On National Poetry Day

Hello, thank you for calling in, I hope all is well?  I'm just popping in quickly because today is National Poetry Day in the UK and I couldn't let it go unmarked.  The theme this year is "Change" but even before I discovered that, I had already chosen the poem I wanted to share with you.  I first came across this poem when I was in my twenties in a book called Looking & Finding which was written by Geoffrey Grigson in 1958, a children's book which is described as "an invitation to become inquisitive and to wonder at the curious things made by man over vast stretches of time."  Even though I didn't find this book until I was an adult, I adore it and have read it many times.  I'd like to share with you this passage:

 

"I do not expect that everybody is going to develop into an expert.  There isn't any need to do everything in imitation of experts or too seriously.

 

It is not a bad thing to give yourself pleasure and delight, so long as your pleasures and delights do not get in the way of other people or upset them.

 

It is not a bad thing to be inquisitive and to wonder."

 

Isn't that lovely?  I'm not an expert in anything - in fact, I have often described myself as a "Jill of all trades, master of none"-  but I am inquisitive and I do wonder, and my explorations give me pleasure and delight.

 

Grigson writes, "Exploration - or looking and finding - is... a kind of long, personal poem, written, read, and enjoyed by the explorer.  All poems in a way are records by imaginative explorers..." and he goes on to suggest four poems to his readers.  One of them is this, written by Percy Bysshe Shelley and first published two hundred years ago.

 

Ozymandias

 

                                                    I met a traveller from an antique land,

                                                    Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

                                                    Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

                                                    Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

                                                    And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

                                                    Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

                                                    Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

                                                    The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

                                                    And on the pedestal, these words appear:

                                                    My name is OzymandiasOzymandias Pharaoh Rameses II (reigned 1279-1213 BCE). According to the OED, the statue was once 57 feet tall., King of Kings;

                                                    Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

                                                    Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

                                                    Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

                                                    The lone and level sands stretch far away.

 

I'll just leave that there for you to ponder upon, but I do wonder if any of you have a poem you would like to share today?

 

See you soon.

Love, Mrs Tiggywinkle x