Poetry and quotable quotes

[North Star]

Redounding in fame thanks, in part, to the occasional allusion in Wodehouse 

Where would poor Keats be without him and G. K. Chesterton . . .

The Logical Vegetarian

    You will find me drinking rum,
    Like a sailor in a slum,
You will find me drinking beer like a Bavarian.
    You will find me drinking gin
    In the lowest kind of inn,
Because I am a rigid Vegetarian.

    So I cleared the inn of wine,
    And I tried to climb the sign,
And I tried to hail the constable as “Marion.”
    But he said I couldn’t speak,
    And he bowled me to the Beak
Because I was a Happy Vegetarian.

    Oh, I knew a Doctor Gluck,
    And his nose it had a hook,
And his attitudes were anything but Aryan;
    So I gave him all the pork
    That I had, upon a fork;
Because I am myself a Vegetarian.

    I am silent in the Club,
    I am silent in the pub,
I am silent on a bally peak in Darien;
    For I stuff away for life
    Shoving peas in with a knife,
Because I am at heart a Vegetarian.

    No more the milk of cows
    Shall pollute my private house
Than the milk of the wild mares of the Barbarian;
    I will stick to port and sherry,
    For they are so very, very
So very, very, very Vegetarian.

[Karl Henning]

Oh, Keats would likely do all right 

[Karl Henning]

. . . silent, upon a peevish vegetarian . . . .

[North Star]

Oh, Keats would likely do all right 

For all we know, he might have lived longer. 

[North Star]

"Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health."
"If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool."
"All depends on how we look at things, and not on how they are in themselves. The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it."
"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves."
"If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves."
- Carl Gustav Jung

[Karl Henning]

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
- Carl Gustav Jung

This, in particular.

[Ken B]

This, in particular.

"GMG as a voyage of self-discovery."

[Cato]

"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves."

- Carl Gustav Jung

This, in particular.

A variation: What will appall you most about your children, is that moment when you recognize that their worst traits are also your worst traits!   0:)

[Karl Henning]

"GMG as a voyage of self-discovery."

(* munches popcorn *)

[Wakefield]

A variation: What will appall you most about your children, is that moment when you recognize that their worst traits are also your worst traits!   0:)

... every man is at every moment everything that has been and all what will be. 

[Florestan]

Walter de la Mare

Music

When music sounds, gone is the earth I know,
And all her lovely things even lovelier grow;
Her flowers in vision flame, her forest trees
Lift burdened branches, stilled with ecstasies.

When music sounds, out of the water rise
Naiads whose beauty dims my waking eyes,
Rapt in strange dreams burns each enchanted face,
With solemn echoing stirs their dwelling-place.

When music sounds, all that I was I am
Ere to this haunt of brooding dust I came;
And from Time's woods break into distant song
The swift-winged hours, as I hasten along.

[Ken B]

"but how I agree with you, Florestan!"

There's one in every crowd!

[Florestan]

There's one in every crowd!

Well, he´s Raro after all... 

TD


Ralph Hodgson

TIME, You Old Gipsy Man

TIME, you old gipsy man,
Will you not stay,
Put up your caravan
Just for one day?

All things I'll give you
Will you be my guest,
Bells for your jennet
Of silver the best,
Goldsmiths shall beat you
A great golden ring,
Peacocks shall bow to you,
Little boys sing.
Oh, and sweet girls will
Festoon you with may,
Time, you old gipsy,
Why hasten away?
Last week in Babylon,
Last night in Rome,
Morning, and in the crush
Under Paul's dome;
Under Paul's dial
You tighten your rein--
Only a moment,
And off once again;
Off to some city
Now blind in the womb,
Off to another
Ere that's in the tomb.

Time, you old gipsy man,
Will you not stay,
Put up your caravan
Just for one day ?

[Florestan]

William Henry Davies

The Inquest

I took my oath I would inquire,
Without affection, hate, or wrath,
Into the death of Ada Wright --
So help me God! I took that oath.

When I went out to see the corpse,
The four months' babe that died so young,
I judged it was seven pounds in weight,
And little more than one foot long.

One eye, that had a yellow lid,
Was shut -- so was the mouth, that smiled;
The left eye open, shining bright --
It seemed a knowing little child.

For as I looked at that one eye,
It seemed to laugh, and say with glee:
'What caused my death you'll never know --
Perhaps my mother murdered me.'

When I went into court again,
To hear the mother's evidence --
It was a love-child, she explained.
And smiled, for our intelligence.

'Now, Gentlemen of the Jury,' said
The coroner -- 'this woman's child
By misadventure met its death.'
'Aye, aye,' said we. The mother smiled.

And I could see that child's one eye
Which seemed to laugh, and say with glee:
'What caused my death you'll never know --
Perhaps my mother murdered me.'

[Florestan]

Siegfried Sassoon

Strangeness of Heart

When I have lost the power to feel the pang
Which first I felt in childhood when I woke
And heard the unheeding garden bird who sang
Strangeness of heart for me while morning broke;
Or when in latening twilight sure with spring,
Pausing on homeward paths along the wood,
No sadness thrills my thought while thrushes sing,
And I'm no more the listening child who stood
So many sunsets past and could not say
What wandering voices called from far away:
When I have lost those simple spells that stirred
My being with an untranslated song,
Let me go home for ever; I shall have heard
Death; I shall know that I have lived too long.

