High school poetry

[igenlode]

What I was writing when I was actually in my teens (after which, owing to circumstances, I more or less stopped writing poetry altogether).
Lyrical verse:

The midnight moon rode full and clear
Above the sleeping hills; and bright
It laid its cloak of gleaming light
Upon the country far and near.

At dawn the birds began to sing;
And growing glory in the East
Shone golden through a pearly mist
To gladden every living thing.

Now day is fine and fair to see,
A sun-drenched spring-like Easter morn;
But after such a night and dawn
How could this beauty fail to be?

There were various doggerel spells/mnemonics for various magic systems, of which I think this is one:

power over living
power over dead
for trees, a young sapling
for flowers, one that's red

a flower, a fern, a noble tree
grass and stone and wood
glass and cloth, a simple soul
The magic's understood

Sadly, I can't actually guess what the spell was intended to achieve...

Balladry:

I sat myself down at a desk one day
To write a Ballad in the Old-Fashioned Way;
I read through the Guardian, the Mirror and the Times
Just to find a story I could render into rhymes.

International News didn't seem quite right;
There was nothing on the Stock Exchange to interest or excite;
I thought that I'd try Politics, but then found in no time
That [politician's name] is not an easy one to rhyme.

(Censored to protect the guilty :-p)

Cosmology

Silence, in the haunting, wilder woods
That burn with dark and brood throughout the day;
Starburn, in the ocean so profound
We look above and name its hollow, Sky;
Earthrock, in the far uplifted peaks
Whose roots suffuse the deeps below the world;
Water, in the countless laughing streams
That net the world with vast immortal song;
Woven in the bright and deadly dance
Of Elements, the Earth began to be.

There's a lot of high fantasy in my work at this stage (which, again, makes a change from the average adolescent concerns, at least as reflected on fanfiction.net!) and on the whole I was handling it skilfully. ('Burn with dark' and 'Starburn' are both good, but perhaps not in conjunction with one another...)

Aged fourteen or fifteen, and strongly influenced by Tolkien, I think:

Trees and Seasons

I saw the beauty of the trees
In springtime first; the gentle breeze,
Which sent the blossoms drifting down,
Stirred buds and twigs of green and brown.
The foliage was fresh and new
And seemed to still be decked with dew.

Then summer came; the trees stood now
In majesty of leaf and bough.
The oak and chestnut, beech in glade,
They cast refreshing pools of shade,
And towered silent, great and green,
In glory which I had not seen.

Then autumn's colours blazed anew,
Defying all that I might do,
And trees that flamed in glory fleet
Now shed their leaves about my feet.
I walked the woods at leisured pace
And watched the leaves with upturned face.

I roamed in winter, and admired
The loveliness the trees acquired.
Their arching limbs were outlined clear
In beauty graceful and severe,
As they stood strong and bare and stark
With mighty limbs and weathered bark.

And having had that beauty bright
Throughout a year before my sight,
I turn my head and glance to see
Admiring every changing tree;
For now I find I can ignore
The loveliness of trees no more.

Experiments in romance, as seen by someone who knew nothing of it:

My heartbeats are a merry troupe
Whose self-control is poor;
I feel them take a dancing step
Just passing by your door.
If, when I am alone with you,
Our gazes meet by chance,
I feel my heedless heartbeats skip
And then begin to dance.
Then let them dance, as dancers will—
I care not what they do;
How can I discipline my heart
When it belongs to you?

Luckily my teenage tastes ran more to overblown landscape than to the more typical adolescent angst:

Morning Serenade

Why not watch the towers of the sunrise
Glow in glory on the blue horizon's rim?
Why not see the dawn light flush the streamers
Riding gallantly above the sleeping World?
Why retain your shuttered room so dim,
Your pinions furled?

We might leave this place before the morning
If you spread your wings and dared at last to fly;
High above the land we'd soar in beauty
And, amid that darkest hour before the dawn,
Watch for light to stain a paling sky
No more forlorn.

