Category — Literature

Robert Browning’s Home Thoughts from Abroad seems a good poem for 1 April. I first loved this poem when I read it at my prep school. I must have been about 10 at the time. Of course, global warming has changed the timing of Spring growth.

Home Thoughts, From Abroad

Oh, to be in England
Now that April’s there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England

Every morning I read something from the Baha’i sacred writings. I do this in obedience to Baha’u'llah’s command. It’s my obligation. But, more than that, this reading is food for my soul.

The odes of Jalaluddin Rumi have been a kind spiritual dessert to the main course of Baha’u'llah’s writings during this Fast. Here’s ode 3050 (in the version by Coleman Barks from Rumi: Like This, published in 1990 by Maypop Books):

The Lord of Beauty enters the soul
as a man walks into an orchard
in Spring.
xxxxxxxxxCome into me
that way again!
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxLight the lamp
in the eye of Joseph. Cure Jacob’s
sadness. Though you never left,
come and sit down here and ask,
“Why are you so confused?”

Like a fresh idea in an artist’s mind,
you fashion things before they come into being.

You sweep the floor like the man
who keeps the doorway:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxWhen you brush
a form clean, it becomes
what it truly is.

You guard Your Silence perfectly
like a waterbag that doesn’t leak.

You live where Shams lives,
because your heart-donkey was strong enough
to take you there.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, spirituality, fasting, poetry, mysticism, Rumi

According to this report, reading Shakespeare is good for the brain.

Why? Well, apparently it’s to do with something called “functional shift“. An example of functional shift is using a noun as a verb, as in “he godded me” (from the tradegy of Coriolanus).

According to Professor Philip Davis from the University of Liverpool’s School of English:

By throwing odd words into seemingly normal sentences, Shakespeare surprises the brain and catches it off guard in a manner that produces a sudden burst of activity - a sense of drama created out of the simplest of things.

Professor Neil Roberts, from the University

Technorati Tags: Shakespeare, brain, functional shift, noun, verb, Coriolanus

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London sunrise

I have to thank the Neocrats for this poem by Khalil Gibran. It is very appropriate for the state of our world.

Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion.

Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave, eats a bread it does not harvest, and drinks a wine that flows not from its own wine press.

Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero, and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.

Pity the nation that despises a passion in its dream, yet submits in its awakening.

Pity the nation that raises not its voice save when it walks in a funeral, boasts not except among its ruins, and will rebel not save when its neck is laid between the sword and the block.

Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox, whose philosopher is a juggler, and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking.

Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpetings, and farewells him with hootings, only to welcome another with trumpetings again.

Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years and whose strong men are yet in the cradle.

Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation.

Sunday 20 August, 2006
It’s worth setting what Baha’u'llah says about the state of the world alongside what Gibran wrote about the nation.

We can well perceive how the whole human race is encompassed with great, with incalculable afflictions. We see it languishing on its bed of sickness, sore-tried and disillusioned. They that are intoxicated by self-conceit have interposed themselves between it and the Divine and infallible Physician. Witness how they have entangled all men, themselves included, in the mesh of their devices. They can neither discover the cause of the disease, nor have they any knowledge of the remedy. They have conceived the straight to be crooked, and have imagined their friend an enemy.

Baha’u'llah’s vision encompasses the whole human race and is expressed in a far more encompassing language than that used by Gibran.

Technorati Tags: poem, Gibran, religion, nation, Baha’u'llah

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