Why I liked English this year

The English exam was today.

Studying might have been a good idea, but regardless it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. We got to read a Coleridge poem that we'd nver seen before, and I might say it's my favorite of his (although Kubla Kahn is pretty kinky). "The AEolean Harp".

It's really great and it's all about the wind and the nature and the interconnectedness of it all, and how... oh he says it better:

"O! the one Life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance every where-
Methinks, it should have been impossible
Not to love all things in a world so fill'd;
Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air
Is Music slumbering on her instrument."

That's my favorite part. It is impossible not to love everything when we are all one thing alive, driven by "one intellectual breeze, At once the soul of each, the God of all". 

Katie and Isabella and Cath and I were on the swing set at the Lee St. Park (having had a picnic with Sam and Eleni and Nick also) and we began to talk about this and it was all so exciting and that intellectual breeze was blowing boldlier. 

Then someone mentioned a question on the actual exam about Sara, Coleridge's lover, and how she was more strictly Christian and told Coleridge to stop having these wild thoughts that were inconsistent with the bible, and "walk humbly with my God". 

Besides Isabella, we mostly thought she was being a hater, and I much preferred the idea that we are all harps, played upon by the same inexplicable powers, creating wild and unpredictable fairy music.

New way to sound cool and make a poetic allusion: "Stop being the Sara to my Coleridge"

It occurred to me that at the age of five or six, I remember being on that same swing set and looking at the same trees and twilight and seeing birds and thinking "You are free and happy. Why am I not you?"

I said this out loud, and it was immediately decided that I was Keats in "Ode to a Nightengale", minus the bit about contemplating my own mortality.

I was born to be this way. I am either a Romantic era poet or a total hippie at heart. Maybe both. 

On an entirely different note, I have pinpointed the occasion when Sam and I became friends. Ms. Simpson's Cotillion, 7th grade, 50's themed night. There were contests and what not, and one was for the twist. I don't know if we won, but we were in the top three. It was impressive.

Also, I am good at making many grilled cheese sandwiches in a short period of time.

Love always,
Clara