ASF Poetry Thread

2020hindsight said:

sad story bud. she must be young and all. commisserations.
makes you realise how short life is yes?

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_mer_(popular_song) "La mer" is a popular song written by French lyricist Charles Trenet (1913 – 2001). It became the basis for the popular song "Beyond the Sea."
It is claimed that Trenet wrote the song with Leo Chauliac in 1943 while riding on a train. It was not until 1946 that he recorded the song.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHYj1-3QrrY&mode=related&search= Charles Trenet - La Mer (live Olympia)

LA MER
La mer , Qu'on voit danser le long des golfes clairs, A des reflets d'argent
La mer , Des reflets changeants, Sous la pluie
La mer , Au ciel d'été confond , Ses blancs moutons ,Avec les anges si purs
La mer, bergère d'azur infinie.

Voyez , Près des étangs , Ces grands roseaux mouillés.
Voyez , Ces oiseaux blancs, Et ces maisons rouillées.

La mer , Les a bercés , Le long des golfes clairs, Et d'une chanson d'amour
La mer , A bercé mon cœur pour la vie.

THE SEA (English Translation)
The sea , which we see dancing along the clear gulfs, has silver sparkles.
The sea , has changing sparkles, Under the rain.
The sea, To the summer sky's confuses her white sheep ,With angels so pure.
The sea, Shepherdess of infinite sky.

See , Next to the ponds ,Those tall wet reeds.
See , Those white birds ,And those rusty houses.

The sea , Has rocked them like a baby , Along the clear gulfs
And with a love song The sea , Has rocked my heart for life.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCW-a_58KqA&NR three videos combined sous le vent Garou Celine Dion

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0uHHbhn5_s&NR same song, this one's a threesome – trust the French Garou, Elodie & Sophia - Sous le vent

SOUS LE VENT
Et si tu crois que j'ai eu peur, c'est faux
Je donne des vacances a mon coeur, un peu de repos
Et si tu crois que j'ai eu tord, attends
Respire un peu le souffle d'or qui me pousse en avant
Et, fais comme si j'avais pris la mer
J'ai sorti la grande voile et j'ai glisse sous le vent
Fais comme si je quittais la terre
J'ai trouve mon etoile, je l'ai suivie un instant
Sous Le Vent
Et si tu crois que c'est fini, jamais
C'est juste une pause, un repit apres les dangers
Et si tu crois que je t'oubli, ecoute
Ouvre ton port aux vents de la nuit, ferme les yeux

Et fais comme si j'avais etcetc
Sous Le Vent

Et si tu crois que c'est fini, jamais
(Sous le vent)
C'est juste une pause, un repit apres les dangers
Fais comme si j'avais pris la mer
etc
Sous Le Vent

UNDER THE WIND ( Translation: )

And if you think I was frightened
It's not true
I'm giving vacations to my heart
Some rest
And if you think I was wrong
Wait
Breathe a little the golden blast
Which pushes me ahead
And

Do as if I took to the sea
I set the main sail
And I glided with the wind
Do as if I left the ground
I found my star
I followed it for a while
Under the wind

And if you think it's over
Never
It's just a pause, a break
After the dangers

And if you think I forget you
Listen
Open your body to the winds of the night
Close your eyes
And

Do as if I took to the sea , etc......
And if you think it's over , etc ......
Do as if I took to the sea , etc......
Do as if I took to the sea , etc......
….
Under the wind

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Garpal Gumnut said:

They **** you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you. ..PLarkin

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Song: Youve Got To Be Carefully Taught Lyrics
Cable:
You've got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught
From year to year,
It's got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught!

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2020hindsight said:

top stuff m8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BU1FuozjiAg

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furphy
A furphy is Australian slang for a rumour, or an erroneous or improbable story.
An original Furphy. The word is derived from water carts made by a company established by John Furphy: J. Furphy & Sons of Shepparton, Victoria. Many Furphy water carts were used to take water to Australian Army personnel during World War I. The carts, with "J. Furphy & Sons" written on their tanks, became popular as gathering places where soldiers could exchange gossip, rumours and fanciful tales.
..
Originally it was synonymous with "rumour" and "scuttlebutt", but the modern meaning (especially in Australian politics) is "an irrelevant or minor issue raised to specifically divert attention away from the real issue".

