Fun with Friedrich!

Expect blogging to be intermittent until the end of the school year. Right now I'm trying to summon the will to power my way through Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy for a paper due early next week. I'm enjoying it, even though it is nowhere near as lively as his later work. Still, one has to enjoy finding gems such as this:

“…the artist's delight in what becomes, the cheerfulness of artistic creation that defies all misfortune, is merely a bright image of clouds and sky mirrored in a black lake of sadness.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The Birth of Tragedy, section 9

Good times, y'all.

Wednesday Not-Poem: Some line from a Killers song…

“The stars are blazing like rebel diamonds cut out of the sun…”

What is a rebel diamond? Is he comparing stars to the sun? I guess that's all right, because, you know, the sun is a star. But still, guys. I can't read your mind.

Wednesday Poem: Possibilities

Possibilities
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Where are the poets, unto whom belong
The Olympian heights; whose singing shafts were sent
Straight to the mark, and not from bows half bent,
But with utmost tension of the thong?
Where are the stately argosies of song,
Whose rushing keels made music as they went
Sailing in search of some new continent,
With all sail set, and steady winds and strong?
Perhaps there lives some dreamy boy, untaught
In schools, some graduate of the field of street,
Who shall become a master of the art,
An admiral sailing the high seas of thought,
Fearless and first, and steering with his fleet
For lands not yet laid down in any chart.

“Wednesday” Poem (late): Aaron Stark, Erasmus

I've been sick and busy, but you will hear no more about that from me, because this is not a personal blog.

I was browsing the old Oscar Williams American Poetry anthology and enjoyed some of the Edwin Arlington Robinson poems. Robinson got his big break when Theodore Roosevelt publicly lauded Robinson's fascinating “Luke Havergal.” I checked around for some other public domain stuff and found two that I think I like, both about outsiders, one in Maine and one in late Medieval Europe. Here they are.

Aaron Stark
Edwin Arlington Robinson

Withal a meager man was Aaron Stark—
Cursed and unkempt, shrewd, shriveled, and morose.
A miser was he, with a miser's nose,
And eyes like little dollars in the dark.
His thin, pinched mouth was nothing but a mark;
And when he spoke there came like sullen blows
Through scattered fangs a few snarled words and close,
As if a cur were chary of its bark.

Glad for the murmur of his hard renown,
Year after year he shambled through the town—
A loveless exile moving with a staff;
And oftentimes there crept into his ears
A sound of alien pity, touched with tears—
And then (and only then) did Aaron laugh.

Erasmus
Edwin Arlington Robinson

When he protested, not too solemnly,
That for a world's achieving maintenance
The crust of overdone divinity
Lacked aliment, they called it recreance;
And when he chose through his own glass to scan
Sick Europe, and reduced, unyieldingly,
The monk within the cassock to the man
Within the monk, they called it heresy.

And when he made so perilously bold
As to be scattered forth in black and white,
Good fathers looked askance at him and rolled
Their inward eyes in anguish and affright;
There were some of them did shake at what was told,
And they shook best who knew that he was right.