On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year by Lord Byron

'Tis time this heart should be unmoved,
Since others it hath ceased to move:
Yet, though I cannot be beloved,
Still let me love!

My days are in the yellow leaf;
The flowers and fruits of love are gone;
The worm, the canker, and the grief
Are mine alone!

The fire that on my bosom preys
Is lone as some volcanic isle;
No torch is kindled at its blaze—
A funeral pile.

The hope, the fear, the jealous care,
The exalted portion of the pain
And power of love, I cannot share,
But wear the chain.

But 'tis not thus — and 'tis not here —
Such thoughts should shake my soul, nor now,
Where glory decks the hero's bier,
Or binds his brow.

The sword, the banner and the field,
Glory and Greece, around me see!
The Spartan, borne upon his shield,
Was not more free.

Awake! (not Greece— she is awake!)
Awake, my spirit! Think through whom
Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake,
And then strike home!

Tread those reviving passions down,
Unworthy manhood!— unto thee
Indifferent should the smile or frown
Of beauty be.

If thou regret'st thy youth, why live?
The land of honourable death
Is here:— up to the field, and give
Away thy breath!

Seek out— less often sought than found—
A soldier's grave, for thee the best;
Then look around, and choose thy ground,
And take thy rest.

Today is Byron's 226th birthday, a fact I was regrettably made to realise whilst filling in the date in an exam. I felt it was so representative of my life as a whole - incessantly teased with hints towards my real interests whilst completing something economics coerces me into. It is strange that most people in this country would consider themselves free when asked - when one really considers the world, it becomes quite clear that the individual under capitalism spends his entire life depleted and tyrannised by the weight of false necessity. Once we accept this as freedom, we will gladly accept the negation of the personality at the hands of others, and I believe this accounts for the preponderance of dull people at large today. The fact that all activity must be committed first for others is unconscionably inimical to the human spirit. 

I have a terrible habit of digressing wildly. The point is that this short poem is, in my opinion, one of the most challenging of Byron's (and also one of his last, if not his last). There is so much going on, and so many countervailing forces that it becomes difficult to discern his true feelings, and this is probably his intention. There is the conflict between youth and age, as must occur at an age such as 36, too old to really be a 'youth' but perhaps too young to really be a respectable adult. He writes of the death of passion and then, later, how adulthood impels him to 'Tread those reviving passions down'. Of course this is how encroaching adulthood feels - one is expected to be solemn and professional in today's world, and the word 'childish' is thoroughly derogatory in nature. There is with age a responsibility which is utterly baleful, and a burgeoning indifference to life's offerings, which Byron explained in a letter to Shelley: 'As I grow older, the indifference--not to life, for we love it by instinct--but to the stimuli of life, increases'. It is interesting to note that Byron died before he saw his 37th birthday, almost as if the emotional death of adulthood was a negation of his entire being, and that he was fated to embody the spirit of youth forevermore.

I cannot stay to chat, because I have another exam tomorrow, the content of which I am certain is relating to economics in some way, but I will use this evening to determine precisely this relationship. And thus we see freedom today - the freedom to be forced by that most vomitworthy thing, 'employment prospects', to do things one does not enjoy. Such is this distorted world. 

There's Not a Joy the World Can Give by Lord Byron

There's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away
When the glow of early thought declines in feeling's dull decay;
'Tis not on youth's smooth cheek the blush alone, which fades so fast,
But the tender bloom of heart is gone, ere youth itself be past.

Then the few whose spirits float above the wreck of happiness
Are driven o'er the shoals of guilt, or ocean of excess:
The magnet of their course is gone, or only points in vain
The shore to which their shivered sail shall never stretch again.

Then the mortal coldness of the soul like death itself comes down;
It cannot feel for others' woes, it dare not dream its own;
That heavy chill has frozen o'er the fountain of our tears,
And though the eye may sparkle still, 'tis where the ice appears.

Though wit may flash from fluent lips, and mirth distract the breast,
Through midnight hours that yield no more their former hope of rest,
'Tis but as ivy-leaves around the ruined turret wreath -
All green and wildly fresh without, but worn and grey beneath.

