Spring by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –

When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;

Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush

Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring

The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;

The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush

The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush

With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?

A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning

In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,

Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,

Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,

Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

Dark jewels

I have listened to the arguments of fools
I have heard them like a donkey bray
I have looked within and found dark jewels.

I have studied algebra like Boole’s
I read the works of Euclid and obeyed
I have listened to the arguments of fools.

I have been to colleges and schools
I have seen the wolves therein who prey.
I have looked within and found dark jewels

I have earned my knowledge and my tools
I have kept them current day by day
I have listened to the arguments of fools

I have loved strange men whom I thought cool
I have often felt the need to pray
I have looked within and found dark jewels

So we each must fumble through the day
Knowledge and perception show the way
I have listened to the arguments of fools
I have looked within and found dark jewels.

Honeysuckle

The pink flowers of the honeysuckle rise
Like crocuses in springtime from the green
Like eager maidens wanting to be seen
As sunshine glitters on their shapely thighs.

Too much sun has made them over-bold
They’re at risk of suffering from their desperate joy.
For all the rain and clouds made them annoyed;
They must be fertilised or die before they’re old.

This fierce sun makes me a melting splodge
A lick of oil paint mixed and uncomposed.
Who was this artist; what did she propose?
And will this portrait in her memory lodge?

As flowers will inevitably die
They do not lose by hurling up their joys.
But should we women imitate their ploys?
For we might live in shame, though we defy

Each child of nature feels the touch of sun.
Some stretch out in joy while others run.
If you vacillate and never choose,
She who chooses has the least to lose .

The flow

My old blue fountain pen allows
The ink across the page to flow
Like wet paint from an artist’s brush,
And words come in a rush.
Enchanting through the hand which writes,
Bewitched with art, beauty alights.
The script is like a music score
Through which we pass as through a door.
Imagination’s home.
As ,mysteriously.to you, to me,
The spirits of our hearts are tamed,
By rhythms of pen,of brush,of mind.
They enter vision quite unplanned,
Like moths to flutter softly round
Fire joined heart and hand.
The pen slows down,the hand goes still
And just as dreams at daybreak will,
They shrink,they disappear,they’re gone.
I almost caught that one!

Like new mown grass

13335795_717967215009826_3551374442510483070_n Nerve endings shriek
Like new mown blades of grass
Arms are tender,feel raw inside
As if the hands can’t deal with loss
I satisfy them with scented lotion
They want to retract into my body
I have no shell to protect me.
Tension makes me steely.
But the hands can’t lie
Thin and bony,no fat to cover
The nerves give out a message
Lost,loveless,lonely
Touch me with your invisible glance.
Embrace me with your eternal mind.

The Death of Silence

RELATED CONTENT [poetry foundation]
Discover this poem’s context and related poetry.

BY ROBIN EKISS

A car’s backfire

rifles the ear

with skeleton clatter,

the crowd’s walla walla

draws near, caterwaul

evaporating in thin air.

Silence is dead.

(Long live silence.)

Let’s observe a moment

of it, call it what it’s not:

splatter of rain

that can’t soothe

the window’s pane,

dog barking

up the wrong tree.

Which tree, which air

apparent is there to hear

a word at its worth?

Hammer that drums

its water-logged warning

against the side

of the submarine:

I’m buried to the hilt

like the knife,

after it’s thrown,

continues to bow

to the apple

it’s split.

The depth of heart

To grow is both a process and an art
Requiring food with richness aptly packed
And growth’s success requires a depth of heart

Trust and truth we need to even start
As wondering muses contemplate our tricks
Growth is both a process and an art.

On the surface thoughts like fishes dart
Bigger fish are swarming through the wrecks
Growth’s process requires the depths,the heart

Five fathoms we must sink when we depart.
We leave behind our sacred scrolls and texts
To grow is both a process and an art.

The path is absent from all current charts.
From libraries and colleges run next.
Growth’s success will need a sturdy heart.

To say,I am, tempts pain to hit us quick
The fire,the flames around us duly lick.
To grow is both a process and an art
We must endure the depths of our own hearts

Yet fear surprise

The point of living is to feel alive
Not caged by too high walls or steely fence
We want to love,be taken by surprise.

Our wounded mangled self we can’t deride,
Recalling fights and struggles lived through once.
The point of living is to feel alive.

