― cozen (Cozen), Friday, 15 April 2005 13:06 (eighteen years ago) link
― PJ Miller (PJ Miller), Friday, 15 April 2005 14:05 (eighteen years ago) link
The blowjob poem is cute enough.
― Casuistry (Chris P), Friday, 15 April 2005 14:28 (eighteen years ago) link
― Donald, Friday, 15 April 2005 15:00 (eighteen years ago) link
― Casuistry (Chris P), Friday, 15 April 2005 16:10 (eighteen years ago) link
― Casuistry (Chris P), Friday, 15 April 2005 16:11 (eighteen years ago) link
― Jaq (Jaq), Friday, 15 April 2005 17:46 (eighteen years ago) link
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,Silence the pianos and with muffled drumBring out the coffin, let the mourners come.....
― carolyn, Friday, 15 April 2005 21:45 (eighteen years ago) link
destroy: gosh if i know.
― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Saturday, 16 April 2005 01:19 (eighteen years ago) link
i like the other, more famous onesthe lines about airports in wb yeats; about suffering the old masters were never wrong, some of his ballads...but the platonic blow.
― anthony, Sunday, 17 April 2005 07:37 (eighteen years ago) link
Altogether elsewhere, vastHerds of reindeer move acrossMiles and miles of golden moss,Silently and very fast.
― Donald, Sunday, 17 April 2005 15:29 (eighteen years ago) link
― youn, Sunday, 17 April 2005 15:56 (eighteen years ago) link
I wish I still had my Auden book.
― PJ Miller (PJ Miller), Monday, 18 April 2005 09:17 (eighteen years ago) link
We, too, had known golden hoursWhen body and soul were in tune,Had danced with our true lovesBy the light of a full moon,And sat with the wise and goodAs tongues grew witty and gayOver some noble dishOut of Escoffier;Had felt the intrusive gloryWhich tears reserve apart,And would in the old grand mannerHave sung from a resonant heart.But, pawed-at and gossiped-overBy the promiscuous crowd,Concocted by editorsInto spells to befuddle the crowd,All words like Peace and Love,All sane affirmative speech,Had been soiled, profaned, debasedTo a horrid mechanical screech.No civil style survivedThat pandemoniumBut the wry, the sotto-voce,Ironic and monochrome:And where should we find shelterFor joy or mere contentWhen little was left standingBut the suburb of dissent?
And I read this again yesterday and realised that I really hadn't GOT it - or liked it - before:
Musee des Beaux Arts
About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters; how well, they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
― Archel (Archel), Monday, 18 April 2005 11:03 (eighteen years ago) link
― rrrobyn (rrrobyn), Monday, 18 April 2005 12:29 (eighteen years ago) link
I rather admire the daring melodrama of 'September 1st, 1939'. 'Show an affirming flame', indeed!
Surely it is time for JtN to ... wax, about 'Moon Landing'?
― the firefox, Monday, 18 April 2005 16:14 (eighteen years ago) link
"...could whistle; would sit still".
Marvellous. Also that one about the open shirt and tinkling guitar - I can't recall the name.
― Ally C (Ally C), Tuesday, 19 April 2005 21:39 (eighteen years ago) link
― Shutruk Nahunte, Wednesday, 22 June 2005 07:27 (eighteen years ago) link
― Casuistry (Chris P), Wednesday, 22 June 2005 23:27 (eighteen years ago) link
when u distract yrself from working on a deadlined proposal (due friday but i'm nowhere with it) by rewriting STOP ALL THE CLOCKS as LOCK ALL THE THREADS
this is where i got to: “archive the back-up shitposts, unkillfile mr snrub”
i quit when i spotted that "fredrick b” would deliver more useable rhymes but a less mark s outcome
― mark s, Monday, 27 January 2020 16:33 (four years ago) link
They are still alive, but in a world he changedsimply by looking back with no false regrets; all he did was to remember like the old and be honest like children.
He wasn't clever at all: he merely toldthe unhappy Present to recite the Past like a poetry lesson till sooner or later it faltered at the line where
long ago the accusations had begun,and suddenly knew by whom it had been judged, how rich life had been and how silly, and was life-forgiven and more humble,
able to approach the Future as a friendwithout a wardrobe of excuses, without a set mask of rectitude or an embarrassing over-familiar gesture.
