R.L. Swihart's Blog, page 15

Happy Halloween: Thick-billed Kingbird in Ontario CA

 

Nicholas McDowell: Poet of Revolution

The various poetic experiments and student exercises that Milton chose to preserve from his time at school and at Cambridge exhibit such an accelerated pursuit of the humanist ideal of the complete orator–poet. Milton’s character and career, as a writer of both poetry and prose, were profoundly influenced by the educational and cultural ideals of humanitas, in which he was intensively trained by private tutors and then at grammar school and university. Milton exemplifies the success of a humanist programme that sought to instil in students an ‘emotional commitment to antiquity and its repository of useful knowledge, which illuminated the human condition and guided behaviour’.29 The following chapters will show how the pursuit of humanist erudition was a key concern of his life up to the point in 1639 when, aged thirty, he returned from a fourteen-month tour of Italy to an England sliding into civil war. His dedication to the cause of liberty after 1640 was motivated less by ‘benevolence towardes all men’ than by a conviction that humanitas, of which poetry was both an embodiment and a key constituent, could only be pursued under religious and civil conditions that enabled freedom of thought and the advancement of learning.

Baudelaire: Paris Spleen

We had spent a long day together, and it had seemed to me short. We had promised one another that we would think the same thoughts and that our two souls should become one soul; a dream which is not original, after all, except that, dreamed by all men, it has been realised by none.

Baudelaire: Paris Spleen

"The great misfortune of not being able to be alone," La Bruyere says somewhere, as though to shame those who rush to forget themselves in the crowd, fearing, doubtless, that they will be unable to endure themselves. "Almost all our ills come to us from inability to remain in our room," said another sage, Pascal, I believe, recalling thus in the cell of meditation the frantic ones who seek happiness in animation, and in a prostitution which I could call fraternary, if I wished to use the fine language of my century.

Baudelaire: Paris Spleen

From The Plaything of the Poor:

I should like to give you an idea for an innocent diversion. There are so few amusements that are not guilty ones! When you go out in the morning for a stroll along the highways, fill your pockets with little penny contrivances—such as the straight merryandrew moved by a single thread, the blacksmiths who strike the anvil, the rider and his horse, with a whistle for a tail—and, along the taverns, at the foot of the trees, make presents of them to the unknown poor children whom you meet. You will see their eyes grow beyond all measure. At first, they will not dare to take; they will doubt their good fortune. Then their hands will eagerly seize the gift, and they will flee as do the cats who go far off to eat the bit you have given them, having learned to distrust man.

Baudelaire: Paris Spleen

From Crowds:

Multitude, solitude: equal terms mutually convertible by the active and begetting poet. He who does not know how to people his solitude, does not know either how to be alone in a busy crowd. The poet enjoys this incomparable privilege, to be at once himself and others. Like those wandering souls that go about seeking bodies, he enters at will the personality of every man. For him alone, every place is vacant; and if certain places seem to be closed against him, that is because in his eyes they are not worth the trouble of visiting.

Aloysius Bernard: My Thatched Cottage

 I. My Thatched Cottage

 In autumn the thrushes would come to rest there, drawn by the berries of a vivid redness harvested from the service tree of the bird-catchers. The Baron R. Monthermé. 

Lifting her eyes afterwards, the good old woman observed how the dry cold north wind was tossing the trees, and was dispersing the traces of the crows that hopped over the snow surrounding the barn. The German poet Voss, Idyll XIII. 

My thatched cottage will have, in the summer, the leafage of the woodland for a parasol, and in the autumn, for a garden, at the window’s edge, a patch of moss that will enshrine the pearls of the rainfall, and some wallflower that smells like the almond. But in the winter, what a pleasure, when the morning will have discarded its bouquets of hoarfrost on my frozen windows, to perceive quite far off, on the outskirts of the forest, a traveler who continues to diminish, him and his mount, in the snow and the haze! 

What a pleasure, in the evening, to peruse, under the mantel of the fireplace blazing and perfumed from the brushwood of a juniper tree, the chronicles of the gallant knights and monks, portrayed so marvelously that they seem, some to joust and others to pray, one more time! 

And what a pleasure, in the late night, during the uncertain and pallid hour that precedes the break of day, to hear my cockerel making himself hoarse inside the henhouse, and then the cockerel at some farm responding to him faintly, a sentinel perched on the outposts of the slumbering village.

Ah! If only the King were reading, ensconced in his Louvre, what we have written–O my muse unsheltered against the hurricanes of life!–then surely that lord suzerain over so many fiefs that he does not know the number of his castles would not begrudge us a small thatched cottage!

Translated by Donald Sidney-Fryer

R L Swihart: Two New Poems

Two new poems -- "Heretic" & "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" (see teaser) -- are in the latest In Parentheses. Trouble is: it costs. But there's a lot to love, and the digital version is less than $5. Check it out!

#rlswihart #InParentheses #Heretic #GoodbyeYellowBrickRoad #poetry #readmorepoetry2024❤️🎈

Brothers K: Alyosha and the Boys

My dear children, perhaps you won't understand what I am saying to you, because I often speak very unintelligibly, but you'll remember all the same and will agree with my words some time. You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one's heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us. 

Brothers K: Ivan in Court

"I am like the peasant girl, your excellency... you know. How does it go? 'I'll stand up if I like, and I won't if I don't.' They were trying to put on her sarafan to take her to church to be married, and she said, 'I'll stand up if I like, and I won't if I don't.'... It's in some book about the peasantry." "What do you mean by that?" the President asked severely. "Why, this," Ivan suddenly pulled out a roll of notes. "Here's the money... the notes that lay in that envelope" (he nodded towards the table on which lay the material evidence), "for the sake of which our father was murdered. Where shall I put them? Mr. Superintendent, take them." The usher of the court took the whole roll and handed it to the President. "How could this money have come into your possession if it is the same money?" the President asked wonderingly. "I got them from Smerdyakov, from the murderer, yesterday.... I was with him just before he hanged himself. It was he, not my brother, killed our father. He murdered him and I incited him to do it... Who doesn't desire his father's death?" "Are you in your right mind?" broke involuntarily from the President.