The eighteen posts here are from a high school humanities project I turned in forty years ago at Academy of the Sacred Heart in Grand Coteau, Louisiana. The beginning half of the project can be found at firewheel

The original materials have suffered from heat and my careless handling over the years, but are largely intact and authentic. I found some evidence of possible tampering. At least one page was missing, and a few of the photos seem to have been manipulated. However, I think the project has retained its overall impact.

As I retyped each of the poems over the last two months, I was moved to briefly be in the poet's seat, to experience the unique expression of being, the eruption of art, of understanding, from each writer. In taking photos of the images, originally from National Geographics and Smithsonians dated before June of 1971, I came to appreciate each artist and photographer. They offer a diversity of perspective from around the world in such a beautiful and gripping way. I'm also grateful to Mother Carmen Smith who assigned this project to us, and to Ms. Juanita Durio who brilliantly taught the visual arts segment of the class.

Altough I believe most of the material presented so far in this blog is authentic, I've come to discover that a few pictures and poems were tampered with, and one or more pages were removed. With 15 more pages still to go, I noted something was off, and then went back and found other discrepancies. I apologize. Hope to come up with a way to proceed, but project is on hold for now.
Linda

FROM CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE
Canto III, 6

‘Tis to create, and in creating live
A being more intense, that we endow
With form our fancy, gaining as we give
The life we image, even as I do now.
What am I? Nothing; but not so art thou,
Soul of my thought! With whom I traverse the earth,
Invisible but gazing, as I glow
Mix’d with thy spirit, blended with thy birth,
And feeling still with thee in my crush’d feelings’ dearth.

George Gordon, Lord Byron---

ELEGY FOR JANE
( My student, Thrown by a Horse)

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,
A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing;
And the mold sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw;
Stirring the clearest water.

My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiny shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.

Theodore Roethke---

ALFONSO CHURCHILL

They laughed at me as “Prof. Moon,”
As a boy in Spoon River, born with the thirst
Of knowing more about the stars.
They jeered when I spoke of the lunar mountains,
And the thrilling heat and cold,
And the ebon valleys by silver peaks,
And spica quadrillions of miles away,
And the littleness of man.
But now that my grave is honored, friends,
Let it not be because I taught
The lore of the stars at Knox College,
But rather for this: that through the stars
I preached the greatness of man,
Who is none the less a part of the scheme of things
For the distance of spica or the spiral nebulae;
Nor any the less a part of the question
Of what the drama means.

Edgar Lee Masters---

THEODORE THE POET

As a boy, Theodore, you sat for long hours
On the shore of the turbid Spoon
With deep-set eye staring at the door of the crawfish’s burrow,
Waiting for him to appear, pushing ahead,
First his waving antennae, like straws of hay,
And soon his body colored like soapstone,
Gemmed with eyes of jet.
And you wondered in a trance of thought
What he knew, what he desired, and why he lived at all.
But later your vision watched for men and women
Hiding in burrows of fate amid great cities,
Looking for the souls of them to come out,
So that you could see
How they lived, and for what,
And why they kept crawling so busily
Along the sandy way where water fails
As the summer wanes.

Edgar Lee Masters---

from A FIDDLER

In his stooping face it was plain to see
How close to dream is a soul set free---
A half-found world;
And company.

Walter De La Mare---

SPRING AND FALL:
To a Young Child

Márgáret are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now, no matter, child, the name:
Sórróws springs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Gerard Manley Hopkins---

CHILD ON TOP OF A GREENHOUSE

The wind billowing out the seat of my britches,
My feet crackling splinters of glass and dried putty,
The half-grown chrysanthemums staring up like accusers
Up through the streaked glass, flashing with sunlight,
A few white clouds all rushing eastward,
A line of elms plunging and tossing like horses,
And everyone, everyone pointing up and shouting!

THEODORE ROETHKE---

John Anderson my jo, John,
When we were first aquent,
Your locks were like the raven,
Your bonie brow was brent;
But now your brow is beld, John,
Your locks are like the snaw;
But blessings on your frosty pow,
John Anderson, my jo.

John Anderson my jo, John,
We clamb the hill thegither;
And mony a canty day, John,
We’ve ad wi ane anither,
Now we maun totter down, John,
And hand in hand we’ll go,
And sleep thegither at the foot,
John Anderson, my jo.

Robert Burns---

THE HARBOR

Passing through huddled and ugly walls
By doorways where women
Looked from their hunger-deep eyes,
Haunted with shadows of hunger-hands,
Out from the huddled and ugly walls,
I came sudden, at the city’s edge,
On a blue burst of lake,
Long lake waves breaking under the sun
On a spray flung curve of shore;
And a fluttering storm of gulls,
Masses of great gray wings
And flying white bellies
Veering and wheeling free in the open.

Carl Sandburg---

Ecstatic bird songs pound
the hollow vastness of the sky
with metallic clinkings---
beating color up into it
at a far edge,--- beating it, beating it
with rising triumphant ardor,---
stirring it into warmth,
quickening in it a spreading change,---
bursting wildly against it as
dividing the horizon, a heavy sun
lifts himself--- is lifted---
bit by bit above the edge
of things,--- runs free at last
out into the open---! Lumbering
glorified in full release upward-----
songs cease.

William Carlos Williams---