1. T. S. Eliot - La Figlia Che Piange
2. W. H. Auden - Postscript
3. Dante Alighieri - Purgatorio: Canto V
4. Carol Ann Duffy - Lovesick
5. Gertrude Stein - Suppose An Eyes
6. Elizabeth Bishop - Breakfast Song
7. Cyril Wong - invisible snapshot: after simryn gill
8. Emily Dickinson - Safe in their alabaster chambers
9. Alfred Noyes - The Highwayman
10. Amy Lowell - Vintage
11. Jack Kerouac - 12th Chorus of Desolation Blues
12. Anon - The Battle of Maldon
13. 王昌齡 - 閨怨
14. Frank O'Hara - Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!)
15. Arthur Rimbaud - L'Orgie Parisienne
16. Rumi - Like This
17. Teng Qian Xi - Ghazal of Winter
18. John Donne - Song
19. Pablo Neruda - So That You Will Hear Me
20. Lewis Carroll - Humpty Dumpty's Song
21. Anon - Mary Hamilton
22. Issa - Three Haiku
23. E. E. Cummings - if I should sleep with a lady called death
24. J. R. R. Tolkien - Lament For Théoden
25. Yevgeny Yevtushenko - Waiting
26. 杜甫 - 觀公孫大娘弟子舞劍器行并序
27. Ng Yi-Sheng - Equidistance
28. Anon - Judith
29. Carl Sandburg - Maybe
30. Sylvia Plath - Last Words


Thank you everybody for reading, I hope you have enjoyed this month!

Last Words
Sylvia Plath



I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus
With tigery stripes, and a face on it
Round as the moon, to stare up.

I want to be looking at them when they come
Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots.
I see them already - the pale, star-distance faces.
Now they are nothing, they are not even babies.
I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first gods.
They will wonder if I was important.
I should sugar and preserve my days like fruit!
My mirror is clouding over -
A few more breaths, and it will reflect nothing at all.
The flowers and the faces whiten to a sheet.

I do not trust the spirit. It escapes like steam
In dreams, through mouth-hole or eye-hole. I can't stop it.
One day it won't come back. Things aren't like that.
They stay, their little particular lusters
Warmed by much handling. They almost purr.
When the soles of my feet grow cold,
The blue eye of my turquoise will comfort me.
Let me have my copper cooking pots, let my rouge pots
Bloom about me like night flowers, with a good smell.

They will roll me up in bandages, they will store my heart
Under my feet in a neat parcel.
I shall hardly know myself. It will be dark,
And the shine of these small things sweeter than the face of Ishtar.

Maybe
Carl Sandburg

Maybe he believes me, maybe not.
Maybe I can marry him, maybe not.

Maybe the wind on the prairie,
The wind on the sea, maybe,
Somebody, somewhere, maybe can tell.

I will lay my head on his shoulder
And when he asks me I will say yes,
Maybe.

The Old English version of the Jewish heroine Judith's beheading of the evil general Holofernes varies from the Vulgate Latin Bible in that Judith is not a widow but a virgin. I would explain in greater detail the significances of this change, but last time I tried it took me a 4,000-word essay and even then didn't cover everything.

This bit has the drunken Holofernes summoning Judith to his pavilion after his Beer-Party (legit OE word, btw: gebeorscipe)

Judith (extract)
Anon, trans. yours truly

( in Old English! )


( In Modern English! )

When interviewed about this poem, Ng Yi-Sheng said: "It's gay. It's very, very gay."

Ah, Ng Yi-Sheng.





Equidistance
Ng Yi-Sheng

Socrates taught us to love boys and the mathematics. We assumed the spherical boy,
equilateral boy, his proof necessarily elegant. Common nights we wake to find
ourselves missing his surface area, warm to the touch; a scalene child
beside us, all knobbled wrists and truncations. I turn and dream

of the heave of his volume, the breadth and square of his utter radius, but
men on camels stalk my sleep who would solve this desert with variables unknown:
let x be the value of he who lies before me, breathing at my feet like a somnolent eleven,
yet I fear to wake, for they have taught me also the use of the zero.

Du Fu hath written the following:

'On the 19th of the Tenth-month in the second year of Dali, I saw, in the house of the Kueifu official Yuante, a girl named Li from Lingying dancing with a dagger. I admired her skill and asked who was her teacher. She named Lady Gongsun. I remembered that in the third year of Kaiyuan at Yancheng, when I was a little boy, I saw Lady Gongsun dance. She was the only one in the Imperial Theatre who could dance with this weapon. Now she is aged and unknown, and even her pupil has passed the heyday of beauty. I wrote this poem to express my wistfulness. The work of Zhang Xu of the Wu district, that great master of grassy writing, was improved by his having been present when Lady Gongsun danced in the Yeh district. From this may be judged the art of Gongsun.'

