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larryhammerWhoops, forgot (holiday) to post for Poetry Monday on Monday, making this a posthumous post appropriate for one more posthumous poem by a 2nd Gen Romantic, though one who wasn’t one of the three greats:
“Dirge,” Thomas Beddoes
If thou wilt ease thine heart
Of love, and all its smart,—
Then sleep, dear, sleep!
And not a sorrow
Hang any tear on your eyelashes;
Lie still and deep,
Sad soul, until the sea-wave washes
The rim o’ the sun to-morrow,
In eastern sky.
But wilt thou cure thine heart
Of love, and all its smart,—
Then die, dear, die!
’Tis deeper, sweeter,
Than on a rose bank to lie dreaming
With folded eye;
And then alone, amid the beaming
Of love’s stars, thou’lt meet her
In eastern sky.
A funeral song from the start of Act II, scene 1, of Death’s Jest-Book; or The Fool’s Tragedy, another long work with a ridiculous provisional title, though in this case it was completed but eternally tinkered with for a few decades rather than unfinished due to terminal illness. Beddoes was, like Keats, a medical-type turned poet-and-would-be-dramatist, though he’d been a physician rather than surgeon and outlived his 20s. And yes, Britten did set this to music, as have many others.
---L.
Subject quote from Festoons of Fishes, Alfred Kreymborg, which I’ve been waiting for ages to use.
“Dirge,” Thomas Beddoes
If thou wilt ease thine heart
Of love, and all its smart,—
Then sleep, dear, sleep!
And not a sorrow
Hang any tear on your eyelashes;
Lie still and deep,
Sad soul, until the sea-wave washes
The rim o’ the sun to-morrow,
In eastern sky.
But wilt thou cure thine heart
Of love, and all its smart,—
Then die, dear, die!
’Tis deeper, sweeter,
Than on a rose bank to lie dreaming
With folded eye;
And then alone, amid the beaming
Of love’s stars, thou’lt meet her
In eastern sky.
A funeral song from the start of Act II, scene 1, of Death’s Jest-Book; or The Fool’s Tragedy, another long work with a ridiculous provisional title, though in this case it was completed but eternally tinkered with for a few decades rather than unfinished due to terminal illness. Beddoes was, like Keats, a medical-type turned poet-and-would-be-dramatist, though he’d been a physician rather than surgeon and outlived his 20s. And yes, Britten did set this to music, as have many others.
---L.
Subject quote from Festoons of Fishes, Alfred Kreymborg, which I’ve been waiting for ages to use.