Poetry, with its eye on what really matters, can help us taste food again. Mary Oliver’s “Plum Trees” reminds us to eat with full awareness.
Tag Archives: T. S. Eliot
Nothing So Sensible as Sensual Inundation
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Plum Trees", Andrew Marvell, Food, Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Mary Oliver, Sensuality, To His Coy Mistress Comments closed
March Madness Ends with a Whimper
“This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.” Eliot’s well-known conclusion to “The Hollow Men” (read the poem here) came to mind after watching the Butler Bulldogs lose to the Connecticut Huskies 53-41.The game was so bad that it takes a masterpiece of modernist despair to do it justice.
Epiphany from a Camel’s Point of View
Scott Bates’s version of the epiphany focuses on a camel’s point of view. This camel doesn’t end up in Bethlehem but his work is no less holy.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Fable of the Third Christmas Carol", Epiphany, Religion, Scott Bates Comments closed
Washing Away Michael Vick’s Sins
Spiritual Sunday In a follow-up to yesterday’s post on football quarterback Michael Vick, I want to elaborate further on Coleridge’s argument for penance. Penance is not only the right thing to do. It also can make you feel very, very good. Coleridge gives us images in Rime of the Ancient Mariner that drive this point […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Football, Michael Vick, Redemption, Religion, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sin, Sports, Wasteland Comments closed
George Steinbrenner, Not a Hollow Man
Sports Saturday Mistah Steinbrenner—he dead. So I imagine T. S. Eliot announcing the death of the legendary Yankee owner this past week. That’s because, if one goes by Eliot’s famous 1925 poem “The Hollow Men,” one could not say that “the Boss” was “Shape without form, shade without colour,/ Paralysed force, gesture without motion.” In fact, an […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Hollow Men", Baseball, George Steinbrenner, Sports Comments closed
This Fragile Earth, Our Island Home
On Monday I talked about how Silko says that, if we are to end our destructive (and ultimately self-destructive) assaults upon the earth, we must come into spiritual alignment with it. I’m aware that appealing to Native American religions is sure to draw jeers from certain sectors of the political right, especially the Rush Limbaughs […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Defense of Christianity, Environmentalism, Leslie Marmon Silko, Nature, Religion Comments closed
The Journey towards Renewal
Today is the Christian Feast of the Epiphany, the day celebrating the three wise men from the east visiting the infant Jesus with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Symbolically, this captures the world’s old wisdom systems acknowledging the new dispensation of love and renewal represented by God entering the world and taking human form, […]
Perpetual Migraines and Julian of Norwich
This is the first of a series of posts I will be writing on literature and pain. There are a couple of reasons why I write about this now. First, in last night’s salon in honor of my cancer-stricken friend Alan Paskow, we discussed the introduction to Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: The Making […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Book of Showings, Four Quartets, Julian of Norwich, Religion, Suffering Comments closed
