Poetry - Central Dauphin School District



Poetry

Augustan, Romantic, American Transcendental, Symbolist

This is an excerpt from The Princeton Review: An overview of Literary Movements

AUGUSTANS

Representative English Augustan Poets and Poems

• John Dryden (1631-1700)-"Mac Flecknoe"; "Marriage a-la-mode"; "Absalom and Achitophel"

• Alexander Pope (1688--1744)-"The Rape of the Lock"; "Windsor Forest"; "Epitaph on Sir Isaac Newton"

Related Prose and Ploys·

Gulliver's Travels and A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), and A Beggar's Opera by John

Gay (1685--1732)

A Quick Definition

Augustan poetry is best known for its rhymed, heroic-couplet satire. These pairs of lines in iambic pentameter often produce great forward propulsion, and most students report that reading them aloud helps with comprehension. Coming between the baroque metaphysical poets and the enthusiastically sincere romantic poets, the wickedly funny Augustan poets went back to antiquity for their inspiration. They translated Greek and Roman epics into English using heroic couplets, and wrote their own original work based on classical forms.

What to Look for in Augustan Poetry

• Wit, irony, and paradox are still as important as they were for the metaphysical poets, but one must also add brevity to the list when discussing the Augustans. Their poems can be quite long, but because they employ the heroic couplet so pointedly, their observations are often quite pithy. As Pope put it in his poem "Essay on Criticism," "True wit is nature to advantage dress'd, What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd."

• The ongoing subject of Augustan poetry is human frailty. Even when these poets used biblical subjects for their plots, as Dryden does in "Absalom and Achitophel," the tone taken often mocks human behavior: "What cannot praise effect in mighty minds, / When flattery soothes, and when ambition blinds!"

• These poets were also likely to dress absurdly mundane plots (such as the secret cutting of a noble maiden's hair in "Rape of the Lock"), in the outward appearance of heroic epic poetry, for comic effect.

• Current events figure in these poems, either allegorically or directly Pope, in his famous epitaph for Sir Isaac Newton, wrote: "Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night; God said 'Let Newton be' and all was light," which addresses the ongoing controversies between the forces of religion and science in Europe's eighteenth century.

Dryden's poem "Mac Flecknoe" satirizes another prominent poet of his day and takes sides in contemporary political debates, similar to how a present-day poet with Democratic leanings might make fun of Republican leaders.

ROMANTIC POETRY/AMERICAN TRANSCENDENTALISM

Representative English Romantic Poets and Poems

• William Wordsworth (1770-1850)-"1 Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"; "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge Sept. 3, 1802"; "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey"; "My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold"; "Lucy"

• Percy Shelley (1792-1822)-"Ozymandias"; "Ode to the West Wind"; "Adonais-An Elegy on the Death of John Keats"; "The Cloud"; "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"

• John Keats (1795-1821)-"Ode on a Grecian Urn"; "When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be"; "To Autumn"; "La Belle Dame Sans Merci"; "Ode to a Nightingale"

Representative American Transcendental Poets and Poems

• Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)-"Ode to Beauty"; "The World-Soul"; "Song of Nature"

• Walt Whitman (1819-1892)-"When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer"; "A Noiseless Patient Spider'; "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"; "There Was a Child Went Forth"; "Song of the Open Road"

Related European Prose .

Ivanhoe by Sir WaIter Scott (1771-1832) and Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (1802-1885)

Related American Prose

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864); The Poet, an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson that inspired Whitman to become a poet; and Walking, an essay by Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

A Quick Definition

Romantic poetry written in English is a (mostly) nineteenth-century English and American poetic

mode that breaks with earlier neodassical ideas about poetry by specifically emphasizing that these

poems were written in, as Wordsworth calls it, "the real language of men" and about" common life."

This poetry is emotional and often enthusiastic in its embracing of the large, impressive forces of

nature and the infinite resources of the human imagination. Famous for having given us the image of

tormented poets idly strolling over moors, looking through their wind-whipped hair at a tulip, these

poems are often used on AP exams because of their strong thematic content.

What to look for in Romantic Poetry

• Natural imagery redeems the imagination of the individual stuck in the crowded, industrial torment of the city. See Wordsworth's (American Transcendentalist) I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, wherethe speaker, on a couch, imagines himself floating above a chorus of daffodils.

• The human imagination empowers the individual to escape from society's strictures, established authority, and even from fear of death. Think about how Whitman's (American Transcendentalist) speaker in When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer needs to leave the room where the lecture is happening in order to better understand the perfect silence of the stars.