We dither to and fro in puzzled ways
We feel the anguish, still and quite intent.
We want to love,be taken by surprise.

The self’s spontaneous, not a thing contrived;
Formed with love and hate,with all intense.
The rage of living is to be alive.

When washed away by feelings glad,immense
That cross our borders without our lament
The hope,the need of living is our life
We want to give and take yet fear surprise

Ariel BY SYLVIA PLATH

Stasis in darkness.

Then the substanceless blue

Pour of tor and distances.

God’s lioness,

How one we grow,

Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow

Splits and passes, sister to

The brown arc

Of the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eye

Berries cast dark

Hooks—

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,

Shadows.

Something else

Hauls me through air—

Thighs, hair;

Flakes from my heels.

White

Godiva, I unpeel—

Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I

Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.

The child’s cry

Melts in the wall.

And I

Am the arrow,

The dew that flies

Suicidal, at one with the drive

Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning

Stanley Plumly

“Ariel” is, of course, Plath’s singular and famous example of the form completely at one with its substance, the language exactly the speedy act of its text. The point for the poet is obvious: “How one we grow,/Pivot of heels and knees.” The speaker thus becomes as much Ariel as the horse, and together they become the one thing, the poem itself, “the arrow,/ /The dew that flies/Suicidal, at one with the drive.” The run from stasis in darkness into the red eye of morning is a miraculous inhabiting, in which the natural and referential world dissembles, blurs into absence, to the point that the transformation of the horse and rider can become absolute. “Something else / / Hauls me through air . . . ” In seconds, she is a white Godiva, unpeeling dead hands and stringencies, then, almost simultaneously, she is foam to wheat, and at that freeing instant, in terror or in esctasy, the child’s cry melts in the wall. “Ariel” is as close to a poetry of pure, self-generating, associative action as we could hope for, as if the spirit, at last, had found its correlative, had transcended, in the moment, memory.

From “What Ceremony of Words” in Ariel Ascending: Writings about Sylvia Plath. Ed. Paul Alexander. Copyright © 1985 by Paul Alexander.

I’d be sent to buy mint

Do you remember squirming under the table
Banging your head on the corner
Or falling down the stairs.
I broke my leg once.
Knees scabbed and bruised; we don’t see that now
I suppose they don’t do the dangerous things we used to do.
Mr Turner had an allotment where he grew flowers and herbs
I’d be sent to buy mint sometimes and a bunch of flowers
Then the council made the land into garages for rent.
And hardly anyone had a car.Until Beeching.
The Great Train Robber.

I am in a study brown

Oh,doctor I am in a flap
I cannot turn this childproof cap
I cannot take my medicine
So I shall toss it in the bin

The beta blockers make me down
I am in a study brown.
The mini aspirins make me bruise
And my mind is quite confused.

The ibuprofen hurt my heart
Yet without one I cannot start.
The thyroxine has no effect
So now I feel my life is dreck.

The codeine fails to make me high
I'm not addicted, though I try.
I'll have to take a shot of gin
And alcohol will make me sin.

I'll go to parties in a dress
That makes men's hormones more or less.
I'll take a big one home with me,
And give him poison in his tea.

And when I am in jail at last
I'll feel remorse for all my past.
For as I suffer dreadful pain
God has hit me yet again.

It's not enough that I am blind
And suffer terrors in my mind
Not enough that lovers cruel
Give me stick instead of jewels.

Or maybe life does not make sense
Especially when I feel so tense.
Maybe random are my days
and my life has gone astray.

I think that I shall buy a cat
And love it tenderly and chat.
But if my cat gives me a scratch...
I'll light its tail up with a match.

All the world must me obey
Else I'll be enraged all day.
I want my own way all the time.
Other people must conform.

I am here and full of ills
What do you think of these blue pills?
If they take away my heart
That at least will be a start.

Then they can remove my brain
To help me with this damned pain.
Why not kill me right away
Then I'll be from pain astray?

I have heard grass singing in the wind.

I have heard grass singing in the wind.
I have walked through poppy fields in sun
I have suffered when dark rain descends

I have watched trees’ shadows in the ponds
I have known the arctic wastes of pain
I have heard grass singing in the wind.

Another soul is writing with my hand
Yet I have wept while loaning him my pen
I have suffered when dark rain descends

I have known the edges of the mind
I ‘ve sensed hollow silence un-contained.
I have heard grass singing in the wind.

