Martin brings together an assortment of his favorite poems and quotes. And these particular writings just happen to share the common theme of advice, be it crucial, loving, humorous or cautionary. From Kipling, to Mark Twain, to Dylan Thomas, advice is the order of the day in this not to be missed episode.
Martin brings together an assortment of his favorite poems and quotes. And these particular writings just happen to share the common theme of advice, be it crucial, loving, humorous or cautionary. From Kipling, to Mark Twain, to Dylan Thomas, advice is the order of the day in this not to be missed episode.
M -S -W Media
Hello and welcome to the Martin Sheen podcast. With yours truly,
Martin Sheen, of course, and I'm delighted to be your host for this podcast pilgrimage where the destination is the journey itself. Along the way,
I plan to share stories and personal memories of some of the many people, places, and events that have helped to shape my lifelong, happy, and continuing struggle as an artist and a man to unite the will of the spirit with the work of the flesh.
I also hope to explore poetry as a powerful form of expression and communication by proxy, as it were, and how poetry is such a vital and necessary component of our spirituality and our public discourse. And from time to time, I'll invite friends, fellow actors, poets, scholars, and family members to join our pilgrimage and discuss what inspires their artistic journey. And so, friends, let us begin.
Advice. Now, that's a word loaded with meaning, and it can hide behind many disguises. A call to action, guidance, inspiration, perhaps motivation. It's hard to see advice coming. Whether you ask for it or not, people are always offering advice, and why should poets be any different. Sometimes, however, that advice extends itself beyond the personal and becomes like a troubadour sounding a much -needed alarm to awaken an entire society. Though advice can be found in writings of guidance from the old to the young, from the wise to the foolish, from the life-weary and hardened to the naive and innocent. Of course, it seems there's nothing off limits when it comes to advice, such as romance or conflict or life's lessons. But it always boils down to one thing, really. Are you going to take the advice? And won't it be easier to take that advice if it's offered in poetic form?
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born December 30, 1865, in what was known then as British India, and that inspired much of his work. That work included the Jungle Book, The Second Jungle Book, The Man Who Would Be King, Mandalay, Gungadin, and The White Man's Burden, among many others. Kipling, in the late 19 and early 20th century,
was among the United Kingdom's most popular writers.
In fact, in 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature as the first English language writer to receive the prize, and at the age of 41, its youngest recipient to date. He was also singled out by the British Poet Laureate ship and several times for a knighthood, but he declined both.
Following his death on the 18th of January, 1936, his ashes were interred at Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey. And I was introduced to this poem by Dennis Hopper while we were filming Apocalypse now in the Philippines in 1976.
If by Rudyard Kipling.
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
Here now,
When Day Is Done
by Ramandranath Tagore
If the day is done,
if birds sing no more,
if the wind has flagged tired,
then draw the veil of darkness thick upon me,
even as thou hast wrapt the earth with the coverlet of sleep
and tenderly closed the petals of the drooping lotus at dusk.
From the traveler,
whose sack of provisions is empty before the voyage is ended,
whose garment is torn and dust-laden,
whose strength is exhausted,
remove shame and poverty,
and renew his life like a flower under the cover of thy kindly night.
Ramandranath Tagore was born May 7, 1861, in Bengal,
India. He was a poet, novelist, writer, playwright, composer,philosopher, social reformer, and painter of the Bengali Renaissance.
His novels, stories, songs, and essays speak to topics political, personal, and spiritual.
Tagore joined Mahatma Gandhi's nonviolent movement, advocating independence from Great Britain.
Mostly known for his poetry, Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1917. Raman Dronath Tagore died August 7, 1941. He was 80 years old.
Consider this.
Whether given or received, when has anyone ever regretted an act of mercy or compassion? On the other hand, as the old saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished.
We're going to take a little break here, but I assure you there's more to come. Stay tuned.
And we're back. Thank you for staying with us.
Once again, we return to the Bard for this next selection and one of the most quoted plays in all of Shakespeare. It is Hamlet, no less, and perhaps one of the most quoted speeches in all of English literature. From Act 3, Scene 2, here is Hamlet's rousing speech to the actors, just before the big play, if you will.
Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to
you, trippingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it, as
many of your players do, I had as lief the town crier had
spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with
your hand, thus, but use gently. For in the very torrent,
tempest, and as I may say, whirlwind of your passion,
you acquire and beget a temperance that may give
it smoothness. Oh, it offends me to the soul to hear a
robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to
tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings,
who for the most part are capable of nothing but
inexplicable dumb shows and noise. I could have such a
fellow whipped for o’erdoing Termagant. It out-Herods
Herod. Pray you avoid it.
Be not too tame neither, but let your own
discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the
word to the action, with this special observance: that you
o’erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so
overdone
is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at
the first and now, was and is to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror
up to nature — to show virtue her own feature, scorn her
own image, and the very age and body of the time his
form and pressure. Now, this overdone or come tardy off,
though it makes the unskillful laugh, cannot but make the
judicious grieve, the censure of the which, one must in
your allowance o’erweigh a whole theater of others. Oh,
there be players that I have seen play, and heard others
praise, and that highly, (not to speak it profanely) that,
neither having the accent of Christians nor the gait of
Christian, pagan, nor no man, have so strutted and
bellowed that I have thought some of nature’s journeymen
had made men (and not made them well) they imitated humanity so abominably.
