Photo above taken on a sailing trip on Lake Huron, Summer 2016, story here
If you'd like to contact the Argo Builder with any polite questions or comments, please write to [email protected]
Some favorite poems below, and some originals thrown in. But first, a short piece of prose, that to me is poetry.
Herman Melville, 1851, excerpt from Moby Dick
“Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all! why should any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! let us fly these deadly waters! let us home! Wife and child, too, are Starbuck’s- wife and child of his brotherly, sisterly, play-fellow youth; even as thine, sir, are the wife and child of thy loving, longing, paternal old age! Away! let us away!- this instant let me alter the course! How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl on our way to see old Nantucket again! I think, sir, they have some such mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket.”
“They have, they have. I have seen them- some summer days in the morning. About this time- yes, it is his noon nap now- the boy vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me, of cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come back to dance him again.”
The Song of the Happy Shepherd
by W.B. Yeats
The woods of Arcady are dead,
And over is their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey Truth is now her painted toy;
Yet still she turns her restless head:
But O, sick children of the world,
Of all the many changing things
In dreary dancing past us whirled,
To the cracked tune that Chronos sings,
Words alone are certain good.
Where are now the warring kings,
Word be-mockers? — By the Rood
Where are now the warring kings?
An idle word is now their glory,
By the stammering schoolboy said,
Reading some entangled story:
The kings of the old time are dead;
The wandering earth herself may be
Only a sudden flaming word,
In clanging space a moment heard,
Troubling the endless reverie.
Then nowise worship dusty deeds,
Nor seek, for this is also sooth,
To hunger fiercely after truth,
Lest all thy toiling only breeds
New dreams, new dreams; there is no truth
Saving in thine own heart. Seek, then,
No learning from the starry men,
Who follow with the optic glass
The whirling ways of stars that pass --
Seek, then, for this is also sooth,
No word of theirs — the cold star-bane
Has cloven and rent their hearts in twain,
And dead is all their human truth.
Go gather by the humming sea
Some twisted, echo-harbouring shell,
And to its lips thy story tell,
And they thy comforters will be,
Rewarding in melodious guile
Thy fretful words a little while,
Till they shall singing fade in ruth
And die a pearly brotherhood;
For words alone are certain good:
Sing, then, for this is also sooth.
I must be gone: there is a grave
Where daffodil and lily wave,
And I would please the hapless faun,
Buried under the sleepy ground,
With mirthful songs before the dawn.
His shouting days with mirth were crowned;
And still I dream he treads the lawn,
Walking ghostly in the dew,
Pierced by my glad singing through,
My songs of old earth's dreamy youth:
But ah! she dreams not now; dream thou!
For fair are poppies on the brow:
Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.
-----------
Reflections on "The Song Of The Happy Shepherd": It has spoken to me since my early adulthood with a siren song to seek a human truth beyond mechanics and physics, and to seek a world of understanding beyond, and more ethereal than those things; and I believe that "grey truth" can cause us to miss out on some of the more meaningful strengths and experiences of human potential. That said, in these recent days especially, I am left thinking that to disavow the advice of "Starry men" and their "optic glass", who seek to understand and define scientific facts, is a dire mistake. Also , I believe many things are "certain good" , not only words; but words by themselves are certainly good (but not the only things that are good). Words enjoyed without any other distractions are certainly good, so perhaps I can believe that "words alone are certain good". I am left with proposing a paradox, loving the poem, while both agreeing and disagreeing with it at the same time. I want to pursue and cultivate my "human truth" whilst paying close attention to "grey truth" when it comes to the reality of human rights, equality, the economy, and the environment.
Samuel Walter Foss, Excerpt from The House by the Side of the Road
Let me live in a house
by the side of the road,
Where the race of men go by-
The men who are good and the men who are bad,
As good and as bad as I.
I would not sit in the scorner’s seat,
Or hurl the cynic’s ban;-
Let me live in a house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.
Refrain from "The Stolen Child" by W.B. Yeats
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Poet Warning
by Jim Harrison
Note: I don't think this poem is in the public domain, so I won't publish it here, but I recommend reading it.
Who Goes With Fergus
by W.B. Yeats
Who will go and ride with Fergus now
And pierce the deep woods woven shade
And dance upon the level shore?
Young man life up your russet brow,
And lift your tender eyelids, maid,
And brood on hopes and fear no more.
And no more turn aside and brood
Upon loves bitter mystery;
For Fergus rules the brazen cars,
And rules the shadows of the wood,
And the white breast of the dim sea
And all disheveled wandering stars.
