Elizabeth’s Story: Poems in my diary Wednesday, 10 February 2010
Posted by edincityoflit in Stories.Tags: Arthur O’Shaughnessy, John Clare, Kathleen Jamie, Lewis Carroll, Robert Browning, Robert Frost, Rupert Brooke
add a comment
I carry my poems in my handmade diary, printed on brown kraft paper, typed in different fonts. Some are ‘The Path Less Taken’ and ‘Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening’ by Robert Frost, ‘Jabberwocky’ (like Brian Taylor), ‘Ode’ by Arthur O’Shaughnessy, ‘I Am’ by John Clare, and Kathleen Jamie’s ‘Queen of Sheba’ because I live in Currie and did travel on the Brownie’s borrowed truck.
My mother used to read Browning and Brooke to me when I was little, in Lincolnshire, and I was taught a lot of poetry at High School but I wish I could remember more complete poems.
Hamish’s stories Wednesday, 20 January 2010
Posted by carryapoem in Stories.Tags: Edwin Morgan, Emily Dickinson, Gaius Valerius Catullus, Robert Browning, Robert Graves, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sappho, W H Auden, William Carlos Williams
add a comment
I don’t literally carry poems round with me (though there was a time – late teens, early twenties – when I took Robert Graves’s The White Goddess everywhere), but there are poems, or lines from poems, which have inhabited my head for years. They’re there for a variety of reasons: Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ for its virtuosity and tone; William Carlos Williams’s red wheelbarrow for its simple saying so much; Emily Dickinson’s ‘There is no frigate like a book’ for its slogan; Edwin Morgan’s ‘The Apple’s Song’ for its dizzy voice; Auden’s ‘Look, Stranger’ for its sound; Catullus’s ‘odi et amo’ for its telling truth about love and Sappho’s ‘phainetai moi…’ for the accurate delineation of the physiology and psychology of being in love; and my favourite line of poetry, ‘The silly buckets on the deck’, from Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, for – I don’t know – its ineffability? They’re all touchstones.
Hamish Whyte is a poet, publisher and former librarian and bibliographer. He has worked extensively with the Scottish Poetry Library, not least on granting them the acquisition of his Edwin Morgan Archive.
Carry a Poem 