Mountain Poetry

I enjoy reading, memorizing, thinking on, and reciting poetry when I'm in the mountains and rocks (or wish I was). What are your favorite related poems or poets?

Mine are

Robert Service (especially The Call of the Wild , The Tramps , A Rolling Stone )
Lord Alfred Tennyson (especially Ulysses , memorizing it now)

Are you sure you are in the right place? Maybe I'm in the wrong place.

rging wrote:Maybe I'm in the wrong place.

Could be.

walt whitman...although the poems aren't necessarily about the mountains, they do encompass nature and the spirit of life and adventure. I really enjoy song of the open road & song of myself

"In the mountains, there you feel free."

line 17 of "The Wasteland"

"You ask me why I dwell in the green moun­tain;
I smile and make no reply for my heart is free of care.
As the peach-blossom flows down stream and is gone into the unknown,
I have a world apart that is not among men."

Chinese poet Li Bai

Gary Snyder, hands down. In every poem of his, you can hear the mixture of awe, reverence, exuberance, and lust that comes from a day outside in an ecosystem and a landscape that isn't about you:

Ah to be alive
on a mid-September morn
fording a stream
barefoot, pants rolled up
holding boots, pack on
sunshine, ice in the shallows,
northern rockies.

Rustle and shimmer of icy creek waters
stones turn underfoot, small and hard on toes
cold nose dripping
singing inside
creek music, heart music,
smell of sun on gravel.

I pledge allegiance.

I pledge allegiance to the soil
of Turtle Island
one ecosystem
in diversity
under the sun--
With joyful interpenetration for all.

Plus, he wrote my favorite summary of "the climbing life" ever, the one that is taped to my computer screen and that I could be contentedly buried under (if I wasn't planning to become cremains and take to the winds somewhere):

Range after range of mountains
Year after year after year
I am still in love.

Oh, and as far as actual climbing goes, Doug Robinson has written some of my favorite descriptions of the feeling that comes from actual movement over stone. Check out A Night on the Ground, A Day in the Open.

The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain

There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.

It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction,

How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,

For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:

The exact rock where his inexactness
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,

Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.

Wallace Stevens

I'm sorta getting it although its more songs that get stuck in my head. Sorry I lack culture.

Hello darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence

Simon an Garfunkel

My favorite mountain love poem as expressed by Louie from the Taxi sitcom!
youtube.com/watch?v=VWc52mh…

Thanks for sharing WDW4, and others who posted some inspiring stuff. Very cool

big fan of neruda and wendell berry.

Wendell Berry - “The Snake”

At the end of October
I found on the floor of the woods
a small snake whose back
was patterned with the dark
of the dead leaves he lay on.
His body was thickened with a mouse
or small bird. He was cold,
so stuporous with his full belly
and the fall air that he hardly
troubled to flick his tongue.
I held him a long time, thinking
of the perfection of the dark
marking on his back, the death
that swelled him, his living cold.
Now the cold of him stays
in my hand, and I think of him
lying below the frost,
big with a death to nourish him
during a long sleep.

From Openings, 1968.

Josh wrote:Gary Snyder, hands down. In every poem of his, you can hear the mixture of awe, reverence, exuberance, and lust that comes from a day outside in an ecosystem and a landscape that isn't about you

It is about you...and me...and everyone. But i get your meaning i think. It's nice to be pulled from our daily narcissistic minutiae. Separating ourselves helps us understand that we are not separate at all.

My favorite poetry...

Here's to you, here's to me

may we never disagree, if we do..

fuck you! Here's to you here's to me.

"The Mountains are calling and I must go" -John Muir
"Climb the mountains and get their good tidings" -John Muir

My favorite:

The Schreckhorn
(With thoughts of Leslie Stephen)

Aloof, as if a thing of mood and whim;
Now that its spare and desolate figure gleams
Upon my nearing vision, less it seems
A looming Alp-height than a guise of him
Who scaled its horn with ventured life and limb,
Drawn on by vague imaginings, maybe,
Of semblance to his personality
In its quaint glooms, keen lights, and rugged trim.

At his last change, when Life's dull coils unwind,
Will he, in old love, hitherward escape,
And the eternal essence of his mind
Enter this silent adamantine shape,
And his low voicing haunt its slipping snows
When dawn that calls the climber dyes them rose?

Thomas Hardy -1897

I've never read anything better, poetry or otherwise, about climbing, climbers, or mountains. Hardy was a stallion. He and Leslie Stephen, who was part of the first ascent party of the Schreckhorn, were close friends.

Who Has Known Heights

Who has known heights and depths, shall not again
Know peace--not as the calm heart knows
Low, ivied walls; a garden close;
The old enchantment of a rose.
And though he tread the humble ways of men,
He shall not speak the common tongue again.

Who has known heights, shall bear forevermore
An incommunicable thing
That hurts his heart, as if a wing
Beat at the portal, challenging;
And yet-lured by the gleam his vision wore,--
Who once has trodden stars seeks peace no more.

Mary Brent Whiteside

I hope this thread takes off. I love poetry and lyrics with mountain imagery in them.

Here's one by Gary Snyder:

Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.

I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.

I love a good sunrise,
framed by mountains afar....
high craggy peaks,
a thousand miles from my car.

Austin Baird wrote:"You ask me why I dwell in the green moun­tain; I smile and make no reply for my heart is free of care. As the peach-blossom flows down stream and is gone into the unknown, I have a world apart that is not among men." Chinese poet Li Bai

Wonderful!

I myself would quote Townes van Zandt...Mother the Mountain, Colorado Girl, Snowing on Raton...good words about some good places, well worth a youtube.

Some Townes lyrics...

The mountain moon
Forever sets too soon
Bein' alone is all the hills can do
Alone and then
Her silver sails again
And they will follow
In their flyin' shoes
Flyin' shoes
They will follow in their
Flyin' shoes

another song...

My home is colorado
With their proud mountains tall
Where the rivers like gypsys
Down her black canyons fall
I'm a long, long way from denver
With a long way to go
So lend an ear to my singing
Cause I'll be back no more

I left as a young man
Not full seventeen
With nothin' for company
But the wind and a dream
'bout all the fast ladies
And livin' I'd find
When I left my proud mountains
And rivers behind

So I rolled and a-rambled
Like a leaf in the wind
Well, I found my fast ladies
And some hard livin' men
Well, I sometimes went hungry
With my pockets all bare
Lord, I sometimes had good luck
With money to spare

I made me some friends, lord,
That I won't soon forget
Some are down under
And some are rambling yet
But as for me
I'm headed for home
Back to high colorado
Never more for to roam

So friends, when my time comes
As surely it will
You just carry my body
Out to some lonesome hill
And lay me down easy
Where the cool rivers run
With only my mountains
'tween me and the sun

My home is colorado