God’s Wonderful Surprise from Woodlands Point Community Church on Vimeo.
Poem #50, The Eagle by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1851
“An essay is a glass of water. But if a few drops of that water fall on a hot frying pan and sizzle? Then you have a poem.”~The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
I could write an essay on the eagle, a textbook on the care and feeding of eagles, take a photograph of an eagle, write a novel about eagles and eagle-lovers, but would I really have said anything more worthy about The Eagle than this poem says? Tennyson called it a “a fragment” since he was used to writing much longer poems. It’s certainly a memorable fragment.
Saturday Review of Books: April 7, 2012
“I’d had the idea once, that if I could get the chance before I died I would read all the good books there were. Now I began to see that I wasn’t apt to make it. This disappointed me, for I really wanted to read them all. But it consoled me in a way too, I could see that if I got them all read and had no more surprises in that line I would have been sorry.†~Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow
Welcome to the Saturday Review of Books at Semicolon. Here’s how it usually works. Find a book review on your blog posted sometime during the previous week. The review doesn’t have to be a formal sort of thing. You can link to your thoughts on a particular book, a few ideas inspired by reading the book, your evaluation, quotations, whatever.
Then on Friday night/Saturday, you post a link here at Semicolon in Mr. Linky to the specific post where you’ve written your book review. Don’t link to your main blog page because this kind of link makes it hard to find the book review, especially when people drop in later after you’ve added new content to your blog. In parentheses after your name, add the title of the book you’re reviewing. This addition will help people to find the reviews they’re most interested in reading.
After linking to your own reviews, you can spend as long as you want reading the reviews of other bloggers for the week and adding to your wishlist of books to read. That’s how my own TBR list has become completely unmanageable and the reason I can’t join any reading challenges. I have my own personal challenge that never ends.
Poetry Friday: Poem #49, Sonnet 43 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1850
“I have lived all my chief joys, and indeed nearly all emotions that go warmly by that name and relate to myself personally, in poetry, and in poetry alone.”~Elizabeth Barrett Browning
How’s this for a “homeschooled prodigy”?(from Victorian Web)
“Elizabeth, an accomplished child, had read a number of Shakespearian plays, parts of Pope’s Homeric translations, passages from Paradise Lost, and the histories of England, Greece, and Rome before the age of ten. She was self-taught in almost every respect. During her teen years she read the principal Greek and Latin authors and Dante’s Inferno–all texts in the original languages. Her voracious appetite for knowledge compelled her to learn enough Hebrew to read the Old Testament from beginning to end. Her enjoyment of the works and subject matter of Paine, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Wollstonecraft was later expressed by her concern for human rights in her own letters and poems. By the age of twelve she had written an “epic” poem about the Battle of Marathon, consisting of four books of rhyming couplets. Barrett later referred to her first literary attempt as, “Pope’s Homer done over again, or rather undone.”
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints!—I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
More EBB trivia:
The Barretts had 12 children, and Mr. Barrett forbade all those who grew to adulthood to marry. Elizabeth had to elope to marry Robert Browning.
Elizabeth began taking opium for pain relief at age 15, and she remained addicted to it for the rest of her life.
Robert and Elizabeth Browning lived in Italy for most of their marriage–which was apparently very happy and mutually beneficial. They had one child, a son.
Romantically, Elizabeth Barrett Browning died in Italy “in her husband’s arms.”
Poetry Month: Poetry Memorization
“Children were no longer made to learn poetry by heart. And so the deep rhythms of the language, its inner music, was lost to them, because they had never had it embedded in their minds.”~Love Over Scotland by Alexander McCall Smith
A project for April, Poetry Month: Make a Memory Poem Book.
Poems for your memory poem book:
All Things Bright and Beautiful by Cecil Frances Alexander.
Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Daffodils by William Wordsworth.
The Children’s Hour by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Animal Crackers by Christopher Morley.
Time for Rabbits by Aileen Fisher.
A Prayer in Spring by Robert Frost.
