Hail, poetry! thou heav'n born maid...
I thought I would post the answers to the poetry meme I posted some time ago...
- Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run
Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress. The corresponding first lines are: "Had we but world enough and time/This coyness, Lady, were no crime".
- On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye
... that clothe the wold and meet the sky, and through the field the road runs by
To many tower'd Camelot. Etc etc. Tennyson, of course - Lady of Shalott. The last line is "God in his mercy lend her grace - The Lady of Shalott".
- Out of the ash I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air
Sylvia Plath, Lady Lazarus. "I have done it again./One year in every ten/I manage it..."
- And when I sue
God for myself, he hears that name of thine
And sees within my eyes the tears of two.
Just because I like this one so much, I'm going to put the whole of it here. If you clicked on the LJ-cut, well, you knew what to expect...
Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand
Henceforward in thy shadow. Nevermore,
Alone upon the threshold of my door
Of individual life, I shall command
The uses of my soul, or lift my hand
Serenely in the sunlight as before
Without the sense of that which I forbore -
Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine
With pulses that beat double. What I do
And what I dream include thee, as the wine
Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue
God for myself, he hears that name of thine
And sees within my eyes the tears of two.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnet #5 from the Portugese.
- Let us go then, you and I
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table
TS Eliot is so the greatest poet of all time... The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, of course. "We have lingered in the chambers of the sea/By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown/Till human voices wake us, and we drown."
- Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad
Christina Rossetti, Remember - one of the most famous sonnets ever, next to number 9 below. "Remember me when I am gone away/Gone far away into the silent land..."
- So she went into the garden
To pick a cabbage leaf, to make an apple pie
The Great Panjandrum, by Samuel Foote. Apologies to all - I think it should actually be "To cut a cabbage leaf"! If you don't know this poem, you should read it - it is wonderfully random. The story is that an actor friend of Foote's claimed that he could memorise any passage at first reading, so Foote composed this nonsense to test his claim. Obviously my memory is not nearly as good, since I have read it numerous times and still managed to get it wrong... "And they all fell to playing the game of catch-as-catch-can, till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots."
- I met a traveller from an antique land
Ozymandias, by Mr PB Shelley. Yet another great sonnet. I see a theme here! "Nothing beside remains. Round the decay/Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare/The lone and level sands stretch far away."
- So long as men can breathe, and eyes can see
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee
Shakespeare, of course - "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" Yes, I have a definite predilection for sonnets!
- What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
William Blake, "Tyger tyger burning bright..." Though when I see tigers at the zoo, the more appropriate line is "Tyger tyger sleeping sound/Sprawled upon the grassy ground..."