Off The Shelf Resumes

Remembrance

by Sir Thomas Wyatt

 

 

They flee from me, that sometime did me seek

    With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.

I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,

    That now are wild, and do not remember

    That sometime they put themselves in danger

         To take bread at my hand; and now they range

         Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise

    Twenty times better; but once, in special,

In thin array, after a pleasant guise,

    When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,

    And she me caught in her arms long and small;

         Therewith all sweetly did me kiss,

         And softly said, ‘Dear heart, how like you this?’

It was no dream: I lay broad waking:

    But all is turned, thorough my gentleness,

Into a strange fashion of forsaking;

    And I have leave to go of her goodness,

    And she also to use newfangleness.

         But since that I so kindly am served,

         I would fain know what she hath deserved.

 ~Sir Thomas Wyatt

def:  newfangleness: fickleness, infidelity




 Notes: When I began Verse Escape, six years ago now back in the heyday of blogging, I included a feature called Off The Shelf, where I shared the works of poets dead and living that in some manner spoke to me. Since at this point, my own output is so low, and the blog exists mostly for my own satisfaction (though my few kind readers are much appreciated) I've decided to once again do so, and the first entry in the reawakened series will be Remembrance,(also sometimes called by its first line, They Flee from Me That Sometime Did Me Seek) by Sir Thomas Wyatt.

Sir Thomas Wyatt was a 16th-century English ambassador and lyrical poet in the court of Henry VIII. He was a great innovator in popularizing many classical poetic forms  into the English language, including the sonnet.  

[Per wikipedia: "A significant amount of his literary output consists of translations and imitations of sonnets by the Italian poet Petrarch; he also wrote sonnets of his own. He took subject matter from Petrarch's sonnets, but his rhyme schemes make a significant departure. ...Wyatt employs the Petrarchan octave, but his most common sestet scheme is cddc ee. This marks the beginnings of an exclusively "English" contribution to sonnet structure, that is three quatrains and a closing couplet. 

In addition to imitations of works by the classical writers Seneca and Horace, he experimented in stanza forms including the rondeau, epigrams, terza rima, ottava rima songs, satires and also with monorime, triplets with refrains, quatrains with different length of line and rhyme schemes, quatrains with codas, and the French forms of douzaine and treizaine. Wyatt introduced contemporaries to his poulter's measure form ...and is acknowledged a master of the iambic tetrameter.^" ]

Several of his poems, including the often anthologized  Whoso List To Hunt, are reputed to be about Anne Boleyn, with whom he was rumored to have had an affair. This sent him to the Tower during Anne's trial for adultery, though unlike her and five of her alleged lovers, he escaped execution and remained more or less in the King's favor, as much as anyone can be said to have done so.

Wyatt died in 1542 at the age of 39. His poetry remained unpublished during his lifetime.

I like all of his work, but this poem in particular.

Images: Sir Thomas Wyatt, by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1535-37

Still Life With Animals, 1660, by Melchior d'Hondecoeter

Public Domain

Divine Comedy

Divine Comedy

 

What is said here

is true in the moment

if in itself

the moment is true.

Here before bewitchment and betrayal,

before the spell winds out

before the mind-clot bursts,

the indifferent bile seeps scouring

beyond the skein

of loops and traps; said quick

before our pages become

blackened stalks

pulled naked 

in the wind.

~July 2015

 

posted for     real toads

 

 

Flash Fiction 55 Plus

Kerry's plus this time is to draw on either the paintings of Rossetti or the writings of Dante; I have used Rossetti's Mnemosyne, the mother of the muses, the goddess of memory,  from whom Hesiod said 'kings and poets receive their powers of authoritative speech...'  You may remember from other process notes that she possesses a pool in the underworld, which when the dead drink from it, restores every memory of past lives, being the opposite of Lethe where all such baggage is allowed to be forgotten.  

Dante contributes the title, and the poets conversing in a limboish Hell..

Images: Mnemosyne, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Dante;Hell;IVth Canto, Homer and the Ancient Poets, by William Blake 
Public Domain via wikimedia commons

The Empty Quarter

The Empty Quarter

In the dry slaughterhouse

of time imperative,

where blood disappears
before it stains the dune's
granular face, change has let

a fragment of me live

without your empty kiss

inhabited by insistent teeth,

your cold clay lips' crumble,

uncomfortable with truth,

your eyes that claim

no color of their own,

dead leaves on the green

and formless sea adrift,

always traveling away.

