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Maggie's FarmWe are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for. |
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Sunday, October 31. 2021You are Old, Father WilliamTwo verses from Lewis Carroll's parody of an old sanctimious verse:
Saturday, July 10. 2021Saturday verse: Alexander PopeAmerican Digest reminded of this opus by Pope(1688-1744) An Essay on Man (entire thing here) KNOW then thyself, presume not God to scan; Saturday, May 29. 2021Saturday Verse: The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner by Randall JarrellSaturday, May 15. 2021Saturday Verse: YeatsMonday, May 10. 2021Monday Verse: When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d
I link Walt Whitmans' remarkable poem. Really, his best in my view. The bird he refers to is the Catbird. Yesterday morning before church I heard a Rose-Breasted Grosbeak calling, and looked around, Nope. It was a Catbird. Mimic thrush. Fooled me.
Saturday, May 1. 2021Saturday Verse: Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1899)God's Grandeur (1877) The world is charged with the grandeur of God. And for all this, nature is never spent; Saturday, April 24. 2021Saturday Verse: Vladimir NabokovRevolution (2005) I found a lengthy word with a non-Russian ending, That word contained the writhing of mysterious passions: the sinuous streets, the evil-auguring constructions, And, once upon a time, how sweet I used to find it But now the fateful word above my childhood tales, now crepitate like gray newspaper sheets. —Translated by Dmitri Nabokov
Sunday, February 21. 2021HopkinsOur friend Gerard is as much of a fan of Hopkins as I am. At The Great Books, 30 minutes about Gerard Manley Hopins' work and life. None of this RC priest's work was published during his short life.
Saturday, February 20. 2021Saturday Verse: Dylan Thomas
The whole piece can be read here but, better yet, you can stream Thomas reading it here. (19 minutes) Saturday, February 6. 2021Ice storms, and Birches, reposted - not from todayWe had a lovely ice storm this week (only a few branches "pruned" by Mother Nature), reminded me of Robert Frost and swinging birches. Beautiful:
Related, here's Robert Frost reciting his Birches:
Saturday, December 5. 2020Saturday Verse: Karl ShapiroCalifornia Winter It is winter in California, and outside A line of snails crosses the golf-green lawn By noon the fog is burnt off by the sun It is winter in the valley of the vine. And skiers from the snow line driving home But this land grows the oldest living things, It is raining in California, a straight rain Saturday, November 14. 2020Saturday Verse: Emily Dickinsonh/t American Digest After great pain, a formal feeling comes – The Feet, mechanical, go round – This is the Hour of Lead –
Saturday, August 15. 2020Saturday Verse: LongfellowThe Building of the Ship (c 1850). Yes, about boat-building, skill and craft, but also a metaphor about the American nation. It begins: "Build me straight, O worthy Master! The merchant's word The rest of the delightful saga is below the fold -
Continue reading "Saturday Verse: Longfellow" Saturday, August 1. 2020Saturday Verse: Louise GluckMatins You want to know how I spend my time? Saturday, June 27. 2020Saturday Verse: W.S. MerwinThe Summer (1991) After we come to see it and know we scarcely live without it we begin trying to describe what art is and it seems to be something we believe is human whatever that is something that says what we are but then the same beam of recognition stops at one penguin choosing a pebble to offer to the penguin he hopes to love and later the dance of awkwardness holding an egg on one foot away from the snow of summer the balancing on one foot in the flash of summer Saturday, March 28. 2020Saturday Verse: John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)Lots of people feeling snowbound these days, housebound. Get outside! A short excerpt from Snowbound: A Winter Idyl (1866): Yet, haply, in some lull of life, Ahhh, the benediction of the air. Read the entire wonderful but old-fashioned-sounding 1865 poem by the great north of Boston newspaper editor and abolitionist here. He made a lot of money from that poem. Whittier's home, to which the poem refers, stands in Haverhill, MA. It's a sentimental poem you can read to the kids - with feeling! Especially on a snowbound day. Saturday, February 29. 2020Saturday Verse - Robert Frost. "The life of muscles rocking soft..."
