Sleep evades me, yet again. A strange sense of melancholy descends. Its a bittersweet feeling. What better time to read some of my all time favourite poetry.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines - Pablo Neruda
Tonight I can write the saddest lines,
Write, for example 'The night is shattered,
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I cannot have her.To feel that I have lost her.
To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
What does it matter that my love could not keep her?
The night is shattered and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for and she is not with me.
The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.
I, no longer love her, thats certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
Another's. She will be anothers.Like my kisses before.
Her voice.Her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I, no longer love her, thats certain. But maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this be the last pain that she has made me suffer.
And these the last verses that I write for her.
Neruda was part of my Literature course during O' Levels and Ive been in love with his work ever since. The agonizing poignancy, the haunting repetition...uff amazing! Another great poem which Ive always been fascinated with is by Mathew Arnold and what makes it even more special is that it is so in sync with the maddening confusion that engulfs our lives today.
Dover Beach - Matthew Arnold
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon blanched land,
Listen! You hear the grating roar
of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return,up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago,
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
of human misery; we
find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant Northern sea.
The Sea of Faith,
was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore,
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled,
But now I only hear,
Its melancholy, long withdrawing roar,
Retreating to the breath,
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
and naked shingles of the world.
Ah, Love! Let us be true
to one another! for the world which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams
so various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Noe certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain,
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night,
The last verse of this poem just simply takes my breath away every time I read it. Excruciatingly beautiful...
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