[Notes]

2014.12.10


[Movie] Splendor in The Grass

→ ideas from Wordsworth's poem, Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood,

"Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind"

Free verse v.s. Blank verse v.s. Heroic couplet

Free verse

Free verse is an open form (see Poetry analysis) of poetry. It does not use consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or any other musical pattern. It thus tends to follow the rhythm of natural speech.

Blank verse

Blank verse is poetry written in regular metrical but unrhymed lines, almost always iambic pentameters. It has been described as "probably the most common and influential form that English poetry has taken since the 16th century" and Paul Fussell has estimated that "about three-quarters of all English poetry is in blank verse."

Heroic couplet

A heroic couplet is a traditional form for English poetry, commonly used in epic and narrative poetry; it refers to poems constructed from a sequence of rhyming pairs of lines in iambic pentameter. Use of the heroic couplet was pioneered by Geoffrey Chaucer in the Legend of Good Women and the Canterbury Tales., and was perfected by John Dryden in the Restoration Age.


[Poem] O Captain! my captain! ─ Walt Whitman

O Captain! my captain!

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.


elegy 輓歌


[Poem] Funeral Blues ─ Wystan Hugh Auden

Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead'.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.


[Quotes] "April is the cruellest month."

→ from The Burial of the Dead ─ Eliot T.S.


[Poem] When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd ─ Walt Whitman


phallic symbol 陽具象徵


[Sonnet 18] Shall I Compare thee to a Summer day? ─ William Shakespeare

Shall I Compare thee to a Summer day?

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.