Oh, could I feel as I have felt, or be what I have been,
Or weep as I could once have wept, o'er many a vanished scene;
As springs in deserts found seem sweet, all brackish though they be,
So, midst the withered waste of life, those tears would flow to me.

I've been perched above the keyboard for some time, like a kind of domesticated vulture which has been told to write minutes for a business meeting. 'Where the fuck do I begin with this?' it would think in its vulturine tongue, claws lacerating the cheap plastic keys. The Tower of Babel would rise between it and the screen, precluding all expression on this decidedly English keyboard. For how might a vulture express itself if it cannot command a language common with its recipients? Indeed, how might it express itself if it cannot command a language common with its own heart? Words, for all their power, are blunt instruments, representing only vaguely what one might wish to say at any given point. It takes an incredible manipulator of these blunt objects to make something at all incisive. I can't make anything except rock soup at the moment. What I can do is read poems other people have written and hope that they approximate my thoughts. Then I post them on my moaning, anile blog and scavenge from the corpses. In this respect, the vulture is awakened to one of the secrets of life; I think it is important to learn from the lives of dusty, dead people. For one thing, they are usually far more interesting than shiny, non-dead people, who largely seem to lurch through life with their massive, cruciferous skulls filled with quotidian wank. 'Bread,' they say, 'need bread so don't die,' heaving their unwilling cadaver to the local supermarket (a word which warrants neither the root 'super' nor 'market'). All people seem to strive to perfect is the somatic, the material, the pointless. This is the capitalist delusion. But no more talk of capitalism here! 

What can I say of this poem? It describes my thoughts at present. In fact, I have always suspected that all people live the double life presented in stanza four, but I of course cannot be certain. It's perfectly possible to be affable and kind when one is flayed inside. Indeed it is not just possible but predictable. Look at people as you walk in public - there is usually something degraded in their aspects, some kernel of woe. I cannot stand this delirious notion that everybody is oh so happy. Of course this cannot be true, but what is so maddening is that people portray themselves as such. Anybody who is truly happy is ignorant to the black truth of the world.

This is why I begrudge animals their passivity, their galvanic responses to all of life's stimuli. By dispensing with this nonsense of rationality, they live in the present. More than this - they can only live in the present. There is nothing to suggest that an earwig has a conception of its mortality, or its ageing, or its evanescence. We live in the past, the present and the future, and thereby do not live at all. The blank walls of infinity which compass our brief spans somehow suffocate what we do have until we have nothing at all. Man treats himself so seriously - I sit here typing at a keyboard, a colossal shrew in a rotating chair. The vulture I discussed earlier, perhaps. What kind of perverse world is this? I'm sat in a library with solemn faces, Easter Island moai, strewn round me at indeterminate points, tapping plastic nodules on a plastic oblong. Their craggy features peer down on the buttons, to make sure order is maintained in the World of the Keys. This is our significance. We are a strange sect of button-tappers, bedizened in the most gaudy, modern clothing imaginable. Our god is Solemnity and our purpose is self-denial to the end. I do hope I'm not going mad. Yet there is something utterly bizarre in this entire experience. The concept of a library is the most ordered, artificial, sterile conceit. What is there here but dullness and waiting? Really, these people look as if they have been exhumed out of formaldehyde. 'The mortal coldness of the soul' descended on these people in the womb, I fear. Conceived in the freezer aisle, perhaps. People are dull and this is all. We should all be either screaming or laughing. Instead, we sit, composed like dead things, propped up with brittle bones through, in many cases, regrettable items of clothing. This is humanity today - domesticated and dull. I cannot bring myself to be excited at humankind - it really does tire me. Yet, like a hopeful fool, I return to it, arms wider, only to be rebuffed with improved vitality. I do wonder sometimes if it is I that is dull, and all the world is riotously interesting.

I don't know what happened in that last paragraph. I feel as if my brain has wept characters onto a page. I didn't even particularly discuss the poem. This is the first time I've ever composed a blog post in a library, and my misanthropic tendencies have made a grand appearance. Yet this is how I feel. 

