Solocrow — One Crow Against the World

A Song of Opposites

Posted on May 25th, 2007 by solocrow.
Categories: Dead Poets, Generic Blatherings.

“Under the flag
Of each his faction, they to battle bring
Their embryon atoms.” - Milton

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Karasu

Posted on May 8th, 2007 by solocrow.
Categories: Dead Poets, Generic Blatherings.

Kareeda ni
Karasu no tomarikeri
Aki no kure

On the dead limb
squats a crow –
autumn night.

~ A haiku from Matsuo Basho (1664-1694).

Image: Crows, 1766; pair of six-fold screens; ink and gold on paper by Maruyama Okyo (like Basho, also from the Edo period).

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SONG (”OLD ADAM…”)

Posted on March 14th, 2007 by solocrow.
Categories: Dead Poets.

Old Adam, the carrion crow,
The old crow of Cairo;
He sat in the shower, and let it flow
Under his tail and over his crest;
And through every feather
Leaked the wet weather;
And the bough swung under his nest;
For his beak it was heavy with marrow.
Is that the wind dying? O no;
It’s only two devils, that blow
Through a murderer’s bones, to and fro,
In the ghosts’ moonshine.

Ho! Eve, my grey carrion wife,
When we have supped on kings’ marrow,
Where shall we drink and make merry our life?
Our nest it is queen Cleopatra’s skull,
’Tis cloven and cracked,
And battered and hacked,
But with tears of blue eyes it is full:
Let us drink then, my raven of Cairo.
Is that the wind dying? O no;
It’s only two devils, that blow
Through a murderer’s bones, to and fro,
In the ghosts’ moonshine.

~ Thomas Lovell Beddoes

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Portrait d’une Femme

Posted on February 9th, 2007 by solocrow.
Categories: Dead Poets.

Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,
London has swept about you this score years
And bright ships left you this or that in fee:
Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things,
Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price.
Great minds have sought you–lacking someone else.
You have been second always. Tragical?
No. You preferred it to the usual thing:
One dull man, dulling and uxorious,
One average mind–with one thought less, each year.
Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit
Hours, where something might have floated up.
And now you pay one. Yes, you richly pay.
You are a person of some interest, one comes to you
And takes strange gain away:
Trophies fished up; some curious suggestion;
Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale or two,
Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else
That might prove useful and yet never proves,
That never fits a corner or shows use,
Or finds its hour upon the loom of days:
The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work;
Idols and ambergris and rare inlays,
These are your riches, your great store; and yet
For all this sea-hoard of deciduous things,
Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff:
In the slow float of differing light and deep,
No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,
Nothing that’s quite your own.
Yet this is you.

Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

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