Saturday, 9. June 2007, 05:17:59
Thoughts, Poetry
The republic has emptied her bullets in one summer dusk
In this vast setting of sand and mud
All around this square that has reflected history so much
The fortress of freedom has once more been thrown up
Once more justice must be bought with men's blood and guts
Saturday, 30. September 2006, 08:14:03
Poetry, Thoughts
A poem by
Robert Frost,titled "War Thoughts at Home" and dated 1918 has been discovered by a graduate student at the University of Virginia.
According to Reuters, the poem will be published next week. With the help of Google, I have located the source of Reuters' news:
Between Friends: Rediscovering the War Thoughts of Robert Frost. Here are two stanzas from the 35-line poem:
And one says to the rest
"We must just watch our chance
And escape one by one-
Though the fight is no more done
Than the war is in France."
Than the war is in France!
She thinks of a winter camp
Where soldiers for France are made.
She draws down the window shade
And it glows with an early lamp.
Among many of Robert Frost's poems, like
My Butterfly, this is probably my favorite one:
Robert Frost: Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favour fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Some say it is a brilliant gemlike compression of Dante's
Inferno. There is circumstantial evidence to suggest Frost's familiarity with Dante's Inferno. His personal library, now housed at the Fales Library of New York University, contains four editions of
Dante's Divine Comedy.
At its most obvious, formal level, "Fire and Ice" has nine lines, mirroring Dante's nine circles of hell. But it is at the thematic level that Frost most tellingly follows Dante, for the poem reflects the same system of ethics that Dante employs to classify the sins and punishments of hell. In "Fire and Ice", I read Fire as Passion, and Ice as Reason. According to Aristotle, sins of reason are worse than sins of passion. As an eternally borned sinful being, I would rather go along the road of passion.
P.S. I have attempted to make my own chinese translation of "Fire and Ice" here:
烈焰与寒冰.
Friday, 29. September 2006, 00:13:26
Roving Beijing, Poetry, Blogosphere
That day before I wrote "Thanks Giving", I had heard a "sad" story from a close friend during lunchtime. It is a "she". We have not seen each other for a while. Knowing that I was vacating and doing nothing in Beijing, she proposed to offer me a free lunch with a condition. She said she had broken up with her partner recently, and desperately needed someone to talk to and a shoulder to lean upon. I said it definitively was an affirmative, because it would be odd if we just ate without any conversation, and lending her my shoulder or shoulders would be fine. We dined at Morel, a belgian restaurant lying a couple of blocks south of Kempinski. She ordered a single dish and did all the talking as I enjoyed my three-course meal with a bottle of vintage red wine. She was not sad but pretty sober. While she sipped her third glass of wine, she advised me some of her experiences about give-and-take in love affairs. I saw her into the eyes and listened to her story tenderly. I had spared my shoulder(s). When we left, she said I was a great listener and she felt a lot better then. And, I paid the bill.
To record the gathering, I blogged that night. I actually had not much to write about. As I closed the essay and found that it was short and there were a couple of rhymes in the sentences. So, I broke them up and keyed off the punctuations. It did not look pathetic but "poetic" and I was quite happy with it.
Today, I looked up Danwei and found a very interesting article titled "
Let's all write poetry! - the Zhao Lihua affair". I learn now that the way I manipulated with my essay is being called "pear blossom verse" (梨花体) in poetry writing. Of course, I have never seen it as a poem. I was just lazy. Ai Weiwei, an architect and artist at Beijing's
798 Art District said in the aforementioned article that even doggerel is poetry. I am quite happy with his "endorsement". Afterall, it is worth paying for the "free lunch". Thanks should be giving to my heartbreaking friend. Now, I become a poet.
WIDGETIZE