a satire against reason and mankind

Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom, and also of madness and folly, but I learned that this, too, is a chasing after the wind.

For with much wisdom comes much sorrow;
the more knowledge, the more grief.

eccl. 1:17-18

i guess I'm the only one who enjoys poetry, at least today :)

I'm sorry, I did not see this thread, I just kind of stumbled over it.

I particularly enjoyed that piece you posted, I have not read it before. I will have to go find more. It is very intellectual, is it not, and very cynical?

However, you are not the only one who enjoys poetry here.

Hawkesbury likes poetry I think, and Eekers (she likes Elliot too) and FurPetesSake is very literary.

Elliot is a particular favorite of mine, though I am partial to Shakespeare, Yeats (not Keats) and Dylan Thomas.

I used to memorize poetry, but all I can remember now is a little Shakespeare. "...Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May.." I do remember that one in its entirety.

I was going to send Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, my daughter used to like me to read that one to her, for some reason. But this one seems more of a foggy wet day piece while Prufrock is kind of spring or summery. Besides, it has kind of a Prufrockian flavor to it. And in a way, it is echoing a fainter version of Rochester's sentiments.

Enjoy.

.......

Portrait of a Lady

T. S. Elliot

Thou hast committed—
Fornication: but that was in another country,
And besides, the wench is dead.

The Jew of Malta.


I
AMONG the smoke and fog of a December afternoon
You have the scene arrange itself——as it will seem to do—
With “I have saved this afternoon for you”;
And four wax candles in the darkened room,
Four rings of light upon the ceiling overhead,
An atmosphere of Juliet’s tomb
Prepared for all the things to be said, or left unsaid.
We have been, let us say, to hear the latest Pole
Transmit the Preludes, through his hair and finger-tips.
“So intimate, this Chopin, that I think his soul
Should be resurrected only among friends
Some two or three, who will not touch the bloom
That is rubbed and questioned in the concert room.”
—And so the conversation slips
Among velleities and carefully caught regrets
Through attenuated tones of violins
Mingled with remote cornets
And begins.

“You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends,
And how, how rare and strange it is, to find
In a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends,
(For indeed I do not love it … you knew? you are not blind!
How keen you are!)
To find a friend who has these qualities,
Who has, and gives
Those qualities upon which friendship lives.
How much it means that I say this to you—
Without these friendships—life, what cauchemar!”
Among the windings of the violins
And the ariettes
Of cracked cornets
Inside my brain a dull tom-tom begins
Absurdly hammering a prelude of its own,
Capricious monotone
That is at least one definite “false note.”
—Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance,
Admire the monuments,
Discuss the late events,
Correct our watches by the public clocks.
Then sit for half an hour and drink our bocks.

II
Now that lilacs are in bloom
She has a bowl of lilacs in her room
And twists one in her fingers while she talks.
“Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know
What life is, you who hold it in your hands”;
(Slowly twisting the lilac stalks)
“You let it flow from you, you let it flow,
And youth is cruel, and has no remorse
And smiles at situations which it cannot see.”
I smile, of course,
And go on drinking tea.
“Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall
My buried life, and Paris in the Spring,
I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world
To be wonderful and youthful, after all.”

The voice returns like the insistent out-of-tune
Of a broken violin on an August afternoon:
“I am always sure that you understand
My feelings, always sure that you feel,
Sure that across the gulf you reach your hand.

You are invulnerable, you have no Achilles’ heel.
You will go on, and when you have prevailed
You can say: at this point many a one has failed.

But what have I, but what have I, my friend,
To give you, what can you receive from me?
Only the friendship and the sympathy
Of one about to reach her journey’s end.

I shall sit here, serving tea to friends.…”

I take my hat: how can I make a cowardly amends
For what she has said to me?
You will see me any morning in the park
Reading the comics and the sporting page.
Particularly I remark
An English countess goes upon the stage.
A Greek was murdered at a Polish dance,
Another bank defaulter has confessed.
I keep my countenance,
I remain self-possessed
Except when a street piano, mechanical and tired
Reiterates some worn-out common song
With the smell of hyacinths across the garden
Recalling things that other people have desired.
Are these ideas right or wrong?

III
The October night comes down; returning as before
Except for a slight sensation of being ill at ease
I mount the stairs and turn the handle of the door
And feel as if I had mounted on my hands and knees.

“And so you are going abroad; and when do you return?
But that’s a useless question.
You hardly know when you are coming back,
You will find so much to learn.”
My smile falls heavily among the bric-à-brac.

“Perhaps you can write to me.”
My self-possession flares up for a second;
This is as I had reckoned.
“I have been wondering frequently of late
(But our beginnings never know our ends!)
Why we have not developed into friends.”
I feel like one who smiles, and turning shall remark
Suddenly, his expression in a glass.
My self-possession gutters; we are really in the dark.

