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    Light's Ladder
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    Light's Ladder
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    Light's Ladder
    Ebook98 pages43 minutes

    Light's Ladder

    By Christopher Howell

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    In this extraordinary new collection by distinguished poet Christopher Howell, the opening poem presents us with a spiritual paradox that will echo throughout its pages. The speaker remembers an earlier time of happiness, freedom, and a certain innocence. The poem closes with:

    And if he remembers now

    he is in love, which is the soul’s condition, and alone

    because that is how we live.

    "How we live" is the book's major inquiry; its illustration, the poems' major achievement. How do we live, in our dailiness, in our loves, our private and global wars? And, in the face of unbearable grief, how can we live?



    Keats

    When Keats, at last beyond the curtain

    of love’s distraction, lay dying in his room

    on the Piazza di Spagna, the melody of the Bernini

    Fountain “filling him like flowers,”

    he held his breath like a coin, looked out

    into the moonlight and thought he saw snow.

    He did not suppose it was fever or the body’s

    weakness turning the mind. He thought, “England!”

    and there he was, secretly, for the rest

    of his improvidently short life: up to his neck

    in sleigh bells and the impossibly English cries

    of street venders, perfect

    and affectionate as his soul.

    For days the snow and statuary sang him so far

    beyond regret that if now you walk rancorless

    and alone there, in the piazza, the white shadow

    of his last words to Severn, “Don’t be frightened,”

    may enter you.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Washington Press
    Release dateJun 1, 2016
    ISBN9780295806815
    Unavailable
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