D.H.Lawrence wrote quite a few short and sharp poems - these two from the posthumous "More Pansies" are among my favourites:


Retort to Whitman

And whoever walks a mile full of false sympathy
walks to the funeral of the whole human race.

Retort to Jesus

And whoever forces himself to love anybody
begets a murderer in his own body.




------------------
Mark Allinson

I'm going out to mash a slug or two.
They're wasting my tomatoes, oozing slime
On everything I own. I think it's time
The bastards learned a lesson.- You come too.
--Bruce Bennett

I looked at this thread a while back and wondered when someone would post Stevenson’s Requiem, which was once (if it isn't now) one of the best-loved short lyrics in the language, though perhaps not in the US. I remember when I first read it as a child, those eight lines went effortlessly into my memory. And surely memorability is a major test.
....

REQUIEM

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie;
Glad did I live and gladly die
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
"Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill."

....
But what would one of the more theoretical critics in our Deep End make of this, I wonder?

L1: Under the wide and starry sky

(First line should establish the norm of the meter: change Under to Beneath)

"starry sky" is a cliché. Try "Beneath the wide and dark night sky"

L2: Dig the grave and let me lie.

Oh-oh. Sense alert! You want your grave dug at night? The gravediggers will claim overtime. Anyway where else could you lie but under the sky? The whole thing's a poeticism. So take out L1 and 2.

L3: Glad did I live and gladly die.

Where to start with this?! Poetic inversion AND a wrenching of grammar to fit the meter. If you lived gladLY, surely you died gladLY? So try something like "I lived gladly and died gladly".

L4: And I laid me down with a will.

More archaic poeticism. Illogicality, too. You laid yourself down, after you were dead? Even if we let that pass, your laying yourself down with a will is just repeating that you were died gladly". So omit L4.

L5: This be the verse you grave for me.

Archaic: try "Inscribe this on the grave for me".

L6: Here he lies where he longed to be

Fix meter and inversion with "He lies here where he longed to be".

L7: Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

(Rhetorical repetition and, again, inversion. How about "The sailor's back home from the sea"?

L8: And the hunter home from the hill.

Implied verb here. Better make it explicit. Two anapests in here, too. The hunter doesn't really go with the sailor, anyway, so I suggest "The prisoner at last is free."

Putting the rewrite together:

I lived gladly and died gladly.
Inscribe this on the grave for me:
He lies here where he longed to be.
The sailor's back home from the sea
The prisoner at last is free.

Yep, that'll do it!

Don't take me too seriously, folks!

Henry

Henry,

that last post was fantastic! And well over due. I was waiting for a post that would show how pedantic prosody may be used as a weapon against the art. If something is working, why shoot it down for not obeying the tic-toc rule of the clock? Unless you have a hatred of an inspiration forever beyond your grasp - like Blake's rationalising Spectre, " Whose pretence to knowledge is Envy."

But I really came on to post one of my favourite epigrams: Donne's "Hero and Leander".

Both rob'd of aire, we both lye in one ground,
Both whom one fire had burnt, one water drowned.


I love the way he weaves all four elements into these two lines.


------------------
Mark Allinson

[This message has been edited by Mark Allinson (edited December 22, 2003).]

Although probably found more prolifically in other places, I found this poem in This Book Will Change Your Life by BENRIK, Authors of Works of Literary Distinction at Commonsense Prices -

A cat
Sat on
A mat.

------------------
-SRyan

Authorship
by Jame Naylor

King David and King Solomon
....Led merry, merry lives
With many, many lady friends
....And many, many wives,
But when old age crept over them,
....With many, many qualms,
King Solomon wrote the Proverbs
....And King David wrote the Psalms.

I knew that.

I love that Naylor poem, and just discovered it in, of all places, Good Poems, by Garrison Keillor. But since GK recently read a Gwynn poem on the air, I shouldn't be surprised he has good taste.

I know this is the "Mastery" thread, and not a place to post one's own poems, but since the thread seems to have run its course, and I have a poem that is just six words long, I hope it won't be amiss if I post it here:


Robert Frost's Puppy

He wrote doggerel
for Kennedy's inaugural.

**

And, as long as I've broken the ice, I'll post one more ultra-short one:

My Grandmother, The Actress

Of the two famous playwrights
who charmed and beguiled her,
Oscar was Wilde
but Thornton was Wilder.

Roger, I'm fond of that neat little poem by James Naylor, but I have its title as Conscience — which seems more appropriate than Authorship. I like your own two, especially the second.

Since we seem to have moved on to the light, I’ll offer this old punny limerick:

There was a young fellow from Clyde
Who fell down a sewer and died.
....The next day his brother
....Fell into another
So now they’re interred side by side.
....
And rhyming along the lines of your playwrights one is this, by Housman:

THE SHADES OF NIGHT

The shades of night were falling fast
And the rain was falling faster
When through an Alpine village passed
An Alpine village pastor.

The early Yeats was good at poems of 8 lines or
less. Here's one:

A DRINKING SONG

Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.