Biography

Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud, a French poet, was born Oct.20,1854, in Charleville. His childhood was marred by a 'cantankerous and vindictive' mother and by the discipline of the local school, but his poetic virtuosity was extraordinary. By the age of fifteen he had written verse in imitation of the Romanticists (Vers de College,1932) , and one of his teachers, Izambard, introduced him to contemporary poetry. He was fiercely revolutionary, and wrote the words 'Down with God' on the public benches of Charleville. He ran away from his native town, twice to Paris and once into Belgium, and once he spent 10 days in prison for travelling by train without a ticket. During these escapades, he wrote such poems as Ma Boheme and Le Cabaret vert.
In 1871, in Charleville, he wrote his first prose poems and the Lettres du voyant, and sent to Verlaine a copy of his poem Le Bateau ivre. Verlaine was enthusiastic with the work and encouraged Rimbaud to come to Paris. At this time he had already started the composition of his Illuminations, which was not published until 1886. Verlaine and Rimbaud drifted into an affair. He served in the army of the Commune, and after its fall he went abroad with Verlaine, travelling in England and Belgium. In 1873, in Brussels, he was shot in the wrist by Verlaine, who was condemned to 2 years' imprisonment in the city of Mons for the act. After the incident, Rimbaud wrote a new Illuminations and Une Saison en Enfer.

In november 1893, Rimbaud gave up the writing of poetry and started traveling through Europe on foot. He returned once more to Paris and then disappeared for 16 years. Part of this time he spent in the East, but the greater part was in Ethiopia, where he dealt in contraband firearms, in ivory and gold, and perhaps in slaves. In 1891 he became ill, returned to France to have one leg amputated, and died on November 10 in a Marseille hospital.

poem by Arthur Rimbaud
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Poem

(Abbreviated from the conversation with Mr. T E H.

Over the flat slope of St Eloi
A wide wall of sandbags.
Night,
In the silence desultory men
Pottering over small fires, cleaning their mess-tins:
To and fro, from the lines,
Men walk as on Piccadilly,
Making paths in the dark,
Through scattered dead horses,
Over a dead Belgian’s body.

The Germans have rockets. The English have no rockets,
Behind the lines, cannon, hidden, lying back miles.
Before the line, chaos.

My mind is a corridor. The minds about me are
corridors.

[...] Read more

poem by Ezra Pound
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4th July 1882, Malines. Midnight

Belgian, with cumbrous tread and iron boots,
Who in the murky middle of the night,
Designing to renew the foul pursuits
In which thy life is passed, ill-favoured wight,
And wishing on the platform to alight
Where thou couldst mingle with thy fellow brutes,
Didst walk the carriage floor (a leprous sight),
As o'er the sky some baleful meteor shoots:
Upon my slippered foot thou didst descend,
Didst rouse me from my slumbers mad with pain,
And laughedst loud for several minutes' space.
Oh may'st thou suffer tortures without end:
May fiends with glowing pincers rend thy brain,
And beetles batten on thy blackened face!

poem by James Kenneth Stephen
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The Bells of Malines

AUGUST 17, 1914

The gabled roofs of old Malines
Are russet red and gray and green,
And o'er them in the sunset hour
Looms, dark and huge, St. Rombold's tower.
High in that rugged nest concealed,
The sweetest bells that ever pealed,
The deepest bells that ever rung,
The lightest bells that ever sung,
Are waiting for the master's hand
To fling their music o'er the land.

And shall they ring to-night, Malines?
In nineteen hundred and fourteen,
The frightful year, the year of woe,
When fire and blood and rapine flow
Across the land from lost Liege,
Storm-driven by the German rage?
The other carillons have ceased:

[...] Read more

poem by Henry Van Dyke
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No Secret: The Rwandan Genocide

A remote source of the Nile,
the Kagera River originates in Burundi.
On its way to Lake Victoria it flows
into a steep gorge along the natural border
between Rwanda and Tanzania.
Before entering the ravine,
the river cascades in a small waterfall
that swells in the rainy season.

As the Kagera sweeps down from
the highlands it carries within its currents
vast clusters of uprooted trees embedded
in gigantic dollops of elephant grass.
In the spring and summer of 1994
it was still much the same.
However, this time also thousands
of human corpses floated on the river.

Rwanda and Burundi
are two tiny African countries,

[...] Read more

poem by Paul Hartal
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Quis Pro Domino

Quis Pro Domino?

Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay--
Ay' verily: and by ministry of such men
As did His will upon the Saracen:
And Christendom owns not that man today
Who deems it not the holiest task to slay,
So utterly, that they rise not again,
Yon blatant heathenrie, past human ken
Outlawed to death, its raving spawn and prey.
And thou has lit one flame of love and wrath,
Who, all unterrified, didst take thy stand,
And tear the Beast, and baulk him of his spring.
O noble Belgium, lion in the path;
An inch of sword holding a foot of land;
A folk of men, showing a man for King!

poem by Christopher John Brennan
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Ashore At Dover

On landing, the first voice one hears is from
An English police-constable; a man
Respectful, conscious that at need he can
Enforce respect. Our custom-house at home
Strict too, but quiet. Not the foul-mouthed scum
Of passport-mongers who in Paris still
Preserve the Reign of Terror; not the till
Where the King haggles, all through Belgium.
The country somehow seems in earnest here,
Grave and sufficient:—England, so to speak;
No other word will make the thing as clear.
“Ah! habit,” you exclaim, “and prejudice!”
If so, so be it. One don't care to shriek,
“Sir, this shall be!” But one believes it is.

poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
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A Sonnet Upon The Pitiful Burning Of The Globe Playhouse In

Now sit thee down, Melpomene,
Wrapp'd in a sea-coal robe,
And tell the doleful tragedy
That late was play'd at Globe;
For no man that can sing and say
But was scar'd on St. Peter's Day.
Oh sorrow, pitiful sorrow, and yet all this is true.

All you that please to understand,
Come listen to my story,
To see Death with his raking brand
'Mongst such an auditory;
Regarding neither Cardinal's might,
Nor yet the rugged face of Henry the Eight.
Oh sorrow, pitiful sorrow, and yet all this is true.

This fearful fire began above,
A wonder strange and true,
And to the stage-house did remove,
As round as tailor's clew;

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poem by Anonymous Americas
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Scarlett And Melanie

Scarlett O’ and Melanie,
presenting the dichotomies
of feminine near-felony
and law, would need lobotomies
to reconcile. If, frankly, dear,
you give a damn, you must decide
to which of them your heart is near,
allowing it to be your guide,
for if you choose them both the wind
will see that you are gone. Life ain’t
like Hollywood. If you have sinned,
don’t try to make out with a saint,
because there always is a clash
when opposites attempt to meet,
and if they do they tend to crash,
since those who cannot change must cheat.

Inspired by Michiko Kakutani’s review of Molly Haskell’s “‘Frankly My Dear: Gone With the Wind’ Revisited” (“Frankly My Dear: ” NYT, April 24,2009) :
Just as the dichotomy between Scarlett and Melanie, Rhett and Ashley gave the movie a classic bipolar architecture, so Cukor and Fleming became, in Ms. Haskell’s words, the movie’s stylistic “yin and yang”: Cukor providing “the delicate gradations of feeling between lovers and family” while Fleming supplied the movie’s “bold, sweeping movement through time and history.” At the same time, Ms. Haskell observes, the art director William Cameron Menzies endowed the sprawling opus with a visual coherence: “The expressionistic landscapes and character positionings designed by Menzies and his staff keep certain images as touchstones, in the forefront of consciousness — like the horse collapsing on the bridge, the fire in the background, the use of the new moon, ” even as his masterful use of the new process of Technicolor worked to heighten the drama of the story. In the end the real reason this movie with too many cooks miraculously worked, Ms. Haskell says, was “the fire and desperation of three people with strangely overlapping tastes and eccentricities”: “In ‘Gone With the Wind, ’ Mitchell’s only book, every crisis and trauma of her life is transmuted into narrative; Selznick seized the reins and threw himself into the making of the movie like a man possessed; and Leigh, whose casting was less accidental than legend has it, invested Scarlett with something beyond beauty, something altogether uncanny — a demonic energy, a feverishness that would later tip over into illness and pathology.” All three of these people, Ms. Haskell argues, were “possessed of fire-and-ice opposites that they projected into their lives and careers”: “Leigh, the mesmerizing mixture of bawdy sexpot and exquisite doll, echoed the Scarlett-Melanie sides of Margaret Mitchell, flapper turned matron. Mitchell, in turn, was attracted in fiction and in life to male opposites: the blackguard and the saint (she created one of each; she married one of each) .” As for Selznick, Ms. Haskell says, he liked to cast his protégées as “wide-eyed innocents” or “palpitating sexpots, ” who in turn were attracted “to good boy-bad boy opposites.” “The intensely personal energy of this dividedness, the deep-down tension in Mitchell, Selznick and Leigh between vulgarity and refinement, ” she concludes, “is what gives the archetypes in ‘Gone With the Wind’ their extraordinary human resonance, ” and thanks to the way the three of them threw themselves into the project, “that historical ‘costume’ story” never feels remotely past.

