Day One Hundred and Three
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli Page: 178 Finished
Marriage Poems John Hollander Page: 255 Finished
I’m going bald. My hair is falling out at an incredible rate. The drain trap in the shower is completely full before I’m halfway through my daily ablutions. All day I’m picking hairs off myself and the boys. Never having had thick hair, the loss is especially keen. Hair loss is a normal side effect of high stress and thus a normal side effect of labor but I’m almost back to my normal weight, wearing my old jeans and otherwise starting to feel like myself again, so why do I have to go bald now?
Poetry has never been my “thing”. I didn’t have the opportunity to learn much about it in school and I never sought it out on my own. It tends to bear a poor reputation among those I know and I can’t help but believe that that is our fault and not poetry’s. Unfortunately what was once a noble art has descended in popular culture to the adornment of greeting cards but we have such a wealth of accumulated poetry that we should be able to find some to understand and enjoy. Other than the great epics there was no poetry on the Everyman’s Greatest 100 lists I used to develop my reading plan. I did get to add a few books to the preset list to round out my numbers and I added two of the Everyman’s Pocket Poets. I chose the poems of Baudelaire because I wanted to know why Lemony Snicket named the children after him and I chose the Marriage Poems because I’m in love with my husband. Unfortunately not everyone thinks well of marriage and while many of the poems are frankly joyful some are indisputably hopeless. I thought Thomas Hardy’s novels were depressing! His poems on marriage? Dreary. And if Hardy is sadly defeatist, Swift is unhappily worse and thank God that Shelley is in the minority. Hardy believed that marriage was almost always a destruction of ones hopes and ambitions, Swift that the body was gross and it’s marital function grosser and Shelley that we were not meant to be bound to another for a lifetime. I wonder why John Hollander chose to include such overwhelmingly negative perspectives. I did enjoy the anthology despite the downers and am inspired to begin adding poetry into my regular reading routine. I love the Pocket Poets bindings and would love to own the whole set.
I had the privilege of getting up at 5:45 this morning to open Veritas while Jared slept a bit longer. But then he handled both boys and tore down part of a brick house while I hung out and made coffee. On the whole I think his day was more productive because while I had a busy day in the coffeehouse (and GREAT sales) he managed to get us a thousand dollars worth of bricks free.