Tuesday, September 26, 2006

On All Things Poetical

I have recently, since mid-summer, been trying to re-find a poetry site that I once came across. I found it while looking for a poem to memorize for a class just over two years ago. It was a rather extensive site, given that anyone could add poems to it if they discovered one missing, and covered everything from a few Roman (in Latin!) poems up through many of the more modern works. I have no idea what it was called, except that I think "poetry" or similar might have been somewhere in the title. I think, at the time, the color scheme involved purple. And you could search by author, by title, or by keywords within the poems. Anyone have any idea what I'm talking about? And if you do, please, please let me know the site's address!

I've found
this one, from which I took the following poem:

Love and Friendship - a poem by Emily Bronte

Love is like the wild rose-briar,
Friendship like the holly-tree
The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms
But which will bloom most constantly?

The wild-rose briar is sweet in the spring,
Its summer blossoms scent the air;
Yet wait till winter comes again
And who will call the wild-briar fair?

Then scorn the silly rose-wreath now
And deck thee with the holly's sheen,
That when December blights thy brow
He may still leave thy garland green.

But that isn't the right site; it doesn't carry half so many poems, nor, in particular, the ones I am looking for. (If I could remember either the title or poet I'm looking for, or even any particular lines of the poem, I'd give them to you, but I can't.) It doesn't even carry many of Chesterton's poems. Though it does have this one:

Gold Leaves - a poem by G.K.Chesterton

Lo! I am come to autumn,
When all the leaves are gold;
Grey hairs and golden leaves cry out
The year and I are old.

In youth I sought the prince of men,
Captain in cosmic wars,
Our Titan, even the weeds would show
Defiant, to the stars.

But now a great thing in the street
Seems any human nod,
Where shift in strange democracy
The million masks of God.

In youth I sought the golden flower
Hidden in wood or wold,
But I am come to autumn,
When all the leaves are gold.
Then there's this site, but that's also not what I'm looking for. Nor is this one, though they seem to have an extensive collection (but no Chesterton at all!).
And simply because of where I am, I will also mention this site of cowboy poetry.
And speaking of poetry, why is it that it is so hard to write? I won a contest for writing the best bad poetry once, carefully copying the style of I forgot who it was, and won a book. That was purposefully bad, and so it was good. But now - I keep trying, now and then, and the words come easily at times, but when I go back and read them later they always sound horrible. When they're decent I can't manage to stick with a style. I'll have one line of seven syllables in iambic pentameter, then two twice as long but each switching to a separate meter, then the next only four syllables and an entirely different style all together. And the next verse may start out long, alternate differently from the first, and contain twenty lines instead of four. When I can get that down, as I managed to do for a poem I began this past summer, then inevitably the words I require will never quite fit.
I can appreciate good, steady, non-modern poetry. I prefer it. Yet my own falls so far short as to be incomprehensible even to most teenagers at today's high school poetry slams. Which, by the way, I never attended, having professed a deep hate for all poetry until sometime through college. Perhaps, after all, I will now have to stick to just reading... And yet sometimes poetry expresses things so much better than words ever could.
And far, far more succinctly. Which we all know I need.

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