07 3 / 2012
The Attempt
I love your brown curls, black in rain, my colleen,
I love your grey eyes, by this verdant shore
Two Derravaraghs to plunge into and drown me,
Hold not those lakes of light so near me more.
My hand lies yellow and hairy in your pink hand,
Fragilis rubra of the bramble flower,
Yet soft and thornless, cool and as caressing
As grasses bending heavy with a shower.
See how the clouds twist over in the twilight,
See how the gale is ruffling up the lake;
Lie still for ever on this little peninsula,
Heart beat and heart beat steady till we wake.
Hear how the beech trees roar above Glencara,
See how the fungus circles in the shade,
Roar trees and moan, you gliding royal daughters,
Circle us with poison, we are not afraid.
Gothic on Gothic my abbey soars around me,
I’ve walks and avenues emerald from rain,
Plentiful timber in a lake reflected,
And creamy meadowsweet scenting my demesne.
Press to your cheeks my hand so hot and wasted,
Smooth with my fingers the freckles of your frown,
Take you my abbey, it is yours for always,
I am so full of love that I shall drown.
I lie by the lake water
And you, Cloncurry, not near,
I live in a girl’s answer,
You, in a bawd’s fear.
— John Betjeman
29 12 / 2011
The Licorice Fields at Pontefract
In the licorice fields at Pontefract
My love and I did meet
And many a burdened licorice bush
Was blooming round our feet;
Red hair she had and golden skin,
Her sulky lips were shaped for sin,
Her sturdy legs were flannel-slack’d
The strongest legs in Pontefract.
The light and dangling licorice flowers
Gave off the sweetest smells;
From various black Victorian towers
The Sunday evening bells
Came pealing over dales and hills
And tanneries and silent mills
And lowly streets where country stops
And little shuttered corner shops.
She cast her blazing eyes on me
And plucked a licorice leaf;
I was her captive slave and she
My red-haired robber chief.
Oh love! for love I could not speak,
It left me winded, wilting, weak,
And held in brown arms strong and bare
And wound with flaming ropes of hair.
-John Betjeman
03 11 / 2011
He thought how much he liked her
While he was being given his change, Dixon studied the barmaid, who was large and very dark with a narrow upper lip and rather close-set eyes. He thought how much he liked her and had in common with her, and how much she’d like and have in common with him if she only knew him.
— Kingsley Amis, from Lucky Jim
16 10 / 2011
From A College Window
The glimmer of the limes, sun-heavy, sleeping,
Goes trembling past me up the College wall.
Below, the lawn, in soft blue shade is keeping,
The daisy-froth quiescent, softly in thrall.
Beyond the leaves that overhang the street,
Along the flagged, clean pavement summer-white,
Passes the world with shadows at their feet
Going left and right.
Remote, although I hear the beggar’s cough,
See the woman’s twinkling fingers tend him a coin,
I sit absolved, assured I am better off
Beyond a world I never want to join.
D.H. Lawrence
30 9 / 2011
Picking gooseberries, she said.
“She lay stretched out on the floorboards with her hands under her head and her eyes closed. Sun blazing down, bit of a breeze, water nice and lively. I noticed a scratch on her thigh and asked her how she came by it. Picking gooseberries, she said. I said again I thought it was hopeless and no good going on, and she agreed, without opening her eyes. I asked her to look at me and after a few moments — after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because of the glare. I bent over her to get them in the shadow and they opened. Let me in. We drifted in among the flags and stuck. The way they went down, sighing, before the stem! I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.”
— Samuel Beckett, from Krapp’s Last Tape
22 9 / 2011
Furious Horsemen
Although Atlas is not a machine built to handle textual materials, he uses the dead hours of the night to get it to print out thousands of lines in the style of Pablo Neruda, using as a lexicon a list of the most powerful words in The Heights of Macchu Picchu, in Nathaniel Tarn’s translation. He brings the thick wad of paper back to the Royal Hotel and pores over it. ‘The nostalgia of teapots.’ ‘The ardour of shutters.’ ‘Furious horsemen.’ If he cannot, for the present, write poetry that comes from the heart, if his heart is not in the right state to generate poetry of its own, can he at least string together pseudo-poems made up of phrases generated by a machine, and thus, by going through the motions of writing, learn again to write?
— J.M. Coetzee, from Youth
06 9 / 2011
"His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul."
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24 8 / 2011
Why Did I Dream Of You Last Night
Why did I dream of you last night?
Now morning is pushing back hair with grey light
Memories strike home, like slaps in the face;
Raised on elbow, I stare at the pale fog
beyond the window.
So many things I had thought forgotten
Return to my mind with stranger pain:
- Like letters that arrive addressed to someone
Who left the house so many years ago.
Philip Larkin
22 8 / 2011
"Wallace Stevens is beyond fathoming, he is so strange; it is as if he had a morbid secret he would rather perish than disclose."
15 8 / 2011
"W. is very excitable: he has more passion about philosophy than I have; his avalanches make mine seem mere snowballs. He has the pure intellectual passion in the highest degree; it makes me love him. His disposition is that of an artist, intuitive and moody. He says every morning he begins his work with hope, and every evening he ends in despair — he has just the sort of rage when he can’t understand things as I have."
