• Home
  • Readings
  • About
  • Contact
  • Seanchai
  • Brehon
  • Trees
  • Bees
  • Service
  • Path
  • Poetry
  Sleeping Dragon Grove

Read, memorize, write and recite good poetry!
Traditional Bardic training in poetic forms was a study of high level patternment in language as a means of understanding the patternment of nature and the universe.  The Druidic injunction against the written text goes far beyond a need for secrecy.  The study and practice of poetic patterns is mystic praxis and the voicing of those patterns is incantation.  The voicing of poetic patterns brings us in tune with levels of patternment existing beyond the reach of our physical senses.  

Picture
Picture

​Between What I See and What I Say... (1976)  
by Octavio Paz

Between what I see and what I say,
Between what I say and what I keep silent,
Between what I keep silent and what I dream,
Between what I dream and what I forget:
poetry.
            It slips
between yes and no,
                              says
what I keep silent,
                            keeps silent
what I say,
                dreams
what I forget.
                      It is not speech:
it is an act.
                It is an act
of speech.
                  Poetry
speaks and listens:
                            it is real.
And as soon as I say
                              it is real,
it vanishes.
                Is it then more real?

Tangible idea,
                    intangible
word:
        poetry
comes and goes
                        between what is
and what is not.
                        It weaves
and unweaves reflections.
                                        Poetry
scatters eyes on a page,
scatters words on our eyes.
Eyes speak,
                  words look,
looks think.
                  To hear
thoughts,
              see
what we say,
                  touch
the body of an idea.
                              Eyes close,
the words open.

— Octavio Paz (1914-1998),
     "Between What I See and What I Say..."
     A Tree Within, (Poems 1976-1987)
​
​
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
W. B. Yeats, 1865 - 1939

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 honey-bee; 
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 grey, 
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.


Leaves of Grass
​
This is what you should do:
Love the earth and sun and the animals,
despise riches, give alms to every one that asks,
stand up for the stupid and crazy,
devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants,
argue not concerning God,
have patience and indulgence toward the people...
re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book,
dismiss whatever insults your own soul,
and your very flesh shall be a great poem...

~ Walt Whitman ~
(Leaves of Grass, 1855)


Recuerdo
BY EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
We were very tired, we were very merry--
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable--
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

We were very tired, we were very merry--
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, “Good morrow, mother!
” to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.



"For years my heart inquired of me‚"
BY HAFEZ
TRANSLATED BY DICK DAVIS
READ THE TRANSLATOR'S NOTES
For years my heart inquired of me 

                   Where Jamshid's sacred cup might be, 

And what was in its own possession 

                   It asked from strangers, constantly; 

Begging the pearl that's slipped its shell 

                   From lost souls wandering by the sea. 


Last night I took my troubles to 

                   The Magian sage whose keen eyes see 

A hundred answers in the wine 

                   Whose cup he, laughing, showed to me. 

I questioned him, "When was this cup 

                   That shows the world's reality 


Handed to you?" He said, "The day 

                   Heaven's vault of lapis lazuli 

Was raised, and marvelous things took place 

                   By Intellect's divine decree, 

And Moses' miracles were made 

                   And Sameri's apostasy." 


He added then, "That friend they hanged   

                   High on the looming gallows tree— 

His sin was that he spoke of things 

                   Which should be pondered secretly, 

The page of truth his heart enclosed 

                   Was annotated publicly. 


But if the Holy Ghost once more 

                   Should lend his aid to us we'd see 

Others perform what Jesus did— 

                   Since in his heartsick anguish he 

Was unaware that God was there 

                   And called His name out ceaselessly." 


I asked him next, "And beauties' curls 

                   That tumble down so sinuously, 

What is their meaning? Whence do they come?" 

                   "Hafez," the sage replied to me, 

"It's your distracted, lovelorn heart 

                   That asks these questions constantly."



Picture
Picture
The Song of Amergin from the Book of Leinster
(http://celticmythpodshow.com/Resources/Amergin.php)

Earliest manuscript:
Lebar na Núachongbála (The Book of Leinster)
p. 49 in the diplomatic edition; from the CELT site
Ic tabairt a choisse dessi i nHerind asbert Amairgen Glúngel mac Miled in laídseo sís.

1. Am gáeth i mmuir. ar domni.
2. Am tond trethan i tír. 1550] {MS folio 12b 40}
3. Am fúaim mara.
4. Am dam secht ndírend.
5. Am séig i n-aill.
6. Am dér gréne.g
7. Am caín. 1555]
8. Am torc ar gail.
9. Am hé i llind.
10. Am loch i mmaig
11. Am briandai.
12. Am bri danae. 1560]
13. Am gai i fodb. feras feochtu.
14. Am dé delbas do chind codnu.
15. Coiche nod gleith clochur slébe. 
16. Cia on cotagair aesa éscai
17. Cia dú i llaig funiud grene. 
18. Cia beir búar o thig Temrach.
19. Cia buar Tethrach. tibi.
20. Cia dain.
21. Cia dé delbas faebru. a ndind ailsiu.
22. Cáinté im gaí cainte gaithe. Am. 


James Carey's translation: 
from The Celtic Heroic Age (2003) (pg. 265)

108. As he set his right foot upon Ireland, Amairgen Glúngel son of Míl recited this poem:

I am a wind in the sea (for depth)
I am a sea-wave upon the land (for heaviness)
I am the sound of the sea (for fearsomeness)
I am a stag of seven combats (for strength)
I am a hawk upon a cliff (for agility)
I am a tear-drop of the sun (for purity)
I am fair (i.e. there is no plant fairer than I)
I am a boar for valour (for harshness)
I am a salmon in a pool (for swiftness)
I am a lake in a plain (for size)
I am the excellence of arts (for beauty)
I am a spear that wages battle with plunder.
I am a god who froms subjects for a ruler
Who explains the stones of the mountains?
Who invokes the ages of the moon?
Where lies the setting of the sun?
Who bears cattle from the house of Tethra?
Who are the cattle of Tethra who laugh?
What man, what god forms weapons?
Indeed, then; 
I invoked a satirist...
a satirist of wind.





William Butler Yeats
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?


Sunday Morning
BY WALLACE STEVENS
I
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.
       II
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.
       III
Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.
       IV
She says, “I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?”
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured
As April’s green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow’s wings.
       V
She says, “But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss.”
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.
       VI
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
       VII
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.
       VIII
She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.


Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.