Thursday, April 10, 2014

I feel like this is pretty important...

It's Samuel L. Jackson reading a poem about the TV show "Boy Meets World." Watch it here.

Thursday, April 3, 2014

@GOOGLEPOETICS #internet

I don't know if anybody else enjoys twitter, but I think it is a wonderful outlet for written expression. It is sometimes difficult to trim an idea or a feeling into 140 characters or less. #wordeconomy #amiright In my honest opinion, the twitter account @googlepoetics is a novel account.

Google poetics are poems submitted to @googlepoetics based off google's search prediction feature.

Sometimes the google-inspired poems are awesome and shocking.

#herearesomethativemade

Monday, March 24, 2014

No weekly prompt this week

All,

This is a note to say that there will be no weekly prompt this week, because I want you all to write in form for your next assignment, and you should turn in either your meter/sound poem or your form poem for the next workshop. Happy writing!

Jenny

Assignment Five: the Formal Poem

ASSIGNMENT FIVE: THE FORMAL POEM

MOLBERG: ENGL 3150

Due Monday, 4/7

This is the first and only assignment in this course in which I will ask you to stick close to “the rules.” Mary Oliver reminds us that a great dancer knows the rules of the dance, and in order to successfully break or bend these rules, that dancer must practice. Though the process of writing in form can be challenging and sometimes frustrating, it is a way of exercising a muscle which, if trained and flexed, will strengthen your free verse poetry.

For this assignment, choose one of the forms outlined in our course packet entitled “form” (Petrarchan sonnet, Shakespearean sonnet, villanelle or sestina). I have provided you with many examples of each form. For further reading, see the anthology section of Rules of the Dance. Follow closely the requirements of your chosen form. If the form calls for meter, use meter; if it calls for rhyme, use rhyme. You may choose to utilize techniques like enjambment, caesura and slant rhyme to give yourself a break from stilted verse, though these techniques are not required.

The best thing you can do in preparation for this assignment is to read voraciously. If the examples I have given you aren’t enough, check out poets.org, and search your chosen form. This site provides many helpful examples, old and new.

Finally, the most important and productive step of this assignment: revise, revise, revise. Read your poem aloud and revise some more. If taking on the challenge of writing a poem in form seems daunting, practice first. Try writing a few singular lines in iambic pentameter, or make a word bank of rhyming words (or words that utilize slant rhyme) that you enjoy. This poem itself is practice. It need not be perfect—we’ll make use of workshop in order to hone the poem. Have fun. Writing in form will open new worlds of language.

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Personally worthless & Krebs vs. Snopes

Comments/statement: On page 68 of The Triggering Town, Hugo says, "Many American poets seem to feel personally worthless unless they write." I'd like to disagree with this. I think that the use of the word "worthless" may be over the top. I wouldn't say that writing doesn't make people feel like they're doing something worthwhile with their lives, but I would say that not all writers feel like they are of no value themselves unless they write. I don't really understand why he says such a strong thing, especially when writing in and of itself does not necessarily make people feel worthy--take Plath for example. If writing all those poems made her feel worthy, would she have killed herself? I think, instead, that writing something that others appreciate is what makes people feel worthy, and I think that a poet CAN write a poem without having that nagging feeling of personal worthlessness being the driving force. Basically, I just have a problem with that whole idea Hugo presents.

Question(s): What would Hugo have to say about someone who isn't a Krebs or a Snopes? Would he even consider them legitimate poets (or writers)?

Monday, March 10, 2014

Glee vs Misery

I've read some comments on the The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo and it makes me curious... In happiness versus misery, which would be the winner? Well, it would depend on the perspective. Many poets that we know of are best recognized for their powerful (and often confusing without some context) poems that are both beautiful and perturbing. When the word "poet" comes up, what do most people picture? I won't use that as my question, though it's an interesting thought.

Do we picture a soft landscape with someone writing of their love for nature? Or do we more often imagine a frantic writer desperate for their words to be heard, or at the very least to relinquish their minds of the flurry of provoking thoughts?

