Another case of accidental reference to Esperanto: Housman’s poem “1887”
I don’t know whether A.E. Housman’s poem “1887”, which is the first poem in his book “A Shropshire Lad” has been noted in the putative “catalog of accidental instances of, or allusions to, Esperanto”, but I suspect not, so I am mentioning it here.
The content of the poem can also be taken as a very wide reference to, among other things, Esperanto, as the poem is basically an elaboration of the thesis of the Dostoevsky quotation, “There is nothing easier than lopping off heads, and nothing more difficult than developing ideas.” (“Get you the sons your fathers got, / And God will save the Queen”) Of course, the idea of an easy-to-learn, politically-neutral, international language is pre-eminently one of those ideas “difficult to develop”. fyi.
Regards,
Mike Jones
American expat in Beijing
8.Mar.2011
For the second year, the literature club at the online high school at which I work had an all-school poetry reading (It's still going on; I'm listing to others read while I type.)
last year, I thought about offering an Esperanto poem
http://esperanto-usa.org/en/node/1045
but ultimately rolled a die and the die forced me to read one of my own English language poems.
This year, I read Ĉi-Nokte, one of Julius Balbin's haunting poems on the holocaust. It was pretty well received!
