Useless! Useless!
—heavy rain driving
into the sea
I really like this poem, haikus are really beautiful and easier to understand. Kerouac is noticing something I’ve noticed before, how so much fresh rain goes into the salty sea. And there it’s not much use.
My life has been the poem I would have writ
But I could not both live and utter it.
This poem is really short, but it says a lot. He talks about life and how it represents a poem, its very hard to understand. I’m trying to understand what writ means but I think it means write, Thoreau just wanted the poem to rhyme.
Nature by Henry David Thoreau
O Nature! I do not aspire
To be the highest in thy quire,—
To be a meteor in the sky,
Or comet that may range on high;
Only a zephyr that may blow
Among the reeds by the river low;
Give me thy most privy place
Where to run my airy race.
In some withdrawn, unpublic mead
Let me sigh upon a reed,
Or in the woods, with leafy din,
Whisper the still evening in:
Some still work give me to do,—
Only—be it near to you!
For I’d rather be thy child
And pupil, in the forest wild,
Than be the king of men elsewhere,
And most sovereign slave of care:
To have one moment of thy dawn,
Than share the city’s year forlorn.
I really like the imagery in this poem it makes me feel calm. I noticed a lot of rhyming in a AB pattern. I also noticed that this poem is very structured and has a lot of punctuation. Nature writing is usually in this tone. I think Thoreau was an OG nature writer/poet. Good for him!
Translation by Thomas Walsh and Salomón de la Selva.
Poets! Towers of God
Made to resist the fury of the storms
Like cliffs beside the ocean
Or clouded, savage peaks!
Masters of lightning!
Breakwaters of eternity!
Hope, magic-voiced, foretells the day
When on the rock of harmony
The Siren traitorous shall die and pass away,
And there shall only be
The full, frank-billowed music of the sea.
Be hopeful still,
Though bestial elements yet turn
From Song with rancorous ill-will
And blinded races one another spurn!
Perversity debased
Among the high her rebel cry has raised.
The cannibal still lusts after the raw,
Knife-toothed and gory-faced.
Towers, your laughing banners now unfold.
Against all hatreds and all envious lies
Upraise the protest of the breeze, half-told,
And the proud quietness of sea and skies…
I like the poets use of punctuation in his poem, I haven’t seen many poems like that. It gives a lot of upfront emotions. I think the author is talking to fellow poets directly in a language they understand. He gives them instructions that almost seems like advice and flatters them. Some symbols that I noticed are towers, sirens, and the ocean.
greycore 