TOP 10 POETRY (HONORABLE MENTION)

 

I live in a poetic world – and I have my Top 10 Poetry, by poem and poet, as well as twenty special mentions

But wait – there’s even more!

There’s enough poems and poets out there that I like exceeding my Top 10 Poetry and my twenty special mentions, so it’s time for honorable mentions. I rank them by chronological order (as I’d otherwise rank them all in B-tier or high tier) – by the year of publication for their standout poem, for which I like and include them in my honorable mentions.

 

 

 

 

(1654) JOHN DONNE – TO HIS MISTRESS GOING TO BED

 

One of the metaphysical poets. I don’t recall what makes a poet metaphysical but this poem would suggest that it’s being pretty raunchy.

 

“Licence my roving hands, and let them go,

Before, behind, between, above, below.

O my America! my new-found-land,

My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann’d”

Now that’s metaphysics!

I don’t know how it would go down standing over your mistress and declaring her to be your America as saucy foreplay these days. It’s time to manifest your destiny, baby!

I do like how the poem finishes off (heh) with its version of that cheesy pick-up line – “You know what would look good on you? Me!”

 

To teach thee, I am naked first; why then

What needst thou have more covering than a man.

 

 

 

 

 

 

(1681) ANDREW MARVELL – TO HIS COY MISTRESS

 

“Had we had but world enough and time

This coyness, Lady, were no crime”

 

Carpe diem as a pick-up line to get in her pants.

No, seriously, that’s the poem – and why I like it.

That and the worms that makes it a favorite among adolescent students everywhere –

 

“then Worms shall try

That long preserv’d Virginity”

 

Like John Donne, Andrew Marvell is another surprisingly raunchy 17th-century ‘metaphysical’ poet.

Ultimately, he’s something of a one-poem wonder for his most famous and celebrated poem “To His Coy Mistress” – but what a poem! In the word of TV Tropes, it “is pretty much the trope codifier for the more philosophical sort of seduction lyric and contains a bunch of phrases that are hugely quotable, forever appearing in titles and epigraphs”. That seduction lyric is the persuasion of the speaker’s prospective lover by means of a carpe diem philosophy – or YOLO in modern internet slang. Seize the day, baby.

It’s also a popular poem in schools – well, as popular as poems get in schools – where it certainly is fertile ground for lowbrow humor for perpetually adolescent minds like mine. There’s the two hundred years the poet would spend on each of his lover’s breasts, if only they did have eternity. Not to mention, the ages he would devote to every other part, which prompts thoughts of an ass age – heh

And of course there’s the worms (“Can we do the one with the worms again, Miss?” – actual quote reported by teacher).

All lowbrow locker room humor aside, there is something powerfully evocative in Marvell’s vibrant imagery and command of rhyming couplets, particularly in the last stanza where the speaker urges the woman to seize life by the, well, horns.

 

“Let us roll all our Strength, and all

Our sweetness, up into one Ball:

And tear our Pleasures with rough strife,

Thorough the Iron gates of Life.

Thus, though we cannot make our Sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run.”

 

 

 

 

 

(1818) PERCY BYSSE SHELLEY – OZYMANDIAS

 

I have a soft spot for the English Romantic poets. Yes – that’s capital-R Romanticism, for the cultural and intellectual movement originating in Europe in the late eighteenth century and which still arguably holds sway in Western culture even today. Two of them – Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats – feature in the Top 10 itself. Two others – William Blake and Lord Byron – feature as honorable mentions. That leaves the last two of the big six – William Wordsworth and Percy Bysse Shelley.

Shelley may now perhaps best be known as the husband of Mary Shelley, author of the iconic Frankenstein. However, he has at least earned his place in my special mention cult and pulp entries, largely off the back of this poem.

Yes – there is other poetry by Shelley I enjoy, such as “To a Skylark” – even if it starts in a weird way to modern ears:

 

“Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

Bird thou never wert”

 

Yeah…what? But I can’t say mad at a poem that features these lines:

 

“We look before and after,

And pine for what is not:

Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.”

 

However, it is his sonnet Ozymandias, often anthologized and commonly taught in schools, that ranks as my favorite for this entry. And as it is a sonnet and hence short (sixteen lines), I can quote it here in full:

 

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

 

Ozymandias was a Greek name for the Egyptian pharoah Ramesses II – or Ramesses the Great, who reigned in 1279-1213 BC. The theme is obvious – human hubris in the face of time. Decline and fall – even for the greatest rulers and the empires they forge (although of course Shelley with his radical political views was quite happy to speed them along). Ramesses now reduced to empty ironic words on a statue, the statue itself fallen into pieces and ancient Egypt itself, known mostly for its giant tombstones and broken statuary.

 

 

 

 

 

(1842) ROBERT BROWNING – MY LAST DUCHESS

 

“That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive”

And so begins Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue – and one of my favorite villainous dramatic monologues at that. Make no mistake – the Duke (prefaced as Ferrara) is a villain. Indeed, his monologue unveils himself as a narcissistic sociopath – and particularly chilling in its calm and casual delivery, even potentially charming in its eloquence but for what it unveils (as perhaps with all the best villainous monologues).

The Duke introduces his last Duchess, not in person but in her painting – which he keeps curtained off for his gaze only (or that of his select guests, including the one to whom he’s speaking in the poem), a detail easy to miss in first reading but which acquires significance as the poem advances.

He then introduces her transgressions:

 

“She had

A heart—how shall I say?— too soon made glad,

Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er

She looked on, and her looks went everywhere”.

 

At first, this seems to insinuate a roving eye, until he reveals what the sort of things that made his young naïve bride glad – a sunset, the gift of a cherry bough, even perhaps a compliment from the portrait artist himself. Indeed, most of the supposed “transgressions” seem to take place in his own mind – or his own narcissistic need that she pay him the proper attention.

 

“She thanked men—good! but thanked

Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked

My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name

With anybody’s gift”

 

And then come the lines that I always find so chilling in its cold detachment – and so heartbreakingly tragic for his last Duchess

 

“Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,

Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without

Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;

Then all smiles stopped together”

 

And so the Duke unveils himself as akin to a mafia don who took out a hit on his wife. Because she smiled too much.

It’s even more heartbreakingly tragic as it is based (loosely – or perhaps not) on real historical figures – the fifth Duke of Ferrara, Alfonso Il d’Este) and his wife, the teenaged Lucrezia de Medici, dead at the age of seventeen. Browning had more in mind than simply recreating a historical character. The Italian Renaissance held a particular fascination for Browning and his contemporaries, for the juxtaposition of artistic and intellectual heights with the ruthlessness of its aristocratic elite that did indeed resemble mafia families.