds might be the only "unpremeditated" singers - but their song is more like the ungrammatical speech of feral children than like the creativity of the artist.
Actually, it all boils down to two messages that the bird might actually be saying: "fuck me" or "fuck off" - as birdsong generally relates to territoriality or mating (or, in fewer cases, warning of predators). The cynical side of me might suggest that most poets are expressing one of the same messages - but never mind ...
Monday, 14 July 2008
Dante's "La Vita Nuova"
Dante's La Vita Nuova ("The New Life"), published in 1295, is a collection of prose and poetry that tells the autobiographic story of his love for Beatrice. Dante first saw the girl when he was 9 years old, and she 8, and remained infatuated with her from that day forth.
On the right: Henry Holiday's depiction of Dante's first meeting with Beatrice. She is the one wearing the "crimson mantle", turning her head to him.
The nature of their love affair no doubt seems bizarre to us today: although he barely knew her, she was the primary muse for all of his writings. She is the guide that leads him through Paradise in The Divine Comedy, and is often described as "Love herself". He claims to have only met her twice; each occassion a brief meeting on the streets of Florence (in the first, they do not even speak to each other). She subsequently married a banker and died when she was just 24 years old. Dante himself married a woman named Gemma Donati, who one imagines must have been perturbed by her husband's obsession for "the Divine Beatrice", whom Dante claims regularly visited him in dreams.
Because of the nature of their (non-)relationship, critics often praise Dante's depictions of Beatrice as being some of the clearest representations of courtly love (you should recognise this phrase from school-Shakespeare: the idea of love being asexual, unfulfilled, secretive and worshipful). Nonetheless, Dante's love sonnets contain some intensely physical imagery. My favourite sonnet from "La Vita Nuova" describes a vision that Dante has, shortly after meeting Beatrice for the second and final time:
To every captive soul and gentle heart
into whose sight this present speech may come,
so that they might write its meaning for me,
greetings, in their lord’s name, who is Love.
Already a third of the hours were almost past
of the time when all the stars were shining,
when Love suddenly appeared to me
whose memory fills me with terror.
Joyfully Love seemed to me to hold
my heart in his hand, and held in his arms
my lady wrapped in a cloth sleeping.
Then he woke her, and that burning heart
he fed to her reverently, she fearing,
afterwards he went not to be seen weeping.
(Patrick Cassidy wrote an aria based upon this sonnet, called Vida Cor Meum, which was used in the films Hannibal and Kingdom of Heaven. It is divine - try to find it if you can.)
The vision fills Dante with fear and grief, as he sees in it a foreshadowing of Beatrice's immanent death. The emotions of the poem are strange: note that Love initially holds his heart "joyfully", but after feeding the "fearing" lady Dante's heart, he begins to weep. It is as though the intensity of the image is so powerful that it transfigures emotion. Always in Dante, the symbolic act has more power than the real.
This changes, as La Vita Nuova progresses. Ironically, after Beatrice's death, Dante's love for her takes on a far more real and human quality. His poetry comes to express simpler, non-metaphorical emotion:
Whenever, alas! I remember
that I may never again
see that lady for whom I so grieve,
so much grief is gathered in my heart
by the grieving mind,
that I say: ‘My spirit, why do you not go,
since the torments you suffer
in this world, which grows so hateful to you,
bring such great thoughts of dread?’
Then I call on Death,
as to a sweet and gentle refuge:
and I say: ‘Come to me’ with such love,
that I am envious of all who die.
On the right: Henry Holiday's depiction of Dante's first meeting with Beatrice. She is the one wearing the "crimson mantle", turning her head to him.
The nature of their love affair no doubt seems bizarre to us today: although he barely knew her, she was the primary muse for all of his writings. She is the guide that leads him through Paradise in The Divine Comedy, and is often described as "Love herself". He claims to have only met her twice; each occassion a brief meeting on the streets of Florence (in the first, they do not even speak to each other). She subsequently married a banker and died when she was just 24 years old. Dante himself married a woman named Gemma Donati, who one imagines must have been perturbed by her husband's obsession for "the Divine Beatrice", whom Dante claims regularly visited him in dreams.
Because of the nature of their (non-)relationship, critics often praise Dante's depictions of Beatrice as being some of the clearest representations of courtly love (you should recognise this phrase from school-Shakespeare: the idea of love being asexual, unfulfilled, secretive and worshipful). Nonetheless, Dante's love sonnets contain some intensely physical imagery. My favourite sonnet from "La Vita Nuova" describes a vision that Dante has, shortly after meeting Beatrice for the second and final time:
To every captive soul and gentle heart
into whose sight this present speech may come,
so that they might write its meaning for me,
greetings, in their lord’s name, who is Love.
Already a third of the hours were almost past
of the time when all the stars were shining,
when Love suddenly appeared to me
whose memory fills me with terror.
Joyfully Love seemed to me to hold
my heart in his hand, and held in his arms
my lady wrapped in a cloth sleeping.
Then he woke her, and that burning heart
he fed to her reverently, she fearing,
afterwards he went not to be seen weeping.
(Patrick Cassidy wrote an aria based upon this sonnet, called Vida Cor Meum, which was used in the films Hannibal and Kingdom of Heaven. It is divine - try to find it if you can.)
The vision fills Dante with fear and grief, as he sees in it a foreshadowing of Beatrice's immanent death. The emotions of the poem are strange: note that Love initially holds his heart "joyfully", but after feeding the "fearing" lady Dante's heart, he begins to weep. It is as though the intensity of the image is so powerful that it transfigures emotion. Always in Dante, the symbolic act has more power than the real.
This changes, as La Vita Nuova progresses. Ironically, after Beatrice's death, Dante's love for her takes on a far more real and human quality. His poetry comes to express simpler, non-metaphorical emotion:
Whenever, alas! I remember
that I may never again
see that lady for whom I so grieve,
so much grief is gathered in my heart
by the grieving mind,
that I say: ‘My spirit, why do you not go,
since the torments you suffer
in this world, which grows so hateful to you,
bring such great thoughts of dread?’
Then I call on Death,
as to a sweet and gentle refuge:
and I say: ‘Come to me’ with such love,
that I am envious of all who die.
Truly, Beatrice becomes more alive to him after her death. Dante once called her, "La gloriosa donna della mia mente" (the glorious lady of my mind) ... a muse that he was free to imagine as he wished, as it so barely included its original human model.
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