Czeslaw Milosz – A Song on the End of the World

 Poems
Nov 192010
 

On the days the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.

Robert Browning – from Paracelsus

 Poems
Nov 192010
 

This is my plan–(first drinking its good luck)–
I will accept all helps; all I despised
So rashly at the outset, equally
With early impulses, late years have quenched:
I have tried each way singly: now for both!
All helps! no one sort shall exclude the rest.
I seek to know and to enjoy at once,
Not one without the other as before.
Suppose my labour should seem God’s own cause
Once more, as first I dreamed,–it shall not baulk me
Of the meanest earthliest sensualest delight
That may be snatched; for every joy is gain,
And gain is gain, however small. My soul
Can die then, nor be taunted–“what was gained?”
Nor, on the other hand, should pleasure follow
As though I had not spurned her hitherto,
Shall she o’ercloud my spirit’s rapt communion
With the tumultuous past, the teeming future,
Glorious with visions of a full success.

…

After all, Festus, you say well: I am
A man yet: I need never humble me.
I would have been–something, I know not what;
But though I cannot soar, I do not crawl.
There are worse portions than this one of mine.
You say well!

Palladas – Selections

 Poems  Tagged with:
Nov 192010
 

translated by Tony Harrison

7
Why this desperation to move heaven and earth
to try to change what’s doled out at your birth,
the lot you’re made a slave by the gods?

Learn to love tranquillity, and against all odds
coax your glum spirit to its share of mirth.

8
Man’s clay, and such a measly bit
and measuring the Infinite!

Leave geography alone, you can’t survey
the paltry area of that poor clay.

Forget the spheres and first assess
not space but your own littleness.

16
God rot the guts and guts’ indulgences.
It’s their fault that sobriety lets go.

19
Loving the rituals that keep men close,
Nature created means for friends apart:

pen, paper, ink, the alphabet,
signs for the distant and disconsolate heart.

32
Nouns and poor grammarians decline.
I’m selling off these rotten books of mine,
my Pindar, my Callimachus, the lot.
I’m a bad ‘case’. It’s poverty I’ve got.
Dorotheus has given me the sack
and slanders me behind my back.

Help me, Theon, or all that’ll stand
between poverty and me’s an &

64
The blacksmith’s quite a logical man
to melt an Eros down and turn
the God of Love into a frying pan,
something that can also burn.

Anne Carson – On Discovering at Dinner that Adam Zagajewski and I Share a Birthday

 Poems
Nov 192010
 

metals talking among themselves, metals that first meet above the earth..

Adam Zagajewski, Another Beauty

I thought about it walking home.

One ot chose relentlessly clear midwest II idnights frozen all the way up to a half
moon loose in hers team in blueblack vastness. Silent silent. Agnostic night.
No blackbirds.
Share a birthday! –

were we

negatives lying side by side in the developer’s tray while certain weird red minutes
drained away? Or loitering together in that lobby in heaven where June 21st souls
all gather to wait
and Adam and I

[avoiding Sartre]

ducked to a corner to talk about scansion. He mentioned, as always, Catullus.
I would have liked a cup of tea. This was shortly
after the big bang.
Microwaves

hissed past us

like bad radio stations. There was a desolation here and there in our minds.
Knives were singing, Adam made a note about this. A philosopher (not Sartre)
stood in a knot of disciples
expounding

the difference between

[two concepts that must be distinguished]. Most wore shaggy furs or sheepskins,
the philosopher a heavy sweater. ‘It will be warmer after we’re born,’
I said to Adam
and he said,

‘Of this I am not sure.’

Friedrich Schiller – Live with your century, but do not be its captive

 Quotes
Nov 192010
 

Live with your century, but do not be its captive; render to your contemporaries what they need, not what they praise. Without sharing their guilt, share with noble resignation their punishment and bow with freedom under the yoke with which they can dispense no better than they can bear it. By the steadfast courage with which you disdain their good fortune, you will demonstrate to them that it is not your cowardice that submits to their sufferings. Consider them as they ought to be when you practice to influence them, but consider them as they are when you contemplate acting on their behalf. Seek their approval through their dignity, but reckon their good fortune to their unworthiness; in this manner your own nobility will summon up their own but their unworthiness will not obstruct your goal… Expel the arbitrary, the frivolous, the coarse from their amusements, and ultimately from their natures. Wherever you find them, surround them with noble, great and ingenious forms, encompass them with the symbols of all that is excellent, until at length reality is overcome by appearance and art by nature.

Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen, 9. Brief (1791) in: Sämtliche Werke, vol. 5, pp. 595-96 (H. Göpfert ed. 1980)(S.H. transl.)