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05-18-2002, 10:57 AM
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Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: dallas
Posts: 717
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Self-portrait
A lens of crystal whose transparence calms
Queer stars to clarity, and disentangles
Fox-fires to form austere refracted angles;
A texture polished on the horny palms
Of vast equivocal creatures, beast or human;
A flint, a substance finer-grained than snow,
Graved with the Graces in intaglio
To set sarcastic sigil on the woman.
This for the mind, and for the little rest
A hollow scooped to blackness in the breast.
The simulacrum of a cloud, a feather:
Instead of stone, instead of sculptured strength,
This soul, this vanity, blown hither and thither
By trivial breath, over the whole world's length.
Felo De Se
My heart's delight, I must for love forget you;
I must put you from my heart, the better to please you;
I must make the power of the spirit set you
Beyond the power of the mind to seize you.
My dearest heart, in this last act of homage,
I must reject you; I must unlearn to love you;
I must make my eyes give up your adorable image
And from the inner chamber of my soul remove you.
Heart of my heart, the heart alone has courage
Thus to relinquish; it is yourself that stills you
In all my pulses, and dissolves the marriage
Of soul and soul, and at the heart's core kills you.
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05-20-2002, 05:37 AM
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Join Date: Jul 2000
Location: Athens, Greece
Posts: 3,205
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Thanks very much for posting these, gray. She is a poet I have not read much of. I like the cool-eyed objectivity of the self-portrait. And in the second poem, I am intrigued with the last stanza, where she seems to be playing off etymology with "heart" and "courage" and "core."
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05-20-2002, 06:13 AM
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Join Date: May 2001
Location: Yorkshire, UK
Posts: 2,479
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Dear Gray
Thank you for posting these. Here are two more, the second and final sonnets from "Wild Peaches", from Nets to Catch the Wind (1921), written, despite the disclaimer in the last of these, in a more sensuous style.
2.
The autumn frosts will lie upon the grass
Like bloom on grapes of purple-brown and gold.
The misted early mornings will be cold;
The little puddles will be roofed with glass.
The sun, which bums from copper into brass,
Melts these at noon, and makes the boys unfold
Their knitted mufflers; full as they can hold,
Fat pockets dribble chestnuts as they pass.
Peaches grow wild, and pigs can live in clover;
A barrel of salted herrings lasts a year;
The spring begins before the winter's over.
By February you may find the skins
Of garter snakes and water moccasins
Dwindled and harsh, dead-white and cloudy-clear.
4.
Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones
There's something in this richness that I hate.
I love the look, austere, immaculate,
Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones.
There's something in my very blood that owns
Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate,
A thread of water, churned to milky spate
Streaming through slanted pastures fenced with stones.
I love those skies, thin-blue or snowy gray,
Those fields sparse-planted, rendering meagre sheaves;
That spring, briefer than apple-blossom's breath,
Summer, so much too beautiful to stay,
Swift autumn, like a bonfire of leaves,
And sleepy winter, like the sleep of death
Clive Watkins
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05-20-2002, 05:43 PM
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Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: Breaux Bridge, LA, USA
Posts: 3,487
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Thanks for the poems, with which I was not familiar. I know more of the lyric Wylie than the sonnet Wylie. Unfortunately, I don't have my favorites here where I can quote them, but I'm thinking particularly of one that says:
We'll wear our love like wedding rings,
Long polished to the touch.
We shall be busy with other things,
And they will not trouble us much.
The secret of a happy marriage...
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