/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.3350535]

Pretentious c/lit/oris suckers, what is your favourite poem?

[Anonymous No.3350543]

"The Hollow Men"

- T.S. Eliot

[Anonymous No.3350551]

"classic water" by david berman

etheridge knight's haiku are pretty bitchin too

[Anonymous No.3350554]

>>3350551

Post it.

[Anonymous No.3350561]

I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

[Anonymous No.3350567]

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

[Anonymous No.3350568]

>>3350554

i tried but the system thought the link was spam?

google it, it should be the first result

[Anonymous No.3350574]

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

[Anonymous No.3350576]

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

[Anonymous No.3350585]

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain etc

[Anonymous No.3350587]

[This part will be fucked because italics can't be used, nor can indentations.]

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

[Anonymous No.3350591]

>>3350587

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

[Anonymous No.3350593]

>>3350568

You copy/paste the poem, friend.

[Anonymous No.3350598]

>>3350593

oh

k 1 sec

[Anonymous No.3350602]

>>3350587

Save this image and post it. This is necessary. Of all people, /lit/ anons should understand the necessity of enabling italics.

[Anonymous No.3350604]

The Illiad
/Thread

[Anonymous No.3350608]

>>3350598

Classic Water - David Berman.

I remember Kitty saying we shared a deep longing for
the consolation prize, laughing as we rinsed the stagecoach.

I remember the night we camped out
and I heard her whisper
"think of me as a place" from her sleeping bag
with the centaur print.

I remember being in her father's basement workshop
when we picked up an unknown man sobbing over the shortwave radio

and the night we got so high we convinced ourselves
that the road was a hologram projected by the headlight beams.

I remember how she would always get everyone to vote
on what we should do next and the time she said
"all water is classic water" and shyly turned her face away.

At volleyball games her parents sat in the bleachers
like ambassadors from Indiana in all their midwestern schmaltz.

She was destroyed when they were busted for operating
a private judicial system within U.S. borders.


Sometimes I'm awakened in the middle of the night
by the clatter of a room service cart and I think back on Kitty.

Those summer evenings by the government lake,
talking about the paradox of multiple Santas
or how it felt to have your heart broken.


I still get a hollow feeling on Labor Day when the summer ends

and I remember how I would always refer to her boyfriends
as what's-his-face, which was wrong of me and I'd like
to apologize to those guys right now, wherever they are:

No one deserves to be called what's-his-face.

[Anonymous No.3350620]

Dans l'interminable
Ennui de la plaine
La neige incertaine
Luit comme du sable.

Le ciel est de cuivre
Sans lueur aucune.
On croirait voir vivre
Et mourir la lune.

Comme des nuées
Flottent gris les chênes
Des forêts prochaines
Parmi les buées.

Le ciel est de cuivre
Sans lueur aucune.
On croirait voir vivre
Et mourir la lune.

Corneille poussive
Et vous, les loups maigres,
Par ces bises aigres
Quoi donc vous arrive ?

Dans l'interminable
Ennui de la plaine
La neige incertaine
Luit comme du sable.

Ariettes oubliées VIII - Verlaine

[Anonymous No.3350626]

>>3350604

>Claiming a definitive answer to a subjective enquiry
>Either one cannot be definitive - making your '/thread' false - or we can all be definitive on this matter - making your '/thread' tautological

Either way, you don't read Greek so you're living a lie.

[Anonymous No.3350631]

>>3350626

And I love you, though I think you're being silly.

[Anonymous No.3350640]

>>3350626
Tautological Logic for the win, yo.
Circular Reasoning is the Best, because the best reasoning is circular reasoning.

Don't lose your cheese spread every time you see someone on the internet strongly expressing a conviction.

You'll have no cheese spread left for your crackers,

And crackers need cheese spread,

Definitively.

[Anonymous No.3350667]

>>3350640

Heck, I retract what I said. I realised it was dumb shortly after I posted it. It's a great poem. I point you toward my later comment, the former half of which I greatly emphasise in light of your cheese spread analogy.

>>3350631

[Anonymous No.3350672]

>>3350626
>expecting modest answers from people responding to a thread that opens by calling upon pretentious people.

