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faith in honest doubt

faith in honest doubt

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I blog on whatever angries up the blood or otherwise inspires commentary -- often politics and religion, but also culture, music, books, poetry, science, beauty, truth, these internets, and the most dangerous topic of all .... man.

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Recent Posts Tagged With 'poetry'

  • Poem of the Day: "It Was Not Death"

    Posted on Saturday December 12th, 2009 at 20:32 in poetry

    This is a poem superficially about death but more about the end beyond which the speaker cannot see. It feels about right on this day when I have lost the last of my grandparents.Emily Dickinson, "It was not death"It was not death, for I stood up,And...

  • Poem of the Day: "Lullaby"

    Posted on Friday November 13th, 2009 at 12:47 in poetry

    Here's a poem to return to whenever you need to rescue love from the fashionable madmen with their pedantic boring cries.W.H. Auden, "Lullaby"Lay your sleeping head, my love,Human on my faithless arm;Time and fevers burn awayIndividual beauty fromTho...

  • The Dreams in Question

    Posted on Friday October 23rd, 2009 at 23:40 in poetry, english

    Hamlet was famously beset with fearful dreams of what may come should he kill himself:To die- to sleep-No more; and by a sleep to say we endThe heartache, and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummationDevoutly to be wish'd...

  • Poem of the Day: "Song"

    Posted on Saturday October 17th, 2009 at 18:27 in poetry

    This poem is an elegant presentation of oblivion, but maybe not as sure of its claims as it first seems, concluding two batches of declarations with conditional couplets.Christina Georgina Rossetti, "Song"When I am dead, my dearest,Sing no sad songs ...

  • Poem of the Day: "The Plain Sense of Things"

    Posted on Tuesday October 13th, 2009 at 07:01 in poetry

    This poem imagines the end of imagination, invokes a pond subtracted of everything that makes it identifiable as a pond, and in its title offers "plain sense" without making any. Are these paradoxes or are they just broken promises? Wallace Stevens,...

  • Friday What-You-Need Blogging

    Posted on Friday October 2nd, 2009 at 11:37 in politics, poetry, god stuff, people-watching, meta-

    It's Friday, so what could anyone need? Freddie Gage needs all his friends to be revivified, but not I. I can still point to some possibilities.How about finding awe in what still gets published as respectable opinion in reputable newspapers by way o...

  • Poem of the Day: "When Forty Winters ..."

    Posted on Thursday September 17th, 2009 at 07:02 in books, poetry

    As if to defy the reality of my ever-narrowing tilt down the slide of another multiple-of-ten birthday, I hereby present one of Shakespeare's meditations on aging: William Shakespeare, Sonnet #2.When forty winters shall beseige thy brow,And dig deep ...