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Books 2009

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Friday, 30 May 2008

Comments

I just recently found out about this wonderful poem. I didn't know it was G.K. Chesterton.

The poem was the last words of a great film, starring Alec Guiness in 1962, called "The Horse's Mouth". If you can, you'll probably put it right up there in your top ten, all time bests.

... "and great things to be seen". It's really inspiring.

I think he may have been digging into the old Anglo-Saxon soul and reveling in the poetry of it, as contrasted with the "straight-road" ways of the Normans. The rolling road is preferred to the straight road. One way of experiencing this poem may be to sort of put your "eyes" out of focus and feel the impressions of his references, but to know more about the references and combine them with feeling the poem would most likely be the best experience. I am reminded of Vaughan Williams' "Fantasy on a Theme of Thomas Tallis". I can feel the whole history of Merrie Old England distilled and concentrated into that one piece. My experience of this poem is similar to that.

I love it. To read it makes me proud of this strange country I am very proud to live in.

I only found this poem after going to a restaurant/bar/club in the Kensal area called Paradise by way of Kensal Green. My curiosity into why it was called that brought me to finding this poem.

I can tell you nothing about it as I hardly understand it. From the little I can understand, the whole sounds cynical to me but that's certainly not a definitive and trustworthy opinion.
The two last stanzas are particularly difficult to understand, I guess there must be symbols or references in them (wild thing? wild rose? inn of death?). And who is the "him"? Is it the English drunkard that Chesterton mentioned before?
All I can tell for sure is that I remember having already read the two first stanzas on your blog last year, it was probably in one of your posts about your London walks.

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Quotidian

  • Nothing is of greater consolation to the author of a novel than the disovery of readings he had not conceived but which are then prompted by his readers. (Umberto Eco, Reflections on The Name of the Rose)
  • ... relatively few persons in London ... can afford the luxury of one or more servants. No fewer than 3,700,000 have no servants at all, and of the half million that have servants 227,000 have only one. (The Times, 6 June 1895)
  • Standing among savage scenery, the hotel offers stupendous revelations. There is a French widow in every bedroom, affording delightful prospects. (Tyrolean inn brochure, according to Gerard Hoffnung)
  • (A doctor is at an elderly relative's deathbed) "The old sawbones, eh?" he bellowed ... "Just in the nick, perhaps. Haul the old girl back by the short hairs, if you ask me. Devilish smart at his work ... Always take a fence with more confidence when I know he's out with us."
  • Too often, when a man of Monty Godkin's mental powers is plunged in thought, nothing happens at all. The machinery just whirs for a while, and that is the end of it. (P G Wodehouse, Heavy Weather)
  • ...the breed that take their pleasures as Saint Laurence took his grid (Kipling, The Five nations)

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