It's Friday: must be poetry day!!

[chaletian]

According to the Metro, that bastion of respectable reporting, poetry is dying out! OHNOES! To help battle against this dreadful fate, I post herewith a random pome:

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited ;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

~ Thomas Hardy


And also, in a single-handed attempt to bring poetry back, please help me in my pome-themed SDC. Please? Anyone? Bueller?

Comments

[katherinea.livejournal.com]

Since when do ‘gate’ and ‘desolate’ rhyme, Mr H?
Am rubbish, will try to think of SDC.

[bookwormsarah.livejournal.com]

This is one of my absolute favourite poems, and I find myself chanting odd lines when on a Brisk Winter Walk in the Country. Blast beruffled plumes...scores of broken lyres...spectre-grey...and that last wonderful, melancholy "Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew/And I was unaware."

Thank you for posting.

[mrsrev.livejournal.com]

There seems to be a lot of poetry on BBC at the moment! Random people bursting into poems all over the place.

My mother and I found ourselves reciting poetry in the shopping centre last week, we were both surprised that the other one knew this!

I think that I will never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
In fact, unless the billboards fall,
I'll never see a tree at all!

(Ogden Nash, I think)

[katie__pillar.livejournal.com]

Ahh, hence ye olde ebay name, I assume. Never heard it before (bet you're surprised!)