REA+3+Addition+Poems

REA 3 Additions Poems

Read (and listen) to each of these three poems. Compare and contrast them to "God's Grandeur" and the Christian/Catholic view that God is incarnated in every aspect of our lives and that grace abounds, that suffering is redemptive, and that there is the sure and certain hope of the resurrection.

1. Read W.H. Auden's "Stop All the Clocks" as you watch this video clip, []

W. H. Auden

//**Stop All the Clocks**//

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead, Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves, Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one; Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun; Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood. For nothing now can ever come to any good.

2. Read Ann Sexton's "The Truth the Dead Know" as you watch this video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkCHYVgXHiQ

//**The Truth the Dead Know**//

// For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959 // // and my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959 //

Gone, I say and walk from church, refusing the stiff procession to the grave, letting the dead ride alone in the hearse. It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate myself where the sun gutters from the sky, where the sea swings in like an iron gate and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones from the whitehearted water and when we touch we enter touch entirely. No one's alone. Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in the stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

3. Read "Colours" by Yevgeny Yevtshenko


 * Colours ** Yevgeny Yevtushenko[[image:Yevgeny_Yevtushenko.jpg width="167" height="244" align="right" caption="Евгений Евтушенко"]]

When your face

appeared over my crumpled life

at first I understood

only the poverty of what I have.

Then its particular light

on woods, on rivers, on the sea

became my beginning in the coloured world

in which I had not yet had my beginning.

I am so frightened, I am so frightened,

of the unexpected sunrise finishing,

of revelations

and tears and the excitement finishing.

I don't fight it, my love is this fear,

I nourish it who can nourish nothing,

love's slipshod watchman.

Fear hems me in.

I am conscious that these minutes are short and the colours in my eyes will vanish

when your face sets.