The Hypocatastasis Of Sublimity

Good poetry is just that.

Analects follow.

The first excerpt is from 'Ode On A Grecian Urn' by John Keats, the poet's poet.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands dressed?
What little town by river or sea-shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, they streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul, to tell
Why thou art desolate, can ne'er return.

The next is also by Keats; it's called 'The Poet'.

Where's the Poet? Show him! Show him,
Muses mine, that I may know him!
'Tis the man who with a man
Is an equal, be he king,
Or poorest of the beggar-class,
Or any other wondrous thing
A man may be 'twixt ape and Plato.
'Tis the man who with a bird,
Wren or eagle, finds his way to
All its instincts. He hath heard
The lion's roaring, and can tell
What his horny throat expresseth,
And to him the tiger's yell
Comes articulate and presseth
On his ear like mother-tongue.

Third in line is a fragment from William Butler Yeats' 'News For The Delphic Oracle'

Straddling each a dolphin's back
And steadied by a fin,
Those innocents re-live their death,
Their wounds open again.

The following are the last few lines from the prologue of Geoffrey Chaucer's 'The Canterbury Tales'

He said, "Soon I shall begin the game,
What, welcome be the cut, a Goddess name!
Now let us ride, and harken what I say."
And with that we rode forth our way;
And he began with right a merry cheer
His tale anon, and said as ye may here.

This one's from Lord Tennyson's translation of Claudian's Proserpine, written perhaps when he was 11 after being inspired by Alexander Pope's Homer's Iliad.

Ye mighty demons, whose tremendous sway
The shadowy tribes of airy ghosts obey,
To whose insatiate portion ever fall
All things that perish on this earthly ball,
Whom livid Styx with lurid torrent bounds
And fiery Phlegethon for aye surrounds,
Dark, deep and whirling round his flaming caves
The braying vortex of his breathless waves

One of the most prominent lyrical poets is Russian Alexander Blok, and here is the full body of his 'Night, street and streetlight, drugstore...', concise and so evocative.

Night, street and streetlight, drugstore,
The purposeless, half-dim, drab light.
For all the use live on a quarter century -
Nothing will change. There's no way out.

You'll die - and start all over, live twice,
Everything repeats itself, just as it was:
Night, the canal's rippled icy surface,
The drugstore, the street, and streetlight.

Renamed haiku in the 19th century by Masaoka Shiki, hokku is a form of Japanese poetry whereby the poem consists of three phrases, each of 5, 7 and 5 on in each line in that order (each on is like a syllable, except that it's one on for a short syllable, two for a long syllable, double consonant or diphthong, and three on for the possible "n" at the end of a phrase). Perhaps the most witty proponent of this style was Matsuo Bashō, and here's he at his witty best. It's like a pretentiously small serving of caviar that you had to have smuggled to be cooked in the first place.

an ancient pond / a frog jumps in / the splash of water

(fu-ru i-ke ya / ka-wa-zu to-bi-ko-mu / mi-zu no o-to)

Du Fu, together with Li Bai, is considered to be one of China's greatest poets. The following is a fragment from his 'To My Retired Friend Wei'. I've chosen these particular lines as being good because they've been pieced together to create a metaphor that's become very meaningful to me of late. However, and since Du Fu was also a master of the technique, that means the following translation may or may not reflect his technical skills. If you're interested, you can find the original here.

It is almost as hard for friends to meet
As for the morning and evening stars.
Tonight then is a rare event,
Joining, in the candlelight,
Two men who were young not long ago
But now are turning grey at the temples.
...To find that half our friends are dead
Shocks us, burns our hearts with grief.
We little guessed it would be twenty years
Before I could visit you again.
When I went away, you were still unmarried;
But now these boys and girls in a row
Are very kind to their father's old friend.

Perhaps I'm duty-bound to mention the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (as translated by Edward FitzGerald) but, as fate would have it, the reason behind the mention extends beyond the guise of a chore. While the masterpiece presents a facade of infinite polished surfaces, there are a couple of lines that jut flirtatiously into my conscience.

The Moving Finger writes: and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

This is an excerpt from what has been frequently and deservingly called a masterpiece of world literature, penned by Dante degli Alighieri, the father of the Italian language.

Walking did not slow our talk, nor did the talking
slow our motion, as conversing we moved swiftly,
like ships that are driven by favoring winds.
And the shades, that seemed things dead twice over,
stared at me, amazed, from the sockets of their eyes,
once they saw I was alive.
And I, continuing, remarked:
'Perhaps he climbs more slowly than he'd like
because someone else is with him.
'But tell me, if you know, where Piccarda is.
And tell me if I am seeing anyone of note
among these people who are staring at me so.
'I cannot say whether my sister was more virtuous
than she was beautiful. On high Olympus
she already triumphs, rejoicing in her crown.

(canto 24 of Purgatorio)

The following is the full content of Wysten Hugh Auden's 'Our Hunting Fathers', a morose retrospection on the demands of ambition and the reality of futility.

Our hunting fathers told the story
Of the sadness of the creatures,
Pitied the limits and the lack
Set in their finished features;
Saw in the lion's intolerant look,
Behind the quarry's dying glare,
Love raging for, the personal glory
That reason's gift would add,
The liberal appetite and power,
The rightness of a god.

Who, nurtured in that fine tradition,
Predicted the result,
Guessed Love by nature suited to
The intricate ways of guilt,
That human ligaments could so
His southern gestures modify
And make it his mature ambition
To think no thought but ours,
To hunger, work illegally,
And be anonymous?

There are many more poets unto whose works I wish I could proffer the space to discuss (without trundling out of the "blog" territory) or the time to dissect, but much as I aspire to attain such measures of glory, it must be remembered that these analects will and must only impress upon whatever skill I may someday profess, but never be permitted to shroud. Some of them include Goethe, Christina Rossetti, Oriah Mountain Dreamer and Baudelaire. On that note, here is an excerpt from a beautiful poem written by a dear friend - both a sustained reminder of poetry's independence from the vassalage of instruction, its access to acquiescent expression and its strangely reassuring promise of inchoate liberation.

Lets misconstrue a ripe game.
Where you thief every soul who dare peep through screens.
Curtains of horrored humor.
Resonating of rinsed glee.
The breath of a warrior.
The blade of a martyr.
Encouraging the same side of destruction.
Foresee the magnificent men.
The men of honour.
The men of death.
The men born and bred in blood.