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MY LAST FAREWELL, By Jose Rizal

Farewell, my adored Land, region of the sun caressed,
Pearl of the Orient Sea, our Eden lost,
With gladness I give you my Life, sad and repressed;
And were it more brilliant, more fresh and at its best,
I would still give it to you for your welfare at most.

On the fields of battle, in the fury of fight,
Others give you their lives without pain or hesitancy,
The place does not matter: cypress laurel, lily white,
Scaffold, open field, conflict or martyrdom's site,
It is the same if asked by home and Country.

I die as I see tints on the sky b'gin to show
And at last announce the day, after a gloomy night;
If you need a hue to dye your matutinal glow,
Pour my blood and at the right moment spread it so,
And gild it with a reflection of your nascent light!

My dreams, when scarcely a lad adolescent,
My dreams when already a youth, full of vigor to attain,
Were to see you, gem of the sea of the Orient,
Your dark eyes dry, smooth brow held to a high planev
Without frown, without wrinkles and of shame without stain.

My life's fancy, my ardent, passionate desire,
Hail! Cries out the soul to you, that will soon part from thee;
Hail! How sweet 'tis to fall that fullness you may acquire;
To die to give you life, 'neath your skies to expire,
And in your mystic land to sleep through eternity !

If over my tomb some day, you would see blow,
A simple humble flow'r amidst thick grasses,
Bring it up to your lips and kiss my soul so,
And under the cold tomb, I may feel on my brow,
Warmth of your breath, a whiff of your tenderness.

Let the moon with soft, gentle light me descry,
Let the dawn send forth its fleeting, brilliant light,
In murmurs grave allow the wind to sigh,
And should a bird descend on my cross and alight,
Let the bird intone a song of peace o'er my site.

Let the burning sun the raindrops vaporize
And with my clamor behind return pure to the sky;
Let a friend shed tears over my early demise;
And on quiet afternoons when one prays for me on high,
Pray too, oh, my Motherland, that in God may rest I.

Pray thee for all the hapless who have died,
For all those who unequalled torments have undergone;
For our poor mothers who in bitterness have cried;
For orphans, widows and captives to tortures were shied,
And pray too that you may see you own redemption.

And when the dark night wraps the cemet'ry
And only the dead to vigil there are left alone,
Don't disturb their repose, don't disturb the mystery:
If you hear the sounds of cithern or psaltery,
It is I, dear Country, who, a song t'you intone.

And when my grave by all is no more remembered,
With neither cross nor stone to mark its place,
Let it be plowed by man, with spade let it be scattered
And my ashes ere to nothingness are restored,
Let them turn to dust to cover your earthly space.

Then it doesn't matter that you should forget me:
Your atmosphere, your skies, your vales I'll sweep;
Vibrant and clear note to your ears I shall be:
Aroma, light, hues, murmur, song, moanings deep,
Constantly repeating the essence of the faith I keep.

My idolized Country, for whom I most gravely pine,
Dear Philippines, to my last goodbye, oh, harken
There I leave all: my parents, loves of mine,
I'll go where there are no slaves, tyrants or hangmen
Where faith does not kill and where God alone does reign.

Farewell, parents, brothers, beloved by me,
Friends of my childhood, in the home distressed;
Give thanks that now I rest from the wearisome day;
Farewell, sweet stranger, my friend, who brightened my way;
Farewell, to all I love. To die is to rest.

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Dr. José Rizal
In full, JOSÉ PROTACIO RIZAL MERCADO Y ALONSO REALONDA (born 19 June 1861, Calamba, Philippines- died 30 December 1896, Manila, Philippines), patriot, physician and man of letters whose life and literary works were an inspiration to the Philippine nationalist movement.
Rizal was the son of a prosperous landowner and sugar planter of Chinese-Filipino descent on the island of Luzon. His mother, Teodora Alonso, one of the most highly educated women in the Philippines at that time, exerted a powerful influence on his intellectual development.

