The pleasure which moderns chiefly desire from printed poetry is ruled out anyway. You cannot ponder over single lines and let them dissolve on the mind like lozenges. - CSL. Preface to Paradise Lost
On this note, let’s consider the villanelle. A form that ponders over a single line until they dissolve into a kind of thudding in the chest.
I love them. And here is where I admit to being able to enjoy things as moderns do. The goal is onward. Words for another time.
The most famous is Thomas’s pounding Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, not the original, but possibly the peak.
"Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,Because their words had forked no lightning theyDo not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how brightTheir frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,And learn, too late, they grieve it on its way
,Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
This is the dance of two lines - First meeting across a stanza and then taking in turn their promenade before meeting finally at the end. Usually in a turn that beats like coffin nails, the nell of death, a final tragedy.
A personal favorite, Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art. The pounding turns to pull and swirls in pulsing time towards that greater loss.
"The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster."
I hope that it will turn in time and speak of greater eternity, the greater hopes and dreams of the Christian heart.
My own: Obedience
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