Two more to make up for the gap
Part Two of the Alphabet piece will follow eventually; I think the poem stinks, quite frankly, so I'm going to put up other stuff instead.
So, here is yesterday's, a dark tribute to Wordsworth's "She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways":
She dwelt among the trodden ways Beneath the gates of Hell, A wench that men were quick to buy But quicker still to sell;
A bauble with her clasp unsprung Laid bare before the eye, But rough and plain as scudding clouds In grey autumnal sky.
She lived unknown, but all would see When blood her garter blotched: When, at last, her light was snuffed The world stood by and watched.
And today's, based on the little oasis of lovely weather we have so recently enjoyed in southern Ontario:
The warmth is gone that was so pleasant, The spring is gone from London Town. Unwrapp'd is that tardy Christmas present; And now the storms are coming down, And frost bejewels each sapling's crown.
The winter cometh in ascendance: Savage breaks the granite sky. And men who strode in sunshine's radiance, Bow 'fore zephyrs, dark and high, An omen that the blizzard's nigh.
The cracking ice returns betimes, Though now 'tis just the frost that's here. And we shall dream of sun-lit climes, Where all are glad, and do not fear Dark winter's grasp five months a year.
==
This little respite from the winter, in which all of the snow has melted and the winds blew warm, has been one of the most enjoyable periods of my recent days. What a merciless tease. :(
¶ 1:08 PM
This blog was started in an attempt to write a poem once a day, every day, for an entire year, but this expedition has met with failure! I gave up on transcribing the damn things in late January, and gave up writing them entirely around the end of February. It's not easy to do this at all. In fact, it is hard. I still feel as though I've learned something, anyway, so I'll keep what I did manage to do up here for now. I'll probably start posting stuff again irregularly when my workload decreases somewhat, which was really the reason for my problems in the first place. Who would have thought being in the third year of an honours BA would give you a lot of work to do?
Johnson on Poetry
"To a poet nothing can be useless. Whatever is beautiful and whatever is dreadful must be familiar to his imagination: he must be conversant with all that is awfully vast or elegantly little. The plants of the garden, the animals of the wood, the minerals of the earth, and meteors of the sky, must all concur to store his mind with inexhaustible variety: for every idea is useful for the enforcement or decoration of moral or religious truth; and he who knows most will have most power of diversifying his scenes, and of gratifying his reader with remote allusions and unexpected instruction."
- Imlac, in Rasselas
"The essence of verse is regularity, and its ornament is variety. To write verse is to dispose syllables and sounds harmonically by some known and settled rule -- a rule however lax enough to substitute similitude for identity, to admit change without breach of order, and to relieve the ear without disappointing it."
- From the biography of John Dryden in Lives of the Poets
Chesterton on Poetry
"Imagination does not breed insanity.
Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad;
but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers;
but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen,
in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does
lie in logic, not in imagination. Artistic paternity is as
wholesome as physical paternity. Moreover, it is worthy of
remark that when a poet really was morbid it was commonly
because he had some weak spot of rationality on his brain.
Poe, for instance, really was morbid; not because he was poetical,
but because he was specially analytical. Even chess was too poetical
for him; he disliked chess because it was full of knights and castles,
like a poem. He avowedly preferred the black discs of draughts,
because they were more like the mere black dots on a diagram.
Perhaps the strongest case of all is this: that only one great
English poet went mad, Cowper. And he was definitely driven mad
by logic, by the ugly and alien logic of predestination.
Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him
in health. He could sometimes forget the red and thirsty hell
to which his hideous necessitarianism dragged him among the wide waters
and the white flat lilies of the Ouse. He was damned by John Calvin;
he was almost saved by John Gilpin. Everywhere we see that men
do not go mad by dreaming. Critics are much madder than poets.
Homer is complete and calm enough; it is his critics who tear him into
extravagant tatters. Shakespeare is quite himself; it is only
some of his critics who have discovered that he was somebody else.
And though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision,
he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators.
The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily
in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea,
and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion,
like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To accept everything
is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires
exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet
only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who
seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits."
-From Orthodoxy
