Tag: Poem
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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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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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Holy Spring (Dylan Thomas)
Sometimes, when people first read through a Dylan Thomas poem, they say, ‘What on earth is he on about?” And there are times when he reminds me of someone who needs to get so much in, that he crams his suitcase close to bursting point; or reminds me of Einstein’s e=mc2 equation, which compresses an…
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Over Sir John’s Hill (ii) (Dylan Thomas)
This poem is one of those written while the poet was living in Carmarthenshire, in the Boathouse overlooking the estuary of the rivers Taf and Towy, in sight of nearby Sir John’s Hill. To begin to do justice to this feast of linguistic brilliance and poetic virtuosity would demand many a page. In this post,…
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Poem on his Birthday (part i) – Dylan Thomas
Stanza 1. In this poem, it’s Thomas’s ‘thirty-fifth‘ birthday. It’s just another ‘sandgrain‘ day in the ongoing hourglass of his life, except that it’s the half-way point in the Biblically allotted ‘three score years and ten’. The ‘mustardseed sun‘, however, the small, orange sun of late October, is more than three-quarters of the way along…
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Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night (Dylan Thomas)
I sometimes quote a favourite Joseph Campbell saying, “Follow your bliss”. My bliss, at the moment, is Dylan Thomas. Having written 3 successive posts, I’ve decided to delete and update 2 previous ones. “Do Not Go Gentle” is a counterpart to the “Elegy”, both having to do with his father. “Elegy”, which I recently wrote…
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Poem in October (Dylan Thomas)
Thomas called this, “the first place poem I’ve written”. The place was Laugharne, on the estuary of the river Taf in Carmarthenshire, where Dylan lived for 4 years in the Boathouse and where, in the graveyard of St Martin’s Church, he and his wife Caitlan are buried. Detailed analyses of Thomas’s poems can differ from…
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