Poetry

[schubert]

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

W. H. Auden, September 1, 1939

https://poets.org/poem/september-1-1939

[Dekalb_Blues]

Four Burnt-Out Cases Walk Into A Bar In Manhattan
Or,
Pledging Undying Love To Rosetta
(And In The End — With Time And Luck...)

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade....

W. H. Auden, "September 1, 1939"

"The Age of Anxiety" is the strangest flower of a marvelously fertile period. The decade following WH Auden's emigration to New York in 1939 produced not only the long poems "For the Time Being", "New Year Letter" and "The Sea and the Mirror" — his sublime meditation on The Tempest — but some of the finest works of this or any 20th-century poet: "In Memory of WB Yeats", "At the Grave of Henry James", "If I Could Tell You", "The Fall of Rome", "The Quest". And the great — and latterly disavowed — lament for a falling world "September 1st, 1939"....

It is in "September 1st, 1939" that we first glimpse the setting for what would become "The Age of Anxiety":

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play . . .
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

At the outset of "The Age of Anxiety" Auden spotlights four of these faces, solitary drinkers in a wartime New York bar: Malin, a Canadian airman; Quant, a world-weary clerk; Rosetta, a buyer for a department-store; and Emble, a young naval recruit. Over six sections — a prologue, a life-story, a dream-quest, a dirge, a masque and an epilogue — they meditate on their lives, their hopes, their losses, and on the human condition. In real terms they get talking at the bar, grab a booth together, get plastered and stagger back to Rosetta's place. There they drink some more and dance a bit until the two older gents drift home and the younger one pledges undying love to Rosetta before crashing out on her bed....

Unsurprisingly Malin, Quant, Rosetta and Emble all sound like Auden, who wrote some lively charades but wasn't really a playwright. Then again, because they sound like Auden, what they say is mostly brilliant, beautiful, or both. Here is Malin's description of the death of an airman: 

We fought them off 
But paid a price; there was pain for some. 
'Why have They killed me?' wondered our Bert, our
Greenhouse gunner, forgot our answer,
Then was not with us . . .

While Quant imagines the decay of the dead: 

Soil accepts for a serious purpose 
The jettisoned blood of jokes and dreams . . .

And Rosetta imagines, with striking prescience, the world to come:

Odourless ages, an ordered world 
Of planned pleasures and passport-control,
Sentry-go sedatives, soft drinks and
Managed money, a moral planet
Tamed by terror . . .

After several pages of the poem one is aware only of Auden.... That is to say, Auden fourfold. When it becomes clear that the puppet-master has handed out abstractions to all his characters — Malin is "Thought", Quant "Intuition", Rosetta "Feeling" and Emble "Sensation"....

Auden's burned-out Manhattanites are under no more obligation to chat in American slang than Hamlet is to murmur in Middle Danish. The speeches are meant to be taken as inward monologues, dream-soliloquies, while the uniform shape of utterance suggests a commonality, a shared and inescapable plight. Verse should be neither too free nor too formed, as human experience is also neither: breath and bloodstream hold in place a struggling spirit, and Auden is a master of human utterance only insofar as he's a master of form....

One must love Auden's poetry to be able to speak this heresy, but I can't help wondering what fun he might have had — we might have had — with, instead of the poem, a wartime novel in the vein of Henry Green or Elizabeth Bowen. In virtually the last words of the poem something is revealed: "[Malin] returned to duty, reclaimed by the actual world where time is real and in which, therefore, poetry can take no interest . . ." This points to the problem with "The Age of Anxiety": time is real to real people. Abstractions can't change, so they don't listen.

A lesser poet wrote a greater poem for the age of anxiety: in Louis MacNeice's "Autumn Journal", set in London on the brink of the war, a recognisably human voice is blown hither and thither by memories, lusts and terrifying headlines. Auden's "The Age of Anxiety" isn't even the best work of art called "The Age of Anxiety": if I'm a junior minister in Auden's world, I'm barely a tea-boy in that of Leonard Bernstein, but I'd accord that honour to his Symphony No 2. Bernstein found the poem "fascinating and hair-raising". From the time he read "The Age of Anxiety" in 1948 "the composition of a symphony based on [it] acquired an almost compulsive quality", he wrote, describing an "extreme personal identification of myself with the poem, the essential line [of which] is the record of our difficult and problematic search for faith." Three years after the Holocaust, in the year of the founding of Israel, one can scarcely imagine how "difficult and problematic" faith had become for Bernstein.

―(above excerpted from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/a...-bernstein )





MacNeice's poem describes the poet's thoughts and feelings between August and December 1938 as the Second World War approaches. With echoes of the First World War and elements of reportage, ethics, love poems, and politics, it contains, as MacNeice wrote to TS Eliot, "everything which from first-hand experience I consider significant." 


