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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Grainne who wrote (93126)1/10/2005 9:37:35 PM
From: epicure  Respond to of 108807
 
I was going to tell you that my other favorite Pound poem was about gentians (don't miss my first favorite- posted to Redfish- the River Merchant's Wife)- imagine my surprise to find out Pound didn't write the gentian poem :-) I read it long ago in a volume that also had many other poets, including plenty of Pound- turns out Bavarian Gentians (which I remembered as blue gentians) is by Lawrence!

Anyway, I'm happy to be reunited with it:

Bavarian Gentians

Not every man has gentians in his house
in soft September, at slow, sad Michaelmas.

Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the daytime, torch-like, with the smoking blueness of Pluto's
gloom,
ribbed and torch-like, with their blaze of darkness spread blue
down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day
torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto's dark-blue daze,
black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter's pale lamps give off
light,
lead me then, lead the way.

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness
even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on
the lost bride and her groom.

-- D. H. Lawrence