All Is Vanity, Saith the Preacher by Lord Byron

I.
Fame, wisdom, love, and power were mine,
And health and youth possess'd me;
My goblets blush'd from every vine,
And lovely forms caress'd me;
I sunn'd my heart in beauty's eyes,
And felt my soul grow tender:
All earth can give, or mortal prize,
Was mine of regal splendour.

II.
I strive to number o'er what days
Remembrance can discover,
Which all that life or earth displays
Would lure me to live over.
There rose no day, there roll'd no hour
Of pleasure unembitter'd;
And not a trapping deck'd my power
That gall'd not while it glitter'd.

III.
The serpent of the field, by art
And spells, is won from harming;
But that which coils around the heart,
Oh! who hath power of charming?
It will not list to wisdom's lore,
Nor music's voice can lure it;
But there it stings for evermore
The soul that must endure it.

Today is National Poetry Day, one of those arbitrary events which paradoxically engenders in the beholder a sense both of hope and futility. Hope because it is at least heartening that poetry has not been entirely forgotten, but overwhelmingly a sense of futility in that poetry's standing in the world necessitates such a ridiculous gesture to begin with. Where does one begin? It is like having a national day for roller skating, or digressing excessively, or eating cheese. It almost means nothing. Those who would roller skate if left to their own devices (we can assume roller skates to have a place among these devices) will roller skate regardless of the day, and those who do not will hardly take up the activity simply because of some misplaced allegiance to nominal, calendrical rubbish. The day would simply serve as some kind of generator of strife between those who roller skate and say, 'That's a nice idea,' and those who do not roller skate and say, 'That's not a nice idea.' I like to think humans are not so shallow as to be swayed by such nonsense, but perhaps I speak too highly of my fellow bipedal primates. 

I think I would be a little more sanguine were it not for the absolute conspicuity of the fact that poetry is dead. Like rock and roll, it simply is not made anymore. Of course there are people who brand themselves as poets, and I'm sure there are people who brand themselves as supporters of the rock and roll movement, but let us not pretend that this is anything more than a token gesture. These movements are impossible to wilfully resurrect, and I cannot imagine any sort of new Romantic age unless there was a colossal coincidence of talent. It would not occur because some children had seen the hashtag #NationalPoetryDay on Twitter. Certainly, it seems nobody has been much inspired, all tweets containing fragments of prose nonsense demarcated by that oh-so-poetic line break. Please. Modern poetry is to me indistinguishable from rap lyrics, and this is naturally a cause for great regret. There is nothing poetic in the anaemia of modern poetry. One can almost imagine the Muses sitting on Mount Parnassus, passing a joint and watching episodes of The Only Way is Essex in their onesies. 

But this poem! Shitting Norah! It is perhaps tragic and certainly conceited to say that Byron is one of the people with whom I most sympathise, but there you have it. I've just mocked the state of all modern poetry, my conceit is already exposed. But seriously, I cannot say whether Byron had some supernal knowledge of the human character, or whether he had some supernal knowledge of my character, for I can only speak for myself, but he had some supernal knowledge of something. Who can say that they have not at times experienced a feeling of futility, of persecution even? Byron seems to summarise these feelings in a way unlike any other, he has a way of speaking not to academic fustiness but to the soul; Will Self writes of Byron that: 'I've always found George Gordon (Lord Byron) to be the most proximate of those literary and historical figures whose towering eminence and temporal removal should, by rights, place them at a distance.' So perhaps it is not just me. I think this proximate quality to his work can be attributed to its overriding candour. 

The title of this poem seems to come from Ecclesiastes: 'Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.' This is doubly interesting because it is precisely Ecclesiastes and Byron that Bertrand Russell synthesises in a chapter on 'Byronic Unhappiness' in The Conquest of Happiness, and whilst he makes an elegant attempt I'm not sure he wholly mollifies my pessimism. That's probably quite bad, isn't it? One of the biggest geniuses of the past 100 years cannot inculcate some optimism in me. 

