appropriated from quingawaga

[hel_ana]

meme-bit: April is National poetry month. When you see this, post a poem you like on your LJ.

I'm actually going to post two. The first is one of my early favourites, the second one of the most recent favourites.


Ozymandius
Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
My name is Ozymandius, King of Kings,
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.



i carry your heart with me
E.E. Cummings

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)

i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

Comments

[culturalnomad.livejournal.com]

I did literature as one of my A-Levels in secondary school. (The A-Level exams are taken after year 13 in the British school system, usually after studying a relatively small number of subjects very intensively for years 12 and 13.) One component of the course that year was the poems of Shelley. To be frank, I didn't and don't like much of his poetry, but I DID like Ozymandias. I memorised it almost without consciously trying, and I can still quote it.

(I did like a few selected lines from some of his other poems. I liked the rhythm and imagery of his description of King George III [the bane of the American colonies] in "Sonnet: England in 1819" -- "An old, mad, blind, despise and dying king --".)

By the way, I found out something interesting about Mary W. Shelley this morning. (P.B. Shelley's wife, who wrote "Frankenstein.") If I have time, I'll write it up for my own LJ.

I've never been particularly impressed by anything else I have read by e.e. cummings, but I did like the one you quote here.

[hel_ana]

I've always been somewhat indifferent to Cummings as well, but that one I heard read before I read it on paper.

Ozymandias is, likewise, one of the few Shelley works that I'm tremendously fond of.

Though, truthfully, I tend to be a prose girl. Though I recently read The Namesake, which is beautifully lyric.

[schonfelddip.livejournal.com]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMzgVshG6CI