And Yeats's version of Ronsard.

When You are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And, nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.
How many loved your moments of glad grace
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountain overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

— A free paraphrase by W.B. Yeats
in his 1893 collection The Rose.

**********
I'm a bit of a Yeats fan too.  See last week's post for an explanation.
 

Thursday extracts: Ronsard. (Yes, it's in French!)

Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la chandelle,
Assise auprès du feu, dévidant et filant,
Direz, chantant mes vers, en vous émerveillant :
Ronsard me célébrait du temps que j’étais belle.
Lors, vous n’aurez servante oyant telle nouvelle,
Déjà sous le labeur à demi sommeillant,
Qui au bruit de mon nom ne s’aille réveillant,
Bénissant votre nom de louange immortelle.
Je serai sous la terre et fantôme sans os :
Par les ombres myrteux je prendrai mon repos :
Vous serez au foyer une vieille accroupie,
Regrettant mon amour et votre fier dédain.
Vivez, si m’en croyez, n’attendez à demain :
Cueillez dès aujourd’hui les roses de la vie.

— Sonnet pour Hélène, 1587

I had to recite this for a French speech contest when I was 15. I still think it's beautiful. 

Words of love from Omar Khayyam

With me along some Strip of Herbage strown
That just divides the desert from the sown,
Where name of Slave and Sultan scarce is known,
And pity Sultan Mahmud on his Throne.
   
Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse---and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness---
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

Doesn't matter where you are as long as the company's right. Yes - that is my hand, holding K's.
Verses taken from the FitzGerald translation.
Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) was a Persian philosopher, mathematician, astronomer and poet. Suffolk-born poet Edward FitzGerald (1809-83) translated a number of his quatrains from Persian and collected them together under the title The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.

Thursday extracts: McGough on Poems

A Good Poem

 I like a good poem
 one with lots of fighting
 in it. Blood, and the
 clanging of armour. Poems

 against Scotland are good,
 and poems that defeat
 the French with crossbows.
 I don't like poems that

 aren't about anything.
 Sonnets are wet and
 a waste of time.
 Also poems that don't

 know how to rhyme.
 If I was a poem
 I'd play football and
 get picked for England.

Roger McGough

Thursday extracts. Walt Whitman on love...

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) American poet, was a man ahead of his time. He wrote some of the sexiest poetry ever put on paper - and it got him into trouble.
His collection Leaves of Grass was deemed obscene because of its overtly sexual nature. Here's a taster of why.



From Spontaneous Me

The real poems, (what we call poems being merely pictures,)
The poems of the privacy of the night, and of men like me,
This poem drooping shy and unseen that I always carry, and that all men carry,
(Know once for all, avow'd on purpose, wherever are men like me, are our lusty lurking masculine poems,)
Love-thoughts, love-juice, love-odor, love-yielding, love-climbers,
and the climbing sap,
Arms and hands of love, lips of love, phallic thumb of love, breasts
of love, bellies press'd and glued together with love,
Earth of chaste love, life that is only life after love,
The body of my love, the body of the woman I love, the body of the
man, the body of the earth,
Soft forenoon airs that blow from the south-west,
The hairy wild-bee that murmurs and hankers up and down, that gripes the
full-grown lady-flower, curves upon her with amorous firm legs, takes
his will of her, and holds himself tremulous and tight till he is satisfied;

*********

Preferences

I would rather be loved than rich
I would rather be intelligent than beautiful
I would rather be caring than popular
I would rather be lonely than conventional.

I would rather be right than honoured
I would rather be happy than thin
I would rather be me than a princess
I would rather be with you than anything.