Category Archive: Poetry
Collective Birthday Cake
22 January finds a number of salient birthdays: Lord Byron, 22 January 1788 The Great Romantic Poet, the great romantic, beloved of Goethe. “I may not overlap the eternal bar Built up between us, and will die alone, Beholding with the dark eye of a seer The evil days to gifted souls foreshown, Foretelling them to those who will not hear. As in the old time, till the hour be come When Truth shall strike their eyes through many a tear, And make them own the Prophet in his tomb.” (The Prophecy of Dante) Conrad Veidt, 22 January 1893 A…
Continue Reading →If…
Rudyard Kipling born today, 30 December 1865, in Bombay (now Mumbai). If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise: If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and…
Continue Reading →Leonard Cohen
(photo by Rama)
Leonard Cohen (21 September, 1934 to 7 November, 2016) With a voice even less impressive and more throwaway than Dylan, like a sombre, kindly and perhaps slightly whiskey-giddy uncle, singing his niece to sleep. A sublime indifference to Fame; a gorgeous disregard for money matters, such that he failed to notice his management was cleaning him out. A true poet’s sense, and it is rare, for true poetry to bind with popular music to advantage. Except he did it, in First We Take Manhattan, Dance Me To The End Of Love, Famous Blue Raincoat, So Long, Marianne, and one of the best…
Continue Reading →Time Off for Bad Behaviour
François Villon (born in Paris 1431; sentenced to be ‘hanged and strangled’ 1462 – commuted to exile, 1463; vanished 1463) was quite a villain. A killer, a thief, a common brawler, he happened to also be a poetic genius. The moral is that sometimes we need The Bad Guys. Awarded a Master of Arts at 21. He killed a priest at the age of 24 (possibly self-defence). After a year on the lam, he returned to Paris and celebrated Christmas Eve, 1456, by (sacrilegiously) robbing the College of Navarre. Four more years on the lam led to his (first) death sentence at Orleans in…
Continue Reading →Not to Yield
20 October 1833: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, completes his famous poem. It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades Vext the dim sea: I am become a name; For always…
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