Neruda

Ocean

Body purer than a wave,
salt that washes the line,
and the luminous bird
flying without roots.

Full Woman, Fleshly Apply, Hot Moon: Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda. Translated by Stephen Mitchell

Jane Kenyon

 After an illness walking the Dog

Wet things smell stronger,
and I suppose his main regret is that
he can sniff just one at a time.
In a frenzy of delight
he runs way up the sandy road—
scored by freshets after five days
of rain. Every pebble gleams, every leaf.
When I whistle he halts abruptly
and steps in a circle,
swings his extravagant tail.
The he rolls and rubs his muzzle
in a particular place, while the drizzle
falls without cease, and Queen Anne’s lace
and Goldenrod bend low.
The top of the logging road stands open
and light. Another day, before
hunting starts, we’ll see how far it goes,
leaving word first at home.
The footing is ambiguous.
Soaked and muddy, the dog drops,
panting, and looks up with what amounts
to a grin. It’s so good to be uphill with him,
nicely winded, and looking down on the pond.
A sound commences in my left ear
like the sound of the sea in a shell;
a downward, vertiginous drag comes with it.
Time to head home. I wait
until we’re nearly out to the main road
to put him back on the leash, and he
—the designated optimist—
imagines to the end that he is free.

Otherwise: New and Selected Poems 1997, Graywolf Press

Fredegond Shove

Revelation

Near as my hand

The transformation: (time to understand

Is long but never far,

As things desired are)

No iceberg floating at the pole; no mark

Of glittering, perfect consciousness, nor dark

And mystic root of riddles; death nor birth,

Except of heart, when flesh is changed from earth

To heaven involved in it: not at all strange,

Not set beyond the common, human range;

Possible in the steep, quotidian stream,

Possible in a dream;

Achieved when all the energies are still –

Especially the will.

Published in “Daybreak” Hogarth Press 1922

Imtiaz Dharker

Women Bathing

All our lives, in every city, 
out of every landscape
the waters of the Alhambra
have been murmuring to us.
From fountains, from watercourses,
from the secret pools in courtyards,
voices calling across centuries.

The other women are bathing
in the moonlight.

‘Come,’ they say, ‘Come out of the day’s heat,
out of shaded rooms, let’s escape and slip away,
let the veils fall, one by one.
Slide into the pools that lie like mirrors of the sky,
and let the moon wash over our bodies.’

Bodies lush, generously-hipped.
Bodies like pomegranates,
bursting with promises.

 from The Terrorist At My Table (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2006)

Louise Bogan

Leave-Taking

I do not know where either of us can turn

Just at first, waking from the sleep of each other.

I do not know how we can bear

The river struck by the gold plummet of the moon,

Or many trees shaken together in the darkness.

We shall wish not to be alone

And that love were not dispersed and set free—

Though you defeat me,

And I be heavy upon you.

But like earth heaped over the heart

Is love grown perfect.

Like a shell over the beat of life

Is love perfect to the last.

So let it be the same

Whether we turn to the dark or to the kiss of another;

Let us know this for leavetaking,

That I may not be heavy upon you,

That you may blind me no more.

Originally published in Poetry, August 1922.

Julio Cortazar

THE HAPPY CHILD

That flash of happiness
twists in the air and settles
lightly on your hair like a petal
along with the breeze’s bees

Out of this airy happiness flows
the beauty where you go dancing
oh girl blind to the stirring
wings of a black rose

Tennyson

Tennyson's poetry is not popular nowadays, but I am a bit of a fan of things Victorian - as well as Tennyson, I like William Morris, the Pre-Raphaelites and Julia Margaret Cameron, but Tennyson is almost the archetypal Victorian with his literary career spanning much of the nineteenth century. So far, so bourgeois! 

Published in Tennyson's Poems, Chiefly Lyrical in 1830 Mariana is not strictly speaking a Victorian poem. For context, in 1830 Coleridge and Wordsworth were still alive but Keats, Shelley and Byron had all flamed into fame and died during the previous decade. Victoria herself wouldn't come to the throne for another seven years, and the other Behemoths of Victorian literature (Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes) were in the future.  For me there are echoes of Donne's Nocturnal Upon St Lucy's Day  - another poem full of lost love, cold and darkness.

It is often linked to Millais painting of the same name (painted in 1851), which certainly conveys the ennui of Tennyson's Mariana, but I think the feel of the poem is much more like some of the works by Samuel Palmer, like this one held in Tate Britain, an ink and gouache on card made around the same time. The world is monochromatic, darkening, the mood is solitary and wistful.

Samuel Palmer, Landscape Girl Standing, c1826 

©Tate Photo ©Tate CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported)

Mariana in the Moated Grange

With blackest moss the flower-plots

Were thickly crusted, one and all:

The rusted nails fell from the knots

That held the pear to the gable-wall.

The broken sheds look'd sad and strange:

Unlifted was the clinking latch;

Weeded and worn the ancient thatch

Upon the lonely moated grange.

She only said, "My life is dreary,

He cometh not," she said;

She said, "I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!"

Her tears fell with the dews at even;

Her tears fell ere the dews were dried;

She could not look on the sweet heaven,

Either at morn or eventide.

After the flitting of the bats,

When thickest dark did trance the sky,

She drew her casement-curtain by,

And glanced athwart the glooming flats.

She only said, "The night is dreary,

He cometh not," she said;

She said, "I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!"

Upon the middle of the night,

Waking she heard the night-fowl crow:

The cock sung out an hour ere light:

From the dark fen the oxen's low

Came to her: without hope of change,

In sleep she seem'd to walk forlorn,

Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn

About the lonely moated grange.

She only said, "The day is dreary,

He cometh not," she said;

She said, "I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!"

About a stone-cast from the wall

A sluice with blacken'd waters slept,

And o'er it many, round and small,

The cluster'd marish-mosses crept.

Hard by a poplar shook alway,

All silver-green with gnarled bark:

For leagues no other tree did mark

The level waste, the rounding gray.

She only said, "My life is dreary,

He cometh not," she said;

She said "I am aweary, aweary

I would that I were dead!"

All day within the dreamy house,

The doors upon their hinges creak'd;

The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse

Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek'd,

Or from the crevice peer'd about.

Old faces glimmer'd thro' the doors

Old footsteps trod the upper floors,

Old voices called her from without.

She only said, "My life is dreary,

He cometh not," she said;

She said, "I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!"

The sparrow's chirrup on the roof,

The slow clock ticking, and the sound

Which to the wooing wind aloof

The poplar made, did all confound

Her sense; but most she loathed the hour

When the thick-moted sunbeam lay

Athwart the chambers, and the day

Was sloping toward his western bower.

Then said she, "I am very dreary,

He will not come," she said;

She wept, "I am aweary, aweary,

Oh God, that I were dead!"