Not to be left behind

"...Not to lose time, not to get caught,
Not to be left behind, not, please! to resemble
The beasts who repeat themselves, or a thing like water
Or stone whose conduct can be predicted..."

From "In Praise of Limestone", W.H.Auden (1948)

Comments

fallslikesnow said…

not, please!That ! is a bit of an annoyance. Too strident. I can see why it should be there (this poem is filled with desperate requests) but it seems uneccessary. It interrupts the urgency of the first two lines I quoted and subtracts from the elegance of the two that follow.

1:24 am

Ley Lines #1

The concept of "ley lines" is generally thought of in relation to Alfred Watkins, but the stimulus and background for the concept is attributed to the English astronomer Norman Lockyer . [3] [4] [5] On 30 June 1921, Watkins visited Blackwardine in Herefordshire , and went riding a horse near some hills in the vicinity of Bredwardine , when he noted that many of the footpaths there seemed to connect one hilltop to another in a straight line. [6] He was studying a map when he noticed places in alignment. "The whole thing came to me in a flash", he later told his son. [7] It has been suggested that Watkin's experience stemmed from faint memories of an account in September 1870 by William Henry Black given to the British Archaeological Association in Hereford titled Boundaries and Landmarks , in which he speculated that "Monuments exist marking grand geometrical lines which cover the whole of Western Europe". [8] Watkins believed that, in ancie...

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