Larry’s Pretty Good Journal

For Poetry Monday, one more late Shelly:

“The flower that smiles to-day,” Percy Shelley

    The flower that smiles to-day
        To-morrow dies;
All that we wish to stay
        Tempts and then flies.
What is this world’s delight?
Lightning that mocks the night,
        Brief even as bright.

    Virtue, how frail it is!
        Friendship how rare!
Love, how it sells poor bliss
        For proud despair!
But we, though soon they fall,
Survive their joy, and all
        Which ours we call.

    Whilst skies are blue and bright,
        Whilst flowers are gay,
Whilst eyes that change ere night
        Make glad the day;
Whilst yet the calm hours creep,
Dream thou—and from thy sleep
        Then wake to weep.


Another poem written in the last year of his life and published posthumously with an editorial title, though this time the title Mary supplied was “Mutability.” It’s common to point out, for context, that Percy and Mary lost three children in early childhood. Like many of his shorter lyrics, it’s been set to music several times.

He nails that dismount.

---L.

Subject quote from Anti-Hero, Taylor Swift.

For Poetry Monday, another posthumously published short from a 2nd Gen Romantic:

“Music, when soft voices die,” Percy Shelley

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory—
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the belovèd's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.


Written in 1821 but not published until the 1824 Posthumous Poems edited by Mary Shelley and Leigh Hunt, under the title “To ——”. To be fair to the editors, Shelley used that title for a couple other enigmatic love lyrics also not written to Mary.

---L.

Subject quote from Zeur niet!, Annie M. G. Schmidt, tr. de_eekhoorn.

For Poetry Monday:

Epitaph for a Tyrant, W. H. Auden

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.


Written 1939.

---L.

Subject quote from Época, Gotan Project.

For Poetry Monday, another short poem from another language, this time with my translation:

Inscribed in the Temple of Mulan, Du Mu

I bend my bow in battle, serving as a man—
Within my dreams, as formerly, I paint my brows.
I often long for home, yet raise my cup at banquets.
Upon Fuyundui’s shrine, I pray to Wang Zhaojun.

题木兰庙
弯弓征战作男儿，
梦里曾经与画眉。
几度思归还把酒，
拂云堆上祝明妃。

Yes, this is the Mulan you all know, and yes, a temple to her—southern China has many Mt. Mulans, literally “magnolia mountain,” and when her legend spread in the 5th and 6th centuries, those with Daoist temple complexes started dedicating one of their temples to her worship. (One in Wuhan, founded before 700, can still be visited.) Du Mu (803-852) was a late Tang poet from the same Du clan as Du Fu, though they weren’t closely related. According to his biographies, this temple was near the Hubei-Henan border.

The speaker is Mulan during her army service on the northern steppes. Fuyundui is a pass near Baotou, Inner Mongolia, on the north bank of the Ordos Loop of the Yellow River, where Xiongnu and other steppe nomads would pray before raiding south into Han lands—just as Mulan wants to return south herself. Wang Zhaojun was sent by Han Emperor Yuan (so a few centuries before Mulan’s supposed time) to make a diplomatic marriage to the Chanyu of the Xiongnu Empire, and after his death was not allowed to return—making her another woman who went north in service of the empire and longed to go home. A lot of resonance in just one line.

Index of Chinese translations

---L.

Subject quote from Ticket to Ride, The Beatles.

For poetry Monday:

“Aren’t you who you once were?,” Shun’e, tr. Thomas McAuley

Aren’t you who you once were?
Aren’t I who I was then?
How strange that
All we trusted in
Has changed.

kimi ya aranu / wa ga mi ya aranu / obotsukana / tanomeshi koto no / mina kawarinuru

君やあらぬ我が身やあらぬおぼつかなたのめしことのみなかはりぬる


Shun’e (1113-c.1191) was a Heian nobleman (from the Minamoto clan), Buddhist priest (his lay personal name is not recorded), and poet (I translated one of his in One Hundred People, One Poem Each). This is from a poetry competition, and won its round, in part because it’s a deliberate echo of a poem by Ariwara no Narihira (which I’ve also translated).

