Category: history
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The Gaze Blank and Pitiless
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WB Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” was written almost exactly a century ago, but if it’s possible for a poem to become truer still with age, then surely this one does. And yet…Yeats wrote his poem in 1919, in the aftermath of the First World War and the beginning of the Irish War of Independence…
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West of Caritas
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“The Conversion of Saul” by Michelangelo, Pauline Chapel fresco, Vatican City. This “I” we each inherit, made spine of the world, axis, pole, look-out from the world’s helm gazing on the universe, gazing on you, gazing on death… “Mummy,” I said, seven or eight years old, “I have decided that I am God.”…
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The Photograph
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“He first deceased : she for a little tried To live without him, liked it not, and died.” There they stand, those old antagonists, posing at the head of the high-walled city, that vast coronet of ruin. Above them, the daily familiar blue glare of God’s regard, far beneath them, their radiant…
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Trace a Fraught Frontier
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Where’s the fraught frontier between Mercia and East Anglia ? Guards were stationed here gazing out from within. And within was somewhere to die for. And without was someone to kill. I explored it once, that fraught frontier, now footpath between nettles. It was sunday and Cambridge families were out walking there after a good…
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Cat Vies with Hard Drive for my Soul
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Our race has re-made the world to be a reflection of our own chaotic inner lives and processes. We’ve fashioned our environment in such a way that it has become our self-portrait (if we dare to look). Perhaps we see ourselves for the first time, when we look out on the world we have made.…