printBeauty is the best antidote to politics, my daily drudgery. The poetry of Louis MacNeice is a salve for the soul. It inoculates against the Maya Angelou bastardizations. (She was court poet to the Clintons.)
From “Louis MacNeice From Cradle to Grave“:
The final poem in Louis MacNeice’s collection Plant and Phantom (1941) is the lyric, “Cradle Song”:
Sleep, my darling, sleep;
The pity of it all
Is all we compass if
We watch disaster fall.
Put off your twenty-odd
Encumbered years and creep
Into the only heaven,
The robbers’ cave of sleep.
The wild grass will whisper,
Lights of passing cars
Will streak across your dreams
And fumble at the stars;
Life will tap the window
Only too soon again,
Life will have her answer –
Do not ask her when.
When the winsome bubble
Shivers, when the bough
Breaks, will be the moment
But not here or now.
Sleep and, asleep, forget
The watchers on the wall
Awake all night who know
The pity of it all.
Update: Please people, this post was about transcendence. I mean, I’m no poetry expert, but I know beauty when I read it. That’s why I like MacNeice. So I beg of our reader hereunder, spare me mumbo-jumbo. Give us “Snow,” rather, will you, please?
This poem written by William B.Yeats brings joy to me,I’ll share it with you Ilana:
‘”All the words that I utter, And all the words that I write,
Must spread out their wings untiring,
And never rest in their flight,
Till they come where your sad, sad heart is,
And sing to you in the night, Beyond where the waters are moving, Storm-darken’d or starry bright.”
Thank you Ilana for the poem by McNeice, then poetry was an art form, a creation to inspire, be praised, read, recited.
Where are the true poets of today, lost in the:-“Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”-WB.Yeats’ prophetic poem: The Second Coming.