“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I
seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting
myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than
ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
Isaac Newton is meant to have said this but what his reasons
were is unclear. He was not exactly a straightforwardly modest man. When we
look at those vast expanses of gray or if you're lucky blue sea, what do you
think?
As poets we should go beyond the everyday of Newton's solitary
rambler, try and make it fresh. In his time the Victorian scholar Matthew
Arnold did just that with his famous poem Dover Beach (available in lots of
places). Looking for the fresh metaphor, the new way of seeing is what we're
about, what he was doing.
For Arnold it was turbulent problems of faith which he linked to
the tide's withdrawing roar. I think we should be on the lookout for such
newness as we walk along our shores. Don't you?
Thank you for reading. David Riley
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