What is your favorite short poem approximating twelve lines or less?

Here is mine by W.B. Yeats:

WHEN YOU ARE OLD

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.



[This message has been edited by Carl Sundell (edited August 30, 2002).]

That's a great one, Carl. (You've got a typo, though -- should be "hid his face.") Here's a short poem by James Merrill:

RENEWAL

Having used every subterfuge
To shake you, lies, fatigue, even that of passion,
Now I see nothing but a clean break.
I add that I am willing to bear the guilt.

You nod assent. Autumn turns windy, huge,
A clear vase of dry leaves vibrating on and on.
We sit, watching. When I next speak
Love buries itself in me, up to the hilt.

The Yeats is an interesting choice, as it is also a translation of sorts.

This is one of my all-time favorite short poems, by Robert Graves. (Actually, it also might be interesting to discuss it in the loose/accentual meter thread...)

I've posted it on these boards before, so apologies for the repetition:

Love Without Hope

Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher
Swept off his tall hat to the Squire's own daughter,
So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly
Singing about her head, as she rode by.

Damn, Alicia, that's beautiful. Just made my week.

Frost, of course, was a master at this.

The Span of Life

The old dog barks backward without getting up.
I can remember when he was a pup.

And I've always liked this, by Aiken:

Music I Heard

Music I heard with you was more than music,
And bread I broke with you was more than bread;
Now that I am without you, all is desolate;
All that was once so beautiful is dead.

Your hands once touched this table and this silver,
And I have seen your fingers hold this glass.
These things do not remember you, beloved,
And yet your touch upon them will not pass.

For it was in my heart that you moved among them,
And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes;
And in my heart they will remember always —
They knew you once, O beautiful and wise.


(robt)

The Oxford Book of Short Poems isn't very good, but they made the maximum 13 lines to avoid being over-whelmed by sonnets.The best short poem? One I can remember only vaguely is from the Greek Anthology:
Best, never born,
Next best, die young;
Not drag your way
To weary age.
I am probably misquoting, but does anyone recognise it? I add that I admire the expression, not the sentiment.

Hector, it is a common sentiment in Greek literature. Perhaps Tony Lombardy could tell us where this expression of it may be from.

Sophocles says something very like it somewheres, I think-- Antigone or Oedipus at Colonos perhaps.

A favorite contemporary 12-line poem on much the same theme (and which has also been posted here before) is "This Be the Verse"...

There are too many good ones!

Well, since I'm pretty much a Cliftonphile at this point, I'll offer this odd, little 5-line dedication for her book Good News about the Earth:

<dir>for the dead
of jackson and
orangeburg
and so on and
so on and on</dir>

--something in the line-breaking and phrasing, the concision, always sends chills down my back.

C.

As to the Greek verse, there is an exchange supposedly between Homer and Hesiod that runs as follows:

HESIOD: `Homer, son of Meles, inspired with wisdom from heaven, come,
tell me first what is best for mortal man?'

HOMER: `For men on earth 'tis best never to be born at all; or
being born, to pass through the gates of Hades with all speed.'

I've known it for years, including through a fractured skull and brain damage so it could be a memory of translating/adapting the Hesiod/Homer exchange at school: our Classics master used to emphasise brevity as a virtue in translation.
Another adaptation from the Greek anthology is A.D.Hope's on the Australians who died in Vietnam:

Go tell the old men, safe in bed,
We took their orders and are dead.

A friend wrote what he thinks is the greatest contrast between length of title and length of poem:

On W.H.Auden's "September 1, 1939"
A lie
and shame
from "I"
to "flame".

One of many:

Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now

by A.E. Housman

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.



Terese

According to my battered Norton anthology, Yeats' poem was "suggested by a sonnet of the 16th-century French poet Pierre de Ronsard" (am not familiar with the poem myself). Perhaps "inspired by" or "after" rather than "translation"...

___________________

Terese, I can't recite the Ronsard, but it's unspeakably gorgeous, even better than the Yeats. It is definitely an "imitation." Not a translation. As is Part XI of "A Man Young and Old" where Yeats paraphrases that great chorus from Oedipus at Colonus, and concludes:

Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say,
Never to have drawn the breath of life or looked upon the light of day.
The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.

Speaking of Ronsard and the Greek Anthology:

Scribblers to be rid of,
poets I shall discard
when I dispense with love:
Anacreon, Ronsard.

Below an English translation of Ronsard's poem followed by the original. I prefer Yeats.


