#swiss poetry

[tills-poetry-wednesday]

Poetry Wednesday - Episode 28

Albin Zollinger - Wo aber fliegen die Abendvögel hin

The first Swiss poem in this series. The opening lines didn't do too much for me. But the last two lines were stuck in my head for a while. A reminder that things and processes are beyond our awareness, knowledge and agency. The English translation could be:

"And always while we lie and sleep

Ships detach themselves darkly in the harbour."

[burningvelvet]

Some of Mary Shelley’s journal entries from late July 1816 when she, Percy, and Claire toured the Valley of Chamounix and visited the Mer de Glace (Montanvert). The scenery inspired Frankenstein and Percy Shelley’s poem Mont Blanc:

“Tuesday, July 23 (Chamounix). — In the morning, after breakfast, we mount our mules to see the source of the Arveiron. When we had gone about three parts of the way, we descended and continued our route on foot, over loose stones, many of which were an enormous size. We came to the source, which lies (like a stage) surrounded on the three sides by mountains and glaciers. We sat on a rock, which formed the fourth, gazing on the scene before us. An immense glacier was on our left, which continually rolled stones to its[Pg 145] foot. It is very dangerous to be directly under this. Our guide told us a story of two Hollanders who went, without any guide, into a cavern of the glacier, and fired a pistol there, which drew down a large piece on them. We see several avalanches, some very small, others of great magnitude, which roared and smoked, overwhelming everything as it passed along, and precipitating great pieces of ice into the valley below. This glacier is increasing every day a foot, closing up the valley. We drink some water of the Arveiron and return. After dinner think it will rain, and Shelley goes alone to the glacier of Boison. I stay at home. Read several tales of Voltaire. In the evening I copy Shelley’s letter to Peacock.”

“Wednesday, July 24. — To-day is rainy; therefore we cannot go to Col de Balme. About 10 the weather appears clearing up. Shelley and I begin our journey to Montanvert. Nothing can be more desolate than the ascent of this mountain; the trees in many places having been torn away by avalanches, and some half leaning over others, intermingled with stones, present the appearance of vast and dreadful desolation. It began to rain almost as soon as we left our inn. When we had mounted considerably we turned to look on the scene. A dense white mist covered the vale, and tops of scattered pines peeping above were the only objects that presented themselves. The rain continued in torrents. We were wetted to the skin; so that, when we had ascended halfway, we resolved to turn back. As we descended, Shelley went before, and, tripping up, fell upon his knee. This added to the weakness occasioned by a blow on his ascent; he fainted, and was for some minutes incapacitated from continuing his route.

We arrived wet to the skin. I read Nouvelles Nouvelles, and write my story. Shelley writes part of letter.”

Excerpts from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein:

“At length I arrived at the village of Chamounix. Exhaustion succeeded to the extreme fatigue both of body and of mind which I had endured. For a short space of time I remained at the window watching the pallid lightnings that played above Mont Blanc and listening to the rushing of the Arve, which pursued its noisy way beneath. The same lulling sounds acted as a lullaby to my too keen sensations; when I placed my head upon my pillow, sleep crept over me; I felt it as it came and blessed the giver of oblivion.”

“These sublime and magnificent scenes afforded me the greatest consolation that I was capable of receiving. They elevated me from all littleness of feeling, and although they did not remove my grief, they subdued and tranquillised it. In some degree, also, they diverted my mind from the thoughts over which it had brooded for the last month. I retired to rest at night; my slumbers, as it were, waited on and ministered to by the assemblance of grand shapes which I had contemplated during the day. They congregated round me; the unstained snowy mountain-top, the glittering pinnacle, the pine woods, and ragged bare ravine, the eagle, soaring amidst the clouds—they all gathered round me and bade me be at peace.”

“Where had they fled when the next morning I awoke? All of soul-inspiriting fled with sleep, and dark melancholy clouded every thought. The rain was pouring in torrents, and thick mists hid the summits of the mountains, so that I even saw not the faces of those mighty friends. Still I would penetrate their misty veil and seek them in their cloudy retreats. What were rain and storm to me? My mule was brought to the door, and I resolved to ascend to the summit of Montanvert. I remembered the effect that the view of the tremendous and ever-moving glacier had produced upon my mind when I first saw it. It had then filled me with a sublime ecstasy that gave wings to the soul and allowed it to soar from the obscure world to light and joy. The sight of the awful and majestic in nature had indeed always the effect of solemnising my mind and causing me to forget the passing cares of life. I determined to go without a guide, for I was well acquainted with the path, and the presence of another would destroy the solitary grandeur of the scene.”