Shall I compare thee to a poet's glee?

Not really.

Thing is: you're more likely to compare stressful feelings to things you've never actually experienced.

Cloud nine? Sure. Happiness can feel like floating. You can feel relaxed and calm, but those are still things you've physically experienced. You've floated in water. You've been relaxed, before. I... can't actually think of more descriptions of happiness except comparing it to the blazing of a thousand suns, which I imagine none of us have seen before.

Think of when you have lost someone close... Perhaps a relative or a friend? Maybe even something happened in your life? And everything came crashing down... You felt as though you had a thousand pounds on your shoulders causing them to droop... Your eagerness to talk about these things lessens, but you often do have a lot to say. Often times, frustration becomes overwhelming.

Perhaps it's just me? I wouldn't exactly suggest that misery, depression, or anxiety can make for the best poetry all the time, but these troubling emotions tend to have a louder voice than the soothing tone of v-a-c-a-t-i-o-n.

You are more inclined to get creative when you're expressing something distasteful. Triggering things are what make us write, and in this world... what triggers you?

Watching the news, seeing the world in such madness with its riots, starvation, and murders?

Here's my question:

Which catches your attention first: singing or SCREAMING? Now, see, that's unfair. I capitalized that whole word as compared to the singing... But it's unpleasant, isn't it? Out of place? A bit forceful? Unsettling?

Ha. Just kidding. That wasn't my real question.

My question is: which do you think is more powerful for writing muse? What drives you more?

This is just my personal curiosity after reading. Nobody likes sad endings, but you remember them more than any other part.

I'm getting caught up more in the psychology of it than anything. My apologies.

Have a good Spring Break, guys!

Krebs vs. Snopes: The battle of the ridiculously miserable ones.

I'm feeling insanely sick, so I'm going to keep this brief. (Woo, spring break.)

After reading and re-reading Hugo's Krebs/Snopes theory, I've been struggling to decide whether or not Plath fits into either of these categories. Of course, I'd think she'd call herself an outsider, but would she then be a Snopes? It's safe to say she had a hard time handling success.

alfljfaljkfasjalk

Are you a Krebs or a Snopes?

I'd like to think of myself as a Krebs, but that's probably my younger Hemingway-obsessed-phase me talking.

"please, this is hardly the time?"

Comment:

While reading through the chapters, the Plath poems and more recently, the questions everyone has been asking about poets and their critical self-examination, I had a hard time removing the words of Wordsworth from my head:

"the poet is chiefly distinguished from other men by a greater promptness to think and feel without immediate external excitement, and a greater power in expressing such thoughts and feelings"

I think often this absence of immediate excitement can be interpreted by the poet as a miserable feeling or lack thereof. Plath was certainly fond of doing so. Actually it seems it was necessary for her to explore that numbness, but the inability to react emotionally and conventionally is almost paradoxical in her poetry. The tormenting emotional evocation in her work is undeniably present, which really complicates her purpose or reward from writing, with regards to her subject matter. I'm not sure I can appropriately explain the complexities her poetry and all poetry frequently stirs up.

I think whatever it is we to choose to examine as poets, without such immediate responsiveness, removes us from the present and dislocates us from the rest of humanity.

From a psychoanalytical approach, I'm sure somebody would argue that the things poets choose to write about often relates back to some sort of repression or inability to communicate things otherwise, but I think that is too general, which is why poetry can honor anything.

Question:

Do you think that a poet's self-criticism begins at their detachment from the present and forces them to examine their self before addressing their life experience? And does the order in which we scrutinize existence convey any importance in poetry?

Am I making sense? Is this meaningless?

Pain

I wonder a lot about an artist's relationship to pain. How important it is to art and how it manifests itself in the artistic process. So while I read through "The Triggering Town," I held that idea in mind. There were many portions of the "Statements of Faith" chapter that caused me to reflect on the idea, but none so much as on page 73 when he notes that "the imagination is faced with the problem of preserving the world through internalization, then keeping that world rigidly fixed long enough to create the unknowns in the poem."

