Mark Kleiman has a nomination, from ancient Greece, for “the saddest poem ever written.” There are likely a lot of contenders for this title, and even a quick survey would reveal the emotion’s many different varieties (and do wonders for our readership), so it’s probably not the right thing to start a ranking. In any event, Mark’s post caught my eye because I happened to read the following lines just yesterday evening:
bq. Andromache led the lamentation of the women, while she held in her hands the head of Hector, her great warrior: “Husband, you are gone so young from life, and leave me in your home a widow. Our child is still but a little fellow, child of ill-fated parents, you and me. How can he grow up to manhood? Before that, the city shall be overthrown. For you are gone, you who kept watch over it, and kept safe its wives and their little ones …
bq. “And you have left woe unutterable and mourning to your parents, Hector; but in my heart above all others bitter anguish shall abide. Your hands were not stretched out to me as you lay dying. You spoke to me no living word that I might have pondered as my tears fell night and day.”
That’s from an old translation by S.E. Winbolt, which doesn’t seem to be available online. The Samuel Butler translation is freely available, though.
{ 17 comments }
chun the unavoidable 12.09.03 at 8:51 am
Suis-je trompé? La charité serait-elle sour de la morte, pour moi?
chun the unavoidable 12.09.03 at 8:53 am
And that’s “sister,” not “sour-patch kid.”
rilkefan 12.09.03 at 9:31 am
Slim Cunning Hands
Slim cunning hands at rest, and cozening eyes–
Under this stone one loved too wildly lies;
How false she was, no granite could declare;
Nor all earth’s flowers, how fair.
Walter de la Mare
Henry 12.09.03 at 10:45 am
From Randall Jarrell’s “A Country Life”:http://plagiarist.com/poetry/?wid=3039
Asked about it, who would not repent
Of all he ever did and never meant,
And think a life and its distresses,
Its random, clutched-for, homefelt blisses,
The circumstances of an accident?
drapetomaniac 12.09.03 at 1:16 pm
The World as Meditation
Wallace Stevens
It is Ulysses that approaches from the east,
The interminable adventurer? The trees are mended.
That winter is washed away. Someone is moving
On the horizon and lifting himself up above it.
A form of fire approaches the cretonnes of Penelope,
Whose mere savage presence awakens the world in which she dwells.
She has composed, so long, a self with which to welcome him,
Companion to his self for her, which she imagined,
Two in a deep-founded sheltering, friend and dear friend.
The trees had been mended, as an essential exercise
In an inhuman meditation, larger than her own.
No winds like dogs watched over her at night.
She wanted nothing he could not bring her by coming alone.
She wanted no fetchings. His arms would be her necklace
And her belt, the final fortune of their desire.
But was it Ulysses? Or was it only the warmth of the sun
On her pillow? The thought kept beating in her like her heart.
The two kept beating together. It was only day.
It was Ulysses and it was not. Yet they had met,
Friend and dear friend and a planet’s encouragement.
The barbarous strength within her would never fail.
She would talk a little to herself as she combed her hair,
Repeating his name with its patient syllables,
Never forgetting him that kept coming constantly so near.
Glenn 12.09.03 at 3:12 pm
Here’s a sad one:
They imprisoned him
before they charged him
They tortured him
before they interrogated him
They stubbed out cigarettes in his eyes
and held up some pictures in front of him
Say whose faces are these
he said: I do not see
They cut off his lips
and demanded that he name
Those “they†had recruited
he said nothing
And when they failed to make him talk
they hanged him.
A month later they clear him
They realized the young man
was not the one they really wanted
but his brother…
By Ahmed Mattar, another Iraqi poet living in exile in London, wrote these lines in memory of a friend who died under torture in Iraq.
The poem was posted on this site:
http://mountaingirl.blogs.com/journeytoiraq/2003/12/torture.html
Curtis Crawford 12.09.03 at 3:55 pm
Tears, Idle Tears
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.
Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.
Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more!
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Ophelia Benson 12.09.03 at 6:02 pm
Well, and since we started off from the Iliad, one of the most moving – (but also saddest, with grief and reconciliation mixed together) – bits of poetry I know of is the 24th book of that poem, when Achilles and Priam make a sort of rapprochement, enough anyway to get Achilles to give Hektor’s body to Priam.
anon 12.09.03 at 6:21 pm
Hymns to the Night is intensely sad in parts:
Aside I turn to the holy, unspeakable, mysterious Night. Afar lies the world — sunk in a deep grave — waste and lonely is its place. In the chords of the bosom blows a deep sadness. I am ready to sink away in drops of dew, and mingle with the ashes. — The distances of memory, the wishes of youth, the dreams of childhood, the brief joys and vain hopes of a whole long life, arise in gray garments, like an evening vapor after the sunset. In other regions the light has pitched its joyous tents. What if it should never return to its children, who wait for it with the faith of innocence?
