"The face is a picture of the mind with the eyes as its interpreter.” ―Marcus Tullius Cicero / "The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter - often an unconscious but still a faithful interpreter - in the eye.” ―Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
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The most significant limitation intrinsic to online public forums [including this one] is that people are deprived of gazing into each others' eyes. ~Bob
Originally posted by HandyAndyIntroduction to Poetry
Could you decode this one?
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
By Billy Collins (Former Poet Laureate of the United States)
Ars Poetica
A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds. *
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,
Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind—
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs. *
A poem should be equal to:
Not true.
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.
For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—
A poem should not mean
But be.
By Archibald MacLeish
Note: With an apology to Kewpie for these somewhat relevant sidebars.