Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts

Saturday, April 6, 2013

A Psalm of Life ~ Longfellow

Waiting to Sail

A Psalm of Life 

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 
What The Heart Of The Young Man Said To The Psalmist.

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
   Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
   And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
   And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
   Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
   Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
   Find us farther than to-day.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
   And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
   Funeral marches to the grave.
In the world’s broad field of battle,
   In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
   Be a hero in the strife!
Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
   Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,— act in the living Present!
   Heart within, and God o’erhead!
Lives of great men all remind us
   We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
   Footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
   Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
   Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
   With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
   Learn to labor and to wait.
Be not Slumbering in restlessness or be Languid in your thoughts. Instead seek to leave behind footprints in the sandy, slippery life that may encourage another. 
Labor not in vain. Leave your trail to help another take heart.
Before me someone left footprints that help to buoy my soul when I am feeling lost on that beach. Some other Soul Labored in and out of the waves that seek to pull us down and I benefit from their wisdom of jumping waves.. 
So now I am Learning to Labor in that muck and to Wait........
 
Always Blessed, 
Gretchen 
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Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Homeschool~ Poetry Study



Poetry.
Does it make you feel a bit apprehensive?
Are you convinced it is all full of thees and thous and incomprehensible language?
Does the idea of reading poetry bring you to a place of eye rolling and high school style anguish?

It doesn't have to be like that!


Hear me out on this. (Well, read me out on this. :)) Poetry is a valid and wonderful addition to your homeschool. Poetry can build listening skills, reading comprehension, and can be used to explain certain grammar techniques and phonics skills. The trick is to find valid age appropriate poetry that will keep the attention of your student and teach some beautiful literary appreciation as well.


To be fair, I am biased. I love words. I love reading words. I love placing words together. I love word games. You get the idea. When I was sixteen I got my first thesaurus. I think it was for English class. We may have used it only once but I loved it. I found words to look up just to make my diary look more linguistic. I wrote all of my reports using that handy thesaurus. I sent notes to my grandma saying the same thing three different ways using creative wording. Words with hidden meanings and beautiful lettering can make a simple sentence become, well.... poetry.






Here's the thing about Poems.
They come in more forms than:
Little boy blue, 
Come blow your horn,
The sheep are in the meadow,
The cows are in the corn.
~Mother Goose


Or the standard:
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
~Elizabeth Barrett Browning 




Poetry can tell a story. 
The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is a beautiful poem broken into twenty-two chapters. It is a story written in poetic form. It is beautiful and also informative. There is much to be learned about this culture and the territory. You can find it free online here.
By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon them;
Bright before it beat the water,
Beat the clear and sunny water,
Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.
 Can you see it? I can almost smell the lake water and the pine sap. Gitche Gumee is the great Lake Superior. The gloomy pine trees are most likely the beautiful tall logging pines found in Northern Minnesota. Lovely descriptions. Here are the next lines:
There the wrinkled old Nokomis
Nursed the little Hiawatha,
Rocked him in his linden cradle,
Bedded soft in moss and rushes,
Safely bound with reindeer sinews;
Stilled his fretful wail by saying,
"Hush! the Naked Bear will hear thee!"
Lulled him into slumber, singing,
"Ewa-yea! my little owlet!
Who is this, that lights the wigwam?
With his great eyes lights the wigwam?
Ewa-yea! my little owlet!"
~Song of Hiawatha, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It tells us a story. 


Poetry can be moving. 
It can set your heart to feel and your mind to think. It does not need to be picked and pulled apart, but instead appreciated as a whole. It can be a catalyst for great conversation and debate. It can be motivating on  a personal level. 

If  ~ Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!
There is some good discussion in there, I think.


