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larryhammerFor Poetry Monday:
Solitude, Babette Deutsch
There is the loneliness of peopled places:
Streets roaring with their human flood; the crowd
That fills bright rooms with billowing sounds and faces,
Like foreign music, overshrill and loud.
There is the loneliness of one who stands
Fronting the waste under the cold sea-light,
A wisp of flesh against the endless sands,
Like a lost gull in solitary flight.
Single is all up-rising and down-lying;
Struggle or fear or silence none may share;
Each is alone in bearing, and in dying;
Conquest is uncompanioned as despair.
Yet I have known no loneliness like this,
Locked in your arms and bent beneath your kiss.
Deutsch (1895-1982) typically wrote poems imagistic enough that she’s often labeled an Imagist. In addition to poetry, she wrote criticism and a couple novels, but is best known for her numerous translations. This is from her first collection, Banners (1919). And since I’ve been noting writerly husbands, in 1921 she married the translator and professor of Russian literature Avrahm Yarmolinsky.
---L.
Subject quote from Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798, William “Cannot Title Worth a Damn” Wordsworth.
Solitude, Babette Deutsch
There is the loneliness of peopled places:
Streets roaring with their human flood; the crowd
That fills bright rooms with billowing sounds and faces,
Like foreign music, overshrill and loud.
There is the loneliness of one who stands
Fronting the waste under the cold sea-light,
A wisp of flesh against the endless sands,
Like a lost gull in solitary flight.
Single is all up-rising and down-lying;
Struggle or fear or silence none may share;
Each is alone in bearing, and in dying;
Conquest is uncompanioned as despair.
Yet I have known no loneliness like this,
Locked in your arms and bent beneath your kiss.
Deutsch (1895-1982) typically wrote poems imagistic enough that she’s often labeled an Imagist. In addition to poetry, she wrote criticism and a couple novels, but is best known for her numerous translations. This is from her first collection, Banners (1919). And since I’ve been noting writerly husbands, in 1921 she married the translator and professor of Russian literature Avrahm Yarmolinsky.
---L.
Subject quote from Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798, William “Cannot Title Worth a Damn” Wordsworth.
no subject
Date: 27 November 2023 04:25 pm (UTC)Also William “Cannot Title Worth a Damn” Wordsworth. Heh!
no subject
Date: 27 November 2023 04:58 pm (UTC)Willy had ... issues.