Is that why so much of our societies' artistic reflection is married to the feelings of loss, grief, and destruction? Is it because pain is the most readily available resource to artists and can be internalized and rationalized in an authentic way because all people have known it? Maybe not, but it seems to me that pain could be one of the easiest things to cultivate in the imagination and therefore for the mind to preserve in relation to the world. It also makes it a little easier to believe that when Faulkner was asked "Why do you drink so much?" that his reply: "for the pain" was more likely in relation to keeping it "alive."

Saturday, March 8, 2014

Do we have to be miserable, and feel completely inferior to be successful writers?

Jamie WalzelMarch 8, 2014 at 5:21 PM

Question: What is Richard Hugo's fascination with unhappiness and why does he feel it is the key to being a successful writer?

On page 73 in The Triggering Town (sorry, can't find the italics button), Hugo states, " I was distrustful of both Eliot and Roethke when late in their careers they announced they were happy."

Sounds like someone in the last part of their career was maybe jealous? IDK. I would love to hear what you guys think!

Do we have to be miserable, and feel completely inferior to be successful writers?

Triggering Town: Comment from readings 3-3-2014

After reading Triggering Town, "Statements of Faith," I actually came away feeling a little bit sad for Richard Hugo.

Let me preface my future comments by saying that I not only enjoyed, but took a lot of value away from the preceding chapters. However, in chapter 7, Hugo mentions over and over that to be a great poet, one must stay in a feeling of worthlessness. I am not a great poet. Heck, I'm not even a good poet, but I couldn't disagree with him more. I think this may work for him, but I am pretty sure there are poets that did not stay in a worthless state and still wrote amazing poetry.

He also mentions that writers who get to a point where they think there work is good or great, lose the ability to be self-critical. He is really generalizing here again. I am pretty sure Ezra Pound thought a lot of himself! He cranked out some pretty good poetry. Then there is Frederick Seidel, whom many consider the best living poet today, and he is extremely full of himself. I won't even get into the other fiction writers like Fitzgerald and others who were also pretty full of worth (opposite of worthless) who created masterpieces.

I actually think some people need to get away from feeling worthless! I do. To me feeling worthless is a drag. When I feel worthless, I have no energy to produce anything of value. I need to feel like I am accomplishing something, not in a pitiful state.

I also think encouragement is good for people. Hugo contends that it is better not to tell a young poet he or she is good. Again, I disagree. Without encouragement, a good writer may never become great because he or she may move on to something they think they are good at and never write anything again.

When I am feeling good, in a positive frame of mind, it affects me physically and mentally and also stirs the spirit to come up with good stuff to transfer to the page. This is when I personally write my best. When I am encouraged, I write even better! Hugo suggests just the opposite is true for writers. The over generalization really is discomforting.

After reading the chapter, I feel like he wants everybody to be miserable so they can write well. Hey, is anyone up for misery… ?
I didn't think so.

:o)

Jamie

Friday, March 7, 2014

Assignment Four: The Lyric (due 3/24)

ASSIGNMENT FOUR: THE LYRIC

ENGL 3150: MOLBERG

Due 3/24

For this assignment we will use the basic understanding of the lyric as a poem in which a first person narrator speaks intensely about personal feeling. It is also important to keep in mind the lyric’s origins in music. Your poems should strive for an economy of language, compression and precision that avoid the wordiness or slackness associated with prose. The lyric falls in the register between song and speech. Be wary of sounding too poetic, too archaic.

Even though the lyric is a poem that expresses emotion, I do not want you to abandon the descriptive and figurative principles we’ve worked with in earlier assignments. The emotional situation of a poem gains richness and power from imagery. In fact, as T.S. Eliot argues, emotion cannot be stated directly, but needs “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events”—what he calls an objective correlative—to express the emotion in a work of art. Imagery is essential in this process—in Hirch’s terms, it allows the poem to enact emotion.

