by Orna Ross | Jan 6, 2014 | Poetry |
I have thoughts but I am not my thoughts. I am one who sees them swirl. What can be seen is not the seer. I have thoughts but my thoughts are not me. I have a body but I am not my body. I am one who makes it move. What can be moved is not the mover. I have a body but...
by Orna Ross | Dec 29, 2013 | The Rest |
This is a section from the most remarkable Christmas poem ever written, “For The Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio”, by WH Auden. Composed in 1942, the darkest days from the British Allies perspective of World War II, the poem is 1500 lines long (more than...
by Orna Ross | Dec 22, 2013 | Poetry |
It is a poem born out of loneliness and solitude. Kavanagh wrote it after spending another festive season alone in his bachelor flat in Dublin and the poem is infused with nostalgia for rural, farm-family life, recalled through the lens of Christmas. The memories...
by Orna Ross | Dec 8, 2013 | The Rest |
Yeats's near contemporary, TS Eliot, also pictures Christmas through the lens of the magi, though his are more human, more physical, occupying a poem full of the mundane details of travel: snow, lack of decent shelter, cursing camel-men, hostile cities and towns,...
by Orna Ross | Dec 1, 2013 | Fiction |
The “god-shaped question” is the subject of W.B. Yeats' poem about The Magi, the three men variously called kings or wise men who came to Bethlehem on the night of Jesus’s birth to pay homage to a new saviour. For Yeats, they are trapped forever in that posture of...