Actually, lately, it hasn’t been so much a lack of wanting to write as a lack of wanting to write about sewing. This surprised me, though it should not have. I always have mulitiple projects started, because after a time I get sick of working on one, and work on something else instead. Why would Click Here to continue reading.
This week’s poem of the week is Ash Wednesday by T.S Eliot. It was his first poem after his conversion to Anglicanism.
The great split in America between the Congregationalists and the Unitarians has had a profound and far reaching effects on our culture. It has affected our politics. It laid the seeds for the 60’s and gave us higher education as we know it today. And as this essay points out, it has also affected our architecture.
This is part of the sound track to this movie.
H/T The Belmont Club and Vanderleun
We were all sitting around discussing books the other day. One book that received a fair amount of discussion was the “The Runner” by Cynthia Voigt. Some individual who can never get his nouns straight said that book started off with a quote from a poem called “A Shropshire Lad” by A. E. Housman.
That is not accurate. “A Shropshire Lad” is the name of a collection of poems. The name of the actual poem that leads off and ends the book is To an Athlete Dying Young. That poem can be found in “A Shropshire Lad”. So can other poems that make an appearance in “The Runner”.
Anyway, in honor of our discussions the other day, we have made “To an Athlete Dying Young” poem of the week.
Continuing the Editor’s theme on demographics, a sonnet from Shakespeare, by way of Bartleby:
WHEN forty winters shall besiege thy brow
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,
Thy youth’s proud livery, so gaz’d on now,
Will be a tatter’d weed, of small worth held:
Then being ask’d, where all thy beauty lies, 5
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,
To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserv’d thy beauty’s use,
If thou couldst answer ‘This fair child of mine 10
Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse,’
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.
Growing up, I always thought that all rock and roll bands were stupid. The few times I heard some of the songs only served to confirm my bias. But as I worked in the trades I was kinda forced to listen to a lot of good old rock and roll. In the process I discovered that some of the classical rock bands actually had a talent that I could respect. There were a number of songs that I actually looked forward to coming on to the radio.
One such song is “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd. You can read the lyrics here, but I think that it is better to just listen to the song through the clip below.
In homage to this week’s essay of the week, the poem of the week is The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S Eliot
As SippicanCottage says, “This is the part of the year that grinds”. We could not have said it better ourselves.
No one at the Ethereal Voice cares one wit for John Lennon but we do like a well written essay. And The Day We Killed John Lennon by Gerard Van der Leun is a well written essay.