Authors Electric

On Black Wednesday just past, Alex, Kay's granddaughter, wrote a plaintive message on Facebook: Thanks, Donald, for spoiling my birthday. Couldn't be put better! I thought I'd already started my November blog. It was on a subject which, on Wednesday, I suddenly saw as a miserable and insignificant self-regarding piece of triviality and I had neither will nor energy to continue. I may  return to it next month if the present fit wears off in time. I tried to think rationally about the disaster which took place on Tuesday night  and Wednesday morning but couldn't, though I may be on the way to doing it now.  I just wanted to express what I felt. But I didn't have the words. So I turned to poetry - other people's, not only because I can't write the stuff but  because I believe, with Shelley in his A Defence of Poetry , that 'Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.' Why? Because, he memorably says (with the obtrusive ...

“I told you I was ill.” Me in my kitchen. Must fix light. Of course not! The line is from Shelley’s Ozymandias, a great sonnet for reciting aloud late at night when you’re alone in the house. Don’t tell me I’m the only one. It helps to have a kitchen with a bit of echo (we had ours knocked through recently, not solely for this purpose), and as you change the bin-liner, or stir your solitary mug of tea, you can especially tinker with the climactic line, ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’ How many exclamation marks to add to ‘despair!!!’ this evening? Where to place the emphases? ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’? ‘Look on my works, ye mighty ’ (sarcastic), ‘Look on my works –’ (no). Hours of fun. It’s surprisingly hard to commit ‘Ozymandias’ to memory, I think because of the oddly fragmented way the phrases tumble around each other, like the stones of the ruin. So here it is in full: I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and tr...