Tag Archives: Alfred Lord Tennyson

A Poem for Heroes and Mass Murderers

By Robin Bates | Published: July 5, 2010

Since the World Cup is underway in South Africa, I watched Clint Eastwood’s Invictus last week, about the 1995 World Cup Rugby Tournament held in South Africa. Based on a true story, the film notes that, while in prison, Nelson Mandela, like many black South Africans, would root against the South African rugby team, beloved […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Invictus", Apartheid, Clint Eastwood, Faisal Shahzad, John Milton, Nelson Mandela, Paradise Lost, politics, Sports, Timothy McVeigh, Ulysses, William Ernest Henley | Comments closed

Becoming the Hero of Our Own Life

By Robin Bates | Published: June 24, 2010

David Copperfield (1935) “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show,” writes narrator David Copperfield at the beginning of the great Charles Dickens novel. But why the uncertainty? Can’t we just decide to be the hero of […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Beowulf, cancer, Catcher in the Rye, Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, death and dying, In Memoriam, J. D. Salinger, Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot | Comments closed

Ring Out the Old, Ring in the New

By Robin Bates | Published: December 24, 2009

I am writing to you from the home of my parents in Sewanee, Tennessee, where I figure I have spent around 48 of my 58 Christmases. In this I differ from the Tennyson in the third Christmas passage of In Memoriam. For the first time since Hallam’s death, he is not celebrating the season in […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Christmas, death and dying, grieving, In Memoriam | Comments closed

Dead Hands Reaching Out to Comfort

By Robin Bates | Published: December 23, 2009

Alfred Lord Tennyson’s three Christmas passages in In Memoriam are reminiscent of the way that my own family celebrates Christmas. My ancestry is British and the ceremonies that we observe date at least as far back as my great grandmother Eliza Scott Fulcher, born in the 1850’s. Christmas in Sewanee, Tennessee (which is where we are […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Christmas, death and dying, grieving, In Memoriam | Comments closed

Singing Carols in the Darkness

By Robin Bates | Published: December 22, 2009

Thinking about my dead son in this Christmas season brings to mind Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam, the lengthy poem that he wrote over the course of 17 years lamenting the death of his close friend Arthur Henry Hallam.Hallam was a young man when he died unexpectedly of a cerebral hemorrhage, and Tennyson describes his […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Christmas, death and dying, grieving, In Memoriam | Comments closed

Trusting that Good Can Come from Ill

By Robin Bates | Published: October 8, 2009

Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus What have I learned about literature and pain this past week? First, that writers have taken up the topic, just as they take up every aspect of human existence. They imagine what it is like to feel pain and, through poetic images and fictional stories, convey that experience to readers. By entering […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Christopher Marlowe, death of a child, Death of Ivan Ilych, Doctor Faustus, Heart of Darkness, In Memoriam, John Milton, Joseph Conrad, Leo Tolstoy, Name of the Rose, Pain, Paradise Lost, Rachel Kranz, Suffering, Umberto Eco | Comments closed

Alan’s Cancer vs. an Exquisite Corpse

By Robin Bates | Published: August 20, 2009

Colleagues of my friend Alan Paskow held another one of our salons Monday night. Alan is a former professor of philosophy at St. Mary’s College, now retired, who currently has cancer in his lungs. We have been meeting once a month or so to show our support and to generally reaffirm how important community is. Monday […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged cancer, death and dying, In Memoriam, Surrealism | Comments closed

Father-Son Conflict: The Comic Version

By Robin Bates | Published: July 23, 2009

In yesterday’s post I began giving an account of a car conversation I had with my two sons regarding stories that explore father-son relationships, as well as my desire for a story in which fathers and sons collaborate to handle the world’s challenges. Darien, my older son, felt that the archetypal conflict as it […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged fathers and sons, Henry Fielding, John Milton, Paradise Lost, Tom Jones, Ulysses | Comments closed

Poetry Standing Firm in the Face of Fire

By Robin Bates | Published: June 30, 2009

“But maybe stories and poetry can help open our minds to possibilities that are very real but extremely hard to see; and in that sense, they can be very practical.” – Rachel Kranz in a response to yesterday’s post I love the two responses to yesterday’s post (from the two major women in my life) […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Azar Nafisi, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herbert Marcuse, Martin Luther King, politics, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Simin Belbahani, Ulysses, Uncle Tom's Cabin | Comments closed