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    AC Benus
  • AC Benus
  • Author
  • 12/25/2023
  • 215 Words
  • 307 Views
  • 7 Comments
Poetry posted in this category are works of fiction. Names, places, characters, events, and incidents are created by the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual persons (living or dead), organizations, companies, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.
Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you. 

The Great Mirror of Same-Sex Love - Poetry - 108. ...where the hours are suns...

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I think continually of those who were truly great.

Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history

Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,

Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition

Was that their lips, still touched with fire,

Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.

And who hoarded from the Spring branches

The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

 

What is precious, is never to forget

The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs

Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.

Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light

Nor its grave evening demand for love.

Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother

With noise and fog, the flowering of the Spirit.

 

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,

See how these names are fêted by the waving grass

And by the streamers of white cloud

And whispers of wind in the listening sky.

The names of those who in their lives fought for life,

Who wore at their hearts the fire’s center.

Born of the sun, they traveled a short while toward the sun

And left the vivid air signed with their honor.

—Stephen Spender,

1939

 

 

 

 

_

 

as noted
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Poetry posted in this category are works of fiction. Names, places, characters, events, and incidents are created by the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual persons (living or dead), organizations, companies, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.
Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you. 
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ReaderPaul

A marvelous example of poetry.  Economical of words, but meaningful.  The parts of it referring to snow, sun, and Spring were very meaningful to me.  In my part of the United States Midwest, we get a lot less snow than we did when I was a kid and also much less snow than when I was starting to work full time as an adult.

In spite of weather differences, the pace of the poem reminds one of somewhat slower times of life, before we were continually connected by 24-hour news networks and cell phones and the internet.  Yet the passions of life clearly shine through.

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AC Benus
20 hours ago, ReaderPaul said:

A marvelous example of poetry.  Economical of words, but meaningful.  The parts of it referring to snow, sun, and Spring were very meaningful to me.  In my part of the United States Midwest, we get a lot less snow than we did when I was a kid and also much less snow than when I was starting to work full time as an adult.

In spite of weather differences, the pace of the poem reminds one of somewhat slower times of life, before we were continually connected by 24-hour news networks and cell phones and the internet.  Yet the passions of life clearly shine through.

Thanks, ReaderPaul. It's been difficult to find the manuscript version of this poem, but the 1939 date could be before or after WW2 started. By the peace-loving tone of the work, I think it's from after. And thus, a partial tribute to some the best and brightest going off to die in war again. Spender was born in 1909, and thus about 10 years old when WW1 ended. It's common to find survivor's syndrome -- a feeling of artistic inferiority compared to those who were killed in the fighting -- in poets, writers, artists and other creative people of this era. F. Scott Fitzgerald termed his peer group "the lost generation" because of it 

Edited by AC Benus
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