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Category Archives: Poetry

Years, like circles

30 Thursday Dec 2021

Posted by la Clarina in Poetry, Things

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Happy New Year, Poetry, Turlough O'Carolan

Another year very nearly gone, you see? Another year in this strange, unsettled era of ours. Another plague year…

Did you do what you had set out to do this year, o Readers? I find that I hadn’t set out to do too much. Well yes, I hazily meant to write more, to step into my new director’s shoes, to move a little – oh yes: and to write one cheerful thing. I suppose that, at some level, I found it safer to play it by ear? Continue reading →

Song for the Rainy Season

16 Thursday Sep 2021

Posted by la Clarina in Poetry

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Elizabeth Bishop, Poetry, rain, September

It’s raining.

For the first time in forever, it rains. Nothing dramatic: a rather gentle, grey, whispering thing. Most Septemberish – the sort that begs for poetry…

And because I had this very, very hazy memory of blind drops crawling on roofs – with no earthly idea of what it could be from, I made good use of the power of the Net, and discovered Elizabeth Bishop’s Song for the Rainy Season.

Continue reading →

Divine Monsters (or, my very own Dante Day)

23 Friday Jul 2021

Posted by la Clarina in Poetry, Theatre

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Dante Alighieri, Dante700, directing, Inferno

Early morning walk (because I truly am that good… if only once in a blue moon)

Rush to town

A meeting

A gazilion small things (“Since you’re going to town anyway…”)

Home and the quickest lunch ever

The images – oh Lord, the images! (Because I did have them all but ready – but then lightning struck, and I changed them all, and had to begin again from scratch, and this one is much better, and… and… and…) Continue reading →

Emily’s flowers

08 Thursday Jul 2021

Posted by la Clarina in Poetry

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Emily Dickinson, Herbarium, morning walks, Poetry, wildflowers

I went for a walk on the river bank, early this morning. I try to do it two or three times a week, and it is hard to get up and go – because apparently I can’t wrap my head around the simple notion of “early to bed, early to rise” – but once I’m by the river, it’s more than worth the ungodly levée. I love the slant of the early sun on the dew-damp fields, and the birds in the trees, and the occasional hare or pheasant, and oh, the glory of wildflowers, in every possible hue of yellow, indigo, white, mauve, purple, pink, and blue! This morning I even spotted a few late-blooming poppies. And of course there were bees and bumble-bees humming among the riot of colours and shapes… Continue reading →

A bird in the boughs sang “June!”

03 Thursday Jun 2021

Posted by la Clarina in Poetry, Scribbling, Theatre

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#StoryADayMay, Alice in Wonderland, Clinton Scollard, directing, revision, theatre life

…And “June” hummed a bee
In a Bacchic glee
As he tumbled over and over
Drunk with the honey-dew.

And that was Clinton Scollard. That said… Continue reading →

Dante’s Ulysses

25 Thursday Mar 2021

Posted by la Clarina in Poetry

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Allen Mandelbaum, Canto 26, Dante, Dante Alighieri, Dante Day, Inferno, Ulysses

Here in Italy Dante Alighieri is very much The Poet – the fellow who took it upon himself to describe in poetry a journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.

His Divina Commedia – the Divine Comedy – is the object of passionate study by hordes of scholars, and a staple of the school curriculum. As far as I know, no Italian kid is allowed to leave school without meeting Dante – more or less exhaustively (that depends on the kind of school), and more or less satisfyingly (and that mostly depends on the teacher).

Father of the Italian language or no, Dante is no easy read. His Fourteenth Century Italian, his rhetorically complex style, and the many references to his day make the Commedia less than immediate to our modern ears – and while some teachers really do their best to introduce their pupils to the power and beauty of it, some… don’t. A great pity… Continue reading →

Who cares for poetry anyway?

21 Thursday Jan 2021

Posted by la Clarina in Poetry

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Poetry, school, tenage angst

He is fifteen and a half – that most dreadful of ages – and quite bright when he can be bothered. Alas, that’s not always the case, lost as he is in that teenage tumult of rebellion, Fortnight games, and hunger for peer-approval. I might add that the long, long months of lockdown and Covid-related restrictions are hardly helping… Continue reading →

With a spoonful of poetry…

17 Thursday Sep 2020

Posted by la Clarina in Eccentricities, Poetry

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Charlotte Brontë, christopher marlowe, Literary quotes, Rudyard Kipling, Vacuum cleaner

We have this ongoing disagreement, my friend Milla and I. A friendly disagreement, mind – but still.

It is all about poetry, you see. Or at least, about quoting poetry – and the occasional bit of prose – at what Milla deems to be the wrongest moments. I, on the other hand, argue that not only there is no wrong moment for poetry – but, on the contrary, there is very little in this world that can’t be made at least a little better by a few well-chosen lines. Continue reading →

A Something in a Summer’s Day

27 Thursday Aug 2020

Posted by la Clarina in Poetry

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Emily Dickinson, summer

Poetry today, and Emily Dickinson – with the beauty and mystery of nature, and the wonders that keep being wonders year after year as the seasons dance past again and again, and the held breath before the magical, shimmering transience… Oh, no one like Emily for this kind of thing, is there?

Also, the summer colours threaded all through!

A something in a summer’s day,
As slow her flambeaux burn away,
Which solemnizes me.

A something in a summer’s noon,—
An azure depth, a wordless tune,
Transcending ecstasy.

And still within a summer’s night
A something so transporting bright,
I clap my hands to see;

Then veil my too inspecting face,
Lest such a subtle, shimmering grace
Flutter too far for me.

The wizard-fingers never rest,
The purple brook within the breast
Still chafes its narrow bed;

Still rears the East her amber flag,
Guides still the sun along the crag
His caravan of red,

Like flowers that heard the tale of dews,
But never deemed the dripping prize
Awaited their low brows;

Or bees, that thought the summer’s name
Some rumor of delirium
No summer could for them;

Or Arctic creature, dimly stirred
By tropic hint,—some travelled bird
Imported to the wood;

Or wind’s bright signal to the ear,
Making that homely and severe,
Contented, known, before

The heaven unexpected came,
To lives that thought their worshipping
A too presumptuous psalm.

Lovely, isn’t it? And, as is often the case, a little haunting in its loveliness.

The Way through the Woods

25 Thursday Jun 2020

Posted by la Clarina in Poetry

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Poetry, Rudyard Kipling

Some Kipling today.

I’ve always loved this one, and was reminded of it last night, as I sat in the garden at twilight, watching as the small grey bats flew circles, quite a dance, lower and lower around me, entirely unafraid…

They shut the road through the woods
      Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
      And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
      Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
      And the thin anemones.
      Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
      And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods
      Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
      Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
      Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,
      And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
      Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
      As though they perfectly knew
      The old lost road through the woods.
But there is no road through the woods.

I don’t know whether there are ghostly presences in my garden – although the house was built on the site of a Napoleonic battlefield, so who am I to say there aren’t – but the idea is a very pleasant one to entertain on a blue-green summer evening, in a garden gone slightly wild, where birds and bats and hedgehogs are reasonably sure that no one will bother them.

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