My favourite poems IV: George Herbert

I am not religious. I don't pray. I know a lot of Christians who do and I'm not sure what they get out of it. Sometimes it seems to be a shopping list of requirements, sometimes a request for an answer confirming what they've already decided, sometimes a buttering up of a strangely narcissistic God, sometimes just ritual. George Herbert managed to come up with a definition that makes it far more meaningful. And I love the way the poem is just a string of mystical metaphors.
I'll post this one today, because this, of all days, needs all the prayers going as the doors slam shut.

Prayer 

Prayer the Church’s banquet, angels’ age,
  God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
  The Christian plummet sounding heaven and earth;
Engine against the Almighty, sinner’s tower,
  Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days-world-transposing in an hour,
  A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
  Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed,
  The milky way, the bird of paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
  The land of spices; something understood.

George Herbert

My favourite poems III: escape

Another poem, which everyone knows. If, like me, you are sitting for hours on a hard hospital chair, waiting for a bed to become available for your mother, the thought of being anywhere else at all is wonderful.
It also taught me how to use rhythm to paint a picture.
I do wonder, though, how a rowed ship owned by Nineveh (access Persian Gulf) can make it from Ophir (possibly Sri Lanka or Red sea port) to Palestine (Mediterranean) before the building of the Suez canal. This sort of thing worries me.

Cargoes

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amethysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

John Masefield

My Favourite Poems II

Here's another poem, which is an entire Dystopian/Utopian novel in miniature, by Edwin Muir. Very green.

The Horses

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
'They'll molder away and be like other loam.'
We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers' land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers' time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half a dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.
Edwin Muir

My favourite poems I

I'm going to share my favourite poems, just because I feel like it.

This one, because I spent a particularly beautiful day in Laugharne this year, although I saw no herons or cockle-women. And I am long past being thirty.

POEM IN OCTOBER

It was my thirtieth year to heaven

Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood

And the mussel pooled and the heron 

Priested shore

The morning beckon

With water praying and call of seagull and rook

And the knock of sailing boats on the webbed wall

Myself to set foot

That second

In the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-

Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name

Above the farms and the white horses

And I rose

In a rainy autumn

And walked abroad in shower of all my days

High tide and the heron dived when I took the road

Over the border

And the gates

Of the town closed as the town awoke.

A springful of larks in a rolling

Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling

Blackbirds and the sun of October

Summery

On the hill's shoulder,

Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly

Come in the morning where I wandered and listened

To the rain wringing

Wind blow cold

In the wood faraway under me.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbour

And over the sea wet church the size of a snail

With its horns through mist and the castle

Brown as owls

But all the gardens

Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales

Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.

There could I marvel

My birthday

Away but the weather turned around.

It turned away from the blithe country

And down the other air and the blue altered sky

Streamed again a wonder of summer

With apples

Pears and red currants

And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's

Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother

Through the parables

Of sunlight

And the legends of the green chapels

And the twice told fields of infancy

That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.

These were the woods the river and the sea

Where a boy

In the listening

Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy

To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.

And the mystery

Sang alive

Still in the water and singing birds.

And there could I marvel my birthday

Away but the weather turned around. And the true

Joy of the long dead child sang burning

In the sun.

It was my thirtieth

Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon

Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.

O may my heart's truth

Still be sung

On this high hill in a year's turning.

Dylan Thomas