I have sorrowed for humans confined
I have watched the antics of bad men
I have suffered when dark rain descends

I have seen the storm by camera lens.
I have felt the solar system bend.
I have heard grass singing in the wind.
I have suffered when dark rain descends

Precision in poetry

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/articles/detail/68419

“Poetry charts the changes in language, but it never merely reproduces or recapitulates what it finds. The lyric poem defamiliarizes words, it wrenches them from familiar or habitual contexts, it puts a spell on them. The lyric is cognate with those childish forms, the riddle and the nursery rhyme, with whatever form of verbal art turns language inside out and draws attention to its categories. As the eighteenth-century English poet Christopher Smart put it, freely translating from Horace’s Art of Poetry:”

It is exceedingly well
To give a common word the spell
To greet you as intirely new

In Smart’s belief, as Marcus Walsh observes in Christopher Smart: Selected Poems(1979), “every creature worships God simply by being itself, through its peculiar actions and properties….

Garden

Soft rain is falling
Pink honeysuckle rises
Looks like crocuses

Growing on shed roof
It was “suitable for shade”
But it climbed over

Until it found sun.
The wisteria has moved
To a tree next door.

I can see upstairs
How it drapes and dangles from
A young rowan tree.

The apple blossom
I’ve not noticed it again
But I saw the wren.

The wren is near now
Hides in weigelia
With its wren babies.

My friend saw a thrush
We’ve not seen one here lately.
Only the blackbirds.

Oh, what art

The gift for imitation is an art
Needs eyes and face and mind to work as one;
And who would dare to play the darkest parts?

To reproduce another being’s heart;
To manifest a self till acting’s done.
The gift for imitation is an art

To play another, may one’s soul contort;
Although a little demon may be fun.
But who would dare to play the darkest part?

I’d sooner play a demon than a tart
Especially if I had a piper and a drum
The gift for imitation, oh, what art.

When we play adult games we have no charts
And we know too many use a gun
But who would dare to play the darkest parts?

We face a trump and devils may become
Our fellow citizens till all’s undone.
The gift for imitation is an art
Yet will he dare to play the darkest part?

Theodore Roethke:The Waking

https://youtu.be/IxY2g4mR8Xk

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

Villanelles:what I think so far

Let’s start with one of the most well known poems by Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on that sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas

Form: Villanelle

I enjoyed writing some villanelles;I found it hard too.One reason is clear.
Look at the first three lines in the above poem.Lines 1 and 3 are going to be repeated several times.They also come together to end the poem.
This means they have to be good.These lines in Thomas’;s poem are often quoted.As it happens I disagree with them as advice but I think they are marvellous as poetry.And who takes advice from poets?
So thinking of two good lines before you start… or even one good line to begin with is something I have found more difficult than I do with sonnets.Of course I only began last week so I can’t be surprised by my lack.
However I found the repetition and the sounds were very enjoyable and memorable.More so after I had tried to write my own.And that is one good reason for writing poetry.You will enjoy other people’s poetry much more, if it is good.As we don’t see what Dylan Thomas threw away we don’t know how much effort and work was involved in writing his beautiful poem.Sometimes I have done nearly 30 revisions to a poem.Sometimes I put one on Facebook,not for my family to read,but just moving it and re-reading it often suggests an improvement.Sometimes someone reads it but not always.But it’s good for me.
If I can think up another first line,I shall continue my study.

So sorrow’s ale brings memories of joy

The art of musing isn’t hard to learn
Instead of tablets,screens,electric toys=…….
A spacious mind may entertain the spurned

We sometimes learn this when we need to mourn
As companions leave, of sympathy devoid
The art of musing isn’t hard to learn.

As milk ‘s transformed to butter as we churn
So sorrow’s ale brings memories of joy
A spacious mind may entertain the spurned

The art of living is one art we earn
By patience and with tempers un-annoyed
The art of musing isn’t hard to learn

As life goes by,how greatly we may yearn
For lovers lost in wars akin to Troy
A spacious mind can entertain the spurned.

Unlike that mistress tempted to be coy,
We open up our our minds to marvelled joy
The art of musing isn’t hard to learn
A spacious mind may entertain the spurned

Days

Some days are days for losing

Diaries,letters,lovers.
Some days are days for losing
Fathers,money,mothers.Some days are days for finding
Mobile phones and patience.
Some days are days for finding
New friends and old relations.