In writing this assignment, you should think about sound. Revisit the course packet entitled “Sound.” You have a further option of selecting a metrical pattern—see Part One of Oliver’s Rules for the Dance—to guide your lines, though this is not necessary. You could work with a repeated stanza pattern as well—rhymed couplets or quatrains.

The poem you hand in should not be the first draft you write. Poetry demands work, and what you first write will need to be rethought and revised until the poem offers what it has to say in a clear and effective manner. Reread your work. Read your poem aloud.

Examples:

The following poem is a sonnet. You may choose to write a sonnet for this assignment, but keep in mind that assignment #5 will also be a poem written in form:

-by William Shakespeare

Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws,

And make the earth devour her own sweet brood,

Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws,

And burn the long-lived phoenix in her blood,

Make glad and sorry the seasons as thou fleet’st,

And do whate’er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,

To the wide world and all her fading sweets:

But I forbid thee one most heinous crime,

O carve not with thy hours my love’s fair brow,

Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen;

Him in thy course untainted do allow

For beauty’s pattern to succeeding men.

Yet do thy worst, old Time: despite thy wrong,

My love shall in my verse ever live young.

Elegy for Jane

My student, Thrown by a Horse

By Theodore Roethke

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;

And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;

And how, once started into talk, the light syllables leaped for her

And she balanced in the delight of her thought,

A wren, happy, tail into the wind,

Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.

The shade sang with her;

The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing;

And the mold sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth

Even a father could not find her:

Scraping her cheek against straw;

Stirring the clearest water.

My sparrow, you are not here,

Waiting like a fern, making a spiny shadow.

The sides of wet stones cannot console me,

Nor the moss, wound with the last light.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,

My maimed darling, my skitter pigeon.

Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:

I, with no rights in this matter,

Neither father nor lover.

For the Anniversary of My Death

By W.S. Merwin

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day

When the last fires will save to me

And the silence will set out

Tireless traveler

Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer

Find myself in life as in a strange garment

Surprised at the earth

And the love of one woman

And the shamelessness of men

As today writing after three days of rain

Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease

And bowing not knowing to what

Leda and the Swan

By W.B. Yeats

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push

The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

And how can body, laid in that white rush,

But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

And Agamemnon dead.

Being so caught up,

So mastered by the brute blood of the air,

Did she put on his knowledge with his power

Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Weekly Prompt Five: Nesting Rhyme

EMOTION/MOTION/OCEAN/SHUN

(taken from Susan Mitchell)

Weekly Prompt 5

ENGL 3150: Molberg

If you read the title of this exercise aloud, you will hear a quadruple rhyme. But if you examine the words themselves, you will notice that there is something special about this rhyme scheme. The sound of the word shun is contained in ocean, the sounds of both shun and ocean in motion, and shun, ocean and motion can all be folded into emotion. Such a rhyme scheme, which incidentally was favored by the seventeenth-century poet George Herbert, is called diminishing rhyme because the rhyming words get smaller as you move from emotion to shun. But I prefer the term nesting rhymes because the words nest one inside the other like Russian wooden dolls.

Write an eighteen-line poem that uses diminishing, or nesting rhyme. Order your eighteen lines into six three-line stanzas. Each stanza will take its end rhymes from a single word. Say, for example, the first line of the first stanza ends with the word manifold. Then the second line would end with the word fold, the third line with the word old. For the second stanza, choose a different word that introduces a new rhyme sound—say stumble, tumble, bull. There’s nothing wrong with sticking to the same rhyme sounds for all eighteen lines as long as you use six different words to produce those rhymes—e.g., emotion supplying the rhymes for stanza one, attention supplying the rhymes tension and shun for stanza two. But realize if you do that, you will make writing the poem more difficult.

Paradise.

By George Herbert

I Bless thee, Lord, because I GROW

Among thy trees, which in a ROW

To thee both fruit and order OW.

What open force, or hidden CHARM

Can blast my fruit, or bring me HARM,

While the inclosure is thine ARM.

