How is your sight? What captures your attention? Despite Emily Dickinson’s opening phrase, I don’t think her poem is a lament for lost eyesight. What do you think? My comments follow her poem. Read the rest of this entry »
Do you know when and how to prune a grapevine? George MacDonald wrote this sonnet in August, when grape leaves often begin dropping naturally, hopefully exposing clumps of ripe grapes. My comments follow his sonnet. Read the rest of this entry »
How loathe I’ve been
To squander this life
To cast to the wind
Or drop into the ground
What I cannot save Read the rest of this entry »
Last week I discovered this delightful poem by Emily Dickinson. She was about 32 years old when she wrote it. It’s full of wisdom and a touch of self-directed humor. Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s another gem from Emily Dickinson that has seeped into my heart and mind. I love reading it out loud. The cadence is clear, steady and unrelenting: a 3-line metric pattern of 4-4-3, 4-4-3, 4-4-3…. Read the rest of this entry »
What a week! Up and down, but on the whole, more up than down. Chiefly because of little things that kept interrupting me, reminding me there’s way more to life than health issues.
Best of all, Mother Nature reasserted her right Read the rest of this entry »
~~~St. Paul’s Girls’ School, London
The following words and images came to me recently while listening to Gustav Holst’s Brook Green Suite. He wrote it from his hospitable bed a year before he died in 1934. Read the rest of this entry »
9:05am, Monday. I wrote this immediately following breakfast today. Trying to capture how I felt and then let my mind and heart go wherever I needed to go. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m in the shady if not elderly bracket of life. You know. That time of life when people start treating you differently. Sometimes they don’t know whether to do obeisance because you’ve lived so long, or whether to treat you as Read the rest of this entry »
During the last three months I’ve become hooked on Emily Dickinson’s enigmatic poetry. Today I’m trying my hand at personal reflections on one of my favorites. It’s from a collection of just over 100 of her poems. The editor has restored the author’s own vocabulary and punctuation, using original, sometimes difficult to decipher manuscripts as her guide.
Fortunately, the editor’s pointers for reading the poems included reading them often and reading them out loud. Since then I’ve Read the rest of this entry »
Telling the Truth 