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What Are The 10 Greatest Poems?
Poetry seems to be almost dead in the modern world. I do not think that this is true. The poets of today are songwriters.
What do you think are the ten greatest poems? My preliminary list:
- King David, Psalm 13
- King David, Psalm 22
- Kipling, The Gods of the Copybook Headings
- Henry van Dyke/Beethoven, Hymn to Joy, (musical performance with lyrics; music by Beethoven)
- Macauley, Horatius at the Bridge
- Whitman, O Captain, My Captain
- John McCrae, In Flanders Fields
- Kipling, If
- Wordsworth, She Was A Phantom Of Delight
- Trent Reznor, Hurt (musical performance by Johnny Cash, with lyrics)
It was hard to keep Kipling down to two. It was really hard to keep King David down to two.
As with my post on Great Books, I ask that you not just toss out poems that you think are good. Prioritize. I’d like to see your Top Ten list — or if you prefer, what you would add to and take off from my list.
Published in Literature
The Tyger by William Blake:
Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies. Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand, dare seize the fire? And what shoulder, & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? & what dread feet? What the hammer? what the chain, In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp, Dare its deadly terrors clasp! When the stars threw down their spears And water’d heaven with their tears: Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee? Tyger Tyger burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
I know the Superchicken song, too.
That there was a time when Mad Magazine could be confident its readers would recognize the parody …
http://www.online-literature.com/coleridge/646/
That is one long poem!
Is there a problem with shift+enter not taking as the end of poetry lines? Testing:
The boy stood on the burning deck,
His feet were covered in blisters.
He had no trousers to put on
So he had to wear his sister’s.
Seems to be working for me. Not sure what is going on with a few of the other comments, where lines are appearing all run-together.
Poems copied off other websites and pasted into Ricochet don’t always keep their enjambment.
Dante’s “Divine Comedy” anyone?
I have not read it myself, although it is on my bucket list.
I listened to Inferno and part of Purgatorio recently. I hated it. Which is why I never finished it.
It’s a mishmash of classical mythology and early 14th century Italian political score-settling. You will need footnotes longer than the work itself.
Dante really runs out of steam after the end of Inferno. I have a strong suspicion he must have already accepted an advance on the later books. Because a lot of Purgatorio consists of him maximizing word count with lengthy descriptions of his imaginary landscape.
OK I’ll bite. First though, it might be of interest to some to know that Yeats’ great and famous “The Second Coming” preceded, in Michael Robartes and the Dancer, “A Prayer for my Daughter”–the poem that generally tops my list of the greatest lyrics in the English language. I doubt the succession is accidental; my take is that Yeats hoped, after the catastrophe his weird belief-system of Rosicrucian Irishness saw around and coming, that remnant humanity, revived, preserved, conserved in the home would somehow prevail. The catastrophe continues; call it history. Link below.
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/prayer-my-daughter
Before it was available online I keyed Prayer into my Mac so I could send it to the lucky. Still a vivid memory from college first reading this: “. . .the future had come/Dancing to a frenzied drum/Out of the murderous innocence of the sea. . . .”
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The strange thing is, they show up correctly on the post preview, but not the post itself.
That they do.
I likewise got through Inferno and part of Purgatorio before I lost steam. I don’t think I could have gotten that far without rudimentary knowledge of Italian and one of those side-by-side prose translations that doesn’t try to preserve rhyme or meter. The language used to describe the imaginary landscapes is often quite beautiful, and one of the works attractions, I think.
I just sort of let my brain tune out as my eyes scanned through sections where the footnotes mentioned early 14th century Italian political score-settling.
Lyrics, of moderate length or short. No Scripture. Sort of an impossible task; problem with a great poem is, that while you’re reading it the shock of recognition you’re having tends to obliterate all the other poems you’ve ever read (not a thought new with me; somewhere Clive James expresses it better). The first three can swap places with each other anytime. And if I were currently reading Donne or Herbert . . . Greatest? Oh brother. But I’m prepared to defend the greatness of each poem on the list. And since some are doubtless unfamiliar to most readers, I feel I ought to; but a list is a list.
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Probably by tomorrow I’ll bump one or another for John Keats’ ‟Ode on a Grecian Urn” Keats’ Grecian Urn, most death-haunted and desperately hopeful of his great series.
For the unlinked poems, let me test how kind the Ricochet formatter is. I’ve entered them into my Mac to send to friends I thought should see them, so I can cut and paste. Stevens’ poem is a short one. My Saint Patrick’s Day poem.
