snobs continued...

So, I'm reading the letters of John Keats for my dissertation and have come across conclusive evidence for my hypothesis that English students and their ilk are indeed incorrigible snobs.

Keats hadn't written to the love of his life as much as much as she would have liked one particular week. What was his excuse?

I have been writing with a vile old pen the whole week, which is excessively ungallant. The fault is in the Quill: I have mended it and still it is very much inclin'd to make blind 'e's.

See, happens to the best of us.

Mary

So, first of all, happy new year one and all! Here's to 2011 - it'll be a good 'un, I can tell.

Secondly. I am currently writing my dissertation (as I'm in my third, and final, year of uni), and I've chosen to write about John Keats and Mary Shelley. I'm focusing on their personal letters rather than their literary works per se, and am discussing their desire to be remembered and their work to be recognised, as well as the huge struggles they came up against despite being incredible writers/poets.

Well, it's a blast if you're into Romantic poetry.

Anyway, I was reading some of Mary Shelley's letters today and came across this passage written after the death of her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. It's so stunning that it actually made me cry. This lady knows how to write grief. I've kept her spellings:

...I can at those moments forget myself - until some idea, which I think I would communicate to him, occurs & then the yawning & dark gulph again displays itself unshaded by the rainbows which the imagination had formed. Despair, energy, love, despondency & excessive affliction are like clouds, driven across my mind, one by one, until tears blot the scene, & weariness of spirit consign me to temporary repose...

The world will surely one day feel what it has lost when this bright child of song deserted her - Is not Adonais his own Elegy - & there does he truly depict the universal woe which should overspread all good minds since he has ceased to be their fellow labourer in this worldly scene...

Thus may I also say - The eight years I passed with him was spun out beyond the usual length of a man's life - And what I have suffered since will write years on my brow & intrench them in my heart...

Wow.

Don't worry, I'll post something perkier next time.

he knew his stuff

Though gay companions o'er the bowl

May dispel awhile the sense of ill;

Though pleasure stirs the maddening soul,

The heart -- the heart -- is lonely still.

- Byron

two cinema trips

The first:

Just lovely. Very beautiful film, full of colour and expression. Very sad, but to be expected given the true story, but very delicate and not over-sentimental. Not only that, but heroine is curvy enough to give us all hope of finding a tragic but beautiful Romantic poet out there.



The second:

Feel ashamed to admit it, but I really bloomin' enjoyed this one too. Perhaps not as heart-wrenching and gorgeous, but - I've got to hand it to them - it's certainly compelling. Left the cinema feeling all teen-angsty and as giddy as a 15 year-old, and inevitably in love with a werewolf. £4 well spent, I'd say.