[...] Read more

poem by Gershon Hepner
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Frankly, My Dear

Scarlett O’ and Melanie,
presenting the dichotomies
of feminine near-felony
and law, would need lobotomies
to reconcile. If, frankly, dear,
you give a damn, you must decide
to which of them your heart is near,
allowing it to be your guide,
for if you choose them both the wind
will see that you are gone. Life ain’t
like Hollywood. If you have sinned,
don’t try to make out with a saint,
because there always is a clash
when opposites attempt to meet,
and if they do they tend to crash,
since those who cannot change must cheat.

Inspired by Michiko Kakutani’s review of Molly Haskell’s “‘Frankly My Dear: Gone With the Wind’ Revisited” (“Frankly My Dear: ” NYT, April 24,2009) :
Just as the dichotomy between Scarlett and Melanie, Rhett and Ashley gave the movie a classic bipolar architecture, so Cukor and Fleming became, in Ms. Haskell’s words, the movie’s stylistic “yin and yang”: Cukor providing “the delicate gradations of feeling between lovers and family” while Fleming supplied the movie’s “bold, sweeping movement through time and history.” At the same time, Ms. Haskell observes, the art director William Cameron Menzies endowed the sprawling opus with a visual coherence: “The expressionistic landscapes and character positionings designed by Menzies and his staff keep certain images as touchstones, in the forefront of consciousness — like the horse collapsing on the bridge, the fire in the background, the use of the new moon, ” even as his masterful use of the new process of Technicolor worked to heighten the drama of the story. In the end the real reason this movie with too many cooks miraculously worked, Ms. Haskell says, was “the fire and desperation of three people with strangely overlapping tastes and eccentricities”: “In ‘Gone With the Wind, ’ Mitchell’s only book, every crisis and trauma of her life is transmuted into narrative; Selznick seized the reins and threw himself into the making of the movie like a man possessed; and Leigh, whose casting was less accidental than legend has it, invested Scarlett with something beyond beauty, something altogether uncanny — a demonic energy, a feverishness that would later tip over into illness and pathology.” All three of these people, Ms. Haskell argues, were “possessed of fire-and-ice opposites that they projected into their lives and careers”: “Leigh, the mesmerizing mixture of bawdy sexpot and exquisite doll, echoed the Scarlett-Melanie sides of Margaret Mitchell, flapper turned matron. Mitchell, in turn, was attracted in fiction and in life to male opposites: the blackguard and the saint (she created one of each; she married one of each) .” As for Selznick, Ms. Haskell says, he liked to cast his protégées as “wide-eyed innocents” or “palpitating sexpots, ” who in turn were attracted “to good boy-bad boy opposites.” “The intensely personal energy of this dividedness, the deep-down tension in Mitchell, Selznick and Leigh between vulgarity and refinement, ” she concludes, “is what gives the archetypes in ‘Gone With the Wind’ their extraordinary human resonance, ” and thanks to the way the three of them threw themselves into the project, “that historical ‘costume’ story” never feels remotely past.

[...] Read more

poem by Gershon Hepner
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Puzzles

Immense is God's love for men that
He not only keeps them companied
But amused and entertained
Through his ubiquitous
Puzzle games intricately
worked out for them
..in the sky, in the oceans,
In the mountains.... everywhere
If only they care to seek them out.
To boost their enthusiasm
In this mind racking tournament,
A rich reward awaits
Each puzzle solved
As can be seen from
Watt's answer to his rattling kettle
That won us the locomotive
Or Jenner's answer to the
Uninfected dairymaids that
Won us the vaccine for smallpox
Or Fleming's answer to the growth

[...] Read more

poem by John Tiong Chunghoo
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Very Subdued Indeed (Revised)

With strange piano tuners staying over
at the farm my twin lives in an activity
whirl, drinking lots of wine and beer while
cursing the piano's unwilling steel strings

She indulges in wild quests to find missing
registration papers, attends family weddings,
visits with her stepdaughter and beau; then
breathlessly my sis wants to know

Whether my life is such wild theatre also,
I say no, not at all, mine is slow, very few
events and little intrigue - though my son
keeps us guessing how he will get on

In school, he claims never to have home-
work - and we wonder if our daughter is
home because she never shows - I have
to visit her room, standing space only

[...] Read more

poem by Margaret Alice Second
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To the biologist the problem of socialism appears largely as a problem of size. The extreme socialists desire to run every nation as a single business concern. I do not suppose that Henry Ford would find much difficulty in running Andorra or Luxembourg on a socialistic basis. He has already more men on his pay-roll than their population. It is conceivable that a syndicate of Fords, if we could find them, would make Belgium Ltd. or Denmark Inc. pay their way. But while nationalization of certain industries is an obvious possibility in the largest of states, I find it no easier to picture a completely socialized British Empire or United States than an elephant turning somersaults or a hippopotamus jumping a hedge.

