This life political

If you’ve met me, you probably know my politics, which are also easily gleaned from even the most cursory browse through these pages.  So in a spirit of multipartisanship, let us enjoy the quipping and the sniping of selected poets on themes political, amatory and existential.  Should any of you not get the election-night result you want, these verses are easily adaptable:

Loudspeaker

Better a tent of skins, a coracle,
A beaver’s house that listens to reeds,
Than the vast gobblings of this oracle
That on the cud of Nothing chews and feeds.

(RH)

When two lovers meet, then
There’s an end of writing
Thought and Analytics:
Lovers, like the dead,
In their loves are equal:
Sophomores and peasants,
Poets and their critics
Are the same in bed.

(W.H. Auden, “Heavy Date”)

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

(Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West”)

As many as be here of Pandar’s hall,
Your eyes, half out, weep out at Pandar’s fall;
Or if you cannot weep, yet give some groans,
Though not for me, yet for your aching bones.
Brethren and sisters of the hold-door trade,
Some two months hence my will shall here be made;
It should be now, but that my fear is this:
Some gallèd goose of Winchester would hiss.
Till then I’ll sweat, and seek about for eases,
And at that time bequeath you my diseases.

(Troilus and Cressida, V.10.48-57)

Material more timely and perhaps more entertaining can be found here and here, though again, the connections are associative and adjunct rather than direct.

Tagged as: election, poetry