You it is that act the jealous jailer
Lock yourself within yourself and shut me out,
Turn your back to freedom that is offered,
Nip[?] your feathers and then dim your narrow room.
Need you in your youth become devout
And make a tomb?

Come with me and I will give you freedom,
And we'll watch the arcing fish amidst the spray;
Beauty lying calm beneath the starlight;
Jewelled fire-drops that outshine the evening's glow;
Come to see the dawn, sweet, come away—
I need you so.

In despite of everything my teachers had told me, I was busy playing with rhyme-patterns and formal structure ;-p

More Kiplingesque verse (I was —and am— a considerable admirer of Kipling):

Do not look straight at the sun
When ambition comes calling down time;
Though the pride of the past
Cannot force you, at last,
That glory is less than sublime.

Do not dwell on what should have been done;
For Then is a wry shade of Now.
Though an Empire fade away
We must build for today,
And the deeds of the Past shall teach how.

This one I did an elaborate illuminated border for:

The ocean is raging; the wild breakers roar,
In fury and madness the waves charge the shore,
And proud at the forefront, fit steeds for the brave,
A thousand white horses ride in on the wave.

Their foamy crests tossing and proud heads flung high,
Their forelegs strike out as they challenge the sky;
They leap on the rocks and foam down to the grave,
A thousand white horses that charge on the wave.

The great waves roll in as the wind whips the spray
And crash down in ruin, white foam against grey;
I ache for the beauty, the power and the rage
As a thousand white horses go down on the wave.

(Just for comparison, here's the 'blank verse' I wrote the day before on the same landscape):

The wild sky, the fierce sky, the pale and northern blue sky
Scoured and bleached by winter storms that goad the ocean's rage,
Grim and wide and steely, stretches overhead to seaward—
Its fleeing clouds are ripped apart and savaged by the wind.

The wind stoops —a cold moan— and rages to the seaward;
The sea is great and dark and cruel and shows its gleaming teeth,
A foaming snarl of water spumes defiance upward.
The galeblown menace in the sky gives challenge to the sea.

Hmm, that's actually better when typed up than I thought it was — some striking use of 'single feet' in the second line of each verse — but the rhyming version is far simpler and yet more accomplished. My talent was for basic rhymed iambics, always.

And the same holiday, following day (I was clearly feeling inspired to poetry —and experiment— that week):

Golden, silken, bubbling light
which ripples the leaves and fountains bright
between the twigs! with living gold
the canopy quivers, seems to hold
a river of sun which spills and flows
until the vaulted woodland glows!

An acrostic for a birthday card (always an easy way to make people think you'd gone to a lot of effort :-p)

Let all your year be filled with joy
Untouched by tears; while to your call
Come family and friends to make
Your eighteenth birthday best of all.

Influenced here by Guy Gavriel Kay, I think:

O wild, the tears, the swans'-flight feathers;
The gusts that stall the bird-wings of the mind.
What boughs that groan as passion breaks the tree?
O strong and sweet, the bank to shield my reed-tops,
Where is the music I cannot find?
Still waters run deep and out to the sea,
Gold and cream that bore my life away.

(Sadly I no longer have any idea what I had in mind, if anything, for the last-line reference; it may just have been written to sound good...)

Ah, and here's some angst (although not, I think, autobiographical; I was playing with emotions and words in the cosmology vein again).

Bitterness

Gold -- tearing gold -- and the Sun rides over
Pain -- anguished pain -- and the claws at my heart
Fire -- flaming fire -- and my eyes are burning
Red -- looming red -- and the world tears apart.

What hope, what life, what soul have we
That come so swift to pain?
Why fight at all,
If battles all
Are always fought in vain?

What faith, what shame, what mercy, are
It seems we do not know
That fight so fell
Yet know full well
Our brother is the foe.

What heart, what eyes, what love is there
Man would not tear from Man?
An evil deed
It was indeed
When humans first began.