[North Star]

Tomas Tranströmer

Allegro

I play Haydn after a black day
and feel a simple warmth in my hands.

The keys are willing. Soft hammers strike.
The resonance green, lively, and calm.

The music says freedom exists
and someone doesn't pay the emperor tax.

I push down my hands in my Haydnpockets
and imitate a person looking on world calmly.

I hoist the Haydnflag––it signifies:
"We don't give in. But want peace."

The music is a glass-house on the slope
where the stones fly, the stones roll.

And the stones roll right through
but each pane stays whole.

[Florestan]

Tomas Tranströmer

Allegro

I play Haydn after a black day
and feel a simple warmth in my hands.

The keys are willing. Soft hammers strike.
The resonance green, lively, and calm.

The music says freedom exists
and someone doesn't pay the emperor tax.

I push down my hands in my Haydnpockets
and imitate a person looking on world calmly.

I hoist the Haydnflag––it signifies:
"We don't give in. But want peace."

The music is a glass-house on the slope
where the stones fly, the stones roll.

And the stones roll right through
but each pane stays whole.

Sounds more like Gandhi than Haydn. 

[North Star]

Something I wrote a while ago, the first line is a quotation from Plath's Resolve.

Mourners at an empty throne
No glory descends
When a life ends
- It is but a loan.

[XB-70 Valkyrie]

There are two kinds of people: those who try to win, and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.

Skills that transfer: Street fights, off-path hiking, seduction, and broad erudition. Skills that don't: school, sports, games, laboratory--what's reduced and organized

The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty first will be that of the technological one.

Sports feminize men and masculinize women.

- Nassim Taleb

[Florestan]

John Masefield

LAUGH AND BE MERRY

Laugh and be merry, remember, better the world with a song,
Better the world with a blow in the teeth of a wrong.
Laugh, for the time is brief, a thread the length of a span.
Laugh and be proud to belong to the old proud pageant of man.

Laugh and be merry: remember, in olden time.
God made Heaven and Earth for joy He took in a rhyme,
Made them, and filled them full with the strong red wine of His mirth
The splendid joy of the stars: the joy of the earth.

So we must laugh and drink from the deep blue cup of the sky,
Join the jubilant song of the great stars sweeping by,
Laugh, and battle, and work, and drink of the wine outpoured
In the dear green earth, the sign of the joy of the Lord.

Laugh and be merry together, like brothers akin,
Guesting awhile in the rooms of a beautiful inn,
Glad till the dancing stops, and the lilt of the music ends.
Laugh till the game is played; and be you merry, my friends.

ROADWAYS

One road leads to London,
One road leads to Wales,
My road leads me seawards
To the white dipping sails.

One road leads to the river,
And it goes singing slow;
My road leads to shipping,
Where the bronzed sailors go.

Leads me, lures me, calls me
To salt green tossing sea;
A road without earth's road-dust
Is the right road for me.

A wet road heaving, shining,
And wild with seagull's cries,
A mad salt sea-wind blowing
The salt spray in my eyes.

My road calls me, lures me
West, east, south, and north;
Most roads lead men homewards,
My road leads me forth.

To add more miles to the tally
Of grey miles left behind,
In quest of that one beauty
God put me here to find.

A WANDERER´S SONG

A wind's in the heart of me, a fire's in my heels,
I am tired of brick and stone and rumbling wagon-wheels;
I hunger for the sea's edge, the limit of the land,
Where the wild old Atlantic is shouting on the sand.

Oh I'll be going, leaving the noises of the street,
To where a lifting foresail-foot is yanking at the sheet;
To a windy, tossing anchorage where yawls and ketches ride,
Oh I'll be going, going, until I meet the tide.

And first I'll hear the sea-wind, the mewing of the gulls,
The clucking, sucking of the sea about the rusty hulls,
The songs at the capstan at the hooker warping out,
And then the heart of me'll know I'm there or thereabout.

Oh I am sick of brick and stone, the heart of me is sick,
For windy green, unquiet sea, the realm of Moby Dick;
And I'll be going, going, from the roaring of the wheels,
For a wind's in the heart of me, a fire's in my heels.

BEAUTY

I have seen dawn and sunset on moors and windy hills
Coming in solemn beauty like slow old tunes of Spain:
I have seen the lady April bringing the daffodils,
Bringing the springing grass and the soft warm April rain.

I have heard the song of the blossoms and the old chant of the sea,
And seen strange lands from under the arched white sails of ships;
But the loveliest thing of beauty God ever has shown to me,
Are her voice, and her hair, and eyes, and the dear red curve of her lips.

THE WORD

My friend, my bonny friend, when we are old,
And hand in hand go tottering down the hill,
May we be rich in love's refined gold,
May love's gold coin be current with us still.

May love be sweeter for the vanished days,
And your most perfect beauty still as dear
As when your troubled singer stood at gaze
In that dear March of a most sacred year.

May what we are be all we might have been
And that potential, perfect, O my friend,
And may there still be many sheafs to glean
In our love's acre, comrade, till the end.

And may we find when ended is the page
Death but a tavern on our pilgrimage.