Category: Poetry
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Juxtaposition – Two Scottish Poets
When I read Iain Crichton Smith’s poem it resonates, for me, with the poem by Hugh MacDiarmid. I’m not ‘proud’ to be a Scot – that’s an accident of birth – but I’m happy to belong to a little nation with a large past, complete with the cruel suffering of the highland clearances, the pride…
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A Juxtaposition
The Wordsworth poem reminds me that we are all made of ‘star dust’. We’re made of exactly the same atoms as everything else in the universe. These atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, calcium, phosphorus, sulphur, potassium, sodium, chlorine and magnesium were created millions and billions of years ago in the nuclear furnaces of massive,…
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The Exodus times Three
In its final form, Exodus, like the Bible’s other opening books, was a well-crafted compilation using a variety of oral and written source materials. These had originated, and then been expanded upon, for at least five centuries, in different locations, at diverse times, by numberless story tellers and writers. The final editors had exemplary respect…
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Exodus – the Burning Bush
In these Exodus blogs, I’m exploring some of the ways in which the writers/editors crafted their work. In my view, they were writing neither straightforward history, nor fiction, but what might be called ‘religious literature’, which they shaped into an inspiring eye, ear and imagination catching, ‘national epic’. I think of it as being mythicised…
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Elgar the Enigma
This is an invitation to revisit two sublimely beautiful and meaningful pieces of Elgar’s music. One is mostly misunderstood, while the other is uniquely revelatory. First is “Nimrod” from his ‘Enigma Variations’. Let’s un-attach it, briefly, from the November Cenotaph observance, where It seems ‘custom-built’ to fit the remembrance of Great Britain’s part in two…
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That Christmas ‘Star’
One Christmas ‘tradition’ that continues to amuse me, is the annual attempt to cobble up credible ‘explanations’ of the nature and behaviour of the ‘Christmas Star’. It appears only in Matthew’s Gospel but (all credit to the writer’s imagination) it never fails to make an ‘other worldly’ impact on readers of his story. In the…
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‘O little town of Bethlehem’
This is my favourite Christmas carol, though I’m no longer ‘traditionally’ religious, and believe Jesus was born in Nazareth, not Bethlehem. Why, some might ask, do I find this carol moving and meaningful? The reason is that its words and music symbolise and energise deep-seated archetypal contents in my psyche, which have profound meaning irrespective…
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The Three Nativity Stories
Have you realised that there are actually three Nativity Stories? The first is in Matthew’s Gospel, which includes a guiding star in the sky; an arrival of “wise men” from the east; King Herod’s slaughter of babies and toddlers; the escape of the ‘holy family’ to Egypt; their eventual attempted return to their “house” in…
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