Poetry Spot - Sara Teasdale

A Prayer
by Sara Teasdale

When I am dying, let me know
That I loved the blowing snow
Although it stung like whips;
That I loved all lovely things

And I tried to take their stings
With gay unembittered lips;
That I loved with all my strength,
To my soul's full depth and length,

Careless if my heart must break,
That I sang as children sing
Fitting tunes to everything,
Loving life for its own sake.

American poet Sara Teasdale (August 8, 1884 – January 29, 1933) was an extremely sickly child and only began to attend school at the age of 9. She fell in love with a fellow poet, Vachel Lindsay, and the two regularly sent one another love letters, but Teasdale married a rich businessman at the age of 30.

She won the 1918 Pulitzer Prize for poetry among other prestigious awards, but she committed suicide in 1933 by overdosing on sleeping pills, two years after Lindsay also took his life.

I would like to take this opportunity to encourage the youth to take up poetry - a happy career path to follow indeed.

Poetry Spot - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Song
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Tho' veiled in spires of myrtle-wreath,
Love is a sword that cuts its sheath,
And thro' the clefts, itself has made,
We spy the flashes of the Blade !

But thro' the clefts, itself has made,
We likewise see Love's flashing blade,
By rust consumed or snapt in twain :
And only Hilt and Stump remain.







Samuel Taylor Coleridge (21 October 1772 – 25 July 1834) was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was one of the founders of the Romantic Movement in England.

It is also interesting to note that he, like all the great classical poets, suffered from crippling bouts of anxiety and depression. Coleridge chose to treat these episodes with opium, becoming an addict in the process.

Poetry Spot - Old Adam, the Carrion Crow

Old Adam, the Carrion Crow
by Thomas Lovell Beddoes

Old Adam, the carrion crow,
The old crow of Cairo;
He sat in the shower, and let it flow
Under his tail and over his crest;
And through every feather
Leak'd the wet weather;
And the bough swung under his nest;
For his beak it was heavy with marrow.
Is that the wind dying? O no;
It's only two devils, that blow,
Through a murderer's bones, to and fro,
In the ghosts' moonshine.

Ho! Eve, my grey carrion wife,
When we have supped on king's marrow,
Where shall we drink and make merry our life?
Our nest it is queen Cleopatra's skull,
'Tis cloven and crack'd,
And batter'd and hack'd,
But with tears of blue eyes it is full:
Let us drink then, my raven of Cairo!
Is that the wind dying? O no;
It's only two devils, that blow
Through a murderer's bones, to and fro,
In the ghosts' moonshine.

Thomas Lovell Beddoes (b. July 20, 1803) was an English poet and dramatist. His work shows a constant preoccupation with death, and after being expelled from Bavaria due to his involvement in radical politics, he returned to England, where he became increasingly disturbed and later committed suicide by poision in 1849 at the age of 46. Nice.

Poetry for the eternally depressed

I Am

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest--that I loved the best--
Are strange--nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below--above the vaulted sky.

John Clare

This poem was written by John Clare in late 1844 or 1845 and published in 1848. It was composed when Clare was in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum (commonly Northampton County Asylum, and later renamed St Andrew's Hospital), isolated by his mental affliction from his family and friends. And it suits my mood today.