Search Results: Wordsworth
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 06 December 2022
8 Comments
The child, Wordsworth thought, is able to witness the divine in nature, but gradually this ability fades. Whereas once everything seemed apparelled in celestial light/ the glory and the freshness of a dream, four stanzas end with the questions Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream? We know this development happens to us all.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Brian Matthews
- 07 September 2017
2 Comments
Born a few months after Shelley drowned and desperate to understand the living Nature the Romantics had known, Matthew Arnold too found the natural world had gone silent. Where Wordsworth had heard 'strange utterance [in] the loud dry wind' and 'the sky seemed not a sky / Of earth - and with what motion moved the clouds', Arnold sadly concluded that 'the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new, hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light ...'
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EDUCATION
- Gillian Bouras
- 20 December 2016
9 Comments
I have no idea how many students I've taught in two countries. I remember, usually, the high achievers and their troublesome and often troubled opposites, but most are a blur: the human memory has its limits. On the other hand I think I can name all the teachers I ever had: this, of course, is much easier to do. There was more evidence of this today. I was in the Kalamata post office, waiting my turn and clutching a fistful of cards bound for Australia, when a bearded young man asked me a question.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Peter Gebhardt
- 10 January 2014
1 Comment
Ten years ago, my wife and I went to Dublin. Upon our arrival at the hotel there were three notes waiting from Seamus; the first suggested a meeting, the second drinks, the third 'Heigho, we'll have some scrags'. He picked us up in a Mercedes Benz. I said something about a poet and such a car, 'Never mind it's got a broken window'.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Peter Gebhardt
- 05 September 2013
8 Comments
Ten years ago, my wife and I went to Dublin. Upon our arrival at the hotel there were three notes waiting from Seamus; the first suggested a meeting, the second drinks, the third 'Heigho, we'll have some scrags'. He picked us up in a Mercedes Benz. I said something about a poet and such a car, 'Never mind it's got a broken window'.
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ENVIRONMENT
- Barry Breen
- 10 April 2013
6 Comments
If poetry is the pulse of our cultural life, so too can it be seen as the pulse of our public decisions. Our poetry loving Minister for the Environment may find wisdom in the words of some of his favourite poets when it comes to decisions about the Murray Darling basin, Tarkine wilderness and Great Barrier Reef.
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AUSTRALIA
- Barry Gittins
- 05 January 2011
9 Comments
The next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders may merge Asperger's into the broader 'autism spectrum disorder'. The father of a misdiagnosed two-year-old boy reveals the emotional and social implications of mental illness pigeonholing.
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AUSTRALIA
- Barry Gittins
- 22 February 2010
17 Comments
The next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders may merge Asperger's into the broader 'autism spectrum disorder'. The father of a misdiagnosed two-year-old boy reveals the emotional and social implications of mental illness pigeonholing.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 20 May 2009
6 Comments
Les Murray describes himself as a poet who is religious
rather than a religious poet, and celebrates a sense of wonder and
mystery. In an increasingly secular age, poetry has a new
function as an alternative or complement to religion.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 28 January 2009
5 Comments
As the bush scents drift, I
remember: the aroma of fish and chips floating
along the platforms at Flinders Street Station; the smell of dust that
heralds a storm, as moisture hits
bone-dry earth. When your life is sliced in two by migration, you do not scorn nostalgia.
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RELIGION
The situation of Christians in Bethlehem is difficult, and many are leaving. It is hard to shed tears for Jewish victims of the Holocaust while living under Israeli military occupation, and it is equally difficult being part of a Christian minority in a predominately Middle Eastern Muslim society.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Brian Matthews
- 14 November 2007
A person unaware of and cut off from nature will be taken by surprise when nature embarks on one of its punitive cycles. The Romantic poets reckoned that there was a spirit within the natural world that you could connect with.
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