W103 | The
Last Lap - Poems About Being Old, Dying, and the Afterlife | Don Barkin
In-person at The Stockbridge Library
|
We
will read some great poems about being old, the end of this life, and visions
of the afterlife, such as: “An Old Man's Winter Night” by Robert Frost; “Do Not
Go Gentle into that Good Night” by Dylan Thomas; “The Wild Iris” by Louise
Glück; “That Time of Year Thou May’st in Me Behold” by Shakespeare; “I died for
Beauty” by Emily Dickinson; Wordworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” ode; and
William Blake’s “Eternity” (“He who binds to himself a joy/Does the winged life
destroy/He who kisses the joy as it flies/Lives in eternity’s sunrise.”). Also,
Walt Whitman’s giddy lines from Song of Myself: “Has any one supposed it
lucky to be born? / I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die,
and I know it.”
Don Barkin has degrees from Harvard College and Cambridge University. He has taught seminars for a number of years at Yale and Wesleyan. He has published three books of poetry. He has been a newspaper reporter and school teacher and is a frequent OLLI at BCC instructor. |
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