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2 December 2005: Can't post a poem of mine without yattering about it for at least a paragraph. My "Somewhere in France, 1802" must be 15-years-old or more. jwcurry had it in one of his Curvd H&Z publications, an anthology, as I recall. That made me pretty happy, for he was hard for me to please--but well worth pleasing. It's a simple enough piece, exploiting my little letters-as-windows device that I first used in my "Tribute to Shakespeare" (and don't by any means consider an invention of mine). "Somewhere in France, 1802" has three layers: the evening on top of the ocean on top of Wordsworth's poem--make that the scene depicted in Wordsworth's poem; i.e., not text about thunder, but thunder itself.
The octet is what I love about Wordsworth's poem, which I consider one of greatest poems in English, even though I'm no fan of the sentimental bullshit about the Innocence of Children. For me, the poem is a wonderful celebration of pantheism, captruing near-perfectly what I've felt now and then when communing with The Sea, or the Sky. I revere Nature and consider it holy. And underlying, which is most what my poem attempts to be about. But I also planned it as a haiku about a scene: man and daughter in the quiet of an evening . . . and the eternal thunder underlying it all. A poet and his daughter are also there, which adds the possibility of connotations of poetic creativity, and/or poetic sensibility engaging a seascape. Wordsworth and his daughter are there, too, to add the history of a great poet encountering the ocean--permanently--for all who read poetry.
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