Dear David F.,

Thank You for your wisdom.
I so enjoy reading your posts.
You write with grace and humour.
Your posts are always rich with
anecdotes, stories, dialogue, and
short but interesting scenarios.
Reading them is an intellectual pleasure
and an emotional delight!

Dear csteele,

Thank You for your input into this thread.
It's much appreciated.

"Come my love and we shall wander
All of life to see and know
In the season's lostward rambling
All things come and all things go.

We shall climb the snowy mountains
Sail across the rolling sea
We shall live for one another
I for you and you for me.

We'll go down to green grass meadows
Where the cold winds never blow
If we taste the wine of loving
Only you and I shall know.

Come my love and we shall wander
Just to see what we can find
If we only find each other
Still the journey's worth the time."

(Mason Williams).

Bush poetry, as seen on a sign

I've never been charged with trespass
I've never been charged with rape
But I will be charged with murder
If you don't shut this bloody gate

This is a passage from Charles Darwin's autobiography.

"Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, 'poetry of all kinds...gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in his historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also lost almost any taste for pictures and music...My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of fact, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the highest tastes depend, I cannot conceive...The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature."

Dear Banjo,

Loved it!

Smiles all round!

Dear Poirot,

Thanks for the Darwin reference.
I'm learning so much from this thread,
and loving it. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
wrote something very similar to Darwin:

"No man was ever a great poet, without
being at the same time a profound philosopher.
For poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of
all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions,
emotions, language."

And Goethe agreed:

"A man should hear a little music, read a little
poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his
life, in order that wordly cares may not obliterate
the sense of the beautiful... in the human soul."

(Sigh!)

Dear Foxy,
much as I hate to be the spoiler in all this fun (and I don't want to be the superego either), there's something so complacently middle-classed, so culturally-capitalistic about this thread (I expect the men will be retiring for port and sensible conversation shortly) that's imperialistic and shallow; as though we wrote the poetry and shared the pain, and so can comment authoritatively over tea and cucumber sandwiches. As Walter Benjamin observed, "There is no document of culture that is not at the same time a document of barbarism".

But on a lighter note, since a little bracing indecency seems passe; the premoderns were much more liberated than we. Chaucer translated:

This Absalom plumped down upon his knees,
And said: "I am a lord in all degrees;
For after this there may be better still
Darling, my sweetest bird, I wait your will."
The window she unbarred, and that in haste.
"Have done," said she, "come on, and do it fast,
Before we're seen by any neighbour's eye."
This Absalom did wipe his mouth all dry;
Dark was the night as pitch, aye dark as coal,
And through the window she put out her hole.
And Absalom no better felt nor worse,
But with his mouth he kissed her naked arse
Right greedily, before he knew of this.
Aback he leapt- it seemed somehow amiss,
For well he knew a woman has no beard;
He'd felt a thing all rough and longish haired,
And said, "Oh fie, alas! What did I do?"
"Teehee!" she laughed, and clapped the, window to;
And Absalom went forth a sorry pace.
"A beard! A beard!" cried clever Nicholas,
"Now by God's corpus, this goes fair and well...."

Dear Squeers,

You might enjoy some examples of modern
erotic Australian poetry. The first is -
J.J. Bray's poem,
"Lust and Love," - a clever, not entirely
facetious, discussion between two facets of human
experience - frequently contrary, occasionally
complimentary.

"Lust's an honest robber,
Bludgeoning for sex.
Love's a whining con-man,
Passing phony cheques.

Lust is intermittent,
Sups his fill and sleeps.
Love from dawn to sunrise
Castigates or creeps.

Lust is standard issue -
Men or pigs or geese.
Love's a visitation
From some god's caprice.

Lust can be diverted
Towards another goal.
Love is monomanic,
Compass to the pole.

Yet some say the prize piece
Life's mint ever coined
Comes when by some chance freak
Lust and love are joined."

The second is Elaine Golding's
"Genesis/take 2."

"lying beneath the tree
she's heady with the perfection
of moist ripe flesh
caught between exploring fingers
marvels at shape and texture
takes quiet pleasure
in sticky sweet juices
creeping beneath unpolished fingernails
decides to 'keep a secret' -
but he approaches
envious of the new found playmate
afraid of any contest
between it
and his own voluptuous substance
thus, reluctantly she reveals the fruit
lying softly between her legs
presses it to his mouth -

and knows there'll be trouble in Paradise tonight."

Cucumber sandwiches anyone?