Today's poet

[Mossdog]

Ahem. Pushing a very tenuous link here between twinkling Subaru and Keats (or was it Yeats?), here's an offering. After all, the 9:00 watershed has passed.


BRIGHT STAR

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen masque
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft swell and fall,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.


—John Keats

[freckle]

Lovely stuff. I was wondering who the Sailing Seven were and found this...

In this delightful poem, which expresses the affection of God and the Cosmos for a small infant, Yeats is refering to the Pleiades, also known as M45, the Seven Sisters, SED, or Subaru. It's an open cluster in the constellation Taurus that actually has nine named stars in it. The Pleiades were nymphs, the seven daughters of the Titan Atlas and the sea nymph Pleione -- their group name is derived from their mother's name. The cluster is visible in the Mediterranean at night during the summer from mid-May to early November, which was the sailing season in antiquity -- thus they are known as "The Sailing Seven".

I will never look at a Subaru on the M45 again in quite the same way!

Sorry for spoiling the mood

Not at all, I wondered the same thing myself so good to know more!

[freckle]

Good evening Mossdog!

That was an awesome poem, thank you for posting.......in a similar vein perhaps here is another from Yeats...

He Remembers Forgotten Beauty

When my arms wrap you round I press
My heart upon the loveliness
That has long faded from the world;
The jewelled crowns that kings have hurled
In shadowy pools, when armies fled;
The love-tales wrought with silken thread
By dreaming ladies upon cloth
That has made fat the murderous moth;
The roses that of old time were
Woven by ladies in their hair,
The dew-cold lilies ladies bore
Through many a sacred corridor
Where such grey clouds of incense rose
That only God's eyes did not close:
For that pale breast and lingering hand
Come from a more dream-heavy land,
A more dream-heavy hour than this;
And when you sigh from kiss to kiss
I hear white Beauty sighing, too,
For hours when all must fade like dew.
But flame on flame, and deep on deep,
Throne over throne where in half sleep,
Their swords upon their iron knees,
Brood her high lonely mysteries.

William Butler Yeats

phew!

[Mossdog]

Good evening Mossdog!

That was an awesome poem, thank you for posting.......in a similar vein perhaps here is another from Yeats...

He Remembers Forgotten Beauty

When my arms wrap you round I press
My heart upon the loveliness
That has long faded from the world;
The jewelled crowns that kings have hurled
In shadowy pools, when armies fled;
The love-tales wrought with silken thread
By dreaming ladies upon cloth
That has made fat the murderous moth;
The roses that of old time were
Woven by ladies in their hair,
The dew-cold lilies ladies bore
Through many a sacred corridor
Where such grey clouds of incense rose
That only God's eyes did not close:
For that pale breast and lingering hand
Come from a more dream-heavy land,
A more dream-heavy hour than this;
And when you sigh from kiss to kiss
I hear white Beauty sighing, too,
For hours when all must fade like dew.
But flame on flame, and deep on deep,
Throne over throne where in half sleep,
Their swords upon their iron knees,
Brood her high lonely mysteries.

William Butler Yeats

phew!

Gosh!

[freckle]

i know !....likin the new signature, cool :-)

[Mossdog]

I have thought about it Joss, and I definitely need to go and lie down now! No mistake. (Apposite signature too Freckle.)

[Hes]

Flowers

There's another skin inside my skin
that gathers to your touch, a lake to the light;
that looses its memory, its lost language
into your tongue,
erasing me into newness.

Just when the body thinks it knows
the ways of knowing itself,
this second skin continues to answer.

In the street - café chairs abandoned
on terraces; market stalls emptied
of their solid light,
though pavement still breathes
summer grapes and peaches.
Like the light of anything that grows
from this newly-turned earth,
every tip of me gathers under your touch,
wind wrapping my dress around our legs,
your shirt twisting to flowers in my fists.


Anne Michaels

[freckle]

Like the light of anything that grows
from this newly-turned earth,
every tip of me gathers under your touch,
wind wrapping my dress around our legs,
your shirt twisting to flowers in my fists.


Wow, wow, and wow again! how utterly brilliant thanx Hes!

[freckle]

Lullaby

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guility, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's sensual ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of sweetness show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find your mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

W.H. Auden

[XRunner]

Lovely stuff. I was wondering who the Sailing Seven were and found this....Yeats is refering to the Pleiades,

Last night I saw the Pleiades again,
Faint as a drift of steam
From some tall chimney-stack;
And I remembered you as you were then:
Awoke dead worlds of dream,
And Time turned slowly back.

I saw the Pleiades through branches bare,
And close to mine your face
Soft glowing in the dark;
For Youth and Hope and Love and You were there
At our dear trysting-place
In that bleak London park.

And as we kissed the Pleiades looked down
From their immeasurable
Aloofness in cold Space.
Do you remember how a last leaf brown
Between us flickering fell
Soft on your upturned face?

Last night I saw the Pleiades again,
Here in the alien South,
Where no leaves fade at all;
And I remembered you as you were then,
And felt upon my mouth
Your leaf-light kisses fall!

The Pleiades remember and look down
On me made old with grief,
Who then a young god stood,
When you—now lost and trampled by the Town,
A lone wind-driven leaf,—
Were young and sweet and good!

Arthur H Adams