Remembering my oldest son, who died 20 years ago, I turn to Shelley’s elegy for Keats.
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Tag Archives: In Memoriam
Let Us Sail into the Promise of the Day
E. A. Robinson’s “Children of the Night” finds spiritual hope in a dark world.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Children of the Night", Alfred Lord Tennyson, Doubt, E. A. Robinson, Faith Comments closed
The Declining English Major
An English prof, sensing obsolescence, turns to “In Memoriam” (also Fowles, Wordsworth & Arnold).
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Dover Beach", Alan Bennett, Alfred Lord Tennyson, English major, French Lieutenant's Woman, History Boys, Humanities, Intimations of Immortality, John Fowles, Matthew Arnold, William Wordsworth Comments closed
Can Poetry Stop This Man?
Poetry may not have been able to stop Donald Trump, but it has its ways of mounting resistance. Poems by Tennyson, Auden, and Yeats explain how.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "In Memory of W. B. Yeats", "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing", Alfred Lord Tennyson, Donald Trump, Joyce Carol Oates, William Butler Yeats Comments closed
Love & the Red Fool-Fury of the Seine
Tennyson, responding to Paris massacres in the 1840s, asserts his faith in love and in social truth. Our challenge is to continue to believe this in the wake of the recent terror attacks.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Alfred Lord Tennyson, Paris terror attacks, Terrorism, violence Comments closed
Dear Son, Far Off, My Lost Desire
I understand more with each passing year what Tennyson means when he says his love “is vaster passion now” and how Hallam is thoroughly mixed with God and nature. Tennyson goes on to say that the moral will of humankind—the “living will” that is the best part of ourselves as a people—can finding footing on this spiritual rock. And that the living water that springs from this rock will “flow through our deeds and make them pure.”
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Alfred Lord Tennyson, death of a child, Easter, Julia Bates, Religion, Spirituality Comments closed