• The sublime (impressively big, obscure or scary) is the main descriptive mode, rather than the "merely beautiful." Look at how the speaker in Shelley's Ozymandias relies on words such as "vast," "colossal," and "boundless" to create a sense of how intimidating the statue must have been, and actually is.

• Transcendence is the ultimate goal of all the romantic poets. Wordsworth turns a city into a beating-heart in Composed Upon Westminster Bridge Sept. 3, 1802; Shelley in Ode to the West Wind turns the west wind into poetic inspiration; Keats turns an old urn into a meditation on life and death in his Ode on a Grecian Urn; Whitman (American Transcendentalist) in his Noiseless Patient Spider turns a spider into a human soul surrounded by a vacant, vast expanse, yearning to be connected. What do all these poems have in common? Each finds transcendence in the ordinary.

What to look for in American Transcendental Poetry

• Several themes dominate transcendental poetry: the dignity of physical labor, Nature and the natural world as the template for the human world, and the importance of self-identity, spiritual progress, and social justice. Emerson, a leading figure in the movement, developed the idea of an Over-Soul, a shared mind connected to every individual. This reinforced the theme that man and Nature are inherently good, championed individuality and the common man, and spoke against the corrupting influence of organized religion and politics.

• By meditation, by communing with nature, through work and art, man could transcend his senses and attain an understanding of beauty and goodness and truth.

• The movement was philosophical more than literary and bent on developing a society in practice of its principles. As a reaction against the scientific rationalism of the previous, Transcendentalism relied on the authority of direct experience over external influence.

THE SYMBOLISTS

Representative French Symbolist Poets and Poems

• Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)-"Spleen"; "Harmonie du soir (Harmonies of Evening)"; "Correspondances (Correspondences)"

• Stephane Mallarme (1842-1898)-"L'Apres-midi d'un faune (The Afternoon of a Faun)"; "Soupir (Sigh)"; "Salut (Salutation)"

• Paul Verlaine (1844-1896)-"Il pleure dans mon couer (It Rains in My Heart),,; "Chanson d'automne (Autumn Song)"; "Langueur (Langour)"

• Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891)-"Le bateau ivre (The Drunken Boat)"; "Voyelles (Vowels)"

Symbolist-Influenced Poets Who Wrote in English

• Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) -"Chanson"; "Impression du Matin"; "Harmony"

• W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)-"The Lake Isle of Innisfree"; "Towards Break of Day"; "Broken Dreams"; "Leda and The Swan"; "Sailing to Byzantium"

• Arthur Symons (1865-1945)-"White Heliotrope"; "Colour Studies"; "Perfume"

• T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)-"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"; "Ash Wednesday"

Related Symbolist Prose.

~ Rebours (Against the Grain) by Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) and The Picture ofDorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

A Quick Definition

The symbolists are often considered the link between the schools of romanticism and modernism.

Full of the yearning for transcendence, which they inherited from the romantic poets, the symbolists took this yearning in a more decadent and sensual direction, which foreshadowed the kind of sexual frankness one often finds in modernist work. Many of their poems will seem obscure on the first few readings, but if you take the time to analyze the deep symbols and intuitive associations found in their work, you will be in a better place when you are asked to interpret a poem by Yeats or Eliot.

What to Look for in Symbolist Poetry

• Many symbolist poems deal with the crepuscular (dusk and dawn), and with the time between waking and sleep. Consider Wilde's "Impression du Matin." Dreams or dream states figure prominently in many symbolist works of art, as dream experiences afford human beings one of their best opportunities to explore the relationship between states.

• Synesthesia, the using of one sense to describe another, proved to be a favorite mode of the symbolists. For example, Rimbaud attributes colors and sounds to the different vowels in his poem "Voyelles."

• The French symbolists proved particularly adept at using words with three or four simultaneous meanings, creating a resonance among groups of these words. For example, Mallarme in "Salut" toasts younger poets gathered around a white tablecloth that can simultaneously be seen as a white sail for a boat and a white, blank page upon which these poets will eventually write. By carefully choosing his words, the speaker of this poem keeps all three meanings viable throughout this beautifully dense poem.

• As you can tell from the other items in this list, symbolists were drawn to the properties of music, and attempted to create some of the same effects in their poetry by concentrating on simultaneous effects (similar to harmony) and by choosing mellifluous words meant to inspire a kind of languor in the reader.

