Love's as warm as tears

Love’s as warm as tears, 

  Love is tears: 

Pressure within the brain, 

Tension at the throat, 

Deluge, weeks of rain, 

Haystacks afloat, 

Featureless seas between 

Hedges, where once was green. 

Love’s as fierce as fire, 

  Love is fire: 

All sorts—infernal heat 

Clinkered with greed and pride, 

Lyric desire, sharp-sweet, 

Laughing, even when denied, 

And that empyreal flame 

Whence all loves came. 

Love’s as fresh as spring, 

  Love is spring: 

Bird-song hung in the air, 

Cool smells in a wood, 

Whispering ‘Dare! Dare!’ 

To sap, to blood, 

Telling ‘Ease, safety, rest, 

Are good; not best.’ 

Love’s as hard as nails, 

  Love is nails: 

Blunt, thick, hammered through 

The medial nerves of One 

Who, having made us, knew 

The thing He had done, 

Seeing (with all that is) 

Our cross, and His. 

POEMS “Love’s as Warm as Tears"

by C.S. Lewis

Pearlie

A poem on the craziness of English pronunciation

I found this long but amusing poem today. Can you say it all in the right pronunciation? 

The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité (1922)

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation’s OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.
Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Fe0ffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.
Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.
Pronunciation (think of Psyche!)
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won’t it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It’s a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
Finally, which rhymes with enough,
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!

Were you able to read it all without any problems? 

English I can say could be the most complicated language with so many borrowed words.

There are 587 words in the poem. And I fared about 98.6%. 

Okay, I am a perfectionist. I'm sorry but it irks me that I can't say it all properly.

How about you?

Check out the pronunciation here:

pearlie

Lost Days by Dante Gabrielle Rossetti

The lost days of my life until to-day,
What were they, could I see them on the street
Lie as they fell? Would they be ears of wheat
Sown once for food but trodden into clay?
Or golden coins squandered and still to pay?
Or drops of blood dabbling the guilty feet?
Or such spilt water as in dreams must cheat
The throats of men in Hell, who thirst alway?

I do not see them here; but after death
God knows I know the faces I shall see,
Each one a murdered self, with low last breath.
‘I am thyself, — what hast thou done to me?’
‘And I—and I—thyself,’ (lo! each one saith,)
‘And thou thyself to all eternity!’

by Dante Gabrielle Rossetti

pearlie

The Prelude

The Prelude 

by William Wordsworth

When from our better selves we have too long

Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop, 

Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, 

How gracious, how benign, is Solitude; 

How potent a mere image of her sway; 

Most potent when impressed upon the mind 

With an appropriate human centre—hermit,  

Deep in the bosom of the wilderness; 

Votary (in vast cathedral, where no foot 

Is treading, where no other face is seen) 

Kneeling at prayers; or watchman on the top 

Of lighthouse, beaten by Atlantic waves; 

Or as the soul of that great Power is met 

Sometimes embodied on a public road, 

When, for the night deserted, it assumes 

A character of quiet more profound 

Than pathless wastes.

pearlie

An Empty Cup

I hold in my hands an empty cup

I hadn’t known it to be so

But it was empty it was such 

Though I thought it overflowed

But nay it was empty still 

I looked and there was nothing

I thought I had it filled

It had to at least with something

The cup was once not empty it was not

It was full and it was brimming

With stuff so good I always thought

I’d always have it coming 

But alas it’s all drained out now

I hold on my hands an empty cup

I have to do something but how

What should I do to fill it up

I now see I have filled it with stuff

I thought will amount to something

But these stuff are all but fluff

It goes into the cup and becomes nothing

I thought they’d be good

I thought they’d be fine

I was wrong I was so wrong

I was totally out of line

I really need to do something

I have in my hands an empty cup

I need it filled with good things

I need it to fill it up

I need to go back to the good things

The stuff that I love so much 

The mulling, the thinking, the reading

To go back to them now I must

I have in my hands an empty cup

I now need to fill it up

Copyright © 2018 Pearlie Ng

A Sad Child by Margaret Atwood

You're sad because you're sad. 


It's psychic. It's the age. It's chemical. 


Go see a shrink or take a pill, 


or hug your sadness like an eyeless doll 


you need to sleep. 



Well, all children are sad 


but some get over it. 


Count your blessings. Better than that, 


buy a hat. Buy a coat or pet. 


Take up dancing to forget. 



Forget what? 


Your sadness, your shadow, 


whatever it was that was done to you 


the day of the lawn party 


when you came inside flushed with the sun, 


your mouth sulky with sugar, 


in your new dress with the ribbon 


and the ice-cream smear, 


and said to yourself in the bathroom, 


I am not the favorite child. 



My darling, when it comes 


right down to it 


and the light fails and the fog rolls in 


and you're trapped in your overturned body 


under a blanket or burning car, 



and the red flame is seeping out of you 


and igniting the tarmac beside your head 


or else the floor, or else the pillow, 


none of us is; 


or else we all are.

~ Margaret Atwood

pearlie