Flos Carmeli

Dear Steven,

I started off at the top with First Confession - what a joy! He somehow captures the bright immediacy of youth as remembered by an adult.

Ode: Ha! I laughed til I cried - still chuckling! The form of the poem, considered apart from its subject, has a quiet regular strength and is very pleasing in its rhythm and its feel in the mouth, into which he throws some of the most hilarious imagery I've ever read. Vesuvius upside down!

And yet he ends, so to speak, with a thought that leads to the Incarnation.

Perhaps it's a guy thing - the hardest I've ever laughed was when Rusty Buzzard [sic] and I got on the subject of all the different sorts of grogans.
The bomb burst, the majestic Titanic pointing upwards as it sinks, etc.

I'd like to share this poem with my wife, but it's impossible for me to read it aloud.

Good stuff Steven! Who knew that the phrase "big pain in the rear" was poetry? *grin* I liked "First Confession" best.

I am off to read "Ode" but will leave you with a poem that I posted (http://happycatholic.blogspot.com/2005/04/favorite-poem.html).

Ode was fine (as you predicted I didn't like it as much as the two gentlement), but I did laugh out loud at A Brat's Reward.

Hi All,

Glad to be of service. My personal favorite is "Nude Descending a Staircase." I knew the poem before I knew the painting, and so seeing the inspiration was, shall we say, less than inspiring.

But wow:

"Her lips imprint the swinging air
that parts to let her parts go by."

And then that entire final stanza that begins "One woman waterfall. . ." this is poetry, pardon the pun, in motion--a beautiful use of rhythm, meter, assonance, alliteration, nearly every device you can imagine, and very, very simply done.

shalom,

Steven

Hi all,

Be sure to check out "Nothing in Heaven Functions As it Ought" with crowds of innocents huffing the nimbus off the venerable Bede, but Hell, sleek Hell. . .

shalom,

Steven