tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145653764764266444.post1465735924168018566..comments2023-10-17T08:19:58.196-04:00Comments on FreeThinke: FreeThinkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16682678301019952436noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145653764764266444.post-4107728729410564952015-11-09T07:32:13.240-05:002015-11-09T07:32:13.240-05:00Too bad, but that is your right and privilege.
W...Too bad, but that is your right and privilege. <br /><br />We all have our limitations.FreeThinkehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16682678301019952436noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145653764764266444.post-6249766015275986462015-11-08T14:36:46.991-05:002015-11-08T14:36:46.991-05:00Thank you, sir. I have found the more involved I b...Thank you, sir. I have found the more involved I become with material of this quality, the more it means to me, and the more I want to learn about how it is put together from a technical standpoint, and what may or may not have motivated the author to compose it. The more I learn the more I want to know, and the harder I try to unlock whatever "secrets" may be embedded the more I grow to love the material.<br /><br />What frankly started out as a lark sixty-odd years ago, ultimately developed into a passionate preoccupation, and finally a life-sustaining avocation.FreeThinkehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16682678301019952436noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145653764764266444.post-88914348988589301422015-11-08T14:27:36.264-05:002015-11-08T14:27:36.264-05:00Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age sho...<b><i>Do not go gentle into that good night,<br />Old age should burn and rave at close of day;<br />Rage, rage against the dying of the light.<br /><br />Though wise men at their end know dark is right,<br />Because their words had forked no lightning they<br />Do not go gentle into that good night.<br /><br />Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright<br />Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,<br />Rage, rage against the dying of the light.<br /><br />Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,<br />And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,<br />Do not go gentle into that good night.<br /><br />Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight<br />Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,<br />Rage, rage against the dying of the light.<br /><br />And you, my father, there on that sad height,<br />Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.<br />Do not go gentle into that good night.<br />Rage, rage against the dying of the light.</i></b> <br /><br />~ Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)<br /><br />Please go back now, read it again and notice the tightly woven, highly restrictive nature of the form in which it is written. What may seem at first like a spontaneous outburst of raw emotion is in truth a disciplined, beautifully crafted work of poetic art. Yet, despite the strict schematic dictates it adheres to, it manages to SING. This is a mark of true genius.<br /><br />What Thomas has given us here is a VILLANELLE. "And what might that be?" you ask? Here is the demanding schemata which the poet followed to perfection.<br /><br /><br /><b>VILLANELLE</b> - The villanelle contains 19 lines, 5 stanzas of three lines each and 1 stanza of four lines with two rhymes and two refrains. The 1st, then the 3rd lines alternate as the last lines of stanzas 2,3,and 4, and then stanza 5 (the end) as a couplet. It is usually written in tetrameter (4 feet) or pentameter. The structure is as follows<br />:<br />line 1 - a - 1st refrain<br /> line 2 - b<br /> line 3 - a - 2nd refrain<br /><br />line 4 - a<br /> line 5 - b<br /> line 6 - a - 1st refrain (same as line 1)<br /><br />line 7 - a<br /> line 8 - b<br /> line 9 - a - 2nd refrain (same as line 2)<br /><br />line 10 - a<br /> line 11 - b<br /> line 12 - a - 1st refrain (same as line 1)<br /><br />line 13 - a<br /> line 14 - b<br /> line 15 - a - 2nd refrain (same as line 2)<br /><br />line 16 - a <br />line 17 - b<br /> line 18 - a - 1st refrain (same as line 1)<br /> line 19 - a - 2nd refrain<br /><br />Incredible that so much artful calculation could go into a work so powerfully expressive, but that strict discipline is applied to virtually all works of musical and poetic art. The test of greatness is to write so well that all the formal underpinnings and pure craft disappear in subservience to the beauty and power of the affect, meaning and possible social significance. FreeThinkehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16682678301019952436noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145653764764266444.post-89245394836977631032015-11-08T14:09:52.762-05:002015-11-08T14:09:52.762-05:00This poem was left unfinished at Dylan Thomas'...This poem was left unfinished at Dylan Thomas' death. The first seventeen lines were untouched, but the rest was reconstructed and edited from Thomas' manuscript by his friend Vernon Watkins, who did, I must say, a magnificent job of completing it.