On an unseasonably mild day, calm after a week of stormy winds, we gathered for a Free Choice meeting. Emily Bronte’s ‘Tell me tell me smiling child’ charmed with its simple form. Staying in the 19th century Christina Rossetti’s ‘A Birthday’ – again simple at first appearance – generated a vigorous debate between the humanists and others in the group as we thrashed out the suggestion that it was overly sentimental, indebted to pre-Raphaelite imagery, and whether shells can ‘paddle’. Sir Walter Scott’s ‘Edinburgh’ from Marmion was much less controversial, while Adrienne Rich’s ‘Peeling Onions’ was approved and struck a chord with all those among us who suffer from peeling onions. An extract from John Donne’s ‘The Storme’ showed the poet in rare wryly humorous vein, while T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding swept us wonderfully into a particularly English beauty and spirituality.
Our topic for February will be ‘Offspring’.
Our topic for February will be ‘Offspring’.
