Author |
Thread: 'We Being Ghosts' (Read 2761 times) |
|
Tiny Montgomery
MV Feature
I love Midnight Voices!
Posts: 87
|
 |
'We Being Ghosts'
« : 09.02.08 at 15:01 » |
Quote
|
Has anyone mentioned the fine new Clive James poem, 'We Being Ghosts,' published in The Spectator on February 2? It's a moving meditation on ageing. The fourth line of the first stanza reads:
"And even I sleep half the day, cough half the night."
There's perhaps an echo here, intentional or otherwise, of Larkin's 'Aubade':
"I work all day, and get half-drunk at night."
|
 |
https://peteatkin.com/forum?board=Words&action=display&num=1202569311&start=0#0  |
|
|
|
Kevin Cryan
MV Fellow
I love Midnight Voices!
Posts: 1144
|
|
Re: 'We Being Ghosts'
« Reply #1: 09.02.08 at 20:08 » |
Quote
|
I have not seen the poem yet, but title certainly set bells ringing.
When Quentin Compson, one of the many troubled one of the characters in William Faulkner’s novel Absalom , Absalom!, asks his father to explain why the ageing reclusive, Miss Rosa Coldfield, summoned him out to her home in order to tell him her version of the of local legend, he gets this reply:
," Mr Compson said. "Years ago we in the South made our women into ladies. Then the War came and made the ladies into ghosts. So what else can we do, being gentlemen, but listen to them being ghosts?" [excerpt]
Kevin Cryan
|
| |
https://peteatkin.com/forum?board=Words&action=display&num=1202569311&start=1#1 |
|
|
|
|
