"Bitter-Sweet" by George Herbert

"Bitter-Sweet" by George Herbert

Ah, my dear angry Lord,
Since thou dost love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.

I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve;
And all my sour-sweet days
I will lament and love.

*

George Herbert (1593-1633) has come to be one of the most admired of the metaphysical poets. Though he is a profoundly religious poet, even secular readers respond to his quiet intensity and exuberant inventiveness, which are amply showcased in this selection. Herbert experimented brilliantly with a remarkable variety of forms, from hymns and sonnets to pattern poems, the shapes of which reveal their subjects. Such technical agility never seems ostentatious, however, for precision of language and expression of genuine feeling were the primary concerns of this poet, who admonished his readers to “dare to be true.” An Anglican priest who took his calling with deep seriousness, he brought to his work a religious reverence richly allied with a playful wit and with literary and musical gifts of the highest order. His best-loved poems, from “The Collar” and “Jordan” to “The Altar” and “Easter Wings,” achieve a perfection of form and feeling, a rare luminosity, and a timeless metaphysical grandeur. READ more here: http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/…/herbert-poems-by-georg

Derek Walcott, “Map of the New World: Archipelagoes”

 Derek Walcott (1930-2017) 的這首詩, “Map of the New World: Archipelagoes”，童元方1992年雙十在哈佛翻譯過："新世界地圖"

文題為："詩在水上  不在山間--瓦科特的詩"，收入【一樣花開】，台北：爾雅，1996，頁199-208

Derek Walcott, “Map of the New World: Archipelagoes”

At the end of this sentence, rain will begin.
At the rain’s edge, a sail.

Slowly the sail will lose sight of islands;
into a mist will go the belief in harbours
of an entire race.

The ten-years war is finished.
Helen’s hair, a grey cloud.
Troy, a white ashpit
by the drizzling sea.

The drizzle tighten like the strings of a harp.
A man with clouded eyes picks up the rain
and plucks the first line of the Odyssey.

the song “Darlin’ Eileen”

Leonard Bernstein


Happy St. Patrick's Day! Or might we say Lá fhéile Pádraig sona dhuit!!
We share with you the song “Darlin’ Eileen” from the original Broadway cast recording of the musical Wonderful Town, with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green.
Act II opens in Manhattan’s Christopher Street Station House, where Eileen Sherwood (recently arrested) has charmed the Irish precinct police to make butler’s announcements, retrieve newspapers and carry her suitcase and dresses.
The police are convinced that Eileen is Irish and has “brought a breath of the old country into the Station House” and the police have “been feelin’ twice as Irish since [Eileen} came into our lives”.
In a greatly exaggerated Irish brogue, Officer Lonigan sings:
_____________________
“Take it from me
The mayor of Shannon
Would shoot off a cannon
And crown ye the queen
Darlin' Eileen, darlin' Eileen
Fairest colleen that iver [sic] I've seen
And it's oh I wish I were back
In the land of the green with my darlin' Eileen”
To which Eileen reponds:
“Listen my lads, I've something to tell you
I hope won't impel you to cry and to keen
Mother's a Swede and father's a Scot
And so Irish I'm not and I never have been”
All the police will hear none of this:
“Hush you, Eileen, hush you, Eileen
Fairest colleen that ever I've seen
Don't you hand us none of that blarney
You come from Kilarney, you're Irish Eileen”
_____________________
A lusty jig dance resumes and ends in a “hats off” salute to the Irish girl of their dreams, Eileen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyhi1z1wh3w

Derek Walcott 1930-2017

Derek Walcott, The Art of Poetry No. 37

I went to visit Derek Walcott on his home island of St. Lucia in mid-June, 1985. St. Lucia is one of the four Windward Islands in the eastern Caribbean, a…

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Derek Walcott 1930-2017

Homecoming: Anse la Raye . "Poetry, is perfection's sweat but which must seem as fresh as the raindrops on a statue's brow", claimed Walcott in his Nobel speech. Here, the poet of the Caribbean, illustrates this apparent ease of writing and shows us how fragmented memory is central to his poetry. (for Garth St Omer) Whatever else we learned at school, like solemn Afro-Greeks eager for grades, of Helen and the shades of borrowed ancestors, there are no rites for those who have returned only, when her looms fade, drilled in our skulls, the doom- surge-haunted nights, only this well-known passage under the coconuts' salt-rusted swords, these rotted leathery sea-grape leaves, the seacrabs' brittle helmets, and this barbecue of branches, like the ribs of sacrificial oxen on scorched sand; only this fish-gut reeking beach whose frigate stuck like buzzards overhead whose spindly, sugar-headed children race pelting up from the shallows because your clothes, your posture seem a tourist's. They swarm like flies round your heart's sore. Suffer them to come, entering their needle's eye knowing whether they live or die, what others make of life will pass them by like that far silvery freighter threading the horizon like a toy; for once, like them, you wanted no career but this sheer light, this clear, infinite, boring, paradisal sea, but hoped it would mean something to declare today, I am your poet, yours, all this you knew, but never guessed you'd come to know there are homecomings without home. You give them nothing. Their curses melt in air. The black cliffs scowl, the ocean sucks its teeth, like that long dugout canoe like a small petal fallen in a cup, reflecting nothing but its image, you sway, reflecting nothing. The freighter's silvery ghost is gone, the children gone. Dazed by the sun you trudge back to the village past the white, salty esplanade under whose palms, dead fishermen move their draughts in shade, crossing, eating their islands, and one, with a politician's ignorant, sweet smile, nods as if all fate swayed in his lifted hand.

