Quote:
Bach (mystic poet of sound)
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Oh yes, Michael. Some of the poems/books that have especially moved me over the years:
Sappho, Love and the Trick-Stitching Child,
read by Cally-Dinkum
Charlotte Mew,
the first four poems on this page
Christina Rossetti,
Goblin Market
Emily Dickinson,
I cannot live with You
Emily Brontë,
Stanzas
Edward Thomas,
The Owl
Auden,
September 1, 1939
Rose Kelleher,
Enlightenment
June Jordan,
Song of the Law Abiding Citizen
Tennyson,
Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal
Geoffrey Hill,
Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings
(along with all the other sonnets in
Irresistible Sonnets)
Blake,
London
HD, Helen in Egypt
Milton, Paradise Lost
Homer, The Odyssey (tr Emily Wilson)
Spencer, The Faery Queene
Shakespeare, Hamlet, especially this part:
Now I am alone.
O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann'd,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing!
For Hecuba!
What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? What would he do,
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Make mad the guilty and appal the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears. Yet I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak,
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing; no, not for a king,
Upon whose property and most dear life
A damn'd defeat was made. Am I a coward?
Who calls me villain? breaks my pate across?
Plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face?
Tweaks me by the nose? gives me the lie i' the throat,
As deep as to the lungs? who does me this?
Ha!
'Swounds, I should take it: for it cannot be
But I am pigeon-liver'd and lack gall
To make oppression bitter, or ere this
I should have fatted all the region kites
With this slave's offal: bloody, bawdy villain!
Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!
O, vengeance!
Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,
That I, the son of a dear father murder'd,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words,
And fall a-cursing, like a very drab,
A scullion!