That Trojan War guy
It will not profit an old languid king
By this still ash, among bland arid crags
Stuck with an cranky woman, just to script
Unjust laws for a group of louts and fools
That hoard, and nap, and drink, and know not him.
I cannot stop voyaging. I will drink
All drops of this world. I had lots of fun
And had a lot of pain, both on my own
And with my good companions. On land and
As rainy stars through scuddding drifts would haunt
A dim bay. Now I am a titular
Man, always roaming with a hungry mind.
I saw and know a lot; towns and harbors
And customs, tropics, councils, and monarchs.
And I was not last among this grand crowd.
I drunk in giddy joy of war with troops
Far on a ringing plain of windy Troy.
I am a part of all I run across.
But all I do is just an arch, through which
To squint at that unfound world. Its margin
Will blur always and always as I walk.
How dull it is to halt, to call a stop,
To rust in a scabbard and not to glow!
As though surviving was living. Just hours
Is all too small, and not a lot is still
Around, but any hour I clutch
From that still that will not stop. It’s a thing
That can bring many things with it. How wrong
Just for four suns to sit and hoard my mind
And this gray spirit craving a long trip
To follow truth as if a sinking star
Until an utmost bound of human thought.
This my son, my own only offspring
For whom I put down this crown and island,
I’m a fan of him, who’ll try to fulfill
This labor, by slow toil to turn mild
A brutal folk, and through soft urgings to
Instil productivity, show what’s good.
Without any guilt, working in a job
Of common duty, kind, happy, won’t fail
In pansy hugging work or stuff, and pay
Fair adoration to our local gods
Ruling on his own. His work works for him.
That is my port; my boat puffs out its sail
A dark broad bay now glooms. My sailors, you
Souls that would toil, and wrought, and thought as I,
That always with a joyful frolic took
Storms and fair days, in opposition to
Brows, scalps and minds–you know I’m also old.
Saturn still has his honor and his toil
And all will pass away, but not right now.
A work of nobility can occur
Fitting of warriors that could fight Gods.
And now lights will start shining down from rocks.
A long day rolls on. A slow lunar climb
Occurs, and many sounds moan round us. Hark,
‘Tis not too hard to look for a far world.
Push off, and sitting all in a row, lash
At sounding furrows, for it is my goal
To sail past that horizon, and all baths
Of all far-off stars, until I cannot.
Possibly distant gulfs will wash us down.
Possibly our boat shall find islands fair
And run across grand champions of Troy.
Though much is fading, much will last, and though,
I am not now as strong as, in old days
I was to push on land and sky, that which
I am, I am. A mix of all of you
Not as strong as in past, but strong in will
To fight, to look, to find, and not to quit.
Dying fish
Shall I compare you to a dying fish
That flops amid wet glass and gasps in air?
On reflection, that would not be my wish.
I think that the comparison’s unfair.
For fish are fit when water wraps their gills
But water blurs you till you’re beyond use.
For you it is not open air that kills
But in a puddle, you lie soaked and loose.
Destruction for the hope of gain, I guess
Can once in a while be justified.
But at observing you, I must confess
The shards and puddle leave me stupefied.
Why would have someone broken glass for thee,
Oh newspaper that was already free?
Bolton 2, Everton 1
New poetic form, as befits the way I heard about this story; every line is exactly 140 characters long.
An American football field is one hundred yards long when measured (as most people would measure it) between the near edges of the endzones.
It is less commonly measured in two dimensions by marching bands. “On the fifty-yard line, eight steps inside the home sideline, trombones.”
Though the director does not speak to us, we take our places, finding our coordinates in tiny text placed in a folder (of the variety flip).
A trending Tweet can be at most one hundred forty characters long, though that is enough for a quote whose context can be inferred, or quip.
If one cannot infer context, of course, it is unclear whether the quoted person is referring to a physical location or a metaphorical place.
But one could find out the story behind the uncelebratory stance, a deflection to credit the wind pushing things in three dimensional space.
So a tie is broken. But sidebar trends tend to lag, and by the time the news breaks somewhere else the tie is restored and a footnote loses.
Playing on another remembered field, the pale numbers beneath unseen, the gold halftime score above unremarkable, the marching band refuses.
Based on certain of yesterday’s events, although coincidentally not the Iowa caucus
I met a traveler from an ancient time.
Translation was tricky, far from her home
But we bonded over meter and rhyme
As she recited some forgotten poem.
She paged through an anthology I found.
We spoke of lines, and where a line should break.
We spoke of how a poem should look or sound;
What was a good start, what was a mistake.
She knew some odes to gems; pearl or obsidian,
That glittered, or had glittered in the past.
She read about ongoings more quotidian
From my peers. Well, her era couldn’t last.
“Did you–” I tried to say, “know more of truth?”
She left. I hid within a voting booth.
Iceberg
Shall I compare you to an icy floe
That floats atop a vast, enormous sea?
Upon reflection, the answer is “no”;
There are no penguins here, nor could there be.
They say eight-ninths of icebergs escape
Our eyes. We but glimpse one great piece of ice.