Inclose me still for fear I START.

Be to me rather sharp and TART,

Then let me want thy hand and ART.

When thou dost greater judgments SPARE,

And with thy knife but prune and PARE,

Ev’n fruitfull trees more fruitful ARE.

Such sharpnes shows the sweetest FREND:

Such cuttings rather heal then REND:

And such beginnings touch their END.

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

FLARF ORIGINS, POETRY BY GARY SULLIVAN AND JORDAN DAVIS

This the first flarf poem written by Gary Sullivan. It was a response-prank sent to this online scam by the "organization" Poetry.com. Sullivan's father was among the many who were fooled. This was Gary's poetic response:

mhm

Gary Sullivan

Yeah, mm-hmm, it's true
big birds make
big doo! I got fire inside
my "huppa"-chimp(TM)
gonna be agreessive, greasy aw yeah god
wanna DOOT! DOOT!
Pffffffffffffffffffffffffft! hey!
oooh yeah baby gonna shake & bake then take
AWWWWWL your monee, honee (tee hee)
uggah duggah buggah biggah buggah muggah
hey! hey! you stoopid Mick! get
off the paddy field and git
me some chocolate Quik
put a Q-tip in it and stir it up sick
pocka-mocka-chocka-locka-DING DONG
fuck! shit! piss! oh it's so sad that
syndrome what's it called tourette's
make me HAI-EE! shout out loud
Cuz I love thee. Thank you God, for listening!

The poem, which was obviously made as a joke, circulated blogs and Sullivan's own circle of poetry friends. More people began writing flarf and the movement is starting to be taken quite seriously. I think that flarf poets are inspired by the endless absurdities present on the internet that mirror worldly existence, at least to an extent. That being said early flarf was certainly entertaining, but I'm still not quite sure there was anything I could understand of these early days of the flarf scene.

This is a group of poems inspired by both flarf and the internet. Davis certainly calls attention to the strange, honest, beautifully creative human preposterousness.

(thank you poetry foundation.)

Three Poems on Demand

BY JORDAN DAVIS

TURTLES GENERATE POEMS

No wonder they move so slowly—

Somebody in there is

Trying to write.

PICTURES OF BUGS BUNNY DRESSED LIKE A THUG

What drove me to draw this picture

Of Bugs Bunny dressed like a thug?

Plural. Pictures. Not once did I sketch

The buff tattooed torso of Thug Bugs

But many times, over several days.

He looks mean, doesn’t he? When O when

Will this election be over

So I can blow off life again

Without inadvertently producing objects

Of great and mysterious-to-me beauty.

POEM FOR A SIXTH WEDDING

You know a lot better than I do

What you’re doing

Monday, March 3, 2014

Course Packet: Sound (read for 3/17)

SOUND

Molberg: ENGL 3150

Course Packet

The most recognizable sound effect used in poems is rhyme. When two words rhyme, they have a similar ending sound. Words that end in the same letters, such as "take" and "make" rhyme, or words with different endings but the same sound rhyme, such as "cane" and "pain." Poetry also makes use of near rhymes (or slant rhymes), which are words that almost rhyme, but not quite -- such as "bear" and "far."

Other sound effects make use of repeating letters or combinations of letters. Consonance is repeating the same consonants in words that are near each other. The statement "mummy's mommy was no common dummy" is an example of consonance because the letter m is repeated. If the repeated letters appear only at the beginning of the words, this is known as alliteration. For example, "the big brown bear bit into a blueberry" is an example of alliteration because several words close together begin with the letter b.

If the letters or sounds that are repeated are vowels instead of consonants -- as in "I might like to fight nine pirates at a time" -- it is known as assonance. Assonance can be pretty subtle sometimes, and more difficult to identify than consonance or alliteration.

