love

(re: yesterday's post)
Jacqueline Kennedy wrote in a scrapbook for her children,
"Remember how much your father and mother loved poetry. Daddy wouldn't have been what he was without his love for language."
-------------------------
"He's a silly bastard.
I wouldn't hire him to run a -- cathouse."
----------------------Now, THERE'S a "love" for "language" ! : ) : )
[excerpt from The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, by Caroline Kennedy]:

As a child, the poems I loved best were those where the distance isn't far between the world we live in and an entirely different and magical one. My mother sparked this interest by making those poems part of our daily lives, awakening in us a sense of limitless possibility. When we drove past the East River in Manhattan and saw the tugboats pushing their barges, we would talk about all the faraway places to go, and how other travelers had gotten there. She would quote lines from The Odyssey and "Sailing to Byzantium" by W.B. Yeats.

...My mother lived her life with a spirit of adventure. She loved to ride horses at full gallop, explore faraway places, and read about those who approached life the same way. She shared this love of heroic adventure with my father.

One poem that was special to both of them was Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Ulysses." My mother had memorized it with her grandfather when she was ten years old. She introduced it to my father, who often quoted from it in his speeches, and later the poem became identified with my uncle Bobby as well.

from "ULYSSES" --
Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world...
...for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Off all the western stars, until I die...
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are, --
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
-------------------------[end Excerpt]
"Remember how much your father and mother loved poetry. Daddy wouldn't have been what he was without his love for language."

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