[Excerpt from "Autumn Journal":]

iii

August is nearly over, the people
Back from holiday are tanned
With blistered thumbs and a wallet of snaps and a little
Joie de vivre which is contraband;
Whose stamina is enough to face the annual
Wait for the annual spree,
Whose memories are stamped with specks of sunshine
Like faded fleurs de lys.
Now the till and the typewriter call the fingers,
The workman gathers his tools
For the eight-hour day but after that the solace
Of films or football pools
Or of the gossip or cuddle, the moments of self-glory
Or self-indulgence, blinkers on the eyes of doubt,
The blue smoke rising and the brown lace sinking
In the empty glass of stout.
Most are accepters, born and bred to harness,
And take things as they come,
But some refusing harness and more who are refused it
Would pray that another and a better Kingdom come,
Which now is sketched in the air or travestied in slogans
Written in chalk or tar on stucco or plaster-board
But in time may find its body in men's bodies,
Its law and order in their heart's accord,
Where skill will no longer languish nor energy be trammelled
To competition and graft,
Exploited in subservience but not allegiance
To an utterly lost and daft
System that gives a few at fancy prices
Their fancy lives
While ninety-nine in the hundred who never attend the banquet
Must wash the grease of ages off the knives.
And now the tempter whispers 'But you also
Have the slave-owner's mind,
Would like to sleep on a mattress of easy profits,
To snap your fingers or a whip and find
Servants or houris ready to wince and flatter
And build with their degradation your self-esteem;
What you want is not a world of the free in function
But a niche at the top, the skimmings of the cream.'
And I answer that that is largely so for habit makes me
Think victory for one implies another's defeat,
That freedom means the power to order, and that in order
To preserve the values dear to the élite
The élite must remain a few. It is so hard to imagine
A world where the many would have their chance without
A fall in the standard of intellectual living
And nothing left that the highbrow cared about.
Which fears must be suppressed. There is no reason for thinking
That, if you give a chance to people to think or live,
The arts of thought or life will suffer and become rougher
And not return more than you could ever give.
And now I relapse to sleep, to dreams perhaps and reaction
Where I shall play the gangster or the sheikh,
Kill for the love of killing, make the world my sofa,
Unzip the women and insult the meek.
Which fantasies no doubt are due to my private history,
Matter for the analyst,
But the final cure is not in his past-dissecting fingers
But in a future of action, the will and fist
Of those who abjure the luxury of self-pity,
And prefer to risk a movement without being sure
If movement would be better or worse in a hundred
Years or a thousand when their heart is pure.
None of our hearts are pure, we always have mixed motives,
Are self deceivers, but the worst of all
Deceits is to murmur 'Lord, I am not worthy'
And, lying easy, turn your face to the wall.
But may I cure that habit, look up and outwards
And may my feet follow my wider glance
First no doubt to stumble, then to walk with the others
And in the end — with time and luck — to dance.

(https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/10...ber-poetry)



8.14 ▶ Questioner: What do the Orion group have -– what’s the objective with respect to the conquest of the Orion group?

Ra: I am Ra. As we have said previously, their objective is to locate certain mind/body/spirit complexes which vibrate in resonance with their own vibrational complex, then to enslave the un-elite, as you may call those who are not of the Orion vibration.


16.17 ▶ Questioner: What was their purpose in doing this?

Ra: I am Ra. The purpose of the Orion group, as mentioned before, is conquest and enslavement. This is done by finding and establishing an elite and causing others to serve the elite through various devices such as the laws you mention and others given by this entity.


11.18 ▶ Questioner: Then we have crusaders from Orion coming to this planet for mind control purposes. How do they do this?

Ra: As all, they follow the Law of One observing free will. Contact is made with those who call. Those then upon the planetary sphere act much as do you to disseminate the attitudes and philosophy of their particular understanding of the Law of One which is service to self. These become the elite. Through these, the attempt begins to create a condition whereby the remainder of the planetary entities are enslaved by their own free will.






Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god ...
https://theamericanscholar.org/what-occu...orgetting/



We who are four
Were once but one.
Before his act of
Rebellion ...
http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9412.pdf




More original & improvised musical offerings from Dan Dechellis — for those who seek to limit the exercise of their inescapable elitist urges to that of the STO-friendly domain of the mindfully empathic aesthetic cognoscenti.   Who appreciate some damn good tunes by a wonderfully lyrical & sympatico musician.  

[flofrog]

That day the sun rose as if
it was the most natural thing
in the world; as if the long lake
glaciers had dug in the hard

bed of a withered sea
would keep the sea’s salt
buried forever like treasure;
as if the least you could expect

was for geese to swim through
blue air in a luminous shoal,
a great white mesh hauled
up the deep blue of the lake;

as if snow itself had hatched
a flock of fat flakes on the ground
and taught them how to fly
under their own steam; or as if

it should come as no surprise
to find yourself amazed,
between the salt and the sunlight,
catching snow-geese with your bare eyes.