• Often associated with the "art for art's sake" movement that placed aesthetics and form above political relevance or reducible message, symbolist poetry finds its artistic counterparts in these kinds of paintings: Whistler's Nocturne Blue and Gold-Old Battersea Bridge, Turner's Moonlight and Monet's Waterloo Bridge in Grey Weather.

Literary Terms:

1. Persona – the speaker; Although the persona is known as the voice of the author, it is not necessarily the author. (Plural, personae or personas; Latin,” mask"): An external representation of oneself which might or might not accurately reflect one's inner self, or an external representation of oneself that might be largely accurate, but involves exaggerating certain characteristics and minimizing others. One of the most famous personae is that of the speaker in Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal." Here, the Irish author Swift, outraged over Britain's economic exploitation of Ireland, creates a speaker who is a well-to-do English intellectual, getting on in years, who advocates raising and eating Irish children as a means of economic advancement.

2. Voice - AUTHORIAL VOICE: The voices or speakers used by authors when they seemingly speak for themselves in a book. (In poetry, this might be called a poetic speaker). The use of this term makes it clear in critical discussion that the narration or presentation of a story is not necessarily to be identified with the biographical and historical author. Instead, the authorial voice may be another fiction created by the author. It is often considered poor form for a modern literary critic to equate the authorial voice with the historical author, but this practice was common in the nineteenth century. However, twentieth-century critics have pointed out that often a writer will assume a false persona of attitudes or beliefs when she writes, or that the authorial voice will speak of so-called biographical details that cannot possibly be equated with the author herself. In the early twentieth-century, New Critics also pointed out that linking the authorial voice with the biographical author often unfairly limited the possible interpretations of a poem or narrative. Finally, many writers have enjoyed writing in the first person and creating unreliable narrators--speakers who tell the story but who obviously miss the significance of the tale they tell, or who fail to connect important events together when the reader does. Because of these reasons, it is often considered naive to assume that the authorial voice is a "real" representation of the historical author.

3. Euphony - (from Greek "good sound"): Attempting to group words together harmoniously, so that the consonants permit an easy and pleasing flow of sound when spoken, as opposed to cacophony, when the poet intentionally mixes jarring or harsh sounds together in groups that make the phrasing either difficult to speak aloud or grating to the ear. Here is an example of euphony from John Keats' The Eve of St. Agnes (1820):

And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;

Manna and dates, in argosy transferred

From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one

From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon.

4. Cacophony - (Greek, "bad sound"): The term in poetry refers to the use of words that combine sharp, harsh, hissing, or unmelodious sounds. Dissonance is the effect of cacophony, the harsh discordant sound.

5. Internal rhyme A poetic device in which a word in the middle of a line rhymes with a word at the end of the same metrical line. Internal rhyme appears in the first and third lines in this excerpt from Shelley's "The Cloud":

I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,

And out of the caverns of rain,

Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,

I arise and unbuild it again.

In the excerpt above, the word laugh is an internal rhyme with cenotaph, and the word womb is an internal rhyme with tomb. Other examples include the Mother Goose rhyme, "Mary, Mary, quite contrary," or Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, ("We were the first that ever burst / Into that silent sea").

6. Masculine rhyme - rhymes that end with a heavy stress on the last syllable in each rhyming word.

7. Feminine rhyme – rhymes that end with a lightly stressed syllable on the last syllable in each rhyming word.

8. Closed couplet - Two lines--the second line immediately following the first--of the same metrical length that end in a rhyme to form a complete unit. Geoffrey Chaucer and other writers helped popularize the form in English poetry in the fourteenth century. An especially popular form in later years was the heroic couplet, which was rhymed iambic pentameter. It was popular from the 1600s through the late 1700s. Much Romantic poetry in the early 1800s used the couplet as well.

9. Consonance - A special type of alliteration in which the repeated pattern of consonants is marked by changes in the intervening vowels--i.e., the final consonants of the stressed syllables match each other but the vowels differ. As M. H. Abrams illustrates in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, examples include linger, longer, and languor or rider, reader, raider, and ruder.

10. Sibilance – a type of alliteration that involves the repetition of a soft, hissing sound. “She sells seashells down by the seashore.”

A Quick Review of Meter

METER: A recognizable though varying pattern of stressed syllables alternating with syllables of less stress. Compositions written in meter are said to be in verse. There are many possible patterns of verse. Each unit of stress and unstressed syllables is called a "foot." The following examples are culled from M. H. Abrams' Glossary of Literary Terms, seventh edition, which has more information.

