Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Mind-Forged Manacles

Inspired by Flye's Pretty Talk tag, here's a stanza from a William Blake poem I read this week:

In every man's every cry
In every child's fearful cry
In every voice, in every ban
The mind-forged manacles I hear

I think its the poem London and I think that's an accurate quote, but if my memory's mussed I'll give you your money back. I've been reading a lot more poetry lately. It appeals to my blog-forged attention span.

3 comments:

flyE said...

"Mind-Forged Manacles" is gud, very gud. That phrase describes about 80% of my job -- Overcoming Mind-Forged Manacles since 1996.

You linked to Coleridge... did you ever read the first post-Hitchhiker Douglas Adams book, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency? An "original" stanza from Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner changes the future world in a bad way, so a guy goes back in time, catches Coleridge all hopped up on Laudanum, and starts blathering to him about albatrosses while he's trying to write, and gets them stuck in his head; thus the "new" poem replete with albatross references we know today.

$9,000,000,000 Write Off said...

As you know, Coleridge makes an appearance in Tim Clark's The Stress of her Regard , which is why I started reading his stuff.

Anonymous said...

I'm looking for one I barely remember... this is not it:

Nature's first green is gold

Her hardest hue to hold

Her early leaf's a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.