“For everybody said so, all our friends,
They all were sure our feelings would relate
So closely! I myself can hardly understand.
We must leave it now to fate.
You will write, at any rate.
Perhaps it is not too late.
I shall sit here, serving tea to friends.”

And I must borrow every changing shape
To find expression … dance, dance
Like a dancing bear,
Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape.
Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance—
Well! and what if she should die some afternoon,
Afternoon grey and smoky, evening yellow and rose;
Should die and leave me sitting pen in hand
With the smoke coming down above the housetops;
Doubtful, for quite a while
Not knowing what to feel or if I understand
Or whether wise or foolish, tardy or too soon…
Would she not have the advantage, after all?
This music is successful with a “dying fall”
Now that we talk of dying—
And should I have the right to smile?

Last Edited by waterlily on 02/23/2014 05:41 PM

Thank you Waterlily!

for Sunday readers

Resonant indeed

Since I mentioned it, I will post the Sonnet. It has been going through my head a lot the last couple of months, along with another one, so I guess it is the season for it:

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 dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
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.
–William Shakespeare

It is a beautiful little poem, and sort of an antidote to all the pervasive corruption and deterioration, at least for a few minutes.

This one was the other one I memorized, and on the third one my life took a different turn, got a job, and there went the memorization.

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.



And that is pretty much the entire course of my serious poetry memorization, which makes me sort of sad now.

Hope is the thing with feathers

by Emily Dickinson

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Reason is the apple in the garden, the beginning of the fall.

I find myself agreeing with him and smiling at some lines and wanting to yell at him that our reason IS our art in some circumstances.

So, I like it. It makes you think about yourself.

I tend to agree with that. Reason can only take you so far, then it leaves you at the brink of a void.

and that, dear writer, is the purpose of the poem.

a very sarcastic look on life, but makes me smile too.

while I agree to some extent, to another, I see that this is a desperate poet.

thanks for taking a look!

So, then the question is, how to not do that vain seeking after wisdom, knowledge, position, profit, all that stuff?

"...grasping for the moon in water.." as the Chinese say?

Or, as they say in Arkansas, "It doesn't make any difference how the mule got in the ditch, the problem is to get him out."

I think that it is one of those things if you go directly at it, you'll never solve it.

So maybe undercutting it with kindheartedness and honesty is the way? Well, it is for me anyway.

I still believe in love in its different manifestations.

A soft mushroom can destroy a cement sidewalk.

balance is key.

not all or the other.

Chop wood, carry water.

The yang strong and the yin yielding. For all the talk, that is what it comes to, black white, male female, mind heart, from the very most subtle to this chaotic world.

The unreasonable language of wind and water.
We think in words, and reason orders our thoughts. There are other languages too, we all have known them from time to time in moments of calm but only in the slipstream of reason. Hearing them is not hard but learning to listen is. The body knows these languages, if we let it listen. The water talking to the lake, the wind to the trees, the river to the mountains. It is not body language but body knowledge, it is beyond reason, it is timeless and deep.

beautiful thoughts, AC.

this is 100% true.

Those who can live with fewer distractions and more mountain, trees and water indeed have a smoother path. It is a great challenge in more crowded places.

oh lily, how right you are indeed.

this is why I am a city refugee!!

It's a lot quieter there, isn't it?

What bothers me more than audio noise is the mental noise and I live in a relatively quiet area, except for the donkeys and burros down the road. :-)

Just be careful you don't end up in a "refugee" camp..

oh much quieter.

I didn't realize that I had become accustomed to sirens, heliocopters, and traffic noise.

now, here in the silence, I notice my thoughts. it's refreshing and scary all at once, if that makes sense?

Yes. it makes sense, absolutely. You are a really



But, so far as I know, noticing your thoughts, being aware of them, is the first step to not acknowledging the ones that are not truly yours.

The city noise really gets in the way of doing that. I can see why you got out. But this is where I am, not in the city, but not in the mountains either, and I guess it is where I am supposed to be for now, out here with the donkeys and chickens.

Scary? Oh yes. I heard once that when the mind goes serene and quiet, the first thing you want to do is start thinking again, like a kit throwing a rock into a still pond. I would not argue with that.

In Answer

In these quiet years growing calmer,
Lacking knowledge of the world’s affairs,
I stop worrying how things will turn out.
My quiet mind makes no subtle plans.
Returning to the woods I love
A pine-tree breeze rustles in my robes.
Mountain moonlight fills the lute’s bowl,
Shows up what learning I have left.
If you ask what makes us rich or poor
Hear the Fisherman’s voice float to shore.

Wang Wei (699-759 AD)

I wish I could achieve this type of serenity.

I'm not sure that's possible in this day and age.

Nobody knows if they can make it until they have made it, though. It's a worthy goal, and IMO the only game in town.

It must have been much easier at that time. Practicing in this day and age is the equivalent of exercising against resistance. Ha ha.

Anyway, you are closer to pine tree breezes, now all you need is a lute!