Renouncement

Each Friday we provide the link to the blog that is hosting a celebration of poetry around the blogosphere. At that site you can find the links to the many other blogs that are posting poems (new and old), discussions of poems, and reviews of poetry books.

Enjoy the festivities!

The host this week is Kate Coombs. You can visit her here at Book Aunt.


(Alice Meynell by John Singer
Sargent, 1856-1925, American
portrait painter)

Alice Meynell (1847-1922) was an English journalist, suffragette, and poet. She was so respected for her poetry that her name was mentioned as a possible candidate for her country’s poet laureateship.

“The disciplined spareness and surface simplicity of her poetry was unusual in a late Victorian period characterized by much poetic ornamentation. Her friend and admirer G. K. Chesterton stated that ‘she was different from most of the advanced artists of the period in the detail that she was facing the other way, and advancing in the opposite direction.’. . .

“In fact, a number of critics compared her work to that of the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets, whom she much admired. Her poetic restraint was regularly noted, as in the Pall Mall Gazette review of Later Poems in 1901: ‘She has accustomed us to look for quality rather than quantity and we are not disappointed. The rarity of her verses, measured by the gross test of counting pages and lines, is paralleled by the uncommon beauty of the poetry they embody, and the distinction wherewith it is expressed.’” ~ F. Elizabeth Gray, in Encyclopedia of Catholic Literature, vol. II

The English poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) wrote that he thought the sonnet below is one of the finest love sonnets ever written.

RENOUNCEMENT

I must not think of thee; and, tired yet strong,
I shun the love that lurks in all delight —
The love of thee — and in the blue heaven’s height,
And in the dearest passage of a song.
O just beyond the sweetest thoughts that throng
This breast, the thought of thee waits hidden yet bright;
But it must never, never come in sight;
I must stop short of thee the whole day long.

But when sleep comes to close each difficult day,
When night gives pause to the long watch I keep,
And all my bonds I needs must loose apart,
Must doff my will as raiment laid away, —
With the first dream that comes with the first sleep
I run, I run, I am gather’d to thy heart.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

(William Butler Yeats, 1908 by John Singer
Sargent, 1856-1925, American portrait painter)

“Sometimes I told myself very adventurous love-stories with myself for hero, and at other times I planned out a life of lonely austerity, and at other times mixed the ideals and planned a life of lonely austerity mitigated by periodical lapses,” W. B. Yeats wrote in his Autobiography. “I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem ‘Innisfree,’ my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music.”

THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

~ William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Irish poet and dramatist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1923