It shocks me beyond words to think of the horror that the girls in the Muzaffarpur children’s home in Bihar have faced. This poem cannot come close to expressing the damage that such sexual, mental and physical violence does. Nevertheless, I had to write about it. This poem is for those girls and their immeasurable strength. ‘Dear God, Why Did […]
Monday afternoon, you step into the clamour of the school bus. You walk past the boys from the younger years busy with their usual jostling and jabbering. Peals of laughter pierce the air, mysterious objects are thrown around, and someone spills a packet of crisps on the floor. The older ones at the back are absorbed by a slice of […]
A pot of basil, two lovers and a tragedy. It's a plot that will always sound like you've heard it before (save for the pot of basil.) This week, read my take on the tragic Romantic-era poem 'Isabella' by Keats.
It is rare to find that one book on my reading list leads so effortlessly into the next one, but no sooner had I emerged from Hawthorne's 'The Scarlet Letter' did I stumble upon 'Unaccustomed Earth' by Jhumpa Lahiri, opening with this vivid epigraph (above). Long having claimed her place on my 'Favourite Authors' shelf, Lahiri brings her skill with the short story form to a life of travel and rootlessness.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter delves into one woman’s journey through guilt, temptation and societal humiliation. Set in a Puritan New England settlement, a young woman named Hester Prynne has been condemned to wear a ‘scarlet letter’ to shame her for having a child out of wedlock. Her husband, a traveler who is usually abroad, arrives to find her on […]
So, exam “season” is upon us. I wonder what the Romantic poets, with their capacity for celebrating the beauty of nature, would have to say about that phrase. Students, at this time of year, hardly look like poetic inspiration. We really don’t have time to think about gardens, like Blake, nor do we resemble the “dancing daffodils” Wordsworth stumbled upon […]
The blog hath risen from its slumber! As I have had some free time over the Spring Break, I managed to scribble down this poem. This is inspired by some of my recent reading: Shakespeare's 'Marriage of True Minds' and Carol Ann Duffy's 'Valentine'.
