Poets United Midweek Motif ~ When I Think About Myself

   

“This above all; to thine own self be true.”— Shakespeare

SOURCE

“I am very much aware of my own double self. The well-known one is very under control; everything is planned and very secure. The unknown one can be very unpleasant. I think this side is responsible for all the creative work — he is in touch with the child. He is not rational; he is impulsive and extremely emotional.”—Ingmar Bergman

Midweek Motif ~ When I think About Myself

Let’s begin today with Maya Angelou’s poem When I Think About Myself:

When I think about myself,
I almost laugh myself to death,
My life has been one great big joke,
A dance that's walked
A song that's spoke,
I laugh so hard I almost choke
When I think about myself.

Sixty years in these folks' world
The child I works for calls me girl
I say 'Yes ma'am' for working's sake.
Too proud to bend
Too poor to break,
I laugh until my stomach ache,
When I think about myself.

My folks can make me split my side,
I laughed so hard I nearly died,
The tales they tell, sound just like lying,
They grow the fruit,
But eat the rind,
I laugh until I start to crying,
When I think about my folks. 

                

Do you find time to think about yourself? Even if you don’t you have to do it Now for this week’s Motif’s sake J We want a self-portrait poem this week.

           

What thoughts rise up when you think of yourself? Is it about the long path you’ve been walking that has almost shaped you? Is it about the small but meaningful and significant moments that have changed you? Is it about the thousand ‘yous’ that’s living within you?

The list can go on and on. Think over and write your lines:

I Am

by John Clare

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest- that I loved the best-
Are strange- nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below- above the vaulted sky. 

My Own Heart Let Me More Have Pity On

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

My own heart let me more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst's all-in-all in all a world of wet.

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room, let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
's not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather - as skis
Betweenpie mountains - lights a lovely mile.

Please share your new poem using Mr. Linky below and visit others in the spirit of the community—

                (Next week Susan’s Midweek Motif will be ~ Lady Liberty)

        

The Living Dead

 Honouring our poetic ancestors

All Nature Has a Feeling

By John Clare (1793-1864)

All nature has a feeling: woods, fields, brooks
Are life eternal: and in silence they
Speak happiness beyond the reach of books;
There's nothing mortal in them; their decay
Is the green life of change; to pass away
And come again in blooms revivified.
Its birth was heaven, eternal is its stay,
And with the sun and moon shall still abide
Beneath their day and night and heaven wide.


I very much share these sentiments!

John Clare was an English poet who often celebrated nature. He also wrote lovely love poems, and some political pieces including at least one satire.

I was a bit torn on which to feature, but nature seemed appropriate. I think that we become particularly conscious of nature at times of seasonal change such as now, when Spring is beginning here (Australia) and in the Northern Hemisphere autumn has arrived.

We most often see Clare pictured as a romantically good-looking, open-faced young man. Other images show him grown bald and portly, with a somewhat vacant look. I've chosen a portrait between these extremes.

Known as "the peasant poet of Northamptonshire" (which is on his gravestone) he had problems with poverty, limited education, the English class system, alcohol, and both physical and mental illness. He suffered from bouts of depression and had a stroke from which, we are told, he never really recovered. Towards the end of his life he was delusional.

He spent his final years in and out of asylums. The good news is that he was humanely treated and encouraged to write; in fact wrote some of his most admired work there.

His poetry did achieve recognition in his lifetime. He was very successful in his early poetic career. Ultimately, though, he could not manage enough sales to support himself and his family (he had seven children). He was forced by necessity to find other work as well. I guess most of us can relate to that!

Wikipedia tells us that although he was politically and socially conservative, he was poetically innovative. He tried to make a case for not being strictly grammatical; he included the slang and folk phrases of the time in his poems; he had a more practical, less sentimental understanding of the countryside than the Romantics; and he could be deeply metaphysical.

His importance was re-evaluated in the 20th Century. He is now considered influential. Among other things he is acknowledged for the Clarian sonnet, his own sonnet variation. (It's a lovely one to work in!) Amy Trumble treated Poets United to one of Clare's own examples back in 2011, in her "Exploring the Classics" series. Here it is.

In an article entitled "Man Out of Time", Christopher Caldwell examines the place of Clare's poetics in depth, examining such factors as patronising publishers of his day who "corrected" his work, and the depth it had when restored to the original. The article reviews John Clare: A Biography by Jonathan Bate (also available from Amazon UK and Google Books).

You can find more of his poems at PoemHunter, and collections of his work are still available at Amazon or through Google Books. (Scroll down to see all the different titles available. On the other hand, make sure you don't get him mixed up with contemporary writers of the same name.)

His life was mostly sad and difficult, yet in his pastoral poetry he left us some of the most joyful verses in the English language.

John Clare's "Sonnet"

Sonnet

I love to see the summer beaming forth

And white wool sack clouds sailing to the north

I love to see the wild flowers come again

And mare blobs stain with gold the meadow drain

And water lillies whiten on the floods

Where reed clumps rustle like a wind shook wood

Where from her hiding place the Moor Hen pushes

And seeks her flag nest floating in bull rushes

I like the willow leaning half way o’er

The clear deep lake to stand upon its shore

I love the hay grass when the flower head swings

To summer winds and insects happy wings

That sport about the meadow the bright day

And see bright beetles in the clear lake play

John Clare, 1841.

John Clare (1793-1864) was born in the Northamptonshire village of Helpston and attended school there until he was around eleven years old, following which he was largely self-taught. Clare’s first book of poetry: Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820), was very well-received, and his work was extremely popular with the public. In the 1830s, however, his popularity faded; a problem his publishers tried to correct by standardizing his verses into what they considered to be more contemporary poetic conventions. Clare wrote this Sonnet in 1841, the year before he was confined in the Northampton County Asylum where he spent the rest of his days.

Another Sonnet, for all of you. Can you tell I love Sonnets? Especially one about the summertime which is finally coming around. What do you all think of this work?

by A.M. Trumble

A Collection of John Clare's poems