Profundity, Poetry and Prose (No Spam)

[dragon wench]

Inspired by Tricky's music thread I have decided to do something similar with regard to poetry, prose and fiction.

Have you ever read something that leaves you breathless? Poems or prose that resonate so deeply within the soul you almost forget to breathe?

Here is the place to share those experiences.
Much like the music thread, it is not about simply listing books, poems etc. that you like
However, do feel free to quote sections of books or post poems, and, describe what they make you feel, the emotions or sensations they trigger.



To begin, here is a small piece from Peter Matthiessen's book In Search of the Snow Leopard.

If the snow leopard should manifest itself, then I am ready to see the snow leopard. If not, then somehow (and I don’t understand this instinct, even now) I am not ready to perceive it, in the same way that I am not ready to resolve my koan; and in the not-seeing, I am content. I think I must be disappointed, having come so far, and yet I do not feel that way. I am disappointed, and also, I am not disappointed. That the snow leopard is, that it is there, that its frosty eyes watch us from the mountain—that is enough.

For me, this encapsulates so much..
The acceptance that we may not always find what we seek... The understanding that we still garner knowledge, even if we do not find exactly what we are looking for... The realisation that perhaps we must be ready to perceive before we are able to see...

[Avane]

The women in Shakespeare's plays were in many cases, truely amazing. In an age in which women were not [acknowledged] participants in the public sphere, other than our very own Fairie Queen, QEI [who really got there by default, daddy couldn't have a healthy boy...]. It is surprising that many of his female characters were as strong and as central to the direction of his plots as they were.
An outstanding example is Lady Macbeth. She exhibits many of what is considered to be unfeminine, male characteristics in her single-mindedness and determination, and let's face it blood-thirsty-ness.
In a play written 400 years ago, Lady Macbeth's disgust at her husband's evasiveness and indecision in their pact to kill the king Duncan and her visceral declaration of her feelings on the subject, is written with a degree of imagery that is yes, breathtaking. Act 2 Scene 1.
Lady Macbeth: "What beast was't then
That made you break this enterprise with me?
When you durst do it, then you were a man:
And to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man.
...I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn
As you have done to this."
It is the complexity and fertile imagery of Shakespeare's writing that leaves me awed and amazed.

[kathycf]

Someone at another forum I belong to had the last lines of William Blake's The Garden of Love as their signature. It really caught my eye, and I read the entire poem. I was not very familiar with Blake's poetry, although I quite like his artwork. The only other poem I had read of his was The Tiger.

The Garden of Love

II went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.

I think at first reading, the poem can be interpreted as being anti-religious, (and indeed, I believe that is how Blake meant it to be read) although that is not what strikes me about it. I particularly like the line "And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door". I think it resonates with me because of my own personal history.

*edit*

I found this page, that has a few illustrations to go with the poem.

William Blake's "The Garden of Love"

[dragon wench]

Speak To Us Of Love From “The Prophet”

Then said Almitra, Speak to us of Love.

And he raised his head and looked upon the people, and there fell a stillness upon them. And with a great voice he said: When love beckons to you, follow him, Though his ways are hard and steep. And when his wings enfold you yield to him, Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you. And when he speaks to you believe in him, Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.

For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning. Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun, So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth. Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself. He threshes you to make you naked. He sifts you to free you from your husks. He grinds you to whiteness. He kneads you until you are pliant; And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God's sacred feast.

All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life's heart.

But if in your fear you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure, Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing-floor, Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.

Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself. Love possesses not nor would it be possessed; For love is sufficient unto love.

When you love you should not say, "God is in my heart," but rather, "I am in the heart of God." And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.

Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself. But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:

To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.

To know the pain of too much tenderness.

To be wounded by your own understanding of love;

And to bleed willingly and joyfully.

To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;

To rest at the noon hour and meditate love's ecstasy;

To return home at eventide with gratitude;

And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.

~ By Kahlil Gilbran ~

For me... this is one of the best pieces ever written to express the joys and agonies of the human heart.... It articulates so well how this thing we call love demands... our complete surrender... It conveys so clearly that we must experience raw visceral pain alongside those depths of joy that can only come from a profound connection with another.

[kathycf]

I like your post, DW, but I am afraid it is quite hard for me to read. The text is rather dark and against a dark background there isn't enough contrast. I was able to read it easier by highlighting it with my mouse. Just an aside, not meant to be spammy.

This is just beautiful.

To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.

To know the pain of too much tenderness.

To be wounded by your own understanding of love;

And to bleed willingly and joyfully.

To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;

To rest at the noon hour and meditate love's ecstasy;

To return home at eventide with gratitude;

And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.

Heh heh, here is a little excerpt from King Lear to tie in some themes in this thread. Shakespeare, love, and "eyesight" ...