Out of the mud two strangers came Good blocks of oak it was I split, The sun was warm but the wind was chill. A bluebird comes tenderly up to alight The water for which we may have to look The time when most I loved my task Out of the wood two hulking tramps Nothing on either side was said. But yield who will to their separation, Saturday, January 18. 2020Saturday verse: Walt Whitman, When Liberty GoesFrom The Preface to the 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass. h/t American Digest “When liberty goes it is not the first to go nor the second or third to go . . it waits for all the rest to go . . it is the last. . . When the memories of the old martyrs are faded utterly away . . . . When the large names of patriots are laughed at in the public halls from the lips of the orators . . . . When the boys are no more christened after the same but christened after tyrants and traitors instead . . . . When the laws of the free are grudgingly permitted and laws for informers and bloodmoney are sweet to the taste of the people . . . . When I and you walk abroad upon the earth stung with compassion at the sight of numberless brothers answering our equal friendship and calling no man master… When we are elated with noble joy at the sight of slaves . . . . When the soul retires in the cool communion of the night and surveys its experience and has much extasy over the word and deed that put back a helpless innocent person into the gripe of the gripers or into any cruel inferiority . . . . When those in all parts of these states who could easier realize the true American character but do not yet— When the swarms of cringers, suckers, doughfaces, lice of politics, planners of sly involutions for their own preferment to city offices or state legislatures or the judiciary or congress or the presidency, obtain a response of love and natural deference from the people whether they get the offices or no . . . . When it is better to be a bound booby and rogue in office at a high salary than the poorest free mechanic or farmer with his hat unmoved from his head and firm eyes and a candid and generous heart . . . . And when servility by town or state or the federal government or any oppression on a large scale or small scale can be tried on without its own punishment following duly after in exact proportion against the smallest chance of escape . . . . Or rather when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged from any part of the earth— Then only shall the instinct of liberty be discharged from that part of the earth. Saturday, January 4. 2020Saturday Verse: Wallace StevensSunday Morning I Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice. She dreams a little, and she feels the dark Encroachment of that old catastrophe, As a calm darkens among water-lights. The pungent oranges and bright, green wings Seem things in some procession of the dead, Winding across wide water, without sound. The day is like wide water, without sound, Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet Over the seas, to silent Palestine, Dominion of the blood and sepulchre. II Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams? Shall she not find in comforts of the sun, In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else In any balm or beauty of the earth, Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven? Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow; Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms; gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; All pleasures and all pains, remembering The bough of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul. III Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth. IV She says, “I am content when wakened birds, Before they fly, test the reality Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings; But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields Return no more, where, then, is paradise?” There is not any haunt of prophecy, Nor any old chimera of the grave, Neither the golden underground, nor isle Melodious, where spirits gat them home, Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured As April’s green endures; or will endure Like her remembrance of awakened birds, Or her desire for June and evening, tipped By the consummation of the swallow’s wings. V She says, “But in contentment I still feel The need of some imperishable bliss.” Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams And our desires. Although she strews the leaves Of sure obliteration on our paths, The path sick sorrow took, the many paths Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love Whispered a little out of tenderness, She makes the willow shiver in the sun For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet. She causes boys to pile new plums and pears On disregarded plate. The maidens taste And stray impassioned in the littering leaves. VI Is there no change of death in paradise? Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs Hang always heavy in that perfect sky, Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth, With rivers like our own that seek for seas They never find, the same receding shores That never touch with inarticulate pang? Why set the pear upon those river-banks Or spice the shores with odors of the plum? Alas, that they should wear our colors there, The silken weavings of our afternoons, And pick the strings of our insipid lutes! Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly. VII Supple and turbulent, a ring of men Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn Their boisterous devotion to the sun, Not as a god, but as a god might be, Naked among them, like a savage source. Their chant shall be a chant of paradise, Out of their blood, returning to the sky; And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice, The windy lake wherein their lord delights, The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills, That choir among themselves long afterward. They shall know well the heavenly fellowship Of men that perish and of summer morn. And whence they came and whither they shall go The dew upon their feet shall manifest. VIII She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine Is not the porch of spirits lingering. It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.” We live in an old chaos of the sun, Or old dependency of day and night, Or island solitude, unsponsored, free, Of that wide water, inescapable. Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness; And, in the isolation of the sky, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness, on extended wings. Saturday, December 28. 2019Saturday verse for a new year: Max EhrmannDesiderata Go placidly amid the noise and haste, Speak your truth quietly and clearly; Avoid loud and aggressive persons, Keep interested in your own career, however humble; Be yourself. Take kindly the counsel of the years, You are a child of the universe, Therefore be at peace with God, With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, Max Ehrmann, Desiderata, Copyright 1952. Saturday, November 30. 2019Saturday Verse: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
UNDER a spreading chestnut tree His hair is crisp, and black, and long, Week in, week out, from morn till night, And children coming home from school He goes on Sunday to the church, It sounds to him like her mother's voice, Toiling,—rejoicing,—sorrowing, Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend, Saturday, November 9. 2019Saturday Verse: Seamus HeaneyFollower My father worked with a horse-plough, An expert. He would set the wing Of reins, the sweating team turned round I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake, I wanted to grow up and plough, I was a nuisance, tripping, falling, Saturday, October 19. 2019Saturday Verse: Whatever You Do is Wrong
Then you curse yourself for a fool greenhorn, And so, through life, a poor wretch tries Still, I think that the God who sits in His sky, Saturday, September 14. 2019Saturday Verse: Alfred, Lord TennysonUlysses It little profits that an idle king, I cannot rest from travel: I will drink And drunk delight of battle with my peers; Were all too little, and of one to me This is my son, mine own Telemachus, There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail: The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though
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