Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry Month Again

~ shawnaborman ~ Leave a comment

Howdy, howdy! How’s everyone doing? I’ve been sitting here trying to figure out what to blog about, but absolutely nothing is coming to me. I doubt you want another post about Mardi so soon. She’s doing good. Things are quiet. Dad’s redoing some stuff in the kitchen (pics when he’s done). It’s gloomy and there are some storms supposedly heading this way. And I’m super tired for no reason. Even my Pepsi isn’t helping. Anyway, I realized it’s April, which means it’s poetry month. Instead of rambling about nothing, I thought I would share one of my favorite Poe poems.

The Sleeper

By: Edgar Allan Poe

At midnight, in the month of June,
I stand beneath the mystic moon.
An opiate vapor, dewy, dim,
Exhales from out her golden rim,
And softly dripping, drop by drop,
Upon the quiet mountain top,
Steals drowsily and musically
Into the universal valley.
The rosemary nods upon the grave;
The lily lolls upon the wave;
Wrapping the fog about its breast,
The ruin moulders into rest;
Looking like Lethe, see! the lake
A conscious slumber seems to take,
And would not, for the world, awake.
All Beauty sleeps!—and lo! where lies
Irene, with her Destinies!

Oh, lady bright! can it be right—
This window open to the night?
The wanton airs, from the tree-top,
Laughingly through the lattice drop—
The bodiless airs, a wizard rout,
Flit through thy chamber in and out,
And wave the curtain canopy
So fitfully—so fearfully—
Above the closed and fringéd lid
’Neath which thy slumb’ring soul lies hid,
That, o’er the floor and down the wall,
Like ghosts the shadows rise and fall!
Oh, lady dear, hast thou no fear?
Why and what art thou dreaming here?
Sure thou art come o’er far-off seas,
A wonder to these garden trees!
Strange is thy pallor! strange thy dress!
Strange, above all, thy length of tress,
And this all solemn silentness!

The lady sleeps! Oh, may her sleep,
Which is enduring, so be deep!
Heaven have her in its sacred keep!
This chamber changed for one more holy,
This bed for one more melancholy,
I pray to God that she may lie
Forever with unopened eye,
While the pale sheeted ghosts go by!

My love, she sleeps! Oh, may her sleep,
As it is lasting, so be deep!
Soft may the worms about her creep!
Far in the forest, dim and old,
For her may some tall vault unfold—
Some vault that oft hath flung its black
And wingéd pannels fluttering back,
Triumphant, o’er the crested palls
Of her grand family funerals—

Some sepulchre, remote, alone,
Against whose portals she hath thrown,
In childhood, many an idle stone—
Some tomb from out whose sounding door
She ne’er shall force an echo more,
Thrilling to think, poor child of sin!
It was the dead who groaned within.

A to Z: Quotes

~ shawnaborman ~ 2 Comments

Hello, hello!  Today, I thought I would compile a list of quotes from various authors (ranging from A to Z).  Some will be old favorites and others will be new things I find during my searches.  What are some of your favorite writerly quotes or quotes from authors?  Feel free to share here or on my social media pages!

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A. Isaac Asimov: “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.”

B. Judy Blume: “Each of us must confront our own fears, must come face to face with them. How we handle our fears will determine where we go with the rest of our lives. To experience adventure or to be limited by the fear of it.”

C. Angela Carter: “Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”

D. Roald Dahl: “I understand what you’re saying, and your comments are valuable, but I’m gonna ignore your advice.”

E. Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

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F. F. Scott Fitzgerald: “That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”

G. Louise Gluck: “Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer.”

H. Ernest Hemingway: “Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.”

I. John Irving: “Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!”

J. James Joyce: “History…is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

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K. Stephen King: “People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.”

L. H.P. Lovecraft: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”

M. A.A. Milne: “If ever there is tomorrow when we’re not together, there is something you must always remember. You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. But the most important thing is, even if we’re apart, I’ll always be with you.”

