The Green Side of the Grass

Posted by Unknown On Wednesday, May 9, 2012 1 comments
It's lunch time so here's something to help you laugh and relax.

CLICK HERE TO ENJOY THE GREEN GRASS OF THE GRASS

Thanks to Freddie who sent me this video clip.

While you are enjoying that clip, do check out the following post from The Guardian HERE:

We are none of us getting any younger, and faced with the signs of bodies and minds that are slowing down with age we can only console ourselves with the thought that growing old beats the one available alternative.

Probably the most widely-known poem on the subject of ageing is Warning, by Jenny Joseph. Of course, Joseph's vision of old age as a time of rebelling against the tyranny of convention is a young person's view, and one that conveniently omits such unpleasant aspects of the process as memory loss and incontinence.

Matthew Arnold's Growing Old serves as a suitably melancholy counterweight to Warning's purple glow. For Arnold, the tragedy of age is to forget what it was to be young, or that you ever were a youth at all. Arnold's high Victorian despair makes me want to turn to Shakespeare's Madrigal, a defiant fist in the face of age.

Coleridge, in his Youth and Age, a title that echoes the Bard, is horrified to find himself say "when I was young"; this is the moment when he discovers that he is no longer a young man and must start to come to terms with this change. This need to learn to accept the new circumstances that come with a long life is also at the heart of Elizabeth Bishop's Crusoe in England; in Bishop's poem, Defoe's hero finds himself old and alone. His friend Friday is dead, his story has been misrepresented by those who have written about it, and the only people who show any interest in him are the ones who run the local museum; he has outlived his time.

Bishop has Crusoe lament his lack of knowledge; in contrast, Elizabeth Jennings' Rembrandt's Late Self-Portrait is a poem of ruthless self-knowledge. The painter has also outlived his time, but is celebrated for confronting the facts of ageing unblinkingly and defeating them by transmuting them into art.

It is a victory that is denied most of us; the best we can hope for is the "mustn't grumble" attitude of the old monk in Basil Bunting's Chomei at Toyama or the sense of being trapped that comes across so strongly in Robert Creeley's Age. Unless, of course, you're William Butler Yeats and can turn the process of growing old into a kind of grand drama, with yourself as hero. Yeats wrote extensively about ageing, perhaps most famously in When You Are Old, although personally I prefer his The Wild Old Wicked Man.

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1 comments to The Green Side of the Grass

  1. says:

    cin2tan I'm trying Zingko , MFIII, misai-kucin, black-face general, garden-snail eggs, lemon-grass, sour-sop fruit leaf root .....,&
    GOD's grace to stay YOUNG !!

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