MetaFilter posts tagged with Bunting

Sappho: Poem of Jealousy (26 Translations)

y2karl — Sat, 02 Oct 2004 22:04:03 -0800

Are you not amazed at how she evokes soul, body, hearing, tongue, sight, skin, as though they were external and belonged to someone else? And how at one and the same moment she both freezes and burns, is irrational and sane, is terrified and nearly dead, so that we observe in her not a single emotion but a whole concourse of emotions? Such things do, of course, commonly happen to people in love. Sappho’s supreme excellence lies in the skill with which she selects the most striking and vehement circumstances of the passions and forges them into a coherent whole. Longinus, On the Sublime
Sappho’s poem of jealousy survives only because the ancient critic Longinus quoted it as a supreme example of poetic intensity--now Ken Knabb has put up 26 translations of it in the English at the Gateway to the Vast Realms , the literature and texts section of his Bureau of Public Secrets. And wait! There's more!

'A thrush in the syringa sings...' - Regarding Poet Basil Bunting

y2karl — Sat, 09 Nov 2002 02:22:20 -0800

A thrush in the syringa sings.

`Hunger ruffles my wings, fear,
lust, familiar things.

Death thrusts hard. My sons
by hawk's beak, by stones, by cat and weasel, die.
From a shaken bush I
list familiar things,
fear, hunger, lust.'

O gay thrush!

Basil Bunting,
Basil Bunting,
Basil Bunting.

The Return of PoemFilter

The Collected Poems Of William Butler Yeats

y2karl — Sun, 03 Nov 2002 21:50:28 -0800

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

The Collected Poems Of William Butler Yeats