The List of Poems I’ve memorized

Posted on August 10, 2011 by literarylee

This is an updated list of the poems I’ve memorized in alphabetical order of the poet’s first name.  In choosing poems to memorize, I sometimes select seasonally appropriate verse.  I also balance light with serious.  I memorize poems suited for certain moments, like a toast, or saying something nice about someone at a farewell event or birthday, or on a holiday like Christmas or the Fourth of July.  A fitting, apropos poem heightens my awareness of a moment and marks it for future reference.  Glance at the list and you’ll see Robert Burns is my favorite poet, autumn is my favorite season, and love, my favorite sentiment.  As I post the poem texts in the blog, I will add the link to this page.  Continue reading →

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Collecting Words – Pub Names Part 1

Posted on August 9, 2011 by literarylee

(An odd bit of word play I engage in from time to time is collecting words.  Here is the introductory letter and the first portion of my collection of pub names which I gathered during a one month trip through England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales in 1999.  We took the trip while living in India, so I wrote the letter from there upon our return.  I find it fascinating that what I said about a word collection twelve years ago, I would write again in this blog as an idea of how to add a bit of literary to life.  A person could collect all kinds of words, from book titles to puns, to misused adverbs one hears on television, to words with four syllables or more to, well, all sorts of things.  I also collect epitaphs which I’ll share later.  Consider getting a small notebook and beginning your own word collection.)

Oct 1999 – Subject: My Collection

Hello From India,

This letter has nothing to do with India except that I am writing it from here.  What this letter does have something to do with is a large number of items I obtained while on our vacation in Britain this past summer.  I hope this letter is a world‑wide… nay… universe‑wide cyber first!

I started a collection while in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.  I won’t be able to continue the collection until I go back, which is o.k., really, because I have enough to satisfy me until then.  I started a collection of pub names.  Continue reading →

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Bombay Letters: Servant Talk

Posted on August 8, 2011 by literarylee

May, 1998

Hello from Bombay,

We employ two servants, but it is hard to communicate what all that means if you don’t live with them and interact with them on a day-to-day basis.  I will share a few examples. This past Saturday evening at 7:00 p.m. the doorbell rings.  It is our driver, Hasmukh.  We had not asked for his services that evening even though we were going out.   He works 8‑6 Monday through Saturday and after that we pay him 40 rupees an hour ($1) overtime.  This past week we utilized his after-hours services a few times, partly because it is difficult to find parking once we arrive at our destination, and partly because it is his son’s birthday and we thought the extra income would help him purchase a gift.  That we thought the second one begins to get at what I mean by day-to-day living with and employing a servant.

So Hasmukh is at the door asking if we are going out that night.  Odd, I thought, but he is very nice, very polite, very trustworthy, so I wasn’t bothered or suspicious and told him, “Yes, as a matter of fact, we are.  We need to be somewhere at 8 o’clock.”  It bothered me a little, knowing that it bothers him when I drive.  Don’t misunderstand me.  He is not bothered because he is missing out on overtime, or because he is not tooling along in our lovely(?), luxury(?!), 1987 Toyota Van.  Oh no!  He’s bothered because Sahib (pronounced saab, like the car) is driving, something Sahibs or Memsahibs (Sahib’s wife) do not do.  In my typical American disregard for my proper station (which I am certain neither Hasmukh nor Patsy begrudge), I am doing something outside my calling and worse, doing something that is within his. Continue reading →

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Dreams

Posted on August 7, 2011 by literarylee

Langston Hughes

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

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Buckets o’ Bounty*

Posted on August 6, 2011 by literarylee

The entire gardening venture is satisfying and fun for the most part.  Yes, there are disappointments and frustrations such as critters that munch plants.  I believe I shared a half dozen ears of corn over the last couple of weeks with a creature able to peel the husk back.  I’m thinking raccoon.  Here’s what Robert Burns said to a mouse about sharing some of his corn with it:

 I doubt na, whiles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun* live!   (must)
A daimen icker* in a thrave*   (one ear out of a large bunch)
‘S a sma’* request;   (small)
I’ll get a blessin wi’* the lave*,   (with what’s left over)
An’ never miss’t!
(from the poem “To a Mouse” by Robert Burns)

Then you’ve got unpredictable weather, summer drought and over-wet spring, also a bother.  Add to that my foolish anxiety waiting for seeds to push through the soil, then the ridiculous worry, wondering if the plants will bear fruit.  These I bring on myself and almost always the seeds and plants prove me wrong by sprouting and bearing.  Gardening includes a lot of back-breaking work: turning over soil, lugging wheelbarrows full of manure or mulch or compost to the garden, watering.  There’s the tedium of planting tiny seeds one at a time in their own little cells.  And don’t get me started with weeding.  But these are why I like tending a garden, and part of what makes the July through September payoff so satisfying.

Continue reading →

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Among the Liberators: A Walk Down Virginia Avenue

Posted on August 5, 2011 by literarylee

Welcomed by poets, accompanied by statesmen and generals (the Liberators), walking mostly in the shade of lofty elms and oaks, the open-eyed pedestrian strolling down this street will be inspired, delighted and refreshed.  That’s why I’m writing a travelogue about this 1.1 mile gem of a street  in the northwest part of Washington, D.C. called Virginia Avenue.

