Category Archives: Poems, prose & song

“Mandalay” by Rudyard Kipling

Myanmar, Bagan

Boris Johnson, Britain’s foreign secretary, yesterday started reciting lines from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Mandalay” while inside a Myanmar temple during an official visit to the former British colony. He was on a live mic (and on camera) at the time, being filmed for a Channel Four documentary; the British ambassador, Andrew Patrick, who was chaperoning Johnson on the visit to Yangon’s sacred Shwedagon Pagoda, was quick to remind him that citing from the colonial-era poem was inappropriate. Here’s the poem in full: Continue reading →

A source for Martin Luther King Jr.’s quote about faith and the staircase?

Martin Luther King Jr. / Wikimedia Commons

“Faith is taking the first step, even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”

When you search for that sentence on Google, you’ll get about 3,700,000 results — most of which attribute the statement (sometimes as a paraphrase) to Martin Luther King Jr. But can anyone find a source for that citation? I have searched on the King Institute web site — probably the most comprehensive collection  “of King’s most significant correspondence, sermons, speeches, published writings, and unpublished manuscripts” — and found nothing resembling that sentence.

Can anyone shed any light on the history of this famous quotation?

Many thanks to Bronwyn for raising this interesting query.

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A sonnet on William Shakespeare’s 453rd birthday

Claude Monet: Springtime / Wikimedia Commons

Sonnet 98

From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April dress’d in all his trim
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing,
That heavy Saturn laugh’d and leap’d with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odour and in hue
Could make me any summer’s story tell,
Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew;
Nor did I wonder at the lily’s white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
They were but sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
Yet seem’d it winter still, and, you away,
As with your shadow I with these did play.

— William Shakespeare, born on this day in 1564

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Written in Early Spring — by William Wordsworth

Songs of Innocence – Spring, by William Blake / Wikimedia Commons

Written in Early Spring
I heard a thousand blended notes
While in a grove I sat reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What Man has made of Man.

Through primrose tufts, in that sweet bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And ’tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.

The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure –
But the least motion which they made
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.

If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature’s holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What Man has made of Man?

— William Wordsworth