Oct 5, 2015 Ramblings and Musings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0XYZNx6854
I’m in the mood for Keats!
When I was young, about ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen — I was madly in love with the Romantic Poets — Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron, plus a poet who SHOULD have been a Romantic Poet, but is categorized as a Victorian Poet — Alfred, Lord Tennyson. I LOVED all the poetry I read, and would sit with my Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of Poetry, which I bought in a tiny alley in a busy shopping area in the city of Madras, now Chennai, India. I would walk around with this book in hand, and drink, nay inhale, the poems therein — keep in mind I was only ten, then. (I also climbed trees, read Enid Blyton, comics, Mad Magazine and all manner of stuff, apart from reading English Romantic poetry. Oh, I read Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Blake and others, too, of course, and loved it all. But it was the poetry of the Romantic Age that caught me in its net. The influence of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge on me is incalculable, even if I may not mirror them in my own work. It’s the feeling, the emotion, the magic of their language that ensnared me. And above all, it was John Keats who spun a silent web in which I was happy to be trapped.
Strangely, I didn’t memorize his poetry the way I memorized WW or Coleridge, or Eliot in the 20th century. I just drowned in his evocative moods, much as a bee might drown in a flower, drunk and delirious, and not bothering to analyze why.
These three poems, especially, moved me greatly:
Ode to a Nightingale – John Keats
Ode on a Grecian Urn – John Keats
La Belle Dame Sans Merci — John Keats
When you read his lyrical, melancholic, musing, dream-imagistic poetry, you’ll see why I love him so much.
I always wonder what he would have been like had he lived beyond the age of 25. It makes me deeply sad to think of those whose flame burned so brightly that it consumed them (or so, I think fancifully, but it really was about the lack of good medicine in those days).
To know more, here’s good old Wikipedia on John Keats!
Tags: English Poetry, Fancy, John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode to Autumn, Romantic Poetry, S.T. Coleridge, William Wordsworth
Sep 23, 2014 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries
No one said it better than Wordsworth. I will add nothing more to the poem below, except to say, Thank you, Mr. Wordsworth. This poem always, always resonated with me.
The World Is Too Much With Us
William Wordsworth
1770–1850
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 be
A 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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Tags: #Nature, #sonnet, artifice, Quotation, The World is Too Much With Us, William Wordsworth
Mar 26, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries
I don’t have an original poem or story today. Instead, I have some favorite poems to share with you:
The World is Too Much With Us, by William Wordsworth
Picnic, Lightning, by Billy Collins
Here’s a painting that always moves me, because the painter, Peter Brueghel (one of my favorites) depicts the fall of Icarus in the most undramatic (and because of the understated nature of the image, doubly dramatic), and bucolic setting possible.
Of all the Greek myths, I find the myths of Icarus and Daedalus, of Orpheus and Eurydice, and of Eros and Psyche to be among the most compelling. They captured my heart when I was a pre-teen. As an adult, I wrote the lyrics and composed the music for two songs about Icarus and Daedalus back in the 1990s, and recorded them. (I still rather enjoy listening to them, after all these years — one of these days, I’ll put it on YouTube, and provide a link on my blog.)
Back to Icarus and Daedalus. Here’s the poem Musee Des Beaux Arts by W.H. Auden which is about the Brueghel painting and the story of Icarus. Then, there’s Landscape With The Fall of Icarus by William Carlos Williams about the same painting.
So, this is what I’ll do on the days I have too much other work. I’ll share the works of my favorite poets and painters, and musicians and thinkers with you.
On days when I have time, I might actually write some essays about artists, musicians, writers, et al. Those are yet to come.
Thanks for looking in!
Love,
Dreamer of Dreams
Tags: Icarus and Daedalus, Kubla Khan by Coleridge, Landscape of the Fall of Icarus by William Carlos Williams, Lightning by Billy Collins, Musee Des Beaux Arts by W.H. Auden, Peter Brueghel, Picnic, William Wordsworth