Robert Louis Stevenson bequeaths his birthday to Annie Ide
I had read somewhere that Robert Louis Stevenson had bequeathed his birthday (13th November) to a girl who was born on Christmas Day. Lately I came across Katherine Miller’s poem…
Category: poetry
“We tire of distraction or concentration. we sleep and are glad to sleep”
From “Choruses from the Rock”, T S Eliot: In our rhythm of earthly life we tire of light. We are glad when the day ends, when the play ends; and…
“Thinking about the immortality of the crab”
Via the Wikipedia page devoted to Miguel de Unamono, I came across this wonderfully evocative Spanish idiom: Thinking about the immortality of the crab (Spanish: Pensar en la inmortalidad del cangrejo) is…
I Taught Myself To Live Simply – Anna Akhmatova
I taught myself to live simply and wisely, to look at the sky and pray to God, and to wander long before evening to tire my superfluous worries. When the…
Elegy For Jane (My Student, thrown by a horse) – Theodore Roethke
Text taken from here. Elegy for Jane (My student, thrown by a horse) I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils; And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;…
Poetry is Beauty’s Voice
Originally posted on Signs of Life:
“Words and measures do not give life; they merely symbolize it” (Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity 48). For any kind of beauty there…
T.S. Eliot: Ash Wednesday
Originally posted on The Broken Towers:
Today is Ash Wednesday and although I did not want to provide a reading of a long poem for some time, I thought not…
Reading on the bus: a literary bus conductor from Arnold Bax’s Farewell My Youth.
(edit August 30th – (edit 30th August 2018 – (edit 30th August 2018 – for further extracts from Arnold Bax’s “Farewell My Youth”, see here on the forgotten and despised man of…
Séamus Sweeney 