觀公孫大娘弟子舞劍器行并序
杜甫


( 霍如羿射九日落， 矯如群帝驂龍翔 )


A Song of Dagger-Dancing to a Girl-Pupil of Lady Gongsun
Du Fu
trans. Jean Elizabeth Ward


( There lived years ago the beautiful Gongsun, who dancing with her dagger drew from all four quarters an audience like mountains lost among themselves )

Waiting
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
trans. Peter Levi

My love will come
will fling open her arms and fold me in them,
will understand my fears, observe my changes.
In from the pouring dark, from the pitch night
without stopping to bang the taxi door
she’ll run upstairs through the decaying porch
burning with love and love’s happiness,
she’ll run dripping upstairs, she won’t knock,
will take my head in her hands,
and when she drops her overcoat on a chair,
it will slide to the floor in a blue heap.

When I was young and read the Lord of the Rings for the first time, I was all about the Elves.  They were tall and perfect and sang exquisite songs about trees.  Being older, and having come to uni and studied Anglo-Saxon battle poetry, I have found the poems that speak to me more are now the songs of Men - above all, the songs of Rohan, because in them you can see Tolkien's complete and utter devotion to the Old English heroic verse.  

There are so many ways in which this lament is perfectly constructed.  The precise mimesis of the alliterative half-line, the inexorable rhythm achieved by such an exact, controlled meter, the chiastic movement of Théoden and his riders out of darkness, into light, back into darkness.  The sheer strength of alliteration (read it out! READ. IT. OUT.) especially that of the 'f', which drives 'forth' into 'fate' and breaks 'fear' with 'fealty' - the entire span of the Anglo-Saxon warrior experience from oath-making to death-taking pounded into you in four terrible, beautiful half-lines and ARGH I CAN'T GO ON just read it I have all the feels I think I might cry again.


Lament For Théoden
J. R. R. Tolkien

From dark Dunharrow in the dim morning
with thane and captain rode Thengel's son:
to Edoras he came, the ancient halls
of the Mark-wardens mist-enshrouded;
golden timbers were in gloom mantled.
Farewell he bade to his free people,
hearth and high-seat, and the hallowed places,
where long he had feasted ere the light faded.
Forth rode the king, fear behind him,
fate before him. Fealty kept he;
oaths he had taken, all fulfilled them.
Forth rode Théoden. Five nights and days
east and onward rode the Eorlingas
through Folde and Fenmarch and the Firienwood,
six thousand spears to Sunlending,
Mundburg the mighty under Mindolluin,
Sea-kings' city in the South-kingdom
foe-beleaguered, fire-encircled.
Doom drove them on. Darkness took them,
Horse and horseman; hoofbeats afar
sank into silence: so the songs tell us.



People who deserve better, and choose worse.  That is how you know your heroes.

If you think E. E. Cummings was all about the semicolons and candyfloss and green men on the moon, you are gravely mistaken. I was originally going to post the poem 'Little Ladies More Exactly Dead', which he wrote about prostitutes, but half of it is in French and I didn't feel like making such a long translation on my own so, here, I present you instead with Cummings-does-Donne's-The-Apparation-but-with-interesting-punctuation.



if I should sleep with a lady called death
E. E. Cummings

if I should sleep with a lady called death
get another man with firmer lips
to take your new mouth in his teeth
(hips pumping pleasure into hips).

Seeing how the limp huddling string
of your smile over his body squirms
kissingly, I will bring you every spring
handfuls of little normal worms.

Dress deftly your flesh in stupid stuffs,
phrase the immense weapon of your hair.
Understanding why his eye laughs,
I will bring you every year

something which is worth the whole,
an inch of nothing for your soul.

The other day Michael asked for Basho, but I have no Basho so have some Issa instead! Issa (一茶, or cup-of-tea) wrote an impressive 20,000 haiku (though I imagine haiku must be a lot easier to write than...poetry forms longer than haiku) and is considered along with Basho, Buson and Shiki to be one of the Great Four haiku poets.



Haiku
Kobayashi Issa

(trans. David G. Lanoue)

( The following poem has the provisional title of 'Hell'. )


( This one is my favourite )


(trans. Lewis Mackenzie)


( This one was written for the death of his baby daughter )



D: