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  #1  
Unread 09-04-2014, 01:14 PM
Julie Steiner Julie Steiner is offline
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Default Insect-themed poems NOT in translation

As the insect-themed 2014 Translation Bake-off approaches (exciting details here!), I thought it would be fun to start a related thread on this board, for insect-themed poems that do not require translation into English.

I'll kick things off with two citations in memory of departed Sphereans.

Some may disagree with my opinion that these two poems "do not require translation into modern English". Personally, though, I think they both make sense, with a little effort on the part of the reader.

---

Today is the fifth anniversary of the funeral of M.A. Griffiths, whose username here was "grasshopper", although she also answered to "wordbug" and "The Insect" on other lists. One of her most celebrated poems, "The Pismire Oration", is insect-themed. The word pismire, from the Middle English pissemyre, was used by Chaucer in The Summoner’s Tale, and is apparently still used regionally to mean ‘ant’. The word derives from piss (‘urine’ – presumably inspired by the smell of formic acid secreted by ants) plus mire (‘ant’ – compare the Greek-derived myrmidon). Margaret also used the variant "pissant" in a different poem.

"The Pismire Oration" was published posthumously here, in Paul Stevens' broadsheet The Flea, accompanied by an audio file of Margaret reading her poem.

The name of Paul's publication was itself a tribute to another insect-themed poem--'The Flea' by John Donne--which Paul republished here; this, too, is accompanied by a lovely audio file. Paul died in March 2013.

Much ink has been spilt on the erotic and religious imagery of Donne's poem, so I'll resist the temptation to add to it. I would like to say a bit about "The Pismire Oration", though. It is widely regarded as an amphigory--a poem which appears to make sense, but, upon closer examination, doesn't. Although there's nothing wrong with amphigories, which can be quite delightful, I contend that this poem's whimsical wordplay is actually quite coherent, once you realize that the speaker is an ant.

In response to comment on The Pennine Poetry Works, Maz said:

Quote:
Dear T—,

It’s great fun to play around with words – caterpillars do munge on leaves, don’t they?

This ant is clearly a fan of the Bard’s and was deeply affected by John of Gaunt’s speech. She may live near the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park.

It didn’t strike me before, but ‘liplap danglers’ is pure Rambling Syd Rumpo, isn’t it?

Kind regards,
grasshopper
[4 October 2003]
With the benefit of Maz's hint, I do indeed spot obvious similarities between this poem's third strophe and John of Gaunt’s speech in Shakespeare’s Richard II, which extols ‘This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle...this other Eden, demi-paradise...this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England...’

Margaret also mentions Rambling Syd Rumpo, who was a character of the English comedian Kenneth Williams, and a fixture of the BBC's 'Round the Horne' radio show (1965-1968). He lampooned the folk music revival going on at the time. His extensive repertoire, including ‘The Ballad of the Woggler’s Moulie’, used obscure or made-up words in suggestive contexts.

While commenting on someone else's poem in another workshop, Margaret also made this remark, which I like to think has relevance to this poem:

Quote:
My father used to tell me wonderful stories about a kingdom of ants that lived under a giant oak tree – how I wish I could remember them.
[9 August 2004]
---

I'm looking forward to others' contributions of insect-themed poems to this thread, and in the upcoming Translation Bake-Off.

You needn't attempt to compete with my verbosity here--good luck with that, if you do!--but in keeping with the name of this board, I do hope you'll include at least a little musing with poems posted to this thread.

Last edited by Julie Steiner; 09-06-2014 at 01:45 PM. Reason: added noindex tags
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  #2  
Unread 09-04-2014, 05:43 PM
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Maryann Corbett Maryann Corbett is offline
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Default Plath

I can think of at least two insect poems right off the bat, one easy to find and one I'll have to hunt for. This is the easily found one: Sylvia Plath's "The Arrival of the Bee Box," so often assigned for student themes that papers about it can be found all over the Internet. So I won't go on at length, as others probably have their own ideas!


I ordered this, clean wood box
Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift.
I would say it was the coffin of a midget
Or a square baby
Were there not such a din in it.

