Updated: Apr 25
If all the good people were clever,
And all clever people were good,
The world would be nicer than ever
We thought that it possibly could,
—Dame Elizabeth Wordsworth (1931)
The good all thought they were clever.
The clever all thought they were good.
The handcart to Hell—forever—
Sped on, as I knew that it would!
Sunday, April 20, 2025
The glacier knocks in the cupboard, / The desert sighs in the bed, / And the crack in the tea-cup opens / A lane to the land of the dead.—W H. Auden
Why are so many poets vegetarians?
You might well ask!
It’s since they scan what’s what
—their special task.
The maudlin multitude do not,
who’ll sigh one day at scrutable positions—
a school in store for every solemn sot.
And if they enquire what a poem means,
answer: "What do you suppose it seems?"
We write, not what we think, but what impinges
on pious minds, past bone and pervious meninges.
The meninges: dura mater, arachnoid, and pia mater (Wikipedia)
Addendum
The ilium, ischium, and os innominatum
—that nameless bone!
conspire to keep me still in bed—
Muggs, the cat, has been fed.
O frabjous day! Nothing to do,
nowhere to go, but stay home
listen to music on WTJU,
enumerate my antique flirts—
nothing there that specially hurts.
Epigraph: W. H. Auden, “As I Walked Out One Evening” (1937)
Friday, April 18, 2025
Updated: Jun 2
“Art is a thing that is too big and too heavy for a single life, and even those who have reached a ripe old age are only beginners.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke to Lou Andreas-Salome, August 11, 1903
Art’s too much for a single life,
René proclaimed when twenty-eight—
youth is wasted on the young,
as GBS* and/or Oscar say;
narrow the way and strait the gate
leading to life a few shall find;
wide to destruction the freeway
flows; many are for it designed.†
This is in art especially true,
which cuts its teeth on wordy strife.
Strive not so wild to make it new,
as Ezra did—it pained his wife
(and René, too—perplexing Lou).
Now I’ve attained a ripe old age,
I feel that perhaps I’ve won a stage.
Wednesday, April 16, 2025
*GBS = George Bernard Shaw.
† Matthew 7:13-14 (KJV):
Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:
Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.
