Oct 16, 2015 Uncategorized
No poem from me tonight — But there’ll be a sonnet from me tomorrow. Meanwhile here are some sonnets to keep you company and gladden you as you go about your possibly sad and forlorn day, which might, perhaps, be stripped of poetry (I’m just being facetious — I know all your lives and days are filled to the brim with poetry! 🙂 ).
This first one is by William Wordsworth, and is one of my favorites. I have often felt like Wordsworth did, but he lived in the early 19th century, so life should have been less frantic — just goes to show that the times, they aren’t a-changin’– they’ve always been bad:
The World is Too Much With Us
By William Wordsworth
The world is too much with us; late and soon,Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—Little we see in Nature that is ours;We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;The winds that will be howling at all hours,And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;For this, for everything, we are out of tune;It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather beA Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
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I love how Mr. Wordsworth’s wants to go back to the times of the Greeks, when the gods were marvellous, mysterious, all-powerful, and all about nature.
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Here’s one by that singularly wonderful sonneteer, Will Shakespeare:
Sonnet 18:
Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?by William Shakespeare
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st;
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee
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I’ve always enjoyed these lines:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st;
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st;
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Those are such beautiful and hopeful lines at the end! Such a testament to the power of poetry and art, which confer immortality (although even these fade or fall with time, as we’ll see in the sonnet below, namely:
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Ozymandiasby Percy Bysshe Shelley:
I met a traveller from an antique land,Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,Tell that its sculptor well those passions readWhich yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;And on the pedestal, these words appear:My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!Nothing beside remains. Round the decayOf that colossal Wreck, boundless and bareThe lone and level sands stretch far away.”
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And thus, all the works of men and women come crumbling to dust. A cheering and cheerful thought, no?
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And, finally, this oft-quoted little jewel of a sonnet:
How do I Love Thee?
Sonnet Number 43
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.I love thee to the depth and breadth and heightMy soul can reach, when feeling out of sightFor the ends of being and ideal grace.I love thee to the level of every day’sMost quiet need, by sun and candle-light.I love thee freely, as men strive for right;I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.I love thee with the passion put to useIn my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.I love thee with a love I seemed to loseWith my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,I shall but love thee better after death.
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I love how she says these lines below — nicely made parallels and anaphoras. And those expected similes are so perfectly expressed:
I love thee freely, as men strive for right;I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
And the idea of immortality shows up again, with the sense that this time, it will not be an ephemeral sort of immortality through art, but a permanent one, through love.
I do not feel cynical here, even though that part of me might want to rear its contrary, twisty head. I’m willing to go with Ms. Barrett Browning’s vision here.
For, as we all like to believe, Love conquers Death.
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Feb 17, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries, Teaching and Learning
What would I like to post?
I’d like to post a letter to this planet:
Hello, Earth! What have you been up to in the past week?
Ah yes, a meteor hit the upper atmosphere above the Urals in Russia. Tethered to the planet, we see signs of an imminent inescapable route to extinction. Right? Wrong!
Okay, we are seeing the signs of a possible mass extinction. I mean, didn’t millions die? What’s that you say? Oh, about 1,200 people were injured from the shock generated by it?
Regardless, I feel bad that such a thing happened, and guilty because I’m glad it didn’t happen here, or at least it hasn’t happened yet.
So, when that meteorite comes blazing out of the sky, that’s it, then. How apocalyptic, how random, how utterly pointless to have that tangent to our circle which goes off-course!
We need a blanket that repels those visitors from our solar system, and not just the atmosphere. Let’s create one now. Right!
What however, if you, Earth are suffering from an auto-immune disorder known as human life? What then? Will we be long gone before any meteoric strikes of the truly apocalyptic variety?
Do you remember what happened in December, those events whose shock waves continued into January, O Earth?
Two terrible events came to occupy our news — on December 14th, six adults and twenty children died in an elementary school because of the unhinging of a man, and on December 16th, a twenty-three year old Indian woman was brutalized in the most horrifying way by six unhinged men.
The first event created sorrow and despair in all of us, but it wasn’t long before the crazies in the organization that aims to “protect” the Second Amendment, all stepped up with bizarre rationalizations for MORE weapons. When that meteor came and struck, some went about, creating false myths about it, turning a blind eye to that which was under their noses. Where did the souls of those people go? Where has conscience fled? Where have empathy and reason gone? Are those people who deny the massacre even human?
After the horror of the young woman’s death, India came together, and has had mass rallies, protests, clashes with the police, men and women speaking out against the blame-the-victim attitude of a male-dominated society. Awareness hit like a shock wave, and shattered many people’s hearts. In many Indian cities, men are becoming more aware and women are standing up for their right to be free in a fettered society, while the male-dominated Indian villages speak about pernicious Western influences and blather on about how women dress, which, they proclaim, invites their fate. What does it take to change the minds of all people? What MORE will it take?
Meanwhile, wars continue around the earth. Women and children get sold into slavery, to be exploited brutally, then killed when things get complicated for the exploiters. Young men, the best and sometimes (but not always) the brightest, push off to fight other young men, eliminating any future for either. Greed is rampant. Fear and hatred rule the foolish and the venal. Everything, but EVERYTHING becomes a mind game, or worse, a game of war and peace.
And we buy, buy, buy, more and more stuff, more and more electronic and digital toys. And somewhere in the Congo and elsewhere close by, women and children are brutalized by mercenary soldiers who wish to control the lands that contain coltan, that combination of minerals which our cell-phones and laptops need. The gentle and the innocent, with all that potential for life, peace, hope and beauty are wiped out by greed-unhinged bestial creatures masquerading as men, while the land around them is mercilessly plundered.
Those meteors strike human lives every day, every single day. I cannot even wrap my mind around that.
Is this the beginning of suicide of the human species? Are we, the individual cells in the complex organism called human life, dealing with a deadly auto-immune disorder? Are we ever going to achieve balance? Will we see reason? I speak not of the few and far-between, but of the whole.
I am a teacher, and I work for the cause of reason and the intellect. I work for the cause of empathy and kindness. I work for the cause of sharing responsibility for the planet, when I head the “Green Team” at my school, and recruit children to deal with “reducing, reusing and recycling” for the Planet. I work to bring some measure of sanity to the insanity that afflicts my life and the lives of those I know. (Of course, I may not always succeed, irrational and irritable that I might seem to my nearest and dearest when I am tired or sleepy, but I try, I try!) I work to bring the beauty of language and literature into the drab vocabulary of the working world, when I teach Shakespeare, or Steinbeck, or Gaiman. I work for the cause of creating a space for children speak their minds, and for their right to weave their emotional and aesthetic lives into their poetry in my Friday afternoon Poetry Club. I work for the cause of right over wrong, for the cause of humanity over inhumanity within my very small milieu, when I teach about the Civil Rights Movement, and we read Melba Pattillo Beals’ book Warriors Don’t Cry, or when we study the Jewish-holocaust period in Europe. At least, it’s something, or so I tell myself.
Today, right now, in the depths of the night, I’m not so sure.
If earth is suffering from an auto-immune disorder known as humanity, a meteoric visitor from outer space wouldn’t be a bad thing.
I’ll be all right tomorrow, I’m sure. But today … today is all about despair. I’m sorry!
Tags: #Peace, auto-immune disorder, delhi gang-rape, gaiman, meteor strike, Planet Earth, sandy hook, Shakespeare, steinbeck, War