Some days I feel at sea for hours,
Some days I feel so lost.
Some days I know that life’s worthwhile
Whatever the emotional cost.

Days are special units
In the journey we call life.
Days are short so don’t waste time
In needless haste or strife.

Villanelle for an Anniversary By Seamus Heaney

350th Anniversary of Harvard

A spirit moved. John Harvard walked the yard,

The atom lay unsplit, the west unwon,
The books stood open and the gates unbarred.

The maps dreamt on like moondust. Nothing stirred.
The future was a verb in hibernation.
A spirit moved, John Harvard walked the yard.

Before the classic style, before the clapboard,
All through the small hours of an origin,
The books stood open and the gate unbarred.

Night passage of a migratory bird.
Wingflap. Gownflap. Like a homing pigeon
A spirit moved, John Harvard walked the yard.

Was that his soul (look) sped to its reward
By grace or works? A shooting star? An omen?
The books stood open and the gate unbarred.

Begin again where frosts and tests were hard.
Find yourself or founder. Here, imagine
A spirit moves, John Harvard walks the yard,
The books stand open and the gates unbarred.

The sin a child is born to is not hers

The sin a child is born to is not hers;
For mother’s body’s sacred with its grace.
The sin a child is born to,it is ours

Yet ,at a baptism will the priest declare:
Out ye demons,leave this infant’s space.
The sin a child is born to is not hers

The infant naturally speaks in tongues of fire.
The Spirit moves eternal in its trace
The sin a child is born to,it is ours

The path we learn to walk ‘s already there
The rules and laws were written with no haste
The sin a child is born to is not hers

A child born now is marked by Iraq War
A child born now, in paranoia’s traced.
The sin a child is born to,it is ours

Oh,look upon the infant’s holy face
Beatific vision is there traced
The sin a child is born to is not hers
The sin a child is born to,it is ours

I have sifted earth

I have walked the silent paths of grief
Sunless,dreary,cold and all alone.
I have slept on beds of winter leaves.

I know that death’s an avaricious thief.
Although my heart weeps and my joy has gone.
I have never felt I was deceived.

I have learned that human life is brief.
I have learned by sorrow we’re undone.
I have sifted earth and what’s beneath.

I felt dark emotions in me seethe
While I have been mocked by glaring sun.
I have learned the geography of grief.

I wait in silence for this life to cease
Or will a fluttering wing make chaos come,
Change my heart and give me a fresh lease?

Unconsoled grief can make us dumb
Into our hearts, we drag the ice that numbs
I have walked the silent paths of grief
I have made my bed on winter leaves.

The Difference Between Lack and Absence by Annie Diamond

Both mean not having, but one means missing too.
Absence can be welcome, but lack implies desire—
the absence of some noise, a lack of you

might be a good example. And it’s true
that lack makes judgment, means that we require
the thing that’s gone (a constant aching, too)

while absence just reports; we can make do
with smaller things; it doesn’t sound so dire.
Who needs the noise? (But I need you.)

Absence lets us start anew,
while lacking keeps us laced to its dark pyre.
Both are not having, but one is missing too,

and wanting nothing more than to undo
whatever sins caused lacking to transpire.
The noise is done, and so, I guess, are you

with me. In verse I struggle to subdue
my restless heart. (The lacking makes me tired.)
Both mean not having; one means missing too—
the absence of some noise, a lack of you.

Annie Diamond is a student at Barnard College, a private women’s liberal arts college affiliated with Columbia University. She has also studied abroad at Mansfield College, one of the constituent colleges of Oxford University in England. She recently completed her sophomore year at Barnard College, where she studies English and creative writing. Her work has been published in Apt, Avatar Review, Clockwise Cat, The Columbia Review and The Lyric. She was awarded first prize in The Lyric‘s College Poetry Contest for her villanelle “The Difference Between Lack and Absence.” The same poem later won the Lyric Memorial Prize and was named the best poem to appear in The Lyric for the year 2013. Her favorite writing spot is the Hungarian Pastry Shop on New York City’s 111th Street, and her number one life ambition is to appear on Jeopardy.

