/lit/ - Literature

>>17804787

Be not sparing
Leave off swearing.
Buy my herring
Fresh from Malahide,
Better never was tried.
Come, eat them with pure fresh butter and mustard,
Their bellies are soft, and as white as a custard.
Come, sixpence a dozen, to get me some bread,
Or, like my own herrings, I soon shall be dead.

- Jonathan Swift

>>17804787
SAINT PAATRIK'S DAYIE

In my memory I will always see
The town that I have loved so well
Where our school played ball by the gas yard wall
And we laughed through the smoke and the smell
Going home in the rain, running up the dark lane,
Past ther gaol (jail) and down behind the fountain,
Those were happy days in so many, many ways
In the town I loved so well.
In the early morning, the shirt factory horn
Callde women from Creggan, the moor and the bog
While their men on the dole played a mother's role
Fed the children and then trained the dogs.
And when times got tough, there was just about enough
But they saw it through without complaining
For deep inside was a burning pride
In the town I loved so well
There was music there in the Derry air
Like a language that we all could understand
I remember the day when I earned my first pay
When I played in a small pick-up band
There I spent my youth and to tell you the truth
I was sad to leave it all behind me
For I learned about life and I found a wife
In the town I loved so well
But when I returned how my eyes have burned
To see how a town could be brought to its knees
By the armoured cars and the bombed out bars
And the gas that hangs on to every breeze
Now the army's installed by the old gas yard wall
And the damded barbed wire gets higher and higher
With their tanks and their guns oh my God what have they done
To the town I loved so well
Now the music's gone but they carry on
For their spirit's been bruised, never broken
They will not forget but their hearts are set
On tomorrow and peace once again.
For what's done is done and what's won is won
And what's lost is lost and gone forever
I can only pray for a bright, brand new day
In the town I loved so well

>>17804787
On Raglan Road of an autumn day, I saw her first and I knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue;
I saw the danger, yet I passed along the enchanted way,
And I said, let grief be a falling leaf at the dawning of the day.

On Grafton Street in November, we tread lightly along the ledge
Of a deep ravine, where can be seen, the worth of passion's pledge,
The Queen of Hearts still making tarts and I not making hay;
O I loved too much, and by such and such is happiness thrown away.

I gave her gifts of the mind, I gave her the secret sign that's known
To the artists who have known the true gods of sound and stone
And word and tint and without stint, I gave her poems to say;
With her own name there and her long dark hair like clouds over fields of May.

On a quiet street where old ghosts meet, I see her walking now
Away from me so hurriedly, my reason must allow
That I had loved, not as I should, a creature made of clay
When the angel woos the clay he'd lose his wings at the dawn of day.

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

- He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, William Butler Yeats

>>17804787
Digging
BY SEAMUS HEANEY
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

>>17805055

>>17805076
glad that smut is hidden behind a spoiler image

Raw materials by Dunsany

THE down on the uncaught wing,
The dream that will not abide,
Sheep-bells softly a-ring
In fields that horizons hide,

The glow of remembered dawns,
Dew on the spider’s snare,
Light late on old lawns
Out of the fading air,

The mystery lurking just
On the other sides of trees,
Tales from books that are dust
Blown by on the breeze;

All that our ordered days
Fail to bring to our door,
Elves of the wood, and fays
Of the moonlight out on the moor;

Of these is poetry wrought,
And, when history’s over,
These by hearts shall be sought,
As bees yearn to the clover.

>>17804787
Mid-Term Break
BY SEAMUS HEANEY
I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying—
He had always taken funerals in his stride—
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'.
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four-foot box, a foot for every year.

"Dancing In The Moonlight (It's Caught Me In Its Spotlight)"
by P. Lynott

When I passed you in the doorway
Well you took me with a glance
I should have took that last bus home
But I asked you for a dance

Now we go steady to the pictures
I always get chocolate stains on my pants
And my father he's going crazy
He says I'm living in a trance

But I'm dancing in the moonlight
It's caught me in its spotlight
It's alright, alright
Dancing in the moonlight
On this long hot summer night

It's three o'clock in the morning
And I'm on the streets again
I disobeyed another warning
I should have been in by ten

Now I won't get out until Sunday
I'll have to say I stayed with friends
But it's a habit worth forming
If it means to justify the end

Dancing in the moonlight
It's caught me in its spotlight
It's alright, alright
Dancing in the moonlight
On this long hot summer night

And I'm walking home
The last bus has long gone
But I'm dancing in the moonlight

[Instrumental]

Dancing in the moonlight
It's caught me in its spotlight
It's alright, alright
Dancing in the moonlight
On this long hot summer night

Dancing in the moonlight (I'm dancing in the moonlight)
It's caught me in its spotlight (It's caught me in in it's spotlight)
Dancing in the moonlight (dancing in the moonlight)
On this long hot summer night (It's got me hot)

Dancing in the moonlight (I'm dancing in the moonlight)
It's caught me in its spotlight (It's caught me alright alright alright)
Dancing in the moonlight
On this long hot summer night (It's so got them hot)

Dancing in the moonlight (I'm dancing)
It's caught me in its spotlight (I'm still dancing)
Dancing in the moonlight (I'm dancing in the moonlight)
On this long hot summer night...

>>17804787
>Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone’s in the midst of all.

t.one of yeats' last good poems before he started shitting on about moons

>>17805180
Thin Lizzy slaps. 10/10 song

>>17804787
got any more love poems?

>>17806131
Oh, Call it by Some Better Name
by Thomas Moore

Oh, call it by some better name,
For Friendship sounds too cold,
While Love is now a worldly flame,
Whose shrine must be of gold:
And Passion, like the sun at noon,
That burns o'er all he sees,
Awhile as warm will set as soon--
Then call it none of these.

Imagine something purer far,
More free from stain of clay
Than Friendship, Love, or Passion are,
Yet human, still as they:
And if thy lip, for love like this,
No mortal word can frame,
Go, ask of angels what it is,
And call it by that name!

>>17806168
sublime.

Fág Gleann na nGealt thoir,
Is a bhfuil d’aois seo ár dTiarna i d’fhuil,
Dún d’intinn ar ar tharla
Ó buaileadh Cath Chionn tSáile,
Is ón uair go bhfuil an t-ualach trom
Is an bóthar fada, bain ded mheabhair
Srathar shibhialtacht an Bhéarla,
Shelley, Keats is Shakespeare:
Fill arís ar do chuid,
Nigh d’intinn is nigh
Do theanga a chuaigh ceangailte i gcomhréiribh
’Bhí bunoscionn le d’éirim:
Dein d’fhaoistin is dein
Síocháin led ghiniúin féinig
Is led thigh-se féin is ná tréig iad,
Ní dual do neach a thigh ná a threabh a thréigean.
Téir faobhar na faille siar tráthnóna gréine go Corca
Dhuibhne,
Is chífir thiar ag bun na spéire ag ráthaíocht ann
An Uimhir Dhé, is an Modh Foshuiteach,
Is an tuiseal gairmeach ar bhéalaibh daoine:
Sin é do dhoras,
Dún Chaoin fé sholas an tráthnóna,
Buail is osclófar
D’intinn féin is do chló ceart.

Fill Arís
by Seán Ó Ríordáin