Well…sometimes blogging is like this. I do have to say it is extremely gratifying when a person takes the time to comment on a post. Although, I am happy I’ve never gotten the “‘yuo are teh sUxx0r!’ from Anonymous.” It does upset me when I think of something that I want to say during the day and then I forget it by the time I sit down in front of the computer, but I refuse to be the weird guy that walks around with a small notebook, muttering to himself, cryptically jotting things down like some demented criminal casing every joint he enters. Speaking of remembering…
I was talking with a friend of mine today about Milton and I mentioned how the first time I truly became interested in Paradise Lost was after I read The Crow graphic novel (It was published in 1990 and the movie was released in 1994). That graphic novel also got me interested in Emily Dickinson, because her poem 712, sometimes listed as The Carriage, is recited by Eric in the comic. I realized after that short conversation today that I hadn’t really looked at the poem in a long time. So you can look at it with me:
BECAUSE I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.
We passed the school where children played
At wrestling in a ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.
We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.
Since then ‘t is centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses heads
Were toward eternity.
So there it is. I really like that poem. The first stanza was the piece that was mention in the graphic novel, and by the time I actually found the poem I had that first stanza memorized.
As stupid as it sounds, comics have lead me to investigate things I would never have been interested in had I not been a fan of the “low culture” they represent. I remember having my mom help me find Bulfinch’s Mythology in the library, simply because Bruce Banner spoke of it in an issue of The Incredible Hulk and I just had to read it for myself.