Pretentious people are Pretentious,
Redundant Tautologies are Redundant

[Anonymous No.3350719]

>>3350667
It's okay, no feathers were ruffled, I was only being brief for the sake of brevity,

It would have been more thorough for me to express that the Illiad is an under-appreciated masterpiece that, while acknowledged as a literary work of art, is not recognized enough for it's poetic value.
The Epic Poem and even Sonnets have taken a back seat to shallower, more sense memory poetry, which are well worth acclaim, but which are overshadowing works that adhere to a more rigid framework and require more ambition.
The Illiad leads the charge in defense of the more ambitious poetry, It stands as a monument saying to ephemeral "poetry magnets" free-and-blank verse fans the pure power that poetry is capable of.

But "The Illiad /Thread" seemed like a more poetic way of saying that.

[Anonymous No.3351031]

The Fugitive by Fernando Pessoa

[Anonymous No.3351035]

Richard Cory all day erry day

[Anonymous No.3351170]

It might be "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" by Wallace Stevens. I can recite the whole thing from memory, for some reason.

[Franz Liszt !!ixFboNvY7Y1 No.3351195]

On the stiff twig up there
Hunches a wet black rook
Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain.
I do not expect a miracle
Or an accident

To set the sight on fire
In my eye, not seek
Any more in the desultory weather some design,
But let spotted leaves fall as they fall,
Without ceremony, or portent.

Although, I admit, I desire,
Occasionally, some backtalk
From the mute sky, I can't honestly complain:
A certain minor light may still
Leap incandescent

Out of the kitchen table or chair
As if a celestial burning took
Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then ---
Thus hallowing an interval
Otherwise inconsequent

By bestowing largesse, honor,
One might say love. At any rate, I now walk
Wary (for it could happen
Even in this dull, ruinous landscape); sceptical,
Yet politic; ignorant

Of whatever angel may choose to flare
Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook
Ordering its black feathers can so shine
As to seize my senses, haul
My eyelids up, and grant

A brief respite from fear
Of total neutrality. With luck,
Trekking stubborn through this season
Of fatigue, I shall
Patch together a content

Of sorts. Miracles occur,
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again,
The long wait for the angel.
For that rare, random descent.

[Matsuo Basho No.3351202]

Fleas and lice-
a horse pissing
by my pillow

[Anonymous No.3351219]

Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

[Anonymous No.3351458]

Continuities

Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form—no object of the world.
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing;
Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain.
Ample are time and space—ample the fields of Nature.
The body, sluggish, aged, cold—the embers left from earlier fires,
The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again;
The sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual;
To frozen clods ever the spring's invisible law returns,
With grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn.

[Anonymous No.3351476]

Fern Hill Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

[Anonymous No.3351478]

>>3351476
And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace,

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying,
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

- dylan thomas. Sorry for the formatting,

[Anonymous No.3351481]

Prufrock. Yeah, I know.

[Anonymous No.3351482]

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air....

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark, or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
- Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

[Cammy !!50j7tuCXdh0 No.3351485]

Hortense by Rimbaud or something by Baudelair or Whitman.

[Anonymous No.3351508]

"Gnome" by Samuel Beckett

Spend the years of learning squandering
Courage for the years of wandering
Through a world politely turning
From the loutishness of learning

[Oscar Wilde No.3351512]

THE Gods are dead: no longer do we bring
To grey-eyed Pallas crowns of olive-leaves!
Demeter’s child no more hath tithe of sheaves,
And in the noon the careless shepherds sing,
For Pan is dead, and all the wantoning 5
By secret glade and devious haunt is o’er:
Young Hylas seeks the water-springs no more;
Great Pan is dead, and Mary’s Son is King.

And yet—perchance in this sea-trancèd isle,
Chewing the bitter fruit of memory, 10
Some God lies hidden in the asphodel.
Ah Love! if such there be then it were well
For us to fly his anger: nay, but see
The leaves are stirring: let us watch a-while.

[Anonymous No.3351547]

"Eleg?a" de Miguel Hern?ndez.

I think it's from "El rayo que no cesa", but I don't remember pretty well. I also enjoy Kavafis work, and Pessoa's poetry. They are my favourite authors in the genre, I think.

