In today's poetry feature, Stephen selects three variations on Horace's famous advice about how to live... Perhaps the best-known piece of advice on How to Live was given by Horace: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero. In The Oxford Dictionary of Latin Words and Phrases (1998) the phrase is translated as ... Read More...
Poetry
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote his own requiem - and it echoed in the work of later poets... Robert Louis Stevenson suffered from ill-health for much of his short life. Nevertheless, he usually remained in good spirits. But he knew what he was up against. Thus, it is not surprising that, on ... Read More...
Brisbane-based journalist Ben Atherton reveals how Dylan Thomas led him astray... Back in the good old days, when I was trying to get my first job on newspapers, a standard interview question was: "Why do you want to become a journalist?". The standard answer always began with platitudes about an "enjoyment" of ... Read More...
Happy New Year from all at The Dabbler! For our first post of 2014, Stephen offers poems for the new year and the old... As the New Year arrives we should spare a thought for the Old Year. Yes, T. S. Eliot has suggested that "Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present ... Read More...
An eerily perfect etching casts a chilly spell over Jonathan Law. Winter in the cathedral city – somewhere in the north of England, some time (we might guess) in the earlier 1500s. Gothic structures rise from the earth, rear ponderously skyward, and lose themselves in the glistening, frosty light. Snow on ... Read More...
Merry Christmas from all at The Dabbler! It has now become a Dabbler tradition to give Brit's tragicomic Christmas poem an airing. The ideal time to read it is on Christmas Day, upon waking after your post-lunch nap... A boozy, stomach-busting Christmas dinner – preceded by beer and champagne, accompanied by ... Read More...
Stephen brings you some poetry for Christmas Eve... Christina Rossetti's best-known poem is usually sung or listened to, not read. I suspect that many of those who sing or listen to the verses are not aware that they were written by Rossetti. Here is the first stanza of the poem: In the ... Read More...
In this weekend's poetry feature Nige considers the use of enjambment... What is wrong with this poem? Why no! I never thought other than That God is that great absence In our lives, the empty silence Within, the place where we go Seeking, not in hope to Arrive or find. He keeps the interstices In our knowledge, the ... Read More...
The biography of the austere and forbidding poet R.S. Thomas is a hoot, reveals Nige... It's not often a biography has me laughing out loud - let alone in the Introduction. But so it was with Byron Rogers' The Man Who Went Into the West: The Life of R.S. Thomas, which ... Read More...
Kingsley Amis rated A.E. Housman as one of the greatest English poets. Stephen reveals why... The two great themes of A. E. Housman's poetry are love (unrequited, or requited and lost) and death (or, put differently, the fleeting nature of life). These subjects are addressed in verse that some may find ... Read More...