Poetry was created by our LORD. 
The Psalms are the original organized poetry. All topics are covered. Lessons of morality are showcased. Commands and love notes are sung to us so sweetly. The Psalms are a favorite for many people for their fluid and graceful quality. The lines roll off the tongue fairly easily and pull on our heart strings.
1 May God be gracious to us and bless us
    and make his face to shine upon us, Selah
2 that your way may be known upon earth,
    your saving power among all nations.
3 Let the peoples praise you, O God;
    let all the peoples praise you.
4 Let the nations be glad and sing for joy,
    for you judge the peoples with equity
    and guide the nations upon earth. Selah
5 Let the peoples praise you, O God;
    let all the peoples praise you.
6 The earth has yielded its increase;
    God, our God, has blessed us.
7 May God continue to bless us;
    let all the ends of the earth revere him.
~Psalm 67


Poetry can be a teaching tool. 
My children have thoroughly enjoyed reading Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses and A.A. Milne's Now We Are Six. These are timeless poems written for children. The poems are fanciful and full of childhood dreams and thoughts. The picture above is Sir Bean reading his favorite poem, Forgiven by A.A. Milne. 
Forgiven by A.A. Milne
I found a little beetle; so that Beetle was his name,
And I called him Alexander and he answered just the same.
I put him in a match-box, and I kept him all the day ...
And Nanny let my beetle out -
Yes, Nanny let my beetle out -
She went and let my beetle out -
And Beetle ran away.

She said she didn't mean it, and I never said she did,
She said she wanted matches and she just took off the lid,
She said that she was sorry, but it's difficult to catch
An excited sort of beetle you've mistaken for a match.

She said that she was sorry, and I really mustn't mind,
As there's lots and lots of beetles which she's certain we could find,
If we looked about the garden for the holes where beetles hid -
And we'd get another match-box and write BEETLE on the lid.

We went to all the places which a beetle might be near,
And we made the sort of noises which a beetle likes to hear,
And I saw a kind of something, and I gave a sort of shout:
"A beetle-house and Alexander Beetle coming out!"

It was Alexander Beetle I'm as certain as can be,
And he had a sort of look as if he thought it must be Me,
And he had a sort of look as if he thought he ought to say:
"I'm very very sorry that I tried to run away."

And Nanny's very sorry too for you-know-what-she-did,
And she's writing ALEXANDER very blackly on the lid,
So Nan and Me are friends, because it's difficult to catch
An excited Alexander you've mistaken for a match. 
There is rhyming, punctuation, phonics practice and comprehension that can take this poem to a whole lesson if you wanted. Or you could just enjoy the wonder of children and read Forgiven for sheer love of the realness of it. 

This is just the tip of the proverbial ice berg. There are numerous types, styles, and kinds of poetry. The idea is to just get reading it. Once there is an appreciation for poetry, a child can be led to write his own. When they are older, the works of Shakespeare or Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales will still be challenging but at least familiarly written. Wonderful works like Beowulf will be more easily read and enjoyed if the groundwork is done now. 

We don't do much other than read and enjoy the poems. There are grand discussions sometimes. Mostly though we sip tea and giggle or shed a tear. We compare to our own lives or compare against what The LORD says in His Word. We appreciate the beauty of the words.



Happy Reading!
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Monday, February 18, 2013

Any Husband or Wife

On The Veranda~ John Singer Sargent

 

Any Husband or Wife
by Carol Haynes

Let us be guests in one another's house
With deferential "no" and courteous "yes";
Let us take care to hide our foolish moods
Behind a certain show of cheerfulness.

The Angelus~ Jean-Francois Millet

Let us avoid all sullen silences;
We should find fresh and sprightly things to say;
I must be fearful lest you find me dull,
And you must dread to bore me anyway.

Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife~ John Singer Sargent

Let us knock gently at each other's heart,
Glad of a chance to look within–and yet,
Let us remember that to force one's way
Is the unpardoned breach of etiquette.

Sunday Afternoon ~ Leopold Karl Walter Graf von Kalkreuth

So, shall I be host–you, the hostess,
Until all need for entertainment ends;
We shall be lovers when the last door shuts
But what is better still–we shall be friends.

The Home of the Red, White, and Blue~ Lilly Martin Spencer


Wise Counsel comes in many forms. 