I hope we have reformed that indifferently with us, sir.
Oh, reform it altogether. And let those that play your
clowns speak no more than is set down for them. For there
be of them will themselves laugh, to set on some
quantity of barren spectators to laugh too. Though in the
meantime, some necessary question of the play be then
to be considered. That’s villainous, and shows a most pitiful
ambition in the fool that uses it. Go make you ready.
Consider this from Mark Twain.
It is better to keep your mouth closed and let
people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
This particular poem is called
Different by Clere Parsons.
Not to say what everyone else was saying
not to believe what everyone else believed
not to do what everybody did,
then to refute what everyone else was saying
then to disprove what everyone else believed
then to deprecate what everybody did,
was his way to come by understanding
how everyone else was saying the same as he
was saying
believing what he believed
and did what doing.
Clere Parson, an English poet, born in India in
1908, his only works were simply called
“Poems” and they werer published after his
death. Clere Parsons dies in 1931, he was 23
years old.
Here now,
The Threshing Machine by Robert Bly.
You are eighty-
Six, and, while we
Talk, suddenly
Fall asleep.
Would you have been
Proud of me
If I had lived
More like you?
In this same hospital
Room, as you were
Drying out thirty-five
Years ago, you asked:
“Are you happy?”
I was twenty-eight
“Happiness is not one
Of the aims I have
Set for my life.”
You were alarmed.
I was bluffing, as
Isolated as you.
Now you have almost reached
The last station.
Shall I say that you
Misspent your like?
You stood vibrating
On a threshing machine,
Pullies, choppers, shakers
Below you,
And kept your balance
Mostly
I walked on a shaky rope,
Carrying six
Children on my shoulders,
Felt their love.
A woman whom I knew
From the ocean had
A message for me
And it arrived.
Now for the first time
I can see your skull
Below your closed
Grape-like eyes.
Some modest,
Luminous
Thing has happened.
What more
Did we expect?
Robert Bly was an American poet, essayist and activist,
born on Dec. 23, 1926 in Parle County, Minnesota. His best-
known prose book is “Iron John: A Book About Men”
published in1990, which spent 62 weeks on the New York
Times Best Seller list, and is a key text of the Mythopoetic
Men’s Movement.
Robert Bly died Nov. 21, 2021 in Minneapolis. Mr. Bly
was 94 years old.
Please stay tuned. We'll be right back.
Welcome back.
Thanks for staying with us, and we continue.
Public speaking has always been a challenge for me, and so I often sought advice from qualified sources. I discovered this one from Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Be brief, be sincere, be seated.
And this from Oscar Wilde. Be yourself, everyone else is taken.
But the most effective advice I ever received was from my friend Father Michael Judge at St. Francis Church in New York City. When I confided to him my fear of public speaking, he responded with this brief poem prayer that I recite at every public speaking event to this very day.
Lord, take me where you want me to go.
Show me who you want me to see.
Tell me what you want me to say.
Then, Lord, get me out of your way.
Father Michael Judge was born May 11, 1933, in Brooklyn, New York. He was a Franciscan friar and the chaplain for the New York City Fire Department. He died September 11, 2001, in New York City at Ground Zero, the first officially recorded victim of 9 -11. Father Michael Judge was 68 years old.
And our final selection is from Dylan Thomas, one of his most famous works called
Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
by Dylan Thomas
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas was born October 27th 1914 in Wales, and he achieved early success with his poems, Do Not Go Gentle, Death Shall Have no
Dominion, as well as his voice plays Under Milkwood, A Child's Christmas in Wales, and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.
He also acquired a reputation as a brilliant, though alcoholic and doomed poet. He died in New York City on his fourth U tour November 9th, 1953. Dylan Thomas was 39 years old.
I invite you to delve further into the works of the poets I shared with you, and I hope you seek out writers and poets whose work speaks to your hearts and minds with the power to inspire your life. If you've enjoyed what you've heard here, please subscribe to my podcast, The Martin Sheen Podcast, with your host, yours truly, Martin Sheen, of course, wherever you find your podcasts. Yeah, I have to say that. You can find a complete list of the poets and titles of their poems that I've chosen at our website, The Martin Sheen Podcast dot com.
I want to thank the people who make this podcast possible, our producer and research assistant Renee Estevez, who assures me that the internet is a real thing and a safe place, if not used off-label, and our sound engineer and editor, Bruce Greenspan, the man behind these rich and seamless recordings. And to his dog Gracie, our studio mascot who snores in perfect pentameter.
And so, friends, we part with the prayer from Tagore.
Where the heart is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards
perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into
the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening
thought and action—
Into that heaven of freedom (my Father) let our country
awake.
amen
The Martin Sheen podcast all rights reserved no part of this podcast may be reproduced distributed or transmitted in any form without prior written of the author N .E. Productions. The Threshing Machine by Robert Bly is included here by granted copyright permission of Mary Bly, who we thank for the opportunity to share her father's poems. Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas is included here by
copyright permission of the Dylan Thomas Trust, 1951.