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10-29-2018, 12:17 AM
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Join Date: Feb 2001
Location: Beaumont, TX
Posts: 4,749
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Enough
Enough
There has to be a better way than this:
The frantic pace obscuring what time means,
The endless sense that something is amiss,
The numbing cold upon the flickering screens.
There has to be a better way to live,
Where rage and outrage tire of their striptease,
Where we realize that to get we have to give,
Where opponents are not enemies.
We'd better find a way to cool it down.
We'd better learn to have more conversations.
We need to learn that we're a common noun,
Admit some calculus of variations.
Otherwise, well, you think this is rough?
I've never heard a fire say "Enough."
By David Rothman
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10-29-2018, 06:06 AM
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Join Date: Aug 2016
Location: Boston, MA
Posts: 4,197
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Yes, it's beginning to feel like it's time. Brilliant final two lines.
And of course this one:
The World Is Too Much With Us
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
By William Wordsworth
z
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10-29-2018, 09:06 AM
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Join Date: Feb 2009
Location: Old South Wales (UK)
Posts: 6,667
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I've kicked seven shades of shit out of this particular poem. I've mocked it, parodied it, sided with Hecht to laugh at it and extrapolated from it in several directions. But it's still the one that comes first to mind in this context.
Dover Beach
By Matthew Arnold
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
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10-29-2018, 10:28 AM
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Join Date: Jun 2001
Location: New York
Posts: 16,476
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Thanks for the Wordsworth and Arnold. The Rothman, not so much.
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10-29-2018, 02:05 PM
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Join Date: Feb 2001
Location: Beaumont, TX
Posts: 4,749
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Lots of "enough" going around:
In another room, just outside the locker room, Coach Jay Gruden stood behind a lectern and shook his head.
“I like the way we are playing and competing,” Gruden said. “After the Saints game it could have gone a lot of different ways with this team, but our leaders stepped up and said, ‘Enough is enough.’ ”
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10-29-2018, 04:36 PM
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Join Date: Feb 2009
Location: Old South Wales (UK)
Posts: 6,667
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Is that about not calling the team "Redskins"?
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10-30-2018, 06:13 PM
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Join Date: Feb 2001
Location: Beaumont, TX
Posts: 4,749
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I have sent a Facebook PM to the poetry editor:
"Please consider resigning from The New Criterion.
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10-30-2018, 07:44 PM
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Join Date: Dec 2004
Location: Berkeley, CA, USA
Posts: 3,140
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“There has to be a better way than this,”
is often what one says when what one means
is that they can’t account for what’s amiss
without discomfort, so they put up screens
to blind them to the hells some others live.
But sometimes emperors are all striptease,
and you can’t just ignore it when they give
their followers a list of enemies
and wink that they should all be taken down.
It isn’t something cured by conversations.
And call it what you will, by any noun,
a thorn is still a thorn, the variations
are all equally bloody, cold, and rough.
In times like these, "enough" is not enough.
--David R.
Last edited by David Rosenthal; 10-30-2018 at 10:37 PM.
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10-30-2018, 07:46 PM
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Join Date: Sep 2016
Location: Seattle
Posts: 2,626
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(you're missing a "the" in L5)
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10-30-2018, 07:50 PM
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Join Date: Dec 2004
Location: Berkeley, CA, USA
Posts: 3,140
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Aaron Novick
(you're missing a "the" in L5)
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(thanks, fixed)
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