In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
Dylan Thomas, one of the poets featured.
Even without music certain lyrics sing. What is this quality? Yeats doesn’t have it; Blake does. Well, of course this needs to be qualified, of course it does: so, better to say that Yeats has a rather self-conscious lyricism, that the singing doesn’t often feel fully spontaneous, that it’s a little bit arch, a little bit art song
Who would marry Medea? Who would write about her as if she were a normal woman? The answer to the first question is ‘Probably nearly anyone’ – Medea wild with love and beautiful - and to the second, much the same. A lot of student essayists write about this classic as if, in some respects at least, Medea were like any neighbour, any woman you might find just living down the street. In this version the play is seen as a feminist text, excoriating Jason and stressing the plight of women in a social culture where they are the inferior sex, and Euripides is seen as hoisting the flag for Feminism .
Hamlet & Oedipus Part 2 The Raven returns: His gear is only half-unpacked. His room, apart from the reading light over his desk, is almost completely dark, and the rest of the house is empty, everyone else is still away.
A Christmas Greeting, Brief but Meaningful, from The Raven TO ALL : PEACE AND GOODWILL This is the Festive season. Deeper than this it is also the Season of the greatest of all Mysteries: ‘the intersection of the timeless /With time.’ (T.S. Eliot), the celebrating of the majesty and miracle of the Christ Incarnate.
The Triumph of the Sphinx – her cruel and irrational power over human life, one of the key themes in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. She was often represented on the tombs of young men, as here. She is the most formidable enemy Oedipus has to face at Thebes.
