"The Birth of the Bard" *

Yesterday's word was: mentee- So close, Rhonda! (As a side note, you are most likely to choose the word that I purposely throw in as a red herring, which probably says something about the way we think...) Also Paula, your comment from yesterday disappeared..  And that was a great verse. :)  Michael's comment also ran away... Hopefully you guys removed them and I don't have some random comment eating gremlin on my blog.

A phantasmagoric quote from class tonight.

It was the last thing that was said, and I think something that is going to stick with me for quite some time, though I may have already forgotten most of the rest of those three hours.

"The poet is born at the death of Adonis. Venus becomes no longer a goddess but a human because she can understand what human love is. Indeed she decrees that henceforth love goes along with pain and disappointment to mirror her own experience with Adonis. And the flower that comes from Adonis's blood spilled on the ground is Shakespeare, because he, too is being born as a poet, as a bard, in love and pain. Because a poet is someone who understands life and love and pain more deeply than most people bother to look."  -James Baumlin lecturing on the theory of his wife, Tita Baumlin.

I'm not sure that this quote translates to how *deeply* I felt it, when Dr. Mr. Baumlin said it.

But as he was speaking it was almost as if he was striking a tuning fork inside my mind with his words... the resonance was that pronounced and that strong.

It sounds/feels so much like my own story. The writer in me was really only born in the death of Nathan. When I finally felt that I understood something more intrinsically than many people do. When I finally felt like I had something of merit to say.

*The title of this blog post is the title of the paper that my Shakespeare professor, Dr. Tita Baumlin, wrote on Venus and Adonis, which her husband told us this evening is the "seminal work" on that particular poem... and I believe him.