From the concert I just posted comes this poem, also new to me, by Gerald Manley Hopkins, whom I like because despite by inability to get poetry, I can get him, if someone gives me a few hints and I pay close attention.
Thomas Doubting over at Grim's also brings forth a poem, a longer one by Robert Frost, my favorite for the same reason. I need a little help - okay, sometimes even a moderate amount of help (though not on what he just posted. Only a little this time!) - but I can get there, enough to reread a couple of times, then come back in a week or so, and then occasionally forever, which is I think the the way poems are usually meant to be read. That doubtless inspired me to bring something a little more in that vein myself. As the reader tells us, this starts off in rather demoralising fashion, but closes beautifully in the last two lines.
God's Grandeur
4 comments:
We always live in the morning of the world; as Chesterton says, it is we who grow old, not the world or its creator. For them it is always new, and it is always morning somewhere.
On the Frost poem: democracy is a fit subject for poetry, and I notice that the poetry about it runs into the same problems as democracy itself. It is either accessible to the many, as it must be to be fit for self-government by the many; or it is not, in which case the refinements of the elite poets (and, moreover and more, the elite teachers of poetry) create a barrier to entry for the many. They can no longer understand the poetry or engage in it in what is accepted as a fit way; and so the system is no longer democratic at all.
The price for a functioning system of self-government by the many is, then, like the price of a poetry about democracy that the many could practice. It will sound unrefined -- perhaps very ugly in the ear -- and it will often descend to base levels. Yet only such can really do what democracy, or its poetry, is meant to do.
I suppose that generalizes to literature about democracy, or that is done as a practice of democracy. Aristophanes' plays, for example, could be quite ribald, unfair, even ridiculous in their potrayal of figures within Athenian democracy. Socrates' portrayal by Aristophanes in "the Clouds" was libelous (or slanderous, since most people will have heard it rather than read it) to the point that it contributed to Socrates' death at the hands of that democracy in my opinion. That is the dark side of the thing.
Yet if you restrict drama to 'high forms' when it touches politics, you set up barriers that keep the people from exercising power themselves. It just becomes another self-serving class privilege by an elite that gathers the power to themselves that was meant to be shared by all citizens.
Another of Gerald Manley Hopkins poems that took my breath away when first read over 50 years ago, The Windhover 1877
I don't mess with poetry much, but that one literally puts a lump in my throat every time.
Post a Comment