this and lermontov's demon are the only poems longer than a page that i've enjoyed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8wEEaHUnkA&pp=ygUZd2F4d2luZyBhcmNoaXZlIHBhbGUgZmlyZQ%3D%3D is a very well done piece
And how delightful when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!
All colors make me happy: even gray.
My eyes were such that literally they
Took photographs. Whenever I'd permit,
Or, with a silent shiver, order it,
And our best yesterdays are now foul piles
Of crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files.
In later years it started to decline:
Buddhism took root. A medium smuggled in
Pale jellies and a floating mandolin.
Fra Karamazov, mumbling his inept
All is allowed, into some classes crept;
And to fulfill the fish wish of the womb,
A school of Freudians headed for the tomb.
And blood-black nothingness began to spin
A system of cells interlinked within
Cells interlinked within cells interlinked
Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct
Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.
the bit from bladerunner
Now I shall speak of evil as none has
Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;
The white-hosed moron torturing a black
Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac;
Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools;
Music in supermarkets; swimming pools;
Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx,
Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds, and sharks.
But it's not bedtime yet. The sun attains
Old Dr. Sutton's last two windowpanes.
The man must be--what? Eighty? Eighty-two?
Was twice my age the year I married you.
Where are you? In the garden. I can see
Part of your shadow near the shagbark tree.
abstained from telling John Shade in front of all those grinning old males how much I admired his work lest a serious discussion of literature degenerate into mere facetiation.
What’s midnight to the young?
can be counted on the fingers of one maimed hand.
The summer night was starless and stirless, with distant spasms of silent lightning.
I was supposed to castle the long way before going to bed and the short way first thing in the morning.
Windows, as well known, have been the solace of first-person literature throughout the ages.
Solitude is the playfield of Satan. I cannot describe the depths of my loneliness and distress.\
The sun is a thief: she lures the sea
and robs it. The moon is a thief:
he steals his silvery light from the sun.
The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon.
‘But I am told this manner of thinking is taught in high school?’ ‘That’s where the broom should begin to sweep. A child should have thirty specialists to teach him thirty subjects, and not one harassed schoolmarm to show him a picture of a rice field and tell him that this is China because she knows nothing about China, or anything else, and cannot tell the difference between longitude and latitude.’
I am a strict vegetarian...The usual questions were fired at me about eggnogs and milkshakes being or not being acceptable to one of my persuasion. Shade said that with him it was the other way around: he must make a definite effort to partake of a vegetable. Beginning a salad, was to him like stepping into sea water on a chilly day, and he had always to brace himself in order to attack the fortress of an apple.
Combinatorial fate rests on its laurels.
such humdrum potterings are beneath true scholarship
I have seen nothing like it on lexical playfields and the odds against the double coincidence defy computation
Vladimir Nabokov’s 1962 novel Pale Fire includes a character named John Shade, a poet who writes the lines
Space is a swarming in the eyes; and time,
A singing in the ears.
In the first edition of his 1964 book The Ambidextrous Universe, Martin Gardner quoted these lines and, as a joke, credited them to Shade rather than Nabokov, listing Shade in the index.
Nabokov, in turn, in his 1969 novel Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle had a character quote Gardner’s book and the same two lines of verse:
‘Space is a swarming in the eyes, and Time a singing in the ears,” says John Shade, a modern poet, as quoted by an invented philosopher (‘Martin Gardiner’) in The Ambidextrous Universe, page 165.
Gardner’s book concerns symmetry, and Ada is a palindrome; further, the action in that novel takes place on Anti-Terra, a sort of mirror image of Earth. Nabokov’s 1974 novel Look at the Harlequins!, also influenced by Gardner’s book, concerns a man who can’t distinguish left from right.
(from futilitycloset)