Starting with the obvious...: Fire and Ice by Robert Frost
Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.
"Anticlimax is, of course, the warp and way of things. Real life seldom structures a decent denouement." - Martin Silenus
My love is like to ice, and I to fire: How comes it then that this her cold so great Is not dissolved through my so hot desire, But harder grows the more I her entreat? Or how comes it that my exceeding heat Is not delayed by her heart-frozen cold, But that I burn much more in boiling sweat, And feel my flames augmented manifold? What more miraculous thing may be told, That fire, which all things melts, should harden ice, And ice, which is congeal’d with senseless cold, Should kindle fire by wonderful device? Such is the power of love in gentle mind, That it can alter all the course of kind.
Found this one in my junk mail folder, a while back. The title reminded me of Petyr Baelish, who Hoster Tully called "that stripling... wretched boy."
The Stripling by Dante Micheaux
1 Samuel 17:56
The field soldiers remember the triumph, a lithe boy’s naal on the head of giant, before the king rode through the ranks to inquire about his parentage or the prince had him bathed, his hair scented with sweet herbs.
After the crowds dwindled, because neither one’s cunning nor the adulation of the victorious are nourishment, and the battle, having made him hungry, alone and in silence, the boy slowly ate the brain of the giant.
A stripling, to tell the truth, the boy grew— mad with the taste—savored the giant brain and learned its ways, became a giant, begat giants, who craved and ate all the people in the land, except their own.
About This Poem
“‘The Stripling’ is the marriage of a thematic obsession with beautiful boys (in this case, the youthful, ruddy and handsome David) and history’s tendency to perpetually recast the underdog and the favorite in its oldest stories.” —Dante Micheaux
"Anticlimax is, of course, the warp and way of things. Real life seldom structures a decent denouement." - Martin Silenus
This well-known little ditty always reminded me of the "heart in conflict with itself" stuff, and the way in which Martin places import in personal choices over blood and titles:
The Road Not Taken
BY ROBERT FROST
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
"I can see it. You have more of the north in you than your brothers."
Starting with the obvious...: Fire and Ice by Robert Frost
Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.
And of course, the response from Conrad Aiken:
Frostbite by Conrad Aiken
Some say the world will end by Fire And some by Frost. By verse of ice, or vice of verser, (God only knows which were the worser!) But anyway, the world well lost.
"Anticlimax is, of course, the warp and way of things. Real life seldom structures a decent denouement." - Martin Silenus
This well-known little ditty always reminded me of the "heart in conflict with itself" stuff, and the way in which Martin places import in personal choices over blood and titles:
Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same,
An odd conflict, no? When he included the bolded.
All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Oscar Wilde.
Since it's ice and fire, I'd normally quote Roethke's "The Shape of Fire"--but it's very long and odd and hard.
So, instead, on a similar note or personal conflict, this poem reminds me of a number of characters:
In a Dark Time by Theodore Roethke
In a dark time, the eye begins to see, I meet my shadow in the deepening shade; I hear my echo in the echoing wood— A lord of nature weeping to a tree. I live between the heron and the wren, Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What’s madness but nobility of soul At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire! I know the purity of pure despair, My shadow pinned against a sweating wall. That place among the rocks—is it a cave, Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
A steady storm of correspondences! A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon, And in broad day the midnight come again! A man goes far to find out what he is— Death of the self in a long, tearless night, All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire. My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly, Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I? A fallen man, I climb out of my fear. The mind enters itself, and God the mind, And one is One, free in the tearing wind.
All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Oscar Wilde.
Just an excerpt from "The Dying Man" part 5: "They Sing, They Sing."
5. They Sing, They Sing
The edges of the summit still appall When we brood on the dead or the beloved; Nor can imagination do it all In this last place of light: he dares to live Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.
All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Oscar Wilde.
These are the ones who escape after the last hurt is turned inward; they are the most dangerous ones. These are the hottest ones, but so cold that your tongue sticks to them and is torn apart because it is frozen to the motion of hooves. These are the ones who cut your thighs, whose blood you must have seen on the gloves of the doctor’s rubber hands. They are the horses who moaned like oceans, and one of them a young woman screamed aloud; she was the only one. These are the ones who have found you. These are the ones who pranced on your belly. They chased deer out of your womb. These are the ice horses, horses who entered through your head, and then your heart, your beaten heart. These are the ones who loved you. They are the horses who have held you so close that you have become a part of them, an ice horse galloping into fire.
8 And Jehovah God planteth a garden in Eden, at the east, and He setteth there the man whom He hath formed; 9 and Jehovah God causeth to sprout from the ground every tree desirable for appearance, and good for food, and the tree of life in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
"I can see it. You have more of the north in you than your brothers."
I was recently thanking ravenousreader for sharing this poem from Adrienne Rich's, The Dream of a Common Language...
Power
Living in the earth-deposits of our history
Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old cure for fever or melancholy a tonic for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.
Today I was reading about Marie Curie: she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness her body bombarded for years by the element she had purified It seems she denied to the end the source of the cataracts on her eyes the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil
She died a famous woman denying her wounds denying her wounds came from the same source as her power. ”
That poem by Adrienne Rich 'Power' is very much about reconciling ourselves to the cost of not only power, but of living itself.
All of us are brought as high as we're brought low by our own peculiar constitution -- what the Greeks called 'daimon'.
Adrienne Rich's poems concern themselves with attempting to integrate the split (between the self and the shadow), while not seeking to deny that there is a corruption, a disjunction, etc.
The 'silver lining' lies in recognising that we must use the same tools that caused the problem in order to solve it -- well, maybe not 'solve,' but at least attempt to 'salve'...
And so -- I present you with another of her poems, demonstrating this dialectic (it also contains a spider web which might please you):
Integrity
the quality of being complete; unbroken condition; entirety ~ Webster A wild patience has taken me this far
as if I had to bring to shore a boat with a spasmodic outboard motor old sweaters, nets, spray-mottled books tossed in the prow some kind of sun burning my shoulder-blades. Splashing the oarlocks. Burning through. Your fore-arms can get scalded, licked with pain in a sun blotted like unspoken anger behind a casual mist.
The length of daylight this far north, in this forty-ninth year of my life is critical.
The light is critical: of me, of this long-dreamed, involuntary landing on the arm of an inland sea. The glitter of the shoal depleting into shadow I recognize: the stand of pines violet-black really, green in the old postcard but really I have nothing but myself to go by; nothing stands in the realm of pure necessity except what my hands can hold.
Nothing but myself?....My selves. After so long, this answer. As if I had always known I steer the boat in, simply. The motor dying on the pebbles cicadas taking up the hum dropped in the silence.
Anger and tenderness: my selves. And now I can believe they breathe in me as angels, not polarities. Anger and tenderness: the spider's genius to spin and weave in the same action from her own body, anywhere -- even from a broken web.
The cabin in the stand of pines is still for sale. I know this. Know the print of the last foot, the hand that slammed and locked the door, then stopped to wreathe the rain-smashed clematis back on the trellis for no one's sake except its own. I know the chart nailed to the wallboards the icy kettle squatting on the burner. The hands that hammered in those nails emptied that kettle one last time are these two hands and they have caught the baby leaping from between trembling legs and they have worked the vacuum aspirator and stroked the sweated temples and steered the boat there through this hot misblotted sunlight, critical light imperceptibly scalding the skin these hands will also salve.
"I can see it. You have more of the north in you than your brothers."