Benny Bunter
Well-known member
There's no way you can reduce this to just a sentimental poem about having kids
That bit about the film of ash in the grate is what links it to the Prynne I posted, musing at the firesideThis bit:
Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, every where
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought.
feelings too | |
Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps, | |
As may have had no trivial influence | |
On that best portion of a good man's life; | |
His little, nameless, unremembered acts | |
Of kindness and of love. |
me and woops dont have emotions we dont evn know what they are
The whole romanticism movement is fascinated by children/childhood - rather than mini adults childhood acquires its own state. The argument about whether we are blank slates or vessels to be filled with knowledge. Also WW and his ‘child is father of the man’ and that growing up is growing towards the shade of the prison gate. For Coleridge the child has this potential to grow up with this new of being, that he doesn’t have to go through what Coleridge has gone through. Nature will be his school mistress. To us, in our kid centred world, none of it may seem radical but it sure as fuck was back then.I could be wrong here but I think being a bit sentimental about children was something of a 19th C. invention, after Rousseau.
Also some of the language, again, registers as cloying, when the sentiment (love for your child, hopes for their future) isn't.
No, having a look at it now. It's not poetry but he's nailed the twinkly eyed old codger sitting by the fireside and telling a (boring) story thing though.Have you read "Michael" @luka ? A very moving story of a shepherd and his son, Luke.
Most beautiful line that stood out to me last night:
"... he had been alone
Amid the heart of many thousand mists,
That came to him, and left him, on the heights."
The way the story begins reminds me a little of Hadjit Murad by Tolstoy.