More poetry
Once again up too late, I just found Keat's Hyperion, and finished book one. I would love to give impressions, but the fact is that I'm really not very good at poetry. Even I can gather the mournful tone... perhaps as I read the rest I'll get better? I don't know.
I love the description of the Goddess. She is described as Earth, so perhaps Gaea? Saturn speaks to Thea, so I think maybe Althea, though she was mortal.
So came these words and went; the while in tears
She touch’d her fair large forehead to the ground,
Just where her falling hair might be outspread
A soft and silken mat for Saturn’s feet.
One moon, with alteration slow, had shed
Her silver seasons four upon the night,
And still these two were postured motionless,
Like natural sculpture in cathedral cavern;
The frozen God still couchant on the earth,
And the sad Goddess weeping at his feet:
Until at length old Saturn lifted up
His faded eyes, and saw his kingdom gone,
And all the gloom and sorrow of the place,
And that fair kneeling Goddess; and then spake,
As with a palsied tongue, and while his beard
Shook horrid with such aspen-malady
The more I read this passage, the more I need to read it again. The lines, "One moon, with alteration slow, had shed/ Her silver seasons four upon the night," especially, paint such a beautiful background to the lonely, sad end of an era.
Tomorrow seems a more appropriate time to finish. Before I read Simmons' Hyperion, I was only vaguely aware that a man named John Keats had existed, with possible peripheral awareness that he had written poetry. I suppose Keats was one of those artists that was never appreciated in his own time, and reading over some of his works now it's difficult to see how. Here lies one whose name was writ on water, indeed.
Man, I don't even like poetry.
I love the description of the Goddess. She is described as Earth, so perhaps Gaea? Saturn speaks to Thea, so I think maybe Althea, though she was mortal.
So came these words and went; the while in tears
She touch’d her fair large forehead to the ground,
Just where her falling hair might be outspread
A soft and silken mat for Saturn’s feet.
One moon, with alteration slow, had shed
Her silver seasons four upon the night,
And still these two were postured motionless,
Like natural sculpture in cathedral cavern;
The frozen God still couchant on the earth,
And the sad Goddess weeping at his feet:
Until at length old Saturn lifted up
His faded eyes, and saw his kingdom gone,
And all the gloom and sorrow of the place,
And that fair kneeling Goddess; and then spake,
As with a palsied tongue, and while his beard
Shook horrid with such aspen-malady
The more I read this passage, the more I need to read it again. The lines, "One moon, with alteration slow, had shed/ Her silver seasons four upon the night," especially, paint such a beautiful background to the lonely, sad end of an era.
Tomorrow seems a more appropriate time to finish. Before I read Simmons' Hyperion, I was only vaguely aware that a man named John Keats had existed, with possible peripheral awareness that he had written poetry. I suppose Keats was one of those artists that was never appreciated in his own time, and reading over some of his works now it's difficult to see how. Here lies one whose name was writ on water, indeed.
Man, I don't even like poetry.