Sports Saturday Today’s post is on the sport of hunting (I’ll get to the Super Bowl next week). I should warn you that some of the passages you will encounter will be graphic. They are taken from the 14th century romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which I am teaching at the moment. As […]
Tag Archives: death and dying
A True Poem about the End of Grieving
In addition to my regular classes, I am also teaching a course on novels by Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Bronte at a local retirement center. The class has 15 students, all of them women, and I began it with several poems by Emily Bronte, the best poet of the sisters. A lyric about grieving hit […]
Searching for a Light in Death’s Cave
Spiritual Sunday Today’s post I dedicate to those who lost loved ones in the Arizona shootings—and to everyone else who has lost someone close in the past year or so. I offer up a poem by the 17th century poetry Henry Vaughan that gets at some of the mood swings that the mourners can expect […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Silence and Stealth of Days", "They Are All Gone into the World of Light", Arizona shootings, Henry Vaughan, Religion | Comments closed
Hope: Invisible before Us and Still Possible
At the end of yesterday’s memorial service remembering those who died in the tragic Tucson shooting, the president of the University of Arizona read a poem by W. S. Merwin, recently named our poet laureate. I found a copy of it on the University’s Poetry Center website, along with the following wonderful quotation by Merwin […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "To the New Year", Arizona shootings, Barack Obama, W. S. Merwin | Comments closed
Can Art Perform in the Face of Death?
Film Friday – 2010 in Review One of my favorite holiday films is the comic melodrama Family Stone (2008), the story of a family’s Christmas reunion. Despite their determination to put on a happy front, the family must face up to a number of underlying tensions. Foremost among these is the mother’s terminal cancer, which […]
How to Write a “True” Essay about Lit
When I wasn’t teaching class yesterday, I was continuing my marathon essay-grading session. I took a break to write today’s post, however, and used a well-known poem by Langston Hughes to reflect on what I was asking my students to do. In “Theme for English B,” the only black student in a college composition course […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Theme for English B", Beowulf, Langston Hughes, Race, teaching | Comments closed
Thy Eternal Summer Shall Not Fade–True?
Sunday evenings are for visiting our friends Alan and Jackie. I feel blessed that Alan is sharing his dying with us and that I get to have with him the final conversations I did not have with Justin, my son who drowned. We don’t talk that much about death. Mostly we talk, as we always […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Mermaid Tavern", John Keats, Sonnet 18, William Shakespeare | Comments closed
Looking to Poetry for Afterlife Evidence
Spiritual Sunday It has finally sunk in with me that my friend Alan will not recover from his cancer, and I find myself wrestling once again with the questions that arose after my son drowned. The biggest question, of course, is whether death is the end. Every Sunday in my Episcopal Church I claim that […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Up-Hill", Christina Rossetti, death, George Herbert, Religion | Comments closed
Responding to Intruder Death
As we do every week, Julia and I visited our friends Alan and Jackie this past Sunday evening, Julia to administer Reiki massage and I to talk. Alan was tired from his chemotherapy treatments and in pain from a cracked rib (he doesn’t know how that happened). Nevertheless we talked about literature, including Sir Gawain […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged cancer, Edgar Allan Poe, Masque of the Red Death, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight | Comments closed
