Word: poem
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ORLANDO BELONGS--with Ajax and Avalon--to a curious breed of proper nouns whose senses have passed over the centuries from the epic to the cheap and commercial. Once the name was instantly recognizable as the hero of Ariosto's 16th-century narrative poem; now it conjures up the strains of "Tie a Yellow Ribbon "Round the Old Oak Tree" and the sun-soaked giant mice of Disneyworld, Florida...
...little kids of the poem were the only children of Danny and Semadar Haran, for whom Hadara, now 15, used to babysit. Einat, 5, and Yael, 2, were both killed in April 1979, when terrorists entered Nahariya from the sea in a motor-powered dinghy and attacked a four-story apartment house. In one apartment they found Einat and her father, whom they took back to the beach. Danny they shot to death, and when Israeli forces approached, one of the terrorists picked up Einat by the feet and cracked open her head on a rock...
...July 18, 1874, a shy Oxford don visited his sisters at Guildford, in the south of England. There, part of a poem came to mind. It was only eight words long, but the phrase would haunt generations: "For the Snark was a Boojum, you see." Charles Dodgson subtitled his completed work "An Agony in Eight Fits," but it is really the final volume of an unintended trilogy, a trip to Wonderland without Alice...
...Snark is a poem about being and nonbeing, an existential poem, a poem of existential agony. The Bellman's map is the map that charts the course of humanity; blank because we possess no information about where we are or whither we drift. The Snark is, in Paul Tillich's fashionable phrase, every man's ultimate concern. This is the great search motif of the poem, the quest for an ultimate good. But this motif is submerged in a stronger motif, the dread, the agonizing dread, of ultimate failure. The Boojum is more than death...
...Snark is a poem about being and nonbeing, an existential poem, a poem of existential agony. The Bellman's map is the map that charts the course of humanity; blank because we possess no information about where we are or whither we drift. The Snark is, in Paul Tillich's fashionable phrase, every man's ultimate concern. This is the great search motif of the poem, the quest for an ultimate good. But this motif is submerged in a stronger motif, the dread, the agonizing dread, of ultimate failure. The Boojum is more than death...