This is a recommendation and literature review post. I touch upon works which have transformed me. I hope my readers too are helped by these authors and poets.
Category: Poetry
The End of the World sung by Skeeter Davis
This song is one of the best out there and I am a sucker for country music…so when I found it in the horror sci-fi movie adaptation of Stephen King’s Under the Dome, I couldn’t but share it with you, my reader. Thank you for listening in.
Funeral Blues by W.H. Auden
This is one of Auden’s most beautiful but under-anthologized poems. The beauty of the poem is undercut by great sorrow since “our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought”.
Spring and Fall by Fr. Hopkins SJ
Hopkins knew the fleeting/hardening nature of Samsara. In this poem, which is not very well known, Fr. Hopkins is at his best as a practitioner of Sprung Rhythm and as a follower of St. Ignatius of Loyola. The world turns, while the Cross is still.
The Rose Family by Robert Frost, or Poem 2
Frost’s evokes Romeo and Juliet in this poem. This is one of Frost’s lesser known poems. But his legendary machismo intrudes upon the poem unlike Shakespeare who never intruded in his works.
Poem 1, by Francis William Bourdillon
This is one of those love poems which never leaves the heart. What use if we call poetry texts? What use if we forget that poetry is what makes us human? What use to know that the Big Bang occurred if one has not felt abject in a sky afire with stars?
