Tuesday 5 July 2022

FORGOTTEN VERSE...




11 comments:

McSCOTTY said...

Very nice poem but a rather depressing comment on lost ambition, the lost youth element I ( sadly) get though.

Gene Phillips said...

This poem might illustrate the opinion that honest sentiment is always cogent and never overplayed. Harry Chapin's "Cat's in the Cradle" comes to mind as another good example of honest sentiment.

Kid said...

Lost youth - the curse of growing up and growing old, alas, McS.

******

I'll have to look it up, GP - I don't think I'm familiar with it.

Colin Jones said...

Kenneth Grahame died on July 6th 1932, just 22 days before my mother was born!

Kid said...

Do you know if your mother ever read The Wind In The Willows, CJ?

Colin Jones said...

She definitely didn't.

Kid said...

Might've done so as a child, possibly? Or wasn't she a reader?

Colin Jones said...

My mother had a copy of 'Gone With The Wind' by Margaret Mitchell but I can't recall any other novels she owned. She preferred non-fiction such as biographies or magazines like 'Woman's Own'.

Kid said...

I suppose it's always possible she could have read it at school, eh? I first started to read the book in my school library, then took it home to finish it. I'd have been around 12 at the time. Interesting that the last two words of the title of Margaret Mitchell's book are also the first two words of Kenneth Grahame's.

baggsey said...

That's a very powerful and clever poem, Kid. I keep re-reading it. I think the poem means something different to the reader depending their age, and the sentiment is coloured by the reader's own life experience. I did initially read it as being that the speaker feels they have not achieved their potential, and feels they have let down their younger self, but that may not be the case. Equally the speaker may feel that they are satisfied the way their life has turned out and feels that they successfully avoided the wrong path ("the man I might have been"). I also feel that the title "Sometimes" implies that this feeling of contemplating paths untaken is not constant.

A great choice, Kid. And I second Gene's suggestion that you listen to Harry Chapin's song "Cat's In The Cradle". In fact I recommend that you track a copy of his CD "Great Stories Live".

Kid said...

I'm not sure if the second verse is deliberately vague in order to imbue it with an undeserved profundity, or whether the writer wasn't quite sure of what he wanted to say and let the demands of rhyme take over from clear expression, B. I do like the first verse though, and I think I can see what the writer might've been trying to say with the second, but then it slips away from me again.



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