<br /><br /><b>Elegy on the Death of His Father<br /><br /><i>Too proud to die; broken and blind he died<br />The darkest way, and did not turn away,<br />A cold kind man brave in his narrow pride<br /><br />On that darkest day, Oh, forever may<br />He lie lightly, at last, on the last, crossed<br />Hill, under the grass, in love, and there grow<br /><br />Young among the long flocks, and never lie lost<br />Or still all the numberless days of his death, though<br />Above all he longed for his mother's breast<br /><br />Which was rest and dust, and in the kind ground<br />The darkest justice of death, blind and unblessed.<br />Let him find no rest but be fathered and found,<br /><br />I prayed in the crouching room, by his blind bed,<br />In the muted house, one minute before<br />Noon, and night, and light. The rivers of the dead<br /><br />Veined his poor hand I held, and I saw<br />Through his unseeing eyes to the roots of the sea.<br />(An old tormented man three-quarters blind).<br /><br />I am not too proud to cry that He and he<br />Will never never go out of my mind.<br />All his bones crying, and poor in all but pain,<br /><br />Being innocent, he dreaded that he died<br />Hating his God, but what he was was plain:<br />An old kind man brave in his burning pride.<br /><br />The sticks of the house were his; his books he owned.<br />Even as a baby he had never cried;<br />Nor did he now, save to his secret wound.<br /><br />Out of his eyes I saw the last light glide.<br />Here among the light of the lording sky<br />An old man is with me where I go<br /><br />Walking in the meadows of his son's eye<br />On whom a world of ills came down like snow.<br />He cried as he died, fearing at last the spheres'<br /><br />Last sound, the world going out without a breath:<br />Too proud to cry, too frail to check the tears,<br />And caught between two nights, blindness and death.<br /><br />O deepest wound of all that he should die<br />On that darkest day. oh, he could hide<br />The tears out of his eyes, too proud to cry.<br /><br />Until I die he will not leave my side ...</i></b><br /><br />~ Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)FreeThinkehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16682678301019952436noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145653764764266444.post-49909150093357544142015-11-08T13:17:03.689-05:002015-11-08T13:17:03.689-05:00Remember the procession of the old-young men
From ...<i>Remember the procession of the old-young men<br />From dole queue to corner and back again,<br />From the pinched, packed streets to the peak of slag<br />In the bite of the winters with shovel and bag,<br />With a drooping fag and a turned up collar,<br />Stamping for the cold at the ill lit corner<br />Dragging through the squalor with their hearts like lead<br />Staring at the hunger and the shut pit-head<br />Nothing in their pockets, nothing home to eat,<br />Lagging from the slag heap to the pinched, packed street.<br />Remember the procession of the old-young men.<br />It shall never happen again.</i>Thersiteshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15751286903359745316noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145653764764266444.post-79272687656002132752015-11-08T13:03:26.881-05:002015-11-08T13:03:26.881-05:00Not a Dylan Thomas fan, sorry.
As for going "...Not a Dylan Thomas fan, sorry.<br /><br />As for going "gently into that good night," it sounds like something to aspire to.Thersiteshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15751286903359745316noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145653764764266444.post-81586217685381325902015-11-08T09:22:06.337-05:002015-11-08T09:22:06.337-05:00What a life, and what a great topic. Thank you fo...What a life, and what a great topic. Thank you for this post.Silverfiddlehttp://westernhero.blogspot.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145653764764266444.post-1203846519750902362015-11-07T22:50:33.421-05:002015-11-07T22:50:33.421-05:00Dylan Thomas, always a favorite... this particular...Dylan Thomas, always a favorite... this particular reading.<br /><br />Thanks for posting.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com