Cultural Evening

​The Cultural Evening on Friday 18 February acknowledged the month of love with an evening of romantic poetry, both Romantic in the style of the Romantic Poets and romantic in being about love and romance. The heavy rains that preceded the evening, and only let up as we started, did not deter the diehards, and while the gathering was small, the poems paid true homage to romance. We were privileged to hear two poems read by the poet and to hear an original song sung by the lyricist. No evening of romantic poems is complete without sonnets. We listened to Sonnet 116 Let me not to the marriage of true minds by William Shakespeare and the more down to earth Sonnet 130 My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun. The sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning How Do I Love Thee (Sonnet 43) and Sonnet 14 by John Donne Batter my heart, three person'd God. John Donne got a second reading with The Good-Morrow. E.E. Cummings was a favourite with three poems. The evening opened with love is a place. We heard i carry your heart with me (i carry it in) and shared the love he had for his mother and the relationship between his parents in if there are any heavens my mother will (all by herself) have
one. It will not be a pansy heaven nor
a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but
it will be a heaven of blackred roses
…

John Keets made an appearance as the epitome of a Romantic Poet with La Belle Dame Sans Merci. He was flanked by Catullus, the Roman poet of c. 84 - c. 54 BCE and two poems by Jane Fox. Two modern poems that may also be lyrics, although they were recited as poems by their respective authors (on YouTube) were When a Boy Tells You He Loves You by Edwin Bodney and I wish I was a photograph by Andrea Gibson. Another modern poet, with a large Instagram following, is Pavana Reddy from whom we heard a very short poem:
my wounds
don’t feel
like wounds
in your hands.
they feel
like beginnings,
like a chance
to make things
right again.

A cup of tea or coffee and a rusk, a scone and some peanuts made the evening homely. By the end of the evening everything felt right again.