Thursday, December 13, 2018
The Never Ever Repayable Debt
The Poet Laureate from Herefordshire County in western England, John Masefield lost his mother at six years of age who died while giving birth to his sister. This heartrending experience at an impressionable age left an indelible mark of sorrow on his soul which he found almost impossible to...
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Friday, December 7, 2018
Aren't there Ghosts all around us?
“ Ghosts”, meaning “those who come back” refers to people, ideas or beliefs from the past that affects life in the present. The prevalence of such “ghosts” is a major theme in the Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, written in 1881, a powerful but a controversial play. Taboo topics, like...
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Saturday, November 17, 2018
L I F E
I made a posie, while the day ran by: Here will I smell my remnant out, and tie My life within this band. But time did becken to the flowers, and they By noon most cunningly did steal away And wither'd in my hand. My hand was next to them, and then my heart: I took, without more thinking, in good...
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Thursday, November 15, 2018
Delight in Disorder
(Here's another of Robert Herrick's poems I enjoyed interpreting). Robert Herrick’s Delight in Disorder, is one of his most famous poems published in 1648 in a collection of poems, called the Hesperides. The title of the poem is itself an oxymoron, dedicated to the praise of disorderliness. In a...
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Tuesday, November 13, 2018
The Night Poece to Julia
A metaphysical poet, Robert Herrick, conjured up incoherent imageries and streamlined these threads into a fine fabric of mannerly poetic diction. Herrick's The Night Piece, to Julia (1648), is a five-line, four-stanza lyric poem where Herrick implores the woman of his desire, Julia, to visit him at...
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Friday, November 9, 2018
Today is Diwali, the Festival of Lights, celebrated across India with great verve and fun and frolic, firecrackers Et al. So I thought of contributing something which, I believe, will bring light to yours... The mind is perfectly capable of repeating the Known: with the Unknown, it is powerless,...
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Sunday, November 4, 2018
I Claim but only a Memory of the same
Born in 1812 in Camberwell in England, Robert Browning has been regarded as one of the stylist litterateurs of the early Victorian era. He found the true channel of his poetic genius in the dramatic monologue. A dramatic monologue is neither soliloquy nor meditation, but is a series of remarks,...
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Saturday, November 3, 2018
Be Thou Me O Ecstasy !
The starry night's twinkling towers And the daylight's dancing hours The birds and trees and skies and flowers Benevolent rains of sweet monsoon showers O Ecstasy, you sovereign almighty Empress Pure, and in the image of perfect gladness Without the tinge of any gloomy sadness Nature's all-embracing...
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Thursday, November 1, 2018
Significance of the Epilogue in Shaw's Saint Joan
Joan of Arc’s burning at the stake in 1431, is depicted in the last scene of Shaw’s Saint Joan. But the Epilogue which is a dream-fantasy, completes her life-story by showing her rehabilitation in 1456 and her canonization in 1920. On one dark and stormy night in June 1456, King Charles VII of...
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Tuesday, October 30, 2018
The Trial Scene of the Maid of Orleans
In Shaw’s Saint Jones, while the opening scenes depict Joan of Arc’s coming and triumph, the last scene depicts her trial on the charge of heresy and her death. She is handed over by the secular authorities to the ecclesiastical polity to decide on the ‘how’ and the brutal ‘medievality’ of her...
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