tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5372944507290813851.post1088515614357015409..comments2024-01-02T01:36:43.959-08:00Comments on Come, Sit by the Hearth ...: POETRY: Read More, Blog More #3Snowballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02638506554534468064noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5372944507290813851.post-44964639523543886302012-03-31T08:47:20.565-07:002012-03-31T08:47:20.565-07:00I understand that need to have a place all your ow...I understand that need to have a place all your own, a place where you can be completely yourself. And I do want that place to be a room full of books! Thank you for participating and sharing the poem by Emily Dickinson; it's one of my favorites!Leslie @ This is the Refrainhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18027804132268043518noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5372944507290813851.post-72041898535210344592012-03-31T05:12:17.046-07:002012-03-31T05:12:17.046-07:00Oatmeal
I eat oatmeal for breakfast.
I make it o...Oatmeal<br /><br />I eat oatmeal for breakfast.<br /><br />I make it on the hotplate and put skimmed milk on it.<br /><br />I eat it alone.<br /><br />I am aware it is not good to eat oatmeal alone.<br /><br />Its consistency is such that it is better for your mental health if somebody<br /><br /> eats it with you.<br /><br />That is why I often think up an imaginary companion to have breakfast with.<br /><br />Possibly it is even worse to eat oatmeal with an imaginary companion.<br /><br />Nevertheless, yesterday morning, I ate my oatmeal with John keats.<br /><br />Keats said I was right to invite him: due to its glutinous texture, gluey<br /><br /> lumpishness, hint of slime, and unusual willingness to disintegrate,<br /><br /> oatmeal must never be eaten alone.<br /><br />He said it is perfectly OK, however to eat it with an imaginary companion,<br /><br />and he himself had enjoyed memorable porridges with Edmund Spenser<br /><br /> and John Milton.<br /><br />He also told me about writing the “Ode to a Nightingale”.<br /><br />He wrote it quickly, he said, on scraps of paper, which he then stuck in<br /><br /> his pocket,<br /><br />but when he got home he couldn’t figure out the order of the stanzas,<br /><br /> and he and a friend spread the papers on a table, and they made<br /><br /> some sense of them, but he isn’t sure to this day if they got it right.<br /><br />He still wonders about the occasional sense of drift between stanzas,<br /><br />and the way here and there a line will go into the configuration of a<br /><br /> Moslem at prayer, then raise itself up and peer about, then lay<br /><br /> itself down slightly off the mark, causing the poem to move<br /><br /> forward with God’s reckless wobble.<br /><br />He said someone told him that later in life Wordsworth heard about<br /><br /> the scraps of paper on the table, and tried shuffling some stanzas<br /><br /> of his own, but only made matters worse.<br /><br />When breakfast was over, John recited “ To Autumn”<br /><br />He recited it slowly, with much feeling, and he articulated the words<br /><br /> lovingly, and his odd accent sounded sweet.<br /><br />He didn’t offer the story of writing “To Autumn”, I doubt if there is<br /><br /> much of one.<br /><br />But he did say the sight of a just-harvested oat field got him started on it<br /><br />and two of the lines, “For Summer has o’er-brimmed their clammy cells”<br /><br /> and “Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours” came to him<br /><br /> while eating oatmeal alone.<br /><br />I can see him – drawing a spoon through the stuff, gazing into the<br /><br /> glimmering furrows, muttering – and it occurs to me:<br /><br />maybe there is no sublime, only the shining of the amnion’s tatters.<br /><br />for supper tonight I am going to have a baked potato left over from<br /><br /> lunch.<br /><br />I’m aware that a leftover baked potato can be damp, slippery, and<br /><br /> simultaneously gummy and crumbly,<br /><br />and therefore I’m going to invite Patrick Kavanagh to join me.<br /><br /> Galway Kinnell.@parridhlanternhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12793548943992250238noreply@blogger.com