But below you’s another hue and shape.
I learned your different names. Do they suffice?
We sort by what is useful. What brings hail
Or gentle rain to nourish growing crops?
But I can’t help but wonder if words fail
To classify the hidden forms of tops.
Would wordsmiths have devised the same divides
If they could have looked at clouds from both sides?
Coiled Snake
New year, new idea for poems. I can imagine there being a lot where this came from, but no promises.
Shall I compare you to a coiled snake?
Or perhaps to twin snakes, that both lie tangled?
No, I shall not; serpents seem no mistake.
They’re keen and powerful, not frayed or mangled.
Shall I compare you, then, to a mousetrap
That lies in wait to catch the hopeless mice?
Mousetraps can be improved by skill or hap
They say, but you are regressive, not nice.
Once others stood where you, now helpless, lie
With such aid by my side, I proudly stood.
And now I fumble. Incompetent, I
Scorn you at risk to me. You’re still no good.
How am I ever going to get places
If I do not care about my shoelaces?
Unhelpful recommendations
Sorry for the dead muse–been doing lipogrammatic stuff elsewhere.
I often give my post “tags” to group together posts about similar content. Recently, WordPress has started trying to suggest some more tags.
“Trying” being the operative word.
Here, in roughly chronological order by original post, are some of their, er, suggestions for your amusement.
Chinese system, stupid car, dint, accordion style, footwear category, sophomores, hard knocks, warm location, moxie, wisconsin wisconsin, wedding ring, high school basketball, wrath, norms, last syllable of a word, james clark maxwell.
Happy holidays!
Feminine Rhyme
As a follow-up to my last post, here’s a wider pool of feminine rhyme samples from other poems (not necessarily hymns–the Praise and Thanksgiving section of the Evangelical Lutheran Worship hymnal is relatively heavy on the “add an unstressed word to the end to make a feminine rhyme,” and includes no less than three mountain/fountain pairs). This pool comes from the Poetry Foundation website. I was amused to find James Clark Maxwell (of physics’ Maxwell’s Equations fame, or infame if you’re me) contributing several poems, including this evocatively-titled piece.
“ation” was counted as a “legit” rhyme in the last post, but upon further consideration I realize how “all-purpose” it really is. (Again, I’m not above most of these tricks–one of my lipogram projects has a bunch of “ations” together. Should dust that off sometime.)
A Feminine Touch
It should come as no shock that I’m a stickler for rhyme. Whether it be “cat” and “hat” or “two fish” and “blue fish,” I appreciate people who take the time to make their lines…line up.
But there’s a difference between these two examples, so it’s time for a short crash course in poetic…stuff. “Cat” and “hat” have parts of one syllable in common. Of course, they’re only one syllable long. So consider “surprise” and “disguise”–although they’re two syllables long, the stress is on the last syllable in both of them, and so we look at the stressed syllable. Since “ise” matches with “ise,” there’s the same kind of one-syllable rhyme going on here. This is, for some reason, called “masculine rhyme.”
But sometimes the stress is on the second-to-last syllable of a word (or a line). An example I wrote is “Wieters” and (for instance) “heaters.” The last syllables are exactly the same, and the previous syllables rhyme as well. This is called “feminine rhyme”. Personally, I’m particularly pleased with myself if I can come up with rhymes like that–often, they’re rarer then the masculine kind. (There are a few three-syllable combinations, like “clarity” and “parity,” which as far as I know don’t have a special name.)
Although these two-syllable rhymes can be hard to come up with, if you work for it it’s not that difficult. Given two rhyming verbs, you can always thrown an unstressed “ing” onto the back of both of them. Voila–feminine rhyme! (I am no means above this trick myself.) Last night, listening to “Good King Wenceslas,” I realized how many ways there are to do this. You can add a verb ending (“telling” and “dwelling”), stretch out some arguably monosyllabic words (“cruel” and “fuel”), use archaic words (“hither” and “thither” when “here” and “there” mean the same thing), or even find two distinct rhyming words (“mountain” and “fountain”).
So, I got to wondering what other Christmas carols did…
Here, “suffix” denotes some other suffix than “ing” (dinted/printed), and “word” means there’s an unstressed word coming after two rhyming words (“own him”/”enthrone him”). “Weak” is just a rhyme I’m skeptical of (“deliver”/”forever”?)
A special shoutout to “Ding Dong Merrily on High,” which takes boring old “swing” and “sing” and conjugates them into “swungen” and “sungen.” Keeping it old school.
To Hypothetical Critics
Concede this: that for all my love of forms,
My stubborn treks upon unchanging ground,
My rigid steps, my hands that cling to norms,
That someone else (or sometimes I) have found;
I will not speak of everything cliched.
Some of your muses have eschewed their blessing
And curse from me. There is enough that’s played
To give what should be enough for addressing.
And should you seek from here some lofty claims
Some lesson that somebody should abstract,
Or some reminder that games are just games,
Worthless number upon meaningless fact,
A voice from the crossroads of work and play–
You might just find me with nothing to say.
