The Raven puts up Three More Poems for View
In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
Dylan Thomas, one of the poets featured.
Perfect Lyrics
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
Is ‘Medea’ a Feminist Text?
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
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
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 Irrational
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.
Getting Away From The Dark Side: Oedipus and Hamlet
One of the best commentaries on Sophocles’ hero, Oedipus, and the Vision of the play can be found in the Penguin Classics reprint: SOPHOCLES. The Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus. The fabulous translation of these works by Robert Fagles has none of the self-conscious ‘classicism’ and ‘Ancient’ staginess of so many others.
The Charm of the Great Gatsby
Is The Great Gatsby ‘deep’? That’s probably not the right word; there’s something about its surface lightness, something that keeps it buoyant, despite the sorrows it touches on and sustains, that makes ‘deep’ seem top-heavy, slightly wrong.
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Earlier this year there were major floods in Colombia. The site of Garcia Marquez’ novels was awash; rivers were swollen, houses and people were swept away, whole villages were blotted out. Day after day the world turned to water. Indeed there was so much water running through Colombia that for those of us living in chronically dry places, stricken by drought and bushfire, it was like something from the Bible, something you believed in but could hardly imagine happening in the same space and time that you yourself lived in. Almost beautiful, until the statistics hit home.