Poetry
- Poet for July
- Kooser Column 4
- Edward De Vere
- The Poetry of the Bhagavad Gita
- Kooser Column 170
- Tricked by W. B. Yeats
- Sandra Beasley
- Rime or Rhyme?
- Kooser Column 3
- Siegfried Sassoon
Posted by
Linda Sue Grimes
Linda Sue Grimes
Pablo Neruda ransacked the spiritual poetry of Rabindranath Tagore, borrowing and plagiarizing at will.
When Pablo Neruda, the Chilean Nobel Laureate, published his first collection of verse, titled Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, he put his borrowings of the Bengali Poet Rabindranath Tagore on display.
While many of the poems demonstrate their debt to Tagore’s poems, Neruda’s number 16 is a total rip-off of Tagore’s #30 from The Gardener. In his memoirs, Neruda claims that he had told his friend, Joaquin Cifuentes Sepveda, that he had considered putting a disclaimer with the poem, saying that it was a “paraphrase,” but Sepveda discouraged him, saying Neruda would be accused of plagiarism. Sepveda’s advice was flawed.
After Neruda’s “paraphrase” was discovered to be perilously close to the Tagore poem, in the next edition the poem carried the explanation, “This poem is a paraphrase of the 30th poem in Rabindranath Tagore's The Gardener.” While this disclaimer might give the act legal cover, it in no way diminishes the fact that Neruda plagiarized Tagore.
Pablo Neruda is July’s featured poet: July Poet – Pablo Neruda: ‘To be men! That is the Stalinist law!’
While many of the poems demonstrate their debt to Tagore’s poems, Neruda’s number 16 is a total rip-off of Tagore’s #30 from The Gardener. In his memoirs, Neruda claims that he had told his friend, Joaquin Cifuentes Sepveda, that he had considered putting a disclaimer with the poem, saying that it was a “paraphrase,” but Sepveda discouraged him, saying Neruda would be accused of plagiarism. Sepveda’s advice was flawed.
After Neruda’s “paraphrase” was discovered to be perilously close to the Tagore poem, in the next edition the poem carried the explanation, “This poem is a paraphrase of the 30th poem in Rabindranath Tagore's The Gardener.” While this disclaimer might give the act legal cover, it in no way diminishes the fact that Neruda plagiarized Tagore.
Pablo Neruda is July’s featured poet: July Poet – Pablo Neruda: ‘To be men! That is the Stalinist law!’
Posted by
Linda Sue Grimes
Linda Sue Grimes
Kooser’s fourth column features the poem “Another Feeling” by Ruth Stone.
Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry
While serving as the U. S. Poet Laureate 2004 to 2006, Nebraska poet Ted Kooser launched his series of weekly columns called American Life in Poetry. These columns are offered free to newspapers to dramatize the value and just plain fun of poetry and to demonstrate how poetry enhances life in America.
Kooser’s Commentary
Kooser introduces the poem: "None of us can fix the past. Mistakes we've made can burden us for many years, delivering their pain to the present as if they had happened just yesterday. In the following poem we join with Ruth Stone in revisiting a hurried decision, and we empathize with the intense regret of being unable to take that decision back, or any other decision, for that matter.”
The Poem
Is the speaker of the poem perhaps a bit of drama queen? Here are the first four line of “Another Feeling”:
Once you saw a drove of young pigs
crossing the highway. One of them
pulling his body by the front feet,
the hind legs dragging flat.
To read the entire poem, please visit American Life in Poetry Column 4.
While serving as the U. S. Poet Laureate 2004 to 2006, Nebraska poet Ted Kooser launched his series of weekly columns called American Life in Poetry. These columns are offered free to newspapers to dramatize the value and just plain fun of poetry and to demonstrate how poetry enhances life in America.
Kooser’s Commentary
Kooser introduces the poem: "None of us can fix the past. Mistakes we've made can burden us for many years, delivering their pain to the present as if they had happened just yesterday. In the following poem we join with Ruth Stone in revisiting a hurried decision, and we empathize with the intense regret of being unable to take that decision back, or any other decision, for that matter.”
The Poem
Is the speaker of the poem perhaps a bit of drama queen? Here are the first four line of “Another Feeling”:
Once you saw a drove of young pigs
crossing the highway. One of them
pulling his body by the front feet,
the hind legs dragging flat.