OF HIS LADY'S OLD AGE.
RONSARD, 1550

WHEN you are very old, at evening
You'll sit and spin beside the fire, and say,
Humming my songs, 'Ah well, ah well-a-day!
When I was young, of me did Ronsard sing.'
None of your maidens that doth hear the thing,
Albeit with her weary task foredone,
But wakens at my name, and calls you one
Blest, to be held in long remembering.
I shall be low beneath the earth, and laid
On sleep, a phantom in the myrtle shade,
While you beside the fire, a grandame grey,
My love, your pride, remember and regret;
Ah, love me, love! we may be happy yet,
And gather roses, while 'tis called to-day.

Quand vous serez bien vielle, au soir, à la chandelle,
Assise auprès du feu, dévidant et filant,
Direz, chantant mes vers et vous émerveillant:
"Ronsard me célébrait du temps que j'étais belle."
Lors vous n'aurez servante oyant telle nouvelle,
Déjà sous le labeur à demi sommeillant,
Qui au bruit de Ronsard ne s'aille réveillant,
Bénissant votre nom de louange immortelle.
Je serai sous la terre, et fantôme sans os;
Par les ombres myrteux je prendrai mon repos;
Vous serez au foyer une vieille accroupie,
Regrettant mon amour et votre fier dédain.
Vivez si m'en croyez, n'attendez à demain;
Cueillez dès aujourd'hui les roses de la vie.



[This message has been edited by Carl Sundell (edited September 02, 2002).]

There's a soul in the Eternal
Standing stiff before the King;
There's a little English maiden
Sorrowing.

There's a proud and tearless woman
Seing pictures in the fire;
There's a broken, battered body
On the wire.

(Woodbine Willie)

__________________________

Terese,

Whew! Yours is far the superior translation for artistic worth. But, with you, I still give the palm to Yeats.

That's a lovely translation, Terese, really beautiful.
(I'd be tempted to say "will fade tomorrow".)
I enjoyed yours too, Carl, with its archaic feel, though personally I'd tend to go for contemporary idiom.
Regards,
David

"I enjoyed yours too, Carl, with its archaic feel"

David, just to clarify that it wasn't my translation. I lifted it from a source I can't remember.

What never fails to amaze me is the facility with which translators can find rhymes that match, more-or-less, the sense of the text in both languages.

Well done, Terese!

________________________

Dear Terese

Let me add my plaudits to those above. This is in several ways an admirable version of this famous poem. As you request, I have sent you some further thoughts privately.

Well done!

Clive Watkins

Outstanding Terese! A wonderful gift to all of us who stumble over our French.

Very nice, Terese! You have a knack.

Clive, Tim, Alicia

You're all very kind. Thank you.

Terese

Besides Housman & Stephen Crane, from whom i could quote
many, these:

Leonard Cohen: #41

I was lost
when I met you on the road
to Larissa
the straight road between the cedars

You thought
I was a man of roads
and you loved me for being such a man
I was not such a man

I was lost
when I met you on the road
to Larissa


Emily Dickinson: #89

Some things that fly there be--
birds--hours--the bumblebee--
of these no elegy.

Some things that stay there be--
grief--hills--eternity--
nor this behooveth me.

There are that resting, rise.
Can I expound the skies?
How still the Riddle lies!


William Blake

The Angel that presided o’er my birth
Said, “Little creature, form’d of Joy & Mirth,
Go love without the help of any Thing on Earth.”


Bill Knott & W.S. Merwin have also written fine brief poems.

And though of all evils in the Nine Worlds it is worst for
a poet to quote himself, one of mine:

BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POST”Song of the Liberated Ulcer”

This hole in me will one day be set free.
Till then we quarrel, siblings who understand
each other too well.



[This message has been edited by graywyvern (edited September 03, 2002).]

Terese,

Fantastic translation! You should do more!

(robt)

Thanks, Robert. I'm sure I will do more.

Terese

Terese,

Just remember, you owe me one for starting you off as a translator. Good luck!

Carl

I've cited this one in another forum, but I'll cite it again for compact beauty.

REQUIEM
Robert Louis Stevenson

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 sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

.

Another one, unusual for this poet:

NAPOLEON

What is the world, O soldiers?
It is I.
I, this incessant snow,
This Northern sky.
Soldiers, this solitide through which we go
Is I.


which is by de la Mare

Having recently edited a large anthology of epigrams and
other short poems, I thought I might type in a few of my
favorites.
One little-known one by Larkin:

None of the books have time
To say how being selfless feels.
They make it sound a superior way
Of getting what you want. It isn't at all.

Selflessness is like waiting in a hospital
In a badly-fitting suit on a cold wet morning.
Selfishness is like listening to good jazz
With drinks for further orders and a huge fire.


