The Poet Pleads with His Friend For Old Friends

W.B. Yeats in 1908

Listen to:

The Poet Pleads with His Friend For Old Friends (:36)

by William Butler Yeats 

performed by Bob Gonzalez, rhapsode

Though you are in your shining days,

Voices among the crowd

And new friends busy with your praise,

Be not unkind or proud,

But think about old friends the most:

Time's bitter flood will rise,

Your beauty perish and be lost

For all eyes but these eyes.

(from The Wind Among the Reeds)

Devouring Time

Listen to:

Devouring Time (1:14)

by William Shakespeare 

performed by Bob Gonzalez, rhapsode

Sonnet XIX.

Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws,

And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;

Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger's jaws,

And burn the long-lived phoenix in her blood;

Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleet'st,

And do whate'er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,

To the wide world and all her fading sweets;

But I forbid thee one most heinous crime:

O! carve not with thy hours my love's fair brow,

Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen;

Him in thy course untainted do allow

For beauty's pattern to succeeding men.

Yet, do thy worst old Time: despite thy wrong,

My love shall in my verse ever live young.

Now I Will Do Nothing But Listen

Image by Michal_LUKASIEWICZ
http://kooookooookooookoooo.deviantart.com/art/A41-180217457

Listen to:

Now I Will Do Nothing But Listen (3:01)

by Walt Whitman 

performed by Bob Gonzalez, rhapsode

from Song of Myself

 26

Now I will do nothing but listen,

To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it.

I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames,

    clack of sticks cooking my meals,

I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,

I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following,

Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night,

Talkative young ones to those that like them, the loud laugh of

    work-people at their meals,

The angry base of disjointed friendship, the faint tones of the sick,

The judge with hands tight to the desk, his pallid lips pronouncing

    a death-sentence,

The heave'e'yo of stevedores unlading ships by the wharves, the

    refrain of the anchor-lifters,

The ring of alarm-bells, the cry of fire, the whirr of swift-streaking

    engines and hose-carts with premonitory tinkles and color'd lights,

The steam-whistle, the solid roll of the train of approaching cars,

The slow march play'd at the head of the association marching two and two,

(They go to guard some corpse, the flag-tops are draped with black muslin.)

I hear the violoncello, ('tis the young man's heart's complaint,)

I hear the key'd cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears,

It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast.

I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera,

Ah this indeed is music--this suits me.

A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me,

The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full.

I hear the train'd soprano (what work with hers is this?)

The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,

It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess'd them,

It sails me, I dab with bare feet, they are lick'd by the indolent waves,

I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath,

Steep'd amid honey'd morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death,

At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,

And that we call Being.

To a Dog

Listen to:

To a Dog (1:00)

by John Jay Chapman

performed by Bob Gonzalez, rhapsode

Past happiness dissolves. It fades away, 

Ghost-like, in that dim attic of the mind 

To which the dreams of childhood are consigned. 

Here, withered garlands hang in slow decay, 

And trophies glimmer in the dying ray 

Of stars that once with heavenly glory shined. 

But you, old friend, are you still left behind 

To tell the nearness of life's yesterday? 

Ah, boon companion of my vanished boy, 

For you he lives; in every sylvan walk 

He waits; and you expect him everywhere. 

How would you stir, what cries, what bounds of joy, 

If but his voice were heard in casual talk, 

If but his footstep sounded on the stair! 

I Am

Listen to:

I Am (1:18)

by John Clare

performed by Bob Gonzalez, rhapsode

 I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.

Fortune and Men's Eyes

Woodcut by Paul Celan

Listen to: 

Fortune and Men's Eyes (:53)

by William Shakespeare

performed by Bob Gonzalez, rhapsode

SONNET 29

When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself, and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Remembrance of Things Past

Listen to: 

Remembrance of Things Past (:51)

by William Shakespeare

performed by Bob Gonzalez, rhapsode

SONNET 30

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

I summon up remembrance of things past,

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,

And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:

Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,

For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,

And weep afresh love's long since cancelled woe,

And moan the expense of many a vanished sight:

Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,

And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er

The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,

Which I new pay as if not paid before.

But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,

All losses are restor'd and sorrows end.

I Saw in Louisiana

Listen to: 

I Saw in Louisiana a Live Oak (1:18)

by Walt Whitman

performed by Bob Gonzalez, rhapsode

I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,

All alone stood it, and the moss hung down from the branches;         

Without any companion it grew there, uttering joyous leaves of dark green,  

And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself;          

But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves, standing alone there, without its friend, its lover near—for I knew I could not;                

And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it, and twined around it a little moss,     

And brought it away—and I have placed it in sight in my room;        

It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,       

(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them;)           

Yet it remains to me a curious token—it makes me think of manly love;           

For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana, solitary, in a wide flat space,

Uttering joyous leaves all its life, without a friend, a lover, near,         

I know very well I could not.