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"Reality Is An Activity Of The Most August Imagination"
At least one critic has suggested that the word "august" in the title of the following poem is a pun, the primary sense being "majestic, stately, sublime" (OED). I'm not so sure about that. Wallace...
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Blackbirds: In Memory Of Seamus Heaney
Sometimes the fact that a certain person is simply there in the world -- as a presence, an example, an inspiration -- is a matter of great significance. We often take their presence for granted. And...
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A Proper Place, Part Five: "My Room Is A Musty Attic, But Its Little Window...
I don't believe that living in a garret leads to wisdom or contentment. That being said, I do harbor a daydream of living in a monk's cell in San Marco in Florence during the quattrocento. This...
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Stars And Wolves
Patrick Kavanagh's "My Room," which appeared in my previous post, closes with the following stanza:My room is a musty attic,But its little windowLets in the stars.The reference to the stars reminds me...
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Wolves
September and -- strange to say -- it is 90 degrees and clear in the Land of Mist and Moss. It seems an odd time to be thinking of wolves. Such thoughts seem better suited to a bleak mid-winter...
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September: "Lovely With Dream And Faint, Faint, Faint"
September has a high wistfulness quotient. Summer is hanging on, but your emotions tell you otherwise. Things seem vaguely unsettling -- like having one foot in the rowboat and one foot on the dock....
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"Green Now, Grey Now, Gone Anon"
When not bemoaning the state of their love life, Elizabethan poets were wont to be worrying another sore tooth: the transience of our time on earth. Christina Rossetti's lines "To think that this...
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Heartsease
I ought to be better versed in the names of flowers. I do know that the dahlias are still flourishing at this time of year. But I am in no position to distinguish one variety from another. On my...
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The Sky Of Autumn
Autumn sometimes provokes in me an urge to simplify, to pare things down. Perhaps this is due to the sense of impending loss. But "impending loss" sounds too dire: this is, after all, my favorite...
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Autumn Moon
Is the moon different in autumn? I have no hard evidence, only inklings. I am one of those who is lucky enough to have fond childhood memories of the sight and smell of piles of raked-up burning...
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Noise
We are surrounded by noise. My definition of noise is catholic: the noise of which I speak is both audible and visible. Any electronic screen is noisy. Thus, for instance, a politician talking on a...
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"Something To Wear Against The Heart In The Long Cold"
Like Philip Larkin, R. S. Thomas is a victim of caricature. To wit: "The curmudgeonly, irascible God-doubting priest who refused to have a vacuum cleaner in his house because of the noise." Or some...
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Arrivals And Departures
Well, yes, "life is a journey, not a destination." The statement is often attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, but it is not clear that he is actually the source. I suspect Chinese philosophers were...
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"The Heart That Is Low Now Will Be At The Full Tomorrow"
In his later years, R. S. Thomas lived in a stone cottage near the sea on the Lleyn Peninsula in Wales. I recently came across a poem of his that I had completely forgotten. It dates from his years...
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"The View From The Window"
R. S. Thomas's poems about windows in my previous post got me to thinking about another poem of his. It is also a "window poem," but I am thinking as well of the image of the ever-changing World...
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"Kin And Companion To A Tree"
Recently, mornings here have been foggy. The fog is thin, and takes on a pinkish-orange glow as the sun rises. The scene puts me in an 1890s mood: ethereal, half-lit, vaguely melancholic, vaguely...
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"The Falling Of The Leaves"
The two autumn poems by Arthur Symons in my previous post got me to thinking of autumn poems by another turn-of-the-century poet: W. B. Yeats. As I age, I find myself drawn more and more to the Yeats...
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Fountain
A small tree stands by itself out in one of the fields that I pass through on my afternoon walk. Each autumn I watch the tree's leaves turn red and then fall over the course of a few weeks. In time,...
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"I Am Your Old Intentions She Said And All Your Old Intentions Are Over"
W. B. Yeats's "Ephemera," which I posted last week, goes quite well with the following poem by Thomas Hardy. Although the poem was first published in 1899 (in Hardy's first collection of verse), it...
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Divisions And Distances
Estrangement from a loved one (or from a once-loved one) is the theme of a large number of Thomas Hardy's poems. Hardy's most significant estrangement was from Emma, his first wife. Upon her death,...
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