Favourite poet and poem

[Adam J. M. Eagleton]

Right, I think we should get some discussion going on here. Firstly, who is your favourite poet, and why? Secondly, what is your favourite poem by that poet? Post the poem here if you can.

[Megan]

Well done for taking control, Adam. You know mine already, but I'll contribute anyway. :)
My favourite poet is Sylvia Plath, what with the general awesomeness of the woman. She had a prodigious creative talent and fantastic skill with words, and her poetry is simultaneously compassionate and ferocious, focused on herself but also the outer world. She wrote a lot of poetry for the short time that she lived, all of stunning beauty and a great joy to read.
Okay, I'll.. just pick one, I guess. I don't know that I have a favourite poem of hers, but a very excellent one (of many very excellent ones) is The Eye Mote.

The Eye Mote
Blameless as daylight I stood looking
At a field of horses, necks bent, manes blown,
Tails streaming against the green
Backdrop of sycamores. Sun was striking
White chapel pinnacles over the roofs,
Holding the horses, the clouds, the leaves

Steadily rooted though they were all flowing
Away to the left like reeds in a sea
When the splinter flew in and stuck my eye,
Needling it dark. Then I was seeing
A melding of shapes in a hot rain:
Horses warped on the altering green,

Outlandish as double-humped camels or unicorns,
Grazing at the margins of a bad monochrome,
Beasts of oasis, a better time.
Abrading my lid, the small grain burns:
Red cinder around which I myself,
Horses, planets and spires revolve.

Neither tears nor the easing flush
Of eyebaths can unseat the speck:
It sticks, and it has stuck a week.
I wear the present itch for flesh,
Blind to what will be and what was.
I dream that I am Oedipus.

What I want back is what I was
Before the bed, before the knife,
Before the brooch-pin and the salve
Fixed me in this parenthesis;
Horses fluent in the wind,
A place, a time gone out of mind.


It should be noted that Pablo Neruda is also a fabulous poet, and I love his poem A Lemon.

A Lemon

Out of lemon flowers
loosed
on the moonlight, love's
lashed and insatiable
essences,
sodden with fragrance,
the lemon tree's yellow
emerges,
the lemons
move down
from the tree's planetarium

Delicate merchandise!
The harbors are big with it-
bazaars
for the light and the
barbarous gold.
We open
the halves
of a miracle,
and a clotting of acids
brims
into the starry
divisions:
creation's
original juices,
irreducible, changeless,
alive:
so the freshness lives on
in a lemon,
in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,
the proportions, arcane and acerb.

Cutting the lemon
the knife
leaves a little cathedral:
alcoves unguessed by the eye
that open acidulous glass
to the light; topazes
riding the droplets,
altars,
aromatic facades.

So, while the hand
holds the cut of the lemon,
half a world
on a trencher,
the gold of the universe
wells
to your touch:
a cup yellow
with miracles,
a breast and a nipple
perfuming the earth;
a flashing made fruitage,
the diminutive fire of a planet.


If that isn't the best poem about a piece of fruit ever, I don't know what is.

[Megan]

Oh, hahaha, who HASN'T read Daddy. I've read all of Ariel and The Colossus, the books of poetry. Daddy's probably the craziest one by far.

[Adam J. M. Eagleton]

Oh, you finished The Colossus? How was it? (Brilliant, obviously.)

And Daddy really is unbelievably powerful.

[Megan]

It was, of course, spectacularly amazing and beautiful and vivid. Minutely less depressive than Ariel, and more concerned with.. well, random things, I guess. There's a poem about mushrooms in there. Wonderful. :)
Daddy is fantastic in a let's-throw-as-many-vivid-images-at-the-reader-as-possible-at-one-time-to-outstanding-effect kind of way. Stunning, and disturbing, and very powerful.

[Adam J. M. Eagleton]

Ted Hughes is the poet that holds my admiration the most. It's between him, T. S. Eliot, and R. S. Thomas, but I'll go with Hughes for now. He never fails to astonish me with his control of language: it is tough, powerful, vivid, and raging with life and colour, but frequently intensely moving. He took great inspiration from his home county, Yorkshire, and animals and nature were always present in his work, but was also influenced by myth and the works of the classical poets. In my opinion, his greatest achievement was his last major publication, Birthday Letters, which was written over several decades and was on the subject of his late former wife Sylvia Plath. The final poem in that collection, effectively the last poem he published (excepting a small book he had privately published), is called Red, and is one of his most compelling.

Red

Red was your colour.
If not red, then white. But red
Was what you wrapped around you.
Blood-red. Was it blood?
Was it red-ochre, for warming the dead?
Haematite to make immortal
The precious heirloom bones, the family bones.

When you had your way finally
Our room was red. A judgement chamber.
Shut casket for gems. The carpet of blood
Patterned with darkenings, congealments.
The curtains — ruby corduroy blood,
Sheer blood-falls from ceiling to floor.
The cushions the same. The same
Raw carmine along the window-seat.
A throbbing cell. Aztec altar — temple.

Only the bookshelves escaped into whiteness.

