Sunday, December 31, 2017
A Tragic Greek Mythological Tale in Verse
The greatest musician ever on earth, Orpheus Played his lyre with such masterly hand That wild beasts tamed, rivers in their flow stopped And even trees and mountains would begin to follow his band Nymphs swarmed, utterly charmed and obsessed With Orpheus, but he, to lovely Eurydice Was committed in...
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Monday, December 25, 2017
How will our end come?
In the Gospel of Thomas in Saying 18 Christ says: The disciples said to Jesus, "Tell us, how will our end come?" Christ said, "Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end? You see, the end will be where the beginning is. Congratulations to the one who stands at the...
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Thursday, December 21, 2017
Death, be not proud
“Death, be not proud” is the tenth poem in a series of nineteen Holy Sonnets of John Donne (1572 - 1631). Here, by downplaying death he writes about faith and of his assertion in God, employing the literary device of apostrophe to directly address Death. It is personified as a bully that has nothing...
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Monday, December 18, 2017
Incentives Proceed not from Without but from the Soul
The sun is setting and the atmosphere, stiflingly windless; it is the evening twilight. Andrea, the son of a sartor (dress-maker) and a brilliant painter is sitting in his studio at Fiesole, a small town near Florence, with Lucrezia, his worldly-minded wife and model, who has for long forsaken any...
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Thursday, December 14, 2017
LULLABY
Wystan Hugh Auden's "Lullaby” opens with a picture of the poet watching his beloved sleeping peacefully on his “faithless” arm, one he himself cannot trust ( some critics have interpreted the scene to be a post-coital one, with which I do not agree ); while she, on the contrary, sleeps absolutely...
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Sunday, December 10, 2017
The Connectedness of Time and Eternity
Nothingness - what modern physicists call no-matter - is the essential stuff the universe is made of, exactly as the Vedas had propounded thousands of years ago that all manifestation is derived from an ultimate principle of spiritual consciousness - the one and only existent form of eternity - the...
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Thursday, December 7, 2017
The Natue, Origin and End of Poetry
The British philosopher and economist, John Stuart Mill wrote this essay ' Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties' in 1832, when he was twenty-six. A man of sharp intellect, it is a careful analysis of his views on the different kinds of poetry he read during his time. (An off-course information - the...
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Tuesday, December 5, 2017
Love at First Sight
The last few days I have been reading a selection of works by the 1996 Polish Nobel poet laureate, Wislawa Szymborska (1923 - 2012). What I found striking in her writings is the air of casual simplicity even with which she makes us think on things profound, without the use of word felicity common to...
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Monday, November 27, 2017
The Liberating Power of Wine both in its Divine and Demonic aspects
Dionysus, the Greek god of vegetation and of wine, is the son of Zeus and the Theban princess Semele, daughter of the goddess Harmonia and Cadmus, the former King and founder of Thebes, and sister of Agave. Dionysus is thus the first cousin of Pentheus, who is the son of Agave and is the present...
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Saturday, November 25, 2017
RP raises a fine query and has made me think
She says, "Higgins had put so much "effort'' into transforming Eliza, but in the end is possessive in a sense and unappreciative of her. One normally should be pleased with and for Eliza, but he will never see her as an equal, or even as his better. She'll always be the cabbage leaf that HE...
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