There is nothing more satisfying than reading a book while sipping a hot cup of tea.
I have started 2015 with an anthology The Individual and Society. Divided into five parts: Caste/ Class; Gender; Race; Violence and War; and Living in a Globalized World, this has some wonderful pieces on all these important issues. While many of the writers were familiar to me, I have also discovered new voices like Maya … Continue reading First Read of 2015: The Individual and Society
O love is the crooked thing, There is nobody wise enoughTo find out all that is int, For he would be thinking of loveTill the stars had run awayAnd the shadows eaten the moon.W.B. Yeats' The Green Helmet and Other Poems, first published in book form in the year 1910, is a strange little text. Comprising of … Continue reading Some New moon: The Green Helmet, and Other Poems by W.B. Yeats
Zephyr is a light wind (or the west wind) that awakens everything to life in the month of April. It is one of the many reasons, that makes April beautiful for Chaucer (and for the pilgrims to Canterbury):Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breethInspired hath in every holt and heethThe tender croppes...And so we begin … Continue reading Z is for Zephyr
Xanadu, that fabled land which Coleridge immortalized in his poem Kubla Khan.In Xanadu did Kubla KhanA stately pleasure-dome decree:Where Alph, the sacred river, ranThrough caverns measureless to manDown to a sunless sea.The land is magical:A savage place! as holy and enchantedAs e'er beneath a waning moon was hauntedBy woman wailing for her demon-lover.The poet continues:The … Continue reading X is for Xanadu
"Ah, but a man's Reach should exceed his graspOr what's a heaven for?"Inspiring lines to reach for those stars.*Which is that one star that you want in your grasp more than any other?*Entry for letter R.
Ozymandias is "the King of Kings" who now remains only a broken headless statue with a shattered visage toppled on the ground. Shelley's poem describes in a kernel the fate of all those fallen idols and broken icons.`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'Nothing beside remains. Round the … Continue reading O is for Ozymandias
In 1915, appeared a poem that was to change the course of literature and leave its imprint forever.T.S. Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock is a hero in a very unheroic sense. He is unsure, timid, and insecure:...an attendant lord, one that will doTo swell a progress, start a scene or two, Advise the prince; no doubt, an … Continue reading J is for J. Alfred Prufrock
All my thought-of posts are going for a toss. Just finished John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and immediately these lines rose in my mind:Man's Inhumanity to manMakes countless thousands mourn!These lines occur in Robert Burns' poem Man was Made to Mourn: A Dirge. A poem published in 1784.To me the best counter … Continue reading I is for Inhumanity
So there I was thinking of a post on Horses when I read a post on Hafiz @ Book Snob. So I decided to share a poem of his too. To the uninitiated, Hafiz was a Persian Sufi poet who lived in the 14th Century.This was the first poem of his that I read but … Continue reading H is for Hafiz
It is 1939. Europe is sitting on a tinder box. The year begins on a tragic note. Nobel Laureate W.B. Yeats, having already witnessed a world war and other dances of destruction closes his eyes forever. PoetW.H. Auden, having but recently shifted to New York, writes an elegy mourning not only the death of the … Continue reading D is for Dogs
a hot cup of pleasure 