Tháinig Long ó Valparaiso. Four Seasons - Sonnets. William Blake - Auguries of Innocence. Art prints | poetry | cine | homeblake images To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour.
A robin redbreast in a cage Puts all heaven in a rage. The Road Not Taken. The Same Gesture. John Montague (b.1929, New York), the author of many books of poetry, stories, memoirs and essays, has been called "the greatest Irish poet of his generation" by Derek Mahon.
Born to Irish parents in America, he returned to Ireland at the age of four to be raised by aunts, and was educated at a school where the folksong and Irish poetry expert Sean O'Boyle was an influential teacher. Montague has since travelled the world as poet, teacher and journalist, keeping always a literary and emotional anchor in Ireland.
It is no surprise, then, that Ireland is a recurrent theme in his work. In some poems - 'Like Dolmens Round my Childhood, the Old People', 'The Trout' or 'The Water Carrier', for example - we hear of remembered childhood experience; others deal with the history and politics of the country, from the effect of enforced language change in the nineteenth century in 'A Grafted Tongue' to the recent violence that informs 'A Response to Omagh'. If— "If—" is a poem by British Nobel laureate Rudyard Kipling, written in 1895[citation needed] and first published in Rewards and Fairies, 1910.
It is a tribute to Leander Starr Jameson,[1] and is written in the form of paternal advice to the poet's son. As poetry, "If—" is a literary example of Victorian-era stoicism.[2] The well-known Indian historian and writer Khushwant Singh claims that Kipling's If is "the essence of the message of The Gita in English. "[3]