Tag: melancholy

poetry appreciation

autumn beauty

Oct 29, 2020 #ageing, #autumn, #beauty, #inspire, #melancholy, #poems, #poetry, #school, #swans, #teacher, #The Wild Swans at Coole, #time, #trees, #WB Yeats, #woods, #Yeats by Lucy Crispin

This was one of the three poems that changed the course of my life. That sounds rather dramatic, but it’s true. We “Did” Yeats for A-level and I was blessed with one of those teachers whose capacity to inspire you feel at the time without really realising what’s going on. Without Stevie I don’t know if I would have “got” literature and followed it as student, teacher, writer, throughout my life. So this is a very important poem for me. Here it is: ‘The Wild Swans at Coole‘ by Yeats.*

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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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