Tag: hopeless

poetry appreciation

the nadir experience

Feb 10, 2022 #accompaniment, #apostrophe, #be near me when my light is low, #despair, #grief, #hopeless, #hopelessness, #in memoriam ahh, #meaninglessness, #metre, #nihilism, #rhyme, #rhyme scheme, #Tennyson by Lucy Crispin

Needless to recount again my extreme enthusiasm for Tennyson’s In Memoriam AHH. For today’s “poem that helps” I offer you ‘Be near me when my light is low’, poem 50 out of In Mem‘s 131-poem length. It’s in the public domain, so the text is below; but if you want a laugh, you can listen to a computer read it here. It’s hilarious. For what it should sound like, try this one.

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poetry appreciation

there’s this mood, too

May 14, 2020 #anger, #angry, #corona virus, #Covid 19, #crisis, #despair, #fear, #fearful, #frightened, #future, #grief, #hopeless, #Merwin, #sad, #Separation, #war, #When the War is Over, #WS Merwin, #zeugma by Lucy Crispin

That extra time we’re supposed to be having at the moment, during which we relax, read, knit ourselves cunning new kitchens, all that lot… It hasn’t been like that for me. I seem to have spent a startling amount of time doing I know not what. But one of the things I have managed to achieve, which I’ve been meaning to do for a long time, is get hold of some WS Merwin.

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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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