THE following POEMS were written originally for the Amusement of the Author, as they were the Products of her leisure Moments. She had no Intention ever to have published them; nor would they now have made their Appearance, but at the Importunity of many of her best, an...
our stories, our very lives. The great Christian poet of the 4thcentury, Ephrem the Syrian, describes the Bethlehem effect in one of his poems. He begins by proclaiming his Christmas joy:
The titles of male-authored lyric collections during the period of the Civil Wars and Interregnum indicate a privileged method of poetic composition: ejaculation. The first of many editions of Christopher Harvey’s The Synagogue: or Sacred Poems and Priv
The Saturnalia was a proper feast in every sense. Everybody stopped work, there was a general exchanging of gifts of various sorts and loosening of general rules. For example it was licit to gamble only during the Saturnalia and at no other time (although this law was respected to different...
a procession, the ekphora, conveyed the deceased to the cemetery outside the city walls for burial. Greek law required the ekphora and the burial to conclude before sunrise so the city would not be disturbed by the funeral. Bodies could be cremated or buried intact; cremains were collected...
Today is the feast day of George Herbert (1593-1633), one of my favorite poets. It is fitting that we remember him at the beginning of Lent, for his poems are imbued with the season’s themes of repentance and renewal. He was a student of what the Book of Common Prayer calls our ...
Be nothing better than a wandering cloud, I cannot miss my way. I breathe again! Laying wildflowers on Wordsworth’s grave on my 50th birthday. Related post:Grace Me Guide [i]Vera Pavlova, “Four Poems,” translated from the Russian by Steven Seymour,The New Yorker, July 30, 2007, 37...
You can find more general information about Herbert’s life and works in the links at the end of this post. Today I want to look at two poems about the inescapable mortality of the human condition. In the first, “Time,” the poet meets up with the Grim Reaper, wielding his scythe us...
On the day of Jiwang 既望of the month of Zhongqiu 仲秋(27 September 706),53 he issued an imperial edict to hold a funeral ceremony for Chan Master Shenxiu. “The Taichang qing 太常卿 (Chief Minister of the Court of Imperial Sacrifices) guided and led the funeral procession, and the ...
Zi Xia replied, “We know, that is to say, we read in the Book of Poems, that life and death depend on fate, wealth and honors depend on heaven. For the perfect man who does not sin against those to be respected and who observes the rites, are not all the people of the world ...