[Andrew Frisardi]

Originally Posted by Ed Shacklee

I haven't seen Kathleen Raine mentioned, so I thought I'd offer this:

The Pythoness

I am that serpent-haunted cave
Whose navel breeds the fates of men.
All wisdom issues from a hole in the earth;
The gods form in my darkness, and dissolve again.

From my blind womb all kingdoms come,
And from my grave seven sleepers prophesy.
No babe unborn but wakens to my dream,
No lover but at last entombed in me shall lie.

I am that feared and longed-for burning place
Where man and phoenix are consumed away,
And from my low polluted bed arise
New sons, new suns, new skies.

xxxxx- Kathleen Raine

I’m glad you mentioned her, Ed. I have her Collected next to my desk these days. She has some gems. Here’s another:

The World

It burns in the void
Nothing upholds it
Still it travels.

Traveling the void
Upheld by burning
Nothing is still.

Burning it travels
The void upholds it
Still it is nothing.

Nothing it travels
A burning void
Upheld by stillness.

—Kathleen Raine

And her study of Blake is, I think, the best that's been done.

[Mary Meriam]

Here are two more by Kathleen Raine:

Go Loudly, Pentheus

Behind the time when dogwood starts to flower
I work and dance inside long changing days
to find the taste, the marrow of the hour
and twist it like a snake into a phrase
that stings with all the passion of a kiss
and smiles with anger in a lying mask
behind your back and turning in your wrist:
I give you back in blood the thing you ask.

And while you climb the mountain like a child,
expecting pleasures and a pretty dance,
I'll screw your trouble into a spring wild
and deadly in the hidden trap of chance.
Under your well-laid palace stones I've cracked
and wriggled like a rooting lightning-gale
and gently, sweetly in the bright birds of fact
I'll wind fat songs of fancy up your trail.

Go loudly, grin behind your mask as dead
as I will make you in a ringing glade.
I take joy in the sour blood I've said
into your ignorant ears. Now fade
and take my phosphor in your vein
as suddenly as it has ripped your sky.
Hear as you die the innocent refrain
of birds inside your blue unseeing eye.


ENVOI

Take of me what is not my own

my love, my beauty, and my poem -

the pain is mine, and mine alone.

See how against the weight in the bone

the hawk hangs perfect in mid-air -

the blood pays dear to raise it there,

the moment, not the bird, divine.

And see the peaceful trees extend

their myriad leaves in leisured dance -

they bear the weight of sky and cloud

upon the fountain of their veins.

In rose with petals soft as air

I bind for you the tides and fire -

the death that lives within the flower,

oh, gladly love, for you I bear.

[T.S. Kerrigan]

Frank, I don't know if you were aware of this, but Coulette was unable to get his poems published in magazines at the end of his life. A sad situation.

[W.F. Lantry]

Originally Posted by T.S. Kerrigan

Coulette was unable to get his poems published in magazines at the end of his life.

This piece, almost an elegy, is one of the most moving I've read in a long time...

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/29/ma...ce.html?src=pm

Thanks,

Bill

[David Landrum]

I missed this discussion. One of my favorite poets is C. S. Lewis, who is known as a children's writer and theologian but wrote poetry all his life and published in journals like Time and Tide and Oxford Review. Here's one I liked:

The Meteorite

Among the hills a meteorite
Lies huge; and moss has overgrown,
And wind and rain with touches light
Made soft, the contours of the stone.

Thus easily can Earth digest
A cinder of sidereal fire,
And make her translunary guest
The native of an English shire.

Nor is it strange these wanderers
Find in her lap their fitting place,
For every particle that's hers
Came at the first from outer space.

All that is Earth has once been sky;
Down from the sun of old she came,
Or from some star that travelled by
Too close to his entangling flame.

Hence, if belated drops yet fall
From heaven, on these her plastic power
Still works as once it worked on all
The glad rush of the golden shower.

[Philip Quinlan]

Here is a lovely, if oddly punctuated, poem by Laurie Lee. Not only underrated, but hardly known as a poet.

The Evening, the Heather

The evening, the heather,
the unsecretive cuckoo
and butterflies in their disorder,
not a word of war as we lie
our mouths in a hot nest
and the flowers advancing.

Does a hill defend itself,
does a river run to earth
to hide its quaint neutrality?
A boy is shot with England in his brain,
but she lies brazen yet beneath the sun,
she has no honour and she has no fear.


I would have punctuated it thus:


The Evening, the Heather

The evening, the heather,
the unsecretive cuckoo
and butterflies in their disorder;
not a word of war as we lie,
our mouths in a hot nest
and the flowers advancing.

Does a hill defend itself?
Does a river run to earth
to hide its quaint neutrality?
A boy is shot with England in his brain,
but she lies brazen yet beneath the sun.
She has no honour and she has no fear.

[Duncan Gillies MacLaurin]

Not true, Philip! This one is much anthologised and rightly so:

Home from Abroad

Far-fetched with tales of other worlds and ways,
My skin well-oiled with wines of the Levant,
I set my face into a filial smile
To greet the pale, domestic kiss of Kent.

But shall I never learn? That gawky girl,
Recalled so primly in my foreign thoughts,
Becomes again the green-haired queen of love
Whose wanton form dilates as it delights.

Her rolling tidal landscape floods the eye
And drowns Chianti in a dusky stream;
The flower-flecked grasses swim with simple horses,
The hedges choke with roses fat as cream.

So do I breathe the hayblown airs of home,
And watch the sea-green elms drip birds and shadows,
And as the twilight nets the plunging sun
My heart's keel slides to rest among the meadows.

Laurie Lee
My Many-Coated Man (1957)

[Lance Levens]

Karl Shapiro, hands down. Wrote a book on prosody and an entire poem 8 or 9 ottava rimas devoted to a Cadillac--in anapestics, I believe.

[Bill Carpenter]

Shapiro's Essay on Rime, a verse treatise on poetry--subject matter, thought, and prosody--is the greatest!

[W.F. Lantry]

Originally Posted by Duncan Gillies MacLaurin

Home from Abroad

Duncan,

Thanks for posting this! It is truly hilarious, the best send-up of Du Bellay I've ever seen! I'm still laughing!

Off to look him up, as I've never read him before. I anticipate several hours of enjoyment! Thanks to you and Philip for listing him!

Thanks,

Bill