Walking to my place of work this morning I was thinking of all the things I
was going to say - and most of it I haven't - in reply
One was picking up on the mention of Hardy. & I wanted to aver my high
regard for those poems & also a lot of the modernist push... but I wanted
to say that it ain't so simple(resisting the temptation to go all ira
gershwin there) & thomas would have been one of my examples... well,the
example, but I was sure there were others. I'm not sure about that now. But
Edward Thomas certainly
so ta for that
& I was also going to say that it gets muddling once one steps out of the
anglo world & away from Ez or can do unless one does a great deal of work
Work's ok, but there's not always time
I have a high regard for Ritsos, but my Greek is nowhere near good enough.
And my background reading is still undone decades after I stopped tramping
around Greece. So I have access to a body of work that's just sort of there
inexplicably in a largely empty room in my head
a bit like Syd Barrett sitting there and I'm not quite sure who he is but
he's very familiar
*
and the oddity of how some of us start and stop with enthusiasms.
Somewhere between pre dawn and my first coffee, that crack of Meliville's
about passing a coffin factory went through my mind and I decided that next
I shall read again Moby Dick
that's all I have to say
nice w/e all
L
.
On 21 November 2014 16:48, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> [poem of the day from
> Poetry Foundation.org]
>
> The Thrush
> When Winter's ahead,
> What can you read in November
> That you read in April
> When Winter's dead?
>
> I hear the thrush, and I see
> Him alone at the end of the lane
> Near the bare poplar's tip,
> Singing continuously.
>
> Is it more that you know
> Than that, even as in April,
> So in November,
> Winter is gone that must go?
>
> Or is all your lore
> Not to call November November,
> And April April,
> And Winter Winter--no more?
>
> But I know the months all,
> And their sweet names, April,
> May and June and October,
> As you call and call
>
> I must remember
> What died into April
> And consider what will be born
> Of a fair November;
>
> And April I love for what
> It was born of, and November
> For what it will die in,
> What they are and what they are not,
>
> While you love what is kind,
> What you can sing in
> And love and forget in
> All that's ahead and behind.
>
> Edward Thomas 1878-1917
> [PF says:
> Thomas wrote his first poems in 1914 at the urging of the American poet
> Robert Frost,
> with whom he forged a friendship during Frost's years in England. ....
> in 1915 he enlisted in the infantry and was killed two years later in the
> Battle of Arras,
> while the first edition of his Poems (1917) was being prepared for press.]
>
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