John Keats' "On the Grasshopper and the Cricket"

Link to Original Poem: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16757

A Poem Within the Poem:

The poetry of earth is birds.
When the sun is hiding in cool trees,
a grasshopper will run from hedge to hedge
about the new-mown mead,
never done with a fun summer voice,
faintly pleasant with luxury.

The poetry of earth never rests at ease.
On the frost, delights lead a lone winter evening
beneath wrought silence. From the stove,
there shrills warmth in the cricket's grassy song,
increasing ever, and seems to one,
the grasshopper's among some drowsy hills.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"

Original Poem: http://etext.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/poems/Kubla_Khan.html


A Poem Within the Poem:

Kubla Khan ran through caverns measureless to man,
down to a sunless sea. Five miles of fertile ground
were bright with sinuous rills,
where blossomed

spots of greenery. That romantic chasm
slanted down a savage place, as if this earth
in fast thick pants were breathing. A fountain was

forced amid fragments vaulted like hail, and
amid these rocks, the sacred river ran,
then reached the caverns measureless to man,

and sank in tumult to an ancestral ocean.
Kubla heard voices prohesying the dome of pleasure
from the fountain and the caves:

"Could I revive her symphony and song,
that with music loud and long,
I would build
that dome in air, weave a circle
with that sunny hair, floating and flashing
the honeydew milk of Paradise."

William Shakespeare's "Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment" (Sonnet CXVI)

Link to Original Poem: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/363.html


A Poem Within the Poem

True minds admit love alters when
it alteration finds.
It looks on tempests, shaken, the star

to every worth's unknown.
Love 's Time's fool, rosy lips and cheeks
come with his hours and weeks

to the edge of doom. If this be proved,
I writ, ever loved.

Emily Dickinson's "There's a certain slant of light"

Link to Original Poem: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15390


A Poem Within the Poem:

Certain winter afternoons
oppress like Cathedral Tunes --

We can find no scar,
Where the Meanings are --

None may Seal Despair --
An affliction sent us of the air --

The Shadows hold the Distance --
their breath like the look of Death.

John Donne's "A Valediction Forebidding Mourning"

Link to Original Poem: http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/mourning.php


A Poem Within the Poem:

Say virtuous men pass away.
Whisper to their souls. While their friends go,
say "No." Let us make noise and melt,
tear profanation of our joys,
flood sighs to tell the laity our tempests love
moving the earth.

Men reckon. It did and meant. Harms and fears
cannot admit absence. Those things
which elemented
spheres, by a love so much refined, remove
that ourselves know not what it is.
Sublunary lovers' love sense eyes, lips, and hands.
Inter-assured, our soul is sense.

I must not endure a breach. No. An airy gold
thinness moves
twin compassses. They are two.
They be two, sit stiff in the center,
hearken after

an expansion. Come home to begin.
Thy firmness misses. Make my circle
roam and run the show.

Introduction: A Project I Have Wanted to Undertake for Years...

Hello, welcome to my humble blog! I hope you enjoy your stay. This blog is a project that I have contemplated undertaking for a while now. As suggested by the title of this blog, "Poems Within Poems," I endeavor to find poems within poems. Essentially, I am reordering the words, editing out content, and changing the stanza and line structures of certain poems to find "a poem within a poem," as you might say. Most of the poems that I am editing are "classics" in the literary canon.

This is a personal project of mine, an intimate one in a way. I know that it may seem silly or downright inane to some people who come across this blog (personal projects can often seem silly to outsiders), but I have long been interested in exploring the idea of "a poem" through the editing of preexisting poems. As someone fascinated by spatial structures, I have never fully understood what makes a poem, "a poem," beyond the relatively simple lists of elements that go into what people have defined as a poem.

So, at the heart of this blog, I guess the question that I am posing is: What is a poem? More specifically, to what extent is a poem simply the sum of stanzas and meter and rhyme and words and lines as opposed to an entity that exists independent of language itself? What happens if the "form" of a poem is changed -- to what extent does it remain the same (or become a different) poem in "substance"? How would we perceive a "different" poem that uses many of the same words as a preexisting poem? I am hoping to gain some insight into these questions through this "experimental", hopefully educational blog on the art of poetry.