An anonymous medieval one:

Omnes gentes plaudite!
I saw many birds sitten on a tree;
They tooken their flight and flowen away
With Ego dixi, have a good day!
Many white feathers hath the pie--
I may no more singen, my lips are so dry.
Many white feathers hath the swan--
The more that I drink, the less good I can.
Lay sticks on the fire, well may it brenne!
Give us one drink ere we go henne.


And Pope's famous but still gorgeous thing:

When other Ladies to the Groves go down,
Corinna still, and Fulvia, stay in town;
Those Ghosts of Beauty lingering here reside,
And haunt the Places where their Honour died.


One of Kipling's Epitaphs of the War (all of which
are wonderful):

The Sleepy Sentinel

Faithless the watch that I kept: now I have none to keep.
I was slain because I slept: now I am slain I sleep.
Let no man reproach me again, whatever watch is unkept--
I sleep because I am slain. They slew me because I slept.


Not many short poems more touching or tender than
this one by Donald Justice:

On the Death of Friends in Childhood

We shall not ever meet them bearded in heaven,
Nor sunning themselves among the bald of hell;
If anywhere, in the deserted schoolyard at twilight,
Forming a ring, perhaps, or joining hands
In games whose very names we have forgotten.
Come, memory, let us seek them there in the shadows.


Henri Coulette:

Petition

Lord of the Tenth Life,
Welcome my Jerome,
A fierce, gold tabby.
Make him feel at home.

He loves bird and mouse.
He loves a man's lap,
And in winter light,
Paws tucked in, a nap.


and his epigram on Ginsberg:

Sixteen thousand lines, give or take sixteen,
And no two lines that you can read between.


And this:

Eurydice dies! The loneliness is grand.
Yet were she to come back, dust rag in hand...


And this by our own master, Tim Murphy--"Dies Irae":

At the field's edge a feather
clings briefly to a bough
before a change of weather
offers it to the plough,
much as it did my father.

(The single comma, the half rhyme--heartbreaking.)


Landor (who has many others as good or better):

How soon, alas, the hours are over,
Counted us out to play the lover!
And how much narrower is the stage,
Allotted us to play the sage!
But when we play the fool, how wide
The theatre expands; beside,
How long the audience sits before us!
How many prompters! what a chorus!


Ralph Hodgson's "The Bells of Heaven":

'Twould ring the bells of Heaven
Their wildest peal in years,
If Parson lost his senses
And people came to theirs,
And he and they together
Knelt down with angry prayers
For tamed and shabby tigers,
And dancing dogs and bears,
And wretched, blind pit ponies,
And little hunted hares.


Walter de la Mare:

Here lies, but seven years old, our little maid,
Once of the darkness Oh, so sore afraid!
Light of the World---remember that small fear
And when nor moon nor stars do shine, draw near.


My favorite Housman:

Crossing alone the nighted ferry
With the one coin for fee,
Whom, on the wharf of Lethe waiting,
Count you to find? Not me.

The brisk fond lackey to fetch and carry,
The true, sick-hearted slave,
Expect him not in the just city
And free land of the grave.


And (sometimes, I think, my favorite poem), anonymous,
from the 20s or 30s:

Carnation Milk is the best in the land;
I've got a can of it here in my hand--
No teats to pull, no hay to pitch,
You just punch a hole in the sonofabitch.


Enough.

Fine selection, Prof Mezey.
Here's one not a lot of people know:

He that supper for is dight,
He lyes full cold, I trow, this night!
Yestreen to chamber I him led,
This night Grey-steel has made his bed!

(Sir Eger, Sir Grahame and Sir Gray-Steel)

(from memory):

Sometimes i feel
like a priest
in a fish and chip queue,
quietly wondering
as the vinegar runs through,
what must it be like
to buy supper for two.

Roger McGough

Song For a Beautiful Girl Petrol Pump Attendant on the Motorway

I wanted your soft verges
but you gave me the hard shoulder.

Adrian Henri


though it has to be said that all the best ones are mine.

modesty <u>as well</u> as bad taste

Peter

Actually for (another) ps, there's a poem in one of those 'how-to-write-poetry' books - possibly Tennyson - about an eagle.

Found it:

The Eagle

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson


[This message has been edited by peter richards (edited September 04, 2002).]

Dear Peter

Each to his or her own! But I have always thought Tennyson’s "The Eagle" a poor poem. Surely, the bird clasps the crag with its feet? To compound the problem, two lines further on, he tells us that the bird is standing, "Ringed with the azure world" - on its hands presumably.

