Poetry

Date: 25 October 2005 12:19:24

I greatly enjoy reading poetry in my spare time. I wouldn't say I am particularly knowledgable, but I have a few poets I greatly enjoy reading. I do need, and would like, to broaden my horizons -- so any suggestions gratefully appreciated.

The works of John Donne are among my favourites. I find his religious poems particularly appealing, but I enjoy all of his works: the sheer vibrancy and energy that seems to pervade each poem. I have also read a few other works by other metaphysical poets and have enjoyed them also. Among religious persons I also enjoy the works of St John of the Cross and St Ephrem the Syrian.

Listening to Mirabilis, I'm reminded of the wonderful poetry I have heard through the Mediæval Bæbes' CDs. From the extract from the Middle English poem Orpheo about a queen who falls under an enchanted fairy tree; to the Mediæval French Lanquan Li Jorn (Jaufré Rudel) about a woman so famed of beauty, though he had never met her; to Walter von der Vogelweide's (1170-1230), a German troubadour, song about Palestine being the place of Christ's birth; to an extract from the Mediæval English novel Pearl detailing the longing for beauty unreachable, I find myself transported. I love to have my mind constantly transported to another time and place and to find myself, by the words, completely ..

And so it was with the poems the Bæbes provided in in Mirabilis: for me it was two in particular -- James Hogg's Kilmeny, where another world is invoked and so wondrously described; and Robert Burns' heart-wrenching The Lament. I do love misery and angst in poetry.

Here is a sample of each:

O thou pale orb that silent shines
While care-untroubled mortals sleep!
Thou seest a wretch who inly pines.
And wanders here to wail and weep!
With woe I nightly vigils keep,
Beneath thy wan, unwarming beam;
And mourn, in lamentation deep,
How life and love are all a dream!

The Lament, Robert Burns

When she spoke of the lovely forms she had seen,
And a land where sin had never been;
A land of love and a land of light,
Withouten sun, or moon, or night;

Where the river swa'd a living stream,
And the light a pure and cloudless beam;
The land of vision, it would seem,
A still, an everlasting dream.

Kilmeny, James Hogg