January 2010

Happy New Year! 2.1.10


Here we are in a new year and what an interesting selection of poems we had to start us off. As we were doing ‘Favourite poems’ diversity could be expected, but the natural world turned out to be a kind of unofficial theme. We began with Shelley’s ‘The Cloud’, which gave raise to lots of differing views. Moving further out into space, John Donne’s ‘Song’, beginning ‘Go and Catch a Falling star’, swiftly moved back into the early modern convention of the faithless female beauty. Kipling’s atmospheric ‘The Way Through the Woods’ had us roughly divided between those who thought there were ghosts, and those who had other ideas. Ralph Hodgson’s ‘Eve’ proved fascinating for its unusual treatment of the Temptation because of its very English setting which included not only the orchard and the lane, but ‘titmouse’, linnet, and Jenny Wren. Ted Hughes ‘The Thought-Fox’ certainly made us think! As did his ‘Crow’s Nerve Fails’. After all the wildlife, Simon Armitage’s ‘About his Person’ returned us unequivocally to bleak modern human life, and Tony Harrison’ ‘First Aid in English’ challenged us to consider the limitations of language when confronted with atrocity. After some of the rather sombre subject matter, was nice that the last things on the agenda were light-hearted couplets and epigrams gathered from the Internet.

Our next meeting is on Feb 6th. And the topic is ‘poems beginning with D’. FYI – Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’ has already been ‘bagged’!