Keep on rocking in the free world

How ironic, after yesterday's post, to find myself on the street , waiting to see my local Member of Parliament, in the "company" of three Party functionaries.

One turned out to be a candidate in the upcoming local elections, one a photographer and the other must be someone because he arrived in the same car as the MP.

The three men, ignoring me (this is very odd in a small village) ; there were only the four of us in the street, were talking to each other as they stood right beside me, in a circle, in important voices.

One of the subjects that came up , we were there rather a long time, was Oscar Wilde's "The Ballad of Reading Gaol"; the photographer, who sported CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) stickers on his white van, parked in front of me, has just re-read the poem and found it very powerful. Absolutely.

The irony, I think, given what I was describing just a couple of hours before , in my blog below, is that one of the poem's most famous images is this one :

"I never saw a man who looked

With such a wistful eye

Upon that little tent of blue

Which prisoners call the sky,

And at every drifting cloud that went

With sails of silver by."


...If you pop over to http://www.eliteskills.com/c/1370, you will find not only the the entire poem there but also the most extraordinary analaysis by a 13 year old, that is so spot-on :

"I think he (Oscar Wilde) is just talking about the lack of respect for love that human beings used to be subject to in those times (and even moreso in these times)."

How that poem plays itself out, day after day.....

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

When I am 64 and other false positives : The PACE Trial.

THE STONEBIRD DEFINITION OF SEVERE ME

Paralysis, a qualitative study of people with Severe Myalgic Encephalomyelitis