The archivist is on top of things for a change, and ready to switch out poems with alacrity. During this past month, I read some escapist literature, a mystery novel by Deborah Crombie called
Dreaming of the Bones. The subject was the suicide of a woman poet of the Sixties, which turned out to actually be murder. No surprise there, plot-wise, but the poet character was obsessed with the life and poetry of WWI era poet Rupert Brooke. Each chapter heading had a quote from one of his poems, and thus I read more Rupert Brooke last month than I'd done in twenty years.
I was a bit surprised at how good he was, despite being obviously very young--and how good he might have become if he'd lived longer and lost some of the melodrama of youthful exuberance. Anyway, here is a bio page of his short but eventful life
at Poets.org, for those interested.
The selection I've chosen for this month, by Rupert Brooke of course, is
Sonnet: I said splendidly I loved you; it's not true.
You'll find it here, on the
Off the Shelf page, which now allows comments.
~*~
And here for final perusal before hitting the archives is last month's verse, Calypso's Island, by Archibald MacLeish:
Calypso's
Island
by
Archibald MacLeish
I know
very well, goddess, she is not beautiful
As you
are: could not be. She is a woman,
Mortal,
subject to the chances: duty of
Childbed,
sorrow that changes cheeks, the tomb--
For
unlike you she will grow gray, grow older,
Gray and
older, sleep in that small room.
She is
not beautiful as you, O golden!
You are
immortal and will never change
And can
make me immortal also, fold
Your
garment round me, make me whole and strange
As those
who live forever, not the while
That we
live, keep me from those dogging dangers--
Ships
and the wars--in this green, far-off island,
Silent
of all but sea's eternal sound
Or
sea-pine's when the lull of surf is silent.
Goddess,
I know how excellent this ground,
What
charmed contentment of the removed heart
The bees
make in the lavender where pounding
Surf
sounds far off and the bird that darts
Darts
through its own eternity of light,
Motionless
in motion, and the startled
Hare is
startled into stone, the fly
Forever
golden in the flickering glance
Of leafy
sunlight that still holds it. I
Know
you, goddess, and your caves that answer
Ocean's
confused voices with a voice:
Your poplars
where the storms are turned to dances;
Arms
where the heart is turned. You give the choice
To hold
forever what forever passes,
To hide
from what will pass, forever. Moist,
Moist
are your well-stones, goddess, cool your grasses!
And
she--she is a woman with that fault
Of
change that will be death in her at last!
Nevertheless
I long for the cold, salt,
Restless,
contending sea and for the island
Where
the grass dies and the seasons alter:
Where
that one wears the sunlight for a while.
Image: Island of Treasures, by Rene Magrite, 1942
All copyright belongs to the copyright holders.
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