Mary used some of Percy’s poetry in Frankenstein. Here’s an excerpt from one of Percy Shelley’s most famous poems, Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni:

“Some say that gleams of a remoter world

Visit the soul in sleep, that death is slumber,

And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber

Of those who wake and live.—I look on high;

Has some unknown omnipotence unfurl'd

The veil of life and death? or do I lie

In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep

Spread far around and inaccessibly

Its circles? For the very spirit fails,

Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep

That vanishes among the viewless gales!

Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,

Mont Blanc appears—still, snowy, and serene;

Its subject mountains their unearthly forms

Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between

Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,

Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread

And wind among the accumulated steeps;

A desert peopled by the storms alone,

Save when the eagle brings some hunter's bone,

And the wolf tracks her there—how hideously

Its shapes are heap'd around! rude, bare, and high,

Ghastly, and scarr'd, and riven.—Is this the scene

Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young

Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea

Of fire envelop once this silent snow?

None can reply—all seems eternal now.

The wilderness has a mysterious tongue

Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,

So solemn, so serene, that man may be,

But for such faith, with Nature reconcil'd;

Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal

Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood

By all, but which the wise, and great, and good

Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.”

Excerpt of a letter from Percy Shelley to his friend Thomas Love Peacock, July 25th:

“We have returned from visiting the glacier of Montanvert, or as it is called the Sea of Ice, a scene in truth of dizzying wonder. The path that winds to it along the side of a mountain, now clothed with pines, now intersected with snowy hollows, is wide and steep. The cabin of Montanvert is three leagues from Chamouni, half of which distance is performed on mules, not so sure-footed but that on the first day the one which I rode fell in what the guides call a mauvais pas, so that I narrowly escaped being precipitated down the mountain. We passed over a hollow covered with snow, down which vast stones are accustomed to roll. One had fallen the preceding day, a little time after we had returned: our guides desired us to pass quickly, for it is said that sometimes the least sound will accelerate their descent. We arrived at Montanvert, however, safe.

On all sides precipitous mountains, the abodes of unrelenting frost, surround this vale: their sides are banked up with ice and snow, broken, heaped high, and exhibiting terrific chasms. The summits are sharp and naked pin-nacles, whose overhanging steepness will not even permit snow to rest upon them. Lines of dazzling ice occupy here and there their perpendicular rifts, and shine through the driving vapours with inexpressible brilliance: they pierce the clouds like things not belonging to this earth.

The vale itself is filled with a mass of undulating ice, and has an ascent sufficiently gradual even to the remotest abysses of these horrible deserts. It is only half a league (about two miles) in breadth, and seems much less. It exhibits an appearance as if frost had suddenly bound up the waves and whirlpools of a mighty torrent. We walked some distance upon its surface. The waves are elevated about twelve or fifteen feet from the surface of the mass, which is intersected by long gaps of unfathomable depth, the ice of whose sides is more beautifully azure than the sky. In these regions everything changes, and is in motion.

This vast mass of ice has one general progress, which ceases neither day nor night; it breaks and bursts for ever: some undulations sink while others rise; it is never the same. The echo of rocks, or of the ice and snow which fall from their overhanging precipices, or roll from their aerial summits, scarcely ceases for one moment. One would think that Mont Blanc, like the god of the Stoics, was a vast animal, and that the frozen blood for ever circulated through his stony veins.

We dined (M[ary], C[lare], and I) on the grass, in the open air, surrounded by this scene. The air is piercing and clear. We returned down the mountain sometimes encompassed by the driving vapours, sometimes cheered by the sunbeams, and arrived at our inn by seven o'clock.”

[oatbugs]

LOVELY DAUGHTER UNSOUND MIND!