ONE HOUR TO MADNESS AND JOY
by Walt Whitman
ONE hour to madness and joy! O furious! O confine me not!
(What is this that frees me so in storms? What do my shouts amid lightnings and raging winds mean?)
O to drink the mystic deliria deeper than any other man!
O savage and tender achings! (I bequeath them to you my children, I tell them to you, for reasons, O bridegroom and bride.)
O to be yielded to you whoever you are, and you to be yielded to me in defiance of the world!
O to return to Paradise! O bashful and feminine!
O to draw you to me, to plant on you for the first time the lips of a determin'd man.
O the puzzle, the thrice-tied knot, the deep and dark pool, all untied and illumin'd!
O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last!
To be absolv'd from previous ties and conventions, I from mine and you from yours!
To find a new unthought-of nonchalance with the best of Nature!
To have the gag remov'd from one's mouth!
To have the feeling to-day or any day I am sufficient as I am.
O something unprov'd! something in a trance!
To escape utterly from others' anchors and holds!
To drive free! to love free! to dash reckless and dangerous!
To court destruction with taunts, with invitations!
To ascend, to leap to the heavens of the love indicated to me!
To rise thither with my inebriate soul!
To be lost if it must be so!
To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fulness and freedom!
With one brief hour of madness and joy.
The Return of Fergus
by Jason Talbot
The stolen child is right to weep,
As the lords and ladies of Byzantium
Drink ignorance and greed, and count their sheep,
And praise themselves, singing in the coliseum.
Yet here, we in these shaded woods by the stream,
Strike steel on flint and start a fire,
And in its glow, debate and dream
Of truth and love, that will never tire.
Beware you lords with shallow pleas,
That stir his blissful slumber.
He shakes the hills and wakes the seas,
To rise and rage, and take back all plunder.
Let the Grass Grow Long
By Jason Talbot
A morning dew,
Like it was when you ran,
A child, careless, shoeless,
Absorbent,
Open,
Across the weedy, wet grass,
That had been rightly left
To grow long.
-Published in the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Calendar
Trillium
by Jason Talbot
Jack in the pulpit preaching:
A noble effort, as Spring sap flows
In the lusty warming woodland
Where none can help but love
Or to steal a glance or more
At the Trillium in her short white skirt,
Casting the spell of Spring, breathing in
Hope and risk, and young love again.
She laughs at yesterday, and at tomorrow.
-Published in “The Avocet Journal of Nature Poetry”
Mountains of Stones
by Jason Talbot
Through the pines he would dash
Becoming Sioux, Apache, or Mohican.
He couldn’t be caught,
For every trail was in his mind.
There were mountains of stones
Full of rattlers, he knew.
In the boughs of the tallest tree
He found joy.
Under the canopy of umbrella plants
They found a hidden world
All their own.
With time to lay with his stomach
On the dirt, taking in the world around him.
Then as he grew from boy to man
A road opened before him,
And towards it with vigor he did dash,
But he felt he was not
Becoming Sioux, Apache, or Mohican.
-Published in "The Avocet Journal of Nature Poetry"
Bengaluru
by Jason Talbot
The oboe sings its melancholy song
A piano key or two, tell their story too
My favorite Bacharach comes to an end.
Familiar patchwork of molded concrete
And new glass buildings
Rise in varying degrees of guilt
Over the filthy, sad, now hopeful
Now inspiring, streets below.
Now the Requiem plays.
I, transported, uplifted, by its
Anonymous, eternal wonder
Drink my Kingfisher from a can
And whistle along with the Kyrie
As I look through the window
Over the artificial world
Of the manicured hotel patio
Over the molded concrete
Over the inspiring humanity
Over the seas, over the far-away shore
To a lovely loving wife
And my children
The angels of my soul
Do I do right by them?
Enough for them?
I do not. I do not.
My belly is full of my own wishes
That I have hungrily eaten.
I think to myself, how wanting-to,
and doing, are very separate things….
I am off again
Over the tree tops
Through the clouds
Past time and space
The joy of the ages
The tragedy of unnecessary suffering.
I am the luckiest man alive.
None of us is better than the other at the start
Few better in the middle, and
Our souls are all equal at the end.
Liber scriptus proferetur
In quototum proferetur
Et lux perpetua luceat eis
Our time is short
My time is short
Lord, let them not weep
Let me my sense of humor keep
And leave the world a better place
Then when the sun first saw my face
For my children and wife
May I be what they need, all their life.
The sweet song ends and I quickly soar
Back to my room in Bangalore
To rags and hope, and the Kingfisher’s gone
Time to go down, to the manicured lawn.
