Eccentric Flower:199901/lucinda and other fragments

five january (late-breaking)

lucinda and other fragments

I am stunningly impressed! Not twelve hours after I wrote it, three people have told me who Lucinda Matlock is (although one of them admits to cheating). My awe goes out to Mary Anne, Jette, and Wyyrd.

"Lucinda Matlock" is one of the poems in Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology - one of the good ones. I resented having to read this book in high school; we read Our Town at the same time and I feel like if you're going to be maudlin about the progression of life and death, Thornton Wilder's approach is the way to go. (OK, ok, I admit it - the end of the play, with the dead, really creeps me out and I love it.)

Anyway, most of Spoon River does nothing for me. Lucinda - she's the one who says "Oh my children/Life is too strong for you/It takes life to love life" - is all right, as is Cassius Hueffer:

While I lived I could not cope with slanderous tongues,
Now that I am dead I must submit to an epitaph
Graven by a fool!

I may be a cheerful soul, but I like my poems good and cynical.

Since I've got my book of poetry quotes open, let me see what else is in the box. It's that kind of night. I never quote entire poems here - that's a copyright violation - but I'm not above a fragment every now and then. Fortunately, I've got plenty of examples here where I only wrote down a fragment, because that was the only part of the poem I liked. I have a particular page in my book which consists of nothing but two-line fragments. I use them as email signatures sometimes.

It's usually no good to read them all together in one place, though; it diminishes their effect. Oh, well ... what's life without a little wretched excess every now and then?

But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement.
[W B Yeats]

Possessing what we were still unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
[Robert Frost]

Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
[Wallace Stevens]

It is needless to state that a trout on the plate
Beats several in the aquarium.
[Guy Wetmore Carryl]

Strange blessings never in Paradise
Fall from these beclouded skies.
[Edwin Muir]

For what one is, one sees not; 'tis the lot
Of him at peace to contemplate it not.
[Yvor Winters]

Approval of what is approved of
Is as false as a well-kept vow.
[John Betjeman]

Oh, come forth in the storm and rout
And be my love in the rain.
[Frost]

previous
next
this month

© columbine