Tag Archives: poets

J.E. Flecker, ‘The Golden Journey to Samarkand. Prologue’

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We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage
And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die,
We Poets of the proud old lineage
Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why,–

What shall we tell you? Tales, marvellous tales
Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest,
Where nevermore the rose of sunset pales,
And winds and shadows fall toward the West:

And there the world’s first huge white-bearded kings
In dim glades sleeping, murmur in their sleep,
And closer round their beasts the ivy clings,
Cutting its pathway slow and red and deep.

II
And how beguile you? Death has no repose
Warmer and deeper than that Orient sand
Which hides the beauty and bright faith of those
Who made the Golden Journey to Samarkand.

And now they wait and whiten peaceably,
Those conquerors, those poets, those so fair:
They know time comes, not only you and I,
But the whole world shall whiten, here or there;

When those long caravans that cross the plain
With dauntless feet and sound of silver bells
Put forth no more for glory or for gain,
Take no more solace from the palm-girt wells,

When the great markets by the sea shut fast
All that calm Sunday that goes on and on:
When even lovers find their peace at last,
And Earth is but a star, that once had shone.

*****

Following on from my previous blog post on James Elroy Flecker, this is the Prologue to ‘The Golden Journey to Samarkand’. It has some nice lines, but the piece that contains the stirring lines that get quoted and misquoted and truncated out of context, that piece is the Epilogue, which I will post next time.


Painting by Richard-Karl Karlovič Zommer: ‘Samarkand’ (19th/ 20th century)

J.E. Flecker, ‘To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence’

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I who am dead a thousand years,
And wrote this sweet archaic song,
Send you my words as messengers
The way I shall not pass along.

I care not if you bridge the seas,
Or ride secure the cruel sky,
Or build consummate palaces
Of metal or of masonry.

But have you wine and music still,
And statues and a bright-eyed love,
And foolish thoughts of good and ill,
And prayers to them who sit above?

How shall we conquer? Like a wind
That falls at eve our fancies blow,
And old Maimonides the blind
Said it three thousand years ago.

O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,
Student of our sweet English tongue,
Read out my words at night, alone:
I was a poet, I was young.

Since I can never see your face,
And never shake you by the hand,
I send my soul through time and space
To greet you. You will understand.

*****

Herman Elroy Flecker – who switched his first name to James – was born in England in 1884 and died in Davos, Switzerland in early 1915. Flecker is one of those poets with 4 or 5 memorable poems, with the rest being very dated stylistically and thematically.
‘To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence’, ‘The Piper’ (barely), ‘War Song of the Saracens’ (for the rollicking rhyme), ‘Yasmin’, ‘The Old Ships’… but, especially, ‘The Golden Journey to Samarkand’ (Prologue and Epilogue, part of a stage play produced after the poet’s death in 1915). If you don’t like those poems, don’t even bother with the rest.
He worked in the British consular services in the Eastern Mediterranean, and his work is loaded and larded with Greek, Ottoman and Arabic influences.

Photograph of James Elroy Flecker [c.1911-1914], Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, MS. 21234/1

Odd Poem: Hu Mingfu (胡明复) , ‘Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den’

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Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den is crafted entirely from the syllable “shi,” distinguished only by tonal variation, yet it still conveys a complete and coherent story in Chinese. The poem was originally written by Hu Mingfu (胡明复) and published by linguist Yuen Ren Chao in Volume 11 of The Chinese Students’s Monthly in 1916.[2][3] It was then refined by Yuen Ren Chao in the 1930s for demonstrative purposes in his lectures.

In Chinese:

“Shi Shì shí shĩ shĩ”

Shíshì shishì Shi Shì, shì shi, shì shí shí shĩ.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shĩ.
Shí shí, shì shí shi shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shi Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shĩ, shì shĩ shì, shĩ shì shí shĩ shìshì.
Shì shí shì shí shi shi, shì shíshì.
Shíshì shĩ, Shì shĩ shì shì shíshì.
Shíshì shì, Shì shĩ shì shí shì shí shĩ.
Shí shí, shĩ shí shì shí shĩ shĩ, shí shí shí shĩ shĩ.
Shì shì shì shì.

English Translation:

In a stone den lived a poet named Shi, who loved lions and had resolved to eat 10 lions.
He often went to the market to look for lions.
At 10 o’clock, 10 lions had just arrived at the market.
At that moment, Shi also arrived at the market.
He saw those 10 lions and, using his arrows, slayed them.
He brought the bodies of the 10 lions back to the stone den.
The stone den was damp, so he asked his servants to wipe it clean.
After it was cleaned, he tried to eat the 10 lions.
When he began eating, he realized that those 10 lions were actually 10 stone lion statues.
Try to explain this matter.

