Off The Shelf Archives~October

Fall is blowing in, and for once, it is cool and crisp even here in the Dust Bowl. My favorite season, Halloween (yes, for me it is an entire season) is here, and with it all the haunting music of the end of summer and the beginning of change. So I am not dithering about this month, but changing out the Off The Shelf selection to match the impending onslaught of fall colors with a short, brooding  poem by Emily Dickinson called by it's first line "The name of it is Autumn..."

In other news, I will once again be keeping with an All Hallows theme this month, as I have for the past few years, so you can expect a bit more of the dark to be showing up. My muse has been absent without leave a lot lately, but I will post whenever she deigns to cooperate.

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Without further ado, then, here is Emily Dickinson on the Off The Shelf Page, and below, last month's selection Personal Helicon, by Seamus Heaney, for a last persual:

Personal Helicon

for Michael Longley

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.


One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.


A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.


Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.


Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

~Seamus Heaney

Image: Fountain in the Garden of Saint Paul Hospital, 1889, Vincent Van Gogh
via wikipaintings.org

Off The Shelf Archives~August

Most of us active in the world of internet poetry have probably heard by now that the celebrated Irish poet and 1995 Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney, passed on Friday, August 30, 2013, at the age of 74.

Mr. Heaney has appeared on my Off The Shelf page previously, but I have chosen another one of his poems to remember him by for this next month, Personal Helicon.

This link to the NYTimes gives a full obituary and biography for those interested.


You can find his poem here, in the Off The Shelf archives.

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As always, here is a last look at the previous Off the Shelf selection, some songs from The Tempest, by William Shakespeare:

Some Songs

from The Tempest, by William Shakespeare

Our Revels Now Are Ended 

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.
( ~Prospero)


Ariel's Songs

Come unto these yellow sands,

   And then take hands:

Curtsied when you have, and kissed

   The wild waves whist,

Foot it featly here and there;

And, sweet sprites, the burden bear.

   Hark, hark!

      Bow, wow

   The watch-dogs bark,

      Bow, wow,

   Hark, hark! I hear

The strain of strutting Chanticleer

Cry, Cock-a-diddle-dow.

Full fathom five thy father lies;

   Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

   Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange:

Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell.

                      Ding-dong!

   Hark! now I hear them,

                    Ding-dong, bell!


Where the bee sucks, there suck I,

In a cowslip's bell I lie,

There I couch when owls do cry,

On the bat's back I do fly

After summer merrily
Merrily, merrily, shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

Image: Miranda, by John William Waterhouse
Public Domain, via wikipaintings.org

Off the Shelf Archive~February

Barely making it before the end of the month, the Archivist frantically bestirs herself to change out last month's Seamus Heaney selection for something to give us a breath of madness and spring, from Lorca.

I never get a lot of readers or response to this feature, but I do get a lot of personal satisfaction from it, so I'm going to continue it, but without the tedious commentary on my part. From now on it will just be poems. In that spirit,  you will find Ghazel of Unforeseen Love, by Spanish surrealist poet Federico Garcia Lorca in the March

Off the Shelf Archives

and below is last month's Punishment, by Seamus Heaney, read by the author. As always, feel free to comment on either poem here, as comments are disabled off the main page.

Punishment

~by Seamus Heaney

Here is the text:

Punishment
by Seamus Heaney (1939-)

I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.

It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.

I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.

Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:

her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring

to store
the memories of love.
Little adultress,
before they punished you

you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,

I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur

of your brain's exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles' webbing
and all your numbered bones:

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.

Off the Shelf Archive~January

I've been most remiss (as usual) at refreshing the Off the Shelf selection,  but again as usual, my excuse is I've had many poems and new-to-me poets to choose from recently and its been hard to pick. What I've chosen this month is a bit of a departure for me, a poem spoken by the author. Myself, I'm a visual person, and poetry spoken is almost always poetry that has less impact for me, and which I frequently misconstrue, but this piece works fine for me in this medium and comes through loud and clear.  Punishment, by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, is an intriguing piece of writing to me, juxtaposing the distant past and the present for a dubious squint at the progress, or lack of it, we've made as a species.  

If you'd like to know more about Heaney, born in 1939 in County Derry, Northern Ireland, winner of the Nobel prize among many others, there's a short but detailed biography here at the Poetry Foundation.

Just click here to go to the February Off the Shelf Archives for Heaney's poem.

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In order to make room for the current piece, the former selection, two poems by American poet Wallace Stevens, are moved here for a final perusal. Feel free to comment on either selection here, as comments are disabled off the main page. Suggestions of poems or poets for next time are always welcome.

Two Poems by Wallace Stevens

Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather. 

~by Wallace Stevens

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. 

~by Wallace Stevens

Header image: Winter Coats, by Jose Clemente Orozco, Oil on canvas, 1932

Bottom image:  Woodland Stream in a Winter Landscape, John Henry Twachtman, Oil on canvas 

Both images courtesy of wikipaintings.org