Anyway, that's all folks. I keep reciting the first four lines of the third stanza in my head over and over again at the moment - much like a pop song but without the brain expungement. I think this is one of the lost and unappreciated charms of poetry - it has great music. Perhaps this goes some way to explaining poetry's demise, for music is far more accessible now than in previous centuries. It is now possible for the unwashed masses to gain a similar effect through the far less forbidding medium of pop music. Just a thought. 

To Inez by Lord Byron

Probably minutes after doing something of vague illegality

Nay, smile not at my sullen brow,
Alas! I cannot smile again:
Yet Heaven avert that ever thou
Shouldst weep, and haply weep in vain.

And dost thou ask what secret woe
I bear, corroding joy and youth?
And wilt thou vainly seek to know
A pang even thou must fail to soothe?

It is not love, it is not hate,
Nor low Ambition's honours lost,
That bids me loathe my present state,
And fly from all I prized the most:

It is that weariness which springs
From all I meet, or hear, or see:
To me no pleasure Beauty brings;
Thine eyes have scarce a charm for me.

It is that settled, ceaseless gloom
The fabled Hebrew wanderer bore,
That will not look beyond the tomb,
But cannot hope for rest before.

What exile from himself can flee?
To zones, though more and more remote,
Still, still pursues, where'er I be,
The blight of life--the demon Thought.

Yet others rapt in pleasure seem,
And taste of all that I forsake:
Oh! may they still of transport dream,
And ne'er, at least like me, awake!

Through many a clime 'tis mine to go,
With many a retrospection curst;
And all my solace is to know,
Whate'er betides, I've known the worst.

What is that worst? Nay, do not ask -
In pity from the search forbear:
Smile on--nor venture to unmask
Man's heart, and view the hell that's there.

Byron appears to be getting a disproportionate share of my attention on this blog but I don't much mind. Not when it allows me to post a surfeit of pieces like this, at least. I am fast starting to believe that he may be the best English poet, and certainly of the past 200 years, much though I love Poe and Shelley and Keats and all the rest. Before that, though, I think the contenders are Shakespeare and Milton, who are both nonpareils in their own unique ways. It's impossible and fruitless to attempt to compare them. But Byron was one of those very rare figures, like Oscar Wilde, who seemed so ahead of their time, and our time for that matter. There was such an understanding of what it was to be human - the absurdity, the folly, the rare moments of splendour that sanctify the endeavour. If anything, we have made a regression from the 1800s in terms of exploration of the human condition. Gone are the days of poems like this - nowadays it is enough to write about eating at Starbucks, or doing a shit, or both simultaneously, I can't stop you. All this wrought under the anaemic guise of what they call 'free verse', a rather deceptive moniker. It is not free poetry at all - it is the most stilted, constipated type of poetry imaginable. It is bound by its own indolence, poetry that has lost the will to live, and this is not freedom. And personally I think it is generous to confer the name 'poetry' on what is a collection of prose fragments. To me, metre is the heart of poetry. It is the sway and cadence of each line that generates the majesty required for the title 'poetry'. Poe wrote in The Poetic Principle that 'rhythm, and rhyme, is of so vast a moment in Poetry as never to be wisely rejected- is so vitally important an adjunct that he is simply silly who declines its assistance, I will not now pause to maintain its absolute essentiality.' So there.

I'm not quite sure why, but the last line of this poem rather disarmed me. I just somehow was not expecting that choice of words, but this is conducive rather than deleterious to the general effect. Additionally, the rhythm is so perfect. It is a belief I expect I shall forever stand by that poetry in metre has far more power to establish some imperium over the soul, and the final line of this poem exploits metre with ruinous impact (in a good way of course). It reminds me of the final line of Poe's Alone, 'Of a demon in my view,' which is prefaced by such momentum that the the curtness of the ending is all the more potent.

This poem is so clearly Romantic, its subject being that kind of solitary woe you might associate with the Byronic hero. People would often say of Byron that he looked at times rapt in another dimension, as if considering some exclusive misery. Indeed, he probably was, but he did try to affect dissatisfaction too, to bolster his appearance as the Romantic ideal - pale, thin, mysterious and haunted.