*****

If you chase this odd poem down in more detail, you will find arguments about the original poet’s intent, and the subsequent modifications by Yuen Ren Chao (who apparently claimed full ownership), and which language is appropriate for it, and more, in Wikipedia and elsewhere. I leave you with a long excerpt from pinyin.info:

“Yuen Ren Chao was the leader of the group that designed National Romanization. He knew that National Romanization (Guóyǔ Luómǎzì) could only write “modern vernacular Chinese,” and not Classical Chinese. In order to demonstrate this point he playfully wrote a classical essay consisting entirely of “homophones” entitled “Record of Mr. Shi Eating Lions.” The whole essay is copied as follows:

Shi2 shi4 shi1shi4 Shi1 shi4 shi4 shi1, shi4 shi2 shi2 shi1. Shi4 shi2shi2 shi4 shi4 shi4 shi1. Shi2 shi2, shi4 shi4 shi4, shi4 shi2 shi* shi1 shi4 shi4. Shi4 shi2, shi4 shi4 shi4 shi2 shi1, shi3 shi2 shi2 shi3 shi4, shi3 shi4 shi2 shi1 shi4shi4. Shi4 shi2 shi4 shi2 shi1 shi1 shi4 shi2 shi4. Shi2 shi4 shi1, shi3 shi4 shi4 shi3 shi2 shi4. Shi2 shi4 shi4. Shi4 shi3 shi4 shi2 shi4 shi2 shi1 shi1. Shi2 shi2, shi3 shi4 shi4 shi2 shi* shi1 shi1 shi2 shi2 shi* shi2 shi1 shi1. Shi4 shi2, shi4 shi3 shi4 shi4 shi4shi2. Shi4 shi4 shi4 shi4.” (The original article had no punctuation.) (* The character 硕 shuò, meaning huge, was pronounced as shí in the past.)

The vernacular translation of this essay is:

Shítou wūzi lǐ xìng Shī de shīrén xǐhuan chī shīzi, tā juéxīn yào chīdiào 10 tóu shīzi. Tā shíshí dào shìchǎng shàngqu kàn shīzi. Shí diǎn zhōng, tā dào shìchǎng, gānghǎo 10 tóu zhuàngdà de shīzi láidào shìchǎng. Zhè shíhou, tā kàn le zhè 10 tóu shīzi, yīkào 10 zhī shítou zuò de jiàn, bǎ zhè 10 tóu shīzi shāsǐ. Tā jiǎn qǐ zhè 10 tóu shīzi de shītǐ, huídào shítou wūzi lǐ qù. Shítou wūzi cháoshī. Tā jiào shìzhě mǒgān shítou wūzi. Shítou wūzi mǒgān le, tā kāishǐ chángshì chī zhè 10 tóu shīzi de shītǐ. Chī de shíhou, cái zhīdào zhè 10 tóu zhuàngdà de shīzi de shītǐ, shíjì shì 10 tóu zhuàngdà de shítou shīzi de shītǐ. Zhè shíhou, tā cái míngbai zhè jiàn shì de zhēnxiàng. Qǐng nǐ jiěshì, zhè shì zěnme huíshì?

The English translation of the essay is:

Mr. Shi, a poet who lived in a stone house, liked to eat lions. He vowed to eat ten lions. He often went to the market to look at lions. At ten o’clock, he went to the market, (and) just then ten large lions (also) came to the market. At that time, he saw these ten lions. Relying on the power of ten arrows with stone tips, he caused the ten lions to pass away. He picked up the bodies of the ten lions and went back to his stone house. The stone house was damp, so he told his servant to try and wipe it (dry). After the house had been wiped (dry), he began to try to eat the bodies of the ten lions. As he was eating, he realized that the bodies of the ten large lions were actually bodies of ten large stone lions. Only then did he understand the real situation. Can (you) explain what happened? (Translated by Victor H. Mair)

The point is that, if Chao’s classical essay were written in Hanyu Pinyin, everything would be shi and naturally no one could read and understand it. In other words, it is a kind of tour de force tongue twister. Even if it were written in characters, people still would not be able to understand it when it is read aloud. There are people who use this (playful) piece (that is forced and unnatural even in Classical Chinese) to oppose Hanyu Pinyin. They have completely misunderstood Yuen Ren Chao’s original intention!”

“Stone lion” by Ben Sutherland is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Chris O’Carroll, ‘Dorothy Parker on Andrew Marvell’

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He doesn’t have the time, he pleads,
For long and patient wooing.
A mortal man with urgent needs,
He would be up and doing.