[Anonymous No.3351555]

Wir sind ganz angstallein,
haben nur aneinander Halt,
jedes Wort wird wie ein Wald
vor unserm Wandern sein.
Unser Wille ist nur der Wind,
der uns drängt und dreht;
weil wir selber die Sehnsucht sind,
die in Blüten steht.
- Rilke

(German /lit/izen, don't know if englisch version exists)

[Anonymous No.3351559]

The little sparrows

hop ingenuously

about the pavement

quarreling

with sharp voices

over those things

that interest them.

But we who are wiser

shut ourselves in

on either hand

and no one knows

whether we think good

or evil.


Meanwhile,

the old man who goes about

gathering dog-lime

walks in the gutter

without looking up

and his tread

is more majestic than

that of the Episcopal minister

approaching the pulpit

of a Sunday.

These things

astonish me beyond words.

[Anonymous No.3352179]

Yeats' The Second Coming. Maybe it's not a very original choice, but goddamn it's fucking incredible.


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.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

[Anonymous No.3352196]

Dream Song 51, by John Berryman

Our wounds to time, from all the other times,
sea-times slow, the times of galaxies
fleeing, the dwarfs' dead times,
lessen so little that if here in his crude rimes
Henry them mentions, do not hold it, please,
for a putting of man down.

Ol' Marster, being bound you do your best
versus we coons, spare now a cagey John
a whilom bits that whip:
who'll tell your fortune, when you have confessed
whose & whose woundings—against the innocent stars
& remorseless seas—

—Are you radioactive, pal? —Pal, radioactive.
—Has you the night sweats & the day sweats, pal?
—Pal, I do.
—Did your gal leave you? —What do you think, pal?
—Is that thing on the front of your head what it seems to be, pal?
—Yes, pal.

[Anonymous No.3352520]

The poor nigger on the wall.
Look at him.
Look at the poor nigger.
Look at the poor nigger… on… the… wall.
Fuck him… Fuck the nigger on the wall…
Black man… is… de… debil?

>my sense of social injustice is still intact

[Anonymous No.3352536]

We don't see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August
when the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay
of this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchard
when suddenly the wind cools and for a moment
you get a whiff of salt, and in that moment you can almost
believe something is waiting beyond the Pacheco Pass,
something massive, irrational, and so powerful even
the mountains that rise east of here have no word for it.

You probably think I'm nuts saying the mountains
have no word for ocean, but if you live here
you begin to believe they know everything.
They maintain that huge silence we think of as divine,
a silence that grows in autumn when snow falls
slowly between the pines and the wind dies
to less than a whisper and you can barely catch
your breath because you're thrilled and terrified.

You have to remember this isn't your land.
It belongs to no one, like the sea you once lived beside
and thought was yours. Remember the small boats
that bobbed out as the waves rode in, and the men
who carved a living from it only to find themselves
carved down to nothing. Now you say this is home,
so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust,
wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.


"Our Valley" by Philip Levine

[AnalCrust !m9jxTLhLcw No.3352547]

http://spanishpoems.blogspot.com.es/2006/07/jos-de-espronceda-la-desesperacin.html
It's in Spanish, but there's the translated version at the end.

[Anonymous No.3352553]

WHAT is a woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre.
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

She has no house to lay a guest in
But one chill bed for all to rest in,
That the pale suns and the stray bergs nest in.

She has no strong white arms to fold you,
But the ten-times-fingering weed to hold you
Out on the rocks where the tide has rolled you.

Yet, when the signs of summer thicken,
And the ice breaks, and the birch-buds quicken,
Yearly you turn from our side, and sicken—

Sicken again for the shouts and the slaughters.
You steal away to the lapping waters,
And look at your ship in her winter-quarters.

You forget our mirth, and talk at the tables,
The kine in the shed and the horse in the stables
To pitch her sides and go over her cables.

Then you drive out where the storm-clouds swallow,
And the sound of your oar-blades, falling hollow,
Is all we have left through the months to follow.

Ah, what is Woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

[Anonymous No.3353238]

>>3351481

Do I dare disturb the universe?

Fuck yeah.