What sign, what thought, what dream is there
That we will ever change?
We kill in vain
And die in pain
And never deem it strange.

Love -- tortured love -- and jealousy murders
Hope -- strangled hope -- with nothing to give
Peace -- ruined peace -- and the world is ending
Life -- vicious life -- why should I live?

(I like the (conscious) contrast between the 'bad' things at the beginning and the 'good' things at the end, likewise turned sour, and the internal patterning; not sure about the final line, which rings false in my ears with its too-glib conclusion. A less obvious twist on 'live' would have been more effective, with a lifetime's hindsight...)

This one, on the other hand, actually shocked me, to the degree that I immediately wondered if it was actually written by one of my classmates on that same school trip (the page looks as if it was torn out of someone else's notebook; I never used squared exercise paper). But it's indubitably my handwriting.
Not my style at all, completely anomalous in its lack of sophistication and its rawness — and I have absolutely no recollection of it. Oh, I was bitterly unhappy in my teenage years, but not in that vein. I just wouldn't have written 'poetry' of such crashing banality and shock-value (and without a single semi-colon :-p)
Only apparently I at the very least copied it out, because it's on the back of that glowing golden verse about sunlit woods... and while I can believe I borrowed a bit of paper to jot that down (since I was actually on board a steamer at the time!) I simply cannot picture why I would have written this within a day or so of the outpouring of the other three. It's not even good...

Alone
The salt tears rolling.
The harsh words at my back.
All bonds broken.
Alone.
Cold wind on my hot eyes,
A cold hand at my heart,
The bleak, bare sky overhead,
I run.
I run up the fell
The swelling hills,
Pulse pounding, lungs burn.
I run
And find the crag.
They do not care and never cared.
Why go on?
I jump.
The hard rocks rise up to embrace me...

(Well, 'fell' and 'crag' are probably mine, since I doubt they're in the average seventeen-year-old's vocabulary unless someone went wild with a thesaurus, but... honestly? Why would I even have kept that? It's just embarrassing.
Possibly I didn't even realise there was something else on the back of the 'golden' one when I filed away the torn-put page...)

I shan't attempt to copy everything; there's various other verses on horses, sea, landscape, seasons and the like, one that was entered for a poetry prize (but I don't remember that it won anything, despite the judge's approving comments on the bottom), a couple on railways (old preoccupations meeting the new!) and a few proto-fannish effusions directed at characters from my own stories ;-p
I will, however, quote from the written comment I got when showing a 'portfolio' of my best sixth-form work to one of the English teachers (I wasn't studying English, so didn't come into their orbit in the ordinary way): You are brilliantly inventive and have a real ear for the rhythms of language -- especially in speech but your narrative sense is strong, too. I know you'll keep writing -- no need for me to encourage you but I loved your writing -- your voice is distinctive.
I think I deserved that. I was genuinely talented at poetry (even if I didn't, as it turned out, keep on writing it...)

Here's one final experimental piece I found from when I was sixteen (and still influenced by Tolkien, though I never tried the Old English alliterative format again despite success here):

Images of Christmas

The lapping lamplight   lying golden
Along each smooth edge,   around the curves
Of tinted treasures   on the tree,
Strokes silken surfaces,   polished sheen
Of old worn oak   and time-shaped ash
That gently enclose   the jewelled heart
The rare-coloured richness   of the quiet room;
The fire flickers—   warming fur
A comfortable cat   sleeps calmly.

The forest's sharp fragance   steals faintly
Drawn from the tree's dark   drooping branches;
Aroma evoking   uplands wooded
Where silver stars shine,   the sky's gems
That blaze in the beauty   of midnight's blue;
Scent that is setting   the silent scene—
Where breezes blow   the needled branches
The tree-tops tremble   against troubled sky.

But the curtains are closed,   the cold night
Safely shut out   of the scented room.
The presents are pile   in fresh paper,
Warm welcome awaiting   the weary guest.