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To Autumn – II

John Keats

I

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
  Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
  With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
  And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
    To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
  With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
  For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

II

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
  Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
  Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
  Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
    Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
  Steady thy laden head across a brook;
  Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
    Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

III

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?
  Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,–
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
  And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
  Among the river sallows, borne aloft
    Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
  Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
  The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
    And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

 

I hope you enjoy it Yousei :)

Lambert, 1792 is the backdrop for the story of kids growing up in the street of London. Nothing sensational, no innovations in form – just a simple, good story with down-to-earth characters who could  easily be your neighbours today. It is in this simplicity that resides its strength. I confess that sometimes I get a bit tired of modern novelists cleverness and sophistication. Nothink against it,  but it is just refreshing to have an ‘Aristotelian’ novel from time to time, with beginning middle and end, even when there flasbacks and open endings.

The cherry at the top of the cake is to have William Blake as a ’supporting’ character – actually this book, in the right hands, would  make a quite interesting film.

Good story, nice reading  :)

To Autumn – I

William Blake

O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stain’d
With the blood of the grape, pass not, but sit
Beneath my shady roof; there thou may’st rest,
And tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe,
And all the daughters of the year shall dance!
Sing now the lusty song of fruits and flowers.

‘The narrow bud opens her beauties to
The sun, and love runs in her thrilling veins;
Blossoms hang round the brows of Morning, and
Flourish down the bright cheek of modest Eve,
Till clust’ring Summer breaks forth into singing,
And feather’d clouds strew flowers round her head.

‘The spirits of the air live in the smells
Of fruit; and Joy, with pinions light, roves round
The gardens, or sits singing in the trees.’
Thus sang the jolly Autumn as he sat,
Then rose, girded himself, and o’er the bleak
Hills fled from our sight; but left his golden load.

Thrilling, fascinating, bloody…

Of course, if you don’t like the genre, this can easily be discarded as ‘low brow’ literature because, at the end of the day,  it is nothing more than a whodunnit. But what an entertaining one! And if you like English history, as I do, then you can be sure you will not put it down till the very end.

It is the fouth book in the Shadlake series and, since Monsieur Poirot, I don’t think we have had a more likeable sleuth. Perhaps even more than Christie’s creation, because Brother Shadlake is a sort of  ’normal’ bloke.  He is not meant to be a detective at all, but one of the barristers of the prestigious Lincon’s Inn Court at the time of Henry VIII who, as any people circulating in the fringes of the power at the time, sees himself entangled in its threads of treason, falsehood, religious fanaticism  and  power struggle.

Running to the bookshop to buy the previous three!!

Dylan Thomas

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child’s death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

If there is any pleasure in being a frequent customer of the British Rail is the number of hours you can devote to reading. I’ve been coming and going between Plymouth and Leicester and it has given me the opportunity to catch up with some reading. The Uncommon Reader is a very short book that fitted perfectly in one leg of the journey and made it extremely pleasant . What a funny delightful story, full of irony and criticism hidden behind its supposed lighteness. Highly enjoyable! :)

Northop Frye in The Educated Imagination uses the metaphor of a person cast away in a desert island to explain the three levels in which the mind operates,  how it interacts with the world and how these levels are expressed in different ‘languages’.

I’ve been studying understanding of human imagination for my MEd dissertation and Frye’s metaphor of the desert island made me remember stories such as Cast Away with Tom Hanks, Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Lord of the Flies. So back to the book I went but this time reading it in a completely different tone and I realised how absolutely terrifying the story is. It is the stuff of nightmares because it is not about the loss of innocence but its intrinsic absence. No horror stories and gore can compare to the terror that this story brings because you simply realise that the desert island may actually be just round the corner…

This is just my second Ishiguro’s novel. After a memorable books, such as Remains of the Day, it is hard for any writer to live up to the expectations to their readers. Never Let Me Go is a novel that puzzles from the title to the the last page. It starts in a way that even makes you question if the meaning of a common word is really the one you have always known and taken for granted.

The story is quite surreal but it does not really matter because what is behind the plot is much more and this is exactly the writer’s story-telling skills and his ability to make us connect with the characters. It’s unsettling, disturbing and hauntly humane.

My good intentions of leaving novels for the period of the dissertation have not lasted long.  Having to travel to London twice in the last two months, I simply needed a book. I was attracted by the title and the good reviews it received but I’m sincerely disappointed.

The idea is simply brilliant – it’s quite original and the setting in Nazi German, even being a bit trodden is always engaging, the characters have a lot of potential to be developed but simply I felt that the story never took off. There are moments that you think that author will finally spread his wings and  take you there but is it is just a false alam and it falls flat again. Pity! Really nice idea which in the hands of a more gifted writer would have been a really good book.

Matthew Arnold

YES: in the sea of life enisled,

With echoing straits between us thrown.

Dotting the shoreless watery wild,

We mortal millions live alone.

The islands feel the enclasping flow,

And then their endless bounds they know.

 

But when the moon their hollow lights,

And they are swept by balms of spring,

And in their glens, on starry nights,

The nightingales divinely sing;

And lovely notes, from shore to shore,

Across the sounds and channels pour;

 

O then a longing like despair

Is to their farthest caverns sent!

For surely once, they feel, we were

Parts of a single continent.

Now round us spreads the watery plain–

O might our marges meet again!

 

Who order’d that their longing’s fire

Should be, as soon as kindled, cool’d?

Who renders vain their deep desire?–

A God, a God their severence ruled;

And bade betwixt their shores to be

The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.

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