Overall, then, and indeed by any specifics, a cracking poem, Gromit. I can't speak for anyone else but I have a huge sympathy with what Byron writes here, and that's probably why I praise the piece so much. I should mention that it's part of Canto I of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which is well worth a read. Until our next convocation.  

The Dream by Lord Byron, Part 1

Our life is twofold; Sleep hath its own world, 
A boundary between the things misnamed 
Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world, 
And a wide realm of wild reality, 
And dreams in their development have breath, 
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy; 
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts, 
They take a weight from off waking toils, 
They do divide our being; they become 
A portion of ourselves as of our time, 
And look like heralds of eternity; 
They pass like spirits of the past -they speak 
Like sibyls of the future; they have power - 
The tyranny of pleasure and of pain; 
They make us what we were not -what they will, 
And shake us with the vision that's gone by, 
The dread of vanished shadows -Are they so? 
Is not the past all shadow? -What are they? 
Creations of the mind? -The mind can make 
Substances, and people planets of its own 
With beings brighter than have been, and give 
A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh. 
I would recall a vision which I dreamed 
Perchance in sleep -for in itself a thought, 
A slumbering thought, is capable of years, 
And curdles a long life into one hour. 


OK, this poem is incredible. I was very tempted to end the blog post there but I don't have much else to do, so ramble I will. This is only the first part of the poem, from nine in total. I was considering including the whole thing but it is probably slightly too long for a blog post. 

One thing to note about this poem is that it is very uncharacteristic of Byron to write in blank verse, he was a staunch defender of rhyming verse. He said of Milton's Paradise Lost that, ‘I am not persuaded that the Paradise Lost would not have been more nobly conveyed to posterity, not perhaps in heroic couplets – although even they could sustain the subject, if well balanced – but in the stanza of Spenser, or of Tasso, or in the terza rima of Dante, which the powers of Milton could easily have grafted on our language.’

Actually it seems Byron rather enjoyed criticising established greats of poetry, though of course he was entirely entitled to do so. He said of Shakespeare that: 'Shakespeare’s name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down. He had no invention as to stories, none whatever. He took all his plots from old novels, and threw their stories into a dramatic shape, at as little expense of thought as you or I could turn his plays back again into prose tales. That he threw over whatever he did write some flashes of genius, nobody can deny: but this was all.' This seems rather severe but honestly there is nothing terribly factually incorrect here. It is Shakespeare's masterful use of language that immortalises his works more than the stories themselves.

Anyway, I must leave now, I require a cold shower after reading that poem.

On The Death of a Young Lady by Byron

I am feeling perhaps more indolent than convention necessitates today, and so I'm going to take the route of least resistance and do some copy and pasting. This is a Byron poem that is notable for its context - it was written by Byron at 14(!). I'm fond of it but Byron really wasn't, writing in its first publication that:

'The author claims the indulgence of the reader more for this piece than, perhaps, any other in the collection; but as it was written at an earlier period than the rest (being composed at age 14), and his first essay, he preferred submitting it to the indulgence of his friends in its present state, to making either addition or alteration.' He would later go on to write in his notebooks that this poem is 'an Elegy. A very dull one.' I think he was overly harsh on his 14-year-old self, after all he has already grasped iambic pentameter, rhyme schemes, and much else besides. Though it was characteristic of Byron to scourge himself. I think in this case it was probably exacerbated by comparison against his idol, Alexander Pope, and Pope's achievements by his early teens. Pope famously wrote his Ode on Solitude at the age of 12, nearly unheard of in poetry. In classical music it is almost accepted as a truism that the early prodigies will become the leading figures in the future, but poets tend to begin a lot later.

This poem was written following the death of his cousin Margaret Parker*, whom Byron describes in his notebooks as 'one of the most beautiful of evanescent beings'. He again emphasises the deficiencies of the poem, further highlighted through contrast against his cousin, writing 'I do not recollect scarcely any thing equal to the transparent beauty of my cousin, or to the sweetness of her during the short period of our intimacy. She looked as if she had been made out of a rainbow – all beauty and peace.'

