I'm going to start choosing poetry excerpts to discuss briefly on here.. it'll be a good way to get me reading more again and share some of those amazing 'moments' that happen in poetry and what they mean. To me at least. So without further ado, today's selection:
"Spirit of beauty! tarry with us still,
It is not quenched the torch of poesy,
The star that shook above the Eastern hill
Holds unassailed its argent armoury
From all the gathering gloom and fretful fight -
O tarry with us still! for through the long and
common night,
Morris, our sweet and simple Chaucer's child,
Dear heritor of Spenser's tuneful reed,
With soft and sylvan pipe has oft beguiled
The weary soul of man in troublous need,
And from the far and flowerless fields of ice
Has brought fair flowers meet to make an earthly paradise"
~ from Oscar Wilde's "The Garden of Eros"
I love this poem because it definitely still applies to this day: an increasing need to fight for the preservation of poetry and beauty in a world of financial focus and mass production. If you didn't know, Morris opened a firm "The Kelmscott Press" to try and revive the art of hand-printing rather than machine printing, which he did for all of Chaucer's works, with wood carved illustrations, it was beautiful.
Love you Oscar, Poetry is not dead.
~Tam~
