Via abebooks, a little non-light reading. You need The Complete Works to go with it, as the author goes through all the sonnets.
Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher
Walter Savage Landor
I strove with none, for none was worth my strife:
Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art:
I warm’d both hands before the fire of Life;
It sinks; and I am ready to depart.
I might have come home today with a tidy pile of black fabric. Because I needed more variety, that’s why.
I’ve been doing a little research, thinking about what book to get for the next poetry “conversation” in March. We’ll be discussing W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney, two very fine Irish poets. I already have the collected works of Yeats and thought I would see what’s available for Heaney. Anyway I found this great quote here:
Asked about the value of poetry in times of crisis, Heaney answered it is precisely at such moments that people realize they need more to live than economics: “If poetry and the arts do anything,” he said, “they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.”
There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it ill behooves any of us to find fault with the rest of us.
