poetry

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Johann’s Birthday

Lapham'sQuartly

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

(1749 – 1832)—Reprinted from Lapham’s Quarterly

Having returned to Frankfurt from Leipzig University in 1768, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe began studying the alchemical writings of Paracelsus and Basil Valentine and performing experiments in his own laboratory. The poet, statesman, playwright, novelist, and scientist began his masterwork Faust around 1771, publishing Faust: A Fragment in 1790 and Faust: Part One eighteen years after that.

We have a book of Goethe’s poetry here. It’s in the TBR pile, where it is likely to remain for the rest of my life at the least. Although I do reference it upon occasion, flipping through it to find something of interest. That is done in an easy frame of mind. Not the mad passionate one of the search for the perfect—in a book where you know it will be.
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World Poetry Day

There isn’t much to say about some poems. They speak for themselves and echo into the world.

Photo From BrainPickings Dylan Thomas—One of the best. Here’s a recording of Dylan reading his own poem. Posted on YouTube.

 

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Derek Walcott

LOVE AFTER LOVE

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,derekwalcott
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott—January 23, 1930—March 17, 2017