Hughlings Himwich

The Weaver-God, He Weaves

THE WEAVER-GOD, HE WEAVES;
and by that weaving is he deafened,
that he hears no mortal voice;
and by that humming, we, too,
who look on the loom are deafened;
and only when we escape it
shall we hear the thousand voices
that speak through it.

(Herman Melville, Moby Dick, "A Bower in the Arsacides")

Dylan Thomas

       

      

    DEATH SHALL HAVE NO DOMINION

by Dylan Thomas

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

Song of Wandering Aengus

          

                     THE SONG OF WANDERING AENGUS                  

                    by: W.B. Yeats

WENT out to the hazel wood,                      

Because a fire was in my head,                      

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,                      

And hooked a berry to a thread;                      

 

And when white moths were on the wing,                      

And moth-like stars were flickering out,                      

I dropped the berry in a stream                      

And caught a little silver trout.                      

 

When I had laid it on the floor                      

I went to blow the fire a-flame,                      

But something rustled on the floor,                      

And some one called me by my name:                      

It had become a glimmering girl                      

With apple blossom in her hair                      

Who called me by my name and ran                      

And faded through the brightening air.                      

 

Though I am old with wandering                      

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,                      

I will find out where she has gone,                      

And kiss her lips and take her hands;                      

And walk among long dappled grass,                      

And pluck till time and times are done                      

The silver apples of the moon,                      

The golden apples of the sun.                    

Poems of Edward Thomas

Rain

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.

The Cherry Trees

The cherry trees bend over and are shedding,
On the old road where all that passed are dead,
Their petals, strewing the grass as for a wedding
This early May morn when there is none to wed.

In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood
This Eastertide call into mind the men,
Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should
Have gathered them and will do never again.

Nazik al-Malaika

Nazik al-Malaika, 83, Poet Widely Known in Arab World, Is Dead

By ALISSA J. RUBIN
Published: June 27, 2007

BAGHDAD, June 26 — Nazik al-Malaika, one of the Arab world’s most famous poets, an early exponent of the free verse movement in Arabic, died last Wednesday in Cairo. She was 83.

She had Parkinson’s disease for many years but died of unspecified natural causes related to old age, Nizar Marjan, the Iraqi consul in Cairo, told The Associated Press. In a country riven by sectarian strife, her life and work as a poet and a literary critic were poignant reminders of Iraq’s cultural renaissance in the mid-20th century. Baghdad was then considered the Paris of the Middle East, and poets and artists flocked here to work.

Ms. Malaika was one of a small group of Iraqi poets who broke away from classical Arab poetry, with its rigid metric and rhyme schemes. Influenced by the writing of Shakespeare, Byron and Shelley as well as by classical Arabic poets, these poets took up modern topics and used lyrical language that spoke with the immediacy of life on the Arab street.

In a searing poem about honor killings, “To Wash Disgrace,” in which a woman is killed by her father or brother for having dishonored the family by having a love affair before marriage, Ms. Malaika used simple language to convey the terrible loneliness of such a death.

Oh mother, a rattle, tears and darkness
Blood gushed out, and the stabbed body trembled.
“Oh mother!” Heard only by the executioner
Tomorrow the dawn will come and roses will wake up
Youth and enchanted hopes will ask for her
The meadows and the flowers will answer:
She left to wash the disgrace.
The brutal executioner returns
And meets people
“Disgrace!” He wipes his knife
“We’ve torn it apart.”
And returned virtuous with a white reputation.

She also wrote essays on the constraints imposed on women in Arab society and as an early feminist questioned the patriarchal structure that deprived many women of choices in marriage and career.

Born in Baghdad in 1923 to a mother who was also a poet and a father who was an editor and teacher of Arabic, Ms. Malaika was one of seven children. She wrote her first poems, in the classical Arabic form, when she was 10. She graduated from the Higher Teachers Training College in Baghdad, where she studied the classical Arabic poets and the modernists of the early 20th century, as well as learned to play the oud, an Arab lute, and attended classes in acting.

She learned English and French and won a scholarship to study at Princeton University. In 1954 she continued her studies at the University of Wisconsin, earning a master’s degree in comparative literature. She returned to Baghdad and married a fellow student in the Arabic language department, Abel Hadi Mahbouba, and with her husband and others helped found the University of Basra.

Later she moved to Kuwait, where she taught for many years, but like many Iraqis was forced to return to Iraq when Saddam Hussein invaded the country in 1990. Soon after the gulf war ended in 1991, she fled to Cairo.

Her husband, whom she described in an autobiographical essay as “the best colleague, companion and friend,” died in 2005. She is survived by a son.

In 1949, Ms. Malaika published her first volume of free-verse poetry, “Ashes and Shrapnel.” Earlier 20th-century Arab poets had already begun controversial experiments outside the rigid classical form, in which each verse ends with the same rhyme scheme and each line has the same number of beats. But it was her writing and that of a handful of contemporaries that popularized free verse, and she gradually became a celebrated figure and her poems the subject of academic studies.

Much of her work dealt with alienation and the fear of fading into oblivion. Her poem “Lament of a Worthless Woman” (1952) suggests the universal fear of being forgotten after death:

She left, no cheek turned pale, no lip trembled.
The doors did not hear the story of her death...
The news tumbled down the avenue its echo not finding a shelter
So it stayed forgotten in some hole, its depression the moon lamenting.