To read the entire poem, please visit American Life in Poetry Column 4.
Posted by
Linda Sue Grimes
Linda Sue Grimes
The identity of the writer of the plays and sonnets attributed to “William Shakespeare” has long been debated; the most likely candidate appears to be Edward De Vere.
Part of the quandary is that a chap named William Shakespeare and De Vere were contemporaries. William Shakespeare, an actor, he lived from April 26, 1564, until April 23, 1616; De Vere from April 12, 1550 until June 24, 1604.
The main challenge to William’s actually having written the works attributed to him is that he lacked both the education and experience to account for the learning and depth of understanding portrayed in the sonnets and dramatized in the plays, while the opposite is true for De Vere. Episodes from the plays have been found to be part of De Vere’s life experience.
The truth may never be fully known, and scholars and critics continue to argue on either side.
Here is an analysis of a De Vere sonnet, “De Vere’s Love Poem.” Also, I continue to analyze the Shakespeare sonnets, of which I have complete the following: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 73, 96, 116, 126, 130, 138
The main challenge to William’s actually having written the works attributed to him is that he lacked both the education and experience to account for the learning and depth of understanding portrayed in the sonnets and dramatized in the plays, while the opposite is true for De Vere. Episodes from the plays have been found to be part of De Vere’s life experience.
The truth may never be fully known, and scholars and critics continue to argue on either side.
Here is an analysis of a De Vere sonnet, “De Vere’s Love Poem.” Also, I continue to analyze the Shakespeare sonnets, of which I have complete the following: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 73, 96, 116, 126, 130, 138
The Poetry of the Bhagavad Gita
Posted by
Linda Sue Grimes
Linda Sue Grimes
Paramahansa Yogananda’s 'The Yoga of the Bhagavad Gita' is a condensed version of the two-volume set titled 'God Talks to Arjuna'.
The Mahabharata is thought to be the longest epic poem ever written. The Bhagavad Gita is an important part of that extended epic, and the Gita is often extolled as the “Hindu Bible.”
With Paramahansa Yogananda’s two-volume set of the translation of the Gita titled God Talks to Arjuna, the world experienced for the first time a detailed explication of the poetry of the Gita.
Then in 2007, Self-Realization Fellowship issued Paramahansa Yogananda’s The Yoga of the Bhagavad Gita. This important condensation serves as a useful summary and introduction to Yogananda’s classic work titled God Talks to Arjuna.
With Paramahansa Yogananda’s two-volume set of the translation of the Gita titled God Talks to Arjuna, the world experienced for the first time a detailed explication of the poetry of the Gita.
Then in 2007, Self-Realization Fellowship issued Paramahansa Yogananda’s The Yoga of the Bhagavad Gita. This important condensation serves as a useful summary and introduction to Yogananda’s classic work titled God Talks to Arjuna.
Posted by
Linda Sue Grimes
Linda Sue Grimes
For his 170th column of American Life in Poetry, the former poet laureate offers Sam Green’s “Night Dive.”
About Sam Green’s poem, Kooser writes: “I've lived all my life on the plains, where no body of water is more than a few feet deep, and even at that shallow depth I'm afraid of it. Here Sam Green, who lives on an island north of Seattle, takes us down into some really deep, dark water.”
For a sample of the opening stanza of “Night Dive”:
Down here, no light but what we carry with us.
Everywhere we point our hands we scrawl
color: bulging eyes, spines, teeth or clinging tentacles.
At negative buoyancy, when heavy hands
seem to grasp & pull us down, we let them,
To read the rest of Green’s poem, please go to American Life in Poetry: Column 170.
*****
For a sample of the opening stanza of “Night Dive”:
Down here, no light but what we carry with us.
Everywhere we point our hands we scrawl
color: bulging eyes, spines, teeth or clinging tentacles.
At negative buoyancy, when heavy hands
seem to grasp & pull us down, we let them,
To read the rest of Green’s poem, please go to American Life in Poetry: Column 170.
*****
Posted by
Linda Sue Grimes
Linda Sue Grimes
Critics and scholars never point out the conflation of bearer and born in W. B. Yeats’ widely acclaimed poem, “The Second Coming.”
People love apocalyptic declamations that seem profound and prophetic. Whenever there is a crisis in the world (and the world is never without a crisis!), folks like to point to a well-known poem and say yes that describes how things are today.