[yeswearemagazine]

Absolutely stunningly poetic. Deserves the total total best, for the third YWAMag selection of the Swiss François Meylan. Untitled, Switzerland, April 2 023 © François Meylan :

[kiralou02]

[randomrichards]

SWISS ARMY MAN:

Lonely man marooned

Worlds most useful farting corpse

Learning how to live

[tessa-roy]

Canta viejo Sicuri Poster made for Suizpacio, Santiago de Chile Based on the poem "Canto viejo Sicuri" by Juan Carlos Mamani Morales, 1958 Made suring a weeklong workshop with Diego Bontognali and Atlas Studio during my 2nd year at ECAL during my BA in Graphic Design

[st-paul-dano-cathedral]

[mailmiocuoredipietratremaancora]

This Wimbledon final made me so happy and at the same time made me think about these last 20 years of tennis. According to me, professional sport is a particular form of art or, if you prefer, a particular aesthetic practice/experience. Tennis was my sport so it’s the only one I can speak about with any real (yet limited) competence. That said, I’m going here to compare tennis with poetry (Italian one, just to narrow down the field). We could also say that some players are poets and others are novelists, but it’d make it unnecessarily complicated.

So, in literature we tend to recognise a special and powerful meaning to the word “poet”: not all those who wrote poems are poets, and there are poets and Poets (as there are painters/sculptors and Artists). The capital letter is usually a mark of uniqueness and almost divinity; it means: there are a lot of great, amazing, outstanding poets, but only a few Poets, the ones who are born maybe once every hundred years. Italian literature had less than one Poet every century, maybe we had only three or four in more than 800 years. I like to think that they’re three: Dante, Petrarca and Leopardi (and perhaps also Tasso and Montale).

The point is that we can look at professional tennis in the same way. It’s easy to say how great a player (as a poet) is, but when it comes to capital letters, art and beauty know better. I think Roger Federer will be remembered in the same way we remember Dante, Michelangelo, Picasso: not simply as great and/or the best in what he did, but as a round artist, as a genius who went beyond his own practice. That’s all the difference. I cannot tell you who’s, formally speaking, a better poet between Dante and Petrarca, but I can tell you they were both unprecedented and unrepeatable geniuses who revolutionised not only Italian but global poetry for ever. That’s what Federer, and only a few before him, did for tennis, for this amazing and beautiful sport. He’s unprecedented in his way and he’s going to be unrepeatable, even when someone else is going to revolutionise it all over again.

Thanks for reading and sorry for the rant 🖖🏻

[laikacore]

who do you know that it means to be like 

dying on the broken coast of a cradled country

bogged up from the bottom of the sea

sliding down the mountain

who do you think has the means to tell you

to show you to get through to be you

how do you think it plays out in your head

on the screen on the back of the bed

riding down the sideway

something maybe something bigger something

inside or outside or seeing you in her face

why does it have to be now

why can’t it be not

why do i have to look it in the face

but do you think maybe, do you think maybe i could?

you can open me up and turn me any way you want

please go ahead it would be the most free i have been in this body

back on the the screen back on the bed

melded into two

i wish i could undo

but as deep as i drive it’s still a step too soon too late

maybe oneday

no really one day

i will know i will be

and you won’t be afraid to look at me right

all i ever needed by laika wallace

[theirafterthoughts]

it can't be stopped

[yeswearemagazine]

Untitled, Innsbruck, Austria © Mario H. :

[roughghosts]

A bell in the distance: ‘La Clarté Notre-Dame’ and ‘The Last Book of the Madrigals’ by Philippe Jaccottet

A bell in the distance: ‘La Clarté Notre-Dame’ and ‘The Last Book of the Madrigals’ by Philippe Jaccottet, translated by John Taylor @seagullbooks

When Swiss Francophone writer Philippe Jaccottet died in 2021 at the age of ninety-five, he left two final manuscripts, finished in the final year of his life with the assistance of his friend, poet José-Flore Tappy. These two works, La Clarté Notre-Dame, a sequence of prose pieces, and The Last Book of the Madrigals, a selection of verses, have now been published together in John Taylor’s…

[poetryandcommotion]

[sbpstudios]

it’s funny how a home can feel like hell.

we were supposed too make good memories here. there were good memories here once.

i can’t stand this place anymore.

i feel like i’m drowning, i feel salt water filling my lungs and just when i breach the surface you drag be back under.

when did it get this bad? how did we get here? why does being here make my throat swell and my heart burn with anger and hurt?

i made this place too be my home.

now it’s my hell.

i need too leave. i’ll die if i stay a minute longer.

i quit.

