We’re just about to run out of poetry month! Here’s Annie Finch, to close things out until next year.
Sir, I am not a bird of prey:
a Lady does not seize the day.
I trust that brief Time will unfold
our youth, before he makes us old.
How could we two write lines of rhyme
were we not fond of numbered Time
and grateful to the vast and sweet
trials his days will make us meet?
The Grave’s not just the body’s curse;
no skeleton can pen a verse!
So while this numbered World we see,
let’s sweeten Time with poetry,
and Time, in turn, may sweeten Love
and give us time our love to prove.
You’ve praised my eyes, forehead, breast:
you’ve all our lives to praise the rest.
In response to Andrew Marvell, of course. Both poems are pretty good, so I’m reluctant to take sides. Except: Annie Finch has a blog! Does Andrew Marvell have a blog? Not to my knowledge, no. So Finch wins this round.
That’s really sweet.
“You’ve praised my eyes, forehead, breast:
You’ve all our lives to praise the rest.”
If I were a tender kinda gal that’d make me swoon.
Off-topic, but I had to mention it. From the New York Times:
“Our Lives as Atoms — Mark Buchanan, a theoretical physicist, begins his new blog by exploring American political opinion.”
And guess what; it’s behind the TimesSelect wall!
Today, famous poet* Steven Weinberg speaks on:
The Invention of Science: Poetry and Technology
May 1, 2007 – 4:30PM
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA
Rockefeller Hall, Schwartz Auditorium
Open to Public, Alumni, Students, Faculty, and Staff.
Free
* OK, he’s really a Nobel-prize winning physicist.
Perhaps andrew motion is the nearest thing the uk has to the non-blogging marvell these days. He may not blog but, as a concession to the 21st century, he does have a website, as befits the Poet Laureate.
Good show of a poem in response to Marvell’s, but I think this one is the most clever “response” from a coy mistress that I’ve ever come across. Well, it’s a bit dismissive…see ya, good luck! 😉
Admittedly Marvell does not… but Chaucer does (and he’s the better poet 🙂
I used the Marvell poem in an undergraduate lecture on logic and reasoning the other day. It is a lovely example of Denial of the Antecedent, as somebody at Wikipedia cleverly noticed. Nice riposte too.