The Meat man wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 7:21 pm
Doc Dan wrote: ↑Sun Jul 02, 2023 11:30 pm
Doc, have you ever read any of Andrew Klavan's books? If not I have a feeling you'd enjoy them. I especially like his more recent
Another Kingdom trilogy, and the new and on-going Cameron Winter series. They're the kind of books that are hard to put down - fast paced and action packed, but with a
lot of depth and insight to them; they make you think after you read them.
One thing that made me think of Andrew Klavan is that he's also a lover of the English Romantic poets. He recently wrote a book called
The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus. Never read it but I've heard good things about it.
Thanks! Truth and Beauty sounds like a great book.
I used to hate poetry. I thought it was for girls and sissies. Well, someone introduced me to Robert Service when I was stationed in Alaska so long ago and I fell in love with it. He said all of the things I was experiencing. Anyway, I also discovered Tennyson and Walter Scott. I really like those two. There is nothing sissy about either one of them. After that, I came to appreciate Rossetti, Burns, Browning, and more. I've even tried to write some poetry, myself. I'm not good, I'm afraid, but I still try.
Some of the English poets were pagans or hedonists. However, many, like Rossetti, Tennyson, and others were of deep faith. poems say a lot with fewer words that have to be tasted and reflected upon. Good poetry is meant to be read out loud, even if to oneself. The words have a sound and a taste or something.
Read Tennyson's Idylls of the King or Scott's Lady of the Lake for some manly poetry that are actually stories. Read Service if you want a taste of the Yukon and Alaska.
Here is Robert Service's The Three Voices. The man lies camping on a lonely beach in the far North:
The waves have a story to tell me,
As I lie on the lonely beach;
Chanting aloft in the pine-tops,
The wind has a lesson to teach;
But the stars sing an anthem of glory
I cannot put into speech.
The waves tell of ocean spaces,
Of hearts that are wild and brave,
Of populous city places,
Of desolate shores they lave,
Of men who sally in quest of gold
To sink in an ocean grave.
The wind is a mighty roamer;
He bids me keep me free,
Clean from the taint of the gold-lust,
Hardy and pure as he;
Cling with my love to nature,
As a child to the mother-knee.
But the stars throng out in their glory,
And they sing of the God in man;
They sing of the Mighty Master,
Of the loom his fingers span,
Where a star or a soul is a part of the whole,
And weft in the wondrous plan.
Here by the camp-fire’s flicker,
Deep in my blanket curled,
I long for the peace of the pine-gloom,
When the scroll of the Lord is unfurled,
And the wind and the waves are silent,
And world is singing to world.
