Poetry

The thing I miss most about school is being forced to read outside my comfort zone.

I know a lot of people are big on reading 'Christian books', which I do think is important. However, I find them often limited, repetitive, not entirely well-written and either trying too hard to be cool and awesome, or completely inaccessible. Of course I haven't read every 'Christian book', and there are, as always, a few exceptions. But there are just so many amazing texts out there that when you're at uni, you miss out on hearing about unless you're doing English.

My favourite text we studied was T.S. Eliot's poetry. It was just beautiful in a really scary kind of way.

From The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock

Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
...

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—

And from Preludes:

His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o'clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

How beautiful is that? I lost my Eliot anthology, which is a bit of a shame because I wanted to read some of his post-conversion poetry. Anyway, it just reminds me constantly to stop being lame and filling my head with crap. Of course, Harry Potter doesn't count as crap.