March

[selenak]

No news about honorh yet; poetry is as good a distraction as any when fretting. So, a march poem by Ted Hughes.

March morning unlike others

Blue haze. Bees hanging in air at the hive-mouth.
Crawling in prone stupor of sun
On the hive-lip. Snowdrops. Two buzzards,
Still-wings, each
Magnetized to the other,
Float oprbits.
Cattle standing warm. Lit, happy stillness.
A raven, under the hill,
Coughing among bare oaks.
Aircraft, elated, splitting blue.
Leisure to stand. The knee-deep mud at the trough
Stiffening. Lambs freed to be foolish.

The earth invalid, dropsied, bruised, wheeled
Out into the sun,
After the frightful operation.
She lies back, wounds undressed to the sun,
To be healed,
Sheltered from the sneapy chill creeping North wind,
Leans back, eyes closed, exhausted, smiling
Into the sun. Perhaps dozing a little.
While we sit, and smile, and wait, and know
She is not going to die.

Comments

[bimo]

Cones
by F.S. Flint

The blue mist of after rain
fills all the trees;

the sunlight gilds the tops
of the popular spires, far off,
behind the houses.

Here a branch sways
and there
a sparrow twitters.

The curtain's hem, rose-embroidered,
flutters, and half reveals
a burnt-red chimney pot.

The quiet in the room
bears patiently
a footfall on the street.

Please let me know if there's anything I can do, well except spamming your journal with imagist poetry....

[selenak]

That is a beautiful poem, and can you tell me more about the author?

Also: see newest post. I'm so relieved, I can't tell you.

[bimo]

Wonderful news! I'm so relieved that HonorH is safe and accounted for, even though I only know her via her presence in your journal.

As for F.S. Flint:

Full name Frank Stuart Flint. One of the more prominent members of the British Imagist group, and apparently extremely linguistically gifted, as he managed to work up his way from a working class background into the circles of Hulme and Pound. I must admit, though, that I would never have discovered him if he hadn't been included in a larger anthology of Imagist poetry.

Here's what the Britannica has to say on the subject:

born Dec. 19, 1885, London, Eng.
died Feb. 28, 1960, Berkshire


in full Frank Stuart Flint English poet and translator, prominent in the Imagist movement (expression of precise images in free verse), whose best poems reflect the disciplined economy of that school.

The son of a commercial traveler, Flint left school at the age of 13 and worked at a variety of jobs. At the age of 17 his reading of a volume by the 19th-century Romantic poet John Keats fired his enthusiasm for poetry. Two years later he became a civil-service typist and enrolled in a workingman's night school. He learned French and Latin (eventually he mastered10 languages) and after World War I rose to become a high official in the Ministry of Labour.

Flint's first volume of poetry, In the Net of the Stars (1909), was a collection of love lyrics, clearly showing the influence of Keats and his contemporary Percy Bysshe Shelley. The same year, he and a group of young poets, all dissatisfied with the state of English poetry, began working to overthrow conventional versification and to replace strict metre with unrhymed cadence (a term he appropriated). His friendship with the English poet T.E. Hulme and the American poet Ezra Pound helped him to develop further his own distinctive poetic style. Cadences (1915) and Otherworld (1925) established him as a leading member of the Imagists.

After the death of his wife in 1920, Flint suddenly stopped writing. He did, however, continue to produce translations, mostly of French works.