R.E.Slater - Me and My Yesterday Church

"because the world needs more, not less,

love, fidelity, commitment, devotion, and sacrifice"

Me and My Yesterday Church

R.E. Slater

December 23, 2020

Farewell,

Farewell to all my conversations

Farewell to all my bright heart's dreamin's

I just wanna feel something

I just wanna believe in something

Keep me up all night

Keep me up long nights.

Farewell,

Farewell to all my yesterday's teachings

Farewell to all my last year's feelings

I just wanna feel something

I just wanna believe in something

Keep me up all year long

Keep me up all year long.

Hello,

Hello to all my new conversations

Hello to all my sad heart's seasons

I once felt something

I had once felt something

Loved you yesterday

Loved you once yesterday.

Hello,

Hello to all my new inspirations

Hello to all my waking sensations

No more sunrise suffocations

No more noontide horrorfications

Let you go

Let you go for all my tomorrows.

Overcome here,

Overcome and not forsaking

Overcome here not letting you flow by

My yesterday's illuminations

My tomorrow's inaugurations

Won't let you go

Won't let you go, no, not I.

No more,

No more sad goodbyes

No more lost goodbyes

No more dark night's weepings

No more daylight sweepings

Becoming has commenced

Becoming is becoming again.

R.E. Slater

December 23, 2020

*dedicated to the process theologies

of open and relational Christology

and letting go of the Trumpian church

once hallowed, once divine.

*ps... thanks to Miley Cyrus

for the inspiration; Rock On...

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

all rights reserved

* * * * * * * * *

Plastic Hearts (Backyard Sessions)

by Miley Cyrus (Official Music Video)

LYRICS

Hello
The sunny place for shady people
A crowded room where nobody goes
You can be whoever you wanna be here

And Oh
I’ve been living at the Chateau
Shouldn’t drive but I should really go home
I don’t even know ‘em but they won’t leave here

Frightened by my own reflection
Desperate for a new connection
Pull you in but don’t you get too close
Love you now but not tomorrow
Wrong to steal but not to borrow
Pull you in but don’t you get too close

I’ve been California dreaming
Plastic hearts are bleeding
Keep me up all night
(keep me up)
Keep me up all night
(all night)

Lost in black hole conversation
Sunrise suffocation
Keep me up all night
(keep me up)
Keep me up all night

I just wanna feel
I just wanna feel something
But I keep feeling nothing all night long

All night long
All night long
All night long

Hello
I’ll tell you all the people I know
Sell you something that you already own
I can be whoever you want me to be

Love me now but not tomorrow
Fill me up but leave me hollow
Pull me in but don’t you get too close

I’ve been California dreaming
Plastic hearts are bleeding
Keep me up all night
(keep me up)
Keep me up all night
(all night)

lost in Black hole conversation
Sunrise suffocation
Keep me up all night
(keep me up)
Keep me up all night

I just wanna feel
I just wanna feel something
But I keep feeling nothing all night long
All night long
All night long
All night long

I’ve been California dreaming
Plastic hearts are bleeding
Keep me up all night
(keep me up)
Keep me up all night
(all night)

lost in Black hole conversations
Sunrise suffocation
Keep me up all night
(keep me up)
Keep me up all night

I just wanna feel
I just wanna feel something
But I keep feeling nothing all night long

Poems of Paris & Love

 

Emilia Clarke - La Vie En Rose

May 9, 2018

Song: Melody Gardot - La Vie En Rose

10 of the Best Poems about Paris

Selected by Dr Oliver Tearle

Previously, we’ve offered ten of the best poems about the city, ten of the best New York poems, and some of our favourite poems about London. Now, it’s time to hop across the Channel to the French capital, with ten of the greatest poems about Paris, from French, English, and American poets.

Charles Baudelaire, ‘Parisian Dream’. What better place to begin our pick of classic Paris poems with a poem by the nineteenth-century French writer who reinvented the way poets wrote about the city? Here, Baudelaire (1821-67) blends the real with the illusory, as the title suggests, appealing to art and architecture as he recalls a vivid dream of the city he experienced… - Dr. Oliver Tearle

Fleurs du mal / Flowers of Evil

by Charles Baudelaire

Rêve parisien

À Constantin Guys

I

De ce terrible paysage,
Tel que jamais mortel n'en vit,
Ce matin encore l'image,
Vague et lointaine, me ravit.

