Dover Beach

The sea is calm to-night.

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-blanch'd 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 {AE}gean, 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 furl'd.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, with drawing 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,

Nor 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.

-Matthew Arnold

About Poet:

Matthew Arnold was an English poet, and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold, literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator. Matthew Arnold has also been characterized as a sage writer, a type of writer who speaks from a presumed position of moral authority, chastising and instructing the reader on contemporary social issues.

It’s the Dream

It’s the dream we carry
that something wondrous will happen
that it must happen
time will open
hearts will open
doors will open
spring will gush forth from the ground–
that the dream itself will open
that one morning we’ll quietly drift
into a harbor we didn’t know was there.

- Olav H. Hauge

About Poet:

Olav H. Hauge was one of Norway's most beloved poets in the 20th century. While working as a gardener and fruit farmer in Ulvik where he grew up, he lived a grand life in the books that he collected and the poems that he wrote. Hauge's first poems were published in 1946, all in a traditional form. He later wrote modernist poetry and in particular concrete poetry that inspired other, younger Norwegian poets, such as Jan Erik Vold.

Letter from a Mughal Emperor, 2006

Nothing here’s worth a tick.

I hid everything except the heads. They respect slaughter.

They respect only slaughter. They forget the other things we brought them, the ghazals, the

gardens, the ice and symmetry.

It’s an affliction to grow up motherless, with your lady mother living beside you.

They have many images, but they have no God. They’re fit only for war.

Even the dogs are second rate.

In Tashkent I had no money, no country or hope of one, only humiliation. But among the people I

found much beauty. No pears are better.

There are no accidents. There’s only God.

Tending to his doves on the eve of battle, my father flew into a ravine at the fortress of Akhsi.

He became a falcon. I became emperor.

Sometimes, when I eat a Kabul melon, I remember my father and you.

I’ve forgotten more than I’ve seen, but I haven’t forgotten enough.

There’s only one way to live in a place like this, with your disgust close at hand.

One night I took majoun because the moon was shining. The next day I took some more, at sunrise.

I enjoyed wonderful fields of flowers, flowers on all sides. I saw an apple sapling with five or six leaves placed regularly on each branch.

No painter could have done this.

I made a schedule. Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday for wine, the other days for majoun.

Your letter puzzled me:

The people are caught between constant spiritual anguish and a faith that will give meaning to the question that consumes them: the dual substance of Krishna, the yearning of man to know God. Between the spirit and the flesh, a great unwinnable war.

Dear friend, write clearly, with plain words. Writing badly will make you ill.

Once, in an orchard, I was sick with fever and vision. I was young, but I prepared myself.

A hundred years or a day, in the end you’ll leave this place.

Long ago, my grandfather’s face looked into mine, I think with love.

Now when we speak it’s of ghazals, of metrics and rhyme or of our most famous massacres.

When he conquered Lahore he planted a banana tree. It thrived, even in that climate.

His memory is so good it gives him a second life. Mine gives only a partial one.

It’s no more than I need.

-Jeet thayil

About poet:

Born in Kerala, Jeet Thayil is a performance poet, songwriter and musician. He has authored four collections of poetry in English, and is editor of the forthcoming Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (2008). Educated in Hong Kong, New York and Mumbai, he is currently based in Bangalore. As a musician who plays guitar, he works with ‘Bombay Down’ (NYC) and ‘Sridhar/ Thayil’ (Bangalore).

Neruda's The Song of Despair

The memory of you emerges from the night around me.
The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea.
Deserted like the wharves at dawn.
It is the hour of departure, oh deserted one!
Cold flower heads are raining over my heart.
Oh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked.
In you the wars and the flights accumulated.
From you the wings of the song birds rose.
You swallowed everything, like distance.
Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank!
It was the happy hour of assault and the kiss.
The hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse.
Pilot’s dread, fury of a blind diver,
turbulent drunkenness of love, in you everything sank!
In the childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded.
Lost discoverer, in you everything sank!
You girdled sorrow, you clung to desire,
sadness stunned you, in you everything sank!
I made the wall of shadow draw back,
beyond desire and act, I walked on.
Oh flesh, my own flesh, woman whom I loved and lost,
I summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song to you.
Like a jar you housed the infinite tenderness,
and the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar.
There was the black solitude of the islands,
and there, woman of love, your arms took me in.
There were thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit.
There were grief and the ruins, and you were the miracle.
Ah woman, I do not know how you could contain me
in the earth of your soul, in the cross of your arms!
How terrible and brief was my desire of you!
How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid.
Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs,
still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds.
Oh the bitten mouth, oh the kissed limbs,
oh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies.
Oh the mad coupling of hope and force
in which we merged and despaired.
And the tenderness, light as water and as flour.
And the word scarcely begun on the lips.
This was my destiny and in it was the voyage of my longing,
and in it my longing fell, in you everything sank!
Oh pit of debris, everything fell into you,
what sorrow did you not express, in what sorrow are you not drowned!
From billow to billow you still called and sang.
Standing like a sailor in the prow of a vessel.
You still flowered in songs, you still broke in currents.
Oh pit of debris, open and bitter well.
Pale blind diver, luckless slinger,
lost discoverer, in you everything sank!
It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour
which the night fastens to all the timetables.
The rustling belt of the sea girdles the shore.
Cold stars heave up, black birds migrate.
Deserted like the wharves at dawn.
Only the tremulous shadow twists in my hands.
Oh farther than everything. Oh farther than everything.
It is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned one.

(Translated by W. S. Merwin )

About Poet:
Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904–September 23, 1973) was the pen name of the Chilean writer and politician Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. With his works translated into manifold languages, Pablo Neruda is considered one of the greatest and most influential poets of the 20th century. In 1971 Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature a controversial award because of his political activism. Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language".