Blog » Poem of the week
English spelling and pronunciation
January 08, 2013 / 1 CommentsThose of you who are studying English are already pretty frustrated by the inconsistencies in English spelling and pronunciation. These two poems will probably do no more than rub it in... I I take it you already know Of tough and bough and cough and dough? Others may stumble but not [..]
Beethoven to his Immortal Beloved
December 16, 2013 / 0 CommentsBeethoven to his Immortal Beloved Though still in bed, my thoughts go out to you, my Immortal Beloved, now and then joyfully, then sadly, waiting to learn whether or not fate will hear us - I can live only wholly with you or not at all - Yes, I am resolved to wander so long away from [..]
The Tables Turned - 04.12.2011
December 04, 2013 / 0 CommentsThe Tables Turned - a possible translation of "Preokret"! The age of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Blake – the age of the Romantics and the age of Henry David Thoreau and Emerson - coincided with the Industrial Revolution and the rise of science. The Romantics presented and [..]
What is poetry
November 26, 2013 / 0 CommentsI get the impression that today more and more people are writing poetry, which can only be a good thing.. I have dabbled in it myself, though not with any success. But what is poetry? There are probably as many definitions of poetry as there are poets. Wordsworth held that “poetry takes its [..]
Jacqueline du Pre
October 18, 2013 / 0 CommentsJacqueline du Pré On October 19th1987, the cellist Jacqueline du Pré died at the age of 42. In 1971, at the height of her career she started to lose sensitivity in her fingers. She made her last recording in the same year and subsequently performed very rarely. By 1973 her symptoms [..]
Jupiter Hammon - the first African-American poet to be published
October 16, 2013 / 0 CommentsOctober 17th marks the three hundredth anniversary of the first known African American to publish literature, Jupiter Hammon, 1711- c.1806 . Hammon [..]
Thomas Hardy - the Wessex poet
October 15, 2013 / 0 CommentsThomas Hardy Who hasn’t heard of Thomas Hardy? Perhaps he is not as well-known as some of his contemporaries in the world of literature, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Emile Zola, Oscar Wilde – the list is endless – but who hasn’t at least heard [..]
Tomas Transtromer - three poems
October 09, 2013 / 1 CommentsIn the week when Tomas Tranströmer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, it seems fitting that I should publish some of his poems – English translations, of course. I have to admit to never having read a single one of Tranströmer’s poems before this week and am grateful [..]
To a child at the piano - Alistair Reid
October 01, 2013 / 2 CommentsThis poem, as the title suggests, takes the form of advice to a child learning a new piano piece, but to me it contains advice on how to do anything in life - in fact it is a blueprint on how to live. Play the tune again; but this time with more regard for the movement at the source of [..]
The Lady of Shalott by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
September 27, 2013 / 0 CommentsAlfred, Lord Tennyson wrote two versions of the poem “The Lady of Shalott, one published in 1833, of twenty stanzas, the other in 1842 of nineteen stanzas. It was loosely based on the Arthurian legend of Elaine of Astolat, as recounted in a thirteenth-century Italian novella titled Donna di [..]
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