An example of this phenomenon can be seen in the many articles and books written with titles of lines from this Yeats poem. If you google “Things fall apart”+”New York Times,” you’ll get close to 40,000 sites.
W. B. Yeats was a great poet and a deep thinker. He constructed a work that he called A Vision, which, in fact, is nothing more than his own statement on poetics. It is a dense work but fundamentally flawed.
Yeats often misconstrued concepts to the point of turning them on their head—a topic about which I began writing with my doctoral dissertation and which I will continue to address.
However, I am focusing here only on one technical issue with the poem. This issue is a minor one in comparison to the philosophy on which it is based, but still, it is important that the reader is aware of this problem: the conflation of the bearer and the born in the last two lines of the poem: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Because, to my knowledge, the absurdity of these lines has never been discussed, I have written two articles explaining the problem:
An example of this phenomenon can be seen in the many articles and books written with titles of lines from this Yeats poem. If you google “Things fall apart”+”New York Times,” you’ll get close to 40,000 sites.
W. B. Yeats was a great poet and a deep thinker. He constructed a work that he called A Vision, which, in fact, is nothing more than his own statement on poetics. It is a dense work but fundamentally flawed.
Yeats often misconstrued concepts to the point of turning them on their head—a topic about which I began writing with my doctoral dissertation and which I will continue to address.
However, I am focusing here only on one technical issue with the poem. This issue is a minor one in comparison to the philosophy on which it is based, but still, it is important that the reader is aware of this problem: the conflation of the bearer and the born in the last two lines of the poem: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Because, to my knowledge, the absurdity of these lines has never been discussed, I have written two articles explaining the problem:
Posted by
Linda Sue Grimes
Linda Sue Grimes
This poem, “The Native are Restless,” by Sandra Beasley offers an inimitable perspective on living with children.
Structured in thirteen unrimed couplets, the poem dramatizes the uniqueness that each child contributes to the household. The following are the first four:
1
Of course you invited them in: faces painted
like trick-or-treaters, carrying pointy spears.
2
The youngest clutched his goat, the tallest
her stack of bowls, and you had rooms to spare.
3
They fill the house with song and drums;
they show you the dance for morning, the dance
4
for evening, the dance for mowing the lawn.
They yank the dust covers off your heart.
The line, “They yank the dust covers off your heart,” fairly springs off the page. Sandra Beasley is a poet whose career is worth following.
To read the rest of the poem, as well as to hear it read, please visit, “The Native are Restless.”
NB: I have placed numbers between the couplets to separate them on the blog page.
*****
1
Of course you invited them in: faces painted
like trick-or-treaters, carrying pointy spears.
2
The youngest clutched his goat, the tallest
her stack of bowls, and you had rooms to spare.
3
They fill the house with song and drums;
they show you the dance for morning, the dance
4
for evening, the dance for mowing the lawn.
They yank the dust covers off your heart.
The line, “They yank the dust covers off your heart,” fairly springs off the page. Sandra Beasley is a poet whose career is worth following.
To read the rest of the poem, as well as to hear it read, please visit, “The Native are Restless.”
NB: I have placed numbers between the couplets to separate them on the blog page.
*****
Posted by
Linda Sue Grimes
Linda Sue Grimes
“Rhyme” came into English usage through an unfortunate error; now it is so widespread that many readers think the original, correct spelling is incorrect.
The most successful poetry textbook ever written is Laurence Perrine’s Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry. Professor Perrine died before the book reached its ninth edition; his successor, Professor Thomas Arp, renamed the text Perrine’s Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry. The text is now in its twelfth edition and continues to be selected for its clarity and depth in poetry instruction. Laurence Perrine used the spelling “rime” throughout his influential textbook; he was interested in accuracy.
Origin of the Term “Rhyme”
The term, “rime,” in Old English was “hrim”; in Middle English, it had become “rime” and remained so until the 19th century, when English printers misguidedly started spelling it “rhyme.” The error was encouraged by Samuel Johnson, who mistook the term as a derivative of the Greek “rhythmos.”
Shakespeare and Coleridge
In Shakespeare’s sonnets, the spelling is always “rime”; the sonnets were written two centuries before the error. The famous poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge is “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
Rime, Not Rhyme
I prefer the spelling “rime” for two reasons: I am not comfortable perpetuating an error. And a rule of poetry, indeed all writing, requires brevity in language use: never use a long word, when a short one will do, and never use two words when one will do. The spelling, “rime,” is one letter fewer than the bulky, erroneous “rhyme.”