Le sommeil est plein de miracles!
Par un caprice singulier
J'avais banni de ces spectacles
Le végétal irrégulier,

Et, peintre fier de mon génie,
Je savourais dans mon tableau
L'enivrante monotonie
Du métal, du marbre et de l'eau.

Babel d'escaliers et d'arcades,
C'était un palais infini
Plein de bassins et de cascades
Tombant dans l'or mat ou bruni;

Et des cataractes pesantes,
Comme des rideaux de cristal
Se suspendaient, éblouissantes,
À des murailles de métal.

Non d'arbres, mais de colonnades
Les étangs dormants s'entouraient
Où de gigantesques naïades,
Comme des femmes, se miraient.

Des nappes d'eau s'épanchaient, bleues,
Entre des quais roses et verts,
Pendant des millions de lieues,
Vers les confins de l'univers:

C'étaient des pierres inouïes
Et des flots magiques, c'étaient
D'immenses glaces éblouies
Par tout ce qu'elles reflétaient!

Insouciants et taciturnes,
Des Ganges, dans le firmament,
Versaient le trésor de leurs urnes
Dans des gouffres de diamant.

Architecte de mes féeries,
Je faisais, à ma volonté,
Sous un tunnel de pierreries
Passer un océan dompté;

Et tout, même la couleur noire,
Semblait fourbi, clair, irisé;
Le liquide enchâssait sa gloire
Dans le rayon cristallisé.

Nul astre d'ailleurs, nuls vestiges
De soleil, même au bas du ciel,
Pour illuminer ces prodiges,
Qui brillaient d'un feu personnel!

Et sur ces mouvantes merveilles
Planait (terrible nouveauté!
Tout pour l'oeil, rien pour les oreilles!)
Un silence d'éternité.

II

En rouvrant mes yeux pleins de flamme
J'ai vu l'horreur de mon taudis,
Et senti, rentrant dans mon âme,
La pointe des soucis maudits;

La pendule aux accents funèbres
Sonnait brutalement midi,
Et le ciel versait des ténèbres
Sur le triste monde engourdi.

— Charles Baudelaire

Parisian Dream

To Constantin Guys

I

This morning I am still entranced
By the image, distant and dim,
Of that awe-inspiring landscape
Such as no mortal ever saw.

Sleep is full of miracles!
Obeying a curious whim,
I had banned from that spectacle
Irregular vegetation,

And, painter proud of his genius,
I savored in my picture
The delightful monotony
Of water, marble, and metal.

Babel of arcades and stairways,
It was a palace infinite,
Full of basins and of cascades
Falling on dull or burnished gold,

And heavy waterfalls,
Like curtains of crystal,
Were hanging, bright and resplendent,
From ramparts of metal.

Not with trees but with colonnades
The sleeping ponds were encircled;
In these mirrors huge naiads
Admired themselves like women.

Streams of blue water flowed along
Between rose and green embankments,
Stretching away millions of leagues
Toward the end of the universe;

There were indescribable stones
And magic waves; there were
Enormous glaciers bedazzled
By everything they reflected!

Insouciant and taciturn,
Ganges, in the firmament,
Poured out the treasure of their urns
Into chasms made of diamonds.

Architect of my fairyland,
Whenever it pleased me I made
A vanquished ocean flow
Into a tunnel of jewels;

And all, even the color black,
Seemed polished, bright, iridescent,
Liquid enchased its own glory
In the crystallized rays of light.

Moreover, no star, no glimmer
Of sun, even at the sky's rim,
Illuminated these marvels
That burned with a personal fire!

And over these shifting wonders
Hovered (terrible novelty!
All for the eye, naught for the ear!)
The silence of eternity.

II

Opening my eyes full of flames
I saw my miserable room
And felt the cursed blade of care
Sink deep into my heart again;

The clock with its death-like accent
Was brutally striking noon;
The sky was pouring down its gloom
Upon the dismal, torpid world.

— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

Parisian Dream

To Constantin Guys

I

Of the dread landscape that I saw,
Where human eyes were never set,
I still am ravished by the awe
That, vague and distant, haunts me yet.

Sleep is of miracles so fain
That I (O singular caprice!)
As being formless, could obtain
That vegetable life should cease.

A painter, in my genius free,
I there exulted in the fettle
Derived from a monotony
Composed of marble, lymph, and metal.

Babels of stairways and arcades,
Endless and topless to behold,
With ponds, and jets, and steep cascades
Filling receptacles of gold:

Ponderous cataracts there swung
Like crystal curtains, foaming shawls —
Dazzling and glittering they hung
Suspended from the metal walls.

Not trees, but colonnades, enclosed
Motionless lakes, besides whose shelves
Gigantic naiades reposed,
Like women, gazing at themselves.

Blue sheets of water interlay
Unnumbered quays of green and rose,
That stretched a million leagues away
To where the bounds of space impose.

'Twas formed of unknown stones that blazed
And magic waves that intersect,
Where icebergs floated, seeming dazed
With all they mirror and reflect.

Impassive, cold, and taciturn,
Great Ganges, through the sky's vast prism,
Each poured the treasures of its urn
Into a diamond abysm.

Architect of my fairy scene,
I willed, by wondrous stratagems,
An ocean, tamed, to pass between
A tunnel that was made of gems.

There all things, even the colour black,
Seemed irridescently to play,
And liquid crystalised its lack
Of outline in a frozen ray.

No star, no sun could be discerned,
Even low down, in that vast sky:
The fire was personal that burned
To show these marvels to the eye.

Above these moving wonders sheer
There soared (that such a thing should be!
All for the eye, none for the ear!)
A silence of eternity.

II

My opening eyes, as red as coal,
The horror of my lodging met.
I felt re-entering my soul
The knife of cares and vain regret.

The clock with brutal accent played
Funereal chimes. The time was noon
And heaven covered, with its shade,
The world, this fatuous balloon!

— Roy Campbell, Poems of Baudelaire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952)

Parisian Dream

I

That marvelous landscape of my dream —
Which no eye knows, nor ever will —
At moments, wide awake, I seem
To grasp, and it excites me still.

Sleep, how miraculous you are —
A strange caprice had urged my hand
To banish, as irregular,
All vegetation from that land;

And, proud of what my art had done,
I viewed my painting, knew the great
Intoxicating monotone
Of marble, water, steel and slate.

Staircases and arcades there were
In a long labyrinth, which led
To a vast palace; fountains there
Were gushing gold, and gushing lead.

And many a heavy cataract
Hung like a curtain, — did not fall,
As water does, but hung, compact,
Crystal, on many a metal wall.

Tall nymphs with Titan breasts and knees
Gazed at their images unblurred,
Where groves of colonnades, not trees,
Fringed a deep pool where nothing stirred.

Blue sheets of water, left and right,
Spread between quays of rose and green,
To the world's end and out of sight,
And still expanded, though unseen.

Enchanted rivers, those — with jade
And jasper were their banks bedecked;
Enormous mirrors, dazzled, made
Dizzy by all they did reflect.

And many a Ganges, taciturn
And heedless, in the vaulted air,
Poured out the treasure of its urn
Into a gulf of diamond there.

As architect, it tempted me
To tame the ocean at its source;
And this I did, — I made the sea
Under a jeweled culvert course.

And every color, even black,
Became prismatic, polished, bright;
The liquid gave its glory back
Mounted in iridescent light.

There was no moon, there was no sun, —
For why should sun and moon conspire
To light such prodigies? — each one
Blazed with its own essential fire!

A silence like eternity
Prevailed, there was no sound to hear;
These marvels all were for the eye,
And there was nothing for the ear.

II

I woke; my mind was bright with flame;
I saw the cheap and sordid hole
I live in, and my cares all came
Burrowing back into my soul.

Brutally the twelve strokes of noon
Against my naked ear were hurled;
And a gray sky was drizzling down
Upon this sad, lethargic world.

