In Memoriam: To My Grama With Love

Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep

By Mary Elizabeth Frye

Do not stand at my grave and weep,

I am not there; I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow,

I am the diamond glints on snow,

I am the sun on ripened grain,

I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you awaken in the morning’s hush

I am the swift uplifting rush

Of quiet birds in circling flight.

I am the soft star-shine at night.

Do not stand at my grave and cry,

I am not there; I did not die.

Remember
By Christina Rossetti

Remember me when I am gone away,

            Gone far away into the silent land;

            When you can no more hold me by the hand,

Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.

Remember me when no more day by day

            You tell me of our future that you planned:

            Only remember me; you understand

It will be late to counsel then or pray.

Yet if you should forget me for awhile

            And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

            For if the darkness and corruption leave

            A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smile

            Than that you should remember and be sad.

She Is Gone

By David Harkins

You can shed tears that she is gone
or you can smile because she has lived.

You can close your eyes and pray that she’ll come back
or you can open your eyes and see all she’s left.

Your heart can be empty because you can’t see her
or you can be full of the love you shared.

You can turn your back on tomorrow and live yesterday
or you can be happy for tomorrow because of yesterday.

You can remember her and only that she’s gone
or you can cherish her memory and let it live on.

You can cry and close your mind, be empty and turn your back
or you can do what she’d want: smile, open your eyes, love and go on.

i carry your heart with me

By e. e. cummings

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)

                                                      i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

One Art

By Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.  

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident

the art of losing's not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

from How to Like It

By Stephen Dobyns

But the dog says, Let's just go back inside.

Let's not do anything tonight. So they

walk back up the sidewalk to the front steps.

How is it possible to want so many things

and still want nothing. The man wants to sleep

and wants to hit his head again and again

against a wall. Why is it all so difficult?

But the dog says, Let's go make a sandwich.

Let's make the tallest sandwich anyone's ever seen.

And that's what they do and that's where the man's

wife finds him, staring into the refrigerator

as if into the place where the answers are kept--

the ones telling why you get up in the morning

and how it possible to sleep at night,

answers to what comes next and how to like it.

Happy 200th Birthday, Charles Dickens!

Today (my half birthday) is Charles Dickens' bicentennial birthday! To honor that, I've finally finished my posting that I began while reading David Copperfield two weeks ago. I haven't read a lot of his novels, but many of my fondest childhood memories involve my mother reading A Christmas Carol  to me and the two of us watching Oliver Twist and other movie adaptations of his books. As I told my mother earlier today, for better or for worse, I'm attributing a good bit of my love for English literature (and consequent desire to study the same) to the fact that she used to read to me from Dickens, Poe, Nash, and Wordsworth (to name only a few). The jury is out on whether it's blame or praise she should receive for this. Today, I'll simply say, "Thanks, Mom. Without your encouragement, I wouldn't be racking up thousands of dollars in student loans."

Though I have often thought it might be fun to be Jane or Elizabeth Bennet, or some other other of Jane Austen's heroines, after reading Charles Dickens' David Copperfield, I have decided that the one thing I would not wish to be in the nineteenth century is a young orphaned boy (though I'm not sure it would be any better to be a young orphaned girl, likely she would end as a prostitute as Little Em'ly does). Poor Davy reminds me quite a bit of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones eponymous main character (whose life I read about last term). Both are orphans, both have self-righteous people telling lies to others about their supposedly irredeemable bad qualities, and both are naively innocent to a point that makes me want to cry out to them, "No, you should NOT trust all of your hard-earned pennies to that person of an obviously suspicious nature!" Dickens, like Fielding, chooses to tell nearly the entire life story of his main character, which while interesting makes both books long to the point of soporific tediousness. The twenty-first century reader in me is always going, "Okay, get on with it. Let's have done with it already." The main difference between the two books is that Fielding's had an amazingly intricate weaving of plot and action interspersed with essays, while Dickens wrote a much more character-centric novel (told in first person) that stops to wallow in character, emotions, and thoughts much more than Fielding did.

Copperfield's eccentric Aunt Betsey is possibly my favorite character in the whole novel (his nurse/maid Peggotty is a close second). In a twist on the usual obsession with male heirs, she shows up on the eve of his birth determined that his mother should give birth to a girl that she (the aunt) will help raise. She's so disappointed upon learning Copperfield's gender that she leaves immediately and isn't seen for about 10 years or so.

I've selected one of my favorite passages about her in honor of Dicken's birthday today and since I didn't end up reading it at our "Twopenny Reading" Birthday Party at school, I will post it here:

From David Copperfield, Chapter XIII

"To this hour I don’t know whether my aunt had any lawful right of way over that patch of green; but she had settled it in her own mind that she had, and it was all the same to her. The one great outrage of her life, demanding to be constantly avenged, was the passage of a donkey over that immaculate spot. In whatever occupation she was engaged, however interesting to her the conversation in which she was taking part, a donkey turned the current of her ideas in a moment, and she was upon him straight. Jugs of water, and watering pots, were kept in secret places ready to be discharged on the offending boys; sticks were laid in ambush behind the door; sallies were made at all hours; and incessant war prevailed. Perhaps this was an agreeable excitement to the donkey-boys; or perhaps the more sagacious of the donkeys, understanding how the case stood, delighted with constitutional obstinacy in coming that way. I only know that there were three alarms before the bath was ready.; and that on the occasion of the last and most desperate of all, I saw my aunt engage, single-handed, with a sandy-headed lad of fifteen, and bump his sandy head against her own gate, before he seemed to comprehend what was the matter. These interruptions were the more ridiculous to me, because she was giving me broth out of a table-spoon at the time (having firmly persuaded herself that I was actually starving, and must receive nourishment at first in very small quantities), and, while my mouth was yet open to receive the spoon, should would put it back in the basin, cry ‘Janet! Donkies!’ and go out to the assault."