-Published in "Coldnoon Journal of International Travel Writing" supported by OP Jindal Global University, Delhi
If you'd like to contact the Argo Builder with any polite questions or comments, please write to [email protected]
Some favorite poems below, and some originals thrown in. But first, a short piece of prose, that to me is poetry.
Herman Melville, 1851, excerpt from Moby Dick
“Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all! why should any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! let us fly these deadly waters! let us home! Wife and child, too, are Starbuck’s- wife and child of his brotherly, sisterly, play-fellow youth; even as thine, sir, are the wife and child of thy loving, longing, paternal old age! Away! let us away!- this instant let me alter the course! How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl on our way to see old Nantucket again! I think, sir, they have some such mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket.”
“They have, they have. I have seen them- some summer days in the morning. About this time- yes, it is his noon nap now- the boy vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me, of cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come back to dance him again.”
The Song of the Happy Shepherd
by W.B. Yeats
The woods of Arcady are dead,
And over is their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey Truth is now her painted toy;
Yet still she turns her restless head:
But O, sick children of the world,
Of all the many changing things
In dreary dancing past us whirled,
To the cracked tune that Chronos sings,
Words alone are certain good.
Where are now the warring kings,
Word be-mockers? — By the Rood
Where are now the warring kings?
An idle word is now their glory,
By the stammering schoolboy said,
Reading some entangled story:
The kings of the old time are dead;
The wandering earth herself may be
Only a sudden flaming word,
In clanging space a moment heard,
Troubling the endless reverie.
Then nowise worship dusty deeds,
Nor seek, for this is also sooth,
To hunger fiercely after truth,
Lest all thy toiling only breeds
New dreams, new dreams; there is no truth
Saving in thine own heart. Seek, then,
No learning from the starry men,
Who follow with the optic glass
The whirling ways of stars that pass --
Seek, then, for this is also sooth,
No word of theirs — the cold star-bane
Has cloven and rent their hearts in twain,
And dead is all their human truth.
Go gather by the humming sea
Some twisted, echo-harbouring shell,
And to its lips thy story tell,
And they thy comforters will be,
Rewarding in melodious guile
Thy fretful words a little while,
Till they shall singing fade in ruth
And die a pearly brotherhood;
For words alone are certain good:
Sing, then, for this is also sooth.
I must be gone: there is a grave
Where daffodil and lily wave,
And I would please the hapless faun,
Buried under the sleepy ground,
With mirthful songs before the dawn.
His shouting days with mirth were crowned;
And still I dream he treads the lawn,
Walking ghostly in the dew,
Pierced by my glad singing through,
My songs of old earth's dreamy youth:
But ah! she dreams not now; dream thou!
For fair are poppies on the brow:
Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.
-----------
Reflections on "The Song Of The Happy Shepherd": It has spoken to me since my early adulthood with a siren song to seek a human truth beyond mechanics and physics, and to seek a world of understanding beyond, and more ethereal than those things; and I believe that "grey truth" can cause us to miss out on some of the more meaningful strengths and experiences of human potential. That said, in these recent days especially, I am left thinking that to disavow the advice of "Starry men" and their "optic glass", who seek to understand and define scientific facts, is a dire mistake. Also , I believe many things are "certain good" , not only words; but words by themselves are certainly good (but not the only things that are good). Words enjoyed without any other distractions are certainly good, so perhaps I can believe that "words alone are certain good". I am left with proposing a paradox, loving the poem, while both agreeing and disagreeing with it at the same time. I want to pursue and cultivate my "human truth" whilst paying close attention to "grey truth" when it comes to the reality of human rights, equality, the economy, and the environment.
Samuel Walter Foss, Excerpt from The House by the Side of the Road
Let me live in a house
by the side of the road,
Where the race of men go by-
The men who are good and the men who are bad,
As good and as bad as I.
I would not sit in the scorner’s seat,
Or hurl the cynic’s ban;-
Let me live in a house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.
Refrain from "The Stolen Child" by W.B. Yeats
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Poet Warning
by Jim Harrison
Note: I don't think this poem is in the public domain, so I won't publish it here, but I recommend reading it.
Who Goes With Fergus
by W.B. Yeats
Who will go and ride with Fergus now
And pierce the deep woods woven shade
And dance upon the level shore?
Young man life up your russet brow,
And lift your tender eyelids, maid,
And brood on hopes and fear no more.
And no more turn aside and brood
Upon loves bitter mystery;
For Fergus rules the brazen cars,
And rules the shadows of the wood,
And the white breast of the dim sea
And all disheveled wandering stars.
ONE HOUR TO MADNESS AND JOY
by Walt Whitman
ONE hour to madness and joy! O furious! O confine me not!
