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:
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this book, because I never thought most of Tolkien's published poetry was good enough to warrant a full edition of the unpublished ones as well.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!).
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.
yes that's lovely writing
I really admire you
oh thanks
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this book, because I never thought most of Tolkien's published poetry was good enough to warrant a full edition of the unpublished ones as well.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!).
I think this is the right attitude yeah