This is a rant! Ordinarily I wouldn't be so blunt about it, but apparently, with some people you just have to be flat-footed and clear, or they just don't get it! A while back I did a blog on Sam Walter Foss's Poem," the Calf Path",which I recalled from my childhood with great delight. (you'll find it in archives, under poetry,roughly entitled,"From Amongst My Childhood Book-Shelves!" just in case you missed it, or are unfamiliar with the poem.) This was back in April of this year. With the whole background, and taking into consideration the fact that I first heard this poem when I was very small, I thought surely that the simple reprinting of this wonderful poem would be enough to jog a few memories, and introduce this jewel of witty, thoughtful commentary on the state of man's tendency to "follow the beaten path" rather than do something different, to stand alone, without any further assistance or explanation from me. I thought that right up until this evening,when I followed a referrer back and the search was... meaning of the calf-path! I was appalled! What is the meaning of the calf-path? The meaning of the calf-path! I admit to some mental stuttering over that! How is it possible that a person capable of reading and writing, and able to use a computer,can read this poem and not understand it's meaning? Now, I will admit that there have been some poems I have read,and shook my head, and wondered what the whole point of it was, but the Calf-path is not one of those incomprehensible pieces, full of symbolism and archaic references,that make you grab your thesaurus and start searching franticly for the meanings of words you've never heard before! It is in fact, so obvious as to the meaning that all three children in our family, of which I was the youngest, totally understood, enjoyed and loved from the first time our mother read it to us. Certainly, she had a flair for reading aloud that instantly made an amusing passage completely hilarious,but she never did have to stop and explain anything to us, during her rendition of it. So, keeping in mind that I was too young to read...what am I to conclude about this seeker of the meaning? Is this a person who has no interest in poetry, as a genre,and therefore feels that opening a book and reading the work for themselves is beneath them, or are they just too lazy to crack a book, and wants all their answers spelled out for them ? Or, am I reading too much into this,and the difficulty lies not in their inability to understand, but that all unknowingly, mine was a whole family of enlightened geniuses? I don't think so. If that were the case, I doubt very much that this incident would have thrown me into a tizzy, and grate on my nerves so badly that I felt I had to rant on it to get over this sensation of jangling irritation which makes me literally want to throw my hands in the air,and just cry with frustration over this glaring example of thick-headed,muddy-brained,"whose-was-the-hand-that-sloped-back-this-brow?" kind of ignorance!
Rant over.
If I have insulted you, I am sorry,but the truth is, all anyone has to do to understand the "Calf-Path" is to read it. It's meaning is so obvious a child can understand it.
OUI?
Posted by: Steel | September 11, 2006 at 04:48 AM