The box is locked, it is dangerous.
I have to live with it overnight
And I can't keep away from it.
There are no windows, so I can't see what is in there.
There is only a little grid, no exit.

I put my eye to the grid.
It is dark, dark,
With the swarmy feeling of African hands
Minute and shrunk for export,
Black on black, angrily clambering.

How can I let them out?
It is the noise that appals me most of all,
The unintelligible syllables.
It is like a Roman mob,
Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!

I lay my ear to furious Latin.
I am not a Caesar.
I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.
They can be sent back.
They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.

I wonder how hungry they are.
I wonder if they would forget me
If I just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree.
There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades,
And the petticoats of the cherry.

They might ignore me immediately
In my moon suit and funeral veil.
I am no source of honey
So why should they turn on me?
Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.

The box is only temporary.

---

I don't think I'm imagining that a lot of insect-themed poems seem to focus on fear, on a sort of essential enmity between insects and us. We can't look into such different faces and understand them, or deal with their smallness and unfathomable numbers. Sound, darkness, dangerous, anger, mob, furious, maniacs, funeral veils! There's an amazing lot of terror in there.
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  #3  
Unread 09-04-2014, 05:55 PM
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Maryann Corbett Maryann Corbett is offline
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And for contrast: Rhina Espaillat's "Roach," in which the poet somehow manages an uncomfortable bit of sympathy with the utterly alien bug:

Roach

A leggy speck, a fleck of brown
caught flicking on the rim of sight:
when he saw me it must have been
apocalypse by reading light.

A jolt of current triggered by
nothing so convolute as grief —
and yet so like despair I winced —
flattened his body like a leaf,

snapped back his pinhead face to stare
at landscape hugely gone awry,
electrified him out of choice
and gave him barely time to die.

I clubbed him with the nearest book.
I've heard the cells that help them tense
are so like ours that microscopes
can barely tell the difference.
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  #4  
Unread 09-04-2014, 06:59 PM
Roger Slater Roger Slater is offline
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The Fly
William Blake

Little fly,
Thy summer’s play
My thoughtless hand
Has brushed away.

Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?

For I dance
And drink and sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.

If thought is life
And strength and breath,
And the want
Of thought is death,

Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live,
Or if I die.
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  #5  
Unread 09-04-2014, 07:39 PM
Roger Slater Roger Slater is offline
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A few insect images by Keats spring to mind:

On the Grasshopper and Cricket
BY JOHN KEATS

The Poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper’s—he takes the lead
In summer luxury,—he has never done
With his delights; for when tired out with fun
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.

**
And in "To Autumn," Keats has a wonderful insect image:

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;


And in "Melancholy" he gives us:

Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips
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Unread 09-04-2014, 07:43 PM
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Peter Chipman Peter Chipman is offline
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Keats's sonnet was written as part of a private competition with Leigh Hunt to see who could write a better poem on the theme of "The Grasshopper and the Cricket." Here's Hunt's:


To the Grasshopper and the Cricket
By James Henry Leigh Hunt

Green little vaulter in the sunny grass,
Catching your heart up at the feel of June,
Sole voice that ’s heard amidst the lazy noon,
When even the bees lag at the summoning brass;
And you, warm little housekeeper, who class
With those who think the candles come too soon,
Loving the fire, and with your tricksome tune
Nick the glad silent moments as they pass;
O sweet and tiny cousins, that belong
One to the fields, the other to the hearth,
Both have your sunshine; both, though small, are strong
At your clear hearts; and both seem given to earth
To sing in thoughtful ears this natural song,—
In doors and out, summer and winter, Mirth.

Last edited by Peter Chipman; 09-04-2014 at 07:45 PM.
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Unread 09-04-2014, 07:56 PM
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Peter Chipman Peter Chipman is offline
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I can't believe nobody has mentioned Richard Wilbur's "Mayflies."