(What is this that frees me so in storms? What do my shouts amid lightnings and raging winds mean?)
O to drink the mystic deliria deeper than any other man!
O savage and tender achings! (I bequeath them to you my children, I tell them to you, for reasons, O bridegroom and bride.)
O to be yielded to you whoever you are, and you to be yielded to me in defiance of the world!
O to return to Paradise! O bashful and feminine!
O to draw you to me, to plant on you for the first time the lips of a determin'd man.
O the puzzle, the thrice-tied knot, the deep and dark pool, all untied and illumin'd!
O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last!
To be absolv'd from previous ties and conventions, I from mine and you from yours!
To find a new unthought-of nonchalance with the best of Nature!
To have the gag remov'd from one's mouth!
To have the feeling to-day or any day I am sufficient as I am.
O something unprov'd! something in a trance!
To escape utterly from others' anchors and holds!
To drive free! to love free! to dash reckless and dangerous!
To court destruction with taunts, with invitations!
To ascend, to leap to the heavens of the love indicated to me!
To rise thither with my inebriate soul!
To be lost if it must be so!
To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fulness and freedom!
With one brief hour of madness and joy.
The Return of Fergus
by Jason Talbot
The stolen child is right to weep,
As the lords and ladies of Byzantium
Drink ignorance and greed, and count their sheep,
And praise themselves, singing in the coliseum.
Yet here, we in these shaded woods by the stream,
Strike steel on flint and start a fire,
And in its glow, debate and dream
Of truth and love, that will never tire.
Beware you lords with shallow pleas,
That stir his blissful slumber.
He shakes the hills and wakes the seas,
To rise and rage, and take back all plunder.
Let the Grass Grow Long
By Jason Talbot
A morning dew,
Like it was when you ran,
A child, careless, shoeless,
Absorbent,
Open,
Across the weedy, wet grass,
That had been rightly left
To grow long.
-Published in the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Calendar
Trillium
by Jason Talbot
Jack in the pulpit preaching:
A noble effort, as Spring sap flows
In the lusty warming woodland
Where none can help but love
Or to steal a glance or more
At the Trillium in her short white skirt,
Casting the spell of Spring, breathing in
Hope and risk, and young love again.
She laughs at yesterday, and at tomorrow.
-Published in “The Avocet Journal of Nature Poetry”
Mountains of Stones
by Jason Talbot
Through the pines he would dash
Becoming Sioux, Apache, or Mohican.
He couldn’t be caught,
For every trail was in his mind.
There were mountains of stones
Full of rattlers, he knew.
In the boughs of the tallest tree
He found joy.
Under the canopy of umbrella plants
They found a hidden world
All their own.
With time to lay with his stomach
On the dirt, taking in the world around him.
Then as he grew from boy to man
A road opened before him,
And towards it with vigor he did dash,
But he felt he was not
Becoming Sioux, Apache, or Mohican.
-Published in "The Avocet Journal of Nature Poetry"
Bengaluru
by Jason Talbot
The oboe sings its melancholy song
A piano key or two, tell their story too
My favorite Bacharach comes to an end.
Familiar patchwork of molded concrete
And new glass buildings
Rise in varying degrees of guilt
Over the filthy, sad, now hopeful
Now inspiring, streets below.
Now the Requiem plays.
I, transported, uplifted, by its
Anonymous, eternal wonder
Drink my Kingfisher from a can
And whistle along with the Kyrie
As I look through the window
Over the artificial world
Of the manicured hotel patio
Over the molded concrete
Over the inspiring humanity
Over the seas, over the far-away shore
To a lovely loving wife
And my children
The angels of my soul
Do I do right by them?
Enough for them?
I do not. I do not.
My belly is full of my own wishes
That I have hungrily eaten.
I think to myself, how wanting-to,
and doing, are very separate things….
I am off again
Over the tree tops
Through the clouds
Past time and space
The joy of the ages
The tragedy of unnecessary suffering.
I am the luckiest man alive.
None of us is better than the other at the start
Few better in the middle, and
Our souls are all equal at the end.
Liber scriptus proferetur
In quototum proferetur
Et lux perpetua luceat eis
Our time is short
My time is short
Lord, let them not weep
Let me my sense of humor keep
And leave the world a better place
Then when the sun first saw my face
For my children and wife
May I be what they need, all their life.
The sweet song ends and I quickly soar
Back to my room in Bangalore
To rags and hope, and the Kingfisher’s gone
Time to go down, to the manicured lawn.
-Published in "Coldnoon Journal of International Travel Writing" supported by OP Jindal Global University, Delhi