Lo, even as I passed beside the boothOf roses, and beheld them brightly twineTo damask heights, taking them as a signOf my own self still unconcerned with truth;Even as I held up in hands uncouthAnd drained with joy the golden-bodied wine,Deeming it half-unworthy, half divine,From out the sweet-rimmed goblet of my youth.Even in that pure hour I heard the toneOf grievous music stir in memory,Telling me of the time already flownFrom my first youth. It sounded like the riseOf distant echo from dead melody,Soft as a song heard far in Paradise.
The above is, of course, a sonnet. From one of my favorite poets, Wallace Stevens, who just called it "Sonnet." I guess he didn't write that many that he wanted to share with the world. But this one is worth sharing. He did an excellent job crafting something that has the elegance of formal poetry but still has the feel of conversational speech. On, of course, a change of perspective and of philosophy.
2 comments:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
I agree '14' is a beautiful sonnet. It reminded me of Shakespeare's 18th which is a bit more formal and not so conversational, but perhaps it was in a form of English spoken by people in Elizabethan times. Who knows?
I like Wallace Stevens too - when you posted his 'Snow Man' poem some time ago I saved it to read again. From what I've been given to understand he was, if not an athiest, at least convinced the time of religion was over and nature is the final resting place. I haven't studied him at all but I imagine he was ready for anything, including if there is an after.
Shakespeare's sonnet--like his sonnets in general--deserves a lot of praise. He manages to fit some surprising stuff in there. The poem praises the object of his affections, of course. But also he stands back and praises the power of the poem. He knew what verse could do.
What was everyday speech like in Elizabethan England? It's hard to tell. Most people were illiterate, so in some ways written English from the time is unrepresentative by nature. The formality of the language may also have something to do with the sonnet being a relatively new introduction to England, having first arisen in Italian.
That's a pretty good summation of much of Stevens's philosophy as I understand it. My impression of him is that he was satisfied to let people like Eliot and Pound garner most of the attention as Modernist poets as he made his big little poems in relative isolation.
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