You look at my face
But you don't see my mind
All you really want
Is a pretty behind
You wanna hold me
But you don't wanna know me
You're looking for
A dream-come-true
Who's gonna live
Her life for you
You wanna hold me
But you don't wanna know me
All you're gonna do
Is waste my time
Go back to your world
And stay out of mine
You wanna hold me
But you don't wanna know me
You wanna hold me
But you don't wanna know me
You wanna hold me
But you don't wanna know me
by Richard W. Bray
There's nothing that I would not do
To show the world how I love you
I'll build a castle on the moon
We'll only eat with golden spoons
(I really like my happy life
You want a trophy not a wife)
I'll slay a dragon with a stick
I'll feed the world and cure the sick
I'll put the sun inside a jar
I'll carve your name upon a star
(You think you're such a gallant guy
Have you read the Nymph's Reply?)
I'll dig for diamonds with my hands
I'll walk across the desert sands
I'll climb a mountain for your heart
I'll buy the greatest works of art
(I'm really just a simple girl
I like sunsets more than pearls)
I'll search the skies and tame the sea
To demonstrate sincerity
I beg and beg on bended knee
But you never hear my plea
(Won't you listen? Can't you see?
You never did a thing for me)
by Richard W. Bray
Sir Walter Raleigh, The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd
If we lived in decades past
When marriages were built to last
I might be tempted to tilt your glass
And be your little lovely lass
When I was young my mother told me
That a man is good to hold me
But I must never bought and sold be
Thus no man has yet controlled me
She said a girl must make her way
In this crazy world today
And if I always let you pay
I’ll be tormented should you stray
I do not fit your portrait, sir
Neither rubies nor your fur
Will set my little heart astir
Or make my body coo and purr
You confirmed just what your heart meant
When you offered an apartment
And a closet full of garment
As though my life were some department
Of an edifice you dreamed
Without once consulting me
I can’t live your reality
I shan’t subsume identity
by Richard W. Bray
Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten–
In folly ripe, in reason rotten.
(In other words, “I’ll choose my own life, Mister.” Marlowe’s shepherd painted a lovely portrait of a life for two, but he didn’t ask the nymph for her input until he was finished. That’s why I find the feminism of Raleigh’s nymph so appealing.)
No one has ever asked me to recite the fourth stanza of “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” by Sir Walter Raleigh. But my brain is constantly preparing itself for the task. Often I’m riding my bicycle when those twenty-seven marvelously collocated words decide to flow across my consciousness.
How long do I stretch out the three soons? (Listen to how Nancy Wickwire does it) How long do I pause after break and wither? How much sarcasm can I pack into the first syllable of reason? How long do I pause after reason and how hard do I hit the first syllable of rotten?
In one year they sent a million fighters forth
South and North,
And they built their gods a brazen pillar high
As the sky,
Yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force–
Gold, of course.
Oh HEART! oh blood that freezes, blood that BURNS!
Earth’s returns
For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin!
Shut them in,
With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!
Love is best.
Love or war, which is better? It seems like such an easy question. So why do we waste so much of ourselves making war when we could be making love? The final stanza of Robert Browning’s “Love Among the Ruins” reminds us how absurd our priorities can be.
I love the way Steven Pacey reads “Love Among the Ruins.” He emphasizes the word heart as a hinge upon which the entire poem turns. He also emphasizes burns at the end of the line. Browning’s exclamation points suggests this reading is correct.
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
WHAT did I know, what did I KNOW
of love’s AUStere and LONEly offices?
So e.e.cummings isn’t the only poet whose father moved through dooms of love.
In marked contrast to Pacey’s reading of “Love Among the Ruins,” Robert Hayden’s rendition of “Those Winter Sundays” is subtle. In the penultimate line he emphasizes What a little bit and know even less. Hayden also breathes a little extra heart into the first syllables of austere and lonely in the last line.
by Richard W. Bray
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