Tumgik
#poems I like
bannstrahl · 9 months
Text
Tumblr media
38 notes · View notes
rawritsnikky · 2 years
Text
Tumblr media
Enough said.
16 notes · View notes
thespreadsheetzone · 1 year
Text
Poems I Like, part 3: The Voice You Hear When You Read Silently by Thomas Lux
is not silent, it is a speaking- out-loud voice in your head; it is spoken, a voice is saying it as you read. It's the writer's words, of course, in a literary sense his or her 'voice' but the sound of that voice is the sound of your voice. Not the sound your friends know or the sound of a tape played back but your voice caught in the dark cathedral of your skull, your voice heard by an internal ear informed by internal abstracts and what you know by feeling, having felt. It is your voice saying, for example, the word 'barn' that the writer wrote but the 'barn' you say is a barn you know or knew. The voice in your head, speaking as you read, never says anything neutrally- some people hated the barn they knew, some people love the barn they know so you hear the word loaded and a sensory constellation is lit: horse-gnawed stalls, hayloft, black heat tape wrapping a water pipe, a slippery spilled chirr of oats from a split sack, the bony, filthy haunches of cows… And 'barn' is only a noun- no verb or subject has entered into the sentence yet! The voice you hear when you read to yourself is the clearest voice: you speak it speaking to you.
A pretty short one this time, but what little I have to say proves the poet's plainly-stated point perfectly:
When I first read this, years ago in a high school classroom, the line that caught my attention was "slippery/spilled chirr of oats." I could hear it in my head so clearly that it stunned me, and I had to sit back and just run that sound in my mind again and again for a solid minute. I absolutely did not complete the assignment of analyzing the poem in preparation for a class discussion, but I nonetheless completed the larger objective of Appreciating Poetry.
There's something about that particular onomatopoeia that really, really comes through to me. I love sounds like that, dry rustling white noise - actually, in the same vein there was a big bulky grey plastic printer in my middle school's library, and every time something was printed on it I loved to listen to the sound it made. I guess it was a bit like ASMR - it definitely felt like it scratched an itch inside my brain. I was shocked when I read this poem, silently, to myself, and felt that same way just reading this one line.
Hell, forget sound, it was a visceral sense-memory of something I'd never experienced. I could feel the weave of the burlap under my fingers and see the way the sack slouched as it emptied onto the packed dirt, for all that I'd only ever interacted with oats in cardboard cylinders in the kitchen cabinet.
I guess if I wanted to complete that long-missed assignment I could run my mouth about some of the imagery and alliteration - "dark cathedral of your skull," holy and echoing, sure. "horse-gnawed stalls, hayloft, black heat tape," you almost whisper some of these lines with how many unvoiced consonants are in them. But I don't need that, not really. I heard the poem just fine the first time around.
3 notes · View notes
dillyfirestarter · 2 years
Text
Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
3 notes · View notes
potatoesandsunshine · 7 months
Text
everything u need to know about me can actually be explained by the fact that i read that poem about the serving girl wearing the pearls so they're warm for her mistress when i was like 11 and it rewrote my brain chemistry forever
Tumblr media
like this Changed Me
52K notes · View notes
Text
Tumblr media
meditations on first philosophy (1641) - rene descartes
"who give a shit"
60K notes · View notes
llovely · 2 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
here's a fake interview about my me & my girlfriend that i transcribed from my head. enjoy!
16K notes · View notes
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
Beautiful from Ordinary Days
70K notes · View notes
max-reblogger · 6 months
Text
14 Now while I sat in the day and looked forth, In the close of the day with its light and fields of spring, and the farmers preparing their crops, In the large unconscious scenery of my land with it lake and forests, In the heavenly aerial beauty (after the perturbed winds and the storms), Under the arching heavens of the afternoon swift passing, and the voices of children and women, The many-moving sea tides, and I saw the ships how they sailed, And the summer approaching with richness, and the fields all busy with labor, And the infinite separate houses, how they all went on, each with its meals and minuta of daily usages, And the streets how their throbbing throbbed, and the cities pent-lo, then and there, Falling upon them all and among them all, enveloping me with the rest, Appeared the cloud, appeared the long black trail, And I knew death, its thought, and the sacred knowledge of death. Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me, And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me, And I in the middle as with companions, and as holding the hands of companions, I fled forth to hiding receiving night that talks not, Down to the shores of the water the path by the swamp in the dimness, To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still, And the singer so shy to the rest received me, The grey-brown bird I know received us comrades three, And he sang the carol of death, and a verse for him I love. From deep secluded recesses From the fragrant cedars and the ghostly pines so still, Came the carol of the bird. And the charm of the carol rapt me, As I held as if by their hands my comrades in the night, And the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird. Come lovely soothing death, Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving, In the day, in the night, to all, to each, Sooner or later delicate death. Praised fathomless universe, For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious, And for love, sweet love-but praise! praise! For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death. Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet, Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome? Then I chant it for thee I glorify thee above all, I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly. Approach strong deliveries, When in the loving floating ocean thee, Laved in the flood of they bliss O death. From me to thee glad serenades, Dances for thee I propose saluting thee, adornments and feasting for thee, And the sights of the open landscape and the high-spread sky are fitting, And life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night. The night in silence under many a star, The ocean shore and husky whispering wave whose voice I know, And the soul turning to thee O vast and well-veiled death, And the body gratefully nestling close to thee. Over the treetops I float thee a song, Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriads fields and prairies wide,Over the dense-packed cities all and the teeming wharves and ways, I float this carol with joy to thee death. - Walt Witman
Poems I like - #10
1 note · View note
Text
One day I will stop falling in love with you. Until I do, I'll be thinking of you.
k.b. // laufey, philharmonia orchestra - let you break my heart again
5K notes · View notes
lonesome-dreamsss · 2 months
Text
his handprint may be burned into your skin but it's still the gentlest touch you've ever received.