---L.

Subject quote from Hello, Adele.

For Poetry Monday, another Auden:

In Time of War XIV, W.H. Auden

Yes, we are going to suffer, now; the sky
Throbs like a feverish forehead; pain is real;
The groping searchlights suddenly reveal
The little natures that will make us cry,

Who never quite believed they could exist,
Not where we were. They take us by surprise
Like ugly long-forgotten memories,
And like a conscience all the guns resist.

Behind each sociable home-loving eye
The private massacres are taking place;
All Women, Jews, the Rich, the Human Race.

The mountains cannot judge us when we lie:
We dwell upon the earth; the earth obeys
The intelligent and evil till they die.


Part of a sonnet cycle written for a travel book, Journey to a War (1939) by Auden and Christopher Isherwood, in which they documented the conditions at the front of the Sino-Japanese War. This was not his first poem about a war he observed first-hand (see “Spain 1936”) nor his first collaborative travel book (see Letters from Iceland), but the cycle as a whole is possibly his best work from the 1930s. He extensively revised the cycle when he started including it in his collections (and dropped the verse commentary appended in Journey), but this is from the original version.

---L.

Subject quote from Not Alone, Patty Griffin.

For Poetry Monday:

“The night is darkening round me,” Emily Brontë

The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow;
But a tyrant spell has bound me,
And I cannot, cannot go.

The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighed with snow;
The storm is fast descending,
And yet I cannot go.

Clouds beyond clouds above me,
Wastes beyond wastes below;
But nothing drear can move me;
I will not, cannot go.


Chosen for tonal affinities with last week.

---L.

Subject quote from Not Alone, Patty Griffin.

For Poetry Monday, while I could start another Kipling pong to a Housman ping, let’s instead boing off Housman himself:

Poem, after A. E. Housman, Hugh Kingsmill

What, still alive at twenty-two,
A clean, upstanding chap like you!
Sure, if your throat ’tis hard to slit,
Slit your girl’s, and swing for it.

Like enough, you won’t be glad
When they come to hang you, lad:
But bacon’s not the only thing
That’s cured by hanging from a string.

So, when the spilt ink of the night
Spreads o’er the blotting-pad of light
Lads whose job is still to do
Shall whet their knives, and think of you.


Housman claimed this was the best and indeed only good parody of himself he’d seen.

---L.

Subject quote from Pepper, Butthole Surfers.

For Poetry Monday, back to Kipling:

If—, Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same:
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!


First published in Rewards and Fairies (1910) as the endnote to “Brother Square-Toes.” In context, it provides commentary on George Washington from the story, who takes an unpopular stand for the good of his new country, but it was originally written in 1895 (the same year as most of A Shropshire Lad) about his friend L.S. Jameson, shortly before his failed raid (at Cecil Rhodes’s behest) against the Boer government of Transvaal. I did not expect the reframing that last tidbit provides, and I’m still processing what to do with it.* The poem’s adoption by stiff-upper-lip-ism was already problematic, of course. And yet many phrases ring and ring again with me, such as those two imposters and that unforgiving minute.


* I also don’t know what to make of Kipling’s use of colons.

---L.

Subject quote from If Some Grim Tragedy, Ninna May Smith, who coined a brilliant phrase with that “little rodent cares.”

For Poetry Monday, more Kipling, with a more haunting trace of the past:

The Way Through the Woods, Rudyard Kipling

They shut the road through the woods
    Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
    And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
    Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
    And the thin anemones.
    Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
    And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods
    Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
    Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
    Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,
    And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
    Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
    As though they perfectly knew
    The old lost road through the woods.
But there is no road through the woods.


First published in 1910 in Rewards and Fairies, the sequel to Puck of Pook’s Hill, as the endnote to “Marklake Witches.” It was probably written in 1899, shortly before his daughter’s death at age eight, for a friend of his daughter after the two had a day in the woods alone where they had an experience they attributed to ghosts. I love the subtle effect of adding that extra line in the second stanza.

---L.

Subject quote from Puck’s Song, from “Weland’s Sword,” Puck of Pook’s Hill, Rudyard Kipling.