Today light conquers darkness
good triumphs over evil
knowledge beats ignorance
as millions of Hindus light lamps
and decorate floors with colored
rice and sand and flour designs
designed to banish the dark side
of the universe from their little
corner of it where they are doing all
they can to push back darkness
and ignorance and evil into
the far corners of the rooms they live in.
This high holy day and festival
cries out to be celebrated here in
The Land of Creeping Ignorance
the land of ten million guns
the land of double talk and new-
speak, of hatred and intolerance
of violence and daily death
in school yards and churches and
nightclubs. We all need to light
some lamps and make mandalas on our
living room floors. Today please. This
darkness that surrounds us, will drown us all.
[/Poem]
Featured Art: Indian girls lighting candle and clay lamps for the Hindu Festival of Light
viaWikimedia Commons Khokarahman [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]
Related Article: What is India’s Diwali Festival? Diwali is India’s ‘Festival of Light’, a time when people come together to celebrate good conquering evil, light conquering dark.
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains ….My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains ….One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, ….But being too happy in thine happiness, — ……..That thou, light-wingèd Dryad of the trees, ……………..In some melodious plot ….Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, ……..Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
O for a draught of vintage! that hath been ….Cool’d a long age in the deep-delvèd earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country-green, ….Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South! ….Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, ……..With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, ……………..And purple-stainèd mouth; ….That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, ……..And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget ….What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret ….Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, ….Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; ……..Where but to think is to be full of sorrow ……………..And leaden-eyed despairs; ….Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, ……..Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
Away! away! for I will fly to thee, ….Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy, ….Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night, ….And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, ……..Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays ……………..But here there is no light, ….Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown ……..Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, ….Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet ….Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; ….White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; ……..Fast-fading violets cover’d up in leaves; ……………..And mid-May’s eldest child, ….The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, ……..The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time ….I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a musèd rhyme, ….To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die, ….To cease upon the midnight with no pain, ……..While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad ……………..In such an ecstasy! ….Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain— ……..To thy high requiem become a sod.
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! ….No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard .>..In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path …..Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, ……..She stood in tears amid the alien corn; ……………..The same that ofttimes hath ….Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam ……..Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell ….To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well ….As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades ….Past the near meadows, over the still stream, ……..Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep ……………..In the next valley-glades: ….Was it a vision, or a waking dream? ……..Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?
Jack Ramey talks about John Keats and reads Ode to a Nightingale.
John Keats, born on October 31, 1795, is the quintessential Romantic poet. He was not well regarded during his brief lifetime, but now, more than two hundred years after his birth, his small output of poems are considered some of the most beautiful and beloved in the English language. Two years ago, I stood on the very ground, Wentworth Place in Hampstead (now the Keats House Museum), where Keats composed his famous Ode to a Nightingale, one of the most moving poems ever written.
His good and loyal friend, the artist, Joseph Severn, painted the portrait shown above. When Keats contracted tuberculosis, Severn went with Keats to Rome, nursing him until the end. He died of tuberculosis in Rome at the age of 25 convinced that his work would be forgotten. He requested that no name or date be written on his tombstone, only the inscription: “Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water.”
Painting of John Keats by Joseph Severn (1793–1879), via Wikimedia Commons
Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, …..Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express …..A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape …..Of deities or mortals, or of both, …..In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? …..What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? ……….What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard …..Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d, …..Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
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!
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed …..Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied, …..For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love! …..For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d, …..For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above, …..That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d, …..…..A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
Who are these coming to the sacrifice? …..To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, …..And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore, …..Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, …..Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore …..Will silent be; and not a soul to tell …..…..Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede …..Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed; …..Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! …..When old age shall this generation waste, …..Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, …..“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all …..…..Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
[/Poem]
Jack Ramey talks about John Keats and reads Ode on a Grecian Urn.
.
Some say that Keats was inspired to write his Ode on a Grecian Urn after seeing the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum. Others maintain it was the Townley Vase that fired his imagination. Neither of these objects, however, contain the wealth of detail that exists in the poem.
In it, the poet contemplates the eternal nature of art and the fleeting nature of life. He relates a scene where an ancient village empties itself out and its citizens walk to a pagan sacrifice accompanied by pipes and drums and wild ecstasy. A lover tries to kiss a maiden who is “loath” to accept his advances on this pious morn. She will never be his, but she will always be young and desirable. Art and beauty passed down through the ages trump reality, Keats seems to say, by being forever unchanging, forever young, forever new.
When I was in London two summers ago, I tried to see the Townley Vase at the British Museum, but it was not on display, kept in a locked room in the basement, available only through prearranged appointment. But I did spend time with the Elgin marbles and their scenes of sacrifice infamously ripped off the façade of the Parthenon in Athens by Lord Elgin, an act of looting famously condemned by Lord Byron and the Greek government. Keats’s famous last lines of the Ode still resonate and acted for me as a poetic voiceover to the Elgin marbles: ”Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.”
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and Preserver; hear, O hear!
II
Thou on whose stream, ‘mid the steep sky’s commotion,
Loose clouds like Earth’s decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,
Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine airy surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head
Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith’s height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge
Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre
Vaulted with all thy congregated might
Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: O hear!
III
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers
Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know
Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: O hear!
IV
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O Uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
V
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened Earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
Featured Painting: Percy Bysshe Shelley, by Alfred Clint (1807-1833)
via Wikimedia Commons
Jack Ramey talks about Shelley and reads Ode to the West Wind.
I love Shelley. His beautiful poetry, and his beautiful soul. His fine mind. I love him because he hated hypocrisy, he hated injustice, especially against the poor and downtrodden, and he loved liberty and freedom above all.
And also I love him because he recognized the genius of John Keats when the critics and even Byron dismissed him as an uneducated Cockney. He wrote one of the greatest elegies in the language, Adonais, an elegy on the death of Keats.
Shelley was all air, an ethereal spirit communing with gods and goddesses and the spirits of mountains, and rivers, and trees. And the divine spirit of the wind.
He wrote his marvelous poem, Ode to the West Wind, while in Florence in late October 1819, after a walk through the woods that skirt the Arno River during a fierce wind and rain and hail storm. The violence in the transition of the seasons from autumn into winter is seen as a revolutionary act that will benefit mankind in the coming peace of a symbolic spring. The physical storm and its metaphorical possibilities excited his great poetic imagination, and he went home and this poem literally poured out of him.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Jack Ramey talks about Shelley and reads Ozymandias.
Shelley was a radical. He hated tyranny and loved freedom and liberty and the rights of the common man. The Mask of Anarchy, Prometheus Unbound, and The Triumph of Life are all great long poems that celebrate the triumph of libertarian values over tyranny. Shelley’s sonnet, Ozymandias, is one of his most famous poems.
It began as a friendly competition between Shelley and his friend Horace Smith, based on a recent announcement of the British Museum‘s acquisition of the adjacent statue. They chose a passage from the Greek Historian Diodorus, which described a massive Egyptian statue and quoted its inscription: “King of Kings Ozymandias am I.” This fine poem reflects Shelley’s view that tyranny cannot last and that tyrants will always vanish in the end and return to the dust that they came from, as all things do.
If you like our video, please share it so we can help build a broader appreciation among the younger generation of the immortal poetry written by Shelley.
Statue of Ramesses II by BabelStone
British Museum via Wikimedia Commons
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