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    Great Short Poems from Around the World
    Great Short Poems from Around the World
    Great Short Poems from Around the World
    Ebook526 pages2 hours

    Great Short Poems from Around the World

    By Dover Publications

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    About this ebook

    This keepsake gift volume ranges from the twelfth century B.C. to modern times to present an international sampling of the world's best short poems. The works of ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Persian poets appear alongside those of Arabic, Chinese, German, Indian, Japanese, and Hungarian authors, in addition to classics by English, Irish, and American writers.
    Featured poems include those of Pushkin ("I Loved You"), Yeats ("Down by the Salley Gardens"), Jonson ("On My First Daughter"), Hughes ("The Negro Speaks of Rivers"), Basho ("The Quiet Pond"), Bhasa ("The Moon"), and Tsvetaeva ("I do not think, or argue, or complain"). Additional selections include verse by Li Po, Sappho, Paz, Shakespeare, Dickinson, Blake, Campion, H.D., Heine, Frost, Lermontov, Swift, Rilke, and many others.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateSep 19, 2013
    ISBN9780486783192
    Great Short Poems from Around the World

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      Book preview

      Great Short Poems from Around the World - Dover Publications

      Great

      SHORT POEMS

      from

      Around the World

      This keepsake gift volume ranges from the twelfth century B.C. tomodern times to present an international sampling of the world’s best short poems. The works of ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Persian poets appear alongside those of Arabic, Chinese, German, Indian, Japanese, and Hungarian authors, in addition to classics by English, Irish, and American writers.

      Featured poems include those of Pushkin (I Loved You), Yeats (Down by the Salley Gardens), Jonson (On My First Daughter), Hughes (The Negro Speaks of Rivers), Basho ( The Quiet Pond), Bhasa (The Moon), and Tsvetaeva (I do not think, or argue, or complain). Additional selections include verse by Li Po, Sappho, Paz, Shakespeare, Dickinson, Blake, Campion, H.D., Heine, Frost, Lermontov, Swift, Rilke, and many others.

      Great

      SHORT POEMS

      from

      Around the World

      Great

      SHORT POEMS

      from

      Around the World

      Edited by

      Bob Blaisdell

      DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.

      Mineola, New York

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: see page xxv.

      The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous assistance of Dorothy Belle Pollack in the preparation and selection of poems for this volume.

      Copyright

      Copyright © 2013 by Dover Publications, Inc.

      All rights reserved.

      Bibliographical Note

      Great Short Poems from Around the World is a new compilation, first published by Dover Publications, Inc., in 2013.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Great short poems from around the world / edited by Bob Blaisdell.

      p. cm.

      Includes index.

      eISBN-13: 978-0-486-78319-2

      1. Poetry—Collections. 2. Poetry—Translations into English. I. Blaisdell, Robert.

      PN6101.G72 2013

      808.81—dc22

      2011010017

      Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation

      47877701 2013

      www.doverpublications.com

      Note

      Wouldst thou hear what man can say

      In a little? reader, stay.

      — Ben Jonson

      We’ll keep this short.

      There is no genre of poetry called short, exactly, though there are many short-forms. Most poetry simply is short and takes only a minute or two to slide or slog through. But short for this volume means 100 syllables or less. When I found several translations of My muse, what ails this ardor? by Sappho, the greatest lyric poet of ancient Greece, only one of them in English translation squeezed under the syllable limit, and that was by the most stupendous sonneteer in English literary history, Sir Philip Sidney. (Speaking of Sidney’s great sonnets, at 140 syllables they are way, way too long.) I have avoided clipping sparkling lines and stanzas from the world’s great poets because I wanted to present poems that were written short—that said what had to be said, just like that!, and then out the door. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that there are an awful lot of short poems describing the passions aroused and provoked by the lightning strikes of romantic love: jealousy, misery, disappointment, delight, joy, comfort, bliss:

      Unhappy they whose life is loveless;

      for without love

      it is not easy to do aught or to say aught.

      I, for example, am now all too slow,

      but were I to catch sight of Xenophilus

      I would fly swifter than lightning.

      Therefore I bid all men not to shun

      but to pursue sweet desire;

      Love is the whetstone of the soul.

      — Alpheius of Mytilene

      How to catch such feelings except in a few ecstatic lines? There are not so many philosophical poems as love poems, if only because philosophy usually needs explanation. There are poems of grief and remembrance, and many extremely short poems of quiet perfect observation:

      A fallen blossom

      returning to the bough, I thought—

      But no, a butterfly.

      —Arakida Moritake

      While these poems do come from all around the world, it happens that some cultures have favored genres that extend poetry into forms that couldn’t be called short. On the other hand, the Japanese developed and mastered haiku while the classical Romans and Greeks cultivated epigrams. If that sounds like an apology that there seem too few poems from, for example, South America, Africa, and Malaysia, among many other regions of the world, it is. Someone else could do an anthology with an equal number of poems in English, using the same syllable limit, and not include a single poem that’s in this one and have just as worthy a collection. This means that there are jewels upon jewels of short poems the world over and these are just a few hundred I encountered on my treasure hunt.

      Finally I must explain or excuse the alphabetical arrangement of this anthology; my hopes are that the randomness of our alphabet will keep the reader’s focus on the short form rather than on country of origin, language, or chronology, which would suggest development across time, culture, language, and space rather than on how individual poets do their best to make an impressive little something out of a few syllables. (By the way, some of the poets with Arabic names are alphabetized by first name if it is their family name—for example: " Abu’l-Alaal-Ma’rri.) I’m pleased with the happy arrangement that sits Ezra Pound at the table next to Alexander Pushkin or Emily Dickinson followed by the Indian Dilsoz. I am aware of having made occasional anachronistic identifications of country of origin for each poet. Sappho, a native of the island of Lesbos, wrote in Greek but wouldn’t have thought of herself as living in Greece. Rainer Maria Rilke, born in Prague, part of the Austro-Hungarian Bohemia" at the time, wrote in German but lived for various periods all over Europe. The Latin poet Martial was from an area in present-day Spain but lived in a Roman culture and wrote in a language that predated Spanish.

      While most of the poets here are represented by only one or two poems, almost all of them wrote many more. Discussing his reading habits and how he broadened his awareness of fellow bards, Robert Frost remarked: One of my points of departure is an anthology. I find a poet I admire, and I think, well, there must be a lot to that. Some old one—Shirley, for instance, ‘The glories of our blood and state’—that sort of splendid poem. I go looking for more.¹ I hope readers will go looking for more splendid works by the poets they discover here: among them Yosa Buson, Gyorgy Petri, and Gustavo Adolfo Becquer or even by the better-known Li Po, Anna Akhmatova, and William Carlos Williams.

      I particularly wish to thank the translators George Gomori, Dorothy Belle Pollack, Ekaterina Rogalskaya, Karen Van Dyck, John Wilson, and Clive Wilmer for their permission to include their work.

      — Bob Blaisdell

      ¹ The Paris Review Interviews: Writers at Work. Second Series. Edited by George Plimpton. New York: Penguin, 1979. 18.

      Contents

      Note

      Acknowledgments

      Abu’l-Ala al-Ma’rri

      Thus they have passed, and we shall follow soon

      Yamabe Akahito

      Like the mists that ever rise

      Anna Akhmatova

      One can never mistake true tenderness

      The Muse

      Richard Aldington

      Evening

      The River

      Amalfi

      Thomas Bailey Aldrich

      Memory

      William Allingham

      Four Ducks on a Pond

      Alpheius of Mytilene

      Unhappy they whose life is loveless

      Anacreon

      Nature’s Laws

      Ball Game

      Anonymous

      The way down to Hades

      Young Men dancing, and the old

      Caught, Thrasybulus, in the net of a boy’s love

      The love of women touches not my heart

      Persistent Love

      My name—my country—what are they to thee?

      Poor in my youth, and in life’s later scenes

      The Scribe: A Hedge of Trees

      As the moon sinks on the mountain-edge

      The cloud clings

      While with my sleeves I sweep the bed

      The nightingale on the flowering plum

      Moonlight

      Three Triads

      Ah, would that I could hide within my songs

      Grief

      Song (Since you love me and I love you)

      Cuckoo Song

      Adam lay ybounden

      Youth and Age

      Westphalian Song

      Western wind, when wilt thou blow?

      Give justice, O blue sky

      O sleep, fond Fancy, sleep, my head thou tirest

      Madrigal (My Love in her attire doth shew her wit)

      I see the snowy winter sky

      Quail Song

      Magpie Song

      Black Hair

      Spring Song

      Song of the Trees

      The Approach of the Storm

      A Loon I Thought It Was

      Envoy

      Butterfly Song

      Ptarmigan

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