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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Friday, November 24, 2017
Eliza's transformation from a squashed cabbage leaf into a duchess
In Shaw's Pygmalion when Eliza first appears as a flower-girl she does not cut a romantic figure. Between eighteen and twenty, she wears a dusty sailor hat, her mousy coloured hair badly needs washing, her shoddy black coat and coarse, brown skirt have long been exposed to the soot of London, her...
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Thursday, November 23, 2017
Significance of the title of Shaw's play, Pygmalion.
Although the background of Shaw's Pygmalion is phonetics, its basic theme is human relations. Pygmalion, in Classical Greek mythology, was a legendary King of Cyprus and a fine sculptor, who could never find any good in women and resolved to live out his life unmarried. Once he, having fashioned an...
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Wednesday, November 22, 2017
Someone once asked me, where in the body is the soul?
And I answered nowhere and everywhere, just as God exists nowhere and everywhere. It is recorded in the Genesis that God created all that is in six days and on the Seventh, He rested. This I find somewhat difficult to believe, because then there is no possibility for evolution! and it is...
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Friday, November 17, 2017
Here there's No Praise for the Rising Sun
John Donne's " The Sunne Rising " (published 1633), is one of his classic poems on love's charm, set in the speaker's bedroom. Here, he, in a rhetorical manner, apostrophises, that is, addresses, the sun. Both he and his lover lay in bed presumably after a night of warm romantic passion, oblivious...
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Sunday, November 12, 2017
The Significance of The Rainbow
THE RAINBOW (published 1915) is perhaps the finest of D.H.Lawrence’s works. Here he displays his daringly modern style of writing – a self-conscious break from the traditional styles of the Victorian... late 19th and early 20th century Europe and North America - both radical and protean. In...
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Thursday, November 9, 2017
The Tyger burning bright
William Blake’s The Tyger (published 1794, extra link for details) is a powerful and formidable poem. Judging by its surface meaning, the poem contemplates the fact that besides peacefulness and gentleness in man, like that voiced in his The Lamb, the world includes also fierce strength, terrifying...
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