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Aesthetic Realism: Life, Love & Learning

Leila Rosen, English Educator & Aesthetic Realism Associate

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    • To find out more about Aesthetic Realism

“The Shadows, Black,” by Ellen Reiss

January 30, 2016 by leirose

Here is a poem I love, written by Ellen Reiss, with whom I’ve studied for many years in the course The Aesthetic Realism Explanation of Poetry. As the world today is, and has been for so long, in turmoil about how to see the sameness and difference of people—in place, time, language, religion, culture, appearance—I am reminded of this moving poem about reality, including the reality which is the human self, wherever one lives. It is introduced with this brief note by the poet:

“The Shadows, Black” is about two different aspects of the world: an Arabian desert and New York, with its skyscrapers. The poem says that these two are of each other, inseparable—as a person needs to see different aspects of herself as the same person. —Ellen Reiss

Ellen Reiss is the Aesthetic Realism Chair of Education, and is the editor of the groundbreaking periodical The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known. In that journal, she has written powerfully and with great kindness about the justice with which one person needs to see another. To read more poems by Ms. Reiss, and by others, go to What Poetry Really Is: A Celebration. And you can read some of her critical writings, and also works by Eli Siegel, poet and founder of Aesthetic Realism, at On the Criticism of Poetry.

The Shadows, Black 

The shadows, dark, stretched across the desert sand,
Shadow-deep, shadow-thin,
Have the profundity of New York skyscrapers
Reaching toward blue.
A camel moves, pale against the large sun;
Feels the pulsing of the desert in his legs
Longs to curl up, puppy-like, beside a great tree:
He has known this life of winding caravans,
Of dark men shaded by white cloth.
The sand is grey now, the sun purely white,
The shadows black.
The camel drops his eyelids, trembles,
Remembering metal buildings soaked in rain,
The pounding of water on wide, dusty streets,
And he hears the tinkling of small bells echo over miles of sand
Made lovely by shadows.

©Ellen Reiss


You may also be interested in these reports I’m proud to have written of poetry lectures by Eli Siegel:

  • On a great lecture by Eli Siegel about the poetry of the African American poet Sterling A. Brown (1901-1989), from his book Southern Road
  • On what Mr. Siegel showed, in his lecture Poetry, Atmosphere, and Neatness, about the poetry of John Keats
  • On the work of the important 19th-century English poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in the lecture Some Poetry Is Distinguished

Filed Under: About Literature

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Kindness: definition & comment by Eli Siegel

People everywhere are looking for kindness from others, and we want to be kind too. But we can be mixed-up about what kindness really is. In his great work Definitions and Comment: Being a Description of the World, Eli Siegel shows what kindness is, in beautiful prose that makes this big human subject clear! You can read his definition and comment here.

© 2014–2025 by Leila Rosen