Byron recounts his reaction to the death of his cousin, writing 'My passion had its usual effects upon me: I could not sleep, could not eat; I could not rest; and although I had reason to know that she loved me, it was the torture of my life to think of the time which must elapse before we could meet again – being usually about twelve hours of separation! But I was a fool then, and am not much wiser now.'

Here is the poem, as you asked:

[1]

     Hush'd are the winds, and still the evening gloom,

       Not e'en a zephyr wanders through the grove,

     Whilst I return to view my Margaret's tomb,

       And scatter flowers on the dust I love.

[2]

     Within this narrow cell reclines her clay,

       That clay where once such animation beam'd;

     The King of Terrors seized her as his prey,

       Not worth, nor beauty, have her life redeem'd.

[3]

     Oh! could that King of Terrors pity feel,

       Or Heaven reverse the dread decrees of fate!

     Not here the mourner would his grief reveal,

       Not here the muse her virtues would relate.

[4]

     But wherefore weep? her matchless spirit soars

       Beyond where splendid shines the orb of day;

     And weeping angels lead her to those bowers

       Where endless pleasures virtue's deeds repay.

[5]

     And shall presumptuous mortals heaven arraign,

       And, madly, godlike Providence accuse?

     Ah! no, far fly from me attempts so vain,

       I'll ne'er submission to my god refuse.

[6]

     Yet is remembrance of those virtues dear,

       Yet fresh the memory of that beauteous face;

     Still they call forth my warm affection's tear,

       Still in my heart retain their wonted place.

*interestingly, Byron also wrote a poem on her brother's death, which I think I will write a blog post about in the future (as certainly I cannot do so in the past).

Blog on, mate

I apologise for the faintly gruesome title. I also apologise in advance for the far more gruesome stream of seemingly random words which is about to pass your eyes like some sort of Perspex hearse filled with decomposing, filled bin bags.

I've made a blog. I'm also in the mood for self-evident statements. I'm not really sure what to say actually. I'm inclined to believe this is a very unfavourable augury for the future success of this blog. Certainly running out of ideas before the first post is not what I was hoping for. Second or third post maybe.

I've called it, after at least forty seconds of vaguely strenuous book-grabbing, 'Redeemed from Worms'. This is from a magnificent Byron poem (I feel the 'magnificent' may be superfluous in this sentence) called Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup Formed From a Skull. I think a mere human can only imagine the vastness of a forehead which can comfortably house six verses of poetry. I wasn't going to quote the poem in full, but now I will do precisely that. Call the citation police if you want.


Start not -nor deem my spirit fled:
In me behold the only skull
From which, unlike a living head,
Whatever flows is never dull.

I lived, I loved, I quaffed like thee;
I died: let earth my bones resign:
Fill up -thou canst not injure me;
The worm hath fouler lips than thine.

Better to hold the sparkling grape
Than nurse the earthworm's slimy brood,
And circle in the goblet's shape
The drink of gods than reptile's food.

Where once my wit, perchance, hath shone,
In aid of others' let me shine;
And when, alas! our brains are gone,
What nobler substitute than wine?

Quaff while thou canst; another race,
When thou and thine like me are sped,
May rescue thee from earth's embrace,
And rhyme and revel with the dead.

Why not -since through life's little day
Our heads such sad effects produce?
Redeemed from worms and wasting clay,
This chance is theirs to be of use.


The story behind this poem is that Byron's gardener had found a skull in Byron's garden, as one does. Goodness knows why, but Byron decided to have this turned into a drinking vessel. He writes, in a letter which I'm certain I've read in full but can only find in part on Wikipedia, 'There had been found by the gardener, in digging, a skull that had probably belonged to some jolly monk or friar of the Abbey, about the time it was demonasteried. Observing it to be of giant size, and in a perfect state of preservation, a strange fancy seized me of having it set and mounted as a drinking cup. I accordingly sent it to town, and it returned with a very high polish and of a mottled colour like tortoiseshell'. So it seems I was right about the 'giant size' of this fortuitously endowed bonce.