GONERIL
Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter;
Dearer than eye-sight, space, and liberty;
Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare;
No less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honour;
As much as child e'er loved, or father found [friend];
A love that makes breath poor, and speech unable;
Beyond all manner of so much I love you.

CORDELIA
[Aside] What shall Cordelia speak?
Love, and be silent.

LEAR
Of all these bounds, even from this line to this,
With shadowy [shady] forests and with champains rich'd,
With plenteous rivers and wide-skirted meads,
We make thee lady: to thine and Albany's issue
Be this perpetual. What says our second daughter,
Our dearest Regan, wife to Cornwall? Speak.

REGAN
Sir, I am made
Of the self [selfsame] mettle as my sister,
And prize me at her worth. In my true heart
I find she names my very deed of love;
Only she comes too short: that I profess
Myself an enemy to all other joys,
Which the most precious square of sense possesses;
And find I am alone felicitate
In your dear highness' love.

CORDELIA
[Aside] Then poor Cordelia!
And yet not so; since, I am sure, my love's
More ponderous [richer] than my tongue.

True devotion over looked because it was not "flashy" or "well spoken". Although the love in this quote is obviously that of a child for a parent, I wonder how many people's feelings are overlooked because they don't express themselves, or don't express themselves "flashily" enough. I think this is truly an example of style over substance.

[Avane]

Dragon Wench as your post: hope you will agree that profundity, poetry and prose in childhood is equally relevant. When I was very, very small and at primary school in Scotland we were first introduced to poetry that was thought to be appropriate to small children. So for me Hillaire Belloc's writing, does have that resonance that moment of stopping and thinking 'what'? This is something that I never experienced before. Poetry, hey I'm, only 5... As I would like to think that childhood experiences are equal to adult ones, I would also like to add Edgar Allan Poe's The Bells, but only the first part of it, as it is v. long. The word tintinnabulation has probably been my favourite word since I first heard it. I look out for it everywhere, but am usually disappointed... But for me, the awful Rebecca is a worthwhile study please read with care all small girls, as she was an especial warning to me at ages 5/6.

Rebecca
Hilaire Belloc

Who Slammed Doors For Fun And Perished Miserably

A trick that everyone abhors
In little girls is slamming doors.
A wealthy banker’s little daughter
Who lived in Palace Green, Bayswater
(By name Rebecca Offendort),
Was given to this furious sport.

She would deliberately go
And slam the door like billy-o!
To make her uncle Jacob start.
She was not really bad at heart,
But only rather rude and wild;
She was an aggravating child…

It happened that a marble bust
Of Abraham was standing just
Above the door this little lamb
Had carefully prepared to slam,
And down it came! It knocked her flat!
It laid her out! She looked like that.

Her funeral sermon (which was long
And followed by a sacred song)
Mentioned her virtues, it is true,
But dwelt upon her vices too,
And showed the deadful end of one
Who goes and slams the door for fun.

The children who were brought to hear
The awful tale from far and near
Were much impressed, and inly swore
They never more would slam the door,
— As often they had done before.
Online text © 1998-2007 Poetry X. All rights reserved.
From Cautionary Tales for Children | 1920

@Edgar Allan Poe
The Bells

With my favourite word that still make me stop and savour tintinnabulation

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.

[kathycf]

Avane, that Rebecca story is wonderful!

It reminds me a little bit of The Gashlycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey. I have always loved his illustrations the best, but the stories are good too. He is just so macabre, funny and...I don't know. Hard to explain. I always found it very appealing.

At any rate, Gashlycrumb Tinies is about a group of 26 children (for each letter of the alphabet) who all come to a "bad end". There really isn't a moral lesson with it, it just seems they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

P is for Prue trampled flat in a brawl.

Q is for Quentin who sank on a mire.

You can read the whole story and see the illustrations here:

Edward Gorey

[Avane]

[IA is for Amy who fell down the stairs...B is for Basil assaulted by Bears...[/i]love it will read all tomorrow, def a 'Gorey' read... Glad you liked Rebecca, awful child... Gashlycrumb Tinies, 26 of them excellent!!

[kathycf]

I don't care much for stream of consciousness writing, nor am I a huge fan of James Joyce...but. I still have my copy of Ulysses because:
a.) I am too cheap to get rid of such an expensive book.
b.) The final chaper "Penelope" or Molly Bloom's soliloquy is just beautifully written and makes the whole book worth keeping in my opinion. Molly was a sensual, sexual woman in a time when women were not acknowledged to be so. Molly has been unfaithful (unlike Penelope) but she re-discovers her love for her husband. This part recalls when Leopold first proposed to her.

16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharans and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down Jo me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.


Complete searchable text of Ulysses can be found here.