A walk awaits

The Dream

I enjoy reading accounts of trips.  My favorite, Days and Nights on the Grand Trunk Road, by Anthony Weller who describes his journey on the famous road in India and Pakistan that runs from Calcutta to the Khyber Pass, is a well-written page turner of a book I highly recommend.  I dream of writing about traveling on one of the slightly less exotic but nevertheless fascinating and historic U.S. highways such as U.S. 30 (Lincolnway), U.S. 40 (National Highway), or U.S. 1 (Atlantic Highway).  I would interview people along the way, gather local history and stories, and paint a word picture of the road’s past and present.  The trouble with this dream is resources.  I have neither the time nor the money to take a trip like this, do the research, then write about it.  Since I haven’t yet gotten a call from National Geographic offering to sponsor me on such a venture, and since I am gainfully employed in a day job that gobbles up large chunks of my week, I need to put my dream of writing a travelogue on a back burner.

Or do I?          Continue reading →

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Socks Outside

Posted on August 4, 2011 by literarylee

I took my lunch break wearing socks,
I walked outside for several blocks

My shoes were new they hurt my feet,
Turned my poor heels to raw, red meat.

The pain was getting so intense,
To walk much more just made no sense.

I took them off, I stepped right out,
The cool relief ’bout made me shout.

I walked as normal down the street,
In shirt, tie, pants, and stocking feet.  Continue reading →

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The Rider Chronicles 8 – A Morning Stroll with Rider and his Grandmother

Posted on August 3, 2011 by literarylee

Sunday morning at Rider’s house and his grandmother, that dear woman I slept alongside these past hours, these past almost thirty years, and I were awake.  Anxious to spend time with him, we both wondered if our grandson was also awake.  As if reading our thoughts, sensing our desire to be with the child, out popped his  bleary-eyed father bearing the bundle we had hoped for.  After a few mumbled words of thanks to us for watching him (it had been a bad night), he headed back to bed.

The two of us know, we feel, what baby care is all about.  We did it with three babies, now adults, of our own.  I remember that joyful task seeming at times not so joyful, spending endless hours comforting or lulling to sleep little ones who seemed to want to do anything but.  Caring for Rider in dribs and drabs (at least for me; my wife has put in considerably more hours than I have) seems almost a lark.  Maybe this is one of the joys of grandparenthood.  Continue reading →

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The Accidental Pilgrim, part 1

Posted on July 31, 2011 by literarylee

The Accidental Pilgrim, Part 1: Nazareth, Cana, Mt. Tabor, Capernaum

November 2005

Hello from Jerusalem,

We were thrilled when they offered to take us to Galilee.  It was absurd that we’d been in Israel for over a year and hadn’t yet made or found the time to drive the mere two hours to the area around the Sea of Galilee with its many Christian sites, beautiful rolling hills, and pastoral landscape.  Now with two cousins and a cousin-in-law as house guests, we were finally making plans to go there, led by two Orthodox nuns from the monastery where we go to church.  Mother Katherine, an American about our age, and Sister Ambrosia, an English speaking Russian in her 30s, are fun, energetic and faithful people and we were glad to be guided by them.

The two nuns pulled up in their large van promptly at 8:00 a.m. the morning after Thanksgiving (along with the Abbess and other friends, they had celebrated Thanksgiving with us the night before).  Two hours later we parked in Nazareth at the church built over and around the well where Mary was told by Gabriel that she would give birth to Jesus.  The smallish church has an Orthodox looking sanctuary with a set of stairs off the side leading to a dimly lit area where you could look down and see the spring.  A spigot drawing from the spring allowed visitors to fill bottles with the water

Entering the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth

Continue reading →

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Poem Memory Tip # 7

Posted on July 30, 2011 by literarylee

Some poems contain a line that seems almost perfect.  Or if not perfect, at least rare, clever, beautiful, and therefore, completely memorable.  I recently finished memorizing Shakespeare’s Sonnet 99 and recited it to my bride on our 3oth wedding anniversary this past week.  The poem’s theme is familiar: the sight of something beautiful, in this case flowers, reminds the poet of his love.  In fact, he can’t even see or smell flowers without being reminded of her and in fact, finding her superior to any of them.  Robert Burns’ poem, Of A’ the Airts, conveys the same theme.

Here are the first five lines of Sonnet 99.

The forward violet thus did I chide:
Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells,
If not from my love’s breath?  The purple pride
which on the soft cheek for complexion dwells
In my love’s veins thou hast too grossly died.

Line two is an example of a rare, lovely line.  Its structure and melody, its rhythm and flow make it easy to remember.  It almost memorizes itself.  First, it contains ten syllables, just what you’d expect from a sonnet.  Second, it fits a rhyme scheme (smells and dwells).  But the almost magical part is the interplay of S and Th.  Except for the words whence and didst, every word begins with either S or Th.  The last six words alternate Th with S and form a kind of melody.  When memorizing a line like this, it helps to know the pattern.  And if, while memorizing, you get stuck on a particular word, you can at least know that it starts with an S or a Th.

Memorize a poem.  Discover a perfect sentence.  Make your bride smile.

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