N. Friedrich Nietzsche: “People who comprehend a thing to its very depths rarely stay faithful to it forever. For they have brought its depths into the light of day: and in the depths there is always much that is unpleasant to see.”

O. George Orwell: “Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”

P. Edgar Allan Poe: “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”

Q. Paul Quarrington: “Everybody is damaged goods. Everybody got bumps and dents, ja? But sometimes two people fit together, and the bumps go into the dents, and you have a whole thing like a potato.”

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R. J.K. Rowling: “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.”

S. Maggie Stiefvater: “There are moments that you’ll remember for the rest of your life and there are moments that you think you’ll remember for the rest of your life, and it’s not often they turn out to be the same moment.”

T. J.R.R. Tolkien: “I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”

U. John Updike: “The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun’s just started.”

V. Jules Verne: “We are of opinion that instead of letting books grow moldy behind an iron grating, far from the vulgar gaze, it is better to let them wear out by being read.”

W. Oscar Wilde: “Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”

X. Xue Xinran: “Everybody says women are like water. I think it’s because water is the source of life, and it adapts itself to its environment. Like women, water also gives of itself wherever it goes to nurture life…”

Y. Jane Yolen: “Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood.”

Z. Sarah Zettel: “The true lady treats the whole world as her dance floor…”

National Poetry Month

~ shawnaborman ~ Leave a comment

Hello, hello!  Since April is National Poetry Month, I thought I would share a list of five poems that have stuck with me through the years.  They aren’t necessarily favorites, just ones that I keep coming back to for some reason.  I think we all have at least one, even if we aren’t the biggest fans of poetry in general.  It might be a nursery rhyme or song lyrics (because those totally count as poetry), but it’s there.  I actually have a lot more than five, but I don’t want to bore anyone.

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1.  The first poem is called “The Suicide” by Ai (if the link doesn’t take you directly to the page, it’s on page 40 in that one).  It was originally included in her collection, Cruelty.  I found this poem in my Intro to Poetry Writing class an undergrad.  The teacher gave us a list of poets and we had to pick three to read.  I wanted to see what a woman whose name means love wrote about, and I wasn’t disappointed.  I immediately fell in love with the way she made mundane things creepy and disturbing, but made the creepy and disturbing stuff beautiful.  I don’t know why “The Suicide” has stuck with me, but I find myself drawn to rereading it every couple of years.

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2.  Next up is “Acquainted with the Night” by Robert Frost, which appeared in West-Running Brook.  Pretty sure I was still in high school when I was introduced to this one.  I just remember feeling a kinship with the speaker of the poem.  Someone who was awkward, lonely, and probably a little depressed.  I still feel that strong connection to it whenever I read it.  Maybe I’m just weird.

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3.  I can’t do a list like this without including John Donne.  A lot of his poems have resonated with me, but the one that I undoubtedly come back to the most is “Holy Sonnet X: Death, be not proud.”  I don’t remember how old I was when I came across this one, but I do know that I loved it from the start.  The personification of Death has always interested me.  The idea that it was a physical being that I could talk to was creepy and wonderful even as a kid.  Then Donne goes and kills Death, which I fully admit I found a little sad.  Why can’t Death join us in eternity?  But yeah, this is one I’ll always hold dear.

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4.  The Wild Iris by Louise Gluck is another collection I discovered during that Intro to Poetry Writing class.  While I related to a lot of the poems in this book, “Snowdrops” is the one I come back to every so often.  I read it as someone breaking free of a long depression, feeling all of that weight disappear.  It gave me hope during a dark period in my life.  It still gives me the same feeling every time I read it.

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5.  And, of course, Poe is going to make an appearance on this list.  While I am drawn more to his short stories, I do enjoy his poetry once in a while.  For me, “A Dream Within a Dream” is the poem I come back to the most.  I can take or leave the first half, but something about the second part just keeps calling me back to it.  The fear and the lack of control is something I relate strongly to, so I suppose that’s why I keep going back to it.

What about you?  What poem keeps pulling you back to it?  Feel free to share your list here or on my social media pages.