Here i sit and watch you TwoVery good 2020: Our poetry is head and shoulders above anyone elses on ASF, that's for sure.
Alf E Neumann was a lad, three parts funny one part sadHere i sit and watch you Two
f%%# around like cockatoos
you drink your tea i scull my wine
GEE somethin wrong with this rhyme..
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200704/s1903102.htmBar of soap gives caffeine kick in the shower. Inventors have created a soap infused with caffeine which helps users wake up in the morning. etc
http://www.pathguy.com/tyger.htm Understanding William Blake's "The Tyger" Ed Friedlander, M.D
As an online William Blake fan, I receive at least one request per month from students asked to interpret William Blake's wonderful lyric, "The Tyger."
The contrast with "The Lamb" is obvious. ("Little Lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee?" The answer is God, who became incarnate as Jesus the Lamb.) "The Tyger" asks, "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" And the answer is, "Yes, God made the Tyger too."
To understand "The Tyger" fully, you need to know Blake's symbols. One of the central themes in his major works is that of the Creator as a blacksmith. This is both God the Creator (personified in Blake's myth as Los) and Blake himself (again with Los as his alter-ego.) Blake identified God's creative process with the work of an artist. And it is art that brings creation to its fulfillment -- by showing the world as it is, by sharpening perception, by giving form to ideas.
Blake's story of creation differs from the Genesis account. The familiar world was created only after a cosmic catastrophe. When the life of the spirit was reduced to a sea of atoms, the Creator set a limit below which it could not deteriorate farther, and began creating the world of nature. The longer books that Blake wrote describe Los's creation of animals and people within the world of nature. One particularly powerful passage in "Milton" describes Los's family weaving the bodies of each unborn child.
In believing that creation followed a cosmic catastrophe and a fall of spiritual beings into matter, Blake recalls Gnosticism, a multi-faceted religious movement which has run parallel to mainstream Christianity. Unlike most other Gnosticizers, Blake considered our own world to be a fine and wonderful place, but one which would ultimately give way to a restored universe. Blake believed that his own visions, which included end-of-the- world images and sometimes a sense of cosmic oneness, prefigured this, and that his art would help raise others "to the perception of the infinite." For Blake (and for many, if not most, mainstream Christians), the purpose of creation is as a place for our own growth, in preparation for the beginning of our real lives. Although the natural world contains much that is gentle and innocent ("Songs of Innocence"), those who are experienced with life ("Songs of Experience") know that there is also much that is terrible and frightening. (The "fearful symmetry" might be that of the lamb and the tyger, innocence and experience.)
A casual reader or student does not have to understand Blake's mystical-visionary beliefs to appreciate "The Tyger". For the casual reader, the poem is about the question that most of us asked when we first heard about God as the benevolent creator of nature. "Why is there bloodshed and pain and horror?" If you're like me, you've heard various answers that are obviously not true. "The Tyger", which actually finishes without an answer, is (on this level) about your own experience of not getting a completely satisfactory answer to this essential question of faith.
There is more. "The Tyger" is about having your reason overwhelmed at once by the beauty and the horror of the natural world. "When the stars threw down their spears / And watered heaven with their tears" is the most difficult section of "The Tyger". In the creation story in "Job", the stars sing for joy at creation, a scene which Blake illustrated. In Blake's later books, the stars throw down their cups at the collapse of a previous clockwork universe founded on pure reason. For Blake, the stars represent cold reason and objective science. (They are weaker than the Sun of inspiration or the moon of love. Their mechanical procession has reminded others, including the author of "Lucifer in Starlight", of "the army of unalterable law"; in this case the law of science.) Although Blake was hostile (as I am, and as most real scientists are) to attempts to reduce all phenomena to chemistry and physics, Blake greatly appreciated the explosion of scientific knowledge during his era. But there is something about seeing a Tyger which you can't learn from a zoology class. The sense of awe and fear defy reason. And Blake's contemporary "rationalists" who had hoped for a tame, gentle world guided by kindness and understanding must face the reality of the Tyger.
.....
If you found that you really enjoyed "The Tyger", then I hope you'll have a chance to explore more of Blake's writings -- even the difficult "Prophetic Books" -- as well as his own influences (especially the Bible and "Paradise Lost"). You may also enjoy learning about his times, and the social injustices of which he was so deeply aware. .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_BlakeI have always loved the classical poets like Blake because of the intensity and compactness of their expression, especially within the discipline of rhyme and meter which make it easy to remember the words. Today there is very little interest outside of academia and trendoid circles in the amorphous stuff that passes for "contemporary poetry". But Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Keats, and Tennyson were extraordinarily popular with ordinary people. Blake was less well-known to his contemporaries, but now is hugely popular with casual readers.