“It was my honor and pleasure to judge The Lyric‘s yearly and quarterly awards. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that my favorite poem for the year 2013 was written by a college student, Annie Diamond. I believe she has a very bright future.”—Michael R. Burch

Acquainted With The Night by Robert Frost

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-by;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

Robert Frost’s “Acquainted With The Night” is more of a sonnet than a villanelle, but it is a marvellous poem with a killer opening line that doubles as a killer closing line.

Bother me no more

No sight is like the rising of sun

When promises of dreams seem  clear and still
My heart  though sore ,can fancy  love has come
Without hard times and exercise of will.

No morning is without new dawn of hope
When all our conflicts shall be put aside.
Imagination is  far flung in scope,
Never  noting dreams may fraughtly lie.

No love is like my long lost love for you
Once known,once felt,it settles in the heart.
Yet I do believe love can be found anew
But only when the lost  true love  departs.

So bother me no more with reveried bliss.
Go leave me with my  life,though all’s amiss

Joy will return one day

Some days are sad and blue

And then we feel lonely too;
Or we cause rifts.

Some days are doldrum days.
Some days are like bad plays.
Not such a gift.

Most days have joyful parts.
Most days we lift our hearts.
They pass all too swift.

Some days love speaks to me.
Some days I feel so free.
I love my craft.

Life is a patterned weave.
Love helps us when we grieve.
Love is a raft.

See how the sun comes back.
See how light fills the gaps..
Some days we laugh.

Weep now and I’ll weep with you.
I have known sorrow too.
Yet sorrow will pass.

Joy is not far away.
Joy will return one day….
With life’s arts and crafts

I confess

I love you more than marmalade
I love you more than jam
I love you more than earl grey tea
I love you as you am.

I love you in the living room
I love you in the bed
I love you in the bus shelter
I love you just instead.

I love you in your underwear
I love you when you’re dressed
I love you in that old grey coat
I love you ,I confess.

Yet with your eyes you made a final call

The pattern of your speech is in my ear
Although I do not hear you speak out loud
Shall I say ear or is it heart that bears
The form that made your speech have its right sound?

Wherever in myself I find your trace
I long to keep it even when I grieve.
As though, because I do not see your face,
I never wish by sound to be deceived.

And at the end you did not speak at all
Like the baby while inside its nest.
Yet with your eyes you made a final call
As contented as a baby joined to breast.

And so you went, but left your patterns here.
So with fine prosody, I feel you near

Prosody

From google

Prosody

ˈprɒsədi/

noun

noun: prosody; plural noun: prosodies

1.
the patterns of rhythm and sound used in poetry.

“the translator is not obliged to reproduce the prosody of the original”
the theory or study of prosody.

“a general theory of prosody”
2.

the patterns of stress and intonation in a language.

“the salience of prosody in child language acquisition”

Origin

late 15th century: from Latin prosodia ‘accent of a syllable’, from Greek prosōidia ‘song sung to music, tone of a syllable’, from pros ‘towards’ + ōidē ‘song’.

I haunt my familiar spaces

The shops look all the same to me.
plastic human models with no heads
are placed in the windows
showing us how we might look
if we bought the latest fashions.

People walk, by dropping paper and cans
some look at me,most don’t
I’m invisible now ,I’m a ghost.
I haunt my familiar spaces
the library green and the path by the pond

The phone shops tempt us with larg notices:
Only £39 per month for the best
the latest,the new maps and locations
faster access to email and photos.
Look here I am,another selfie.

The only beauty is a pigeon in the sun
and a black man with gentle,luminous eyes
smiling at me as he sweeps away the paper
tossed down by the blinded people
who jabber beside the coffee shop.

Appearances, both natural and contrived

How gently,sweetly softly flowers pose,

Carnation,orchid ,daffodil and rose.
For their intricate petals form a shield
Yet bees with striped force shall make them yield.

Appearances,both natural and contrived,
Mixed with the wiles of human nature thrive.
As knowing not, we pluck the apple rare
And bite its flesh,with teeth we have to bare.

We too deceive the innocent who pass
Not seeing watchers hid behind the glass.
The windows break,the deep earth quakes;
Seized is the maiden ,he her virtue takes.

Beneath the surface,force and fierceness thrive.
What fearsome, burning God enjoys our lives?

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Some days are days for losing

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350th Anniversary of Harvard

A spirit moved. John Harvard walked the yard,

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Some days are sad and blue

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