Little Red-Cap, by Carol Anne Duffy

[longtime-lurker.livejournal.com]

I'm fascinated by literature that plays with classic fairytales, and this poem is one of my favorites in that genre; it tells the familiar story of Little Red Riding Hood like you've never heard it before.


At childhood's end, the houses petered out
into playing fields, the factory, allotments
kept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men,
the silent railway line, the hermit's caravan,
till you came at last to the edge of the woods.
It was there that I first clapped eyes on the wolf.

( Read more... )

Requesting some help...

[chryseis2089.livejournal.com]

I'm looking for a poem that appeared on December's SAT II Literature Test. It's about how the key to poetry is the beauty generated by the clash between the expected and the real. It uses a garden in winter as a metaphor. It also talks about a relationship in which the speaker's loved one does something unexpected, much to the speaker's joy.

That's about all I remember ^^;; Thanks for the help.  

Grief, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

[calliopemused.livejournal.com]

I tell you hopeless grief is passionless,
That only men incredulous of despair,
Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air
Beat upward to God's throne in loud access
Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness
In souls, as countries, lieth silent-bare
Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare
Of the absolute heavens. Deep-hearted man, express
Grief for thy dead in silence like to death-
Most like a monumental statue set
In everlasting watch and moveless woe
Till itself crumble to the dust beneath.
Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet;
If it could weep, it could arise and go.

Grief
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The Highwayman, by Alfred Noyes

[stitchesandlace.livejournal.com]

The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight, over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding-
            Riding-riding-
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.


He'd a French cocked-hat on his forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin,
A coat of the claret velvet, and breeches of brown doe-skin;
They fitted with never a wrinkle: his boots were up to the thigh!
And he rode with a jewelled twinkle,
            His pistol butts a-twinkle,
His rapier hilt a-twinkle, under the jewelled sky.


Over the cobbles he clattered and clashed in the dark inn-yard,
And he tapped with his whip on the shutters, but all was locked and barred;
He whistled a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
But the landlord's black-eyed daughter,
            Bess, the landlord's daughter,
Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair

( And dark in the old inn-yard... )

This poem is one of my all-time favourites. I heard it for the first time in high school, some 5 years ago, and it made me tear up. To this day I still get shivers! So beautiful.

RIP Evan

[sanguine-satire.livejournal.com]

I am standing on the sea shore,
A ship sails in the morning breeze and starts for the ocean.
She is an object of beauty and I stand watching her
Till at last she fades on the horizon and someone at my side says:
"She is gone."

Gone! Where?
Gone from my sight - that is all.
She is just as large in the masts, hull and spars as she was when I saw her
And just as able to bear her load of living freight to its destination.
The diminished size and total loss of sight is in me,
not in her.

And just at the moment when someone at my side says,
"She is gone",
There are others who are watching her coming, and other voices take up a glad shout:
"There she comes"
- and that is dying. A horizon and just the limit of our sight.
Lift us up, Oh Lord, that we may see further.

-- Bishop Brent

Eireann Lorsung

[arielblue.livejournal.com]

Being

A letter is holy. A story
is holy hands reaching out into the world.
Birds come home
      across distance I can't conceive

and live in their bodies.
Ash in the air. Every place I've been
is on fire with words.

  One day
I throw away all my love letters
without noticing. Mountains

in the heart.
       What belongs
to me? I leave the world
all the time. These arms, these

fingers, this tongue, these feet,
and their bent wings. I know
it will be dirt, the prayers

now in marrow will retake
earth. I will live inside whatever flies.
Burning, the brink of all things.

--Éireann Lorsung
from Music for Landing Planes By (Milkweed Editions, 2007)