[gauloiseblue]

Gauloiseblue's Bookmarks

A/N: Since there's no bookmark system like they had in AO3, I decide to make one on this site. Will update the list from time to time.

COD

Price

[The True Me] by @i-am-hungry-24-7 Useless by @syoddeye Lazy Saturday Mornings by @clementine-thedestroyer Price and Beauty Mark by @ohmygraves Growing older with john price. by @obsessivelullabies Growing older with john price; smut. by @obsessivelullabies Ex-husband price, but the “ex” lays on significantly blurred lines now. by @captainfern Ex Husband!Price by @moongreenlight (A/N: you have NO idea what this fic had done to me) The boys all collectively realize that you are the captain’s favourite by @dante-mightdie weird HC by @theycalledhimastar

Gaz

lavender skies by @yeyinde (A/N: Gaz girlie, please read this I'm begging-) I may love Kyle, but I can totally admit when he acts like a total weirdo (he doesn’t, he’s perfect). by @theycalledhimastar

König

Ex-Lover Konig with runaway reader by @diejager Dog Hybrid König by @comfortless Hades!Konig and Persephone!reader by @comfortless Aroura Borealis by @clementine-thedestroyer Underground Fighter!König X Rich!Reader by @melancholic-thing

Soap

Rugby player soap fucks you after a win by @vanderilnde Pushy ass cbf!johnny and benefit pay by @shotmrmiller Valentine Days with Soap by @killerpancakeburger cbf!johnny as the dog he is by @ghouljams

Ghost

soulmate au with ghost but it's the fucking opposite of rainbows and sunshine by @bi-writes

Poly/HC

Fancy (Vampire! Poly! 141 x Plus size! Fem! Reader) by @swordsandholly 141 80’s Arcade AU by @clementine-thedestroyer TF141 and "can I try your drink?" By @syoddeye (A/N: don't @ me) 141 when they need attention by @void-my-warranty TF141 when you gave him hickey when you're drunk by @gloomwitchwrites

The Arcana

Asra's Love by @bahrtofane Teen Asra and puppy love headcanons by @smoke-and-silver Trip adventures with Asra by @smoke-and-silver Arcana and Weddings (fanarts) by @bastart13

Random/Miscellaneous

A/N: I put all of the Ghost Band stuff here bc I'm not officially into the fandom, but they're so irresistible to read hnggg

THEN // if (then) FINAL PART (Ghoap Comic) Roach's puppy eyes Korangi pt. 1 Korangi pt .2 Korangi (sus) pt. 3 Korangi (even more sus) pt. 4 Ghoap food pt. 1 👍👍 Self-care (Ghoap short comic) Capt Price having a cheeky wank (audio) Barry Sloane thirst trap (maybe) Bare chested Barry- Barry ugly ass poems (i'm horny) Barry Sloane seducing clip ASMR Barry talking ASMR Barry (Price) pt. 2 The band Ghost wildin' Ghost band shenanigan: part 1 The Ghouls + Rut Season (HC) Swiss meets red velvet ‘you’ve got to press it on you.’ (Ghost Band HC) Nameless Ghoul NSFW headcanons Swiss relationship and NSFW headcanons .... yeah I'm normal I swear St. Vincent *heart eyes* Miyazaki's Retirement Declarations (chronologically) Hayao Miyazaki's "Inspirational" Quotes The Hand

Web Weave | Poetry

not romantic not platonic but a secret third thing [what would happen between earth and the moon if the earth stopped spinning as illustrated by xkcd randall munroe] - Lyudmilla Ignatenko, the wife of deceased firefighter Vasily Ignatenko, Voices from Chernobyl, by Svetlana Alexeivich (transl. Keith Gessen) Robin Wood, “Psychoanalysis of Psycho” | Stoker (2013) dir. Park Chan-wook Stoker (2013) dir. Park Chan-wook and "The Lady of the House of Love" by Angela Carter This Is Me (Stoker 2013) Rice Paddies Home (What Is Home?) Whenever I see you, I remember AM I MAKING YOU FEEL SICK? // DEVOTION THAT EATS YOU ALIVE