Famous Poets

Leaning into the Afternoons​

Pablo Neruda



Leaning into the afternoons I cast my sad nets
towards your oceanic eyes.

There in the highest blaze my solitude lengthens and flames,
its arms turning like a drowning man's.

I send out red signals across your absent eyes
that smell like the sea or the beach by a lighthouse.

You keep only darkness, my distant female,
from your regard sometimes the coast of dread emerges.

Leaning into the afternoons I fling my sad nets
to that sea that is thrashed by your oceanic eyes.

The birds of night peck at the first stars
that flash like my soul when I love you.

The night gallops on its shadowy mare
shedding blue tassels over the land. ​

 

Sonnet XI

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.

Pablo Neruda​

 

The Two Trees
William Butler Yeats
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THE TWO TREES by: William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) BELOVED, gaze in thine own heart, The holy tree is growing there; From joy the holy branches start, And all the trembling flowers they bear. The changing colours of its fruit Have dowered the stars with merry light; The surety of its hidden root Has planted quiet in the night; The shaking of its leafy head Has given the waves their melody, And made my lips and music wed, Murmuring a wizard song for thee. There the Loves a circle go, The flaming circle of our days, Gyring, spiring to and fro In those great ignorant leafy ways; Remembering all that shaken hair And how the wingèd sandals dart, Thine eyes grow full of tender care: Beloved, gaze in thine own heart. Gaze no more in the bitter glass The demons, with their subtle guile, Lift up before us when they pass, Or only gaze a little while; For there a fatal image grows That the stormy night receives, Roots half hidden under snows, Broken boughs and blackened leaves. For all things turn to barrenness In the dim glass the demons hold, The glass of outer weariness, Made when God slept in times of old. There, through the broken branches, go The ravens of unresting thought; Flying, crying, to and fro, Cruel claw and hungry throat, Or else they stand and sniff the wind, And shake their ragged wings; alas! Thy tender eyes grow all unkind: Gaze no more in the bitter glass.

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Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.


William Ernest Henley


Sawtooth Mountains Stanley Idaho

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William Shakespeare
1564-1616

SONNET 18

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 ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st;
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.


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Excerpts From The Book of Disquiet

The Book of Disquiet

Fernando António Nogueira Pessôa


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32
SYMPHONY OF A RESTLESS NIGHT

Everything was sleeping as if the universe were a mistake. The wind, blowing uncertainly, was a formless flag unfurled over a non-existent army post. High, strong gusts ripped through nothing at all, and the window-frames shook their panes to make the edges rattle. Underlying everything, the hushed night was the tomb of God* (and my soul felt sorry for God).

Suddenly a new order of universal things acted on the city, the wind whistled in its lulls, and there was a slumbering awareness of countless agitations on high. Then the night closed like a trapdoor, and a vast calm made me wish I’d been sleeping.


33
During the first days of Autumn when nightfall arrives suddenly, as if prematurely, and it seems we took longer to do our day’s work, I enjoy, while still working, the thought of not working which the darkness brings, for the darkness is night, and night means sleep, home, freedom. When the lights come on, dispelling darkness from the large office, and we continue our day’s work in the beginning of night, I feel a comfort that’s absurd, like a remembrance belonging to someone else, and I’m at peace with the numbers I write, as if I were reading while waiting to fall asleep. We’re all slaves of external circumstances. A sunny day transports us from a café on a narrow side street to wide-open fields; an overcast sky in the country makes us close up, taking shelter as best we can in the house without doors of our own self; the onset of night, even in the midst of daytime activities, enlarges – like a slowly opening fan – our awareness that we ought to rest. But the work doesn’t slow down; it gets livelier.

