Word: poems
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Once a year, as another December gives way to a chill January, Chief Justice John Roberts rereads a poem published in 1749 by the great writer, moralist and late-night conversationalist Samuel Johnson. Roberts began the ritual in the 1970s as an undergraduate at Harvard, where he was one of many students taught to revere Johnson by the master biographer Walter Jackson Bate...
...pairing, not least because Roberts comes off as upbeat as a roomful of Rotarians, while Johnson, despite his vast accomplishments--including singlehandedly compiling the first comprehensive dictionary of the English language--was haunted by the inevitability of disappointment. The poem, "The Vanity of Human Wishes," is a devastating reflection on remorseless fate. "Life protracted is protracted Woe," the poet says...
...picture the chief at New Year's--this man who has it made, settled into his comfortable chair in his big house in the wealthy Washington suburb of Chevy Chase, Md. He's reading, maybe for the 30th or 35th time, this intricate, almost overwhelming poem about how nothing in this world can be counted on to turn out right. What's the meaning of this annual discipline? Perhaps that the conservatism of John Roberts goes much deeper than mere politics. That he favors authority and tradition while distrusting reforms and revolutions because he believes in the ancient notion that...
...Pagoda in the Shwedagon's shadow, Aung Way, a poet and '88 stalwart jailed three times for his political views, presses into my hand a poem, which I shove into my pocket. Some of the monks chew betel nut, which makes their mouths froth alarmingly with bloodred saliva. The oldest monk, who is 49 and holds a Burmese translation of Francis Fukuyama's The Great Disruption, says the monks have three demands: "Release Aung San Suu Kyi and all other political prisoners; begin a process of national reconciliation; lower the prices of daily commodities...
Dingman chose to talk about the diversity of students in the incoming class, reciting the poem “Psalm” by Polish Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska...