Why disparage or be snarky?
Posted: 18 Mar 2012, 21:25
"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud... and other poems you half-remember from school"
Perfectly fine book to trigger memories, etc, as the title says, but why the sly comments on the authors, like:
"One can only imagine what the new Mrs. Wordsworth made of this."
Yes, that's mild, and, maybe some newlwed wives would not want their husband's little sister to live with them, as the case of William Wordsworth.
But why even make the comment? They are dead, as of 1850. His poems are his gift.
That's why I love the poem "Romantics Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann" by Lisel Mueller:
The modern biographers worry
"how far it went," their tender friendship.
They wonder just what it means
when he writes he thinks of her constantly
his guardian angel, beloved friend.
The modern biographers ask
the rude, irrelevant question
of our age, as if the event
of two bodies meshing together
establishes the degree of love,
forgetting how softly Eros walked
in the nineteenth centruy, how a hand
held overlong or a gaze anchored
in someone's eyes could unseat a heart,
and nuances of address not known
in our egalitarian language
could make the redolent air
tremble and shimmer with the heat
of possiblity. Each time I hear
the Intermezzi, sad
and lavish in their tenderness,
I imagine the two of them
sitting in a garden
among late-blooming roses
and dark cascades of leaves,
letting the landscape speak for them,
leaving us nothing to overhear.
Perfectly fine book to trigger memories, etc, as the title says, but why the sly comments on the authors, like:
"One can only imagine what the new Mrs. Wordsworth made of this."
Yes, that's mild, and, maybe some newlwed wives would not want their husband's little sister to live with them, as the case of William Wordsworth.
But why even make the comment? They are dead, as of 1850. His poems are his gift.
That's why I love the poem "Romantics Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann" by Lisel Mueller:
The modern biographers worry
"how far it went," their tender friendship.
They wonder just what it means
when he writes he thinks of her constantly
his guardian angel, beloved friend.
The modern biographers ask
the rude, irrelevant question
of our age, as if the event
of two bodies meshing together
establishes the degree of love,
forgetting how softly Eros walked
in the nineteenth centruy, how a hand
held overlong or a gaze anchored
in someone's eyes could unseat a heart,
and nuances of address not known
in our egalitarian language
could make the redolent air
tremble and shimmer with the heat
of possiblity. Each time I hear
the Intermezzi, sad
and lavish in their tenderness,
I imagine the two of them
sitting in a garden
among late-blooming roses
and dark cascades of leaves,
letting the landscape speak for them,
leaving us nothing to overhear.