And outside the window
Poppies thin and wrinkle-frail
As the skin on blood,
Salvias, that your father named you after,
Like blood lobbing from the gash,
And roses, the heart's last gouts,
Catastrophic, arterial, doomed.

Your velvet long full skirt, a swathe of blood,
A lavish burgandy.
Your lips a dipped, deep crimson.

You revelled in red.
I felt it raw — like crisp gauze edges
Of a stiffening wound. I could touch
The open vein in it, the crusted gleam.

Everything you painted you painted white
Then splashed it with roses, defeated it,
Leaned over it, dripping roses,
Weeping roses, and more roses,
Then sometimes, among them, a little blue bird.

Blue was better for you. Blue was wings.
Kingfisher blue silks from San Francisco
Folded your pregnancy
In crucible caresses.
Blue was your kindly spirit — not a ghoul
But electrified, a guardian, thoughtful.

In the pit of red
You hid from the bone-clinic whiteness.

But the jewel you lost was blue.

[Megan]

Yay awesome poet couples. :)
Well, not so much when they end up hating each other, but you catch my drift.

Edit: Okay, I've actually read the poem now. It was amazing. And the only poem I've ever read by Ted Hughes that I liked. Any more suggestions? I've read a few and disliked them.

[Adam J. M. Eagleton]

Ooh, brilliant! I'm thrilled that you liked it.

Okay, well, there's:

The Horses

I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.
Evil air, a frost-making stillness,

Not a leaf, not a bird —
A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood

Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light.
But the valleys were draining the darkness

Till the moorline — blackening dregs of the brightening grey —
Halved the sky ahead. And I saw the horses:

Huge in the dense grey — ten together —
Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move,

With draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,
Making no sound.

I passed: not one snorted or jerked its head.
Grey silent fragments

Of a grey silent world.

I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge.
The curlew’s tear turned its edge on the silence.

Slowly detail leafed from the darkness. Then the sun
Orange, red, red erupted

Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,
Shook the gulf open, showed blue,

And the big planets hanging —.
I turned

Stumbling in the fever of a dream, down towards
The dark woods, from the kindling tops,

And came to the horses.
There, still they stood,
But now steaming and glistening under the flow of light,

Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves
Stirring under a thaw while all around them

The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound.
Not one snorted or stamped,

Their hung heads patient as the horizons,
High over valleys, in the red levelling rays —

In din of the crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,
May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place

Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing curlews,
Hearing the horizons endure.


Then there's:

Fulbright Scholars

Where was it, in the Strand? A display
Of news items, in photographs.
For some reason I noticed it.
A picture of that year’s intake
Of Fulbright Scholars. Just arriving —
Or arrived. Or some of them.
Were you among them? I studied it,
Not too minutely, wondering
Which of them I might meet.
I remember that thought. Not
Your face. No doubt I scanned particularly
The girls. Maybe I noticed you.
Maybe I weighed you up, feeling unlikely.
Noted your long hair, loose waves —
Your Veronica Lake bang. Not what it hid.
It would appear blond. And your grin.
Your exaggerated American
Grin for the cameras, the judges, the strangers, the frighteners.
Then I forgot. Yet I remember
The picture: the Fulbright Scholars.
With their luggage? It seems unlikely.
Could they have come as a team? I was walking
Sore-footed, under hot sun, hot pavements.
Was it then I bought a peach? That’s as I remember.
From a stall near Charing Cross Station.
It was the first fresh peach I had ever tasted.
I could hardly believe how delicious.
At twenty-five I was dumbfounded afresh
By my ignorance of the simplest things.

[Megan]

Yeah, not so much. It's really odd, how differing my opinions on him are. I can appreciate that they're good, well-written poems, and that he has a way with words, but.. I'm just not feeling it. Strange.

[Adam J. M. Eagleton]

I know what you mean. It's usually quite hit-and-miss with Hughes, and I know that you prefer more vivid, imagistic . . . well, Plathian poetry. Red is probably his most Plathian poem, but I haven't finished Tales from Ovid yet, so maybe there'll be more in there. Hughes probably just isn't your cup of tea, I suppose.

[Megan]

Maybe that's it. For goodness' sake, why can't everyone just write like Sylvia Plath. ;) No, that'd be boring, with no variation and everything. I like other poets, I just really love her.

[Adam J. M. Eagleton]

Actually, it's about Plath's suicide. Red, for Hughes, and I believe for Plath, represented the savage, darker, animal nature of her, as well as her depression, and blue her intellect and kindness, which Hughes sees as her "jewel", the thing she sacrificed to be lost in the "pit of red". And "Poppies thin and wrinkle-frail / As the skin on blood" is obviously a reference to Plath's poem Poppies in July: "And it exhausts me to watch you / Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth. // A mouth just bloodied. / Little bloody skirts!" Also of note is the fact that when Hughes and Plath met for the first time, Hughes took a scarf of hers which he recalled as having been blue, but which Plath writes was red. Plath also bit his cheek and drew blood: ". . . and I was stamping and he was stamping on the floor, and then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hair band off, my lovely red hairband scarf . . . hah, I shall keep, he barked. And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face."

[Megan]

Where is that last quote from?