Nobel laureate poet Derek Walcott dies aged 87 in St Lucia

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Image captionDerek Walcott was one of the Caribbean's best known writers

Nobel laureate poet Derek Walcott has died aged 87 at his home in the Caribbean island of St Lucia after a long illness, local media reports say.

He was regarded by critics as one of the greatest Caribbean poets.

The writer's collections include In A Green Night: Poems 1948 - 1960 and his epic work, Omeros, which draws on Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.

He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 and the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry in 2011.

His winning collection for the TS Eliot Prize, White Egrets, was called "a moving, risk-taking and technically flawless book by a great poet" by the judges.

The Nobel Committee, announcing his prize, said: "His poetry acquires at one and the same time singular lustre and great force... Walcott's style is melodious and sensitive."

The poet won many other prizes, including a MacArthur Foundation award - the so-called "genius grant".

Walcott said at the time: "It's nice to get it, because it gives you four or five years of a great deal of security - the tough thing is when it's finished!

"It has a very bad connotation, this idea of a 'genius' - I'm not denying the fact that I'm prodigious, I'm not denying the fact that I wrote well... to me it's a gift. I feel blessed that I was gifted."

Appearing on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs in 1992, he said he had written as far back as he could remember, and recalled his mother, a schoolteacher, reciting Shakespeare at home.

• Listen to Derek Walcott's 1992 Desert Island Discs

His father, who died while he was still an infant, had also written poetry, he said.

"I heard that kind of sound at home from when I was very young," he said. "I always knew that was what I wanted to do - to write, particularly poetry."

Born in 1930, he studied at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, before moving to Trinidad in 1953, where he worked as a theatre and art critic.

He published his first collection, 25 Poems, at the age of 18. He was also an accomplished painter and playwright.

Image captionWalcott in 1992 - the year he was awarded the Nobel Prize

The Cultural Development Foundation of St Lucia has paid tribute to Walcott, saying in a statement: "The world has lost one of its noted literary icons.

"Our sympathies extend to St Lucia as a nation, who without doubt are proud and honoured to call him a true son of St Lucia.

"He was very vocal about the island's culture and heritage, and its preservation, and his love for St Lucia and the Caribbean was evident in his numerous mentions of 'home' in his work."

Speaking about the shock of returning home to St Lucia, Walcott said: "You had to balance off the beauty of the place with some of the poverty around you."

The Poetry Society described his death as "terrible news" and encouraged others to read his poetry in memoriam.

Walcott was also embroiled in controversy over his candidacy for the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry in 2009.

He pulled out of the race after academics at the university received dozens of anonymous letters linking him to an allegation of sexual harassment in 1982.

The eventual winner - the first woman to hold the prestigious position - was then forced to resign after just days in office, when it emerged she had briefed journalists on the allegations.

Wallace Stevens 詩選

Selected Poetry - American Studies @ The University of Virginia

xroads.virginia.edu/~ma05/dulis/poetry/Stevens/stevens2.html

The song and water were not medleyed sound Even if what she sang was what .... 

XXII Poetry is the subject of the poem, From this the poem issues and To this ...

"Love Song" by Rainer Maria Rilke, Joyce DiDonato, When my soul touches yours, Bernstein YouTube

Leonard Bernstein

4小時 · 

On this day in 1963, Leonard Bernstein’s “When my Soul Touches Yours” was premiered by mezzo-soprano Jennie Tourel at The Town Hall in New York City.

This is the second of “Two Love Songs” composed by Bernstein in 1949, both dedicated to his good friend Ms. Tourel, the first of which, "Extinguish My Eyes", she premiered
at The Town Hall 14 years prior. The songs' texts were written by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, with English translation by Jessie Lamont.
_______________

"Love Song"
Rainer Maria Rilke
(trans. Jessie Lamont)

When my soul touches yours a great chord sings!
How shall I tune it then to other things?
O! That some spot in darkness could be found
That does not vibrate whene'er your depths sound.
But everything that touches you and me
Welds us as played strings sound one melody.
Where is the instrument whence the sounds flow?
And whose the master-hand that holds the bow?
O! Sweet song—
_______________

We share with you a recording of Joyce DiDonato and pianist David Zobel performing "When My Soul Touches Yours" on the Eloquentia France Label.

Joyce DiDonato When my soul touches yours Bernstein YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLVYgTQe18M

A Picture of the Painter Howard Hodgkin: Philip Larkin的名詩THE TREES (Seamus Justin Heaney )

Howard Hodgkin, painter, 1932-2017
BBC的52分鐘，肯定讓你覺得人生充實：
A Picture of the Painter Howard Hodgkin

A Picture of the Painter Howard Hodgkin

Alan Yentob presents a profile of Howard Hodgkin

Howard Hodgkin在愛爾蘭開大展，室內顏色選 Howard 喜愛的印度豐富的多彩，如展覽室的印度蘋果綠.....夕陽....美術館請愛爾蘭名詩人Seamus Justin Heaney (1939-2013-MRIA was an Irish poet, playwright, translator and lecturer. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize)  介紹，他朗讀Philip Larkin的名詩
http://www.poetryarchive.org/poem/trees

THE TREES