Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Great Regulars: In poetry we are continually being reborn

into new fairylands. The poet in the child is a traveller into fairyland, and if at a later stage he returns to reality, he must bring back with him fire from that heaven if he is to remain a poet. He can not be a poet of experience unless he has first been a poet of innocence.

from V Sundaram: News Today: My favourite poems and poets--I

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Probably the best known of all [Sir Henry] Newbolt's poems and the one for which he is now chiefly remembered is Vitaï Lampada. It refers to how a future soldier learns stoicism in cricket matches in the famous Close at Clifton College:

There's a breathless hush in the Close to-night
Ten to make and the match to win
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play, and the last man in.

from V Sundaram: News Today: My favourite poems and poets--II

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Love is the supreme good; it is the overflowing life, the giving and surrender of ourselves to noble ends and lofty causes. It is the valley of humility and the Everest of Himalayan ecstasy. I can go on joyously this way, endlessly forever and ever. Yet at the same time, finally we can never ignore what Shakespeare (1554--1616) said in conclusion: "Love reasons without reason".

These emotions and feelings surged up in my mind and heart again when I re-read the following poem of Allgernon Charles Swinburne (1837- 1909) called 'A Match'

from V Sundaram: News Today: My favourite poems and poets--III

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In poetry, the symbolist procedure--as typified by Verlaine--was to use subtle suggestion instead of precise statement (rhetoric was banned) and to evoke moods and feelings through the magic of words and repeated sounds and the cadence of verse (musicality) and metrical innovation

Rain

from V Sundaram: News Today: My favourite poems and poets--IV

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