Month: January 2020

IF – Rudyard Kipling – Comments

richinaword Poetry analysis Tags: , 3 Comments

IF

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
‘ Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936) – Text taken from the Net … it could have errors.

This poem consists of four eight line rhyming iambic pentameter stanzas. The whole poem is instruction on the way to live life – a father talking to a son. Instruction is based on the word IF … the Ifs that may happen in life and the advice response is elaborated.

This poem came in #1 in the search for the most favourite poem by the UK Bookworm programme in 1995. So the advice offered must have had some resonance with the UK public. And maybe his father had lived through some harrowing experiences such as risking all his money on one turn of pitch-and-toss.

And if the son succeeds in making that appropriate response then the son becomes ‘a Man’, it being so important for the son to succeed and become ‘a Man‘. The son having more importance than a daughter which is still prevalent in so many societies and situations! The poem must be viewed against the historical context.

The poem can have a universal dimension of instruction with a few amendments such as …
S1 … line 3 … If you can trust yourself when everybody doubts you,
S4 … line 4 … If all peoples count with you, but none too much;
And in the last line … And – what is more – you’ll be some hero!

However, this loses something for it is Father-Son talking and poems must adhere to the concrete of the text of the poet, so the latent universal is there for the reader to accept independent of Father-Son and those looking for some kind of gender equality should do so in this light and not colour appreciation this way.

If you can read a poem for full appreciation
without letting personal preference shade your understanding.

There are, of course, many cases where text is changed for gender equality but poetry is not the case!

Full details of the poem IF on Wikipedia
A link to Rudyard Kipling on Wikipedia

Awash in Smoke – Australian Bushfires

richinaword My Poems Tags: , , , 2 Comments

 

SmokePoem

Burnt Bush – Batemans Bay, NSW

Awash in Smoke

in the shock aftermath death knell
on a day hard to happen
a dull blue twist slowly ascends
into the sullen smoke hangover

the stubborn littered ground aglow
as the after-life scrub still smoulders,
like a discarded cigarette butt
menacing cancer

blackened tangled gum trunks
twist fingers into the lost sky
while a dead kangaroo silhouetted
dissolves in the shifting smoke

life stalls in the depressed choke
of the continued fall of dust cladded air

Richard Scutter 9 January 2020

Context –

The current Australian bushfires are unprecedented in their magnitude and destruction. They have been extensive across all States and have destroyed massive areas of bush. And they are still burning at the time of this Post. The current loss is 2,316 homes and over 24 lives coupled with considerable stock loss.

World Wildlife Conservation estimate that 1.25 billion animals have died and of course their habitat decimated. Australia is a very large country and continent and some of the tracks of land involved in the fires are bigger than European countries.

Smoke from these fires has clouded and polluted many towns and cities not directly connected with the destruction and fires. This has been the case in Canberra over the last three weeks. The intensity of the smoke depends on wind direction but on some days Canberra has been the most polluted major city in the world.

The world-wide response to this on-going tragedy has been quite amazing. I give my heartfelt thanks for all this support and to those that have donated to the funding of the recovery effort. Unfortunately the scars are severe and it will take many years for the regrowth to take hold but the bush is resilience and it will recover!

Angels – Mary Oliver – Comments

richinaword Poetry analysis Tags: , , , 2 Comments

Angels

You might see an angel anytime
and anywhere. Of course you have
to open your eyes to a kind of
second level, but it’s not really
hard. The whole business of
what’s reality and what isn’t has
never been solved and probably
never will be. So I don’t care to
be too definite about anything.
I have a lot of edges called Perhaps
and almost nothing you can call
Certainty. For myself, but not
for other people. That’s a place
you just can’t get into, not
entirely anyway, other people’s heads.

I’ll just leave you with this.
I don’t care how many angels can
dance on the head of a pin. It’s
enough to know that for some people
they exist, and that they dance.

Mary Oliver (1935 – 2019)

This is all to do with how we and others see the world. We know what we see and how we feel. How we articulate this in a way that others can understand is another matter. And equally the converse is true.

And how much do we understand another person? But to help there is that intersecting commonality between peoples based on common life experience and the fact that we are all of the human variety.

In this poem by Mary Oliver there is a plea to be accepting of what others say however ridiculous it might seem. And she suggests living in the ‘perhaps’ for it is true that we can never really get into the head of another. So if someone says they have seen an ‘angel’ or anything else truly out of the ordinary then who are we to deny the sighting and in due course perhaps we might see the same.

Of course ‘angels’ come in many forms and there is one sitting in the chair across the room at the moment. I don’t know about the dancing element!

Perhaps the first stanza is sufficient combined with the first line of the second, if I might suggest my perhaps on first reading this poem.

Mary Oliver died in January last year … a Wikipedia link 

Smoke – Michael Symmons Roberts – Comments

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Smoke

First one tree, then another, horizons close
towards us, house-lights dim and drown.
The huge, low moon dissolves. Pray in us,

spirit, animus, holy ghost among
the wet leaves, in the smoke’s mute song.
Eyes sting. All perspective gone.

One building bleeds into another.
Torch beams shrink to dandelions
Headlamps fade to dull gems set in cars.

Distances collapse. Shouts could cross
streets, valleys, oceans. Silence, broken
by a siren on another continent.

And what burns? Sweet and salt,
bracken, berries, hair. What new edifice
hardens within, waits for world to sharpen.

Michael Symmons Roberts (1963

Animus – hostility
Edifice – structure

This poem, written by UK poet Michael Symmons Roberts in 2011, marries nicely with the smoke drenched city of Canberra as the wanton bushfires send their hangover dust into Canberra from the devastation on the NSW south coast.

A clear message that is not going away – long after the smoke dissipates!

Unfortunately the Australian Prime Minister (Scott Morrison) is not showing the leadership needed to address climate change in an adequate way – waiting for some serious sharpening.

Below Black Mountain Tower, Canberra shrouded in smoke (3 January 2019) …

20200103_112105[1]

A link to Michael Symmons Roberts on Wikipedia.