Category: Poetry
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Norwegian Wood
Among all of the Beatles’ ballads that I listened to in my youth, Norwegian Wood stood out for its romantic tune and peculiar title. I didn’t understand English as well then, but a read of this song’s lyrics is anything but. As the authors had clarified straightaway, it was about an affair gone awry. As…
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The Birch Tree
At Loschwitz above the cityThe air is sunny and chill;The birch-trees and the pine-treesGrow thick upon the hill. Lone and tall, with silver stem,A birch-tree stands apart;The passionate wind of spring-timeStirs in its leafy heart. I lean against the birch-tree,My arms around it twine;It pulses, and leaps, and quivers,Like a human heart to mine. One…
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Venice
Along the coast of northeastern Italy, where the rivers Brenta, Adige, and Po meet the Adriatic sea, lies Lido, a long sand-bank that forms a bulwark to protect the Lagoon of Venice from fierce storms sweeping often over this turbulent sea. Over thousands of years, sediment brought down from the Alps by these rivers built…
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Winter’s Bone
Considered the greatest Russian poet, Alexander Pushkin is to Russian letters what Leonardo da Vinci is to Western European art. He is regarded as the founder of modern Russian literature, the inventor of the modern Russian language, who bridged the gap between the literary Russian of the past and the vernacular. To the Russian people,…
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A Meditation on Death
In the early 19th century, a school of landscape painters, later coined the Hudson River School, flourished alongside the American conservation movement. Influenced by the European Romantic era, the Hudson River School celebrated and idealized nature above that made by man. Founded by the English émigré Thomas Cole in 1825, its beginning was marked by…
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The Moon
While the global calendar in use for official activities is the solar calendar, which keeps track of the Sun’s position relative to the stars, many parts of the world also maintain another calendar, which keeps track of the Moon’s phases. The moon makes a complete orbit around the earth in 28 days, but it takes…
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The Dragonfly
The Brazilian poet Mário Quintana was quoted to have said, “Don’t waste your time chasing butterflies. Mend your garden, and the butterflies will come.” As a gardener, I can say that birds will come as soon as there’s a slightest sighting of fruits, flowers, a water puddle, or even just freshly tilled soil, but it’s…
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Portrait of A Lady
Your thighs are appletrees whose blossoms touch the sky. Which sky? The sky where Watteau hung a lady’s slipper. Your knees are a southern breeze — or a gust of snow. Agh! what sort of man was Fragonard? — As if that answered anything. — Ah, yes. Below the knees, since the tune drops that…
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Women In Vietnamese Literature
I have previously written about the Vietnamese poet Hồ Xuân Hương, who was truly an outlier in Vietnamese literature. In a culture heavily influenced by Confucianism, during a time when women were to abide by the three obediences and the four virtues, she had the audacity to write poetry that was outlandish and sexually clandestine. …
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Concept Evolution
How we view the world reflects who we are, so that two individuals witnessing the same event or reading the same text may have completely different understandings of it. That one is always evolving means what one hears, sees, and reads is always evolving too. At different stages of life, we are moved by different…
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