Monthly Archives: February 2020

Thou Still Unravish’t Bride of Quietness

Leave a reply

Keats:
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
…
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Memories

Leave a reply
The first writer in the West to talk about the strange hold of memory and past experience on us was Homer, the first writer in the West.
Our word nostalgia comes from two words in Homer meaning ‘the return to home’ and ‘agonizing pain’.
When Helen of Troy in the famous scene on the walls of Troy where she points out all the Greek warriors she used to know to king Priam, she says repeatedly an untranslatable phrase that is so delicate and psychologically piercing, almost spoken under her breadth, but showing the break in her soul:  “If ever it really was”  but in Greek much more haunting and wispy because ‘ever’ and ‘really’ are not actual words but particles, like uh in English, so that it is more a sigh than a statement.
We all live in the shadow of our past that at the strangest times will launch armed flotillas to tear down the walls of our citadel.