I ran 20km today (my furthest ever!). Through most of it these lines drummed in my head,
'God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus!—
Why look'st thou so?'—'With my crossbow
I shot the Albatross.'
Flipping love that poem, and I read almost all of it out loud to myself while sitting in my duvet-tent this morning.
Another poem I've been really loving (also nautical) is The Song of the Red War Boat, by Rudyard Kipling. A perfect triumphant, defiant, rollicking rhythm, and -ah- so exciting I stumble over the words as I read it because I get ahead of myself.
And when I think of poems that have rhythm (and there are so many of them) I remember a book I read before coming to Cambridge, The Poem and the Journey, where Ruth Padel, recalls a canoeing trip in which the ellipses of Emily Dickinson's poem Civilisation - Spurns - the Leopard! marked each dip and push of her paddle in water. Now I cannot read that poem without associating it with punctuating physical action, which means it lends itself quite nicely to runs (unfortunately I only know the first 2 lines by heart and so those ones are the ones that repeat themselves, between footfalls)
After the run I had an orange before dinner, which was the most Chinese-New-Year my day got.
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