I'm rather a big fan of simple rhyme schemes, and this poem profits hugely from such a structure. Byron had a habit of using rhyme schemes that would frankly have driven me insane if I had to write in them, such as Don Juan's complex but not altogether incomprehensible abababcc. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, however, uses a far more convoluted ababbcbcc. I think I would be liable to engage in heated debates with hairdryers if subjected to such a writing pattern. Or indeed any number of household appliances; perhaps a stern disagreement with the toasted sandwich maker; a chagrined altercation with the dumpling steamer. I could go on (but mercifully won't). I can only speculate that the unfortunate lack of dumpling steamers in Byron's era is what led him to making cups out of skulls. 

I feel justified in saying that after reading 'Fill up -thou canst not injure me;/The worm hath fouler lips than thine,' I can sympathise with the female hot flush. This is why I love poetry - one can create perfect beauty in a line and then almost disregard it in a pit of nonchalance by moving on to the next verse. 

Iambic tetrameter (duh-dun,duh-dun,duh-dun,duh-dun) is an often-overlooked metrical pattern which is very easy to begin with but very difficult to master. It is hugely challenging to compress poetic thoughts into 8- or 9-syllable lines. Pentameter and hexameter are more difficult to begin with but pentameter is used in probably 90% of structured poems, so you have a lot of reference material. The only poet I can think of who used tetrameter a huge amount is Andrew Marvell. Perhaps Jonathan Swift too.

I've rambled quite successfully about that poem but the point about the line redeemed from worms is that it represents the plucking of something from the past and restoring it into worth. Poetry is unbelievably neglected nowadays (unsurprisingly really - there is a veritable dearth of talent). Whenever I think of the state of poetry today, I think of Arthur Miller's phrase 'a paucity of heroes' - it seems perfectly apt. This was not a major phrase of his, but its beauty did linger in my head. Anyway, this blog is in part for the drawing of attention to poetry. There are too many worms and too much wasting clay for poetry to flourish unaided. 

This blog is not just for poetry, though. If my almost terminal indolence allows it, I will try to write slightly informal, or at least short, essays on subjects which occur to me. This keeps happening to me and I siphon off one paragraph before being sucked into the black hole of the kitchen, doomed to eat peanut butter on toast for the foreseeable future. 

I think I did have a brief outline for this first blog post but I've completely misplaced it. Isn't 'misplace' an odd word? It makes the rather large assumption that each thing has a proper place in the universe, from which it must not stray. If this were the case then I would certainly be in the pub this very second.

This will not be a lifestyle blog. For one thing, the word 'lifestyle' is almost emetic to me. I have no plan when I get up in the morning and this is no source of lamentation on my part (though I'm sure the same cannot be said of my poor, suffering parents). The idea of an artificial construct of a life, some dry husk which one must fill, is in my mind absolute anathema. There are two possible outcomes to such a situation. One, that you meet or exceed your own expectations and experience brief euphoria followed by impossible despair at the ease with which your hopes and aspirations were mown down like reeds. The thought 'Well what now?' is an unbidden inevitability. The other outcome is of course that you fail to meet your expectations and feel even worse. The other reason I will not have a lifestyle blog is that it would certainly bore you into extinction. I will give you a brief taste of such a life, almost as an vaccination against its future relaying. Today I slept at 11am, woke up at 8pm, ate a Snickers bar, and slept from 10pm to 1am. This is the sort of irresistible gossip one might come to expect from my life. So no, I will blog about the interesting things in this world. If anything interesting happens to me, of course I will include it, but that is not the primary purpose of this blog.

I feel I should end here, indeed my laptop is beginning to freeze as if in protest to the idiocy with which I've approached this post. The fantastic thing about making a blog is that if you're terrible at writing anything remotely interesting, and would therefore have some cause to be embarrassed (the ability to be boring is a curse far worse than lycanthropy), then your blog simply will not be read. In other words, success is the only scenario in which your blog will get any attention. So it's a great way of being able to write in a rather equanimous way whilst also having some sense of seriousness.

I will certainly think of something I've forgotten as soon as I publish this, but such is the dynamic lifestyle of pressing plastic keys on a keyboard. Hope I haven't bored you to death. Or even to incapacity.