Oddly, as our topic was Free Choice, no one brought either Chaucer's famous opening lines to the Canterbury Tales, nor T.S. Eliot's callous parody from The Waste Land, but we did have a number of poems that picked up the feeling of spring with their use of flowers images.
The poems chosen for this afternoon’s meeting were the provocative ‘Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes’ by the Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. This had been left over for several months but was definitely worth waiting for. Among the others were some short selections from A.E. Housman’s charming ‘A Shropshire Lad’, Philip Larkin’s ‘Sympathy in White Major’ – a poem that taxed our hermeneutic powers and called on different cultural contexts; Archibald MacLeish’s deceptively compact but equally testing ‘Ars Poetica’; the exquisite and finely crafted ‘The Spring’ by the Cavalier poet Thomas Carew; selections from ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, by Rupert Brooke, which divided us into those who liked the very English images of the garden at the start and those who felt it was too ‘sweet’. Balancing the nostalgia we also had Martin Southall’s ‘May 1945’, and Ezra Pound’s plea for classical rigour in ‘The Return’.
Next month our topic will be ‘Kings and Queens’ – so there should be plenty of scope!
The poems chosen for this afternoon’s meeting were the provocative ‘Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes’ by the Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. This had been left over for several months but was definitely worth waiting for. Among the others were some short selections from A.E. Housman’s charming ‘A Shropshire Lad’, Philip Larkin’s ‘Sympathy in White Major’ – a poem that taxed our hermeneutic powers and called on different cultural contexts; Archibald MacLeish’s deceptively compact but equally testing ‘Ars Poetica’; the exquisite and finely crafted ‘The Spring’ by the Cavalier poet Thomas Carew; selections from ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, by Rupert Brooke, which divided us into those who liked the very English images of the garden at the start and those who felt it was too ‘sweet’. Balancing the nostalgia we also had Martin Southall’s ‘May 1945’, and Ezra Pound’s plea for classical rigour in ‘The Return’.
Next month our topic will be ‘Kings and Queens’ – so there should be plenty of scope!