I think this is a good example of verse which is driven by the need to rhyme and of what can happen when a poet, even a fine one such as Tennyson, fails to keep his eye on the object.

The Adrian Henri and Roger McGough pieces are very funny. I knew Henri slightly in my student days; we even shared a platform once. (In those distant times I occasionally found the courage to inflict my verses on the public in person.)

Best wishes!

Clive Watkins

My favorite short poem, though hardly an original choice, is Frost's "Fire and Ice." Hard to beat. At least three dozen Dickinson poems would also be in the running.

Though not a "poem" unto itself, I've always thought of these lines from Shelley's "Adonais" as being able to stand on their own quite beautifully:

Life, like a dome of many-colour'd glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity

I'm a huge lover of the short poem, and have really been enjoying this thread. Is twelve lines (in IP, no less) really considered short ? I write almost exclusively short poems then. "Fire and Ice", "The Eagle" (annoying ??!!) and the Coulettecat are three of my favorites, already mentioned above. Some other really good ones in this thread. Love the Hodgson and the Graves. Thanks for starting this one, Carl, I hope more shorties will be posted here. Here are a few more I love:


The Question Answered

What is it men in women do require ?
The lineaments of gratified desire.
What is it women do in men require ?
The lineaments of gratified desire.

-Blake

```````

A Short History

Corn planted us; tamed cattle made us tame,
Thence hut and citadel and kingdom came.

-R Wilbur


``````````


yes is a pleasant country,
if's wintry
(my lovely)
let's open the year

both is the very weather
(not either)
my treasure,
when violets appear

love is a deeper season
than reason;
my sweet one
(and april's where we're)

- cummings

``````````

Theology

There is a heaven, for ever, day by day,
The upward longing of my soul doth tell me so,
There is a hell, I'm quite as sure; for pray,
If there were not, where would my neighbors go ?

-Paul Dunbar

````````````

The Wanderer

There is no end
to a wanderer’s sorrow.
The wisdom of Erda
queried by Wotan,
the counsel of Ragna
sung in a saga
I’ll follow tomorrow—
tomorrow if ever—
for I am no friend
of Volsung or Vala.

-Tim Murphy

```````

After Long Silence

Speech after long silence; it is right,
All other lovers being estranged or dead,
Unfriendly lamplight hid under its shade,
The curtains drawwn upon unfriendly night,
That we descant and yet again descant
Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song:
Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young
We loved each other and were ignorant.

-Yeats


``````````

Watermelons

Green Buddhas
On the fruit stand.
We eat the smile
And spit out the teeth.

-Charles Simic

```````

Going to Extremes

Shake and shake
the catsup bottle,
None'll come --
and then a lot'll.

-Richard Armour

Dear Wendy

I have taken to heart your implied reproof for my rather puerile way of expressing my view of Tennyson’s "The Eagle" ("really, really annoying") and edited my observations into more sober form.

I still think it’s a poor poem, however! http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/smile.gif But as Tom remarked elsewhere a day or so ago, "De gustibus…."

Apart from the Tennyson, I love all your choices!

Best wishes!

Clive Watkins

I have to go with Roger on Fire and Ice, though Spring Pools and Nothing Gold Can Stay are close contenders. Francis, whom we have discussed at great length twice, wrote many perfect short poems. Those who have no Francis can read a good deal of him at Caleb's site: www.poemtree.com. And Yeats wrote a pile of great ones. Here's a favorite:

A Toast

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

And Another: To A Squirrel At Kyle-na-No

Come play with me.
Why should you run
Through the shaking tree
As though I'd a gun
To strike you dead,
When all I would do
Is to scratch your head
And let you go?

Many thanks to Wendy V and our Master of Memory for including a couple of mine in such august company.

Clive, not to worry. I'd already forgiven you.
http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/cool.gif

So long as I'm here, I'd forgotten to include one of Herrick's Julia poems:

When as in silks my Julia goes
Then, then, methinks how sweetly flows
The liquefaction of her clothes !

Next, when I cast my eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free,
- O how that glittering taketh me.

And one other I can't resist, in spite of its proseyprosiness:

True or False

Real emeralds are worth more than synthetics
but the only way to tell one from the other
is to heat them to a stated temperature,
then tap. When it's done properly
the real one shatters.
I have no emeralds.
I was told this about them by a woman
who said someone had told her. True or false,
I have held my own palmful of bright breakage
from a truth too late. I know the principle.

-John Ciardi



[This message has been edited by wendy v (edited September 05, 2002).]