Tag: Poetry
-
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…
-
“The Combat” – a ‘Sacred’ Poem by Edwin Muir
What is this strange, moving, fascinating poem about? It’s about an ongoing fight to the death between very different creatures. It seems to be a decidedly “unequal battle”. One of the combatants looks like a ‘no-hoper’. There is a “crested animal” resembling the mythical griffin, with “eagle’s head” and “whetted beak”; “body of leopard” and…
-
The Nativity Stories (v) Unconditional Love
I’ve been suggesting that the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke are two different stories that invite us, while enjoying what’s on the surface, to think a little more deeply. Some people might imagine that because I don’t regard these stories as historical, their meaningfulness for me must be sadly impoverished, but not so !…
-
A little Poem that says a Lot …
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening : Robert Frost Some time ago, in one of my blog posts, I tried to show that Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road not Taken”, isn’t as simple and straightforward as it might, at first sight, appear. There’s a bit of ambivalence and ambiguity that invites us to dig…
-
The Sea of Faith (Matthew Arnold)
Matthew Arnold’s poem was published in 1867, eight years after Charles Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species‘. It reflects the fears of traditional Christians at a perceived undermining of some long-held beliefs. The science of geology lengthened the Earth’s age from the Bible’s few thousand, to many millions of years. Darwin’s theory of evolution dethroned…
-
Appearance, Reality, and William Blake (pt.1)
In a poem entitled ‘The Everlasting Gospel‘, William Blake wrote, In his ‘Auguries of Innocence‘, however, when we do look “thro’ the Eye”, this enables us, In this first of two posts, let’s look at the lines from “The Everlasting Gospel“. The “five windows of the soul” are the five senses which give us information…
-
Trees and Us – William Blake and Martin Buber
WILLIAM BLAKE, poet : about awakening to an awareness of belonging to the one totally interwoven web of all life and being … “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.” “The tree which moves some to tears of joy, is in the eyes of others only a green thing which…
RAY'S VIEWS ONLINE 