Keats: Forever Young Keats died today. February 23rd, 1821. He was 25 years old. It is a select group, the band of poets who died young. The admission price is steep. I wish Sophia had not had to pay it. I wish she was not now, like Keats, “forever young.” Yet she is. She will always be 22, as he is 25. “Bury me in garlands/ Of burning paper/ With all my pollen sparks of steel,”
Saving Narnia: Sophia, On History There is a strange and wonderful symmetry to Sophia’s life, as if it was crafted with a writer’s eye; every piece feels necessary and precisely placed, like one of those poignant yet beautiful Russian stories Sophie loved so much, a vivid portrait sketched by Tolstoy. One aspect of such symmetry is the deeply embedded nature of Sophia’s love of history. It runs, like a golden thread, through the pattern of
Sophia: January 17th In the car park, green things Push through bitumen to survive, While above, a winter sky of powdered jewels, Fra Angelico blue, waits for its angels. Suddenly your eyes, so blue themselves, looking up Are full of tears. There, in a wheelchair, in a car park, Amid the grime and weeds, You cried for the beauty of the sky. I cry thinking of it, thinking of the mind That thought the thoughts
Scrovegni Chapel—The Nativity The image of the Nativity scene, and the detail of the angel from it which accompanies one of the Christmas posts (The Gift), are from Giotto’s fresco cycle in the Scrovegni Chapel (or Arena Chapel) in Padua. These images were chosen not just for their appropriateness to the time of year, but also because the Scrovegni had a particular significance for Sophia. The Scrovegni is an artistic gem. It is one of the
The Annunciation and the Nativity The following poem is by a 16 year-old Sophia. It is taken from Loose Leaves, the sequence of poems she wrote after seeing The Medieval Imagination, an exhibition of illuminated manuscripts at the State Library in Melbourne. Ours is a broken world. The battle against disorder, which (as is symbolised in Sophie’s poem) includes suffering and death, is fought line by line, poem by poem, thought by beautiful thought. Sophie
The Gift. It is that time of year. Joy lies at the heart of it. Christmas signifies the astonishing concept at the centre of Christianity, that of the Incarnation (in which the Absolute Being sustaining all things but eternally existing—perfect and unchanging—outside them, entered our world, doing so in the most vulnerable and mutable of human forms, that of a tiny baby). Libraries have been written to unpack this notion. A lazy familiarity with the
JOY Sophia was, and is, a joy to me. It seemed appropriate to enter a poem into the 2017 ACU poetry competition which had “Joy” as its theme. It was a poem I wrote when Sophie was alive, over which she had passed her incisive critical eye, so I feel it bears a part of her. Sophie was the best reader one could have—observant, precise, never self-interested, always focussed on the craft. How wonderful it was
Love is most nearly itself When here and now cease to matter. TS Eliot, East Coker, Four Quartets
Poetry Prize Update It is planned that Sophia’s prize will be up and running again next year. There will be a slightly different format, but a similar emphasis. Culture is a living organism. It needs the rich soil of history in order to unfold its potential. “Know thyself,” was the injunction inscribed at Delphi (it is, as Sophia notes in Kaddish, "…the one wise thing the Delphic woman said”), but we cannot truly know ourselves
July 30th –Table Reserved