He’d worship for two hundred years
Your left breast, then your right,
He swears, but can’t because he fears
Death’s swift-encroaching night.

He notes how brief are human lives.
He says you mustn’t tease,
For once that chariot arrives,
You’ll have no days to seize.

Though you know joining him in bed
Is what you’ll likely do,
You’re certain romance will be dead
Before the two of you.

*****

Chris O’Carroll writes: “Dorothy Parker’s verse paints her enthusiastic about sex but skeptical about romance. I wanted to incorporate both of those outlooks into her imagined response to Marvell’s famous come-hither argument.”

‘Dorothy Parker on Andrew Marvell’ was first published in Snakeskin.

Chris O’Carroll is the author of four books of poems — The Joke’s on Me, Abracadabratude, Quantum Creed, and the newly published Ridiculous Positions. He is a Light magazine featured poet and a contributor to Love Affairs at the Villa Nelle, Extreme Sonnets, New York City Haiku, and The Great American Wise Ass Poetry Anthology, among other collections.

Villanelle: Janice D. Soderling, ‘The Poor Poet, Carl Spitzweg’

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Der Arme Poet (best-known painting by Carl Spitzweg, 1839)

​​If only I can hatch a heartfelt rhyme,
(with thought and frowns, it can’t be very hard),
I’ll take my rightful place with the sublime.

O, gradus ad parnassum. One quick climb.
I’ll be crème de la crème and avant-garde,
if only I can hatch a heartfelt rhyme.

Top hat, cravat and walking stick meantime
are ready—attributes to reap regard.
I’ll take my rightful place with the sublime.

No more damp attic life; no fleas or grime.
My poem will be perfection—a petard!
If only I can hatch a heartfelt rhyme.

My peers will shout, “Alors, a paradigm!
Such lofty wit, a wise camelopard.“
I’ll take my rightful place with the sublime.

I bite my quill: crime, slime, Mülheim, enzyme.
The world will bow, salute and call me bard.
If only I can hatch a heartfelt rhyme,
I’ll take my rightful place with the sublime.

*****

Janice D.Soderling writes: ​​“This poem is ekphrastic, generated from a preceding work of art.
“About the mysterious motor that generates, I can say little. But no composer, artist, poet, sculptor works ex nihilo. Earliest man, woman, looked at their handprint, their footprint, and a thought rose, an urge to express what they felt – a primitive fear of death perhaps – and off they went to the caves to imprint their hand, or to carve a footprint on the rockface by the sea. A shout-out that Kilroy was here.
“We hear music in the babbling brook, in the sighing wind, in the raindrop falling from leaf to leaf and plopping into the puddle below. There is poetry in the emotive sounds we make and hear: tinkling laughter, cooing seduction, growling rage, keening sorrow, barking grief. Of such, language is made; of language Shakespeare made Sonnet 73.
“All art is imitation, from birdsong to a symphony orchestra, from the walking stride to the metrical verse. All art is a denial of death. Even the comic art.“

​​Janice D. Soderling is an American–Swedish writer who lives in a small Swedish village. Over the years, she has published hundreds of poems, flash and fiction, most recently at Mezzo Cammin, Eclectica, Lothlorien Poetry Journal and Tipton Poetry Journal. Collections issued in 2025 are The Women Come and Go, Talking (poems) and Our Lives Were Supposed to Be Different (short stories).

‘The Poor Poet’ was originally published in American Arts Quarterly, and republished in the current Well Met, where links at the bottom will take you to other poets in the issue.

Pic credit: Carl Spitzweg, The Poor Poet (via Wikipedia)​

​​​

Lucius Falkland, ‘Sado-Masochism in Love Poetry’

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Some like being bound up in leather and chains,
Others spanked with a branch from a tree,
But the people who truly get turned on by pain
Try to publish their love poetry.

The poet’s not known for his psychical health:
He wrestles despair, feels dejected,
Not that undisposed to killing himself,
Yet his heart’s work so often rejected.

Sometimes he must wait the best part of a year,
Like an innocent man on death row,
To have to him confirmed his most terrible fear,
For they are quite sadistically slow.

And the hurt they inflict? It’s not over yet.
Do they find wounding fragile souls funny?
Some journals won’t read the submissions they get
If the poets don’t first send them money!

Once it’s crafted and honed and as good as Ted Hughes,
On a par with their earlier choices,
They find a new method to mentally abuse:
They prioritize “marginalised voices.”

The agony felt by a hounded young deer
As he’s brought to the ground by a predator
Is as nothing compared to the suffering and fear
That’s induced in a poet by an editor.

