The Book Haven writes: “The elder Irish poet said, ‘He devoted years to collaborating with me on a book I needed to write but one that, without Dennis as interviewer, might never have got written.’ He called O’Driscoll ‘my hero.'”
Poet Dennis O’Driscoll, 58, died suddenly last Christmas Eve. Seamus Heaney praises him as his hero.
(It has been my custom to post a poem by Chesterton every Christmas. But I didn’t do that this year. I thought of posting a New Year’s poem tonight, but it looks as if Chesterton didn’t write any. This, however, is close. Happy New Year.)
The old earth keepeth her watch the same,
Alone in a voiceless void doth stand,
Her orange flowers in her bosom flame,
Her gold ring in her hand,
The surfs of the long gold-crested morns
Break evermore at her great robe’s hem,
And evermore come the bleak moon-horns,
But she keepeth not watch for them.
She keepeth her watch through the aeons,
But the heart of her groweth not old,
For the peal of the bridegroom’s paeons,
And the tale she once was told.
The nations shock and the cities reel,
The empires travail and rive and rend,
And she looks on havoc and smoke and steel,
And knoweth it is not the end.
The faiths may choke and the powers despair,
The powers re-arise and the faiths renew,
She is only a maiden, waiting there,
For the love whose word is true.
She keepeth her watch through the aeons,
But the heart of her groweth not old,
For the peal of the bridegroom’s paeons,
And the tale she once was told.
Through the cornfield’s gleam and the cottage shade,
They wait unwearied, the young and old,
Mother for child and man for maid,
For a love that once was told.
The hair grows grey under thatch or slates,
The eyes grow dim behind lattice panes,
The earth-race wait as the old earth waits,
And the hope in the heart remains.
She keepeth her watch through the aeons,
But the heart of her groweth not old,
For the peal of the bridegroom’s paeons,
And the tale she once was told.
God’s gold ring on her hand is bound,
She fires with blossom the grey hill-sides,
Her fields are quickened, her forests crowned,
While the love of her heart abides,
And we from the fears that fret and mar,
Look up in hours and behold a while
Her face, colossal, mid star on star,
Still looking forth with a smile.
She keepeth her watch through the aeons,
But the heart of her groweth not old,
For the peal of the bridegroom’s paeons,
And the tale she once was told.
Man’s Maker was made man
that the Bread might be hungry,
the Fountain thirst,
the Light sleep,
the Way be tired from the journey;
that Strength might be made weak,
that Life might die.
~ St. Augustine (via Relief Journal, Painting by Guido Reni) Continue reading “Man’s Maker was made man”
Professor Hunter Bakers writes, “It is interesting to read about education in the 19th century. One encounters a former emphasis on memorization and recitation. I suppose that method is considered inadequate now and we have moved well past it.”
I think memorizing is important. It’s recommended in the Trivium at early ages, because kids like to rattle off quotes. They are little parrots at that age.
Andrew Peterson talks about discovering a poem by Wendell Berry. “Just a few days ago my kind neighbor Tommy gave me permission to harvest a few maple seedlings from his property and I spent an afternoon replanting them around the Warren with these same hopes for the blessing they might be to my children’s children. Once again, the sage words of the Mad Farmer gave me a clear picture of what it means for us to be keepers of his creation, standing amidst a breadth of old beauty that we didn’t ask for and don’t deserve.”
“Arthur eastward in arms purposed
his war to wage on the wild marches,
over seas sailing to Saxon lands,
from the Roman realm ruin defending.”
Thus begins a new epic poem by the beloved author of The Lord of the Rings. What’s that, you ask? How can write a new poem when he’s been dead since 1973? Bah! What is death among friends?
Longfellow tells us:
“A cold, uninterrupted rain,
That washed each southern window-pane,
And made a river of the road;
A sea of mist that overflowed
The house, the barns, the gilded vane,
And drowned the upland and the plain,
Through which the oak-trees, broad and high,
Like phantom ships went drifting by;
And, hidden behind a watery screen,
The sun unseen, or only seen
As a faint pallor in the sky;–
Thus cold and colorless and gray,
The morn of that autumnal day,
As if reluctant to begin,
Dawned on the silent Sudbury Inn,
And all the guests that in it lay.” Read on
Pamela Petro talks about longing for a home that is not her’s–Wales.
I’m American, but I have a hiraeth on me for Wales. I went there first as a grad student in the 1980s. I learned to drink whiskey and do sheep impressions (I can differentiate between lambs and ewes). I learned what coal smoke smells like (nocturnal and oily). And I fell in love with the earth. It happened one late afternoon when I went for a walk in the Brecon Beacons. (The dictionary defines beacons as “conspicuous hills,” which is about as apt as you can get.) When I set off from sea level the air was already growing damp as the sun faded. Ahead of me the Beacons’ bald, grey-brown flanks were furrowed like elephant skin in ashes-of-roses light. It soon became chilly but the ground held onto its warmth, so that the hills began to smoke with eddying bands of mist. That dusk was unspeakably beautiful and not a little illicit. It seemed, for a millisecond, as if I were witnessing the earth drop its guard and exhale its love for the sky, for the pungent cattle, the rabbits whose bones lay underfoot, and for me, too. I felt as if my bodily fluids, my wet, physiological self, were being summoned to high tide. The hills tugged on my blood and it responded with a storm surge that made me ache—a simple sensation more urgent and less complicated than thought, like the love of one animal for another. Or the love of an animal for its home.
Amhurst College thinks they might have the second known photograph of Emily Dickinson.
Photo: Amhurst College Archives
There is, currently, only one authenticated photograph of Dickinson in existence – the well-known image of the poet as a teenager in 1847. But Amherst College believes an 1859 daguerreotype may well also be an image of the reclusive, beloved poet, by now in her mid-20s and sitting with her recently widowed friend, Kate Scott Turner. If so, it will shed new light on the poet who, by the late 1850s, was withdrawing further and further from the world.
The photograph is currently being evaluated by experts.
Tip: Neatorama.