[Oops. Post-transmission and other business, I realize my top ten is eleven poems long. Poetic license?]
Please Ricochet formatter, display Wallace Stevens’ “The Irish Cliffs of Moher” properly formatted, below. Amen.
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The Irish Cliffs of Moher
Who is my father in this world, in this house,
At the spirit’s base?
My father’s father, his father’s father, his—
Shadows like winds
Go back to a parent before thought, before speech,
At the head of the past.
They go to the cliffs of Moher rising out of the mist,
Above the real,
Rising out of present time and place, above
The wet, green grass.
This is not landscape, full of the somnambulations
Of poetry
And the sea. This is my father or, maybe,
It is as he was,
A likeness, one of the race of fathers: earth
And sea and air.
—Wallace Stevens—
Looks like “Moher” worked. Now Milosz (word limit makes me split it into more than one post), next Herbert.
ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE [1]
Standing on flagstones of the sidewalk at the entrance to Hades
Orpheus hunched in a gust of wind
That tore at his coat, rolled past in waves of fog,
Tossed the leaves of the trees. The headlights of cars
Flared and dimmed in each succeeding wave.
He stopped at the glass-paneled door, uncertain
Whether he was strong enough for that ultimate trial.
He remembered her words: “You are a good man.”
He did not quite believe it. Lyric poets
Usually have—as he knew—cold hearts.
It is like a medical condition. Perfection in art
Is given in exchange for such an affliction.
Only her love warmed him, humanized him.
When he was with her, he thought differently about himself.
He could not fail her now, when she was dead.
He pushed open the door and found himself walking in a labyrinth,
Corridors, elevators. The livid light was not light but the dark
of the earth.
Electronic dogs passed him noiselessly.
He descended many floors, a hundred, three hundred, down.
He was cold, aware that he was Nowhere.
Under thousands of frozen centuries,
On an ashy trace where generations had moldered,
In a kingdom that seemed to have no bottom and no end.
Thronging shadows surrounded him.
He recognized some of the faces.
He felt the rhythm of his blood.
He felt strongly his life with its guilt
And he was afraid to meet those to whom he had done harm.
But they had lost the ability to remember
And gave him only a glance, indifferent to all that.
For his defense he had a nine-stringed lyre.
He carried in it the music of the earth, against the abyss
That buried all of sound in silence.
He submitted to the music, yielded
To the dictation of a song, listening with rapt attention,
Become, like his lyre, its instrument.
Thus he arrived at the palace of the rulers of that land.
Persephone, in her garden of withered pear and apple trees,
Black, with naked branches and verrucose twigs,
Listened from the funereal amethyst of her throne.
He sang of the brightness of mornings and green rivers,
He sang of smoking water in the rose-colored daybreaks,
Of colors: cinnabar, carmine, burnt sienna, blue,
Of the delight of swimming in the sea under marble cliffs,
Of feasting on a terrace above the tumult of a fishing port,
Of the tastes of wine, olive oil, almonds, mustard, salt.
Of the flight of the swallow, the falcon,
Of a dignified flock of pelicans above a bay,
Of the scent of an armful of lilacs in summer rain,
Of his having composed his words always against death
And of having made no rhyme in praise of nothingness.
Orpheus and Eurydice [part 2]
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I don’t know—said the goddess—whether you loved her or not.
Yet you have come here to rescue her.
She will be returned to you. But there are conditions:
You are not permitted to speak to her, or on the journey back
To turn your head, even once, to assure yourself that she is
behind you.
And so Hermes brought forth Eurydice.
Her face no longer hers, utterly gray,
Her eyelids lowered beneath the shade of her lashes.
She stepped rigidly, directed by the hand
of her guide. Orpheus wanted so much
To call her name, to wake her from that sleep.
But he refrained, for he had accepted the conditions.
And so they set out. He first, and then, not right away,
The slap of the god’s sandals and the light patter
Of her feet fettered by her robe, as if by a shroud.
A steep climbing path phosphorized
Out of darkness like the walls of a tunnel.
He would stop and listen. But then
They stopped, too, and the echo faded.
And when he began to walk the double tapping commenced again.
Sometimes it seemed closer, sometimes more distant.
Under his faith a doubt sprang up
And entwined him like cold bindweed.
Unable to weep, he wept at the loss
Of the human hope, for the resurrection of the dead,
Because he was, now, like every other mortal.