We no longer work; we amuse ourselves with the labour to which we’re condemned. And all of a sudden, across the huge columned sheet of my numerary destiny, the old house of my elderly aunts, shut off from the world, shelters the drowsy ten o’clock tea, and the kerosene lamp of my lost childhood, glowing only on the linen-covered table, blinds me to the sight of Moreira, illuminated by a black electricity infnities away from me. The maid, who is even older than my aunts, brings in the tea, along with the vestiges of her interrupted nap and the affectionately patient grumpiness of old-time servants, and across all my dead past I enter items and totals without a single mistake. I retreat into myself, get lost in myself, forget myself in far-away nights uncontaminated by duty and the world, undefiled by mystery and the future. And so gentle is the sensation that estranges me from debits and credits that if by chance I’m asked a question, I answer in a soft voice, as if my being were hollow, as if it were nothing more than a typewriter I carry around with me – portable, opened and ready.

It doesn’t faze me when my dreams are interrupted; they’re so gentle that I keep dreaming them as I speak, write, answer, or even discuss. And through it all the long-lost tea finishes, the office is going to close… From the ledger which I slowly shut I raise my eyes, sore from the tears they didn’t shed, and with confused feelings I accept, because I must, that with the closing of my office my dream also closes; that as my hand shuts the ledger it also pulls a veil over my irretrievable past; that I’m going to life’s bed wide awake, unaccompanied and without peace, in the ebb and flow of my confused consciousness, like two tides in the black night where the destinies of nostalgia and desolation meet.

34
Sometimes I think I’ll never leave the Rua dos Douradores. And having written this, it seems to me eternity. Not pleasure, not glory, not power… Freedom, only freedom. To go from the phantoms of faith to the ghosts of reason is merely to change cells. Art, if it frees us from the abstract idols of old, should also free us from magnanimous ideas and social concerns, which are likewise idols. To find our personality by losing it – faith itself endorses this destiny.

35
… and a deep and weary disdain for all those who work for mankind, for all those who fight for their country and give their lives so that civilization may continue…… a disdain full of disgust for those who don’t realize that the only reality is each man’s soul, and that everything else – the exterior world and other people –is but an unaesthetic nightmare, like the result, in dreams, of a mental indigestion. My aversion to effort becomes an almost writhing horror before all forms of violent effort. War, energetic and productive labour, helping others – all this strikes me as the product of an impertinence.....Everything useful and external tastes frivolous and trivial in the light of my soul’s supreme reality and next to the pure sovereign splendour of my more original and frequent dreams. These, for me, are more real.


36
It’s not the cracked walls of my rented room, nor the shabby desks in the office where I work, nor the poverty of the same old downtown streets in between, which I’ve crossed and re-crossed so many times they seem to have assumed the immobility of the irreparable – none of that is responsible for my frequent feeling of nausea over the squalor of daily life. It’s the people who habitually surround me, the souls who know me through conversation and daily contact without knowing me at all – they’re the ones who cause a salivary knot of physical disgust to form in my throat. It’s the sordid monotony of their lives, outwardly parallel to my own, and their keen awareness that I’m their fellow man –that is what dresses me in a convict’s clothes, places me in a jail cell, and makes me apocryphal and beggarly. There are times when each detail of the ordinary interests me for its own sake, and I feel a fondness for things, because I can read them clearly.

Then I see – as Vieira* said that Sousa,* in his descriptions, saw – the ordinary in its singularity, and I have the poetic soul that inspired the intellectual age of poetry among the Greeks. But there are also moments, such as the one that oppresses me now, when I feel my own self far more than I feel external things, and everything transforms into a night of rain and mud where, lost in the solitude of an out-of-the-way station, I wait interminably for the next third-class train. Yes, my particular virtue of being very often objective, and thus sidetracked from thinking about myself, suffers lapses of affirmation, as do all virtues and even all vices. And I start to wonder how I’m able to go on, how I dare have the faint-heartedness to be here among these people, exactly like them, in true conformity to their shoddy illusion.

Like flashes from a distant lighthouse, I see all the solutions offered by the imagination’s female side: flight, suicide, renunciation, grandiose acts of our aristocratic self-awareness, the swashbuckling novel of existences without balconies. But the ideal Juliet of the best possible reality closed the high window of the literary encounter on the fictitious Romeo of my blood.

