Poem for a Sunday

From A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day by John Donne

Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness ;
He ruin’d me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death—things which are not.

Poem For a Sunday

This poem seems to have multiple versions and checking through the internet I’m unable to find a definitive author. I first heard it in the film Icebound. 

 

After a while you learn the subtle difference
Between holding a hand and chaining a soul,
And you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning
And company doesn’t mean security,
And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts
And presents aren’t promises
And you begin to accept your defeats
With your head up and your eyes open,
With the grace of a woman,
Not the grief of a child
And you learn to build all your roads on today,
Because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans
and futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight.
After awhile you learn that even sunshine
Burns if you get too much
So you plant your own garden and decorate your own soul,
Instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers
And you learn that you really can endure…
That you really are strong
And you really do have worth,
and you learn and learn…
With every good bye you learn.

Poem for a Sunday

Currently watching Romeo and Juliet as I go through the second draft, so here’s the opening of Romeo and Juliet:-

Two households both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life…

Has to be one of the best beginnings ever.

Okay, back to work.

Poem for a Sunday

I’ve been watching repeats of Torchwood.

 

Because I could not stop for Death – Emily Dickinson

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labour, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then ’tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses’ heads
Were toward eternity.

Poem for a Sunday

Leisure by W.H.Davies

WHAT is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?—
No time to stand beneath the boughs,
And stare as long as sheep and cows:
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass:
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night:
No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance:
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began?
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

Poem for a Sunday

When I was at school every term we’d have a book to read and one term it was The Owl Service by Alan Garner. An incredibly atmospheric YA book. What most stuck with me I think were three things, 1) in the front of the edition we read there was a drawing of the plate with the owl pattern on and you could quite clearly see the pattern could either be owls or flowers, 2) At the end when the boy is saving the girl as she is being attacked by ‘owls’ (that may not be how the story ends it’s over twenty years since I read the story so I could have retold it in my own head). But the third thing that I remember quite clearly is a quote from the beginning of the book that just set up the whole intense and almost claustrophobic atmosphere of the story that would follow. The quote is from W. H. Auden’s The Two :-

The sky is darkening like a stain
Something is going to fall like rain
And it won’t be flowers.

The quote stayed with me, and often when the sky is full of stormclouds it will just pop into my head.

 

The Two – W.H.Auden

You are the town and we are the clock.
We are the guardians of the gate in the rock
The Two
On your left and on your right
In the day and in the night,
We are watching you.

Wiser not to ask just what has occurred
To them who disobeyed our word;
To those
We were the whirlpool, we were the reef,
We were the formal nightmare, grief
And the unlucky rose.

Climb up the crane, learn the sailor’s words
When the ships from the islands laden with birds
Come in
Tell your stories of fishing and other men’s wives:
The expansive moments of constricted lives
In the lighted inn.

But do not imagine we do not know
Nor that what you hide with such care won’t show
At a glance
Nothing is done, nothing is said,
But don’t make the mistake of believing us dead:
I shouldn’t dance.

We’re afraid in that case you’ll have a fall.
We’ve been watching you over the garden wall
For hours.
The sky is darkening like a stain
Something is going to fall like rain
And it won’t be flowers.

When the green field comes off like a lid
Revealing what was much better hid:
Unpleasant.
And look, behind you without a sound
The woods have come and are standing round
In deadly crescent.

The bolt is sliding in its groove,
Outside the window is the black remov-
ers van.
And now with sudden swift emergence
Comes the women in dark glasses and the humpbacked surgeons
And the scissor man.

This might happen any day
So be careful what you say
Or do.
Be clean, be tidy, oil the lock,
Trim the garden, wind the clock,
Remember the Two.

Poem for a Sunday

From Auguries of Innocence by William Blake

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

Poem for Sunday

As it’s Remembrance Sunday in the UK today. Two poems we traditionally hear around this time. At 11 a.m. please take a moment to remember those who gave up their lives so we could have our freedom.

 

The Soldier by Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by the suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

 

Ode of Remembrance (From For the Fallen by Laurence Binyon (1869-1943))

 They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

Poem for a Sunday

Excerpt from The Garden of Prosperine by Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837 – 1909)

 

From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.

Poem for a Sunday

A friend of the family passed away this week, so this one feels appropriate.

 

Remember by Christina Rossetti

 

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann’d:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.