Sometimes a poet might want to make you imagine you're hearing something. This is part of a concept called auditory imagery, or giving an impression of how something sounds. One common way to create auditory imagery is through the use of onomatopoeia. Think about words that describe a sound -- words like buzz, clap or meow. When you say them aloud, they kind of sound like what they are describing. For example, the "zz" in the word buzz kind of sounds like the noise a bee makes.

*Think of the above concepts as you read the following poems:

Pied Beauty

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things--

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

       For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough;

       And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                     Praise Him.

The Man On The Dump

By Wallace Stevens

Day creeps down. The moon is creeping up.
The sun is a corbeil of flowers the moon Blanche
Places there, a bouquet. Ho-ho…The dump is full
Of images. Days pass like papers from a press.
The bouquets come here in the papers. So the sun,
And so the moon, both come, and the janitor's poems
Of every day, the wrapper on the can of pears,
The cat in the paper-bag, the corset, the box
From Esthonia: the tiger chest, for tea.

The freshness of night has been fresh a long time.
The freshness of morning, the blowing of day, one says
That it puffs as Cornelius Nepos reads, it puffs
More than, less than or it puffs like this or that.
The green smacks in the eye, the dew in the green
Smacks like fresh water in a can, like the sea
On a cocoanut—how many men have copied dew
For buttons, how many women have covered themselves
With dew, dew dresses, stones and chains of dew, heads
Of the floweriest flowers dewed with the dewiest dew.
One grows to hate these things except on the dump.

Now in the time of spring (azaleas, trilliums,
Myrtle, viburnums, daffodils, blue phlox) ,
Between that disgust and this, between the things
That are on the dump (azaleas and so on)
And those that will be (azaleas and so on) ,
One feels the purifying change. One rejects
The trash.

That's the moment when the moon creeps up
To the bubbling of bassoons. That's the time
One looks at the elephant-colorings of tires.
Everything is shed; and the moon comes up as the moon
(All its images are in the dump) and you see
As a man (not like an image of a man) ,
You see the moon rise in the empty sky.

One sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail.
One beats and beats for that which one believes.
That's what one wants to get near. Could it after all
Be merely oneself, as superior as the ear
To a crow's voice? Did the nightingale torture the ear,
Pack the heart and scratch the mind? And does the ear
Solace itself in peevish birds? Is it peace,
Is it a philosopher's honeymoon, one finds
On the dump? Is it to sit among mattresses of the dead,
Bottles, pots, shoes, and grass and murmur aptest eve:
Is it to hear the blatter of grackles and say
Invisible priest; is it to eject, to pull
The day to pieces and cry stanza my stone?
Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.

Blackberrying

By Sylvia Plath

Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,

Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,

A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea

Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries

Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes

Ebon in the hedges, fat

With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers.

I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me.

They accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides.

Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks --

Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.

Theirs is the only voice, protesting, protesting.

I do not think the sea will appear at all.

The high, green meadows are glowing, as if lit from within.

I come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies,

Hanging their bluegreen bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese screen.

The honey-feast of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven.

One more hook, and the berries and bushes end.

The only thing to come now is the sea.

From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me,

Slapping its phantom laundry in my face.

These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.

I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me

To the hills' northern face, and the face is orange rock

That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space

Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths

Beating and beating at an intractable metal.

Dying

By Emily Dickinson

I heard a fly buzz when I died;
The stillness round my form
Was like the stillness in the air
Between the heaves of storm.

The eyes beside had wrung them dry,
And breaths were gathering sure
For that last onset, when the king
Be witnessed in his power.

I willed my keepsakes, signed away
What portion of me I
Could make assignable,-and then
There interposed a fly,

With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz,
Between the light and me;
And then the windows failed, and then
I could not see to see.

Holy Sonnet XIV

By John Donne

Batter my heart, three-person’d God; for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but oh, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

John Donne
1572-1631

Carrion Comfort

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;

Not untwist--slack they may be--these last strands of man

In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;

Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me

Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan

With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,

O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee

               and flee?

Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.

Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,

Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.

Cheer whom though? The hero whose heaven-handling flung me,

               fóot tród

Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night,

               that year

Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.