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On The Hurry Of This Time -- Henry Austin Dobson

       
(Poem #1900) On The Hurry Of This Time
 With slower pen men used to write,
 Of old, when "letters" were "polite";
 In Anna's or in George's days,
 They could afford to turn a phrase,
 Or trim a struggling theme aright.

 They knew not steam; electric light
 Not yet had dazed their calmer sight; -
 They meted out both blame and praise
 With slower pen.

 Too swiftly now the Hours take flight!
 What's read at morn is dead at night:
 Scant space have we for Art's delays,
 Whose breathless thought so briefly stays,
 We may not work - ah! would we might! -
 With slower pen.
-- Henry Austin Dobson
I remember, back in the nineties when email was just beginning to be
widespread, the flood of articles lamenting the inevitable demise of the
handwritten letter, and the creeping soullessness of the casually dashed-off
email that was replacing it. Come the next decade, and that has been
succeeded by laments for the inevitable demise of the printed book, and its
replacement by soulless e-books, expedient audiobooks and mindless
television. It's rather amusing, then, to read today's poem, and realise
that the hastier time Dobson was writing about was 1882.  Plus ça change,
plus c'est la même chose.

martin

Biography:
  English poet, 1840-1921
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Austin_Dobson

23 comments: ( or Leave a comment )

merle almeida / Kotak / Institutional Equities said...

1882 for goodness sake! I spend my weekends currently going through mountains of files from the desk of my father-in-law who passed away two months ago. Looking at letters written by the f-i-l 50-100 years after Dobson's lament, I share the poet's wistfulness for a time of the slower pen - in this case a battered old typewriter. And wonder at the measured tone of those letters, the painstaking structure, the multiple drafts in the case of letters 'meting out blame' -where a potentially offensive word is scratched out and replaced with one more gentle.

Merle

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