Poems

[cosmolinguist]

This morning when I had to wake up very early after some odd dreams, I saw Stuart had shared a poem on Facebook. He said "I'd love to say that you can't beat a Keat, but there's always Shakespeare and Cooper-Clarke, Plath and Barrett-Browning and Donne and Yeats. But this is at least hard to beat."

When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be
By John Keats
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power<
Of unreflecting love—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

I've left the only comment there, and it says "I always found it quite comforting that however bleak I was feeling a romantic had gotten there first." It's true: I'm not usually a fan of Keats (or indeed half the other poets Stuart listed, but I love what a varied list this is) but I do like this one.

And then soon after, JT shared a poem I definitely should've known about but I didn't.

Mid-Term Break
By Seamus Heaney
I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying—
He had always taken funerals in his stride—
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'.
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four-foot box, a foot for every year.

And I left the only comment there, too. It says "Seamus Heaney is amazing, an absolute favorite of mine. Luckily my brother made it to a lot more than four but this poem still reminds me so much of losing him." And that's true, too. It made me tear up a little when I was supposed to be on my way to a typology lecture.

I don't know what made these two share these poems, but my day was better for having been unexpectedly presented with them.