Category Archives: Poetry

Fiction, Poetry

Shakespeare’s Sonnets Performed by Sir Patrick Stewart

1 Comment

Next month, Audible will release a recording of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets performed and commented on by Sir Patrick Stewart. You’ll need to sign up for Audible, either a free trial or subscription.

Stewart started sharing sonnets on social media during the pandemic. Now, they are collected in an audiobook along with Stewart’s comments and related stories. This should be excellent.

Serious fans of the sonnets may want to compare this recording with that of the Cambridge All the Sonnets of Shakespeare, read by Kenneth Branagh and Lolita Chakrabarti, which will no doubt be more scholarly.

Poetry, Religion

I read ‘In No Strange Land,’ by Francis Thompson

1 Comment

My intention yesterday was not to post the Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen video. I was thinking that I had put up a reading of Francis Thompson’s ‘The Hound of Heaven’ not long ago, and I ought to do ‘In No Strange Land’ too. Because it’s a lovely poem of faith, possibly even better than the ‘Hound,’ but that’s an apples and oranges thing. (It also inspired the title of a hit movie and song of the 1950s.)

And there were several readings to choose from on YouTube. I sampled them, but they failed to please me. I have strong views on how this poem (which I memorized long ago and can still reel out) ought to be read.

Well, as they say, if you want something done right, you’ll have to do it yourself. And I have the technology.

Above, my reading of ‘In No Strange Land.’ Feel free to share it, if you like.

Poetry, Religion

‘The Hound of Heaven,’ read by Richard Burton

Leave a comment

This Friday night, instead of music, a poem. Actor Richard Burton (a lost soul, if there ever was one) reads one of the great English Christian poems, “The Hound of Heaven.” Francis Thompson (1859-1907), an impoverished Catholic poet who died young of tuberculosis, wrote this amazing ode to the relentless love of Christ, which was published in a collection in 1893.

There was a time — it doesn’t seem long ago, but it was — when I could recite this entire poem from memory. I still have big chunks of it in my head, and can recall the others when prompted.

I always recited it more slowly and meditatively than Burton, who reads it rapidly, in the tone of a fugitive, his pacing tight with dramatic tension.

Music, Poetry

‘Solveig’s Song’

2 Comments

It’s Friday and I have neither a book to review nor a useful thought in my head. Therefore, I shall post a Sissel song.

(And there was great rejoicing.)

Yesterday, I might mention, was my birthday – and one of the big milestone ones. I won’t say which one, of course. Suffice it to say that I’ve outlived 3 of my grandparents, and one of my parents. The meditations this fact arouses in me are not, generally, comforting.

I pondered what kind of song would be suitable to commemorate my oldness and fullness of days. Nothing really commended itself, so I finally figured, well, just post a Sissel piece. What haven’t I done yet?

And I realized I’d never posted “Solveig’s Song.”

(I think. Checking would be too much trouble.)

Even if you’re not Norwegian (unlikely as that is), you’ve probably heard this melody somewhere before. It’s one of the classics from Edvard Grieg – part of the incidental music he wrote for Henrik Ibsen’s controversial, experimental play, “Peer Gynt.”

I will confess – I’ve never read “Peer Gynt.” It appeals to me more than most of Ibsen’s works (I’m not a fan), but from all I hear, it’s a “challenging” and obscure work, about a man who seems to be – like Ibsen himself – obstinately difficult and antisocial. He kidnaps a bride from her wedding, abandons her, and then is joined by Solveig (the Solveig of the song), the daughter of Haugean pietists (my people). He runs away from her too, in order to spend his life in foreign parts, seeking wealth, which he loses in the end. In the last act, he returns to Solveig, who has remained faithful to him, and tells him that he has committed no sin. Then she (probably) dies (the script isn’t clear).

Anyway, “Solveig’s Song” is a solo earlier in the play, in which Solveig expresses her faithful (I might say stupid) love. I suppose Solveig is meant to represent the mercy of God in some way, though (lumpkin that I am) I don’t really see it.

But Sissel sure sings it beautifully.

Have a good weekend.

Music, Poetry

Sunday Singing: All Flesh is Grass

Leave a comment

Today’s hymn is another one William Cowper (1731-1800) that you won’t find in your hymnal. In fact, I don’t have a tune for it. I found it in The Churchman’s Treasury of Song from 1907. It’s a portion of his larger work The Task, published in 1794. In The Churchman’s Treasury of Song, it’s given as a devotional hymn for the third week after Easter.

The Poetry Foundation described Cowper as “the foremost poet of the generation between Alexander Pope and William Wordsworth. For several decades, he had probably the largest readership of any English poet. From 1782, when his first major volume appeared, to 1837, the year in which Robert Southey completed the monumental Life and Works of Cowper, more than 100 editions of his poems were published in Britain and almost 50 in America.”

