Month: August 2020

“Stopping Place” by Edith Sitwell

"Stopping Place"

In highly-varnished noisy heat

As through a lens that does not fit—

The faces jolt in cubes and I

Perceive their odd solidity

And lack of meaning absolute:

For why should noses thus protrude

And to what purpose can relate

Each hair so queerly separate?

Anchored upon the puff of breeze

As shallow as the crude blue seas,

The coloured blocks and cubes of faces

 

[ . . . ]

 

Edith Sitwell's poem "Stopping Place" was published in the 1918 "cycle" of Wheels. To read this poem in full in a digitized version of this publication, follow the link(s) below:

Archive.org

The Modernist Journals Project

“A House” by J.C. Squire

"A House"

Now very quietly, and rather mournfully,

In clouds of hyacinth the sun retires,

And all the stubble-fields that were so warm to him

Keep but in memory their borrowed fires.

 

And I, the traveller, break, still unsatisfied,

From that faint exquisite celestial strand,

And turn and see again the only dwelling-place

In this wide wilderness of darkening land.

 

The house, that house, O now what change has

come to it.

Its crude red-brick facade, its roof of slate;

What imperceptible swift hand has given it

A new, a wonderful, a queenly state?

 

[ . . . ]

 

J.C. Squire's poem "A House" was published in Georgian Poetry 1916-1917. To read this poem in a digitized version of this publication, follow the link(s) below:

Archive.org

Project Gutenberg (HTML version)

 

“Venus Transiens” by Amy Lowell

"Venus Transiens"

Tell me,

Was Venus more beautiful

Than you are,

When she topped

The crinkled waves,

Drifting shoreward

On her plaited shell?

Was Botticelli's vision

Fairer than mine;

And were the painted rosebuds

He tossed his lady,

Of better worth

Than the words I blow about you

To cover your too great loveliness

As with a gauze

Of misted silver?

For me,

You stand poised

In the blue and buoyant air,

Cinctured by bright winds,

Treading the sunlight.

And the waves which precede you

Ripple and stir

The sands at my feet.

 

Amy Lowell's poem "Venus Transiens" was published in the 1915 Some Imagist Poets anthology. To read this poem in a digitized version of this publication, follow the link(s) below:

Archive.org

HathiTrust

The Modernist Journals Project

“Six Significant Landscapes” by Wallace Stevens

"Six Significant Landscapes"

I.

An old man sits

In the shadow of a pine tree

In China.

He sees a larkspur,

Blue and white,

At the edge of the shadow,

Move in the wind.

His beard moves in the wind.

The pine tree moves in the wind.

Thus water flows

Over weeds.

 

II.

The night is of the color

 

[ . . . ]

 

Wallace Stevens' sequence "Six Significant Landscapes" was published in the 1916 Others anthology. To read this poem sequence in full in a digitized version of this publication, follow the link(s) below:

Archive.org

“Gothic” by Aldous Huxley

"Gothic"

Sharp spires pierce upwards, and the clouds are full of

tumbling bells. Reckless, break-neck, head over heels

down an airy spiral of stairs run the bells.' Upon Paul's

steeple stands a tree.'

Up again and then once more to the bottom, two steps at

a time. 'As full of apples as can be.'

 

[ . . . ]

 

Aldous Huxley's poem "Gothic" was published in the 1918 "cycle" of Wheels. to read this poem in full in a digitized version of this publication, follow the link(s) below:

Archive.org

The Modernist Journals Project