*****

Lucius Falkland writes: ‘I wrote this poem in response to having so many of my love poems rejected by poetry journals. It struck me as absurd that poets experience feelings, including being in love, so intensely that they must process them via poetry, they share the most poignant aspects of their lives with journal editors, and yet they know they will frequently get rejected. It is as though they write about their deepest pain only to then subject themselves to the further pain of being told that they can’t even express their pain properly. ‘Are we poets Masochists?’ I wondered. Naturally, this poem was itself rejected by a number of editors – with one even commenting that he was sympathetic to my plight. before rejecting it anyway because ‘it’s not the right fit’ (euphemism for ‘I don’t like it!) – before being published in The New English Review.”  

Lucius Falkland is the nom de plume of a writer and academic originally from London. His first poetry volume, The Evening The Times Newspaper Turned Into Jane Eyre, was published in 2025 with Exeter House Publishing. It can be purchased here.

Illustration: “Vinegar Valentine – 05” by BioKnowlogy is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.

Pope Francis: ‘Dear Poets, Help Us Dream’ (excerpts)

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Dear poets, I know that you hunger for meaning, and that is why you reflect on how faith questions life. (…) Poetry is open; it throws you into another realm.

In light of this personal experience, today I would like to share some thoughts with you on the importance of your service.

The first thing I want to express is this: you are eyes that see and dream. Not only do you see, but you also dream. A person who has lost the ability to dream lacks poetry, and life without poetry does not work. We humans yearn for a new world that we may never fully see with our own eyes, yet we desire it, seek it, and dream of it. A Latin American writer once said that we have two eyes: one of flesh and the other of glass. With the eye of flesh, we see what is before us; with the eye of glass, we see what we dream. Woe to us if we stop dreaming—woe to us! (…) Indeed, poetry does not speak of reality from abstract principles but rather by listening to reality itself: work, love, death, and all the little and great things that fill life. Yours is — to quote Paul Claudel — an “eye that listens.” (…)

I would also like to say a second thing: you are the voice of human anxieties. Often, these anxieties are buried deep within the heart. You know well that artistic inspiration is not only comforting but also unsettling because it presents both the beautiful realities of life and the tragic ones. Art is the fertile ground where the “polar oppositions” of reality — as Romano Guardini called them — are expressed, always requiring a creative and flexible language capable of conveying powerful messages and visions. For example, consider when Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, tells the story of a little boy, the son of a servant, who throws a stone and hits one of his master’s dogs. The master then sets all the dogs on the boy. He runs, trying to escape the fury of the pack, but ultimately, he is torn apart under the satisfied gaze of the general and the desperate eyes of his mother.

This scene has tremendous artistic and political power: it speaks to the reality of yesterday and today, of wars, social conflicts, and our personal selfishness. It is just one poetic passage that challenges us. And I’m not only referring to the social critique in that passage. I speak of the tensions of the soul, the complexity of decisions, the contradictions of existence. There are things in life that, at times, we can’t even understand or find the right words for: this is your fertile ground, your field of action. (…)

That is what I want to ask of you today as well: go beyond the closed and defined borders, be creative, do not domesticate your anxieties or those of humanity. I fear this process of taming because it stifles creativity, it stifles poetry. With the words of poetry, gather the restless desires that inhabit the human heart so they do not grow cold or die out. This work allows the Spirit to act, creating harmony amidst the tensions and contradictions of human life, keeping the fire of good passions alive, and contributing to the growth of beauty in all its forms, beauty that is expressed precisely through the richness of the arts.

This is your work as poets: to give life, to give form, to give words to all that human beings live, feel, dream, and suffer, creating harmony and beauty. It is a work that can also help us better understand God as the great “poet” of humanity. Will you face criticism? That’s okay, bear the weight of criticism while also learning from it. But never stop being original, creative. Never lose the wonder of being alive.

So, eyes that dream, voices of human anxieties; and therefore, you also have a great responsibility. And what is it? It’s the third thing I want to say: you are among those who shape our imagination. Your work has an impact on the spiritual imagination of the people of our time. Today, we need the genius of a new language, powerful stories, and images. (…)

Dear poets, thank you for your service. Continue dreaming, questioning, imagining words and visions that help us understand the mystery of human life and guide our societies toward beauty and universal fraternity.

Help us open our imagination so that it transcends the narrow confines of the self and opens up to the entire reality, with all its facets, thus becoming open to the holy mystery of God. Move forward, without tiring, with creativity and courage!

I bless you.

