Tag: Poetry

The Grass of Far-off Years – George Eliot quote

These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird notes, this sky with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedge, such things as these are the mother tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them. Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass today might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and grass of far-off years, which still live in us and transform our perception into love.

The Mill on the Floss
George Eliot

Found as footnote in:
Art as an Experience
John Dewey

Here’s the footnoted text by Dewey:

But the live creature adopts its past; it can make friends with even its stupidities, using them as warnings that increase present wariness. Instead of trying to live upon whatever may have been achieved in the past, it uses past successes to inform the present. Every living experience owes its richness to what Santayana well calls “hushed reverberations.”

We are Transmitters – D.H. Lawrence

We are Transmitters
As we live, we are transmitters of life.
And when we fail to transmit life, life fails to flow through us.

That is part of the mystery of sex, it is a flow onwards.
Sexless people transmit nothing.

And if, as we work, we can transmit life into our work,
life, still more life, rushes into us to compensate, to be ready
and we ripple with life through the days.

Even if it is a woman making an apple dumpling, or a man a stool,
if life goes into the pudding, good is the pudding
good is the stool,
content is the woman, with fresh life rippling in to her,
content is the man.

Give, and it shall be given unto you
is still the truth about life.
But giving life is not so easy.
It doesn’t mean handing it out to some mean fool, or letting the living dead eat you up.
It means kindling the life-quality where it was not,
even if it’s only in the whiteness of a washed pocket-handkerchief.

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?”

[image or embed]

— 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