As I spent a night in an emergency room, I thought of my wife, my mother, and this Piercy Ruth and Naomi poem.
Tag Archives: William Wordsworth
A Friendship Stronger Than Fear
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Ode to a Nightingale", "Book of Ruth and Naomi", "Strange Fits of Passion I Have Known", Book of Ruth, John Keats, Marge Piercy, mothers and daughters-in-law, widows Comments closed
Summer’s Over, Back to School
The end of the Pooh books mourns the end of summer and the return to school.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "End of Summer", "Tables Turned", A. A. Milne, back to school, House on Pooh Corner Comments closed
Poetry Complements the Intellectual Life
In the grip of an arid intellect resulting in depression, philosopher John Stuart Mill turned to poetry.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Depression, Intimations of Immortality, John Stuart Mill, Lord Gordon Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, utilitarianism Comments closed
Imagination’s Transformative Power
The Romantics saw the literary imagination as a powerful transformational force.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged M.H. Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Romanticism, Tintern Abbey Comments closed
Dreaming of Travel during Covid
A very smart Covid poem circulating on social media at the moment references 11 poems, all about longing to travel.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud", "Lake Isle of Innisfree", "Sea Fever", "Green Eye of the Yellow God", "Mandalay", "Milford Haven", "Rolling English Road", "Skye Boat Song", "Upon First reading Chapman's Homer", A. E. Housman, COVID-19, Crown, G.K. Chesterton, J. Milton Hayes, John Keats, John Masefield, Kenneth Grahame, Loveliest of Trees, Michael Drayton, Midsummer Night's Dream, Outlanders, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Sir Henry Boulton, W. B. Yeats, William Shakespeare, wind in the willows Comments closed
Was the Moon Landing Poetic? A Debate
Friday As tomorrow will be the 50th anniversary of the lunar landing, I went looking for literature that marked the occasion. A useful New York Times article, written 20 years after the event, surveyed the field and alerted me to the two poems that I share today. Interestingly, not much was written, leading to the […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "World is too much with us", "Moon Landing", "Voyage to the Moon", Archibald MacLeish, lunar landing, Neil Armstrong, Of a Fire on the Moon, W. H. Auden Comments closed
Through Lit, We Learn Compassion
Tuesday My brother Sam, an enthusiastic Unitarian Universalist, gave me Karen Armstrong’s Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life for Christmas, and I was pleased that the author sees literature playing a major role. In today’s post I share how she draws on the ancient Greeks. Armstrong writes, “All faiths insist that compassion is the test […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Prelude", Aeschylus, compassion, Eumenides, Euripides, Heracles, Homer, Iliad, Oedipus at Colonus, Oresteia, Sophocles, Tintern Abbey Comments closed
Returning to the Misty Past
John Gatta’s “Spirits of Place” is helping me understand why I have chosen to retire in my home town. Wordsworth, Stowe, Homer, and Frost help out as well.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Death of the Hired Man", "Pulley", George Herbert, Harriet Beecher Stowe, home, Homer, John Gatta, Odyssey, retirement, Robert Frost, Sewanee, Tintern Abbey, Uncle Tom's Cabin Comments closed
