Here’s the original poem by Robert Frost. Note ‘shadowy” – a break from the otherwise perfect meter. It’s not exactly a dactyl, because under the influence of the meter, we probably turn the ‘w’ into a vowel more or less and barely pronounce the ‘o.’ Still. “In one tree’s overthrow” – It is inappropriate to read ‘tree’ as an unstressed syllable, I believe, despite the meter. And so we have a spondee here in the middle of the line. in ONE TREE’S OV-er-THROW What figures and glimmers tangled with this… Read more Poetry Challenge 8: In Winter in the Woods Alone →
We gather together
we stand with heads bowed
to ask the Lord’s blessing
on this dear old crowd.
O WORLD invisible, we view thee, O world intangible, we touch thee, O world unknowable, we know thee, Inapprehensible, we clutch thee! Does the fish soar to find the ocean, The eagle plunge to find the air– That we ask of the stars in motion If they have rumor of thee there? Not where the wheeling systems darken, And our benumbed conceiving soars!– The drift of pinions, would we hearken, Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors. The angels keep their ancient places– Turn but a stone and start a wing! Tis… Read more Poetry Survey Series Post Ten: The Kingdom of God by Francis Thompson →
Here’s an excerpt from C. S. Lewis’ poem ‘From the Nameless Isle.’ I believe this is an early effort, but it demonstrates, with admirable aplomb, the modernized Anglo-Saxon verse style that we are attempting. Read aloud for best effect, and with the speech rhythms of daily speech, except that you should stress slightly more than normally the stressed syllables, pause a bit longer than you usually would at the ceasura, and give the heavy, or long, syllables their full weight, or length. My excerpt begins just after a castaway from… Read more Some Help With Our Anglo-Saxon Challenge: From the Nameless Isle by C. S. Lewis →
For this poem, I’m sending us back to youtube for a musical version. Many people say that Tolkien was not a good poet. They love what he did for the fantasy novel genre, but he should have just realized he wasn’t a poet. People say the same thing about C. S. Lewis, interestingly enough. Both Lewis and Tolkien, however, were consciously pursuing the same aesthetic aims in their novels and in their poetry (something like a continuation, a new flowering, even a maturation, of the Romantic movement in literature.) Those… Read more Poetry Survey Series Post Nine: The Lay of Beren and Luthien by J. R. R. Tolkien →
It’s Tuesday the 20th of May, Anno Domini 2014. Having set myself a poet’s challenge, I present here my finished work. The challenge was to write a new poem based on Shakespeare’s “Fear No More the Heat of the Sun.” The rules in this challenge are simply that you must use the first line of a famous poem, and write your own poem as following from that line. Partly this is just to make sure that I keep writing and bust through my dreadful writer’s block, and partly it is… Read more Poet’s Challenge: Fear No More the Heat of The Sun →
Augustine – a breathtaking poem by a friend.
I’ve pretty much been writing a poem a day for a while. So far I’ve been able to salvage 5. Dance When he whirls her round and round her patterned waist rat-tatts his hands. Her mind is oppositely wound and cannot spin with beer and glands surrender to a lilting sound and yield a body for a flower. She wants a word of power. What brief and commonplace return does he expect he can extract with mutterings of burn and yearn? What deep attention she’d exact – he ought to… Read more Five Poems: Poem 1, Dance →
Slow Literature 