J.B.S. Haldane in Possible Worlds
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The small writer

As I walk on Guido Gezelle’s birth ground,
Bruges, a city full of people is spread around me,
there’s a small boat with sails flapping in the wind,
cathedrals and channels are everywhere, a place where you can love

and in a channel there’s something small circling
dressed in black armoured skin
but maybe it’s only my imagination
comprehending secret words written on the water surface

and when I look up into the sky
there are clouds closing
and suddenly it’s as if the clouds open
with His great presence coming down,

I have to cover my eyes against the bright light
and I see a water beetle drawing the names of God on the water.

[Reference: Het Schrijverke by Guido Gezelle. Bruges is a city in Belgium.]

poem by Gert Strydom
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Snow Fall in the Moonlight

Snow fall in the moonlight,
Like soft cotton falling from the sky,
Covering the ground and bushes in pure white,
Glowing beautifully in the night of December.

Snow fall in the moonlight,
Like a child I walked happily through the pure white snow,
Making soft crackling sound in the silent winter night,
When I reached the far end of the open field,
I turned to see the path I had taken,
A straight line through the pure white snow.

Snow fall in the moonlight,
Can there be a more beautiful sight than this?
As I look into the night sky,
And the soft snow flakes touches my face,
I breathe the fresh cold air of the winter night.
As I stood alone in silence, stillness in the air,
My feeling and longing comes to my lips,
And I thank Allah for this beautiful moment,

[...] Read more

poem by Spiritual Seeker
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Dawgs of War

Comes the British bulldog first—solid as a log—
He’s so ugly in repose that he’s a handsome dog;
Full of mild benevolence as his years increase;
Silent as a china dog on the mantelpiece.
Rub his sides and point his nose,
Click your tongue and in he goes,
To the thick of Britain’s foes—
Enemies behind him close—
(
Silence for a while
).

Comes a very different dog—tell him at a glance.
Clipped and trimmed and frilled all round. Dandy dog of France.
(Always was a dandy dog, no matter what his age)
Now his every hair and frill is stiff as wire with rage.
Rub his sides and point his nose,
Click your tongue and in he goes,
While behind him France’s foes

[...] Read more

poem by Henry Lawson
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When It's Over

'Young soldier, what will you be
When it's all over?'
'I shall get out and across the sea,
Where land's cheap and a man can thrive.
I shall make money. Perhaps I'll wive
In a place where there's room for a family.
I'm a bit of a rover.'

'Young soldier, what will you be
At the last 'Dismiss'?'
'Bucked to get back to old Leicester Square,
Where there's good champagne and a glad eye winking,
And no more 'Verey Lights' damnably blinking
Their weary, dreary, white-eyed stare.
I'll be out of this.'

'Young soldier, what will you be
When they sign the peace?'
'Blowed if I know; perhaps I shall stick it.
The job's all right if you take it steady.

[...] Read more

poem by Max Plowman
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Oh, how i'd like to travel

I lie awake each night
Staring at the ceiling
Following each crack
Finding new routes

Oh, how I’d like to travel
Somewhere new,
Somewhere old,
Somewhere where the people;
Sing merrily
Dance happily

Oh, how I’d like to travel
On a plane,
On a boat,
On something that will get me there;
Fast, like a soaring bird
Safely, like a locked room

Oh, how I’d like to travel

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poem by Jodi Right
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I Wonder.

In Flanders Fields red poppies grow.
But long dead warriors lie below.
Their rotted bodies nourishing
The scarlet poppies flourishing..

As if to draw attention to.
The graves of men who never knew.
That they would not see their homes more
But here they lie for evermore.

In Flanders Fields lost heroes lie.
In unmarked graves beneath the sky.
Far from the which gave them birth
They add their substance to the earth.

Which Belgian farmers cultivate.
Selected randomly by fate.
There can be few survivors left

[...] Read more

poem by Ivor Or Ivor.e Hogg
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Rural Architecture

There's George Fisher, Charles Fleming, and Reginald Shore,
Three rosy-cheeked school-boys, the highest not more
Than the height of a counsellor's bag;
To the top of GREAT HOW did it please them to climb:
And there they built up, without mortar or lime,
A Man on the peak of the crag.

They built him of stones gathered up as they lay:
They built him and christened him all in one day,
An urchin both vigorous and hale;
And so without scruple they called him Ralph Jones.
Now Ralph is renowned for the length of his bones;
The Magog of Legberthwaite dale.

Just half a week after, the wind sallied forth,
And, in anger or merriment, out of the north,
Coming on with a terrible pother,
From the peak of the crag blew the giant away.
And what did these school-boys?--The very next day
They went and they built up another.

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poem by William Wordsworth
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