dashing in to meme...

[lagilman]

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) 'Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.' I conclude now I have no
inner resources , because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights and gripes
as bad as achiles

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

John Berryman, from THE DREAM SONGS



(or, from the other side of my poetical personality...)


Whan that Abril with his showres soote
The draughte of March hath perced to tha roote
And bathed every veine in swich licour
Of which virtu engendered is the flowr;
Whan Zephyrus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath every holt and heethe
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne
And smale fowles maken melodye
That slephen al the night with open ye --
So priketh him nature in hir corages --
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages...

Chaucer, The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales

(that's all I remember off the top of my head, and yeah, I had to check the actual spelling, not that most of you would know if I'd messed it up *grin*)

Comments

[greeneyedkzin.livejournal.com]

(cough)

[lagilman]

Hey, I said most

[patchwork-prose.livejournal.com]

Re: Berryman.

Hah!

:-)

[lagilman]

I love Berryman.

[deire.livejournal.com]

I had the most wonderful prof for Chaucer, same lady who helps run the Clarion in Michigan. I can hear her cadences all over again.

[lagilman]

My medieval lit professor, who was also my English advisor, was a wonderful man -- Phil West..

I found a copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that he had given me when I graduated, and there was a note in it saying that, if I chose to continue on to grad school, he expected me to "rock the field and make him obsolete."

You can never made a great teacher obsolete. Not so long as the students remember...