— Edna St. Vincent Millay, Flowers of Evil (NY: Harper and Brothers, 1936)

* * * * * * *

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘Place de la Bastille, Paris’. A leading poet and painter in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Rossetti (1828-82) uses this sonnet to reflect upon Paris’s bloody past, thinking back to a time when the Bastille prison stood upon this spot in the capital, before the Revolution of 1789. - Dr. Oliver Tearle

Place De La Bastille, Paris
by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

How dear the sky has been above this place!
Small treasures of this sky that we see here
Seen weak through prison-bars from year to year;
Eyed with a painful prayer upon God's grace
To save, and tears which stayed along the face
Lifted at sunset. Yea, how passing dear
Those nights when through the bars a wind left clear
The heaven, and moonlight soothed the limpid space!
So was it, till one night the secret kept
Safe in low vault and stealthy corridor
Was blown abroad on gospel-tongues of flame.
O ways of God, mysterious evermore!
How many on this spot have cursed and wept
That all might stand here now and own Thy Name.

* * * * * * *

Arthur Symons, ‘Paris’. Before T. S. Eliot subsumed the Symbolist method into his work, Symons (1865-1945) was pioneering Symbolist techniques to describe the city in his own poetry, and ‘Paris’ provides a nice example of this. We can clearly detect Baudelaire’s influence in particular: - Dr. Oliver Tearle

Paris
by Arthur Symons

My Paris is a land where twilight days
Merge into violent nights of black and gold;
Where, it may be, the flower of dawn is cold:
Ah, but the gold nights, and the scented ways!

Eyelids of women, little curls of hair,
A little nose curved softly, like a shell,
A red mouth like a wound, a mocking veil:
Phantoms, before the dawn, how phantom-fair!

And every woman with beseeching eyes,
Or with enticing eyes, or amorous,
Offers herself, a rose, and craves of us
A rose's place among our memories.

* * * * * * *

Sara Teasdale, ‘Paris in Spring’. Teasdale (1884-1933) was an American poet, who wrote many poems set in cities both in America and Europe. Here, she describes Paris in springtime, taking in many of the locales around the city: - Dr. Oliver Tearle

Paris In Spring

by Sara Teasdale

The city's all a-shining

Beneath a fickle sun,
A gay young wind's a-blowing,
The little shower is done.
But the rain-drops still are clinging
And falling one by one --
Oh it's Paris, it's Paris,
And spring-time has begun.

I know the Bois is twinkling
In a sort of hazy sheen,
And down the Champs the gray old arch
Stands cold and still between.
But the walk is flecked with sunlight
Where the great acacias lean,
Oh it's Paris, it's Paris,
And the leaves are growing green.

The sun's gone in, the sparkle's dead,
There falls a dash of rain,
But who would care when such an air
Comes blowing up the Seine?
And still Ninette sits sewing
Beside her window-pane,
When it's Paris, it's Paris,
And spring-time's come again.

* * * * * * *

Ezra Pound, ‘In a Station of the Metro’. Perhaps the most famous very short poem about Paris, this two-line imagist masterpiece captures the sudden fleeting impression of the commuters at a Paris Metro station. - Dr. Oliver Tearle

In a Station of the Metro
by Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

* * * * * * *

Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Zone’. Written in 1913, ‘Zone’ captures the experience of modern-day Paris, with the sound of aeroplanes and the sights of the city, advertisements and the bustle of the capital. - Dr. Oliver Tearle 

Zone

by Guillaume Apollinaire

At last you're tired of this elderly world

Shepherdess O Eiffel Tower this morning the bridges are bleating

You're fed up living with antiquity

Even the automobiles are antiques
Religion alone remains entirely new religion
Remains as simple as an airport hangar

In all Europe only you O Christianism are not old
The most modem European Pope Pius X it's you
The windows watch and shame has sealed
The confessionals against you this morning
Flyers catalogs hoardings sing aloud
Here's poetry this morning and for prose you're reading the tabloids
Disposable paperbacks filled with crimes and police
Biographies of great men a thousand various titles

I saw a pretty street this morning I forgot the name
New and cleanly it was the sun's clarion
Executives laborers exquisite stenographers
Criss-cross Monday through Saturday four times daily
Three times every morning sirens groan
At the lunch hour a rabid bell barks
The lettering on the walls and billboards
the doorplates and posters twitters parakeet-style
I love the swank of that street
Situated in Paris between the rue Aumont-Thieville and the avenue des Ternes