It is unfortunate that an error has taken hold of a perfectly good word and changed it for so many generations of readers, writers, printers, publishers, and editors. Today, the forms “rime” and “rhyme” are considered interchangeable by many editors, while most prefer and even insist on “rhyme.” Some readers even believe that the term “rime” is actually incorrect except when referring to a type of ice.
*****
Origin of the Term “Rhyme”
The term, “rime,” in Old English was “hrim”; in Middle English, it had become “rime” and remained so until the 19th century, when English printers misguidedly started spelling it “rhyme.” The error was encouraged by Samuel Johnson, who mistook the term as a derivative of the Greek “rhythmos.”
Shakespeare and Coleridge
In Shakespeare’s sonnets, the spelling is always “rime”; the sonnets were written two centuries before the error. The famous poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge is “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
Rime, Not Rhyme
I prefer the spelling “rime” for two reasons: I am not comfortable perpetuating an error. And a rule of poetry, indeed all writing, requires brevity in language use: never use a long word, when a short one will do, and never use two words when one will do. The spelling, “rime,” is one letter fewer than the bulky, erroneous “rhyme.”
It is unfortunate that an error has taken hold of a perfectly good word and changed it for so many generations of readers, writers, printers, publishers, and editors. Today, the forms “rime” and “rhyme” are considered interchangeable by many editors, while most prefer and even insist on “rhyme.” Some readers even believe that the term “rime” is actually incorrect except when referring to a type of ice.
*****
Posted by
Linda Sue Grimes
Linda Sue Grimes
Ted Kooser, Nebraska poet and former U. S. Poet Laureate, features Marnie Walsh’s “Bessie Dreaming Bear.”
Kooser comments on the poem as he introduces it: “A poem need not go on at great length to accomplish the work of conveying something meaningful to its readers. In the following poem by the late Marnie Walsh, just a few words, written as if they'd been recorded in exactly the manner in which they'd been spoken, tell us not only about the missing woman in the red high heels, but a little something about the speaker as well.”
The first four lines:
we all went to town one day
went to a store
bought you new shoes
red high heels
To finishing reading the poem, please visit Kooser’s fine Web site at American Life in Poetry: Column 3.
*****
The first four lines:
we all went to town one day
went to a store
bought you new shoes
red high heels
To finishing reading the poem, please visit Kooser’s fine Web site at American Life in Poetry: Column 3.
*****
Posted by
Linda Sue Grimes
Linda Sue Grimes
With this blog entry, I begin a series of mini-analyses of attractive poems that remain, nevertheless, rather one-dimensional.
An Excited Heart
Siegfried Sassoon’s “The Heart’s Journey” consists of two quatrains, each with the rime scheme of ABAB.
The speaker has met a person who has aroused him deeply. After touching the person’s face, it seemed to the speaker that “Drifts of blossom flushed and fell.” The face blushed with excitement then quickly dissipated. He admits that he does not know the person well.
In the second stanza, the speaker offers a fascinating description of his deep emotional reaction to this person’s “joy”: the person motivated “Chime on chime from bell on bell / In the cloisters of my heart.” The speaker’s heart was still and quiet until this person aroused it, and it grew excited.
Commentary
Except for the last two lines, the poem remains rather bland, and while those final lines are interesting, the two stanzas taken together do little more than repeat the theme that the speaker became excited by someone he recently met.
****
Siegfried Sassoon’s “The Heart’s Journey” consists of two quatrains, each with the rime scheme of ABAB.
The speaker has met a person who has aroused him deeply. After touching the person’s face, it seemed to the speaker that “Drifts of blossom flushed and fell.” The face blushed with excitement then quickly dissipated. He admits that he does not know the person well.
In the second stanza, the speaker offers a fascinating description of his deep emotional reaction to this person’s “joy”: the person motivated “Chime on chime from bell on bell / In the cloisters of my heart.” The speaker’s heart was still and quiet until this person aroused it, and it grew excited.
Commentary
Except for the last two lines, the poem remains rather bland, and while those final lines are interesting, the two stanzas taken together do little more than repeat the theme that the speaker became excited by someone he recently met.
****
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