Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?

TOBACCO SHOP - (excerpts)

I'm nothing. I'll allways be nothing. I can't even wish to be something. Aside from that, I've got all the world's dream inside me.

Windows of my room, The room of just one of the millions in the world nobody knows (And what would they know, if they knew that?), You open on the mistery of a street people are constantly crossing, A street blocked off to all though, A street that's real, impossibly real, and right, unconsciously right, With the mistery of things lying under live beings and stones, With death spreading darkness on walls and white hair on heads, With fate driving the cart of everything down nothingness road.

Today I'm bowled over, as though hit by the truth. Today I'm clearheaded, as though I were going to die, Having no more brotherly feeling for things Than to say good-bye, turning this house and this side of the street Into a line of coaches in a long train with its whistle shrieking good-bye From inside my head, And a nerve-wracking, bone-cracking jerk as it moves off.

Today I'm mixed up, like someone who thought something and grasped it, then lost it. Today I'm torn between the allegiance I owe Something real outside me - The Tobacco Shop across the street, And something real inside me - the feeling that it's all a dream.

I failed in everything. Since I was up to nothing, maybe it was all really nothing. From learning and training for anything useful I escaped By slipping off to the country with great plans, By found only grass and threes there, And when there were people, they were just like any others. I leave the window, sit down in a chair. What should I think about?

[....]

(Eat your chocolates, little girl! Eat your chocolates! Look, there's no metaphysics on earth but chocolates. Look, all religions on earth have nothing more to teach us than a candy store does. Eat, dirty little girl, eat them up! If I could gobble down those chocolates as trustily as you do! But I think, peeling off the silver wrapper, it's only tinfoil, And toss it in the floor, just as I've tossed away my life.)

But at least, out of my bitterness at what I'll never be, There's the quick calligraphy of these lines, The broken archway to the Impossible. And at least I reserve for myself this dry-eyed contempt- Noble, at least, in the great gesture I make Flinging out the dirty clothes I am, with no laundry list, into the drift of things, And stay at home, shirtless.

[....]

In one another's arms, birds in the trees

- Those dying generations - at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

…

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

…

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

…

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

- W B Yeats

“Think and wonder, wonder and think.”

  In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori
  baskets of olives and lemons,
  cobbles spattered with wine
  and the wreckage of flowers.
  Vendors cover the trestles
  with rose-pink fish;
  armfuls of dark grapes
  heaped on peach-down.

  On this same square
  they burned Giordano Bruno.
  Henchmen kindled the pyre
  close-pressed by the mob.
  Before the flames had died
  the taverns were full again,
  baskets of olives and lemons
  again on the vendors' shoulders.

  I thought of the Campo dei Fiori
  in Warsaw by the sky-carousel
  one clear spring evening
  to the strains of a carnival tune.
  The bright melody drowned
  the salvos from the ghetto wall,
  and couples were flying
  high in the cloudless sky.

  At times wind from the burning
  would drift dark kites along
  and riders on the carousel
  caught petals in midair.
  That same hot wind
  blew open the skirts of the girls
  and the crowds were laughing
  on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.

  Someone will read as moral
  that the people of Rome or Warsaw
  haggle, laugh, make love
  as they pass by the martyrs' pyres.
  Someone else will read
  of the passing of things human,
  of the oblivion
  born before the flames have died.

  But that day I thought only
  of the loneliness of the dying,
  of how, when Giordano
  climbed to his burning
  he could not find
  in any human tongue
  words for mankind,
  mankind who live on.

  Already they were back at their wine
  or peddled their white starfish,
  baskets of olives and lemons
  they had shouldered to the fair,
  and he already distanced
  as if centuries had passed
  while they paused just a moment
  for his flying in the fire.

  Those dying here, the lonely
  forgotten by the world,
  our tongue becomes for them
  the language of an ancient planet.
  Until, when all is legend
  and many years have passed,
  on a new Campo dei Fiori
  rage will kindle at a poet's word.

  Warsaw, 1943