Tag: fear

poetry appreciation
poetry appreciation

handrails and lifelines and emergency lanterns

Jan 9, 2020 #Arnold, #despair, #doubt, #Dover Beach, #faith, #fear, #hope, #Matthew Arnold, #melancholy, #poem, #poetry, #sadness, #The Buried Life, #trust by Lucy Crispin

In an article in The Times in 2016 Libby Purves wrote of how ‘[p]eople have been through everything before us and some, by great grace, have recorded it with undying power. English-speakers are particularly lucky,’ she continued, ‘since some of the very best have done this in our fabulously hybrid, magpie language… [Poets] have crafted handrails and lifelines and emergency lanterns. They reassure us that others walked this hard trail and lived to express it’.

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poetry appreciation, reflection

‘the centre cannot hold…’

Dec 12, 2019 #apocalypse, #dread, #election, #fear, #George Eliot, #helpless, #hope, #hopeless, #Middlemarch, #nightmare, #poem, #poetry, #politicians, #politics, #terror, #The Second Coming, #unease, #Yeats by Lucy Crispin

For me, it’s got to be ‘The Second Coming‘ as poem of the day today (hear Dominic West read it here). Election day in the UK, and a sense of no good news ahead, whether nationally or globally… The poem’s cascade of nightmarish images strikes fear into me; or rather, makes visible the fear that is already there. Bits of the poem have echoed round my mind often over these last few years, offering a sort of grimly reassuring sense that dread is, if nothing else, a shared experience. Doom has impended before; feels impending now; and seems likely to continue to impend until it breaks, or cracks, or whatever it is that doom does when it’s no longer future but present tense.

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