A song for St. Valentine’s Day

Posted by Fred Scrooby on February 14, 2008, 11:07 PM | #

Good poem.  I love that.

Posted by melba peachtoast on February 15, 2008, 12:02 AM | #

Cor blimey! as the platypus said when it saw Ayers Rock for the first time. What do you suppose it means, Freddy darling?

Posted by onlooker on February 15, 2008, 01:32 AM | #

“Cor blimey! as the platypus said when it saw Ayers Rock for the first time. What do you suppose it means?”

God took a giant dump?

Posted by Fred Scrooby on February 15, 2008, 02:35 AM | #

Melba, dost thou not see?
It’s wishing thee
Happy St. Valentine’s Day!
Though so far away,
The poet wants to say
Thy femininities,
Thy Eucalyptus trees,
Thy many wallabies,
Wombats, aboriginees,
Duck-billed platypees,
And other charms, jeeze!,
Together us do greatly please.
And we think thou art the bee’s knees!

Posted by Fred Scrooby on February 15, 2008, 04:34 AM | #

Skillful use by Soren of pararhyme, assonance, and consonance in that poem.  Pararhyme if I’m not mistaken was first popularized by the great World-War-I poet Wilfred Owen.  It’s harder to pull off than straight rhyme, and Soren does a good job of it here.

Posted by Al Ross on February 15, 2008, 05:43 AM | #

Interesting comments,Fred. Literary criticism may not be necessary for literature but it’s probably essential for civilization.

Posted by Guessedworker on February 15, 2008, 10:33 AM | #

Well, this looks to me like a poem about the post-Paulian fall of the Roman MultiCult in the age of the unknowable St Valentine - and indeed St Valentines, for there were three of four of them, and no one knows which we celebrate today.

The pithy moral, the crushing foot and the striking at heel I need a bit of help with.

Posted by z on February 15, 2008, 01:33 PM | #

we must be more tolerant of others.  For the sake of goodness we must forsake the pig.  we must not rub our dollar bills in pork grease.  we must give up hot dogs, pizza and ham.  we must have no pigs or pork any where.  we must not rub pork on our bullets and bombs.  there must be no pork on your handshake.  Lest ye offend.

Posted by melba peachtoast on February 15, 2008, 03:13 PM | #

“The pithy moral, the crushing foot and the striking at heel I need a bit of help with.”

Genesis 3:15 KJV And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

Posted by Johan Van Vlaams on February 15, 2008, 04:44 PM | #

A Valentine’s day poem
from Emmaret for her husband Mike du Toit.

History professor Mike du Toit already suffers in prison in South Africa for six years. His only “mistake” was to warn his fellow citizens to be on the safe side when chaos may (and will) start. He is accused of crimes he cannot have done, because by that time he already was in prison.

Full text:

IF

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowances for all their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating.
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make the dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build them up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they have gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run --
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

liefde (in English: with love)

Jou vrou

Posted by onlooker on February 15, 2008, 06:55 PM | #

Genesis 3:15 Saint Joseph Catholic Bible.  “I will put emnitybetween you and the woman, between your seed and her seed; he shall crush your head, and you shall lie in wait for his heel.”

Her seed; he ... his: refers principally to Jesus Christ, the Conqueror of Satan. The Hebrew words include also all faithful children of God in every age who share in Christ’s victory by their opposition to Satan and his offspring. God’s enemies.

Crush ... lie in wait for: though the same Hebrew verb is used in both instances. these two meanings are determined by the parts of the body injured (head and heel) and by the serpents manner of attack.

This verse contains the first promise of a Redeemer for fallen mankind.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on February 16, 2008, 06:38 AM | #

In this log entry I love looking at the photo Soren chose of the caryatid almost as much as I love reading the poem he wrote:  a magnificent piece of sculpture filled to overflowing with Euro cultural/racial heritage and significance, as the caryatid’s graceful, feminine, flowing garment is filled to overflowing with a supremely graceful, highly appealing European womanly body overflowing with fertility (those Greeks certainly knew how best to depict the ideal European womanly body!), her head is filled to overflowing with lush waves of classically-coiffed Greek locks gently pulled back from her face and flowing/tumbling down the nape of her neck, and her hat is filled to overflowing with the sacred building she’s effortlessly supporting by means of the incredible strength of her Ancient Greek feminine soul overflowing with womanly piety, the strongest force in the known universe.  And look at that sedate gaze, that perfect eternal face overflowing with timeless Western racial/cultural artistic beauty at its pinnacle of expression.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on February 16, 2008, 06:55 AM | #

The Erechtheum.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on February 16, 2008, 08:26 AM | #

Look at the details of the coiffure from the back.  Modernity will bring you absolutely nothing remotely this feminine.  Modernity knows nothing of this high degree of femininity; doesn’t know it exists.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on February 16, 2008, 02:11 PM | #

Regarding the coiffure as seen from behind, I showed the photo to my wife just now, who says what I took for intricate braids arranged sideways aren’t braids but a cord of twisted fiber or reed material, which is attached to the hat, which the girl wraps around her head in order to help keep the heavy hat from falling off.  Do the gals here see it this way, or are those braids of hair?