Iambic (the noun is "iamb" or "iambus"): a lightly stressed syllable followed by a heavily stressed syllable.

Example: "The cúrfew tólls the knéll of párting dáy." (Thomas Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.")

Anapestic (the noun is "anapest") two light syllables followed by a stressed syllable: "The Assyrian came dówn like a wólf on the fóld." (Lord Byron, "The Destruction of Sennacherib.")

Trochaic (the noun is "trochee") a stressed followed by a light syllable: "Thére they áre, my fífty men and wómen."

Dactylic (the noun is "dactyl"): a stressed syllable followed by two light syllables: "Éve, with her básket, was / Déep in the bélls and grass."

Iambs and anapests, since the strong stress is at the end, are called "rising meter"; trochees and dactyls, with the strong stress at the beginning with lower stress at the end, are called "falling meter." Additionally, if a line ends in a standard iamb, with a final stressed syllable, it is said to have a masculine ending. If a line ends in a lightly stressed syllable, it is said to be feminine. To hear the difference, read the following examples aloud and listen to the final stress:

Masculine Ending:

"'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house,

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse."

Feminine Ending:

"'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the housing,

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mousing."

We name a metric line according to the number of "feet" in it. If a line has four feet, it is tetrameter. If a line has five feet, it is pentameter. Six feet, hexameter, and so on. English verse tends to be pentameter, French verse tetrameter, and Greek verse, hexameter. When scanning a line, we might, for instance, describe the line as "iambic pentameter" (having five feet, with each foot tending to be a light syllable followed by heavy syllable), or "trochaic tetrameter" (having four feet, with each foot tending to be a long syllable followed by a short syllable). Here is a complete list of the various verse structures:

• Monometer: one foot

• Dimeter: two feet

• Trimeter: three feet

• Tetrameter: four feet

• Pentameter: five feet

• Hexameter: six feet

• Heptameter: seven feet

• Octameter: eight feet

• Nonameter: nine feet

Augustans

Marriage a-la-mode

by John Dryden (1631 – 1700)

Why should a foolish marriage vow,

Which long ago was made,

Oblige us to each other now

When passion is decay'd?

We lov'd, and we lov'd, as long as we could,

Till our love was lov'd out in us both:

But our marriage is dead, when the pleasure is fled:

'Twas pleasure first made it an oath.

If I have pleasures for a friend,

And farther love in store,

What wrong has he whose joys did end,

And who could give no more?

'Tis a madness that he should be jealous of me,

Or that I should bar him of another:

For all we can gain is to give our selves pain,

When neither can hinder the other.

Epitaph on Sir Isaac Newton

by Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744)

Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night.

God said, let Newton be, and all was light.

Now o'er the one half world

Nature seems dead.

Romantic Poetry

My Heart Leaps Up

by William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850)

My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky:

So was it when my life began;

So is it now I am a man;

So be it when I shall grow old,

Or let me die!

The Child is father of the Man;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

Love's Philosophy

by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822)

The fountains mingle with the river

And the rivers with the ocean,

The winds of heaven mix for ever

With a sweet emotion;

Nothing in the world is single,

All things by a law divine

In one another's being mingle—

Why not I with thine?

See the mountains kiss high heaven,

And the waves clasp one another;

No sister-flower would be forgiven

If it disdain'd its brother;

And the sunlight clasps the earth,

And the moonbeams kiss the sea—

What is all this sweet work worth

If thou kiss not me?

Ode to a Nightingale

by John Keats (1795 – 1821)

1.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:

'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,

But being too happy in thine happiness,—

That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,

In some melodious plot

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,

Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

2.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been

Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,

Tasting of Flora and the country green,

Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!

O for a beaker full of the warm South,

Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,

With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,

And purple-stained mouth;

That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,

And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

3.

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

What thou among the leaves hast never known,

The weariness, the fever, and the fret

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,

Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

And leaden-eyed despairs,

Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,

Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

4.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,

Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,

But on the viewless wings of Poesy,

Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:

Already with thee! tender is the night,

And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,

Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;

But here there is no light,

Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown

Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

5.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,

Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,

But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet

Wherewith the seasonable month endows

The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;

White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;

Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;

And mid-May's eldest child,

The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,

The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

6.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,

To take into the air my quiet breath;

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

In such an ecstasy!

Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—

To thy high requiem become a sod.

