Backyard and Beyond

3 Responses to “Violets”

1. 1 Ellen March 30, 2020 at 9:11 am

   Violets are my favorite! It is so nice to see this. With Spring being so different each year, I am always afraid I missed something. I will be trying to get into Van Cortlandt Park woods to take a peek at these. If we can still do that 😦
   Hope all is good with you and M. The quiet here means that I hear the birds more than people. Not a bad thing!

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2. 2 alaspooryorick March 30, 2020 at 9:13 am

   April is the cruellest month, breeding
   Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
   Memory and desire, stirring
   Dull roots with spring rain.

   From “The Waste Land” by T.S. Eliot

   The Waste Land is a poem by T. S. Eliot, widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry.Published in 1922, the 434-line poem first appeared in the United Kingdom in the October issue of Eliot’s The Criterion and in the United States in the November issue of The Dial. It was published in book form in December 1922. Among its famous phrases are “April is the cruellest month”, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust”, and the mantra in the Sanskrit language “Shantih shantih shantih”.

   Eliot’s poem combines the legend of the Holy Grail and the Fisher King with vignettes of contemporary British society. Eliot employs many literary and cultural allusions from the Western canon, Buddhism and the Hindu Upanishads. The poem shifts between voices of satire and prophecy featuring abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location, and time and conjuring a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures.

   The poem’s structure is divided into five sections. The first section, “The Burial of the Dead,” introduces the diverse themes of disillusionment and despair. The second, “A Game of Chess,” employs alternating narrations, in which vignettes of several characters address those themes experientially. “The Fire Sermon,” the third section, offers a philosophical meditation in relation to the imagery of death and views of self-denial in juxtaposition influenced by Augustine of Hippo and eastern religions. After a fourth section, “Death by Water,” which includes a brief lyrical petition, the culminating fifth section, “What the Thunder Said,” concludes with an image of judgment.

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3. 3 Monica M March 31, 2020 at 1:39 pm

   Matthew,
   Thanks for the Violas!
   My backyard, which was once my grandmother’s, is always full of the tiny variety. They bring wonderful memories each spring, as I was told when very young, to go pick a bouquet for my mimi. She’d display them in a small cobalt blue vase on the kitchen table. Beautiful. Their leaves are pretty too.
   Thanks for the memory.

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