Posted by melba peachtoast on February 16, 2008, 02:36 PM | #

All very nice, Freddy, but while you are rhapsodizing about the Eternal Feminine, who is minding the Stoa?

Posted by Fred Scrooby on February 16, 2008, 03:50 PM | #

“All very nice, Freddy, but while you are rhapsodizing about the Eternal Feminine, who is minding the Stoa?”

Melba I’m shocked at thee!  How couldst thou say that!  How mean thou art, sometimes!  My wife is faithful! — Besides, she knows naught about thee and me, so has no reason to take her revenge by finding her bas relief elsewhere and frieze me out.  So, in answer to thine unkind insinuation, m’dear, my wife is a pillar of fidelity and my stoa a temple of true sentiment in need of no “minding.”

Now let’s move on to more elevated matters, shall we?

From Wikipedia:

A caryatid (Greek:  Καρυάτις; plural: Καρυάτιδες) is a sculpted female figure serving as an architectural support taking the place of a column or a pillar supporting an entablature on her head.  The Greek term karyatides literally means “maidens of Karyae,” an ancient town of Peloponnese.  Karyai had a famous temple dedicated to the goddess Artemis in her aspect of Artemis Karyatis:  “As Karyatis she rejoiced in the dances of the nut-tree village of Karyai, those Karyatides, who in their ecstatic round-dance carried on their heads baskets of live reeds, as if they were dancing plants” (Kerenyi 1980 p 149).

[...]

A caryatid supporting a basket on her head is called a canephora ("basket-bearer"), representing one of the maidens who carried sacred objects used at feasts of the goddesses Athena and Artemis.  The Erectheion caryatids, in a shrine dedicated to an archaic king of Athens, may therefore represent priestesses of Artemis in Karyai, a place named for the “nut-tree sisterhood” — apparently in Mycenaean times, like other plural feminine toponyms, such as Hyrai or Athens itself.

Incidentally, notice that from the Greek words supplied at the start of the above excerpt we see we really should be saying “caryatis” to refer to one caryatid, the “tid” ending coming from the Greek plural form.

Now look what Lord Elgin did:

One of the caryatids was removed by Lord Elgin in order to decorate his Scottish mansion and was later sold to the British Museum (along with the pedimental and frieze sculptures taken from the Parthenon). [...] Elgin attempted to remove a second caryatid; when technical difficulties arose he tried to have it sawn into pieces.  The statue was smashed and its fragments were left behind. It was later reconstructed haphazardly with cement and iron rods.  Nowadays the five original caryatids are displayed in helium-filled glass cases in the Acropolis Museum and have been replaced in situ by exact replicas.

Reading that, one says to oneself, “What a complete oaf that guy must’ve been!,” but on looking him up one learns he was OK, and was merely trying to save the marbles from Turkish neglect. 

After the British government purchased the Elgin Marbles in 1816 and opened them to public display John Keats, who went with friends (including one Hayden) to see them, wrote these two sonnets about them (the second of which, below, is considered one of the immortal monuments of English literature):

Forgive me, Haydon, that I cannot speak
Definitively on these mighty things;
Forgive me that I have not eagle’s wings —
That what I want I know not where to seek:
And think that I would not be overmeek
In rolling out upfollow’d thunderings,
Even to the steep of Helciconian springs,
Were I of ample strength for such a freak.

Think too that all those numbers should be thine;
Who else?  In this who touch thy vesture’s hem?
For when men star’d at what was most divine
With browless idiotism — o’erweening phlegm —
Thou hadst beheld the Hesperean shine
Of their star in the east and gone to worship them.

______

My spirit is too weak; mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
Yet ‘tis a gentle luxury to weep
That I have not the cloudy winds to keep
Fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye.

Such dim-conceivèd glories of the brain
Bring round the heart an indescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old Time — with a billowy main,
A sun, a shadow of a magnitude.
______

[There, I certainly hope that got Melba’s mind onto ... higher things ....]