Robert Travers, 2021

[flofrog]

All right this is a long path to a poem here, but if you have some time and patience it's worth it, I think...

I have many interests and for some  weird reason, one is people who show interest in human laws. One of these persons is Preet Bharara, born in India and came to live in United States. I love him for his humanity. He has a podcast and a newsletter, this below is this day's newsletter, titled as usual A Note from Preet.  So in it is a poem...

Dear Reader,

This week’s note is not about politics, the law, or some current event. It’s about a historical footnote that moved me this past week. Maybe you know the background story. I certainly didn’t. So I thought I’d share it.

I happened upon it last Friday evening, just before dinner. I was reminded by someone that it was January 28th and that this was the anniversary of the space shuttle Challenger disaster. On that date in 1986, on live television, the Challenger exploded in mid-air on its ascent. The blast killed all seven crew members, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. I was a senior in high school, but I wasn’t in class for some reason. Maybe I was sick; maybe I was playing hooky; I don’t remember. I watched the launch at home in my bedroom, on my black and white RCA television set. Like everyone else, I was beyond shocked. Maybe I shrieked; maybe I cried; I don’t remember. The feeling of loss was very heavy in the country.

As it happens, President Ronald Reagan was supposed to report on the State of the Union that night. But the state of the union was sad and pained and grief-stricken. It was not the time for politics. So instead Reagan delivered a short address to console the country, and it was near-perfect for the moment. He spoke to the families of the crew who were mourning; he spoke to the schoolchildren of America who witnessed a schoolteacher die; and he spoke to all citizens who wondered what the future of space exploration might be.

Reagan said, “The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we’ll continue to follow them.” He said, “We’ll continue our quest in space. . . Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue.” But it is the final line of his address that is best remembered:

We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’

I remember that line as well as I remember the explosion. My main extracurricular activity in high school was speech. I was a student of it and a practitioner of it, and that perfect line stayed with me. It stayed with a lot of people. I may have wondered if the words were Reagan’s or speechwriter Peggy Noonan’s, but it sounded to many like a literary reference. But there was no Google back then, and I didn’t bother to find out.

Fast forward to last Friday. I had a little time, and so I searched the web for the origin of the “surly bonds of earth.” I learned the story. And if you don’t know it, it’s really something.

The final twelve words of Reagan’s Challenger speech are indeed borrowed from a sonnet. But not by Shakespeare or any other famous poet. The phrases come from a poem called “High Flight.” It was written in 1941 by a man named John Gillespie Magee. Magee was all of 19 years old when he put those words to paper. Born of an American father and an English mother who were missionaries in China, Magee came to the United States in 1939. He won a scholarship to Yale, but in 1940 he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force to become a pilot. He was deployed to England for combat duty in July of 1941. It was while serving in World War II, even before the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor, that Magee wrote “High Flight.”

It is a beautiful poem. It is not about death. At least not overtly. Rather, it is about the rush of human flight, which in 1941 was a fairly recent venture. It was, after all, only 38 years after Kitty Hawk. Magee writes of “sun-split clouds” and “footless halls of air.” Magee loved the skies. He loved the skies as future astronauts would. He loved the skies as sailors love the sea.

This is the full poem:
High Flight

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.
Magee sent the poem to his parents. He would never know the impact it would have, because it was never published in his lifetime. You see, tragedy would strike Magee as it later struck the shuttle crew. A few months after he wrote the sonnet, on December 11, 1941, still only 19, he collided with another plane mid-air over England. History does indeed rhyme, just like a sonnet.

Perhaps he knew he was going to die. Or he knew the risk of it. Perhaps his poem was not just about flight.

I learned something else. Decades after Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee himself slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God, the poem he penned still resonates. It still rates. And it has found life as an inspiration to pilots and astronauts all over the world.

It is inscribed in full on the Space Shuttle Challenger Memorial.

It is the official poem of the Royal Canadian Air Force.

It was taken into space by astronaut Michael Collins on his Gemini 10 mission.

It appears on many headstones in the Arlington National Cemetery.

And it has been set to music by, among other artists, John Denver, who recorded the song “Flight (The Higher We Fly)” in 1983.

I may have been late to it, but I’m glad I finally came to learn the story of the poem and the pilot.
Preet

[Malajube]

Just wanted to post that the very first poem in this thread, The Reed Flute, gave me chills even though I did not understand it at all! Haha! Maybe there is something for me there if I can comprehend it.

I am ecstatic to have found this thread. I've been wanting to find a source for good poetry, though I've not been searching. I look forward to reading through in the days to come. I thank everyone who has taken time to share these bloomed flowers from other human spirits!

[flofrog]

those are beautiful Quincunx