As Hurricane Harvey pounds the Gulf Coast, Edith Sitwell’s poem “Still Falls the Rain” comes to mind. Sitwell was writing about the World War II London blitzkrieg, but the poem still applies.
Monthly Archives: August 2017
Still Falls the Rain
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Still Falls the Rain", climate change, Edith Sitwell, environmental disasters, Hurricane Harvey Comments closed
Memorizing Poetry Is Good for You
Memorizing poetry is a powerful way to understand it. Unfortunately, the practice of doing so has fallen out of favor in schools.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, Memorizing poetry Comments closed
A Cradle Yet Shall Save the Earth
Mark Twain has fun in “Huckleberry Finn” with today’s New Testament reading, which is about Moses being discovered in “the bushrushers.” Victor Hugo also has a charming poem about the incident.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Moses on the Nile", Exodus, Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, Moses, Victor Hugo Comments closed
Do You Believe in the Great White Race?
There’s a marked contrast between the nobility people claim for the Confederate statues and the young men swarming around them. Langston Hughes understood the contrast in his darkly humorous “Ku Klux.”
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Ku Klux", Confederate statues, Donald Trump, KKK, Langston Hughes, racism, which supremacy Comments closed
Seeing the Beauty in an Invalid
As I sat by the hospital bed of a dear friend holding her hand, the well-known opening lines from Auden’s “Lullaby” came to mind:
What Kind of Con Man Do You Want?
Gogol’s “Dead Souls” shows us two conmen, one who is a lot like our president, the other like various politicians (including Ryan, McConnell and Hillary Clinton). The boisterous and ineffective conman comes off better that the carefully calculating one.
The Eclipse Brought 2 Poems to Mind
While watch the solar eclipse, I conflated two poetic passages, one from “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the other from “The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence.”
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence", Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, solar eclipses Comments closed
