“’cause i don’t need boxes wrapped in strings/ and desire and love and empty things/ just a chance”

[larryhammer]

For Poetry Monday, one last one from A Shropshire Lad:

“From far, from eve and morning,” A.E. Housman

From far, from eve and morning
    And yon twelve-winded sky,
The stuff of life to knit me
    Blew hither: here am I.

Now—for a breath I tarry
    Nor yet disperse apart—
Take my hand quick and tell me,
    What have you in your heart.

Speak now, and I will answer;
    How shall I help you, say;
Ere to the wind’s twelve quarters
    I take my endless way.


Tonally very different from last week’s, though it’s another that’s influential on SFF—both Zelezny and Le Guin, among others, took titles from it. This has always given me vibes of Ariel from The Tempest.

---L.

Subject quote from Better Days, Goo Goo Dolls.

Comments

[graydon]

It may be all my biases, but I tend to take this one as someone raised in a fully creationist worldview who is too educated not to know it isn't true sort of tiptoeing up to the edge of not being able to say "until we meet again" to the dying and speak honestly.

Impermanence is a tough thing to deal with when you've been raised on certain eternities.

[larryhammer]

You can slice this a bunch of different directions. Housman was good at complexity in small, sometimes astonishingly so.

[graydon]

I am paraphrasing from long-ago memory, but Houseman got described as "precisely confused" in an English course I took. The voice in the poem is struggling with something, and while they know exactly what it is, this is not actually helping.

[larryhammer]

That is an excellent description.

[cmcmck]

I adore this one!

We live among the Shropshire hills as you know and this feels so much of them.

[asakiyume]

Now--for a breath I tarry

I love that. It reminds me (though time and influence-wise I suppose people ought to be reminded in the opposite direction) of Laurie Anderson's Kokoku, which I love with a mighty love. These lines in particular:

I come very briefly to this place
I watch it quiver
I watch it shake

And yes, "the wind's 12 quarters," hee. The other day my dad was talking about Tacitus and quoted "they make a desolation and they call it peace," and I thought heyyyyy, now I know where Arkady Martine got the title for A Desolation Called Peace (which book I haven't read, but I admire the title!)

[larryhammer]

Martine is totes def playing on Tacitus, both in title and theme.