A Brother's Perspective on Literature

2009-09-01T16:27:00.001-07:00

Still Reading T.S. Eliot for the time being.

The second stanza of "Cousin Nancy" was comical to me.

I can just imagine these poor sophisticated New England aunts trying to understand how they felt about this feministic niece of theirs, and her modern ways.

"Cousin Nancy"

Miss Nancy Ellicott

Strode across the hills and broke them,

Rode across the hills and broke them–

The barren New England hills–

Riding to hounds

Over the cow-pasture.

Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked

And danced all the modern dances;

And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it,

But they knew that it was modern.

Upon the glazen shelves kept watch

Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith,

The arm of unalterable law.

T.S. Eliot

2009-08-19T20:19:00.000-07:00

I unearthed a stack of books (by unearthed, I mean I found them on the desk) from my old office that I used as Herron Editor, a post which I held on to like a vice for a good semester. Anyway, among them was one of my more loved books of poetry. ''The Wasteland'' and Other Poems by T. S. Eliot. I'm looking forward to settling down to some form of reflective string or piano music and re reading my favorite poem of this selection: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". Some of my favorite lines are below.

Do I dare

Disturb the Universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all –

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

So how should I presume?

Dulce Et Decorum Est

2009-08-11T22:59:00.000-07:00

My College Literature Instructor introduced us to this poem. I would feel inept to really critique it or produce any commentary on it, so I will just leave you with the poem and allow you to interpret the finer points.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

-Wilfred Owen

My Antonia

2008-03-24T13:21:00.000-07:00

Willa Cather. The name never conjured up thoughts of anything brilliant in my head. She was an author. An author about whom if you anything, you know that her more well known works of fiction were based in the Midwest--Nebraska, to be precise. Nebraska. It always sounded kind of boring to me. What exactly is in Nebraska? What kind of people live there? Farmers. Boring Farmers, of this stereotype I was certain. I have been pleasantly surprised by Willa Cather, and her stories of the Midwest.

As any great lover of literature does, I collect books. Any book. Hoping to someday read it. Well this was the case when I picked up My Antonia and decided to add it to my collection, if for no other reason than that it was a classic, and it would look good on my shelf. It sat there among other great works of literature on the top of my dusty bookshelf, for the past two years. Until yesterday afternoon.

When faced between the choice of Homer's ancient work and the agrarian work of Ms. Cather,I settled for what I assumed would be lighter reading. It was, I suppose, I have also discovered what may become one of my favorite classic works of literature by an American author. I have only read a few chapters into the book, but My Antonia is filled with descriptive language of landscape and thought. It is beautiful. Cather paints the picture of the prairie and its beauty through the eyes of a recently orphaned young boy, who is seeing all of its beauty for the first time.

Here are a few passages that I fell in love with so far.

I had the feeling that the world was left
behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man's jurisdiction. I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a familiar mountain ridge against it. But this was the complete dome of heaven, all there was of it. I did not believe that my dead father and mother were watching me from up there; they would still be looking for me at the sheep-fold down by the creek, or along the white road that led to the mountain pastures. I had left even their spirits behind me. The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither. I don't think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.

As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.

I can remember exactly how the country looked to me as I walked beside my grandmother along the faint wagon-tracks on that early September morning. Perhaps the glide of long railway travel was still with me, for more than anything else I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy blowing- morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping...

I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away. The light air about me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and the sun and the sky were left and if one went a little farther there would be only sun and sky, and one would float off into them...I kept looking up at the hawks that were doing what I might so easily do.

Lewis and Salisbury Cathedral

2008-03-04T21:04:00.000-08:00

I've just started reading C. S. Lewis' The Great Divorce. The introduction alone has given me much to consider. I'll have to read it a few times I'm sure.

a poem from one of my favorites...

2008-02-18T19:12:00.000-08:00

"Dirge"

Boys and girls that held her dear,
Do your weeping now;
All you loved of her lies here.

Brought to earth the arrogant brow,
And the withering tongue
Chastened; do your weeping now.

Sing whatever songs are sung,
Wind whatever wreath,
For a playmate perished young,

For a spirit spent in death.
Boys and girls that held her dear,
All you loved of her lies here.

--Edna St. Vincent Millay