Change has let me live

here in its hot and proper suburb,

on the dunes that sting and shift,

where you loved me once

as much as you could love

before you thought

you'd found out what I am, where

in the sliding sand the sentence began;

the jailor's bored withdrawing bit by bit

of all on which a prisoner might live;

however skilled the hand, cruelty is

yet another loss, worrying bones 

and flesh, spitting out

the dirty artifacts of

fallacy and reality. 

So keep your empty kiss

to gnaw yourself to sleep.

Brush off the fossil bones of the extinct,

reconstruct exhibits of your conceit, 

so large and dead.

Where I have gone, where I

have still to go, no shows are held,

no knife can bite, and change has let me live

where I will never need again

the dwelling of your caress.

~May 2015

posted for     real toads

Get Listed: Pablo Neruda

The viceroy of vocabulary, grapeling (it could be that) delves for this month's word gold into the incomparable poetry of one of the finest original poets of the 20th (or any) century, Chile's Pablo Neruda. See the link for the words listed, all of which I have used here in this feeble attempt to touch a little of Neruda's duende, (not autobiographically especially.)

Process note: The Rub' al Khali or Empty Quarter is the second-largest sand desert in the world, encompassing most of the southern third of the Arabian Peninsula. ~wikipedia







Images: The Gift, 1921,  and Rayograph--The Kiss, 1922, by Man Ray
Fair Use via wikiart.org

Lost And Found

Lost And Found

A slight shift, a fracture

a quiver in the focus;

things get lost beyond finding.

In their place? Only memory,

that varnish of hearsay, sealing of wish, 

where fact turns to fiction, pain into history

in the shift, in the break.

One night while you talked

I fell through that thinning,

pushed into the unthreading

by the North on your wind.

I landed hard on a dodo's beak,

snapped a pterodactyl wing-bone 

there in the big box of everything lost.

I found ten thousand ghosts

and the almost-necessities long since replaced;

torn concert t-shirts, sophomore copies of Eliot,

left-behind keys, flaking champagne corks, half-dead double A's;

I ate for my dinner plates of unuttered praise,

and the laughter of children, made before they aged.

 

Ankle deep in old phone numbers, 

unsaid endearments, 

I searched in vain for the footmates to

singular socks, wore them as they were

with only one blue slipper,  

for the forgotten dance step, that last step

where no one had to watch out.

A slight shift, a crack and

I'm here now, with these friends,

my colleagues in flotsam,

in the place where you lost me;

music drifts the dancers

down comes the kiss  

left in your old coat pocket, the last match 

and the wick

for the lamp in the heart;

In this lost light, this lovelight,

it's impossible to be lonely

when the crowd swells

every day.

~April 2015

posted for 

National Poetry Month With Magaly Guerrero

With apologies for the length of this piece--sometimes they just keep coming.

"It Hurts But It Doesn't Harm"

On the eighth day of this month of poetry, the intricate mind of Magaly Guerrero asks us to 

"Weave a poem that explores the difference between hurt and harm"

 

I will be out of pocket for much of today (April 8) but will be back to return visits as soon as I can.

Images: Board of Demented Associations, c. 1931, by Salvidor Dali
The Ladies at Bonheur, by Remedios Varo
Fair Use via wikiart.org

Reposts for Christmas, #2

As this posts, dear readers, we will be somewhere in the wilds of Oklahoma, hiking with the dogs through a strange, season-less landscape hung between summer and winter, with warm sun and cold cold winds. And no internet. Hope that all who celebrate it enjoy Thanksgiving, and also this flashback from August 2013 which I've exhumed for your interim diversion. See you soon, and thanks again to everyone for your support.

 

The Farewell Book

"..High above the mast the moon
Rides clear of her mind and the waves make a refrain
Of this: that the snake has shed its skin upon
The floor. Go on through the darkness. The waves fly back.." 

~Wallace Stevens

I always keep the Book of Order

close by my chaos bed, my flag

at the masthead of longing, where

the brush of a half-numb hand upon 

its sleeping lover's cover lets me think

I'm not alone.