This hymn focuses on mortality and ultimate truth.

“I, I am he who comforts you;
who are you that you are afraid of dman who dies,
of the son of man who is made like grass,
and have forgotten the Lord, your Maker,
who stretched out the heavens
and glaid the foundations of the earth . . .” (Isaiah 51:12-13 ESV)

All flesh is grass, and all its glory fades
Like the fair flower dishevell’d in the wind;
Riches have wings, and grandeur is a dream.
The man we celebrate must find a tomb,
And we that worship him ignoble graves.
Nothing is proof against the general curse
Of vanity, that seizes all below.
The only amaranthine flower on earth
Is virtue; the only lasting treasure, truth.
But what is truth? ‘Twas Pilate’s question put
To Truth itself, that deign’d him no reply.
And wherefore? will not God impart his light
To them that ask it?—Freely—’tis his joy,
His glory, and his nature to impart.
But to the proud, uncandid, insincere,
Or negligent inquirer, not a spark.
What’s that which brings contempt upon a book,
And him who writes it, though the style be neat,
The method clear, and argument exact?
That makes a minister in holy things
The joy of many and the dread of more,
His name a theme for praise and for reproach?—
That, while it gives us worth in God’s account,
Depreciates and undoes us in our own?
What pearl is it that rich men cannot buy,
That learning is too proud to gather up;
But which the poor, and the despised of all,
Seek and obtain, and often find unsought?
Tell me—and I will tell thee what is truth.

Fiction, Poetry, Reviews

Sir Gawain: What It Means to Be a Real Man

Leave a comment

I didn’t realize Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was set at Christmastime when I picked it up several days ago, so reading it during the Christmas break was seasonal as well as enriching. It could be the poem for modern men today. It’s focus on chastity in the face of strong seduction would make modern readers heads spin.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight begins with a striking man walking into King Arthur’s court.

“For all men marvelled what it might mean
That a horseman and his horse should have such a colour
As to grow green as grass . . .”

He says he’s looking for sport, which is the feeling of everyone in the court already. Arthur loved hearing the exploits of his men. The green knight offered a challenge: Any man could strike him with a fierce blow if he would agree to seek him out in one year’s time to receive a blow in kind from him. Even though everyone thought such a challenge was madness, they also couldn’t refuse it.

“‘By heaven,’ then said Arthur, ‘What you ask is foolish,
But as you firmly seek folly, find it you shall.'”

Sir Gawain, who is the greatest of Arthur’s knights (in the early tales) and his nephew, is the one to suggest to the king someone else accept the challenge in case it goes the way everyone suspects. No need to lose the king to a jolly green giant.

This is the part of the story you’ve likely heard. What follows is another regular year until All Saints Day when Gawain leaves to find the Green Chapel, because “Why falter I or fear? What should man do but dare?” He searched without any prospects until Christmastime. Then he prays and then comes across “the comeliest castle” that “shimmered and shone through the shining oaks.”

He stays there several nights enjoying great and chivalrous hospitality, and that’s when things get weird. The host and all of his men intend to spend the next day hunting, but he urges Gawain to continue resting at the castle, and he proposes this “bargain”: whatever gains they earn in the woods or in the castle will be exchanged. Gawain thinks it’s a great deal.

I found this bargain very strange. What could Gawain possibly achieve within the castle? Spoiler alert: It’s his good host’s wife!

Part three describes three temptations or seductions paired with the exploits of the hunting party. Readers and listeners are meant understand the hunting party illustrates the Gawain’s seduction. That’s the reason I say young men ought to read and talk about this poem. If a woman boldly invited you into adultery, how would you handle it? For Gawain, chivalric manners are high virtue, so he can’t just turn her away. In fact, he seems to agree with her proposal, “but Sir Gawain was on guard in a gracious manner.”

The text seems to say Gawain would not indulge this woman because he is his imminent death at the hand of the Green Knight (line 1285). Maybe that is one motivator, the other and primary one being Christian morality, and if it is factor, doesn’t that strike sparks against modern men who would likely argue the other way. Believing they were about to die, why not take the host’s wife?

One theme we can draw from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a common question that brings out bucket lists: If you knew you were going to die in a year, what would you do? The greatest knight in Camelot not only sought out the man he believed would kill him but also sought every virtue he could recognize.

Why would anyone choose to throw all morality in the bin because he believed he would die in a year? We’re all going to die–this winter or next, this decade or next. Does believing you can see your finish line approaching mean virtue no longer has value? Wouldn’t that argue that you believe virtue has no real value for you now, while your death is still hidden from you?

Poetry

“Let me not waste the days You’ve given me.”

Leave a comment

Bethel McGrew offers a poem for Thanksgiving that begins this way:

Let me not waste the days You’ve given me.
The mornings I might sleep away, the nights
When all my fears are all that I can see,
Trapped in the glow of flickering blue lights.

