The holiest of all holidays are those
Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;

The secret anniversaries of the heart.

-Longfellow

Here's a fragment that was found among Robert Lowell's papers after his death and was read by Joseph Brodsky at Lowell's funeral. It might be lines from the Greek Anthology:

Christ, let me die at night
with a semblance of my senses
like the full moon that fails.

______________________

_____________________

The Anthology often makes the hair on my arms arise, even the possible (probable) fakes, such as this, said (in the Anthology, which is plagued by respectful linguistically anachronistic forgeries) to be by Sappho. Here is Rexroth's matte version :

      This is the dust of Timas
      Who went unmarried to the dark
      Bedroom of Persephone. And
      For her death all her girl friends cut
      Their lovely hair with bright sharp bronze.

and a more accurate one by Willis Barnstone (1965) :

      Here is the dust of Timas who unmarried
      was led into Persephone's dark bedroom,
      and when she died her girlfriends took sharp
      iron knives and cut off their soft hair.


Ronsard ...


Then there's Housman, especially the later Housman :

XXXVII - EPITAPH ON AN ARMY OF MERCENARIES.

These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when Earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth's foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.




                                                       Oof...!

XXVI

The half-moon westers low, my love,
And the wind brings up the rain;
And wide apart lie we, my love,
And seas between the twain.

I know not if it rains, my love,
In the land where you do lie;
And oh, so sound you sleep, my love,
You know no more than I.



XV - EIGHT O'CLOCK

He stood, and heard the steeple
Sprinkle the quarters on the morning town.
One, two, three, four, to market-place and people
It tossed them down.

Strapped, noosed, nighing his hour,
He stood and counted them and cursed his luck;
And then the clock collected in the tower
Its strength, and struck.



               And also Sellar, W.C and Yeatman, R.J. ('1066, and all that') :


Old-Saxon Fragment

Syng a song of Saxons
In the Wapentake of Rye
Four and twenty eaoldormen
Too eaold to die....


Thisbe threade darngudthing!

Who doesn't love Dickinson? She is master of the short poem:

I died for beauty but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed?
"For beauty," I replied.
"And I for truth, the two are one;
We brethren are," he said.

And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names

[quote=Allen Tice;142005]The Anthology XXVI

The half-moon westers low, my love,
And the wind brings up the rain;
And wide apart lie we, my love,
And seas between the twain.

I know not if it rains, my love,
In the land where you do lie;
And oh, so sound you sleep, my love,
You know no more than I.

Here's the better and more concise original he nicked it from:

Westron wynde, when wilt thou blow,
The small raine down can raine.
Cryst, if my love were in my armes
And I in my bedde again!
(Anon)

--Am I the only person who struggles to get on with Dickinson?
It's not so much what she says but the way she says it.
Her rhymes are often terrible.

Exactly, although (great Latinist and often stunning poet that he was), Housman beams a sidelong glance at the Hellenistic Greek Anonymous : PMG 976 (here).

I actually prefer the other Housman quotes I gave, and I think Housman wanted to blend yours and PMG 976, but didn't succeed as well as he might have. I like the item for other reasons that chiefly relate to PMG 976 (also Anon).

If you go to the link I gave, and then click on the letters at the upper left About Allen Tice, and then scroll down to the heading 'Poetae Melici Graeci 976 ("deduke"...), you will find a discussion of this very much abused text, which is NOT in Aeolic 5th Century Greek. (Even the additional Greek letter 'nu' that is supposed to clinch the pro-Aeolic argument is entered above the line as an afterthought.)

Yet if it were Aeolic, it wouldn't one be whit better, because it is a gem!

Is authorship irrelevant?

If I put the words of Stephen Sondheim over the name William Shakespeare, who cares, right?

Quality is quality is quality.

There are several reasons, metrical and linguistic, why it is not Aeolic....

finally, beyond the actual text fragment, its style is more like, let's say, a Julie London torch than anything else. There is no actual evidence, not a shred, that it is anything other than a late production made to very high stands indeed, for commercial use in a nightclub for merchants and sailors some time before the Maccabees of Biblical fame to the east, and rather later than Plato also. It was preserved because it was very good, nothing more.

Enough about PMG 976 and all that.

- Allen

--Am I the only person who struggles to get on with Dickinson?
It's not so much what she says but the way she says it.
Her rhymes are often terrible. >>

David, I love her, but can only take her in small doses. My poor daughter has been struggling with Emily in her English class this year. All that whittled speak and taut breath and close quartered end rhyme can grow tiresome, but when it comes to the big, cosmic question-marks and the paleo paradoxes, there's just no disputing she's a frackin' genius.