She obeys her father; he obeys his. The feud between the Montagues and the Capulets continues, the curtain falls on what didn’t happen, and I go on home – to my rented room where I loathe the landlady who isn’t home, her children I hardly ever see, and the people from the office that I’ll see only tomorrow – with the collar of a clerk’s coat turned up without astonishment over the neck of a poet, with my boots (always purchased in the same shop) automatically avoiding the puddles of cold rain, and with a bit of mixed concern, for having once more forgotten my umbrella and the dignity of my soul.*

 

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A moment of happiness, you and I sitting on the verandah, apparently two, but one in soul, you and I. We feel the flowing water of life here, you and I, with the garden's beauty and the birds singing. The stars will be watching us, and we will show them what it is to be a thin crescent moon. You and I unselfed, will be together, indifferent to idle speculation, you and I. The parrots of heaven will be cracking sugar as we laugh together, you and I. In one form upon this earth, and in another form in a timeless sweet land. Rumi

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If anyone asks you how the perfect satisfaction of all our sexual wanting will look, lift your face and say, Like this. When someone mentions the gracefulness of the nightsky, climb up on the roof and dance and say, Like this. If anyone wants to know what "spirit" is, or what "God’s fragrance" means, lean your head toward him or her. Keep your face there close. Like this. When someone quotes the old poetic image about clouds gradually uncovering the moon, slowly loosen knot by knot the strings of your robe. Like this. If anyone wonders how Jesus raised the dead, don’t try to explain the miracle. Kiss me on the lips. Like this. Like this. When someone asks what it means to "die for love," point here. If someone asks how tall I am, frown and measure with your fingers the space between the creases on your forehead. This tall. The soul sometimes leaves the body, the returns. When someone doesn’t believe that, walk back into my house. Like this. When lovers moan, they’re telling our story. Like this. I am a sky where spirits live. Stare into this deepening blue, while the breeze says a secret. Like this. When someone asks what there is to do, light the candle in his hand. Like this. How did Joseph’s scent come to Jacob? Huuuuu. How did Jacob’s sight return? Huuuu. A little wind cleans the eyes. Like this. When Shams comes back from Tabriz, he’ll put just his head around the edge of the door to surprise us Like this. Rumi

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“Poetry Surrounds Us” – Vincent van Gogh​

Posted on February 23, 2014 by Christopher Chase


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“The more I think it over, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people. People are often unable to do anything, imprisoned as they are in I don’t know what kind of terrible, terrible, oh such terrible cage. Do you know what makes the prison disappear? Every deep, genuine affection. Being friends, being brothers, loving, that is what opens the prison, with supreme power, by some magic force. Without these one stays dead. But whenever affection is revived, there life revives.

If only we try to live sincerely, it will go well with us, even though we are certain to experience real sorrow, and great disappointments, and also will probably commit great faults and do wrong things, but it certainly is true, that it is better to be high-spirited, even though one makes more mistakes, than to be narrow-minded and all too prudent. It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love, is well done.

What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion.

Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum… Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it. I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream.

That God of the clergymen, He is for me as dead as a doornail. But am I an atheist for all that? The clergymen consider me as such — be it so; but I love, and how could I feel love if I did not live, and if others did not live, and then, if we live, there is something mysterious in that. Now call that God, or human nature or whatever you like, but there is something which I cannot define systematically, though it is very much alive and very real, and see, that is God, or as good as God.

To believe in God for me is to feel that there is a God, not a dead one, or a stuffed one, but a living one… When I have a terrible need of — shall I say the word — religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.”

~Vincent van Gogh ~​

 

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“Bittersweet” In my hallucination I saw my Beloved’s flower garden In my vertigo, in my dizziness In my drunken haze Whirling and dancing like a spinning wheel I saw myself as the source of existence I was there in the beginning And I was the Spirit of Love Now I am sober There is only the hangover And the memory of Love And only the sorrow I yearn for Happiness I ask for help I want mercy And my Love says: Look at me and hear me Because I am here Just for that I am your Moon and your Moonlight too I am your flower garden and your water too I have come all this way, eager for you Without shoes or shawl I want you to laugh To kill all your worries To Love you To nourish you Oh sweet bitterness I will soothe you and Heal you I will bring you roses I, too, have been covered with thorns. by RUMI.

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