Feb

Love and Friendship

“Love is like the wild rose-briar,
Friendship like the holly-tree —
The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms
But which will bloom most contantly?
The wild-rose briar is sweet in the spring,
Its summer blossoms scent the air;
Yet wait till winter comes again
And who wil call the wild-briar fair?
Then scorn the silly rose-wreath now
And deck thee with the holly’s sheen,
That when December blights thy brow
He may still leave thy garland green.”

by Emily Bronte

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/novel_19c/wuthering/index.html

9 years ago Short URL Comments

Poetry

Feb

Archer

“What is god, what is not god, and what is in between?”

————-

“Lyric nightingale,

on a night like this, by the shore of Proteus,

the Spartan slave-girls heard you and began their lament,

and among them — who would have believed it? — Helen!

She whom we hunted so many years by the banks of the Scamander.

She was there, at the desert’s lip; I touched her; she spoke to me:

‘It isn’t true, it isn’t true,’ she cried.

‘I didn’t board the blue bowed ship.

I never went to valiant Troy.’

Breasts girded high, the sun in her hair, and that stature

shadows and smiles everywhere,

on shoulders, thighs and knees;

the skin alive, and her eyes

with the large eyelids,

she was there, on the banks of a Delta.

And at Troy?

At Troy, nothing: just a phantom image.

That’s how the gods wanted it.

And Paris, Paris lay with a shadow as though it were a solid being;

and for ten whole years we slaughtered ourselves for Helen.”

from “Eleni” by Giorgos Seferis ( http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1963/seferis-bio.html)

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/181856

9 years ago Short URL Comments

Poetry

Eleni/Giorgos Seferis/Troia

Feb

[My life, I love you]

Maid of Athens, ere we part,
Give, oh, give me back my heart!
Or, since that has left my breast,
Keep it now, and take the rest!
Hear my vow before I go,
[My life, I love you]

By those tresses unconfined,
Woo’d by each Aegean wind;
By those lids whose jetty fringe
Kiss thy soft cheeks’ blooming tinge;
By those wild eyes like the roe,
[My life, I love you]

By that lip I long to taste;
By that zone-encircled waist;
By all the token-flowers that tell
What words can never speak so well;
By love’s alternate joy and woe,
[My life, I love you]…..

George Gordon Byron (1788 – 1824)

Title: Maid Of Athens, Ere We Part

9 years ago Short URL Comments

Poetry

Lord Byron