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Melanie Bettinelli's avatar

One of my favorites. A reminder that I should share it with my daughter who loved the Alison Uttley novel, A Traveller in Time, about a girl who goes back in time to get tangled in the Babington plot.

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Mark Brown's avatar

The poet was 24. At 24 he both could pen such a poem and take part in a real high level conspiracy. I compare that right now to having a 22 year old and a 19 year old lazing around the house apparently all summer. Neither of whom seem to be able to write an effective resume to wait tables. I'll give the 16 year old shuttling himself between athletic fields all day all summer a break. That might be as quixotic as killing Elizabeth I, but it is a plan being worked. The poet's conception of youth feels more modern or more like ours where life might not start until you are thirty-something and we should get a free pass. Where as surely Walsingham would have thought something like "you were old enough to make choices and now are paying for those choices like a man." There is something off with our conception of youth.

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Michael Kupperburg's avatar

One of the better examples of how Death concentrates the mind.

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Joseph Bottum's avatar

Knowing that you're being hanged in the morning concentrates the mind wonderfully. Unfortunately, what it concentrates the mind on is the fact that you're being hanged in the morning.

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Dave's avatar

It’s still amazing to me how religion through the years has resulted in so many unnecessary deaths of young and old.

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John Kelleher's avatar

An old favorite

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Zina Gomez-Liss's avatar

I am most certainly among those readers who are moved by those one-hit-wonder poets. There are many poets who known to the poetry world as having a body of work; however, in greater layman’s culture they only really know in the for one poem (like Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays”) if they are to be known at all. In Tichborne’s case, he hadn’t much other than this sad beauty which likely would not have been written except for the immediate circumstances that caused his death.

How ironic is it that Chidiock Tichborne’s death sentence ultimately gave him poetic immortality?

Also, did you hear A. E. Stallings do her explication of this poem in her latest Oxford lecture? She also gave some love to “tares” — a lovely rhyming word that sadly is too archaic to reasonably use on the regular.

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Frank Dent's avatar

Tare is still used to some extent in U.S. agriculture as a general term for a group of legumes, vetch probably the most common, often planted as a forage or cover crop.

https://plant4harvest.com/what-is-a-tare-plant/

Coincidentally, Horace & friends today quoted an Edwin Muir poem that also included “corn and tares.” What are the odds? Maybe the word will have a comeback.

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Zina Gomez-Liss's avatar

Yes, I noticed “tares” in Victoria’s post about the Muir poem as well! We will see if it makes a comeback. It would be so useful for poets LOL. Frank, have you listened to Stallings’s lecture?

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Frank Dent's avatar

No, I have not listened to it. Is it in the form of a podcast or something? I sometimes will read podcast transcripts but generally don’t listen to them — too slow, too easy to miss bits, and too awkward to go back and review earlier portions.

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Zina Gomez-Liss's avatar

Yes, it’s a video or audio on Apple podcast. Very inconvenient. It’s the only thing I listen to in that app. She’s had some great lectures. I hear you re: frustrations. This is Stallings series is infrequently published so it’s not as much of a commitment than a regular show.

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Melanie Bettinelli's avatar

You can also watch the video streaming on the Oxford website: https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/repetition-form-change-oblique-strategy-poetry

Thanks, Zina, for reminding me to look that up. I had forgotten to check in for her latest lecture. What a delightful lecture/poetry reading.

Frank, I highly recommend watching the video, because Alicia posts slides of the poems she's reading but also some she doesn't read. I also watched with the closed captioning on to catch some of the words I missed. It's a treat to hear her read the poems she discusses, so do listen and don't just read the transcript. These are originally presented as lectures, not a podcast-- the podcast is just the recording of the live lecture repackaged, so to speak-- so it's not really paced like a podcast but like an academic lecture, which is really a completely different format.

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