Nicholas Weininger 12.09.03 at 6:50 pm
The first portion of Akhmatova’s “Requiem” is worth a mention, I think. Doesn’t translate too well, though.
Tom 12.09.03 at 9:34 pm
Gotta be Catullus.
“Odi et amo. Quare id faciam fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio, et excrucior.”
Katherine 12.09.03 at 10:38 pm
They printed this in the New Yorker right after September 11. I don’t actually know if it was written before or after–it’s weirdly prescient if before, but then so was E.B. White fifty years before. Anyway, it will forever be associated for me.
The Disappearances, by Vijay Seshadri
“Where was it one first heard of the truth?”
On a day like any other day,
like “yesterday or centuries before,”
in a town with the one remembered street,
shaded by the buckeye and the sycamore–
the street long and true as a theorem,
the day like yesterday or the day before,
the street you walked down centuries before–
the story the same as the others flooding in
from the cardinal points is
turning to take a good look at you.
Every creature, intelligent or not, has disappeared–
the humans, phosphorescent,
the duplicating pets, the guppies and spaniels,
the Woolworth’s turtle that cost forty-nine cents
(with the soiled price tag half-peeled on its shell)–
but, from the look of things, it only just happened.
The wheels of the upside-down tricycle are spinning.
The swings are empty but swinging.
And the shadow is still there, and there
is the object that made it,
riding the proximate atmosphere,
oblong and illustrious above
the dispeopled bedroom community,
venting the memories of those it took,
their corrosive human element.
This is what you have to walk through to escape,
transparent but alive as coal dust.
This is what you have to hack through,
bamboo-tough and thickly clustered.
The myths are somewhere else, but here are the meanings,
and you have to breathe them in
until they burn your throat
and peck at your brain with their intoxicated teeth.
This is you as seen by them, from the corner of an eye
(was that the way you were always seen?).
This is you when the President died
(the day is brilliant and cold).
This is you poking a ground wasps’ nest.
This is you at the doorway, unobserved,
while your aunts and uncles keen over the body.
This is your first river, your first planetarium, your first popsicle.
The cold and brilliant day in six-color prints–
but the people on the screen are black and white.
Your friend’s mother is saying,
Hush, children! Don’t you understand history is being made?
You do, and you still do. Made and made again.
This is you as seen by them, and them as seen by you,
and you as seen by you, in five dimensions,
in seven, in three again, then two,
then reduced to a dimensionless point
in a universe where the only constant is the speed of light.
This is you at the speed of light.
sidereal 12.09.03 at 11:41 pm
The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, easily.
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.â€
Honorable mention goes to Frost’s Bereft
John Isbell 12.10.03 at 12:41 am
Thank you, katherine.
Sylvia Plath. Jacques Brel, “Ne me quitte pas.” For Catullus, I prefer
“miser Catulle, desinas ineptire,
et quod vides perisse perditum ducas…”
Baudelaire gets this tone sometimes.
Bernard 12.10.03 at 5:13 pm
I like this ending to a Wordsworth poem:
–Yet some maintain that to this day
She is a living child;
That you may see sweet Lucy Gray
Upon the lonesome wild.
O’er rough and smooth she trips along,
And never looks behind;
And sings a solitary song
That whistles in the wind.
Joshua W. Burton 12.11.03 at 2:33 am
God lay dead in heaven;
Angels sang the hymn of the end;
Purple winds went moaning,
Their wings drip-dripping
With blood
That fell upon the earth.
It, groaning thing,
Turned black and sank.
Then from the far caverns
Of dead sins
Came monsters, livid with desire.
They fought,
Wrangled over the world,
A morsel.
But of all sadness this was sad —
A woman’s arms tried to shield
The head of a sleeping man
From the jaws of the final beast.
— Stephen Crane
Joshua W. Burton 12.11.03 at 2:36 am
Or, in a different key,
So, without overt breach, we fall apart,
Tacitly sunder—neither you nor I
Conscious of one intelligible Why,
And both, from severance, winning equal smart.
So, with resigned and acquiescent heart,
Whene’er your name on some chance lip may lie,
I seem to see an alien shade pass by,
A spirit wherein I have no lot or part.
Thus may a captive, in some fortress grim,
From casual speech betwixt his warders, learn
That June on her triumphal progress goes
Through arched and bannered woodlands; while for him
She is a legend emptied of concern,
And idle is the rumour of the rose.
— William Watson
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