The Book has first and last page

but only a hole in the center, infinite,

secret, full of talismans, gauds and baubles,

wrack and whatnots, bones and blood,

astrolabes and artifacts of

someone else's life that is my own.

 

I sang out the genius from the cavity;

a wild shadow marked with your name.

I found for you the kiss long lost

in the dusty centrifuge, and made

the sickle wand that was
all the moon on a stick.

There atop the crease

you were born to lie,

to slither up and slide

your bendable spine into

the hammock of that crescent, to

murmur with flickering tongue

divine

the language of mind to mind,

but when at last I put

my feet to the morning's board,

I felt only the pricking crackle of

a skin shed on the floor.

Still I go on, a lunatic singing apart

flying waves of darkness, hook'd
on a used moon and a hollow book.

~August 2013

 

originally posted for     real toads

Challenge: Fireblossom Friday:

 the book within the story within the poem 
 Fireblossom asks us to think of matryoshkas, to pick a favorite poem and nest it in a story (see above link for a more coherent exposition.) 

I've chosen not one but two of my favorite poems by Wallace Stevens to nest here, using various words and phrases from:

The Idea of Order at Key West
(text and reading by Stevens)

Farewell to Florida

(text)

Photo © joyannjones 2013

Nevermaiouw

Nevermaiouw

or, How the Raven Met Cattriona

with apologies to E.A.P.

Once upon a dismal Friday as I gazed out on the skyway

dripping fitful raindrops highly irking to my fur,

as I nodded, moistly napping, suddenly there came a crapping

from a feathered menace flapping, hovering in the dusky blur.

'Tis some noisome pigeon,' said I, 'perched upon the entrance door.

Only this and nothing more.'

Ah, distinctly I could spy it, murdering my peaceful quiet,

it was useless to deny that bird that leered down from the door;

as I watched it puff and flutter, black as ink and slick as butter,

softly I began to mutter, 'this is nothing but a gutter starling fed on rotten store,

just a starling garbage-fattened, hanging on the entrance door.

This it is and nothing more.'

But suddenly there came a squawking, as if the monstrous thing were talking,

a devilish and infernal cawking,  a stalking once I'd seen before

from a creature long-forgotten, with a tongue my Master taught on

many a sleepless midnight fraught to speak out misbegotten lore.

Twas the thrice damned noxious Raven with his prate of 'Nevermore"

that woke me, angered to my core.

He did not come to grant me wishes with a beak o'erfull with fishes,

or cook me liver so delicious that I swooned upon the floor--

No! he set my tail a-lashing, and my pointed teeth a-gnashing

with his ever-constant trashing of the entrance door--

obliviously besplattering, while for treats he did implore,

treats Mine Alone for evermore.

Never, swore I, would he triumph, play the monarch or the pontiff

ruling me with caw and quantive statements from the entrance door.

So low I crouched upon the railing, and as he his tail was trailing,

did I pounce upon his failing body as I spilled its gore;

squawking yet he tumbled sailing, down before the open door.

This I saw and nothing more.

As he lay there feebly twitching, I scratched my ear, for it was itching---

and the Raven he went pitching wildly 'cross the chamber floor.

Like the Rabbit ran from Alice, to the pallid bust of Pallas

limped the vandal of our palace that I knocked down with a claw.

As finally then a silence placid fell upon that bird most foul, 

quoth I the Kitty, 'Nevermiaouw!"

~October 2014

posted belatedly for    real toads

Kerry's Challenge: If only they could talk

Thanks to Fireblossom for leading the way with her poem describing the funeral oration of Dog Antony,  the premise of which I have shamelessly transplanted here in hedgewitchian soil.  
Kerry, in her rendition of Dylan Thomas's dog's final wishes, takes this concept beyond pastiche and into pure poetry, but here I have played for laughs.

Edgar Allan Poe is said to have had a cat named Cattriona, and I chose this pairing for my poem in part to mark the anniversary of Poe's death at age 39 on October 7, 1849. The inspiration for it however, comes directly from Kerry O'Connor's prompt, and any Raven involved is purely a product of Poe's imagination. No actual ravens were harmed in the production of this piece.

Top image: Cat Catching a Bird, 1939, by Pablo Picasso.

Fair use via wikiart,org

Footer: Image courtesy of google image search

copyright unknown, no infringement intended.