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[samsom]

I've recently run across two very different poems, ones I haven't read in a long time but the fragments of which floated around the back of my unconscious for years.

The first is long, several verses and I've been listening to Loreena McKeenitt sing it on my iPod, falling more and more in love with it with every play.

The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes

http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~trent/ochs/lyrics/highwayman-orig.html

V & VI are my favorite verses, plus the last four. I just adore the repetition of certain words and phrases, and of course, it's a great story. Very tragic.

The second is The Look by Sara Teasdale. I think I read this the one and only time before today when I was about twelve or thirteen. It dug its way down into my pysche and influenced a lot of what I try and write - the unspoken, the subtext, between two people. I don't always succeed, if ever, but I try. I found it today thanks to the miracle of Google.

http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/2964.html

If anyone is so inclined, what words are you grooving on currently, have grooved on?

Comments

[landrews.livejournal.com]

lolol over the icons, hee!

I love that you have a great poem. The Look is wonderfully efficient and true. Hands down, the most influential poem in my head is The Death of The Ball Turret Gunner by Randall Jarrell. We read it in a Lit class my junior year of college. I was almost eighteen and I do believe it's colored a lot of my perceptions ever since (I'm 41 now :issurprised:) I just remember thinking, I understand this and the feeling behind it- though I had no reason to-

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

My other sense memory poem was from fifth grade- Carlos Williams Carlos- Between Walls

the back wings
of the

hospital where
nothing

will grow lie
cinders

in which shine
the broken

pieces of a green
bottle

And seeing this I think of his This is Just To Say which is about cold, sweet plums, probably the reason I had Angel eat plums in one of my fics, lolol. Thanks for stirring up my brain :-)

[landrews.livejournal.com]

Wow! I was tired last night! That would be William Carlos Williams, lolol

[samsom.livejournal.com]

I like the Ball Turret Gunner one - that last line's a killer.

I think the Highwayman creates a sense of midnight that I'd love to incorporate into a fic. The black sky, the black outlines of the trees, the sound of a horse's hooves before you see the rider. I just felt everything in it, the feeling between the lovers, the sense that Bess wouldn't let him die no matter what. She took control of a situation where they tried to render her without control or choice.