He was educated at the Ateneo de Manila and the University of Santo Tomas in Manila. In 1882, he went to study medicine and liberal arts at the University of Madrid. A brilliant student, he soon became the leader of the small community of Filipino students in Spain and committed himself to the reform of Spanish rule in his home country, though he never advocated Philippine independence. The chief enemy of reform, in his eyes, was not Spain, which was going through a profound revolution, but the Franciscan, Augustinian and Dominican friars who held the country in political and economic paralysis.

Rizal continued his medical studies in Paris and Heidelberg. In 1886, he published his first novel in Spanish, Noli Me Tangere, a passionate exposure of the evils of the friars rule, comparable in its effect to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. A sequel, El Filibusterismo, 1891, established his reputation as the leading spokesman of the Philippine reform movement. He annotated an edition in 1890 on Antonio Morga's Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, which showed that the native people of the Philippines had a long history before the coming of the Spaniards.

He became the leader of the Propaganda Movement, contributing numerous articles to its newspaper, La Solidaridad, published in Barcelona. Rizal's political program, as expressed in the newspaper, included integration of the Philippines as a province of Spain, representation in the Cortes (the Spanish parliament), the replacement of the Spanish friars by the Filipino priests, freedom of assembly and expression, and equality of Filipinos and Spaniards before the law.

Against the advice of his parents and friends, Rizal returned to the Philippines in 1892. He found a nonviolent reform society, La Liga Filipina, in Manila, and was deported to Dapitan, in northwest Mindanao, an island south of the Philippines. He remained in exile for four years, doing scientific research and founding a school and hospital. In 1896, the Katipunan, a nationalist secret society, launched a revolt against Spain. Although he had no connections with that organization or any part in the insurrection, Rizal was arrested and tried for sedition by the military. Found guilty, he wa publicly executed by a firing squad in Manila. His martyrdom convinced Filipinos that there was no alternative to independence from Spain. On the eve of his execution, while confined in Fort Santiago, Rizal wrote Mi Ultimo Adios ("My Last Farewell"), a masterpiece of 19th-century Spanish verse.

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..A plant I am, that scarcely grown,
Was torn from out its Eastern bed,
Where all around perfume is shed,
And life but as a dream is known;
The land that I can call my own,
By me forgotten ne'er to be,
Where trilling birds their song taught me,
And cascades with their ceaseless roar,
And all along the apreading shore
The murmurs of the sounding sea.

While yet in childhood's happy day,
I learned upon its sun to smile,
And in my breast there seems the while
Seething volcanic fires to play.
A bard I was, my wish alway
To call upon the fleeting wind,
With all the force of verse and mind:
"Go forth, and spread around its flame
From zone to zone with glad acclaim,
And earth to heaven together bin ... etc

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2020hindsight said:

NOTES ON PAYING THE RENT
If you basejump, if you wing it, if you dare things to go wrong
and you dare your soul to sing it, though it may be your last song,
will your chute tear accidental, is this 'bad luck' if it does
or are YOU some yearly rental, in some game of "chase the buzz"
- you were doing what you loved with mates, and that's what fortune does.

If you hangglide mountain ranges where the misty clouds recline
where the colour pattern changes with the arching sun behind
mostly wind like magic pillows - but should gusts blow false to you
are you food for weeping willows, or just rent that's overdue.
- you were doing what you loved wth mates, praps rent was overdue.

If you surf and crash and tumble with white pointer sharks beneath,
when last year one of your number lost a leg to razor teeth
guess it's just like paying rental for the freedom you enjoy
and it's sadly incidental - there's a warning with the toy!
- and it's sad that rent is paid for by this sacrificial boy.

I have stood on sandy beaches and I've deep inhaled the scent,
and I've asked the god of creatures where do I pay back some rent,
rent for lighting up the landscape, rent for warming up the sand
and for phonecalls that are answered, by some friendly landlord's hand.
- but the answer adds "remember! rent is paid in every land."

Then the voice gets sentimental "rent is small for First World days
just be thankful that your rental is one third the Third World pays
yet you help them only rarely? yet you've means and you have ways?
you could share their rent more fairly, help your brother through his maze
- help the odds of his existence, help reduce the rent he pays".

