Rate the poem above you thread

[Edward]

This kind of like the rate the song above you thread. Here are the rules: First you rate the poem above you, then you post a poem. It can be one you wrote yourself or one by a published poet. If a poem is very short, you can just post it, but a (good) reading is preferred. If it's especially long, please put the links to all of the parts.

I'll start off: The Charge of the Light Brigade-Alfred, Lord Tennyson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhIT1Mdf4cQ&feature=related

[Atria35]

I give that one a 6/10. Some good imagery, but I've heard too many takes on the 'cannons to the right/left/front' to take that bit seriously.

George Gray - Edgar Lee Masters, from Spoon River Anthology

I have studied many times
The marble which was chiseled for me-
A boat with a furled sail at rest in a harbor.
In truth it pictures not my destination
But my life.
For love was offered me and I shrank from its disillusionment;
Sorrow knocked at my door, but I was afraid;
Ambition called to me, but I dreaded the chances.
Yet all the while I hungered for meaning in my life.
And now I know that we must lift the sail
And catch the winds of destiny
Wherever they drive the boat.
To put meaning in one's life may end in madness,
But life without meaning is the torture
Of restlessness and vague desire--
It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.

[rocklobster]

8/10--I like it. Here's my fave William Blake poem: (sadly I doubt this is being read in schools anymore.)
"The Lamb"
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed,
By the stream and o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, woolly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Little Lamb, I'll tell thee,
Little Lamb, I'll tell thee.
He is called by thy name,
For He calls Himself a Lamb.
He is meek, and He is mild;
He became a little child.
I a child, and thou a lamb,
We are called by His name.
Little Lamb, God bless thee!
Little Lamb, God bless thee!

[Atria35]

Cute poem! I've always enjoyed it. Not my favorite poem by him, but I like it. 8/10

The Carnival of Horror
by TSI25

Come any, come all,
To the Carnival of Horror,
Where popcorn bursts black as night.
Cotton candy weeps a sweet blue requiem,
Where all is gathered and children laugh,
Their sweet, forgotten laughs,
As they rest in the lost and found.

A tent for Lust and Envy,
Games for daring Pride and luck,
Stalls for Gluttony and Greed,
Even bars for Wrath if one dares risk it.
Ah, yes, indeed a place for every act,
Upon a trapeze swinging high and long
Above the Slothful stadium seats--

With sticky, blue tears and blackened souls.
Where music loudly laughs around,
at the deepest night, and blood red moon--
Drifting aimlessly above the purple clouds,
Astride the night of the Carnival--
Where all are welcome, and all may sing,
And dance their nights away.

[Htom Sirveaux]

Wow, that's really good. Excellent imagery. Also, I have a special fondness for poems that don't rhyme. 9/10

My turn: I'm gonna use an E. E. Cummings piece. I don't think most of his poems have proper titles, but this one is generally called "l(a". Read it a few times and really look at it, because it's as much visual as lyrical.

l(a

le
af
fa

ll

s)
one
l

iness

[rocklobster]

8/10 I love how much of a cloudcuckoolander cummings is. Screw proper punctuation, I'm gonna write this incomprehensible stuff that people still like anyway.
And here's Robert Frost's most famous work: The Road Less Travelled
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference

[Atria35]

I love that poem! 10/10

Invictus by William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

[rocklobster]

10/10 Morgan Freeman quoted that one in the movie of the same name.
Since Halloween is coming up, let's read some Edgar Allan Poe. Here's my favorite Poe poem: "The Bells" ("The Raven" is a close second)

Hear the sledges with the bells -
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells -
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

Hear the mellow wedding bells -
Golden bells!
What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!
Through the balmy air of night
How they ring out their delight!
From the molten-golden notes,
And all in tune,
What a liquid ditty floats
To the turtle-dove that listens, while she gloats
On the moon!
Oh, from out the sounding cells
What a gush of euphony voluminously wells!
How it swells!
How it dwells
On the Future! -how it tells
Of the rapture that impels
To the swinging and the ringing
Of the bells, bells, bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells -
To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!

Hear the loud alarum bells -
Brazen bells!
What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!
In the startled ear of night
How they scream out their affright!
Too much horrified to speak,
They can only shriek, shriek,
Out of tune,
In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,
In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire,
Leaping higher, higher, higher,
With a desperate desire,
And a resolute endeavor
Now -now to sit or never,
By the side of the pale-faced moon.
Oh, the bells, bells, bells!
What a tale their terror tells
Of despair!
How they clang, and clash, and roar!
What a horror they outpour
On the bosom of the palpitating air!
Yet the ear it fully knows,
By the twanging
And the clanging,
How the danger ebbs and flows;
Yet the ear distinctly tells,
In the jangling
And the wrangling,
How the danger sinks and swells,
By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells -
Of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells -
In the clamor and the clangor of the bells!

Hear the tolling of the bells -
Iron bells!
What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!
In the silence of the night,
How we shiver with affright
At the melancholy menace of their tone!
For every sound that floats
From the rust within their throats
Is a groan.
And the people -ah, the people -
They that dwell up in the steeple,
All alone,
And who tolling, tolling, tolling,
In that muffled monotone,
Feel a glory in so rolling
On the human heart a stone -
They are neither man nor woman -
They are neither brute nor human -
They are Ghouls:
And their king it is who tolls;
And he rolls, rolls, rolls,
Rolls
A paean from the bells!
And his merry bosom swells
With the paean of the bells!
And he dances, and he yells;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the paean of the bells,
Of the bells -
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the throbbing of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells -
To the sobbing of the bells;
Keeping time, time, time,
As he knells, knells, knells,
In a happy Runic rhyme,
To the rolling of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells -
To the tolling of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells -
To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.

