Dear Pericles,

Thank You for explaining your position.

Now, allow me to explain mine.

Dorothy Auchterlonie (or Green) was one of the
poets I chose for an anthology of Australian
poetry as part of my degree. Chooseing a theme
for an anthology of Australian poetry was not an
easy task. Colleagues at work suggested a variety
of themes, amd just as I was starting to make up
my mind, a crisis in the Persian Gulf made it up for me.

An anthology based on an anti-nuclear theme of Australian
poetry suddenly became for me, the assignment I had to do.

I felt that we needed new ways of thinking to cope with the
nuclear age. It is here that writers with their concern
for the human condition and their special skills with language,
can enable us to imagine the horrific reality of nuclear
arms and nerve us to build an alternative future.

As for your criticism of Dorothy Green - remember the context
and time about which she writes. "Even in 1900,
Madame Butterfly was out of date, Fidelity, acceptance, death
or dishonour - what quaint anachronisms!..." And:
"...No penalties-only consequences, Which Pinkertons cannot evade,
Any more than Butterflies..." (if the shoe fits ...).

Anyway, the technology since 1945 has changed! Yet the moral
position is still the same as in this poem of Dorothy
Green's ... One can rid the world of atrocities only by
refusing to take part in them!

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn tells us in the Preface, to his book,
"The Gulag Archipelago<" about an old Russian proverb that says:

"No, don't! Dig up the past!
Dwell on the past and you'll lose
an eye!"

But the proverb goes on to say: "Forget the past and you'll
lose both eyes."

Decades have gone by, and the scars and sores of the past
are healing over for good. However, unless we learn
from the mistakes of the past, the tragedies (such as
those mentioned in this poem) it is unlikely that we will
have a future to contemplate. The moral choice is ours
to make.

Dear Foxy,

I'm glad you got a laugh. Especially after your horrible days this week past.

I recognize what you're saying about the poetry-yuk syndrome. It took me about 20 years to pick up on Shakespeare again after spending a year with a teacher who didn't have the knack for it (nice woman though she was). I'd been enjoying Shakespeare by just reading The Merchant of Venice on my own. I zoomed over language I didn't grasp - but got the feel of the story and characters and was getting enthusiastic about it. Nasty Shylock! Clever Portia! Then the formal teaching began and the teacher had us all go through and dissect each line and word meticulously. Snore fest. Ruined it for me completely. Mind you I didn't think as well of Portia when I reread it 20 years later either. Our perspective sure changes over time. It pays to read an item more than once I think.

Poirot; Hey g'day. I thought so too :)

Dear Pynch,

Teachers have a tremenduous influence on a
child. I remember my Mathematics teacher
who convinced me that I was a total idiot
when it came to Maths. To this day - I
still have problems with the subject.
Even though I have no trouble doing the
money at the end of the day at the library
branch. It's the mental attitude. I guess
the same goes for any subject - once we
get fixated on it. I remember a line out of
the film "Annie Hall," that might make you
laugh.

"I heard that commentary and dissent have
merged and formed - dysentery."

Dear Foxy,

Teachers can get a student to hate a subject, but I hope you will have an aftermath where you will learn to love the beauty of numbers and mathematical reasoning. I remember Olive C. McGavern, my junior high school English teacher, who wore a black ribbon with a jeweled clip around her neck - presumably to hide the wrinkles. She taught me to love Shakespeare and to hate George Eliot. When we would read aloud from Shakespeare Olive C. would say, "Sally, read from line 97 to line 120." When Sally would finish, OCM would say, "John, continue from line 137 to 160." I would hurriedly look to see what was between 120 and 137. Invariably there would be a sexual reference. In figuring out what it meant (I would have been unaware if OCM hadn't pointedly ignored it) I got engrossed in the language and loved the flow and the wit. "Shakespeare's Bawdy" by Partridge contains many of Will's sexual references.

We went through Silas Marner and her attention to the minutiae made it hate it. About 45 years later I picked "Middlemarch", and it was great. Since then I have read all of Eliot's novels including Silas Marner again.

Dear davidf,

I thought you might find the following 5 lined poem as powerful as I did.

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner by Randall Jarrell published in 1945. It is about a gunner on a World War II American bomber aircraft, who was killed and whose remains were unceremoniously hosed out of the turret.

My English Lit teacher in a Victorian State School Fred L. was my favourite. A Sri Lankan he only stood a bit over 5 foot in the old scale with a very small stature and a pageboy haircut. But he could hold a double class of unruly state school kids spell bound. He was able to speak old English fluently as well as Latin and numerous other languages, and oh what a voice.

He had a form of leukemia acquired, he suspected, from taking hundreds of xrays of himself with a silver strip down his tongue in order to examine how it was involved in speech.

If my memory serves me right he only had 2 students fail his HSC class in nearly ten years of teaching.

Speaking of Shakespeare and bawdy lines one of the kids is studying Richard 111 at the moment and in Act 1, scene 1 I found the lines;
“He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.”

Would this be the Shakespearian equivalent of intimating oral sex or am I reading far too much into it?

Dear csteele,

That is a most powerful poem. There was a very handsome young man I knew in the army who survived the war but had his face below his eyes shot off. I have often wondered what the rest of his life was like. At my age I find most of those I knew are dead or around the bend. I appreciate Foxy, you and a lot of other people on this list.

A couple of days his sons emailed me that a dear cousin of mine had died. He was on dialysis but hoped he had many years left. He had requested that there be no funeral to mourn his death but a big party to celebrate his life.

I am sure that Shakespeare often had the origin of the world (see Courbet) on the tip of his most fluent tongue.

Olive C. had us skip the following lines from the Taming of the Shrew:

KATHERINA. If I be waspish, best beware my sting.
PETRUCHIO. My remedy is then to pluck it out.
KATHERINA. Ay, if the fool could find it where it lies.
PETRUCHIO. Who knows not where a wasp does wear his sting? In his tail.
KATHERINA. In his tongue.
PETRUCHIO. Whose tongue?
KATHERINA. Yours, if you talk of tales; and so farewell.
PETRUCHIO. What, with my tongue in your tail? Nay, come again, Good Kate; I am a gentleman.

Lechery and gluttony can keep one preoccupied so one can abstain from being cruel or inconsiderate which are real sins.

A nude newt,
The brewed brute
Strummed a lewd lute
On a skewed scute.