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"Never Give In" Speech, October 29, 1941, Harrow School
When Churchill visited Harrow on October 29 to hear the traditional songs again, he discovered that an additional verse had been added to one of them. It ran:

"Not less we praise in darker days
The leader of our nation,
And Churchill's name shall win acclaim
From each new generation.
For you have power in danger's hour
Our freedom to defend, Sir!
Though long the fight we know that right
Will triumph in the end, Sir!

Almost a year has passed since I came down here at your Head Master's kind invitation in order to cheer myself and cheer the hearts of a few of my friends by singing some of our own songs. The ten months that have passed have seen very terrible catastrophic events in the world - ups and downs, misfortunes - but can anyone sitting here this afternoon, this October afternoon, not feel deeply thankful for what has happened in the time that has passed and for the very great improvement in the position of our country and of our home? ........

Another lesson I think we may take, just throwing our minds back to our meeting here ten months ago and now, is that appearances are often very deceptive, and as Kipling well says, we must "…meet with Triumph and Disaster. And treat those two impostors just the same."

You cannot tell from appearances how things will go. Sometimes imagination makes things out far worse than they are; yet without imagination not much can be done. Those people who are imaginative see many more dangers than perhaps exist; certainly many more than will happen; but then they must also pray to be given that extra courage to carry this far-reaching imagination. But for everyone, surely, what we have gone through in this period - I am addressing myself to the School - surely from this period of ten months this is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never-in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. We stood all alone a year ago, and to many countries it seemed that our account was closed, we were finished. All this tradition of ours, our songs, our School history, this part of the history of this country, were gone and finished and liquidated.

Very different is the mood today. .....we now find ourselves in a position where I say that we can be sure that we have only to persevere to conquer.

You sang here a verse of a School Song: you sang that extra verse written in my honour, which I was very greatly complimented by and which you have repeated today. But there is one word in it I want to alter - I wanted to do so last year, but I did not venture to. It is the line: "Not less we praise in darker days."

I have obtained the Head Master's permission to alter darker to sterner. "Not less we praise in sterner days."

Do not let us speak of darker days: let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days; these are great days - the greatest days our country has ever lived; and we must all thank God that we have been allowed, each of us according to our stations, to play a part in making these days memorable in the history of our race.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory An allegory (from Greek ἄλλος, "other", and ἀγορεύειν, agoreuein, "to speak in public") is a figurative mode of representation conveying a meaning other than the literal.

Allegory is generally treated as a figure of rhetoric, but an allegory does not have to be expressed in language: it may be addressed to the eye, and is often found in realistic painting, sculpture or some other form of mimetic, or representative art.

The etymological meaning of the word is broader than the common use of the word. Though it is similar to other rhetorical comparisons, an allegory is sustained longer and more fully in its details than a metaphor, and appeals to imagination, while an analogy appeals to reason or logic. The fable or parable is a short allegory with one definite moral.

Since meaningful stories are nearly always applicable to larger issues, allegories may be read into many stories, sometimes distorting their author's overt meaning. For instance, many people have suggested that The Lord of the Rings was an allegory for the World Wars, while in fact it was well under way before the outbreak of World War II and J.R.R. Tolkien's emphatic statement in the introduction to the American edition "It is neither allegorical nor topical....I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence ."

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2020hindsight said:

YE WEARY WAYFARER, Fytte VI
POTTER's CLAY [An Allegorucal Interlude]

Though the pitcher that goes to the sparkling rill
Too oft gets broken at last,
There are scores of others its place to fill
When its earth to the earth is cast;
Keep that pitcher at home, may it never roam,
but lie like a useless clod,
Yet sooner or later the hour will come
When its chips are thrown to the sod.

Is it wise, then, say, in the waning day,
When the vessel is crack'd and old,
To cherish the battered potters clay ,
As though it were virgin gold?
Take care of yourself, dull, boorish elf,
Though prudent and safe you seem,
Your pitcher will break on the musty shelf
And mine by the dazzling stream.

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