*****

The above is a substantial excerpt from the letter Pope Francis wrote for the book ‘Verses to God: An Anthology of Religious Poetry‘ (published by Crocetti Editore), curated by Davide Brullo, Fr. Antonio Spadaro, and Nicola Crocetti. The letter is given in full in the Vatican News.

The Economist’s obituary for Pope Francis states he insisted on: “no papal cape or red slippers, just a plain white cassock and his ordinary black shoes. (…) No crest-embellished dinner plates, no new pectoral cross; he kept the iron-plated one he had worn, from 1998, as archbishop of Buenos Aires. No 12-room apartment in the Vatican, but a two-room suite in the guests’ hostel, and meals in the dining room with everyone else. “We’ll see how long it lasts,” said one aide, uncomfortable. It lasted until he died; for in Buenos Aires, after all, he had cooked his own meals and travelled by bus. (…) In Buenos Aires he was called the “Slum Bishop” for insisting that he, and his priests, should go out in the streets and on the margins. (…) He made a point of reaching out, feeding hundreds of homeless with pizza at the Vatican and adopting several families of Syrian refugees.”

So, sympathy for the homeless, and refugees… and poets. There’s a spiritual resonance to that grouping!

Photo: “The Inauguration Mass For Pope Francis” by Catholic Church (England and Wales) is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Sonnet: Eric McHenry, ‘Lives of the Poets’

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They rubbed two sticks together and made friction.
They made a fist but couldn’t make a hand.
Their dictionary wasn’t made of diction.
Their diction made them hard to understand.

Trying to make a poem, they made a list.
Trying to make the team, they made the choir.
They made up stories whose protagonist
would rub two sticks together and make fire.

Mistakes were made, and mixtapes to go with them.
They made a couch their bed and made their bed.
They tried to make a joke at the expense
of love and money. “Make me,” money said.
They made up stories but they made no sense.
They rubbed two cents together and made rhythm.

*****

Eric McHenry writes: “Strangely, I remember almost nothing about writing this poem, except that I was thinking about the etymology of ‘poet’ (‘maker’) and about the versatility of the verb ‘make’.”

‘Lives of the Poets’ was first published in Literary Matters.

Eric McHenry is a professor of English at Washburn University and a past poet laureate of Kansas. His books of poetry include Odd Evening, a finalist for the Poets’ Prize; Potscrubber Lullabies, which received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; and Mommy Daddy Evan Sage, a collection of children’s poems illustrated by Nicholas Garland. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas, with his wife and two children.
Eric McHenry – The Waywiser Press
Eric McHenry, Author at The American Scholar

Photo: “Master Sacha twirls the fire stick” by one thousand years is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Short poem: RHL, ‘The Self-Aware’

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Most insecure are those, the self-aware:
for all their acts are pointless and they know it,
scurrying like ants on an eclair…
the universe, indifferent, looks askance.

This insecure mode breeds defensiveness
and therefore arrogance, not least in poets
who know their work especially valueless…
even to other ants.

*****

I think we poets, who can be so rude about other people, need to be rude about ourselves occasionally. Not that the universe cares one way or the other.

This poem was originally published in The Road Not Taken – A Journal of Formal Poetry – in Fall 2016. Thanks, Dr. Kathryn Jacobs!

Photo: “Ant picnic” by dmcneil is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Poems on poets: ‘Maz’ Griffiths, ‘Lies’

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Perhaps it’s true, as Twain implies,
statistics are the greatest lies
but point for point and size for size,
I think they tie for major prize
with poets’ modest little ‘i’s.

*****

Margaret Ann Griffiths, aka Maz, aka Grasshopper, was a British poet known almost exclusively for her online work. In his Preface and Personal Recollection, editor Alan Wickes speaks of her “belligerent modesty” and her lack of interest in the preservation of her verse. In 2008, after winning Eratosphere‘s annual Sonnet Bake-off with “Opening a Jar of Dead Sea Mud” and being praised by Richard Wilbur, she was a Guest Poet on the Academy of American Poets website, where she was hailed as “one of the up-and-coming poets of our time”.

Her poem ‘Lies’ speaks volumes (in a brief space) about the different types of modesty available to creative figures. Her reputation for wit, intelligence, astute criticism and kind-heartedness goes well with her wide-ranging subjects and diverse styles of verse. She was the preeminent English-language online poet of the early 21st century.

Her work was posthumously collected by fans and fellow poets in the 2011 ‘Grasshopper‘ from Arrowhead Press and Able Muse Press.

Photo: “Anjo da Vila, Vila Madalena, São Paulo, Brazil.” by ER’s Eyes – Our planet is beautiful. is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.