Always Blessed,
Gretchen :)

Paintings found: http://www.jssgallery.org/

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Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Tuesday's Gifts~ Dust of Snow

 

 'Tis a challenge sometimes to find a gift in the cold and snow here in Minnesota. We are overly compensated most years and about the end of January all I want to think about is spring muddiness and lilacs blooming. Our LORD, though, asks us to be thankful everyday, for everything, because all things good are from Him. So I can choose to look at the beauty of a snowflake, or ten million zillion of them, and be blessed. What a gift.

Dust of Snow

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued. 
 
 
Waiting


xox


Frosty Bits


Fragile Lace 
 
 He says to the snow, ‘Fall on the earth,’    and to the rain shower, ‘Be a mighty downpour.’ 
~ Job 37:6
 
 
Always Blessed,
Gretchen :)
 
 
All pictures are courtesy of my sister, Sara Rose Nissen.  
Check out her artwork over at  as seen through my eyes.
 
 
   

 
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Wednesday, January 16, 2013

The Beauty of Tea

There is no trouble so great or grave that cannot be much diminished by a nice cup of tea.  ~Bernard-Paul Heroux


Find yourself a cup of tea; the teapot is behind you.  Now tell me about hundreds of things.  ~Saki



All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes.  ~George Orwell, "A Nice Cup of Tea"



The best quality tea must have creases like the leathern boot of Tartar horsemen, curl like the dewlap of a mighty bullock, unfold like a mist rising out of a ravine, gleam like a lake touched by a zephyr, and be wet and soft like a fine earth newly swept by rain.  ~Lu Yu




You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.  ~C.S. Lewis 




A Proper Tea is much nicer than a Very Nearly Tea, which is one you forget about afterwards.  ~A.A. Milne





Bread and water can so easily be toast and tea.  ~Author Unknown


Tea time..........

Always Blessed,
Gretchen :)


Possibly Linking With:
Cornerstone Confessions
Wisdom Wednesdays and Link Up
No Ordinary Blog Hop
Frontline Moms Friday Fun
The Welcoming House


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Monday, December 24, 2012

Merry Christmas Quotables!


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Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred, and we are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmas-time.  ~Laura Ingalls Wilder

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At Christmas
A man is at his finest towards the finish of the year;
He is almost what he should be when the Christmas season's here;
Then he's thinking more of others than he's thought the months before,
And the laughter of his children is a joy worth toiling for.
He is less a selfish creature than at any other time;
When the Christmas spirit rules him he comes close to the sublime...
~Edgar Guest
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Never worry about the size of your Christmas tree.  In the eyes of children, they are all 30 feet tall.  ~Larry Wilde, The Merry Book of Christmas
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Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth; that can transport the sailor and the traveller, thousands of miles away, back to his own fire-side and his quiet home!  ~Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, 1836
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Christmas waves a magic wand over this world, and behold, everything is softer and more beautiful.  ~Norman Vincent Peale
 
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He who has not Christmas in his heart will never find it under a tree.  ~Roy L. Smith

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I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round, as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.  ~Charles Dickens

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Instead of being a time of unusual behavior, Christmas is perhaps the only time in the year when people can obey their natural impulses and express their true sentiments without feeling self-conscious and, perhaps, foolish.  Christmas, in short, is about the only chance a man has to be himself.  ~Francis C. Farley

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When we recall Christmas past, we usually find that the simplest things - not the great occasions - give off the greatest glow of happiness.  ~Bob Hope
 
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Like snowflakes, my Christmas memories gather and dance - each beautiful, unique and too soon gone.  ~Deborah Whipp
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It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas when its mighty Founder was a child Himself.  ~Charles Dickens

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For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given,
and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.   Isaiah 9:6

source
Merry Christmas from my Family to yours! May the LORD Bless You and Yours Today and Every Day. May His Spirit live in you and transform your life!
Christmas Blessings! 

Always Blessed,
Gretchen :) 



Possibly Linking With:
Cornerstone Confessions
Wisdom Wednesdays and Link Up
No Ordinary Blog Hop

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