3K notes · View notes
bannstrahl · 9 months
Text
Tumblr media
author unknown (please tell me if you know)
2 notes · View notes
comradekatara · 4 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
2 kinds of grad students (both massive nerds)
5K notes · View notes
thespreadsheetzone · 1 year
Text
Poems I like, part 1: "Aspens" by Matthew Brenneman
They say that aspens propagate and grow
Not scattering seed-pods to the whimsies of
The wind, but from a common root below,
Which binds them surely each to all
And is their counterpart of human love,
So that you'll find no solitary tree,
But in great stands arrayed against the cold
They seem to keep each other company
And, at this apogee of fall,
To cloak the mountainsides in cloth of gold.
Short and sweet, very sappy (pun intended). A few technical details jump out at me as carrying or supporting meaning - the punctuation, the meter, and the line breaks.
Starting with the line breaks, specifically their placement in the middle or at the ends of phrases (putting line breaks in the middle of a phrase is called "enjambment," which I had to look up because it's been a long time since high school English class). Every line in this poem consists of exactly one complete phrase or clause, except for the bit about "scattering seed-pods to the whimsies of/the wind."
It could be an accident or a case of the poet not being able to work out the line to end at the "right" place, but it's not like the poet couldn't have used some other phrasing to make the line break fall at the end of the phrase if he wanted to. "Not scattering seed-pods to the tearing wind" would work, for example, or "whistling wind" or "blowing wind" or any other two-syllable adjective, followed by "but rather from a common root below" to keep the syllable count in the next line. The fact that alternate phrasing would be so easy to insert here means it's deliberate rather than a case of "oh shit how can I end this line, fuckfuckfuck just put in whatever kinda makes sense," and the fact that it's the only break in the pattern means it's significant.
It's certainly no coincidence that the part about "scattering seed-pods" is the only part where the end of the line breaks up a phrase. Both the phrase and its enjambment speak of a sudden break, and the last few small words in the next line seem cast out, scattered like seed-pods far away from their parent trees. It makes the sense of sudden separation more potent and keenly felt than if the poet had stuck to perfectly-placed line breaks.
Secondly, the meter: this poem is in iambs (a repeating pattern of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable - they SAY that ASpens PROpaGATE and GROW, etc). Each verse has three lines of iambic pentameter (5 stressed-unstressed syllable pairings), then one of iambic tetrameter (5 stressed-unstressed pairings), then one last line of iambic pentameter again.
This pattern of iambs is unbroken except for, arguably, in one instance: "not scattering seed-pods" is metrically laid out as "not SCAT-ter-ing SEED-pods." "Scattering" is a dactyl (STRESSED-unstressed-unstressed) and doesn't fit nicely in the iambic pattern that has been established.
You could argue that it's meant to be read as two syllables, "SCAT'ring," with the middle syllable sort of elided or skipped over. And that certainly could be true! Plenty of poetry includes lines like that. If you did read it as "scatt'ring," that might have the effect of making it seem a bit more olde-timey, like a well-worn tale or a piece of folk wisdom. That would also fit with the very rigid and defined form that this poem follows, since it's a lot more common to have a very strict rhyme scheme and metric pattern in older poetry than in newer (and by newer I mean in the last 150 years or so) stuff.
I can't prove that the way the poet speaks normally does or does not include the habit of swallowing the middle syllable of "scattering," or that the poem was "meant" to be read out one way or another. I think it's certainly possible that it was "meant" to be read out as scat-ter-ing; the poet has already shown us that he is willing to break poetic form for the sake of meaning, as in that case of enjambment I talked about 4 paragraphs back. Frankly, though, it doesn't matter! I am choosing to interpret it as being a dactyl, because it seems no more or less well-supported than the other option, and because I can make a solid point based on its assumption.
The solid point that I can make, which it took a very long time for me to get to, is that the effect of placing a break in the established metrical pattern on that word in that line is to emphasize the meaning of the line. When you read it out, your mouth does the same thing it's describing - fire out a few more syllables a bit more quickly than it does for the rest of the line, trip over the rhythm of the line a little bit, scatter the word. The shape of the word is made meaningful right along with the word itself.
And at last we come to the punctuation. The crux of it is this: the whole poem is one long sentence. There are phrases and clauses separated by commas, but ultimately everything is grouped together.
If the last line did not end with a period, then the only punctuation in the poem would be commas, which would then seem like the most separating option as compared to no punctuation whatsoever. The lines of the poem would form smaller, discrete groups merely placed next to each other.
The presence of the period at the end, though, says "see? I could have done this the whole time. Any of those lines could have ended with a period. But they didn't - because they didn't need to be separated like that." The lines of the poem are shown to belong to the same group precisely because the period is there to define the group. It is no great mystery why this was done, either - the whole poem operates on themes of togetherness and separateness, and so it is only fitting that the lines of the poem are bound together like aspens, each to all.
2 notes · View notes
bollplart · 11 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Siegfried Sassoon, “The Redeemer” (1917)
1 note · View note
liriostigre · 6 months
Text
Tumblr media
Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies
6K notes · View notes