7.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

No hungry generations tread thee down;

The voice I hear this passing night was heard

In ancient days by emperor and clown:

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,

She stood in tears amid the alien corn;

The same that oft-times hath

Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam

Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

8.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

To toil me back from thee to my sole self!

Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well

As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.

Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades

Past the near meadows, over the still stream,

Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep

In the next valley-glades:

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

Romantic Poetry – American Transcendentalism

The World-Soul

by Ralph Waldo-Emerson (1803 – 1882)

Thanks to the morning light,

Thanks to the seething sea,

To the uplands of New Hampshire,

To the green-haired forest free;

Thanks to each man of courage,

To the maids of holy mind,

To the boy with his games undaunted,

Who never looks behind.

Cities of proud hotels,

Houses of rich and great,

Vice nestles in your chambers,

Beneath your roofs of slate.

It cannot conquer folly,

Time-and-space-conquering steam,—

And the light-outspeeding telegraph

Bears nothing on its beam.

The politics are base,

The letters do not cheer,

And 'tis far in the deeps of history—

The voice that speaketh clear.

Trade and the streets ensnare us,

Our bodies are weak and worn,

We plot and corrupt each other,

And we despoil the unborn.

Yet there in the parlor sits

Some figure of noble guise,

Our angel in a stranger's form,

Or woman's pleading eyes;

Or only a flashing sunbeam

In at the window pane;

Or music pours on mortals

Its beautiful disdain.

The inevitable morning

Finds them who in cellars be,

And be sure the all-loving Nature

Will smile in a factory.

Yon ridge of purple landscape,

Yon sky between the walls,

Hold all the hidden wonders

In scanty intervals.

Alas, the sprite that haunts us

Deceives our rash desire,

It whispers of the glorious gods,

And leaves us in the mire:

We cannot learn the cipher

That's writ upon our cell,

Stars help us by a mystery

Which we could never spell.

If but one hero knew it,

The world would blush in flame,

The sage, till he hit the secret,

Would hang his head for shame.

But our brothers have not read it,

Not one has found the key,

And henceforth we are comforted,

We are but such as they.

Still, still the secret presses,

The nearing clouds draw down,

The crimson morning flames into

The fopperies of the town.

Within, without, the idle earth

Stars weave eternal rings,

The sun himself shines heartily,

And shares the joy he brings.

And what if trade sow cities

Like shells along the shore,

And thatch with towns the prairie broad

With railways ironed o'er;—

They are but sailing foambells

Along Thought's causing stream,

And take their shape and Sun-color

From him that sends the dream.

For destiny does not like

To yield to men the helm,

And shoots his thought by hidden nerves

Throughout the solid realm.

The patient Dæmon sits

With roses and a shroud,

He has his way, and deals his gifts—

But ours is not allowed.

He is no churl or trifler,

And his viceroy is none,

Love-without-weakness,

Of genius sire and son;

And his will is not thwarted,—

The seeds of land and sea

Are the atoms of his body bright,

And his behest obey.

He serveth the servant,

The brave he loves amain,

He kills the cripple and the sick,

And straight begins again;

For gods delight in gods,

And thrust the weak aside;

To him who scorns their charities,

Their arms fly open wide.

When the old world is sterile,

And the ages are effete,

He will from wrecks and sediment

The fairer world complete.

He forbids to despair,

His cheeks mantle with mirth,

And the unimagined good of men

Is yeaning at the birth.

Spring still makes spring in the mind,

When sixty years are told;

Love wakes anew this throbbing heart,

And we are never old.

Over the winter glaciers,

I see the summer glow,

And through the wild-piled snowdrift

The warm rose buds below.

A noiseless patient spider

by Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892)

A noiseless patient spider,

I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,

Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,

It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,

Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,

Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,

Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,

Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,

Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

Symbolists

Posthumous Remorse

by Charles Baudelaire

translated by Keith Waldrop

When you go to sleep, my gloomy beauty, below a black marble monument, when from alcove and manor you are reduced to damp vault and hollow grave;

when the stone—pressing on your timorous chest and sides already lulled by a charmed indifference—halts your heart from beating, from willing, your feet from their bold adventuring,

then the tomb, confidant to my infinite dream (since the tomb understands the poet always), through those long nights in which slumber is banished,

will say to you: "What does it profit you, imperfect courtisan, not to have known what the dead weep for?" —And the worm will gnaw at your hide like remorse.

When You are Old

by W. B. Yeats (1865 – 1939)

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.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download