Yeats is possibly my favourite poet of all time. The passion and joy and rhythm within his lines are just sublime. Yeats was born in 1865 in Dublin of Anglo-Irish Protestant descent, the son of a lawyer. The family was much troubled by the upheavals in his native Ireland and moved to London when Yeats was around just two years old. His father also wanted to pursue a new career as an artist and felt that London would be preferable […]
Read moreIt is Sunday and time for thought and reflection and creation. And an odd prayer or dream maybe. Once again, my first objective is to practise metrical discipline, and I have chosen the Sonnet, a structure popularised by Shakespeare but that probably originated in Italy in the 14th century at the start of the Renaissance. A sonnet comprises 14 lines divided into three quatrains and a final couplet. The meter is in what is known as iambic pentameter, ten syllables […]
Read moreIt is a Sunday, a time for art, play, thought, and love. In that spirit, here are some reflections in the form of a poem. The starting point comes from A Spell for Creation by Kathleen Raine (1908-2003), which explores the interconnectedness, cyclicity and unity of things. I initially adhere to Raine’s iambic tetrameter, simply as an exercise in the cognitive discipline of following a specific poetic meter. Later, however, I take considerable poetic licence. So to speak. I also develop […]
Read moreHere is a poem by GK Chesterton (1874-1936) in celebration of my father, Patrick Simpson Lambert (1924-2008), the most thoughtful man I have ever known, despite his human frailties. There were many learnings for me through his life that every day still evolve and build and teach. But the most important learning is that of empathy, understanding and stoic acceptance of life’s hard slings; a trait that he himself raged against as he slipped into his own gentle good […]
Read moreRudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was a so-called Anglo Indian, born in then-named Bombay during the height of the Indian Raj in 1865. By some contemporary accounts he was simply another jingoistic imperialist, and some of his views are distinctly off-key, for example he described the Irish as “writing dreary poetry…deprived of love of line or knowledge of colour.” He was an early friend of Oswald Mosely, and had a visceral hatred of Communism, at the same time believing that the new […]
Read moreLewis Carroll is the professional pen name of the English Author Charles Dodgson (27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898). Dodgson is a classic polymath, excelling as a poet, a mathematician, a photographer and a fine-line artist. His most famous and popular work is Alice’s Through the Looking Glass, though I think I prefer his so-called nonsense poems, Jabberwocky and the Hunting of the Snark. The Snark story comprises eight poems that together form a magical and ever-winding thread. Carroll […]
Read moreDylan Thomas (1914-1953). There is a nice old pub called the Fitzroy Tavern at the bottom of Charlotte Street in Bloomsbury in London. It has a great feel to it but what I particularly like is that on the first floor it has a small room full of books and photographs and drawings dedicated to the memory of Dylan Thomas, who frequently drank there. Thomas was by many accounts a difficult man to live with, but some of his poetry […]
Read moreThe Greeks, or at least some of them, well understood the importance of the brain even if they did not know very much about its inner workings. And the Egyptians before them had a hieroglyph for the brain, the first known recorded reference to the brain being an Egyptian papyrus from the seventeenth century BCE describing a couple of patients who had suffered trauma to the head. The Greek surgeon-philosopher Hippocrates, or at least his translators (1), was a beautiful […]
Read more(A variation on an incomplete theme i to en) Finding the point in a foggy white cloud, Something, nothing, everything, Cantor mused. Paradise! Thought Hilbert. Enthused, confused. But there’s more to Hilbert John Space, keep apace. One and zero Shannon reused. It felt replete… Detect, correct – expand. Command. Turing complete but not complete. Breathless, restless. Not so fast, Gödel felt damned. Clever Schrödinger and his matrix mistress. Bohr in his lab, Heisenberg on the rock. But what does it […]
Read more
It is strange how the unconscious is always making suggestions. When I was a lot younger, these suggestions were often abrupt, sometimes a little mad and occasionally, I must confess, quite aggressive. In rare instances – all of which I remember now like they were yesterday – they were sublime. As in the case when I first set eyes on my beautiful and lovely wife. These days my id’s suggestions are gentle, guiding and numerous. This morning’s waking suggestion was […]
Read more