On My Carnal Attraction to Keats

I cannot help but develop these unfathomably awkward carnal crushes on posthumous poets. In the past six months I have passed through Eliot (Oh, Tom!) and Herbert (never have I felt so hot for churches!), and now I find myself lusting after Keats (damn!).

In reverence, I hereby present a Very Select Collection of Keats’ Most Perfect Lines According to My Own Inexcusably Limited Reading.*

Disclaimer: I do feel a little bad pulling these prettinesses from their resident poems. They do lose blood in the process. Titles subsequently are linked to online versions, for one’s ownest prosodic pleasure.

1. From Sonnet to a Lady seen for a few moments at Vauxhall

Time’s sea hath been five years at its slow ebb,
Long hours have to and fro let creep the sand,
Since I was tangled in thy beauty’s web
And snared by the ungloving of thine hand.

ll. 1-4.

2. From Ode on a Grecian Urn

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

ll. 11-12.

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

ll. 46-50.

3. From Ode to a Nightingale

But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

ll. 38-40.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;

ll. 51-54.

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

ll. 79-80.

4. From Ode on Melancholy

But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,

ll. 11-12.

5. From Bright Star, Would I were Steadfast as Thou Art

The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,

ll. 5-6.

6. From Hyperion

O aching time! O moments big as years!
All as ye pass swell out the monstrous truth,
And press it so upon our weary griefs
That unbelief has not a space to breathe.

Book I: 64-67.

*Having “discovered” Keats for my lustful self only last tuesday (!), my reading has been limited to the shorter pieces in his Collected Poems that I have chanced upon as I flick anxiously through, trying to decide where to begin. No doubt once I’ve munched my full way through Endymion, The Eve of St. Agnes, Hyperion, and their like, I will have to update, yes!

A sectional view of NYPL, 1911

“The seven tiers of stacks in which many of the books of the New York Public Library are shelved. Elevators transfer the books to the room above as they are called for.” From Scientific American, New York: Munn Co., 1845–.

A nine-level-ed universe of bookiness! With elevators and cardboard boxes! This makes me happy.

Self according to Tagore

My eyes strayed far and wide before I shut them and said “Here art thou!” The question and the cry “Oh, where?” melt into tears of a thousand streams and deluge the world with the flood of the assurance “I am!”

Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali 12.

I feel the beginning, see. And it’s wonderful, if a little sad, too.

ChezSucreChez

Happiness is a pretty bookcase

Look at this.

If this were in my life, I think I could be happy forever.

via lushlee.

Also, this entry heralds the beginning of a new blog category: one devoted to HOT BOOKCASES.

Oh, to be wrapped stiffly in paper!

They began to walk along the street, along the asphalt promenade, on one side of which, protected by brick and stucco, glass and iron, life was being led. But the other side, the sea side, flowed. They had put an iron railing between the asphalt and the sea. But this did not deter any latent desire. It was as much a protection as theory is from fact. This was the evening air damply stroking, wind fingering the bones, the opening and closing of violet and black on its oyster-bellied self, the sound of distance which is closer than thought. The iron railing spindled and dwindled in the evening landscape. Sometimes faces looked through the openings in brick and stucco, from their pursuits behind glass, or under the blunt planes, or in the elaborate bandstand, looked out to wonder at the extent of their own charade.

But only to wonder at, Theodora Goodman noticed. The most one can expect from the led life is for it to be lit occasionally by a flash of wonder, which does not bear questioning, it is its own light.

‘You see, Ludmilla,’ said Alyosha Sergei, ‘it is the same as anywhere else, the same. In the window above the quincaillerie there is a woman who will have a child in December. I have watched her adding it up. When the post-office clerk from Marseille, who has seen his future in a mirror, cuts his throat in the bathroom of his wife’s father, who has invited him for fifteen days to tell him his faults, they will stitch silver tears on crêpe and pretend that it was insanity, so that they can give him a tombstone and curse his grave.’

‘But it will not affect the calendar of the woman who is having a child in December,’ said Theodora Goodman.

‘No,’ said Alyosha Sergei. ‘Unfortunately, no. She will have her child, some eventually spotty boy, who will hate algebra, and marry the daughter of Madame Le Boeuf, and be killed in a war. This Madame Le Boeuf, who is at the moment wrapping a stiff fish in the sheet of the Petit Marseillais for the curé’s supper, is chiefly obsessed by eternity. She would like to know that her soul will be wrapped stiffly in a sheet of paper and not expected to swim.’

‘Through eternity,’ added Theodora Goodman.

‘Alas,’ sighed Sokolnikov.

Patrick White, The Aunt’s Story, London: Vintage, 1994: 178-9.

Glover St, between 20:09 and 20:23

Smelled, while walking: cooking oil, cut grass, fertilizer, car exhaust, curried-something, warm frangipanis.

Heard, while walking: a dog, a truck, a choir of cicadas, a magpie, the wind, a horn, the stacking of plates, two children, a leaf.

Seen, while walking: one paper aeroplane, a fence of large white trumpet flowers, a moth, a dead possum.

Said, while walking: “hello” to an older man, a dog.

The Most Perfect Dress in the World, II

Sublime.

I mean look at this baby, really. The cut-out bodice (not seen in this picture). The low, curved back with its little squared bow. The full skirt. It’s lined with silk, and wait for it — has invisible pockets for restless/nervous/momentarily unengaged hands. Honestly. This dress SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED.

Line Anatomy of a Trip

A Melancholic Interlude

So go these days, these funny boundless days I can scarcely arrange numbers for. Sitting in an overheated attic in Salzburg, listening to church bells, I am sad, I suppose, or something like it.

I am in Austria (and was in Hungary); and will be until the 15th of December. I am on hiatus, hence the no-posts.

I’m spending my time thinking too much, talking too little, making and scuttling plans, eating and mourning the passing of pastries, chestnuts, pretzels, and doubting — ah. Always, that.