Entropy; or, Everything Happens

October 9, 2013 6:24 PM

Poetry quote recommendations!

I am thinking on starting a new blog about local history, specifically historical markers. I want some poetry to pair with each entry that speaks to the theme of the impermanence of man's creation. The idea that something used to be here, and now it's not. Or, something super important happened here, and now it is a highway.

It doesn't have to be all depressing - I'd love poems about progress and positive change as well! Or perhaps some other related theme that I haven't yet thought of.

Currently, the idea is for the blog title to be a quote from Shelley's Ozymandias.

posted by chainsofreedom to Writing & Language (9 answers total)

Sonnet Against Entropy, John M. Ford. I love this poem.
posted by Jeanne at 6:28 PM on October 9, 2013 [1 favorite]

Grass, Carl Sandburg

Dream Within A Dream, Edgar Allan Poe
posted by lumensimus at 7:12 PM on October 9, 2013

This previous thread about poems etc. on impermanence may help, although it's not as focused on the deterioration/disappearance of things.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 7:13 PM on October 9, 2013

From TS Eliot's The Waste Land (and from memory):

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea's swells
And the profit and loss
A current under sea picked his bones in whispers.
As he rose and fell, he passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
Oh you who turn the wheel and look to windward
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you
posted by nicwolff at 8:46 PM on October 9, 2013 [1 favorite]

Emily Dickinson "This Quiet Dust"
John McRae "In Flanders Fields"
posted by brujita at 10:09 PM on October 9, 2013

For The Union Dead by Robert Lowell.
posted by Phlegmco(tm) at 3:47 AM on October 10, 2013

From Lapis Lazuli by William Butler Yeats:

On their own feet they came, or On shipboard;
Camel-back; horse-back, ass-back, mule-back,
Old civilisations put to the sword.
Then they and their wisdom went to rack:
No handiwork of Callimachus,
Who handled marble as if it were bronze,
Made draperies that seemed to rise
When sea-wind swept the corner, stands;
His long lamp-chimney shaped like the stem
Of a slender palm, stood but a day;
All things fall and are built again,
And those that build them again are gay.
posted by désoeuvrée at 4:50 AM on October 10, 2013 [1 favorite]

Made famous by the Bradbury story:

There Will Come Soft Rains
by Sara Teasdale

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

posted by Rhaomi at 7:49 PM on October 10, 2013

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o'erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world's worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

(From Ode by Arthur O'Shaughnessy)
posted by fix at 8:28 AM on October 11, 2013