Tag: Poetry

Milton When You are Down on Your Luck

I am glad that none of my friends has ever found himself sitting on a bench in a park with a quarter in his pocket, as I once did, and nothing in the bank; in fact, no bank account. It’s a very lonely feeling. It gives new meaning to the sense of loneliness and despair.

I wallowed in that slough for a bit. It was not, after all, a happy situation and I am not a dim-witted optimist. But I had two choices, die in the slough or move on. I thought of the last two lines of Milton’s Lycidas,

At last he rose, and twitch’d his mantle blue:
To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.

So I got up, forever grateful to Mr. Barrows, my college English instructor, for teaching me to study Lycidas seriously and realize what a great poem it is and why that matters.

Falling
William McPherson
https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/thinking-about-the-poor/articles/falling

Working with the Quotidian Materials of Life

“The core insight I received from my second reading of Office Politics was that, if I thought I could stand at one remove from my place of employment and regard it as a kind of diorama or spectacle, I was deluding myself. As Rilke wrote in a very different context, all this seems to require us. I had fallen into the quotidian and was going to have to work with the materials at hand, pedestrian and unpromising as they might seem, to make of my life and career something meaningful. This was no small gift of self-knowledge to receive from a novel.”

Office Politics
Wilfred Sheed
From the foreword by Gerald Howard

In William Shakespeare’s play As You Like It, the character Rosalind observes that Orlando, who has been running about in the woods carving her name on trees and hanging love poems on branches, “seems to have the quotidian of love upon him.” The Bard’s use doesn’t make it clear that quotidian comes from a Latin word, quotidie, which means “every day.” But as odd as it may seem, his use of quotidian is just a short semantic step away from the “daily” adjective sense. Some fevers come and go but occur daily; in medical use, these are called “quotidian fevers” or simply “quotidians.” Poor Orlando is afflicted with such a “fever” of love.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/quotidian

Eternity is the Eve of Something – Chesterton Quote

To sum up the whole matter very simply, if Mr. McCabe asks me why I import frivolity into a discussion of the nature of man, I answer, because frivolity is a part of the nature of man. If he asks me why I introduce what he calls paradoxes into a philosophical problem, I answer, because all philosophical problems tend to become paradoxical. If he objects to my treating of life riotously, I reply that life is a riot. And I say that the Universe as I see it, at any rate, is very much more like the fireworks at the Crystal Palace than it is like his own philosophy. About the whole cosmos there is a tense and secret festivity—like preparations for Guy Fawkes’ day. Eternity is the eve of something. I never look up at the stars without feeling that they are the fires of a schoolboy’s rocket, fixed in their everlasting fall.

Heretics
Gilbert K Chesterton

What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding?

Elvis Costello opens his L A show with “What’s so funny about peace, love and understanding?”

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— Rick Hasen (@rickhasen.bsky.social) June 21, 2025 at 9:22 PM

As I walk through this wicked world
Searchin’ for light in the darkness of insanity
I ask myself, “Is all hope lost?
Is there only pain and hatred and misery?”

And each time I feel like this inside
There’s one thing I wanna know
What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding? Oh-oh
What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding?

And as I walk on through troubled times
My spirit gets so downhearted sometimes
So where are the strong, and who are the trusted?
And where is the harmony, sweet harmony?

‘Cause each time I feel it slippin’ away, just makes me wanna cry
What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding? Oh-oh
What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding?

So where are the strong, and who are the trusted?
And where is the harmony, sweet harmony?
‘Cause each time I feel it slippin’ away
Just makes me wanna cry

What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding? Oh-oh
What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding? Oh-oh
What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding?

Introduction to Poetry – Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Found in:
The Poetry Reader: An Anthology

Some Schools of Thought on Tlön

One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time: it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory. Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. Another, that the history of the universe—and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives—is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. Another, that the universe is comparable to those cryptographs in which not all the symbols are valid and that only what happens every three hundred nights is true. Another, that while we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men.