His lyre was silent, yet he dreamed, defenseless.
He knew he must have faith and he could not have faith.
And so he would persist for a very long time,
Counting his steps in a half-wakeful torpor.
Day was breaking. Shapes of rock loomed up
Under the luminous eye of the exit from underground.
It happened as he expected. He turned his head
And behind him on the path was no one.
Sun. And sky. And in the sky white clouds.
Only now everything cried to him: Eurydice!
How will I live without you, my consoling one!
But there was a fragrant scent of herbs, the low humming of bees,
And he fell asleep with his cheek on the sun-warmed earth.
-Czeslaw Milosz-
[from Second Space]
Zbigniew Herbert’s “Apollo and Marsyas”. This is Czeslaw Milosz’s translation.
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Apollo and Marsyas
The real duel of Apollo
with Marsyas
(absolute ear
versus immense range)
takes place in the evening
when as we already know
the judges
have awarded victory to the god
bound tight to a tree
meticulously stripped of his skin
Marsyas
howls
before the howl reaches his tall ears
he reposes in the shadow of that howl
shaken by a shudder of disgust
Apollo is cleaning his instrument
only seemingly
is the voice of Marsyas
monotonous
and composed of a single vowel
Aaa
in reality
Marsyas relates
the inexhaustible wealth
of his body
bald mountains of liver
white ravines of aliment
rustling forests of lung
sweet hillocks of muscle
joints bile blood and shudders
the wintry wind of bone
over the salt of memory
shaken by a shudder of disgust
Apollo is cleaning his instrument
now to the chorus
is joined the backbone of Marsyas
in principle the same A
only deeper with the addition of rust
this is already beyond the endurance
of the god with nerves of artificial fibre
along a gravel path
hedged with box
the victor departs
wondering
whether out of Marsyas’ howling
there will not some day arise
a new kind
of art — let us say concrete
suddenly
at his feet
falls a petrified nightingale
he looks back
and sees
that the hair of the tree to which Marsyas was fastened
is white
completely
-Zbigniew Herbert-
Some lovely ones here.
Jerry, Jerry, Jerry. It’s not about the extinction of the buffalo, but about the loss of the vast herds of buffalo that used to roam the great plains.
I remember reading this when I was just 7 or 8 and experiencing for the first time the inevitable bittersweet sadness of a lost past. I knew damn well there were still buffalo around.
Somewhere on the list of ten should be The Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot. Here are a couple of pieces from the second part:
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
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So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
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Yep, there are allusions galore–Saint John of the Cross, Julian of Norwich, Dante, the Bhagavad Gita, something about a guy from Nantucket–you know, all the classics, but your study will be rewarded. The poem builds and is enriched with thematic echoes from one part to the next. Even the most famous lines (e.g., . . . human kind/Cannot bear very much reality) have more or different meanings in context.
Another way to approach the Quartets is by the spoken version; there are three that I know of. I have the version by Alec Guinness, but Jeremy Irons has a version you might enjoy.
Another suggestion–for men still obsessing over their unfaithful ex–is Catullus #85. My recollection of Alva Bennett’s translation is:
I love her and I hate her
You ask how
I don’t know, but I feel it happening
and it’s excruciating
Ok, I wouldn’t include Catullus in the top ten, but we shouldn’t forget T.S Eliot.
Sunday Morning — Wallace Stevens
Eros Turannos — E.A. Robinson
Lycidas — John Milton
The Second Coming — W.B. Yeats
Musee des Beaux Arts – W.H. Auden
Sonnet 18 — William Shakespeare
Little Gidding — T.S. Eliot
Ode on a Grecian Urn — John Keats
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner — Randall Jarrell
Song of Myself — Walt Whitman
I thought The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner would be about the belly gunner who was trapped in his bubble in a B-17 whose landing gear wouldn’t extend.
Given the incredible compression of the poem, who’s to say you aren’t correct? The part about awakening to combat — which seems utterly unrealistic, or allegorical, to most readers — hits especially home with me, as my father, a B-17 bombadier (401st BG –30 missions) told me he used to sleep on the way into missions. . .and awaken with the first explosions of flak. I told him he must have been incredibly cool to have done that. He replied that no, he was so scared of what was to come that sleep was his only escape.
You have to look at Divine Comedy as a political hit piece. Then it becomes funny.
Spoiler Alert: The hottest circle of hell is reserved for fence sitters.