On January 14:
ELEGY WRITTEN IN A COUNTRY CHURCH-YARD
[excerpts]
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds:
Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
The breezy call of incense-breathing morn,
The swallow twittering from the straw-built shed,
The cock’s shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,
No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.
For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,
Or busy housewife ply her evening care:
No children run to lisp their sire’s return,
Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share,
Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the Poor.
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour:-
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Some village Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood,
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell, guiltless of his country’s blood.
Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray;
Along the cool sequestered vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.
Haply some hoary-headed swain may say,
“Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn
Brushing with hasty steps the dews away,
To meet the sun upon the upland lawn;
“One morn I miss’d him on the custom’d hill,
Along the heath, and near his favorite tree;
Another came; nor yet beside the rill,
Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he;
“The next with dirges due in sad array
Slow through the church-way path we saw him borne,-
Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay
Graved on the stone beneath yon aged thorn.”
The Epitaph
Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth
A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.
Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth,
And Melancholy marked him for her own.
Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,
Heaven did a recompense as largely send:
He gave to Misery all he had, a tear,
He gained from Heaven (’twas all he wished) a friend.
No farther seek his merits to disclose,
Or draw his frailties from their dread abode
(There they alike in trembling hope repose),
The bosom of his Father and his God.
By Thomas Gray (1716-71)
Poem of the week: September 15, 2009
Sea-Fever
I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face and a grey dawn breaking.
I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.
By John Masefield (1878-1967).
(English Poet Laureate, 1930-1967.)
For all you cricket fans out there…
England is triumphant over Australia in the 2009 Ashes!
Arctic sea monster’s giant bite
A giant fossil sea monster found in the Arctic had a bite that would have been able to crush a 4×4 car, according to its discoverers.Â
Researchers say the marine reptile, which measured an impressive 15m (50ft) long, had a bite force of about 45 tonnes (33,000lbs) per square inch.
The creature’s partial skull was dug up last summer in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard by a Norwegian-led team.Â
Dubbed “Predator X”, it patrolled the oceans some 147 million years ago.
Its jaws may have been more powerful than those of a Tyrannosaurus rex, though estimates of the dinosaur’s bite vary substantially.
It is thought to belong to a new species of pliosaur – a group of large, short-necked reptiles that lived at the time of the dinosaurs.Â
But even by the standards of this group, the creature’s size has astonished scientists.
Its estimated length exceeds that of another large pliosaur, dubbed “The Monster”, which was uncovered in Svalbard a year earlier than this one.Â
Expedition leader Jorn Harald Hurum, from the University of Oslo’s Natural History Museum, said the “The Monster” would have been big enough to chomp on a small car.Â
He said the bite estimates for the latest fossil forced a re-think.
This one, he said, might have been able to “crush a Hummer”, referring to General Motors’ large 4×4 vehicle.
 Researchers say the shape and proportional size of the brain resembles that of another “apex predator”: the great white shark.Â
The biggest marine reptile on record is a 21m-long ichthyosaur, Shonisaurus sikanniensis, from Triassic Period rocks in British Columbia, Canada.