Use any poem with vivid images that are easy for a child to draw and remember.
Unexpected Joy
Today I am inspired by this family to live out the Easter meaning of resurrection and perseverance:
Poetry Month: Favorite Poets
“Poetry may not change the world, but its lack will.”~Carol Willette Bachofner
A few years ago during National Poetry Month a couple of bloggers were highlighting their favorite poets:
Stefanie at So Many Books says “Adrienne Rich is my favorite poet. . . . For Rich, poetry must be engaged with the world. Poetry is action and the poet must be committed to the act of poetry itself and the poem acting in the world.”
At The Common Room, The Headmistress gives us Phyllis McGinley: here, and here, and here, and here.
My favorite poet? Maybe Edgar Allan Poe. He and I love the sounds of words.
Or Robert Frost. He and I like stories, poetic stories.
Or Lewis Carroll. He and I like to laugh.
Who’s yours?
At the Favorite Poem Project you can watch video presentations of many diverse Americans’ favorite poems.
But do tell us here what your favorite is, too. In addition to naming your favorite poet, tell us the title of your favorite poem.
October Baby
I recommend this movie.
Poem #48, In Memoriam by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1850
“Poetry is emotion put into measure.”~Thomas Hardy
Tennyson’s friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, b. 1811, was the subject, upon his death in 1833 at the age of 22, of Tennyson’s famous poem In Memoriam. Hallam was engaged to Tennyson’s sister, Emilia, and he was Tennyson’s close friend. He died suddenly while travelling in Vienna of a brain hemorrhage. The poem wasn’t actually published until 1850; I guess it took Tennyson that long to work through his grief in poetic form over Hallam’s untimely death.
In Memoriam is written in four-line ABBA stanzas of iambic tetrameter, and such stanzas are now called In Memoriam Stanzas. It’s a long poem that traces Tennyson’s grieving over the course of at least three years. Here are a few of the most often quoted lines and stanzas of the poem:
Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove;
Thine are these orbs of light and shade;
Thou madest Life in man and brute;
Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot
Is on the skull which thou hast made.
Thou wilt not leave us in the dust:
Thou madest man, he knows not why,
He thinks he was not made to die;
And thou hast made him: thou art just.
********************************
I falter where I firmly trod,
And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world’s altar-stairs
That slope thro’ darkness up to God,
I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope.
********************************
I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
********************************
Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last — far off — at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.
So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.
********************************
Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law–
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed–
******************************
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.
Tennyson struggles with doubt and grief and philosophical questions throughout the poem, but ends with faith in a God who hears his cries:
No, like a child in doubt and fear:
But that blind clamour made me wise;
Then was I as a child that cries,
But, crying, knows his father near;
And what I am beheld again
What is, and no man understands;
And out of darkness came the hands
That reach thro’ nature, moulding men.
Queen Victoria, after the death of her beloved husband Albert, said, “Next to the Bible, In Memoriam is my comfort.”
Poem #47, Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe, 1849
“A wounded poet bleeds poetry.”~Richard Jesse Watson
And an insane poet bleeds crazy poetry? This poem was my very favorite poem in all the world, until I read this post several years ago at the blog of English professor Amanda Witt. Now it’s still one of my favorite poems, with a little bit of crazy mixed into my appreciation for the poet and his poem. I like the sound and the content, and if that makes me a little off-the-wall, I’m content to own the adjective.
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of ANNABEL LEE;–
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love,
I and my Annabel Lee–
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud by night
Chilling my Annabel Lee;
So that her high-born kinsman came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.
The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,
Went envying her and me–
Yes! that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of a cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we–
Of many far wiser than we-
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:
For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I see the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea–
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
Kelly Fineman has a more positive and down-to-earth interpretation of Poe’s famous love poem.
Justin at A Bit of Randomness agrees with Ms. Witt that Annabel Lee “gets a little creepy” when the narrator lies down next to a corpse! Adrienne also says that Poe Becomes a Lot More Disturbing After You’ve Lost a Spouse.