only your savage heart

This poem is also for Lan Wangji, and for Wei Wuxian, and for my extraordinarily talented friend helcinda, who just posted her phenomenal vid album, The Black Parade: an Untamed Vid Album. It's a masterpiece, and I honestly don't have words for how good it is, or for how many times it has made me cry and clutch my heart with feelings. So, in honor of those feelings, here's some Pablo Neruda. I post a lot of Neruda, but let's be honest: he wrote some of the very best love poetry in any language, and I always spend at least a couple of hours narrowing down my choices. This seemed like the right one, today. ♥

De las estrellas que admiré, mojadas
por ríos y rocíos diferentes,
yo no escogí sino la que yo amaba
y desde entonces duermo con la noche.

De la ola, una ola y otra ola,
verde mar, verde frío, rama verde,
yo no escogí sino una sola ola:
la ola indivisible de tu cuerpo.

Todos las gotas, todas las raíces,
todos los hilos de la luz vinieron,
me vinieron a ver tarde o temprano.

Yo quise para mí tu cabellera.
Y de todos los dones de mi patria
sólo escogí tu corazón salvaje.


Of all the stars I admired, drenched
in various rivers and mists,
I chose only the one I love.
Since then I sleep with the night.

Of all the waves, one wave and another wave,
green sea, green chill, branchings of green,
I chose only the one wave,
the indivisible wave of your body.

All the waterdrops, all the roots,
all the threads of light gathered to me here;
they came to me sooner or later.

I wanted your hair, all for myself.
From all the graces my homeland offered
I chose only your savage heart.

—Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), XLVI from Cien sonetos de amor, or One Hundred Love Sonnets, translated by Stephen Tapscott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).

a phantom fury of the past

One of the difficulties of being on this trip during National Poetry Month is that, in ten years of posting poetry, I've already posted a boatload (hah) of poems that fit my current theme. I try not to repeat myself, but there are so many favorites that I've been thinking about, both in the weeks and months leading up to this trip, and while we've been in Athens and Delphi and Santorini and Olympia, and on this ship. If you feel inclined to read some other poems, here are a few from years past:

William Butler Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium
Derek Walcott, Sea Grapes
Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck
John Masefield, Sea Fever
Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ulysses
John Keats, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
Anne Carson, excerpt from Autobiography of Red
Louise Glück, Persephone the Wanderer
Jack Gilbert, Ovid in Tears and The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart
Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach
W. H. Auden, The Fall of Rome
C. P. Cavafy, Ithaca

And for today:

Since Persia fell at Marathon,
The yellow years have gathered fast:
Long centuries have come and gone.

And yet (they say) the place will don
A phantom fury of the past,
Since Persia fell at Marathon;

And as of old, when Helicon
Trembled and swayed with rapture vast
(Long centuries have come and gone),

This ancient plain, when night comes on,
Shakes to a ghostly battle-blast,
Since Persia fell at Marathon.

But into soundless Acheron
The glory of Greek shame was cast:
Long centuries have come and gone,

The suns of Hellas have all shone,
The first has fallen to the last:
Since Persia fell at Marathon,
Long centuries have come and gone.

—Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935), "Villanelle of Change," in this case from Collected Poems, 1921, although I got it from Poetry Foundation. I love villanelles so much.