[Avane]

Originally Posted by kathycf

I don't care much for stream of consciousness writing, nor am I a huge fan of James Joyce...but. I still have my copy of Ulysses because:
a.) I am too cheap to get rid of such an expensive book.
b.) The final chaper "Penelope" or Molly Bloom's soliloquy is just beautifully written and makes the whole book worth keeping in my opinion. Molly was a sensual, sexual woman in a time when women were not acknowledged to be so. Molly has been unfaithful (unlike Penelope) but she re-discovers her love for her husband. This part recalls when Leopold first proposed to her.

16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all

Complete searchable text of Ulysses can be found here.

This is really spooky. I was just 'doing a deal' with someone on another website that if she watched a film that I recommended the I would submit myself to watching James Joyce's The Dead. Prior to that I had been making some unfavourable comments about Ulysses, like 'impenetrable and 'deeply depressing'. But reading this, maybe because it is out of context, it really is beautiful. Okay, doubt will ever be a Joyce fan, but he's not as bad as I had thought.

[kathycf]

In my opinion most of Joyce really is "impenetrable". I would recommend reading his short story collection The Dubliners from which the short story "The Dead" is taken. It is fairly straight forward prose, while Ulysses is stream of consciousness. I hate stream of consciousness.

While some of the passages from Ulysses are very beautiful, the book as a whole is mainly good for treating insomnia.

[dragon wench]

The final chaper "Penelope" or Molly Bloom's soliloquy is just beautifully written and makes the whole book worth keeping in my opinion. Molly was a sensual, sexual woman in a time when women were not acknowledged to be so. Molly has been unfaithful (unlike Penelope) but she re-discovers her love for her husband. This part recalls when Leopold first proposed to her.

This is one of the most beautiful pieces ever written in the English language, thank you very much for posting it.

I generally concur about Ulysses though... I find it can be a definite slog, not unlike War and Peace.

I plan to post something else later, so as to retain the spirit of the thread, but I've a splitting headache just now, so it will have to wait

[Avane]

This is from William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. I have heavily edited it to make my point about how it is we live within the Virtual World. For all of us on this site and sites that are similar there is another dimension to how we live. I think that Mr Gibson expresses it very well [any 'lack' is in my editing].

His book does not start here but for the purposes of the forum, it does. The following statement is perhaps something to think about.

It is a way now, approximately, of being at home. The forum has become one of the most consistent places in her life, like a familiar café that exists somehow outside of geography and beyond time zone.

THE WEBSITE OF DREADFUL NIGHT

Five hours: New York jet lag and she wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.

It is that flat and spectral non-hour, awash in limbic tides, brainstem stirring fitfully, flashing inappropriate reptilian demands for sex, food, sedation, all of the above, and none really an option now.

She knows, now absolutely…that Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here…Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind. That must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.

She seats herself in his high-backed workstation chair and clicks the transparent mouse. Stutter of infrared on the pale wood of the long trestle table. The browser comes up. She types Fetish:Footage:Forum, which Damien, determined to avoid contamination, will never bookmark.

The front page opens, familiar as a friend's living room. A frame-grab from #48 serves as backdrop, dim and almost monochrome, no characters in view. This is one of the sequences that generate comparisons with Tarkovsky. The cult of the footage is rife with subcults, claiming every possible influence. Truffaut, Peckinpah . . . The Peckinpah people, among the least likely, are still waiting for the guns to be drawn.

She enters the forum itself now, automatically scanning titles of the posts and names of posters in the newer threads, looking for friends, enemies, news. One thing is clear, though; no new footage has surfaced. Nothing since that beach pan, and she does not subscribe to the theory that it is Cannes in winter.

She also sees that her friend Parkaboy is back in Chicago, home from an Amtrak vacation, California, but when she opens his post she sees that he's only saying hello, literally.

She clicks Respond, declares herself CayceP.

Hi Parkaboy. nt

When she returns to the forum page, her post is there.

It is a way now, approximately, of being at home. The forum has become one of the most consistent places in her life, like a familiar café that exists somehow outside of geography and beyond time zones.

There are perhaps twenty regular posters on F:F:F, and some much larger and uncounted number of lurkers. And right now there are three people in Chat, but there's no way of knowing exactly who until you are in there, and the chat room she finds not so comforting. It's strange even with friends, like sitting in a pitch-dark cellar conversing with people at a distance of about fifteen feet. The hectic speed, and the brevity of the lines in the thread, plus the feeling that everyone is talking at once, at counter-purposes, deter her.

The Cube sighs softly and makes subliminal sounds with its drive, like a vintage sports car downshifting on a distant freeway. She tries a sip of tea substitute, but it's still too hot. A gray and indeterminate light is starting to suffuse the room in which she sits, revealing such Damieniana as has survived the recent remake.