Monday, April 7, 2014

The Art of Saying Thank You

The New York Times' Guy Trebay discusses Jimmy Fallon, emoticons, and thank-you notes.

It's hip to write on a little paper square.

"'What they want...is to draw a distinction between the tossed-off, compressed nature of electronic messages and a form of ritualized communication that gives material evidence 'that the person really did appreciate something.'”

Thursday, April 3, 2014

Spring Poems: Emily Dickinson, "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass"

A narrow fellow in the grass 

BY EMILY DICKINSON
A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him—did you not
His notice sudden is,
The grass divides as with a comb,
A spotted shaft is seen,
And then it closes at your feet,
And opens further on.

He likes a boggy acre,  
A floor too cool for corn,
But when a boy and barefoot,
I more than once at noon
Have passed, I thought, a whip lash,
Unbraiding in the sun,
When stooping to secure it,
It wrinkled and was gone.

Several of nature’s people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality.
But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.

Spring Poems: Robert Frost, "The Pasture"

The Pasture

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I shan't be gone long. -- You come too.

I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother. It's so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I shan't be gone long. -- You come too.

Spring poems: AE Housman, "Loveliest of Trees"

"Loveliest of Trees"
LOVELIEST of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
  
Now, of my threescore years and ten,         5
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
  
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,  10
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

Spring Poems: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Frost, and Mortality

(really about grieving)

Spring and Fall
to a young child
MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older        5
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:        10
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

     And here is a companion poem from a different
author and century

Nothing Gold Can Stay

by Robert Frost

Nature's first green is gold, 
Her hardest hue to hold. 
Her early leaf's a flower; 
But only so an hour. 
Then leaf subsides to leaf. 
So Eden sank to grief, 
So dawn goes down to day. 
Nothing gold can stay. 
- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19977#sthash.bmNAsovi.dpuf