AllBlue's Blog

Poetry Sundays (October 23)

23 October 2011 -

Posted by AllBlue

This week I read Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ode to the West Wind:

I

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic...

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Tags: Shelley 0 Comments

Poetry Sundays (October 2)

02 October 2011 -

Posted by AllBlue

This week I read Il Penseroso by John Milton. The following text is copied from Project Gutenberg's The Poetical Works of John Milton. I read it in Understanding Poetry, by Cleanth Brooks, Jr. and Robert Penn Warren, in which the spelling was updated (i.e.: "joyes" to "joys";...

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Poetry Sundays

10 September 2011 -

Posted by AllBlue

A few weeks ago I decided to read poetry on Sunday mornings. I'm trying to get to the library each week to pick a poet or poets whose work I've never read before or maybe read a long time ago. A couple of weeks ago I came across Billy Collins. He wrote a couple of poems about artists. Here's...

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Tags: poetry, Constable, Goya 5 Comments

Frustrations with Ayer

19 February 2011 -

Posted by AllBlue

da fire wanted me to go on. Let me just say, it's slow going.

The following is a quote from a passage that made me just a little mad, and by that I mean a combination of angry and crazy:

The next step in the analysis of the notion of a material thing is to show how these separate groups of visual and tactual sense-contents are...

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Language, Truth and Logic by Alfred Jules Ayer: notes, quotes and questions

28 January 2011 -

Posted by AllBlue

I won’t be going through the entire work trying to summarize it all. Nothing that all-encompassing. I’m just going to quote some passages I found interesting, sometimes commenting on them, sometimes not. I’ll also include questions that the text brought to mind that maybe some people will have ideas about. I’m hoping to get a good grasp of...

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Thoughts on Ode to Billie Joe by Bobby Gentry

18 January 2011 -

Posted by AllBlue

When I write about poetry in this blog, it’s usually about standard poems that end up in books, not about pop songs. That’s not really because of any snobbery on my part. I think there are some very well-written songs out there. I just hadn’t thought of it before today.

So here are a few paragraphs about...

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Chabrias and Timotheus, generals in the Athenian Navy

16 January 2011 -

Posted by AllBlue

In Ch. 17, Passing the Torch, from John R. Hale's Lords of the Sea, discussing the years 397 to 371 B.C.E., Chabrias and Timotheus caught my interest. I hope to find more information on them. A couple of quotes:

Chabrias, the son of an affluent Athenian trierarch and horse breeder, took an interest in the technical side...

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The Unfortunate Rake/St. James Infirmary Blues

31 October 2010 -

Posted by AllBlue

This is a sad song and is sung to a melancholy melody. It's been done countless times and there is even a CD with different versions of it that I'd like to get. I first heard an Irish version of it, maybe done by Tommy Makem and The Clancy Brothers, many years...

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Scattered

25 September 2010 -

Posted by AllBlue

There is a stack of books on my kitchen table that just keeps growing and I can't seem to finish reading a single one. They're an interesting group, poetry, fiction and non, contemporary and ancient. They have seductive covers in colors that for an unknown reason tend almost overwhelmingly to red or reddish orange and black.

The titles...

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The Prediction

29 March 2010 -

Posted by AllBlue

The Prediction - Mark Strand

That night the moon drifted over the pond,
turning the water to milk, and under
the boughs of the trees, the blue trees,
a young woman walked, and for an instant

the future came to her:
rain falling on her husband's grave, rain falling
on the lawns of her children, her own mouth
filling with cold air,...

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