Here's the young street and you're still a baby
Dressed by your mother in blue and white only
You're very pious and with your oldest friend Rene Dalize
Nothing is more fun than Masses and Litanies

It's nine o'clock the gaslight is low you leave your bed
You pray all night in the school chapel
Meanwhile an eternal adorable amethyst depth
Christ's flamboyant halo spins forever
Behold the beautiful lily of worship
Behold the red-haired torch inextinguishable
Behold the pale son and scarlet of the dolorous Mother
Behold the tree forever tufted with prayer
Behold the double gallows honor and eternity
Behold the six-pointed star
Behold the God who dies on Friday and rises on Sunday
Behold the Christ who flies higher than aviators
He holds the world's record for altitude

Christ pupil of the eye
Twentieth pupil of the centuries knows its stuff
And bird-changed this century like Jesus climbs the sky
Devils in the abyss look up to watch
They say this century mimics Simon Magus in Judea
It takes a thief to catch a thief they cry
Angels flutter around the pretty trapeze act
Icarus Enoch Elijah Apollonius of Tyana
Hover as close to the airplane as they can
Sometimes they give way to other men hauling the Eucharist
Priests eternally climbing the elevating Host
The plane descends at last its wings unfolded
bursts into a million swallows
Full speed come the crows the owls and falcons
From Africa ibis storks flamingoes
The Roc-bird famous with writers and poets
Glides Adam's skull the original head in its talons
The horizon screams an eagle pouncing
And from America there comes a hummingbird
From China sinuous peehees
Who have only one wing and who fly in couples
And here's a dove immaculate spirit
Escorted by lyre-bird and shimmery peacock

Phoenix the pyre the self-resurrected
Obscures everything ardently briefly with ash
The sirens abandon their perilous channels
Each one singing more beautifully arrives
Everyone eagle Phoenix Chinese peehees
Eager to befriend a machine that flies

You are walking in Paris alone inside a crowd
Herds of buses bellow and come too close
Love-anguish clutches your throat
You must never again be loved
In the Dark Ages you would have entered a monastery
You are ashamed to overhear yourself praying
You laugh at yourself and the laughter crackles like hellfire
The sparks gild the ground and background of your life
Your life is a painting in a dark museum
And sometimes you examine it closely

You are walking in Paris the women are bloodsoaked
It was and I have no wish to remember it was the end of beauty

In Chartres from her entourage of flames Our Lady beamed at me
The blood of your Sacred Heart drenched me in Montmartre
I'm sick of hearing blissful promises
The love I feel is a venereal disease
And the image possessing you in your pain your insomnia
Vanishes and it is always near you

And now you are on the Riviera
Under lemon trees that never stop blooming
You are boating with friends
One is from Nice one is from Menton two from La Turbie
We are staring terrified at giant squid
At fish the symbols of Jesus swimming through seaweed

You are in the garden at an inn outside of Prague
You are completely happy a rose is on the table
And instead of getting on with your short-story
You watch the rosebug sleeping in the rose's heart

Appalled you see yourself reproduced in the agates of Saint Vitus
You were sad near to death to see yourself there
You looked as bewildered as Lazarus
In the Jewish ghetto the clock runs backwards
And you go backwards also through a slow life
Climbing the Hradchen listening at nightfall
To Bohemian songs in the singing taverns

You in Marseilles among the watermelons

Yu in Coblenz at the Hotel Gigantic

You in Rome beneath a Japanese tree

You in Amsterdam with a girl you find pretty who is ugly
She's engaged to marry a student from Leyden
Where you can rent rooms in Latin Cubicula locanda
I remember spending three days there and three in Gouda

You are in Paris hauled before the magistrate
You are under arrest you are a criminal now

You went on sorrowful and giddy travels
Ignorant still of dishonesty and old age
Love afflicted you at twenty and again at thirty
I've lived like a fool and I've wasted my time
You dare not look at your hands I want to weep all the time
On you on the one I love on everything that frightened you