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
Labyrinths
Jorge Luis Borges

see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertius

Shakespeare Everyday – November 13

November 13 | The Tempest | Act 3 Scene 2

Shakespeare stimulates every sense, giving images a smell, a sound, and a colour even when he doesn’t mention those aspects explicitly. When read or heard, the language can be completely immersive, particularly in the later plays. However complex Caliban of The Tempest may be, what is certain is that he speaks one of the most beautiful speeches in the play. The words themselves, like the isle he talks of, hum with gentle sounds and sweet airs.

CALIBAN
Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices,
That if I then had waked after long sleep
Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked I cried to dream again.

Shakespeare for Every Day of the Year

Searching for the Book of Vindication – The Library of Babel, Borges

When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope. At that time a great deal was said about the Vindications: books of apology and prophecy which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained prodigious arcana for his future. Thousands of the greedy abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed up the stairways, urged on by the vain intention of finding their Vindication. These pilgrims disputed in the narrow corridors, proffered dark curses, strangled each other on the divine stairways, flung the deceptive books into the air shafts, met their death cast down in a similar fashion by the inhabitants of remote regions. Others went mad . . . The Vindications exist (I have seen two which refer to persons of the future, to persons who perhaps are not imaginary) but the searchers did not remember that the possibility of a man’s finding his Vindication, or some treacherous variation thereof, can be computed as zero.

Labyrinths
Jorge Luis Borges

Things I Want Decided – Izumi Shikibu

Which shouldn’t exist
in his world,
the one who forgets
or the one
who is forgotten?

Which is better,
to love
one who has died
or not to see
each other when you’re alive?

Which is better,
the distant lover
you long for
or the one you see daily
without desire?

Which is the least unreliable
among fickle things –
the swift rapids,
a flowing river,
or this human world?

Izumi Shikibu
c. 976–c. 1030
‘Things I Want Decided’
Japan
Translated by Jane Hirshfield

Shikibu was a member of Japan’s famed ‘Thirty-six Medieval Poetry Immortals’, a legendary collective of Japanese masters from antiquity. Here, Shikibu weaves two different kinds of absence – absence from the earth and the absence of desire. With this braid, she challenges readers to reflect upon which fate is truly worse.

The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine
Kaveh Akbar

Happiness and the Sense of Smell – Joseph Brodsky

It was a windy night, and before my retina registered anything, I was smitten by a feeling of utter happiness: my nostrils were hit by what to me has always been its synonym, the smell of freezing seaweed. For some people, it’s freshly cut grass or hay; for others, Christmas scents of conifer needles and tangerines. For me, it’s freezing seaweed…

A smell is, after all, a violation of oxygen balance, and invation into it of other elements – methane? carbon? sulphur? nitrogen? Depending on that invasion’s intensity, you get a scent, a smell, a stench. It is a molecular affair, and happiness, I suppose, is the moment of spotting the elements of your own composition being free. There were quite a number of them out there, in a state of total freedom, and I felt I’d stepped into my own self-portrait in the cold air.

Watermark
Joseph Brodsky
A collection of forty-eight essays on Venice explores the city’s meandering, waterlogged streets, stunningly beautiful architecture, atmospheric characters, and unique spirit. By the author of Less Than One.

Invocation of the Creator – Yoruba Poem

Yoruba Tribe
In African folklore, I have found a strange image of the Creator as a swarm of bees.

INVOCATION OF THE CREATOR
He is patient, he is not angry.
He sits in silence to pass judgement.
He sees you even when he is not looking.
He stays in a far place – but his eyes are on the town.

He stands by his children and lets them succeed.
He causes them to laugh – and they laugh.
Ohoho – the father of laughter.
His eye is full of joy.
He rests in the sky like a swarm of bees.

Obatala – who turns blood into children.

Translated by Ulli Beier

A Book Of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry
Czeslaw Milosz (Editor)