Before the moon grew old with age
The world lay locked in iron cage;
Kept tight within the borders deep
Of woods where dark things walk and creep,
And silence layed upon the pools
And starlight gleamed like flaming jewels
Upon the gloomy mushroom’d loam
Within the heart of mossy foam.
I have always had a soft spot for romantic notions and ideas. I love the idea of romance, I love the reality of a strong and loving relationship even better. “To My Dear and Loving Husband” by Anne Bradstreet, is her attempt to express the depths of her feelings and emotions towards her husband. Bradstreet instantly had my attention when she started with “If”, this use of a conditional clause intrigued me, she uses it to draw attention to the immense compatibility and love between the speaker and her husband. Continue reading “An Image of Love: “To My Dear and Loving Husband” by Anne Bradstreet”
(From last year. Not my favorite, but it was enjoyable to write.)
Set apart from millions
a world crafted of eons
stretching into eternity,
a single spark among infinity.
Glittering in the deep
this waking world never sleeps.
Ever-dreaming, ever-living,
around a sun ever-burning.
A planet filled with smoke and scars,
listen, listen to the silence of the stars.
Throughout Scandinavian shores there are statues called ‘the Fisherman’s Wife.’ They show a woman reaching her hand out to the horizon, in honor of all the fishermen lost at sea, as well as honoring the wive’s whom they left behind. This poem is based on the statue I saw in Norway.
She stood alone at water’s edge,
holding strong her lifetime pledge.
‘Til death do us part’ were the words,
echoing round her head.
The clouds were low and water wild,
winter winds reviled.
Out of sight, out of sound,
Based off a recent expedition to Norway, where I spent time in Jotunheimen (which literally means ‘home of the giants’ in Norwegian) and I was inspired to write something about the endlessness of that place. I know why it is named what it is.
Far beyond the dusty hills of Gjendesheim,
beyond the endless shores of the Northern Sea,
there lies a place, touched by the hands of eternity.
They called it Jotunheimen,
named for those who dwell within the expanse,
Oh dreamer,
the world wants to see your
soul.
Your burning heart,
your tangled ideas,
your iridescent hope,
and
sharp-as-blade sorrows.
The world needs
them.
“The Wasteland” by T.S. Elliot is a brilliantly complex and hard to interpret poem. Dealing with the after-effects of World War 1, it explores how poetry and modernism should respond to such devastation as a global war. The picture painted by Elliot is bleak and full of desolation, it’s a world that Elliot seems uncertain will recover, but in one section of the poem on death that is a glimmer of the notion of hope. A character of the poem says, “‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,/ ‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? /‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed’” (ll. 71-73). Continue reading “Poetry’s Response to Modernism and War: The Wasteland by T.S. Elliot”
Across the pallid grey of dusky dim
that lays upon the shattered seas;
beyond the skyline’s golden rim
that scintillates the western breeze,
there lays a hidden, lonely shore
long left to ancient myth and lore.
A silent coast, a desolate strand
an unremembered sylvan land.
How far we reach,
stretching our wings to the sky,
testing the limits of
impossibility.
Diving deeper
and deeper
into the farthest recesses of the cosmos.
When you were sad and the world seemed without hope, I offered you a handful of stars freshly picked from the fields of the sky. You put them in a glass bottle and displayed them on the windowsill where the sun could shine through and set them glittering like a thousand diamonds risen from the sea.
Joined at the Authorship 