Frost wrote a slew of insect poems: "A Considerable Speck" and "Departmental" and "The White-Tailed Hornet" and "My Butterfly" and "Design" and "Blue-Butterfy Day" and "To a Moth Seen in Winter" and "Pod of the Milkweed" and "Waspish" and "One Guess" and "Range-Finding." (OK, so a couple of those are about arachnids, not insects....)

And then there's Robert Francis's "The Wasp" and "Flower and Bee" and "The Orb Weaver" and "Ladybird, Ladybird."

Lots of butterflies and bees in Dickinson, of course. None that especially grabs me.

Last edited by Peter Chipman; 09-04-2014 at 08:25 PM.
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Unread 09-04-2014, 10:00 PM
Orwn Acra Orwn Acra is offline
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He did discover a butterfly. Accidentally. I believe it landed on the hood of his car as he was being driven across America, a road trip that would later inspire Lolita. The antepenultimate line strikes me in the heart.

On Discovering a Butterfly

I found it in a legendary land
all rocks and lavender and tufted grass,
where it was settled on some sodden sand
hard by the torrent of a mountain pass.

The features it combines mark it as new
to science shape and shade—the special tinge,
akin to moonlight, tempering its blue,
the dingy underside, the checkered fringe.

My needles have teased out its sculptured sex;
corroded tissues could no longer hide
that priceless mote now dimpling the convex
and limpid teardrop on a lighted slide.

Smoothly a screw is turned; out of the mist
two ambered hooks symmetrically slope,
or scales like battledores of amethyst
cross the charmed circle of the microscope.

I found it and I named it, being versed
in taxonomic Latin; thus became
godfather to an insect and its first
describer—and I want no other fame.

Wide open on its pin (though fast asleep)
and safe from creeping relatives and rust,
in the secluded stronghold where we keep
type specimens it will transcend its dust.

Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,
poems that take a thousand years to die
but ape the immortality of this
red label on a little butterfly.

-- Vladimir Nabokov
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  #9  
Unread 09-04-2014, 11:14 PM
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W.F. Lantry W.F. Lantry is offline
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Thanks for that, Orwn. I love this stanza:

I found it and I named it, being versed
in taxonomic Latin; thus became
godfather to an insect and its first
describer—and I want no other fame.

Nice. And in return, here's John Clare:

****

Insects

These tiny loiterers on the barley's beard,
And happy units of a numerous herd
Of playfellows, the laughing Summer brings,
Mocking the sunshine on their glittering wings,
How merrily they creep, and run, and fly!
No kin they bear to labour's drudgery,
Smoothing the velvet of the pale hedge-rose;
And where they fly for dinner no one knows-
The dew-drops feed them not-they love the shine
Of noon, whose suns may bring them golden wine
All day they're playing in their Sunday dress-
When night reposes, for they can do no less;
Then, to the heath-bell's purple hood they fly,
And like to princes in their slumbers lie,
Secure from rain, and dropping dews, and all,
In silken beds and roomy painted hall.
So merrily they spend their summer-day,
Now in the corn-fields, now in the new-mown hay.
One almost fancies that such happy things,
With coloured hoods and richly burnished wings,
Are fairy folk, in splendid masquerade
Disguised, as if of mortal folk afraid,
Keeping their joyous pranks a mystery still,
Lest glaring day should do their secrets ill.
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  #10  
Unread 09-05-2014, 06:40 AM
Roger Slater Roger Slater is offline
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If spiders quality, this one by Emily Dickinson has always been a favorite of mine:


Alone and in a Circumstance
Reluctant to be told
A spider on my reticence
Assiduously crawled

And so much more at Home than I
Immediately grew
I felt myself a visitor
And hurriedly withdrew

Revisiting my late abode
With articles of claim
I found it quietly assumed
As a Gymnasium
Where Tax asleep and Title off
The inmates of the Air
Perpetual presumption took
As each were special Heir --
If any strike me on the street
I can return the Blow --

If any take my property
According to the Law
The Statute is my Learned friend
But what redress can be
For an offense nor here nor there
So not in Equity --
That Larceny of time and mind
The marrow of the Day
By spider, or forbid it Lord
That I should specify.
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