And now you are crying at the sight of refugees
Who believe in God who pray whose women nurse babies
The hall of the train station is filled with the refugee-smell
Like the Magi refugees believe in their star
They expect to find silver mines in the Argentine
And to return like kings to their abandoned countries
One family carries a red eiderdown you carry your heart
Eiderdown and dreams are equally fantastic

Some of the refugees stay on in Paris settling
Into slums on the rue des Rosiers or the rue des Ecouffes
I have seen them often at dusk they breathe at their doorways
They budge from home as reluctantly as chessmen
They are chiefly Jewish the women wear wigs
And haunt backrooms of little shops in little chairs

You're standing at the metal counter of some dive
Drinking wretched coffee where the wretched live

You are in a cavernous restaurant at night

These women are not evil they are used-up regretful
Each has tormented someone even the ugliest

She is the daughter of a police sergeant from Jersey

Her hands I'd never noticed are hard and cracked

My pity aches along the seams of her belly

I humble my mouth to her grotesque laughter

You're alone when morning comes
The milkmen jingle bottles in the street

Night beautiful courtesan the night withdraws
Fraudulent Ferdine or careful Leah

And you drink an alcohol as caustic as your life
Your life you drink as alcohol

You walk to Auteuil you want to go on foot to sleep
At home among your South Sea and Guinean fetishes
Christs of another shape another faith
Subordinate Christs of uncertain hopes

Goodbye Goodbye

Sun cut throated

* * * * * * *

Hope Mirrlees, Paris: A Poem. Bearing the influence of Apollinaire’s ‘Zone’ as well as the work of other avant-garde French poets such as Blaise Cendrars and Jean Cocteau, Paris: A Poem (1919) was actually written by a British female poet, born to Scottish parents in Kent in 1887. Helen Hope Mirrlees lived in the French capital during the early twentieth century, and this 445-line poem is remarkably bold and innovative, blending as it does street signs and advertisements in the Paris Metro with allusions to Aristophanes, Shakespeare, and French painting, as we follow the female narrator through the streets of the city over the course of a whole day, from dawn till dusk and through to the dawning of a new day. It was out of print for much of the twentieth century, until the publication of Mirrlees’ Collected Poems in 2011. No pick of the best poems about Paris would be complete without this underrated gem – click on the link above to access a pdf of the first edition, via the Hope Mirrlees website. - Dr. Oliver Tearle

* * * * * * *

T. S. Eliot, ‘Fourth Caprice in Montparnasse’. An early Eliot poem which was only first published in 1996, this was written by the young Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) while he was living in Paris between his studies at Harvard. By this stage, the young poet had already drafted his first remarkable poem, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ – but this little poem shows how the French capital as well as French culture – including French poetry – influenced the young American. - Dr. Oliver Tearle

Fourth Caprice in Montparnasse

by T. S. Eliot

We turn the corner of the street

And again

Here is a landscape grey with rain

On black umbrellas, waterproofs,

And dashing from the slated roofs

Into a mass of mud and sand.

Behind a row of blackened trees.

The dripping plastered houses stand

Like mendicants without regrets

For unpaid debts

Hand in pocket, undecided,

Indifferent if derided.

Among such scattered thoughts as these

We turn the corner of the street;

But why are we so hard to please?

* * * * * * *

Charles Bukowski, ‘Paris’. Here’s an antidote to the paeans to Paris we’ve seen elsewhere on this list: a short free-verse poem in which the poet expresses his dislike for Camus, bicycles, and berets … and (building on this list of stereotypes) Paris itself. - Dr. Oliver Tearle

Paris

by Charles Bukowski

never

even in calmer times

have I ever

* * * * * * *

Paris may be the city of love, but in this poem, the contemporary English poet James Fenton (b. 1949) is ‘on the rebound’ from a previous relationship and in Paris with a new friend (lover?). The poem is gently comical, touching, and celebratory – the perfect note on which to end our selection of great Paris poems. - Dr. Oliver Tearle

In Paris With You

Poem by James Fenton

Don't talk to me of love. I've had an earful

And I get tearful when I've downed a drink or two.

I'm one of your talking wounded.

I'm a hostage. I'm maroonded.

But I'm in Paris with you.

Yes I'm angry at the way I've been bamboozled

And resentful at the mess I've been through.

