6 Comments

Written in to my teenage journal is a Tolkien poem that meant so much to me. We were studying La Peste and I was struggling to defend my adolescent Christian beliefs against a strongly atheist teacher. This really helped:

'The heart of man is not compound of lies

But draws some wisdom from the Only Wise

And still recalls him. Though now long estranged

Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed

Disgraced he may be, yet is not dethroned

And keeps the rags of lordship once he owned

Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light

Through whom is splintered from a single white

To many hues and endlessly combined

In living shapes that move from mind to mind'

I still find that an extremely powerful thought.

Expand full comment

yes that's lovely writing

Expand full comment

I really admire you

Expand full comment

oh thanks

Expand full comment

I'm not likely to buy this book, because I never thought most of Tolkien's published poetry was good enough to warrant a full edition of the unpublished ones as well. But there are individual poems I'm very fond of: my favorite has always been The Sea-Bell in the Tom Bombadil collection. It's a little uneven - I don't think couplets like "I heard a sea-bell swing in the swell, / dinging, dinging, and the breakers roar" hold up very well. But the interplay of rhyming and alliterative verse is effective, and overall the poem captures that elegiac mood of a lost world as thoroughly as anything else he wrote, in my opinion (you may disagree, of course!).

Expand full comment

I think this is the right attitude yeah

Expand full comment