Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold
Dover Beach
by Matthew Arnold
Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires
Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art
by Matthew Arnold
The Magical Moment in Which You Realize that You Are, or Will Be a Writer
Anne Sexton said she realized that she was a poet (I suppose she meant that she had the capacity to be a poet) while watching John Berryman read on TV.
It really a magical moment, the sort of moment in fairy tales when Snow White or Sleeping Beauty discover that they really are princesses.
My own moment came in two installments. In my early twenties I started writing poetry in a rush. And it was like,”Okay, I love this, I can do it. Not as well as Keats, okay, but well enough to give me, and perhaps some others, pleasure.”
My next moment happened several years later. I was reading a description of a family united around the consumption of gargantuan meals in Patricia Hampl’s “A Romantic Education,” and thought “Yes, that’s like my family. I can do this too.” Around that time, I read Annie Dillard’s “An American Childhood” about a bookish and privileged childhood in a steel town much like Jamshedpur, India, where I grew up, each chapter about a different passion or obsession, and I thought, “Yes, I can do this. And this is how.”
Life intervened in the form of two children, health issues, the need to work to pay for the girls’ private school education, but now I am back to writing happily, hoping to complete my memoir, and my slender volume of poetry.
Bookmark this on Delicious
Happy Insensibility |
IN a drear-nighted December, | |
Too happy, happy tree, | |
Thy branches ne’er remember | |
Their green felicity: | |
The north cannot undo them | 5 |
With a sleety whistle through them, | |
Nor frozen thawings glue them | |
From budding at the prime. | |
In a drear-nighted December, | |
Too happy, happy brook, | 10 |
Thy bubblings ne’er remember | |
Apollo’s summer look; | |
But with a sweet forgetting | |
They stay their crystal fretting, | |
Never, never petting | 15 |
About the frozen time. | |
Ah! would ’twere so with many | |
A gentle girl and boy! | |
But were there ever any | |
Writhed not at passèd joy? | 20 |
To know the change and feel it, | |
When there is none to heal it | |
Nor numbèd sense to steal it— | |
Was never said in rhyme. |
I love this poem. Isn’t it almost perfect? In Memory of W. B. Yeats |
||
by W. H. Auden | ||
II
You were silly like us; your gift survived it all: III
Earth, receive an honoured guest: William Yeats is laid to rest. Time that is intolerant Of the brave and innocent And indifferent in a week To a beautiful physique Worships language and forgives, Everyone by whom it lives Pardons cowardice, conceit Lays its honours at their feet Time that with this strange excuse Pardoned Kipling and his views And will pardon Paul Claudel Pardon him for writing well. In the nightmare of the dark |
||
Pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many, when,
with such pleasure, with such joy
you will enter ports seen for the first time;
stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensual perfumes of all kinds,
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
visit many Egyptian cities,
to learn and learn from scholars.
Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to anchor at the island when you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.
Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would have never set out on the road.
She has nothing more to give you.
And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience,
you must already have understood what Ithacas mean.
Constantine P. Cavafy (1911)
Somewhere I have never travelled, by E.E. Cummings
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose
or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands
What is precious is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.
Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields
See how these names are feted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s center.
Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honor.