Poetry

Li Bai is a character, under another name, in Guy Gavriel Kay's reimagining of a story from the Tang Dynasty, . I wonder how it sounds in Chinese. And looking at the Chinese characters, if I could read them, would I see something untranslatable?

Drinking Alone by Moonlight

When I first began reading through the , I noticed what seemed to be an obsession with death. Then I thought that perhaps it wasn't so much an obsession as an integral part of her life experience. I wrote a little about that in one of my first Poetry page entries.

I'm still reading Emily once in a while. Chanced on this one a couple of days ago, and remembered why we love her so.

I taste a liquor never brewed --

September 1918
Amy Lowell

This afternoon was the colour of water falling through sunlight;
The trees glittered with the tumbling of leaves;
The sidewalks shone like alleys of dropped maple leaves,
And the houses ran along them laughing out of square, open windows.
Under a tree in the park,
Two little boys, lying flat on their faces,
Were carefully gathering red berries
To put in a pasteboard box.
Some day there will be no war,

Is there a better description of a tree than uttering joyous leaves?

I SAW IN LOUISIANA A LIVE-OAK GROWING

by: Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

I SAW in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it, and the moss hung down from the branches;
Without any companion it grew there, uttering joyous leaves of dark green,

'Tis a beautiful morning in May and I'm grateful for sites like this one.

'Tis like the birthday of the world,
When earth was born in bloom;
The light is made of many dyes,
The air is all perfume:
There's crimson buds, and white and blue,
The very rainbow showers
Have turned to blossoms where they fell,
And sown the earth with flowers.

- Thomas Hood Read more about Sumer Is Icumen In

I am so haunted by moments of imperfection that I actually dream about them. Last night, for instance. A lovely dream. Rare for me. And then - and then - I screw it up. Some little thoughtless thing that I do earns me disapproval from whoever that was in the dream in whose approval I was basking. Story of my life. So this morning what should the universe send me but this delightful piece from Poetry Daily. Read more about Imperfection

From Poetry Daily this morning:

Spring View
by Du Fu (712–770)
translated by: Kathleen Graber

The country is ruined, yet the mountains and rivers remain.
In the city in spring, the grass and trees grow dense and wild.
In this sorrowful time, the flowers are wet with tears.

Job's wife, addressing God:

All You can seem to do is lose Your temper
When reason-hungry mortals ask for reasons.
Of course, in the abstract high singular
There isn't any universal reason;
And no one but a man would think there was.
You don't catch women trying to be Plato.
Still there must be lots of unsystematic
Stray scraps of palliative reason
It wouldn't hurt You to vouchsafe the faithful.

-lines 135-143

Job, addressing God:

You have it in for women, she believes.
Kipling invokes you as Lord God of Hosts.

(De rerum natura)
Book IV: Proem
Titus Lucretius Carus (c. 98-55 B.C.)
tr. William Ellery Leonard

I wander afield, thriving in sturdy thought,
Through unpathed haunts of the Pierides,
Trodden by step of none before. I joy
To come on undefiled fountains there,
To drain them deep; I joy to pluck new flowers,

THE SECOND COMING
William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.