Tag Archives: Poetry

Dissembling

Posted on January 14, 2026 by Lee

“… And I who am here dissembled / Proffer my deeds to oblivion…” (T.S. Eliot, from “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree,” in Ash-Wednesday.) “Dissembled” here seems to be intended to suggest “disassembled,” since the bones of the … Continue reading →

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Fog

Posted on December 31, 2025 by Lee

In “Morning at the Window,” T. S. Eliot is looking down at a foggy street and it’s the brown fog itself that seems to throw up to him “Twisted faces from the bottom of the street, / And tear from … Continue reading →

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Impatience

Posted on December 29, 2025 by Lee

“The conscience of a blackened street / Impatient to assume the world.” I’ve been thinking about these lines from T. S. Eliot’s “Preludes” over the past couple of days. The street is silent and empty at night, but we are … Continue reading →

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A little says a lot

Posted on July 6, 2023 by Lee

“In the chair / I decided to call Haiku / By the name of Pop” I like Jack Kerouac’s approach to haiku. As everyone knows, haiku means a poem of seventeen syllables. But Kerouac didn’t think the syllable restriction worked … Continue reading →

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Godspeed

Posted on June 6, 2023 by Lee

“This day winding down now / At God speeded summer’s end” are the first two lines of Dylan Thomas’s “Prologue.” William York Tindall points out how the “now” and “end” stand at the ends of the lines, giving these words … Continue reading →

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Happenings

Posted on December 16, 2019 by Lee

In W.H. Auden’s poems, there are “happenings” and there are “ways of happening.” Poets create ways of happening, and this is why such people are generally considered useless – at least by the practical people in our society who concern … Continue reading →

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Know Thyself

Posted on August 26, 2019 by Lee

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Know Thyself” seems to offer up two possible interpretations, and I wonder whether Coleridge believed self-knowledge was possible or not. The poet asks “Say, canst thou make thyself?” and urges his reader to “Learn first that … Continue reading →

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Book Review: Significant Other by Isabel Galleymore

Posted on July 22, 2019 by Lee

Isabel Galleymore’s Significant Other is about the modern human being and her relationship to nature. When the poet is “walking with the ocean below” she is walking with the ocean. She asks the ocean questions, to which “the ocean blinked” … Continue reading →

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Notes on Dante’s Paradise, Canto 3

Posted on May 3, 2019 by Lee

“… think carefully what love is and you’ll see …” This line hands you the key to the poem, if you haven’t picked it up already. The universe of Dante is a hierarchy, where every individual’s place in the order … Continue reading →

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Telling It

Posted on March 15, 2019 by Lee

“I see the boys of summer in their ruin “Lay the gold tithings barren, “Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils …” Great store is set today by grit: telling it like it is, calling it as you see … Continue reading →

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