― Ngolo Cantwell (Chinaski), Sunday, 16 February 2020 14:32 (four years ago) link
I'm only slowly making sense of Auden. For all his formal majesty and trickery, I find him surprisingly sentimental (and funny). That poem about Freud is surprising in all kinds of ways and seems to me to chime with Adam Phillips's approach to psychoanalysis:
INTERVIEWERYou have said, “I read psychoanalysis as poetry, so I don’t have to worry about whether it is true or even useful, but only whether it is haunting or moving or intriguing or amusing—whether it is something I can’t help but be interested in.”PHILLIPSYes, I was interested in psychoanalytic writing as being evocative rather than informative. At the time, the professional literature was written as if it was informing you either about how to practice psychoanalysis or about what people meant, broadly speaking. I couldn’t read it like that. Partly temperamentally, and partly because I’d had a literary education. For me, Freud made sense then not in terms of the history of science or the history of neurology, but in terms of the history of literature. I had been lucky enough to read Tristram Shandy before I read psychoanalysis.One advantage of thinking about psychoanalysis as an art, instead of a science, is that you don’t have to believe in progress. The tradition I was educated in was very committed to psychoanalysis as a science, as something that was making progress in its understanding of people. As if psychoanalysis was a kind of technique that we were improving all the time. This seemed to me at odds with at least one of Freud’s presuppositions, which was that conflict was eternal and that there was to be no kind of Enlightenment convergence on a consensual truth. The discipline was practised, though, as if we were going to make more and more discoveries about human nature, as though psychoanalysis was going to become more and more efficient, rather than the idea—which seemed to me to be more interesting—that psychoanalysis starts from the position that there is no cure, but that we need different ways of living with ourselves and different descriptions of these so-called selves.The great thing about the psychoanalytic treatment is that it doesn’t work in the usual sense of work. I don’t mean by this to avoid the fact that it addresses human suffering. I only mean that it takes for granted that an awful lot of human suffering is simply intractable, that there’s a sense in which character is. People change, but there really are limits. One thing you discover in psychoanalytic treatment is the limits of what you can change about yourself or your life. We are children for a very long time.
One advantage of thinking about psychoanalysis as an art, instead of a science, is that you don’t have to believe in progress. The tradition I was educated in was very committed to psychoanalysis as a science, as something that was making progress in its understanding of people. As if psychoanalysis was a kind of technique that we were improving all the time. This seemed to me at odds with at least one of Freud’s presuppositions, which was that conflict was eternal and that there was to be no kind of Enlightenment convergence on a consensual truth. The discipline was practised, though, as if we were going to make more and more discoveries about human nature, as though psychoanalysis was going to become more and more efficient, rather than the idea—which seemed to me to be more interesting—that psychoanalysis starts from the position that there is no cure, but that we need different ways of living with ourselves and different descriptions of these so-called selves.The great thing about the psychoanalytic treatment is that it doesn’t work in the usual sense of work. I don’t mean by this to avoid the fact that it addresses human suffering. I only mean that it takes for granted that an awful lot of human suffering is simply intractable, that there’s a sense in which character is. People change, but there really are limits. One thing you discover in psychoanalytic treatment is the limits of what you can change about yourself or your life. We are children for a very long time.
― Ngolo Cantwell (Chinaski), Sunday, 16 February 2020 14:41 (four years ago) link
I read Auden's collection About the House and loved it. It's based around a simple meditation on the domestic - his study, the cellar, the attic, the bedroom, the bog (the house where everybody goes) - and is gently wise and funny. His 'in memoriam' for Louis MacNiece, The Cave of Making, is a highlight:
We’re not musicians: to stink of Poetryis unbecoming, and neverto be dull shows a lack of taste. Even a limerickought to be something a man ofhonor, awaiting death from cancer or a firing squad,could read without contempt: (atthat frontier I wouldn’t dare speak to anyonein either a prophet’s bellowor a diplomat’s whisper).
Seeing you know our mysteryfrom the inside and thereforehow much, in our lonely dens, we need the companionshipof our good dead, to give uscomfort on dowly days when the self is a nonentitydumped on a mound of nothing,to break the spell of our self-enchantment when lip-smackingimps of mawk and hooeywrite with us what they will, you won’t think me imposing ifI ask you to stay at my elbowuntil cocktail time: dear Shade, for your elegyI should have been able to managesomething more like you than this egocentric monologue,but accept it for friendship’s sake.
― Ngolo Cantwell (Chinaski), Saturday, 29 February 2020 21:30 (four years ago) link
The Fall of RomeW. H. Auden - 1907-1973
(for Cyril Connolly)
The piers are pummelled by the waves;In a lonely field the rainLashes an abandoned train;Outlaws fill the mountain caves.
Fantastic grow the evening gowns;Agents of the Fisc pursueAbsconding tax-defaulters throughThe sewers of provincial towns.
Private rites of magic sendThe temple prostitutes to sleep;All the literati keepAn imaginary friend.
Cerebrotonic Cato mayExtol the Ancient Disciplines,But the muscle-bound MarinesMutiny for food and pay.
Caesar's double-bed is warmAs an unimportant clerkWrites I DO NOT LIKE MY WORKOn a pink official form.
Unendowed with wealth or pity,Little birds with scarlet legs,Sitting on their speckled eggs,Eye each flu-infected city.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 18 March 2020 10:58 (four years ago) link
have always loved the last verse, to me it applies in all times
(= anything you recognise as an institution is always actually falling)
― mark s, Wednesday, 18 March 2020 11:00 (four years ago) link
The 'very fast' kills me
― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 18 March 2020 11:02 (four years ago) link
Last verse such a kicker.
― Le Bateau Ivre, Wednesday, 18 March 2020 11:08 (four years ago) link
The last verse is huge and feels, amongst other things, like a codebreaker for large chunks of Larkin
― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Wednesday, 18 March 2020 12:28 (four years ago) link
that is a remarkable poem
― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Wednesday, 18 March 2020 21:07 (four years ago) link
A++
― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, 18 March 2020 21:25 (four years ago) link
Came here to see what has been said of Auden after a bunch of his lines kept popping into my head. Saw this from a post above—just fantastic:
― treeship., Monday, 4 January 2021 04:18 (three years ago) link