Bird-Brained Poems
The west was getting out of gold,
The breath of air had died of cold,
When shoeing home across the white,
I thought I saw a bird alight.
Author: Thomas Fleming
Advent and Christmas Poems
I am compiling a list of seasonal poems. Prof. Brownlow has made a wonderful suggestion of Robert Southwell. We can also do some poems about Winter.
Ajax: The Suicide
The Chorus, who have been obtuse throughout the play, have misunderstood Ajax’s parting words as a change of heart instead of a rueful admission that he misjudged the world he has lived in. The drama becomes more intense, when a messenger comes in to report on Teucer’s hostile reception in the Greek camp, and on the instructions he had received from Calchas the prophet NOT to let Ajax out of his hut.
What Are the Classics? Conclusion
For several decades I have plagued teachers and school principals with a few basic questions, without finding anyone of them who could give a reasonable answer. Until these questions are seriously addressed, there can be no significant improvement in education. It is not as if they are trick questions. They are the kind of queries that would be made of any human activity that absorbs to much time, energy, and resources.
Defining Terms: A Brief Squib
There is an interesting FB discussion going on over a post by Carl Jones on the question of capitalism. I would suggest that people who use terms like free market and capitalism begin by understanding the literal meaning of the words they are using.
Poetry: Robinson Jeffers
It is not bad. Let them play.
Let the guns bark and the bombing-plane
Speak his prodigious blasphemies.
The First Stasimon and Second Episode
The chorus is, as we say in psychobabble slang, into denial and don’t want to talk about Ajax’s impending suicide. Instead, after complaints about life in the field outside Troy, their thoughts carry them back to their home on the island of Salamis.
What Are the Classics and Why Should We Read Them”
We live in a culture gone mad on theory: theories of sex and family, theories of government, and, inevitably, theories of education. A debate has raged for centuries over “the future of education.” Early American liberals like Noah Webster insisted that a democratic society needed a suitable educational system, divorced from the classical tradition that encouraged aristocracy and elitism.
Down With Polling!
“Pollsters always lie, as we know, but apart from that, polling should be a major felony because it is based on the degrading fallacy that it is important to know what people want and that political–therefore social and moral–questions can be treated as a popularity contest.”
