Poems Of The Week

Voltaire at Ferney

W. H. Auden



Perfectly happy now, he looked at his estate.
An exile making watches glanced up as he passed
And went on working; where a hospital was rising fast,
A joiner touched his cap; an agent came to tell
Some of the trees he'd planted were progressing well.
The white alps glittered. It was summer. He was very great.
Far off in Paris where his enemies
Whsipered that he was wicked, in an upright chair
A blind old woman longed for death and letters. He would write,
"Nothing is better than life." But was it? Yes, the fight
Against the false and the unfair
Was always worth it. So was gardening. Civilize.

Cajoling, scolding, screaming, cleverest of them all,
He'd had the other children in a holy war
Against the infamous grown-ups; and, like a child, been sly
And humble, when there was occassion for
The two-faced answer or the plain protective lie,
But, patient like a peasant, waited for their fall.

And never doubted, like D'Alembert, he would win:
Only Pascal was a great enemy, the rest
Were rats already poisoned; there was much, though, to be done,
And only himself to count upon.
Dear Diderot was dull but did his best;
Rousseau, he'd always known, would blubber and give in.

Night fell and made him think of women: Lust
Was one of the great teachers; Pascal was a fool.
How Emilie had loved astronomy and bed;
Pimpette had loved him too, like scandal; he was glad.
He'd done his share of weeping for Jerusalem: As a rule,
It was the pleasure-haters who became unjust.

Yet, like a sentinel, he could not sleep. The night was full of wrong,
Earthquakes and executions: soon he would be dead,
And still all over Europe stood the horrible nurses
Itching to boil their children. Only his verses
Perhaps could stop them: He must go on working: Overhead,
The uncomplaining stars composed their lucid song.



You Are Beautiful

Poem by Padraic Husemann


You are beautiful
Not only because of the brownness of your eyes
Or the shape of your body
Not only because of the fullness of your lips
Or the curl of your eye lashes

You are beautiful because You want to be
You are beautiful because God made you that way
You are beautiful because in my eyes
THERE IS NO ONE MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN YOU

You are beautiful because you have a heart
And that is a beautiful thing
You are beautiful because you have a brain
And that is a beautiful thing
You are beautiful because You give advice
And that is a beautiful thing

You are beautiful because God made You that way
You are beautiful because in my eyes
THERE IS NO ONE MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN YOU

You are beautiful because you have confidence
You are beautiful because you have determination and wit
You are beautiful because you have goals and you plan to reach them
You are beautiful because you are always there to lend a helping hand

You are beautiful because God made you beautiful


That last one is so ..for lack of a better word ,, beautiful.

Uh Amazon?

Another day of relaxing and reading as well as playing some music.

Had a problem with one Amazon order - had a text message to say the address is invalid. Poppycock! Was meant to arrive today but alas the text message from them dashed my hopes.

Well if they do not sort it out i will cancel and ask for a total refund,and i was looking forward to hearing this -

Vocabulary

Interesting icicle here on expanding your vocabulary -


https://medium.com/science-journal/how-to-expand-your-vocabulary-4131cf6d3622

This is the author;s ten steps approach.


Look Up Every New Word

Ask Your Friends

Read Every Day

Get a Kindle

Be Patient

Podcasts and Audiobooks

Mnemonic Devices

Write It Down

Every Read is a Write

Be Concise, Not Verbose

Parcel Delivery

I didn't know that cats can deliver Amazon parcels.



Riley making sure it is safe.

Book 30 - Pierre Bayard "How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read"

Pierre Bayard "How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read" (Bloomsbury)





This is a surprisingly thoughtful rumination on books.

How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read,  by a hip French literature professor named Pierre Bayard,; because make no mistake, this is not exactly a practical how-to guide to faking your way through cocktail parties, but more a sneaky examination of what it means to "read" a book anyway, if by "read" you mean "understand, relate to, can recall details of, and can discuss with others."

After all, if we read a book as a child and then completely forget its story as an adult, do we still get to count that as a "read" book?

Bayard gets into all kinds of interesting questions like this, ultimately arguing that the most important thing we can do as readers is understand the entire time period that book is a result of; in the goal of accomplishing that, then, he argues that it's perfectly okay to just read the Cliff Notes of famous huge books you know you're never going to get around to actually reading, perfectly okay to discuss a book at a cocktail party you're familiar with but haven't actually sat down and scanned each and every page. This is how we learn, he argues, how we grow as both humans and patrons of the arts; every Wikipedia entry we read, every conversation we fake our way through, every BBC adaptation we check out, ultimately helps us understand the full-length books we do sit and closely read from the beginning to the end, which is why we shouldn't be ashamed of any of these activities but rather proud of them.

Funny, smart, and very French; a very fun afternoon of reading.