The real heirs of the classical poets are the lyricists of popular music. Sometimes lyrics make no sense, and it's hard for me to appreciate this. (A friend who's knowledgeable about such things told me: "'Stairway to Heaven' is supposed to mean whatever you want it to mean.") At their best, they present a bit of human experience that makes you say, "Wow! I knew that, but never heard it expressed so clearly!"
If you like "The Tyger", you may want to go on to learn more about Blake. For his era, he was extremely radical, both politically and philosophically. He and his wife practiced nudism in a friend's garden ("It's okay, we're just Adam and Eve"). Blake was tried for treason for saying something like "you soldiers of the god-damned king, I hope Napoleon kills all of you" while throwing a drunken soldier out of his garden. ....
He was voted 38th in a poll of the 100 Greatest Britons organized by the BBC in 2002 . According to Northrop Frye, who undertook a study of Blake's entire poetic corpus, his prophetic poems form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language." Others have praised Blake's visual artistry, at least one modern critic proclaiming Blake "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced."[1] Once considered mad for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is highly regarded today for his expressiveness and creativity, and the philosophical vision that underlies his work. As he himself once indicated, "The imagination is not a State: it is the Human existence itself."
brilliant stuff drill (and x2 for the third option lol) .Near a shrine in Japan he'd swept the path, and then placed camellia blossoms there.
We had no way of knowing, he'd swept the path, between fallen camellias.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken
The poem, especially its last lines, where the narrator declares that taking the road "one less traveled by" "made all the difference," can be seen as a declaration of the importance of independence and personal freedom. However, Frost likely intended the poem as a gentle jab at his great friend and fellow poet Edward Thomas, and seemed amused at the slightly "mischievous" misinterpretation.[1]
This one (from same scene) - a wedding toasthttp://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/S/ShakespeareWilliam/play/tempest/tempesta4s1.html , Act IV, scene I
PROSPERO
[Aside] I had forgot that foul conspiracy
Of the beast Caliban and his confederates
Against my life: the minute of their plot
Is almost come.—
To the Spirits
Well done!—avoid;—no more!
FERDINAND
This is strange: your father’s in some passion
That works him strongly.
MIRANDA
Never till this day
Saw I him touch’d with anger so distemper’d.
PROSPERO
You do look, my son, in a moved sort,
As if you were dismay’d: be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.—Sir, I am vex’d;
Bear with my weakness; my, brain is troubled:
Be not disturb’d with my infirmity:
If you be pleased, retire into my cell
And there repose: a turn or two I’ll walk,
To still my beating mind.
JUNO
How does my bounteous sister? Go with me
To bless this twain, that they may prosperous be
And honour’d in their issue.
They sing:
JUNO
Honour, riches, marriage-blessing,
Long continuance, and increasing,
Hourly joys be still upon you!
Juno sings her blessings upon you.
CERES
Earth’s increase, foison plenty,
Barns and garners never empty,
Vines and clustering bunches growing,
Plants with goodly burthen bowing;
Spring come to you at the farthest
In the very end of harvest!
Scarcity and want shall shun you;
Ceres’ blessing so is on you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare
He is counted among the few playwrights who have excelled in both tragedy and comedy; his plays combine popular appeal with complex characterisation, and poetic grandeur with philosophical depth. Shakespeare's works have been translated into every major living language,[8]
"The End of the Beginning"
"The Germans have received back again that measure of fire and steel which they have so often meted out to others.
Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."
—Lord Mayor's Luncheon, Mansion House following the victory at El Alameinin North Africa, London, 10 November 1942.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternity_(graffito) The word Eternity was a famous graffito which was written numerous times in chalk on the streets of Sydney, Australia from the 1940s through to the 1960s. The word had been written by Arthur Stace, an illiterate former soldier, petty criminal and alcoholic who became a devout Christian in the late 1940s. For years after his conversion up until his death in the 1960s, Stace walked the streets of Sydney at night writing the single word "Eternity" on walls and footpaths in his unmistakable copperplate handwriting. Stace's identity remained unknown until it was finally revealed in a newspaper article in the early 1960s.
After Stace's death, his Eternity signature lived on. Australian contemporary artist, illustrator and filmmaker Martin Sharp noticed it and celebrated Stace's one-man campaign in many of his works. More recently, some Australian Christian groups, including those at universities, have run evangelical campaigns whose promotion involved chalking "Eternity", after Stace's fashion, on footpaths.
As part of the fireworks on Sydney Harbour to mark New Year's Day of the year 2000, the graffito "Eternity" was illuminated on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. This moment was symbolically recreated later that year as part of the Sydney 2000 Olympics Opening Ceremony, beamed to billions of television viewers worldwide
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