Share Tobacco Lore Poetry.

[MrTom]

The Pipe of Tobacco William Hugh Logan
Why should life in sorrow be spent,
When pleasure points to the road,
Wherein each traveler with content,
May throw off the ponderous load?
And instead, in ample measure,
Gather fruits too long left ripe;
What's this world without its pleasure?
What is pleasure but a pipe?
See the sailor's jovial state,
Mark the soldier's noble soul;
What doth heroes renovate?
What refines the splendid bowl?

 

[MrTom]

PERNICIOUS WEED! William Cowper.
The pipe, with solemn interposing puff,
Makes half a sentence at a time enough;
The dozing sages drop the drowsy strain,
Then pause and puff, and speak, and pause again.
Such often, like the tube they so admire,
Important triflers! have more smoke than fire.
Pernicious weed! whose scent the fair annoys,
Unfriendly to society's chief joys,
Thy worst effect is banishing for hours
The sex whose presence civilizes ours.

 

[MrTom]

ODE TO TOBACCO,
Come then, Tobacco, new-found friend,
Come, and thy suppliant attend
In each dull, lonely hour;
And though misfortunes lie around,
Thicker than hailstones on the ground,
I'll rest upon thy power.
Then while the coxcomb, pert and proud,
The politician, learned and loud,
Keep one eternal clack,
I'll tread where silent Nature smiles,
Where Solitude our woe beguiles,
And smoke thee, dear Tobac.

 

[MrTom]

A BACHELOR'S SOLILOQUY. A poem close to my pipe.
I sit all alone with my pipe by the fire,
I ne'er knew the Benedict's yoke;
I worship a fairy-like, fanciful form,
That goes up the chimney in smoke.
I sit in my dressing-gowned slipperful ease,
Without wife or bairns to provoke,
And puff at my pipe, while my hopes and my fears
All go up the chimney in smoke.
I sit with my pipe, and my heart's lonesome care
I try, but all vainly, to choke.
Ah, me! but I find that the flame that Love lights
Won't go up the chimney in smoke.

 

[jpmcwjr]

Nice! Are the latter two by Cowper?

 

[mso489]

For some reason, smoking a pipe is enough akin to creating a poem that channeling the one to the other is difficult, for me anyway. Perhaps more poetry gets written than read. Music and songwriting have supplanted much of the work of poetry in culture. But that never prevents anyone, certainly not me, from writing a poem. Hence Bob Dylan wins the Nobel Prize in Literature ... hey, I love his work. You don't see high school kids listening to poetry on their ear buds with their mouths hanging open. Yet.

 

[MrTom]

For some reason, smoking a pipe is enough akin to creating a poem that channeling the one to the other is difficult, for me anyway. Perhaps more poetry gets written than read. Music and songwriting have supplanted much of the work of poetry in culture. But that never prevents anyone, certainly not me, from writing a poem. Hence Bob Dylan wins the Nobel Prize in Literature ... hey, I love his work. You don't see high school kids listening to poetry on their ear buds with their mouths hanging open. Yet.

Dylan for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Yes, but Dylan Thomas ....but, Bob Dylan? Money talks, talk is cheap.

 

[MrTom]

Baccy & pint of literary youth, Dylan's Autumn wake.

It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.

A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill's shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.

It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels

And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singingbirds.

And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart's truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year's turning.