Word: poem
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Sleeping Beauty. Russlan, based on a Pushkin poem, begins in the palace of the Prince of Kiev, where the wedding of the knight Russlan and the princess Ludmilla is about to be celebrated. In a pouf of smoke, Ludmilla is abducted by the wicked dwarf Tchernomor. The rest of the opera concerns Russlan's travails in trying to find her ahead of two other suitors; the prince has promised Ludmilla to the first man who can rescue her. A kind of Russian Siegfried, Russlan receives a magic sword from that singing head but in the end requires a magic...
...Henry poems included here lack some of this edgy vitality, although in the prologue to a work he never wrote, Berryman could open a prayer for inspiration in typically boisterous manner: "So screw you, Muses." Late in the book a poem begins "I didn't. And I didn't."-celebrating a suicide urge that the poet had resisted. Some 40 hours after he wrote these lines, Berryman...
Forecasting the weather has long occupied man's attention. Early farmers and sailors, whose livelihoods-and sometimes lives-depended upon the weather, learned by experience how to read the signs that frequently presaged change. Sailors realized from early days the general wisdom of the poem "Sky red in the morning/ Is a sailor's sure warning/ Sky red at night/ Is the sailor's delight." Farmers observed that dandelions and other flowers closed when a storm was approaching and had a simple way of telling the temperature from the rate at which crickets chirp: count the number...
...occasion of the 25th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth's reign. It was as if the mother tongue of Shakespeare and Milton had lapsed into baby talk. Betjeman's quatrains palpitated with cliches and such treacly rhymes as people/steeple, dutiful/beautiful and blue/true. Stanza 4 particularly captured the poem's schoolboy earnestness...
...nice Valentine's-card poem," said Poet Laurie Lee. Other critics less charitably called Betjeman's work "absolutely pathetic" and "nursery-rhyme gibberish." Member of Parliament Nicholas Fairbairn vowed to write a superior poem (he could not), and the Sunday People invited schoolchildren to submit their efforts with the appeal, "Can YOU do better than Sir John...