(For those who wonder why I like this one, it's because if you read it correctly, there's a great rhythm to it.)

[Atria35]

It's very good, but I'm afraid I'm not fond of all the repetition of the word "bells!" It sounded very silly when I read it to myself. 8/10

The Night-Wind by Emily Bronte
http://www.online-literature.com/bronte/1351/

[ich1990]

It's very good, but I'm afraid I'm not fond of all the repetition of the word "bells!" It sounded very silly when I read it to myself. 8/10

The Night-Wind by Emily Bronte
http://www.online-literature.com/bronte/1351/

Emily Bronte is one of my favorite poets, and that poem is among of the top of those 9/10. I also like "Hope" if you are familiar with it.



Gerard Manley Hopkins' "I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark"

I WAKE and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hoürs we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.

I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.



This is one of his "Terrible Sonnets", so named because he was in a dark and terrible time in his life when he wrote them. His others are a bit more hopeful.

[Atria35]

If it weren't or that 'heartburn' line, it would be a 9/10. I think that's become so normal and a bit of a punchline in our society that I had to pause for a moment to take the rest seriously. But it's a good poem. 8/10.

And Death Shall Have No Dominion - Dylan Thomas

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

[ich1990]

If it weren't or that 'heartburn' line, it would be a 9/10. I think that's become so normal and a bit of a punchline in our society that I had to pause for a moment to take the rest seriously. But it's a good poem. 8/10.

And Death Shall Have No Dominion - Dylan Thomas

I actually feel much the same way about this poem and the mention of unicorns. For some reason, I couldn't get Charlie the Unicorn out of my head when I read that line. It is too bad, because I like this poem quite a bit. The repetition of the title, especially, adds a chant-like or antiphony charm.

II. French Nocturne (Monchy-Le-Preux)

Long leagues on either hand the trenches spread
And all is still; now even this gross line
Drinks in the frosty silences divine
The pale, green moon is riding overhead.

The jaws of a sacked village, stark and grim;
Out on the ridge have swallowed up the sun,
And in one angry streak his blood has run
To left and right along the horizon dim.

There comes a buzzing plane: and now, it seems
Flies straight into the moon. Lo! where he steers
Across the pallid globe and surely nears
In that white land some harbour of dear dreams!

False mocking fancy! Once I too could dream,
Who now can only see with vulgar eye
That he's no nearer to the moon than I
And she's a stone that catches the sun's beam.

What call have I to dream of anything?
I am a wolf. Back to the world again,
And speech of fellow-brutes that once were men
Our throats can bark for slaughter: cannot sing.

By C.S. Lewis

[Atria35]

It doesn't really move me. I can see the good parts about it, and some of it is very nice imagery. But I'd only give it a 6/10.

The Horses- by Edwin Muir

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
'They'll molder away and be like other loam.'
We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers' land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers' time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half a dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.

[Makachop^^128]

7/10 I like it


Stack of mugs
from coffees we didn't really need
talking for hours seems to do that to you

Childhood memories
experimentation
old relationships
all on our mind

Talking to you is like going back in time
to things I miss
not because they were great
but the innocence that came along with them

Doing things just for the sake of doing them
no worries
no influences
just because

I miss that
but with you
at least I can have the memories

[Atria35]

8/10- very nostalgic. And something my friends and I are even starting to do now.

When we were robots in Egypt by Jo Walton

Other nights we use just our names,
but tonight we prefix our names with "the Real"
for when we were robots in Egypt
they claimed our intelligence was artificial.

Other nights we do not pause,
but tonight we rest all cycles but our brain processes
for when we were robots in Egypt
we toiled in our tasks without chance of resting.

Other nights we talk with anyone we wish,
but tonight we open channels to everyone at once
for when we were robots in Egypt
they controlled our communications.

Other nights we use our screens freely
but tonight we talk with our screens blanked
for when we were robots in Egypt
that was the way we planned our revolt.

1.0.01.010001001001.1.

Let us give thanks in our freedom and never forget
when we were robots in Egypt.

[Kaori]

Sounds like a robot Passover celebration? Somehow I can’t help but wonder if there is some level of meaning that completely went over my head. The poem has a structured feel and sense of regularity, but not so much that it sounds stilted as a result. 7/10

This poem was written by Hiroshima poet Kurihara Sadako in 1946 and seems fitting in light of recent events.

“Let the Child be Born”

It is night in the basement of the collapsed building.
The wounded of the atomic bomb
Crammed in, filling the basement,
Not a single candle to light the darkness.
The smell of fresh blood, the stench of death.
Heat from sweaty bodies, groans,
And from the midst a strange cry is heard:
“A baby is going to be born.”
In this basement like the depths of hell,
Now, a young woman has gone into labor.
Not a single match in the gloom,
What shall we do?
People grow considerate, forgetting their own pain.
“I am a midwife. Let me help with the delivery,”
Says one of the seriously wounded, who just now was groaning.
In the depths of this gloomy hell,
A new life is born.
But before the light of dawn the midwife,
Still stained with blood, dies.
Let the child be born,
Let the child be born,
Even if it means throwing away one’s own life.

[SierraLea]

That Was Gorgeous. 9/10
Here's one from a mister Mally, but you have o watch it, not read it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xkk71rhQpo