She notes our Internet-driven fears and her personal ones, asking the Lord to revive her with His goodness.

Let me believe that this, my grateful prayer
Is not in vain. Lord, let me not despair.

Music, Poetry

Sunday Singing: Dear Lord and Father of Mankind

1 Comment

Today’s hymn is adapted from a poem by the American Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier. In that poem, “The Brewing of Soma,” Whittier describes a Hindu drinking ceremony over several verses before contrasting it with Christian repentance. “Our foolish ways” are both old pagan practices and the Christianized versions we may have replaced them with. Instead, may we hear the quiet voice of the Living God speaking through Scripture and natural disaster.

“For thus said the Lord GOD, the Holy One of Israel,
‵In returning and rest you shall be saved;
in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.‵
But you were unwilling . . . ” (Isaiah 30:15 ESV)

1 Dear Lord and Father of mankind,
forgive our foolish ways!
Re-clothe us in our rightful mind,
in purer lives thy service find,
in deeper rev’rence praise,
in deeper rev’rence praise.

2 In simple trust like theirs who heard
beside the Syrian sea,
the gracious calling of the Lord,
let us, like them, without a word
rise up and follow thee,
rise up and follow thee.

3 O Sabbath rest by Galilee!
O calm of hills above,
where Jesus knelt to share with thee
the silence of eternity,
interpreted by love!
Interpreted by love!

4 Drop thy still dews of quietness,
till all our strivings cease;
take from our souls the strain and stress,
and let our ordered lives confess
the beauty of thy peace,
the beauty of thy peace.

5 Breathe through the heats of our desire
thy coolness and thy balm;
let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
speak through the earthquake, wind and fire,
O still small voice of calm!
O still small voice of calm!

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Fiction, Poetry

Have We Forgotten Too Much?

Leave a comment

Peter Hitchens blogged about memory a couple months ago, noting Orwell’s 1984 naturally, pointing out “Orwell’s description of the sort of things people actually do remember: ‘A million useless things, a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead sister’s face, the swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy years ago.'”

He spent half of the post on the former Communist novelist Arthur Koestler (1905-1983). He said at one point everyone with a decent education on world affairs knew about Koestler and the novel Darkness at Noon. “It was perhaps the most devastating literary blow ever aimed at Communist tyranny,” Hitchens said. Important because it exposed truths the world didn’t want to believe. In WWII, Stalin joined the Allied forces, and people wanted to forget any crimes he may have committed before that. Others wanted to believe Marxism was a force for good in the world, so they waved away evidence to the contrary.

“For a large part of my life,” Hitchens wrote, “this potent political novel, and its accompanying volume Scum of the Earth were vital parts of human knowledge and understanding.” Those who had read them were “the undeceived, and the hard-to-deceive.” Where are those people now?

“What if the past has already disappeared?”

Rings of Power: In far more trivial news, reviewer Erik Kain argues that defending Amazon’s ‘Rings Of Power’ by claiming Tolkien had no canon “would make Sauron proud.” A professor with ties to the show has said, “Tolkien’s ideas were ever evolving,” meaning all of his notes and drafts demonstrate none of his ideas, even the published ones, are fixed.

Poetry: To end on cheerful note, read this delightfully modern love poem by Daniel Brown. Here are the first three lines.

A first “I love you” still implies the start 
Of serious, but we moderns also have 
Recourse to a preliminary move; ...

Photo by Hans Eiskonen on Unsplash

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Poetry

Travels to Worlds Unknown (Maybe Fictious)

Leave a comment

It’s been a full week and will continue to be so for rest of the month. I feel a deadline pressing upon me, so let me move quickly to these links.

Poetry: “While Observing A Summer Storm” by Joshua Alan Sturgill. “these I take as pathfinders and guides”

Art: Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901) painted moody mythological scenes, like Isle of the Dead (which you’ve likely seen whether you knew what it was).

Chariots of Fire: The story of Eric Liddell’s race in the classic movie Chariots of Fire took place at the 1924 Olympics in Paris. The Scottish runner won gold in the 400-meter, breaking Olympic and world records with 47.6 seconds. World’s Paul Butler talked about it on Friday’s podcast of The World and Everything in It. I listened to a tape of the movie soundtrack during my fruitful, cassette-tape-buying years. Here’s a nice tribute to the movie and music.

The Facts Fudged: Bill Steigerwald talks about the work he put into his book dividing fact from fiction in John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley. “Taking on the great Steinbeck and challenging the existing narrative about his iconic book was no big deal. I was used to being an outsider, whether it was when covering a KKK cross-burning or attending a conference of public transit officials. The process of reporting and researching Steinbeck’s travels and book was no different from what I had done in a hundred big Sunday newspaper features, just a lot bigger and on my own dime.”

Photo: Elks Lodge, Tacoma, Washington. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.