I admit I'm on the rebound

And I don't care where are we bound.

I'm in Paris with you.

Do you mind if we do not go to the Louvre

If we say sod off to sodding Notre Dame,

If we skip the Champs Elysées

And remain here in this sleazy

Old hotel room

Doing this and that

To what and whom

Learning who you are,

Learning what I am.

Don't talk to me of love. Let's talk of Paris,

The little bit of Paris in our view.

There's that crack across the ceiling

And the hotel walls are peeling

And I'm in Paris with you.

Don't talk to me of love. Let's talk of Paris.

I'm in Paris with the slightest thing you do.

I'm in Paris with your eyes, your mouth,

I'm in Paris with... all points south.

Am I embarrassing you?

I'm in Paris with you.

John Donne - Thou Has Made Me, and Shall Thy Work Decay?

Holy Sonnets:

Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?

by John Donne

Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?

Repair me now, for now mine end doth haste,

I run to death, and death meets me as fast,

And all my pleasures are like yesterday;

I dare not move my dim eyes any way,

Despair behind, and death before doth cast

Such terror, and my feebled flesh doth waste

By sin in it, which it towards hell doth weigh.

Only thou art above, and when towards thee

By thy leave I can look, I rise again;

But our old subtle foe so tempteth me,

That not one hour I can myself sustain;

Thy grace may wing me to prevent his art,

And thou like adamant draw mine iron heart.

* * * * * * * * *

Thou hast made me, shall thy work decay?

John Donne |Analysis|

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Analysis of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets

(Thou hast made me, shall thy work decay?)

John Donne’s poem “Thou hast made me, shall thy work decay?” is a perfect example of Petrarchan sonnet. This sonnet contains fourteen lines and it can be divided into two parts. The first part contains eight lines called octave which present the speaker’s problem of constant temptation by the sins. The second part called the sestet containing six lines and provides God’s attraction as a final solution to the poet’s problem.

Lines 1-4 (Quatrain)

Thou hast made me, shall thy work decay?

Repair me now, for now mine end doth haste,

I run to death, and death meets me as fast,

And all my pleasures are like yesterday;

Donne opens his poem with a question and direct addressing to God that, Is this creation (body of the poet) made up for decay? The poet is worried about it. He feels like his life is falling apart. The poet knows the capability of God to repair and request Him to repair him. He seems quicker because he does not want to live anymore. Donne’s speaker states that he is running towards death, and it is coming “fast” to “meet” him. He understands that all his past was sin like the pleasure of yesterday. Such running of death towards the poet is horrible.

Lines 5-8 (Second Quatrain)

I dare not move my dim eyes any way,

Despair behind, and death before doth cast,

Such terror, and my feebled flesh doth waste,

By sin in it, which it towards hell doth weigh.

In the second quatrain, the poet describes his usual fears that I am unable to move because I just remembering my past bad deeds. He is going to see such terrors because death is coming fast that reminds him of all the deeds. His flesh becomes weak from the sin. He has done many sins in the past and now he terrified that sins will carry strict punishment upon him in the hell but he still feels the need to confess and seek forgiveness and reparations from his Divine Beloved.

 9-12 (Third Quatrain)

Only thou art above, and when towards thee,

By thy leave I can look, I rise again,

But our old subtle foe so tempteth me,

That not one hour I can myself sustain.

In these lines, the poet is optimistic and deems God as the only source of his courage to rise up. The poet expresses his deep sentiments to God and says; when I see towards You I get courage and hope. He positions the Creator "above" and suggests that only toward the Divine can be safely cast his glances. The poet describes his weakness by saying that he does not focus on the divinity even only one hour because of his old enemy Satan always deceives and tempts him.

Lines 13-14 (Couplet)

Thy grace may wing me to prevent his art,

And thou like adamant draw mine iron heart.

The poet once again stresses that God is only his source and He can support him, wing him and repair him. He knows that only God has this capability. He is always in a state of confusion. His open enemy Satan follows him to betray. The last line is a perfect example of metaphysical because the poet used conceit. God is like metal to the speaker’s iron heart. He requested to God that attracts his heart like a magnet attracts iron. He is optimistic about God’s grace.