[R. S. Gwynn]

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

[Jim Moonan]

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

[Ann Drysdale]

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.

[Roger Slater]

Thanks for the Wordsworth and Arnold. The Rothman, not so much.

[R. S. Gwynn]

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.’ ”

[Ann Drysdale]

Is that about not calling the team "Redskins"?

[Quincy Lehr]

I love it when Boomers write sonnets telling me to shut up while they don't feel guilty about publishing in First Things, The New Criterion, and similar C.H.U.D. publications and enjoy the last dozen years before we all boil to death in rising seawater.

[Roger Slater]

I don't think the seawater will be boiling. We will drown in it, not be boiled in it. But it doesn't matter. I've never heard rising seawater say "Enough" whether it was boiling me or simply drowning me.

[R. S. Gwynn]

"Enough, already!"

[Catherine Chandler]

Originally Posted by Quincy Lehr

I love it when Boomers write sonnets telling me to shut up while they don't feel guilty about publishing in First Things, The New Criterion, and similar C.H.U.D. publications and enjoy the last dozen years before we all boil to death in rising seawater.

Would someone enlighten me as to what C.H.U.D. stands for? Thank you.